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This morning, the finalists for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize were announced, and it’s a pretty fantastic list:
U R Ananthamurthy (India)
Aharon Appelfeld (Israel)
Lydia Davis (USA)
Intizar Husain (Pakistan)
Yan Lianke (China)
Marie NDiaye (France)
Josip Novakovich (Canada)
Marilynne Robinson (USA)
Vladimir Sorokin (Russia)
Peter Stamm (Switzerland)
What’s really fricking strange though, is this first couple paragraphs of the press release:
Anyone who could have guessed even five of the 10 novelists who have just been revealed as the finalists for the fifth Man Booker International Prize deserves a mass cap-doffing from the wider reading public. The previous incarnations of the prize have included a large cluster of well-known and indeed expected names, from Doris Lessing and Milan Kundera to Amos Oz and Joyce Carol Oates. There is, however, nothing familiar or expected about the list unveiled today by the chair of judges Sir Christopher Ricks at the DSC Jaipur Literary Festival.
It is a list that will, for many readers, open up a wealth of possibilities since perhaps only two of the writers can be said to have a wide international profile, Marilynne Robinson and Aharon Appelfeld. Robinson, an Orange Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winner is the only one of the 10 who has been nominated for this prize before.
“Nothing familiar or expected”?Only two with a “wide international profile”? What the shit, Man Booker?
Ok, so I’m not familiar with Ananthamurthy or Husain, but all the others are, if not household names, definitely familiar to readers of Three Percent or anyone interested in international literature.
In fact, we’ve reviewed books by all of the foreign authors on here (with the exception of Marie NDiaye, but we have two reviews of her books in the works), and everyone knows of Lydia Davis for either her writing or her translations of Proust and Flaubert. Have some self-respect Man Booker International Prize Press Release Writer—you don’t have to apologize for not including Philip Roth or Haruki Murakami on this list. (Besides, why would you?)
Not to kick a sleeping horse, but here’s another strange bit from this oddly written press release:
The list of finalists reveals other things too [Fiammetta Rocco] thinks. This is a young though very experienced judging panel (although not as young as Marie NDiaye who, at 45, is the most youthful Man Booker International finalist to date) and its choices show a taste for Modernism rather than conventional narrative: “the judges were interested in novelists who push the form”, says Rocco. Many of the novelists – NDiaye, Novakovich and Sorokin among them – are fascinated by cultural migrants which produces in turn a very rich literature. Nevertheless, as Christopher Ricks stresses, these are novelists whose work is different rather than similar.
One of the benefits of such a high profile prize is that it brings with it its own sense of momentum. It is a prerequisite of the prize that the finalists’ work should be available in English and since the MBI imprimatur is a guarantee of quality their nomination will hopefully lead to more of their work being translated in more countries. The winner of the £60,000 prize can also choose a translator of their work to receive a £15,000 award of their own.
The announcement of this year’s prize recipient will be made at a dinner at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on 22nd May and with this list the judges have already made sure the name will be a surprise.
In case you didn’t catch that, this will be a “surprise” because NO ONE KNOWS WHO THESE CRAZY MODERNIST AUTHORS ARE!
Sorry, but fuck off, Man Booker. I like this list of authors a lot, but your public relations spin is annoying and condescending both to readers and to the authors on your list.
Reviewed by Rachael Daum
The Urdu word basti refers to any space, intimate to worldly, and is often translated as “common place” or “a gathering place.” This book by Intizar Husain, who is widely regarded as one of the most important living Pakistani writers,. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sjón just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again—you’ve. . .
Reviewed by Camila Santos
Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through Puerto Rico’s gay world. Published in 2010, the book is already in its fifth Spanish edition. Here in the U.S., the collection has been published by Seven Stories Press and. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
“South”
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
Reviewed by Larissa Kyzer
When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can. . .
Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols
When starting Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, Santiago Roncagliolo’s second work to be translated into English, I was expecting Roncagliolo to explore the line between evil and religion that was front and center in Red April. Admittedly, I. . .
Reviewed by Josh Billings
Christa Wolf’s newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a. . .
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
A rich, beautifully written, consistently surprising satire, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses boasts an elaborate, engrossing plot with disarming twists and compelling characters both challenged and challenging. It leads the reader on a strange pilgrimage—often melancholy but certainly rewarding—through a China. . .
Reviewed by Emily Davis
Maybe I’ve been watching too much Doctor Who lately, and I’m therefore liable to see everything through science-fiction-colored glasses. But when the pages of The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira refer to “the totality of the present and of eternity”. . .
Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
