This year's Man Booker Prize is the first since a rule change allowed novelists from nations other than Great Britain and the Commonwealth to be considered as the top British novel of the year. And there are two Americans on the shortlist who may win the award.
Joshua Ferris's To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a remarkable book. As I wrote earlier, just when it looks like it may be going completely off the tracks and into the woods, Ferris turns this story of a quirky, loner dentist trying to be normal into a story of lost love and identity, and how it may be possible to find a loving, welcoming place in the world when one least expects it.
The other American entry is Karen Joy Fowler's We are All Completely Beside Ourselves. It's the story of a young woman whose sister just happened to be a chimp. But we don't know that when we first meet Rosemary. What we know is that she used to talk a lot but now rarely does, and that her brother and sister are both gone. The story is revealed in a looping narrative. And, in the early pages of the novel, I can report Rosemary excels in sarcasm that is as deprecating toward herself as it is toward her family.
Another book on the shortlist I plan to tackle is the heart-wrenching one by Richard Flanagan. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the story of a man in charge of getting Australian POWs ready to work on the infamous Thailand-Burma Death Railway in the 1940s. Washington Post book editor Ron Charles compares its effect on him to Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
The novel is a personal one to Flanagan. His father survived the brutal horror, which claimed more than 12,000 Allied prisoners. Flanagan has written about a colonial prisoner in Van Dieman's Land before in his Gould's Book of Fish, a brilliant story about forgeries, survival and how different cultures get each other completely wrong. Between wild wisdom in his earlier book and the family connection, I think this one will be worth the subject, which is certain to be hard to read but important to not forget.
The short-listed entry that appears to require the greatest amount of fortitude on my part is J by Howard Jacobson. It publishes in the U.S. in October, and is being compared to Brave New World and 1984. It's set in a world without collective memory; there is no past. A love affair threatens the powers that be and, of course, the lovers. Perhaps I've read too much YA dystopian fiction for this one to be drawing my interest.
On the other hand, Neel Mukherjee's second novel, The Lives of Others, looks to be right up my alley. It's a family saga that exposes how far apart kin can be even when they live close together. Set in the late 60s in Kolkata, the novel also is described by A.S. Byatt in The Guardian as showing the differences between many sets of people and the power of empathy. It also will be published in the States in October.
Finally, Ali Smith's How to be Both at first looks more like an old-fashioned Booker novel. But it does have a trick in that the novel is published in two parts in one volume, but half have one part first and the other half have the other coming first. The two parts apparently are meant to be read in either order, which I know will drive some people absolutely bonkers. One half is the story of George, short for Georgia, a Cambridge teenager. The other half is a spirit that finds itself in a museum gallery, looking at a boy looking at a painting. The spirit painted it when it was Francesco del Cossa in 15th century Ferrara, an artist who was a real person.
That there is a painting involved, made by a real person about not a lot is known, and part of George's story directly compare to Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch.
It appears that one of the main ideas of the novel is to ponder what comes first. Is it what you see first? Is it always chronological? Does it matter?
As a character in another medium said, "It's a mystery." This novel could be completely brilliant or a total gimmick.
The winner will be announced on October 14.
Big news for Readers & Book Lovers: Chrislove is joining us as the new Editor for LGBT Literature. He will be hosting the series on the last Sunday of the month at 7:30 PM ET. Please welcome him to the Group and check out his inaugural diary on Sunday, September 28, 2014!
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