Edward P. Jones continues to receive accolades for his National Book Critics Circle Award. This AP article gives some more insight on Jones and his book, The Known World. Could a Pulitzer be around the corner? In the San Francisco Chronicle, a considerable profile of T. C. Boyle. It looks like Boyle’s next book will be called The Inner Circle. This one will be about Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a real life sex researcher from the 1940s and 50s. And the New York Times Book Review finally finished reading William Vollmann’s massive treatise on violence, Rising Up and Rising Down, (weighing in at 3,299 pages) and makes the review its cover story. They appreciate the expanse of the work, but not so much the content.
Award Winner, New Book, Big Book
Hage Wins the IMPAC
This year's IMPAC shortlist was quite eclectic, as we noted when it was released. One side effect of this is that the 2008 IMPAC won't have an impact on the "Prizewinners" tally that we keep. The upshot, of course, is that the IMPAC shed its spotlight on some less well-known names, including this year's winner: Beirut-born, Canadian novelist Rawi Hage, who won for his debut effort, DeNiro's Game.Andrew reviewed the book for us last year, writing "Less a political tract than a survival story, DeNiro's Game illustrates how a war breeds anarchy which then gives way to militia rule." Elsewhere, The Globe and Mail covers the award and offers an excerpt from Hage's acceptance speech.
●
●
●
The IMPAC very long list
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is unique in that the longlist (or pool of nominees) is not created from submissions by publishers. Instead libraries throughout the world nominate books, resulting in a very long longlist that spans many countries. Eventually, the list is whittled way down to a shortlist by a panel of judges who then goes on to name a winner. Another result of the nominating process is that, by the time the award is handed out on June 14th, 2006, the winning book could be as much as two years old. Despite all this, a look at the past winners reveals an engaging and diverse batch of books. Still, perhaps this award could be better than it is. The Literary Saloon identifies some possible improvements, including a way to cut out the nationalism that pervades the longlist.
●
●
The Prizewinners: International Edition
Max's recent post cataloging 13 years of Anglo-American "Prizewinners" got me wondering... what were the most decorated books in foreign-language fiction during the same period? And how many of them are currently available in English? I assumed that, in an Internet age, this information would be easy to come by in consolidated form; as it turned out, I was wrong. And so, by way of a remedy, I embarked on a tortuous research process.The first step was to figure out what prizes I should be looking at. I tried to identify awards that recognized a single work of fiction annually, or biennially; that focused on a specific linguistic tradition; and that would give a book traction in a market sizable enough to facilitate comparison. That is, I was looking for analogues for the National Book Award or the Booker. The list of prizes I ended up with covers a slightly expanded version of the U.N. Security Council - France and its former colonies, the Spanish-speaking world, Germany and Austria, Italy, Russia, and Japan - which may, in itself, tell us something about the nature of literary laurels.Next, to allow for the time required to translate a book, I narrowed my window to the years 1995-2005, assuming that more recent books may still be in the process of translation. Using Wikipedia, World Literature Today the Library of Congress Catalog, Amazon.com, Babelfish, and other resources, I was able to track down English-language versions of prize-winning titles from those years (though not to rule out the existence of translations the LoC and Amazon might have missed).With its many arbitrary elements, its patent Eurocentrism, and its shaky grasp of some of the languages and cultures involved (readers are encouraged to enlighten me via the comments button), my ad hoc methodology makes the one publisher John O'Brien critiques in the current issue of CONTEXT look positively rigorous. Nonetheless, in light of O'Brien's argument that "translations have suddenly moved from their marginalized place in the American marketplace," the resulting list turns out to be pretty interesting. And, no matter how one interprets the data, this "International Edition" of our Prizewinners feature should offer readers who share my passion for contemporary world literature a place to start.(N.B.: Jealous of Max's arithmetic prowess, I've injected some pseudoscience into this post by calculating the Translation Quotient (TQ): percentage of winners of each award that have been translated into English. The prizes are listed in descending order of TQ.)1. French-Language LiteratureIn the Prix Goncourt, France has one of the world's most venerable and distinguished literary awards. Every December since 1903, it has been given to "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year." My favorites among the honorees include Marcel Proust's Within a Budding Grove and Patrick Chaimoiseau's Texaco. Perhaps because of the prize's august history, and perhaps because of the intensity with which the French promote their literary culture, the Goncourt has the best Translation Quotient of any of the prizes I looked at. Of the 11 winning books from 1995 to 2005, eight have been translated into English. The 2006 winner, Les Bienveillantes, was written in French by an American, and was one of my Most Anticipated Books of 2008.Goncourt winners in translation 1995-2005 (TQ: 73%)1995 - Andrëi Makine, Dreams of My Russian Summers (Arcade)1997 - Patrick Rambaud, The Battle (Grove)1998 - Paule Constant, Trading Secrets (University of Nebraska Press)1999 - Jean Echenoz, I'm Gone (New Press)2000 - Jean-Jacques Schuhl, Ingrid Caven (City Lights)2001 - Jean-Christophe Rufin, Brazil Red (Norton)2003 - Jacques-Pierre Amette, Brecht's Mistress (New Press)2004 - Laurent Gaudé, The House of Scorta (MacAdam/Cage)2. Spanish-Language LiteratureNovelists working in Spanish have a number of interesting prizes at their disposal, including the Cervantes Prize, given for lifetime achievement. The premier prize for a single novel is pretty widely recognized to be the semiannual Premio Internacional de Novela Rómulo Gallegos. Three out of the six winners from 1995 - 2005 have been translated into English; some authors, like Enrique Vila-Matas, have had works other than their Gallegos-winners translated.RRómulo Gallegos winners in translation 1995-2005 (TQ: 50%)1995 - Javier Marías (Spain), Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me (New Directions)1997 - Ángeles Mastretta (Mexico), Lovesick (Riverhead)1999 - Roberto Bolaño (Chile), The Savage Detectives (FSG)3. Italian LiteratureThe preeminent Italian prize is the Premio Strega; the Italians seem to do a pretty good job getting books chosen for the Strega translated into English. Of the 11 winners between 1995 and 2005, three have been translated into English, and several authors have had other titles appear in the U.S.Strega winners in translation 1995 - 2005 (TQ: 27%)1999 - Dacia Maraini, Darkness (Steerforth)2002 - Margaret Mazzantini, Don't Move (Anchor)2003 - Melania G. Mazzucco Vita (FSG)4. Russian LiteratureThis one was a disappointment. Russian is one of the great literary languages, and has its own Booker-Open Russia Literary Prize. Monumental winners like Georgy Vladimov's The General and His Army (1995) would seem to be right up my alley - but haven't been translated into English. Vasily Aksyonov, a Millions favorite and winner of the Russian Booker in 2004, has had a number of books appear in the U.S. But apparently, only one book that took home the prize between 1995 and 2005 has itself been translated.Russian Booker winners in translation 1995 - 2005 (TQ: 9%)2003 - Ruben Gallego White On Black (Harcourt)5. German-Language LiteratureI have to admit, this surprised me. I would have expected German speakers, with their robust literary heritage, to coronate a single book each year to present to the world. Then again, given the history of the last 150 years, the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire, and so on, I suppose it's not surprising that there is some fragmentation when it comes to awards. Perhaps as a remedy, the German Publishers & Booksellers Association in 2005 created the German Book Prize. But according to my (admittedly cursory) research, the preeminent prizes for a single work of German-language fiction during the 1995 - 2005 period would have been Austria's Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and the Alfred Döblin Prize (endowed by Günter Grass). Surprisingly, out of the 17 combined winners of these two prizes from 1995 - 2005, only one was translated into English. (The percentage goes up slightly, to two out of 20, if we throw in the great Ingo Schulze's, 33 Moments of Happiness, which won the Döblin "Förderpreis," [meaning, first novel prize?] in 1995).Döblin and Bachmann winners in translation, 1995 - 2005 (TQ: 6%)1995 - Norbert Gstrein, English Years (Minerva [U.K.])Japanese LiteratureA mixed bag here. The Tanizaki Prize would seem to confer just the kind of distinction a publisher would want - it's so selective that some years, they don't even give it out - and yet none of the 12 winners from 1995 to 2005 have been translated into English. (There were two winners in 1997, 2000, and 2005). Then again, Yuko Tsushima, who won in 1998 and Yoko Tawada, who won in 2003, have had other works translated into English, and Ryu Murakami has been translated quite often.Tanizaki Winners in translation, 1995 - 2005 (TQ: 0%)
●
●
●
The Booker Has Landed
Aravind Adiga of India has won the Booker Prize for his debut novel The White Tiger. In the official announcement, head judge Michael Portillo said "In the end, The White Tiger prevailed because the judges felt that it shocked and entertained in equal measure. The novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader's sympathy for a thoroughgoing villain. The book gains from dealing with pressing social issues and significant global developments with astonishing humour." An excerpt of the book is available, as well.See Also: The Longlist.
●
●
●
Underdog Enright Lands the 2007 Booker
From across the pond comes word that Anne Enright has won the 2007 Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering, beating out bookies' favorite Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones and On Chesil Beach by household name Ian McEwan. The Independent's review of The Gathering sets the scene:brings together fragments of the past, real and imagined, all filtered through the consciousness of Anne Enright's narrator, Veronica Hegarty.Veronica is a middle-aged, newly middle-class Irish mother of two, with a Tudor-redbrick-Queen-Anne house, a nice Saab and an incredibly long-suffering husband. She is endowed with vast numbers of siblings, one of whom, when the novel opens, has just walked into the sea and drowned himself in Brighton.For a second and third opinion, the Guardian offers a pair of raves from A.L. Kennedy and Adam Mars-Jones. Enright hails from Ireland and has three prior novels to her name The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like?, and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. The curious can also read an excerpt from The Gathering.How We Got Here: the longlist, the shortlist
●
●