Tag Archives: Booker Prize

THE THORNFIELD HALL NEWSLETTER

November/December 2024, Issue 3

THE HOLIDAY SHOPPING & READING GUIDE: Glam Literary Prize Lists and Great Reads

Happy Capitalism!

You may despise capitalist Christmas shopping, but you certainly can luxuriate in holiday reading. While the turkey is in the oven, peruse a gripping 87th Precinct mystery by Ed McBain, and after you’ve baked a pie or alternative no-fail chocolate chip cookies, you can dip into Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. There’s lots of down time on the holidays, though it is a well-kept secret.

I hope you enjoy the following Reading and Shopping guide, based on the 2024 Booker Prize lists and my recommendations.

Glam Booker Prize Finalists As Reading Guide

Some use the Booker Prize lists as a holiday guide.

I tell prize junkies: Caveat Emptor.

Because the lists can be a bit wonky. There were some stunning nominees for the 2024 Booker Prize, and some extremely disappointing choices (she says tactfully). As one American vlogger said of the shortlist: “What was that?”

On the other hand, Eric Karl Anderson, popular vlogger and book maven, considered it an unusually strong shortlist.

Predicting the Booker is a bit like playing the ponies. First, let’s study the longlist. My husband and I had tepid reactions. This is not uncommon: every July when the judges announce the longlist we believe we are about to find the Holy Grail. And then we discover the list is very, very long – need it be that long? – and we have scarcely made a dent in it when the shortlist is announced in September.

This year, we were determined to read the entire shortlist. Between us, we read five of the six books. Neither of us finished Anne Michaels’ Held, which begins during World War I and is composed in poetic vignettes. Still, it won the Giller Prize in Canada.

Captain Nemo predicted that Percival Everett’s novel, James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, would win the Booker. In fact, every blogger, vlogger, and Booker addict loved this novel. It is the only nominee that everybody agreed on. And since Everett was also shortlisted for the Booker in 2023, he was a strong candidate.

I noticed, however, that there were five women on the shortlist, so I figured it might be a toss-up between a woman and a Black man. Who knew?

I thought that Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake had a chance of winning: her fast-paced literary spy novel is interwoven with beautiful email essays about the Neanderthals, who, according to the radical who lives in a cave and studies them, were more peaceful than Homo Sapiens – and the world would have been a better place if they’d survived.

There was no question that Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, the first Dutch novel nominated for the Booker, did not belong on the shortlist. Her style is pedestrian, and if not for the twist in the last part of the novel, it would be a simple beach book. But people like beach books. A good read, not a great book.

Captain Nemo loathed Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, a meditative novel about a woman who retreats to a convent retreat house which is overrun with a plague of mice. It didn’t seem the right time for me to read this book, though I recommend Wood’s eerie, terrifying feminist dystopain novel, The Natural Way of Things.

And the winner of the Booker Prize 2024 is… Samantha Harvey’s Orbital! I admired this short lyrical novel set on a space station that revolves around our beautiful, benighted planet. Not much happens. The astronauts look at the earth. And the descriptions of Earth seen from space are gorgeous. Some of the astronauts want to stay in space forever. A woman’s mother dies. It is not the literary science fiction I’d expected: there is little plot. But I loved Harvey’s acceptance speech – she is a committed environmentalist – and you can watch/listen to her at the Booker ceremony video on YouTube.

My Personal Recommendations: Great Reads, New and Old

1. Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon (winner of the Waterstones debut fiction prize)
2. Blue in Chicago, by Bette Howland
3. The Famous Magician, by Cesar Aira
4. Lost on Me, by Veronica Raimo, translated from the Italian by Leah Janecsko
6. This Strange Eventful History, by Claire Messud (longlisted for the Booker 2024)
7. Enlightenment, by Sarah Perry (longlisted for the Booker 2024)

Happy, Happy Reading, Whatever the Time of Year, and Peace on Earth, Good Will to All!

Are You High? The Beach Read as Booker Prize Nominee

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“Are you high?” I was having an imaginary conversation with the 2024 Booker Prize judges. That’s because I was unimpressed with The Safekeep, a nominee.

Every year the judges are given a mountain of books, this year 156, to skim, scan, peruse, and, whenever possible, actually read. The Booker Prize judges are committed to positive thinking, or they would not be on the panel. They will not say an interview, “What a shit-load of bad books!”

And so it begins. The brave Booker judges launch their list.

And then I read one of them.

After finishing The Safekeep, a first novel by a Dutch writer, Yael van der Wouden, I wrote in my book journal, “It is barely literary fiction.” Let me elaborate: it is NOT literary fiction. It is pop fiction.

The plot is simple. There is a mystery surrounding Uncle Karel’s country house. It is 1962, and the strange, possibly Aspergers heroine, Isabel, has lived here since her family fled Amsterdam in 1944. Now Isabel lives alone in the house and devotes herself to cleaning and polishing her late Mother’s cherished things, special plates with the design of a hare, fancy silverware, and furniture. She also gardens maniacally. Everything looks perfect, though Isabel’s mental health is none too good.

Then her younger brother Hendrik tells her the things were not Mother’s at all, but came with the house. Isabel is uncertain. That couldn’t be true, could it? And when her older brother Louis installs his sexy girlfriend, Eva, in the house with Isabel, while he takes a business trip, she is outraged. She should not have to deal with this silly woman. Spoons begin to disappear. Either Eva or the maid is stealing. But the house belongs to Thomas, and he can move in and kick out Isabel any time he wants.

If this novel were by Evie Wyld, author of the superb novel, The Bass Rock, we would be on board. Wyld writes elegantly and lyrically about a house, and meticulously etches the characters and their surroundings. But The Safekeep is lumbering and lackluster, lacking complexity, even as the relationship between Isabel and Eva intensifies. The one saving grace is Eva’s diary, in the final part of the book.

The judges must have thought,. “Well, it’s not special but what about the ending?”

Yes, but… there’s the rest. It won’t win the Booker! The judges are not high: just diplomatic.

The Last Schmooze: The Time of Year for Literary Prizes

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Extemplo Libyae magnas it Fama per urbes—
Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius ullum

“At once Rumor goes through the great Libyan cities,
Rumor, an evil than which nothing is swifter.”—Virgil’s Aeneid

‘Tis the season for Booker Prize rumors.

“Did you hear they accidentally announced the Booker Prize?” my husband asked.

“Where did you hear that?”

“On the internet.”

“That can’t be right.”

When I typed in “Booker Prize accidentally announced,” there was one hit, a blurb from a site I’d never heard of. “On posting the 2020 Booker Prize shortlist on the Booker Prize website, due to a technical error the author Brandon Taylor was listed as the winner. The judges have not yet met to decide the 2020 winner so this information is incorrect and has now been rectified.”

I found nothing about this at The Guardian or the BBC. Everybody likes juicy Booker gossip, so wouldn’t this goofy item have been published widely if it had happened?

I was stewing over the rumor that the judges had already had their final Zoom meeting. My husband kept teasing me. “They chose the winner at the same time as the shortlist to avoid a meeting.”

“No! This is a big prize,” I insisted.

A week later, my husband continues to tease me about the accidental Booker Prize. He claims the only Booker finalist with a waiting list at the library is Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, which was declared the winner. “So don’t you think he’s the winner?”

“No!”

And yet I vaguely remember a forgettable moment in my life: I had been asked to be a judge for some local award. We all had categories, and there were a lot of categories. There were so many categories that almost everybody in town would win.

I did a lot of research before I made my recommendation.

“Hm-mmm. But how about So-and-So? Isn’t he/she your friend?” one of the judges said.

I was confused. “Well, yes, he/she’s excellent. But I do think this other person’s work was brilliant this year.”

“It can’t be true!”

I thought–and apparently I was wrong– it would be nepotism to choose a friend. I thought–and apparently I was wrong–that ethics forbade me from choosing a friend. What really got to me– I had done all that homework!

So much rides on the Booker Prize that we want it to rise above politics and errors. And we want the committee to have one last schmooze, perhaps next month. (Though sooner or later, why would it matter?)