The greatest return to be had on betting on one of the booker shortlists was Howard Jacobson’s ‘The Finkler Question’. Knowing this why did I bet on Tom McCarthy’s ‘C’?
Leaving this opening question aside for further reflection let me direct you to an entering question that concerns me more: ‘Why does the Man-Booker Prize gather so much coverage?’ this question would be considered innoculous & on par with ‘why does a moor-hen’s feathers grow black?’ for their answers would hardly be rewarding information. However I insistently do wish to know, so I’ll ask again but more developed this time, hopefully making the question mark a little sharper like an encosing sythe, why does the Man-Booker Prize gather so much coverage while the Nobel Prize, awarded roughly around the same time, remains untalked of & overlooked?
The Nobel Prize is awarded to ‘the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’. It’s a lifetime acheivement award to letters open to the whole world. But foreign fiction regardless to its quality cannot sustain our interest as the best book in the year can. As accesible as the prize tries to make the literary it more often succeeds in turning comitted writers into quotable celebrities prilvaged enough to take part in an elite lottery we wish to identitfy with rather than trying to interpret what they have actually put on page.
Engagement with ideas has rarely been an English trait, or even a British one. It’s something the commentators have tacitly managed to keep at bay. What I know about Howard Jacobson & ‘The Finkler Question’ from the papers is that it is a book about British Jews written by a man whose name is Howard Jacobson, repeated & repeated. What exactly is a British Jew? Is it a politer Philip Roth? A Saul Bellow in miniture? Where can I find that discussion?
If I know little about Jacobson I know less about Mario Vargas Llosa whose total time in print proabably exceeds little more than a column solemly pronouncing the facts. Considering how Llosa has spent a life walking in the ‘ideal direction’ while producing ‘outstanding work’ can we not give a long moment to reflecting this? Prehaps we are too mistrustful of any direction that is ideal & prehaps we don’t like to be beaten at our own language game by people who cannot speak it. More likely it could be put down to simple lack of interest.
Will we always have underdisscused novels with overmentioned novelists? Will the superficiality of signs be kicked for the dialogue with the semantic in literary journalism, or has all hope of thought & meaningful debate given out amongst the papers for the hollow sound of fickle information? What are the odds?
Also a final porch question: where’s my free copy?
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