The Booker Prize was announced last night in a live feed I watched over a glass of wine between my yoga class and birthday dessert. As chair of judges Peter Florence recapped each book, he said the most, and most effusively, about Ducks, Newburyport, so I thought Ellmann had it in the bag. Then, when it became clear there would be joint winners, I thought maybe Ellmann and Evaristo would share the Prize. But that’s not how things panned out…
I don’t have much to add to the conversation after yesterday’s Twitter storm; I remain entirely uninterested in reading The Testaments, an unnecessary sequel and, by all accounts, subpar Atwood work that didn’t need more buzz than it’s already attracted. Atwood won the Booker in 2000 for a brilliant novel, The Blind Assassin, one of my absolute favorites, and while she’s enough of a legend to be among the few authors to have won the Prize twice (along with Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee and Hilary Mantel), maybe not for this book?
I am, however, delighted for Evaristo. If you haven’t yet picked up Girl, Woman, Other, I’d urge you to give it a try. I’m 1/3 into it now. Through a giveaway on Eric’s blog I won a copy plus two tickets to see Evaristo in conversation with Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (author of Manchester Happened, which I’ll be covering for the Ake Book Festival blog tour later this month) at the London Literature Festival on the 20th, but I couldn’t wait until I pick up my copy from the Southbank Centre so have been reading a library copy in the meantime.
You probably know that Girl, Woman, Other is a linked short story collection about 12 characters (mostly Black women) navigating twentieth-century and contemporary Britain, balancing external and internal expectations and different interpretations of feminism to build lives of their own. I’ve been surprised by the structure and style, however. It’s in four long chapters, each divided between three characters. These are almost like musical suites, with the three stories interlocking (I’m not in far enough to know if there is overlap between the suites). The prose is mostly uncapitalized and unpunctuated, with only a handful of full stops closing sections. This makes it more like poetry: a wry, radical stream of consciousness. I’d compare it, content-wise, to Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi and The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer.
This is the third tie in Booker history – though after a 1992 tie the rules were changed so that it shouldn’t have happened again. As Gaby Wood, literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, puts it, “The thinking was it just doesn’t work—it sort of detracts attention from both, rather than drawing attention to either.” So while it’s wonderful that Evaristo is the first Black woman to win the Booker, there is something almost sinister about the fact that, due to the tie, she gets just £25,000 in prize money rather than the full £50,000. However, both she and Atwood were extremely graceful in their acceptance speeches (Atwood sheepish and apologetic at the same time), so I will try to be as well. It’s a turn-up for the books, anyway!
Yesterday was also my 36th birthday. A dismally wet Monday may not be ideal for a birthday, but I’d had the whole previous weekend for celebrating so can’t really complain. Saturday was a very Newbury day of volunteer gardening in the drizzle; an excellent lunch at Henry & Joe’s, a reasonably new restaurant with small plates of seasonal food, exquisitely presented – on the way to Michelin star quality; an early evening showing of Downton Abbey in the intimate upstairs theatre at the Corn Exchange; and a wander around the Fire Garden art installation, which features giant candles and automata. On Sunday I helped out at a fun and chaotic pet blessing service at church, followed by cake, presents and a homemade feast.
One of the best parts of preparing for my birthday is finding recipes for my husband to make for me. This year I picked a Chocolate Orange Truffle Cake from Perfect Chocolate Desserts (which includes photographs of every step), a veganized Chicken Jackfruit Mole with Red Cabbage Slaw and flatbreads from Pip & Nut: The Nut Butter Cookbook, and A Rum of One’s Own (aka hot buttered rum) from the Tequila Mockingbird literary cocktails book. All amazingly rich and delicious; by nightcap time, I could only manage a sip or two of the rum.
I gave myself the Monday off work (the nice thing about being a freelancer, even if I don’t get paid) and spent much of it reading in comfy spots around the house and looking out at the rain. I also picked out a pile of books I’ve been meaning to reread, but only got around to starting the Thomas. I hadn’t read it since it came out in 2006 yet I remember it so well, even particular phrasing. It was one of the first memoirs to make a really big impression on me.
It won’t surprise you that my wish list contained only books this year, so with the exception of a mug mat, puffin socks and notecards, a couple of CDs, some chocolate and the perfect pin badge (“Bookish”), I received 14 books as presents: two novels and the rest nonfiction, mostly memoirs. I get much of my fiction from the library or from NetGalley/Edelweiss (particularly the American releases I can’t find elsewhere), but there are lots of nonfiction authors whose work I can’t find other than secondhand. I know where I’ll start with this pile: the Houston and McCracken are 2019 releases, so I want to read them before the end of the year in case they make a Best Of list. After that, I’ll let whimsy be my guide. A great haul!
Any additional Booker thoughts?
What caught your eye from my birthday stacks?
Winterson does her darndest to write like Ali Smith here (no speech marks, short chapters and sections, random pop culture references). Cross Smith’s Seasons quartet with the vague aims of the Hogarth Shakespeare project and Margaret Atwood’s 
Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry – I read the first 76 pages. The other week two grizzled Welsh guys came to deliver my new fridge. Their barely comprehensible banter reminded me of that between Maurice and Charlie, two ageing Irish gangsters. The long first chapter is terrific. At first these fellas seem like harmless drunks, but gradually you come to realize just how dangerous they are. Maurice’s daughter Dilly is missing, and they’ll do whatever is necessary to find her. Threatening to decapitate someone’s dog is just the beginning – and you know they could do it. “I don’t know if you’re getting the sense of this yet, Ben. But you’re dealing with truly dreadful fucken men here,” Charlie warns at one point. I loved the voices; if this was just a short story it would have gotten a top rating, but I found I had no interest in the backstory of how these men got involved in heroin smuggling.
The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy – I read the first 35 pages. There’s a lot of repetition; random details seem deliberately placed as clues. I’m sure there’s a clever story in here somewhere, but apart from a few intriguing anachronisms (in 1988 a smartphone is just “A small, flat, rectangular object … lying in the road. … The object was speaking. There was definitely a voice inside it”) there is not much plot or character to latch onto. I suspect there will be many readers who, like me, can’t be bothered to follow Saul Adler from London’s Abbey Road, where he’s hit by a car in the first paragraph, to East Berlin.
There’s only one title from the Booker shortlist that I’m interested in reading: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. I’ll be reviewing it later this month as part of a blog tour celebrating the Aké Book Festival, but as a copy hasn’t yet arrived from either the publisher or the library I won’t have gotten far into it before the Prize announcement.
*However, I was delighted to find a copy of her 1991 novel, Varying Degrees of Hopelessness (just 182 pages, with short chapters often no longer than a paragraph and pithy sentences) in a 3-for-£1 sale at our local charity warehouse. Isabel, a 31-year-old virgin whose ideas of love come straight from the romance novels of ‘Babs Cartwheel’, hopes to find Mr. Right while studying art history at the Catafalque Institute in London (a thinly veiled Courtauld, where Ellmann studied). She’s immediately taken with one of her professors, Lionel Syms, whom she dubs “The Splendid Young Man.” Isabel’s desperately unsexy description of him had me snorting into my tea:
This strange and somewhat entrancing debut novel is set in Arnott’s native Tasmania. The women of the McAllister family are known to return to life – even after a cremation, as happened briefly with Charlotte and Levi’s mother. Levi is determined to stop this from happening again, and decides to have a coffin built to ensure his 23-year-old sister can’t ever come back from the flames once she’s dead. The letters that pass between him and the ill-tempered woodworker he hires to do the job were my favorite part of the book. In other strands, we see Charlotte traveling down to work at a wombat farm in Melaleuca, a female investigator lighting out after her, and Karl forming a close relationship with a seal. This reminded me somewhat of The Bus on Thursday by Shirley Barrett and Orkney by Amy Sackville. At times I had trouble following the POV and setting shifts involved in this work of magic realism, though Arnott’s writing is certainly striking. 
The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas by Daniel James: A twisty, clever meta novel about “Daniel James” trying to write a biography of Ezra Maas, an enigmatic artist who grew up a child prodigy in Oxford and attracted a cult following in 1960s New York City, where he was a friend of Warhol et al. (See 
Please Read This Leaflet Carefully by Karen Havelin: A debut novel by a Norwegian author that proceeds backwards to examine the life of a woman struggling with endometriosis and raising a young daughter. I’m very keen to read this one.
Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott: Full of glitzy atmosphere contrasted with washed-up torpor. I have no doubt the author’s picture of Truman Capote is accurate, and there are great glimpses into the private lives of his catty circle. I always enjoy first person plural narration, too. However, I quickly realized I don’t have sufficient interest in the figures or time period to sustain me through nearly 500 pages. I read the first 18 pages and skimmed to p. 35.
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
#1: I fully expect Richard Powers to win for The Overstory. This is the one I’m partway through; I started reading a library copy on Friday. I’m so impressed by the novel’s expansive nature. It seems to have everything: love, war, history, nature, politics, technology, small-town life, family drama, illness, accidents, death. And all of human life is overshadowed and put into perspective by the ancientness of trees, whose power we disregard at a cost. I’m reminded of the work of Jonathan Franzen (Freedom + Purity), as well as Barbara Kingsolver’s latest, Unsheltered – though Powers is prophetic where she’s polemic.
#2: Washington Black by Esi Edugyan is a good old-fashioned adventure story about a slave who gets the chance to leave his Barbados sugar plantation behind when he becomes an assistant to an abolitionist inventor, Christopher “Titch” Wilde. Wash discovers a talent for drawing and a love for marine life and pursues these joint interests in the disparate places where life takes him. Part One was much my favorite; none of what followed quite matched it in depth or pace. Still, I enjoyed following along on Wash’s escapades, and I wouldn’t mind seeing this take the prize – it would be great to see a woman of color win. 
#3: The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner: Kushner is well respected, though I’ve failed to get on with her fiction before. An inside look at the prison system, this could be sufficiently weighty and well-timed to win.
#4: Everything Under by Daisy Johnson: A myth-infused debut novel about a mother and daughter. On my library stack to read next, and the remaining title from the shortlist I’m most keen to read.
#5: The Long Take by Robin Robertson: A novel, largely in verse, about the aftermath of war service. Also on my library stack. Somewhat experimental forms like this grab Booker attention, but this might be too under-the-radar to win.
#6: Milkman by Anna Burns: Set in Belfast during the Troubles or a dystopian future? From my Goodreads friends’ reviews this sounds wooden and overwritten. Like the Kushner, I’d consider reading it if it wins but probably not otherwise.
We’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, so friends are more important than ever. That’s the impetus for Kate Leaver’s jaunty, somewhat insubstantial book about modern friendship. She observes teen girls on the Tube and reflects on how we as primates still engage in social grooming – though language has replaced much of this more primitive bond-forming behavior. We experience a spike in our number of friends through adolescence and early adulthood, but friendships can fall by the wayside during our thirties as we enter long-term relationships and turn our attention to children and other responsibilities. Leaver argues that female friendships can amplify women’s voices and encourage us to embrace imperfection. She also surveys the bromance, mostly in its TV and film manifestations. There are plenty of pop culture references in the book; while I enjoy a Scrubs or Parks and Recreation scene or quotation as much as the next fan, the reliance on pop culture made the book feel lightweight.
I liked the account of meeting Muriel Spark in Italy, and valued the behind-the-scenes look at the contentious task of judging the 1989 Booker Prize, which went to Kazuo Ishiguro for The Remains of the Days. Especially enjoyable is a passage about getting hooked on saunas via trips to Finland and to Center Parcs, a chain of all-inclusive holiday activity camps in England. Oh how I laughed at his description of nude sauna-going in midlife (whether I was supposed to or not, I’m not sure): “The difference in pleasure between swimming wearing a costume of any kind and the sensation of swimming without one, the water coursing unimpeded round your loins as you move through it, cannot be exaggerated, and I first discovered it in Center Parcs.” I also cringed at the Lodges placing “our Down’s son” Christopher in a residential care home – I do hope thinking about disability has moved on since the mid-1980s.
Sisters Constance and Verity Fitzgerald have been alive for over 200 years. A green pool in Iceland, first discovered in 1783, gives them “extended mortality” so long as they take the occasional two-week nap and only swallow two drops of the liquid at a time. In London in 2015, they eat a hearty stew by candlelight and wait for their boy to come. Then they try the churchyard: dead or alive, they are desperate to have him back. Meanwhile, Clovis Fowler is concealing extra phials of the elixir from her husband, their son and the maid. What’s going on here? We go back to Iceland in 1783 to see how the magic pool was first found, and then hop across to 1783 London to meet the sisters as children.
