Today sees the announcement of the winner of this year’s €100,000 Impac Dublin Literary Award – and its value is more than mere money
HUMANS ENJOY a reasonable element of conflict. Not quite to the point of war, admittedly, but sufficient tension to keep one opinionated.
Now that politics and politicians have become too stupid to excite our rage, there remains the perverted nationalism of sport and the always gratifyingly adversarial arena of literary prizes, with their slightly menacing suggestion that “There will be blood.”
That hint of aggression formerly clung to the Booker, now Man Booker prize. Funnily, as soon as “Man” crept into the title, all the old fury of Burgess versus Golding or a Salman Rushdie openly seething at exclusion gradually seemed to dissipate like clouds on a summer’s day.
Still, there is too much anger in the world and a couple of literary prizes – the International Impac Dublin Literary Award and the London Independent’s Foreign Fiction Prize – are flag-bearers for fiction over hype. The slightly older yet far more vulnerable Foreign Fiction prize was inaugurated in 1990 and survived for five years. After a hiatus, it rose anew in 2001. Impac, however, is made of tougher stuff, sustained by the readers from an international bank of 162 public libraries in 45 countries; it is the prize for anyone who loves fiction.
The longlist is a chaotic treasure of all tastes, submitted by all tastes from high literature to the beach read.
This is why, no mater what, Impac must be heeded, despite, or possibly because of, the national pathos currently shrouding Euro 2012. It all began in 1996 when the gifted Australian writer David Malouf became the first winner with Remembering Babylon.
Today sees the announcement of the 17th writer and novel to collect the €100,000 prize, the world’s richest prize for a single work (the London Independent award is worth £10,000/€12,461).
This year’s Impac shortlist conforms to a recent, somewhat disappointing trend, the ongoing consolidation of English and the international language of fiction. Only two of the 10 contenders is in translation. Last year, there were no translations on the shortlist. In 2010, there were three, including the winner, The Twin by Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker. In 2009, two novels in translation featured, while in 2008, four of the eight contenders were translated from their original languages. It would be such a shame if fiction in translation begins to become lost amid the dominance of English-language fiction.
Impac quickly asserted itself as a prize watched by readers thrilled at seeing the world of international writing being made accessible. There is also the practical point that because of its long run-in – a three-year cycle – by the time the short list emerges many readers find that they have already read the English-language titles.
This year’s 10-book shortlist announced on April 12th immediately became a two-horse race between Briton Jon McGregor’s work of art Even the Dogs, and the US singer Willy Vlautin’s heartbreaking Lean on Pete – both of these novels easily countered the presence of Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning and bewilderingly over-rated A Visit from the Goon Squad. The absence of an Irish contender did not overshadow the list as the McGregor and Vlautin novels were so well received here.
The shortlist also alerted readers to Karl Marlantes’ powerful debut Matterhorn, 30 years in the writing and inspired by his experiences in Vietnam. Not as stylistically ambitious as Denis Johnson’s National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke, which had been shortlisted in 2009, Matterhorn, in its bluntness and raw candour, has echoes of Norman Mailer’s equally autobiographical debut second World War classic The Naked and The Dead (1948).
This year’s other debut contender is Australian Jon Bauer’s Rocks in the Belly, which traces the formative childhood resentments that result in a bitter, confrontational adult. This is a book of truths and will not be for everyone.
British-born and west African-raised Aminatta Forna, shortlisted for her second novel The Memory of Love, evokes a strong sense of west Africa in a novel that follows ordinary people through hard experiences.
Its inclusion, however, makes one all the more aware of the surprise omission of Israeli David Grossman’s To the End of the Land. It tells the story of Ora, the mother of a young soldier who returns from national service only to volunteer for a major offensive.
Ora sets off on a long pilgrimage of sorts, convinced that as long as she is beyond contact her son will survive. The narrative works through a series of long flashbacks. In the absence of Grossman, there is instead his countryman Yishai Sarid with Limassol, a convincing thriller that competently dissects Israeli politics.
US writer Don DeLillo seemed a likely shortlist contender with Point Omega, a chillingly exact comment on contemporary society. Instead, there is Canadian David Bergen’s Giller prize-nominated but highly irritating mid-life crisis narrative The Matter with Morris, which falls far short of Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964), to which it aspires in vain.
Brazilian Cristovao Tezza’s courageously autobiographical The Eternal Son may well have been called The Eternal Child, and tells the story of Tezza’s life as the father of a severely handicapped son. It is honest in its ego as much as in its pain. It is a harsh book and often cruel; Tezza is not seeking sympathy but is intent on understanding. Far more of a direct account than a novel, it is ironic that one of this year’s Impac judges, the British writer Tim Parks in Goodness (1991), wrote a far more powerful novel on a similar theme.
Any time a shortlist appears there are always moaners such as me on the sidelines complaining about the exclusions. It would have been great to see Afghani writer Atiq Rahimi included for his 2008 Prix Goncourt-winning and Impac long-listed The Patience Stone, which tells the story of a woman murdered by her husband in a culture in which female sexuality has no rights. Far more than a polemic, and it is that, The Patience Stone is also beautiful and tragic in its fatalistic power.
Rahimi was previously Impac short-listed in 2004 for his 54-page masterpiece Earth and Ashes. It is also worth lamenting the absence the young Colombian Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s intriguing if not wholly successful The Secret History of Costaguana, which attempts to follow writer Joseph Conrad through the composition of Nostromo.
Aside from the pleasure of seeing McGregor and Vlautin demonstrating the sheer breadth of fiction from complexity to simplicity, this year’s shortlist also highlights English writer Tim Pears, whose sixth novel Landed, in which an ordinary man battles ordinary life in all its hardship, is a fine example of the strong, underplayed and under-hyped narrative of the sleeper variety.
This is where prizes justify themselves, by alerting readers to a novel that they might have missed, but now will read, because it featured on that most useful of book-club selectors – a shortlist.
In all fairness, no one can or should dispute that the International Impac Dublin Literary Award is fulfilling its agenda – the promotion of literature. We readers continue to win. But look to the fiction in translation; that is where Impac panels have triumphed in the past and hopefully, to which they will return.
