An exciting shortlist for the IMPAC literary prize is welcomed by Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent.
A home winner continues to elude the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. No Irish writer features on this year's 10-strong shortlist, which was announced in Dublin yesterday. Now in its 10th year, the €100,000 award, the world's richest purse for a single work of fiction, continues to be emphatically international.
It is an exciting shortlist, not only for its range - two US writers, two Canadians, two South Africans, a German, a Norwegian, a New York-based Dutch author and the veteran Australian, and joint favourite, Shirley Hazzard - but for its lack of the usual suspects and its inclusion of The Known World, a lyric masterpiece by US writer Edward P. Jones.
Among those who failed to make the shortlist were the Canadian prize-list regular, Margaret Atwood, and two Nobel literature laureates, the South African, JM Coetzee, and Germany's Günter Grass, whose novel, Crabwalk, had seemed a likely contender and is the most serious omission. Other major fallers were US writer Tobias Wolff and the Australian double Booker winner, Peter Carey. Of the three longlisted Irish writers, Colum McCann, previously IMPAC- shortlisted in 2000 for This Side of Brightness, had also been tipped to make the final 10 with his novel, Dancer - but didn't.
Of the two South Africans, Damon Galgut, as expected, has been nominated for his superbly understated 2003 Booker contender about post-apartheid South Africa, The Good Doctor, with its echoes of Graham Greene. Galgut's compatriot Diane Awerbuck's lively début, Gardening at Night, reveals yet another aspect to the richness of contemporary South African writing.
It is interesting to see two Canadians in the frame for a prize which has previously been won by Alistair MacLeod. Douglas Glover's Elle: A Novel reinvents Canada's history with a little help from Defoe, Cervantes and Márquez by juggling European fiction with that of a New World imagination. All a bit too clever, however. Frances Itani's more traditional performance, Deafening, looks to the collective agonies of the Great War and will invite comparisons with Pat Barker's The Ghost Road trilogy.
New York-based Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg's comic road novel, Phantom Pain, consists of a son's account of his once- famous novelist father's life, sandwiching dad's unpublished autobiography and his career switch to cookery writing. Should New York Jewish humour, Dutch style, be what you have been searching for, your quest ends here - even if the prize money won't.
Family sagas don't come bigger than Lars Saabye Christensen's Nordic epic bestseller, The Half Brother. Set largely in Oslo in the aftermath of the second World War, it is almost 800 pages long and will certainly gain a wider readership thanks to its place on this shortlist. Unified Germany offers a grim picture through the misadventures of the eponymous central character in Christoph Hein's astutely observed Willenbrock, in which a society as well as a life unravels.
War provides the theme for Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire, which was shortlisted for last year's Man Booker Prize and won the US National Book Award. It is wonderful, an elegant study of the enduring legacy of conflict. It would be a fine winner but for the towering presence on the shortlist of Edward P. Jones's The Known World, a magnificent tapestry of life in the American South of the 19th century. This is an extraordinary, hypnotic work, challenging and at times surpassing that of Toni Morrison's vision. Gracefully and skilfully written, it possesses the music of speech and the weight of memory.
The second US contender, Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, is a vivid exploration of a street culture complicated by racial issues and crime, which starts out as the story of a Brooklyn boyhood mixed-race friendship and chronicles US life with no concession to social niceties. The winner, likely to be decided between Hazzard and Jones, will be announced on June 15th.
