International Impac Dublin Literary Award: shortlist announced Few could have predicted the diverse selection for the prize shortlist
ONE OF Ireland's most internationally established writers, Patrick McCabe, is among the eight novelists shortlisted for this year's International Impac Dublin Literary Award.
His novel, Winterwood, was the only one of six Irish novels longlisted for the award to make the shortlist, which was announced in Dublin yesterday.
Few could have predicted the diverse selection, which although including Andreï Makine and Javier Cercas, is more noteworthy for its absences than its inclusions. With the exception of McCabe's virtuoso excursion into a troubled consciousness, it is strongly political in tone, with war emerging as the major theme.
None of the 37 US novels originally nominated on the 137-strong longlist made the final eight, nor did any of the 16 English books, while former double Booker winner, Australian Peter Carey's Theft a Love Story has been overlooked, although his countrywoman, Gail Jones, author of Sixty Lights, has been selected for Dreams of Speaking, a subtle narrative about the unsaid. Jones, who teaches literature and cinema studies, is one of two women shortlisted.
The second is Yasmine Gooneratne, an internationally recognised authority on Commonwealth literature written in English. The Sweet and Simple Kind, her second novel, is a 600-page family saga spanning more than 20 years in the life of Sri Lankan social history. In common with Gail Jones, Gooneratne is an academic, based in an Australian university.
Shortlisted for this award two years ago with his third book, The Swallows of Kabul, Mohammed Moulessehoul, writing as Yasmina Khadra, is again selected, this time for The Attack. Set in Tel Aviv, it is, as expected, an urgent, often violent narrative.
Khadra is a polemicist on a mission. Whereas The Swallows of Kabul drew on romance and has a period feel, there is a tough sense of purpose about this slightly pompous book, which is written in the first person. At times it resembles Damon Galgut's superb novel, The Good Doctor, in that it also bears the influence of Graham Greene.
Arab-Israeli Sayed Kashua's second novel Let It Be Morning, which follows a journalist returning to his home village, is readable, convincing and well-translated. This first-person narrative will impress through its sheer ease and lack of literary bravado. Again it looks at a society at war but Kashua brings a lightness of touch that will engage. It is a far less edgy work than Rawi Hage's debut De Niro's Game, which is set largely in Beirut and is written in a raw, quasi-poetic prose. It is interesting to see how the ghost of none other than Albert Camus stalks through these novels. Hage is now based in Canada.
Among the outstanding fallers is Martin Amis's House of Meetings, and Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, which had looked like an obvious winner, while Philip Roth, John Updike and Thomas Pynchon are all absentees, as are two fine Austrian novels, Daniel Kehlmann's bestselling Measuring The World and Eva Menasse's Vienna, which takes a highly original look at a dysfunctional Austrian family ill at ease with its Jewishness.
The Spanish writer Javier Cercas, who became internationally famous on the publication of Soldiers of Salamis, is shortlisted with his second novel, The Speed of Light. It tells the story of a young writer who, having secured a grant of sorts, finds himself teaching at a college in the US midwest. While there he meets Rodney Falk, a Vietnam war veteran possessed of a difficult personality and shrouded in mystery. This is a good novel with an interestingly American feel about it, which also succeeds in keeping its Spanish voice.
Cercas is a storyteller who is also an adroit technician, given to layering a narrative.
Although one of my favourite books of 2006, and a remarkable follow-up to a brilliant first novel, it does not quite seem an obvious winner of a prize such as this.
Since the publication in English of Le Testament Francais in 1997, two years after it, his fourth novel, had won the Prix Goncourt and soon sold over a million copies in France alone, Andreï Makine, through subsequent works such as A Life's Music (2001, translation 2002), has become internationally revered as the writer of an atmospheric body of work sharing a cohesive beauty of tone.
His is one of the great publishing stories. Born in Siberia, he left Russia in 1987 to seek asylum in France and writes in French. His great theme is the displacement caused by war. His voice is elegiac and graceful. Shortlisted for The Woman Who Waited, not the best of his novels, although still an appealing book, Makine is a seductive writer. Should he win it would be as if an entire body of work was being honoured - and admittedly, this is a one-book prize.
Pat McCabe's masterclass in menace may well decide the outcome of what is a writer's selection, in this the 12th year of an important prize that always surprises.