The IMPAC judges chose a worthy winner, writes Eileen Battersby,Literary Correspondent
A diverse and impressive international shortlist produced a worthy winner when the outcome of this year's International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award was announced at Dublin Castle yesterday.
The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, author of a gloriously bizarre art history extravaganza cum thriller, My Name Is Red, emerged victorious from a field that included one of Ireland's major writers, John McGahern, Sweden's Per Olov Enquist, Orange Prize winner Ann Patchett, and a subtle exploration of the aftermath of war from Canadian Dennis Bock.
Pamuk will receive €75,000 of the €100,000 prize money, which makes this the world's most lucrative literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English. The rest of the money goes to his translator.
He will be honoured at a ceremony in Dublin on June 14th.
Nominations for the award were made by more than 150 libraries in 40 countries. The prize was set up in 1996 by Dublin City Council and the US management company IMPAC, to underline Dublin's status as a literary centre.
Set in 1590s Istanbul, My Name Is Red is, for all its beauty and profundity - and lavish meditations on art, life, truth and philosophy - hilarious. Translated by Erdag M. Goknar, it is part murder mystery, part deranged love story, and is narrated by a colourful cast of original characters for whom intrigue, violence and hysteria are part of everyday life. The humour is often earthy, the dialogue exasperated and the imagery both surreal and vibrant.
In the rarefied world of illuminated manuscripts, the artists who create them are not treated as gods. Instead they are recruited as boys, and training comes more in the form of beatings than inspiration. The brutality aside, works of great beauty are made daily and a range of motifs, horses, trees, beautiful women, battle scenes and flowers combine to decorate the manuscripts that tell the stories and become the record of a culture.
Somehow, in the midst of all this activity, with its many small cliques of rivalries and resentments, the Sultan is keen on a secret project that will showcase his life and career. He does not care if Eastern tradition is supplanted by Western style.
The task is engaging the four main illuminators, one of whom is now dead.
As the novel opens, this corpse is explaining what it is like to be dead, most particularly, killed by a colleague, disfigured, missing and hidden in a well. It may sound tragic but from the outset Pamuk has achieved a sardonically witty tone that endures throughout. Black, the hero of sorts, returns from service abroad and still harbours hopes of winning the beautiful girl he has lamented over during his dozen years of exile.
Meanwhile, one of the most engaging voices in a cast of talkative characters - the murderer - is busy coming to terms with his deed. An initial sense of remorse quickly gives way to a comic dismissal of the dead man.
The other characters have their problems as well, all of which they share with the reader. Included among the speakers of the 59 chapters is a dog, a storyteller and a horse who begins, "Ignore the fact that I'm standing here placid and stiff; if truth be told, I've been galloping for centuries; I've passed over plains, fought in battles, carried off the melancholy daughters of shahs to be wed; I've galloped tirelessly page by page from story to history, from history to legend and from book to book."
Orhan Pamuk has been one of Turkey's most internationally established writers since the translation in 1990 of The White Castle. The influence of Borges helped endear Pamuk to many readers; his own originality did the rest. The Black Book (1990; 1994) and The New Life (1997) consolidated his following.
My Name is Red possesses colour, energy and immense learning with none of the pretension of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, a previous international bestseller, to cleverly avail itself of a medieval world setting.
Speaking to The Irish Times minutes after the prize announcement, Pamuk, long preoccupied by Eastern versus Western culture, admitted to having a passion for art history and is also delighted with the English translation. "I've had problems with the translations of my other books, but not with this one."
In this, its eighth year, IMPAC was expected to see a first Irish winner. McGahern's novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, had been considered the favourite with its main challenge coming from the international bestseller, US writer Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Pamuk's victory builds on IMPAC's achievement in alerting English-language readers to outstanding foreign-language fiction, such as the 1998 win by Herta Muller's surrealist fable The Land of Green Plums, a chilling exposé of Ceausescu's Romania.
This year's shortlist is also to be applauded for including Canadian Dennis Bock's superb, dignified work, The Ash Garden.Pamuk with Muller joins distinguished former winners such as Scotland's Alistair MacLeod (2001) and Australian David Malouf (1996).