MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2018
SHORT LIST
Six varied and interesting books in translation.
Six varied and interesting books in translation.
The winner will be announced on 22 May.
Han Kang's semi-autobiographical The White Book is a contemplation of life and death. It’s her meditative study of her sibling’s death at a few hours old, and how this event shapes her own history. Taking the colour white as a central component to explore this memory, she makes a list of objects that trigger responses. These include swaddling bands, salt, snow, moon, blank paper and shroud. “With each item I wrote down, a ripple of agitation ran through me. I felt I needed to write this book, and that the process of writing would be transformative, would itself transform, into something like a white ointment applied to a swelling, like a gauze laid over a wound.” Han Kang was in Warsaw - a place which is foreign to her when she undertook this project - and in being in a new place, she recalls with startling clarity the voices and happenings of her home and past. The book is a collection of quiet yet unsettling reflections on exquisitely observed moments. These capsules of text build upon each other, creating a powerful sense of pain, loss and beauty. Each moment so tranquil yet uneasy. Han Kang’s writing is sparse, delicate and nuanced. Describing her process of writing she states, “Each sentence is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air.” You can sense the narrator’s exploration and stepping out into the unknown in her descriptions of snow, in her observations as she walks streets hitherto unknown, and in her attempts to realise the view of her mother, a young woman dealing with a premature birth, and the child herself, briefly looking out at the world. Small objects become talismans of memory, a white pebble carries much more meaning than its actuality. Salt and sugar cubes each hold their own value in their crystal structure. “Those crystals had a cool beauty, their white touched with grey.” “Those squares wrapped in white paper possessed an almost unerring perfection.” In 'Salt', she cleverly reveres the substance while at the same time cursing the pain it can cause a fresh wound. The White Book is a book you handle with some reverence - its white cover makes you want to pick it up delicately. A small hardback, the text is interspersed with a handful of moody black and white photographs. This is a book you will read, pick up again to re-read passages, as each deserves concentration for both the writing and ideas. {Stella}
When something is at rest it is only conceptually differentiated from the physical continuum of its location, but when moving its differentiation is confirmed by the changes in its relations with the actual. Likewise, humans have in them a restlessness, a will to change, a fluidity of identity and belonging that Olga Tokarczuk in her fine and interesting book Flights would see as our essential vitality, an indicator of civilisation so far as it is acknowledged and encouraged, otherwise a casualty of repression or of fear. “Barbarians stay put, or go to destinations to raid them. They do not travel.” Flights is an encyclopedic sort-of-novel, a great compendium of stories, fragments, historical anecdotes, description and essays on every possible aspect of travel, in its literal and metaphorical senses, and on the stagnation, mummification and bodily degradation of stasis. The book bristles with ideas, memorable images and playful treatments, for instance when Tokarczuk reframes the world as an array of airports, to which cities and countries are but service satellites and through which the world’s population is constantly streaming, democratised by movement, no preparation either right or wrong in this zone of civilised indeterminacy. To create a border, to restrict a movement is to suppress life, to preserve a corpse. Tokarczuk’s fragments are of various registers and head in different directions, but several strands reappear through the book, such as the story of a father and young son searching for a mother who disappears on holiday on a small Croatian island. Historical imaginings include an account of the journey of Chopin’s heart from Paris to Poland following his death, the ‘biography’ of the ‘discoverer’ of the achilles tendon, and an account of the peripatetic sect constantly on the move to elude the Devil. For Tokarczuk, we find ourselves, if we find ourselves at all, somewhere in the interplay between impulse and constraint. {Thomas}
The mistake, or at least one of the mistakes, being made by each of the narrators of the stories that comprise Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s The World Goes On is thinking that the occurrences that constitute what they think of as their lives have anything to do with them, and, although they are themselves insufficient reason for these or any other occurrences, the narrators nevertheless find it impossible to extricate themselves, to absent themselves from the proceedings in which they find themselves caught up. The sentences that constitute their lives, for us at least, and what else have they got, are both a grasping for and, by the fact of this grasping, a separation from the circumstances of which they are aware, or that constitute their awareness, so to call it. The characters achieve neither fulfilment nor dissolution, wavering in their inclinations between the two impossibilities, they strive for the meaning of their situation, so to call it, the meaning each time withheld, or in any case ungrasped, the difference between withholding and nongrasping being irrelevant to the reader, as if meaning was something that could either be grasped or withheld, as if anything could signify anything other than itself. Krasznahorkai’s narrators are paralysed by their own ambivalences, they naturally incline, as we all do, both towards the partial, which can be sensed, which cannot be understood, and also towards the general, towards the totality, towards understanding but away from sense, towards the point at which those things that can be grasped are cancelled out by other things that are not grasped, the quest for understanding leading towards the point at which that which could be understood is extinguished, knowledge only becomes possible at the point at which there is no longer anything to know, the whole being not so much the sum of the parts as their nullification. There is no wisdom to be gained from this world. If you are leaving, there is nothing that you need to take, even if you could take anything, even if you could leave, but there is no such possible departure: “History has not ended, and nothing has ended; we can no longer delude ourselves by thinking that anything has ended with us. We merely continue something, maintaining it somehow; something continues, something survives.” The world goes on. “Nothing ever happens without antecedents, actually everything is just an antecedent, as if everything were just always preparing for something else that came before, as if it were preparing for something, but at the same time, an in an appalling manner, as if preparing without any final cumulative goal, so that everything is just a continually dying spark, everything is always striving towards a future that can never occur, what no longer exists strives towards what does not yet exist … nothing can be said beyond the fact that in addition to antecedents there are also consequences [a better translation might be ‘subsequences’], but not occurring in time.” Krasznahorkai, whose native medium is language, must express the paradoxical relationship between meaning and its impossibility through the failure of language to achieve the ends of language. Attempts to represent in language the incomprehensible events in which his narrators are immersed, and they exist only in language after all, result in the incomprehensibility of these events transferring to language itself. Agency becomes indeterminate, narrative position unstable, identity at once both overdefined and underdefined. Understanding is not gained, because it is impossible, but the usefulness of language for even its most straightforward functions is destabilised and suspicion is thrown upon it as an agent of estrangement and obfuscation that leaves us incapable of distinguishing reality from theatre. The virtuosity at which Krasznahorkai aims is almost unattainable. The closer language can be brought to resemble thought the more the shortcomings, or rather limitations, of both language and thought will be revealed. The thirty-page single sentence of ‘A Drop of Water’ is not so much linear, or even circular, as spherical, a thread of words looped endlessly over the surface of a droplet, always encountering itself and then moving on towards the next such encounter, never breaching the surface, and the fifty-three page sentence of ‘That Gargarin’, to my mind the best story in this collection, gradually reveals the insanity of its narrator, or leads him, and us, into this insanity. In his narratives and the tendencies of thought that they embody, Krasznahorkai frequently reaches into the general and towards the universal, presumably in order to demonstrate the futility of such an approach. Only the failure of the perfect, and therefore impossible, attempt can prove the impossibility of the task, but, in the struggle for better failures, is there a point at which the impossibility of the task begins to outweigh the shortcomings of the attempt, a point at which we begin to sense that our failures are existential rather than individual, a point at which we are released from personal into communal hopelessness? {Thomas}
On 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered by James Earl Ray. Before Ray’s capture and sentencing to 99 years’ imprisonment, he evaded the FBI for two months as he crossed the globe under various aliases. At the heart of his story is Lisbon, where he spent 10 days attempting to acquire an Angolan visa. Aided by the recent declassification of James Earl Ray’s FBI case file, Like a Fading Shadow weaves a taut retelling of Ray’s assassination of King, his time on the run and his eventual capture, tied together with an honest examination of the novelist’s own past.
A monster created from human remains rampages around the streets of Baghdad. What qualifies as human in a city traumatised by war? From the rubble-strewn streets of US-occupied Baghdad, the junk dealer Hadi collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and give them a proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he's created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive – first from the guilty, and then from anyone who crosses his path. As the violence escalates and Hadi's acquaintances – a journalist, a government worker and a lonely old woman – become involved, the ‘Whatsitsname’ and the havoc it wreaks assume a magnitude far greater than anyone could have imagined.
"An extraordinary piece of work. With uncompromising focus, Ahmed Saadawi takes you right to the wounded heart of war's absurd and tragic wreckage. A devastating but essential read." - Kevin Powers
"There is no shortage of wonderful, literate Frankenstein reimaginings but few so viscerally mine Shelley's story for its metaphoric riches." - Booklist
An aging member of the once-vibrant youth culture of the 1980s finds himself increasingly at a loss in a society moving at a different pace and a different direction. Vernon Subutex was once the proprietor of Revolver, an infamous music shop in Bastille. His legend spread throughout Paris. But by the 2000s, with the arrival of the internet and the decline in CDs and vinyl, his shop is struggling. When it closes, Subutex is out on a limb, with no idea what to do next. Nothing sticks. Before long, his savings are gone, his employment benefit is cut, and when the friend who had been covering his rent dies suddenly, Subutex finds himself relying on friends with spare sofas and ultimately alone and out on the Paris streets. But, as he is stretching out his hand to beg from strangers in the street, a throwaway comment he made on Facebook is taking the internet by storm. Vernon does not realise this, of course. It has been many weeks since he was able to afford access to the internet, but the word is out: Vernon Subutex has in his possession the last filmed recordings of Alex Bleach, famous musician and Vernon’s benefactor, who recently died of a drug overdose. Unbeknownst to Vernon, a crowd of people, from record producers to online trolls and porn stars, are now on his trail.
"One of the books of the year, if not the decade. No review could do it justice. Seldom has a novel with so much vicious humour and political intent also included moments of beautifully choreographed, unexpected tragedy. Bold and sophisticated, this thrilling, magnificently audacious picaresque is about France and is also about all of us: how loudly we shout, how badly we hurt." - Irish Times
"This is not just a novel, it's an electrocardiogram." - Figaro
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