The 2004 IMPAC literary award shortlist reflects its international focus,writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent
Literary awards come in all shapes, sizes and specialisations. Some are so discreet, no one seems to know anything about them until acknowledgment of having won appears among the few details given in the brief author's biography on the paperback edition of a book. If the prize is a major one, the winning of it may merit mention on the front jacket. Only a few approach Oscar levels of intensity. There are little prizes and big ones, and very public, well-established ones such as the 34-year-old Booker in which the six contenders are paraded like subdued gladiators for about a month before the winner emerges during the course of a smart London dinner.
The largest in terms of prize money is the €100,000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Inaugurated in 1995 with much back-slapping fanfare and many references to Dublin's literary reputation, it set out to attract the world - and it has.
Promoting itself as the biggest, richest and most international award, it draws on nominations from 162 international libraries, not publishers. Now in its 9th year, the award has matured. It has dispensed with its initial self-congratulation, has already contributed a great winner in Romanian Herta Müller's surreal horror story, The Land of Green Plums (1998), and is continuing to deliver the most essential element of its claims - its internationalism.
This year's shortlist, announced at noon yesterday is, again, international, including an Indian, three US writers, one of whom is Mexican-American, two Britons, a Moroccan, a Lebanese - both of whom write in French - a Pole and an Afghani. It also has its share of the usual suspects, headed by a former IMPAC contender and thrice Booker runner-up, Indian writer, Rohinton Mistry, two major US novelists, Jeffrey Eugenides and Paul Auster, and the traditional English stylist, William Boyd, joined by interesting lesser-known foreign writers. The 10 contenders, written by seven men and three women, with four translated from the original, have been drawn from a longlist of 125 titles, 35 in translation, published on November 17th last.
Eugenides heads the list of top scoring nominations. His novel, Middlesex, winner of last year's Pulitzer Prize, was nominated by 11 libraries. In close pursuit is Mistry's, Family Matters, nominated by 10 libraries. Paper-backed last year, in Ireland it is probably to date the most widely read of the contenders.
Both Auster and Boyd are familiar names to the Irish reading public. It will have been noted by IMPAC watchers, that although five Irish writers, including William Trevor, John Banville, Sebastian Barry, Michael Collins and Joseph O'Connor were longlisted, none have made the final shoot-out. So the award, first won by the Australian, David Malouf in 1996 and since by Europeans, with the sole exception of the great Canadian storyteller, Alistair MacLeod in 2001, has yet to have an Irish winner.
For the past three years, the Booker has published a 20-strong longlist. It adds to the Booker hype. But IMPAC has always made its lengthy longlists public, thus stimulating speculative debate, as it invariably juxtaposes the popular with the literary, and features bestsellers alongside the work of Nobel prize winners. There they are, the great, the good and the hyped. Literary fiction prevailed over popular beach reads in the longlist published last November.
This year's IMPAC judges will be praised, and thanked, by readers everywhere for having the wisdom to include Afghani Atiq Rahimi's debut Earth and Ashes, a beautiful war-time fable of only 54 pages in which an old man, his family devastated by the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, battles to find his son. Too short to win? As was Cees Nooteboom's The Following Story. It doesn't matter, the main thing is that readers will be alerted to a remarkable work gracefully translated from the Dari (an Iranian dialect spoken in Afghanistan) by Erdag M. Göknar, translator of last year's winner My Name is Red, by Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk. This is the strength of IMPAC: its showcasing, along with the big Western names, of otherwise elusive foreign language fiction.
It would have been wonderful had Albanian Ismail Kadare's beautiful Spring Flower, Spring Frost made the final 10. Although it didn't, two exciting novels, Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf's dazzling historical picaresque Balthasar's Odyssey, a possible winner, and Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun's This Blinding Absence of Light did. Set in 1666, Balthasar's Odyssey is irresistible, very funny and quite manic. The narrator's journey across the world in pursuit of a book and also himself, races through history and culture with an easy, surprising grace and always celebrates story. This Blinding Absence of Light, based on the true-life agonies of Moroccan prisoners of war trapped in a filthy hell under the desert, is astonishing and is important for its many truths.
Kadare's novel would have been a far more satisfying addition than Maggie Gee's The White Family, which is a sincere, if heavy-handed Guardian reader's polemical study about racism in contemporary Britain as experienced by a London family, white by name and colour.
Any assessment of shortlists usually includes lamenting the omissions, and along with exalted fallers such Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault, Banville's Shroud, Milan Kundera's Ignorance and John Updike's Seek My Face, are three excellent novels that would have benefited hugely by inclusion on such a list. Mary Lawson's outstanding debut, Crow Lake, is a subtle, convincing domestic saga of unsettling, if deceptive, power and is vastly superior to Gee's book. Also sadly overlooked were Scottish writer Janice Galloway's Clara, based on the life of Clara Schumann, composer, concert pianist and hard-pressed wife of Robert Schumann and Canadian Guy Vanderhaeghe's richly atmospheric, multiple narrative, The Last Crossing.
Vanderhaeghe, a writer with an understanding of characterisation as well as an impressive and underrated body of work to his credit, would have benefited from a shortlisting. But the nod went to another, albeit adopted voice from Canada. Based there since 1975, the Bombay-born Rohinton Mistry has won his share of awards, including twice taking the Commonwealth Writers prize and has a large readership. His fiction is warm, humane, profound and very appealing. To date he holds the unofficial honour of reaching the Booker shortlist for each of his three novels. Family Matters looks a strong and deserving favourite for this year's IMPAC, ahead of Maalouf's yarn which will be hampered by sharing a historical setting with last year's winner, My Name is Red. Mistry's quiet narrative has an artistic edge over Eugenides's lively , tragicomic domestic saga about a central character who is born a girl and then reborn as a boy.
That said, Middlesex triumphs through its sympathetic, bewildered narrator. There are flashes of inventive comedy and the story draws on the theme of Greek immigrants adrift in the US. Also concerned with cross-culturalisation is Chicago-born Sandra Cisneros whose Caramelo charts the history of a Mexican-American family. It is a full-blooded, exhausting novel of voices, it entertains and irritates in equal measures. At heart it is concerned with that most intense of cultures, oral tradition, but at times it gushes and heaves.
Paul Auster's eighth novel, The Book of Illusions, is as ever concerned with connections. A professor loses his wife and young sons in an air crash and slides into drunken despair. A late night movie featuring a long dead 1920s comedy star engages him to the point of writing a book about the actor who abruptly disappeared. But a letter arrives and with it, begins a typical Auster journey of connections and coincidences.
William Boyd's Any Human Heart echoes one of his earlier novels, The New Confessions (1987) and is another big book that follows a narrator through a life shaped by the events and central players of the 20th century. Logan Mountstuart lives, lusts and talks, but only becomes convincing in sympathetic old age. Boyd made his name as a post-Waugh writer and is an engaging storyteller, but this book, for all its name-dropping, historical detail and index, never seems quite true.
Truth and memory, as well as story, work well for the Polish writer, Olga Tokarczuk. Her offbeat House of Day, House of Night, in which a narrator moves into an old country house and becomes friendly with her ancient neighbour, is a collection of random tales and local gossip. More a gathering of moments than cohesive narrative, it is a charming, attractive work from a consciousness alert to history's vagaries.
Who will win? The domestic realism of Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters should edge to the finishing line, narrowly ahead of the vivid picaresque of Balthasar's Odyssey, a chaotic quest of quests undertaken by a narrator intent on saving the world and himself.
