Man Booker Prize 2017

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Autumn by Ali Smith

I have finally read a novel by Ali Smith and enjoyed it, though it is distracting to explain why with so many exuberant accolades and comments all over it saying how brilliant it is, I wish I could just read without the expectation this over abundance of blurbs brings. She is clearly the darling of British literary media and publishing, however all the superlatives are a little over the top in my opinion.

Autumn is the first in a series of books she has said she will write, named after the seasons. Winter has just come out and I’ve read some good reviews that suggest it is as good as, and some say even better than Autumn.

Autumn moves back and forth in time and is mostly narrated through the relationship of Elisabeth and her mother’s neighbour Daniel. For her homework, Elisabeth should interview a neighbour and ask certain questions, her mother doesn’t approve and suggests she makes it up. She does. A few days later the mother invites the neighbour to read what her daughter had written. This moment signals the beginning of what will become a special relationship between Daniel, a foreign octogenarian and the teenage Elisabeth.

As the novel opens Daniel appears to be hallucinating and while doing so philosophises about death. Elisabeth is 32 and a junior lecturer in London on a zero hours contract.  She is visiting Daniel Gluck in a home. Every aspect of life is in its Autumn.

In the background the country is changing, attitudes are changing, apathy is being replaced by protest. Seasons change as they always do, legacy’s are lost and forgotten, occasionally revived, survive.

“It’s all right to forget, you know” he said. “It’s good to. In fact, we have to forget things sometimes. Forgetting it is important.  We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we’d never sleep, ever again.”

The narrative skips back to her childhood and then forward twenty years to Daniel in the care facility. He is now 101 years old, Elisabeth visits him and reads to him, he is always asleep, but she talks to him anyway and remembers the things they used to talk about when she was young.

She hasn’t visited her mother for years, but now while she visits Daniel, she spends time with her mother, they are related but alien to each other. They don’t try to make each other understand. Something in Daniel nourishes Elisabeth and helps her to grow, to question, and eventually to understand.

Today he looks like a Roman senator, his sleeping head noble, his eyes shut and blank as a statue, his eyebrows mere moments of frost.

It is a privilege to watch someone sleep, Elizabeth tells herself. It is a privilege to be able to witness someone both here and not here. To be included in someone’s absence, it is an honour, and it asks quiet. It asks respect.

No. It is awful.

It is fucking awful.

It is awful to be on the literal other side of his eyes.

“Mr Gluck,” she says.

Pauline Boty by Lewis Morley, Sept 1963

Daniel describes images to Elisabeth, which years later she recognises, a painting by the British Pop artist Pauline Boty, introducing an element of mystery and intrigue to do with an old scandal and the premature deaths of two young women. We’re not give much detail, and I’m assuming most of us will never have heard of Pauline Boty or Christine Keeler, women whose art and stories were quickly forgotten, denied even.

It’s a cryptic read that enters into subjects, into the lives of a small group of characters without providing all the detail, enough to entice the reader, to hint at the depth of a connection and leaves it before we can entirely understand, we too must imagine, join the dots, make of it what we will, catch the leaves before the fall, but not worry if we don’t, they’ll come around again next season.

 

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Man Booker Prize 2017 Winner #GeorgeSaunders

Yesterday the winner of the Man Booker 2017 was announced, and the prize went to:

Of the shortlisted titles, I’d only read one Exit West and I keep promising to finally read a book by Ali Smith,but that hasn’t happened yet. I was a little intrigued by Lincoln in the Bardo, but put off by the hype and an air of assuredness in the media of it winning; it was the British bookies favourite and although it is his first full length novel, he is an accomplished, bestselling author in the US.

Having listened to Baroness Young speak about how they came to their decision in this video, I am back in ‘intrigue’ mode and thinking, I really would like to know this one from the inside. It’s worth listening to the video, as she also mentions the obstacles some readers might encounter, an admirable admission, as not all award winning literary fiction is as accessible to the reader as one might imagine.

Comments below are extracted from the Man Booker website:

Lola, Baroness Young, 2017 Chair of judges, comments:

‘The form and style of this utterly original novel, reveals a witty, intelligent, and deeply moving narrative. This tale of the haunting and haunted souls in the afterlife of Abraham Lincoln’s young son paradoxically creates a vivid and lively evocation of the characters that populate this other world. Lincoln in the Bardo is both rooted in, and plays with history, and explores the meaning and experience of empathy.’

Lincoln in the Bardo focuses on a single night in the life of Abraham Lincoln: an actual moment in 1862 when the body of his 11-year-old son was laid to rest in a Washington cemetery.

Strangely and brilliantly, Saunders activates this graveyard with the spirits of its dead. The Independent described the novel as ‘completely beguiling’, praising Saunders for concocting a ‘narrative like no other: a magical, mystery tour of the bardo – the “intermediate” or transitional state between one’s death and one’s next birth, according to Tibetan Buddhism.’

Meanwhile, the Guardian wrote that, ‘the short story master’s first novel is a tale of great formal daring…[it] stands head and shoulders above most contemporary fiction, showing a writer who is expanding his universe outwards, and who clearly has many more pleasures to offer his readers.’

Saunders told TIME magazine that he didn’t really want to write about Lincoln,

‘but was so captivated by this story I’d heard years ago about him entering his son’s crypt. I thought of the book as a way of trying to instil the same reaction I’d had all those years ago.’

So have you read this novel, or if not, are you tempted by it? Did you have another favourite to win?

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Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie #ManBookerPrize

I read Home Fire in two days, I thought it was brilliantly done, heartbreaking, tragic, essential. It’s been long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2017 and certainly makes my short list! I’m looking forward to reading more of the author’s back list.

Underpinning the novel is the premise of Sophocles’ 5thC BC play Antigone, an exploration of the conflict between those who affirm the individual’s human rights and those who must protect the state’s security.

Before reading Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, I downloaded a translation of Antigone to read, she acknowledges herself that Anne Carson’s translation of Antigone (Oberon Books, 2015) and The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone by Seamus Heaney were constant companions as she wrote, expressing gratitude too, for the children’s book version The Story of Antigone and its author Ali Smith.

In Ali Smith’s version there is a discussion at the end of the book about what stories are, which reads:

“Stories are a kind of nourishment. We do need them, and the fact that the story of Antigone, a story about a girl who wants to honour the body of her dead brother, and why she does, keeps being told suggests that we do need this story, that it might be one of the ways that we make life and death meaningful, that it might be a way to help us understand life and death, and that there’s something nourishing in it, even though it is full of terrible and difficult things, a very dark story full of sadness.”

Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire is a contemporary retelling of the classic play, set in contemporary London. Even though I knew the premise of the story from having read the play, the story unfolded as if I had no prior knowledge of its likely outcome, it has its own unique surprises and insights, making it a compelling read.

We meet Isma, the eldest daughter of a family, who’ve been raised by their mother and grandmother, as she announces to her twin brother and sister Aneeka and Parvaiz that she is going to the US to complete her PhD studies that were put on pause after the death of their mother and grandmother within the space of a year, leaving her to become the mother to griefstruck twelve-year-old twins. She had briefly known her father, but the twins never.

The rigorous interrogation she is put through on leaving the UK reveal something in her family background that their entire family has tried to keep quiet, just wanting to move on with their lives, that their father had abandoned them and gone to fight as a jihadi in Afghanistan and had died en route to Guantanamo.

While in the US, Isma meets Eamonn, the son of a British politician she detests, setting in motion a litany of events that will have a catastrophic impact on both their families.

“Eamonn, that was his name. How they’d laughed in Wembley when the newspaper article accompanying the family picture revealed this detail, an Irish spelling to disguise a Muslim name – Ayman become Eamonn so that people would know the father had integrated.”

For Parvaiz, the only son, the lack of a father figure created a void, his grandmother had been the only family member willing to talk about him, but her stories were always of the boy, never of the man he became, a subject she was reluctant to be drawn into.

“He had always watched boys and their fathers with an avidity composed primarily of hunger. Whenever any of those fathers had made a certain gesture towards him – a hand placed on the back of his neck, the word ‘son’, an invitation to a football match – he’d retreat, both ashamed and afraid in a jumbled way that only grew more so as the years passed and the world of girls and boys grew more separate, so there were times he was not a twin to a twin but rather the only male in a house that knew all the secrets that women shared with on another but none that fathers taught their son.”

It’s a riveting, intense novel that propels the reader forward, even while something in us wants to resist what we can feel coming. It pits love against loyalty, family versus country, and cruelly displays how hard it is for families to distance themselves from the negative patterns of their ancestral past.

Kamila Shamsie was born in Karachi and now lives in London, a dual citizen of the UK and Pakistan. Her debut novel In The City by the Sea, written while still in college, was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the UK and every novel since then has been highly acclaimed and shortlisted or won a literary prize, in 2013 she was included in the Granta list of 20 best young British writers.

Her novels are (linked to Goodreads):

Note: This book was an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) kindly provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

Click here to Purchase a copy of

Home Fire via Book Depository