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Mittwoch, 17. Oktober 2018

Every Man Booker Prize Winner of the 21st Century / Book Marks October 16, 2018


Congratulations to Anna Burns, who earlier this evening at London’s Guildhall became the 50th winner of the Man Booker Prize—Britain’s most prestigious and high profile literary award—when she took home the gold for her novel Milkman: a tale of tribalism and hope set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which focuses on a young woman who is forced into a relationship with an older man.
From its inception in 1969 until 2013, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African (and later Zimbabwean) citizens were eligible to receive the £50,000 prize; in 2014, however, this eligibility was widened to any English-language novel—a change which proved controversial, but which also opened a door for the two most recent winners (Paul Beatty’s The Sellout in 2016, and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo in 2017) to walk through.
Now you can’t actually buy Milkman over here yet—something which I’m sure will be rectified by a hungry publisher very soon—but while you’re waiting, and still in Booker mode, why not take a journey into the recent past with us, and see what the critics wrote about every previous Man Booker Prize-winning novel of the 21st century?


2017
George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

“…a luminous feat of generosity and humanism … The souls crowd around this uncanny child. As the cast grows, so does our perspective; the novel’s concerns expand, and we see this human business as an angel does, looking down. In the midst of the Civil War, saying farewell to one son foreshadows all those impending farewells to sons, the hundreds of thousands of those who will fall in the battlefields. The stakes grow, from our heavenly vantage, for we are talking about not just the ghostly residents of a few acres, but the citizens of a nation—in the graveyard’s slaves and slavers, drunkards and priests, soldiers of doomed regiments, suicides and virgins, are assembled a country. The wretched and the brave, and such is Saunders’s magnificent portraiture that readers will recognize in this wretchedness and bravery aspects of their own characters as well. He has gathered ‘sweet fools’ here, and we are counted among their number … The narrator is a curator, arranging disparate sources to assemble a linear story. It may take a few pages to get your footing, depending. The more limber won’t be bothered. We’ve had plenty of otherworldly choruses before, from Grover’s Corners to Spoon River, and with so many walking dead in the pop culture nowadays, why not a corresponding increase in the talking dead? Are the nonfiction excerpts—from presidential historians, Lincoln biographers, Civil War chroniclers—real or fake? Who cares? Keep going, read the novel, Google later … the war here is a crucible for a heroic American identity: fearful but unflagging; hopeful even in tragedy; staggering, however tentatively, toward a better world … events sometimes conspire to make a work of art, like a novel set in the past, supremely timely. In describing Lincoln’s call to action, Saunders provides an appeal for his limbo denizens—for citizens everywhere—to step up and join the cause.”
–Colson Whitehead (The New York Times Book Review)
2016

The Sellout
Paul Beatty, The Sellout 

The Sellout makes room for both satirical spectacle and earnest literary whispers. Beatty’s reliance on so many textured backstories and secondary characterizations feels both revelatory and absolutely intentional. … The Sellout while riding beneath terrifying waves of American racial terror and heteropatriarchy, is among the most important and difficult American novels written in the 21st century … The Sellout, in all its spiky satirical absurdity, exists not just in a world created by hip-hop and cradled by the Internet. The Sellout firmly situates itself between white supremacy and black love, between thick anti-blackness and communal black innovation. It is a bruising novel that readers will likely never forget.”
–Kiese Laymon (The Los Angeles Times)

2015
a brief history of seven killings

If A Brief History of Seven Killings can be said to have a main idea, it’s that nobody escapes, at least not entirely, from violence. Because violence isn’t an event, but a kind of potential—a force, like gravity, that lurks in every curve of space … It has less in common with most recent literary fiction than it does with Breaking Bad and The WireSeven Killings is surprising, suspenseful, and, when it stirs from its sinister languor, fast, with action sequences as finger-curling and eyelid-lifting as anything onscreen. But as much as it resembles the best of today’s television, the novel conveys violence with an interior nuance perhaps only achievable in prose. Its intensity comes less from the story’s underworld glamour than it does from James’s style and syntax—a language that gives texture to danger and its psychic terrain … Some will be frustrated by its lack of ‘larger comment,’ the usual hall pass for dangerous art. Others will find it too painful. People who think good writing should always be graceful won’t like it at all.”
–Julian Lucas (The New York Review of Books)
2014

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep

“The story casts its roving eye on 77-year-old Dr. Dorrigo Evans, a celebrated war hero whose life has been an unsatisfying string of sterile affairs and public honors. He loved a woman once, but tragedy intervened, and since then each new award and commendation only makes Dorrigo feel undeserving and fraudulent … For many pages, the novel shimmers over the decades of Dorrigo’s life, only flashing on the horrors of war and the ghosts who haunt him. But soon enough, that unspeakable period comes into focus in a series of blistering episodes you will never get out of your mind … The novel doesn’t exonerate these war criminals, but it forces us to admit that history conspired to place them in a situation where cruelty would thrive, where the natural responses of human kindness and sympathy were short-circuited.”


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