Thursday 3 February 2011

Is speculative fiction poised to break into the literary canon?

Interesting blog piece about the relationship between the Booker and genre, by Damien G Walter online at the Guardian yesterday: 'The Booker prize judges have yet to acknowledge the flowering of British SF and fantasy. Will 2011 be a breakthrough year?' Have a read and see what you think. (The comments thread, though long, is pretty interesting too).

Monday 31 January 2011

Caryl Churchill's 'Seven Jewish Children'

Towards the end of The Finkler Question, Hephzibah, Treslove and Finkler go to see a play called Sons of Abraham, 'a piece of agitprop, that people were writing angry or enthusiastic letters to the papers about' [249]. You remember it:
The final scene was a well-staged tableau of destruction, all smoke and rattling metal sheets, and Wagnerian music, to which the Chosen People danced like slow-motion devils, baying and halooing, bathing their hands and feet in the blood that oozed like ketchup from the corpses of their victims, a fair number of whom were children. [250]
This is Jacobson's fictional version of a very famous contemporary play by Caryl Churchill called Seven Jewish Children (2009). Follow that link to a Wikipedia entry on the play; read the sections on 'praise' and 'criticism'.

Jacobson has been one of the play's most outspoken critics. Here, for instance, is an article he wrote for the Independent [18 Feb 2009] denouncing it.

And here is (prominent Jewish academic and thinker) Jacqueline Rose's angry response to Jacobson in the Guardian.

Jacobson wasn't pleased by Rose's column. Nor is Rose pleased by his reply.

How much of this material makes it into the novel, do you think? And to what extent is it modified or fictionalised?

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (2010)



WEEK 14; JACOBSON, THE FINKLER QUESTION

'The Finkler Question should not be seen as something that was "relentlessly middle-brow, or easy-peasy" because it was comic. It is much cleverer and more complicated and about much more difficult things than it immediately lets you know. Several people have used the word wise, and that's a good word.' [Andrew Motion, chair of judges]

Judges
Chair: Andrew Motion
Rosie Blau
Deborah Bull
Tom Sutcliffe
Frances Wilson

Shortlist

Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)
Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)
Emma Donoghue Room (Picador)
Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Atlantic Books)
Andrea Levy The Long Song (Hachette)
Tom McCarthy C (Jonathan Cape)

[Note: There are links to my reviews of all these titles, over on the sidebar to the right and at the top. AR]

Topics:

• The comic novel.
• Englishness.
• The figure of the Jew.


Reviews

Ron Charles, 'The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson' Wednesday, Washington Post October 13, 2010

Edward Docx, 'The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson' The Observer, Sunday 15 August 2010

Gerard Jacobs, 'The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson', Daily Telegraph 28 July 2010

Anthony Julius, 'The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson', The Jewish Chronicle July 28, 2010

Tuesday 25 January 2011

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009)



WEEK 13; MANTEL, WOLF HALL

'It is no coincidence that this brutal, sophisticated era has attracted the attentions of Hilary Mantel, whose over-arching theme has always been the battle between the weak and the strong' [Olivia Laing]

Judges
Chair: James Naughtie
Lucasta Miller
John Mullan
Sue Perkins
Michael Prodger

Shortlist

Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate)
A. S. Byatt The Children's Book (Chatto and Windus)
J. M. Coetzee Summertime (Harvill Secker)
Adam Foulds The Quickening Maze (Jonathan Cape)
Simon Mawer The Glass Room Little (Brown)
Sarah Waters The Little Stranger (Virago)

Topics:

• Power and powerlessness.
• History.
• The English Reformation.


Reviews

Complete Review has an overview. Some signficiant reviews include:

Vanora Bennett, 'Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel', The Times April 25, 2009

Claudia FitzHerbert, 'Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall' Telegraph 25 Apr 2009

Andrew Holgate, 'Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel', The Sunday Times May 3, 2009

Olivia Laing, 'The Tudors' finest portraitist yet', Observer Sunday 26 April 2009

Christopher Tayler 'Henry's Fighting Dog', The Guardian, Saturday 2 May 2009

Tuesday 18 January 2011

Additional Adiga

Here are a couple of further links (in addition to yesterday's post) that may be useful.

Here is Adiga's Wikipedia page. And here is an interview with him published in Rediff India Abroad, 16 Oct 2008: 'At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal.injustices of society ... the criticism by writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens of in the 19th century helped England and France become better societies. That's what I'm trying to do -- it's not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination.'

Here's a slightly longer interview, at Book Browse.
The influences on The White Tiger are three black American writers of the post-World War II era (in order), Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright. The odd thing is that I haven't read any of them for years and years -- I read Ellison's Invisible Man in 1995 or 1996, and have never returned to it -- but now that the book is done, I can see how deeply it's indebted to them.
The prominent blogger Amardeep Singh didn't like The White Tiger; read and find out why.

Finally, some context for the 2008 Prize more generally from your course leader. That year I decided (I can't remember why) to read the entire Booker Longlist. I blogged my impressions on The Valve, first on the longlist here; and then when the shortlist was announced I revisited the titles. As you can see from that, I speed-read a library copy of Adiga's novel when I went through the longlist, and couldn't get hold of it again when the shortlist was announced. This has the ironic consequence that I say a great deal about all the novels selected by the Booker judges in 2008 except the one that actually won. (I've since re-read it much more carefully, of course). But there's some stuff there that might be of interest.

Monday 17 January 2011

Adiga's White Tiger


[Here is the coursebook page for this title with links enabled]

Week 1. Introduction: Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008)

‘It won’t win any prizes for subtlety. But it hasn’t been nominated for one of those’ – Peter Robins

Aravind Adiga was born in Chennai in 1974. He has worked as a journalist for the Financial Times and Time magazine. The White Tiger is his first novel.

Editions:

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger, (London: Atlantic, 2008; London: Atlantic, 2008).

2008 Judges:
Michael Portillo (chair), Alex Clark, Louise Doughty, James Heneage, Hardeep Singh Kohli

2008 Shortlist:

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs
Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency
Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

Topics:

· Introduction to Literary Prizes and Prize Culture.
· Media Hype and the Book Trade.
· The ‘Man’ Booker Prize: New Dawn or Hot Air?

Reviews:

Adam Lively, ‘The White Tiger’, The Sunday Times, (6 April 2008).
Sameer Rahim, ‘The Man on the Poster’, Times Literary Supplement, 5480 (11 April 2008).
David Mattin, ‘The White Tiger’, The Independent on Sunday, (11 May 2008).
Peter Robins, ‘Review: The White Tiger’, The Daily Telegraph, (9 August 2008).
Kevin Rushby, ‘Review: The White Tiger’, The Guardian, (15 October 2008).
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, (6 November 2008).

A fuller round-up of reviews can be found here.

In the lecture I mention Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's celebrated essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) A version of this difficult but much-cited piece (abbreviated by the author) is available on Google Books.

Tuesday 11 January 2011

First class of Term 2

Today's lecture will crunch the numbers on the Booker. You can find the list of all the winners (from 1969 to 2010) here; and a list of all the shortlisted novels including the winner here. I've gone through and analysed these results in terms of the nationality, gender and genre of winners. A couple of interesting conclusions emerge.