Beaumaris Books Blog

The shortlist for the 2007 Miles Franklin Literary Award, which this year celebrates its 50th year, was announced today. The shortlisted titles are:

• Careless (Deborah Robertson, Picador)
• Carpentaria (Alexis Wright, Giramondo)
• Dreams of Speaking (Gail Jones, Vintage)
• Theft: A Love Story (Peter Carey, Knopf)

The judges pronounced Carey in ‘impressive form’ and his novel ‘splendid and fantastical fiction’; Jones’ Dreams of Speaking was described as ‘a poignant love story, and a portent of hope’; Robertson’s novel was praised as ‘fine, subtle writing with a tension running throughout the story’; while Wright’s Carpentaria, ‘a powerful novel about the Gulf country’, was described as ‘a big novel in every sense.’ ‘Richly imagined and stylistically ambitious, it takes all kinds of risks and pulls them off with the confidence and assurance of a novelist who has now discovered her true power.’

This year’s winner, who will receive $42, 000, will be announced at a gala dinner at the State Library of New South Wales on 21 June.

More Detail http://awards.beaumarisbooks.com.au/4981/

Cormac McCarthy  “The Road”

Published April 17, 2007

Shhhh, don’t tell anyone, but a science fiction novel just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Of course, no one is willing to admit that Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant novel The Road is a work of science fiction. But this is symptomatic of a recurring pattern with books of this sort. The tremendous creativity on display in the world of speculative fiction is masked by a conspiracy of book stores and publishing houses to keep high quality works out of the genre categories.

So you won’t see Cormac McCarthy’s book on the shelves alongside Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein any time soon. The same is true of George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and many other examples. If the science fiction category strikes many readers as unbearably lowbrow, perhaps it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In previous works, Cormac McCarthy has depicted gritty, unforgiving landscapes, usually located in the American Southwest and across the border in Mexico. His tales are marked by conflict and violence. McCarthy is to American fiction what Sam Peckinpah is to Hollywood film. His heroes rarely triumph, they struggling merely to survive.

But McCarthy has never painted a bleaker picture than in The Road. The novel opens in the aftermath of an apocalypse. Details are never provided, but some event of mass destruction has left behind a nuclear winter. Cities are demolished, food supply is scanty, and roving gangs of marauders terrorize the isolated survivors.

In this unforgiving world, a man and his son struggle to reach the coast, where they hope to find other survivors and fresh supplies. McCarthy builds his story around the constant risks and challenges faced by this pair on their dangerous journey. Many things remain unsaid – the cities are unnamed, the protagonists as well, the historical setting is left an enigma. Instead the reader is presented with the human dimension of the story in all its starkness and immediacy.

The novel has a relentless, cinematic quality to its development. But, as always with McCarthy, the psychological aspects also come to the forefront. He builds up the tension in his account to an almost unbearable level. As I read through The Road, I wanted at times to put it down, so overwhelming was the intensity of the narrative. But I felt equally compelled to read on, caught up in the descriptions and unfolding events of this powerful work of literature.

The Road is a major work by a leading American writer. It also serves as testimony to the power of speculative fiction to infuse new life and energy into mainstream fiction. But however you classify it, this cautionary tale is a must-read book.

Peter Carey is among the 15 authors on the judges’ list of contenders for the second Man Booker International Prize.

The judges’ list was announced by the chair of judges, Professor Elaine Showalter, at a press conference held yesterday at Massey College, Toronto. The 15 writers come from 10 countries and four are writers in translation.

The 15 authors on the list are:

• Chinua Achebe
• Margaret Atwood
• John Banville
• Peter Carey
• Don DeLillo
• Carlos Fuentes
• Doris Lessing
• Ian McEwan
• Harry Mulisch
• Alice Munro
• Michael Ondaatje
• Amos Oz
• Philip Roth
• Salman Rushdie
• Michel Tournier

Worth £60,000 (A$137,000) to the winner, the prize is awarded once every two years to ‘a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.’ The Man Booker International Prize was announced in June 2004 and ‘recognises one writer for his or her achievement in fiction.’ The winner is chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel; there are no submissions from publishers.

Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré won the inaugural prize in 2005 and went on to gain worldwide recognition for his work. In addition, there is a separate prize for translation and, if applicable, the winner can choose a translator of his or her work into English to receive a prize of £15,000 (A$34,000).

The winner of the 2007 prize will be announced on 28 June at a ceremony at Christ Church, Oxford, in the UK.

The judging panel for the 2007 Man Booker International Prize is: Professor Elaine Showalter, academic and author; Nadine Gordimer, writer and novelist; and writer and academic, Colm Tóibin. In announcing their list, the judges commented: ‘With this list, we offer a gift to readers all over the world, an opportunity to join a conversation on 15 writers, diverse in nationality, language, themes and techniques, but united in their dedication to the power of the word.’

www.manbookerinternational.com

Allen & Unwin writes: we recently received the sad news that Faber author Michael Dibdin died in Seattle on Friday 30 March after a short illness. He was a much-loved author with tens of thousands of devoted readers, and was also a brilliant critic.

Faber & Faber published Michael Dibdin’s books for over 20 years and his 18th thriller End Games, featuring his wonderful Italian detective Aurelio Zen, is a fittingly clever, vivid and funny novel, that will be published in Australia in September this year.

Counterculture idol Kurt Vonnegut has died at his home in Manhattan, aged 84.

Vonnegut, who often marvelled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home several weeks ago, his wife, photographer Jill Krementz, said.

Vonnegut was a novelist known for his dark humour and metaphysical and science fiction content.

He wrote 14 novels, including Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions and Timequake during a career that began in 1950 with the publication of a short story in the magazine Colliers.

His books were described as dark, comic narratives that blended science fiction, metaphysics, and humanism.

Slaughterhouse-Five, based on his experience during the firebombing of Dresden while being held there as a prisoner of war, brought the horrors of the bombing to the public’s attention and became his most famous work.

“The firebombing of Dresden was a work of art,” Vonnegut wrote. It was “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany”.

He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanising people.

“I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations,” Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.

A self-described religious sceptic and free-thinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view.

He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, he drew a headstone with the epitaph: “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”

But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.

Despite his commercial success, he battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984 he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.

His mother had succeeded in killing herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge.

He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated 135,000 people in the city.

“The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am,” he wrote in Fates Worse Than Death, his 1991 autobiography of sorts.

But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POWs inside an underground meat locker labelled slaughterhouse-five.

Vonnegut, the youngest of three children, was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1922 and was a third generation German-American.

He is survived by his wife and seven children.

Works by Kurt Vonnegut

Player Piano, 1951
The Sirens of Titan, 1959
Canary in a Cat House, 1961 (short works)
Mother Night, 1961
Cat’s Cradle, 1963
God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, 1965
Welcome to the Monkey House, 1968 (short works)
Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969
Happy Birthday, Wanda June, 1971 (play)
Between Time and Timbuktu, 1972 (TV script)
Breakfast of Champions, 1973
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, 1974 (opinions)
Slapstick, 1976
Jailbird, 1979
Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage, 1981 (essays)
Deadeye Dick, 1982
Galapagos, 1985
Bluebeard, 1987
Hocus Pocus, 1990
Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s, 1991 (essays)
Timequake, 1997
A Man Without a Country, 2005 (essays)

- with AP Dylan Welch