Cait86 Reads the Booker Prize

This thread will document my reading of the Man Booker Prize.

I have read:

Winners
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (1992)
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (1998)
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee (1999)
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (2000)
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008)
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009)
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (2011)
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (2012)
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (2013)
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017)

Nominees
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1986)
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood (1989)
The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald (1990)
Black Dogs by Ian McEwan (1992)
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996)
The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin (1999)
The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi (2000)
Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman (2001)
The Stone Carvers by Jane Urguhart (2001)
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002)
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003)
Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller (2003)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon (2003)
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (2005)
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (2006)
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (2007)
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (2007)
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (2008)
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin (2009)
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (2009)
The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt (2009)
Love and Summer by William Trevor (2009)
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (2009)
The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds (2009)
Room by Emma Donoghue (2010)
The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore (2010)
In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut (2010)
The Long Song by Andrea Levy (2010)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (2010)
February by Lisa Moore (2010)
Trespass by Rose Tremain (2010)
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (2010)
On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry (2011)
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt (2011)
A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards (2011)
Snowdrops by A.D. Miller (2011)
Far to Go by Alison Pick (2011)
The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers (2011)
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (2012)
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy (2012)
The Lighthouse by Alison Moore (2012)
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (2013)
Harvest by Jim Crace (2013)
The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín (2013)
TransAtlantic by Colum McCann (2013)
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (2013)
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (2014)
History of the Rain by Niall Williams (2014)
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (2017)
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (2017)
Autumn by Ali Smith (2017)
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor (2017)
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (2017)
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2017)
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (2018)

I currently own, but have not read:

Winners
Troubles by J.G. Farrell (Lost Booker 1970)
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch (1978)
Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally (1982)
Possession by A. S. Byatt (1990)
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (2006)
The Gathering by Anne Enright (2007)

Nominees
Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard (1984)
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1993)
Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry (2002)
The Master by Colm Toibin (2004)
Black Swan Green by Dvid Mitchell (2006)
How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall (2009)
Not Untrue and Not Unkind by Ed O'Loughlin (2009)
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (2009)
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (2010)
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray (2010)
Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch (2011)
The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst (2011)
Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman (2011)
The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness (2011)
The Yips by Nicola Barker (2012)
The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman (2012)
Philida by André Brink (2012)
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (2012)
Skios by Michael Frayn (2012)
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (2012)
Communion Town by Sam Thompson (2012)
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (2013)
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (2013)
How to Be Both by Ali Smith (2014)
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt (2014)
Orfeo by Richard Powers (2014)
Us by David Nicholls (2014)
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (2014)
Lila by Marilynne Robinson (2015)

I'm currently in the middle of Far to Go, which is excellent so far; it is the story of a Jewish family living in the Sudetenland in 1938, right when things where starting to really ramp up in Europe. I'm a fan of Holocaust/WW2 novels (that sounds a little odd, but there you go), so I figured I would enjoy this book.

The main character is Marta, the gentile governess of Pepik Bauer, and her feelings towards her employers, and Jews in general, seem very realistic to me. She goes back and forth - on one hand, she considers the Bauers to be her family, but on the other hand, she is living in a world where Jews were considered the enemy, and Hitler the saviour of the German people. Even though I think/hope Marta will make the right decisions in the end, it is good to see her waver. So often in Holocaust novels people are very black and white - they are either Jewish supporters or not. I think that the average person, however, probably found the issue much more complicated than that, and had to work out how they felt about the things going on around them.

The narrative structure is interesting too, as it moves between past and present, third- and first-person, and also includes letters. I like variation in voice, so I'm good with the transitions, even if they are a little jarring at first.

In the end, Far to Go was good, but not great. I thought the first half of the novel was brilliant - a slow build-up to the occupation of Czechoslovakia through the eyes of some very well-constructed characters. Marta, Pavel, and Annaliese were all interesting characters with plausible motivations, and their actions seemed realistic. The last half was not nearly as strong, and the ending felt rushed (not to mention a bit irritating).

I gave the novel 4 stars, and I will try to construct a review some time this weekend. I don't see this book moving on to the shortlist.

I'm now moving on to Snowdrops by A.D. Miller

Well, I've finished Snowdrops, and found it quite disappointing. It was very evocative of Russia, as Miller excelled at describing both the setting and the corrupt nature of Moscow. However, the characters were flat and stereotypical, and plot boring. It took forever for the conflicts to begin, and the ending was easy to predict. I gave Snowdrops 3 stars, and really hope it does not make the shortlist.

I am now starting The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt.

I've just found your thread Cate ... I look forward to following your reading!

>Hi, Laura!

Alright, so I have finished The Sisters Brothers, and while it was entertaining (most of the time), it was not really my cup of tea. The narrator, Eli, has a very distinctive voice, and I found him interesting for the first half of the book. Then, I started to find his eccentricities rather annoying, and he became almost cartoonish. So, another Booker disappointment. :(

Then, finally, a book that should definitely go on to the shortlist, if not win the whole shebang - The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. This is a short novel, maybe a novella, that is basically an older man's musings on life and memory. It is beautifully written, full of rhythm and repetition, and unlike the first-person narrator of Snowdrops, I actually found Barnes' narrator interesting - I cared about his life and the lessons he learns. Actually, this is one book that I immediately wanted to read again!

I'm glad that you enjoyed The Sense of an Ending, Cait; it's the longlisted book that I'm looking forward to the most. I'll move The Sisters Brothers a few places down the list.

Cait - I totally agree with your assessment of the Barnes book - the best one I have read so far. too.

I did like the deWitt book, more for the novelty of it and comic value of the characters than anything else, but I don't think it has a chance!! I am not as keen on it as others here, but think that the author is likely to have a few more interesting books up his sleeve in the future. (It is sometimes hard not to get swayed by the opinions of others - I must try to make my assessments more impartially!)

Jamrach menagerie has been getting some rave reviews, but I found it a slog and skimmed quite a bit of the second part. It gets my 'slog award'.

>12 kidzdoc: - Hi, Darryl! I think you will enjoy The Sense of an Ending.

>13 kiwidoc: - Karen, I'm not at all keen to read Jamrach's Menagerie - I'm not sure why, maybe because of the comparisons to The Life of Pi - and now I'm even less excited! I'm not swearing off deWitt either, I think for a first novel The Sisters Brothers was good, just not a Booker.

Review for The Sense of an Ending

Rating: 4.5 stars

Julian Barnes' short novel is a beautiful meditation on memory, and the parts of our lives that we choose to forget. Tony, the narrator, opens by describing his final year of high school. He and his two friends were typical cynical teenagers, thinking themselves much smarter than they actually were, full of grand plans for their lives. Into Tony's circle comes Adrian, smarter than the rest, a boy full of philosophy and big ideas. Following high school, each boy goes his separate way. Tony meets a girl, Veronica, and spends a weekend at her parents' house, where he feels out of place. Later, Veronica meets Tony's friends, and seems to like them all more than she likes Tony. Predictably, she breaks up with him and begins dating Adrian.

Years later, Veronica's mother leaves Tony a bit of money and some documents in her will. Mysteriously, Veronica refuses to give up one of the documents. As Tony attempts to get what is rightfully his, he begins to dredge up old memories. Did he ever love Veronica? What role did he play in Adrian's life? What, in the end, has been the point of his very mundane existence?

Honestly, as someone in her twenties, I'm not totally the correct audience for this book. Tony talks about being young and having all kinds of grand hopes for his life. He remembers waiting for his life to start, imagining the exciting things that are certain to happen to him. I identified with this quite a lot, but then when, in the next breath, he basically said that youth don't know what they are talking about, and that life never really "starts" - well, that I didn't understand so much. However, this distance between my experiences and that of the narrator did not hinder my enjoyment of the novel.

Barnes is a terrific writer; The Sense of an Ending is very rhythmic, with just the right amount of repetition. The whole thing fits together beautifully, and Tony's voice was never boring. It takes a lot for me to enjoy a first-person narrative, and Barnes won me over immediately. Tony wasn't perfect, but he also wasn't so flawed that he was unlikeable. He was at times very honest, and at other times totally unreliable, and it was fun trying to decipher what I could believe.

The Sense of an Ending is the first Booker novel this year that has struck me as worthy of the prize, and I would be very disappointed if it didn't at least make the shortlist. I will seek out more of Barnes' work in the future, and look forward to rereading The Sense of an Ending.

Fabulous review of The Sense of an Ending, Cait! I can't wait to start this, and I'll probably read it this coming weekend.

Cait - did you not get a sense of autobiographic reminiscence? I think he has had a stormy history with women. Great review - you really captured the essence of the book.

You must read his early work, Cait. I was particularly taken with his A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
.
He used to live in France and had a love-affair of a kind with Flaubert's work, and Flaubert's Parrot reflects this. I think he way prefers the medium of the shorter story.

(edited to change 9 1/2 to 10 1/2)

As to Jamrach's Menagerie, I have not read The Life of Pi.

I am sure that this book will appeal to some and not others - i did enjoy her writing up to a point - atmospheric, descriptive. But I am more one for the simplistic, crafted style - those writings that read like an effortless delight. This book was work for me- sort of like the Amitav Ghosh book (Sea of Poppies that was nominated a year or two ago. Good writing, but just a slog for me. All personal taste in the end.

Oh, great review of The Sense of an Ending! The library doesn't have a copy (curses!), so I'm eyeing it off on the bookshop's online catalogue...

I could see some good points to Jamrach's Menagerie (review still pending), but I think she mostly just wanted to show off some stylistic fireworks, and I got a bit fed up with that. I did love Life of Pi, but didn't notice any similarities then, or now, when I think about it. (I actually had a momentary comparison to The Tiger's Wife, with the runaway tiger at the beginning.)

Just stopping by to say hi, Cate! It's late here, so perhaps tommorow I'll have time to say something more meaningful!;)

I enjoyed The Tiger's Wife a lot more than Jamrach's Menagerie. Although not a huge fan of magic realism, Obreht did a lovely job of it, has a nice light touch with her prose and I think she really deserved the Orange.

>17 kiwidoc:, 18 - I agree, Karen. I think The Sense of an Ending was probably rather autobiographic. I'll remember your recommendation of The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, thanks! As for Jamrach's Menagerie, I like atmospheric writing, but I prefer it to be sparse, like Michael Ondaatje, as opposed to the dense description of someone like Dickens.

>19 wookiebender:, 21 - I think the comparison to Life of Pi is just in the "animal as metaphor" category - rather like The Tiger's Wife too. I loved Obreht's book, and thought she deserved the Orange Prize as well, though I haven't read The Memory of Love yet.

>20 vancouverdeb: - Hi Deb!

Notes on A Cupboard Full of Coats

4.25 stars - I wish LT had quarter stars!

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this debut novel. I wasn't expecting all that much, probably because the story didn't sound very unique, but I thought Edwards' execution was quite good. Definitely the strong points were the descriptions of Caribbean culture, particularly the food, and also the tension Edwards built into the plot. I enjoyed the movement between Jinx's past and present, and Lemon's contributions to the overall story, and was immediately caught up in the mystery surrounding Jinx's mother's murder. There is a lot of meditation on guilt, and on the role of fate, but the most interesting idea was about the possessive nature of love, and feeling as though loving a person was akin to owning them. I'm not sure that this is typical Booker fare, but I would be quite happy if it made the shortlist.

Review coming next week - I am moving tomorrow and will be without internet for a few days.

Well, A Cupboard Full of Coats got 4.35 from me..... but on LT - I rounded it up to 4.5! I do that quite often... I wish LT had 10th of a star. I really enjoyed A Cupboard of Full of Coats - and I've created a review on the main page . Yours review is great!

Another one for the pile.

>24 vancouverdeb: - Thanks Deb, it was nice to see that someone else liked A Cupboard Full of Coats as much as I did!

>25 kiwidoc: - Let me know what you think of it, Karen!

My Booker reading has sort of stalled lately, though I am still planning on reading the rest of the longlist. I think I will start Half Blood Blues or Jamrach's Menagerie next...

Resurrecting this thread with some reviews/comments from 2012:

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce: This debut novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize the other day, and was the first of the 12 titles I decided to read. By the end, I was worried that I was having flashbacks to last year, when the novels were about readability rather than quality writing. Joyce is, in my mind, nothing beyond a normal commercial writer, and her novel left no real lasting impression. I'm not sorry I read it, but I'm not thrilled with it either.

The plot: Harold Fry, 65, living in a unhappy marriage, get a lette from an old colleague, Queenie, who is dying of cancer. Harold sets out to mail a reply back to Queenie, but he walks right past the nearest mailbox. Then he walks past another. And another. Finally Harold decides to walk the entire length of England to the hospice where Queenie is dying, in hopes that his faith in her can keep her alive.

Most of the novel is Harold's journey, and the people he meets along the way, and the lessons he learns from them. Some of the chapters focus on his wife, Maureen, left at home to try and understand what it is her husband is doing. I enjoyed Maureen as a character far more than Harold, and kind of wished that it had been her pilgrimage, rather than his.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was a quick read, and a sweet story, and I can see it appealing to a lot of readers. But the Booker is about the best in literature, and this certainly was not the best.

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy: Swimming Home is set in a villa in the French Riviera, where poet Joe Jacobs is vacationing with his wife, Isabel, his daughter, Nina, and their friends, Mitchell and Laura. Everything seems perfectly idyllic until a strange girl named Kitty Finch is found swimming naked in the villa's pool. Kitty pretends to believe that the villa was hers for the week, and Isabel invites her to stay. In reality, Kitty has sought out Joe, who she worships, to look at one of her poems. This lie is just the first in a series of secrets and deceptions that drive Swimming Home forward.

Levy makes some interesting choices here, in her writing. Characters frequently believe outlandish things - for example, Kitty is initially mistaken for a bear, dead in the pool, and when Nina goes missing, the adults assume she has been kidnapped, when really she is merely asleep. Kitty is frequently accused of being crazy, but the gullibility and tendency to expect the worst of all the characters makes the entire cast seem a bit off their rockers. Next-door neighbour Dr. Sheridan, caretaker Jurgen, and local Casanova Claude round out the novel with more insanity. Add to this a writing style that is dreamy and trance-like, and Swimming Home feels a bit like that warped picture you get when you open your eyes underwater and look up at the world.

Swimming Home is an excellent book, and I am thankful the Booker judges brought it to my attention.

...and now on to 2013!

The Testament of Mary - Colm Toibin: I read The Testament of Mary this afternoon; at only 104 pages, it doesn't take long to finish, and I wondered, going in, how it could possibly be weighty enough to merit a Booker nomination.

Well, I'm happy to say that it is definitely worthy - Toibin's every word, every image, is purposeful and clear, and Mary's voice is complex. The Testament of Mary was first written as a one-woman stage show (for a theatre festival in Dublin in 2011), and the Broadway production (2013) was nominated for three Tony awards. The novel reads very much like a monologue, with no chapter breaks. It is one continuous speech; Mary recounts her son's last few months, his death, and her life after his crucifixion. Toibin turns a lot of Biblical conventions on their heads, and his Mary is very different from the usual depiction of devout motherhood. She prefers to remember her son as a small boy, rather than the man who gathered misfit followers and caused trouble.

I enjoy books that give voices to previously silenced characters, particularly women from stories of mythical proportions (i.e.: Atwood's The Penelopiad). Even more refreshing is that Toibin, a male author, decided to give a voice to a female character - and really, a character who embodies a female archetype. Like with his Brooklyn, Toibin realistically portrays the thoughts and feelings of a member of the opposite sex, something that I always find impressive.

This was my first foray into the Booker longlist, and I am pleased to say that it held up to my high Booker standards. If all the longlisted books are this good, I will be a happy reader indeed.

4 stars

Harvest - Jim Crace: I just finished Harvest, my first novel by Jim Crace. It is a masterful piece of work - extremely well-written, thematically complex, and a parable for changing times. It takes place over seven days in a small village during the late Medieval period (my guess, anyway, as a year is never identified). The villagers have just finished their yearly harvest, and their master who lives in the manor house is talking about the possibility of sheep, rather than shared crops and open farming. The day after harvest, the villagers wake to see two columns of smoke: one is the fire of three new-comers declaring their squatters rights; the other is the master's dovecote, which has been burned to the ground. The villagers blame the newcomers, and set in motion a series of events that will change the village forever.

The narrator is Walter Thirsk, an outsider who came to the village twelve years ago as the servant of the new master. Walt married one of the villagers and joined their way of life, but he is very aware of his differences - he is not related to the sixty-odd villagers, all who seem to be cousins, and his dark brown hair stands out in a sea of blonde. Walt's outsider status becomes more pronounced as the novel progresses, despite his love for the village.

Two interesting things to note: there are lots of allusions to Genesis here, what with the plot taking place over seven days and the village being idealized as a pastoral Eden; and Crace has announced that Harvest is his last novel, and with the focus on change it certainly reads like a farewell to a way of life. This juxtaposition of old and new, of beginnings and endings, makes Harvest quite timeless, as we all encounter major moments of change in our own lives.

4.5 stars

We Need New Names - NoViolet Bulawayo: We Need New Names is more of a string of short stories than one continuous narrative. The narrator, Darling, lives in Zimbabwe for the first half of the book, and in the US for the second half. She clearly loves her home in Zimbabwe, despite the poverty and other hardships that are part of her every day life. She talks about the games she plays with her friends, their guava-stealing expeditions into the upscale part of her town, Sundays at church, her pregnant 11-year-old friend, and the "Sickness," AIDS. In the US, Darling navigates the cultural differences and tries to stay in touch with her friends and family in Zimbabwe.

I'm not really sure what the Booker judges saw in this book - sure, it was an interesting look at the idea of one's home, and at contemporary Africa, but I didn't find that it added anything unique, or that it was particularly well-written. Darling's voice is well-developed, but the other characters were one-note. Some of the stories were excellent, while others were rather unnecessary. We Need New Names was good, but not great - and the Booker should be great.

3.5 stars

I'm currently reading TransAtlantic by Colum McCann, and loving it - fingers crossed, but it might just be a five-star novel!

I am giving TransAtlantic a full five stars - it is both beautifully written and compellingly plotted. I love McCann's interconnected stories approach, and the way he moved from famous men to not-so-famous women, showing the ordinary people behind extraordinary events. Even though we are only with each character for one chapter, I thought they were all well-drawn, interesting people, and I connected to each of them.

I certainly hope this makes the shortlist.

Not a great start to the 2014 Booker season:

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler - 3 stars

This is not a Booker-quality novel. Sure, it's an interesting enough story, and the writing isn't terrible, but it isn't anything special either. The characters aren't particularly dynamic, the twists weren't shocking, and the ending was way too tidy. This is more of a book club type novel, and definitely not the challenging, thought-provoking read I look for in a Booker nominee.

*****************

I'm currently reading To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris, and unfortunately I don't like it any more than I liked the Fowler. The main character has done nothing in the first 85 pages except whine (and not for very good reasons), and the female characters who surround him are one-dimensional. It's clever and witty, I suppose, but annoyingly so - I want to yell at the main character that maybe his life would be a bit better, and maybe he would be a bit happier, if he stopped saying sarcastic things and made an attempt to have some actual feelings.

Resurrecting this thread after years of absence! I updated the first two posts to include some more recent Booker reading, including several from the 2017 list, which I quite liked. The 2018 list didn't really catch my attention, but I still have lots of backlisted titles to read in the coming years. Looking forward to being more active in this group!

Booker updates from this year so far:

The History of the Rain by Niall Williams

Reading much more frequently over the past year and a half has really helped me to define what I like and dislike in a book. High on my list of dislikes is overly detailed, descriptive writing, and characters who spend their time contemplating the meaning of life. This book, which was technically very beautifully written, contains both of those things. It is about a girl named Ruth, who is confined to her bed in her mother’s house in Ireland. Ruth spends her days reading her father’s library of books, writing her own book about her family history, and contemplating her existence. The actual family history parts were interesting, but they did not outweigh the elements I dislike in my books, unfortunately.

2 stars

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Nao is a teenage girl living in Japan, writing her life story in her diary. Years later, this diary washes up on the shore of an island off the coast of British Columbia, where it is found by Ruth, a Japanese American author. Ruth reads the diary and becomes invested in Nao’s very tragic life, just as Nao becomes invested in the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun.

This was a weird book. It was good, but it was also just too much, like the author threw in every literary technique possible. The last straw for me was the inclusion of magical realism out of nowhere near the end. I don’t mind magical realism, but it needs to be used consistently rather than like a token technique.

Recommended only for fans of Japanese culture, overly stylized novels, or Booker Prize fanatics (that’s how I came across this book, which was nominated in 2013).

3.5 stars

The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald

Short novel set in Cambridge in 1912, about a young man who gets into a bike accident with a mysterious girl. Thoroughly meh.

3 stars

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

This giant historical fiction novel takes place in the early 1800s, just before the First Opium War, and centres on a group of characters sailing from Calcutta to Mauritius on a slave ship called the Ibis. I knew next to nothing about this time period and location, but I was quickly caught up in Ghosh’s damning portrayal of colonialism.

If you like long, involved novels with lots of historical details, this one is for you (plus there are two sequels that I will eventually seek out).

4 stars