Translated material
Nobel infected Booker
Best British Novel of 2007 announced at London's Guildhall
On the last day before the Booker final, the obsessive inscription “Favorites – Ian McEwan and Lloyd Jones” flashed on the award website for so long that in the end even close relatives stopped believing in the possibility of their victory. As a result, something happened that is already becoming a good tradition in the literary world (let’s remember the last Nobel Prize laureate): leaving bishops and knights behind, the most inconspicuous of the pawns became queens.When last year a check for 50 thousand pounds went to 35-year-old Indian Kiran Desai for her hopeless novel “The Inheritance of the Ruined,” it was not so offensive, since her neighbors on the shortlist were not particularly outstanding themselves. This year the Booker list was brightened by at least two bestsellers. Bookmakers predicted victory for the most famous nominee - Ian McEwan with his novel On Chesil Beach - about the life of British youth on the eve of the sexual revolution. The plot of "The Beach" is limited to one evening, when a newlywed couple goes on their honeymoon. Critics hostile to McEwan have long grumbled that On Chesil Beach's compact size and simple composition indicate that it is not a novel but a tale, and is therefore ineligible for nomination. McEwan had no luck with the Booker at all: he received the prize in 1998 for his not very successful opus “Amsterdam”, and five years later the Booker jury passed on his best novel “Atonement”. But the 50-year-old British classic can take comfort from the fact that on the eve of the Booker race, copies of On Chesil Beach alone sold exceeded the total circulation of the novels of the other nominees.
There is much less reason for consolation for 52-year-old Booker debutant Lloyd Jones, whose Mister Pip was favored by critics and was among the favorites in the Booker race. His novel takes place on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. The main character, a teenage girl, impressed by Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations, decides to radically change her life, which turns out to be very difficult to do, since a civil war happens in her homeland very inopportunely. In theory, Lloyd Jones was ideally suited to become the new Booker laureate (it is not surprising that the bookmakers listed him as number two after McEwan). Firstly, he is a New Zealander, and Booker loves to demonstrate political correctness, and secondly, his “Mr Pip” has already confirmed his worth by becoming a winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Prize.
The jury's decision came as a complete surprise to everyone. Dubliner Anne Enright, 45, with her family saga The Gathering, was never mentioned among the favorites and was in last place on the bookmakers' lists.
Announcing the name of the new laureate, the chairman of the jury, director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, Sir Howard Davis, could not help but note that Enright’s book was “depressing and pale in places.” However, his statement did not in any way offend the distraught writer, who readily agreed with the criticism and warned particularly zealous readers not to rush to buy her novel. “That’s right, it’s fair. When a person opens a book, he may want to read something pleasant to cheer himself up. In such cases, it is better not to take up my book. This is the equivalent of a Hollywood drama “for crying”, said the Irish woman, who did not cry that evening, but shocked the audience by admitting that she would spend the bonus 50 thousand pounds on a “new kitchen”. To which Sir Howard Davis responded with an elegant joke: “I hope it will be literary cuisine.”
The jury decision process was, Davis said, “especially difficult” this year. Each novel “had its own defender.” Davis noted that the jury members are "a group of people with similar tastes" but are not necessarily inclined to reach consensus easily. To this end, Davis, director of the London School of Economics, developed what he called a “sophisticated” set of voting systems: majoritarian, simple ranked, and single transferable vote systems. And since after the first vote not all members of the jury believed in Enright’s victory, they had to verify this two more times “to be on the safe side.”
The heroine of the novel “The Meeting” is an Irish woman named Veronica. At the beginning of the novel, she experiences the suicide of one of her many brothers, which becomes an occasion to turn to the history of previous generations of the family and make sure that misfortunes in their family are inherited.
“The most important thing in a family is that it is inevitable, you can’t escape it. Essentially, all families are the same because family stories repeat themselves: families have drunkards, child abusers and many other things,” Enright said at a press conference. And the chairman of the jury, Howard Davis, once again pleased the journalists, saying that his favorite place in the laureate’s novel was its ending.
Dublin-born Anne Enright studied philosophy at Trinity College Dublin and then worked as a producer for the national Irish broadcaster RTE. Enright began writing prose after graduating from Malcolm Bradbury's literary seminar; First, a collection of short stories, “The Portable Virgin,” was published, favorably received by critics, then three novels and a documentary-autobiographical book, “Making Children: How the Curve Took Me into Motherhood,” published in 2004. Anne Enright's only novel, My Father's Wig, was translated into Russian in 2000.