The Malaysian Insider :: Books
The Malaysian Insider :: Books |
| Author Mantel eyes Booker history, Self a contender Posted: 12 Oct 2012 05:28 AM PDT LONDON, Oct 12 — Hilary Mantel could become the first woman to win the coveted Man Booker Prize for fiction twice with her historical novel "Bring Up the Bodies", the bookmakers' favourite alongside Will Self's "Umbrella". The annual literary award to an author from the Commonwealth, Zimbabwe or Ireland will be handed out at a glitzy dinner in London on Tuesday, and the build-up this year has been dominated by 60-year-old Mantel.
Were she to win, she would become not only the first female the "do the double" but also the first British writer. South Africa-born J.M. Coetzee and Australian Peter Carey have won the prize twice. "There has been discussion, I know, about the pros and cons of Mantel advancing so far in the prize again so soon," said Peter Stothard, chair of the Man Booker judging panel and editor of the Times Literary Supplement. "The judges noted Mantel's even greater mastery of method now," he added. Mantel could be back in the frame yet again in 2015, when the third and final instalment of her Cromwell trilogy, "The Mirror and the Light", is due to hit the shelves. 'Moving and draining' The author has admitted that despite the trilogy's critical and commercial success so far, much was still riding on the final chapter of a 10-year writing odyssey. "If I get the third book right then in a sense my whole life will have come right," she told Reuters in June. "But if I don't, then I am going to see it as a failure. In my mind it is all one long project." Self's Umbrella was described by Stothard as "both moving and draining", a reference to some 400 pages without paragraph breaks or chapter divisions. But he added that the tale about a misdiagnosed woman in a north London mental hospital would prove "much less difficult than at first it seems" to those who stuck with it. Mantel and Self have taken turns at the top of bookmakers' betting lists. Mantel edged out Self in odds offered by Paddy Power yesterday with Bring Up the Bodies at 6/4 after leap-frogging Umbrella at 9/4. But today, Ladbrokes said Self had attracted a series of bets in the last two days making him 2/1 "hot" favourite ahead of Mantel at 5/2. The other four shortlisted writers are Deborah Levy ("Swimming Home"), Malaysia's Tan Twan Eng ("The Garden of Evening Mists") and first-time novelists Alison Moore ("The Lighthouse") and Indian author Jeet Thayil ("Narcopolis"). The winner of the Man Booker Prize receives a cheque for £50,000 (RM250,000), international literary kudos and, perhaps most importantly, a significant spike in sales. Research by the Guardian newspaper showed that Mantel's Wolf Hall, for example, sold 35,900 copies before the award was announced and nearly 600,000 afterwards. The year before, Aravind Adiga's "The White Tiger" had sold just 5,703 copies before it won the Booker, rising nearly a hundredfold to 551,061 afterwards. — Reuters |
| Booker nominee Thayil offers bleak Bombay portrait Posted: 11 Oct 2012 08:59 PM PDT  Thayil poses for a picture at his residence in New Delhi on October 3, 2012. — Reuters pic Thayil is a poet and musician who has been writing poetry since he was 13. His novel takes the reader through the Mumbai drug world's smoky alleys and features the musings of opium addicts in the late 1980s — a situation that Thayil, a former opium addict himself, knows well. Thayil spoke with Reuters about his deep relationship with Bombay, his addiction and how this book came about. The Man Booker prize will be announced October 16. Q: What is your connection with Bombay? A: "I went to school there as a boy. I went to St. Xavier's. My family left for Hong Kong when I was eight where my father was working as a journalist. Then I went to school in New York and then came back to Bombay in 1979 and joined Wilson College. In all, I've lived in Bombay for almost 20 years." Q: Does this make you feel strongly about the city? A: "Bombay does that to people. It makes a (connection) with you. It makes it difficult for you. It bludgeons you. I've been reading about that area, Shuklaji street. It is disappearing now — Kamatipura, Shuklaji street, (the) entire area between Mumbai Central and Grant Road is disappearing, being bought away by real estate sharks who are buying up all the broken-down houses and making tall buildings. So very soon that entire district will disappear, and with it a million stories. A look of Bombay will go... a certain character will go. Those people who live there now of course won't be able to afford to live there. "At the end of 'Narcopolis', I have tried to draw that picture a little bit - that Bombay will become a very uniform-looking place. The kind of variety you used to be able to find there like dockyards, for example. It will bear a high-rise tenement kind of look uniformly." Q: How do you look at this change? A: "No question, for bad. Not saying purely in a nostalgic way, I mean also politically. The political changes that have happened, the kind of changes that have happened in terms of money. The way the rich have become constantly richer while the poor are exactly where they were. So the divide has become even larger than what it was. And the whole right-wing thing that's happening in Bombay. The way outsiders, people of other communities, are made to feel unwelcome. These are the kind of things that one could have never imagined in Bombay. It was welcoming. Anybody with talent, ambition, with beauty, with brains you could make it in Bombay. That is the point of this city. One thing after the other has been chipped away." Q: In an interview you used the word "seductive" for Bombay. In "Narcopolis", words seem to come from under a cloud of smoke. Is there a parallel you have drawn between opium and Mumbai? A: "That's kind of hinted at in the book where the change from Bombay to Mumbai takes place ... It's the change from this old 19th century romantic, glamorous, quiet, slow world of opium to the quick, brutal, modern, degrading world of cheap heroin. Interestingly, now there has been a class shift - it's the poorest who do it, absolute down-and-out street guys. When opium was happening, it was respectable. The well off did it, the upper-class Urdu-speaking ... it had a whole culture with it." Q: Was writing "Narcopolis" difficult? A: "It took me five years to write it in all ... I was working on a lot of (other things) as well. I didn't realize what the nature of the difficulty would be. And what it turned out to be was the opposite of catharsis. Catharsis gets stuff out of you. But this put bad feelings into me. Thinking about the nature of addiction, which I hadn't done in all those years. I had to be clean to think about it ... what it takes out of you, what it gives you. It gives you a lot. Wonderful things, which I know I'm not supposed to say, but it's a fact. It gives you a sense of being loved. There is no boredom ever, time becomes your slave, or the slave of your agenda. There is never an existential question. It gives you freedom in a way." Q: How do you look back at the addiction phase? A: "I look back at it with yearning. It's a bad thing!" Q: There is a very important character named Dimple in the book — a eunuch who makes pipes in the opium den and identifies as a woman. Was she based on a real person? A: "She was the one who made pipes in an opium den in about 1980-81. I only saw her twice. Then she disappeared. Many people in that world disappear. There was something about the way she used to make the pipe, very elegant." Q: Why the long sentences? A: "The opening sentence, the prologue, I wrote that about halfway through the writing of the book, and when I wrote that sentence, I realized this is the way the book should be. And I rewrote the book, changing the language of it with long sentences ... rather than short sentences because I realized the only way to write about opium was to write long, open-ended sentences where the writer who is writing it has no idea where the sentence is going to go. So you follow it and there is a sense of discovery — for the reader as well, I hope. You couldn't write a book about opium, which is a very slow, long process, with short quick Hemingway, journalistic, telegraphic sentences. So once I kind of stumbled on that, it changed everything. Then the book happened very fast." — Reuters |
She won the Booker in 2009 with "Wolf Hall", her acclaimed 650-page historical novel charting Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in King Henry VIII's court, and is in contention again for the sequel.| You are subscribed to email updates from The Malaysian Insider :: Books To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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