International Booker

Book round-up

Late bloomer economist

The economist Gary Charness died this week, quite a remarkable late bloomer: PhD at 41, first paper at 50, total output over 100 papers. Related: this week, Tyler Cowen said that Second Act is “one of the very best books written on talent.” It’s out in the UK, and in the US on Kindle (and I think audio.) Feedback from early readers has been lovely.

If you are an early reader/listener of SECOND ACT, please be sure to rate and review on Amazon, Goodreads, and elsewhere. It helps other readers to find out about the book.

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Shakespeare

The next Shakespeare Book Club is 16th June. After that we’ll take a summer break for two months while you all cruise the Mediterranean. Our next play is the glorious As You Like It. After that we only have three more plays on our list, so I might add Othello and The Winter’s Tale, depending on how you all feel.

My Western Canon salon series with Interintellect starts on 6th June. First, Shakespeare’s Inadequate Kings, but then Emma, and on to Goethe, Turgenev, Wilde.

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New books

I have been reading some of the works nominated for the International Booker, whose winner is announced tomorrow. I didn’t read the whole list, partly because these were the review copies I got, partly because I’m busy and indolent. None of these books was as good as Whale, which I read last year. I haven’t reviewed here The Silver Bone because I couldn’t get into it. There’s also Crooked Plow and Simpatia, which look good. (And there’s a Starnone I want to read). I’ll cover them later on.

As for other new fiction, The Glutton is out in paperback, which I admired very much. As is The Late Americans, which I am only half-way through, but I was a big fan of Real Life, and this lives up to expectations. As with Sally Rooney, I will now read anything Brandon Taylor writes. And yes, that very much includes his Substack,

sweater weather

. Taylor’s recent LRB essay on Zola is great (I linked to it in my paid roundup), but his original Substack essay about Zola and Rooney is also splendid. (He also wrote the intro to the new edition of Mavis Gallant I recommended in the last book roundup.)

In non-fiction I am enjoying Literature for the People, by Common Reader favourite

Sarah Harkness

. It’s a biography of the Macmillan brothers, Victorian London’s most remarkable publishers.

Anyway, here are some Booker thoughts…

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Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck

The title is a Greek work for time. Not time as in chronology (chronos), but time as in the apposite moment, the right moment for action. This novel is a romance that hinges on the apposite moment of the falling of the Berlin Wall. To say much more would be to spoil it, and while I’m only two-thirds of the way in, it is an obviously accomplished and well-constructed novel. Of the half dozen or so International Booker novels I either read or dabbled with, this one stays with me the most, and even after not getting back it for several week, I found myself immediately re-immersed. Kairos is, in many ways, an anti-romance, and the male half of the partnership is an anti-hero, and just as East Germany is a sort of country that cannot accept its fate, so the heroine cannot quite accept hers. That is where the dramatic tension comes from and Erpenbeck is masterful at handling it. I would like to read another of her novels. Translated by the wonderful Michael Hofmann.

Not a River, Selva Almada

A novella about a fishing trip that goes wrong, which uses flashbacks to fill in a story about a group of friends who aren’t wanted in the small town where they don’t fit. Political. Rewards slow, careful reading. The translator’s note is interesting but it makes you realise how much you miss: even in Buenos Aires they read Almada with a dictionary because she uses such remote dialect. Obviously splendid but also obvious that very much not all of the splendour is available to us in English.

The Details, Ia Genberg

Monotonous. After I put it down half-way through, intending to go back, I found that I had forgotten it entirely. I was quite amazed to see this book on the shortlist.

Undiscovered, Gabriela Weiner

An example of discourse fiction. So much of the narrative could be lifted straight into an op-ed and no-one would notice. Many pages read more like a personal essay than a novel. Of course, that’s the conceit of the narrative. Where once we had unreliable narrators we now have narrators as personal essayists—those people who, in real life, are the “narrators of their own lives”. But this level of self-awareness often falls flat, one reason I think why such books tend to be short. Even at sub-two hundred pages Undiscovered is reasonably repetitive. The writing is weakest when it is most writerly, as here:

My grandmother Victoria was such a jealous person that even after she had a stroke, when she’d been bedridden for years and could barely string a sentence together, she still had fits of jealousy over my grandfather. I come from a line of people whose brains fail before their green eyes.

Maybe that second sentence catches something about the way people speak today, but it’s such a clunking dip from the quality of the first sentence. The book is characterised by these juxtapositions. The philosophical assumptions that make up the following sentence are ill-considered and expose another of Undiscovered’s weaknesses, loose thinking that is most apparent in the moments when the writer is trying to be profound or expressive.

Our bodies have left our three-person bed and scattered across the house.

There’s a euphony to the rhythm of that sentence, but it means very little. Did they go with their bodies? Are we to assume that “they” consist of something non-material? What is this spiritual self and why don’t we hear more about it? Could it be that this is simply the idle importation of the way people speak without enough consideration of how it affects the pattern and meaning of the narrative?

This book is tiresome and I dropped out half-way, which was much too late.