Now reading Booker book #2!

Reading the Booker Books: P.H. Newby's Something to answer for

I have completed the first Booker book, P.H. Newby's Something to Answer For (1969)!

It is the story of Jack Townrow, of somewhere in the U.K., who returns to Port Said just before the Suez Canal crisis. Townrow has been getting letters from the widow of an old friend from his Army days in Egypt, Mrs. Khoury. Seems Mr. Elie Khoury is dead -- and his wife suspects murder. Townrow thinks he can persuade Mrs. K to return to England, where she is from, and gain some of her wealth in the bargain. Perhaps Mrs. K’s personal crisis is meant to parallel the political one: the marriage of an English cockney woman to a Lebanese merchant could represent the uneasy collaboration between Europe and the Middle East over the Suez Canal, into which is added a greedy, meddling Brit.

Shortly after Townrow's return, he is hit on the head and wakes up naked in the desert. After this point, he becomes a completely unreliable narrator: he can't remember his nationality, and at times he’s not exactly sure who he is. He even commits the Orion Error.¹ He then falls in love with a Jewish woman, and is accused of being a spy for Israel.

Townrow (whose name I kept misreading as Tomorrow throughout the book – symbolic? or just me?) seems to stand for the naïve Brit who assumes his country always does the right thing. This motif is introduced early, when Townrow meets a Jew in the airport on his way to Egypt. They debate whether the British did or could have warned Jews not to get on the trains to the death camps. Finally, the Jew says, “Just because you’re a nice guy yourself, it doesn’t mean you’ve got a nice government.” Later, Townrow, whose mother is Irish and whose father (who abandoned them) is English, says, “What was an Irishman but a sort of Jew?” 

The comparison reminds me of the scene from the excellent film “The Commitments,” when the band leader tries to persuade the white Irish musicians that they have every right to play the blues, telling them that “the Irish are the blacks of Europe,” and to repeat after him: “I’m black and I’m proud.” The latter comparison makes more sense to me; sadly, the Jews have been feared for their supposed power and wealth, while the Irish and blacks have been despised for their lack of both. (Oh, and if you click on "The Commitments" link, that's a young Glen Hansard of "Once" sitting in the center!)

However, the trope of the amnesic, confused, unreliable protagonist in a “vertiginous” situation only takes you so far. It doesn’t appeal to me as a plot device; it seems cliched. Perhaps it wasn’t yet in 1969? I am reminded of the unsolved mysteries and general paranoia of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, or Patrick Modiano’s Rue des Boutiques Obscures (Missing Person, in English). I guess I like my mysteries Goldilocks-medium. I don’t enjoy the nice, neat packages of mystery novels, tied up neatly with a bow of motive and opportunity. I am a Post-Modernist gal, so I can take a certain dose of ambiguity; but this type of novel, which seems so incomplete, grates on my nerves as well.

Finally, Townrow realizes “[y]ou couldn’t answer for anything outside your own personal experience. And if you remembered your own experiences wrongly, you didn’t count at all. You weren’t human.” I remember, therefore I am. He comes to cherish his conscience and honor, but just as I was starting to like him, he makes the ridiculous statement that women don’t understand honor. Sigh. What do you think? Can you like a book that dismisses women so sweepingly?

¹The Orion Error is one of my biggest literary pet peeves. The constellation Orion is a favorite among writers, perhaps because it is so recognizable. The problem is that in the Northern hemisphere (where Egypt is), Orion is only visible in winter – while the scene where Townrow sees Orion directly overhead takes place in summer. Trust me, I’ve researched this thoroughly. My husband even used this site to look up what the sky looked like during July 1956 in Egypt. But I’ve read at least three other works in which characters in the Northern hemisphere see Orion in summer. It’s jarring, and makes me wonder what other details the author has gotten wrong. At least in this case, Townrow doesn’t even know exactly who he is, so we can dismiss the error as faulty memory.

Now reading Booker Book #1

Reading the Booker Books, Post 3: Nobel Overlap

As I perused the list of Booker Prize winners in preparation for reading them all this year, I saw some names I recognized – and many I didn’t. For example, I already knew and loved Margaret Atwood. Then I learned that Kazuo Ishiguro had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature: he’s a Booker prize holder for The Remains of the Day (1989), but I’ve only read his speculative dystopian novel, Never Let Me Go (2005). So I decided to see what kind of overlap there is between the Booker and Nobel prizes.

Since the Nobel Prize in Literature began to be awarded in 1901, it has been awarded 110 times to 114 Laureates (some years, during the two World Wars, no prize was awarded), while the Booker Prize did not begin until 1969, so there is not as much overlap as one might expect. Also, the Nobel Prize is international, and while there is now an international Booker prize, my goal this year is to read the winners of the "original" English-language Booker prize. So, the overlapping center of the Venn diagram contains only five authors: V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, William Golding, John Coetzee, and now Kazuo Ishiguro.

What is interesting to me is the lack of overlap: Toni Morrison won the Nobel, but has never won a Booker? This question led me to the discovery that the Booker prize did not become open to American writers until 2004, while the novel that I believe to be Morrison's best (and most original), Beloved, was published well before that, in 1987.

Then I perused the list of Nobel winners. Many names I did not recognize at all (Roger Martin du Gard? Ivan Bunin?); others I recognized, but have not read more than excerpts from (Eugene O'Neill [sorry Dad], Luigi Pirandello). If I were to set a reading goal next year of one book for each of the 114 Nobel Laureates in Literature, I will have already read complete works by :

1. George Bernard Shaw
2. Pearl Buck
3. Andre Gide
4. William Faulkner
5. Ernest Hemingway: I taught Faulkner's and Hemingway's short stories in grad school
6. Albert Camus: read The Stranger in high school for French AP!
7. John Steinbeck: I have been seeking an occasion to teach the little-known The Winter of Our Discontent. A timely examination of honesty and accomplishment in the modern age.
8. Jean-Paul Sartre: more French AP!
9. Samuel Beckett
10. Isaac Bashevis Singer
11. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: but I read One Hundred Years of Solitude so long ago I would definitely re-read it.
12. William Golding (Booker Prize winner): I am looking forward to reading something of his other than Lord of the Flies.
13. Nadine Gordimer (Booker)
14. Derek Walcott: definitely due for a reread
15. Toni Morrison
16. Seamus Heaney: taught his translation of Beowulf
17. V.S. Naipaul (Booker)
18. John Coetzee (Booker)
19. Patrick Modiano: merci, French book club!
20. Kazuo Ishiguro (Booker)

That brings my number down to a manageable but still hefty 94 books for next year's Nobel Prize reading project. Who's with me??

Next up: Reading Book #1, P.H. Newby's Something to Answer For

Reading the Booker books, Post 2: Amassing the Books

Once I decided to read all the Booker Prize winners this year, I started amassing the books. I want to have them all (and read them all) in print, just so I can see them all together in one place. Also, I like to have shopping goals, like completing sets.

I already had two of the ones I’d read previously, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (in fact, I’m pretty sure I have everything she’s published in book form), and The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, which I read shortly after it came out in 1992; it must have been the summer before I began graduate school.

That left 50 to buy, and I was able to get 21 of them through Paperback Swap. (Great site! You post books you don’t want, request books you don’t have, and you only pay postage for the books you send.) That got me off to a running start. But many of the books I needed weren’t posted, or had long waiting lists.

This holiday season, I was lucky enough to receive some gift cards to Barnes and Noble (thanks to my students) and Powell’s Books (thanks, Dad), so I was able to purchase some online. Then I started scouring thrift stores and used book stores, where I picked up a few more.

Then I got impatient and started buying them online, used, from Thrift Books, Better World Books, and eBay. As of today, I am only waiting on the most recent one, Lincoln in the Bardo, which I bought new from the publisher with a discount for being on a teacher panel. Despite being as thrifty as possible, I’ve spent at least $100 (not counting the gift cards) getting the 50 books I didn’t already own.

I had to clear a shelf, of course – The Booker Bookshelf -- and then, being me, I had to label them. Each book now sports a colorful Post-It flag on its spine with its year and number, 1 through 52. I plan to read them in chronological order, except for Hilary Mantel’s *two* winning novels, #44 and #47, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring up the Bodies (2012), because the second is a sequel to the first, so I will read them together. I also got the audio book for the second one, so I can listen to it in the car, and get on with book #45 after Wolf Hall.

Also, one of my book clubs (I belong to three) generously agreed to read Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha (1993) with me, in early March. Since it’s almost February and I haven’t started yet, I doubt I will be at book #28 by then, so I’ll read that out of order, too.

Next up: Booker Prize winners and the Nobel Prize in Literature!

Booker books 1-51, on the Booker Bookshelf

2018: My year of reading the Booker Prize winners, post 1

Hello! My name is Stephanie. I teach French and sometimes English, and my biggest hobby is reading. I read over a hundred books a year. This year, I decided to set myself a challenge: read all the winners of the Man Booker Prize. The idea for the Booker Books reading project came out of a discussion with my husband Charles, and sloppy reading of a Wikipedia article. 

Like I said, I read a lot, so I’m always saying things like “That book was awesome!” or “This book just isn’t grabbing me.” So Charles asked me once, what makes a book great to you? I thought a bit and decided on originality. I love books that do something I haven’t seen before, an idea that I keep coming back to. For example, a book I keep thinking about years after finishing it is Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead. In this novel, all the dead go to a great city, where they continue to live -- as long as someone alive remembers them. Then, an epidemic wipes out almost everyone on Earth… Of course, originality is not the only thing that makes a book great, and I recognize that it’s very hard to do anything original; as a certain bard once said, there’s nothing new under the sun. 

Around the same time as that conversation, I went to our school’s “booktail” hour (books + cocktails = best. idea. EVER) where one of my colleagues talked about George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, the latest Booker prize winner. I had heard of the Booker prize, but didn’t really know exactly what it signified. So looked it up, and found it is awarded for “the best original novel written in the English language and published in the UK.” In my haste (I was probably on my phone) I saw “MOST original novel” and thought wow, that’s exactly what I want to read, the most original novels!  

It’s called the Man Booker prize, not, alas, after a booklover named Man Booker, but for two publishing houses. The prize was first awarded in 1969. In 1970, 1974, and 1992, two prizes were awarded, so there are 52 for me to read now, and there will be 53 by the end of the year. I had already read three of them: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (1992), Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000), and The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (2011). I once started Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2002) but didn’t care to finish it. Looks like I’ll have to try again.

Next post: getting the books!

Dazed and Bemused

Confused about nonplussed and bemused? You’re not alone.

I must admit that nonplussed and bemused are not words I use a lot. But I’ve been seeing them in writing more and more, and most of the time, they are not being used correctly.

What do you think nonplussed means? If you think it means something like “calm, unfazed,” you are not alone. But that is not correct. It actually comes from Latin “non plus,” meaning “no more,” and it describes that feeling when you are so flabbergasted you have nothing more to say. Picture a nonplussed person as slack-jawed and tongue-tied in disbelief.

If you mean “unfazed,” you could try “impassive” or “stoic,” but not nonplussed.

Similarly, I keep seeing people using “bemused” when what they really mean is “amused.” Though these two words obviously share the same root, muse, they are not synonyms. We all know what amuse means: to distract, in a pleasant way. “To bemuse” means to distract in an unpleasant way – “to confuse” or “to befuddle” – much like nonplus.

So, if what I am telling you leaves you flabbergasted, tongue-tied, and confused, then you are nonplussed and bemused. You’re welcome.