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Books By Catriona Luke
The Booker prize and its literary passengers are approaching their
sell-by date, says Catriona Luke
Breaking the spell of magic realism
VS Naipaul with his Nobel Prize
Booker time again in London. Oh no. Back in the jug agane (back at
school, 'jug' is slang for jail) as Molesworth saye. Who says that
tyrannies and their followers don't come in literary form too. The
long shadow of the Man Booker prize is most closely associated with
Salman Rushdie, who also won Booker of Bookers in 1993, and perhaps
also with VS Naipaul, the magic realist on valium, and neither have
done more to subvert literary truth and suppress a creative generation
in Pakistan and India.
The long shadow of the Man Booker prize is most closely associated
with Salman Rushdie, who won Booker of Bookers in 1993, and perhaps
also with VS Naipaul, the magic realist on valium
Despite the sales that it brings - 250,000 copies for last year's
winner - Booker, with its high regard for modernism, has led the
process as well as inflating literary prejudices and pandering to
Western illusions. But for a long time before the publishers or the
judges noticed it has been in decline. The majority of its winners are
unreadable and the public thinks so too. Who today can remember John
Berger's G (1972), David Storey's Saville (1976), Barry Unsworth's
Sacred Hunger (1992), James Kelman's How Late it was, How Late (1994),
John Banville's The Sea (2005)? A handful of winners have been turned
into films more successful than the original books: Ruth Prawer
Jhabvala's Heat and Dust, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day,
Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark, Michael Ondaatje's The English
Patient. Yann Martel's The Life of Pi is being filmed in India at the
moment.
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Salman Rushdie - children accept Booker of Bookers prize on his behalf
Salman Rushdie - children accept Booker of Bookers prize on his behalf
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Most successfully Booker has sponsored writers who worship the grim
realism in which they so rarely partake. There's a contradiction in
writers producing disdainful allegorical satire when their own
circumstances are so comfortable. Rushdie had been at it a long time
before a fatwa landed on his head for The Satanic Verses. Having been
protected by the British state (it cost millions of pounds), in 2000
he jumped country to the US. His muse, which he found first on Juhu
beach ("she delivered herself of that astonishing tirade against the
whole of India, past, present and future" - The Ground Beneath Her
Feet) kept deserting him, popping up for a time in Britain and then in
the US, but I think quite a few people have paid quite heavily for
this artistic peregrination, and none more so than a generation of
Pakistani and Indian writers.
In the ten years of the new century the Rushdie-Naipaul spell has
begun to be broken, and in Pakistan before India
No country - think of its ordinary people - really deserves a novel
called Shame. For better or worse the book bit into Pakistan's
literary and national psyche; and it pandered to the West's obsession
with good and evil. Once you had added Naipaul's Beyond Belief, a
nonfiction interrogation of the "converted peoples", the die was cast.
A vain hope that Pakistan's description as "the most dangerous country
in the world" was not compounded by a state department official's down-
time reading habits in Foggy Bottom, any more than that being short of
maps the Pentagon used a Lonely Planet guide to draw up plans for the
invasion of Iraq. (They did.)
In India publishers complain of slush piles twinkling under the sag of
magic realism fables, but in Pakistan the combined weight of Rushdie
and Naipaul - although there's a great antidote in Hanif Kureishi's
Karachi chapter of Dreaming and Scheming, which is concurrent with
Rushdie - pretty much reduced readers and novelists to a literary
silence.
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Books from the Booker Prize 2009 shortlist
Books from the Booker Prize 2009 shortlist
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There's a contradiction in writers producing disdainful allegorical
satire when their own circumstances are so comfortable
People were inclined to accept, on the basis that what they had to say
was so dark and painful, that what these authors had written was
accurate. Time to crack open a few myths. Magic realism always worked
better in the hands of South American writers, where it sprang out of
an idiosyncratic Spanish and Portuguese folk-culture conjoined with
Catholicism. Cold satire even heavy with literary allusion is an odd
graft-on to the subcontinent's many softnesses and fluidities. The
political processes may be in turmoil, but Pakistan, India and
Bangladesh have warm funny people. Rushdie and Naipaul produced novels
of chill statelessness and dispossession, in fact personal panoramas,
but with the guns turned outwards to political elites in Rushdie's
case, and on to the ordinary people in Naipaul's. People believed this
and worshiped it as high art.
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Books from the Booker Prize 2010 shortlist
Books from the Booker Prize 2010 shortlist
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Cold satire even heavy with literary allusion is an odd graft-on to
the subcontinent's many softnesses and fluidities
It isn't the first time that coldness and omniscience have lassoed the
landscape. Henry Fielding's Tom Jones when it was published in 1749
was held responsible for two earth tremors that hit London in rapid
succession on account of its 'fetid foundling' and gentle satires on
corruption and hypocrisy. Fielding, the most gorgeous and generous of
men who as a magistrate also got down and dirty among the spittle of
the poor to reform the legal system, had broken the mould the other
way, out of the empty political satires of the eighteenth century and
into a new era of storytelling. For this all hell broke loose. The
literary edifices of dark satire could not stand the light of humanity
pouring in through the window. It offended their one-party state.
Dude, being drop dead cool in the eighteenth century meant being
cynical and hard-shelled. (Although see if you can spot the 1981 book
that took this style from Fielding: "Reader, take care, I have
inadvisedly led thee to the top of a high a hill as Mr Allworthy's,
and how to get thee down without breaking thy neck, I do not well
know. However, let us e'en venture to slide down together, for Miss
Bridget rings her bell, and Mr Allworthy is summoned to breakfast,
where I must attend, and, if you please, shall be glad of your
company".)
In the ten years of the new century the Rushdie-Naipaul spell has
begun to be broken, and in Pakistan before India. With it is going the
whole post-modernist fug, as well as the most tenuous of geopolitical
oxymorons - good and evil, wars on terror, great satans, etc. In the
hands of Pakistani journalists, writers and novelists the whole tone
has begun to shift. Humane, funny, honest, subtle, moral, inclusive,
the fire that has caught hold is of a people's spirit, a topic
resembling garlic to a vampire for Rushdie, Naipaul and Booker.
Rushdie with a book of memoirs to plug has switched to twitter. His
feed shows, without intention, that literary dictators are also liable
to tumble, that the once so powerful can finally be reduced to playing
scrabble with Kylie Minogue, surrounded by groupies. Power and
ambition, dear reader, are not the exclusive property of the political
classes.
Catriona Luke is an editor and writer based in London. She can be
reached at catrionafluke@yahoo.co.uk
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