Booker Longlist 2008
By daithi ~ September 7th, 2008. Filed under: Books.
Last year, I read about half of the longlist for the Booker Prize - with the other half being read by the artist known as Sharona. Having managed to read most of the books that didn’t make it to the shortlist, I did find it an enjoyable experience (the discipline of reading outside of the normal demarcation lines was quite fulfilling), and am doing the same this year, co-ordinated again with my fellow blogger. (The Guardian Books Blog does a similar enterprise, though we thought of it first - however they also judge the books by their covers, which is great fun). This year’s longlist (the Booker Dozen) is here, and last year’s posts over at Lex Ferenda include this.
So far, I’ve read two from my list: Linda Grant’s The Clothes On Their Backs and Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog. Starting with the latter (which was mostly read over a series of train trips) - I found it readable and engaging, though not outstanding. The book deals with life in mid-century India and present-day Australia, though I don’t think I got a huge sense of the essence of the Australian moment. There was some jumping between times, and some particularly suspense-driven writing, but I wasn’t inspired to mark it as a novel of the year. As for Linda Grant, I’ve always liked her writing for the Guardian, but this was in a different register, and yet still it connected with me at some level. The descriptions of interiors, streetscapes and (in particular, given the title and (pardon the pun) thread running through the novel) clothing were wonderful, and there are a number of unexpected directions. Politically, the observations of the odd ideologies of the 70s are compelling. One interesting fact is the use of barely-disguised vignettes from the real-life story of Peter Rachman (which I spotted early on, but didn’t find out until the afterword how freely the debt was acknowledged) - reading the book encouraged me to look at that story in more detail, which is a good sign.
I’m moving on now to Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence. And sharona’s posts are here, here and of course here. And the prize organisers are doing something mad with mobile phones, too.
