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They announced the 2012 Booker Shortlist today:
- Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy
- Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel
- The Lighthouse, by Alison Moore
- Umbrella, by Will Self
- Narcopolis, by Jeet Thayil
- The Garden of Evening Mists, by Tan Twan Eng
Only one of the three longlisters I read made this list — Swimming Home (my review here) — and it happens to be the only one of the three that I thought should be shortlisted.
Don’t forget that many former members of the official Man Booker Prize forum have relocated to the unofficial Man Booker Prize forum at my fairly new place: http://mookseandgripes.myfreeforum.org. Please join us in discussing the shortlisted books and the shortlist in general. Right now folks are very split on whether Swimming Home is any good (I may be spinning that a bit; perhaps many more people there think it is no good, but I’m hoping those of us who liked it are putting up a good fight).
I thought Swimming Home had had nothing but good reviews. Must read those forum posts.
Selfishly I’m a little dissapointed that The Teleportation Accident didn’t make it through. Not because I think it should have (I haven’t the faintest idea if it should have or not), but because I was hoping to see some reviews of it from bloggers I trust.
Max: The Teleportation Accident. and I know it has fans aplenty, is hard to bear for too long. I can’t offer you an extensive review as I couldn’t endure it long enough to apprise it legitimately, but it annoyed me in a little-precocious-kid-Wikipasting-stuff-and-getting-away-with-insufferable-murder kind of way.
Hm, can’t say you’re selling it Lee.
The discussion at Trevor’s forum is quite interesting. People debating the extent to which anachronisms are intentional. The thing with that of course is that once you have some intentional anachronisms, you don’t need to worry too much about whether your other background details are accurate or not. If not, they’re just another anachronism among the intentional ones.
And furthermore, when Beauman gabbles away about ‘how many levels’ his novel works on, it all seems rather ‘accidental’. To me he’s engaging in the kind of aptly ramshackle deceptive novel-writing-as-insipid-ego-tourism that tends to eat up critics as ‘not getting it’. I got it: I couldn’t wait to get rid.