The International Booker Prize Shortlist 2023 – Reading Books by their Covers

The International Booker Prize Shortlist 2023 – Reading Books by their Covers

19.04.2023

These are my initial comments (in my typical jaded style) about the books from the blurbs (my qualifications are a First Class Honours degree and a PhD in English Literature). The shortlist is from https://lithub.com/here-is-the-2023-international-booker-prize-shortlist/ 

Guadalupe Nettel, Still Born, translated by Rosalind Harvey

ABOUT: The recommendation says it is for readers of Rachel Cusk, one of the most boring contemporary authors imaginable. The story is about two ‘independent’ 30 year old career women that don’t have babies (one of them doesn’t want any). Then one of them has a difficult pregnancy. Revives the contemporary debates about whether it is worthwhile for women to have a career or a baby. Explores female friendship following a life changing event.

VERDICT: I don’t want to read this, an exploration of a relationship and ‘independence’ (THE fake myth of the West – nobody is really ‘independent’). The book promotes itself as about ‘the lived experiences of women’ if this is what you want to read about (apparently some people don’t talk to real women who are pregnant as if this was a highly unusual event in life). It is not about the lived experiences of ‘women’ – it is about middle class women from Latin America who have decided to put career before the family but whose plans are suddenly upset by SEX (shudder, the encroachment of a body in their bodiless, body-phobic work environments and culture).

WHY IT WAS CHOSEN (guestimation of subject matter): Important as an exploration of what motherhood means for this generation, when lesser educated women are choosing to have babies and traditional type families. Lip service to women’s rights and feminism, although the book seems to be contradictory because we have a woman that seems to be giving up her career for a baby (I could be wrong, she could be balancing both things). Is the book critiquing the world of work (but then why should it be women that have to give up the world of work for the family, as per an ideology of what Western feminism tells us is ‘wrong’?)

GauZ’, Standing Heavy, translated by Frank Wynne

ABOUT: Undocumented migrants taking jobs as security guards over the years. French Immigration Law. A security guard’s contemporary criticism of capitalism.

VERDICT: Sounds boring. Notably, there is no suggestion that there is any interesting plot.

WHY IT WAS CHOSEN (guestimation of subject matter): The book’s importance clearly stems from the fact that right wing anti-immigration rhetoric across Europe has created a climate of intolerance despite the fact that immigrants do all the necessary but low-status, low-paid, boring or labour-intensive jobs that people born in Western countries don’t want to do. The nomination can be contextualised as a reaction against this. ‘Diversity’ is being championed. Sheds light on a contemporary reaction against capitalism.

Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel

ABOUT: Time machine museum for Alzheimer’s sufferers is invented as a cure. People use the time machine to try and escape the horrors of the present instead. The past begins to invade the present.

VERDICT: This sounds quite interesting. One of the intellectual, thought experiment type novels that I enjoy reading and the plot sounds interesting because something actually happens. I agree with the idea that the present is horrible, as would any sane person.

WHY IT WAS CHOSEN: In a post-Trump era, obsession with a country’s past ‘great’ history is on the literary radar (Trump’s racism is based on the fact that there were less non-white people doing ‘white’ jobs back then, less multiculturalism, and America could go around attacking non-Western countries like Vietnam whenever they wanted as well as denying black people political and civic rights – in this ‘golden era of nostalgia’). I just finished reading ‘The Memory Monster’ with a similar criticism of being stuck in the past with history and not addressing the contemporary ills of society, although there the message was to forget about the past humiliation and violence of the Holocaust. We need to look forwards and at the now, not at the past (only the past for lessons how to deal with the present and future).

Maryse Condé, The Gospel According to the New World, translated by Richard Philcox

ABOUT: ‘A miracle baby is rumoured to be the child of (the Western) God’. Someone investigates.

VERDICT: BORING. I am not interested in religion or its support or debunking in novel form.

WHY IT WAS CHOSEN (guestimation of subject matter): If you have a PhD like me, no one is interested in your academic research. Yet writing like this novel is quite well loved by the kind of people that won’t read actual research, especially when you have pseudo research like this in novel form about something that is completely implausible or patently fictional and irrational. Literature of the undisciplined and uneducated that want to have the glamour of education. Importance? Studies the nature of belief and rumours of exceptionality – could be a debunking of the ego and purported uniqueness (in favour of what? Saying that everyone is base and ignoble? That everyone is a peasant and therefore ‘equal’ in this unequal society – opium of the masses).

Cheon Myeong-kwan, Whale, translated by Chi-Young Kim

ABOUT: No plot given. Described as a fantasy multi-generational novel with magic.

VERDICT: If you cannot at least say what is happening, sounds bloated and incoherent. I don’t like that. Fantasy needs a plot. It says it is ‘beautifully crafted’, but we will be reading it in translation.

WHY IT WAS CHOSEN (guestimation of subject matter): The one novel that isn’t ‘serious’ or worthy on the list. This is usually the one that is supposed to be the best read and there for the reading pleasure.

Eva Baltasar, Boulder, translated by Julia Sanches

ABOUT: Queer women that want a baby when one is forty, although one in the couple doesn’t want it. Almost identical to the other nominated novel about motherhood, but with an LGBT association.

VERDICT: Once again, we have a Western novel exploring whether contemporary women should be ‘free’ of babies and a traditional family or whether they should reproduce. I already know the answer from most of the women of my generation. What is this book actually telling us that we don’t already know? They are mostly ‘independent’ career women that don’t want babies (or if they do, with someone Western or completely Westernised). The usual boring ‘relationship’ novel that I am not interested in reading (fake relationships between people posing as ‘reality’? All from a Western perspective? Not appealing.)

WHY IT WAS CHOSEN (guestimation of subject matter): Same points as before, but this time ‘diversity’ is exaggerated, with the LGBT connection. Apparently, bringing life into this world is now a BIG PROBLEM for the Western feminist mantra of ‘INDEPENDENCE’ and we have to deal with it in literature so that producing the future in the form of babies can somehow be achieved despite hostility, reluctance and the awareness that you actually have to work to look after someone and invest time and care into them to create human beings for society in a convenience society (which means, shudder: sacrifice).