A Literary Life

J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.   I know this as a fact as every work published by him after this date is plastered with this fact.   Two things are wrong with this statement: 1) you don’t win a Nobel Prize, you are awarded one, and 2) having a Nobel Prize conferred on you doesn’t automatically make all of your work wondrous.   I have always admired Coetzee – and admired is so the right word.   You don’t love Coetzee, in fact sometimes he repels you; sometimes he spits in your face and expects you to like him for it.   His prose is deliberately provocative, and it can be notoriously difficult.   I read Disgrace in hardback, in 1999, and about six years later I read Life & Times of Michael K.   Each successive new novel since Disgrace I’ve put on my ‘to read list’ and never gotten around to.   There always seems to be some other author I should buy first, read first, and be angered by first.   Then, the ot...

So I was wandering the aisles of my local bookstore the other day.   I wasn’t particularly looking to buy anything, but killing time while it rained outside, and with nothing else to do.   It was one of those days.   You know the type.   That was when I picked Greg Baxter’s novel off the shelf, where it was sandwiched in between two other novels.   One of the rules is never judge a book by its cover – but I did just that.   Penguin have designed a lovely cover for The Apartment.   With cover quotes from Hisham Matar and Roddy Doyle (two very different writers, tonally, causing yet further intrigue).   The first few lines of the blurb on the back have sold me, and a reading of the opening page is enough to seal the deal. The Apartment, then, is that kind of novel.   One to discover surreptitiously, to come to with little preconception.   Its power lies in its simplicity – that is, a simplicity that carries such overpowering dep...

The Man Booker judges announce their shortlist on Tuesday.   The 12 novels on the longlist will be cut to just 6.      This year’s panel (Sir Peter Stothard chairing, with Dinah Birdh, Amanda Foreman, Dan Stevens and Bharat Tandon as judges) have a tough time ahead.   For my money they’ve compiled one of the most interesting longlists in recent memory.   It seems like an almost impossible task to cut the 12 to 6, but it must be done.   Here, then, are the six novels I think will make the shortlist, in no particular order: ‘Umbrella’ by Will Self ‘Bring up the Bodies’ by Hilary Mantel ‘The Lighthouse’ by Alison Moore ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ by Rachel Joyce ‘Philida’ by Andre Brink ‘The Yips’ by Nicola Barker The first five on that list seemed easy.   But the final position oscillates between The Yips and Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident.   I plumped for The Yips as I thin...

And in the final of my reviews of Man Booker longlisted novels, I turn to:   Hilary Mantel’s latest, Bring up the Bodies, needs little introduction.   It is the second part of her life of Thomas Cromwell, following on from the 2009 winner of the Man Booker, Wolf Hall.   To say that this novel was impatiently awaited by her many, many fans would be an understatement.   They even did an hour long TV special, with an extended interview with Mantel, and they rarely do that on TV these days.   Writers just aren’t interesting enough (apparently).   It is here that I must admit to being a late convert to Mantel’s fiction.   I read about a third of Wolf Hall in 2009 and found it unbearable.   I couldn’t warm to Cromwell, to the decision to present everything in the first person present.   In short, I found the novel a chore. When it was announced last year that Wolf Hall would now have two sequels, and not just the one that Mantel ...