Tag: Booker Prize
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Vis-à-vis dystopia in Paul Lynch’s ‘Prophet Song’
Paul Lynch’s “Prophet Song,” a dystopian novel set in Ireland, captures our era’s social and political unease, earning the 2023 Booker Prize. It explores totalitarianism’s personal impact through characters’ declining capacity to read faces, invoking philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face-to-face encounter. The narrative warns against the corruptive power of authoritarian regimes.
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Bastardising epic: Shehan Karunatilaka’s ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’
Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort of Books, 2022) won last year’s Booker Prize for its ‘energy, imagery and ideas [set] against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars’. We find that ‘surreal vision’ in its depiction of the afterlife—both the In Between (a version of purgatory), and the…
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Anne Enright’s ‘Actress’ (part 1): finding a mother
In this and my next blog (also on Actress), I’m going to focus on intertextuality. Intertextuality was described by Julia Kristeva as a mosaic of interaction between texts.[1] For Kristeva, this quite commonly takes the form of deliberate and explicit intertextual references—quotations, narrative nods, character types and names—but I am most interested in intertextuality that…
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Writing (a) genealogy: ‘Surge’ by Jay Bernard
In ‘Kombucha’, a prose poem about, among other things, menstrual mooncups, Jay Bernard’s persona asks: When I stare at these bottles, it’s blood that has been three times enlarged. Who says we have no genealogy? Who says that if I line them up, as ornaments, a blood archive, then it isn’t like us having had…
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A stretched tapestry: Bernardino Evaristo’s ‘Girl, Woman, Other’
Twelve overlapping stories across over 450 pages. A novel ‘bursting at the seams’ (Guardian). A book without a single full-stop. Bernardino Evaristo’s Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other invites scrutiny about its structure and how it stitches together the twelve narrative patches of the quilt. Or is it: … how it constructs the twelve-piece mosaic? I think…
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Whose fault is it anyway? Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Testaments’
No doubt editors are as old as authors. For Shakespeare, there were not only his fellow actors, but also the Master of the Revels to regulate, edit, and to censor his plays. T.S. Eliot made abundant and explicit use of Ezra Pound’s incisive cutting for ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), calling him ‘il miglio fabbro’ (‘the…