The 2010 Booker longlist is out, and it seems that most of the buzz in the UK is about who's
not on the list. The Guardian article "
Amis-free Booker prize longlist promises to 'entertain and provoke'" introducing the list of 13 nominees actually devotes its headline, subhead, and most of the first four paragraphs to the subject of who's missing in action: Amis, McEwan, Rushdie. Elsewhere in the Guardian Books section, research professor Gabriel Josipovici pulls no punches in including these (former?) darlings of the glitterati in his assertion that
Feted British authors are limited, arrogant and self-satisfied, compares them to "prep-school boys showing off," calls them "virtually indistinguishable from one another in scope and ambition," and muses that the fact that they have won so many awards is "a mystery."
[more inside]
posted by taz
on Jul 29, 2010 -
50 comments
Canadian novelist
Yann Martel, whose novel,
Life of Pi (
excerpt,
review),
won the
2002 Booker Prize,
has been accused of plagiarizing Brazilian novelist Moacyr Scilar's 1981 novella,
Max and the Cats, which shares a similar premise.
Martel freely admits that the premise of Scilar's work, which he discovered via a half-remembered (and scathing) critique, inspired
Life of Pi, but he has not read it. The issue is
whether a premise is intellectual property or whether such ideas are recycled all the time. While this would ordinarily be a literary tempest, Canada and Brazil have had a shaky relationship over trade in recent years;
this may not help the situation.
posted by mcwetboy
on Nov 7, 2002 -
29 comments
The brouhaha that erupted in Britain last month when it was learned that the prestigious Booker Prize might be opened to American writers by 2004, displays a British inferiority complex and underscores the remarkable persistence of preconceptions that Britain and the United States hold about each other. But it's about ideas and styles and even language being swapped and appropriated across the globe. It's about artists picking from a smorgasbord of techniques and influences to try to get a handle on an increasingly fragmented and cacophonous reality, and in doing so creating a new wave of writing that is richer for its multicultural mingling of styles and voices, its voracious mixing of the high and low, the cerebral and street-smart, the old and the new. Just like in MeFi.
posted by semmi
on Jun 14, 2002 -
17 comments
