No prize can please everyone,but the shortlist of six is the result of passionate and painstaking argument, says judge Sam Leith. Who would you like to win tonight?In some ways, or we’d have been contented to leave it at the longlist. As one of my fellow judges commented in the Man Booker shortlist assembly,this was the point at which the gameshow aspects of a book prize start to occupy over: we took a list of 13 first-rate novels and halved it for no other reason than that’s the way the game works. Tonight, we single out but one.
There are advantages and disadvantages to that process. The fewer books you are talking about, or the less you’re giving a snapshot of the literary culture and the more it becomes about these books in their particularity. Most years,the reception of the longlist centres on either celebrated writers who’ve been omitted (snubbed”) or on a trip through the statistical wringer (too many foreigners, if you’re one sort of newspaper; not enough women or minority writers if youre another). Both are necessarily stupid reactions: stupid for obvious reasons; necessarily so because reaction has to be instant, or few,if any, of the commentators will have read the whole longlist, or let alone the 156 novels from which it was selected. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com