Steve_Bamlett_blog

2022 Booker Longlist – The Books I read this year.

My predictions-cum-wishes of WINNER, in order:

1. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (Sort Of Books)
2. On William by Elizabeth Strout (Penguin)
3. Treacle Walker by Alan Garner (4^th Estate, HarperCollins)
4. The Trees by Perceval Everett (Influx Press)
5. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber & Faber)
6. Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto & Windus)

I was aiming to keep these lower – certainly than the full list but maybe considerably lower than that. In previous year’s I blogged the full list.

Here’s the Longlist – and the record of my adventures with it:

Bought (B) Borrowed (A) Not or Not YET B or A	Date Start/ Finish	The 2022 longlist is (WINNER is bolded print):	Outcome:Blog = URLExplanation Paragrah no. below
B 31/07 Shortlist	08/09 / Gave up p.90 9/08	Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto & Windus)	These days I rejoice in NOT having to read books that I don’t much like. It was obvious this was one such and there are plenty of books from the longlist I would rather read. See paragraph 2 below.
B 06/08	13/09 / Abandoned 16/9	Trust by Hernan Diaz (Picador)	Another decision that this is a fascinating novel with an innovative method that I nevertheless find unreadable, so abandoned over half-way through and skimmed. See paragraph 3 below.
B 25/08 Shortlist	29/08 / 07/09	The Trees by Perceval Everett (Influx Press)	Blog completed: https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2022/09/08/he-found-it-all-depressing-not-that-lynching-could-be-anything-but-however-the-crime-the-practice-the-religion-of-it-was-becoming-more-pernicious-as-he-realized-that-the-similarity/
B 28/07	N/A	Booth by Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail, Profile Books)	Not to read. No good reason. Just too much on.
B 31/07 Shortlist	03/08 / 04/08	Treacle Walker by Alan Garner (4th Estate, HarperCollins)	Blog completed: Available at: https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2022/08/06/booker-reflections-shortlist-2022-who-what-said-the-man-is-there-a-difference-this-blog-contains-my-personal-views-of-alan-garners-2021-treacle-walker/
B 04/08 WINNER	09/08 / 12/08	The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (Sort Of Books)	Blog completed: Available at: https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2022/08/14/you-want-to-ask-the-universe-what-everyone-else-wants-to-ask-the-universe-why-are-we-born-why-do-we-die-why-anything-has-to-be-and-all-the-universe-has-to-say-in-reply-is-i-dont/
Not buying again Shortlist	Read this on release	Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber & Faber)	A very readable, beautiful novella but a ‘small thing’ in itself on a too well trod an Irish theme. You want more. Admirable of course.
B 29/07	04/08 / 09/08	Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer (Picador)	Seen at Edinburgh Book Festival 26 / 08 Blog completed: https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2022/08/10/it-seemed-as-if-her-anatomical-nightmares-had-begun-to-bleed-into-the-days-1-this-blog-contains-my-personal-views-of-maddie-mortimers-2022-maps-of-our-spectacular/
B 11/08 Paperback.	16/09 / 19/09	Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Saraband)	Blog completed: https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2022/09/19/the-material-was-haphazardly-arranged-but-that-only-added-i-thought-to-the-authenticity-of-what-she-had-to-say-within-a-few-days-however-i-had-convinced-myself-that-i-was-the-victim-o/
B 11/08	17/08 / 25/08	The Colony by Audrey Magee (Faber & Faber)	Blog complete: https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2022/08/30/8076/
B 29/07	09/09 / 12/09	Night Crawling  by Leila Mottley (Bloomsbury)	Blog complete: https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2022/09/15/inside-the-heat-of-the-room-pushes-down-from-the-ceiling-and-this-is-a-different-kind-of-bodies-on-bodies-these-one-grind-and-instead-of-joy-there-is-much-wanting-were-all-wa/
B 31/07	24/08 / 29/08	After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz (Galley Beggar Press)	Not truly read. Got about a quarter in and then very lightly skimmed. See paragraph 1 below.
B 31/07 Shortlist	13/08 / 16/08	On William by Elizabeth Strout (Penguin)	Blog available at https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2022/08/18/but-when-i-think-oh-william-dont-i-mean-oh-lucy-too-dont-i-mean-oh-everyone-oh-dear-everybody-in-this-whole-wide-world-we-do-not-know-anybody-not-even-ourselves/

Quick Paragraphs

I use these to record reading a novel but choosing not to blog on it.

1. After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz (Galley Beggar Press). This is no doubt a very clever book and a milestone in thinking about queer theory in general, the queer woman and lesbian theory. It visits milestones like the fate of Oscar Wilde, the publishing problems of The Well of Loneliness and the tightening of the law against male homosexuality. It is a novel in which one of the longest sections is a ‘Bibliographic Note’ at the end where debts to Anne Carson and many others are acknowledged including a whole raft of post-modernist literary theory in the journals. I may once have loved this but largely now I don’t. / There are tremendous moments, of course, such as a beautiful post-modern invented definition of the term ‘invert’ used to describe homosexuals by Havelock Ellis and others: ‘inverts may have their warmest parts turned outwards, like orchids or octopuses’ (p. 99). Another example is a wonderful riff, regarding Maud Allan in Wilde’s Salomé on the Cult of the Clitoris: of which the average male Times reader is imagined to say: “I’ve never heard of this Greek chap Clitoris they are all talking of nowadays’ (p. 184). / The theme of rape and madness is heard throughout in the screams at abuse by men of Cassandra of Troy (see page 50f.). Anne Carson translations of Sappho run throughout (as does information from Carson’s notes on the poet) and link to the exciting use of a narrative ‘we’ throughout that overcomes the isolation of first-person storytelling. The grasp of a central story of late nineteenth and early twentieth century queer folks, mainly women but with a brilliant absorption of trans themes within it and a scattering of sensitive men amongst the many hard cases of male misogyny and power-hunger. / Some names will not be known. Others are canonical – including Virginia Woolf of course. Although Italian and British names predominate, it is great to see the Delphi experiment of the expatriate Eve Palmer Sikelianos represented (rather than her Greek husband) to explicate the 1927 Festival of Delphi (p. 227). The information is collected from book and articles mentioned in the bibliographic note but it is a fine compendium of queer, feminist and trans thinking, with a real place for bi-sexuality (Nancy Cunard amongst them). Read it. But as a novel, I don’t want it on the shortlist, though no doubt it would educate me and some of its prose moments already delight me.
2. Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto & Windus). I was not keen on Bulawayo’s first book but this turned me off from the beginning. It is a political allegory, based on the Zimbabwean anti-colonial revolution that seems to be ever wearing on its surface and style a debt to George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Thus this speech from Dr Sweet Mother, the donkey ‘Femal’ (the dropping of the ‘e’ here I find a maddening trait) raised on two hind legs and wearing Gucci heels: “This is not an animal farm but Jidada with a-da and another da! …” (p. 53). No, no! NoViolet but I find this unspeakably silly and unnecessary. A study, I suppose of the fate of revolutionary and popular military ‘GLORY’ turned into a kind of passive acceptance that things go wrong represented in the novel by the word ‘Tholukuthi’. The most useful critique I have found glossed the last word thus: ‘(By the by, the word “tholukuthi” — pronounced to-lu-ku-ti — translates literally to English as something like “you find that” and is used throughout the novel also in the ways you might use “and so” or “and then” or “for real” or “in truth” depending on the context; in other words, it is not really translatable, but by several pages in, readers unfamiliar with the word will have become comfortable with it.)’ Read that review by Ilana Masad here (it is worth it): https://www.wfdd.org/story/glory-nods-orwell-animals-explore-survival-under-corrupt-government. Not one for me, especially when there seems such wonderful writing not on the shortlist. The review in Literary Review suggests that its slow start as a novel is belied by the story in the second half about a goat of promise. Perhaps I should have stuck with but … decided to read more of the longlist.
3. Trust by Hernan Diaz (Picador). This is an earnest novel with strong intellectual pretensions to tell the story of capital and capitalism in the USA through the interest of Marx in the ontology of ‘money’ as a mode of fiction that seeks to persuade and to mislead in order to function. Hence we get narratives that exchange various details about phenomena that depend on the necessity of trust in social, emotional, financial and economic relationships and the duplicities such trusts lead to in all such relationships. Marx’s theory of money is a good basis for understanding why trust and doubt are the the dynamic under-current of the history of capitalism, and why such an under-current brings those in capitalism’s wake to mental breakdown and the breakdown of narrative. the various narratives reflect on each other through a common interest in the dynamics of Depression – in economies and people – and their tendency to florid psychosis if ignored. Mental health discourses are there throughout. Very interesting but I got bored in the process. This is deservedly not on the shortlist. It limits its readership by its demand that we puzzle ourselves into its obsessions and refusal to TRUST simple narrative forms, as anything other than elegant lies masking self-interest.

All the best Steve