Telling Truth Through Fiction: Booker’s Contenders

When JM Coetzee Won His Second Booker Prize Insult In 1999, a novel about truth and reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa, he said it was “the last prize to be won in the English-speaking world.” He would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, but it is true that the buzz about the Booker Prize is generally high. This year there is a lot of interest in the shortlist in the subcontinent with her second novel with Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka. A handful of Indians, of course, have won before, including Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Arvind Adiga; and VS. Naipaul and even Salman Rushdie who are usually drawn into the embrace of the region.

rhetorical satire

As every year, the authors of the shortlist – and the long list – of Booker Prize 2022 Speak your truth through imagination. Novialet Bulawayo, a rhetorical satire on Zimbabwe, splendoris on the shortlist, frames his story along the lines of George Orwell Animal Farm, In an interview to thebookerprizes.com, she said that the outline may have been that of Orwell, but the need to write on the current political upheaval in her country sent her “forging” her childhood. She recalled her grandmother’s magical tales where anything and everything was possible – “trees ran, talking animals made fires and cooked each other to survive the dreadful winters, to woo beautiful women At night the lions were shaped, the rocks spoke and opened up to alternate worlds.” The stories were fictional, but spoke profound truths while taking lessons for humanity.

look | Booker Prize 2022 contenders

Bulawayo’s novel uses art as a form of resistance to tell the truth about the situation in Zimbabwe, where little has changed for the better even after the fall of a long-serving, authoritarian leader like Robert Mugabe. In splendor, a charismatic horse, who commanded the sun, rules and regulations over animal society for decades, but “even sticks and stones know that there is no night that does not end with dawn “, and so it ends one day for the old horse. The new order heralds a very old hope for animals until time repeats itself. Bulawayo doesn’t want a dystopian conclusion and relies on “revolutionary fantasy” to write his ending.

Sheehan Karunatilaka chooses to tell the story of his island home, Sri Lanka, through a war photographer, a closeted homosexual, who forms alliances across the spectrum and ends up dead. In Mali Almeida’s Seven MoonsAn updated version of pre-pandemic chat with the dead, the eponymous photographer is a ghost trying to reconstruct his final moments; And also live by passing the knowledge about a hidden stash of devastating pictures of atrocities kept under the bed for the love of his life, Jaki and a minister’s son DD. His first novel, Sugarwon a bunch of awards, and seven moons With its filthy afterlife that depicts reality, it has received a lot of praise from critics. Mali’s pertinent comment about the ground situation—”…like any reasonable person, you’d prefer the escape option, especially since there’s a lot”—makes her a relatable character, despite her flaws.

looking inwards

Also on the shortlist is Elizabeth Stroud, the best-selling American author for one of her Lucy Barton novels, Oh William! Lucy Barton is a writer – we’re not told what she writes for – who lives in New York and is divorced with two girls. In Oh William!In this book, Lucy is reunited with her first husband, William, and they examine their lives and the people they grew up with, which leads to even more surprising discoveries. In her calm manner, reminiscent of William Trevor, author Stroud admires, she clings to the human experience, old love and loss, and loneliness; Class, gender and inequality. Lucy is never allowed to forget her poor background by her mother-in-law, Katherine, who will introduce Lucy to her friends with these words: “This is Lucy. Lucy comes from nothing.” Later, when Lucy Katherine’s secret and her spoiled origins, she is as compassionate as her creator.

If Stroud looks inward, Percival Everett takes on the issue of widespread racism, but tells the story about lynchings with black humor tree, The first murder takes place in Money, Mississippi, where police find a second body at the crime scene, which looks like Emmett Till, a young black boy who was beaten up in the city decades ago. Soon, murders are reported across the country, and detectives demand answers from a man who has documented every lynching over the years. In chapter one, when two black detectives, Ed and Jim, stop at a restaurant in Billie Holiday strange Fruit Playing (Southern trees holding a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and Blood on the root / Black body swinging in the southern wind / Strange fruits hanging from poplar trees). Like Bulawayo, Everett also uses art as a form of resistance to talk about reality: “Everyone talks about genocide around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years , so no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always there to show. It has a shelf life.”

Irish writer Claire Keegans little things like this Tells the story of Bill Furlong, a coal and lumber merchant who finds a young single mother mourning the loss of her child in the coal shed of a convent. The background is the real-life Magdalene laundry scandal, which explored how scores of “fallen women” in Dublin from 1922 to 1966 were enslaved by the Catholic Church and worked hard in the laundry to repent of their “sins”. was forced to. When a cafe owner tells Furlong to “keep an eye on what you say about what’s out there”, it reminds you of the words of lawyer Michele Garabedian. headlineswhich calculates Boston GlobeAn investigation into allegations of child abuse by Catholic Church clergy: “If it takes a village to raise a child, a village is taken for abuse.” The complicity of everyone from the villagers to the state is one of the points Keegan made in his novel, which has already won this year’s Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

Talking about Alan Garner trek walker, which revolves around an unlikely friendship between a wanderer and a little boy, Joe Koppock, who is then exposed to a world he would never have imagined, Booker’s judges said it was “human gives a glimpse into the deeper work of being”. Critics have acknowledged it as a novel “about both quantum physics as well as ancient lore”. Treckle or Medicine Man Joe wants to fix poor eyesight but “seeing the world is not the way the world is meant to be”. Like the writer, the wanderer is concerned about age, youth, time, history.

back to long list

The winner will be announced today (October 17), and it’s probably also the best time to start reading the authors who made the long list this year but were omitted from the final list of six, notably Leela Motley’s crawling in the nightof maddie mortimer Maps of Our Fantastic Bodies and audrey maggie colony to speak their truth. Stories that transcend time and boundaries should always have new readers.