NOVEL INVENTIONS
With its 2019 shortlist dominated by women, the Booker Prize has again proved its relevance
Of all the revelations in Padma Lakshmi’s memoir, Love, Loss, and What We Ate,
one was the most surprising. Every year that Salman Rushdie did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature, his petulant moping needed consolation. Given their considered prose, you would think writers would be impervious to loss, but Rushdie will tell you—prizes matter. Shortlisted for the first time in 24 years, the one-time Booker winner perhaps knows the prize is the best of fillips. It can undo much obscurity. Rushdie’s Quichotte
may not have the sparkle of Midnight’s Children
(1981), but like the other five books on this year’s shortlist, it responds to our times with an acuity which is novel.
Pictures from the launch of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments
in London offer hope. Books can still be blockbusters. Updating The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Atwood seems to have done it again—she has again conjured a tale that is a testament to fiction. Fans of the writer would be heartened that bookies in Britain have given her a 40 per cent chance to win. Having awarded the prize to Hilary Mantel for Bring up the Bodies in 2012, it’s also clear that Booker juries have never minded sequels.
Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities, a book about a lovestruck chicken farmer, revises the narrative of migration, but this year around, Obioma himself represents a minority of sorts. Four of the six authors shortlisted for the 2019 Booker are women. Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport is a 1,000-page novel that hardly ever employs a full stop. Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives of a dozen characters, a majority of whom are black, British and female.
Though some were surprised to see Elif Shafak on this year’s shortlist, her book 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World does give the 2019 Booker a theme—women, like migrants, deserve more. Regardless of who wins on October 14, the Booker seems to be demanding a better inheritance. ■
Four of the six authors shortlisted for the prize this year are women