Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2008

[Stewart]

The following titles were, back in January, longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2008.

• The Yacoubian Building, Alaa al Aswany
• Book of Words, Jenny Erpenbeck
• The Moon Opera, Bi Feiyu
  
• Castorp, Pawel Huelle
• Agamemnon’s Daughter, Ismail Kadare
• Let It Be Morning, Sayed Kashua
• Measuring The World, Daniel Kehlmann
• Gregorius, Bengt Ohlsson
• Shutterspeed, Erwin Mortier
• The Past, Alan Pauls
• Rivers Of Babylon, Peter Pist’anek
• Delirium, Laura Restrepo
• The Model, Lars Saabye Christensen
• Bahia Blues, Yasmina Traboulsi
• The Way Of The Women, Marlene van Niekerk
• Omega Minor, Paul Verhaeghen
• Montano, Enrique Vilas-Matas

Then the shortlist was whittled down to the following six:

• Castorp, Pawel Huelle
• Measuring The World, Daniel Kehlmann
• Gregorius, Bengt Ohlsson
• The Model, Lars Saabye Christensen
• The Way Of The Women, Marlene van Niekerk
• Omega Minor, Paul Verhaeghen

It was a bit galling as I'd read three of them on the basis of the longlist and not one made it to the final six.

Prize is awarded in May, ?5,000 to the author and ?5,000 to the translator. Paul Verhaeghen stands to sweep the lot if he wins, since he translated his own book from Dutch to English.

[Eric]

What intrigues me is the variety of languages from which the 2008 shortlist of this prize have been translated: Polish, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Afrikaans, Dutch.

This means that, at last, British book prizes for foreign work are becoming a little more adventurous, straying a bit beyond the usual suspects (French, German, Italian, Spanish and maybe Russian).

Polish is spoken by some 40 million people and Poland has a fabulous literature, which somehow managed to survive the Second World War and the censorship and other problems under Communism for half a century. Huelle (pronounced H?lle, I think; the name is not typically Polish at all) is a big name in Poland, as are Jerzy Pilch, Manuela Gretkowska, and several other authors that are almost unknown in Britain.

German is a "big language", always visible when it comes to translation prizes. Kehlmann is quite a cult name in Germany.

Swedish and Norwegian are less well known. I know nothing about authors and the books concerned, but I hope that Scandinavia is recognised as an area where serious fiction comes from, not only thrillers, crime & detective novels and the like.

The remarkable thing about the Flemish novel is that Paul Verhaegen translated it himself from the Dutch. He's evidently good at English, good enough at any rate not to let someone else do the translation. A long book: 696 pages long. I've not yet read Dabbler's review.

Most surprising of all for me was that a novel written in Afrikaans, in what could be termed the "pariah language" of the apartheid era, has got as far as the shortlist of a British book prize. I've only read one of Marlene van Niekerk's novels, "Triomf" about District 6, an area of housing where what were termed "Coloureds" used to live, which was knocked down to make way for a White development. It was interesting enough, but rather long-winded. This shortlisted book is also "a mere" 640 pages long.

[Eric]

Just to remind you that on 8th May 2008, the winner of this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize will be announced.

You can find descriptions of the six shortlisted candidates (and a link to the longlist) at:

http://www.translatedfiction.org.uk/...IFFP-shortlist

It's interesting to see that the entries this year are translated from Norwegian, Polish, German, Afrikaans, Swedish and Dutch.

[Stewart]

Just to remind you that on 8th May 2008, the winner of this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize will be announced.

I fully intended to read all six when the shortlist was announced and have, to date, read none of them. Five of them are sitting on the shelves. I put it down to the month of April, as I've had a turgid reading time. Otherwise I'd have no doubt read one or two.

But in complete ignorance, I'm tipping Castorp to win it. No real justification. Just a hunch.

[Eric]

Must be telepathy, Stewart, I was going to add "place your bets", but forgot.

I could, if I had the energy, read all the entries in the original language, as well as translation, but I'm one human being, not a computer. I'm not saying I wouldn't have to look up a lot of words, especially in the Polish one, but I could at least get an idea whether the translation was OK and also read local reviews, which can be revealing.

But the choice of languages really is surprising. Only German is y'r actual big language.

Huelle
Maybe you're right about the Huelle. My only problem with that book is that it uses a Big Author as a crutch to lean on. It is not as if "The Magic Mountain" were an obscure novel. Polish literature is very rich, so it seems a pity to give prominence to the one Polish novel that owes its existence to a German novel. See the following for many other Polish books:

http://www.bookinstitute.pl/

But with three of his novels already in English, he's bound to be better known than many Polish authors. Having said all that, I wish Antonia Lloyd-Jones well, as she did the Iwaszkiewicz book I mentioned elsewhere on this website.

Niekerk
Another big surprise is the fact that an Afrikaans novel has been shortlisted at all. Personally, I found Marlene van Niekerk's previous novel, "Triomf" pretty long-winded. But she represents a language, which is important. Though this novel looks a bit bandwagon-gimmicky and also long. And a description:

At the start of Marlene van Niekerk's colossal new novel, Milla makes this appeal in solitude, from her deathbed and with a wry sense of its ludicrousness. A victim of motor neuron disease, she can only communicate by flickering her eyelids.

Well, erm, who's Jean-Dominique Bauby?

Ohlsson
You saw what I wrote about Castorp needing the Mann novel for survival. Well, it's sadly the same story with the Bengt Ohlsson novel, Gregorius, which, from what I've read, is a sequel or whatever of Hjalmar S?derberg's "Doktor Glas". So someone else's idea embroidered upon. Makes you cynical. Can't people think up their own plots?

So:

Three out of the six entries either borrow things from existing novels (a prequel to "The Magic Mountain", a sequel to "Doktor Glas") or have a similar theme to a real-life tragedy (Niekerk-Bauby). It's enough to make me even more cynical than I already am.

I've not yet looked at reviews of the Saabye, the Kehlmann and the Verhaegen. Hope there's originality there!

[Stewart]

And the winner is Omega Minor by Paul Verhaeghan. Since he translated the novel from Dutch he takes all of the ?10,000 prize money - half for the author, half for the translator. But he won't be taking the money, as reported on the Guardian website (even though it's the Independent's prize, they haven't mentioned it online yet):

"It's always amazing when people like your work, and it's absolutely amazing when four leading intellectuals say it's the best book they've read all year," Verhaeghen said after learning of his victory. However, while he is delighted to receive the endorsement, he has decided not to take the money. "Part of this book is about the rise and aftermath of Fascism in Nazi Germany. And it's hard to miss the analogous things happening in the US. I refused the Flemish Culture award after I realised around $5,000 (?2,555) of the winnings would go to the US treasury. So this time, I decided to give the money to the American Civil Liberties Union, which works for civil rights. The money won't be liable for tax."

Antonia Byatt, director of literature strategy at award sponsor Arts Council England and the non-voting chair of the judges, said: "I am delighted Paul Verhaeghen has won ... It is a highly ambitious novel which tackles some of the major issues of our time. He deserves such recognition in England, not only for his remarkable writing but also for his huge achievement in translating his own work."

Verhaeghen said he undertook to translate his own work after the Flemish Fund for Literature commissioned some trial translations from other people, and I didn't recognise my own voice. It was the first time I realised I could have an English voice." The resulting book, he explained, "is maybe more American than the original, but I can still recognise it as my novel."


The judges for the prize were literary editor of the Independent, Boyd Tonkin; writer and teacher Abdulrazak Gurnah; literary editor of Le Monde Florence Noiville; and Arts Council England literature officer Kate Griffin.


Boyd Tonkin described the book as "one of those fantastic, big, rich exciting novels that turn up from time to time. If you're looking for comparisons, they would be the Don DeLillo of Underworld and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It is vast and sprawling - and I think it's OK to say that it is quite uneven, because 80% of it is absolutely brilliant."

Even though it has won, I still can't seem to summon up the will to read it. Comparisons to DeLillo and Pynchon put me off straight away, pretty much because I find them impenetrable. But no doubt it will finally appear in book shops near me and I can at least get a look at it and see if, after all, I may chance it.

[Stewart]

I've just been sent a press release regarding this. Better late than never, eh?

Arts Council England has today announced the winner of The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2008 in association with Champagne Taittinger.

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2008 has been awarded to the Belgian author Paul Verhaeghen for his novel Omega Minor. Paul Verhaeghen is the first author to have both written and translated the winning title and has therefore won the full ?10,000 prize for his work translated from Dutch into English. The prize was presented earlier this evening at a ceremony at the Serpentine Gallery, London. The award, a partnership between Arts Council England and the Independent newspaper, was made in association with Champagne Taittinger.

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize celebrates an exceptional work of fiction by a living author which has been translated into English from any other language and published in the United Kingdom in the last year.

Moving back and forth between the main stages of the past century, Omega Minor (translated from the Dutch and published by Dalkey Archive Press) is a tale of the survival of the soul. A novel of big ideas, the book’s whirlwind plot is set between Berlin, Boston, Los Alamos and Auschwitz, and takes in neo-Nazis, a physics professor who returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoctorate who designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe and a Holocaust survivor, who tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist.

Omega Minor is Paul Verhaeghen’s second novel and his first to be translated from Dutch into English. Aside from his writing career, Verhaeghen also works as a cognitive psychologist; his work focuses on memory and the basic aspects of cognitive ageing. He currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Paul Verhaeghen will be donating his prize money to the American Civil Liberties Union in protest of US foreign policy.

Antonia Byatt, Director, Literature Strategy at Arts Council England, said: "I am delighted Paul Verhaeghen has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It is a highly ambitious novel which tackles some of the major issues of our time. He deserves such recognition in England, not only for his remarkable writing but also for his huge achievement in translating his own work."