There are two literary prizes that most well-read Indians recognise and discuss most often — the Nobel and the Booker. With the Booker shortlist coming out on September 9 next week, expect another round of anticipation and heartbreak in the subcontinent: could the judges possibly leave off either Amitav Ghosh or Salman Rushdie, will Mohammed Hanif make it?
Like the New Yorker short story, the Booker novel has come to occupy a category of its very own. A great Booker novel, like a great New Yorker story, is unique and unforgettable: an average Booker novel is earnestly literary, self-consciously experimental and under the trappings, distinctly middlebrow. In India, we worship the Booker because it’s an indicator of literary success, as distinct from literary quality: to have “our” authors appearing on Booker shortlists year after year is another sign of Global India, a soothing balm to our anxieties that we don’t quite belong to the First World yet.
As the news came in that Rawi Hage had won this year’s IMPAC award, I wondered why Indians, so accustomed to reading in translation, don’t follow the IMPAC with greater zeal. (This may have something to do with the fact that the only Indian writers so far to make it to the IMPAC shortlist have been Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry. We don’t have enough representation to pique our interest in the IMPAC.)
Consider this: the IMPAC is best-known for being the world’s richest literary prize, but it operates very differently from most of the major prizes out there. The IMPAC draws up its longlist based on the recommendations from libraries all over the world. This makes it far more international than the Pulitzer, known for its adherence to selecting works of high literary quality, but open only to writers from the US; or to the Booker, open only to writers from Commonwealth countries.
The IMPAC is also one of the few major literary prizes that does not discriminate against works in translation. If a novel is available in English translation, it’s judged alongside works written originally in English. This makes good sense, given that the reader will read what is available in English regardless of whether it’s a translation or not — you read Garcia Marquez or Turgenev in the same way as you read Dickens or Kiran Desai, regardless of the language in which the original work was written.
The breadth of contemporary writing is far better reflected in the IMPAC’s shortlists than in most other prizes. This year’s shortlist featured Patrick McCabe, Gail Jones and Yasmin Gooneratne. It also featured Andrei Makine and Yasmina Khadrua (translated from the French), Javier Cercas (translated from the Spanish), and Sayed Kashua (translated from Hebrew). If you’re wondering who these writers are, that’s the whole point of the IMPAC: to spotlight the best writing coming out today that you haven’t heard of and wouldn’t have heard of without the prize.
This year’s winner, Rawi Hage, was born in Beirut and has lived in New York and Montreal. The two protagonists of DeNiro’s Game, Bassam and George, are survivors who negotiate the maze of Beirut during the civil war of the 1980s: “We were aimless, beggars and thieves, horny Arabs with curly hair and open shirts and Marlboro packs rolled in our sleeves, dropouts, ruthless nihilists with guns, bad breath, and long American jeans.” It’s a riveting story, but since Hage was originally published by the small Anansi Press, his book would probably never have reached India if it hadn’t been for the buzz from the IMPAC.
Over the years, the Booker has introduced readers like me to the works of new writers who’re lighting up the literary gossip circuitboards, to old stalwarts whose new novels we hope to devour. The IMPAC, in contrast, has introduced readers like me to books that we might otherwise have found only by sitting at the feet of the most dedicated literary snobs, those who’re committed to reading a Roberto Bolano ten years before the world discovers Bolano.
Alongside the comforts of the familiar — Jamaica Kincaid, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster — the IMPAC offers to surprise you. Back in 1997, few had read Javier Marias, for instance; and Per Petterson’s wonderful Out Stealing Horses might have remained a minority taste without this award. I had heard of Rawi Hage, but not come across his books until the IMPAC shortlist was announced. If all a literary prize manages to do is to introduce you to a writer you don’t know and are delighted to meet, the IMPAC does a great job.
(Disclaimer: The columnist is chief editor, Westland/ Tranquebar; the views expressed here are personal.)
