[Rund ums Buch] The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2016: Longlist Part 1 #ManBooker2016 #FinestFiction

Beim Man Booker Prize handelt es sich um den wichtigsten britischen Literaturpreis, der seit 1969 jedes Jahr an den besten im Vereinigten Königreich veröffentlichten englischsprachigen Roman verliehen wird. Preisträger bisher waren unter anderem Yann Martel, John Banville, Margaret Atwood, Eleanor Catton, Julian Barnes, Richard Flanagan und Marlon James (der letztes Jahr als Preisträger hervorging).

Die Shortlist wird am 13.09.2016 bekannt gegeben. Verliehen wird der Preis am 25.10.2016.

THE BOOKS (No. 1-7)

Paul Beatty: The Sellout
Born in the ‘agrarian ghetto‘ of Dickens on the outskirts of Los Angeles and raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, the narrator of The Sellout spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He was led to believe that his father’s pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family’s financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that’s left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral. Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been wiped off the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town’s most famous resident – the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins – he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court. (Inhaltsangabe: Oneworld)

Erster Eindruck: Das Cover würde mich nicht direkt ansprechen, muss ich ehrlich gestehen. In der Buchhandlung könnte es also passieren, dass ich an diesem Buch vorbeilaufe. Die Inhaltsangabe allerdings macht „The Sellout“ definitiv zu einem interessanten Roman, werden doch immer wieder aktuelle Themen angesprochen. Nicht ganz oben auf der Leseliste, aber einen Blick wert und aufgrund der aktuellen Lage durchaus Shortlistmaterial.

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J.M. Coetzee: The Schooldays of Jesus
Davíd is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simón and Inés take care of him in their new town Estrella. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog Bolívar to watch over him. But he’ll be seven soon and he should be at school. And so, Davíd is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It’s here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. But it’s here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what grown-ups are capable of. (Inhaltsangabe: Penguin)

Erster Eindruck: Seltsamer Buchtitel, vielversprechenden Inhaltsangabe, hübsches Cover das mit Licht und Schatten spielt und doch Inhalt darstellt. Ich würde es, glaube ich, lesen. ^^

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A.L. Kennedy: Serious Sweet
A good man in a bad world, Jon Sigurdsson is 59 and divorced: a senior civil servant in Westminster who hates many of his colleagues and loathes his work for a government engaged in unmentionable acts. A man of conscience. Meg Williams is ‘a bankrupt accountant – two words you don’t want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your CV’. She’s 45 and shakily sober, living on Telegraph Hill, where she can see London unfurl below her. Somewhere out there is safety. Somewhere out there is Jon, pinballing around the city with a mobile phone and a letter-writing habit he can’t break. He’s a man on the brink, leaking government secrets and affection as he runs for his life.
Set in 2014, this is a novel of our times. Poignant, deeply funny, and beautifully written, Serious Sweet is about two decent, damaged people trying to make moral choices in an immoral world: ready to sacrifice what’s left of themselves for honesty, and for a chance at tenderness. As Jon and Meg navigate the sweet and serious heart of London – passing through 24 hours that will change them both for ever – they tell a very unusual, unbearably moving love story. (Inhaltsangabe: Penguin)

Erster Eindruck: JA ABER SOWAS VON UNBEDINGT. Ich meine, ganz ehrlich: London. Zwei interessante Charaktere.. ein leicht ironischer Ton. Ich will das Buch unbedingt lesen!

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Deborah Levy: Hot Milk
Two women arrive in a Spanish village – a dreamlike place caught between the desert and the ocean – seeking medical advice and salvation. One of the strangers suffers from a mysterious illness: spontaneous paralysis confines her to a wheelchair, her legs unusable. The other, her daughter Sofia, has spent years playing the reluctant detective in this mystery, struggling to understand her mother’s illness.
Surrounded by the oppressive desert heat and the mesmerising figures who move through it, Sofia waits while her mother undergoes the strange programme of treatments invented by Dr Gomez. Searching for a cure to a defiant and quite possibly imagined disease, ever more entangled in the seductive, mercurial games of those around her, Sofia finally comes to confront and reconcile the disparate fragments of her identity. (Inhaltsangabe: Penguin)

Erster Eindruck: Hm. Sieht zunächst aus wie ein Sommer-Sonne-Urlaubsbuch, aber ist es definitiv nicht. Ich müsste aber denke ich noch einmal in eine Leseprobe hineinschnuppern. So ganz sicher bin ich mir nicht.

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Graeme Macrae Burnet: His Bloody Project
A brutal triple murder in a remote Highlands crofting community in 1869 leads to the arrest of a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae. There’s no question that Macrae is guilty, but the police and courts must uncover what drove him to murder the local village constable. And who were the other two victims? And will he swing for his crime? A story ingeniously recounted through the accused’s memoir, trial transcripts and newspaper reports, His Bloody Project is a riveting literary thriller. (Inhaltsangabe: Saraband)

Erster Eindruck: Aufgebaut mit Erinnerungen, Zeitungsartikeln und Aufzeichnungen der Verhandlungen? Oh ja, bitte! Finde ich gut, würde ich lesen.

~oOo~

Ian McGuire: The North Water
A 19th-century whaling ship sets sail for the Arctic with a killer aboard in this dark, sharp and highly original tale that grips like a thriller. Behold the man: stinking, drunk, brutal and bloodthirsty, Henry Drax is a harpooner on the Volunteer, a Yorkshire whaling ship bound for the hunting waters of the Arctic Circle. Also aboard is Patrick Sumner, an ex-army surgeon with a shattered reputation, no money and no better option than to embark as ship’s medic on this ill-fated voyage.
In India during the Siege of Delhi, Sumner thought he had experienced the depths to which a man can stoop and imagined he’d find respite on the Volunteer, but now, trapped in the wooden belly of the ship with Drax, he encounters pure evil and is forced to act. As the true purposes of the expedition become clear, the confrontation between the two men plays out in the freezing darkness of an Arctic winter. (Inhaltsangabe: Scribner UK)

Erster Eindruck: Mischung aus Moby Dick und Master & Commander? Aber jetzt ehrlich, wenn ein Charakter mit den Worten „Behold the man: stinking, drunk, brutal and bloodthirsty“ vorgestellt wird, hat man mich an der Angel. Definitiv einen Blick wert, glaube ich.

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David Means: Hystopia
At the bitter end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nation’s mental hygiene by any means necessary. Soldiers returning from Vietnam have their battlefield traumas „enfolded“-wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy-while veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will in Michigan, evading the Psych Corps and reenacting atrocities on civilians.
This destabilized, alternate version of American history is the vision of the twenty-two-year-old veteran Eugene Allen, who has returned from Vietnam to write the book at the center of Hystopia, the long-awaited first novel by David Means. In Hystopia, Means brings his full talent to bear on the crazy reality of trauma, both national and personal. Outlandish and tender, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia invites us to consider whether our traumas can ever be truly overcome. The answers it offers are wildly inventive, deeply rooted in its characters, and wrung from the author’s own heart. (Inhaltsangabe: Faber & Faber)

Erster Eindruck: OH JA! Ich meine, alleine schon das Cover ist ein Blickfang, aber das gesamte Konstrukt, das historische Tatsachen einfach anders weiterspinnt, klingt einfach nur gut. So richtig gut.

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