Martel’s musical flight of fancy

Yann Martel is no doubt a busy man: not only is the Man Booker Prize–winning author of Life of Pi a new father, he’s also promoting his latest novel, Beatrice & Virgil, and fending off a slew of negative reviews. Yet the Montreal native has also found time to engage in a bit of classical music–inspired whimsy. On Tuesday, at a performance by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Martel supplied an original text to accompany some ballet music by Beethoven. The piece, called The Parole Hearing of Prometheus, took the form of a courtroom drama and was performed in French by Quebec actor Michel Dumont.

From The Gazette:

Trial-by-jury is not an original motif, but it got the piece up and running. Prometheus stood accused not simply of stealing fire and giving it to mankind but of enabling the despoliation of a planet the gods had been treating rather well. “Even Lord Hephaestus, the divine blacksmith, says he does not need so much heat and fire,” thundered Dumont the prosecutor in one of Martel’s more inspired flights.

According to Gazette classical music critic Arthur Kaptainis, the evening was “mostly good fun” despite the “earnest Al Gore undercurrent” of Martel’s accompanying script. Still, following the lead of book critics in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, Kaptainis couldn’t help taking a dig at Martel:

Dumont’s delivery, comic and robust, was entirely in French. Undoubtedly the language of Molière is well suited to courtroom grandiloquence. The English as printed seemed less witty and less literary. This is a significant observation: Martel wrote the text in English and had his parents prepare a translation.

Meanwhile, The Globe and Mail described Martel’s text as a “mere bagatelle compared with the grandeur” of the music, complaining that the story, which touched on melting ice caps and oil spills, was “a tad preachy.”

Martel fans can make up their own minds: a recording of the performance will eventually be released on CD.

Margaret Laurence fails to make “Lost Booker Prize” shortlist

The six finalists for the Lost Man Booker Prize, which was created to retroactively honour books excluded from Booker contention in 1970, have been announced, and Canada’s one potential nominee – Margaret Laurence’s longlisted The Fire Dwellers – was left out. According to the Associated Press:

The six are Patrick White’s The Vivisector, J.G. Farrell’s Troubles, Mary Renault’s Fire From Heaven, Nina Bawden’s The Birds on the Trees, Shirley Hazzard’s The Bay of Noon, and Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat.

… Of the finalists, only Hazzard and Bawden are still alive, but all the books are still in print. Farrell won the Booker in 1973 for The Siege of Krishnapur, and Spark and Bawden have been finalists. The winner will be decided by public vote on the Booker Web site and announced May 19.

Bookmarks: Suing the Nook, profitable poetry, and more

Bookish links from around the Web:

• According to Amazon, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin is the best book of 2009. Also on its list of the top 10 books of 2009: Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder; Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall; Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín; Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl; Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollstead; The Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larsson; The City & The City by China Miéville; Stitches by David Small; and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba
• More trouble for Nook, Barnes & Noble’s new digital reader: GalleyCat reports that Spring Design is suing B&N over the Nook’s design, stating that the bookseller broke non-disclosure agreements and “misappropriated trade secrets” about Spring Design’s own Google-Android based e-book reader, Alex Reader
• British author/actor/comedian/Oscar Wilde fan/blogger/Tweeter Stephen Fry has something to say about the benefits of social media in this two-part online interview
• If you think the mania for classic literature and zombie mash-ups is going to die anytime soon, think again. The LA Times Jacket Copy reports that Quirk Books, the publishing company responsible for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters has announced their latest project, titled Dawn of the Dreadfuls
• Can poetry be profitable? Publisher Dominique Raccah thinks so. The Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy announces Raccah’s trial website, an online poetry community that allows Web browsers to upload, hear, and buy poetry
• The ever-controversial Globe and Mail columnist and author Margaret Wente responds to her many haters. Turns out she likes to make Canadians angry, especially Newfoundlanders

Hilary Mantel: an early Booker favourite

Since being longlisted last week for the 2009 Man Booker Prize, British novelist Hilary Mantel has gone from being a relative outsider on a star-studded list to the overwhelming favourite to take home the £50,000 prize, according to bookies in the U.K. From the Guardian:

The odds on Mantel gaining the award have been slashed with 95% of all bets placed on her novel alone and the value of those bets rising tenfold, according to bookmakers. William Hill said it had “never seen a betting pattern like it,” after a spate of bets made Wolf Hall “the only one in the running for the punters.” A spokesman for the bookmakers, which over the weekend cut the odds on the novel winning from 12-1 to 2-1, said: “It’s almost like an unspoken psychic rumour has gone round that this will be Hilary Mantel’s year. We’ll lose a five-figure sum if the support continues. It is as though a tip has gone around the literary world telling everyone that Mantel is a certainty.”

The contest is notoriously difficult to call and betting does not usually heat up until the shortlist of contenders is announced in September, the spokesman added.

But hundreds of people were placing bets of up to £50 on the 57-year-old novelist from Glossop, Derbyshire, this year, just days after the longlist of 13 books was chosen from the 132 potential contenders.

The New Yorker slobbers over Alice Munro

Among the many reactions to Alice Munro’s well-deserved winning of the Man Booker International Prize, one of the more interesting is that of The New Yorker, the magazine that has published the lion’s share of Munro’s stories over the decades.

On The Book Bench, the magazine’s book blog, Willing Davidson claims that “the arrival of a Munro story in the fiction department is always an event – her typescript pages, with their oddly bolded paragraphs, produce an almost atavistic salivary response.”

Really? They actually salivate when a new story arrives? Munro’s stories are great and all, but you know you’ve perhaps given over too much of your life to literature when you find yourself preparing to eat one.

Though, given how dry Munro’s prose style can be, perhaps a little spit is exactly what’s needed.

How the Booker ruined James Kelman’s career

When James Kelman won the Booker prize in 1994, the Scottish novelist surely expected that Britain’s top literary award would propel him to a wider readership. But in a rare interview appearing in The Sunday Times, Kelman says the controversy surrounding his win has had a damning effect on his career:

“I don’t think it [the Booker] has proved to be that good for me,” he told The Sunday Times. “The hostility, the attacks interfered with my work such in a way that I don’t think ever really recovered.”

Perhaps some amount of controversy was inevitable: As one prurient reviewer noted at the time, Kelman’s profanity-laden How Late It Was, How Late, written in an urban Scottish argot, featured some 4,000 instances of the F-word, and one of the Booker jurors called the book “crap, quite frankly.” However, Kelman claims now that the critical controversy prevented serious consideration of his subsequent work.

“Even if I do a reading just now people will say, ‘well Jim, what about your sweary words? It’s had a very sad effect; it’s not been a positive thing.”

Kelman’s new novel, Keiron Smith, Boy, contains few obscenities because it is written in the voice of a child. It has earned him only £1,400 in sales, though it has won two major literary prizes and has been hailed by critics as his best novel to date.

Gaiman to headline Luminato literary programming

The Toronto-based Luminato arts festival has announced its 2009 lineup, and fanboys the city over will be pleased to know that the theme for the literary programming is “fantasy, horror, and Gothic.” They’ll likely be even more pleased that fantasy icon Neil Gaiman is the headliner. He’ll be flying into town for a night billed as “An Evening With Neil Gaiman,” in which he’ll reveal some of the hidden corners of his “darkly fantastic imagination,” according to the Luminato press release.

Meanwhile, Globe and Mail scribe Russell Smith will host an event featuring three authors of psychological suspense: Patrick McGrath, who’ll kick off the Canadian launch of his latest novel, Trauma; Sarah Langan, winner of the 2007 Bram Stoker Award, who’ll read from her novel The Missing; and Quebec author Monique Proulx, who’ll read from her newest novel, Wildlives. Later in the fest will be “Gothic Toronto: Writing the City Macabre,” which will feature six writers – including Ann-Marie MacDonald and Andrew Pyper – concocting ghoulish tales set in Toronto.

There’ll be some non-fantasy-related programming, too: 2008 Man Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga will headline “World Voices in Fiction,” an evening with new or rising international literary stars. And Canadian children’s authors and illustrators will be feted at readings across the city in partnership with the Toronto Public Library.

For the full details, click here.

National Post hosts online Giller roundtable

In preparation for tomorrow’s Scotiabank Giller Prize gala award ceremony, the National Post has recruited a cadre of industry insiders, authors, and commentators for a special online roundtable about literary awards and their effects on the nominated titles.

The panellists are:

Moderators:
Brad Frenette and Mark Medley, National Post

Guests:
Doug Pepper, president and publisher, McClelland & Stewart
Lewis DeSoto, author of Blade of Grass, longlisted for the Booker Prize
Nino Ricci, author of The Origin of Species, 2008 Governor General’s Literary Awards nominee
Yvonne Hunter, director of marketing and publicity, Penguin Canada
Vincent Lam, author of Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner
Sarah MacLachlan, president of House of Anansi
Douglas Hunter, author of God’s Mercies, 2008 Governor General’s Literary Award nominee
Martha Kanya-Forstner, editorial director, Doubleday Canada
Terry Fallis, author of The Best Laid Plans, 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour winner
George Murray, moderator of Bookninja.com

Although he’s not on the official list, it appears that Pasha Malla, author of the Giller-longlisted story collection The Withdrawal Method, is also on hand for the discussion.

So far, the questions have ranged from the inane — Where will you be on Giller night? — to the provocative — Are we witnessing the emergence of a new generation of CanLit superstars?

In the early going, Doug Pepper has invited Martha Kanya-Forstner out for drinks prior to the gala, Pasha Malla has declared Lee Henderson’s novel The Man Game to be “badass,” and Nino Ricci has called literary juries “just three people horse-trading.” This roundtable discussion might be worth following.

There’s also a ticker at the bottom of the roundtable keeping track of people’s votes for which shortlisted novel should win tomorrow night. As of 12:34 this afternoon, the leader is Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce, with 43% of the vote, followed by Anthony De Sa’s Barnacle Love, with 23%.

Bookmarks – Jeanette Winterson on the cult of personality, Britain’s re-reading habits, TVs in bookstores, and more

Some book-related links:

• Jeanette Winterson on the cult of personality (Times Online)
• Britain likes to re-read (The Guardian)
• What do bookstores need? Television! (The New York Times)
• Clive Cussler likes to look for shipwrecks (The Christian Science Monitor)
• Jiang Rong wins the first-ever Man Asian Booker Prize (Yahoo! News)

Moore, Lansens have eyes on Orange prize

Two Canadian authors have made the longlist for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (the award formerly known as the Orange Prize). Among the 20 contenders are Lori Lansens’ The Girls (published by Knopf Canada here and Little, Brown in the U.K.) and Lisa Moore’s Alligator (House of Anansi Press here and Virago there). Not to mention Stef Penney’s Canada-set The Tenderness of Wolves (Penguin Canada here, Quercus there), which already has a Costa Book of the Year (the award formerly known as the Whitbread Prize) win under its belt.

The Canadian and Canada-friendly titles are up against Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, which has already won the Man Booker Prize (the award formerly known as the Booker Prize); Nell Freudenberger’s The Dissident; and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, among others. The winner will be announced on June 6.

As this Guardian piece notes, the presence of Desai and Penney on the longlist seems to buck an unspoken but longstanding trend on the BritLit awards scene:

But the decision goes far beyond this. None of the richer awards since the first of them, the Booker, was founded in 1968 has gone to a book which has previously won a sizeable rival award. Few if any have even gone to titles shortlisted or longlisted for a rival.

“No prize committee wants to come second,” one of the most seasoned ex-judges said yesterday.

So an as-yet-unawarded Canadian author could be just the ticket.