Daily Archives: 2010/10/13

Howard Jacobson，the Booker Prize-winning novelist

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以下是来NPR上的一篇文章，可以让我们了解多一点作者雅克布森及其获奖作品：

With Jacobson’s Booker Prize Win, A New Life For The ‘Jewish Jane Austen’

by John Freeman

He has been called the British Philip Roth. He’s dubbed himself the Jewish Jane Austen.

But after tonight, Howard Jacobson’s most enduring moniker will surely be that of “Booker Prize-winning novelist.”

After being longlisted twice for the award, British author Howard Jacobson finally wins the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his witty novel, The Finkler Question.

Jacobson is the author of 11 novels and has had several close calls on the Booker Prize “longlist.” He has finally had his day with The Finkler Question.

“The first draft of this speech is dated 1983,” Jacobson joked in accepting the award.

Just like Jacobson to use humor to unsettle.

His exuberantly comical, unflinching novels are, in Britain’s often toned-down literary world, warm but barbed reminders that all is not well.

Julian Treslove, the hero of this new book, is mugged on the way home. He could have sworn, but is not certain, that his assailants called him a Jew. In London’s highly assimilated literary world, Jacobson has often had to stand alone in pointing out the persistence of anti-Semitism.

In contrast to New York, where literary history has been written in the ink of so many Jewish writers, the thrust and torque of that question — what it means to be Jewish — can, especially for an American, sometimes feel strangely absent from the London scene.

Yet Jacobson has been asking the question for three decades in his fiction. Of all his novels, The Finkler Question comes at it most directly. It is a funny novel full of loss and friendship, tweaked by the amusing storyline that its hero isn’t Jewish at all, but has to learn what that means.

The U.S. publishing market has never quite caught on to Jacobson, now aged 68. How welcome, after a spate of recent winners aged 45 and under, that the Booker Prize will be reintroducing and giving a second lease on life to a writer nearly forgotten.

It recalls a passage from Jacobson’s 2004 novel, The Making of Henry, in which its hero ponders eternal life. “If anyone is going to be exempted [from death], shouldn’t it be the joyous, the kind-hearted, the exuberantly fleshly even? To those who have loved life shall more life be given.”

Tonight that was true.

John Freeman is the editor of Granta magazine and a frequent book reviewer for NPR.org.

2010 Man Booker Prize 揭晓

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2010年度布克文学奖揭晓。霍华德·雅克布森凭借其小说《芬克勒问题》（The Finkler Question）脱颖而出。没有时间整理相关资讯，就将《纽约时报》上的这篇文章转录与此，权且充数吧。。。

Howard Jacobson Wins Man Booker Prize for ‘The Finkler Question’

Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, on Tuesday night for “The Finkler Question,” a comic novel about friendship, wisdom and anti-Semitism.

Mr. Jacobson, 68, beat out “C,” by Tom McCarthy, widely considered the favorite to win.

The author of 10 previous novels, Mr. Jacobson, who was born in Manchester, England, was on the long list for the Booker Prize twice before, for “Who’s Sorry Now?” in 2002 and “Kalooki Nights” in 2007.

He accepted the award to unusually enthusiastic and sustained applause at an awards ceremony in London.

“I’m speechless,” he told the audience. “Fortunately, I prepared one earlier. It’s dated 1983. That’s how long the wait’s been.”

The Booker is given each year to a novel by an author in Britain, Ireland or one of the Commonwealth nations. The prize comes with a check for £50,000, or about $80,000, and a practically guaranteed jump in book sales and publicity. “The Finkler Question” was published by Bloomsbury USA this week in the United States.

It was a small triumph for humor in fiction, an argument that Mr. Jacobson made in a nearly 3,700-word essay in The Guardian last Saturday.

“There is a fear of comedy in the novel today — when did you last see the word ‘funny’ on the jacket of a serious novel? — that no one who loves the form should contemplate with pleasure,” he wrote. “We have created a false division between laughter and thought, between comedy and seriousness, between the exhilaration that the great novels offer when they are at their funniest, and whatever else it is we now think we want from literature.”

The chairman of the judging panel, Andrew Motion, Britain’s former poet laureate, called “The Finkler Question” a “marvelous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle.”

“The Finkler Question” tells the story of Julian Treslove, an ordinary former BBC producer who meets an old philosopher friend, Sam Finkler, and their former teacher, Libor Sevcik, for dinner one night in London. Walking home, Mr. Treslove is robbed, an incident that sets him on a quest for self-discovery, wisdom and the knowledge of what it means to be Jewish.

Writing in The Guardian, Edward Docx said the novel was “full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding.”

“It is also beautifully written with that sophisticated and near invisible skill of the authentic writer,” he added.

Mr. Jacobson’s selection was a reminder of the unpredictability of the Booker Prize, which is always the subject of speculation in the weeks before it is announced. Mr. McCarthy’s book was heavily favored, so much so that the online betting site Ladbrokes suspended betting last week after a huge number of wagers were placed on it — a circumstance the bookmaker called “borderline inexplicable.”

Rarely does the front-runner win the prize: last year’s award to “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel was the exception, at least for recent years.

This year’s Booker short list was notable for the books that were not on it. “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” by David Mitchell, and “The Slap,” by the Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkas, both made the 13-book long list but did not make the cut.

The other titles that did make the short list were: “In a Strange Room,” by Damon Galgut; “The Long Song,” by Andrea Levy; “Room,” by Emma Donoghue; and “Parrot and Olivier in America,” by Peter Carey.

【Sarah Lyall contributed reporting from London.】