The Bookshop

Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, The Bookshop, is truly a delightful book. It tells the story of Florence Green, a World War Two widow, who opens a bookstore in a long-abandoned centuries-old house in a small town in Suffolk. It’s a tale of Florence’s courage to go ahead with the bookshop despite the opposition of the most powerful woman in town who had designs to make the ancient house a community arts center.

Fitzgerald believed that the world we live in is divided in her own words of “exterminators and exterminatees.” And the spunky Florence falls into the latter category, as the powerful Mrs. Gamart triumphs in the end. Yet her grace and tenacity in fighting the good fight to the end are inspiring.

Penelope Fitzgerald began her literary career rather late in life at age 58. Her first novel was published at age 60. She soon received literary recognition as her third novel, The Bookshop, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978. The following year, her novel Offshore, won the Booker Prize. Both these novels reflected true life experiences of the author, who had worked in a Suffolk bookshop and lived on a barge on the Thames.       

      

Mrs Eckdorf In O’Neill’s Hotel

It was such a pleasure reading once again William Trevor’s 1969 novel, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel. Set in Dublin, it chronicles the misadventures of Ivy Eckdorf, a London-born photographer who has traveled the world, who takes on the task of photographing the comings and goings at O’Neill’s, a place that had essentially become a house of ill repute. This book was the first of five novels by Trevor to be nominated for a Booker Prize. Four reached the shortlist. But alas,Trevor never won the Prize.

What I especially love of Trevor, in both his novels and short stories, is his descriptions of people and places. He writes of Mrs Eckdorf: “She had eyes of so pale a shade of brown that they were almost yellow, and two reddened lips that were generously full and now were parted in a smile. There was a gap between her teeth, precisely in the centre of this mouth, a slight gap that an ice-cream wafer might just have passed through.”

And he writes of O’Neill’s Hotel: “In the pillared hall of the hotel, with its balding maroon carpet that extended up the stairs, eight chairs echoed a grandeur that once had been. They were tall, like thrones, their gilt so faded and worn that it looked in places like old yellow paint, their once-elegant velvet stained with droppings from glasses of alcohol.”           

The Elected Member

Unfortunately, the British novelist Bernice Rubens has fallen into literary obscurity of late.  She is now best known for being the first woman to win the Booker Prize in 1970 for her novel, The Elected Member. Ms. Rubens also wrote twenty other novels, two of which, I Sent a Letter to My Love and Madame Sousatzka were fairly successful, starring Simone Signoret in the former and Shirley MacLaine in the latter. Ms. Rubens was a screenwriter for both adaptations.

I just finishing rereading The Elected Member, which despite its title has nothing to do with British politics. Its epigraph, a quote from R. D. Laing reads: “If patients are disturbed, their families are very disturbing. The novel then tells the sad tale of the Zwecks, an Orthodox Jewish family in London, whose son Norman is a psychotic and who is eventually institutionalized.

Norman’s mother Sarah, an overbearing woman, decides that he is to be “the elected member” of the family. The father, Rabbi Zweck accedes to his wife’s wishes. Sarah pushes him to unheard of intellectual achievements in his childhood. By age nine, Norman speaks nine languages. He is expected to become a barrister, which he does. But of course the expectation of his parents is that he becomes the best of all barristers.

Norman though is more the victimizer than the victim. He ruins the lives of his sisters Bella and Esther with acts of extreme cruelty. Norman’s prolonged mental illness ultimately is a significant factor in Rabbi Zweck’s deteriorating health and subsequent death.

Although the book is extremely sad, I highly recommend it. It will be difficult to find in libraries and bookstores. Ms. Rubens writing is elegant and graceful. She creates so many poignant moments in the novel. It will be hard for you to hold back your tears.  

The 2019 Booker Prize has New Sponsorship

After 18 years of sponsorship, the Man Group has withdrawn from the sponsorship of the leading literary award for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. Now, in 2019, what had been the Man Booker Prize, now returns to its original name, the Booker Prize.
The Booker Prize has a new sponsor, the Crankstart Foundation and its new subsidiary the Booker Prize Foundation, founded and funded by the Silicon Valley Welsh-born billionaire Sir Michael Moritz, and his wife, Chicago-born author Harriet Heyman. The Booker Prize Foundation will also fund the International Booker Prize.
The Booker Prize longlist will be announced on July 24; the shortlist on September 3; and the winner chosen on October 14. Please sign up as a follower of this blog for these announcements, updates and reviews of the Booker Prize competition.

Booker Prize Winner Film Adaptations

The Life of Pi, nominated this year for an Oscar for Best Film, is the ninth Booker Prize winning novel to have been adapted to the cinema. Two adaptations have captured the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture. These are The English Patient and Schindler’s List (the latter being based on Thomas Keneally’s novel, Schindler’s Ark). The other cinematic adaptations are Remains of the Day, Disgrace, Heat and Dust, Possession, Last Orders and Oscar and Lucinda.   

 

 

 

 

My Course on the Man Booker Prize

I will be teaching a course on the Man Booker Prize beginning Tuesday, January 22, 2013, at the Oakton Community College Emeritus program in Skokie. I decided on teaching this class at Oakton when twenty-two people attended my presentation on the “Man Booker Prize” in Retrospect” at The Book Stall in Winnetka last April. Interest in the Man Booker grows each year in the States, especially with the popularity of the last two winners, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending.

The Man Booker Prize is the top literary achievement in the English-speaking world outside of the United States. Novels by authors who are citizens of the Commonwealth of Nations (formerly the British commonwealth) and Ireland are selected annually for juried competition. Publishers submit novels to a Man Booker review committee each year and the judges are charged with reading about 120 novels in a six to seven time span. A long list of 12 novels is announced in July, and a shortlist of six is announced in September. The winning novel is selected in October at a ceremony in London that is growing so grand that is now getting to be known, in some circles, as the Literary Academy Awards.

I have read all the winners since competition began in 1969. And with just a handful of exceptions, I enjoyed these novels immensely. In reading many of these novels you get a literary perspective of the rise and fall of the British Empire, from the perspectives of both the colonizer and colonized.

If you have interest in taking my course, which meets from 10:00 am until 11:30 am on six consecutive Tuesdays, starting this coming January 22, please call the Oakton Emeritus office at 847-635-1414 or visit the Emeritus website at http://www.oakton.edu/emeritus.