Award-Winning Disappointments

It is silly of me to really rely on external judgments, since one's taste in reading is so personal.  On the other hand, there is so much out there to read or to watch, that sometimes is can be welcome to look over the major literary award winners to help sort through (and screen out) the huge numbers of books that still are produced every year.  There's almost always something from the Man Booker Prize short or long list that catches my attention (though more often than not, it isn't the actual winner).  My reading list is definitely not constructed from these various award lists, but occasionally I will add a prize-winner book if it seems sufficiently intriguing.

All this said, I still take it that much harder when I find myself really disappointed with one of these award-winning books, since so many other people had vetted it.  I think my single worst disappointment (with a Booker winner) was Ben Okri's The Famished Road.  Boy, I did not like that novel.  I don't remember anything about it, other than hating it.

My reactions are much more muted with a very recent Man Booker International winner, Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. It's certainly different and not really a novel at all, or at least an extremely episodic novel, basically re-enacting the experience of going from one thing to another in a cabinet of curiosities.  Well over half of the entries are mini-meditations on travel as well as on human anatomy, including quite a lot on how to prepare bodies to display them after death!  Fictional pieces (with actual characters) are a smaller percentage by number, but as they are much longer (3 to 30+ pages), they take up much more of the book. Occasionally, characters reappear, but usually they are there in one-off appearances.  This New Yorker piece is a fair assessment of the novel.  I was much more into those cabinet of curiosity-type museums when I was younger but kind of outgrew that phase.  It probably doesn't help that I find plasticine-based exhibits, such as Body Worlds, to be fairly stupid and gross (rather than enlightening as Tokarczuk's narrator does).  I didn't find the fictional stories too interesting, as they didn't go anywhere, though the final story about a classics professor on a cruise ship touring Greece had its strengths.  There were certainly moments of recognition (ah-ha moments) and passages I did enjoy, but I actually did a count and there are only 20 pages that I would bother to read again.  Out of a 400 page novel, this is a pretty measly score, so I would definitely say it overstayed its welcome.

Nonetheless, in comparison to Faulkner's A Fable, this was a raging success.  I am so disappointed with this novel.  I am just baffled that it won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.  I can only imagine this was sort of like the Oscar Award given for lifetime achievement, i.e. we all agree Faulkner's great, so let's give him an award already.  If not, then they really hated their readership!  A Fable is Faulkner at his most extreme, which I suppose can be good or bad, depending on your perspective.  I certainly found that the charm of following two-page paragraphs (or even two-page sentences!) had worn off.  Throughout the novel, Faulkner also almost never uses proper names (he does relent a tiny bit when the three women, representing the Three Marys, appear), so you have to really work to figure out who "he" is referring to.  At one point, in the middle of an elephantine paragraph, the subject switches from a general to his elderly batsman.  Frankly, I don't appreciate this at all.  I value clarity in writing, and Faulkner is intentionally making this work hard to read.  (As an aside, Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch is written very much in the high-baroque style of Faulkner.  I did enjoy it (or at least had high tolerance for this) in my 20s.  I suspect I would be a lot less enamored now.)  I'm going to be honest and say that I can't even tell if Faulkner has combined two figures (an Englishman with a way with horses, who becomes a Mason and a saintly French orphan who goes into the army) into one, or if one stands in for Peter and one for Jesus.  That's how confusing this novel is!  (There is another passage where some soldiers swear that the corporal had already been buried at sea, but he was Polish then, so it is certainly possible that Faulkner is making (badly) some point about the universal nature of Christ's love.)  Most of the dialogue is very elusive as well and not remotely like something one person would actually say to another, particularly when one of the Marys claims to the old general (presumably Pontius Pilate) that the corporal (who is a transparent Christ-figure) is actually his son.  (The content of the speech might be conveyed, but not the 3 or 4 page delivery...)  Again, this is Faulkner being very direct (relatively-speaking).  Much more often, it is endless variations of one person stopping short of delivering an actual message and implying that the hearer should already know what is not being said.  Where I really, truly lost patience with this novel was that I could maybe just buy that a regiment would mutiny and refuse to leave the trenches (inspired by the teachings of a Christ-like figure), but I draw the line at all these other soldiers replacing mortar fire and bullets with harmless dummies (almost like something out of Hogan's Heroes, though that was the follow-up war).  It was so unnecessary to add this and really diluted the original message of the novel (already far too convoluted).  I really should just drop A Fable, which I am basically just hate-reading at this point, but I do feel strangely compelled to grind it out.  I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else, however, that's for sure!

Edit (5/31/2020): This is old news, and I commented on Lincoln in the Bardo already elsewhere, but, wow, what a terrible novel to win the Booker.  I actually find it such a terrible novel that it devalues the Booker Prize itself.  I do think their prize committees for the past few years have made some very poor choices.