The annual Booker Prize winner is usually a no-brainer purchase for me. Even if I haven’t heard of the book prior to the announcement, chances are it will turn out to be an excellent read. This year’s winner though…eh, I don’t know.
The Booker Prize was awarded last night to The Gathering by Anne Enright. The Booker’s web site calls the story an “exhilaratingly bleak family epic.” Are they trying to minimize book sales?
Has anyone read it?
Update: Posts elsewhere have me rethinking my initial gut reaction to the Booker winner:
…In short, just about everyone else.
Update 2: The publisher has just announced a reprint run of 75,000 copies, which just goes to show what I know.
October 17th, 2007 at 8:21 am
it has made it onto my “galleys that i will read one day” shelf now, only BECAUSE of the win…
October 17th, 2007 at 9:52 am
I too just read some reviews of this book - was thinking of suggesting it as a Book Club selection tonight since it won the Booker.
That “bleak” aspect didn’t appeal to me either.
(Some day? When in a different frame of mind?)
I’m going with Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill - a Governor General’s Award nominee. It too has a bit of bleakness to it but also sounds somewhat uplifting.
October 17th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Wow, yeah, that really doesn’t make me want to read it either. Ugh. Surely someone could have come up with something better to say about it?
The book arrived! Wheee! Thank you!
October 17th, 2007 at 10:30 am
How can something be “exhilaratingly bleak”? I haven’t read it, but the description did pique my interest. I don’t mind bleak dysfunctional family stories, as long as they are well-written.
October 17th, 2007 at 10:33 am
I think that I am in Toronto Beth’s camp on this one. I won’t say that I’m not going to read it - ever. I’m just not in the frame of mind for “bleak” right now. Maybe in the midst of the gray month of February I might be up for bleak.
October 17th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
I read the excerpt from a link on the Millions, and I thought it was very, very good.
October 17th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
It appears that my entirely uninformed opinion, based upon a fragment of a sentence, may not be the best gauge of the book’s merits.
October 17th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Tim–
To be fair to you, “exhilaratingly bleak” is not the blurb I’d want on my book jacket. they could have come up with a cheerier way of putting it, such as, “A delightful romp toward suicide” or “So refreshingly depressing, we call it ‘defreshing.’”