The Booker Prize 2023 shortlistees on the writers who inspired them
With one month to go until the winner is announced, we asked some of the authors shortlisted for this year's prize to tell us who inspired them, and their shortlisted works in particular
Paul Harding on Shakespeare’s villains: ‘I want my characters to wrestle with their best and worst impulses’
Paul Harding, author of This Other Eden, explains how the moral complexity of Shakespeare’s villains helped him create Matthew Diamond
Matthew Diamond is a character in This Other Eden who comes to the racially integrated community on the fictional Apple Island as a kind of informal, self-appointed educator and missionary. His good intentions for the islanders prove to be the mechanism that begins and hastens the tragic fate of the community, which is both appallingly unjust and an appallingly familiar kind of episode from history.
From the start, perhaps my main concern with Matthew Diamond was finding a way to preserve his agency in all the awful events that befall the islanders and his explicitly racist sentiments, but without thereby flattening him into a paper-doll, cutout villain. That is, the challenge with him was to make him human – complicated, contradictory, a character with a repertoire of better and worse impulses – so that the humanity of the other main characters in the book could be most fully brought into relief against the events he sets into action.
Sarah Bernstein on Marie NDiaye: ‘Her characters and settings remain opaque, they keep their secrets’
Sarah Bernstein, author of Study for Obedience, explains how she drew from Marie NDiaye’s pervasive atmosphere of the uncanny
I first came across Marie NDiaye’s Self Portrait in Green while working in a French-language library in New Brunswick about a decade ago. The novel, published in France in 2005 and in Jordan Stump’s English translation in 2014, takes the form of a fictional memoir comprised of the narrator’s journal entries, and I was very taken – from this first encounter – with NDiaye’s unconventional approach to storytelling, the way the ordinary and the fearsome are brought together in a kind of uncanny web.
In this novel, and the ones by NDiaye I have read subsequently, the everyday social world and its niceties undergo a process of erosion that is so gradual it is almost imperceptible until it is far too late – in this way I have more than once had the sense of being trapped in her narratives. Like the sensation of having come so far only to hear a door shutting and locking behind, NDiaye’s use of humour and the absurd, combined with missing or out of kilter points of orientation, has often given me the feeling I’ve been laughing along at a joke I’ve poorly understood, only to realise I have become complicit in some terrible affair.
Paul Murray on Thomas Pynchon: ‘His vision of the future feels more prescient every day’
Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting, writes about Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a book that’s impossibly gorgeous but hard to keep up with
I first started reading Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 masterpiece, while living temporarily in Frankfurt airport. I was 21; I’d been working in Germany for the summer, then taken a week’s holiday in Prague, returning from which I’d managed to miss my plane home. A kindly travel agent found a seat for free on a flight the following week, so I spent the intervening time eating at the airport McDonald’s, washing in the airport bathroom, and sleeping as best I could on the uncomfortable plastic seats, while bombarded every 30 seconds with booming announcements auf Deutsch from the airport PA.
This, of course, was a not appropriate place to begin reading Gravity’s Rainbow, which opens in London in the last days of World War Two as the city is being hammered by German V-2 rockets. ‘A screaming comes across the sky’ is the famous opening sentence. ‘It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.’ The intelligence services (the book is thronged with spies and agents of various kinds) have discovered a mysterious link between the rocket strikes and the sexual misadventures of an American GI, the hapless Tyrone Slothrop, who soon finds himself sent to the chaotic ‘Zone’ that is postwar Europe on the trail of a V-2 that’s been mysteriously altered. Who’s sent him, and why, also remain mysterious – you may be discerning a pattern here. Discerning patterns is, in part, what the novel is about: Slothrop and others’ increasingly desperate, and in the end doomed, attempts to make sense of a reality that has been smashed to pieces by the horrors of the war.
And finally…
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Very interesting article exploring the minds and works of past writers to have an influence on today's world.