We Have a Winner! The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Categories: In the News , Award Winners , Staff Picks , Fiction
The winner of the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is The Master, by Colm Toibin.
And we nominated it!
Libraries around the world are invited to submit up to three titles to be considered for this award, which is the biggest-money literary prize (100,000 euro) given to honor a single work of fiction. And out of the 132 nominees sent in from 43 countries, the book that our library nominated (well, our library and 16 others worldwide) was the winner.
Toibin's superb character study of the classic novelist Henry James got this comment from the judges:
"In The Master, Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, who was astonishingly alive and vibrant in his art, and yet whose attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. It is a powerful account of the hazards of putting the life of the mind before affairs of the heart."
The news and the full text of the comment aren't up on the award's website yet.
This is the first time in the 11 years the award has existed that a book we nominated was the winner, though I believe we've suggested titles that have made the short list before. Since the submissions come from libraries worldwide rather than a local nominating body, the annual long lists are varied and interesting.
By the way, you'll find The Master on our annual Librarians' Choice list for 2004, too. (No money associated with that honor, unfortunately!)
I was so impressed by this book--it's a gorgeous experiment in narrative voice. As in any attempt to capture the sensibility of a writer, Toibin faces the challenge of convincingly depicting the creative mind. That the writer here is Henry James, a man of an era of great social formality and a man famously devoted to the life of the mind, makes Toibin's attempt to portray his personality and viewpoint in a way that is sympathetic to the modern reader even more difficult.
Toibin depicts James in settled but isolated middle age, after years of success as a novelist, after the notorious failure of his play (booed off the stage in its London opening), and after the deaths of several of the people most important to him emotionally. The James of this novel is minutely observant of social and personal subtleties around him, yet retreats from anything but the most formal social relationships.
In a slow, stately style that pays homage to James's own, Toibin has created a surprisingly sympathetic character study of a not always sympathetic character. Emotionally withdrawn, even cowardly, yet creatively brilliant, the James of this novel is a fascinatingly self-contradictory character.
The other shortlisted titles were:
- Graceland, by Chris Abani
- Maps for Lost Lovers, by Nadeem Aslam
- Havoc, In Its Third Year, by Ronan Bennett
- The Closed Circle, by Jonathan Coe
- An Altered Light, by Jens Christian Grøndahl, translated from the Danish by Anne Born
- The Swallows of Kabul, by Yasmina Khadra, translated from the French by John Cullen
- Breaking the Tongue, by Vyvyane Loh
- Don't Move, by Margaret Mazzantini, translated from the Italian by John Cullen
- The Logogryph, by Thomas Wharton (not yet in the library's collection)
Our other two nominees were Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, and The Falls, by Joyce Carol Oates.
1 Comment
I totally agree with Joan’s impressions of this book. The voice in The Master is so consistent not only within the book itself, but with that of James himself in his novels. The structure of the book delicately weaves episodes of James’ lives with the plots of his novels and stories, yet never breaks its own fine integrity. I did wonder if the novel would be appealing as a story if the reader was not familiar with James, just as I found Cunningham’s Hours so dependent upon Woolf. I think that perhaps this James would be fascinating even as a created character.