Wolf Hall wins the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Hilary Mantel is tonight (Tuesday 6 October) named the winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for Wolf Hall, published by Fourth Estate.

Wolf Hall has been the bookies’ favourite since the longlist was announced in July 2009.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel was picked from a shortlist of six titles. A.S. Byatt, J.M. Coetzee,  Adam Foulds, Simon Mawer and Sarah Waters were all shortlisted for this year’s prize.

Wolf Hall is set in the 1520s and tells the story of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to prominence in the Tudor court.  Hilary Mantel has been praised by critics for writing ‘a rich, absorbingly readable historical novel; she has made a significant shift in the way any of her readers interested in English history will henceforward think about Thomas Cromwell.’

James Naughtie, comments ‘Hilary Mantel has given us a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century.  Wolf Hall has a vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail.

‘It probes the mysteries of power by examining and describing the meticulous dealings in Henry VIII’s court, revealing in thrilling prose how politics and history is made by men and women.

‘In the words of Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell, whose story this is, “the fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions.  This is how the world changes.” ‘

More about this year’s Man Booker Prize in http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1291

2009 Man Booker Prize

This is one of the literary prizes that I most like just because I can always find on the shortlisted and winner  of the recent prizes, books that I have much appreciated, confirming a good tuning of the judges choices with my personal evaluations. I hope this year is no different.

Let’s see…

The shortlisted titles announced today by the judges for the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction are:

The Children’s Book by A S Byatt (Random House, Chatto and Windus)

Summertime by J M Coetzee (Random House, Harvill Secker)

The Quickening Maze by Adam Fould (Random House, Jonathan Cape)

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (HarperCollins, Fourth Estate)

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (Little, Brown)

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Little, Brown, Virago)

Jim Naughtie, Chair of the 2009 judging panel, commented,

“We’re thrilled to be able to announce such a strong shortlist, so enticing that it will certainly give us a headache when we come to select the winner. The choice will be a difficult one. There is thundering narrative, great inventiveness, poetry and sharp human insight in abundance.”

“These are six writers on the top of their form. They’ve given us great enjoyment already, and it’s a measure of our confidence in their books that all of us are looking forward to reading them yet again before we decide on the prizewinner. What more could we ask?”

Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1881)

This is one of the best books I’ve ever read. In the words of a Russian critic, who seeks to explain the feeling inspired by Dostoevsky: ‘He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood and our bone, but one who has suffered and has seen so much more deeply than we have his insight impresses us as wisdom … that wisdom of the heart which we seek that we may learn from it how to live. All his other gifts came to him from nature, this he won for himself and through it he became great.’

Fear. Desperation. Anguish. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is a shockingly intimate tale of a murder and a murderer. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in a garret in the gloomy slums of St. Petersburg, carries out his grotesque scheme of muder and plunges into a hell of persecution, madness and terror. Although he evades the police, Raskolnikov’s dark deed weighs heavily on him. The aftermath of his crime takes the young man on a journey through the range of human emotion and experience. Good and evil, guilt and redemption, agony and joy— a man who cannot escape his own conscience. This novel is an invitation to explore and question many of the ideas and judgments we take for granted.

Below are the first two paragraphs of ‘Crime and Punishment’ published in 1866, translated by Constance Garnett.

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.

He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady, who provided him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.

The Rock – T. S. Eliot

In order to understand T.S. Eliot’s poem, Choruses from “The Rock,” one must first understand Eliot’s views on contemporary theology and spirituality. He felt as if people were moving away from the Church and were losing their religion in favor of more secular worship. The opening stanza from Eliot’s poem can summarize his entire argument.

Opening Stanza from Choruses from “The Rock” (1934)

T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965)

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

Hello world!

I’m an engineer from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who has much interest in literature, movie and others cultural themes. My intention with this blog is to present my comments on books, movies, and others arts works which I’ve liked or for some special reason attracted my attention.

Comments will be welcome.