After last year’s shortlist, where most of the books had already won other prizes, this year the Dublin Literary Award returns to us a sense of discovery, with a tight, rewarding and highly varied shortlist. The winner of the €100,000 prize will be announced by its patron, Lord Mayor Alison Gilliland, on May 19th, as part of the opening day of International Literature Festival Dublin. Here’s my view on the runners.
Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
University of Minnesota Press, 368pp, £14.99
One of the joys of the Dublin Literary Award is the oddities it throws up, which no other prize has noticed. Noopiming: the Cure for White Ladies certainly fits that bill. But with the title of a polemic and the cover design of a self-help book, this novel has a few hurdles to overcome before we begin.
The narrator is Mashkawaji, a being frozen in ice (possibly an analogue for the US ICE: Immigration and Customs Enforcement service), reflecting on the thoughts and activities of their seven friends. (Everyone is gender neutral and referred to as “they”, which makes keeping track of characters trickier.) They are Canadian Native Americans, interacting with the white world that has taken over their land, often feeling more at home in nature.
“Anthropology is always more about your own bias than the thing you are studying,” says Mashkawaji, and, like this definition of anthropology, Noopiming is better in intention than execution. The style, which combines poetry, short standalone paragraphs and aphorisms (“Know this: visiting is more of a dance than an event”), means there is little narrative flow. Despite welcome flashes of cynicism and humour from time to time, this seems likely to be the niche entry on this year’s shortlist. For my money, Tommy Orange’s There There, which was shortlisted in 2020, gave a more accessible – if bleaker – account of contemporary Native American communities.
The Art of Falling by Danielle McLaughlin
John Murray, 304pp, £8.99
When The Art of Falling was published last year, one critic (me) said that "If it doesn't make a prize shortlist or two, we should riot." Well, now we can put away our pitchforks, though it remains odd that the rest of the prize season passed off peacefully without this terrific novel being recognised.
Perhaps it seemed – in contrast to Noopiming or The Death of Vivek Oji – insufficiently new or unusual. And yes, it sits within the traditional form of the character-driven literary novel: but what riches inhabit that genre! McLaughlin, in her first full length work, is up there with the best of them. The book takes us into the cynical, wavering mind of art gallery manager Nessa McCormack, who is struggling to be superwoman by juggling work, family (sullen teenage kid; randy wandering husband) and a shadow that threatens to blot out the new exhibition she’s been working on.
If that doesn’t sound like heart-pounding stuff, then remember that the quality of fiction is in its execution and not just its subject; and McLaughlin perfects Nessa’s voice while handling big topics including art, possession, and how we claim ownership of other people. And the dry cynicism and wit persists to the end, where we’re caught uneasily between a sense of resolution and a fear of disaster still to come.
The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi
Faber, 256pp, £8.99
This novel, the second from "a writer and visual artist based in liminal spaces" (it says here), explores gender identity, sexuality and community in southern Nigeria in the late 1990s. The title seems to give a lot away, but the death of a boy "so beautiful he made the air around him dull" is just the start of it.
Much of the book is in flashback, from when Vivek starts to grow his hair long and dress in ways that make his family uncomfortable, to his relationship with his male cousin Osita (the narrative alternates between Vivek, Osita and an omniscient voice), and beyond. His family worry: “The boy is slim, he has long hair – all it takes is one idiot thinking he’s a woman from behind or something, and then getting angry when he finds out that he’s not.”
We know what’s coming, but Emezi isn’t very interested in whodunit, even though there are plenty of potential antagonists in the community, including the local church members. “It’s not him they were flogging, it was the demon inside him.”
A story like this comes with inbuilt weight and emotional force, but Emezi balances the elements well from horror to charm (even if their sex writing is a bit soft porn). The dialogue gets soapy at times but the sensory prose means the story of Vivek lives on after his death.
At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis
Pushkin Press, 160pp, £8.99
This book, the author's second novel but his first to appear in English, may be the best-known title on this year's wide-ranging shortlist: it won the International Booker Prize in the UK last year, and scooped titles across Europe and America. It achieves the rare twin feats of being both a short book and a slow burner.
At first, its story of Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier in the first World War, seems repetitive, even irritating, in the way Ndiaye bangs on about the same points again and again, hammering the reader with sickening violence. Then we realise he is being driven mad by the memory of allowing his “more-than-brother” Mademba Diop to die in a trench. What seemed like authorial laxity is actually a tightening of the screws.
Ndiaye gains a (deserved) reputation among his fellow soldiers for his unhinged bloodthirstiness – the severed hands of German troops are a particularly fond souvenir for him – and is taken to hospital, where his condition (and the lucidity of his narrative) deteriorates further. He even begins to think he might have a way in with the nurse looking after him…
It all sounds a bit grim, true, but the brevity and the clarity keep it from being overwhelming. Instead, it’s a distinctive and memorable story, and deserves its place on the shortlist just as much as it deserved its other prize wins.
Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey
Europa Editions, 528pp, £16.99
Like At Night All Blood is Black or The Death of Vivek Oji, Remote Sympathy's subject matter (the second World War) gives it an immediate leg-up into Serious Novel territory. It's a privilege that an author must be careful not to squander.
Chidgey succeeds by taking a different angle. The narrative is split between four voices, two of which belong to a Nazi camp administrator at Buchenwald and his wife, who seems more concerned by the sound of peacocks outside their home than the fact that their servant is a camp prisoner.
But the more interesting voices are a chorus of German citizens, and post-war letters from a part-Jewish scientist who in the 1940s develops a “Sympathetic Vitaliser” which he hopes can use vibrations to destroy cancer tumours. Hence the title, referring to forcing an effect from a distance, which also acts as a handy metaphor for the risks of separating our thinking from the human at the other end.
Laced with bitter irony – the Germans celebrate the development of Buchenwald as a “model camp”, and tie themselves in knots over whether they should save a Jew who can cure Nazis of cancer – this is an engrossing, well-developed novel, which fails only in its crushing weight of detail. Some of the reams of research could have been left out, but nonetheless it provides a fascinating angle on a war we thought we already knew everything about.
The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter, translated by Frank Wynne
Picador, 480pp, £9.99
The blurb of this novel, which was a bestseller and multiple award-winner in France, makes it sound like an earnest treatise on well-rehearsed issues such as immigration, colonisation and identity. ("The art of losing isn't hard to master," wrote Elizabeth Bishop in 1976.)
But it turns out to be, in a story centred on Naïma, a young French woman who scratches away at the itch of the Algerian side of her family, part folk tale, part philosophy, and part violent page-turner. The prose is visual and sensory, the experiences of the body always directing the characters’ minds. Its visceral account of the Algerian war of independence – and the status of those Algerian “harkis” who collaborated with the French during the period – seems timely, though one could say that stories of colonialism and its consequences on the generations of immigrants it produces always are.
Although of similar heft to Remote Sympathy, the length feels less oppressive in The Art of Losing: the story covers decades and so feels more like an authentic immersive epic, even if it’s sometimes tricky to follow all the family lines. Like most of the titles on this year’s shortlist, it would be a worthy winner of the prize.
