DANCING girls were probably the only thing missing from Monday's announcement of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award at the Mansion House writes Eileen Battersby. While the sheer innovation of asking libraries around the world to submit titles must be applauded, some marketing aspects of the prize are worrying.
IMPAC is, in fact, the world's largest productivity improvement company. It is not the first commercial enterprise to see the value of associating itself with something as international as fiction. And as the submitted titles are by authors from all over the world with entries written in or translated into English the £100,000 prize is truly international.
One might question the wisdom of publishing a long list of 125 titles, some of extremely dubious merit. With such a lengthy, long list, it is a shame the short list of seven was not extended to 10. Considering that the long list included novels as outstanding as two fine American works destined to become classics (William Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own and the beautiful, elegaic In The Tennessee Country by the great Peter Taylor, a writer who has proved that even at the century's close, there is still someone capable of writing like Henry James) as well as J.M.Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg, people are bound to find fault with some elements of the shortlist, such as the works by the Anglo Indian V.S. Naipul and the Canadian Jane Urquhart. More worthily, the list includes also the most recent works by the Irish writer John Banville, the Dutch Cees Nooteboom and Connie Palmens, Portuguese Jose Saramago, and the Australian David Malouf.
Whatever about the relative merits or weakness of some of the works, the real worry is that the extraordinarily vulgar promotion video which was screened at the Mansion House is due to be seen around the world. There was some embarrassed tittering about the spectacle of original footage of Shaw and Conan Doyle being re edited in order to have the great men express their regret that they were no longer alive and so could not benefit from the prize. In fact there was too much emphasis, overall, placed on money and nationalism rather than literature.
