Ireland's Paul Lynch Won The Booker Prize

 Yes, I am late to posting on this. I found the Booker a better source for a reading list than the American Pulitzer Prize. So, pay attention here.

‘This is a wake-up call’: Booker winner Paul Lynch on his novel about a fascist Ireland 

He chafes at the label “political novelist”, although he realises it will be hard to shake off now. He resists comparisons between Prophet Song and dystopian classics such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. “Too often writers of political fiction believe they have the answers, they know what it is that needs to be fixed.” He is more interested in asking questions. “This is fundamentally about grief. It’s about the things that we cannot control, the things that are beyond our grasp, the things that are lost.” For him the novel’s forebears are Don DeLillo’s Mao II or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The latter writer’s influence seeps through his pages darker than ink.

Lynch, now 46, writes “state-of-the-soul novels”, he says. “Art isn’t a rational process. You don’t sit down and go, ‘I’m going to address this.’” He wanted to make the reader feel what it must be like to be so desperate you contemplate taking your children on a small boat with strangers in the middle of the night. “It’s about not averting your gaze,” he says. “Locking the reader into a true sense of inevitability so they cannot turn away. So they cannot say, ‘I don’t want to look at this.’”

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All his novels are about “the dignity of human beings faced with an indifferent and alien world”, he says. “Life is suffering and yet it’s beautiful. And there’s so much that falls between those two places. I’m never going to get bored of that.”

And in that last quote is what I came back to, and why I will find this one in the next year. I have never understood people who turned to drugs to go beyond reality; reality is weird and wild, and we just need to keep our eyes and minds open.

And then there is LitHub's Booker Prize Winner Paul Lynch on the Fundamental Dignity of the Individual. Listening to the news of anti-Semitism's rise, to the news of the destruction of Palestinians, and Trump calling his political opponents vermin makes it worrisome if we are still concerned with the dignity of people not like ourselves.

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