We’re in the midst of the book awards season, which should have an air of finality (and the winner is…). But for me this year’s Booker Award winner, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, just raises more questions. Does it really matter that Desai is the youngest woman ever to win the award, as the New York Times reported? Is Desai’s relative youth, and the relative obscurity of the other contenders, a (good) sign that the awards committee made an effort to look for vigorous new literature—or what was good, regardless—as opposed to settling for name authors? Or were committee members just being in-your-face? Was Desai’s evocation of India really better than David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, Peter Carey’s Theft: A Love Story, James Lasdun’s Seven Lies, or Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, all longlistees (not even final contenders) that were excellent reads (and personal favorites)? What does it mean to be better, anyway? Actually, our reviewer found Desai’s book a snore; is this evidence of healthy diversity in reviewer opinion, differences in taste across the Atlantic, or a real rift between high-profile judges and daily readers (our reviewers are mostly in-the-trenches librarians)? And why does the Man Booker Prize get featured in the A section of the New York Times, complete with a big picture of Desai flashing her winning smile, when I remember as National Book Critics Circle president battling to get Times coverage for our awards, which always ended up in the B section (sans photos)? If nothing else, awards have the advantage of making one think; I’m glad to give The Inheritance of Loss another look. And now on the next awards.
 

It’s Nobel Prize season again (so far Americans are racking up the science prizes) and across the pond British gamblers with a literary bent are placing bets on their favorite author to win this year’s prize for literature. Although I like the image of tweedy professorial types surreptitiously hanging around their local Off Track Betting offices, Britain’s premier online gambling site Ladbrokes.com spares them the embarrassment. (Unfortunately I can’t link to this site as it is verboten by my company, which has also blocked access to MySpace.com!) But according to Susan Slater Reynold’s Los Angeles Times opinion piece, top candidates on the Ladbrokes site include Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk (3-1odds) and  Syrian poet Adonis (4-5) along with the other usual suspects: Joyce Carol Oates (yech!), Philip Roth (double yech!), John Updike (yawn), and poor old Bob Dylan (go,Bobby!) at the bottom of the pile at 500 to 1. Reynolds goes on to note the continuing controversy over the selection of the winners. Are finalists chosen because of their politics or their literary merits? Reynolds concludes that in the long run, “The Nobel Prize in literature, one of the most lucrative prizes a writer can win, goes, more often than not, to the least commercial work in the world. “  While I would love for Canada’s Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood  to be recognized, they don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. Munro is a short story writer, a definite strike against her, and not overtly political. And after the hoopla over controversial Austrian author  Elfriede Jelinek, those conservative Swedish judges aren’t going to honor another feminist. So I am placing my money on Bob Dylan. Think of the payout if he wins!—Wilda Williams