ಪ್ರತಿಷ್ಠಿತ ಮ್ಯಾನ್ ಬೂಕರ್ ಪ್ರಶಸ್ತಿ ಅನಂತಮೂರ್ತಿ ಕೈ ತಪ್ಪಿದೆ. ಅಮೆರಿಕಾದ ಬರಹಗಾರ್ತಿ ಲಿಡಿಯಾ ಡೇವಿಸ್ ಈ ಪ್ರಶಸ್ತಿ ಗೆದ್ದುಕೊಂಡಿದ್ದಾರೆ.
ಇದೇ ಮೊದಲ ಬಾರಿಗೆ ಕನ್ನಡದ ಬರಹಗಾರರೊಬ್ಬರು ಈ ಪ್ರತಿಷ್ಠಿತ ಪ್ರಶಸ್ತಿಗೆ ನಾಮಕರಣಗೊಂಡಿದ್ದರು. ನಿನ್ನೆಯಷ್ಟೇ ಅನಂತಮೂರ್ತಿ ಅವರು ‘ಸಂಸ್ಕಾರ’ದ ಭಾಗಗಳನ್ನು ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲೂ ಓದುವ ಮೂಲಕ ಲಂಡನ್ ನಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡದ ಕಂಪು ಹರಡಿದ್ದರು.
US writer Lydia Davis wins Man Booker 2013
Press Trust of India | 22-May 21:09 PM
London: Well-known Kannada author UR Ananthamurthy, the only Indian to be shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2013, on Wednesday lost the prestigious award to American writer Lydia Davis. The New York based writer-translator Davis bagged the 60,000 pound prize for her “innovative and influential” writing, which includes works such as ‘The End of the Story’ and ‘Varieties of Disturbance’.
“Lydia Davis’ writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind…There is vigilance to her stories, and great imaginative attention. Vigilance as how to realise things down to the very word or syllable; vigilance as to everybody s impure motives and illusions of feeling,” Sir Christopher Ricks, literary critic and chair of the judging panel, said in reference to the 2013 winner. In seeking out literary excellence, the judges consider a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.
Unlike the annual Booker, the international prize recognises one writer for his or her achievement in fiction and is awarded every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is available in translation in the English language. “My selection in the list of finalists is a triumph of the Kannada language, which is being represented on the global stage today alongside other world languages. As a writer, I am just one among many writing in their mother-tongues in India. I am here on their behalf,” Ananthamurthy said.
The 80-year-old flew down from Bangalore despite his ill health to attend the first-ever awards ceremony for the prize at Victoria and Albert Museum in London on Tuesday. “I have to be dialysed four times a day for my kidneys and my health is not very good but when I saw the list, I felt I must come to represent all my fellow authors from India. It has been a very exciting experience. I hope this award arouses the curiosity of readers around the world and creates an awareness about spaces unfamiliar to many,” added the author best known for his novels ‘Samskara’ and ‘Bharatiputra’.
Ananthamurthy is considered a leading representative of the ‘navya’ or new movement in the literature of the Kannada language. A recipient of the Padma Bhushan and Jnanpith Award, Ananthamurthy was praised by the Booker judging panel for the humanity of his works, which question cultural norms. “Navya is not essentially a break from the past but a continuation of the best of the past. I chose to write in my own language because I felt it was important to be connected with my own environment. Literature keeps itself alive by reinventing and translations, if done well, are a great medium for crossing borders with that literature.
“English is a very hospitable language, which creates that space for experiences from other countries,” said the Mysore-born author, whose own books have been translated into English by fellow Kannada author and poet AK Ramanujan. At this year’s Man Booker International Prize, the Indian author was shortlisted alongside fellow subcontinent author Intizar Husain from Pakistan. Others in the race included Yan Lianke (China), Marie NDiaye (France), Josip Novakovich (Canada), and Peter Stamm (Switzerland).
“I am honoured to be on a list with Intizar, who is a fellow author I have worked with in the past to break down cultural barriers between our countries despite all other differences that may exist,” Ananthamurthy said. Previous winners of the international Booker have included Philip Roth (2011), Alice Munro (2009), Chinua Achebe (2007) and Ismail Kadare (2005) and the winner is chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel with no submissions from publishers.
The other judges on the panel in 2013 included author and essayist Elif Batuman, writer and broadcaster Aminatta Forna, novelist Yiyun Li and author and academic Tim Parks.
Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is an American writer who was born in Massachusetts in 1947 and is now a professor of creative writing at the University at Albany, the capital of New York state.
She is best known for two contrasting accomplishments: translating from the French, to great acclaim, Marcel Proust’s complex Du Côté de Chez Swann (Swann’s Way) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and writing short stories, a number of them among the shortest stories ever written. Much of her fiction may be seen under the aspect of philosophy or poetry or short story, and even the longer creations may be as succinct as two or three pages.
She has been described by the critic, James Wood in his latest collection, The Fun Stuff and Other Essays, as “a tempestuous Thomas Bernhard”. Most of all, as Craig Morgan Teicher, of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, wrote in 2009, the year that Davis’s Collected Stories appeared as a single volume: She is “the master of a literary form largely of her own invention.”
Interview of Lydia Davis by The Guardian
At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.
And here, from her 2007 collection, Varieties of Disturbance, is “Idea for a Short Documentary Film”:
Representatives of different food product manufacturers try to open their own packaging.
As these examples suggest, Davis’s stories often appear to be little more than snapshots of thought, records of fleeting amusement, bafflement or illumination. Lacking, as they do, much of what we expect from a story – a setting, sustained narrative, characters with names – it’s tempting to doubt whether “story” is even the right word for them. Wouldn’t some other term, such as philosophical reflection or prose poem, be more suitable?
When I ask Davis this – she is speaking from her home in upstate New York – she explains that while she can see why her work attracts a variety of labels, she is happy to stick with “story”. “When I first began writing seriously, I wrote short stories, and that was where I thought I was headed. Then the stories evolved and changed, but it would have become a bother to say every time, ‘I guess what I have just written is a prose poem, or a meditation’, and I would have felt very constrained by trying to label each individual work, so it was simply easier to call everything stories.”
Besides, Davis adds – and this is crucial – even if her stories don’t appear to tell any sort of story, there usually is one, hovering in the background. “Even if the thing is only a line or two, there is always a little fragment of narrative in there, or the reader can turn away and imagine a larger narrative,” she says. “I think as long as there’s a bit of narrative, or just a situation, I can get away with calling them stories.”
Davis, who is 63, published her first collection in 1976 (at the time she was married to Paul Auster) and has gone on to complete a further five collections and a novel, The End of the Story. She also translates French literature, and it is the time she spent wrestling with Proust that she holds responsible for turning her into a miniaturist. “I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating Swann’s Way,” she recalls. “There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn’t want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust’s very long sentences. The sheer length of a thought of his didn’t make me recoil exactly – I loved working on it – but it made me want to see how short a piece of fiction could be that would still have a point to it, and not just be a throwaway joke.”
Davis has often been described as a “writer’s writer” – shorthand for saying hardly anyone reads her. But that has begun to change. When her Collected Stories came out in the US last year, it received the sort of acclaim usually reserved for heroes of the mainstream. James Wood gave her a rapturous review in the New Yorker; Jonathan Franzen called her a “magician of self-consciousness”. This month the book is published in the UK. And it is a revelation. Davis’s stories are best read not in isolation from one another but cumulatively; the more you read her, the more you come to appreciate her singular mindset. All literature, if it’s any good, makes demands of its readers, but Davis’s is practically unique in the number of blanks it leaves us to fill in. Basic things, such as the identity of a story’s narrator and his or her relationship to the other chracters, are often totally unclear. Before we begin to try to “work out” her stories, we must accept that we may never know the answer to such things.
The other great thing about Davis’s fiction – which again takes time to appreciate – is how funny it is. From an oblique revenge fantasy such as “Idea for a Short Documentary Film” to the marvellously surreal “The Race of the Patient Motorcyclists”, which imagines a motorbike race where the object is to go as slowly as possible, Davis’s humour is of a kind to make you simultaneously laugh and think. Her work, like that of Kafka – whom she cites as her biggest influence – is a semi-comic, semi-tragic investigation of the oddness of existence. It is experimental writing at its best.
I am really happy and enlightned to read abot Lydia Davis winner of Man Booker award. It is interesting to know about technique of her writing short stories. Really short so short thatit is only a sentence. Brevity is her technique. We must try it in our language. Thank you for this wrting.Udaykumar Habbu, kinnigoli.