THERE WAS never any doubt: this year’s International Impac Dublin Literary Award was always destined, since the shortlist was published, for an American. And on cue when the result was announced last evening in Dublin, the winner was an American, only not one of the two favourites.
Michael Thomas’s
Man Gone Down
unexpectedly took the 14th Impac award ahead of David Leavitt’s persuasive, atmospheric period work The Indian Clerk and also held off the challenge of the popular choice, 2008 Pulitzer prize-winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.
In winning with a first novel, one of three on the shortlist, Thomas (41) became the second US writer and second African American to win the world’s richest prize for a single work of fiction. With four of the eight contenders Americans – Dominican-born Díaz is a US citizen – this year’s shortlist showcased the range of US fiction.
Leavitt's novel is outstanding, while the deservedly fourth short-listed US writer, Travis Holland, impressed with his haunting debut, The Archivist's Story, an accomplished historical novel set in Moscow in 1939. Also short-listed was the international bestseller and 2007 Booker contender, The Reluctant Fundamentalistby Pakistani writer Moshin Hamid.
With its theme of world terrorism, Hamid's book possesses a topicality as does the also shortlisted and fellow Booker contender Indra Sinha's Animal's People.
Ironically the real success of the shortlist was the inclusion of the wonderful Norwegian writer Roy Jacobsen with his powerful war novel The Burnt-out Town of Miraclesin which a woodsman in a small Finnish village emerges as a maverick hero.
Set in 1939 it revisits one of the less-well-documented episodes of the second World War when the Finns briefly held off the Soviets intent on using their ports. One of my books of the year in 2007, its appearance on this Impac shortlist is important.
This is where the prize has triumphed in previous years through alerting readers to outstanding fiction in translation. Jacobson's novel, already widely read, was never going to win but its inclusion consolidated the value of the prize – as did the presence of witty French original Jean Echenoz for Ravel, a Proust-like portrait in miniature of the Pyrenées-born composer. It is a masterly little book, translated by the internationally acclaimed translator Linda Coverdale. Looking at what was a good shortlist of proven novels, dominated by Leavitt as the man with a large and diverse body of work, and Jacobsen who is well-known in Europe, it is ironic that the most personal book and one of the least favoured won on the day.
Concerns have been now raised as to whether this global prize, which has to date championed fiction in translation, has finally surrendered to the dominance of English as the international language of fiction.