And the prospective winners are ...: The Scotiabank Giller Prize has announced a short list of five nominees for this year's award. (Aaron Harris/Canadian Press)
The effectiveness of “Being Alice Munro” as a strategy for winning Canadian literary awards is a theory I first espoused here. But with Munro pulling her latest book, The View from Castle Rock, out of the running for the prestigious and pricey Scotiabank Giller Prize — so that she could sit on its jury with fellow writer Michael Winter and bibliophile and former governor general Adrienne Clarkson — the field seemed wide open this year. And with the announcement Tuesday morning of the short list for the annual $50,000 award ($40,000 will go to the winner; the remaining finalists will collect $2,500 each), the competition is even broader than expected.
For an award that tends to favour well-established and high-profile writers, most of the big shots of the 2006 fall season were conspicuously absent from the long list. Those who did make that cut (Wayne Johnston, Kenneth J. Harvey, Douglas Coupland, David Adams Richards) were pushed aside in favour of Gaétan Soucy (The Immaculate Conception), Rawi Hage (De Niro's Game), Vincent Lam (Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures), Pascale Quiviger (The Perfect Circle) and Carol Windley (Home Schooling).
Don’t be embarrassed if you’re saying, “Um, who?” You’re not alone. Among this list of neophytes — all are nominated for either their first or second book — only one (Lam) is published by a major house (Doubleday), and two of the titles are recent English translations of French novels.
CanLit insiders will be spending the rest of the week speculating as to what exactly went on in the jury meeting. Is the short list a kind of nose-thumbing at previous Giller juries that have always opted for safe (i.e. Atwood, Ondaatje, Munro, etc.) choices? Or an encouragement to the small-but-excellent publishing houses Cormorant and House of Anansi — each boasts two books on the list — that are known to take chances on lesser-known (and often edgier or artier) writers? Will Munro finally have a successor (two of the titles are short story collections)? And is Montreal — the home to three of the nominees — returning to its Mordecai Richler and Mavis Gallant glory days as a fiction powerhouse?
Or, setting all the above aside, does the list simply reflect the five best books of the year, as decided by three smart and opinionated readers?
The answers are anyone’s guess — and with such an unexpected list of nominees, the winner of this year’s Giller Prize is a wild card too. The award will be announced on Nov. 7, giving the rest of Canada a chance to catch up on its reading in the meantime. For starters, here’s a summary of the nominees:
De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage (House of Anansi)
Taking its title from the scene in The Deer Hunter in which three American POWs are forced by their Viet Cong captors to play Russian roulette, this Camus-infused debut novel by Hage — a Lebanese-born, Montreal-based visual artist turned writer — is set in 1980s Beirut at the height of Lebanon’s civil war. George and Bassam are two childhood friends facing adulthood and driven apart by their differing opinions about the conflict.
Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam (Doubleday Canada)
In a series of connected short stories, Lam, a Toronto emergency-room doctor who is making his fiction debut, follows four Toronto medical students from diverse backgrounds as they become doctors. Along the way they encounter love and betrayal, ethical and moral dilemmas, and a variety of complex illnesses — for which Lam helpfully provides a glossary of terms.
The Perfect Circle by Pascale Quiviger (Cormorant), translated by Sheila Fischman
Quiviger, an ex-pat Quebecer now living in Italy where she writes, paints and teaches, drew from her own globe-hopping experience for this story of a young Montrealer named Marianne who falls for Marco, a seductive (but messed up) older man, while she’s holidaying in Tuscany. This debut novel from Quiviger — she has also published a collection of short stories — won the 2004 Governor General’s Award for fiction in its original French.
The Immaculate Conception by Gaétan Soucy (House of Anansi), translated by Lazer Lederhendler
More than a decade after it was published in French, making Soucy a literary star in Quebec (he has since written two more novels), this dark tale set in Depression-era Montreal has finally been translated into English. It tells the story of several inhabitants of the city’s east end as they attempt to recover from an arsonist-generated fire that killed 75 people.
Home Schooling by Carol Windley (Cormorant)
Set mainly on and around Vancouver Island, this collection of short stories includes tales of missing children, family violence and inappropriate love. The Nanaimo, B.C., writer’s earlier collection, Visible Light, was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
The Scotiabank Giller Prize will be announced on Nov. 7.
Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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