Books of the Year The serious newspapers are publ…
Books of the Year
The serious newspapers are publishing their Books of the Year sections round about now. There�s one in the Telegraph, another in the Independent. I used to look forward to them offering ideas for the next necessary read. But after a few years, like the shortlists for the various prizes, one notices more what�s missing. In 1995, there was not a single mention of one of the great post-war novels getting published in English for the first time: Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction. After such provocation, respect for the contributors turns to contempt. It happens every year.
Last year, of course, these lists proliferated. You might remember the public voting a Delia Smith cookbook into the top ten of Waterstones� Books of the Century. What this anomaly reveals is as obvious as a rhinoceros in the living room: there is a lack of authority. We have no criteria to make judgements either way; good or bad. You might say we don�t need to make such judgements, that the time has come to place totalising assertions aside. You can say it, but everyday you still make such judgements. What makes you choose to read one book rather than another? Even if you claim to live in blessed openness to everything - from the Tellytubbies Annual to Mein Kampf - you�ve still made a moral choice to do so. The question remains; how do we judge? Well, I would say, it is precisely by asking the question that can help us judge. For example, Bernhard�s novel is in part about how we relate to the past, how we mediate, or not, between the unbearable lightness of the present and the weight of history. Apart from being shocking, horribly dark, painfully funny and beautifully musical, �Extinction� animates the gaping void opening beneath us as we live.
And for the record, I have no book of the year.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Yawn Despite my unease about making Book of th…
- Goalless
- Looking out to sea
- Repetition again, part 2
- End of year chat
