Booker titles
I’m fascinated by titles of novels. Looking at the Booker longlist, I’m surprised by how little the blood stirs. Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire comes with two words of being the same as one of my favourite novels but it’s not one that in itself promised much in the first place.
So what makes a title perfect? My guess would be that it has to not only underlie the novel like a tectonic plate but be its earthquake too. Oh yesh.
And apropos of the fissures titles can open, I remember a radio show in which Gabriel Josipovici was asked whether the title of his understated and so underrated novel In a Hotel Garden referred to Jewish themes of travel, dispersal and exile (Hotel) and the expulsion from paradise (The Garden of Eden). In the silence that followed, one could hear the author’s bottom jaw hitting the table.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
