Diop’s fast-paced novella about the story of a violently bizarre war-soldier recently won the Booker International Prize for 2021. The international prize is for the fiction written in languages other than English, which are then translated into English. The submission and the list of nominated fiction books for this prize come from all over the world, and thereby represent a variety of stories from different cultures and backgrounds.
This diversity of fiction, especially when written in its native languages, I believe, makes this the most interesting of booker prizes. While the Women’s Prize or the main Booker Prize for fiction do represent great authors and brilliant works of fiction every year, they do mainly come from the west (America, UK, or Central Europe); the International Prize in comparison brings more color and novelty to the prize as each nominated book tells a native story.
From the last year’s shortlist, I could only read Shokoofeh Azar’s novel “The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree” which blended magical realism and violent history of post-revolution Iran to tell heart-wrenching and brutal stories that resulted from the Islamic Revolution. Azar’s novel contrasted and completed my image of Khomeini by showing me his rather extreme edges. Azar’s novel did not win last year’s international prize, but Diop’s novella has won this year’s.
In all honesty, now that I’ve both these books, Azar’s was a much better novel than Diop’s, in that it was more complete, engaging, moving, and significant. Diop’s rushed novella, only a 108 pages, while has the ability to shock the readers with its dark, bizarre, and violent story, nevertheless fails to tell a story that is complete or entire.
Alfa, a French war-soldier, is the first-person narrator of this novella, who tells us about the savagery of war and particularly his own. An unusually fierce and insensitively conscious soldier, the character Alfa represent what war can do to a person by putting him in situations that is utterly grotesque. The second character, Mademba Diop, is Alfa’s more-than-brother buddy to whom he’s been friends since his childhood, and it’s together that they join the war. But soldier-crews never come out of a war as complete and fresh as they enter one – it’s how wars are fought, with men dying and men taking lives.
But Alfa is a particularly violent soldier; fearless, yes – but for the wrong reasons. Moreover, Diop also manages to put in both a pre and post war story in his rather slim book where the readers get a peak into French village lives of the protagonist, his virginity-losing sex, sorcery magic, his father’s multiple-wives, their corrupt landlord, and more.
Yet while such well-rounded story-telling is commendable, its execution is where it fails. This novella needed to be a novel; it desperately longed to have another 150 pages to tell its story with both the depth and entirety that it deserved.
Diop’s winning novella proving to be not as good as Azar’s shortlisted novel from last year’s Int. prize points to fundamental flaw with book prizes: either not every great novel out there gets submitted or the novels that get submitted or one that wins each year aren’t as comparatively worthy to read.
The key is to let time filter out the books and
crown a few worthy-to-read ones; meanwhile read the books that have passed the
test of time.
Ratings: 3.5/5 *** June 29, 2021_