Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s movingly laconic The Discomfort of Evening marks the return of the novel of the interior
Few subjects could converge to create the perfect cauldron for a literary prize — women, red dogs, a 14th century German jester making an entrance in a new incarnation, the Argentinian Pampas, wild horses, an unintended trade of lives where a young brother is sacrificed for a rabbit, the murder of the Witch of La Matosa in rural Mexico, Persian folktales confabulating within the oppressive fortunes of a revolution struggling to survive — all in a climate of urgency in a world gripped by the uncertainties of a pandemic. Since being cited by several literary journalists as “fast becoming the more significant award, appearing an ever more competent alternative to the Nobel” upon the announcement of its first recipient, the powerful Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, the International Booker Prize continues to gain an ascendency that rivals (and perhaps even outrivals) its antecedent, the exclusively English language writing, Commonwealth-centric Man Booker Prize. The increasing anticipation that greets the annual announcement is best measured where it matters most, at that great “index of worth” — the bookies. Few literary prizes worth a name would fail in delivering a suitable controversy. Unable to rise up to the occasion surrounding the joint award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the brilliant if politically eccentric Austrian novelist Peter Handke in 2019, the announcement of the International Booker Prize longlist for 2020 appeared suitably subdued but for the charges of plagiarism directed at one of its finer selections, the South African novelist William Anker’s brooding, sinewy novel of early colonial Africa, Red Dog. Accused of heavy lifting from one of the finer creations in American fiction of recent decades, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Red Dog induced a quite forceful and far reaching debate about the art of “literary borrowing” and the nature of plagiarism. Snared in the middle of this tug of war between theft and being able to see the proverbial woods from the trees, Anker’s fine novel was nevertheless left hanging at the levels of the longlist. The shortlist boasted an increasingly impressive array of literary imaginations, arced principally by the representation of women — four of the five shortlisted were women — and the increasing predilection in contemporary literature for the art of literary retelling.