The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 39: The International Booker Prize 2024 shortlist (part 1)

We’re three weeks away from the International Booker Prize 2024 award ceremony, so we thought it was high time to take a deep dive into this year’s six shortlist books. In the first of two special episodes, we’re exploring the three European titles on the list. Listen in to hear what Jo and James make of them, about the common themes that run across the shortlisted reads and how the International Booker can expand one’s world through literature.

• Their initial thoughts on the 2024 shortlist as a whole
• The common themes running through these books
• Brief biographies of each author, and short summaries of each book
• Their thoughts on the three European books on the shortlist

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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James Walton:

Hello and a very warm welcome to the Booker Prize Podcast, with me, James Walton.

Jo Hamya:

Me, Jo Hammier.

James Walton:

And today the big news is that we’ve got the first of a two-part special on this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist.

Jo Hamya:

As you may know, the International Booker Prize is the Booker Prize’s sister award for the best fiction from anywhere in the whole world that’s been translated into English with the 50,000 pound prize shared between the author and the translator. Last year’s winners, for example, were Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel for Time Shelter. The first Bulgarian novel to win. And you may have even heard James and I interviewing them both for the podcast last December, which I really enjoyed a lot. I remember vividly James asking Angela why in one particular passage of all the words for penis she chose the word pecker.

James Walton:

Yeah, you can always rely on me to raise the tone, I like to think. But Jo, before we get down to International Booker Prize business today, it’s been a while since we last crossed microphones.

Jo Hamya:

So some of you may notice that I am a bit husky.

James Walton:

You were a bit ill, which is why this one is going out a week later than planned. But apart from being a bit ill, what have you been up to? And are you okay now? There’s a bit of a cough going on there I hear.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. So I’m almost recovered, almost. But on the upside, I’ve got this really great husky voice thing going on. It’s made less sexy by the fact that intermittently I have to stop and cough my guts out. But I published my novel very recently, my second book, and you came to the launch, which was really lovely of you.

James Walton:

I did, and it was really great. The book’s called The Hypocrite, which not entirely irrelevant to my book because I haven’t read it, so I felt a bit of a hypocrite coming to, but I will do maybe even by the time this podcast goes out.

Jo Hamya:

And now onto the international prize.

James Walton:

Maybe that’s enough top bants for now, actually Jo. So let’s do that International Booker Prize shortlist, starting with a reminder stroke the news depending on how clued-up you are of what’s on it. And the six books are, in alphabetical order of Authors.

Jo Hamya:

Not a River by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott.

James Walton:

A Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann.

Jo Hamya:

The Details by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson.

James Walton:

Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated by Sora Kim-RussellYoungjae Josephine Bae. What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey.

Jo Hamya:

Crooked Plough by Itamar Vieira Junior translated by Johnny Lorenz.

James Walton:

So Jo, as we’ll discover as we go through them, at six different countries and six different languages represented. What did you make of the shortlist in general?

Jo Hamya:

I really, really enjoyed it and I was slightly disappointed in a kind of national pride kind of sense to not see White Nights by Urszula Honek and translated by Kate Webster on the shortlist because I am half Polish for anyone who’s literally just joined us for this episode. But other than that, because I was ill, I read these all in bed one by one in succession in this really weird dazed state, and maybe it’s just me, but I felt there was this running thread of maybe memory or recovery going through these books of characters trying to reclaim the past. Whether it was through their ancestry or whether it was through their country’s history, or whether it was just in a very, very personal way through the people that they’d met.

And the first book I started with was The Details by Ia Genberg, which very weirdly enough opens with the sentence, “After a few days of the virus in my body, I come down with a fever, which is followed by an urge to return to a particular novel.” And I felt like I was having an out of body experience because I had a virus and I was slightly feverish. But it just set the reading up so nicely.

James Walton:

In fact, she talks about that when you read a book with a fever, it can either wash over you or actually go sort of deeper because you’re in the sort of weirdly heightened state.

Jo Hamya:

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re about to find out which of those statements is true.

James Walton:

I really enjoyed that, the shortlist too, and I think it did what the International Booker is meant to do, which is sort of expand your mind and remind you that the world’s bigger than you thought.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

Like the book, Mater 2-10, which we’ll come on to by Hwang Sok-yong says, “Trouble with Korean literature, there’s never been much about industrial workers.” And I must admit, this has never been a lack I’ve ever felt particularly keen. And yet you suddenly realise, oh yeah, that opening up of the mind really does work. The South American Book set in pretty remote parts of the country, which most of us will not have known about and yet vividly bring to life. Also, we’ll come out to all of this, but what it’s like to live in East Germany, which I was interested in already, but I’m even more interested in now. I also thought there were some quite interesting differences between European and the South Americans and Korean books, which I don’t know. I mean obviously ghosts and spirits are there in the books that aren’t from Europe, but also a more communal sense. They’re more books about we, whereas the European ones are more about I. And obviously sounds if I’m stereotyping, but definitely that sort European individualism for good or ill comes across versus slightly more communal experiences elsewhere.

Jo Hamya:

I think there is some overlap. Obviously I think it’s maybe folly, just from the outset we should both say this, it’s kind of folly to try and create a neat line of comparison-

James Walton:

It is, yeah.

Jo Hamya:

… between these six novels. They are joined by the fact that our judges this year have particular interests and tastes, but it’s not a perfect art by all means.

James Walton:

No, it’s not that.

Jo Hamya:

But I think there is a little bit of overlap. What I’d rather not think about, which we’re going to get onto in this episode later, is this very prolonged meditation on the death of the narrator’s twin brother. And he becomes kind of a ghost in the book, even though he’s talking to her through her memories, he’s definitely a ghost. And the same with Kairos actually, the book starts out on the narrator Katharina unpacking boxes after her former lover has died. Even though we are reading a kind of sensibly present tense account of their relationship, we know at the beginning of the book that he’s already dead. So I felt like there was this very kind of ghostly thread running through all of these books.

James Walton:

Yeah, that’s right. We’ve talked before really about the process of, I think of what we want, sort of external ghosts and spirits becoming internal. And they’re becoming more internal in the Europeans books. But anyway, maybe we should get down to business. So we’ve got six books to do and we’ve got two episodes to them. How are we going to split them?

Jo Hamya:

So we are going to split them because they are actually all quite alike and yet somehow not alike at all. We’ve decided to go for very basic geography. So in this episode, we will be focusing on the European authors. We’ll be talking about The Details by Ia Genberg, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, and What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma. And then in our second episode, we’ll be moving on to the Korean and South American authors and novels. So Crooked Plough, Not a River and Mater 2-10.

James Walton:

Okay.

Jo Hamya:

That’s the best way we could think to do it.

James Walton:

It’s not massively imaginative, but it just did seem to work. And also, I take your point that pretending there’s a massive link between all the books is tempting and there are links, but we will try not to force them too much.

Jo Hamya:

Yes, unfortunately we can’t let this podcast run for two hours for one episode. But I think it would be really interesting to compare, for example, something like Kairos to Mater 2-10 in terms of how it evokes a particular point in history and how it evokes the kind of communist state versus a kind of more capitalist state.

James Walton:

Both about divided countries, aren’t they?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

Germany and Korea.

Jo Hamya:

And it would be really interesting to compare What I’d Rather Not Think about with Not a River, and its kind of evocations of death or gradually meditating on the loss of a character. So Eusebio in Not a River and the twin brother in What I’d Rather Not Think About. But unfortunately we’ve had to split it out somehow.

James Walton:

Yeah, there we have. So why don’t you kick us off with Kairos.

Jo Hamya:

So Kairos is written by Jenny Erpenbeck and translated by Michael Hofmann. Jenny Erpenbeck is a writer, but also an opera director, which I think is actually incredible. And I think it kind of shows in the prose of Kairos, but we’ll move on to that in a sec. Her name is one of those that is kind of bandied about on betting lists for the Nobel Prize every year. And this is the first book of hers that I’ve read, and now I completely understand why. So Kairos itself is principally set in the ’80s in Germany at the point where the Berlin Wall is still up, and there is still a divide between East Germany and West Germany.

James Walton:

And this is very much East Germany, isn’t it? She’s in East Berlin, yeah.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. We sometimes travel with our main character, Katharina, to other countries and once to West Germany, but we stay principally in the east. And one day when she’s 19, meets by chance Hans at a bus stop. They happen to have gotten the same bus at the same day, and they like the look of each other. Hans is 34 years older than her, is that right?

James Walton:

I think so. She’s 19 and he’s 54.

Jo Hamya:

I did do the maths on this, yeah.

James Walton:

And they’ve got this big thing in the early days of their relationship when everything, and they’re mythologizing their relationship as people tend to do, fact that she was born in ‘67 and he was born in ‘33, and that adds up to a hundred.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

It becomes a kind of weirdly big deal for them.

Jo Hamya:

Yes, it becomes a really big deal for them. And there’s this moment where he’s looking at her talking to boys her own age, and he says, “Oh, but their ages wouldn’t add up to a hundred. It’s just me and her who do.” Which seems sweet. But as the book progresses, the relationship sort of begins to fall apart quite spectacularly. So Katharina, her frontal lobe develops ever more as the book goes on. And she thinks in the end that she might like to travel, go to college, work. Eventually she does kind of move away to work in a theatre company and she ends up having a relationship with another boy who’s closer to her own age, which Hans doesn’t take too kindly, but it’s sort of hypocritical because he himself is a married man.

James Walton:

A married with possibly at least one of the mistress mentioned every now and then.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. Oh, at least two.

James Walton:

But how dare she?

Jo Hamya:

Yes, but how dare she? And he sort of takes her back benevolently, but in a very kind of emotionally abusive way. And while this is happening, Erpenbeck is giving us this account of the GDR beginning to crumble. And we kind of know as surely as Hans and Katharina will break up, that the Berlin Wall will come down. And he, I suppose, represents the past. He was a former member of the Nazi party and he finds-

James Walton:

Hitler youth, which was hard to avoid.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, Hitler youth, I suppose.

James Walton:

But yes. But he was still around.

Jo Hamya:

But I very much got the sense-

James Walton:

His father was a full-on Nazi it seems.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I was about to say, I very much got the sense that there was a kind of mourning in him for the days of a fascist government. So I suppose he represents a kind of old, more communist minded or at least socialist, weirdly minded Germany. Whereas Katharina represents a kind of Westernised perspective, a more kind of individual outlook, not the we, but the I, who believes in buying expensive clothes or eating aubergines, which you can’t find in East Germany at the time. And I don’t think that the political events of the ’80s in Germany are an exact metaphor for Hans and Katharina’s relationship. But there is a very nice kind of parallel. There’s this really great way that Erpenbeck has fluidly moving from sentence to sentence between how Hans or Katharina feel and what is going on in the country at the time, I found very gratifying to read.

James Walton:

Yeah, me too. It was never clumsy, was it, the parallels between the two of them?

Jo Hamya:

No.

James Walton:

I mean, occasionally the bit where he sort of takes her back and puts it on under surveillance, he is quite starzy like. And she’s sort of put on a sort of a bit of show trial, but that’s making it sound much cruder than it is. It’s far more suggestive than that. I think a bit harsh on him. He was in Hitler youth, but he didn’t have much choice. His dad was a Nazi, but he chose to come to East Germany because he felt that East Germany was the anti-Nazi state in the way that the West Germany wasn’t, which is sort of true. The first chancellor of West Germany abandoned denazification after a while because he was desperate to get back sort of in with the west. And that sort of kernel of idealism that was at the heart of East Germany at the beginning, he has too. So that’s another way in which he’s sort of East Germany.

Jo Hamya:

That’s true. But then what did you make of the kind of S&M stuff where he becomes quite fond of using a belt on Katharina or there’s a scene where he ties her to the bed and then he goes to the kitchen while she’s tied to the bed and he just leaves her, he smokes a cigarette and she’s there wondering when will he come back? And that was a very weird.

James Walton:

Yeah. Well, again, it’s easy to make parallels. The crudest way of reading that I thought was in a way she was the sort of East German people sort of masochistically accepting this. But the Czech writer, Milan Kundera says at one point that when Russia did what it did to our country, to Czechoslovakia, it sort of did it out of love or pretend love that this was something that was motivated by a sort of rather sentimental love. And he’s quite sentimental in his love for her too, while mistreating her. And so that was another possibility.

I mean, also the thing that fascinates me about East Germany is that it lasted longer than the first World War, the Weimar Republic, the entire Nazi period and the Second World War all put together, and yet it’s dismissed as this weird sort of blip that really didn’t exist. What even was it? And it was a country that lasted that long. And I think one of the things that this book does is tries to restore, to remind us that East Germany was a place in which people built lives for 40 years. It recreates the cafes, the restaurants, the pop stars, the famous writers, all of whom are completely wiped out at the end.

It’s when the Berlin Wall falls, she’s very strong on the idea how brutal that was. So Hans, who’s working for a local radio station, so he’s dismissed along with all the other 13,000 employees of the broadcasting services of a state that no longer exists. And not just them, the sound engineers, the dancers, the editors, the dentists from the clinic, the kindergarten teachers from daycare, the presenters, researchers, camera people, and of course the likes of him, scriptwriters, journalists, composers, directors, regular freelancers, they’re all gone because they were a servant of a country that just suddenly stopped.

Jo Hamya:

This leads me to rehash a debate that we had when we discussed Sally Rooney’s Normal People, where we were trying to decide whether it was a romantic novel with politics attached to whether it was a political novel with romance attached. And I think that same kind of question can be asked of Kairos, and I was wondering what your verdict was this time round?

James Walton:

Yeah, that’s interesting. In this one I think it manages an unbelievably subtle and perfect balance between the two things.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. And that’s down to the prose style as well, which is so sort of fluid. So a lot of this book is told, or most of this book is told in a kind of present tense, which usually feels so intimate, but in this case that does, and Hoffman’s translation does such a great job at creating this kind of poetry without sentimentality at all.

James Walton:

Yeah, yeah.

Jo Hamya:

So that you do feel kind of slightly distanced and yet you care both about the relationship and about East Germany. So there’s this great moment where Hans finds out that Katharina has cheated on him and it sounds mad, but somehow, like you say, there’s this perfect balance between the political and the romance in the novel.

So he’s about to find out something that will absolutely crush their relationship, and you’d think that the prose would centre entirely on him and his thoughts. But instead what we get is, “In February 1956 Khrushchev speaks for the first time about Stalin’s crimes. In March 1956 Brecht,” who Hans is kind of obsessed with “Falls ill in August, he dies. The Stalinalle in Berlin is renamed Karl Marx-Allee. Someone picks up the disdained name and throws it over a low wall into the adjoining yard with a brown shirt also lies. There are three weeks between the night Katharina spent in the studio and the day she hurries out to buy some cake while Hans is ferreting about for an empty bit of scrap paper to write down the name, Threattercofe. He finds one, but it has some writing on it.” And the writing is a kind of note that Katharina had made about sleeping with a friend called Vadim or Vandam. And it’s so great because somehow it’s distant, but it’s not.

James Walton:

Yeah. And the resonances between the two rather than crude parallels, as I say, both of them are paid full attention to. So it actually starts off quite rom-com actually.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, it really does.

James Walton:

Although they’ve got a meek cute, they have their first sex to sort of classical music of the vital type. Early on, she thinks of hands and the way he crinkles up his nose when he’s reading something he likes. But his body’s fond of Katharina’s little nose, the way it quivers when she’s aroused. But then of course it all sort of darkens and darkens. My only wonder about this is the second half becomes quite repetitive. He just beats away at her and what Anne keeps telling her, said the cassettes actually about-

Jo Hamya:

Side A, side B, 60 minutes.

James Walton:

These are just all the terrible things you are and why you’re not worthy of my love and why you’re terrible. And she sort of dutifully listens to and responds to it and sort of pleads guilty to in a, you could regard a sort of show trial way. That goes on for ages and towards the end was there no part of you thinking, oh, just split up already and just break up already. The book’s made its point and let’s get onto the fall of the Berlin War, come on.

Jo Hamya:

I didn’t and I know that you have a more political theory about why it takes so long because I think I remember you saying that essentially, it was like the parallel between these tapes going on and on and on and on is kind of East Germany struggling and running out of steam eventually, but it taking too long. But to me, the Hans’ kind of relentlessness in bringing Katharina down and it’s not just via the tapes, it’s also by a kind of coldness that he shows to her in person.

James Walton:

Interspersed in the classic way with moments of kindness as well.

Jo Hamya:

Yes, yes. I found it… I was actually so glad that it went on for as long as it did, not because I wanted Katharina to be abused in any way, but because it was such an honest account and realistic account of what an emotionally abusive relationship is like, it does go on for on and on and on. Actually, I think this is a great time to play a clip from one of our actor readings this time done by Eleanor Tomlinson, which I think shows really well the kind of point at which the mind games start with Hans and how tragic this is for Katharina.

James Walton:

If only it was though Jo, when there’s plenty, plenty more where that came from.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, there’s way more.

James Walton:

That’s not her visiting. He’s visiting her where she’s doing her theatre studies and then immediately goes back. But that’s only a tiny bit of his mind games. But maybe we should leave Kairos there, shall we?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, we should leave it behind. But really, really loved it. I think this is one of the top of the pile overall on the shortlist.

James Walton:

I’m going to say I’ve prepared lots of stuff, haven’t prepared this, who do you think should win of episode two because it’s really hard?

Jo Hamya:

No, well, I think it’s great. We can talk and then we’ll organically come to that conclusion.

James Walton:

Exactly, we’ll be like the judges themselves. Let me introduce then The Details by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson. So Genberg was born in Stockholm Sweden, 1967, began her writing career as a journalist, and in fact didn’t publish her first novel until 2012 when she was 45. Details is a third novel, first to be translated into English and was a massive bestseller in Sweden. And as you mentioned, it starts with the unnamed narrator having fever, having a COVID fever. It reminds her of having a fever after returning from East Africa once with malaria when she read Paul Auster’s, The New York Trilogy. So she starts reading it again.

Jo Hamya:

There are a lot of literary references in this book.

James Walton:

There’s a lot of books in this book, yeah. It’s got an inscription from Johanna in the front of it, and she turns out to have been an ex-lover. So she talks about a fever and she says at a certain point it’s not unpleasant if you can, “Bear to have the past slinking around your legs like dogs.” And that’s sort of what happens in a slightly heightened fever state. She remembers successively four people in four different sections. So the first is Johanna, her former lover from when she was 27 in 1996. Couldn’t imagine a time when they’re not together. But then they have a brutal breakup.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

Then there’s Niki who’s quite a disturbed friend really, sort of full of love and hate, she says, of her ethic rather brilliantly that, “She was an notion of feelings with more gradients and nuances than she could handle, as if the full cast of Greek Gods and all the emotions and states they represented had been crammed in behind our eyelids.” So a story relationship with them. They share a flat in the early ’90s.

And the third one is Alejandro, who’s a kind of, he does play tambourine and abandoned dances, but this is massive, this is her biggest sort of sexually charged relationship of her life. She absolutely falls in, she’s going out with a rather steady government worker I think at the point. But anyway, this guy blows her away and they have an explosive sexual relationship that was never going to last. And she knew it was never going to last. But actually she occasionally wishes maybe or fantasises about what would’ve happened if it had. And then the fourth section is Brigette, who’s her mother.

Jo Hamya:

Which we don’t really know at the beginning, and then we find out, it’s amazing.

James Walton:

We find out in about four pages into it, but it is a moment.

Jo Hamya:

But by that point, she sort of described her as this, she’s nothing like a mother.

James Walton:

No. And so this is a woman whose life has been completely defined by anxiety because of a trauma in her past and possibly, well, a couple of traumas in her past. And an amazing description of what it’s like to live with anxiety.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, God.

James Walton:

And so the question is, so she just describes these four separate relationships and separate people. And I think why, who’s the book about, at the end is the book about those four people or is it in fact about the narrator? And she says, when she’s talking about Joanna’s words being part of her, “I suppose that is the core of every relationship and the reason that in some sense, no relationship ever ends. And also that’s all there is to the self or the so-called self traces of the people we rub up against.” And I do think that idea that all the people you’ve ever known, and all the relationship you’ve ever had sort of co-exist all the time is not just when you’re in fever. If I put on my iTunes playlist, in which dots around 40 odd years of music, all the people I’ve ever known are just all there.

Jo Hamya:

How do you mean?

James Walton:

So I hear that song and I immediately think of that time with that person.

Jo Hamya:

Oh, yeah.

James Walton:

And then you hear that song and you’re immediately there with that person and that’s still there, no relationship ever ends I think is… And not even just listening to music. If you’re walking around, sometimes you see something or think of something and you know exactly the person from your past that you want to tell that to, you might not even see them or know them anymore. So that idea of all your relationships just to all being there all the time, I think is terrific. And also I think it’s a brilliantly written book, and I really liked it. What did you reckon?

Jo Hamya:

Do you know what I think? So it is brilliant, and I again had this really weird experience of reading it with a fever and it sets up on the premise of a fever. But I think I had this question in my mind while I was reading, because you’re getting ostensibly this account of a person, but also of these four central people in her life. And I wasn’t sure, and as I say this, I really enjoyed reading this book. I kind of wasn’t sure what the book was for. And I had this massive philosophical debate in my head about whether it should have a use. Whether that was quite a kind of materialistic way to think about a novel or whether it was just offering me a different kind of worldview or a way of gathering a life because I couldn’t quite say at the end what I’d actually learned about our narrator. Does that make sense?

James Walton:

Yeah, no, it sort of does. I quoted that bit where she says, “We made up other people we rub up against.” She sort of isn’t really, she’s not particularly affected by a mother’s anxiety really, it doesn’t seem.

Jo Hamya:

No.

James Walton:

In fact, she more often defines herself against these people. She says, “Johanna was like that. She was very sort of forward looking, I’m more of a drifter. Niki was actually crazy. And I’m not.” We can talk about this as well. I think when we come to What I’d Rather Not Think About next, which is they’re both quite random books in a way.

Jo Hamya:

I don’t know.

James Walton:

But I think they excuse their randomness. And I think in the case of The Details, it’s this. So this is when she’s talking with Niki who’s the, as I say, the more disturbed one, but still good fun and interesting to be with when she’s in good form and her conversation’s good. But she absolutely hates anecdotes though.

This is the narrator talking about Niki, “In contrast to most people I’ve known in my life, she rarely told anecdotes with herself is the main character, or anecdotes she’d already told before or anecdotes in general. Since the nature of an anecdote, beginning, middle, and finale contradicted Niki’s demand for complete authenticity. Ever since my friendship with Niki,” this has rubbed off on her I think, “I think of the anecdote as a form of chronic illness that attaches itself to some people that compulsion to tell everything in the shape of a story, to turn life into a formula.” And so I think this book is setting out to be an anti-anecdote. So that does mean it’s random, but I think it’s authentically random. I think I agree with Niki and the narrator, at least when I’m reading this book, I do.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, it definitely gave me a really good reset out of what I, or I suppose what I think should be given to me while I’m reading a novel. Do you know what I mean?

James Walton:

Yeah.

Jo Hamya:

The other thing-

James Walton:

So you’re not not quite anti-anecdote?

Jo Hamya:

Oh, I mean, when you read the blurb, it says, “In the throes of a fever, a woman casts her mind back to the past. And precise vivid language the stories of four important people who have shaped her life are revealed. Thousand little memories from across the lifetime laid bare and vivid details as her body temperature erases.” And I don’t know why now reading this, my mind leapt to, oh, okay, so I’m basically just going to know everything about the narrator because she’s telling us about these anecdotes, but not quite anecdotes. And at the end, some grand lesson will be revealed to me, like she’ll offer me some kernel of wisdom. But instead, I kind of, suppose what I got was a way of accounting for a life.

James Walton:

Yeah, no, I mean, I agree, but I think she has a sort of ghost. It ends in a graveyard. She says, “As far as the dead are concerned, chronology has no import. And all that matters are the details, the degree of density, the how and what and everything to do with who.” But you’re right, that only confirms what we already know, that chronology is not how we experience life in a way. We’re just surrounded by all the people we’ve ever known all the time.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

Okay. Let’s have a clip from the book Read by Dua Lipa no less. And this is from the bit where the narrator first sees Alejandro, the guy who’s about to blow her socks off, involve her in this hurricane of unbelievable erotic love for a bit. And this is the first time she sees him and she’s in a bar called Fashing with her friend Sally.

Oh, she’s got it bad. I’m not quite sure what cigarette pants are, but otherwise that’s a good extra.

Jo Hamya:

They’re kind of straight leg, but pleated the… It’s all right, James. The other thing though, and this is another kind of running theme in this podcast, is the fact that I’m a baby.

James Walton:

We’ve got more tales from Grandad coming up later, don’t you worry.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. But the other thing about this book that I actually really enjoyed is that a lot of this is set sort of around the late ’80s, ’90s. There’s this big kind of section about the turn of the millennium and a kind of New Year’s Eve party, and there are lots of moments-

James Walton:

What did you do for the millennium there, Jo?

Jo Hamya:

I was three, so I was in bed James.

James Walton:

Time for me to look gloomily to the floor again.

Jo Hamya:

But I thought while I was reading this that there was just this amazing air of a kind of, only just, not even digitised but an only just technologically apparent way of living. So there are a lot of passages, for example, about watching MTV for the first time and that being this kind of weird, frantic-

James Walton:

Weird self publicity, what the hell is this? In fact, this is the future.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. Or of like the phone, the landline, not even the phone but the landline sometimes being unplugged and shoved in the laundry basket.

James Walton:

The landline or the phone as we used to call it. Yeah.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, clearly. But you do know what I’m talking about?

James Walton:

No, I do know. I think pre-internet life is a big feature of this book. And also I think it reminds me, in a way, of One Day, the David Nicholls’ World Conqueror, which is full of very precise references to what were particular fashions at what particular time. There’s one bit where she’s going out with a bloke who is trying to smoke like Nicholas Cage did in Wild at Heart.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

The bit you mentioned about MTV, the bit where she goes, interrailing which is a thing, and it’s got young people in huge backpacks everywhere. They were gathered in little groups. Some had guitars or cassette players. I’ll explain them later. Some had set out little meals with bread rolls and soft cheese and beers in front of them. Others lean their backs against the wall as they slept or smoked. So yes, no, I liked that. Well, obviously I did because it made me nostalgic that One Day aspect of the book as well.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I thought it was so great. I particularly enjoyed the kind of moment where she loses her mates at a music festival, and she’s like, “Well, that’s me done for the rest of this music festival.” I was like, why are you done? Why don’t you just text them? Oh, you can’t text them.

James Walton:

That’s right. People could just disappear. I mean, a couple of the people in this book just go.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

And she didn’t know where they are because she didn’t know where they are.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I liked it a lot. I particularly enjoyed, there are a lot of moments in this book, but it becomes more pertinent with her mother about how sort of therapy speak didn’t exist back then. So you were just kind of going through it, but you didn’t have words like anxiety or trauma to hand.

James Walton:

Well, yeah, it wasn’t quite that primitive. She takes refuge in all the sorts of things that have now come through, crystals and signs of the Chinese powders that smelt like A, met with medium, started drawing little circles over my forehead with her finger before I went to school in the morning, all sorts of stuff. But she’s also obsessed with the Yin and Yang symbol. And then the narrator notes quite dryly, “Or was this Yin Yang symbol, though I’d never heard a satisfying explanation of its significance. Almost 10 years later, I would travel by train through the Soviet Union and Mongolia to get to Peking. And during my eight months in Southeast Asia, I never saw the Yin Yang symbol used in any other context than a merchandise for tourists like my mother.” So it’s very clear-eyed and affectionate. I think I do like this book a lot.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I do too. So we should move on to our next book, which is What I’d Rather Not Think About, written by Jente Posthuma and translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey. Posthuma is a Dutch writer. I actually don’t know why I find this so hard to believe, we might come back to this later, but she’s 49 years old. I thought this was written by a much younger person, but in fact, she’s got three other novels under her belt, and she’s quite well acclaimed. She’s won quite a lot of prizes. So that’s on me, maybe I’m being ageist.

James Walton:

No, we’ll come back to that and your toxic ageism. Go on, tell us a bit about the book first then.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. What I’d Rather Not Think About is given to us by a nameless narrator, same as The Details.

James Walton:

[inaudible 00:34:46].

Jo Hamya:

Who has a twin brother who’s taken his own life in a rather kind of Virginia Wolf fashion by walking into a river, although I don’t know whether his pockets are full of stones.

James Walton:

No, they’re full of stones.

Jo Hamya:

They are full of stones.

James Walton:

He cycles into a river with his pockets full of stones.

Jo Hamya:

Good Lord. But there’s this very touching point midway through that I think sums up the book really well for me. The narrator says, “In When Women are Friends, the play by Hannah van Wieringen, one of two characters said, “There aren’t enough stories about how to deal with life after loss. For example, I know everything about how a mother could murder her children,” she said, “But nothing about what happens afterwards.” In other words, how life continues, how people manage to get through it together, when this is the thing we’re more likely to experience. Technically, there are more Tuesday afternoons where nothing really happens in a person’s life, I mean.”

James Walton:

That’s very good, isn’t it?

Jo Hamya:

So we get three things, or at least I got three things as a reader from What I’d Rather Not Think About, primarily we get a kind of portrait of grief. We get that rather than meditating on the actual death itself, we get that very prolonged, lots of Tuesdays where nothing happens, I’m just thinking about my brother and I’m trying to make sense of his suicide. I’m thinking about all of the moments where potentially I could have supported him more or said something or whatever. I’m now sleeping in his apartment that’s across the square from where I live. And my boyfriend’s really annoyed at me for doing it.

Then secondarily, we get through this, a portrait of her twin brother. We learn what he’s like and why he’s special. And I don’t know about you, but I think Jente Posthuma is really good at sort of making the idea of a depressive personality very accessible. Because I think sometimes if you’re of a certain mindset, it’s a bit incomprehensible to you that someone should just be sad because they are sad or because they have that tendency, whether in a biochemical sense or in a more mental sense. And she, I wouldn’t say rationalises it, but she makes it so accessible and so understandable. We actually have a clip from one of our actor readings that I think highlights this really well. It’s done by Anya Shalotra, and I think we should hear it now.

James Walton:

Yeah, that’s some-

Jo Hamya:

It’s powerful stuff.

James Walton:

Yeah, it’s a strong passage that, yeah.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. But we kind of, or at least I felt that I understood why he would’ve cycled into that river by the time we get midway through the book. And then the other thing we get, as you say, are all of our narrator’s weird kind of obsessions, some of which are to do with death and tragedy. For example, she fixates a lot on 9/11, and particularly on the idea of people jumping from the towers and choosing to die rather than-

James Walton:

Also, there were two towers, one was only slightly-

Jo Hamya:

Yes, they were twin towers now there’re-

James Walton:

Two twin towers, one slightly bigger than the other. Then when they collapsed, they both collapsed. So when her brother dies in a way, she sort of collapsed as well. And when she goes to visit it again, there’s one tower in its place. I mean, again, I’m making that sound a bit more crudely symbolic than it is. I think that works quite well.

Jo Hamya:

No, it does work really well. So another one of her fixations is a doctor called Mengele who used to experiment on twins in Auschwitz.

James Walton:

Yeah, so like with the Twin Towers, she keeps sort of coming back to it. She’ll have some memories and then she’ll start talking about Mengele again, twin towers again, memories again. So it is all broken up quite randomly. I thought that was quite brave because, so she’s really comparing her suffering in a way to almost Holocaust Easter. So she’s saying, “I was ashamed of the hours I’d lost searching for stories of Holocaust survivors and the way I use the great suffering of others to process my minor grievances.”

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. It’s the same with 9/11.

James Walton:

But she’s aware of it. But, well, two things. First of all, their therapist, who is actually by coincidence the child of Holocaust survivors, says there is no hierarchy of suffering. And I sort of think that it’s quite brave for her to say, actually, I felt it was bad. Because I think one of the things that happens during this much pain is a sort of lack of proportion. So nobody has ever suffered like I’m suffering now. Seems to be a perfectly… It’s not what you should think, but it might be what you do think when you’re in this level of pain. And so I thought was brave, fool hardy brave.

Jo Hamya:

I thought it was brilliant.

James Walton:

And rather brilliant, yeah.

Jo Hamya:

Because I mean, I think you can trust the reader to take on the role of the therapist in a way, or maybe to even be a bit stricter and say, come on now. You weren’t in Auschwitz. But it still makes sense. You would still understand why she doesn’t have a sense of proportion in relation to her grief because there are all of these really moving accounts of, as I said, she lives across the square from her brother’s apartment and of her just essentially haunting it, just haunting it like a ghost.

James Walton:

I mean, is there something creepy about their relationship?

Jo Hamya:

How do you mean?

James Walton:

Well, the fact that they spend all their time together when they move to Amsterdam even, and then he gives a speech about her wedding, which I think is… So she marries in the end, her boyfriend Leo.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

And I think the speech he makes there is brilliant because it’s affectionate and touching, almost a bit hostile and almost a bit creepy all at the same time, which is what it seems to be. “At my wedding, my brother said he knew of no one more like him than I was. The crowd had to laugh at that. He said it felt good to see me so happy with Leo. He was also slightly concerned about himself and how he would fare without me. “She’s always been there”, he said, “Even when I didn’t want her to be.” Everyone laughed again.” You know what I mean?

Jo Hamya:

Do you know what this is reminding me of now, is her account of when they are both eight years old and her twin brother is gay and they both fall in love with the same boy Hans, and also at some point they fall in love with the TV presenter as well. So do you know what, maybe this says more about me than about the book, but I didn’t find it creepy. Because I think what all of this does is it kind of makes, there’s a point where her brother begins to separate himself very physically from her. So one of the things that they were always supposed to do together was to go to New York and spend a year in New York and instead he goes to Brazil.

James Walton:

He lets her go on her own and sort of crushing, it’s on their 28th birthday, and their dad-

Jo Hamya:

Has just left them a load of money.

James Walton:

He left them a load of money, but he left them to inherit it when he was 28. Because the dad’s theory was that it’s when you’re 28 that you become an adult.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

The brother seems to respond to becoming an adult by saying, “We spent too much time together. This is getting out of hand.” And this obviously crushes her.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. But I thought those moments, especially early on in childhood where she’s talking about their childhood were less kind of creepy. It was more like they were just one person and they had the same desires, the same crushes that they wanted to… Maybe they were not exactly the same because I think she does that very classic sibling thing of saying, “He was better than me. He was more outspoken than me, I followed wherever he went.” But they are-

James Walton:

He was a slightly taller tower.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. But it makes that kind of separation that occurs between the two of them, even when they’re living across the square from each other, but somehow never visit each other anyway, all the more painful. And I also think there’s a way that you begin to understand her brother’s depressive mentality through that separation.

James Walton:

What about the sort of randomness? So we’ve given some hints of it, but not quite. So there’s one bit where we’ll just have a little section, so there’s no section longer than two or three pages. Some are just a few lines. So we’ll just have a bit where the brother explains that what proportion of pigs are born without anuses.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, great conversation actually. I really enjoyed that.

James Walton:

Or that’s you’ll remember, is Dad’s in impression of a Dutch film critic.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

There’s a bit of Donald Trump in there. I didn’t realise his reaction to 9/11 was to say, “Hurrah, I’ve now got the biggest building in this part of New York.” But she mentions that. But I suppose as in The Details where I was trying to argue that the randomness was kind of the point because she’s trying to avoid anecdotes as a simple way. I think the same is here only this time there’s a different reason. She, again, slightly randomly remembers, or maybe not randomly in this case, an interview with Jane Kurtz, the novelist on television, interviewed by an apparently famous Dutch interviewer who says, “Despite Kurtz’s discomfort, he kept questioning him, seeking the one recollection that would be a perfect metaphor for beauty and consolation. The one anecdote that would delineate everything more clearly than a hundred theories could.” So I think what she’s doing in this book is obviously just searching for that here, there, is it there? Is that the perfect antidote? Will that explain it? Will that tell me why my brother died? Will that unlock this mystery? And that’s almost frantic, but just a constant search rather than frantic search.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. Although I think partially as well, what she’s potentially trying to do with all these fragments is sort of piece herself back together as a new person who doesn’t have a brother anymore. Because there was this really heartbreaking moment where she says about her and her brother, “Sometimes we fought about our memories, which memory belonged to whom. In any case, I was sure it had been me, not my brother, who had driven our mother’s car through the neighbor’s hedge. And that I was the one who won a medal at the school Marbles tournament. Extensive research has shown that twins are more likely to claim each other’s memories, and yet they tend not to ascribe their own memories to each other. This is why I found it strange when my brother insisted it was me who had swallowed our mother’s last three sleeping pills in one gulp at 14 when I’m certain it was him. He slept through the night and right through the following day, and I had to ride all the way to school on my own.”

What’s happening is this kind of archiving in a way, which now maybe this is too neat.

James Walton:

Go on, go for it. We’re close to the end now so that’ll be beautiful.

Jo Hamya:

Maybe I’m going to tie this episode up in a bow.

James Walton:

We’re coming to the end of the episode. So yeah, a neat bow, go for it.

Jo Hamya:

But it does make me think of Katharina sifting through the boxes at the beginning of Kairos.

James Walton:

Very much so.

Jo Hamya:

Going through her memories of Hans and sort of giving them to us, shaping them so that gradually they make sense.

James Walton:

Actually, this is not over neat. They’re all archival books in a way.

Jo Hamya:

They are.

James Walton:

I mean, Kairos has got that extra dimension that after the fall of the war, people found that they’re Stasi archives and sort of went through them. And we get a bit of that towards the end of the book and way we went to spoil that. But yeah, but in a way, yes, all these people are going through, they’re through archives in either literal or otherwise. Sorry, just one last, so why are you surprised that she was so young rather than so old?

Jo Hamya:

Because something that we haven’t spoken about in this book is that it’s very funny. And I’m not saying that if you’re over the age of 30, you can’t be funny. But I thought it was such a weirdly kind of Gen Z kind of humour where it was maybe not quite anti-humour, but there was this kind of deeply ironic tone to the way certain lines were delivered. And it was almost, I mean-

James Walton:

Yes, no, I do know you mean-

Jo Hamya:

Maybe it’s because the narrator is so chronically online, she’s always Googling. But it had this kind of very pithy, Twitter, is much better than Twitter, but the kind of pithiness of it and maybe this kind of fragmentedness, which I find in a lot more kind of Zellennial and Gen Z books. Felt very, very young to me.

James Walton:

That’s interesting. Okay. Well, that’s what I’d rather not think about by Gen Z post humour. So we’ve done the three archival books as we’ve now decided they are.

Jo Hamya:

Yes, yes.

James Walton:

Do you want to keep your powder dry for what you want to win overall, or do you want to say what your favourite of those three is?

Jo Hamya:

I will keep my powder dry for the winner overall. Also, I think because it’s not fair to say that until we’ve discussed our Korean and South American books. Out of these three, this sounds a bit dodgy, but even though they are quite different in style and they take place at different points in time and they’re about very distinct narrators, they are also incredibly similar books. They’ve sort of melted into my mind as sort of one big, kind of northern European block. I think I was most impressed by Kairos because it’s just the style of it is so good. It made me want to listen to all the music that was mentioned, and it put me in a very particular time and place. And I’m always endlessly intrigued by this idea of is it a romance with politics attached or is it a political novel with romance attached. But that being said to me, these three books might actually just be equally on par in their very separate ways.

James Walton:

I’m going to say I’m really pleased I’m not a judge. This is really hard.

Jo Hamya:

No, but wait, what’s your favourite?

James Walton:

Of these three, probably Kairos, but I really like… The Details, I might argue when we come to the big showdown next week, is the one of maybe two books on this list that gets better and better. I think well as-

Jo Hamya:

What’s the other one?

James Walton:

Not a River.

Jo Hamya:

I agree with Not to River.

James Walton:

I think a few of the others either slightly run out of steam or either get worse. But you’ve got the point. I explained about Kairos. I thought the second half is too relentless and long, even if deliberate. I don’t think What I’d Rather Not Think About, we’ve got the idea by the time it ends. The Details, the final chapter on her mother is unbelievably good. That’s the one that gets bigger and bigger, and that’s one of the novels I don’t think is front loaded on this shortlist.

Maybe we’ll leave it there for part one of our look at the 2024 International Booker Prize shortlist. Join us in the fortnight for part two when we’ll be introducing, discussing and possibly even arguing about Not a River by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott, Crooked Plough by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated by Johnny Lorenz, Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae. And for more on this year’s International Booker Prize Shortlist, please visit the Booker Prizes’ website, where among much else you can find the full versions of the films of actors reading from the books that we heard today, plus the three that we’ll be discussing next time in their full versions. They’re also available on YouTube.

Jo Hamya:

In the meantime, of course, please don’t forget to rate and review this podcast.

James Walton:

You can also follow the Booker Prizes on X, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. And until next time, goodbye.

Jo Hamya:

Bye

The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by me, Jo Hammier and by James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Kevin Muiolo and the executive producer is John Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s Superyacht Production for the Booker Prizes.