Tea Obreht won the Orange Prize. It feels almost redundant to say it, nearly a week late.
I had a sneaky feeling The Tiger's Wife would carry the day, even though I still haven't quite finished reading or thinking about the whole shortlist. Sometimes a book simply ticks too many boxes not to win, like Half of A Yellow Sun in 2007; and in this case none of the other shortlistees were quite so complete a proposition as Obreht's debut. Each had something against it. Great House = too literary; Grace Williams = too small-scale; Room = too obvious (like Wolf Hall last year!); Annabel = too determinedly about gender; The Memory of Love = too like Half of a Yellow Sun. The Tiger's Wife was very polished, very elegantly balanced; yes, a tad overworked in parts, and perhaps a little too neatly plotted, but oh so accomplished. And, let's not be too cynical about it, but it never hurts if the quality of the novel itself can be enhanced by the profile of its author. Being 25 years old and pretty, with an emotive familial connection to the Balkans conflict, doesn't hurt.
I think I'm satisfied with this year's winner on the whole. The Tiger's Wife may not be my favourite book of the longlist - Anne Peile! - but it is certainly a worthy piece of work, and my less-than ecstatic response last Wednesday night was all of piece with my response to the prize as a whole. I've had a strange, distanced relationship with it this year. At first glance the longlist had me on tenterhooks - so many interesting looking books - but thus far my experience hasn't matched the anticipation.
It's true that I haven't been able to give my full attention to the buzz around the list, and my reading of it has been quite haphazard. Work, work, work has been at the forefront of my mind. I think this is probably why I haven't been able to engage properly with the books, or to blog more about them. I still mean to write about those I've read, especially Great House (about which I have strong feelings) and Grace Williams (which I admired far more than I expected). And I still mean to finish reading the longlist in its entirety, as I've saved some of my most anticipated books until the end, including Joanna Kavenna's The Birth of Love and Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch.
At this time of year the question always arises: should I continue to read the Orange longlist in this way? Instead should I tackle something outside of my comfort zone like the IMPAC? Looking back on my New Year's resolutions (more male authors, more books in translation, more from the TBR pile) I can see that I'm slipping again. Always, always towards women writing in English. So after the Orange it's back to the TBR pile, and back to the men in translation. As an Orange break I just finished a book by a man from the TBR: Vinland by George Mackay Brown. Good stuff.
~~Victoria~~