Annal:1996 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1996 IMPAC Dublin winner
- 1994 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 1993 Booker shortlist
- Score: 26.46
In Remembering Babylon David Malouf gives us a rich and compelling novel, in language of astonishing poise and resonance, about the settling of the continent down under, Australia, and the vicissitudes of first contact with the unknown. In the mid-1840s a thirteen-year-old cabin boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore from a British shipwreck onto the Queensland coast, and is taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later, three children from a white settlement come upon this apparition: “The stick-like legs, all knobbed at the joints, suggested a wounded waterbird, a brolga, or a human that in the manner of the tales they told one another, all spells and curses, had been changed into a bird, but only halfway, and now, neither one thing nor the other, was hopping and flapping towards them out of a world over there, beyond the no-mans-land of the swamps…of nightmare rumours, superstitions and all that belonged to Absolute Dark.”
Possessed of lyrical intensity and always respectful of human complexity, Remembering Babylon tells the story of Gemmy, and of his relation to the whites.…
- 1996 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.46
A group of strangers, passengers on a day-boat that runs aground, are washed up on an island. Shaken and sodden, they nonetheless make quick work of the situation at hand. But what is the situation? They’ve invaded the closely protected enclave of an eminent art historian, but their presence seems to rouse in the historian’s assistant a long-ripening hunger for company.
Certainly the grounding of the boat was an accident, but one of the passengers seems to know the professor and to have an air of purpose about him. Why as their day on the island progresses, do they seem to inhabit a series of weighty tableaux? And who is the man who moves among them as both spectator and player, the nameless, seemingly haunted narrator whose sensibility is the sometimes clarifing, sometimes distorting lens through which we view the action?
Invoking all lost souls and enchanted islands, Ghosts gives us a brilliant mix of gaiety and menace to tell a story about the failures and triumphs of the imagination, about time’s passage, and about the frailty of human happiness. It is an exquisitely written…
A Way in the World: A Novel
- 1996 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.46
“Most of Us Know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.”
So observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum—that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp—which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction, the first in seven years by one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in The Enigma of Arrival, and writing here in the classic form of linked narrations, Naipaul constructs a story of remarkable resonance and power, remembrance and invention. It is the story of a writer’s lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance—language, character, family history—and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical past: “things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing.”
What he writes—and what his release of memory enables…
- 1996 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.46
In lyrical and precise prose braided with myth and symbol, one of Holland’s most popular authors tells the story of a funny-looking man who loved beauty; of a proud, spiritual soul who, all his life, was intrigued by transfiguration and who, despite himself, became a player in a drama of jealousy and revenge.
The Laws: A Novel
Connie Palmen, Richard Huijing
- 1996 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.46
Over a period of seven years, a young philosophy student, Marie Deniet, encounters seven men: an astrologer, an epileptic, a philosopher, a priest, a physicist, an artist, and a psychiatrist. In her attempt to comprehend the laws these enigmatic loves have chosen to live by, Deniet questions life, love, and the universe in a voyage of self-discovery that sometimes gives her hope, and sometimes leaves her feeling marooned. By electing to investigate a woman’s sense of self by means of almost exclusive references to men, Connie Palmen triumphantly traverses the worlds of both sexes. An extraordinary success in Holland, where it sold over 150,000 copies and is now in its nineteenth printing, The Laws is an unconventional love story, a fertile novel of ideas, and a brilliantly conceived story of discovery and self-discovery.
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ: A Novel
José Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero
- 1996 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.46
For Jose Saramago, the life of Jesus Christ and the story of His Passion are things of this earth. A child crying, a gust of wind, the caress of a woman half-asleep, the bleat of a goat or the bark of a dog, a prayer uttered in the grayish morning light. The adolescent Jesus is very much an adolescent: questioning, uncompromising, troubled by the world and by his body. His mother, like any mother, is devoted, fearful, resentful. The Holy Family has the complex frictions of any family. Yet this is not simple, debunking realism, for Saramago also fills his pages with vision, dream, and omen. And the defiance of the authority of God the Father, the righteous indignation on behalf of man, the anger—is still not denial of Him.
Away: A Novel
- 1996 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.46
Esther O’Malley Robertson gazes out at Lake Ontario from her home for perhaps the last time. This house, highly charged with memories and history, is part of a landscape that is now being swallowed by industry. The story of her family’s past has its beginnings in the 1840s off the northern coast of Ireland, where a young woman embraced a semiconscious sailor who had washed in with the tide, and later, with her husband and young son, fled the famine for Canada.
Jane Urquhart imbues the past with a shimmering clarity as she takes us from the harsh Irish coast to the quarantine stations at Grosse Isle and the barely hospitable land of the Canadian Shield; from the flourishing town of Port Hope to the flooded streets of Montreal; from Ottawa to a large-windowed house at the edge of a Great Lake. The characters who inhabit the world of this novel include Liam O’Malley, a down-to-earth, first-generation Irish-Canadian farmer; his sister, Eileen, whose passionate idealism involves her, unwillingly, in a devastating act of betrayal; the eccentric Sedgewick brothers, Anglo-Irish landlords…
