Annal:1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in the year 1997. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Javier Marías, Margaret Jull Costa
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin winner
- Score: 10.47
Juan knows little about his widowed father Ranz, a man with a troubled past; if he has been told no lies, that is because he has asked no questions. All he does know is that before marrying Juan’s mother Ranz was married to her elder sister and she had committed suicide. The unspoken dialogue between father and son, however, is to become a spelling out of the horrifying truth once Juan has been married for a year to Luisa, and the bride turns discreet confessor to the burdened old man. What gradually emerges into the cold light of day is a repetition of scenes already witnessed by Juan in the course of his travels—of a married man blackmailed by his mistress in a Havana hotel, of a woman in New York pursuing a sequence of shabby lovers through the lonely-hearts columns.
With remarkable skill and delicacy Javier Marias builds up his colours to produce a startling picture of two generations, two marriages, and of the secret commerce between spouses that rests on the gossamer-thin threads of an unspoken accord.
- 1996 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 1995 Giller Prize winner
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1996 Booker shortlist
- Score: 32.46
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers—a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village—will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.
As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.47
In 1931, Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil, receiving legendary blues skills in return. He went on to record only twenty-nine songs before being murdered on August 16, 1938. In 1992, however, Johnson suddenly reappears on the Spokane Indian Reservation and meets Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the misfit storyteller of the Spokane Tribe. When Johnson passes his enchanted instrument to Thomas—lead singer of the rock-and-roll band Coyote Springs—a magical odyssey begins that will take the band from reservation bars to small-town taverns, from the cement trails of Seattle to the concrete canyons of Manhattan.
Sherman Alexie imaginatively mixes narrative, newspaper excerpts, songs, journal entries, visions, radio interviews, and dreams to explore the effects of Christianity on Native Americans in the late twentieth century. In addition, he examines the impact of cultural assimilation on the relationships between Indian women and Indian men. Reservation Blues is a painful, humorous, and ultimately redemptive symphony about God and indifference, faith and alcoholism, family and hunger, sex and death.
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.47
A piercing, unforgettable tale of the horror and spiritual weariness of war, Novel Without a Name will shatter every preconception Americans have about what happened in the jungles of Vietnam. With Duong Thu Huong, whose Paradise of the Blind was published to high critical acclaim in 1993, Vietnam has found a voice both lyrical and stark, powerful enough to capture the conflict that left millions dead and spiritually destroyed her generation. Banned in the author’s native country for its scathing dissection of the day-to-day realities of life for the Vietnamese during the final years of the “Vietnam War,” Novel Without a Name invites comparison with All Quiet on the Western Front and other classic works of war fiction.
The war is seen through the eyes of Quan, a North Vietnamese bo doi (soldier of the people) who joined the army at eighteen, full of idealism and love for the Communist party and its cause of national liberation. But ten years later, after leading his platoon through almost a decade of unimaginable horror and deprivation, Quan is disillusioned by…
Pereira Declares: A Testimony
Antonio Tabucchi, Patrick Creagh
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.47
Salazar’s fascist Portugal in 1938 is part of the menacing cloud that hangs over Europe, and Dr. Pereira is an aging, overweight, lonely, mostly retired journalist who doesn’t want to think about it. He escapes facing the ominous times by translating nineteenth-century French stories for the weekly Culture Page he edits for a Lisbon newspaper. He dwells on the past and over-indulges in heavily-sugared glasses of lemonade and omelettes aux fines berbes.
“Are you living in another world, and you working for a newspaper?” his exasperated friend Father Antonio asks him. “Look here Pereira, for goodness sake go and find out what’s happening around you.”
Then Pereira meets a young man, Monteiro Rossi, and in a city where the very walls have ears and where those who know what’s good for them turn a blind eye to what goes on around them, he is forced to break out of the shell of his own inhibitions. In the process of facing reality and encountering the brutality of an authoritarian state, Pereira becomes a gentle hero the reader will long remember.
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.47
In his newest novel, A Tiler’s Afternoon, Lars Gustafsson invites us to share a day’s work with Torsten Bergman, an aging, semi-retired tile-layer.
On this particular day, Torsten arrives at an empty suburban villa, partially renovated and left unfinished. A master craftsman, he knows what to do and goes about his business, all the while reminiscing over his past, considering what may be left of his future, daydreaming about the mysterious Sophie K., the absent occupant of the villa’s upstairs flat. No one checks on the work. With the close of the day comes Torsten’s growing unease over hours spent on perhaps futile labor. “But at that moment there was a loud knocking at the door—no, more of a pounding than a knocking. It sounded as if by some strange coincidence the whole world had come to life again and was trying to get in.”
Like Samuel Beckett, Lars Gustafsson turns the plainest of circumstances into poignant universals. There are yet roads to travel after we say we cannot go on.
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1996 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1995 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.47
Morvern Callar: A Novel
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1995 Whitbread-1st Novel shortlist
- Score: 12.47
Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern’s reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What she does next is even more appalling. Moving across a blurred European landscape—from rural poverty and drunken mayhem of the port to the Mediterranean rave scene—we experience everything from Morvern’s stark, unflinching perspective.
Morvern is utterly hypnotizing from her very first sentence to her last. She rarely goes anywhere without the Walkman left behind as a Christmas present by her dead boyfriend, and as she narrates this strange story, she takes care to tell the reader exactly what music she is listening to, giving the stunning effect of a sound track running behind her voice.
In much the same way that Patrick McCabe managed to tell an incredibly rich and haunting story through the eyes of an emotionally disturbed boy in The Butcher Boy, Alan Warner probes the vast…
