Sometimes roaringly funny, more often plain silly, and lighter than air. ( )

With this biting satire on literary prizes, I guess Edward St. Aubyn has announced his lack of interest in ever winning one again. He unmercifully skewers the judges, the process, the publishers and the authors in a very funny account of a dysfunctional prize committee trying to choose between a range of truly awful novels for the awarding of a major literary prize (a very thinly-disguised Man Booker).


The judges are a mixed bunch of political appointees, academics and arty types who can never agree on anything, even the definition of a novel. Each has his or her favoured candidate, which they advocate passionately throughout the Long list, the Short List and the final judgment. Merit has virtually nothing to do with their grimly-defended choices.

The authors are a weird bunch of a commitment-phobic nymphomaniac whose current boyfriend lets her down, a spoilt Indian aristocrat astounded that his 1200 page epic can’t find a publisher, his old aunty whose recipe book gets entered by mistake, and so on.

St. Aubyn has a lot of fun, including writing up excerpts from his imaginary novels, which include some truly awful writing that he must have struggled to get that badly wrong. These include, for example, a brilliant pastiche of Irvine Welsh from a novel called wot u looking’ at?.

This is a very good novel, maybe a little predictable, but still a lot of fun. ( )

I expected to like this novel a lot more than I actually did - I found the topic more compelling than the topics of the previous 2 standalone novels (which I liked at the end) but something just did not quite work in this one. The prose was as good as usual and the satire and humor mostly worked but there was something missing.

Katherine Burns had just finished writing her latest novel and expects it to get an award or two. Especially the most coveted one in the Commonwealth - The Elysian Prize for Literature. Among her competition: an Indian princeling's book, a historical novel about Shakespeare, a book about a man taking off for the Canadian Wilderness, a few Scottish books (one of them written in the language of the streets), a semi-autobiographical novel and a few more novels which you would expect in a literary competition. Or that was supposed to happen anyway. Except that her editor messed up and her novel was never submitted and instead a cookbook she was trying to help someone find a publisher for got submitted in its stead. That should have been the end of it - mistakes happen after all... except that the judges of the award are not exactly who they should be and did not get their positions because of their literary (or human) merits. If you are not seeing where this is going, you are not paying attention.

The novel alternates between the characters who are vying for the award and the judges, showing all of them at their lowest. One of the authors is so offended from not getting on the long list that he spends most of the novel trying to assassinate the head of the panel. Another who makes the short list keeps insisting that she did not write a novel and that her cookery book is indeed a cookery book. Add to that a few sex affairs, a panel deciding first the short list and then the winner (and the literary merit of the novels seem to be the last thing on their minds), a few scandals about the writers of the novels (mostly the ones we do not get to meet - ours seem to at least stay away from the newspapers) and things slowly grind to the very predictable end.

It is not even thinly veiled satire - but then St. Aubyn is never subtle. The world of literary awards is a cesspit and Man Booker (which fits almost to a T the fictional price here) had not escaped some of the bad press. Which is part of I expected to like this novel more - the more obvious and more odious his topic is, the better St. Aubyn is at making you laugh about it.

Except that something just did not work properly. I am not sure what was missing. Was the topic too close to reality (I like awards lists and even though I know they can be subjective and sometimes have nothing to do with the literary works, I still follow a lot of them)? The more I think about that, the more I keep looking at the main character. In all the previous novels by St. Aubyn (5 Melrose novels and 2 standalones), he has a very strong main character who unifies the novel. I think this is what is missing here - Katherine Burns just cannot hold the center and the novel gets too unfocused. I am not even sure if she was supposed to be the center - the head of the panel, the politician Malcolm Craig, is the first character we meet and stays prominent through the novel. I wonder if this is not what really bugged me while reading - it is not a group novel but at the same time, noone emerges as the center. Which may be the whole point - who is more important in a literary award - the judges or the writers? Because according to the novel, it is not the literary works themselves. ( )

4.5 Hilarious send-up of the publishing world and in particular the world of literary prizes. The fictional one featured here is the Elysian Prize in Great Britain, which is sponsored by a questionable agricultural chemical company looking for respectability. Carefully satirized is the prize committee itself of 5 high-profile people, with personal agendas and political ties: Malcolm is a washed-up MP, Penny Feathers is the former lover of the prize's original inception and a thriller writer, Vanessa is a high-minded academic who guards the literary merit of the prize, Jo is a bleeding heart columnist and broadcaster concerned with relevance and Tobias is a hunky actor whose uncle is connected to the prize at higher levels. In addition, there are the lives of several of the writers who are being considered for the prize: Katherine Burns, whose submission was accidentally switched with an unvetted cook book by her lover/publisher -- exlover, now; Sonny, the Indian maharajah whose work was rejected, his Auntie who is the creator of the cook book and Sam Black, the most promising of them all who is willing to give it all up for a relationship with Katherine. Such tangled situations and relationships with a running commentary on literature and art and perception from Katherine's former lover, Didier make for laughable madcap scenarios. The author has gone all out in creating not just these complex relationships, but also samples of the books that are on the prize list and back-stories to the books, authors and committee members. Let's just say there is no such thing as objectivity and even literary prizes carry an agenda and are swayed by circumstances and favoritism. Who will win? That's the great reveal with much ridiculousness in between. As an audio book, the story is read by one narrator who gets the tone just right and is extremely talented at giving voice and accent to the range of characters and even the different books represented. It moves fast -- rather short, so it takes a bit of attention to not miss clever details, but thoroughly enjoyable. ( )

As I read St. Aubyn’s noveI, I couldn’t stop thinking: “Man Booker”. I think as readers we've definitely lost out. Prizes are as much if not more about marketing as excellence and when there is so much out there, for the Booker to narrow the range of books highlighted (short list?), which is what happened in St. Aubyn’s novel, is a shame. The book judges perhaps didn't see this happening and they aren't responsible for the overall picture after all. UK doesn't have a national book award like the States and there is no Commonwealth Award anymore. Getting and keeping funding for prizes is tough and some are very controversial. There are better ways of readers finding out about books these days. If you have a prize it does need to have a clear category and continuity which the Booker doesn't anymore. It's lost its way and readers will go elsewhere. To this foreign reader, the novel stands as an international literary phenomenon, on the grounds of style and humor alone. It's not a topical satire. It's a farce, and it should be read as such, and it succeeds as such. "The sly, chatty third-person narration and the constant onslaught of wordplay, bathos, farcical mishap and circular logic" are the reasons “Lost for Words” exists for in the first place. It is funny, sidesplittingly so, and all instances of flowery verbiage and "bad writing" are intentional. It could have been a bitter act of revenge, but it's a delightful silly little comedy. As long as you're aware it's lighthearted, slightly whimsical entertainment, and not anything important, it is not to be missed. Humour or comedy literature is about as popular as a cock flavoured lolly with the critics/establishment. Ask about comedy and you get the same old chestnuts, “A Confederacy of Dunces”, etc. I just wish I were a comedy author, all dark and full of gross humour. I, for one, never cared about literary prizes. Well, imagine having spent at least two years sitting in a room by yourself while writing a book at the same time as one of the characters in St. Aubyn’s tries to do. For a chunk of years she should have decided not to read their musings anymore but to walk out of her front door and do stuff herself instead. BTW, just to reassure anyone who gave up on Proust I am pressing on; currently at about 37% read and nothing has happened yet as it should with all top-notch Literature. Artistic prizes don't mean shit, and are often political anyway. The true test of any piece of art, book, film, portrait, is its longevity. That is all. People who don't want their work judged entirely on this criteria should not even be artists. Or is it about length? This raises a genuinely interesting point. The philistines, compulsive naysayers, and unreflecting consumers of literary bilge are not notable for their avoidance of lengthy tomes (400 - 800 pages on average), as proof of which all one need do is visit WH Smith. When someone scoffs at the length of the George Eliot I'm reading - or, more generally, at the voluminousness of any number of 19th/20th Century 'great novelists' - I cast an eye over their dog-eared, spine-cracked huddles of Robert Ludlum, Len Deighton, and publisher-egged-on exponentialismic J.K. Rowling and reflect on so much fuzzily misapplied rationale. Of the winners listed in 2018, the one who stood out as a deserving case was Julian Barnes - 'The sense of an ending' was excellent, and many (not all) of his others are well above average. DBC Pierre wrote one good book but I'm not aware that he's been able to repeat the feat. Marlon James's effort is also interesting but a hard read, as the narrative is confusing at times. I have been unable to 'get into' Margaret Atwood, and "Benjamin Black" (AKA John Banville ) is dreadful...It's quite hard to know what the prize-givers are looking for, given the disparate quality of the prize winners... if there's no story, I'm really not interested. Writing for people who teach English Lit courses should not be a criterion, IMO. Pretentious, shallow, shallow and pretentious. Also superficial and slight-fantastic. That's when not torpid or turgid or turbid. Nay, more, much more from the near millennial critics' armoury, so very much more, they are also sometimes "affected", sometimes "ostentatious, chi-chi" - they can be at times "showy, flashy, tinselly", conspicuous in their "evasiveness" - "flaunty-mute", or "inert and tasteless", then there's the "kitschy or overambitious", the "pompous artifice of the critic's mirror" - it's "hellish professor's trickster", even "flatulent when high pressed inflated", "overblown" or "ripe" - that fustian "hyperventilation in their mannered, high-flown, high-sounding floristy", yes, "flowery, grandiose, big wordy-grand" - "overelaborate" and "unconscious mock-heroic", "grandiloquent", nay, "magniloquent bombastadry" - you know the one, "turgid, orotund" or even "rotund in rhetoric" - "mute-oratorial", "narco-sophomoric", "highfalutin la-di-da fancy-pants narratry" - the "quiescence of pseud-pseud-pseudo flares" or "spare yet tumbling cross-wire eyed puissance". We've read it all before in reviews. If we see not the real thing we see the pretentious sir, pretentious.
There, squall-spat over.

The All-Seeing-I should not in matters of taste and mere contingency fake final say when time could make a mockery of said judgement. On the other hand, I was always a book snob. Meaning: You and I are pretentious. Booker winners and many a nominee and even non shortlist are very much the real deal (*).

(*)I'm sorry; someone has apparently been fumigating my villa against mosquitoes, and the smell was a little pungent. I think I was high as a kite typing that mess above. Apologies all round. ( )