Anne Michaels was shortlisted for her novel The Winter Vault, published by McClelland & Stewart.
Photograph by: Handout, Scotiabank Giller Prize
First there were 96, then there were five.
And on Tuesday, just one will remain: The winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the annual award recognizing excellence in Canadian fiction, will be announced at a gala presentation in Toronto.
The jury is made up of American novelist and short-story writer Russell Banks, U.K. author and journalist Victoria Glendinning, and Canadian writer and professor Alistair MacLeod.
The Giller winner gets $50,000, the largest purse for literature in Canada.
Past winners include Joseph Boyden for Through Black Spruce, Elizabeth Hay for Late Nights on Air, and Vincent Lam for Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures.
Here are plot synopses of each 2009 shortlisted book, plus a few words from the authors:
The Disappeared, by Kim Echlin
A teenage Canadian falls in love with a Cambodian refugee. After the fall of Pol Pot, her lover abandons her and returns home in search of his lost family. She follows him to Cambodia, and discovers one of the darkest chapters of 20th-century history.
On what inspired Echlin to write The Disappeared: "A woman in a market in Cambodia. I was alone, sitting on a bench, and this stranger sat beside me. She told me that she had tried to emigrate at the end of the Pol Pot era (1979), but she was forcibly repatriated to Phnom Penh from her refugee camp. Then she said, 'I lost my whole family during Pol Pot time.' I didn't know how to respond. Finally, I asked, 'What can I do? Can I help you?' She answered, 'No, I just want you to know.' This brief encounter stays with me. Over the years, I have thought about the importance of having one's story heard, of being 'witnessed' to."
The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon
The story takes place in the court of Philip of Macedon, circa 342 BC, and the Plato of 20 years earlier. Aristotle, in first-person narration, reveals his complex relationship with his pupil, Alexander the Great. Aristotle emerges as a man both brilliant and blind, immersed in life but terrified of living. The idea of the golden mean — the concept of a desirable balance or compromise between two extremes — is one of Aristotle's gifts to civilization, and one he imparts to his student.
On what inspired Lyon to write The Golden Mean: "I first read Aristotle as an undergraduate and, long after I left university, I kept going back to his Ethics. It remains such a relevant, resonant book, 2,300 years after it was written: What does it mean to be a good person? What does it mean to live a good life? How can we avoid extremes in ourselves and our behaviour?"
The Bishop's Man, by Linden MacIntyre
The second in a multi-generational trilogy, The Bishop's Man follows the life and career of Duncan, a Catholic priest whose idealism about the church is challenged when he's forced to confront its political side in the wake of sexual scandals.
"The part of the story that I wanted to get at was not the dirty details of what these guys were doing and how twisted they were, but how the institution dealt with it," MacIntyre told the Toronto Star. "That is the huge crime. If this had been dealt with honestly, openly and transparently in the beginning, it might have been confronted and dealt with in some way. Maybe we would have had a serious discussion about the psychological effect of enforced celibacy."
The Fall, by Colin McAdam
Narrated by two male roommates at a coed boarding school in Ottawa — Noel, the son of a Canadian diplomat stationed in Australia, and Julius, the son of the U.S. ambassador — Fall tells the story of what happens when Julius's girlfriend goes missing during the boys' final year.
On what inspired McAdam to write Fall: "Strange anger at first — something to do with people labelling others without getting to know them. And a need to find some way to express the wordless movements of an excited adolescent in love — which I think came from the opposite place to the anger."
The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels
In 1964, a botanist, Jean, and her engineer husband, Avery, move into a houseboat on the Nile River so Avery can work on an ancient shrine that must be relocated to make way for the Aswan Dam. While Jean studies the Egyptian foliage, Avery starts to question his role in the destruction of a way of life. Then personal disaster strikes, sending the couple down different, and unexpected, paths.
"The book deals with destruction and rebuilding, with what it means to rebuild, and explores whether the way we commemorate is a way to remember or a way of forgetting," Michaels told the Vancouver Sun. "I'm dealing with historical material. You don't want to get that wrong; you have a responsibility to make sure everything you say is true, as true as you can conceive it."
The Scotiabank Giller Prize is named in honour of the late literary journalist, Doris Giller, and was founded in 1994 by her husband, Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch.
The gala presentation in Toronto will air Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET on BRAVO!, BookTelevision, and online at CTV.ca.
What the National Post's reviewers thought of the five Giller Prize nominees:
The Disappeared, by Kim Echlin (Hamish Hamilton; 224 pp.; $29) The impossibility of closure after great crimes is the subject of Toronto author Kim Echlin's absorbing novel, and she approaches her subject with the delicacy and solemnity it deserves. Her narrator is Anne Greeves, a middle-aged Montreal language instructor remembering her still raw-in-the-mind love affair with Serey, a Khmer exile 30 years before. When he returns to Cambodia, after the Vietnamese invasion and the fall of Pol Pot's regime, he disappears into a quagmire of political upheaval and killing. Galvanized by what she is sure is a glimpse of her lover on TV, Anne travels to Phnom Penh to find him. She succeeds, but he is soon gone again. The Disappeared penetrates to the aching core of the Cambodian tragedy — but its solemnity comes to seem more tragic pose than due regard for the dead, especially when it tips over into tendentiousness: "Get past the golden rule. Make the enemy inhuman. Call the enemy dog, snake, kraut, gook, kike, cockroach, slut, all that ugly talk." And there is something odd about a well-wrought treatment of chaos. Dark comedy or silence may be the only vehicles that can contain genocide without reducing it. Frank Moher, National Post
The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon (Random House; 304 pp.; $32.95) Lyon's first novel takes as its subject Philip of Macedon's decision, in 343 BC, to hire Aristotle to tutor his son, the future Alexander the Great. Thus, the man who believed that philosophical contemplation was the greatest form of human activity undertook to enlighten the heir of a regime based almost entirely on war and conquest. The title refers to Aristotle's notion that virtuous action is a "golden mean" between opposite extremes. True courage, for example, is found between the extremes of cowardice and rashness. Lyon clearly views this as more than a happy intellectual thought. "I had a need to avoid extremes," Aristotle confesses to his teacher, Plato, "perhaps because I was so subject to them." Lyon uses a number of narrative devices to emphasize the gulf between order and chaos, some of them questionable — language ("ballbusting," "amiable asshole") designed to put Aristotle on our plane, an emphasis on disgusting physical substances (excrement, a reference to "great green skeins of snot"), his view of women as defective males, his depiction as what could be viewed as bipolar. Finally, Lyon takes risks with technique in pursuit of immediacy, chiefly in her use of the present tense. This is infrequently used in fiction, for a reason. It encourages self-consciousness on the part of the narrator, it slows narrative momentum and it flattensout a multi-layered awareness of time. In this case, it heightens the already formidable difficulty of creating believable historical characters. Philip Marchand, National Post
The Bishop's Man, by Linden MacIntyre (Random House; 416 pp.; $32) Duncan MacAskill is a priest in his early fifties who has a history of providing useful services to his boss, a bishop determined to stifle any controversy involving wayward priests. By the 1990s, it has become more difficult to keep scandals hidden, and MacAskill has become too high-profile, as a dean at a Catholic university, so the bishop sends him to a backwater parish in Cape Breton. In Creignish, the fishing is poor, as are the people. MacAskill's flock take refuge in drink, and soon he joins them. CBC journalist MacIntyre gives us a study of a midlife crisis that's going to be a doozy. There's a newspaper reporter sniffing around, there's a local man acting strangely and an attractive single woman. Some readers might find MacIntyre's timeshifting a distraction, but, by and large, the author handles the various decades of his tale deftly. And as a Cape Bretoner, he brings the region vividly to life. Nicholas Pashley, National Post
Fall, by Colin McAdam (Hamish Hamilton; 354 pp., $32) Fall is narrated by two roommates at St. Ebury. Noel is the son of a Canadian diplomat stationed in Australia. He's bookish, obsessive and, because of a lazy eye and a violent outburst in Grade 9, a social also-ran. Julius, the son of the U. S. ambassador, is a golden boy. Good-looking and uncomplicated, Julius is the boyfriend of the most desirable female in the predominantly male student body and the book's title character, Fallon Fitzgerald DeStaad. Her disappearance off a trail in the woods — she is last seen by Noel, who has a crush on her — is the lightly plotted novel's central event. Alas, the mystery of Fall's disappearance is undermined as much by its inconclusive resolution as it is by Fall's thin characterization. In both Noel and Julius's renditions, the title character is never more than an object of gratified or ungratified desire. What saves Fall is McAdam's ability to upend the reader's expectations of his narrators. Noel goes from awkward underdog to suspect; Julius, he of the unexamined life, becomes more sympathetic as he experiences loss. In his take on the boarding-school novel, McAdam offers a portrait of male adolescence that's both empathetic and stylistically daring. Kevin Chong, National Post
The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels (McClelland & Stewart; 352 pp.; $32.99) Three sites of destruction feature prominently: The desert lands that were flooded by the construction of Egypt's Aswan Dam in the early 1960s, the Ontario farmlands and towns displaced by the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the early '50s and Warsaw, reduced to rubble by Hitler's army in '44. The link — aside from the attempt to mitigate destruction — is their presence in the mind of Jean Shaw. She meets her future engineer husband on the dried banks of a river diverted by Seaway construction, later accompanies him to help rescue the Abu Simbel temple from the Nile waters, and has an affair in Toronto with a Polish refugee from Warsaw. In a novel of this sort, there is no avoiding the curse of Michael Ondaatje. Michaels is no imitator — her gift is genuine — but her book breathes his spirit, as if Ondaatje has become part of a permanent literary cold front sweeping across Canada: the over-stuffed romanticism, the precious gestures that no normal human being would consider, the halting of narrative to focus on highly aesthetic tableaux, the odd little aphorisms. That some of these tableaux are beautiful and some of the aphorisms are apt is beside the point. They remain static. The exquisite moments continue to pile up until the reader loses a sense of whatever point the story as a whole is making.
Philip Marchand, National Post
And on Tuesday, just one will remain: The winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the annual award recognizing excellence in Canadian fiction, will be announced at a gala presentation in Toronto.
The jury is made up of American novelist and short-story writer Russell Banks, U.K. author and journalist Victoria Glendinning, and Canadian writer and professor Alistair MacLeod.
The Giller winner gets $50,000, the largest purse for literature in Canada.
Past winners include Joseph Boyden for Through Black Spruce, Elizabeth Hay for Late Nights on Air, and Vincent Lam for Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures.
Here are plot synopses of each 2009 shortlisted book, plus a few words from the authors:
The Disappeared, by Kim Echlin
A teenage Canadian falls in love with a Cambodian refugee. After the fall of Pol Pot, her lover abandons her and returns home in search of his lost family. She follows him to Cambodia, and discovers one of the darkest chapters of 20th-century history.
On what inspired Echlin to write The Disappeared: "A woman in a market in Cambodia. I was alone, sitting on a bench, and this stranger sat beside me. She told me that she had tried to emigrate at the end of the Pol Pot era (1979), but she was forcibly repatriated to Phnom Penh from her refugee camp. Then she said, 'I lost my whole family during Pol Pot time.' I didn't know how to respond. Finally, I asked, 'What can I do? Can I help you?' She answered, 'No, I just want you to know.' This brief encounter stays with me. Over the years, I have thought about the importance of having one's story heard, of being 'witnessed' to."
The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon
The story takes place in the court of Philip of Macedon, circa 342 BC, and the Plato of 20 years earlier. Aristotle, in first-person narration, reveals his complex relationship with his pupil, Alexander the Great. Aristotle emerges as a man both brilliant and blind, immersed in life but terrified of living. The idea of the golden mean — the concept of a desirable balance or compromise between two extremes — is one of Aristotle's gifts to civilization, and one he imparts to his student.
On what inspired Lyon to write The Golden Mean: "I first read Aristotle as an undergraduate and, long after I left university, I kept going back to his Ethics. It remains such a relevant, resonant book, 2,300 years after it was written: What does it mean to be a good person? What does it mean to live a good life? How can we avoid extremes in ourselves and our behaviour?"
The Bishop's Man, by Linden MacIntyre
The second in a multi-generational trilogy, The Bishop's Man follows the life and career of Duncan, a Catholic priest whose idealism about the church is challenged when he's forced to confront its political side in the wake of sexual scandals.
"The part of the story that I wanted to get at was not the dirty details of what these guys were doing and how twisted they were, but how the institution dealt with it," MacIntyre told the Toronto Star. "That is the huge crime. If this had been dealt with honestly, openly and transparently in the beginning, it might have been confronted and dealt with in some way. Maybe we would have had a serious discussion about the psychological effect of enforced celibacy."
The Fall, by Colin McAdam
Narrated by two male roommates at a coed boarding school in Ottawa — Noel, the son of a Canadian diplomat stationed in Australia, and Julius, the son of the U.S. ambassador — Fall tells the story of what happens when Julius's girlfriend goes missing during the boys' final year.
On what inspired McAdam to write Fall: "Strange anger at first — something to do with people labelling others without getting to know them. And a need to find some way to express the wordless movements of an excited adolescent in love — which I think came from the opposite place to the anger."
The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels
In 1964, a botanist, Jean, and her engineer husband, Avery, move into a houseboat on the Nile River so Avery can work on an ancient shrine that must be relocated to make way for the Aswan Dam. While Jean studies the Egyptian foliage, Avery starts to question his role in the destruction of a way of life. Then personal disaster strikes, sending the couple down different, and unexpected, paths.
"The book deals with destruction and rebuilding, with what it means to rebuild, and explores whether the way we commemorate is a way to remember or a way of forgetting," Michaels told the Vancouver Sun. "I'm dealing with historical material. You don't want to get that wrong; you have a responsibility to make sure everything you say is true, as true as you can conceive it."
The Scotiabank Giller Prize is named in honour of the late literary journalist, Doris Giller, and was founded in 1994 by her husband, Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch.
The gala presentation in Toronto will air Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET on BRAVO!, BookTelevision, and online at CTV.ca.
What the National Post's reviewers thought of the five Giller Prize nominees:
The Disappeared, by Kim Echlin (Hamish Hamilton; 224 pp.; $29) The impossibility of closure after great crimes is the subject of Toronto author Kim Echlin's absorbing novel, and she approaches her subject with the delicacy and solemnity it deserves. Her narrator is Anne Greeves, a middle-aged Montreal language instructor remembering her still raw-in-the-mind love affair with Serey, a Khmer exile 30 years before. When he returns to Cambodia, after the Vietnamese invasion and the fall of Pol Pot's regime, he disappears into a quagmire of political upheaval and killing. Galvanized by what she is sure is a glimpse of her lover on TV, Anne travels to Phnom Penh to find him. She succeeds, but he is soon gone again. The Disappeared penetrates to the aching core of the Cambodian tragedy — but its solemnity comes to seem more tragic pose than due regard for the dead, especially when it tips over into tendentiousness: "Get past the golden rule. Make the enemy inhuman. Call the enemy dog, snake, kraut, gook, kike, cockroach, slut, all that ugly talk." And there is something odd about a well-wrought treatment of chaos. Dark comedy or silence may be the only vehicles that can contain genocide without reducing it. Frank Moher, National Post
The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon (Random House; 304 pp.; $32.95) Lyon's first novel takes as its subject Philip of Macedon's decision, in 343 BC, to hire Aristotle to tutor his son, the future Alexander the Great. Thus, the man who believed that philosophical contemplation was the greatest form of human activity undertook to enlighten the heir of a regime based almost entirely on war and conquest. The title refers to Aristotle's notion that virtuous action is a "golden mean" between opposite extremes. True courage, for example, is found between the extremes of cowardice and rashness. Lyon clearly views this as more than a happy intellectual thought. "I had a need to avoid extremes," Aristotle confesses to his teacher, Plato, "perhaps because I was so subject to them." Lyon uses a number of narrative devices to emphasize the gulf between order and chaos, some of them questionable — language ("ballbusting," "amiable asshole") designed to put Aristotle on our plane, an emphasis on disgusting physical substances (excrement, a reference to "great green skeins of snot"), his view of women as defective males, his depiction as what could be viewed as bipolar. Finally, Lyon takes risks with technique in pursuit of immediacy, chiefly in her use of the present tense. This is infrequently used in fiction, for a reason. It encourages self-consciousness on the part of the narrator, it slows narrative momentum and it flattensout a multi-layered awareness of time. In this case, it heightens the already formidable difficulty of creating believable historical characters. Philip Marchand, National Post
The Bishop's Man, by Linden MacIntyre (Random House; 416 pp.; $32) Duncan MacAskill is a priest in his early fifties who has a history of providing useful services to his boss, a bishop determined to stifle any controversy involving wayward priests. By the 1990s, it has become more difficult to keep scandals hidden, and MacAskill has become too high-profile, as a dean at a Catholic university, so the bishop sends him to a backwater parish in Cape Breton. In Creignish, the fishing is poor, as are the people. MacAskill's flock take refuge in drink, and soon he joins them. CBC journalist MacIntyre gives us a study of a midlife crisis that's going to be a doozy. There's a newspaper reporter sniffing around, there's a local man acting strangely and an attractive single woman. Some readers might find MacIntyre's timeshifting a distraction, but, by and large, the author handles the various decades of his tale deftly. And as a Cape Bretoner, he brings the region vividly to life. Nicholas Pashley, National Post
Fall, by Colin McAdam (Hamish Hamilton; 354 pp., $32) Fall is narrated by two roommates at St. Ebury. Noel is the son of a Canadian diplomat stationed in Australia. He's bookish, obsessive and, because of a lazy eye and a violent outburst in Grade 9, a social also-ran. Julius, the son of the U. S. ambassador, is a golden boy. Good-looking and uncomplicated, Julius is the boyfriend of the most desirable female in the predominantly male student body and the book's title character, Fallon Fitzgerald DeStaad. Her disappearance off a trail in the woods — she is last seen by Noel, who has a crush on her — is the lightly plotted novel's central event. Alas, the mystery of Fall's disappearance is undermined as much by its inconclusive resolution as it is by Fall's thin characterization. In both Noel and Julius's renditions, the title character is never more than an object of gratified or ungratified desire. What saves Fall is McAdam's ability to upend the reader's expectations of his narrators. Noel goes from awkward underdog to suspect; Julius, he of the unexamined life, becomes more sympathetic as he experiences loss. In his take on the boarding-school novel, McAdam offers a portrait of male adolescence that's both empathetic and stylistically daring. Kevin Chong, National Post
The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels (McClelland & Stewart; 352 pp.; $32.99) Three sites of destruction feature prominently: The desert lands that were flooded by the construction of Egypt's Aswan Dam in the early 1960s, the Ontario farmlands and towns displaced by the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the early '50s and Warsaw, reduced to rubble by Hitler's army in '44. The link — aside from the attempt to mitigate destruction — is their presence in the mind of Jean Shaw. She meets her future engineer husband on the dried banks of a river diverted by Seaway construction, later accompanies him to help rescue the Abu Simbel temple from the Nile waters, and has an affair in Toronto with a Polish refugee from Warsaw. In a novel of this sort, there is no avoiding the curse of Michael Ondaatje. Michaels is no imitator — her gift is genuine — but her book breathes his spirit, as if Ondaatje has become part of a permanent literary cold front sweeping across Canada: the over-stuffed romanticism, the precious gestures that no normal human being would consider, the halting of narrative to focus on highly aesthetic tableaux, the odd little aphorisms. That some of these tableaux are beautiful and some of the aphorisms are apt is beside the point. They remain static. The exquisite moments continue to pile up until the reader loses a sense of whatever point the story as a whole is making.
Philip Marchand, National Post
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