Reading through the Shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction

 

When the shortlist for the Women’s Prize for fiction was announced in April this year, I decided to make an honest attempt to read all the books before the Prize was announced. Of the six books, only one (The Persians) was already on my TBR, and one other author (Elizabeth Stout) was on my list to explore. But the blurbs seemed interesting, so why not?

I read Sanam Mahloudji’s “The Persians” a couple of weeks after the shortlist was announced. I love multigenerational sagas, especially those featuring women, and this ticked all the boxes. The book starred a matriarch who’d fallen in love with an unsuitable boy but married someone the family approved of, her daughters who escaped to the United States, one granddaughter who stayed behind in Iran, and another who grew up in the US. Persian society seems as classist as Indian society, and I was literally transposing the characters into the Indian context while reading the book. Though it gives the illusion of being an easy read, it asks important questions, and leaves you to seek the answers yourself.
[A promising start. One down, five to go!]

The rest of April passed by without me with me reading any of the other shortlisted titles, and by the end of the month I realised that if I don’t start soon, I will never finish on time.
The second book I read was the audiobook version of Elizabeth Strout’s “Tell Me Everything”- it was a bit of a gamble because I hadn’t been able to finish the only other full length fiction audiobook, but the backup plan was to shift to the digital book if this didn’t work out. The book was unexpectedly good. It is a gentle exploration of people, the burdens they carry and the way they interact with each other. There is no judgement, just an empathetic acceptance that people act the way they do because of the experiences they had growing up. It is the fifth book in the series, but it was easy to ease into the narrative, even without the benefit of the backstory.
[Two down, four to go!]

While I was trying to decide which book to pick up next, my friend Menaka Raman published an article on Miranda July’s “All Fours”, proclaiming it the “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret for perimenopausal women”. How could I resist a resounding recommendation like that? Unfortunately, the book just didn’t work for me. I struggled to relate to the protagonist; her anxieties and her unfulfilled sexual energy. While I totally agree there should be more books that talk about peri-menopause, I would prefer a book which explores it with more sensitivity and nuance than this. I know people love the book, but it just didn’t work for me.
[Three down, three to go!]

I went into a bit of a slump after this, and we were well into June when I picked up the fourth book, Aria Aber’s “Good Girl”. This is the story of the daughter of Afghan refugees who is born in Germany and is forced to confront growing Islamophobia and the disapproval of her community as she struggles to discover herself. I couldn’t really identify with the protagonist and her almost self-destructive tendencies, but the story was told with so much empathy that I really wanted to shake sense into her and get her to accept how precious she was. While this may not have been a book I would have actively sought out, it did give me a very different perspective to the immigrant experience- the confusion of the children born in the foreign land.
[Four down, two to go]

I would normally not have read Nussaibah Younis’ “Fundamentally” right after Good Girl, since there were many superficial similarities between them. But with barely a week to go, I had no choice. Here too, the protagonist is the daughter of Muslim immigrants who is in conflict with her surviving parent and is fearless in exploring her sexuality. But the two books couldn’t have been more different. The tension between the protagonist and her mother is explored in greater detail, and there is an uneasy resolution towards the end of the book where both learn to cherish their similarities and respect their differences. The book is also a light-hearted exploration of how international development agencies function in third world countries, and became my personal favourite to win the Prize.
[Five down, one to go].

I had found the blurb of Yael van der Wouden’s “The Safekeep” rather contrived when I first came across the book, but with it being the only book left, I could no longer put off reading it. I was in for a pleasant surprise. The book drew me in from the very first page where the protagonist finds a shard of her mother’s dinner plate while gardening. There was a timelessness to the story. Neither of the two main protagonists were loveable, but you were emotionally invested in both of them. The book was a story of the kind of love that is not spoken about, but it was also about people’s blindness towards historical wrongs. The themes of displacement, longing and belonging emerge in many of the books on the shortlist, but they are probably explored most beautifully in this tender book.
[Mission accomplished].

While each of the books on the shortlist is distinctly different from the others, there are patterns that emerge. Three of the books feature protagonists are bisexual (and one has a lesbian couple), and the exploration of their sexuality is a major theme in the books. Four books are built around themes of displacement and religious persecution, of which three are told from the perspective of the oppressed. Unlike in last year’s shortlist, all the books this year are majorly set in the United States or Europe, though, like last year, many of the perspectives are of people of colour.

If I were to pick my favourite, it would be “The Safekeep”, followed by “Fundamentally”. Let’s see what the Jury decides.