The dope: for Booker junkies

You know what's great about the selfless promotion of the joy of literature and the love of the reading habit we call the Booker Prize?
The gossip.
First off the mark, Boyd Tonkin, who served as a Booker judge in 1999, the year fellow judge John Sutherland memorably shot off his mouth (link thanks to Zafar, Richa):

From The Independent:

"The professor's distorted leaks attributed to us views we never held. He unpleasantly hinted that some judges felt uneasy about the " anti-Zionist sentiments" of Ahdaf Soueif's short-listed novel The Map of Love, a claim that prompted poisonous racist innuendos against Mr Kaufman in the Arabic media. He falsely wrote that no one really liked that year's outstanding winner, J M Coetzee's Disgrace. And he sneered at the exhausting, life-consuming process by saying Coetzee had won merely "a lottery not a literary competition".

And:

"Yet if the Establishment cabal behind the Man Booker sought a literary rerun of Reservoir Dogs by promoting Professor Sutherland, the opposite has happened. This selection reads more like an invitation to an upmarket vicarage tea-party than to a showdown in a blood-stained warehouse. It has to be said that the overwhelming feature of the 2005 long-list is just how orthodox, inoffensive, and non-contentious it looks. This is a bien pensant list for, and from, bien pensant readers. It will ruffle few feathers and frighten few horses.

Then there's the Thoroughly Pointless Analysis:

From The Observer:
"From a glance at the volumes which have now made the 'semi-final', though, it is the talent of jacket designers which leaps out. Like 17 chocolates in a box, all the titles look enticing."

And the inside dope on Ian McEwan and John Banville, who're both on the longlist. Two months ago, Banville ripped apart McEwan's Saturday in the NYRB, in the fashion of a gently sorrowing but stern priest faced with an erring choirboy.

TEV posted the review on his blog, with comments:

"Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.—are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew."

And a day after the longlist announcement was made, Rushdie called for an Islamic reformation, sparking fears that he might find himself under attack once again.

Countercurrents has the text here:

"What is needed is a move beyond tradition -- nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air.It would be good to see governments and community leaders inside the Muslim world as well as outside it throwing their weight behind this idea, because creating and sustaining such a reform movement wil lrequire above all a new educational impetus whose results may take a generation to be felt, a new scholarship to replace the literalist diktats and narrow dogmatisms that plague present-day Muslim thinking...
...If, however, the Koran were seen as a historical document, then it would be legitimate to reinterpret it to suit the new conditions of successive new ages. Laws made in the seventh century could finally give way to the needs of the 21st. The Islamic Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance of the concept that all ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to altered realities.

Also:
Interviews with longlist contenders:

The Observer on James Meek (The People's Act of Love)
The Independent on Harry Thompson (This Thing of Darkness)
The Observer on Julian Barnes (Arthur and George)
The New Straits Times on Tash Aw (The Harmony Silk Factory)

And Edinburgh is thrilled. The literary festival will see 11 out of the 17 writers on the longlist dropping by--nice planning there.