The majority of the books nominated for this year’s International Booker Prize, the prestigious award for fiction translated into English, are under 200 pages long.
Only one is over 300 pages: Mircea Cartarescu’s 627-page “Solenoid,” translated by Sean Cotter. It is also one of the most high-profile novels on the list.
Many literary critics have long touted Cartarescu as a potential Nobel Prize laureate, and the Romanian author’s nominated tome concerns a schoolteacher reflecting on his life, family and disturbing dreams.
The other titles, announced by the prize organizers in London on Tuesday, include Saou Ichikawa’s 100-page “Hunchback,” translated from Japanese by Polly Barton, about the sexual desires of a disabled care home resident, and Solvej Balle’s 169-page “On the Calculation of Volume I,” translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, in which an antiquarian book dealer relives the same day over and again.
Max Porter, the chair of this year’s judging panel, said in an interview that the selection of so many short books didn’t reflect a “much-prophesied loss of attention span” among readers. The 13 titles were simply the best the panel had read, he added.
Some book award judges gravitate toward long novels, he added, thinking that writing longer is harder, but finessing a short novel was an equal challenge. “Some of these books don’t have a wasted word,” Porter said.
