Man Booker Prize - 3 Quarks Daily

by Leanne Ogasawara

Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for fiction this year, Sanam Mahloudji’s The Persians is a multi-generational novel about a wealthy Persian family, told from the points-of-view of five of the family’s women. Starting the novel, I was expecting a fun romp with a group of extremely glamorous Persian ladies. You know, Chanel suits and amazing shoes. And the novel did open with a wild night: the American branch of the family is partying on vacation in Aspen (where else?), when Aunt Shirin is arrested for prostitution, accused of soliciting an undercover cop in a bar.

A ridiculous idea that Shirin is struggling to take seriously even after she spends the night in jail. After all, she is rich beyond belief, the descendant of a great Persian war hero, if you believe all those old stories, plus the family are hereditary landowners.

This wealth being the center of everything.

The story starts with the matriarch of the story Elizabeth, who falls in love with the chauffeur’s son, not something done back in the day. And then when things get iffy with the Shah and revolution seems possible, Elizabeth’s daughters, including Shirin and family decide to take a short trip to Paris, to wait it out. Fully expecting to return to Iran, Shirin agree when Grandma Elizabeth informs Shirin that her daughter Niaz wants to stay behind in Iran with grandma. That Paris holiday turns into twenty-seven years with Shirin and family eventually settling in Houston and Niaz staying behind with her grandma in Tehran.

Because the family is separated into the bilinguals in America and the Persians who stayed behind, Shirin’s words at the start of the novel have real impact.

“We didn’t come here for a better life. We left a better life.”

It is a startling comment since at one point her daughter Niaz has been jailed by the Revolutionary Guards and has had to lead a life much more circumscribed than Shirin’s drug-fueled wildly extravagant lifestyle. But the more you read, the more you wonder about happiness. First of all, Shirin has basically been profiled and racially targeted by the white policeman in Aspen. That is what her lawyer says. But Shirin dismisses this since because she says, she doesn’t even have dark skin and also because she is convinced that the cop desired her for real and that –just like everywhere else in the world—he was a man struggling with how to contain and control a strong woman. In fact, she was just playing along with him, because she was bored and drunk.

They still have all their money and live like royalty so why does she feel she had a better life in Iran? Read more »

by Ryan Ruby

Pilgrimsprogressbook This month, two minor controversies revived the specter of the “language wars” and reintroduced the literary internet to the distinction between prescriptivism and descriptivism. One began when Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian won the Man Booker Prize and readers took to their search engines en masse to look up the word “Kafkaesque,” which had been used by the book's publishers and reviewers to describe it. Remarking upon the trend, Merriam-Webster noted sourly: “some argue that ‘Kafkaesque' is so overused that it's begun to lose its meaning.” A few weeks before, Slate's Laura Miller had lodged a similar complaint about the abuse of the word “allegory.” “An entire literary tradition is being forgotten,” she warned, “because writers use the term allegory to mean, like, whatever they want.”

When it comes to semantics, prescriptivists insist that precise rules ought to govern linguistic usage. Without such rules there would be no criteria by which to judge whether a word was being used correctly or incorrectly, and thus no way to fix its meaning. Descriptivists, by contrast, argue that a quick glance at the history of any natural language will show that, whether we like it or not, words are vague and usage changes over time. The meaning of a word is whatever a community of language users understands it to mean at any given moment. In both of the above cases, Merriam-Webster and Miller were flying the flag of prescriptivism, protesting the kind of semantic drift that results from the indiscriminate, over-frequent usages of a word, a drift that has no doubt been exacerbated thanks to the internet itself, which has increased the recorded usages of words and accelerated their circulation.

Tag: Man Booker Prize

Other Selves

Monday, May 30, 2016

The Prescriptivist’s Progress