Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

I haven't read the Clegg novel - I was just curious if flipp felt it was a decline from the memoir (Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man).

I didn't realize that the movie Keep the Lights On was based on him, but I didn't care for the Sachs movie too much.

There are actually a couple "memoirs", 90 Days coming a few years later, but quite similar. It is possible I enjoyed his memoir work enough, the prose hitting far too close to home, I went into the novel too much as an apologist, inflicting exponential excitement from page 1 (despite the last 1/3 Silas encumbrance). Okri, do you agree with Flipp? Am I overstating? Similarly, I found I must have delved into A Little Life too late and (unfortunately) found it underwhelming, much in the same vein as The Sellout.

I did revisit Tsar again, it is a very special work, Marra will have a shelf full of accolades if he continues the trajectory of this following Constellation...

It's a quick enough read without being particularly special. Worth your time if not especially remarkable.

Okri wrote:What did you think of his autobiography?

I haven't read it. Good?

What did you think of his autobiography?

Bog wrote:If I was naming just 3 I'd cite Did You Ever Have A Family by Bill Clegg, Black River by SM Hulse (first novels both as well), and Tsar of Love and Tecno by Anthony Marra.

Am I the only one who thought Clegg's book was just kind of awful? I thought it read very much like an amateur first novel. It was multi-perspectival without fully taking advantage of its own structure, chock full of obvious and often cliched writing, a lack of narrative force in the storytelling (it was way too loaded with laborious, and not illuminating, backstory), etc. I really wanted to give it a chance because I'd heard so many great things about it and it was nominated for some of the same awards as A Little Life, so I thought it must be excellent. But I was really disappointed.

I'm sure you can guess which book I was rooting for to win the Pulitzer...

As many likely knew the Pulitzers were announced yesterday with The Sympathizer, a debut novel from Viet Thanh Nguyen, taking the fiction prize. He is a (clearly?) Vietnamese born American Studies professor from USC. His book is also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner but was basically a Juliette Binoche-esque name reading yesterday for those who follow the Pulitzer like we here do the Oscars...(I fall in both camps). It may not have been my ideal choice for top prize but may have been a personal finalist...it is admittedly a pretty fantastic book, especially being a first novel, and a very worthy winner in my opinion. For those interested it involves a Vietnamese double-agent and also includes a little allusion to an Apocalypse Now type movie set device.

Even moreso the 2 named finalists were as far down prediction lists as would be Rikki & the Flash and/or Suffragette for this previous Best Picture Oscar:

Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link
Maud's Line by Margaret Verble

If I was naming just 3 I'd cite Did You Ever Have A Family by Bill Clegg, Black River by SM Hulse (first novels both as well), and Tsar of Love and Tecno by Anthony Marra.

All 3 I had hoped were in the running, but in a season dominated by the Beatty, A Little Life, and Adam Johnson's Pulitzer follow-up, these 3 finalists and this winner were quite the surprise! (albeit for an award on the polar opposite spectrum from today's Oscars...no nominations, no finalists prior to a winner, and no media/online/campaign blitz available, even speculation available is conjecture from the dark)

A great season with lots of personally rewarding fiction released, worthy of awarding! Going forward, Proulx (previous winner) and Delillo (only a finalist) both will be releasing and factoring in for 2017.