Kiran Desai made the Booker Prize longlist for The Inheritance of Loss today:

… several books on the longlist — including Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Robert Edric’s Gathering the Water — … reflected the particularly contemporary theme of displacement. [Link]

Desi American author Naeem Murr, who’s originally from Britain, was nominated for The Perfect Man. Like last year’s nominee Arthur & George (Julian Barnes), the novel features a part-desi protagonist. Rajiv Travers grows up desi in the American Midwest, like many of Bharati Mukherjee’s characters:

Rajiv Travers is the issue of a brief, ill-considered marriage between an Englishman and an Indian mother he never knows. Dumped first on an uncle’s family in London aged five, at 12, this elusive boy, already uncertain of his cultural identity, is pushed off on yet another uncle in tiny Pisgah [Missouri]. [Link]

Armed with a “delicately responsive face” and a mixture of Indian and English qualities of subtlety, cleverness, humour and perception, he ducks and swerves through the storm of inevitable racial insults - monkey, nigger, black bastard, Gunga, shit-wallah. One wonders, however, why Murr chose to make him half-Indian. There is virtually nothing else in the book - story, people, smells, colours - that resonates with anything Indian. The only memory Rajiv seems to have about India is that somebody there once gave him water from a wooden bowl; the other references are exaggerated stories about human sacrifices, elephants and buffalo dung that he makes up to amuse his friends or confound his tormentors…

The Perfect Man is very different from the immigrant novels currently being written at a great rate by Indian and Pakistani writers… In the end, The Perfect Man is not an Indian or an immigrant novel; it is a very American novel, influenced by William Faulkner. It succeeds in recreating an entire world with a full spectrum of human emotions in a small Missouri town… [Link]

Here’s an excerpt:

“Tati jana hai [I need to go potty],” the boy said, whimpering.

“English, Raj.” Gerard pulled him up the steps. “And stop eating your hand…”

Then she frowned, noticing something: a constellation of dark spots on the rug beneath him.

“Oh, oh, oh!” She shouted and jumped to her feet. Gerard flinched, as if afraid she were going to strike him. She picked the boy up by his waist. Brown streams braided his bare legs…

Hurrying out, she returned a few minutes later with a bucket of soapy water and a cloth. As she got on her knees, though, something seemed to occur to her. Looking furiously up at Gerard, who had sat on the couch again, she flung the wet cloth into his lap.

“He’s your son. You clean it up!”

Helplessly, Gerard examined the cloth until Brenna, with a strangled squeal, snatched it back and began to scrub frantically at the rug. [Link]

Murr previously wrote The Boy.

Hisham Matar, a Londoner who grew up in Libya and Egypt, was nominated for In the Country of Men:

This time, the list includes a debut novelist, Hisham Matar, whose In the Country of Men is a story of personal and political oppression set in Libya.

The Times had described it as an “extraordinary first novel”, a universal cry of an innocent victim of institutional sadism. Professor Lee said: “It’s told as if by a child under Gaddafi’s regime in Libya, and told retrospectively. It’s about what it’s like to be growing up in an environment which is deeply repressive. It’s almost Camus-like.” [Link]

Peter Carey, who’s won twice before for Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of the Kelly Gang, was nominated again for Theft: A Love Story.

Here’s the complete list of nominees:

Peter Carey for Theft: A Love Story (Faber & Faber). He has written nine novels, including the Man Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of the Kelly Gang

Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss (Hamish Hamilton). The Indian-born author wrote Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

Robert Edric for Gathering the Water (Doubleday). He was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2002 for Peacetime

Nadine Gordimer for Get a Life (Bloomsbury). The South African received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991

Kate Grenville for The Secret River (Canongate). She won the Orange Prize for The Idea of Perfection

M. J. Hyland for Carry Me Down (Canongate). The Londoner lives and works in Melbourne

Howard Jacobson for Kalooki Nights (Jonathan Cape). The novelist and broadcaster lectured at the University of Sydney for three years before returning to England where he taught English at Selwyn College

James Lasdun for Seven Lies (Jonathan Cape). The Londoner lives in New York and has published collections of poetry and short stories

Mary Lawson for The Other Side of the Bridge (Chatto & Windus). She was born and brought up in a farming community in Ontario and now lives in England with her husband

Jon McGregor for So Many Ways to Begin (Bloomsbury). The Bermudan-born author who lives in Nottingham was the only first-time novelist on the 2002 Man Booker longlist

Hisham Matar for In the Country of Men (Viking). He was born in New York and spent his childhood in Libya and Egypt. He has lived in London since 1986

Claire Messud for The Emperor’s Children (Picador). Her first novel, When the World was Steady, was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award

David Mitchell for Black Swan Green (Sceptre). He spent several years teaching in Japan and now lives in Ireland with his wife and two children

Naeem Murr for The Perfect Man (William Heinemann). His acclaimed first novel The Boy was published in 1998.

Andrew O’Hagan for Be Near Me (Faber & Faber). He was nominated in 2003 by Granta magazine as one of 20 Best of Young British Novelists

James Robertson for The Testament of Gideon Mack (Hamish Hamilton). His first novel, The Fanatic, was published in 2000.

Edward St Aubyn for Mother’s Milk (Picador). His previous novels include A Clue to the Exit

Barry Unsworth for The Ruby in her Navel (Hamish Hamilton). His Sacred Hunger won the Booker in 1992

Sarah Waters for The Night Watch (Virago). Her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, won the 1999 Betty Trask Award [Link]

Related posts: TODAY: Kiran Desai reading, The tree groom, India: A Million Slush Pile Rejects Now, ‘The Inheritance of Loss’, I coulda been a contendah, The Prophecy, Booker ‘em, Dano