Monthly Archives: November 2011
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Semifinal 2 – Tournament of Books: My Brilliant Career vs The Fortunes of Richard Mahony
Posted on November 17, 2011 by hilary in Blog PostsVS This is torture. Two dead white women whose books feel like friends — and I am already deep in subjectivity. They sort of map my life. Once a fierce nineteen year old like Miles Franklin’s Stella/Sybylla, I was determined not to get snagged in convention or my mother’s life. I once loved a brilliant Mahony of a man whose life and death followed something of the same dark passage. I was sent to wander the National Gallery once in search of paintings for the paperback covers of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony — which in 1969 had just been declared by the UK company good enough to wear ‘Penguin livery’ — as they called it back then. Both books are now in Penguin Classics and are slugging it out in a tournament that feels more like kick-boxing than tennis. Judging literary awards can be a snitch, choosing what gets published, no problem. A tournament is something else again. There’s staying power, performance, the roar of the crowd on the day. What the books are about matters and though written more than twenty years apart by very different women who didn’t much admire each other, they have much in common. Both …
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