The 2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has been won by Paul Verhaeghen for his huge novel Omega Minor, published by Dalkey Archive Press.
On a beautifully sunny evening at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, London, Verhaeghen gave an emotive acceptance speech in which he pledged the £10,000 prize money to an American civil liberties charity.
The prize money is usually divided between author and translator, but in this case Verhaeghen – as translator of his own work – scooped the lot.
Omega Minor is a sprawling novel that encompasses the Holocaust, Einstein, farce, mystery, sex and death. It was selected as the wiining book by the judges (Boyd Tonkin, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Kate Griffin and Florence Noiville) over five other compelling novels, which in turn had been chosen from a formidable longlist of seventeen.
Almost 100 novels and short-story collections published during 2007 were entered for the prize – up 10 per cent on last year's count.
The shortlist
The Model by Lars Saabye Christensen, translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Arcadia).
On the eve of a crucial new show, the stalled mid-career artist Peter Wihl discovers that he will soon lose his sight. Cue the painter's shocking quest to escape this looming hell, with a drastic reappraisal of his youth, and his family life, that shines light into dark corners. Pacy, sinister and far removed from all romantic clichés of the artist's life, Christensen's novel combines suspense and reflection as tension mounts, secrets unfold and a shattering climax ensues.
Castorp by Pawel Huelle, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Serpent's Tail)
In pre-First World War Danzig, the student Hans Castorp finds his German rationality upended by the passions and puzzles of the 'Slavic' east. Although he offers a 'prequel' to Mann's The Magic Mountain, Huelle marshalls irony, fantasy and intellectual debate into a self-standing picture of a place and an age. And he fashions a slyly comic but endearing portrait of an idealistic youth blundering, with the best of intentions, into the dangerous 20th century.
For more about English translations of Polish writing go to www.polishwriting.net
Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Carol Brown Janeway (Quercus)
Like a Viennese Tom Stoppard, Kehlmann pursues the parallel careers of two intellectual giants with sparkling wit and mischief. Of his two titans of the Enlightenment, the naive Humboldt travels the world, from South America to Russia, to name its places and species. The worldly Gauss stays at home in muddy Germany to revolutionise maths and physics. As he blends these twin streams of thought, Kehlmann dances on a tightrope between tribute and travesty.
The Way of the Women by Marlene van Niekerk, translated from Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns (Little, Brown)
In a South Africa emerging from its age of injustice, the infirm farmer Milla and her "coloured" servant, now carer, Agaat share a history of conflict and intimacy. In a polyphonic novel that sows many voices into its fertile soil, the women's world becomes a microcosm of a nation's trek out of the past. Diary entries, folklore, songs and stories ring the changes on a narrative that focuses a wide sweep of events and emotions into the bond of mistress and maid.
Gregorius by Bengt Ohlsson, translated from Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella (Portobello)
An archetypal villain of Swedish literature, Gregorius is the pompous, unsavoury pastor spurned by his wife in Soderberg's landmark novel of 1905, Doctor Glas. In Ohlsson's hands, he becomes a victim, even a hero. The first-person narrative presents a lonely and sensitive man trapped by his past and his role. Deftly plotted, movingly observed, this fictional act of redemption turns the tables on a classic, as the scapegoat buttonholes us in a seducer's voice.
Omega Minor by Paul Verhaeghen, translated from Dutch by the author (Dalkey Archive Press)
Moving between the 1930s and 1990s, spanning Nazi-era Berlin, modern Germany and the nuclear-research site at Los Alamos, Verhaeghen creates an epic, and a tragedy, of twentieth-century history. Einstein's lost theorem, the legacy of Auschwitz and the bitter rivalries of science fuse into a mind-stretching and heart-tugging whole. Farce, mystery and sheer stylistic brio enrich a dazzling exploration of the ideas and experiences at the roots of modern life.
