Present day is characterized only and only through the recognition of awards and people know them likely. Literature in earlier times was about content, story line, visualization through words and not to forget the characters in them. Now a days everything becomes subsided when a tag of an award get attached to its cover page…getting nominated itself is an add on to the value of the book. With the rising standards of benchmarking, there are also awards that only consider those entries that are registered after paying fees. So this is where two of the most prestigious awards of literature come in the picture of today- Pulitzer Prize & Man Booker prize. Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition in the media. Whereas Man Booker prize only considers original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe.

Well, all of us or at least most of us familiar with the name of Mr Julian Barnes and Jennifer Egan; aren’t we? For those who aren’t aware, they are respective winners of Man Booker prize and Pulitzer award in the year 2011. Let’s peep into these books and see what was so special about them or are they worth their claim?

The sense of an ending by Mr Julian Barnes is a book that tells a story of a man trying to come in terms with his capricious past. Barnes has maintained his typical sense of lucidity, trademark precision, dexterity and insight in this book. The book is very precise in its telling with not a word washed out on its 150 pages. It is thought aggravating, beautifully pragmatic with just enough mystery to keep you turning the pages to find out what happened. By the time we finish it, it is not only the novel but the title also inspires us. It is a new learning on how a story is told!

The story revolves around Tony Webster and his school friends, who found their circle divided by a newcomer Adrian Finn; cleverer, more measured description of their ostentatious selves. The group submersed in the glower of this bright star. Finn brought a glimmer to their middle-class, suburban edition of the Sixties, when the sexual revolution had yet to explode. “Most people didn’t experience ‘the Sixties’ until the Seventies,” notes Tony. “Which meant, logically, that most people in the Sixties were still experiencing the Fifties.”

It is Tony’s mystified narration of the chronicles throughout, but he proves to be an undependable narrator. Later Tony leaves for university and his first relation – with an undergraduate Veronica begins. Tony faces sexual dissatisfaction, class divergence and youth anxiety, especially when Veronica shifts her interest to Adrian. Tony’s consequent years are relayed in shrill-stop fashion, and take the form of a dull tick-list: monotonous administrative job, boring wife, even a tedious divorce. Four decades next his story does get a jerk when a legacy casts a new glow on the past.

As a final note the writer tries to point out those memories, individual rather than collection accounts for who we were and what we are. An early memory is more precious, though it can be misconstrued. Its pressure can persevere throughout our life.

The second novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan is a collection of linked short stories. It is a book of a different genre, the sort that despite its sporadic stretching of limitations and definitions of what imaginary tale is and can be is finally satisfying only for Egan’s absolute good storytelling. It is filled of gaps, spaces joining stories go uncharted until almost 100 pages later, and various parts of characters’ lives are never explained or are only implicitly veiled at. It’s a powerful work for the ways Egan involves the booklover in the content; fine points that would in other works be major turning points are here only hinted at, pushing the reader to imagine the lives of the characters that Egan has scripted for us.

The stories revolve around a few protagonists who reappear a bit more often than others, and broadly around the American music scene: Lou, a coke-huffing, teenage-girl who seduces music producer in the 1970s, who becomes the counselor of an amateurish young bass player, Bennie, who becomes a music producer himself in later years, who hires a young woman, Sasha, who has a predicament with kleptomania, who sleeps with a youngster, Alex, who ends up hired by Bennie to coax the return of Bennie’s high-school friend Scott, and the story continues with lot many inter related characters who get jumbled up with their life’s goals.

Each chapter has its discrete voice and mood, varying from satire to farce, from melancholy to tragedy. She has been gifted with comic skills by which she has even turned a cruel rape scene into a hilarious affair. Egan has succeeded to create a humorous and creative book that is good and contains some stories that are truly great. It is an outstanding work of literature.

So readers what’s your say in this? Now that you are aware of the contents of both the award winning books…which among them do you think is actually worth the …or are they both? HAPPY reading!

By Poulomi, PGDM10 Vagamon Campus