O n October 25, 2016, Paul Beatty was announced as the most recent winner of the Man Booker Prize. This outcome surprised many observers because Beatty’s novel The Sellout is not conventional Booker material. For one thing, it is not a historical novel, like previous winners The English Patient, Midnight’s Children, or Hilary Mantel’s two fictions about Thomas Cromwell at the court of Henry viii. It is instead a contemporary tale, fantastically detached from the sensation of reality. Mordant and scarifying, it also manages to be laugh-out-loud funny. In its forty-seven-year history, the Booker Prize has not often shown much interest in comedy and, when it has, it has favored a wry version, a collection of mild ironies in the Henry-James-doeshumor mode.

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关于布克奖

2016 年 10 月 25 日，保罗·比蒂被宣布为最近的曼布克奖得主。这一结果令许多观察家感到惊讶，因为比蒂的小说《出卖》不是传统的布克材料。一方面，它不是一部历史小说，就像之前的获奖者《英国病人》、《午夜之子》或希拉里·曼特尔 (Hilary Mantel) 在亨利八世宫廷中关于托马斯·克伦威尔 (Thomas Cromwell) 的两部小说一样。相反，它是一个当代故事，与现实的感觉完全脱节。既尖锐又伤人，它也设法让人大笑起来。在其 47 年的历史中，布克奖对喜剧并不经常表现出太大的兴趣，当它出现时，它更喜欢讽刺的版本，以亨利-詹姆斯-doeshumor 模式收集温和的讽刺。