Submitted by joy storie, Nov 13, 2006 01:03

The point of the International Man Booker prize as I understand it, is not just to please the Americans, but to expand consciousness of other cultures and other ways of seeing the world through literature. All of us know far too little as we go global, about the cultures of countries with which we trade. There is precious little effort by intelligence agencies and departments of foreign affairs around the world put into learning languages and customs of those on whom they report. And the canon of English literature is very fine indeed, but do we know more than a handful of authors of the best writing from other cultures? I think not. Translation, especially of literary works is fiendishly challenging, so it's not surprising, but regrettable that much of the best literary work remains unrecognised in the west. Albania is a specially difficult country to understand because its language is so different and it was virtually cut off for so long. The communist legacy, first of Maoists and then Stalinists is complicated because undoubtedly the latter stamped out to at least to a certain extent some very unsavoury practices based on codes requiring an endless cycling of blood feuds requiring vengeance and destoyed some of the key centres administering them. Like everything else, there are two sides of that debate to be considered. It's not a simplistic case of communists = bad versus everything else = better. I'm delighted that Mr Kadare won the inaugural prize and wish him well as he continues to write in France.

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