Hard to put down - a hectic but rewarding year in books
With publishing's future in flux, the trends, controversies, hits and misses of the year can seem a blur. James Kidd sifts through the chaos to make some sense of it all
It's never easy to summarise the literary year, but the challenge is greater still where 2012 is concerned.
Has the publishing industry experienced a busier, more diverse or more confusingly unstable 12 months? How would Twitter headline it? "Kindle. JKR vs ELJ. Mo Yan's Nobel. Mantel's Man Booker double. Shin Kyung-sook's Man Asian prize. Rushdie, Rushdie everywhere. Random Penguin." Paper books are dead? Long live Amazon. You see the problem. Far too many characters, in all senses of the word.
The year started - and to some extent ends - with Salman Rushdie. In January, the Jaipur Literary Festival was rocked by uncomfortable reminders of the fatwa issued in 1989. A planned video link-up with the novelist was cancelled after protests by Muslim activists threatened to escalate into violence. Festival organiser William Dalrymple reluctantly stopped the event, which inspired a different kind of protest: Hari Kunzru and journalist Amitava Kumar read from The Satanic Verses, which is still banned in India.
Rushdie's defiant response was a prologue of sorts to the long-awaited publication of Joseph Anton, a fascinating, if oddly unlikeable, account of his years living under the Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence. At least 2012 ended with a reminder of Rushdie's genius: Deepa Mehta's film adaptation of his masterpiece, Midnight's Children, was released into cinemas.
The other notable event for Rushdie-watchers was his condemnation of Mo Yan's Nobel Prize for literature. If the Nobel committee was hoping for some peace and quiet after Liu Xiaobo's peace prize in 2010, they were in for a shock. Highlighting Mo's refusal to sign a petition for Liu's release from prison, Rushdie called Mo "the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime".
At a press conference a couple of days before accepting the Nobel laureateship, Mo himself did little to cool tempers when he reiterated his controversial stance on censorship, which he compared to airport security: "I think these checks are necessary." Mo found an unlikely ally in novelist and critic Pankaj Mishra, who took Rushdie to task for his blinkered and narrowly Western perspective. Of course, Rushdie hit back, albeit in inelegantly negative form: "It is not for Mishra to tell me not to criticise the literature laureate Mo Yan for refusing to support him."
As Mishra notes, the saddest part of the spat was how it distracted attention from Mo's considerable contribution to Chinese and world literature. This was corrected somewhat by Per Wästberg, chairman of the Nobel committee, who praised Mo for narrating Chinese history "with his exaggerations, parodies and derivations from myths and folk tales". Far from being a patsy, Mo provides "a convincing and scathing revision of 50 years of propaganda … instead of communism's poster-happy history".