With the 2010 Man Booker Prize announcement just over a week away, let’s take a quick look back. The Booker is one of world’s top literary prizes, and Booker prize winners are regarded as highly influential books. So what effect did last year’s winner, Hilary Mantel’s wildly popular Wolf Hall, have?
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In a Strange Room ­­chronicles Damon’s travels as he journeys from Greece, to various countries in Africa, to India. Traveling, in general, disorients. We are displaced from our normal locations, we are observing places that are not our own, and our minds constantly compare the new, foreign place with the familiar one. Like Rimbaud’s process of becoming a seer, the state of traveling might be a process by which we project toward the unknown by a derangement of the senses. To travel is to step into a sort of duality.

Unlike the memoirist, who promises to tell the truth, the fiction writer says, “I am going to tell you a lie, but at the end you will feel it is true.” He or she is a kind of magician who makes sure you know the flames are only an illusion before letting you burn your fingers.

Divisadero follows three characters through childhood to adolescence on a farm in Northern California’s gold country, a world where the boom is long gone but danger and desperation linger.