TORONTO - When asked about his latest novel, "More," making the long list for the coveted Giller Prize, Austin Clarke acknowledges the recognition briefly before changing the subject, telling stories of everyday life in Toronto.
He took his camera to a shop for a roll of film. While the employee was putting the film in, a tiny screw fell out. She couldn't get it back in, and sent him to another shop.
Try as he might, the man behind the counter there couldn't fix it either and sent him to yet another shop, where a man spent considerable time repairing the camera -- and wouldn't charge him for it.
"I thought it was such a gesture," says Clarke, who then describes another scenario.
He went walking along downtown Queen Street and saw a huge truck trying to reverse into three car spaces. A passerby helped direct the driver while people gathered, watching "in wonder" at the manoeuvrability of the vehicle and the talent of its driver.
After witnessing this, Clarke says he went home and wrote two "wonderful pages" of the novel he's working on.
"We do not spend as much time as we ought to in feeling good about ourselves and our environment," says Clarke.
In 2002 the Barbadian-born author won the Giller for "The Polished Hoe." It was a major breakthrough after a long career that produced 10 novels, five short-story collections and several books of memoirs.
Six years later, he says making the Giller long list for "More" is equally, if not more, exciting.
"I used to pretend that I was impervious to any emotion that came from that kind of recognition. But now I am able, I suppose because I'm older, . . . to enjoy some of the desires that every writer certainly has in his mind when he is writing, that the book is successful and that the book wins a prize," says the 74-year-old Clarke.
"I'm being proper in accepting life's little wonders and gifts without being arrogant and criticizing them, either their frequency or their credence."
Clarke says he finished "More" for the first time in 1987 and since then completed about a dozen revisions, some of which he was admittedly not fond of.
The book takes place during four days in which Idora Morrison does not leave her Toronto basement apartment. But in her thoughts the Barbadian immigrant, whose husband abandoned her years before and whose son has fallen into an unfathomable world of violence and gangs, relives her life.
The minute details that form Idora's existence are painstakingly accounted for, from her youth in Barbados to the way she cuts a certain slice of meat to what headlines she reads over people's shoulders on subways and streetcars.
"I thought it was important to bring the camera closer to her. I thought it was important to follow her in ways that one wouldn't normally think about," says Clarke. "And I think that -- and I might be a bit immodest in saying this -- (the book has) elevated the ordinary to a more dramatic interpretation."
"More" has been billed by publisher Thomas Allen as "perhaps the most political" of all his novels, but Clarke is ambivalent about that description.
"The book deals in an equally or even more significant way about behaviour, personal behaviour, the idiosyncrasies of friendship," says Clarke. "Friendship is not like Yonge Street where you walk and after a couple of miles you'll still be on Yonge Street. It zigzags."
Still, Idora spends a lot of time seething about the racism that still exists in Canada, and her situation itself is political: a single mother living in poverty, struggling to find a place for herself in Canada.
"(The story) gives credence, I think, to the biography of a person in that situation. It gives dignity to a person in that situation," Clarke says.
Idora carries on extensive inner dialogues about newspaper stories reporting on an endless series of young black men killing each other, about young black men leaving and condemning black women to a lifetime of single motherhood, as well her own feelings of acceptance and prejudice.
She seethes at many white Canadians' habit of asking her where she is from, and even when she replies that she has lived in Toronto for 25 years, they still ask, "But, where are you from?"
Clarke says his literature, including this book, is not meant to make sociological points, although "More" does bear witness through the eyes of its protagonist and, at times, criticize.
"It is a harsh criticism, I admit that, but that was deliberate," Clarke says. "I hope it was realistic."
The shortlist for the Giller will be announced Oct. 7.
