Booker Prize Winners

Are books that win The Man Booker prize always really hard to read? I've recently read The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, The Gathering by Anne Enright, and am now reading Waterland (not a winner) by Graham Swift, an author who won the award in the past. All of these novels are tough. I mean, obtuse and confusing, with kind of hard to follow sentences and a purposefully fuzzy sense of what's actually happening and fuzzy timelines.

Why?

Does being hard to read make something a better book? In the end, I would give The God of Small Things a favorable review, but I found it really tough to get into. Roy kind of put up walls of trickiness, not inviting at all. With The Gathering, I just didn't get it. I did not care for that book, plus, it was hard to read. These novels gave me a vague feeling that I have to fight to get through them, that somehow I had to get past all this challenging prose in order to get to the treasure at the center. Once I got to where I was supposed to go, the reward was not quite good enough.

So far I am enjoying Waterland, but it too is hard to follow, and not really in a good way. I'll report back as I read more, and maybe look for Swift's Last Orders (the Booker winner)to see how it measures up. I also happened to grab The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga at the Library this weekend, so maybe I'll have a go at it.

To be fair, I also have read The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, also a Booker Prize winner, and loved it very much. It was a couple years ago though, and I don't remember if it was difficult to read.