Reading the Booker International shortlist is to face a challenge of rhetorical styles. No two books are rhetorically similar. Perhaps their only rhetorical link is that each has been translated into English, each has morphed into a common language. Hebrew, French, Spanish, Norwegian, Danish–the nuances of difference have been somewhat flattened in accessibility.

While the stylistic differences are extreme, there is, however, a thematic similarity that ties the books together. In each novel a central intelligence has told his or her story of struggle to make sense of individual experience–childhood alienation, cultural contradistinction, adult dissonance. Each has probed his or her own experience in something of an obsession to find a pattern, to bring some sort of personal unity to the self facing a world of overwhelming disunity.   Together, they argue that each person must work out his/her own survival in some private place of the mind that processes events they are powerless to control.

A post two weeks ago on the Booker official page news noted that the bookies seemed uncertain of the odds in Booker betting. Schweblin was ahead but barely. On her heels was Grossman, Jacobsen, Enard, and Oz with Nors in last place. Those odds hold true today. If they are any indication of this week’s prize announcement, they place a premium on the shorter read and the more experimental forms. Both Schweblin and Grossman are highly innovative in the ways their stories are realized. Form dictates function. Both play off the interaction of a central narrator with a subordinate narrator who shares the angst and provides a seer’s mentality to the action. Enard and Jacobsen in opposing ways introduce readers to highly individualistic experience. The pleasure comes in the collage of details–the minimalist and the encyclopedic. In contrast, Oz and Nors seem highly traditional in working out the journey motif to personal realization.

If I ranked the books by my own reader preferences, I would start with Jacobsen and move to Nors. Toss up Oz and Grossman, and marginalize Schweblin and Enard.

If I speculate on the committee’s choice, I’ll guess that the winner will be Grossman or Enard, possibly Jacobsen or Schweblin. We’ll see Wednesday.