Word: goncourt
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...Gallic Streicher or an urban Schweitzer? His books illustrate rather than resolve the paradox. When Journey to the End of the Night detonated on the French literary scene in 1932 (there were riots when it did not receive that year's Prix Goncourt), it was like an explosion of excrement. The doctor who had a profound vocation for healing wrote of his pitiable patients with derision and rage. If he was antiSemitic, he also detested Christians...
This picture of ritual life and death on an American fashion magazine brightens the pages of Ouhlier Palerme (To Forget Palermo), the novel that last week won France's celebrated Prix Goncourt. Though a colleague claims that the author "really saw this happen in New York," Edmonde Charles-Roux herself denies that Fair is a takeoff on Vogue, which employed her for 16 years. Curiously, the French lady was fired five months ago as editor of the French edition of Vogue, not for her macabre writing but, so she says, because she had argued that...
Thanks to the Prix Goncourt, Mile, Charles-Roux will certainly reap her own commercial benefits from the book. The Prix Goncourt novel each year makes just about everyone's Christmas shopping list, bringing sudden rewards to the hitherto unrecognized authors that it honors. Though Marcel Proust and Andre Malraux were among past winners, the jury-whose average age is 74-always picks a book that has enough pizazz for the mass reader. With its explicit sexual passages, Oublier Palerme could sell as many as 400,000 copies in France this year, will doubtless be quickly translated into English...
...Franchise prize for his Line Histoire Française a nostalgic reverie in which a man adjusts his boyhood dreams to the new conditions of France. Known as "The Immortals," the academy's haughty members are not too proud for infighting either, gained a publicity jump on the Goncourt by announcing their choice a few days before...
...Anna of the Five Towns, The Old Wives' Tale, the Clayhanger trilogy and Ricey-man Steps was also a superb storyteller and a literary innovator, a Dickens shorn of romanticism. By imposing on the sentimental Edwardian fabric the realistic techniques he had absorbed from such French masters as Goncourt, Flaubert, Maupassant and Turgenev (whom he insisted on calling French because it was in that language that he read him), Bennett became the first popular novelist of his time to tell of the actual lives of recognizable people in words that ordinary readers could understand. This was not a happy...