Bookplanet: French 9/11 novel wins Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

"Windows on the World" by French enfant terrible (along with Houllebecq) Frédéric Beigbeder has won the £10,000 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His novel portrays the final hours of a Texan real estate dealer and his sons in the restaurant at the WTC. Meanwhile a French writer in Paris tries to make sense of the event: so it's a story and an essay, a clever way to dealing with this defining tragedy.
Read more here and especially here. A recent New York Times review called Beigbeder "a hipster nihilist, a publicity hound, a jerk, a self-impressed renegade" and then asked "How is it... that he has written so funny and moving a book?" I guess that reviewer felt he had to get his anti-French licks in before he could give it the thumbs-up. Our Francophobia is as automatic as their anti-Americanism, and both are equally trite and tedious. I like this guy Beigbeder if only for this line he wrote in a recent article. He defended fiction against journalism, saying that the garrulous media "never speak about the important things in your life... Your memories, your loves, your family, the meaning of your existence, beauty, truth, all of that is in novels and nowhere else." You bet. If you want to learn about life anywhere and particularly in 18th century England, you read Middlemarch, not journalism. In novels are written the true history of humankind.