Bookplanet: foreigners clean up in French book awards

After Foreigners Take Four Top Book Awards, Is French Literature Burning? – by ALAN RIDING/NY Times

PARIS, Nov. 17 — French authors can hardly be faulted for not being productive: over the past two months, they have published no fewer than 475 new novels. Yet despite all this creative energy, probably the most striking feature of this fall’s literary season is that of six coveted book prizes, four went to novels written in French by non-French authors.

The New York-born writer Jonathan Littell took both the Goncourt and the Académie Française prizes for “Les Bienveillantes,” or “The Kindly Ones,” which has already sold some 280,000 copies. The Femina prize went to “Lignes de Fille,” or “Fault Lines,” by the Canadian-born novelist Nancy Huston, while “Mémoires du Porc-épic,” or “Memoirs of a Porcupine,” won the Renaudot prize for the French-Congolese author Alain Mabanckou.

French writers did win the Inter-allié and Médicis prizes, but there was yet another foreign footnote: the so-called Goncourt des Lycéens, awarded by a jury of high school students, went this year to “Contours du Jour Qui Vient,” or “Contours of the Day to Come,” by Léonora Miano, a 33-year-old author from Cameroon.

So what, if anything, does this say about the current state of French fiction? “I’d say it is a good thing because it shows that French literature is being enriched by people who bring their culture and background to the language,” said Antoine Audouard, a French novelist whose latest book, “Un Pont d’Oiseaux,” or “A Bridge of Birds,” contended for several prizes this fall. “For a long time, France did not recognize its Rushdies.”

In truth, no less than the Commonwealth writers who have influenced British fiction since the 1980s, many foreign-born authors have long chosen to write in French — notably the great 20th-century playwrights Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, but also novelists like Milan Kundera, Jorge Semprun, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Amin Maalouf and Andreï Makine.

The difference, however, is that French readers, critics and literary-prize jurors are now paying special heed to these so-called Francophone foreign writers. And one conclusion is that outside voices — and there are many more than this year’s prize-winners — are offering something absent in homegrown French fiction.

“It is not a coincidence,” said Mr. Semprun, a Spanish-born Francophone novelist who is also a member of the Goncourt jury. “These writers are more open to the world, more universal, less navel-gazing than some French writers.”

Mr. Audouard said that all too often French novels deal with “my suffering, my pain, my couple, my room.”

For this he blamed the continuing influence of the Nouveau Roman, or the New Novel, which, from the 1950s through experimental writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon, emphasized style over narrative.

“For many in France, style is still the most important factor,” he added.

Josyanne Savigneau, a literary critic at Le Monde, said that “compared to the 1960s, the French reading public wants to be told stories, but many French writers prefer to produce texts.” For this reason, she noted, relatively few contemporary French writers are published in translation. “When you’re following a story, it matters less how it is translated,” she added. “But translation is complicated when the text is minimalist and poetic.”

Conversely, the strong narrative content of much American and British fiction may well account for its popularity in France. Novels by John Irving , Danielle Steel and Ian McEwan are among current best sellers here, while Mary Higgins Clark, Patricia Cornwell, Jim Harrison, William Boyd and Paul Auster also have huge followings. In fact, along with the flood of new French-language novels, 207 novels were published in translation this fall.

Yet while American and British novelists fare well here, the number of living French writers who have had a major international impact of late is exactly one: Michel Houellebecq, whose books include, under their English titles, “The Elementary Particles,” “Platform” and “The Possibility of an Island.” For Ms. Savigneau, there is an explanation. “It’s good to have someone who tells stories,” she said.

Olivier Cohen, director of the French publishing house Éditions Olivier, also acknowledged that there was a message in this year’s literary prizes. “Perhaps it reflects the fact that French culture is less focused on Paris and France and more on the French language,” he said. “Some Francophone writers bring what Roland Barthes called ‘the exoticism of the little difference.’ And it must have made a difference with the public and the prize juries.”

But he added; “I think French literature is doing better and better. Fifteen years ago, it was in a bad state. But the past 10 years have brought great vitality.” He mentioned Jean-Paul Dubois and Jean Echenoz among writers who reflect this new spirit.

Still, only one French novel, “Suite Française” by Irène Némirovsky, has become a best seller in the United States and Britain in recent years — and it was written by a Russian-born Jewish author in the early 1940s before she was deported to a Nazi death camp. “It was a bit shocking that a rare French novel to do well was written 60 years ago and in an old-fashioned style,” Mr. Cohen conceded.

It is too early to gauge whether Mr. Littell’s 903-page novel, “Les Bienveillantes,” acquired in the United States by HarperCollins, will do as well, but this first-person “confession” by a murderous and perverted SS officer has still, in Mr. Semprun’s term, “squashed” all other new fiction here this fall. And even the 39-year-old American author seems taken aback. “It will take time and hindsight to explain its success,” he told Le Monde.