Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [25]
Mention must also be made of Histoire d’O (Story of O), the highly erotic sadomasochistic novel written by Dominique Aury under a pseudonym in 1954. It sold more copies than any other contemporary French novel outside France.
In 1980 Marguerite Yourcenar, best known for her memorable historical novels such as Mémoires d’Hadrien (Hadrian’s Memoirs), became the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française. Several years later Marguerite Duras came to the notice of a larger public when she won the Prix Goncourt (boxed text) for her novel L’Amant (The Lover) in 1984.
Philippe Sollers was one of the editors of Tel Quel, a highbrow, then left-wing, Paris-based review that was very influential in the 1960s and early 1970s. His 1960s novels were highly experimental, but with Femmes (Women) he returned to a conventional narrative style.
Another editor of Tel Quel was Julia Kristeva, best known for her theoretical writings on literature and psychoanalysis. In recent years she has turned her hand to fiction, and Les Samuraï (The Samurai; 1990), a fictionalised account of the heady days of Tel Quel, is an interesting document on the life of the Paris intelligentsia. Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault are other authors and philosophers associated with the 1960s and ’70s.
So-called accessible contemporary authors who enjoy a wide following include Patrick Modiano, Yann Queffélec, Pascal Quignard, Denis Tillinac and Nicole de Buron, a very popular mainstream humour writer whose books sell in the hundreds of thousands. Fred Vargas is a popular writer of crime fiction.
More-serious authors whose careers and works are closely scrutinised by the literary establishment and the well-read include Jean Echenoz, Nina Bouraoui, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Annie Ernaux and Erik Orsenna. Others are Christine Angot, ‘la reine de l’autofiction’ famous for her autobiographical novels, the best-selling novelist Marc Levy, and Yasmina Khadra, a former colonel in the Algerian army who adopted his wife’s name as a nom de plume.
Two recent winners of the Prix Goncourt have been controversial for rather less-than-literary reasons. Jonathan Littell, who took the prize in 2006 for Les Bienveillantes, is actually a New York–born American, though he was largely educated in France and writes in French. And it wasn’t enough that the original title of Gilles Leroy’s award-winning Alabama Song was in English, the theme – the story of the descent into madness of Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of novelist F Scott Fitzgerald and written in the first person – is centred squarely on the other side of the puddle.
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AND THE WINNER IS…
Like the UK’s Booker or the Pulitzer in the USA, the Prix Goncourt (Goncourt Prize) is the most highly respected and coveted literary prize in France, awarded annually since 1903 to the best volume of imaginative work in prose published during that year. In the event of a tie, novels are to be given preference over collections of short stories or sketches. The winner is announced by the 10-strong Académie Goncourt each year at the Drouant, a swanky restaurant in the 2e arrondissement. Though the prize comes with a purse of less than €10, it guarantees much media attention and soaring sales.
Among writers who have won the Prix Goncourt in the past and are still read are Marcel Proust (1919), André Malraux (1933), Julien Gracq (1951), Simone de Beauvoir (1954) and Marguerite Duras (1984). Winners in recent years:
2002 Pascal Quignard, Les Ombres Errantes (Wandering Shadows)
2003 Jacques-Pierre Amette, La Maîtresse de Brecht (Brecht’s Mistress)
2004 Laurent Gaudé, Le Soleil des Scorta (The House of Scorta)
2005 François Weyergans, Trois Jours chez Ma Mère (Three Days at My Mother’s)
2006 Jonathan Littell, Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones)
2007 Gilles Leroy, Alabama Song
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PHILOSOPHY
France may be one of the few countries in the world to require its secondary-school students to demonstrate a solid mastery of philosophical concepts