[New-Poetry] on the Goncourt

[Alexander Dickow]

All,
I'd recommend not getting to moist and excited about
Littell's winning the Goncourt. As a prize, it has a
notoriously spotty and inconsistent history (Celine's
Voyage to the End of the Night was turned down for a
very mediocre book that's been utterly forgotten, as
just one example), even more so than the Nobel (first
French Nobel: Sully-Prudhomme! blecch) or the others.
And yes, there is plenty of jockeying and editorial
politics around it: being involved regularly with
French editorial milieux, I can attest to the terrible
truth of the "it's who you know" principle (I can only
imagine American publishing's pretty much the same
game -- a comforting thought for little ol' rather
unpublished me ;)  ). 
But there are other reasons this is over-hyped. First,
my wife (who's French) was reading le Monde yesterday
online, and said the book is receiving pretty harsh
criticism ("apparently, the book isn't very good" she
reported to me while reading). Secondly, this is a
typical fictional memoire hit, and they're almost
always WAY overrated (and have been a la mode in
France these days: always a bad sign). Anyone read
Nemerovsky's _Suite francaise_ recently? Okay, it
ain't trash: but it's nothing very special either, and
from the standpoint of a dude with a commitment to
formal innovation, it's a zero. 
Oh, and by the way, the "literary meteor" metaphor is
an old one in France; Mallarme used it to describe
Rimbaud. Probably more accurately.
So, without having read the book, I judge, proclaim
and decree in entirely peremptory fashion that none of
you should bother reading this probably boring and
overrated book.
But then, maybe I'm wrong, right?
Yours,
Alex

www.alexdickow.net/blog/
   
  les mots! ah quel désert à la fin
  merveilleux. -- Henri Droguet