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US writer wins top French literary prize

American author Richard Ford's novel "Canada" about a boy whose parents rob a bank on Wednesday won the Femina Prize for best foreign novel, one of France's top literary awards.

Published: 6 November 2013 17:55 CET

US writer wins top French literary prize

Richard Ford with his wife at the award ceremony (Thomas Samson/AFP) and the cover of his prize-winning novel

The Femina Prize is awarded in three categories — best French novel, best foreign novel and best essay — by an all-woman jury.

The Femina committee awarded its prize for best French novel to Cameroonian author Leonora Miano for "La Saison de l'ombre" ("The Season of Darkness") about the loss of loved ones experienced by sub-Saharan Africans during the slave trade.

Miano, who has lived in France since 1991, used her acceptance speech to denounce racist insults directed at the country's justice minister.

"It's not only the minister who is insulted, but all black people who are reduced to being animals (by this)," Miano said, referring to two occasions in the past month when Christiane Taubira has been publicly compared to a monkey.

Miano's novel "The Season of Darkness" ("La Saison de l'ombre") explores the loss of loved ones by sub-Saharan Africans during the slave trade.

"I am very happy, for everyone who feels a little avenged today," she said at the award ceremony in Paris. Miano has lived in France since 1991.

Earlier on Wednesday, Taubira made her first public comments about the racist taunts, warning of a rising tide of racism in France.

"It is not about careless little slips of the tongue, it is much more serious than that," she said in an interview with left-wing daily Liberation.

"Inhibitions are disappearing, dykes have been breached," she said.

The first time Taubira was compared to a monkey was by a group of children whose parents had taken them on a protest against gay marriage.

On the second occasion, the insult came from an electoral candidate of the far right National Front who wrote on her Facebook page that she would prefer to see the minister "swinging from the branches rather than in government".

Best essay went to Jean-Paul and Raphael Enthoven for a work entitled "Dictionnaire amoureux de Proust".

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'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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