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Italian wins Bad Sex in Fiction Award for ‘dancing genitals’

It's an award he probably didn't want to add to his collection, but a prolific Italian novelist was on Wednesday awarded the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for a depiction of love-making which compared genitals to ballet dancers.

Published: 1 December 2016 14:55 CET

Italian wins Bad Sex in Fiction Award for 'dancing genitals'

Erri De Luca. Photo: Marco Bertorello/AFP

Erri De Luca, who was hailed by Il Corriere della Sera as Italy's 'writer of the decade' in 2009, won the award for novel The Day Before Happiness – his first to be translated into English.

Judges singled out a scene depicting a Neapolitan orphan having sex with a mysterious woman he has been watching from afar.

It included the line “my body was her gearstick”, and went on to say: “Our sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe.”

Then the passage took on a more sinister air. De Luca wrote: “Not only my prick, but the whole of me entered her, into her guts, into her darkness, eyes wide open, seeing nothing. My whole body had gone inside her.”

The author was unable to attend the prize-giving in London, and his publisher accepted the dubious accolade on his behalf.

His writing beat off tough competition from other novels that compared sex to “hanging out wet washing” and “a brisk tennis game”.

The Bad Sex award was set up in 1993, to “draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction”.

In 2015, it was won by singer Morrissey for his debut novel List of the Lost, where he described the protagonists' “sexually violent rotation” as a “snowball of full-figured copulation”.

De Luca's first novel, Non ora, non qui (Not then, not now) was published in 1989 and he has gone on to write several international bestsellers.

He works as a translator alongside his career as a poet and novelist. He is also known for his environmental campaign and in particular his opposition to a high-speed rail link between Lyon and Turin. In October 2015, he was cleared of inciting criminal damage after calling for the project to be sabotaged.

The Bad Sex Award will go alongside several other literary awards De Luca has scooped, including the European Prize for Literature and the France Culture Prize.

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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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