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LITERATURE

Siri Histvedt scoops Spain’s top literary award

US writer Siri Hustvedt on Wednesday was awarded Spain's prestigious Princess of Asturias prize for literature for her work which the jury said was among "the most ambitious on today's literary scene"

Siri Histvedt scoops Spain's top literary award
US writer Siri Hustvedt has been awarded Spain's prestigious Princess of Asturias prize. Photo: Marian Ettlinger / Princess of Asturias Foundation

“Employing a feminist perspective, she addresses a variety of the facets that sketch a convulsive, disconcerting present. Furthermore, she does so using fiction and the essay, as an intellectual concerned with the fundamental issues of contemporary ethics,” the jury said in a statement.

The 64-year-old is the author of a book of poetry, three collections of essays, a work of non-fiction, and six novels, including the international bestsellers “What I Loved” and “The Summer Without Men”. Her works have been translated into over 30 languages.

“I'm a little nuts, I am working like a maniac to get it in before I die,” she said during an interview published in March in British daily newspaper The Guardian.

Born in a small town in southern Minnesota to a Norwegian mother and an American father, Hustvedt has said she caught the writing bug as a teenager when her family spent a summer in Reykjavik, Iceland and she spent her days reading the classics

“I feel really happy and honored to receive the Princess of Asturias Award. I also feel surprise, amazement and gratitude,” she said in a statement.   

Hustvedt is married to US writer Paul Auster, who she met in 1981 at a poetry reading in New York.

Auster won the Asturias prize for literature in 2006. Other recent winners of the award include US novelist Richard Ford, Israeli writer Amos Oz and Canada's Margaret Atwood.

The €50,000 ($56,000) award for literature is one of eight prizes handed out yearly by a foundation named after Spain's Princess Leonor.   

Other categories include the arts — British theatre director Peter Brook won it this year — sports and international cooperation. 

The awards are handed out in October in the norther Spanish city of Oviedo, capital of the Asturias region, in a ceremony broadcast live in Spanish television.

READ MORE: Ten books that tell you everything you need to know about Spain

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HISTORY

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

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

'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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