retour sur la rentrée

Has all this talk of the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Goncourt from High School Students (des Lycéens), the Prix Goncourt from Women (the Fémina), the Prix Goncourt from Men (the Interallié), the non-Prix Goncourt (the Renaudot), and the Prix Smarter-than-the-Goncourt-Brothers (the Académie Française) left your head spinning? Feeling a bit adrift trying to grasp the politics and complexities of France's prizegiving culture? John Dugdale has a very smart set of observations and explanations in The Guardian.

And now, we heave a sigh of relief at the end of the rentrée littéraire, and try to decide what to read next. Now that the dust has settled, here's my idiosyncratic "best of the rentrée" list:

François Biot, Nancy Cunard
Quentin Deluermoz (ed.), Chroniques du Paris Apache (1902-1905)
Matthias Enard, Zone
Tristan Garcia, La meilleure part des hommes
Laurent Gaudé, Porte d'enfer
Françoise Hardy, Le désespoir des singes
Charles Lewinsky, Melnitz
Anne Marsella, Patsy Boone
Atiq Rahmini, Syngué Sabour
Olivier Rollin, Un chasseur de lions
Sasa Stanisic, Le Soldat et le gramophone

Bonne lecture!

Comments

[tcheni]

I would add Là où les tigres sont chez eux de Pierre-Marie Blas de Roblès. Prix Médicis, incidentally. Impressive work, maybe too long and sometimes (though very rarely) too easy but on the whole an epic work of story-told real fiction, mâtiné de métaphysique à la française. The beginning of each chapter (an imaginative biography of Athanase Kircher) constitute a master piece on their own.