Translated material
Foreign cars # 9
Established in 1925 in memory of the first publisher of a literary magazine published in the 17th century, Theophrastus Renaudo. The jury includes writers and journalists. Awarded in conjunction with the Prix Goncourt; The main principle when choosing a laureate is “young and unknown.” The Renaudo Essay is awarded in March.
Created in 1988 by the Goncourt Academy under the patronage of the Ministry of National Education, the Goncourt Lyceum is awarded to French writers, regardless of their age. The jury, consisting of lyceum students, is young and demanding. At first, the prize was found, excuse the pun, in the province of Brittany, but, having gained fame, it reached the national level.
Both picky journalists and young lyceum students preferred the black writer from the Ivory Coast. The story is told from the perspective of a twelve-year-old boy living in one of the African countries. No father, no mother - only one close person, a friend: the bandit Yakuba. The boy is no different from his peers - except that he doesn’t play war for fun. A little soldier fighting in Liberia and Sierra Leone. It turns out that killing is not scary and not even fun. Simply necessary. Moving from one gangster group to another, he grows up: he accepts life as it is. He hurts - and he hurts others. “After all, Allah is not obliged to answer for everyone he created . ” A large number of victims, a sea of blood - and grave humor. French schoolchildren have strange tastes!
Ekaterina Demintseva
Created in 1904 with the participation of the women's magazine of the same name, which no one remembers these days. Already from the name it is clear that the award is purely for women; The jury includes only female writers, but both sexes can receive it. The main requirement for an applicant is that the novel be “strong, original and promising.” Awarded in three categories: French novel, foreign novel and essay.
What can a woman write about if not about a relationship with a man? Camille Laurent is no exception to the rule. For her, men are divided into several categories: father, husband, lover, and, oddly enough, publisher. In These Arms is not a feminist book. Laurent loves men and talks about them with humor and tenderness, irony and affection. The result of her desire to be a woman in the eyes of a man (you must admit, a phenomenon that is not often found in the modern world) was a beautiful romance: sly, soft, intimate; a novel about a woman, written by a woman for whom sex is comparable only to writing prose. A rare combination - but, judging by the jury's decision, a very good one. Note for men: there is no arguing about women's tastes.
Ekaterina Demintseva
Created on the initiative of Jean-Pierre Giraudoux in 1958. Awarded in three categories: French novel, foreign novel and essay. The jury consists of famous French writers from France, the laureate is chosen among those “who do not yet have fame comparable to their own talent.”
It would seem an unremarkable story of a certain family. A child is born, his mother dies in childbirth; At the same time, his grandfather dies, who managed to give his grandson the unusual name Noe. The father, having learned about family secrets from letters left by his grandfather, decides to move from America to Italy - as far as possible from his native spider nest. Here, in Italy, Noe experiences his difficult and lonely childhood.
A few years later, the matured Noe meets his future music teacher, Paolo Luciano Duran. From this moment begins the biography of “little Mozart,” who has perfect pitch and talent. Step by step he moves towards writing his main work, Ballade ad vitam aeternam, in which his life experiences are revealed and his whole fate is traced. Ian Upperry wrote a powerful psychological novel about people distraught by their own grief, about love and music - a story of life and death, glorified in the language of art.
Ekaterina Demintseva
Whitbread Award
Exists since 1973. Awarded annually to authors who have lived for at least three years in the UK or Ireland. After the shortlist is announced, first places are determined in four categories (novel, debut novel, poetry and biographical genre). After announcing the winners in the nominations, the jury selects one “main” laureate among them. In 1995, Salman Rushdie was awarded the Whitbread Award for his novel The Moor's Last Gasp. The results of the nominations are announced on January 23. The following two books are on the 2000 shortlist.
Lily Bloom is a 65-year-old American woman living her last hours in the cancer ward of a London hospital. Near Lily, tightly pumped up with morphine, her two daughters are fussing; Now falling into a trance, now briefly returning to reality, the lady is beside herself with anger: there is so little time left and so much to do. In delirium, she curses everything and everyone - starting with the sins of her neighbors and ending with the world as a whole. However, she already sees the world in a somewhat unique way: in the corner of the room, a middle-aged Australian aborigine sits motionless - Lily understands that it is he who will in the near future accompany her to the kingdom of the dead, and instead of an obol, he will take her gold crowns for himself. On the other side of the Styx, Lily will meet her deceased son, and he, having initiated her into the mysteries of the afterlife, will give her the opportunity to observe her remaining daughters in this world - the cold-blooded, ambitious Charlotte and her mother's favorite Natasha, an experienced drug addict.
In this eerie mixture, critics find everything they want - from the history of a Jewish family from New York to the history of Americans in the Old World. However, the historical and cultural context of the book is much broader. Throughout the entire narrative, Lily Bloom is either alive, or dying, or dead, or has been dead for many years, and each status corresponds to a certain state of consciousness - this state determines the style of each specific chapter. Thus, the book most likely tells about the diversity of death; this is a kind of guide to death, which appears not as an ending, but as a continuation - a continuation of those passions, vices and habits that made up the personality before death. The originality of the style and satire makes one remember Jonathan Swift, while the plot reminds us of much more ancient and hermetic texts that performed the same task - to accompany the dying person into the world of shadows. For example, the stepwise structure of “Bardo Thodol” says the same thing: if it is impossible to die “forever,” we must make sure that dying is at least not very shameful.
Kirill Kutalov-Postoll
The Irish writer, known in Russia for her book My Father's Wig , was shortlisted for the award with her novel Who Do You Look Like? The main character was born in Dublin. Her mother died during childbirth, and her father could not forgive his daughter for this tragedy. 20-year-old Maria herself lives in New York and makes a living by cleaning other people's apartments. She takes drugs, sleeps with bad guys and is in a perpetual state of fear. One day, Maria finds in her lover's bag a photograph of a girl who looks exactly like her, but neither the clothes in the picture nor the people around her - none of this happened in her life. Fans of novels about split personality are asked not to worry, since the solution is much simpler than one might think: the girl in the picture is Maria’s sister.
We know that sometimes the simplicity of a plot is deceiving. "Who do you look like?" - just such a case. A sad novel about the search for another, true, lost self; a cruel novel, all of whose characters, without exception, are entangled in their real and unreal lives, in appearances of truths and half-truths; a touching novel about a family falling apart when their children disappear over the horizon.
If the most banal plot about twins had not been hidden behind the intriguing plot, the book would not have happened. Or it wouldn't have been written by Enright. The writer remains true to herself and her two main themes, which, however, are not so much “her” and not even so much “themes” as a very significant direction of modern English-language literature. This direction consists of two components: intellectual feminism and the morally descriptive genre. So Enright's inclusion on Whitbread's shortlist is far from accidental - let's remember Booker 2000 winner Margaret Atwood .
Kirill Kutalov-Postoll