This year’s Prix Goncourt, which most consider to be France’s top literary prize (though any money comes from the boost in book sales and not the prize purse of €10), given to “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year,” was awarded to Mathias Énard for his novel Boussole, Énard’s ninth book (though one news agency reports it as his tenth, so I could be wrong). The book is about an Austrian musicologist on his sickbed where he thinks back on his travels to the East.
The other three finalists for the prize were: Titus n’aimait pas Bérénice by Nathalie Azoulai, Les Prépondérants by Hédi Kaddour, and Ce pays qui te ressemble by Tobie Nathan.
Two of Énard’s books — Zone and Street of Thieves — are available in English in translations from Charlotte Mandell, from Open Letter Books in the U.S. and from Fitzcarraldo Editions in the U.K. If there are others I’m not yet aware of, please let me know in the comments. Surely (hopefully?) Boussole will be coming to us sooner than later.
Isn’t this the book that provoked the recent meltdown from Open Letter’s Chad?
http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=16002
Sounds like they have secured a higher profile U.S. publisher — maybe winning the Goncourt will ensure it actually gets a marketing push.
Does anyone know how often Goncourt prize winners are translated into English? I assume British presses publish them more often than American ones.
Yep, that’s the book. I think I know who the new publisher is, but I haven’t seen it confirmed anywhere, so rather than get it wrong . . . if anyone knows and can confirm, please let us know.
As for other Prix Goncourt winners come out in the United States, most from the past twenty years have, though there’s a lag of some years so we haven’t seen many from the last five years.
It looks like we only have Pierre Lemaitre’s The Great Swindle, which won in 2013 and just came out a couple of months ago. The most recent before that was Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory which won in 2010. But it looks like Jérôme Ferrari’s Sermon on the Fall of Rome is coming in early 2016 (it won in 2012). There are some blank spots (Gilles Leroy’s Alabama Song, winner in 2007, doesn’t seem to have appeared here), but for the most part we get them eventually.