Word: goncourts
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Each year a group of French literary notables and near-notables meets for lunch at the Restaurant Drouant in Paris, and votes for the winner of the Goncourt Prize. They are the members of the Goncourt Academy, and their sole function is that of awarding 5,000 francs to the author of "the year's best work of fiction." There are supposed to be ten members at the luncheon, but the venerable revolutionary writer, Lucien Descaves, refuses to attend meetings with Royalist Leon Daudet, always mails in his vote. After lunch, the Academy's youngest member announces...
...GONCOURT JOURNALS-Edmond & Jules de Goncourt; edited and translated by Lewis Galantiere-Doubleday, Doran...
...Goncourt brothers never married, prided themselves on sharing a Rubens-esque blonde mistress. (Editor Galantiere raises eyebrows at this, suggests that in this case, too, Edmond was a dispassionate observer.) But that they were men of the world, not mere bourgeois scriveners, their journal amply witnesses. They were as much at home in a princess' salon as in an actress' dressing-room, describe each with equal skill...
...Distinctly not for the squeamish." Lena, by a Prix Goncourt winner (Captain Conan), is a War romance on the order of A Farewell to Arms, plus the sinister violence of plot inseparable from Balkan settings. Readers who stubbornly refuse to humor Balkan settings may call it merely macabre sex melodrama skilfully made up to pass as an indictment...
...with Joselito and Belmonte, long before the civil war closed most of the bull rings. To observers with long memories and high standards, bullfighting had become decadent: its matadors were virtuosos, its backers venal, its public vulgar. Against this modern (1934) background of decadence Joseph Peyre sets his Prix Goncourt prize-winning novel of bullfighting Madrid...