Word: goncourts
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...AWARDED. TO PASCAL QUIGNARD, 54, the coveted Goncourt prize, France's top literary award for Les Ombres Errantes (The Wandering Shadows), the first in a three-volume series of aphorisms, reflections and memoirs; in Paris...
...comparison, produced 204 movies last year (a jump of 20%) and sold 76 million tickets. Though a number of European countries - Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain - actually print more books, publishing in France still enjoys a mystique rivaling that of cinema. Authors like Bernard-Henri Lévy and 2001 Goncourt prizewinner Jean-Christophe Rufin are megacelebrities, and book-themed talk shows are standard TV fare. Notes Pierre Assouline, editor of Lire magazine: "The French have always felt writing was the noblest form of communication, and most honest kind of reflection. To write is to live, but to be published...
Chardin didn't say much--at least, not much that he did say has been preserved, since he had no Boswell and the gossips who adored his work, like the Goncourt brothers, came from a later generation and never met him. But there is a tantalizing remark attributed to him by a writer of the 1780s, Charles-Nicolas Cochin: "I must forget everything I have seen and even forget the way such objects have been treated by others." This hints at the extreme pride and immense ambition that underwrote Chardin's apparently modest arrangements of brown jugs, water glasses, dead...
...then Sartre was famous as the leading exponent of the creed known as existentialism (Being and Nothingness, 1943) and the chief guru to the postwar denizens of St. Germain des Pres. De Beauvoir was not far behind. She won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for her fourth novel, The Mandarins, an astringent survey of the Paris literary life as well as a memoir of her own affair with ^ Chicago Novelist Nelson Algren. More enduring fame came from her monumental manifesto The Second Sex (1949), one of the cornerstones of modern feminism...
...critic and historian Ian Dunlop, Degas (Harper & Row; 240 pages; $37.50) is by far the best introduction to the life and work of the painter of boulevards and ballet dancers now in print. A student of Ingres's and the great contemporary of Manet, Flaubert Sand the Goncourt brothers, Degas was one of those ocular witnesses without whom the cultural life of France in the 19th century cannot be understood; and no writer has done a better job of placing this tetchy, formidable genius, with his astonishing powers of observation iand his bitter tongue ("Whistler, you behave as though...