Word: prix
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PRIX FÉMINA. Author Franchise Mallet-Joris deserved a prize, said the critics, but not for her prizewinning book, L'Em-pire Céleste, which they generally dismissed as "good, meaty, lending-library stuff." The story of a poor cafe pianist who realizes his mediocrity after friends read his diary, L'Empire seemed little more than mediocre itself. Critical consensus: had the elderly ladies of the Fémina jury been on their toes, they might have given Franchise the prize for her Illusionist (1951), the story of a young girl's love affair with...
...PRIX GONCOURT. Hardly anyone had heard of the winning book, Saint-Germain, ou la Negotiation, before the award was announced, but the prize assures a sale of 100,000 copies. Written by Francis Walder, a retired Belgian artillery officer turned minor diplomat, Saint-Germain is a diplomat's reconstruction of the negotiations that led up to the peace of Saint-Germain, the temporary truce between French Huguenots and French Catholics before the St. Bartholomew Massacre of 1572. "One can understand his wanting to write the book," sniffed one critic who struggled through it, "but what one cannot understand...
...PRIX RENAUDOT. The awakening of a West Indian seemed a noble enough theme for Negro Poet Edouard Glissant's La Lezarde. The murder of a young Martinique native and the accidental killing of the murderer's girl friend, who is then devoured by the murderer's own dogs, might even be construed to symbolize poetic justice. But literary justice miscarried when Glissant got a prize; critics thought him an intriguing but inept writer...
...PRIX INTERALLIÉ. Apparently outraged that any prizewinner should offer nothing but light entertainment, one commentator damned Bertrand Poirot-Delpech's Le Grand Dadais as "an amusing trifle to take on a short railroad journey." Reminiscent of a Roger Vadim script for a Bardot movie, Le Grand Dadais takes a delinquent schoolboy and a beautiful but dumb stripteaser on a Riviera whirl-all financed with stolen money. Before the boy winds up in the pen, the judge asks: "Is it Mademoiselle Sagan who has put all these ideas in your head?" Answers the accused: "I don't want...
...PRIX MEDICIS. The head of this prize committee was Novelist Alain (The Voyeur) Robbe-Grillet, and the winner was one of Robbe-Grillet's disciples in the school of "New Realism" (TIME, Oct. 13), which stresses objects and description rather than people and motivation. Winner Claude Ollier's La Mise En Scéne offered "interminable descriptions that spare you nothing and then, without ever seeming to take sides, crush you under the weight of inhuman detail." A mining engineer's efforts to make sense out of the remote mountains of North Africa, to lint his murdered...