Word: prix
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...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...
Some of the reasons were plain. Ever since Mike drove in the 1955 Le Mans, where 83 were killed when a track mixup sent Pierre Levegh's Mercedes into the crowd, Grand Prix racing had not seemed quite the same. Last year came the fiery deaths of his Ferrari teammates, Italy's Luigi Musso and Britain's Peter Collins. At Musso's funeral, Mike grabbed Juan Fangio's hand and muttered: "We have to quit this." (Said Fangio: "That conversation finally decided me to retire...