Official Stories? Representing the Occupation and Shoah in Recent Prize-Winning French Novels

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1 The trend continues: in 2007 the French translation of Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (Harper Collins, 2006) was awarded the Prix Médicis Étranger and nominated for the Prix Femina. As a work of non-fiction and a translation, it is not included in this study whose focus is on fictional representations of the Occupation and Shoah. 2 All translations of quotations from works listed in French in the bibliography are mine. The total sales of books in France receiving the six major prizes (Goncourt, Renaudot, Femina, Académie française, Médicis, Interallié) in a given year range between 500,000 and one million copies. In 2006, Gallimard reported sales of 503,440 copies of Littell's Les Bienveillantes alone, although these figures were contested by the polling institution Ipsos that reported 395,000 copies sold. The second best-selling novel of 2006 was Dan Brown's Deception Point with 352,200 copies sold. According to Ipsos, the average sales for a novel receiving the Goncourt from 2000 to 2005 was 237,000. 3 Assouline had access to the archives of the Lutétia. For a year, on the first Thursday of each month, he also attended the dinner offered by the hotel to an association of former deportees. He succeeded in locating and interviewing, thanks to his own “network of relations,” surviving deportees (Gallimard interview). Littell indicates he researched his book for five years, including extended trips to the Ukraine, Stalingrad, and the extermination camps in Poland as well as interviews with survivors. 4 Le Clézio's comments, made during a November 9, 2004 interview on Europe 1, were quoted on the official website of the Prix Renaudot (www.renaudot.com) but are no longer available. 5 In his controversial La tyrannie de la pénitence : essai sur le masochisme occidental (Paris: Grasset, 2006) Bruckner warns against the paralyzing effect on foreign policy of the West's tendency for self-flagellation and self-hatred in regard to its past history of war, genocide, and colonialism. 6 Although the situation of Némirovsky's central characters, Lucile and Bruno, superficially resembles that of the protagonists in Vercor's (Jean Bruller) Le Silence de la mer, the two works are dissimilar in the purpose of the author and the development of the characters. Vercor's short story, published clandestinely in 1942, had a monitory function in prescribing the correct attitude of young French women towards the German occupiers. 7 The public reprisals exacted on French women who had consorted with the enemy, particularly the shaving of the head, are now indelibly etched in the collective memory due in part to films like Ophuls’ Le Chagrin et la pitié and Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour. 8 In 2007 Littell became a naturalized French citizen, after having been refused citizenship twice before winning the Goncourt, another example of cultural politics. 9 The publisher quoted in the interview is Jonathan Burnham of Harper-Collins. Littell's novel is scheduled to be published by Harper Collins in 2009, probably under the title “The Kindly Ones,” in a translation by Charlotte Mandell. All the translations from Les Bienveillantes are therefore my own

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  Angela Kershaw•Journal of War and Culture Studies•2011

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