Man of Letters wins the Bad Sex Award!
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Goncourt winner
Littell wins
Bad Sex Award
By Mike Collett-White
November 30th, 2009
REUTERS.COM
Jonathan Littell,
who won France’s prestigious
Prix Goncourt in 2006 for
“The Kindly Ones,” has picked up
another prize for the same work —
the Literary Review Bad
Sex in Fiction Award.
The annual prize was contested
this year by literary heavyweights
Philip Roth for “The Humbling,”
John Banville for “The Infinites”
and Paul Theroux for “A Dead Hand.”
The judges praised what
they called Littell’s
“ambitious and impressive” novel,
which was originally published
in French.
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“It is in part a work of genius,”
they said.
“However,
a mythologically inspired
passage and lines such as
‘I came suddenly,
a jolt that emptied
my head like a spoon
scraping the inside of
a soft-boiled egg’
clinched the award for
The Kindly Ones.”
“We hope he takes
it in good humor.”
Littell was not expected to attend
the prize ceremony in London.
The award was established
by Auberon Waugh in 1993.
It is designed to draw
attention to the
“crude, tasteless,
and often perfunctory use
of redundant passages of
sexual description in
contemporary novels,
and to discourage it.”
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