Two novels about the Nazis took France’s biggest literary prizes, with Eric Vuillard’s story of how German industry and finance backed Adolf Hitler winning the top Prix Goncourt.
“L’ordre du jour” (in English “Agenda”) had been among the favorites for the Goncourt prize — the most prestigious in the French-speaking world.
Vuillard, 49, says he was taken aback on hearing he won for his elegant, 160-page book which charts how the financial support of German industrialists was crucial to Hitler’s rise.
“One is always surprised, sometimes fatally,” he tells reporters at the Paris restaurant where the winner was announced.
Asked whether the book was a warning for our own populist times, the writer says he wanted to set out how the “elites and industrialists slid into a situation where they compromised themselves.”
The Renaudot award, which is often seen as a consolation prize for those not shortlisted for the Goncourt, went to “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele” about the secret post-Holocaust life of the Nazi war criminal.
— AFP
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