Latest news with #PrixMédicis
Times
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Rachel Kushner: Flaubert is hilarious, cynical and cruel
Rachel Kushner, 56, grew up in Oregon, then San Francisco. After completing a master's in creative writing at Columbia University, she worked as an editor on arts magazines in New York. After she moved to Los Angeles, she started writing fiction. Her debut, Telex from Cuba, was published in 2008. This was followed by The Flamethrowers (2013), The Mars Room (2018), which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and The Hard Crowd (2021), a collection of essays. Her latest novel, Creation Lake, an ambitious and entertaining tale about French eco-activists, a Neanderthal-admiring reclusive thinker and a macho, semi-alcoholic female spy-for-hire with expensive fake breasts, was shortlisted for last year's Booker prize. 'Creation Lake is a smart, funny novel that dares to contemplate the void of uncertainty where we all stand,' was our critic's verdict. Kushner rides motorbikes and is a fan of drag racing. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List On any given day I might answer this differently because I don't, of course, have just one. That would be so narrow. But today my answer is Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. While that's quite guessable and unimaginative as a favourite, given it's considered the most successful novel of all time and the one that cemented the form of this peculiar and incredible genre of art, it's also strong, a strong choice. Do you recall that the first chapter is written in the first-person plural, that there is a 'we' ridiculing young Charles for his bizarre rabbit-fur hat and his rube's demeanour at school, a voice that is presumably a collection of Charles's classmates? We don't meet this 'we' — they are not characters with their own desires and ideas — and instead are mere witnesses to Charles's early failures at sophistication. Although technically the point of view is omniscient, we are mostly thereafter in the thoughts of Emma, a woman who is not satisfied by the life she has acquired and whose desire for worldliness, and her consequent debt, bring her to the bleakest of ends. Flaubert is hilarious, cynical and cruel and also passionate, romantic and ravished. That contradiction perhaps is the heart of this novel's chimerical power. • Colm Tóibín: a writer's last work has a special intensity I am too undecided to choose a single favourite living author but if we narrow it to recent novels by younger writers, I'd like to talk about Emma Cline and The Guest and why I admire that novel about a young woman lying, stealing and grifting among wealthy New Yorkers. The Guest is deliberately structured to pull off the unlikely feat of maintaining the propulsion of a short story for the length of a novel, at which it succeeds. Also, there's a quality to the sentences, as in all of Cline's work, of sensitivity, agility and control. I read her and go: 'Yes, that's exactly right but I never knew that thing could be put into language.' What's odd is I am not the least bit interested in the world of extreme wealth, and part of why The Guest was such a hit was its setting in the Hamptons, where Alex, the narrator, is set loose as a grifter. It's Alex who interests me and whose misconception — that if she can only conform herself to other people's fantasies her problems will be solved — I find so moving. I'm not sure if I'd call this book underrated as much as simply less well known. Its author certainly has the critical reputation he deserves, but Alberto Moravia's Agostino (1944), a novella, really, is the best book I've read about a boy on the cusp of puberty. Agostino is with his mother on summer vacation at the beach and suddenly he can't tolerate being close to her. The world is changing to him because he is changing, and the way that Moravia renders his attitude and the choices he makes perfectly encapsulates what feels so treacherous in adolescence. It's a time in life when a person rejects safety, comfort and guidance, and subjects themselves to the world unchaperoned, to other people who don't care about them, who might humiliate or hurt them. And yet this is what a young person wants — to go out and get banged up by life, instead of stay home and be smothered by safety. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Vintage £9.99 pp416). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
Telegraph
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A lacerating comedy about France, cancel culture and the rental crisis
'An affordable home had become rarer than a winter without rain.' So goes a typically acerbic line in Kevin Lambert's third novel, May Our Joy Endure. In the Francophone world, this social satire has won three prizes, including the Prix Médicis, and it isn't Lambert's first success: he published his first novel, You Will Love What You Have Killed, aged 25; then his breakout second, Querelle of Roberval, also garnered three awards. Both were translated into English by Donald Winkler, who has now translated May Our Joy Endure too. Here, Lambert is tapping into several anxieties du jour: property, wealth, gentrification. He lampoons, too, our moralistic culture of public shaming, in which individual reputations are fair game in the tussle for political and financial supremacy. Like recent British novels such as Andrew O'Hagan's Caledonian Road and Sunjeev Sahota's The Spoiled Heart, it charts a spectacular fall from grace – that of its Québécoise protagonist, a celebrity architect in her sixties, who resembles Canada's Phyllis Lambert with some added Isabelle Huppert glamour. (Lambert herself makes a cameo appearance, whether to suggest or forestall comparisons.) Céline Wachowski – not just an architect but a Netflix presenter, a brand, an 'icon' – is as beloved of the everyman as she is of the glitterati, until a scandal erupts around one of her projects, the Montreal headquarters of a tech multinational called Webuy. Amid an escalating rental crisis, and after a New Yorker article denounces Céline's role in accelerating gentrification, an immigrant evicted to make way for the Webuy project commits suicide. His story goes viral, sparking violent demonstrations that brand Céline a capitalist sellout. Soon she faces losing all she has built. Lambert captures well the bloodlust and sanctimony typical of these public character-assassinations, in which former sycophants are the first to tear down the powerful. And the novel's architecture has a pleasing symmetry: it opens with a glittering party, through which the emerging controversy ripples; the second section delineates Céline's downfall; the third depicts another star-studded soirée that builds to a dramatic climax. The two parties offer vivid tableaux of intersecting psyches, as a close third-person narration flits between characters; in the intervening section, by contrast, dialogue and events are often reported indirectly, with detachment, and at such a pace that the timeline can be confusing. Lambert's prose style loses something in Winkler's translation. What seemed comically overblown in French sounds pompous or convoluted in English: 'The building, despite its multifarious guises, harboured a unity conferred on it by its painful inexistence.' You become tangled in a 'labyrinth of clauses', a phrase Lambert applies to Proust's writing, though it begins to seem apt to his own. There are errors – 'before embracing whole hog', 'an impressive roofing' – and some metaphors are laboured: 'Some waters ran on to be swept away in gutters to the parched earth, but this outflow, at the end of his quest, left him with a pure form, a crystal so hard that it would allow him to convey the essence of what he had discovered.' May Our Joy Endure highlights, to put it kindly, the delicacy of the art of translation. On the other hand, Lambert has a knack for withering put-downs, and these survive: Céline's neighbours are 'little frozen-food tycoons', the New Yorker is a magazine 'whose barely concealed goal was to flood the world with those abominable tote bags'. The tone slides easily from parodic to philosophical, as Céline and her deputy, Pierre-Moïse, doubt themselves in the wake of the furore: 'What's a museum worth if it ruins poor families' lives?' Céline takes refuge in Proust and concludes that little has changed since his era; like his narrator, she has involuntary memories – glimpses of her childhood summoned by camellias. In the Proustian tradition, with a little of Edith Wharton too, Lambert's novel is a lacerating comedy of manners that skewers the hypocrisy not only of the super-rich but of society itself, so eager to idolise success and so willing to turn on its idols. But May Our Joy Endure is a little too much like one of its parties: a whirl of ideas and perspectives, stylish and stimulating, yet a little exhausting to endure.
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
In brief: May Our Joy Endure; The Future of the Novel; Literature for the People
Kev Lambert (translated by Donald Winkler)Pushkin Press, £18.99, pp320 Winner of the Prix Médicis, Lambert's sharp, provocative third novel embeds ever-timely themes – greed, hypocrisy and privilege – in a narrative that blends satire and lyricism, whimsy and voyeurism. At its centre is Céline Wachowski, a charismatic celebrity architect who's all too credibly flawed. You won't be able to look away as her latest project – developing a disused industrial complex on the outskirts of Montreal – turns into a career-threatening calamity, mired in controversy over indigenous land rights and anti-gentrification protests. Simon OkotieMelville House, £9.99, pp144 Okotie offers a fresh and idiosyncratic take on that perennially fretted-over topic: the state of the novel. Conscientiously grounded in theoretical debate stretching back to the start of the 20th century, it's also arrestingly current, eyeing insights derived from cognitive literary studies and threats posed by generative AI. Throughout, the author's questing vitality makes space for lightheartedness, as he cheers on fiction writers prepared to experiment while offering personal insights born of his own novelistic failings. A bracing, positive read, it's recommended even – perhaps especially – to those whose own literary tastes tend to be more conventional. Sarah HarknessPan, £12.99, pp496 (paperback) The lives of the brothers who brought the likes of Thomas Hardy and Christina Rossetti to the Victorian masses make for illuminating stories themselves. The youngest of eight surviving children, Daniel and Alexander Macmillan were raised on a croft on the west coast of Scotland, leaving school early yet going on to found an international publishing house that thrives to this day. Their rags-to-riches ascent (within just two generations, they'd be able to claim a prime minister as one of their own) is brought to life with appropriate narrative flair and an appreciation for their shared curiosity as well as their galvanising moral purpose. To order May Our Joy Endure, The Future of the Novel or Literature for the People go to Delivery charges may apply
