*Life must have its wrangles for Mr. Jonathan Littell. He just "won" a "Bad Sex Award," which is a prank given out by British literateurs in order to tease people for writing about sex in ways the British find unacceptable. I've seen other "Bad Sex Award" nominees, and they usually write about sex in ways that are silly and banal. Whereas Jonathan Littell's supposedly "bad" sex writing doesn't look very bad to me at all. It's not even very sexual. His "award" makes his critics look like hicks. It's embarrassing, but not in the way they intended.
*Then there's this science fiction novel the guy once wrote. All his other work is a complete departure from this effort. It exists, though. I read it when it was first published.
*BAD VOLTAGE is a paperback-original novel by a young, talented guy breaking into publication with a genre work. It's not the greatest science-fiction novel ever written, but given that it's a first publication by a 20-something youngster with some attitude, it's a pretty good sci-fi novel. The weirdest thing about it is not its period sci-fiberpunk cover, but the stark fact that this young American guy went on to become a major French-language literary figure. An extraordinary development.
*Littell seems to be a guy of icy dignity and a classic, philosophical bent. Clearly he treasures his privacy. Check out this way he coolly brushes off a literary award.
Barcelona, June 23, 2009
Ladies and gentlemen,
I have just been informed that my book Les Bienveillantes — Eumenides in Greek — has been awarded the Athens Prize for Literature. I am very touched by this honor, all the more so as it has been granted in and by the very city where those same Eumenides, pacified at last, were once settled “in honor for the rest of time,” to make “their home at Athene’s side.”
In the days when Aeschylus wrote his great tragedy, literature was a public affair, the affair of every citizen. It was a political affair, in which the most fundamental values and problems of the polis would be invoked and debated, a religious affair too, an affair of ethics as much as aesthetics. Judgment of the work was thus the business of the whole city. The prize that was awarded incarnated the public’s sense that the work had, in some important way, contributed to the public good, and the prize ceremony, like all political and religious ceremonies of the time, was a public event, one worthy of record, to be remembered by succeeding generations.
Today, the matter is different. While literature may touch on affairs of politics or religion, it no longer participates directly in them. Even when it seeks to explore the deepest questions besetting mankind, it now properly belongs, in the common view, to that sphere of human activity known as “culture.” The divorce, one might say, is complete. This fact in itself is neither admirable nor deplorable, it is simply a state of affairs. And as such it implies new roles, new responsibilities. It has always been my view that literature is a very private matter now, and that what takes place between a writer and his work belongs to a sphere utterly separate from the interaction of that work with those who read it, comment it, praise it or damn it. Privacy, for me, is a fundamental condition of creation, of work. It was so before my book was published, and must remain so now. It is in this spirit that I express my hope that my inability to join you today will be taken for what it is, an expression of our common love for literature. I thank you very much.
Jonathan Littell
(((Quite an unusual gentleman. I hope he doesn't too much mind the inevitable laughable squalor of the literary life.)))
