Sex & Salvation

Picking the winners before the lavish year-end supply of French literary prizes are passed around is a favorite occupation for French critics. Picking the awards apart after they are made is considered just as much fun. These days the critics were still shredding last year's choices and shedding a significant light on the current French literary scene. Items:

PRIX FEMINA. Author Franchise Mallet-Joris deserved a prize, said the critics, but not for her prizewinning book, L'Em-pire Celeste, which they generally dismissed as "good, meaty, lending-library stuff." The story of a poor cafe pianist who realizes his mediocrity after friends read his diary, L'Empire seemed little more than mediocre itself. Critical consensus: had the elderly ladies of the Femina jury been on their toes, they might have given Franchise the prize for her Illusionist (1951), the story of a young girl's love affair with her father's mistress.

PRIX GONCOURT. Hardly anyone had heard of the winning book, Saint-Germain, ou la Negotiation, before the award was announced, but the prize assures a sale of 100,000 copies. Written by Francis Walder, a retired Belgian artillery officer turned minor diplomat, Saint-Germain is a diplomat's reconstruction of the negotiations that led up to the peace of Saint-Germain, the temporary truce between French Huguenots and French Catholics before the St. Bartholomew Massacre of 1572. "One can understand his wanting to write the book," sniffed one critic who struggled through it, "but what one cannot understand is why anyone should want to call this diversion the best novel of the year."

PRIX RENAUDOT. The awakening of a West Indian seemed a noble enough theme for Negro Poet Edouard Glissant's La Lezarde. The murder of a young Martinique native and the accidental killing of the murderer's girl friend, who is then devoured by the murderer's own dogs, might even be construed to symbolize poetic justice. But literary justice miscarried when Glissant got a prize; critics thought him an intriguing but inept writer.

PRIX INTERALLIE. Apparently outraged that any prizewinner should offer nothing but light entertainment, one commentator damned Bertrand Poirot-Delpech's Le Grand Dadais as "an amusing trifle to take on a short railroad journey." Reminiscent of a Roger Vadim script for a Bardot movie, Le Grand Dadais takes a delinquent schoolboy and a beautiful but dumb stripteaser on a Riviera whirl--all financed with stolen money. Before the boy winds up in the pen, the judge asks: "Is it Mademoiselle Sagan who has put all these ideas in your head?" Answers the accused: "I don't want to disappoint Mile. Sagan, but I think the idea was in the air long ago and will outlive her."

PRIX MEDICIS. The head of this prize committee was Novelist Alain (The Voyeur) Robbe-Grillet, and the winner was one of Robbe-Grillet's disciples in the school of "New Realism" (TIME, Oct. 13), which stresses objects and description rather than people and motivation. Winner Claude Ollier's La Mise En Scene offered "interminable descriptions that spare you nothing and then, without ever seeming to take sides, crush you under the weight of inhuman detail." A mining engineer's efforts to make sense out of the remote mountains of North Africa, to lint his murdered predecessor with a mortall) wounded Arab girl, may add up to a novel but not when surveyed with Ollier's eye for engineering detail. Consensus: the prize went to an incorruptible theorist rather than a gifted writer.

PRIX DE LA NOUVELLE VAGUE. A brand new prize, this one went to a first novel Christiane Rochefort's Le Repos du Guerrier. For a while Le Repos was in the running for Prix Femina, but the member of the female jury reportedly turned i down because they could not believe ii the alcoholic and amatory prowess of th book's hero as he seduces a young heiress Commented Novelist Franc,ois Mauriac "It displeases me to play the role of virtuous father. But I ask this question Why should the history of the sex life c this young lady be of particular interest . . .one is conformist today as never before. Apart from sex, no salvation."

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