2015 Goncourt Longlist As Described by Google Translate

The longlist for this year’s prix Goncourt was announced today, and includes the latest book by Open Letter author Mathias Énard. (We’re having someone read Boussole for us right now. Hopefully I’ll have more info about that in the near future.)

Here’s the complete list of finalists, which also includes Alain Mabanckou and Jean Hatzfeld. (I think those are the only two that I’m familiar with.) And just for fun, under each of the titles is a description from the publisher’s website via Google Translate. This never gets old. Enjoy! (I think that the translation of the description of Nicolas Fargues’s Au pays du p’tit broke Google.)

• Christine Angot, Un amour impossible (Flammarion)

Christine Angot undertakes here to expose a more complex relationship between unconditional love for mother and resentment, depicting a love uncompromising social war and the course of this woman, destroyed by this original sin: the passion dedicated to man which will ultimately destroyed all the marks she had built.

• Isabelle Autissier, Soudain, seuls (Stock)

A couple of thirty parties to circumnavigate the world. A deserted island, between Patagonia and Cape Horn. A perfect nature, wild, which turns into a nightmare. A man and a woman in love who
find themselves suddenly alone. Their new companions: penguins, sea lions, sea elephants and rats. How to fight against hunger and exhaustion? And if we survive, how to get back in men? A novel where you travel in conditions extreme, where we shudder for these two Robinson modern. A moving story.

• Nathalie Azoulai, Titus n’aimait pas Bérénice (P.O.L.)

When we speak of love in France, Racine always happens in conversation, at one time or another, especially when it comes to grief, abandonment. It does not cite Corneille, Racine is quoted.

• Olivier Bleys, Discours d’un arbre sur la fragilité des hommes (Albin Michel)

Taking as a backdrop violent transformations of contemporary China, Speech tree on the fragility of men revisits the story of the earthen pot against the iron pot.

• Mathias Enard, Boussole (Actes Sud)

Thus unfolds a world of explorers arts and history, modern animated Orientalists of a pure desire to mixtures and discoveries that contemporary news comes slapping.

• Nicolas Fargues, Au pays du p’tit (P.O.L.)

The hero and narrator of this novel is 44 and teaches sociology at the university. He has just published a violently anti-French essay (La France … His Ugh, her Chhht, its Rhôlâlââ … His is going to piss, his sleeping It Hits, It’s a Monday and goes like this … With its The glasses of his Jacques François and his goatees Cyril Lignac … The smell of feet of the municipal swimming pools and piss restroom cafés … His love lock, beautiful words and beautiful bastards).

• Jean Hatzfeld, Un papa de sang (Gallimard)

In these families decimated, some grew up in silence and lies, faced spitting on the way to school, others were confronted with their parents’ behavior disorders, with a hoe on a barren plot from the adolescence.

• Hédi Kaddour, Les Prépondérants (Gallimard)

In From California to Europe via North Africa, the paramount lead us into great turmoil of the 1920 Worlds collide, clash beings, wish to , chase each other, change. Writing alert and accurate Hédi Kaddour greenhouse closer these lives and these destinies.

• Simon Liberati, Eva (Stock)

One evening in the winter of 1979, somewhere in Paris, I met a woman of thirteen whose reputation was so “terrible”. Twenty-five years later, it inspired my first novel that I do not know nothing more than a photo of her aparazzi. Much later, it was she who found me at a turn in my life when I had lost my way. She’s the fairy world emerged from the back of the maze that saved and revived one last time the impulse to love. For it is called extraordinary Eva, this book is his praise.

• Alain Mabanckou, Petit piment (Seuil)

Young orphan of Pointe-Noire, Little Pepper performs his schooling in an institution under the authority of abusive and corrupt Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako. Coming soon the socialist revolution, the cards are redistributed. The adventure begins.

• Tobie Nathan, Ce pays qui te ressemble (Stock)

This saga colors millennium sun said all of Egypt: the rise and fall of King Farouk, the last pharaoh, despot to the appearance of Prince Charming, loved his people and paralyzed neuroses.

• Thomas B. Reverdy, Il était une ville (Flammarion)

Here the houses are worthless and people go, abandoning them altogether; the city is in tatters. We are in Detroit in 2008 and circulated a joke: the last which starts off light. Looks like it happened. It is in this city threatened bankruptcy Eugene, a young French engineer, arrives to supervise an automotive project.

• Boualem Sansal, 2084 (Gallimard)

The Abistan immense empire, named after the Prophet Abi, “delegate” of Yölah on earth. His system is based on amnesia and submission to one God.

• Denis Tillinac, Retiens ma nuit (Plon)

Under the tender and mischievous pen of an expert in nostalgia, the history of their passionate love affair becomes that also , gentle and cruel, a generation – the children of the baby boom clueless.

• Delphine de Vigan, D’après une histoire vraie (JC Lattès)

Seduction, depression and betrayal are the three stages of this story that takes the reader behind the scenes of creation, where doubt appearances and pretenses behind a fearsome trap. Who is the master of the game?