The Women of Mystery have been announcing a lot of competitions and giveaways lately. Today it's time to announce a winner--Jonathan Littell. For what? This year's Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Go, Jonathan!
Littell was named the winner of this year's award for The Kindly Ones. In 2006, he won the Prix Goncourt, a prestigious French award, for the same book. The Kindly Ones was originally published in French.
In announcing the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, the judges called The Kindly Ones "ambitious and impressive.
"It is in part a work of genius," they said. However, they added, "a mythologically inspired passage and lines such as 'I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg' clinched the award for The Kindly Ones."
The Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award has been handed out annually since 1993 to draw attention to the "crude, tasteless, and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels, and to discourage it." Littell beat out Phillip Roth (The Humbling), John Banville (The Infinites), and Paul Theroux (A Dead Hand) for this year's award.
According to Reuters, Littell isn't expected to attend the award ceremony.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Rewarding Bad Sex
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10 comments:
Sex and boiled eggs. Never a good combination.
Not the list any writer would like to make, I bet.
Littell may not appreciate the award, but I'm sure he doesn't mind the media attention it's giving him and his book. As they say, there's no such thing as bad publicity...
Awe shucks. He's got no sense of humor.
I like a good soft-boiled egg myself, but it never makes me feel randy exactly. Mostly, it makes me feel like having toast. Also unsexy.
Travis- That was among my first thoughts, too.
Kathy- What's that saying about making lemonade out of lemons?
Lois- That line from his book sounded pretty funny to me! :)
I have to say that as ridiculous as this year's crop of finalists is, they didn't really make me laugh out loud or want to vomit quite the same way some previous years have. Does that mean the bad sex is getting better, or I am merely getting inured to it?
Clare- Now if you add some hot sauce...
Laura- I highly doubt the sex scenes are getting better. I'm afraid we're all just becoming more and more inured to bad sex scenes and bad writing in general.
It's difficult to write erotic scenes without being unintentionally funny. My all-time nominee is "The Horse Whisperer" by Nicholas Evans. The movie is brilliant, but the big climactic love scene near the end of the book was so bad I was laughing til I cried.
I love it! I used to belong to Advertising Women of New York and we had an annual awards show, The Good, The Bad & The Ugly for advertising work. I think Littell's passage would qualify for an Ugly!
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