Littell Wins 'Bad Sex' Literary Award
United Press International
Dec 01, 2009
LONDON (UPI via COMTEX) -- They finally got around to translating Jonathan Littell's book "The Kindly Ones" into English and Monday night it won a British award for bad sex in fiction.
Littell's novel about the Holocaust through the eyes of an executioner, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt when published in French in 2006 and sold more than 1 million copies, was given the nod for the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award, which goes annually to the author who produces the worst description of a sex scene in a novel, The Guardian reported.
Runners-up included Philip Roth, John Banville, Paul Theroux and the literary rock star Nick Cave, the British newspaper said.
It wasn't that the Review's judges totally hated the work by the 42-year-old French-American who lives in Spain. After all, they said some of it was "a work of genius." Just not the sex parts, apparently.
"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 judges wrote.
"We hope he takes it in good humor."
The bad sex award has been around since in 1993. It's goal is to "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it."
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