Brodeck Longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010
Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck, translated from the French by John Cullen, is among the 15 contenders longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2010. Arts Council England awards the prize annually to the best work of contemporary fiction in translation. The novel, which Nan A. Talese published in June, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was glowingly reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. While only a handful of Claudel’s nine novels have been translated in English, American readers might be familiar with the 2008 film he wrote and directed I’ve Loved You So Long, a New York Times Critics’ Pick, which starred Kristin Scott Thomas.
“[Claudel’s] latest novel, Brodeck, arrives like a fresh, why-haven’t-we-known-him discovery, revealing him to be as dazzling on the page as he is on the screen…. Brodeck is the Brothers Grimm by way of Kafka…. [Claudel] audaciously approaches a subject that seems thoroughly covered and makes it fresh. His nightmarish fairy tale captures the essential, inescapable evil at the center of the Holocaust, the human urge to destroy Others … a compulsion existing beyond time, place or politics.”
—The New York Times Book Review