Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Vivant Denon’s No Tomorrow.

Recommended.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

In the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler examines the furor surrounding Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.

Recommended.

Not recommended.

The Complete Review critiques Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years.

Yesterday J. M. G. Le Clézio delivered his Nobel lecture.

In the Guardian, Richard Lea reports the winners of France’s Goncourt and Renaudot prizes.

A roundup at New York Magazine considers The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, To Siberia, Chicago, Sea of Poppies, and The Prospector.

Salon has James Hannaham’s review of Nancy Huston’s Fault Lines.

Sol, an arrogant boy from California, is convinced he is some sort of messiah. Huston draws him with biting specificity and detail, in the process nailing the dark side of American narcissism and child worship. She has a fast-paced style, as breathless as Philip Roth’s, deceptively light though deeply engaged in current events. Sol’s parents have childproofed the house by covering the electrical sockets and putting soft corners on all the furniture, but as soon as Sol is alone, he enthusiastically seeks out images of pornography and torture on the Internet. Huston spares us neither the outrageous vulgarity of the hypocritical environment in which Sol’s parents raise him nor its appalling effect on his personality.

More aspects of Rimbaud are known than can be assimilated: his vastly various, influential and innovative poetry itself; his expressive letters; his scornful and unhesitating permanent abandonment of poetry at the age of 20; the anecdotes of his contemporaries showing him as a drunken, filthy, amoral homosexualteenager who becomes a reserved, hard-working, responsible and respectable (if misanthropic and disgust-ridden) adult merchant and explorer.

The New York Times has Richard Hell’s review of Edmund White’s Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel.

Recommended with reservations.

The Swedish Academy has awarded Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio the Nobel prize in literature for 2008.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

. . .halfway through [the novel], the lives of Paloma and Madame Michel are unexpectedly transformed. A Japanese gentleman named Kakuro Ozu buys a vacant apartment. Though clearly rich, he is also immensely courteous and shrewd, and immediately perceives that neither the little girl nor the concierge is just what she seems. Before long, Monsieur Ozu is gently contriving some little tests to discover more about their secret lives. And this leads to developments that range from the comic to the touching to the heartbreaking.

At the Guardian Alison Flood writes of the somber tone of this year’s rentrée.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.

The plausible minimalist view of Proust’s Jewishness is that, attenuated as it was, it predisposed him to perceive more sharply than he might otherwise have done the hypocrisy and the hidden wellsprings of hostility toward Jews that were exposed in the fierce debates over Captain Dreyfus’s alleged treason.

In The New Republic (linked by way of Powell’s Books because the original article is only for subscribers), Robert Alter reviews Evelyne Bloch-Dano’s Madame Proust.

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter.

At Salon, Stephen Marche writes of the passing of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Alexis Soloski at the Village Voice reviews English translations of Dominique Fabre’s The Waitress Was New, Quebecois author Sylvain Trudel’s Mercury Under My Tongue, and Philippe Grimbert’s Memory.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended.

Recommended.

At Time, Don Morrison examines France’s diminished cultural profile.

Not recommended.

Why do the French have to be so damned right about so many things? An exceptionally unappealing article on the Oxford English Dictionary appears in the Financial Times.