L’Ordre du jour

Éric Vuillard’s ninth book seemed to accumulate every possible handicap when it appeared among the finalists for that year’s prize: it was a “récit,” not a novel, published moreover by the house still directed six months earlier by Françoise Nyssen, then Minister of Culture, and it had appeared in May rather than during the autumn literary season (the last case of a “spring” book winning in November dated back to 1998, with Paule Constant’s Confidence pour confidence).

And yet. It won on the third ballot, by six votes to four for Véronique Olmi’s excellent Bakhita, sweeping aside every reservation and unwritten rule that might have counted against it.

Its success owed above all to its narrative power: L’Ordre du jour is a book of astonishing force in its simplicity. In 160 pages, it shows how “the greatest catastrophes often announce themselves with small steps” and “lifts the hideous rags of history” to tell the story of Europe’s march toward the abyss through two moments. The first is that “unique moment in the history of industrialists, an unprecedented compromise with the Nazis,” which for Krupp, Opel and Siemens was nothing more than an ordinary episode of business life, a routine fundraising. All of them survived the regime and would go on to finance many parties in proportion to their profits, the author writes, mordantly. The second moment is the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Germany on 12 March 1938 — another fundraising, so to speak, heralding the brown tide about to engulf Europe.

Fine condition.