12 Established 1961 Lifestyle Features Wednesday, December 2, 2020

futuristic thriller about the double ident. “That’s one possible way of read- set up in 1903, include Marcel Proust, Alives of passengers aboard a flight ing it,” he said by video link. Jury chair- Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras from Paris to New York won man Didier Decoin said that the novel and Michel Houellebecq. While Tellier France’s top literary award, the Prix had a “real cinematic dimension” and gets a paltry 10 euros ($12) in prize mon- Goncourt, which was awarded by video that he hoped it would be adapted for ey, the award invariably catapults the win- link on Monday. The winner was the big screen. Because of the Covid-19 ner to the top of the best-seller lists. announced two days after the French restrictions, the 10-person Goncourt jury The ceremony comes as the closed government eased a monthlong coron- was forced to forgo its traditional slap-up world of French literature comes under avirus lockdown, allowing bookshops, awards lunch at the Drouant restaurant in rare scrutiny following allegations of which had complained bitterly about the central Paris. Instead, they huddled over abuse against paedophile writer Gabriel restrictions, to reopen. Herve Le Tellier, a video link from their homes. They had Matzneff. Matzneff won the Renaudot 63-year-old former journalist and mathe- been due to name the winner on prize-widely seen as the runner-up to the matician, won the country’s oldest literary November 10, but to show solidarity with Goncourt-in 2013, despite never making he winner of France’s top liter- prize for “L’Anomalie,” his eighth novel. booksellers they held off until bookshops a secret of his preference for sex with Tary prize Monday is a mind- Tellier had been tipped for glory with a were allowed reopen at the weekend, adolescent girls and boys. He faces a tri- bending bestseller called “The page-turner of a novel in which a hit man, along with vendors of other “non-essen- al next year on a charge of promoting Anomaly”, whose brilliant time-shift- a Nigerian pop star and a writer land in tial” goods. Restaurants and cafes paedophilia. The New York Times on ing tricks have sparked comparisons New York only to find that their flight-and remain closed. Tellier won eight of the 10 Saturday criticized “the insular world that with “The Matrix”. Even before the other versions of their selves-had already votes cast by the jurors. dominates French literary life”, saying the work by mathematician and journal- arrived three months earlier. fact that it had changed little since ist Herve Le Tellier picked up the The former Reuters journalist said Whiff of scandal Matzneff was charged showed “just how Prix Goncourt, critics were saying its Monday that it could be read as a para- Two members of the academy chose entrenched and intractable it really is”. story of a flight to New York that is French writer Herve Le Tellier poses after ble for life after Donald Trump. “The idea the fictional memoirs of a senior This year’s Renaudot winner was Marie- lost in time demanded to be made being awarded the Prix Goncourt, France’s is that since Trump is there and is the Moroccan civil servant by Mael Renouard, Helene Lafon for “L’Histoire du Fils” (The into a television series. Le Tellier heads a secretive group of literary most prestigious literary prize, for his novel cause of the world’s destruction, the a former speech writer for French ex- Son’s Story). — AFP tricksters called Oulipo... “L’Anomalie” in Paris. — AFP vision of the book is to propose another prime minister Francois Fillon. Previous version of the world, where Biden is pres- winners of the Prix Goncourt, which was Ouli what? Oulipo, or more accurately OuLiPo, which stands for “OUvroir de LItterature POtentielle”-meaning workshop for potential literature. Don’t worry, even in French it sounds pretentious. Originally a secret soci- ety, and still shrouded in mystery, it was founded in 1960 by a group of mostly French writers and mathe- maticians. They believe mathemati- cal techniques and rules and con- straints are the mother and father of all real invention. Like what? Words games and palindromes (words that read the same both backwards and forwards) are their bread and butter. Take “The Void”: the French novelist and Oulipo mem- ber Georges Perec famously wrote the 300-page novel in 1969 without using the letter “e”-the most com- mon letter in French. While his repu- tation has since fallen into a void in Olena Shcherban, Ukrainian ethnologist and historian, who studies borscht and has 365 This picture shows traditional clay pots in the house yard of Olena Shcherban. English, the Italian Italo Calvino also of its unique recipes from all over Ukraine in her private collection, wearing Ukraine’s — AFP photos experimented with Oulipo as did the traditional clothes and headdress cooks borscht in clay, pots in the wood stove in the vil- grandaddy of conceptual art Marcel lage of Opishnya in Poltava region. Duchamp-he of the urinal fame. Sounds a bit complicated? Not always. Sometimes it can be simple and ingenious, like Oulipo co- founder Raymond Queneau’s classic “Exercises in Style”, which is one story re-told 99 different ways. But it has to be said that “snowball” poems, where each line is a single krainian chef Ievgen Klopotenko word that gets one letter longer never expected to find himself at every line, or lipograms with verses U that omit letters that go below the the center of the conflict between line such as “p”, “j” or “y”, might not Russia and Ukraine. But that’s just what be everyone’s cup of tea. happened when the 33-year-old pushed to have borscht-the traditional beetroot Why would you want to do that? and cabbage dish-recognized as part For the hell of it, of course. of Ukraine’s historical heritage. “I don’t Queneau’s “A Hundred Thousand really like to call it a war for borscht, but Billion Poems” (1961) includes 10 in fact that’s what it is,” Klopotenko, a sonnets that if divided into strips can graduate of the Le Cordon Bleu culinary be recombined 100,000,000,000,000 school, told AFP in his renowned different ways and still rhyme. — AFP Ukrainian restaurant in central Kiev. The chef said he was fed up with how restaurants around the world-including those serving “so-called Ukrainian cui- This picture shows clay pots with borscht in the wood stove. This picture shows three different borscht, cooked according to tradi- sine”-were referring to borscht as tional recipes in the wood stove by Olena Shcherban. Russian soup. So last month he brought a pot of and beloved dishes and a symbol of tra- that Ukrainian cuisine does not exist in gist and historian, said it is “absurd” to borscht to Ukraine’s culture ministry to ditional cuisine”. Ukrainians claim that Ukraine. It’s all Soviet,” Klopotenko said. associate borscht with Russia. “Borscht convince officials to submit an applica- borscht was first mentioned in 1548 in The Soviet Union “swallowed” Ukraine, is the second dish that I ate after my tion to United Nations cultural body the diary of a European traveller who “chewed it and spat it out... We don’t mother’s milk. We wean the baby and UNESCO to list borscht as an intangible tasted the soup in a market near Kiev. know who we are or what we are,” he then feed him with borscht,” Shcherban part of the country’s cultural heritage. They say it arrived in Russia much later added. said as she stood over her stove cook- The list already includes French gas- with Ukrainian settlers. Tensions But there is one thing for Klopotenko ing the soup. The 40-year-old says that tronomy, Neapolitan pizza and between Kiev and Moscow have flared that is quintessentially Ukrainian: the Ukrainians do not know their history well In this file photo US actor George Clooney Georgian wine. The ministry agreed and in the decades following the break-up of beetroot and cabbage soup. “I realized and have a “lack of pride” in their gas- takes part in a press conference in central said it was preparing the application to the Soviet Union in 1991. After a pro- that borscht is what unites us,” he said. tronomy, unlike the French or Italians. London to present a report on atrocities in UNESCO before the March deadline, so Western popular uprising in Kiev in “We may be different, we eat different She has tried to promote the dish South Sudan. — AFP it can be examined in December next 2014 followed by Russia’s annexation of types of borscht cooked to different through a festival in the village of year. And suddenly Moscow bristled. Crimea and support of separatists in the recipes, but it’s borscht.” The applica- Opishnya in central Ukraine that she “Borscht is a national food of many east, the confrontation has intensified. tion will not contain a recipe for borscht has organized for seven years. And this countries, including Russia, Belarus, For Klopotenko, the battle over as “nobody knows the authentic one”, month, she opened a museum dedicat- Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Moldova and borscht is really about Ukraine’s identi- Klopotenko said. ed to borscht. “Borscht is art, borscht is Lithuania,” Russia’s embassy in the ty. The country has been closely tied to language, borscht is culture, borscht is United States said on Twitter. Russia for most of its history. Much of ‘More than just food’ the history of my Ukraine,” Shcherban what is now Ukraine was part of the “We will register something bigger. said.— AFP ‘Borscht unites us’ tsarist Russian empire and later the We will register the culture of borscht in The Russian government soon fol- country became part of the Soviet Ukraine,” he said, adding that the soup lowed on its own Twitter account, calling Union. “When I started studying “is much more important than just food”. andemic hair getting out of control? borscht “one of Russia’s most famous Ukrainian food and cuisine, I realized Olena Shcherban, a Ukrainian ethnolo- PTake a tip from George Clooney: the Hollywood style icon has revealed he trims his signature silver locks with a Flowbee-a quirky home-styling device that attaches to a vacuum cleaner. The Flowbee has long been the butt of jokes since it appeared on late-night television infomercials in the late 1980s. But in pro- moting his new movie, “The Midnight Sky,” Clooney, 59, disclosed he was a long-time fan of the much-mocked gadg- et, when asked during a CBS interview if he had been cutting his own hair during the coronavirus lockdown. “I’ve been cut- ting my own hair for 25 years,” said the Oscar-winner, whose name is synony- mous with red-carpet glamor. “My hair’s really like straw, and so it’s easy to cut. You can’t really make too many mistakes.” “So, years ago, I bought a thing called a Flowbee, which when we were-” he said, at which point his stunned interview- er broke in with: “You did not!” The Flowbee cuts hair and sucks up the clip- pings at the same time, which has led to Olena Shcherban wearing Ukraine’s traditional clothes and headdress cooks borscht in clay Ievgen Klopotenko cooks borscht in his restaurant. its use by astronauts on long-haul space pots in the wood stove in the village of Opishnya in Poltava region. missions in the past. —AFP