It seems a rather French phenomenon, given works like Laurent Binet’s HHhH or Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows On The World, a real time narrative of 9/11. To make things more confusing, he was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for Fiction for The Order Of The Day, even though it was insistent on the grounded reality of the past (in that case the rise of the Nazis), as indeed were The War Of The Poor, about early modern religious conflict, and Sorrows Of The Earth, about Buffalo Bill. There are various English terms, such as “faction”, or “docu-novel”, or the awkward “historical novelisation”. French critics have used the word “récit”, meaning story or narration, and therefore distinct from “roman” – novel – or “histoire” – history. Exactly what kind of book does Éric Vuillard write? It seems to be a matter in some dispute.
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