Abstract

In Cold Type

There is the gentler French person, badboy Benoit Duteurtre, author most recently of the novel "Le Voyage en France," which won the 2001 Médici prize. Duteurtre criticizes Europe for proclaiming a high ground in human rights from which to criticize the Americans, as if, he says, to disguise from itself that it belongs to exactly the same world and is mired in identical contradictions. He makes fun of the way the French use the word Disneyland to refer to the entire American polity. President Jacques Chirac--that unsuccessful chameleon--comes in for a smacking, too. In Chirac's speech after September 11, Duteurtre writes, "I heard the inferiority complex of a Europe deprived of its role as world leader but still quick to judge good and evil."