Taking the Prize
Mr. Vance Packard would probably call them 'planned irrelevancies': Dr. Daniel Boorstin, author of The image, created the phrase 'pseudo- events' to describe trivia inflated into important ircidents by a careful blend ofpress handouts and publicity stunts, washed down with a mixture of big names and big money. I would imagine that last week's gathering of international literary ladies and gentlemen on Corfu to judge the Prix Formentor for 1963 will rank as the leading pseudo-event of the year. One would hardlY have guessed from the gossipy on-the-spot re- ports in the Sunday papers that the Prix Formentor is not in fact the most open of all literary prizes. For all that, the planning behind it is most ingenious: a dozen international pub- lishers invite a panel of international judges to choose the best unpublished novels—from ii11 those on the shelves of the participating pub- lishers, and those alone. The winner receives ten thousand dollars, a great deal of publicity, and his novel is published in a dozen countries —by each of the dozen publishers. The British contingent—'representative' would be too line 3 word—is Weidenfeld and Nicolson. They are on to a winner in the Prix Formentor. and 1 congratulate them on the much-publicised suc- cess of this leading literary pseudo-event.
Previous page
