Lydie Salvayre
The Award
Translated by Jane Davey

"Never a false note.… A brilliant English-language debut for one of France's most virtuosic young novelists." — Publishers Weekly

"Clever … A delicious parody of mumbo-jumbo and corporate smugness, in which solidarity movements and agitators for workers' rights get their comeuppances as well. Sly, stylish and unusually satisfying." — Kirkus

A parable of the corporate world, The Award takes place at a ceremony in a massive automobile factory. One by one, speakers step up to the podium. A company officer introduces each award recipient with a short speech on his or her merits. Then, the winner makes a short speech of acceptance.

Very few of us have escaped either attending or participating in one of these Orwellian functions, where applause, laughter, and the speeches themselves are as orchestrated as at any religious ceremony. But The Award's is a ceremony unlike any other. Each presentation becomes a minibiography of the worker and executive concerned; each speech becomes a short story told in the first-person — sometimes tragic, often very funny. And as the speeches/short stories progress, the reader learns there is a growing chorus of striking workers outside the auditorium who threaten to descend on the proceedings.…

Lydie Salvayre has taken a modern ritual and, in a short novel reminiscent of both 1984 and the film Brazil, discovered something at once amusing and horrifying. She lampoons the blind obedience of both the workers and their bosses, and in the course of doing so questions the primitive hierarchy of the business world.

The Award is Lydie Salvayre's first novel to be published in English. Born to an anarchist mother and a Communist father, she lives in France, to which her Spanish parents fled after the Spanish Civil War. One of France's most innovative novelists, she has made a name for herself — and won awards — for her refusal to be bound by the novel's traditional structure.

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