Paul Verhaeghen sélectionné pour le 4e Prix du livre Européen

Le roman Omega Minor de Paul Verhaeghen à été sélectionné pour le 4e prix du livre Européen.


Les livres sont soumis à un jury de journalistes, correspondants à Bruxelles des grands journaux européens, qui se trouve présidé cette année par le cinéaste et romancier allemand Volker Schlöndorff.

Le prix sera remis le 8 décembre au Parlement européen de Bruxelles en présence de son président Jerzy Buzek.

Pour en savoir plus: lisez cet article dans Le nouvel obs.

Le Monde des Livres fait l'éloge d'OMEGA MINEUR (Paul Verhaeghen)

Paul Benkimoun dans Le Monde de Livres (10 juin): 'Un roman monumental aux renversements vertigineux. Oméga mineur: une oeuvre qui s'impose par sa qualité littéraire et son sens de la construction.'

Pierre Assouline, le Magazine Littéraire et la France entière adorent OMEGA MINEUR de Paul Verhaeghen

Pierre Assouline rend hommage au génie de Paul Verhaeghen (à lire sur son blog La république des livres):


"Voilà donc Oméga mineur écrit dans une langue chahutée par un scientifique azimuté, passionné de coïncidences jusqu’à en tirer des pages et des pages inattendues, qui lit à l’oreille et écrit pareillement. Idéal pour raconter la folie du siècle passé. C’est le genre de roman dont on ressort hébété, en se disant qu’on est loin d’avoir tout compris ni bien suivi. Ce qui est préférable à la lecture de ces romans tranquilles où tout arrive mais rien ne se passe, et dont on ressort dans l’état où l’on y était entré."

Que de louanges pour la traduction française d'Omega minor parue chez Le Cherche Midi; c'est aussi le cas dans Le Magazine Littéraire:

"On n’a pas tous les jours l’occasion de dégainer des références de ce calibre, alors allons-y : Oméga mineur de Paul Verhaeghen soutient la comparaison avec les romans de Don DeLillo (Outremonde), Richard Powers (The Gold Bug Variations) ou, plus lointainement, Thomas Pynchon (L’Arc-en-ciel de la gravité)."

Voir De Papieren Man pour un résumé des réactions dans les médias francophones.

A paraître (début avril) chez Le Cherche Midi: OMEGA MINEUR

Roman épique plongé dans le bain acide du XXe siècle et de ses horreurs, Oméga mineur, a reçu le prestigieux Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. C'est incontestablement l'une des révélations romanesques les plus fortes de ces dix dernières années.


'Un roman comme il n'en paraît que tous les dix ans. S'il fallait chercher une comparaison, on pourrait citer Outremonde de Don DeLillo ou L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité de Thomas Pynchon.' Boyd Tonkin

Traduit par Claro. Le roman paraîtra chez Le Cherche Midi dans la collection Lot 49.

Podcast Paul Verhaeghen at Jewish Book Week

Click here. to Podcast Paul Verhaeghen, author of the awardwinning epic novel Omega minor, during the recent Jewish Book Week in London. Verhaeghen discusses moral choices, writing History and translating his own work into English.

Paul Verhaeghen takes part in Jewish Book Week 2009

Paul Verhaeghen will take part in the Jewish Book Week 2009.

Jewish Book Week, held at Bloomsbury's Royal National Hotel (London), has made its mark as a bold and broad feast of literary treats. This year's events, Saturday 21 February to Sunday 1 March, will include a very prestigious international programme.

Paul Verhaeghen is the author of the epic novel Omega minor. The English translation is published by Dalkey Archive Press. Verhaeghen received the Independent Foreign Fiction prize for Omega minor. The novel is or will be translated in German (Eichborn), English (Dalkey Archive Press), French (Le Cherche Midi), Greek (Polis Publishers) and Hungarian (Gondolat). Omega minor is also nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2009.

Omega minor nominated for the 2009 IMPAC Award

(Ghent, 4th November: Paul Verhaeghen receives yet another literary award: the Prijs van de Vlaamse Provincies.)


It's now official: Paul Verhaeghen's Omega Minor has been nominated for the International IMPAC DUBLIN Literature Award. Along with 145 other books.

This award is special for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the tremendous amount of moolah involved - 100,000 euros. The nominations come from libraries rather than professional judges. Those libraries span the globe. And the award is open to (almost, there is a time restriction) all books available in English in 2008.

Last week Paul Verhaeghen traveled to Ghent (Belgium) to receive yet another award for Omega Minor, the Prijs van de Vlaamse Provincies.

Paul Verhaeghen in The Believer

The October issue of The Believer features a mysterious 'Timeline of Twisted Translations' by Jascha Hoffman. From Edgar Allen Poe to Paul Verhaeghen.

Paul Verhaeghen at the Buchmesse 2008

Omega Minor sold to Hungary

Budapest based publisher Gondolat has bought the Hungarian rights for the epic masterpeace Omega Minor, the internationally acclaimed novel by Paul Verhaeghen.

Gondolat is one of the major Hungarian publishers. In recent years Gondolat has developed a strong collection of quality foreign fiction and has become specialised in Dutch language (from Willem Elsschot, Nescio and Arnon Grunberg to... Paul Verhaeghen).

New Statesman hails Omega minor

Heather Thompson praises Omega minor in the New Statesman (15 May 2008).

'In this brilliant, improbable mishmash of heart-rending horror and hilarious sex, of Hinduism and theoretical physics, of Greek mythology and conspiracy theory and Hebrew lore, Verhaeghen's dense, dazzling efforts are at once engaging and alienating. In a penultimate coup - the decisive gesture of a novel that so cleverly explores voyeurism and betrayal - he shows his hand, exposing a literary deception as canny as any card trick, as callous as any police tip-off.'

Read the article in full here.

OMEGA MINOR: Greek rights sold

Greek rights for Omega minor have been sold to Polis Publishers (Athens). Polis publishes work from a.o. Philip Roth, Daniel Z. Danielewski and Jonathan Coe.

TLS praises OMEGA MINOR

Times Literary Supplement (30 may) features an article on the English translation of Omega Minor:

'With such a range of themes and ideas, Omega Minor is a formidable book. [...] A massively ambitious book. [...] Verhaeghen has also constructed a brilliant thriller.
Omega Minor is a rare and satisfying example of a contemporary novel, serious, unafraid of its own ambition, and entirely, and happily, bereft of irony.'

You can read the article in full on our site (look for the 'press clippings').

Praise for OMEGA MINOR in LE MONDE

After the British consacration of OMEGA MINOR, the French newspaper LE MONDE praises Paul Verhaeghen and his epic novel. Read all about it here.

LE MONDE calls Verhaeghen 'ce Mozart des sciences cognitives':

'OMEGA MINOR, c'est l'histoire d'un rescapé de la Shoah mêlée à celles d'un chercheur et d'un spécialiste de physique quantique. Un livre qui aborde tous les registres, convoquant les grandes interrogations, l'humour et la drôlerie, la pornographie... Un roman très ambitieux qui ne ressemble à rien, a été salué aux Etats-Unis par Thomas Pynchon et offre un concentré saisissant de l'histoire du XXe siècle européen.'

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize: Paul Verhaeghen's speech

There once was a man who got stung by a wasp.
So he threw a stick of dynamite into his neighbor’s beehive.

The man liked honey. So he sat himself down on a lawn chair, waiting for the gooey goodness to be thrown over the garden wall.
Gooey it was, but it was also bright red, and it tasted metallic.

So the man sent his sons over the wall. The few surviving bees attacked the boys and stung them where they could, and then the bees died of their wounds.

The man’s little nephew came by with a picture book, to show the man the difference between honeybees and wasps.
His uncle punched him in the face, and flushed the book down the toilet.

A neighborhood kid rode by on his bicycle. He laughed at the red bumps on the sons’ arms. The man locked him up in the garden shed. That little shit knew more about beekeeping then he led on. The man shoved the garden hose down the child’s throat and kept pumping until the lad collapsed and died.

Then the man pointed the hose at himself.
See, a little water never hurt anybody!
Squeaky clean.
There. Better.
End of story.



Ladies and gentlemen,

When I started writing Omega Minor, in the nineteen nineties, my intent was to write historical fiction. A story about the rise of fascism, a story about the horrors of war, a story about genocide. It is all over, I thought. Long past. Historical fiction.

Of the cardinal mistakes the writer can make, this one is unforgivable: To assume that there is a wall between the world he creates and the world he lives in.
I was translating the novel when the news of Abu Ghraib broke. This was the paragraph I was translating: “What if the terrorist networks and the political reality overlap? What if the violence of the new state is the same as the violence of the vanquished Reich? What if those who liberated the camps fill them up again with ideological adversaries?” It is still possible to shrug one’s shoulders at the news of Abu Ghraib or Blackwater. Bad apples.

But the signs of something bigger are unmistakable. The concentration of all power within the executive branch, the suspension of habeas corpus, the de facto censorship and bullying of the media, the secrecy, the warrantless spying, the trivialization and outsourcing of torture. All is now permitted, we are told, for we are Good, and we fight Evil, and by the very nature of our Goodness, all we do, no matter what it is, is justified, for it is done for Goodness’s sake. Invading a country that never posed a threat, killing at least 83,336 of its civilians , detaining 25,000 of them , building cages on faraway shores for prisoners who, it seems, will never get justice but -- at most -- a verdict. It’s all Good.

It is not.
For instance:
My country has now all but legalized torture, including mock executions, beatings, electrical shocks, forced nakedness, sexual humiliation, the infliction of hypothermia and heat injuries, and waterboarding. This is not the work of a few individuals, a few bad apples. Or if it is, their names are Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and Ashcroft .
This is the twenty-first century. Torture should be as unthinkable as slavery.
In my country, it is not.

These are things you cannot say or write, or you will be branded as “un-American”.
Nobody, in all those years I have lived in the US, has pointed out even this obvious truth: That George W. Bush is now personally responsible for the killing of more Americans than Osama Bin Laden. Let me repeat that: George W. Bush has sent more than 4,000 American soldiers to their deaths, for no reason at all: They were not fighting the terrorists who brought down the Twin Towers; they were not defending America’s liberties; they were not bringing lasting peace to the Middle East; they were not making the world a safer place.
I know this is a lapidary statement. But it needs to be said.
Their families deserve to know why they died.
They deserve to know that power is not the only truth that matters.

I apologize if my statement offends you. If it sounds out of place at a forum like this. But it needs to be said.
In the light of all this, and to avoid supporting the regime with more tax dollars than I already owe them, I have asked the Arts Council England to donate the money associated with the Prize, all 10,000 pounds of it, to the American Civil Liberties Union. Withholding the tax portion of those 10,000 pounds from the US Treasury will shorten the war by a mere eye-blink – its cost is currently 3,810 dollar per second -- but the ACLU can use that money to great effect in their legal battles against torture, detainee abuse, and the silence surrounding it.
We are not immune to history. But neither is history immune to us.
Be diligent, my friends. Do the right thing.
And may we all fare well.

--Paul Verhaeghen, London, May 8, 2008--

Omega Minor wins Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

Paul Verhaeghen has won The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his breathtaking epic novel Omega Minor. Read all about it in this article from The Independent.

'His victory with this exuberant, pyrotechnic, toweringly ambitious epic is a suitably mould-breaking event.'

'Flaubert wanted to write "a novel about nothing". Paul Verhaeghen seems to be aiming at the exact contrary: absorbing the whole 20th century in a single book. In Omega Minor, he creates a never-ending web of stories rooted in almost every field of knowledge, intertwining literature, history, poetry, philosophy, neuroscience, physics and metaphysics. One of the many ideas of the book is about escaping the past – or finding that it is impossible to escape. It is also about a simple and awful truth: that although reality is beyond our understanding, we continue to believe that the world is ultimately comprehensible.'

Paul Verhaeghen in The Low Countries

(Paul Verhaeghen in Antwerp, spring 2006. Copyright Koen Broos)

The Low countries 16, the latest yearbook on arts and society in Flanders and the Netherlands, publishes an interesting article on Paul Verhaeghen's prose: Lichtenberg and Omega minor. In this essay, 'Authenticity is fiction', Sven Vitse writes: 'In the work of Paul Verhaeghen, reality is not something you can count on or something the existence of which you can assume to be self-evident. [...] Omega minor is an ambitious, encyclopaedic novel that penetrates to the core of the traumatic twentieth century - the century of the atom bomb and the holocaust.' Read more at the site of Ons erfdeel.

Omega minor shortlisted for Else Otten Prijs 2008

The german translation of Omega minor, published by Eichborn Verlag in 2006, is shortlisted for the Else Otten Prijs 2008. This price is organised by the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature and the Flemish Literature Fund. The aim of the price is to reward outstanding translators of Dutch literature. In this case Stefanie Schäfer, the German translator of Omega minor.

Omega minor shortlisted for Independent Foreign Fiction Price

(Paul Verhaeghen in 2005, receiving the F. Bordewijkprijs for the Dutch version of Omega minor.)

Omega minor has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Price 2008. Read all about it in this article in The Independent.

Moving between the 1930s and 1990s, spanning Nazi-era Berlin, modern Germany and the nuclear-research site at Los Alamos, Paul Verhaeghen creates an epic, and a tragedy, of 20th-century history. Einstein's lost theorem, the legacy of Auschwitz and the bitter rivalries of science fuse into a mind-stretching and heart-tugging whole. Farce, mystery and sheer stylistic brio enrich a dazzling exploration of the ideas and experiences at the roots of modern life.

The English version of Omega minor is published by Dalkey Archive Press.