This year’s Médicis Prize, a French literary award, went to another Goncourt shortlist finalist, “Titus N’Aimait Pas Bérénice,” or “Titus Didn’t Love Berenice,” by the French novelist Nathalie Azoulai, 49. It is a contemporary love story interwoven with references to the characters in Racine’s play “Berenice,” about the Roman emperor Titus, who declines to marry the woman he loves, Berenice, the queen of Palestine, in order to rule his empire.
Also on the Goncourt shortlist was “Ce Pays Qui Te Ressemble,” or “This Country That Resembles You,” a sometimes comic novel set in the Jewish community of Cairo between the 1920s and the rise to power of Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s. It was written by Tobie Nathan, 67, a writer and ethno-psychiatrist who left Egypt for France in 1957.
Mr. Kaddour said he believed France’s colonial past would continue to haunt it. “It’s a history that is very complicated, a mix of tragedy and the grotesque, like all histories,” he said. “And it is one from which we haven’t yet escaped.”