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The author of an ambitious trilogy of novels spanning France in the twentieth century — Victor (Fayard, 2000), Céline (2002), and Un autre monde (2004) — Paul Pavlowitch is not unacquainted with cases of literary deception, as he remains perhaps best known for having incarnated his uncle novelist Romain Gary’s pseudonym Émile Ajar. Masquerading as a person who didn’t exist, Pavlowitch was able to secure for the celebrated Gary a second Prix Goncourt, making his uncle the only French author to have won it twice — a feat forbidden by award rules. Though Gary confessed in his posthumous memoir, l’affaire Ajar remains one of the most famous scandals in recent French literary history.
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