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On
Novels, Including Reviews
(a) Le prix Goncourt
and others, (b) 2007
competitions, (c) background
and controversy, and (d) other
book items
Sit down. Have an espresso, or if you must, a warm savory cup of coffee. That's a good way to begin a literary day -- to think and talk about books. I'm trying to learn myself and have started this site to help in that endeavor. Maybe you, the visitor, can benefit also. This section will provide information through assorted links to literary prizes, the French novel in general, book reviews, gossip, whatever . . . So as the brain waves settle from the caffeine, let's enjoy!
 a Paris Café | Voltaire said, "L'Écriture est la peinture de la voix." (Writing is painting through speech). Here are some interesting sources which review the merits of current writing: (1) Bibliobs from NouvelObs.com (2) Le Monde.fr, Livres, (3) Figaro.fr, Litteraire, (4) La Libération.fr Livres, and (5) Magazine Littéraire. Now for a few morsels of . . . well, why not a metaphoric croissant, to go with the coffee and help in our endeavors. So here goes! |
The Prix Goncourt (France's most prestigious literary prize), awarded since 1903, has had such winners as Marcel Proust (1919), André Malraux (1933), Simone de Beauvoir (1954) and Marguerite Duras (1984). One interesting sidelight of the competition is that only once in its history has the same author won twice, Romain Gary (born Romain Kacew) for Les racines du ciel (1956) and La vie devant soi, under the pseudonym Emile Ajar (1975). The Academy awarded the prize that second time, without knowing the author's identity, and with Romain's cousin, Paul Pavlowich posing as the author for a while. See the fascinating Wikipedia discussion of Romain Gary. The Prix Renaudot began in 1926, and winners have included Céline (1932), and Irène Némirovsky (2004). See discussion of the latter. |  Romain Gary statue |
The Grand Prix du Roman de
l'Académie française began in 1918. The 2006 winner was
Jonathan LIttel (who also won Le Prix Goncourt). See Wikipedia
The Prix Médicis began in 1958, and is awarded to a writer whose fame does not yet match his or her talent. Previous winners have included Élie Wiesel (1968) and Jean Echenoz (1983). See Wikipedia.
The Prix Femina begain in 1904 and is selected by an exclusively female jury, which meets the first Wednesday of November at l'hôtel de Crillon in Paris. Previous winners have included Marguerite Yourcenar (1968) and Dai Sijie (2003). See Wikipédia.
Le Prix Flore began in 1994, and was created to award a young author of promising talent. Some past winners of note include Michel Houellebecq (1996) and Christopher Donner (2001). See Wikipedia and www.prix-litteraire.
The Prix Médicis began in 1958, and is awarded to a writer whose fame does not yet match his or her talent. Previous winners have included Élie Wiesel (1968) and Jean Echenoz (1983). See Wikipedia.
The Prix Femina begain in 1904 and is selected by an exclusively female jury, which meets the first Wednesday of November at l'hôtel de Crillon in Paris. Previous winners have included Marguerite Yourcenar (1968) and Dai Sijie (2003). See Wikipédia.
Le Prix Flore began in 1994, and was created to award a young author of promising talent. Some past winners of note include Michel Houellebecq (1996) and Christopher Donner (2001). See Wikipedia and www.prix-litteraire.
Daniel Pennac won Le Prix Renaudot (November 5, 2007) for Chagrin d'École (Chagrin of School) (Gallimard), a humorous book about school, told from the point of view of the erstwhile school dunce, who has become a teacher of French. (The latter prize is not specifically related to the Goncourt Prize, but is a kind of complement to it, announced at the same time at the Drouant restaurant in Paris. See discussion of the prize in Wikipedia).
Vassilis Alexakis, a Greek, who writes in both Greek and French, won the Le Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie française (October 25, 2007) for his novel, Ap. J.-C., which means après Christ, or in Latin, anno domingo. In the book a woman of 89 years old asks a student she lodges to lead an inquiry on the monks of Mount Athos, perhaps in search of her lost son, and it takes him 1000 years back into history, and to a series of astonishing meetings. See evene.fr. and a review at e-literature.net.
Jean Hatzfeld won Le Prix Médici for La stratégie des antelopes (The strategy of Antelopes), a book about the 1994 Rwandan genocide, a book which describes what happened when authorities permitted some 40,000 of those who committed the masacres to return to their homes. See review at evene.fr.
Eric Fottorino is the 2007 winner of Le Prix Femina for Baisers de cinéma. He writes about a man who never understood his father, a genius of filmmaking, and since the latter's death, seeks to find his unknown mother, haunting film houses, all the while falling madly in love with a married woman who can never be his. See review by Stéphanie Verlingue at benzinemag.net.
Amélie Nothomb is the 2007 winner of Le Prix Flore for Ni d'Eve, ni d'Adam (Neither Eve, nor Adam). This novel marks the return for the author to the Japanese setting (ever-popular from her Stupeur et Tremblements) and describes the relationship between a Western woman and a Japanese man, and their effort to overcome their differences. See review at evene.fr and blog des livres (8/25/2007)
The Académie Goncourt had set up the awarding of the 2007 prize for three preliminary stages -- the first, a selection of fifteen novels was established for Sept. 11, the second, the winnowing of these contending novels, for Oct. 2, and the third, a final narrowing, for Oct. 25. Interestingly while as of October 26, there were five novels in the running -- Olivier Adam's "A l'abri de rien," [L'Olivier], Phillipe Claudel's "Le rapport de Brodeck [Stock], Michèle Lesbre's "Le canapé rouge" [S.Wespiesser], Clara Dupont-Monod's "La passion selon Juette" [Grasset], and Gilles Leroy's "Alabama Song" [Mercure de France]. The surprising book dropped on October 25 was Amélie Nothomb's "Ni d'Eve, ni d'Adam" (Neither Eve nor Adam).
 Amélie Nothomb | According to a story in Le Monde on November 5, there is some controversy here. They indicate that the elimination of Nothomb in the last round had nothing to do with the quality of her book. Instead, someone apparently from Nothomb's publishing house had written a long letter to the President of the Goncourt jury, and suggested that the prize would be discredited if it were not awarded to Nothomb. This letter had a very bad effect, resulting in Nothomb's elimination. Still, it appears ((Le Monde,November 6) that in the final tally for the Goncourt prize, Nothomb garnered 1 vote anyway. Oliver Adam's book received two votes, Clara Dupont-Monod's, 1 vote, and the winner, Gilles Leroy, 5 votes |
The voting for the Renaudot prize is perhaps more interesting because the vote was 6 to 5 for Daniel Pennac's book, Chagrin d'École (very much an extremely close split decision) over Christopher Donner's Un roi sans lendemain (A King Without Tomorrow) with the casting vote for Pennac, only because the President of the jury, Patrick Besson had two votes. Since the Pennac book was not even one of the five finalists selected for the Renaudot prize (leaving one to wonder at the rules in play for the deciding vote), that makes the result more controversial, and especially frustrated some. According to that November 6 story in Le Monde, Louis Gardel, one of the Renaudot jurors spoke of "un très joli hold-up," ( a very pretty "hold up"/robbery), while André Brincourt, another juror, said he was furious because Pennac's book is not even a novel, but an essay, and Donner's was a remarkable novel. As for the allegations that telephone calls between the two juries took place over the weekend (and that there was purported horse-trading for votes), the President of the Goncourt Academy, Edmonde Charles-Roux, denied that there were such calls.
If the public's say was taken into consideration, it appears to have been, at least as reflected in books sales, pro-Pennac, which may explain the position of the Renaudot juror, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, that this was a question of a very popular novel (Pennac's), unjustly treated by the critics. This year's Renaudot prize winner has been number one in sales according to Bibliobs) (Oct. 15-21, 2007), while neither the Goncourt winner, not Donner's book were in the top 10, though that changed for Alabama Song after the results were announced. For example, a spot check at Bibliobs on Jan. 15, 2008, shows Chagrin d'école still in a no. 1 position, but Alabama Song had risen to no. 5.
Interestingly, nouvel obs.com reports that on November 16, Figaro Magazine selected Donner's book as the winner of the Figaro Prize (worth 8000 euros), saying that they had not selected his book at the outset as one of the finalists for their competition, convinced that it would win one of the grand prizes, but wanted to repair an injustice. It would seem that Donner, who promptly turned down the prize, did so on principle, and underscored his frustration with the Renaudot competition -- if you're not selected as a finalist, you should not suddenly be voted winner. See my review of Donner's historical novel about the French revolution, and who killed Louis XVII?
Amélie Nothomb's book, Ni d'Eve, ni d'Adam" won the Flore prize, but the selection left some puzzled. It's not that the book is undeserving, critically, or in book sales. Indeed, the competition was established to recognize an author with promising talent, and at 30 years old, Ms. Nothomb is certainly in that category. Still, as a writer who in the past sixteen years has published sixteen novels, and has already captured the prestigious Academie Française prize in 1999, she would not appear to be in need of the recognition here, to encourage further development of talent, presumably a rationale for the initial offering of this prize.The award came, possibly as a payback for what was widely seen in the literary world as her worthy book, after Nothomb lost out for both the Goncourt and the Renaudot prize, and what the publisher Leo Sheer called the "terrible mediocrity" of the winners of this autumn's literary prizes. See discussion in the Guardian Unlimited.
The diary of a young French woman, Journal of Hélène Berr, is appearing in French bookstores in January 2008, and could become France's Anne Frank story, and a sales sensation. According to the Guardian Unlimited (1/6/08), the diary tells the story of a young Jewish girl in occupied Paris (twenty-one years of age when she started her diary in 1942), who ended up in a concentration camp. See Patrick Modiano's moving preface to the journal in Bibliobs (Jan. 2, 2008).
While we mull on Gilles Leroy, who won the 2007 Goncourt prize in a novel about Zelda, the wife of the famous American literary figure, F.Scott Fitzgerald, let us recall that an American writer Jonathan Littell won the prize in 2006, with a 900-page novel, Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) narrated by a Nazi SS officer and written in French. See the French Wikipédia on him. Or the English Wikipedia. So things American are seemingly in the literary consciousness of France. There is a New York Times review about Littell by Alan Riding that is interesting.
We will see more from Mr. Littell in the not too distant future. Bibliobs (Sept. 26) has indicated that Littell will publish next November (2008?): (1) an essay entitled Le Sec et L'humide (by Gallimard press) about the Belgium fascist, Léon Degrelle (1906-1994), one of the sources of the Nazi Officer, Maximilien Aue in Les Bieveillantes, and (2) with Fata Morgana four brief stories, under the title Etudes (Studies), which will relate also to the origin of his Goncourt prize-winning novel.
Here are a couple of interesting interviews, relating to older books: (1) a 1987 interview with Annie Cohen-Salal about her book, Sartre: a Life (conducted by Don Swaim at wiredforbooks.org. (in Eng), and (2) Hazel Rowley discusses (Oct. 20, 2005) at WGBH Forum network (video or just audio per choice) her biography on the relationsthip between Simone de Beauvoir and John Paul Sartre (in Eng).
There is an interesting International Herald Tribune video on Paris' famous bookstore, Shakespeare & Co -- Part 1, and Part 2. And a YouTube video on the bookstore with music.
On the French novel, in general, the Wikipedia summary (in English) is fairly extensive, and worth looking at. There's also in French an interesting Wikipédia discussion of the history of the Western novel.
In the Spotlight (Alabama Song & Un roi sans lendemain)
Alabama
Song (2007 Goncourt Prize Winner) by Gilles Leroy
( Interview and reading, click to play video at evene.fr)
Ambitious in a way that many male writers would not dare, Leroy brings to life his opposite sex protagonist, from her growing up in the old South with her father, an austere, strait-laced state Supreme Court justice who never hugged her, to the later tragic figure, striving to be a professional ballerina, novelist (Save Me the Waltz, 1932), painter, to win her husband's respect? or to outdo him? in the grip of seeming schizophrenia. Along the way, she was the inimitable flapper of the jazz age.
Un
roi sans Lendemain
(A king without tomorrow) (2007) by Christopher Donner
(Donner reading -- click to play video at Amazon.fr)
He researches the subject and is near-obsessed: it's pulling two ways. From the harshness of his own childhood and his parents' divorce, he's drawn to the poor child-king, but also strangely, to the prime suspect, Jacques René Hébert, whose anger he can identify with, though repelled too (not unlike the ambivalence he feels for his own radical father).
Impoverished, struggling against failures as a playwright and poet, Hébert will discover his voice in a clever, yet vicious journal, named Le père Duchesne, for a vulgar marionnette of the time -- pipe smoking, two mustaches, angry eyes. At one level, he has his puppet-protagonist spew obscenities, interact with and villify the royal family; at another, on his strings, jerking and twitching with his every issue, the working class radicals. Drunk on popular acclaim, he becomes audacious, broaches: "To guillotine a king [Louis XVI], is it possible? Eh [obscenity deleted], why not? Are we free? If we are, a king is only a citizen like all the others." Fast forward to when the executioner pulls the head from the basket, plunges his arm in royal blood and sprinkles the crowd in "a manner similar to the way one blesses the faithful," and we have entered the brave -- depraved -- new world of revolution, crudely manipulated in the name of abstract ideals.
It's a deadly game with rivals -- such as Robespierre-- of lead the revolution or lose your head. And so, Hébert's Le père Duchesne will demonize Marie-Antoinette, call her a louve (she-wolf), guenon (monkey/hag), and worse. A few centuries hence, out of horrors since: we still cannot fully grasp collective hysteria, though Donner speaks of radicals, exaggerating abuses of the Ancien Règime, tapping anger, always there, from a distant past, to make of Paris -- where children play with toy guillotines to cut off the heads of birds -- as if a panel for an Hieronymous Bosch painting. In it, that small boy from his tower-prison wondering whether his father died bravely, and with the pluck to want to fight! What pathos there!
If the modern day part of the novel, relatively slight, were richer, made us feel more for Herni Norden and how his life hinges on where his research takes him -- he seems to this reader developed, though not fully, and mostly there to get us to Louis XVII and Hébert -- this book, a fascinating look at a terrible period, could have been even stronger: a small cavil, when the bulk of the story is precisely where we want it to be, in the past, breathtaking in scope, masterfully told. I give this book a coup de pouce (thumbs up), so buy, borrow, whatever, and enjoy.
-1/01/08
____________
Jérôme Garcin has an interesting review at Bibliobs.com (in French) with a focus on Donner's life . Of course, as noted in the preceding section, there was enormous controversy in the Renaudot prize selection, which ended with Donner's book losing a 6-5 vote to Daniel Pennac's Chagrin d'Ecole.
( Interview and reading, click to play video at evene.fr)
 Zelda
Fitzgerald | If you're looking for a genial view of F. Scott Fitzgerald, be forewarned: Gilles Leroy's Alabama Song will not deliver. If you might, however, enjoy an alternative take in the voice of a disgruntled spouse, Zelda, the novel entertains, at times dazzles between a pair of fiery bookends -- the asylum blaze she was to perish in, and at the beginning, a scene, near mythological with power, when she, the local teen-siren in Montgomery, Alabama, drew two airmen from a nearby base.They attempted a kind of bravura homage, a flyover of her home, only to end up in a fatal, flaming crash. One night, the literary F. Scott, not knowing of this belle who ensorcelled, went to a country club dance; he should have had himself lashed to his army barracks bedstead (à la Odysseus to his ship's mast). |
Ambitious in a way that many male writers would not dare, Leroy brings to life his opposite sex protagonist, from her growing up in the old South with her father, an austere, strait-laced state Supreme Court justice who never hugged her, to the later tragic figure, striving to be a professional ballerina, novelist (Save Me the Waltz, 1932), painter, to win her husband's respect? or to outdo him? in the grip of seeming schizophrenia. Along the way, she was the inimitable flapper of the jazz age.
(Donner reading -- click to play video at Amazon.fr)
| Who killed Louis XVII, the child-king held captive in the Temple tower during the French revolution? This is the task Christopher Donner undertakes in his runner-up novel for the prestigious Renaudot prize. And he has found a subject that possesses, carrying him -- even as he does us -- on a wild, breathtaking ride. It's a story within a story, because the conceit is of a writer, Henri Norden (in effect, Donner's double) asked to prepare a screenplay for a film on the killing of the child-king. |  Taking of the Bastille |
He researches the subject and is near-obsessed: it's pulling two ways. From the harshness of his own childhood and his parents' divorce, he's drawn to the poor child-king, but also strangely, to the prime suspect, Jacques René Hébert, whose anger he can identify with, though repelled too (not unlike the ambivalence he feels for his own radical father).
Impoverished, struggling against failures as a playwright and poet, Hébert will discover his voice in a clever, yet vicious journal, named Le père Duchesne, for a vulgar marionnette of the time -- pipe smoking, two mustaches, angry eyes. At one level, he has his puppet-protagonist spew obscenities, interact with and villify the royal family; at another, on his strings, jerking and twitching with his every issue, the working class radicals. Drunk on popular acclaim, he becomes audacious, broaches: "To guillotine a king [Louis XVI], is it possible? Eh [obscenity deleted], why not? Are we free? If we are, a king is only a citizen like all the others." Fast forward to when the executioner pulls the head from the basket, plunges his arm in royal blood and sprinkles the crowd in "a manner similar to the way one blesses the faithful," and we have entered the brave -- depraved -- new world of revolution, crudely manipulated in the name of abstract ideals.
It's a deadly game with rivals -- such as Robespierre-- of lead the revolution or lose your head. And so, Hébert's Le père Duchesne will demonize Marie-Antoinette, call her a louve (she-wolf), guenon (monkey/hag), and worse. A few centuries hence, out of horrors since: we still cannot fully grasp collective hysteria, though Donner speaks of radicals, exaggerating abuses of the Ancien Règime, tapping anger, always there, from a distant past, to make of Paris -- where children play with toy guillotines to cut off the heads of birds -- as if a panel for an Hieronymous Bosch painting. In it, that small boy from his tower-prison wondering whether his father died bravely, and with the pluck to want to fight! What pathos there!
If the modern day part of the novel, relatively slight, were richer, made us feel more for Herni Norden and how his life hinges on where his research takes him -- he seems to this reader developed, though not fully, and mostly there to get us to Louis XVII and Hébert -- this book, a fascinating look at a terrible period, could have been even stronger: a small cavil, when the bulk of the story is precisely where we want it to be, in the past, breathtaking in scope, masterfully told. I give this book a coup de pouce (thumbs up), so buy, borrow, whatever, and enjoy.
-1/01/08
____________
Jérôme Garcin has an interesting review at Bibliobs.com (in French) with a focus on Donner's life . Of course, as noted in the preceding section, there was enormous controversy in the Renaudot prize selection, which ended with Donner's book losing a 6-5 vote to Daniel Pennac's Chagrin d'Ecole.
(a) Stendhal,
(b) Balzac, (c) Sand, (d) Dumas,
père, (e) Hugo, (f) Flaubert, (g) Verne,
(h) Zola, (i) Maupassant, (j) Proust, and (k) Camus
Stendhal (less well known as Marie-Henri Beyle) (1783-1842) was a 19th century French writer known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology. Two particularly celebrated works of his are: Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (Project Gutenberg, on-line or download fr) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (on-line or download fr).
Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) is one of the creators of realism in literature. In 1833, Balzac came up with the idea of linking together his novels to give a cross-section of French society. The end result of the idea was roughly 90 novels and novellas, and over 2000 characters, which he called La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). Included therein is the celebrated, Le Père Goriot (Father Goriot) (online eng), where Balzac transposed the story of King Lear to Paris in the 1820s, to rage at a society that loves only money. |  Where Balzac Lived |
Also, see from La Comédie humaine, other great works, such as Les Illusions Perdus (Lost Illusions) (online text eng) (a poet trying to make a name for himself), La Peau de Chagrin (The Magic Skin) (online text eng) (a man finds a magical animal skin that can bring much wealth and power), and Eugénie de Grandet (Eugene Grandet) (online text eng) (first best-selling novel, about a young lady who inherits her father's miserliness), and La femme de trente ans (Special: Listen to a reading in French of extracts by Béatrice Kahn, Marie-Raymond Bertrand et Alain Duband) (online text for the Adobe reader Eng) (a book that dares to speak of the sexual pleasure of women) (Wikipédia discussion). Many of his novels were initially serialized à la Dickens.
Influenced by Balzac was Dai Sajie, with his popular modern novel, Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise. See my review.
George Sand (also known as Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, and Barone Dudevant) (1804-1876) a French romantic writer, is noted for her love affairs with such prominent figures as Prosper Merimée, Frédéric Chopin, Alexandre Manceau, and others. Among her best known works is La Mare Au Diable (1846), in which a young widower, Germain, must chose between a rich woman, and a poor girl. See also culture.fr bio.
Alexander Dumas, père, born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (1802-1870) is best known for his historical novels, such as Les Trois Mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers), and its sequals,Vingt ans après (Twenty Years After), and La Vicomte de Bragelonne ou Dix ans plus tard (La Vicomte de Bragelonne or Ten Years After) (composed of three parts, which includes the most well-known of the three, The Man With the Iron Mask). Perhaps, his most popular work is Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo). For online text of book, see Tome 1, 2, 3, and 4 in Fr) (Also see Wikipedia summary).
His son, Alexander Dumas, fils (1824-1895), is also famous, particulary for La Dame aux Camélias (The Lady of the Camellias), which was turned into a play, and then was the basis for Verdi's opera, La Traviata. See Wikipedia summary.
Victor Hugo (1802-1885), a novelist, poet and dramatist, is recognized as one of the most important of all French writers. See also culture.fr bio. His body of work includes, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Les Misérables (which some have called the greatest novel of all time).
 Portrait of Cosette | The latter is about the ex-convict Jean Valjean, 24601, who became a force for good in the world, but cannot escape his past. Hugo's works make the transition to cinema and musicals quite well. See the great 1923 silent movie production, of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with the hunchback played by Lon Cheney, and the 1939 sound classic from Hollywood, with Charles Laughton. The musical of Les Misérables with a score by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg is truly a classic. In the French songs part of this website, performances from the musical are linked to You Tube, and can be easily enjoyed in video on the computer. There have been fine films of Les Misérables. See 1998 You Tube movie trailer with Liam Neeson. |
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), a novelist of the naturalist school and a great stylist, is well-known world-wide for such novels as L'éducation sentimentale (The Sentimental Education) (a young man's relationship with an older woman, set in the era of the Revolution of 1848), Salammbô (Salambô) (a story of the siege of Carthage), and most of all for the sensational Madame Bovary (a provincial wife commits adultery and has an unhappy love affair), a book condemned as offensive to morality and religion, for which he was prosecuted, but escaped conviction. There have been a number of movies of this story, including one in 1991 by the celebrated French director Claude Chabrol. Flaubert also published a book, Trois contes, which consists of three short stories -- Un coeur simple (Simple Heart) (special: listen to a reading in French by Chloé Réjon, Episode 1, 2, 3, and 4) (online text for all of Trois contes), La Légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier (Saint Julian), and Hérodias (Herodias). See bio at classicreader.com and Wikipedia.
Jules Verne (1828-1905), a French author and pioneer of the science fiction genre, famous for Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Online text Fr) (Around the World in Eighty Days) (online text Eng) (special: listen to a reading in French by Laurence Guillermaz: introduction to the book, Ch. 1, Ch.2, Ch. 3, Ch. 4, Ch.5, and Ch. 6) (Télérama radio). Some other famous books of his are: Voyage au centre de la terre (online text Fr) (Journey to the Center of the Earth) (Online text Eng), De la terre à la lune (online text Fr) (From Earth to the Moon) (online text Eng), Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (online text Fr) (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) (online text Eng), and Paris au XXe siècle (Paris in the 20th Century) (See Wikipedia summary). Click here for e:book downloads.
Jules Verne's books have translated very well to the cinema. Here's are movie trailers on You Tube for Around the World in 80 Days (David Niven, Shirley MacLane) (1956), which one five oscars, Journey to the Center of the Earth (Pat Boone, James Mason) (1959), 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (Kirk Dougas, James Mason, Peter Lorre) (1954).
Emile Zola (1840 -1902), a novelist and critic, who helped found the naturalist school in literature, is particularly celebrated for his Rougon-Macquart cycle of books (1871-1893). That cycle includes Nana (online text fr, eng), Germinal (online text fr, eng), L'Assommoir (The Dramshop) (online text fr, eng), and others. He is also especially noted for his letter J'accuse (See UVA on-line text) in the affair involved Alfred Dreyfus, a french Jewish officer falsely accused of giving military secrets to the Germans and sentenced to Devil's Island. His letter helped bring to light the anti-semitism in the society at the time, which contributed to the scapegoat treatment for Dreyfus, and ultimately led to his being freed.
Guy de Maupassant (1850 - 1893), one of the fathers of the modern short story, is also known for a number of fine novels (relatively short), such as Une Vie (A Woman's LIfe), Bel Ami (Handsome Friend) (the story of journalist George Duroy (see Wikipedia summary), and what some consider his greatest novel, Pierre et Jean (Pierre and John) (see Wikipedia summary), a realist story about the effect of an inheritance on a family. He contracted syphillis at an early age, and by 1891 was considered insane. |  Drawing for Une Vie |
I have a number of his spectacular short story collections, including Contes de la bécasse (Tales of the Woodcock), with the wonderful Ce cochon de Morin (The Pig of Morin) (special: listen to a podcast of it in French) (see text of all the stories in Contes de bécasse, but text of Ce cochon de Morin is especially helpful with the podcast). There are many other famous short stories of his, such as: The Necklace, Boule de Suif ("Suet Ball" in English, referring to a fat woman in the story), La Maison Tellier (Madame Tellier's Establishment), Le Horla (The Horla) (See UVA on-line text), Mademoiselle Fifi (online text, fr, eng, dual fr/eng text online, etc. Here is a link to the Project Gutenberg Works of Maupassant on-line, and for downloading as e:books.
Marcel Proust (1871-1922), a French novelist, essayist and critic, is famous for his monumental work of fiction, A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), a work spanning some 3200 pages, and teeming with roughly 2000 literary characters. In terms of writing, the work is ahead of its time, has some of stream of consciousness that puts him in a category with James Joyce, Virginia Wolfe, and William Faulkner. Other Proust Sites.
There have been a number of efforts to put Proust, and/or his works into film. These include: (1) Time Regained (1999) with Catherine Deneuve and Emmanuelle Béart, where the Chilian director, Raoul Ruiz, emphasized the concluding volume, In Search of Lost Time, from the larger work; (2) Swann in Love (1988) is a dramatization of one small section of Remembrance of Things Past with Jeremy Irons and Ornella Uti; (3) Celeste (1981) is a film based on the memoirs of Céleste Albaret, Proust's confidant and housekeeper from 1914 until the end of his life. Eva Mattes played Céleste and Jürgen Arndt played Marcel Proust.
Albert Camus (1913-1960), a French author and philosopher, born in Algeria, won the nobel prize in 1957. He is celebrated for novels, like La Peste (The Plague), L'étranger (The Stranger), La chute (The Fall) (Audio book mp3), and a posthumous biography, Le premier homme (The First Man). In his life, he is especially noted for his strong opposition to capital punishment, and also spoke against totalitarianism in any form, including Fascism and Communism. His falling out with fellow writer-philosopher Jean Paul Sartre (See article in The Nation, Oct. 5, 2004) at one point a friend, was linked to his sense that the latter espoused totalitarianism in the name of radical Marxism. Though Camus himself rejected the existentialist label, some still argue that his writings are in that philosphic camp. See Wikipédia fr bio.
Here is Albert Camus' banquet speech accepting the Nobel Prize in literature (1957) (Fr, Eng text).
I have chosen, in this part of the web page, a list of writers to discuss, based on my own reading, and because I have been impressed with them, and want to provide my own reviews. I have always been amazed at how well Vladimir Nabakov (of Russian origin), and Joseph Conrad, (Polish), expressed themselves in English. One thing I find interesting is the number of modern writers, using French, but whose first language, based on country of birth, is not French. In the list below, there may not be stylists of the French language in the same way that Nabakov and Conrad were stylists in English (that is, they were stylistically better than practically anyone else writing in English), but still, there are some impressive writers here, who can write quite fine novels in what is for many of them a second langauge. Interestingly, only Japrisot and Vercors were born in France.
-Amélie Nothomb.
Born in Kobe, Japan in 1967 and the daughter of a Belgium ambassador, she spent the first five years of her childhood in Japan. Afterwards she lived successively in China, New York, Bangladesh, Burma and Laos, and did not set foot on Belgian soil until she had reached the age of seventeen. Her books Le Sabotage Amoureux (Loving Sabotage in translation) and Stupeur et Tremblements (Fear and Trembling in translation) are my favorites from her books, both which take a look at life in Japan -- the former, about her growing up as the child of a diplomat there, the later addressing the perils of life in a Japanese company. She has a great sense of the comic in her writing, though she can also be quite dark in a droll sort of way, as with her plot in Catilinaires, about the neighbor who always comes to visit a retired couple in the country at the same time late in the day, sits in a chair wordless, while they try to entertain him, and drives them nearly crazy, because they are too decent and timid to ever shut the door in his face. See the complete review in English and French for information about Nothomb. And here's a link from belgium.be that provides a short bio in English.
-Shan
Sa
| She
was born in 1972 in Beijing, left China for France in 1990.
Her La Joueuse de Go
is a powerfully tragic book, (available in English under the title,
"The Girl Who Played Go"), about a Japanese soldier,who, during his
country's occupation of Manchuria, plays Go with a 16 year old
Manchurian girl,at the Place
des Mille Vents, and they fall in love. |  photo by decent-exposure |
You do not have to enjoy the Eastern game of Go to find this book fascinating, although it certainly doesn't hurt. It is my favorite novel that uses the game of Go as a significant part of the plot. The books that come to mind here, by way of comparison -- The Master of Go by nobel prize winning writer, Yasuanri Kawabata, and Trevanian's international thriller, Shibumi -- are quite good too, so all the more kudos to Shan Sa for such a fine work.
 Memorial for Tianaman Square Victims | Also Shan Sa's earlier book, Porte de la Paix Céleste (Door of Celestial Peace), relating to the topical events of Tiananmen Square is quite good (with an echo of Javert chasing down poor Jean Valjean) given the way the solder Zhao, chases Ayamei across thousands of kilometers. |
-Andrei Makine
Born in Krasnoyarsk, Soviet Union in 1957, he went to France in 1987 as part of a teacher's exchange program and decided to stay. The book of his I have read recently, Le testament français (winner of the 1995 Goncourt Prize) is thoroughly absorbing (autobiographical) and appears in English translation under the title, Dreams of My Russian Summers. The author tells a story about a child who on the edge of the Siberian steppes, grew up listening to his French grandmother, Charlotte, talk about the France of her youth. And he is, as he becomes older, torn between his enchantment with her stories, and his own research and study -- what has become for him a mythic and distant love for France -- against the pull from Russia, where the rest of his family's roots are. There are passages in this book that are brilliant and moving (from the child's being mesmerized by a photo album with far-distant pictures of Paris, a time of a mysterious flood there (which suggests analogies to Atlantis -- a mythic kingdom too), to a visit by the Czar to Paris -- with a weaving together of the fate of two nations, that the child works hard to visualize (because, perhaps unconsciously, wants to reconcile the two parts within himself -- the one part of his heritage, Russian, another, the other from his French grandmother). And then there's that ultimate and irrevocable separation of the two parts of the narrator (with Russia going the way of Lenin and Stalin). Finally as an adult in France (where he has ended up after the fall of the Berlin wall), the grandson readies an apartment, putting the furniture in place, decorating the walls: he dreams of his aged grandmother's felicitous return (and is taking the steps to prepare the way), when something occurs unexpectedly -- a letter with a breathtaking revelation -- and what is most precious, knowledge of his mother's fate will be "gifted" to him. Media Reviews of the English translation of the book are at Biblio.com. The book was turned into a movie, Xiao cai feng, released in France in 2002.
He is a filmmaker born in China in 1954, re-educated between 1971 to 1974 (just like the protagonists in the novel I discuss here, that made him famous), left China in 1984 for France, where he has since lived. His book Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise (2000) (translated into English under the title, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress) takes place during Mao's cultural revolution, when political troublemakers (very loosely applied) are sent to the countryside for harsh re-training. The protagonists in the story, the narrator, and Luo, have to work in a coal mine, and carry buckets of excrement up and down a mountainside. Then imagine the protagonists' joy, after being dispossesed from the somewhat cosmopolitan world they had known, when they discover something more precious than gold -- a trunk of classic novels (which has to be hidden as contraband as a risk to their lives). Indeed, as the narrator first reads Balzac's Ursule Mirouet, despite all of the Chinese propoganda he has been a victim of, and his total ignorance of France, this small book spoke powerfully to him "de l'éveil du désir, des élans, des pulsions, de l'amour, de toutes ces choses sur lesquelles le monde était, pour moi, jusqu'alors demeuré muet . . . " (of the awakening of desire, of transports, urges, of love, of all that the world was for him, until then, mute. And then, the narrator relates: "L'histoire d'Ursule me parut aussi vraie que celle de mes voisins." (The story seemed to me as true as my neighbor's). So, thus, through the transformative power of literature, two worlds (one Western, the other Chinese), so different, and far apart as to seem almost alien, are drawn closer together by the common humanity that, through the magic of literature, unites us all. The plot finally turns then to how one of the protagonists uses the Western novels to court a young Chinese seamstress, with a result, unanticipated.
Born
in
Marseilles, France in 1931,
he studied at a Jesuit College before entering La Sorbonne.
He
became a best-selling mystery writer, directed some short films, and
has written screenplays. His most famous novel is,
no
doubt, Un long dimanche
de fiançailles (1991) (A
Very Long Engagement), which became a movie with
Audrei Tatu. Japrisot tells a fascinating story about a woman who never
gives up searching for her fiancée, purportedly killed in
WWI.
The book is a major novel about World War I. No surprise that the book comes from France. It helps to recall the huge sacrifice that France paid -- the countless lives lost (almost 1,400,000 out of a population of 40 million) in a brutal and seemingly never-ending war. America, of course, lost many lives too, but got into the war near the end, so they were far fewer in number (117,000 out of a population of 92 million). The War's effects were, therefore, not nearly as devastating on our society.
What
ostensibly happened was that five soldiers were found guilty of
self-mutilation to escape military service, and condemned to a near
certain death in a trench in no-man's land between the German
and
French armies. While all of the soldiers were said to have
perished, the fiancée, though many years have passed, keeps searching
for the truth. |  Trench Warfare |
The book is a major novel about World War I. No surprise that the book comes from France. It helps to recall the huge sacrifice that France paid -- the countless lives lost (almost 1,400,000 out of a population of 40 million) in a brutal and seemingly never-ending war. America, of course, lost many lives too, but got into the war near the end, so they were far fewer in number (117,000 out of a population of 92 million). The War's effects were, therefore, not nearly as devastating on our society.
He was born in Russia in 1911, arrived in Paris in 1920, was elected to the Academie Française in 1959. He died on March 2, 2007. Here is a brief bio of Troyat and from the Academie Française a list of his work. He was extremely prolific, producing, according to this link from the academie française from 1935 to 2006, almost a book or two a year.
Out of a huge corpus of accomplished writings, I have two novels of his to briefly review. First, La Neige en Deuil (1952) (The Snow in Mourning), which is a classic adventure story, and quite enjoyable. The protagonist is a mountain guide, Isaïe, who has had some accidents in mountain climbing expeditions, nearly died in the last, and is terrified of going back up because he feels that the mountain has sent him a sign or warning. He now raises sheep, lives alone with his younger brother Marcellin (who is the family "black sheep," a thorougly lazy, unprincipled person), but whom Isaïe loves. People view him as having become a bit of a "simpleton," and it's true that he has become a lesser person since the accidents-- hasn't led expeditions or climbed for years. Then a plane crashes in snow and ice on the mountain, and shortly thereafter, the town's leading guide dies in a rescue mission. Although the view is that there are no survivors from the crash, Isaïe ends upconfronting his own worst fear--in leading his brother up that mountain. He knows Marcellin's motive is immoral: he wants to search the plane for gold, or money that can be picked off the bodies of the dead. Still Isaïe, who fears his brother would climb on his own and perish, goes up to safeguard him, and in so doing, finds something, unexpected at the top.
The other book, Le bruit solitaire du coeur (1985), apparently had as a model Henri Troyat's father, and is really quite excellent. The author catches with sensitivity and humanity the life of an elderly man (93 years old)--an emigré from Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, who ends up shipwrecked (metaphorically) in Paris. It is an unheroic book--unlike La neige en deuil -- but in its own way, quite good. Troyat's protagonist, Igor Dmitrievitch Lébédev, is a man, torn between two worlds--the one of his past (the Russia that is dead, and many of the people he knew in it, along with his beloved wife, Hélène), and the shrinking world of his living, as memories of the past capture and possess. The book is without the external adventure, i.e., mountain-climbing, of La Neige en Deuil. Still, I can see in parts of Igor, my own Father, also a Russian emigré, and both of their journeys through old age, memory, and illness. If play of mind and the humdrum of daily existence is essentially the offered fare here, it is, through the richness and beauty of the author's perceptions and the depth of his own humanity, more than enough!
She was born
in Kiev in 1903 to a
wealthy banking family, achieved her first success with the novel David
Golder, published when she was 26. BookBrowse
has a bio that provides some of the relevant facts about her
life. They note how she had converted from Judaism to
Catholicism in 1939 (which was not enough to suit the Nazi mania for
extermination of all people with any Jewish bloodlines). She
was arrested by the French police in July 1942, died in Aushwitz,
shortly thereafter at the age of 39, and her husband's murder
followed shortly thereafter. The two children, Denise and
Elisabeth (Babet), then aged 5 and 10, were hidden from the
police, and ultimately escaped, with their mother's manuscript that
they didn't have the heart to read (they thought the manuscript was
merely a private notebook) for almost half a century, and also, their
mother's handwriting in the manuscript was so small (perhaps she was
afraid of running out of paper), it was hard to focus on.
It is hard to imagine someone during this period (in constant threat because of her religion, as well as the mortal peril to her husband and children), so taken by "art" and maybe the importance of being a witness here, that she obsessively worked on developing this story, sketching characters, scenes, even as Nazi troopers occupied, and terrrorized the countryside. There is much about Ms. Némirovsky's life, and the book itself, at a site called The Definitive Website. Here are some editorial reviews of the English translation of the book at Amazon.com.
 Yellow badge Jews Were Forced to Wear | After
Elizabeth died, the other daughter
Denise, took a closer look at the manuscript, suddenly realized that
these were no mere personal notes, but something far greater, and had
Némirovsky's Suite
française published to rave reviews. The book
itself was actually conceived and written during the German occupation
of France in the early 1940s, and is a full-blown effort by Irène at a
very ambitious novel, possibly along the lines of Tolstoy's War and
Peace, albeit because of the author's death, it went unfinished.
It won Le
Prix Renaudot for 2004. |
It is hard to imagine someone during this period (in constant threat because of her religion, as well as the mortal peril to her husband and children), so taken by "art" and maybe the importance of being a witness here, that she obsessively worked on developing this story, sketching characters, scenes, even as Nazi troopers occupied, and terrrorized the countryside. There is much about Ms. Némirovsky's life, and the book itself, at a site called The Definitive Website. Here are some editorial reviews of the English translation of the book at Amazon.com.
Not long after I finished La Suite française, I read Le Silence de la Mer by Vercors (who was born in Paris in 1902, under his real name, Jean Bruller). This book was short in comparison to Ms. Némirovsky's opus, but powerful, and also, at much risk to the author, written at the time of the Nazi occupation of France.
Now Le Silence de la Mer is a book of short stories, one of which goes by the title of the volume. It is certainly one of the better stories of the collection and has an aspect of resisting the Germans through silence, an idea evoked in Suite française also, and reflective of an early time in the occupation, when silence may have seemed an option. The story, "Le Silence de la Mer" was turned into a movie by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1947 (director of the recently released in the United States, L'Armée des Ombres), which I discuss in the section of this website on French films. For me, the best story of that Vercors collection is La March à l'étoile, (The March to the Star) a word with a double meaning, evocative of the star that lights heaven (maybe even guided the three wise men to Christ), and the yellow star the Jews had to wear during the Nazi period. That story tells about a boy, Thomas Muritz (modeled after Vercors' father, Louis Bruller), who immigrated to France because as a child he'd idealized it exultantly, passionately, fell in love with it as he never could with anything or anyone else, later, became a self-made giant in France, only to be in the end betrayed because of his religion, or at least, the Jewish part of his family bloodline. One cannot but be drawn to compare that love of France, mythic, visceral, by the grandchild/grandmother in Makine's book, Le testament français (Dreams of my Russian Summers) and that of Thomas for his adoped country. Of course, from the Hell of the Nazi occupation, and the context of those who were collaborators, Vercors was asking if France was worthy of Thomas' love? Two other stories I thought, notable for their excellence in this collecdtion are, "Le Cheval et la Mort" (The Horse and the Death), and "L'imprimerie de Verdun" (The Printing Press of Verdun). There's an outstanding French site on Vercors, at perso.orange.fr, which covers all of his stories, his life in the resistance and much more.
The
image at the top of the page is the ancient library at Alençon, and is,
according to Wikipédia,
available for use, copy, redistribution, modification in any text based
work under GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.2. The
image of the Romain Gary statue in Vilnius was bronze statue by
Lithuanian artist Romas Kvintas on the street where Roman Gary
(1914-1980), novelist, film director, world war II pilot and diplomat
lived as a child. It depicts a boy clasping a galosh, a reference to
the author's 1960 work, La
promesse de l'aube (Promise at Dawn).
The
image was taken in 2007 by Alma Pater, and released
into the public domain. The
image of Amélie Nothomb was taken by Camae, and permission
is granted for its use pursuant to GNU Free Documentation
License, Vers. 1.2, or later. The
image of the photograph of the only remaining house where Balzac lived,
was taken by P. Alejandro Díaz, June 25, 2005, and is an
alleyside
view of the house located at 47, rue Raynouard , 75016 Paris,
France, taken from the Rue Berton alley side. The image is
licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution ShareAlike License Version 2.0, and is available
for use, as long as attribution is given to the
creator/author. The
image of Cosette is from a portrait by Emile Bayard from the original
edition of Les Misérables (1862), and the image is in the public
domain
because copyright has expired. Similary, the drawing by A. Leroux, and
engraving by G. Lemoine (1883) was for Maupassant's book, Une Vie and is now
in the public
domain.The image of the six panel Japanese
screen (byoubu) from the 17th century is a contribution of Kasihin, who
has consented to its use for
any purpose. The
image of Voltaire,
the Paris café,
the swastika,
and the man with the gas
mask and machine gun
are in the public domain. The Go
Image is by decent-exposure on flickr, and is of a position
in a
famous Go game. There is permission
for its
use. The memorial for the Tiananmen
Square victims in Wroclow, Poland, has
been released by the photographer, Julio, and is now in the public
domain. Jews were forced to wear a yellow badge-star to
identify themselves in
Nazi German. This image
can be used for text based work. See
license
