Posts tagged france
No one reads Marcel Aymé, who Simenon called “the greatest French writer of the day.” Image by Bohumil Stepan for a Czech edition of The Green Mare.
Amazon links to books in English, though only one in print at the moment:
- Beautiful Image (in print)
- The Green Mare
- The Man Who Walked through Walls (forthcoming Feb. 2012)
- Walker-through-Walls (presumably an older trans. of the above)
- The Barkeep of Blemont
- The Secret Stream
- The Proverb & Other Stories
- Grand Seduction
- The Miraculous Barber
- The Hollow Field
- The Transient Hour
- The Second Face
- The Fable and the Flesh
- Fanfare in Blemont
- Across Paris & Other Stories
- The Conscience of Love
- The Proverb and Other Stories
- The House of Men
- Five Short Stories
- The Wonderful Farm (for kids, illus. by Sendak)
- The Magic Pictures: More About the Wonderful Farm (illus. by Sendak)
Raymond Queneau
“His thoughts were hemmed in. One can only draw curved lines on the terrestrial sphere which, as they extend, forever meet with themselves. At such intersections we always encounter what we have already seen.” - Queneau (via Frenchtwist)
(For more Queneau see, for example, this conversation at the Review of Contemporary Fiction or his One Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets.
Edmond Jabès: Few Read Him, More Should
I discovered Edmond Jabès’ The Book of Questions serendipitously. The son of wealthy Egyptian Jews, Jabès’ earliest literary friendships were with Max Jacob, Paul Eluard, and Rene Char.
The Book of Questions is the story of two young lovers during the Nazi deportations; not using any traditional narrative, it speaks of Jewishness, silence, dispossession, and writing.
As explained:
“There seems nothing strange about the fact that ancient rabbis can converse with a contemporary writer, that images of stunning beauty can stand beside descriptions of the greatest devastation, or that the visionary and the commonplace can co-exist on the same page. From the very beginning, when the reader encounters the writer at the threshold of the book, we know that we are entering a space unlike any other.” - Paul Auster
And:
“In the last ten years nothing of interest has been written in France that does not have its precedent somewhere in the texts of Jabès.” - Jacques Derrida, 1972
Few read him, more should.
Submitted by aperfectcommotion.
No One Reads Violette Leduc
[SUBMITTED BY http://dailykvetch.tumblr.com/]
I came across Violette Leduc’s Mad in Pursuit in a used bookshop, and bought it due to the mention of Simone de Beauvoir on the back jacket. I then found La Bâtarde at my university’s bookstore. Maybe she’s taught in a French Authors in Translation there; I didn’t investigate. I was just happy to find the book. But I’ve never seen her mentioned anywhere, and I’ve never heard anyone else reference her.
No one reads Marcel Schwob. (Three old posts on 50 Watts.)
Solar Books put out an edition of Imaginary Lives in 2009, though it seems to already be hard to find in the US.
The King in the Golden Mask is long out-of-print, as is The Book of Monelle, last printed in 1929.
No one reads Jean Cocteau. (Though admittedly he’s a Jackie Collins compared to some of the authors featured here.) Image via bookvart.
![No one reads Jacques Rigaut.
Jacques Rigaut, 1922 -by Man Ray
[Rigaut (1898-1929) was a french writer, he acted in the Man Ray’s movie Emak Bakia (1926) with Kiki and Rose Wheeler]
via CP](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ld7aztNZF31qcl8ymo1_500.jpg)
No one reads Jacques Rigaut.
Jacques Rigaut, 1922 -by Man Ray
[Rigaut (1898-1929) was a french writer, he acted in the Man Ray’s movie Emak Bakia (1926) with Kiki and Rose Wheeler]
via CP
(via yama-bato)
No one reads Jules Renard.
In English:
- The Journal of Jules Renard (Tin House)
- Nature Stories (NYRB)
- Histoires Naturelles (diff. translation of the above, from Oneworld)
- Carrot Top
- The Sponger
No one reads Roland Topor. (Cover, long out-of-print Stories and Drawings, Peter Owen, 1968.)
No one reads Pierre Mabille.
Mabille, Pierre (1904-52), was veritable polymath: surgeon, sociologist, active Surrealist from 1934; French cultural attaché in Haiti and first director of the French Institute there (1945); art critic, student of alchemy, astrology, and voodoo. He taught at the École d’Anthropologie and the Faculty of Medicine in Paris (1949-51). As a Surrealist, his most important book is Le Miroir du merveilleux (1940), a wide-ranging and critical anthology. As a thinker, his profession of faith is found in La Construction de l’homme (1936). His desire for a synthesis of different branches of knowledge is revealed in Égrégores ou la Vie des civilisations and La Conscience lumineuse (1938). He also published a psychoanalytical-cum-sociological study, Thérèse de Lisieux (1937).via
In English and highly recommended: The Mirror of the Marvelous
No one reads Cioran.
“It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” More quotes. Hat tip The New Inquiry. (And why I like him.)
In English (these books go in and out of print):
No one reads Aimé Césaire. Read some of his poems here.
In English:
- The Collected Poetry
- Solar Throat Slashed
- Discourse on Colonialism
- Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
- A Season in the Congo (play)
- A Tempest (play)
- Return to My Native Land
- Lost Body
- Non-Vicious Circle
Also see the anthology, The Negritude Poets
(via montycantsin)
No one reads Gontran de Poncins. Thanks again jimmy.
On Amazon: Kalbloona: Among the Inuit (in print as a “Graywolf Discovery”)
Also:
No one reads Francis Ponge. (An appreciation.)
In English (Amazon links):
In English but out-of-print
- The Power of Language
- The Voice of Things
- Ten Poems (trans. Robert Bly)
- The Sun Places in the Abyss and Other Texts
- Making of the Pre
- Things (trans. Cid Corman)
No one reads Jules Vallès (1832–1885).
The Child (in print from NYRB) is the first of a trilogy of autobiographical novels. The others are Le Bachelier (The Graduate; never translated into English), and L’Insurgé (translated as The Insurrectionist and currently out-of-print).
