Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> World Literature - France - 20th Century

Colette, prodded by her first husband, Willy, began her writing career with Claudine at School, which catapulted the young author into instant, sensational success. Among the most autobiographical of Colette's works, these four novels are dominated by the child-woman Claudine, whose strength, humor, and zest for living make her seem almost a symbol for the life force.

Janet Flanner described these books as "amazing writing on the almost girlish search for the absolute of happiness in physical love . . . recorded by a literary brain always wide awake on the pillow."

Colette began writing Break of Day in her early fifties, at Saint-Tropez on the Cote d'Azur, where she had bought a small house after the breakup of her second marriage. The novel's theme--the renunciation of love and the return to an independent existence supported and enriched by the beauty and peace of nature--grows out of Colette's own period of self-assessment in the middle of her life. A collection of subtle reflections about love and life, it is among her most thoughtful and stylistically bold works.

In Jean de Florette and Manon of the Springs, Marcel Pagnol (called by Andre Malraux "one of the great writers of our generation" and by Jean Renoir "the leading film artist of his age") achieve the fullest and most satisfying expression of a story that haunted him for years, a Provencal legend of vengeance exacted by a mysterious sheperdess. Pagnol brings to his treatment of this powerful, moving story his dramatist's sense of place, ambience, and character and his keen understanding of the Provencal countryside and its people. Rich with twists and ramifications, Jean de...

At once a coming-of-age story and meditation on cultural...

The fast-paced and gripping third title in the bestselling Victor Legris mystery series

Paris, November 1891: The body of a barefoot young woman dressed in red is discovered on Boulevard Montmartre. She has been strangled and her face horribly disfigured. That same day a single red shoe is delivered to Victor Legris's Parisian bookshop by a goatherd. Suspecting more than just coincidence, the charming bookseller sleuth and his assistant Jojo are soon searching for the identity of both victim and murderer. Then, a body is discovered in a wine barrel at the same time as a famous...

Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.

Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature (though he declined to accept it), Jean-Paul Sartre philosopher, critic,...

In In the Shadows of Paris, the fifth installment in this c'est magnifique Victor Legris series by Claude Izner, a murderer is at large in belle-epoque Paris.

In the turbulent Parisian summer of 1893, Victor Legris has vowed to his fiancee to give up the dangerous hobby of amateur sleuthing to concentrate on selling books.

But a killer is at large, leaving mysterious references to a leopard in his notes, and intent on revenge for events that took place many years before during the Commune. When a bookbinder friend of Victor's dies in a house fire that does not seem to be...

La Moustache--now a film directed by Emmanuel Carrere

"What would you say if I shaved off my mustache?" asks The Mustache's hero of his wife. Once removed, his wife and friends not only fail to recognize him, but deny the existence of the former mustache altogether. A metaphysical nightmare of the grandest kind, The Mustache is a stunning blend of absurdist comedy and philosophical speculation.

In Class Trip, young Nicholas's vivid imagination gets the best of him when a boy disappears from a school excursion. What the youthful detective finds is...

Seven decades after German troops march into her village, CEleste Roussel is still unable to assuage her guilt. 1943. German soldiers occupy provincial Lucie-sur-Vionne, and as the villagers pursue treacherous schemes to deceive and swindle the enemy, CEleste embarks on her own perilous mission as her passion for a Reich officer flourishes. When her loved ones are deported to concentration camps, CEleste is drawn into the vortex of this monumental conflict, and the adventure and danger of French Resistance collaboration. As she confronts the harrowing truths of the Second World War's...

A long-lost French novel in which three soldiers return home from an unpopular, unspeakable war

When On Leave was published in Paris in 1957, as France's engagement in Algeria became ever more bloody, it told people things they did not want to hear. It vividly described what it was like for soldiers to return home from an unpopular war in a faraway place. The book received a handful of reviews, it was never reprinted, it disappeared from view. With no outcome to the war in sight, its power to disturb was too much to bear.
Through David Bellos's translation,...