French literature
These three books by Patrick Modiano are short, intense, and sensuous.
Read MoreFrench writer Pascal Quignard strives to peer beyond, or behind, what psychoanalysts typically rationalize as the primal parental realities.
Read MoreYasmina Reza’s dollhouse of a novel is a miniaturist’s miracle.
Read MoreVery little happens in Dominique Fabre’s books, yet one keeps on reading. because he so genuinely depicts the ordinary lives that most of us lead.
Read MoreEntertaining yet incisive, The Conquest of Plassans remains a devastatingly acute reminder that religion and politics make surprisingly compatible bedfellows.
Read More“On Leave” is a worthwhile novel that deserves this English revival because it convincingly conveys the alienation felt by soldiers who return home on a brief leave from hostilities taking place abroad.
Read MoreWhile reading Andre Maurois’ “Climates” you feel your world narrowing in uncomfortable ways.
Read MoreHelen Constantine’s new translation of Balzac’s “The Wild Ass’s Skin” serves this wonderful and weird book well. It is one of the great, black comic fables in world literature, a dazzlingly demented exploration of a society’s lack of imagination.
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Book Commentary: Patrick Modiano — An Oddly Elliptical Choice for the Nobel Prize for Literature
Patrick Modiano’s simple sentences pull one in; the nostalgia of loss and pain of youth and the hunt for a vague, romantic Other are easy to relate to.
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