french fiction
Thomas Clerc’s novel reminds us of a stubborn truth: we are all narcissists that live to accumulate shit in rooms.
The author makes fully human an illness marked by absence and estrangement from humanity.
Audin scrutinizes political commitment when it is undertaken by representatives of an intellectual discipline detached from the real world.
Antoine Volodine is a master of the prolonged, very prolonged, tongue-in-cheek spoof. But he is also dead serious.
Makine may be plagiarizing himself, which is a perfectly legitimate thing for a writer to do, but scenes of spring snow and railroad stations become clichés even in talented hands.
Garréta pulls off a stylistic feat: it is impossible to determine the gender of the two main characters.
The success of this short novel set in Japan lies in the empathy it creates for a pair of ordinary and lonely characters.
The prose of Patrick Modiano, this year’s Nobel prizewinner, has a distinctive French style whose directness and grammatical limpidity by no means exclude semantic depth and complexity.
Book Review: Michel Houellebecq and the Wages of “Submission”
If you’ve recently been mourning the end of the Novel of Ideas—take heart. And dig in, for Submission offers a smorgasbord.
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