french fiction
Thomas Clerc’s novel reminds us of a stubborn truth: we are all narcissists that live to accumulate shit in rooms.
Read MoreThe author makes fully human an illness marked by absence and estrangement from humanity.
Read MoreAudin scrutinizes political commitment when it is undertaken by representatives of an intellectual discipline detached from the real world.
Read MoreAntoine Volodine is a master of the prolonged, very prolonged, tongue-in-cheek spoof. But he is also dead serious.
Read MoreMakine 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.
Read MoreGarréta pulls off a stylistic feat: it is impossible to determine the gender of the two main characters.
Read MoreThe success of this short novel set in Japan lies in the empathy it creates for a pair of ordinary and lonely characters.
Read MoreThe 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.
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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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