French literature
By David Mehegan This minimal memoir reminds me of a backyard clothesline, festooned with socks, shirts, pants, dishtowels, suspenders, underwear, bras, new things and old, all in various colors and shapes, flapping briskly in the wind. The Chessboard by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Translated from the French by Ruth Diver. Other Press. 191 pp. Paper. $16.99. Jean-Philippe…
These three books by Patrick Modiano are short, intense, and sensuous.
French writer Pascal Quignard strives to peer beyond, or behind, what psychoanalysts typically rationalize as the primal parental realities.
Yasmina Reza’s dollhouse of a novel is a miniaturist’s miracle.
Very 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.
Entertaining yet incisive, The Conquest of Plassans remains a devastatingly acute reminder that religion and politics make surprisingly compatible bedfellows.
“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.
While reading Andre Maurois’ “Climates” you feel your world narrowing in uncomfortable ways.
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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