In “Les Diaboliques” readers must expect quite a lot of crime and some misogyny as well.
French literature
Book Review: Patrick Modiano’s Maximal Minimalism
These three books by Patrick Modiano are short, intense, and sensuous.
Book Review: “The Sexual Night” — Origins Unknown
French writer Pascal Quignard strives to peer beyond, or behind, what psychoanalysts typically rationalize as the primal parental realities.
Book Review: “Happy Are the Happy” — You Can’t Get There from Here
Yasmina Reza’s dollhouse of a novel is a miniaturist’s miracle.
Fuse Book Review: The Subdued Yearning of “Guys Like Me” — The Sad-Droll Prose of Dominique Fabre
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.
Book Review: Émile Zola’s “The Conquest of Plassans” — “Tartuffe” Gone Realpolitik
Entertaining yet incisive, The Conquest of Plassans remains a devastatingly acute reminder that religion and politics make surprisingly compatible bedfellows.
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.
Book Review: “On Leave” — An Engaging Anti-War Story From France
“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.
Fuse Book Review: Inclement “Climates”
While reading Andre Maurois’ “Climates” you feel your world narrowing in uncomfortable ways.
Book Review: Classic Supernatural Satire — “The Wild Ass’s Skin”
Helen 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.