french

Book Review: The Blissful “Botched-Night Splendor” of Tram 83

October 2, 2015
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Tram 83 mirrors the most sordid and chaotic features of contemporary African cities, in which non-Africans also remain intimately and often deviously involved.

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Book Review: Blaise Cendrars’ Brilliant WW I Memoir — Surviving the “Shambles” of War

August 28, 2015
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The Bloody Hand stands alongside other autobiographical classics devoted to the First World War.

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Book Review: “The Book of Beginnings” — Vive les indifférences!

June 8, 2015
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This study is an attempt to “enter” a foreign way of thought and to study the “possibilities” and, by extension, “potential mindsets” of the human mind.

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Book Review: The Sad Tenderness of Patrick Modiano’s “Dora Bruder”

May 30, 2015
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Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano understands that time periods can mesh, interpenetrate, layer up, blend, and blur naturally in the mind.

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Fuse Book Review: A Peek Inside the Palace of a Veteran French Wordsmith

April 17, 2015
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Roger Grenier wears his considerable learning lightly. His writing is a graceful dance of the intellect.

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Book Review: Using Words as Weapons — Alain Mabanckou’s Tribute to James Baldwin

March 11, 2015
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Like James Baldwin, Alain Mabanckou is striving to see beyond comforting or righteous notions and grasp a world full of movement, migration, diversity, and unexpected mixtures.

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Book Review: “The fuzzy cinema of certain key events of my life” – Frankétienne’s “spiralist” novel “Ready to Burst”

October 6, 2014
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Ready to Burst is a compelling, intricately structured story told in resourceful, oft-poetic language by a influential Haitian poet and novelist.

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Book Review: From France with “L’Amour” — A Neglected Volume by Marguerite Duras

July 9, 2013
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For those of you who have never read Marguerite Duras, “L’Amour” is an invigorating place to start.

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Fuse News Film Review: “Something in the Air” — Radicalism Redux

May 12, 2013
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Assayas’s splendid autobiographical feature is about a young man who refuses to turn his back on the radicalism of the ’60s

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Fiction Review: An Unforgettable “Life of an Unknown Man”

June 7, 2012
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In The Life of an Unknown Man Andreï Makine creates a work of simple elegance that at its core explores the relationship of the past to the present, of truth to art, and of truth to life.

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