The latest addition to my website is Paul Gadenne‘s Siloé [Siloam]. This is a very long autobiographical novel, Gadenne’s first, based on his stay in a tuberculosis asylum in the French Alps. Unlike Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), Gadenne does use TB as symbol of the human condition but uses the isolation of Simon Delambre, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Emmanuel Carrère‘s Un roman russe (My Life as a Russian Novel: A Memoir). Though the English calls it a memoir – and, to a great extent it is – it is written as a novel, called a novel by the author and the publisher and reads as a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Emmanuel Carrère‘s La Moustache (The Moustache). The unnamed hero of this novel decides one day to shave off his moustache to surprise his wife, Agnès. Not only does she not notice, she later insists that he never had a moustache. This previous lack of a moustache is later … Read more
The latest addition to my website is François Bon‘s L’enterrement [The Funeral]. This short novel/long story tells of the unnamed narrator’s visit to a remote village in the Vendée region of France for the funeral of Alain, an old friend. We do not know how Alain died but we suspect it was suicide. The narrator … Read more
I recently attended an exhibition at Tate Britain called Aftermath, exploring the impact of World War One on British, German and French art. I have long been fascinated by this period for two reasons. Firstly I have long enjoyed the British artists of that period (and up to and including World War II). These include … Read more
The latest addition to my website is François Bon‘s Sortie d’usine [Factory Exit]. This is Bon’s first novel but, sadly, neither this novel nor any of his others have been translated into English. It is a stream of consciousness novel, told in the third person, about life in a factory. The unnamed protagonist who, like … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès‘ L’Île du Point Némo (Island of Point Nemo). Like his earlier work, this is a madcap romp, with adventures, sex and violence, world travel and characters from all over the world. It features amputated feet, a racing pigeon fancying, breast-loving Chinese manufacturer of e-readers, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès‘ Là où les tigres sont chez eux (Where Tigers are at Home). This is a massive novel (over a thousand pages) set in Brazil and mixes several stories, including the probably not entirely accurate life of Athanasius Kircher (recently seen in Daniel Kehlmann‘s Tyll … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jean Giono‘s Pour saluer Melville (Melville: A Novel), published in French in 1941 but only published this year in English. It was intended, initially, as an introduction to Giono’s translation of Moby Dick into French but was expanded into a short novel, with Giono inventing a fanciful story … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jean Giono‘s Jean Giono: Le Moulin de Pologne (The Malediction). This is not the joyous Giono novel of his early years but, as the English title tells us, a novel about a curse. The Coste family lived in the Moulin de Pologne (Poland Mill), an estate rather than … Read more