Yeah, you're paying the price for the clichés "French is such an intellectual and art language" and "you should read/gift quality literature"
rdearman wrote:I generally prefer genre books, scifi, murder, action, thriller, etc. I like those books because the characters do stuff! They kill a dragon, have a car chase, shoot a blaster, investigate a murder, they do something. This book is all about navel-gazing. Any action happens "off-stage" and is generally related back by the POV character. The scifi book was bad because it was just a crazy mixture of words, this book is bad because it sucks.
My kind of reader!
A few tips on original French books, where characters do a LOT of stuff:
Michel Robert: L'Agent des Ombres series. Fantasy, definitely for adults, complex, fun, not a cliché, and people do a lot of stuff.
Laurent Genefort: Les opéras de l'espace: awesome, space opera (who would have guessed, by the name), the main character is an opera singer, who loses his voice and needs to find themselves a new career to finance his space quest.
Maxime Chattame: série Autre-Monde. The world as we know ends (the beginning is a bit Stephen King-ish), only kids are left and they need to do a lot of stuff, fight the new wildlife for survival, defend themselves from the former adults, solve mysteries, build an aircraft,...
Marc Lévy: Sept jours pour une éternité: God and Lucifer have a bet, their servants have a lot to do.
Jean-Christophe Grangé: Les rivières pourpres. You wanted a thriller, murder investigation etc? Here you go.
Charlotte Bousquet: Arachnae. Fantasy but far from utopia. Characters do stuff, solve murders, fight for survival or power and so on.
Pierre Pevel: anything from him.
And for the record: I didn't like l'Étranger. It may be a canon book, it may be objectively good, if some say so, but I hated it.