A French Book Reading Resource

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kanewai
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby kanewai » Tue Dec 28, 2021 3:32 am

reineke wrote:
Les 10 livres préférés de 100 écrivains francophones

Quels sont les ouvrages de chevet de nos auteurs ? Eh bien, sans surprise on trouve “A la Recherche du temps perdu”, de Proust, mais aussi “Absalon, Absalon !”, de Faulkner, et… mais oui, ”La Princesse de Clèves” (n’en déplaise à certains).


Les livres les plus cités

A la recherche du temps perdu, de Marcel Proust (33 fois)
Ulysse, de Joyce (13)
Iliade et Odyssée, d’Homère (9)
La Princesse de Clèves, de Mme de La Fayette (9)
Le Bruit et la Fureur, de William Faukner (8)
Absalon, Absalon !, de William Faulkner (8)
Les Fleurs du mal, de Baudelaire (8)
Sous le volcan, de Malcolm Lowry (8)
Don Quichotte, de Miguel de Cervantès (8)
L’Education sentimentale, de Gustave Flaubert (7)
La Bible (6)
Fictions, de J.-L. Borges (6)
Journal, de Franz Kafka (6)
Moby Dick, de H. Melville (6)
Les Frères Karamazov, de Fiodor Dostoïevski (6)
Une saison en enfer, d’Arthur Rimbaud (6)
Anna Karénine, de Léon Tolstoï (5)
Correspondance, de Gustave Flaubert (5)
La Divine Comédie, de Dante (5)
Les Liaisons dangereuses, de Choderlos de Laclos (5)
Le Maître et Marguerite, de Mikhaïl Boulgakov (5)
Mémoires d’outre-tombe, de Chateaubriand (5)
Récits de la Kolyma, de Varlam Chalamov (5)
Si c’est un homme, de Primo Levi (5)
Voyage au bout de la nuit, de L.F. Céline (5)


Well there are certainly some surprises on that list, at least for me. I had to look up some of the names. And I'll be adding two to my potential reading list this year:

La Princesse de Clèves, de Mme de La Fayette - Currently free on kindle! I am not familiar at all with this work.

Mémoires d’outre-tombe, de Chateaubriand - I am not about to read 3500 pages of anything, but I found a 500-page "anthologie" that might be more manageable. I love history, and it will be interesting to hear Chateaubriand's take.

And if anyone ever wants to tackle the English-language modernists on this list (Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf) I would strongly recommend the audio versions over the written versions. A good narrator can really bring these works to life.
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby guyome » Tue Dec 28, 2021 3:23 pm

kanewai wrote:La Princesse de Clèves, de Mme de La Fayette - Currently free on kindle! I am not familiar at all with this work.

Mémoires d’outre-tombe, de Chateaubriand - I am not about to read 3500 pages of anything, but I found a 500-page "anthologie" that might be more manageable. I love history, and it will be interesting to hear Chateaubriand's take.
I remember the Mémoires being something of a slog but I was probably too young to appreciate them. Might be time to reread them, that or his Génie du christianisme.

La Princesse de Clèves is a timeless classic but got featured prominently in the news 10/15 years ago when Nicolas Sarkozy (President-to-be and later President of the French Republic) made disparaging comments about the book, or rather about how important the book should be in some contexts. That's the reason for the "n’en déplaise à certains" in the list posted by reineke.
This, and Sarkozy's approach to culture or university education in general, sparked a minor outrage and some people organised public readings of the book:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8g12v
https://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2 ... _3476.html
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby reineke » Tue Dec 28, 2021 5:36 pm

"By the time he came to write his extraordinary, highly entertaining memoirs, Chateaubriand had witnessed some of the iconic figures and events of French history—from the court of Louis XVI, to the reign of Napoleon, to the disaster of Waterloo, to life under the Restoration. Written across different times and places, Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb tells of exotic adventures to the farthest points of the globe, of heroic battles and political struggles, and of the loneliness of a restless soul. And its startling candor—because it would be published only “from beyond the tomb”—makes it almost ridiculously enjoyable."

CHATEAUBRIAND, François-René (De) – Mémoires D’outre-Tombe (Œuvre Intégrale)
Livre audio gratuit publié le 27 novembre 2016

Également disponibles sur le site, deux sélections d’extraits des Mémoires d’outre-tombe :

- Anthologie (Extraits),
- Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Sélection).

http://www.litteratureaudio.com/livre-a ... grale.html
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby reineke » Tue Jan 04, 2022 7:31 pm

This memoir, ably translated by Andriesse with an introduction from historian Anka Muhlstein, reveals to English-speaking readers the famously aphoristic and flamboyant style that other French writers, including Baudelaire and Proust, admired and sought to emulate.
—Publishers Weekly

The best autobiography ever written...The old viscount could write one hell of a sentence. It’s an incredible book.
—Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions

Chateaubriand’s Memoirs...are his Arc de Triomphe, and may yet prove more lasting than their equivalent in stone.
—Adam Kirsch

To read Chateaubriand is to witness the subjective and yet comprehensive unfolding of a society’s change: of customs, prospects, ethics, conventions. He stands (as in the famous portrait by Girodet) on the farther shore.
—Alberto Manguel

The Memoirs from Beyond the Grave [...] encapsulate and bring to perfect mastery all the linguistic registers that their author had by turns attempted: epic, tragic, elegiac, lyric, oratorical, narrative, descriptive—like an evening rainbow over a Venetian lagoon.
—Marc Fumaroli

A Romantic classic.
—BBC News, Paris

https://www.nyrb.com/products/memoirs-f ... 1973006343

I finished the first nine (audio) books in two days. Today I ran into a passage where he describes how a bullet ricocheted against the barrel of his gun and struck his comrade in arms in the head splattering the poor man's brains over his face.

Another memorable scene involves him falling asleep in an Iroquois longhouse thinking he's all alone and feeling a naked man's leg rubbing against his body and then darting to sleep outside.

This is just in case anyone is on the fence suspecting the book is too...intellectual. Chateaubriand is a very famous author I learned to postpone indefinitely.

La Princesse de Clèves is another famous title that is cited in histories of the novel. It's also pretty short.

Sarcozy kind of looks like Nosferatu.
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby Carmody » Tue Jan 04, 2022 9:24 pm

Wow! reineke ! Sounds great! Thanks so much!
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby kanewai » Tue Jan 04, 2022 9:44 pm

I am loving Chateaubriand. I'm about 1/4 of the way through an anthologie of 500 pages. So far we've experienced his misspent and rebellious youth, the French revolution, dreamlike nights among the native Americans, and a storm at sea. His writing is much more straightforward than English writers of the time, and it is full of passion and romanticism.

Here's his first-person account of the storming of the Bastille:

--------------------

Le 14 juillet, prise de la Bastille. J’assistai, comme spectateur, à cet assaut contre quelques invalides et un timide gouverneur : si l’on eût tenu les portes fermées, jamais le peuple ne fût entré dans la forteresse ...

C’est ce spectacle que des béats sans cœur trouvaient si beau. Au milieu de ces meurtres, on se livrait à des orgies, comme dans les troubles de Rome, sous Othon et Vitellius. On promenait dans des fiacres les vainqueurs de la Bastille, ivrognes heureux, déclarés conquérants au cabaret ; des prostituées et des sans-culottes commençaient à régner ...

Des femmes élégamment parées, des jeunes gens à la mode, placés sur différents degrés des décombres gothiques, se mêlaient aux ouvriers demi-nus qui démolissaient les murs, aux acclamations de la foule. À ce rendez-vous se rencontraient les orateurs les plus fameux, les gens de lettres les plus connus, les peintres les plus célèbres, les acteurs et les actrices les plus renommés, les danseuses les plus en vogue, les étrangers les plus illustres, les seigneurs de la cour et les ambassadeurs de l’Europe : la vieille France était venue là pour finir, la nouvelle pour commencer.

--------------------

And for the non-French speakers, a very quick translation. I'm not 100% sure on some of the words:

--------------------

July 14, storming of the Bastille. I witnessed, as a spectator, that assault against a couple invalids and a timid governor: if they had kept the gates shut the people would have never been able to enter the fortress ...

It was this spectacle that dreamers without a heart found so beautiful. In the midst of murders the orgies began, like during the troubles in Rome under Otho and Vitellius. The winners of the Bastille, drunk and happy, were declared conquering heroes in the cabarets, while prostitutes and sans-culottes began to rule ...

Elegantly dressed women and trendy young men, scattered among the Gothic rubble, mixed with semi nude workers who were tearing down the walls to the applause of the crowd. At this rendezvous one met the most famous orators, the most well known men of letters, the most celebrated painters, the most renowned actors and actresses, the most popular dancers, the most illustrious foreigners, the lords of the court and the ambassadors of Europe: the old France came here for the end, the new France for the beginning.
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby reineke » Thu Jan 06, 2022 1:52 am

"Au reste, en épousant Charlotte Ives, mon rôle changeait sur la terre: enseveli dans un comté de la Grande-Bretagne, je serai devenu un gentleman chasseur: pas une seule ligne ne serait tombée de ma plume; j’eusse même oublié ma langue, car j’écrivais en anglais, et mes idées commençaient à se former en anglais dans ma tête. Mon pays aurait-il beaucoup perdu à ma disparition ? Si je pouvais mettre à part ce qui m’a consolé, je dirais que je compterais déjà bien des jours de calme, au lieu des jours de trouble échus à mon lot. L’Empire, la Restauration, les divisions, les querelles de la France, que m’eût fait tout cela ? Je n’aurais pas eu chaque matin à pallier des fautes, à combattre des erreurs. Est-il certain que j’aie un talent véritable et que ce talent ait valu la peine du sacrifice de ma vie ? Dépasserai-je ma tombe ? Si je vais au delà, y aura-t-il dans la transformation qui s’opère, dans un monde changé et occupé de toute autre chose, y aura-t-il un public pour m’entendre ? Ne serai-je pas un homme d’autrefois, inintelligible aux générations nouvelles ? Mes idées, mes sentiments, mon style même, ne seront-ils pas à la dédaigneuse postérité choses ennuyeuses et vieillies ? Mon ombre pourra-t-elle dire comme celle de Virgile à Dante : « Poeta fui e cantai : Je fus poète, et je chantai ?"

https://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/m ... 01968.html
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby Carmody » Thu Jan 06, 2022 5:27 pm



Just a Happy New Year to all and a big thank you to each and every one of you for making this thread a truly useful French Book Reading Resource. You continue to make it happen and I greatly appreciate it.

Enjoy.
Last edited by Carmody on Mon Jan 10, 2022 2:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sun Jan 09, 2022 6:24 pm

Carmody wrote:Just a Happy New Year to all and a big thank you to each and every one of you for making this thread a truly useful French Book Reading Resource. You continue to make it happen and I greatly appreciate.

Enjoy.
Finally the system accepted a *heart* from me. You deserve a heart and many more besides for sticking with this thread and making it a fine resource for French learners. Merci beaucoup!
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby Carmody » Mon Jan 10, 2022 1:26 am

MorkTheFiddle »
You will never know how important your comments have been for me.
Thank you.
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