MorkTheFiddle wrote:The list from Wikipedia includes the following works by French (I think) authors. Plus the trilogy by Günter Grass, whom I added because of his stature as a major novelist. I checked all the links to be sure they work. (at least on 17 March 2021
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French WW2 Novels from
Wikipedia
I'd like to add to this list (and I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet!) the fairly long (2621 pages) work written by Charles De Gaulle, the leader of the Free French who continued fighting after the surrender of Vichy,
Mémoires de guerre et mémoires d'espoir. It goes over the entire period from the surrender up to the establishment of the French Fourth Republic, then continues onto the Algerian war when he was called to prevent the military coup and solve the crisis caused by the Algerian War. This work is of great value to understanding the Gaullist legacy that almost every political party in France claims, but more than that, it's an enjoyable work in itself. The style is nothing like you'd expect from a military general and politician, it's very heavily literary, well edited and above all very engaging, at least it was to me because I'm interested in this topic quite a bit. The work is full of propaganda, obviously, and the way he describes a lot of events has an extreme anti-american and anti-english tone, which I find adds to its value as a book as well as historical value, since what view other than a leader of one of the major countries of WW2 could be as useful for understanding the context in which it took place? I can't write too much about the literary style because I already forgot most of the style aspects of the book but you'll see things like pas dropping with savoir, oser, pouvoir, and cesser, past subjunctif, and plus-que-parfait subjunctif with its value as a conditional. I think the value of Mémoires de Guerre et Mémoires d'espoir is validated by the fact that it's cited many times in Le Bon Usage, the French grammar book of choice. Though, despite being heavily literary, there really isn't that much vocabulary needed (only 10k words for 99.5% comprehension which is pretty good, 14.3k total unique words), but you will need to search up certain military words, some of them you'll remember just because of how odd and specific they are. I've remembered the word 'spahi', which is described as 'Cavalier de l'armée française appartenant à un corps d'Afrique du Nord créé en 1834 et organisé en une « subdivision d'arme » de la cavalerie en 1841. ' by Larousse, without even specifically trying, for example.
One thing I can suggest to do is to combine your reading with
INA's timeline of all Charles de Gaulle's public speeches and discourses, which is really enjoyable. Seeing Charles de Gaulle put on his WW2 military uniform during his Discours du 29 janvier 1960 is incredible. It's interesting because if you look at the style of discourse and speech in general for every French president, up to Sarkozy the style was very literary. It seems like this hit its peak under Mitterand, who actually spoke with past subjunctif quite a few times, which is something that's very rare, and he specifically trained himself to do it.
Anyway, a really good book and I highly recommend it. I wouldn't suggest reading the 2621 pages in one sitting, or even in one month. I stopped reading it in order to read other books and then picked it back up multiple times, which is good for variety.
EDIT: Though I said the style was literary, it doesn't go as far as archaisms and stops short of things that are becoming (or are) slightly incomprehensible to most french speakers. That is to say, he never goes as far as 'dont' as a replacement for 'ce qui' and 'ce que', aka taking a phrase as an antecedant, or qui as a substitute for lequel/laquelle for non-personnifable objects, nor even subjunctif imparfait with the value of conditional (at least, if my memory is correct). You'll see plenty of 'ne saurait's and I think even a few cases where 'que' with ne expletif represents 'sans que' but I think that's about it. In this sense it's a very modern book, since it only goes up to the acceptable limits of literary language for most modern french people who aren't readers in the first place.