A French Book Reading Resource

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PfifltriggPi
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby PfifltriggPi » Sun Apr 14, 2019 12:14 pm

Carmody wrote:PfifltriggPi

Thanks so much for your in depth review and rating.
I will definitely be reading it soon.


I suppose the only downside is that, due to it's being a recent work, you couldn't find it on line. I don't know if there's an audio book version, although I'd be quite interested if there is. There's also a film adaptation, which my professor has described as "less bad than I remembered". We're watching it sometime in the near future, so I'll be able to comment about it then.
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Carmody
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby Carmody » Sun Apr 28, 2019 12:22 am

Well, I have just finished my first light run through of Le Journal d'une femme de chambre by Octave Mirbeau.

"it is a 1900 decadent novel by Octave Mirbeau, published during the Dreyfus Affair. First published in serialized form in L’Écho de Paris from 1891 to 1892"

Frankly I am not sure what to think of it. I never read anything in English like it before.

The good news is that I found it to be unique in the sense that for me at B1 level it presented very few vocabulary problems. At 354 pages there were a lot of words but the author did not delve down into idioms and dialect as say Jean Giono does.

The bad news is that I don't know what to think of it. I usually have a view or opinion on everything but this left me a bit stumped. In many places the author seems to wander off on a tangent for pages. One gets the feeling he was paid by the page............

Each book I read gets an Extensive Read through and then an Intensive Read through, so my opinion might change but as of the moment I would give it a ............................................................................................................5/10
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DaveAgain
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Apr 28, 2019 6:55 am

Carmody wrote: First published in serialized form in L’Écho de Paris from 1891 to 1892" ... One gets the feeling he was paid by the page............
I read Mr Troyat's biography of Alexandre Dumas last year. He wrote for newspapers/magazines, often in partnership with others.

During his most successful run, he is described as pressing his partner (who produced the first draft) for work, writing his draft, and then passing the product off to the publisher in one day.

I believe Simone Bertiere's Dumas et les trois mousquetaires looks at his working method more closely - there was a court case over the credit for authorship when he fell out with his collaborator.

Mr Balzac also wrote for serial publication, but in his case apparently produced multiple drafts himself. Even on re-editions of older works. Stefan Zweig's biography of him is a good read: Balzac, le roman de sa vie.
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sun Apr 28, 2019 7:16 pm

Carmody wrote:Well, I have just finished my first light run through of Le Journal d'une femme de chambre by Octave Mirbeau.

"it is a 1900 decadent novel by Octave Mirbeau, published during the Dreyfus Affair. First published in serialized form in L’Écho de Paris from 1891 to 1892"

Frankly I am not sure what to think of it. I never read anything in English like it before.


Litteratureaudio has an audiobook for Diary of a Chambermaid. The audiobook's reader is Victoria, whose dry, sardonic delivery is a good fit for Mirbeau's mockery of the hypocrisy of the middle class.

I have not seen any of them, but there are film versions of the novel made in Spanish, English and French, including one by Luis Buñel starring Jeanne Moreau as Celestine. Amazon Movies has it for a fee on Youtube

For the record, I enjoyed the book/audiobook and would give it an 8 or 9 of 10. I enjoyed the satire, though by the end the tone grows tiresome and the events depressing.
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Carmody
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby Carmody » Mon Apr 29, 2019 12:33 am

Thank you very much for your contributions and commentary; greatly appreciate your summary; thought I was the only person to have read this book.

I totally agree with your summary.
:)
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Apr 29, 2019 11:15 pm

Carmody wrote:Thank you very much for your contributions and commentary; greatly appreciate your summary; thought I was the only person to have read this book.

I totally agree with your summary.
:)

Litteratureaudio claims it is the audiobook most downloaded from their site. See the right hand column on the link I gave above. I don't know how I stumbled on it, but up to the time I did stumble upon it, I had never heard of the novel nor of Mirbeau. Discovering the quantity of movies made from the book was an eye-opener as well as a reminder that French culture (and really any culture that is not my own) exists behind a curtain.
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

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Carmody
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby Carmody » Tue Apr 30, 2019 12:31 am

MorkTheFiddle,

Many thanks for the url; yes, I downloaded it and the reader Victoria sounds great to me.

One thing I can't understand is why it is that so many other people know about it and like it. To me it seems to be a book definitely under the radar.

:)
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PfifltriggPi
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby PfifltriggPi » Tue Apr 30, 2019 1:11 pm

I just realized I forgot to put my review of the film version of Une pièce montée here. To recap, for those who do not know, the original book is a 2007 novel telling the story of a bourgeois marriage from the perspective of numerous attendees, and is absolutely amazing.

The movie, on the other hand, is absolutely something, but amazing is far from the term. Had the book not existed, and had it just been a stand-alone film, it would still have been stupid, but the contrast to the book was so sharp, that it felt even worse. Without spoiling too much for those who have not read the book, the changed almost every character to a degree, and completely re-wrote some of the best in much worse ways. The plot was changed so as to not even make sense, striking lines were put in the mouths of different people, which resulted in their force being lost and, all in all it was so re-written that it could not really be called an adaptation of the book.

Every now and then, I come across an "adaptation" of a work of literature which is so horrible I feel personally insulted. This was one of those cases. I wanted to scream. I did, in fact, scream several times while watching. I ended up having to stop it halfway, come back and finish it. By the end I was not sure if I wanted to off myself, or hunt down the people responsible for the film and scream at them. I ended up hand-writing several pages in feedback for my teacher and was still fuming about it for days if not weeks after. (Even just writing this makes me surprisingly upset.)

Edit: The novel was published in 2007, not 2006.
Last edited by PfifltriggPi on Wed May 01, 2019 12:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Carmody
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby Carmody » Tue Apr 30, 2019 1:59 pm

PfifltriggPi »
Une pièce montée

Many thanks for your suggestion and the review. I just my copy of the book in the mail yesterday.

:D
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Carmody
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Re: A French Book Reading Resource

Postby Carmody » Tue Apr 30, 2019 8:20 pm

A question re the French book publishing industry:

when buying my French books I always buy them used and cheap, however, recently I have had two books arrive that have no imprint of a publisher within. This raises a couple of questions such as are these companies pirating the books or, which I guess is more likely, the copyright laws in France allow this practice after a certain amount of time. Does anyone know anything about the French publishing industry?

Thanks.
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