French Literature Series – serie

A literary exploration into the serendipitous convergences underpinning the writing of a novel (here, Ge rard Gavarry s masterful Hoppla! 1 2 3), this rare and revealing glimpse into the creative process pulls back the curtain on the composition of a playful and self-conscious work of fiction.

The long-awaited new translation of the most dazzling and unclassifiable work of fiction in any language.

In this nominally true story of an epic, transcontinental road trip, Jean Rolin travels to Africa from darkest France, accompanying a battered Audi to its new life as a taxi to be operated by the family of a Congolese security guard. The ghost of Joseph Conrad haunts Rolin's journey, as do memories of his expatriate youth in Kinshasa in the early 1960s--but no less present are W. G. Sebald and Marcel Proust, who are the guiding lights for Rolin's sensual and digressive attack upon history: his own as well as the world's. By turns comic, lyrical, gruesome, and humane, "The Explosion of the Radiator Hose" is a one-of-a-kind travelogue, and no less an exploration of what it means to be human in a life of perpetual exile and migration.

Confessions of a Madman personalizes the struggle of a civil war by following the fragmentation and irreversible separation of a single family. Written in alternating flashbacks and descriptions of a man’s present, Sebbar delivers a modern fable for adults: a tale of familial disorientation, identity, violence, and morality. A young man observes his mother losing her mind while waiting for her murdered husband to return home. Despite his estrangement from his father, the son vows to avenge his father’s death by murdering his father’s killers. In delving into his father’s past, he discovers his role in an unsuccessful revolt and soon finds himself following in his father’s footsteps. This book addresses the meaningfulness of cultural traditions, their origins, and their potential contemporary repercussions when juxtaposed with a modern context of events.

This early work by the landmark Swiss author Robert Pinget is unlike any other he produced over his long career; indeed, there are few books by any writer with which it bears comparison—aside perhaps from the novels of Raymond Roussel or Denis Diderot. Graal Flibuste follows the progress of its narrator and his impudent coachman, Brindon, through a fantastical land peopled by strange creatures and stranger potentates, and filled with tall tales, mysteries, crimes, dilemmas, and deities … not least among whom is the terrible god Graal Flibuste himself.

In Absinth, you’ll meet three main characters trying to figure out their life on the backdrop of the upcoming Apocalypse: Iris, a fortune-teller who cannot see not the future but weirdly anachronistic versions of the past; Sid Saperstein, a shameless huckster chosen to publish a sacred manuscript whose message will shake heaven and earth alike; Hermes, the Greek messenger god, dispatched by Zeus to sound out his fellow deities, still smarting from the licking they took two thousand years ago, on how best to take advantage of the coming changes, whatever they may be. And also God Himself, whose enigmatic voice addresses us throughout the novel in the contemporary koans of advertising lingo.

Sally Mara’s Intimate Diary, dating from 1950, is exceptional; a salacious, black humorous andmeaningful story by the influential and erudite French novelist, Raymond Queneau. When ‘Sally Mara’begins her diary in January 1934, she is 17 years old and lives with her mother, older brother andyounger sister in south central Dublin. The everyday language is, of course, English, but she is writingin ‘newly-learned’ French to impress her beloved and just departed French tutor, a professional polyglotlinguist. To impress him even more, she decides to learn Irish in order to write a novel of some kind inIrish. However, the action throughout is determined by Sally’s resolution to overcome her ignorance ofthe mysteries of sex and reproduction. The often sensual and dark humour of Sally Mara’s Journal intime is founded on language andlanguages, so this translation, while prioritizing clarity, aims to maintain ‘Frenchness’, tinged of coursewith Dublinese. Surprisingly, for a French author, Irish words and phrases occur throughout; these arenot translated but, like some challenging French phrases, are supported by footnotes.In 1949, when Raymond Queneau wrote Journal intime, published anonymously under thepseudonym Sally Mara, he was, as always, greatly influenced by James Joyce and fascinated by thelimitations of language. He was also in need of the ready money provided by Éditions du Scorpion,publishers of erotic and violent pulp fiction, and of Journal intime.

The ugly side of superheroesWhat if you suddenly had superpowers? What would you do? How would your friends and family react? What would your obligations to society be?The superheroes’ first missions— combating terrorists or rescuing disaster victims— are a boon to France. Yet while these actions bring the country pride, unity quickly starts to unravel. These superheroes, ultimately, are human. Paparazzi are everywhere. One has an affair with another’s wife. Another questions following the government’s imperialist agenda. Meanwhile the public carps on social media. Molia takes our fascination with superheroes and adds a cutting portrayal of contemporary social mores to create an entertaining and disturbing work with deep dystopian underpinnings.

The unnamed narrator of Francis Bacon’s Armchair has just been released from an extended stay at a psychiatric hospital and now has only one objective: to shut himself away in his apartment and contemplate the best way to restart his life. But his obsession with Cathie, a young woman he met during his convalescence, drives him out of his bedroom one night in search of a telephone—which leads him two floors below into the apartment of his morbidly obese neighbor, Sauvage. Sauvage is a translator overwhelmed by his current project, The Dictionary of Rare and Incurable Diseases, and by the inherent difficulties of his profession. The narrator begins paying regular visits to his mysterious neighbor, and the two isolated men develop a bizarre relationship dominated by fear, jealousy, and mutual fascination. A hypnotic and philosophically dense novel, Francis Bacon’s Armchair deftly weaves between explorations of loneliness, language, and obsession.

Girls in French and Francophone Literature and Film is a collection of essays focusing on constructions of girlhood in French and Francophone Literature and Film from the late-Nineteenth to the early-Twenty-First centuries. The volume is firmly anchored at the intersection of French and Francophone studies and the bourgeoning field of girls’ studies. Collectively, the articles demonstrate that girls’ experience, historically viewed as a mere deviation from the “normative” male model, is a product of diverse ideological, cultural and economic factors, and is deserving of its own field of inquiry.

The volume explores diverse aspects of French-language travel writing. Arranged chronologically by topic, the essays cover the medieval Anglo-Norman story of the Irish traveller Saint Brendan's fantastical visit to hell; the sixteenth-century French expeditions to Florida; the seventeenth-century Dernières découvertes dans l’Amérique septentrionale de M. de la Sale mises au jour par le chevalier Tonti, 1697; the eighteenth-century Histoire générale des voyages by l’abbé Prévost; the eighteenth-century Impressions d' Orient et d'Arabie written in French by the Polish count Waclaw Seweryn Rzewuski; nineteenth-century tales of travel in Algeria by the orientalist painter Eugène Fromentin; early twentieth-century travel narratives by the modernist Blaise Cendrars; the 1936 visit to the Soviet Union by Louis-Ferdinand Céline and André Gide, odyssean thematics in the late twentieth-century work of Nobel prize winner Patrick Modiano; the thematics of nomadism in the twentieth-century writing of Albert Memmi, and the thematics of travel in works by Bernard Ollivier, Rachid Bouchareb, Fatou Diome, Christine Montalbetti, Marie Ndiaye and Emmanuel Lepage.

The steady development of queer theory over the last two decades has provided useful analytical tools and the will to dismiss the watchdog of heteronormativity. Modes of reading have evolved, as this volume of FLS amply attests. Following Bill Edmiston’s introduction to the volume — a concise and informative history of queer theory — the fifteen articles reveal, not surprisingly, significant diversity. One deals with queerness in the context of medieval writing where allegorical and euphemistic expression were understood to be irreconcilable. Another treats translations in Early Modern France of an Ovidian fable that had an inconvenient lesbian dimension. Rousseau’s fixation on his bottom (e.g., for spankings) points to a queer streak, while Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin enhances the theme of sexual misidentity with ornamental figures. The queerness of Sand’s La Mare au diable emerges in the course of a contrasexual reading. A musicologist investigates the possibility of a lesbian esthetics of music in a work by Erik Satie, while a literary scholar finds evidence of Proust’s “outing” in Jean Santeuil. Other articles address the sense of gender transformation wrought by sodomy, a revised view on the writing subject in Jean Genet’s fiction, the queerness of heterosexuality in the works of Michel Houellebecq, and recurring motifs in recent fiction produced by “gay Paris.” Two of the articles treat activism and esthetics in film.

Volume 39 of FLS French Literature Series features ten articles on the topic of the environment in French and Francophone Literature and Film. Contributors engage with the work of such authors, filmakers and cartoonists as Michel Serres, Luc Ferry, Patrice Nganang, Marie Darrieussecq, Yann-Arthus Bertrand and Plantu, and such topics as human zoos, eco-colonialism, queer theory, and the environmental catastrophes of WWI and, globally, of human civilization as recorded in the recent eco-documentary, HOME. Wide-ranging, provocative and topical these articles both broaden and deepen the efficacy of ecocriticism as a tool for enriching our understanding of the field beyond the English and American “nature writing” at the theory’s core.

Maurice Roche has been called “the most interesting novelist in France” (TriQuarterly), and Compact “one of the classics of our modernity” (Le Figaro). Certainly, Compact is one of the most compellingly original works of fiction of the postwar period. Composed-as if a musical score-of six intertwining narratives (each distinguished by its own voice, tense, and typeface), Compact has lost none of its remarkable freshness or groundbreaking innovation since its first appearance in 1966. But along with its striking originality, Compact is also a work rich in offbeat humor and great humanity. Compact is the story of a blind man living in a city of his own imagining. Confined to his deathbed, he engages in mental walks through the world’s capitals. These sightless excursions explode in a plethora of musical arrangements, sexual encounters, and mysterious funeral rites. Meanwhile, a Japanese collector and his transvestite assistant watch over the blind man in exchange-upon the latter’s death-for his magnificent tattooed skin. As a further ordeal, the protagonist finds himself prey to the whims of a sadistic French girl in the next apartment. A novelistic tour de force, Compact fully bears out La Tribune de Geneve`s judgment of Maurice Roche’s work as “the most important literary upheaval to hit France in the last decade.”

Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, "The Truth about Marie" revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint's acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie--the story switching deftly between first- and third-person as the narrator continues to drift through life, and Marie does her best to get on with hers. Like all of Toussaint's novels, "The Truth about Marie"'s plot matters far less than its pace and tempo, its chain of images, its sequence of events. From pouring rain in Paris to blazing fires on the island of Elba, from moments of intense action to perfectly paced lulls, "The Truth about Marie" relies on a series of contrasts to tell a beguiling, and finally touching, story of intimacy forever being regained and lost.

Two minutes into the second act, there is a knock on Nicolas Boehlmer's dressing-room door, just as he's smoking his last cigarette before having to go back on stage... and, without thinking, he says, "Come in," still in character. He quickly finds himself bound, gagged, and stripped by a man who appears to be his mirror image: costumed in the same wig, makeup, and clothes. Nicolas is powerless to prevent his usurper from going out and playing his role--with increasingly ridiculous consequences. Is this "upstaging" the act of a depraved amateur? Sabotage by a rival? A piece of guerrilla theater? A political statement? Whatever the cause, Nicolas and his fellow actors soon find their play--and their lives--making less and less sense, as the parts they play come under assault by this irrational intruder.

The delightful and daring entertainment by French author Herv? Le Tellier is a series of short, intimately interconnected stories making up a lively user's manual to pleasure, relating the various liaisons of couples from Anna and Ben to Yolande and Zach (taking in Chloe and Xavier along the way, as well as twenty others, as you may have guessed), until the crisscrossing of their lives and partners makes up a pattern as intricate as the fresco on the ceiling of a chapel... Harkening back to another playful book on an intimate subject-- Harry Mathews's "Singular Pleasures"--Herv? Le Tellier's "The Sextine Chapel" celebrates the wonderful, often random, often excruciating possibilities of sexual intimacy, with something here for just about everyone--and their wife, husband, lover, or passing fancy.

In the tradition of Joe Brainard's "I Remember" and Georges Perec's "Je me souviens," this delightful "novel" offers a thousand answers to the question, "What are you thinking?" (Or, as translator Ian Monk puts it: "Penny for them?") The answers are spontaneous, revealing, ominous, insignificant, grotesque, amusing, lecherous, tragic and trivial by turns, and lovable in their cheerful imperfection. This is a book about the basics: love, sexuality, death, and all the other things that lurk in our everyday thoughts.

The eighteenth-century German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg left behind at the time of his death thousands of fragmentary notes commenting on a dazzling and at the same time puzzling array of subjects. Pierre Senges’s Fragments of Lichtenberg imaginatively and hilariously reconstructs the efforts of scholars across three centuries to piece together Lichtenberg’s disparate notes into a coherent philosophical or artistic statement. What emerges instead from their efforts are a wide variety of conflicting and competing Lichtenbergs – the poet, the physicist, the philosopher, the humorist – and a very funny meditation on the way interpretations and speculation create new histories and new realities.

Louis Meyer is an overworked aerospace engineer looking forward to a week-long vacation on the Mediterranean. DeMilo is an astronaut and self-proclaimed ladies’ man whose behavior borders on the obsessive and voyeuristic. When a series of coincidences and disasters-including a devastating earthquake in Marseilles-brings them together on a spacecraft with an aloof woman they are both strongly attracted to, the two men’s flaws and shortcomings emerge as they engage in an underhanded competition to win her over. Brimming with Jean Echenoz’s inimitable humor, We Three is both a satirical take on the adventure novel and subtle experiment with narrative point of view.

A covert war has begun in which two adversaries of the current regime, Lauménès and Gonamména, have pitted themselves against double agent Karl Résa; woman of mystery Athena Sansadarc; Inspector Loriot and his second-in-command, Hector; and Pierre, the secretary of a revolutionary party out to avenge the murder of Salomon, a childhood friend cut down in his prime by the enemy.This screenplay-novel resembles a classical tragedy less in its division into five acts than in its hidden, internal structure. Be warned, however, that the unities of time and space are not respected, and even the principle of identity, according to which one cannot be simultaneously self and other, is often violated. In this world, every word spoken seems to echo words spoken long ago, each new event brings an eerie sense of déjà vu, and a shape-shifting opponent always seems to be one step ahead.A surreal, fast-paced thriller on the surface, a brilliant recombination of literary classics underneath, The Antagonist was one of the first (and best) hybrids of its kind, still unrivaled for its freshness and invention.

A musty bar in off-season Cannon Beach, Oregon, provides the setting for an unsuspecting Frenchman’s introduction to the many ways life can go wrong for the unlucky in America. He listens as the barflies nightly recount their tales of woe—betrayal, broken families, financial ruin. Though they seem at first to tolerate the newcomer’s presence and sympathy, a tide of violence is rising, one he perceives only dimly until it is too late to escape. Made doubly powerful by her poetic fascination with the violence and volatility of the American landscape itself, Montalbetti’s novel is a thrilling study of the senseless cruelty disappointed men are capable of.