OCTOBER THREAD ON THE GRAND EUROPEAN TOUR : LA BELLE FRANCE

Undoubtedly after novels from the British Isles, the novels of France are my favourite.
The nation that has brought us Rabelais, Stendahl, Hugo, Balzac,Dumas, Verne, Sand, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, Gide, Proust, Collette, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Perec and Houellebecq amongst so many.

Hugo, Balzac, Zola and Camus would feature in any list of my favourite authors.

OPTIONS

Far too many to choose from but here are 20 novels written in French that I would recommend:

1. The Red and the Black by Stendahl
2. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
3. The Black Sheep by Honore de Balzac
4. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
5. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
6. Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
7. Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant
8. The Debacle by Emile Zola
9. The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
10. Gigi by Colette
11. Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
12. Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre
13. The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir
14. The Plague by Albert Camus
15. Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau
16. Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
17. Manon des Sources by Marcel Pagnol
18. Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec
19. The Wedding by Yann Queffelec
20. Atomised by Michel Houellebecq

What I will read :

The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir

I have already finished this year:

The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis
Eloquence of the Sardine by Bill Francois
Nagasaki by Eric Faye
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix
Canoes by Maylis de Kerangal

>2 PaulCranswick: France has also produced some fantastic comics. My favorites are Asterix and Valerian and Laureline.

I have actually read some Asterix and agree that they are great fun.

>2 PaulCranswick: I am reading Around the World in Eighty Days from the list - I really enjoy Jules Verne's books. I am also going to try and get The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery read this month. I love the book and it has been far too long since I read it.

>6 alcottacre: I like Verne too. He is always good fun, Stasia. If I get time I may read something of his too.

I am reading Pot-Bouille for the Emile Zola Group Read but it doesn’t fulfill my personal sub-challenge because no European travel is involved. La Chartreuse de Parme and Albertine Disparue would have worked nicely, but I reread both fairly recently. Will do some further research.
For once I have read over half of the books on one of Mr Cranswick’s lists, and own a few more.

I voted for TOLSTOY by Henri Troyat and Vercors THE SILENCE OF THE SEA.

>9 m.belljackson: I read The Silence of the Sea a few weeks ago.

I have a few here to pick from:
Live Fast by Brigitte Giraud (Prix Goncourt 2022)
French Tales translated by Helen Constantine
The Kill by Emile Zola
The Book of Pearl by Timothee de Fombelle

I also had a book, Zabor or the psalms, by Kamel Daoud ready to go as he won the Prix Goncourt in 2024, but see that he's an Algerian writer now living in Paris.

I will begin with The Passion in the Desert by Honore Balzac. I've also got Balzac's History of the Thirteen which is 3 novels in one all connected by some sort of mystery. Both of these works are from The Human Comedy. I may also attempt a re-read of Old Goriot, which was a DNF for me in 2023.

I’m working on Les Misérables but you’ve reminded me of Asterix! I definitely need to do a reread.

>10 avatiakh: The Silence of the Sea is one unforgettable tale.

Some great picks here.

>10 avatiakh: I read Chekov by Henry Troyat and would like to get to Tolstoy as well.

I have Les Miserables on the shelf, as well as several Dumas, but all of these are chunksters, and I really don't have time to tackle them this month, unfortunately. The Dumas books would also require a reread of The Three Musketeers to start, as the unread ones are the sequels. I'm going to try for Gigi instead, as soon as it comes in. It will be no problem to fit that in.

>13 m.belljackson: Yes, a book that comes with back story. I read it for a TIOLI challenge, 'a book title that implies silence'

Looking through my library for books by French authors which concern European travel—my personal sub-challenge—I found three, and have now finished the first: Le Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon. It is a light comedy by a playwright who apparently wrote over a hundred of them, although the only one I knew previously was An Italian Straw Hat, made into a famous silent movie by René Clair and also an opera. Monsieur Perrichon was on my shelf because it was a high school text previously belonging to my great-uncle, born in 1885. Back in those days you had to purchase your own textbooks for high school, the way college students do today. Play is a light farce about a nouveau riche business man and the two suitors for his daughter. The first two acts take place during a trip to Switzerland. Happy for my book, that has been opened probably for the first time in a century.

I finished Albert Camus’s L’étranger (The Stranger) yesterday, my second book by him. I enjoyed La peste (The Plague) more, but this was interesting to read.

>19 PawsforThought: I think that observation is spot on, Paws. The Plague is my favourite of his books but The Stranger has an almost indefinable quality to it that certainly benefits a second reading.

>19 PawsforThought: A key novel of Existentialist philosophy. I would, however,recommend Meursault, contre-enquête as a follow-up. The same story, told from the perspective of the brother of the man killed by the narrator of Camus’ novel—-a man he refers to, 45 times, only as “the Arab.” Puts the essential racism of Algeria as a French colony in a whole new light.
PS I note that Camus rejected being identified as an Existentialist.

>21 booksaplenty1949: Thanks for the tip! The way people in the novel seem not to care a bit for the Arabic people (including the murder victim) is one of the toughest things to stomach about the book - though I believe that was on purpose by Camus.

I’ve started Les Miserables but I feel sort of overwhelmed by all the historical and political references that I am not getting. Of course I can just read past them, but it’s an interesting period, and I would like to understand more. Does anybody know of an annotated version?

>23 EllaTim: Ella, there will be an annotated version by Stephen Parkin on Alma Classics but it is only published next year!

https://almabooks.com/product/les-miserables/

There is this one from Amazon and available for $2.99 but I'm not sure how good it is.

https://www.amazon.com/Miserables-annotated-Victor-Hugo-ebook/dp/B01F1KOQ3A

>22 PawsforThought: Yes, I note that several LT reviewers seem to identify the narrator of L’etranger with Camus, which is quite wrong-headed.

>23 EllaTim: I had thought about reading Les Miserables soon, but when I looked at my copy, there were no notes, and I knew I would be lost. I've been looking around and I found this Penguin version has notes:



It is a Penguin 2015 paperback edition translated by Christine Donougher. Although not "annotated" as such, there are end notes. I would think a truly annotated edition would be huge.

I've been searching for an Oxford Classics edition, but I haven't been able to find one. I do have an Oxford Classics edition of Notre-Dame de Paris.

>25 booksaplenty1949: Why people have such a hard time separating author from narrator is beyond me.

>27 PawsforThought: Yeah. Why did the author open Moby Dick with “Call me Ishmael” when his name was Herman?!

>24 PaulCranswick: Thanks Paul. No next year, that would be a long wait. Maybe the other edition would be useful, I’ll try and find some more information.

>26 kac522: Yes, that’s what I was thinking too, I’m just missing too much without the right background. Yes I know Napoleon, but then what? I did find there are Cliff notes, and I found this page on the available English translations.

I completed A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac This was a short story that took place during the Egyptian campaign of Napoleon. A man is captured by Arab forces and escapes to end up in a cave with a panther, which poses both a threat and a surreal relationship. This was from the Comedy Humaine and I will be reading more in that series. 42 pages 4 stars

I am currently reading Balzac’s Seraphita. Set in Norway, so meets my additional criterion of involving European travel. Also an up-to-the minute plot premise. Two people are in love with the main character. One believes this character is a man, one believes this character is a woman. Apparently Seraphita is non-binary, thanks to advanced philosophical practices. Or something.

There are French authors I really dislike and other that I enjoy. For this month I kind of marked out HhHH as a possibility.

>32 Kristelh: I was impressed by HhHH and its metafictional nature, when I read it several years ago.

@labfs39, Thanks for the comment, I will look forward to reading it and sharing my thoughts.

Finished Seraphita. A lengthy Swedenborgian sermon. Hard to believe it was the work of the author of Lost Illusions and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes.

I started Money by Zola.

>36 labfs39: What translation are you reading?

I've been reading the Oxford World's Classics editions, usually translated by Brian Nelson, but this one is by Valerie Minogue.

>32 Kristelh: >33 labfs39: HHhHH was certainly one of my favorite books the year I read it! For the past couple of years, I've been drawn to more contemporary French authors. I can't pin down the reason(s), but they are all unmistakably French. I've now read and heartily recommend Bernard Ollivier's trilogy of his experiences walking a Silk Roads route to Xian, China in Out of Istanbul, Walking to Samarkand, and (my unread one so far) Winds of the Steppe. He also wrote about walking across Europe to Istanbul with his new wife, but I can't afford that one yet.
I thoroughly enjoyed A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé. I will have to make time and forget hitting 75 this year to read Life: A User's Manual, but what I've read sweeps me up.

>38 labfs39: Good. When we were reading Money for the Émile Zola Group Read here some people had the original Vizetelly translation which left out sex scenes which, apart from their prurient interest, were fairly important to the plot.

>40 booksaplenty1949: Agreed. According to the translators note in my edition, Vizetelly not only bowdlerized the text, but he then had to create passages to fix the plot holes. I started off in the Zola Group Read, but fell off the wagon. I do want to continue reading them, however.

I read Gigi for this month. Since I've got so much else on my plate, I needed something short. I knew Gigi was a short novella, but didn't realize it was as short as it actually is. However, having already read The Count of Monte Cristo back in January, which was 1188 pages long, I think that reading a short novella for France in October is more than acceptable. I found it to be charming despite a potentially disturbing plot and appreciated how Gigi stood up for herself in spite of other people's plans for her.

I know, I know—Simenon was born in Belgium and although he lived for about 20 years in France he wound up in Switzerland. But Maigret is a Parisian and I have added Maigret Voyage to this month’s challenge. Maigret travels not only to Lausanne, but also outside his usual social class, which he finds the more significant deracination.

In Chapter 4 Maigret is in a 4 star hotel in Nice drinking a dry martini. I barely recognise him.

>44 booksaplenty1949: A dry martini? Not a beer? Are we sure it’s actually Maigret?

>45 PawsforThought: My response exactly.

I finished Les Misérables. It took some effort, it’s a chunkster, and I had some trouble with the lengthy digressions from the main story. But I loved that main story, very vivid and colorful. The main figures will stay with me.

I finished Live Fast by Brigitte Giraud. This won the Prix Goncourt in 2022 and is an autobiographical novel with Giraud looking back at the death of her husband 20 years earlier in a motorcycle accident. Not really my thing, she writes of all the 'if onlys' that could have changed what happened on that fateful day.

I finished Money by Zola. Although I continue to enjoy Zola's writing, this story, of the machinations of the French stock exchange, was not my favorite.

So, I also managed to read a book by a French author:
The Châtelet Apprentice by Jean-François Parot
I really enjoyed it and will read the other volumes in this series at some point.

Yesterday, I finished Gaston Leroux’ The Phantom of the Opera which was a much quicker and easier read than I had feared. I enjoyed it a lot!

I actually managed to finish both of my reads for this month, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which I still love, and Around the World in 80 Days, which was just fun.

I finished The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas (1850) and found it a charming tale of historical fiction set in the 17th century amidst real current events. At only 234 pages, it had the perfect mix of adventure, romance and revenge. I highly recommend the Penguin edition with translation from the French by Robin Buss, which was smooth and accessible.

Belatedly realised that I owned another unread French book involving travel—-Five Weeks in a Balloon. Turns out it also relates to the Nile, an interest of mine. However my copy is a leather-bound Everyman edition—the kind that starts to fall apart if you look it at it the wrong way, let alone open it. And I like to read French books in the original. Ordered Cinq semaines en ballon which arrived today and looks appealing.

I managed to squeeze in We Always Treat Women Too Well by Raymond Queneau. Set in the Easter Uprising in Ireland in 1916, it is mordantly funny send-up of both the British and the Irish and the mores between men and women in tough situations. Plenty of trigger warnings for sex, bad language and senseless violence but it was a hoot.

>55 PaulCranswick: Wow, an amazing premise. Must hunt it out.