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International literature #6: French
I'd put this series on hold, because of lack of activity. Now I'll give it another go, with French, one of the languages with huge amounts of influential literature.
So, without further ado, please share your favourite French books and authors!
Alexandre Dumas has always had a special place in my heart. I've read a few of his books, specifically The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. They were written as serials for a newspaper so they're pretty long winded, but the stories are so satisfying to me. I would definitely recommend them!
Samuel Beckett is an Irish author that wrote both in English and French. His most famous work, En Attendant Godot was written first in French, then translated to English by Beckett himself as Waiting for Godot. Another text I read of him was Mercier et Camier, which was again first composed in French.
My personal experience with writing in English and Italian is that it is a big big task. Expressing yourself in a language that is not your mother tongue, trying to compose a text with etymological and semiological nuance, to make use of the richness of the language is a hard task that required a really good command of the language and good research skills, and as an extension of the latter, enough perseverence to topple the big obstacle such research is to composing a fluent, beautifully-flowing, natural-sounding piece of text. Doing that successfully enough to receive a Nobel prize is really a big achievement.
Especially when I write in English, I find it hard to deal with the fact that it has been for me the "tech language" for so long. I'm reading more and more literature in English, but IDK if I'll ever have a vocabulary in it as broad as that I have within my mother tongue. When it is not your daily language, you lack access to so many daily occasions where unique modes of language occur, and I find that while writing complex, long, expressive, abstract sentences is not really that hard of a task, pinning down the smaller, more quotidian interactions or thoughts or reactions is way harder.
Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit & Mort à crédit. It's hard to go back to classic books of the same period after that, because they feel so outdated and conventional in comparison.
Voyage au bout de la nuit is definitively the easiest one (and most famous).
I think it's both what it's about and how it's told.
Céline wasn't from the bourgeoisie or the nobility, he was a physician coming from a modest Parisian family. The style is very oral, direct, vulgar and full of slang, while still being quite beautiful (specially in le Voyage). The topics are down to earth, mixed with big topics (WW1, colonialism, capitalism, love, ...) and Céline misanthropic views, all told vicariously in first person with a strong personal voice. If you compare with Proust for example that 10 years earlier describes at length the extremely boring high-class dinner parties with his elegant, sophisticated style, it's night and day.
I spent quite some time reading the first volume of L'identité de la France by Fernand Braudel "Espace et Histoire". And its a wonderful book about the history of France from roman time to post-industrial era.
I think it should be okay for non-native readers/speakers of french, because most of the vocabulary is not technical, and its written like a story going through time-periods jumping backward or forward in time to link geography to economics to social systems.
The thing that I like the most about its series is there lot of attention put on life of farmers, merchants, petty bourgeoisie, or upper class, and their relations with geography, economy, technologies, wars, class systems, borders, rulers, politics etc... And not much on the rulers themselves.
I feel like I was able to see more clearly what the life of peoples would be in differents era