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This novel begins with a funeral for a young mother: A good-looking girl, anyway, who with that coif of hers got to look rather like a nun as the years passed, and whom few of us were content to see lying between oak planks in her least worn dress, the black one she got into on Sundays, even when she couldn't go to Mass at Saint-Sulpice, and that smelled clean, with no odor (no smoke, sweat, animals, cabbage or milk) other than the soap they said came from Marseilles and which in the spring left big bluish trails in the stream. They resembled the Milky Way, which she had showed her son in the summer sky when he was very small. Ambitious and grandiose, Richard Millet's stunning novel announces his introduction to an English-speaking audience. Set in the villages and valleys of France's mountainous provinces, The Glory of the Pythres follows the fortunes-or rather, the colossal misfortunes-of the Pythres (pronounced as pitres, the French word for clowns or buffoons). Of peasant stock, "suspicious, taciturn, mulish, stubborn," the Pythres live a grim existence, locked up with their dead through long winters and passing on their problems like heirlooms to their children. They, like their neighbors, are Others, their culture passing away, their language barely comprehensible to other Frenchmen, their lives defined by tribal hatreds with motives that have long since vanished into history. The translation is no less ambitious than the novel itself. It captures this forgotten world in Millet's musical prose; it contrasts the strange patois of the villagers against "proper" French. Filled with finely observed characters and a breathtaking power of description, The Glory of the Pythres is a unique, powerful work of art.
This novel begins with a funeral for a young mother: A good-looking girl, anyway, who with that coif of hers got to look rather like a nun as the years passed, and whom few of us were content to see lying between oak planks in her least worn dress, the black one she got into on Sundays, even when she couldn't go to Mass at Saint-Sulpice, and that smelled clean, with no odor (no smoke, sweat, animals, cabbage or milk) other than the soap they said came from Marseilles and which in the spring left big bluish trails in the stream. They resembled the Milky Way, which she had showed her son in the summer sky when he was very small. Ambitious and grandiose, Richard Millet's stunning novel announces his introduction to an English-speaking audience. Set in the villages and valleys of France's mountainous provinces, The Glory of the Pythres follows the fortunes-or rather, the colossal misfortunes-of the Pythres (pronounced as pitres, the French word for clowns or buffoons). Of peasant stock, "suspicious, taciturn, mulish, stubborn," the Pythres live a grim existence, locked up with their dead through long winters and passing on their problems like heirlooms to their children. They, like their neighbors, are Others, their culture passing away, their language barely comprehensible to other Frenchmen, their lives defined by tribal hatreds with motives that have long since vanished into history. The translation is no less ambitious than the novel itself. It captures this forgotten world in Millet's musical prose; it contrasts the strange patois of the villagers against "proper" French. Filled with finely observed characters and a breathtaking power of description, The Glory of the Pythres is a unique, powerful work of art.
The first volume of Paths to Contemporary French Literature offered a critical panorama of over fifty French writers and poets. With this second volume, John Taylor?an American writer and critic who has lived in France for the past thirty years?continues this ambitious and critically acclaimed project.Praised for his independence, curiosity, intimate knowledge of European literature, and his sharp reader's eye, John Taylor is a writer-critic who is naturally skeptical of literary fashions, overnight reputations, and readymade academic categories. Charting the paths that have lead to the most serious and stimulating contemporary French writing, he casts light on several neglected postwar French authors, all the while highlighting genuine mentors and invigorating newcomers. Some names (Patrick Chamoiseau, Pascal Quignard, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Jean Rouaud, Francis Ponge, Aime Cesaire, Marguerite Yourcenar, J. M. G. Le Clezio) may be familiar to the discriminating and inquisitive American reader, but their work is incisively re-evaluated here. The book also includes a moving remembrance of Nathalie Sarraute, and an evocation of the author's meetings with Julien Gracq Other writers in this second volume are equally deserving authors whose work is highly respected by their peers in France yet little known in English-speaking countries. Taylor's pioneering elucidations in this respect are particularly valuable.This second volume also examines a number of non-French, originally non-French-speaking writers (such as Gherasim Luca, Petr Kral, Armen Lubin, Venus Ghoura-Khata, Piotr Rawicz, as well as Samuel Beckett) who chose French as their literary idiom. Taylor is in a perfect position to understand their motivations, struggles, and goals. In a day and age when so little is known in English-speaking countries about foreign literature, and when so little is translated, the two volumes of Paths to Contemporary French Literature are absorb
In An Italian Journey, Jean Giono describes his journey to the land of his father's people. A reluctant traveler (he rarely left Provence), Giono discovers a strange beauty not only in the palazzi and canals of Venice but also in wistful waiters, suspicious hairdressers, pugnacious men of God, recalcitrant coffeemakers, umbrellas, and field machinery. In Giono's world a stamp collectors' market can appear to verge on revolution and inept municipal musicians suddenly offer Mozartian joys.