MetaFilter posts tagged with French and fiction

I prefer a ruin to a monument.

spanishbombs — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 18:52:06 -0800

A liquor store in Amsterdam. A veteran in Bagdad. A family in Rome. A WWII veterans memorial in Berlin. A house in Oxford. Edouard Levé photographed towns in the United States that shared names with famous cities. He photographed fully-clothed actors reenacting scenes from rugby and pornography [nsfw]. He also wrote some novels, influenced by Oulipo. Autoportrait, describes his life in 120 pages of unordered vignettes and brief, declarative sentences—"The girl whom I loved the most left me. [...] I am uneasy in rooms with small windows." and so on. His fourth novel, Suicide, is a one-sided conversation between an anonymous narrator ("I") and his friend ("you"), who committed suicide twenty years ago. It's a painfully intimate meditation on the act and its fallout on its own merits—"Your life was hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities."—but few will read Suicide unburdened with the knowledge that Edouard Levé killed himself several days after completing it, at the age of 47. Further reading: The first two paragraphs of Suicide, on the Dalkey Archive Press' website A long excerpt of lines from Autoportrait (from n+1, included above, recommended.) Photography portfolio / biography [large pdf] More from his series Amérique The Millions' review of Suicide, which explores some of the issues around the novel.

Marcel Proust's "A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu"

Trurl — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 21:45:49 -0800

"The Threat to Proust" by Roger Shattuck: When Proust’s novel fell into the public domain in 1987, three Paris publishing houses were ready with new editions that had been in preparation for several years. They all carry the same basic 3,000-page text with few variations. The differences lie in packaging and presentation. Laffont-Bouquins chose to publish three fat volumes prefaced by elaborate historical and biographical materials. Garnier-Flammarion produced ten pocket-sized volumes competently edited by Jean Milly. The new Pléiade edition, published by the original copyright holder, Gallimard, made the boldest, most ambitious, and most expensive bid to claim the market. In a combination of editorial, literary, and commercial decisions, Gallimard proposed to influence the way we read Proust and, to some degree, the way we approach all great literary works. "English Proust" by Chistopher Prendergast: Scott Moncrieff worked from the first Gallimard edition (which, with some exaggeration, Samuel Beckett described in his early essay on Proust as ‘abominable’); Kilmartin worked from the far more reliable 1954 Pléiade edition, while Enright, taking over from Kilmartin (sadly prevented by illness from undertaking his projected revision of his own revision of Scott Moncrieff), has worked from the recently issued second Pléiade.

Blaise Cendrars

Trurl — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:51:56 -0800

Reading Blaise Cendrars is like stepping into another universe. His fiction is unlike anything else I've ever read. His poetry influenced the mighty Guillaume Apollinaire and helped shape the face of modernism. But it is his mockery of biographical detail and the very notion of literature that fascinates me the most. If, like me, you're not a fan of autobiography, then Blaise Cendrars is the memoirist for you.

In the bowels of the beast

klangklangston — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:39:02 -0800

Doug Skinner translates Paul Vibert's House of Flesh and Bone, a short story about living inside large animals. Part 2. Part 3. via

Thai fiction

carsonb — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 21:07:14 -0800

Modern Thai fiction, in English et plus en français.