Bøger i French Literature serien

Completed right before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the most compassionate of Celine's novels, explores the ravages of war and its aftermath.

In this novel, Louis-Ferdinand Celine (Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan) offers us a vivid chronicle of a desperate man's frantic flight from France in the final months of World War II. Accompanied by his wife, their cat, and an actor friend, our autobiographical narrator Ferdinand leaves Paris for Baden-Baden (a World War II hideaway for wealthy Germans), is then sent to a bombed-out Berlin, and finally leaves for Denmark in search of the gold he had stashed there prior to the war. With the Third Reich in ruins and the Allied armies on Ferdinand's heels, North combines documentary realism with hallucinatory images, capturing the chaos of war and its toll on both victim and victimizer.

"Originally published in French as Oeuvres by P.O.L diteur, Paris, 2002."

First published in France in 1985, The Bathroom was Jean-Philippe Toussaint's debut novel, and it heralded a new generation of innovative French literature. In this playful and perplexing book, we meet a young Parisian researcher who lives inside his bathroom. As he sits in his tub meditating on existence (and refusing to tell us his name), the people around him-his girlfriend, Edmondsson, the Polish painters in his kitchen-each in their own way further enables his peculiar lifestyle, supporting his eccentric quest for immobility. But an invitation to the Austrian embassy shakes up his stable world, prompting him to take a risk and leave his bathroom . . .

"In his second "novel," "Newspaper," the acclaimed writer, photographer, and artist Edouard Leve made perhaps his most radical attempt to remove himself from his own work. Made up of fictionalized newspaper articles, arranged according to broad sections some familiar, some not "Newspaper" gives us a tour of the modern world as reported by its supposedly impartial chroniclers. Much of this "news" is quite sad, some is funny, but the whole serves as a gory parody of the way we have been taught to see our lives and the lives of our fellow human beings."--Back cover.

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.In just over half a century, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) had the time to be all of the following: a hunchback; a mathematician; a physics professor; a connoisseur of hare pate; a hermit; an electrical theorist; a skirtchaser; a friend of King George III of England; an asthmatic; a defender of reason; a hypochondriac; a dying man; and the author of 8,000 fragments written with ink and goose quills. Traditionally those fragments have been considered no more than aphorisms, to be sipped like fine schnapps, but certain scholars claim, however, that his famous Wastebooks are really the scattered pieces of a Great Novel, and that this might yet be reconstructed, with the help of scissors, glue, and paper, and by using what is left of our imaginations. The present volume retracts, among other things, the work undertaken for more than a century by valiant Lichtenbergians.

A pioneering French woman turns her eye toward the most classically male American genre.

Translation of: Le grand incendie de Londres.

Trio marks the first time these three shorter Pinget works are collected in a single volume. From the sublime surrealism of Between Fantoine and Agapa, through the Faulknerian take on rural life in That Voice, to the musical rhythm and flow of Passacaglia, this collection charts the varied career of one of the French New Novel's true luminaries. The space between the fictional towns of Fantoine and Agapa is akin to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County: an area where provincialism is neither romanticized nor parodied; where intrigue--often violent intrigue--confronts the bucolic ideal held both by insiders and outsiders; and where reality is shaped not by events, but by talk and gossip, by insinuation and conjecture. Written over the course of his career, these three novels are by turns hilarious and dark, surreal and painstakingly accurate; together they demonstrate the consistent quality of Pinget's versatility.

Together these two novels comprise the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary Frech fiction. Like the works of Georges Bataille, and those of the Marquis de Sade before him, Klossowski's fiction explores the connections between the mind and the body through a lens of sexuality. Both of these novels feature Octave, an elderly cleric; his striking young wife Roberte; and their nephew, Antoine in a series of sexual situations. But Klossowski's books are about theology as well, and this merging of the sexual with the religious makes this book one of the most painstakingly baroque and intellectual novels of our time.

Oliver Rohe's first novel is a word-crazed monologue in the mind of a man named Selber flying back to his wartorn native country for the first time in years. Grappling with his fear of flying and increasingly possessed by reminiscences of his long-dead childhood friend Roman, the narrator begins to wonder if any of his thoughts, or the decisions he has made in his life, are truly his own. From meditations upon loss, violence, repetition, and individuality, to explicit homages to the works of Thomas Benhard, Without Origin is a remarkable and incisive debut.

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.

Beginning as a road novel reuniting Donovan and Tom Lee, old friends from their college days, Christine Montalbetti's novel quickly becomes a playfully unpredictable exploration of American culture. the dreamlike quality of Montalbett's narration creates fresh, often funny new vantages on aspects of American life usually too familiar to be noticed.

"I would consider it scandalous if Hoex's fiction is still unknown in the world literature canon ten years down the road." --Lee Yew Leong, Asymptote Journal

Jean Rolin's Savannah is an elegy of sorts to his close friend British fashion photographer, Kate Barry, retracing the trip they took together through the American South. Rolin's immense descriptive talent, his minute topographical detail, and his poetic, documentary writing come together in a work that looks as much to keep death at a distance as to confront it directly.

In the fourteen stories that make up A Perfect Disharmony, Sebastien Brebel explores the experiences of isolated women and sexually obsessed men while weaving together digression, daydreams, and an accumulation of detail to create a wholly unique approach to the short story form.

The narrator of Villa Bunker receives letters, dozens of them, written by his mother in an isolated seaside villa, which tell of his parents' troubles in this uninhabitable house, which is soon to become a kind of labyrinth roamed by memories and long-buried feelings. At first the narrator's parents fret most about the villa's physical deterioration, but soon their own psychological deterioration becomes the inescapable focus of their stories. Is their joint madness due to the villa's aberrant architecture? Or is the isolation of the villa to blame? Or were they mad all along? The narrator is left to decipher the clues, himself in turn becoming prey to his own house, which like memory and time, seems in a state of permanent metamorphosis.

Mathilde Lewly-a female painter at the dawn of the twentieth century-has achieved notoriety among the Parisian avant-garde. She and her husband, also a talented young artist, pursue their separate visions side by side in a Clichy atelier, galvanized by the artistic ferment that surrounds them. But the couple are threatened by the shadow of Mathilde's little sister, Eugenie: since the two girls' sudden departure from their native England, Eugenie has been determined to vault the eight years separating her from Mathilde. Now, devoured by envy and haunted by a past she never actually experienced, the "e;little one"e; hurls herself into the artistic and personal life of her elder sister. It is the birth of a fierce rivalry, an emotional tug-of-war, played out against the bohemian riot of the last century's wildest years. But will the First World War's sudden and brutal eruption allow Mathilde to escape this intimate conflict and achieve her destiny?

Part prophecy and part erotic fantasy, this classic tale of otherworldly depravity features New York itself-or a foreigner's nightmare of New York-as its true protagonist. Set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city, Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel turns this urban space into a maze where politics bleeds into perversion, revolution into sadism, activist into criminal, vice into art-and back again. Following the logic of a movie half-glimpsed through a haze of drugs and alcohol, Project for a Revolution in New York is a Sadean reverie that bears an alarming resemblance to the New York, and the United States, that have actually come into being.

In this widely acclaimed translation, Dominic DiBernardi expertly captures Celine's trademark style of prose which has served as inspiration to such American writers as Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller.