Happy Literary Valentine’s Day!
Your better half is away? You are too tired to go out? You are single anyway? …
… Well, that doesn’t matter at all, because what we would rather do, at the Book Office, is find a good book to read! And for this, you only need… A book! It wasn't so easy to find love stories in contemporary French literature, but we did our best to go through the recent publications of the past few years and bring the best out of it. Here’s our little selection for a Valentine’s read.
Compass, Mathias Enard, 2017 (translation: Charlotte Mandell)
Follow the musicologist Franz Ritter’s insomniac reminiscences of moments of his life in the Middle East, from Istanbul to Tehran, through Aleppo and Damascus. Perceive beneath the surface of these carefully intricate stories the affection that the main character feels for Sarah, the French scholar caught in the tension between Europe and the Middle East. The novel won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, and is considered as one of Enard’s most ambitious novels.
Trysting, Emmanuelle Pagano, 2017 (translation: Jennifer Higgins & Sophie Lewis)
Nouons-nous is the original title to this collection of short stories – literally, “let’s intertwine”. It features grains of sand, bridges, shampoo, a bike, board games, yoga, sellotape, birds, balloons, tattoos, wandering hands, tweezers, maths, fish, letterboxes, puppets, a vacuum cleaner, a ball of string – and love. In this novel of yous and mes, of hims and hers, Pagano choreographs the objects, gestures, places, and persons through which love is made real.
Hunting and Gathering, Anna Gavalda, 2007 (translation: Alison Anderson)
Who else but Anna Gavalda could we recommend for a love story à la française? The author says she writes for people who don't like reading. But we, bookworms, couldn't let down Hunting and Gathering and it's been on our shelves for more than 10 years now! It's not the most recent read, but a dynamic narrative weaving together the lives of four characters, fragile in their own ways, rediscovering together the importance of food, friendship and love.
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