Blogliterary

Navigation Menu

You are an Eternal Book

Posted by on Jan 29, 2022 in French Literature, French Poets | 0 comments

In those early days, the poet’s mother was an idolized figure, the object of the poet’s total love. ‘At least you are an eternal book’, Baudelaire wrote at the dawn of his 18th birthday to the woman who made the mistake of marrying the austere General Aupick, only a year after his father’s death. Collected under the title Cette maladresse maternelle qui me...

Read More

Re-reading Albert Camus’s ‘The Plague’

Posted by on Mar 26, 2020 in French Literature, French Writers | 1 comment

 “Everyone knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world,” writes Albert Camus in his novel The Plague (La Peste). “Yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars always take people by surprise.” Albert Camus never made the...

Read More

An Illustrator and a Writer

Posted by on Oct 17, 2019 in French Literature | 0 comments

Rarely would you find the union of an author and an illustrator so steadfast, so artistically productive as that of Patrick Modiano, the Nobel laureate in literature and Pierre Le-Tan who passed away on 17 September. Le-Tan’s cover drawings have so informed the pocket editions of Patrick Modiano’s novels that for many readers even the themes of Modiano’s...

Read More

Françoise Mallet-Joris: a long literary career

Françoise Mallet-Joris: a long literary career

Posted by on Aug 24, 2016 in French Feminist Writers, French Literature, French Writers | 0 comments

The author of L’Empire Céleste and a member of l’Académie Goncourt, Françoise Mallet-Joris died on Saturday, August 13 2016.  The sad news of her death was announced by Pierre Assouline, writer and journalist, who succeeded Françoise Mallet-Joris on the Goncourt jury after her resignation in 2011 for health reasons. What Pierre Assouline said about...

Read More

Paul Valéry’s Mauvaises Pensées

Paul Valéry’s Mauvaises Pensées

Posted by on Aug 9, 2016 in Books, French Literature, French Poets | 0 comments

Towards the end of his life, as his muse, Jeanne Loviton, is about to leave him, the French poet Paul Valéry collected in the many pages of his Cahiers some aphorisms, maxims, speculations and questions under the title Mauvaises pensées (Evil Thoughts). The man who enjoyed the status of the official poet has already been a victim of his outdated and faded...

Read More