Recommend any recent good French language books/novels?

[Cailin]

Don't know if anybody has any recommendations to make - but if you could suggest any good French (recent) novels? Am (reasonably) fluent in French but it's a long time since I picked up a book in the language. Have totally lost touch with the recent "bestsellers", can anybody suggest anything?

[annakarina]

You could try Daniel Pennac or Amélie Nothomb... both "literary" bestsellers and the language isn't too difficult from what I remember.

[Etienne]

Wait... do you want good books or best-sellers?? This is confusing.

Jonathan Littel - Les bienveillantes has won the Goncourt prize last year and it's been recommended to me. Haven't read it though.

[Cailin]

Wait... do you want good books or best-sellers?? This is confusing.

Jonathan Littel - Les bienveillantes has won the Goncourt prize last year and it's been recommended to me. Haven't read it though.


Good books would be preferable - mind you there isn't necessarily a distinction between bestsellers and good books...... But that's a totally different thread....

WHat I really meant was what are the French reading at the moment?

Had heard of that Littel book, thanks for the recommendation.:)

[Remarkable]

Would mid 20th ceuntry books do?

[Cailin]

You could try Daniel Pennac or Amélie Nothomb... both "literary" bestsellers and the language isn't too difficult from what I remember.

:wave: Thanks Annakarina - really liked Nothomb, have read a good few of hers. Must try Pennac - family member heading over to France at the end of the week and has offered to pick up some reading while he's there so all ideas gratefully received!

[Cailin]

Would mid 20th ceuntry books do?

Absolutely!:nod:

[Etienne]

Then,
Boris Vian - L'écume des jours
Albert Camus - La peste
Romain Gary (Emile Ajar) - La vie devant soi

would be very good suggestions.

[Cailin]

Merci!

[JBI]

If you can find books by Gabrielle Roy I would recommend her. She was a very talented French Canadian author, though she won The Governor General award Three times (Canada's most prestigious literary prize), she is little known. I don't know how findable she is out of Canada, but I think they did a recent edition of her last and most famous work, Children of My Heart (Ces Enfants de ma vie) .

Her language, as far as I can tell from reading in English translation isn't very difficult, and her style is authentic and aesthetically pleasing, yet simple and elegant.

[bouquin]

The works of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt are also easy to read.

[Virgil]

The Lover by Margurite Duras.

[kratsayra]

Are people still talking about Irene Nemirovsky in France? I'm not sure, it might just be here in the US because of recent translations. She wrote Suite Francaise but my professor told me that some more of her works had recently been discovered.

[JBI]

Yeah, she wrote during world war 2, then died in Auschwitz I believe. That's why she went unknown for so long until someone I guess found a manuscript or something.

[Cailin]

Thanks to all for the recommendations - Les Bienveillantes and Chagrin d'ecole are now in my possession. ;)

[johann cruyff]

Also,try Sartre,Balzac,Zola,Claude Anet,Proust,Camus,Mistral(although,IIRC,he wrote in Occitan),Beckett(wrote in French),Bergson...

[JBI]

All the above aren't contemporary authors...

[johann cruyff]

Oops,didn't notice the topic creator was looking for contemporary authors.Sorry...:blush:

[superunknown]

Andrei Makine - Le testament francais

A beautiful semi-autobiographical book, about a kid growing up in Russia who has a French grandmother and tries to recreate the France of her days as a sort of mysterious "Atlantis." He creates his own biography of his grandmother and how she became permanently stuck in Communist Russia. Released something like 10 years ago I believe, it won both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, probably France's two most coveted literary prices. Makine had to invent a translator for the publishers to accept it, as they refused to believe that a Russian could write so well in French!

Read more about it here: http://www.iht.com/articles/1996/02/02/mak.t.php

Amin Maalouf is also an excellent writer.