Heteronym
06-23-2011, 05:18 PM
A French novelist who won the Nobel Prize in 1921. He died in 1924, around the same time the Surrealist group was coming to life and they used his funeral to launch a vicious campaign against him that has tarnished his reputation to this day. The Surrealists, who between all of them didn't create a single worthy novel, accused him of being old fashioned and representing everything they stood against.
Fortunately I read France before I discovered this so my enjoyment has never been affected by the antics of a bunch of young poets playing anti-bourgeois games. France was a fine satirist, as his novel Penguin Island demonstrates. In this novel a partly blind Christian missionary lands on an island populated by penguins. Confusing them with people, he baptises them. This causes a problem for God, who only allows people to be baptised; he solves the problem by turning the penguins into people and giving them souls. This is just an excuse for France to write a satirical alternative history of Europe and France.
Although I'm busy with other books at the moment, I have Thaïs to read next, a novel about a Christian saint. And then I'm planning to give a go at The Gods Will Have Blood, about the French revolution.
Fortunately I read France before I discovered this so my enjoyment has never been affected by the antics of a bunch of young poets playing anti-bourgeois games. France was a fine satirist, as his novel Penguin Island demonstrates. In this novel a partly blind Christian missionary lands on an island populated by penguins. Confusing them with people, he baptises them. This causes a problem for God, who only allows people to be baptised; he solves the problem by turning the penguins into people and giving them souls. This is just an excuse for France to write a satirical alternative history of Europe and France.
Although I'm busy with other books at the moment, I have Thaïs to read next, a novel about a Christian saint. And then I'm planning to give a go at The Gods Will Have Blood, about the French revolution.