French Fare
Posted by: Admin
There has been a lot of press over the past few days about the U.S. publication of The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell’s 983-page opus that won the Prix Goncourt in 2006. Now hitting book stores and libraries in the U.S. the novel has received ”a dramatically polarized critical response,” as Motoko Rich wrote in a New York Times article. Though Littel was born in the U.S., he chose to write in French, and the book (Les Bienveillantes is the French title) has been a huge bestseller in Europe.
Will book groups want to wade through 983 pages, however hot the book? If the idea of discussing a French bestseller is appealing, this month the book group at the North Branch 
of the Evanston Public Library in Evanston, Illinois (where I live) is talking about The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, which is a more manageable 336 pages. Misha and Nick both alerted us to it back in October.
March 24th, 2009 at 10:24 am
[...] Mary Ellen’s recent post on some recent French fiction garnering a lot of buzz, I thought about another French novel I read recently that would be perfect [...]