Have you ever had a lover? Have you ever been a lover? Or, perhaps a better question, is there someone who is the love(r) of your life? Have you ever lived or dreamed a love so beautiful, so real, that it could not have possibly existed? Are you haunted by memories of what was or what could have been? Some nights, maybe only in your dreams, does that become your reality? Do you wonder what love really is? What it looks like? How it smells? How it feels? Reading L’Amant (The Lover) by Marguerite Duras brings up these questions and more. Written in 1984 and winner of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, The Lover skyrocketed the already well-known Duras to international acclaim. Its theme of forbidden but powerful love continues to resonate with readers today.
Month: June 2016
À Propos: Synonyms in French
French is a language that makes liberal use of synonyms. Et pour cause. Synonyms add variety to writing.
But the French don’t seem to be content with simply using the occasional word having the same (or nearly the same) meaning as another in the language. They use these “lexical stand-ins” at every possible turn.
More accurately, many of these lexical substitutes are metonyms.
À Propos: Book Review – La billebaude
The week before we left Paris, my husband and I went to Boulinier on boulevard Saint-Michel and bought several boxes’ worth of two-euro paperbacks from the sale bins. We knew that finding books in French wasn’t going to be easy in the US, and as voracious readers, we stocked up like soldiers preparing for a siege and shipped them all tarif livres to my parents’ house in Oregon. We chose books at random: some classics, some we thought we’d heard of, maybe, and others that just had good titles or intriguing cover art. Now, nine years later, we’re still working our way through that literary plunder. One of my favorite recent discoveries from the pile is a best-selling 1978 memoir by Henri Vincenot called La billebaude.
À Propos: Book Review – Le Livre des Baltimore
Je regarde regulièrement « La grande librairie », l’émission de François Busnel sur TV5 Monde. Ce journaliste invite des écrivains qui viennent de sortir un livre, de gagner le Prix Goncourt, etc. J’avais donc déjà vu Joël Dicker parler de son dernier roman, qui m’avait semblé intéressant.