#a philosopher for our times

[hedgehog-moss]

Inspired by your last ask! What are the best French books you’ve read that have no English translation yet? I read Play Boy and Qui a tué mon père (really loved the latter) last year and it feels so fun to read something that other Americans can’t access yet

I'm too nervous to make any list of the Best XYZ Books because I don't want to raise your expectations too high! But okay, here's my No English Translation-themed list of books I've enjoyed in recent years. I tried to make it eclectic in terms of genre as I don't know what you prefer :)

Biographies

• Le dernier inventeur, Héloïse Guay de Bellissen: I just love prehistory and unusual narrators so I enjoyed this one; it's about the kids who discovered the cave of Lascaux, and some of the narration is written from the perspective of the cave <3 I posted a little excerpt here (in English).

• Ces femmes du Grand Siècle, Juliette Benzoni: Just a fun collection of portraits of notable noblewomen during the reign of Louis XIV, I really liked it. For people who like the 17th century. I think it was Emil Cioran who said his favourite historical periods were the Stone Age and the 17th century but tragically the age of salons led to the Reign of Terror and Prehistory led to History.

• La Comtesse Greffulhe, Laure Hillerin: I've mentioned this one before, it's about the fascinating Belle Époque French socialite who was (among other things) the inspiration for Proust's Duchess of Guermantes. I initially picked it up because I will read anything that's even vaguely about Proust but it was also a nice aperçu of the Belle Époque which I didn't know much about.

• Nous les filles, Marie Rouanet: I've also recommended this one before but it's such a sweet little viennoiserie of a book. The author talks about her 1950s childhood in a town in the South of France in the most detailed, colourful, earnest way—she mentions everything, describes all the daft little games children invent like she wants ageless aliens to grasp the concept of human childhood, it's great.

I'll add Trésors d'enfance by Christian SIgnol and La Maison by Madeleine Chapsal which are slightly less great but also sweet short nostalgic books about childhood that I enjoyed.

Fantasy

• Mers mortes, Aurélie Wellenstein: I read this one last year and I found the characters a bit underwhelming / underexplored but I always enjoy SFF books that do interesting things with oceans (like Solaris with its sentient ocean-planet), so I liked the atmosphere here, with the characters trying to navigate a ghost ship in ghost seas...

• Janua Vera, Jean-Philippe Jaworski: Not much to say about it other than they're short stories set in a mediaeval fantasy world and no part of this description is usually my cup of tea, but I really enjoyed this read!

Essays / literary criticism / philosophy

• Eloge du temps perdu, Frank Lanot: I thought this was going to be about idleness, as the title suggests, and I love books about idleness. But it's actually a collection of short essays about (French) literature and some of them made me appreciate new things about authors and books I thought I knew by heart, so I enjoyed it

• Le Pont flottant des rêves, Corinne Atlan: Poetic musings about translation <3 that's all

• Sisyphe est une femme, Geneviève Brisac: Reflections about the works of female writers (Natalia Ginzburg, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, etc) that systematically made me want to go read the author in question, even when I'd already read & disliked said author. That's how you know it's good literary criticism

Let's add L'Esprit de solitude by Jacqueline Kelen which as the title suggests, ponders the notion of solitude, and Le Roman du monde by Henri Peña-Ruiz which was so lovely to read in terms of literary style I don't even care what it was about (it's philosophy of foundational myths & stories) (probably difficult to read if you're not fully fluent in French though)

Did not fit in the above categories:

• Entre deux mondes by Olivier Norek—it's been translated in half a dozen languages, I was surprised to find no English translation! It's a crime novel and a pretty bleak read on account of the setting (the Calais migrant camp) but I'd recommend it

• Saga, Tonino Benacquista: Also seems to have been translated in a whole bunch of languages but not English? :( I read it ages ago but I remember it as a really fun read. It's a group of loser screenwriters who get hired to write a TV series, their budget is 15 francs and a stale croissant and it's going to air at 4am so they can do whatever they want seeing as no one will watch it. So they start writing this intentionally ridiculous unhinged show, and of course it acquires Devoted Fans

Books that I didn't think existed in English translation but they do! but you can still read them in French if you want

• Scrabble: A Chadian Childhood, Michaël Ferrier: What it says on the tin! It's a short and well-written account of the author's childhood in Chad just before the civil war. I read it a few days ago and it was a good read, but then again I just love bittersweet stories of childhood

• On the Line, Joseph Ponthus: A short diary-like account of the author's assembly line work in a fish factory. I liked the contrast between the robotic aspect of the job and the poetic nature of the text; how the author used free verse / repetition / scansion to give a very immediate sense of the monotony and rhythm of his work (I don't know if it's good in English)

• The End of Eddy, Edouard Louis: The memoir of a gay man growing up in a poor industrial town in Northern France—pretty brutal but really good

• And There Was Light, Jacques Lusseyran: Yet another memoir sorry, I love people's lives! Jacques Lusseyran lost his sight as a child, and was in the Resistance during WWII despite being blind. It's a great story, both for the historical aspects and for the descriptions of how the author experiences his blindness

• The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, Emmanuel Carrère: an account of the Jean-Claude Romand case—a French man who murdered his whole family to avoid being discovered as a fraud, after spending his entire adult life pretending to be a doctor working at the WHO and fooling everyone he knew. Just morbidly fascinating, if you like true crime stuff

[faaun]

Jack Marsh (2005), Friendship Otherwise - Toward a Levinasian Description of Personal Friendship

[waitmyturtles]

(Source)

[dylanlila]

was talking to dash about how it's easier to relate to lila than elena because elena is the narrator and she loves lila and dash went that's exactly what you needed to read

[stellamancer]

every now and again i think about my evil ex from hell like a bit ago i thought about how he'd said (via text message) that my texts always seemed to have an attitude about them lmao

[namorian]

Star Trek: the future is kinda sorta utopian. Like it’s now Mostly Not Bad and people are Usually Good

Me, gleefully making ocs: so this is a whole multi-planetary faction of primarily clone cyborgs who are just warhammer 40k for cowards (read: the cover of a metal album but a whole society) and this is a planet of human colonists that got shunted back in time and way across space who’ve devolved into mad max shit and these two are mistreated orphans who become best friends and basically run a criminal organization just out of reach of the primary political powers and this—

[illholy]

in light of the 'Judith is stupid' allegation. I will not deny it, also I think if she isnt careful she'd forget her name so. . .

[haml3t]

My vacation was better than I could’ve dreamed like it wasn’t even the festival lineup so much (though I did meet another of my top 3 journalists) even as all the people I interacted with in D.C. and the museums I saw this time that I didn’t last time like I cannot tell you how free I felt during this trip..

Also DO meet your heroes. They will be fantastically excited to see you again and treat you like an old friend even when you’ve only met once before and they will find you just as intelligent, interesting, talented, and dope as you find them and give you a massive hug because they’re so speechless because they think you’re a brilliant artist and are that honoured by your gifts

[amir2018]

That one twitter post that was like…oh my friend, you have flaws? It’s going to be more delicious to love you. AND THAT CHANGED ME!!!

[kaurwreck]

for the ask game: LILAC CHARCOAL AND RASPBERRY

anon this is so sweet 😭

[ask game provided below for reference; if you'd like to play, please reblog from OP here:]

[faaun]

ok let's catch up quickly

[uwudonoodle]

[genderqueeradrien]

[sleepdepravity]

Interesting citation to make.

[dngrcpckwithmurdericing]

"This was the tragic fulfillment of a program of intolerance and arrogance. Vengeance is not our goal, nor do we seek merely a just retribution. We ask this court to affirm by international penal action man's right to live in peace and dignity regardless of his race or creed. The case we present is a plea of humanity to law."

Ben Ferencz (1920-2023), prosecuting Nazis in 1947 at Nuremberg

[luminouslotuses]

taylor swift mention on the qsmp. she may be the biggest popstar in the world but i don’t care this is very important to me