Read 16/05/2021-25/05/2021
Rating 3 stars
Blood Wedding is a psychological crime novel by French writer Pierre Lemaitre. It concerns Sophie, a woman with severe memory loss who, at the start of the book, is looking after a young boy on the days and nights that his busy parents can’t be there. When we meet Sophie, disaster has struck. Continue reading
It’s May Day! Beltane, if you will. I wish I’d been clever enough to do a folk horror Six Degrees of Separation this month. Kate, who hosts the meme at Books Are My Favourite and Best, has chosen a children’s classic, Beezus and Ramona, for the first book in the chain. Read on to see how I end up in a submarine with Captain Nemo.
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Read 28/02/2021
Rating 5 stars
Written in 2005 and first published in English translation in 2014, Marie NDiaye’s hypnotic fictional memoir Self Portrait in Green follows an unnamed narrator, who is a writer, and her encounters with mysterious green women. Continue reading
Read 14/02/2021-21/02/2021
Rating 4 stars
The final installment in Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex trilogy draws together threads from the previous books and has characters zigzagging into one another’s lives, turned there by coincidence and kismet.
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Read 26/08/2019-02/09/2019
Rating 3 stars
I’ve wanted to read Colette’s Claudine books since my birthday trip to Paris four years ago. I intended to buy the omnibus from Shakespeare and Co but they’d sold out. Since then, the books have been on my library wishlist. I saw the Colette biopic earlier this year and read a short story by her in Wayward Girls last month and this spurred me on to borrow the first in the series.
In Claudine at School, we meet our heroine as she turns 15. Continue reading
For August’s 6 degrees of separation, we’ve been asked to start with the last book we finished in the month of July. Continue reading
Read 17/07/2019-02/08/2019
Rating 3 stars
Read as part of the 20 Books of Summer readathon.
I accidentally started Women in Translation month early with this collection of short stories. I should have known that Angela Carter would include a few women whose first language isn’t English. After all, being a woman who doesn’t conform to the artificial notion of femininity isn’t an exclusively Anglophone thing.
Carter introduces her selections as being about women who aren’t really wicked or wayward, at least not all of them. Continue reading
Read 10/03/2019-16/03/2019
Rating 5 stars
The Elegance of the Hedgehog is the story of the intellectual and philosophical engagements with life of two residents of a Parisian apartment building. Renée Michel is the widowed concierge of the building and Paloma Josse the 12 year old daughter of one of its residents. I bought the book a little more than three years ago but haven’t felt any urge to pick it up.
Read 25/11/2018-01/12/2018
Rating 4 stars
I read the first book in Virginie Despentes’s trilogy about a down-on-his-luck former record dealer earlier this autumn. I enjoyed its mercurial plot and its shallow characters enough to ask my local library to buy volume two. Continue reading
Read 10/10/2018-21/10/2018
Rating 4 stars
The first book in Virginie Despentes’s trilogy about a down-on-his-luck former record dealer is a domino effect romp through the music world and its parallel den of vainglorious excess, the French film industry. The title character, Vernon Subutex, has in his possession a set of video tapes in which Alex Bleach, a recently deceased rock star, interviews himself and shares his wisdom with the world.
