One of my French twittos put this book in my timeline the other day and luckily Archambault in Montreal had it in stock and mailed it promptly. Published by the French house Les Arènes, this irreverent survey of French literature between 1500s and the end of the twentieth century will be of interest to anyone who likes the art of a good For Dummies introduction into complex subjects — and to all the francophiles and franco-curious. The author Catherine Mory with the illustrator Philippe Bercovici chose the most frequently studied writers in French high schools and those most often found in le bac exam prep, therefore alas no one from the medieval age made the cut (no Chanson de Roland and no Occitan poetry, alors) and no authors from our century. (For contemporary French lit I’ve always found John Taylor good.) While some of the scenes from writerly lives would be classified 18+ in the anglosphere, this being the country of Charlie Hebdo — and heck, Gargantua and Pantagruel; the book starts with Rabelais — the book is inviting the prepping highschoolers as well as the adult readers to this excercise of knowledge acquisition as ‘dethroning’ and dépoussière.
Mory has the skill of lightly smuggling quite a bit of literary analysis in between the biographical (mis)adventures of authors. We also learn a lot about how they managed financially: what they had to do to have the requisite amounts of money that would enable them to dedicate their lives to poetry, drama and prose. I suppose I tend to forget it, after decades of living in peace and non-censorship, but most of the authors here except the last two or three had had some sort of trouble with censorship from the church or the state, and had their works banned or refused for that reason: it was a sine qua non of a writing life. Most had the war- or political upheaval-related interruptions too.
So this is how le cookie crumbles.
1500s: Rabelais, Joachim du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, Montaigne.
1600s: Corneille, Jean de la Fontaine, Molière, Blaise Pascal, Madame de Lafayette, Racine. The details of the politicking and backstabbing at the court, which was the place of literary life, were particularly interesting.