Anatole France, Larose, Saint-Denys Garneau, Oueffelec, Aventin

Since my last post, I've read an issue of The Economist and an issue of OK Magazine. I think I forgot to mention that last week end, I also read Hello Canada and The National Examiner. Wonder why reporting the trash I read slipped my mind.

Being the start of the month, I got my usual eclectic set of of gift books in French from my non-French-speaking partner. I read the four in one shot. The first was the poetry of Saint-Denys Garneau, whose life I knew nothing about. It was very side and a bit oblique --- possibly Saint-Denys Garneau had mental illness, or was gay and it was treated as mental illness. Can't tell from the introductory essay. Then I read La menace, about racism in France, by an author I had read before, Oueffelec, but of whose novel I remembered nothing. This was a novella, and I didn't think it was earthshaking either. Then I read a collection of pieces by Jean Larose, a professor of literature at Montreal. There are short plays, essays, dialogues, etc. This was clearly intended as a textbook, but without an introduction, I couldn't tell why he chose the pieces or the forms he did. Finally, there was a novel purportedly written by s 15-year-old, Le coeur en poche, about, you guessed it, a fifteen-year-old who knows all about prostitution. I think some publisher got taken for a ride on this one, well ahead of the spate of discovered authorial identity frauds of the last few years.

I also read the first volume of the complete works of Anatole France.