Frapie, Nau, Tharaud, Moselly

I read four Goncourt-winning novels since yesterday. Tharaud's Dingley is a satirical novel, unusually written in collaboration, about the British in World War I. I didn't think it was possible to laugh at that, although national caricatures are always easy. It was a quick read, fairly insignificant. But as with the other three, the Goncourt dared to reward novels very different one from the other, and in any event it is a nice change from Zola (although I just started his last three novels, Fecondite being the first). Moselly wrote Terres lorraines, a tragic pastoral about betrayed love ending, you guessed it, in suicide. I saw the tragedy coming from far away, and the betraying feckless young man is an unusually flat character -- I have still no idea why he took up and dropped the same woman twice. He portrays the seas better than this plot-essential person. Nau in Force ennemie (in English, I'd translate it into 'fifth column' wrote an unusual novel about a mental hospital, an unhealthy place in early 20th century France. It reminded me of The Snake Pit and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in terms of content, and the waterboarding scene was used in the terrible movie The Fifth Floor. There are assaults, mistreatments, lies. Finally, Frapie's novel La Maternelle is about a cleaning woman in a early childhood school, complete with sexual harassment, lies, mistreatment of children, etc. These were all quick reads. Frapie and Nau went to the trouble of introducing a first person narrative point of view, which most authors today skip.