de Lacretelle, Le Franc, Robert

I read a bunch of novels yesterday. First I read Roman du malade by Louis de Robert (all my authors had the French particle, as a matter of fact). It was wonderful -- full of truth, keenly observed, a quick easy read, luminously simple prose. That first page would get the novel published today. It's the story of a man sick with tuberculosis, and he tels the story simply of how people behave around him, of how he falls in love with someone who visits him, of the careful watch of every nuance of a doctor's pronouncements on his illness. Le Franc's Grand-Louis l'innocent is a love story between a shell-shocked soldier and a country woman. I found it somewhat cliche. I then read a daring novel about anti-Semitism, Silbermann by de Lacretelle. It's predictable, but the topic was not welcome in bourgeois France in the interwar period. Finally, I read Odyssee d'un transport torpille, which tells the simple story of a ship and its crews' adventures, going from port to port, before and during World War I.