French novels : XXth century true gems
Discover the best XXth century French novels with our curated list of true literary gems. Explore timeless classics and hidden treasures from France's golden era of literature.
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The Counterfeiters
by Andre Gide
A young artist pursues a search for knowledge through the treatment of homosexuality and the collapse of morality in middle class France.
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In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
The first installment of the French author's multivolume autobiographical novel, originally published in 1913, in which he recalls his childhood and first infatuation.
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Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line
Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.
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Man's Fate
by Andre Malraux
As explosive and immediate today as when it was originally published in 1933, Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine), an account of a crucial episode in the early days of the Chinese Revolution, foreshadows the contemporary world and brings to life the profound meaning of the revolutionary impulse for the individuals involved. As a study of conspiracy and conspirators, of men caught in the desperate clash of ideologies, betrayal, expediency, and free will, Andre Malraux's novel remains unequaled. Translated from the French by Haakon M. Chevalier
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The Plague
by Albert Camus
“Its relevance lashes you across the face.” —Stephen Metcalf, The Los Angeles Times • “A redemptive book, one that wills the reader to believe, even in a time of despair.” —Roger Lowenstein, The Washington Post A haunting tale of human resilience and hope in the face of unrelieved horror, Albert Camus' iconic novel about an epidemic ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature. The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death. Fear, isolation and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine. Each person responds in their own way to the lethal disease: some resign themselves to fate, some seek blame, and a few, like Dr. Rieux, resist the terror. An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947, The Plague is in part an allegory of France's suffering under the Nazi occupation, and a timeless story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence.
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Foam of the Daze
by Boris Vian
Fiction. Translated from the French by Brian Harper. "FOAM OF THE DAZE is a novel like no other, a sexy, innocent, smart and sweet cartoon of a world which then begins, little by little, to bleed real blood until, in the end, the blood turns out to be our own. I read it nearly thirty years ago in its previous incarnation as Mood Indigo and I loved it then; it's still one of my favorite books in the whole world"--Jim Krusoe. "A kind of jazzy, cheerful, sexy, sci-fi mid-20th century Huysmans. Check it out. There is just no place like France"--Richard Hell.
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Slowness
by Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.
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Life, a User's Manual
by Georges Perec
One Of The Most Dazzling And Ingeniously Contrived Works Of Twentieth-Century Fiction, An Entire Microcosm Brought To Life In A Paris Apartment Block. Serge Val-Ne, One Of The Inhabitants Of The Apartment Block, Has Conceived The Idea Of A Painting Which Will Show In Exact Detail The Inside Of Each Apartment Within The Building, Every Person, Every Object. As He Thinks Of His Picture, He Contemplates The Lives Of All The People He Has Ever Known Or Heard About In Sixty Years Living There. Chapter By Chapter, Room By Room, The Narrative Moves Around The Building, Revealing As It Does So A Marvellously Diverse Cast Of Characters In A Series Of Ever More Unlikely Tales, Which Range From An Avenging Murderer To An Eccentric English Millionaire Who Has Devised The Ultimate Pastime-
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The Elementary Particles
by Michel Houellebecq
An international literary phenomenon, The Elementary Particles is a frighteningly original novel–part Marguerite Duras and part Bret Easton Ellis-that leaps headlong into the malaise of contemporary existence. Bruno and Michel are half-brothers abandoned by their mother, an unabashed devotee of the drugged-out free-love world of the sixties. Bruno, the older, has become a raucously promiscuous hedonist himself, while Michel is an emotionally dead molecular biologist wholly immersed in the solitude of his work. Each is ultimately offered a final chance at genuine love, and what unfolds is a brilliantly caustic and unpredictable tale. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne.
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