French Literature Hurts My Head

The other day, my husband was wondering out loud if our four-months-old daughter would become an avid reader like her mother. I am responsible for the three-quarters of our bookshelves’ content at home and I always have a book on the go so I suppose he might be right about me. I have always loved reading. I love stories and I love words; I love being able to escape into another world. However being an avid reader has not led me to become a more discerning one by French standards.

Let’s start at the beginning. I knew how to read before I started primary school at age 6, and I was showed off by my teacher to other classes with the introduction ‘This is how to read properly’. I have no recollection of this, which is probably a good thing. I was a shy little thing in those days and it’s a wonder I wasn’t bullied at the time for being the teacher’s pet. In any case I have not stopped reading ever since those early days, and a lifelong love of books and reading is definitely a legacy I want to pass on to my daughter. I am planning to read to her and teach her, just like my mother did with me. Another reason I am keen to do this is to help her with grammar, punctuation and spelling; if there is something that winds me up, it is poor spelling in adults, and I believe this is partly due to a lack of exposure to books during the childhood years.

I found high school very dispiriting however when it came to introducing me to new reading material. I am not a fan of French literature and find it pompous, obscure, uninspiring and hopeless. At college, we were introduced to what felt like the most boring books I have ever come across and having to dissect and write essays on them did not endear them to me. One year we had to read a book by Emile Zola called l’Assommoir; I was ill and not sleeping well at the time and I remember the ending being so bleak that it made me cry. Maybe it’s a good book; it depicts the life of working class people and it is meant to be very realistic, which is fine but I do question the wisdom of giving it to hormonal and occasionally depressed teenagers. I found it so horrific that I nearly lost the will to live reading it.

France is proud of its literature and the masters of words it has produced, and is keen to force them down our throats through the school curriculum. I don’t know who decides what goes in and what stays out but they appear to go out of their way to find the most depressing books. It’s the relentlessness of the bleak subject matters, complicated sentences and obscure subtext passing for intellectualism of French novels that kills my spirit. When it doesn’t put French teens off reading altogether, it stops them ever wanting to read anything else by the authors that they have studied.

I don’t understand the kind of snobbery at work here but it is highly noticeable in book shops where there is a clear separation between ‘serious works’ and popular books such as, say, Harry Potter. For one thing, serious works have serious covers i.e. no picture, just a plain cover with embossed writing or whatever. Someone out there wants you to know you are about to read a serious book, one you can proudly show off to your intellectual friends. I personally think a book can be fun without selling out to the most common denominator. I am not going to argue that books like Harry Potter are a masterpiece writing-wise because they are not but they do not lack in heart and depth and there is a wealth of imagination to be enjoyed.

When I was a teenager, my favourite book was Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery. It was funny and full of life, and basically a very cheerful read. It was a helpful reminder that not everything in the world is grim and tainted, because life at 14 was awkward, dark and oppressive for me, and I was in dire need of cheering up. It looks to me, and do correct me if I’m wrong, that the English-speaking world has a type of writing that does not exist in France, where misery is acknowledged but there is also hope and a happy ending is not a cop-out.

French authors and books I like

Les Fables de La Fontaine, very clever stuff indeed

Pierre Gripari’s La Sorcière de la Rue Mouffetard et autres contes de la Rue Broca – a fantastic children’s book

Les Contes de Charles Perrault (classic fairy tales of Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, etc)

Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française

Amélie Nothomb’s autobiographical retelling of her experience working in Japan in Stupeur et Tremblements is funny and chilling in equal measures.

Jean Racine, whose plays I prefer to Molière’s. Still it’s not Shakespeare.

Le Petit Prince d’Antoine St Exupéry is one of the few children’s book I can recommend

Victor Hugo gave us Notre Dame de Paris and Les Misérables – great stories

Alexandre Dumas, author of The Count of Monte-Cristo and The Three Musketeers

Most hated French authors, mostly because their stories are rubbish and everything is depressing and hopeless – a non-exhaustive list

Emile Zola – argh

André Malraux – hate hate hate

Gustave Flaubert – mon dieu but who cares

A few non French-speaking authors and books I like (in which there is a lot of science fiction and fantasy)

Juliet Marillier, great re-workings of Celtic fairy tales

Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet, possibly my favourite science-fiction/fantasy series

Madeleine L’Engle has a great way with words

J.R.R. Tolkien

Anything by Bill Bryson (his History of Nearly Everything is fantastic and almost makes me wish I could go back to school to study biology again) and Stephen Clarke (of the Year in the Merde fame)

The 13 and a half lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers, completely crazy and possibly for kids apart from the fact that it is enormous.

You are welcome to try to change my mind, and to introduce me to new authors.