Welcome to Litsy!

Sarah @HardcoverHearts and I are buddy reading Emile Zola‘s Rougon Maquart series in publication order. Starting no. 9 today: Pot Luck.

“It‘s most direct successor in modern French literature may be Baudelaire‘s post-romantic” Fleurs du mal”. It was only a few years after “The Regrets” that the wars of religion between varying factions of Protestants and Catholics (1562-98) profoundly changed French culture and set the stage for the more highly structured and often less personal literature of the 17th century”.

Reading Barzakh, a fantasy/SF novel by Mauritanian author Moussa Ould Ebnou. Doing a bit of research on Aoudaghost/Awdaghost, a city lost to the desert in the Middle-Ages, and on the Sahel region is helping a lot w/ timeline & geography.
Pic by Luca Abbate from https://wildmanlife.com/aoudaghost-economic-hub-of-the-sahara/ This page contains pics & detailed info & matches quite closely the descriptions in the book. Useful.
#Mauritania

This was a cute series of short stories and excerpts in relation to Colette‘s French bull dog and cat and various other animals throughout the book. She was a French novelist who wrote the Real Claudine series and Gigi. She has an amazing descriptive style, especially as this was in the first person in the animals perspective throughout the book. I picked this up at a used bookstore on my travels to San Francisco.

“Freed from words and images, released from books which sleep, spellbound, on library shelves, artistic inspiration remains, in Mirbeau‘s novel, on the level of pain that cannot be voiced in words.“ ~Robert Ziegler

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https://underworldamusements.com/products/in-the-sky-octave-mirbeau

22-3 Feb 25
One of Polly‘s IB literature book so quickly read whilst she was home for the weekend. It was fun and frivolous. I believe I saw the opera 20 years ago. All a bit silly and I now realise I probably should have read The Barber of Seville first.

In February and March, I‘m reading Swann‘s Way with a few bookish friends. I love hearing everyone‘s comments each week. We are reading the Lydia Davis translation and just made it to the halfway point. Proust‘s meandering thoughts are beautiful, but exhausting at times. I love having a chance to savor his words and reflect on them each week instead of rushing through it.

In graphic novel form. https://nbmpub.com/products/bonjour-tristesse