Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: No Prompt

Since there is still no prompt this week, I opted to feature works of French literature after featuring works of German literature in the previous week. This aligns with my pivot toward European literature, following my initial focus on works of Asian literature for the first half of the year. Without ado, here are works of French literature I am looking forward to.

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you choose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: The Ogre
Author: Michel Tournier
Translator (from French): Barbara Bray
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Publishing Date: 1972
No. of Pages: 370

Synopsis: 

An international bestseller, The Ogre is a masterful tale of innocence, perversion, and obsession. Following strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges’s passage from submissive schoolboy to “ogre” of the Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn, it takes us deeper into the dark heart of fascism that any novel since The Tin Drum. Until the very last page, when Abel meets his mystic fate in the collapsing ruins of the Third Reich, it shocks us, dazzles us, and above all, holds us spellbound.

Title: Two Lives and a Dream
Author: Marguerite Yourcenar
Translator (from French): Walter Kaiser, in collaboration with the author
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Publishing Date: 1994
No. of Pages: 216

Synopsis: 

This colleciton of three tales was praised by the San Francisco Chronicle as “intricately researched, imaginative, beautifully written…entirely engrossing.”

Set in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam, “An Obscure Man” is the story of Nathanaël – innocent, open to experience, borne like Everyman upon the stream of life. In “A Lovely Morning,” Nathanaël’s young son joins a touring company of Jacobean actors. Anna, soror . . . , the final tale, is an account of illicit passion in the baroque world of Naples.

Title: The Great Swindle
Author: Pierre Lemaitre
Translator (from French): Frank Wynne
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 439

Synopsis: 

October 1918: the war on the Western Front is all but over. Desperate for one last chance of promotion, an ambitious lieutenant, Henri d’Aulnay Pradelle, sends two scouts over the top of the trenches, and contrives to shoot them in the back to incite his men to heroic action once more.

And so is set in motion a series of shocking events that will bind together the fates and fortunes of Pradelle and the two soldiers who discover his crime: Albert Maillard and Edouard Péricourt.

Back in civilian life, Albert and Edouard find themselves in a society whose reverence for its dead cannot quite match its resentment for those who survived. Penniless, morphine-dependent, cut-off from their families, psychologically and physically destroyed by their wartime experience, the two soldiers conspire to enact an audacious form of revenge against the country that abandoned them to penury and despair, with a scheme to swindle the whole of France on an epic scale.

Meanwhile, believing her brother killed in action, Edouard’s sister, the heiress Madeleine Péricourt, has married Pradelle, who is running a certain scam of his own.

Set amid the ruins of one of the most brutal conflicts of the modern era, this is a devastating portrait of the darker side of post-war France with all her villains, cowards, and clowns, revealing the unbearable tragedy of the lost generation.

Title: The Misunderstanding
Author: Irène Némirovsky
Translator (from French): Sandra Smith
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Publishing Date: 2012 (1926)
No. of Pages: 160

Synopsis: 

Yves Harteloup, scarred by the war, is a disappointed young man, old money fallen on hard times, who returns for the summer to the rich, comfortable Atlantic resort of Hendaye, where he spent blissful childhood holidays. He becomes infatuated by a beautiful, bored young woman, Denise, whose rich husband is often away on business. Intoxicated by summer nights and Yves’ intensity, Denise falls passionately in love, before the idyll has to end and Yves must return to his mundane office job.

In the mournful Paris autumn their love founders on mutual misunderstanding, in the apparently unbridgeable gap between a life of idle wealth and the demands of making a living, between a woman’s needs and a man’s way of loving. As Denise is driven mad with desire and jealous suspicion, Yves, too sure of her, tortures himself and her with his emotional ambivalence. Taking her sophisticated mother’s advice, Denise takes action… which she may regret forever.

With a sharp satirical eye and a characteristic perception for the fault lines in human relationships, Irène Némirovsky’s first novel shows sure signs of the brilliant novelist she was to become.

Title: The Years
Author: Annie Ernaux
Translator (from French): Alison L. Strayer
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Publishing Date: 2017 (2008)
No. of Pages: 231

Synopsis: 

The Years was a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008, and is regarded as a contemporary classic in French studies departments in the US.

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present – even projections into the future – photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands, and names for the ever-proliferating objects are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling, and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written” by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I” for the “we” (or “they,” or “one”) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents’ generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the ‘we’ and impersonal pronouns.”

Title: This Little Family
Author: Inès Bayard
Translator (from French): Adriana Hunter
Publisher: Other Press
Publishing Date: 2020 (2018)
No. of Pages: 264

Synopsis: 

Marie and Laurent, a young, affluent couple, have settled into their large Paris apartment and decide to start trying for a baby. This picture-perfect existence is shattered when Marie is assaulted by her new boss. Deeply shaken by the attack, she discovers she is pregnant, and is convinced her rapist is the father. Marie closes herself off in a destructive silence, ultimately leading her to commit an irreparable act.

In a first novel of extraordinary power and depth, Inès Bayard tears down the hypocritical facade of upper-middle-class respectability, exposing disturbing truths about how society sees women, and how women see themselves.