Month: April 2017

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is the most loved, most read and most adapted novel of the nineteenth century. Prize-winning biographer and translator David Bellos argues that it outshines even its most illustrious contemporaries — for War and Peace, Madame Bovary, Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment were all published within a few years. David Bellos will talk about his new book, The Novel of the Century (Particular Books, 2017), which brings to life the extraordinary story of how Victor Hugo managed to write his epic work despite a revolution, a coup d'état and political exile; how he pulled off an astonishing deal to get it published, and set it on course to become the novel that epitomises the grand sweep of history in the nineteenth century. This biography of a masterpiece insists that the moral and social message of Hugo's novel, its plea for a new sense of justice, is just as important for our century as it was for its own.

Related / Latest publication(s)

The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventures of Les Miserables (Particular Books, Penguin, 2017)

Performance

French singer and songwriter Barbara Carlotti joins novelist Jonathan Coe on stage for an exceptional musical and poetic performance. Between Jonathan Coe’s House of Sleep and Barbara Carlotti’s laboratoire onirique, dreams, memories, and fantasies interweave with reality, composing a free poetic digression between art and science, sound, text and song.

Related / Latest Publication(s)

The House of Sleep (Penguin, 2014)

Talk

February 1980. Roland Barthes is knocked down in a Paris street by a laundry van. History tells us it was an accident. But what if it were an assassination? What if Barthes was carrying a document of global importance? A document explaining the seventh function of language – which gives whoever masters it the ability to convince anyone, in any situation, to do anything. Who can you trust when the idea of truth itself is at stake? Laurent Binet, author of the bestselling HHhH and winner of the Goncourt first novel prize, will be presenting this brilliantly erudite comedy, published by Harvill Secker, in discussion with British author and journalist Alex Preston.

Related / Latest Publication(s)

The 7^th Function of Language (Harvill Secker, 2017)
Translated by Sam Taylor

Talk

Based on a True Story (D'après une histoire vraie) by Delphine de Vigan is a prize-winning, sophisticated and chilling novel of suspense which continually blurs the line between fact and fiction. Just published by Bloomsbury in a translation by George Miller, this unputdownable book takes the reader into a nightmarish story of master manipulation. Rarely seen in London, Delphine de Vigan will tell us more about the boundaries between reality and fantasy, friendship and fascination, and a little too about her previous bestselling books No and Me and Nothing Holds back the Night (No et moi, Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit). The discussion will be chaired by journalist and writer Celia Walden (The Telegraph).

Related / Latest Publication(s)

Based on a True Story (Bloomsbury, 2017)
Translated by George Miller

Talk and Readings

Goncourt Prize-winning Cry, Mother Spain (Pas pleurer) takes us to the heart of the Spanish Civil War, as seen through the delicate transcription of a politically, emotionally and linguistically charged conversation between mother and daughter. Montse is fifteen as Franco’s forces begin their murderous purges and cities across Spain rise up against the old order. Those troubled times, both the happiest and most miserable years of Montse’s life, are set against darker extracts taken from the contemporary account Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune by Georges Bernanos. Lydie Salvayre will be in conversation with her translator Ben Faccini.

Related / Latest Publication(s)

Cry, Mother Spain (MacLehose Press, 2016)
Translated by Ben Faccini

Film

FRA | 1959 | dir. Alain Resnais

One of the most influential films of all time, Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour features Marguerite Duras’s clear, minimalist and haunting prose and revealed Emmanuelle Riva to the world as a French actress who engages in a brief, intense affair with a Japanese architect in postwar Hiroshima.

Related / Latest Publication(s)

Hiroshima mon Amour (Gallimard, 1972)

Film - Kids

FRA | 2016 | dir. Christophe Honoré

Christophe Honoré’s recent adaptation of the Comtesse de Ségur’s classic collection of stories about mischievous little Sophie will delight kids and young at heart. Far from being a model little girl, she’s constantly up to no good, cutting her mother’s fish into tiny pieces, making chalk tea or torturing her wax doll.

Related / Latest publication(s)

Les malheurs de Sophie (Gallimard Jeunesse, 2016)

Readings and Music

Now on the shortlist for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, Mathias Enard’s nocturnal and musical Goncourt-winning novel Compass (Fitzcarraldo Editions) spans the restless night of an insomniac musicologist drifting between dreams and memories of the Middle East, of Aleppo, Damascus and Tehran, as well as of various writers, artists, musicians and orientalists. Also longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, Alain Mabanckou’s Black Moses (Serpent’s Tail), a larger than life comic tale set in 1970s Congo, shows the struggle of a young man obsessed with helping the helpless in an unjust world. Storytellers Alia Alzougbi and David Mildon, accompanied by oud player Rihab Azar, invite you to celebrate this year's two French language Man Booker novels.

Related / Latest publication(s)