Customer Reviews

French Short Stories 1 / Nouvelles Francaises 1: Parallel Text (Penguin Parallel Text) (French and English Edition)

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If you cannot fly to France or Quebec and actually inundate yourself with the French language as it swells around you echoing up from the streets, reading is the next best thing. My usual tack is to find a simply written book in English, so that I am well acquainted with the level of the language. I choose something that talks about quotidian life, and then I use Amazon.fr to find myself the French translation. This technique works well for me, but I find that I am encumbered as I must hold both books at once as I read the French and take an occasional glance at the English translation to ascertain my understanding. Penguin's "French Parallel Text French Short Stories 1" negates the necessity of two books as it prints the French and English translations side by side on adjoining pages.

The eight stories in "French Short Stories I: Parallel Text" took me well over a year to read. I kept the book in a special place where I knew I would run across it each day and at least read a page or two. Not only did I get my daily dose of French, acclimating myself to the French turn of phrase and language usage, I found myself looking forward to discovering each piece of literature for its own merit and determining its place in twentieth century French writing.

For the most part each of the stories is typically French. "The Beach", the first of the stories (the stories are arranged in the order of least difficult first) is a fine example of the minimalist "new novel." Its repetition makes it less difficult to translate but does not by any means suggest that the theme or techniques utilized are in any way simplistic.

By far, my favorite story is the second story, "The Seven League Boots" by Marcel Ayme. Written in fable format, this timeless story is reminiscent of Maupassant and indeed is the longest story in the volume.

The other stories reflect such themes as war, infidelity, the absurd and a love/hate view of a personal relationship told from the benchmark of the aftermath of World War II and the need of each of the writers to convey a wonderful cavalcade of emotions intricately detailed in that singular way that can only be described as French.

The format of the book impeccably provides the student with a tool that transcends the use of dictionary or grammar books. Although as with all writing the tense is the Passé Simple, the reader gets the sense of usage and colloquialisms that the usual text books ignore. Reading aloud adds another dimension to the entire learning experience.

Personally, I enjoy classic literature, but I do not think these books need reflect only literature's cream of the crop. I would like to see a volume dedicated to more modern themes---timeless is nice, but partaking of the real language from a more modern upbeat standpoint would be so much more effective from my perspective facilitation of the language in general.

Recommended with the desire for more modern passages.
Diana Faillace Von Behren
"reneofc"

This anthology offers an excellent sampling of modern trends (1940s - 60s), not contemporary trends, in French literature (and art-house cinema), from Robbe-Grillet's purposeful tedium in tediously recounting French social rituals (noteably rendered in Last Year at Marianbad) to Marcel Ayme's brilliant mixture of realism and wrenching fantasy (a la Red Ballon) to Philippe Sollers's apologia for pristine solipsism (here, an unintentional parody of a French intellectual's grapplings with the mind-body problem; Maitre Woody Allen does Eric Rohmer)--do dust off your past subjunctives.
The translations are excellent: Norman Denny's rendering of Ayme's story deftly combines fantasy and urban reality; and Jean Stewart's rendering of Sollers's fluidly conversational, academic French is imaginatively intuituive. Essential reading for the intermediate to advanced student of French literature.

I am trying to brush up my French language skills. I think this Parallel text is very helpful. It has the advantage of immediate reinforcement, without having to look up every word that I can't remember. I liked some of the stories better than others, but that is to be expected in any book with multiple stories.

This book, "French Short Stories 1 /Nouvelles Francais 1- Parallel Text" is a real eye opener for me. It is possible to read the French by translating each word or phrase without grasping the meaning. With the parallel text, one can read the French and immediately read the English, grasp the concept and be enriched in the French language beyond the literal translation. I recommend it.

The French and English were both well written, but some liberal translations made it difficult for me. I didn't like half the stories. My favorites were one about a French soldier fighting nazi forces. The other was about the problems of a returning prisoner-of-war's dealing with his unfaithful wife after returning home. Of major concern to me was the lack of notes, since I used the book as a learning tool, not a review.