Grand Ouest Authors

Steve Mansfield-Devine, a writer living in Normandy, has asked us to invite other authors to his group:

I'm in the process of setting up a writers group called Grand Ouest Authors.

The aim is to provide a network for anglophone authors who live in Normandy, Brittany and the Pays de la Loire. It's aimed at writers with books in print (via publishers or self-published) and those with book projects that they hope to get into print in the near future.

I've blogged about why I'm setting up the group here.

And there's a contact form for people interested here.

There's only a few of us at the moment, so I'm putting the word out as much as I can, as the more writers we can attract, the more mutual support we can provide. So if you did feel moved to blog about it, that would be great!

Websites for book lovers

A few of our favourite book web-sites:


www.bl.uk/treasures/treasuresinfull.html - treasures of the British Library in zoomable detail: the Gutenberg Bible, Magna Carta, the first edition of Hamlet.

gutenberg.net - 20,000 out of copyright books in downloadable plain format text, digitalised by volunteers.

amazon.co.uk - “search inside” - not as pleasurable as browsing in a bookshop of course, but this feature allows you to dip into a book before you buy.

telegraph.co.uk/readings - authors read aloud to you online from their works or try librivox.org for whole texts read by volunteers, a sort of audio gutenberg.

bbc.co.uk/fivelive/entertainment/mayosbookpanel for lengthy samples of presenter Simon Mayo’s books of the month.

Send us your favourite sites or blogs about books, words or languages.

Do you have a book (fiction or non fiction) you would like to review?
Send 200-250 words for publication on the Rendezvous Readers’ Book Blog  marked “book choice”.

Young readers list for British parents in France

Getting the reading habit isn’t just important for children’s academic progress or, far more importantly, one of the most exciting things that will ever happen to them. What you have read is also part of your national-cultural identity and for British kids growing up in France really to feel British, especially if they go back to the UK, they need to have read the same books (yes, OK, and watched the same tv programmes) as their compatriots.

So, here’s a selection of classic and modern literature from the current UK school reading lists - books they should have read; books that are a joy to read.

Primary pupils:

reading age 5-7

The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss;
A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond;
Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy by Lynley Dodd;
We’re going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen;
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

7-8
Charlotte’s Web by E B White;
The Hundred Mile an Hour Dog by Jeremey Strong;
The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks;
Fungus the Bogeyman by Raymond Briggs;
Mr Majeika by Humphrey Carpenter;
One thousand and One Arabian Nights by Geraldine Mccaughrean;
Ivan the Terrible by Anne Fine

8-9
Alice’s adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll;
The Butterfly Lion by Michael Morpurgo;
Beowulf by Kevin Crossley-Holland;
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner;
The firework-makers Daughter by Philip Pullman;
Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh;
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder;
Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry;
Stig of the Dump by Clive King;
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome;
War Boy by Michael Foreman

9-10
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens;
Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper;
Conor’s Eco Den by Pippa Goodheart;
The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe;
Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz;
Watership Down by Richard Adams;
The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner

Make time for War and Peace

All serious readers know that one day they should tackle Tolstoy’s War and Peace but many put it off: too long, complicated names, chunks of philosophical digression...

In fact, like Dickens’ novels, the book is just a soap opera, but choosing the right translation can make a big difference to your enjoyment. Although there are already more than a dozen in print, two new versions have been battling it out - with some hostility - in 2007.

Although British translator Andrew Bromfield’s “concise” version (Ecco Press) may sound more tempting, it is the Pevear-Volokhonsky version (published by Knopf) which is causing huge excitement with its bold approach to language. For example, the Russian kapli kapali which has always been translated along the lines of the descriptive “raindrops dripped from the trees” is here rendered as “drops dripped” hence conveying the compactness (yes!) of Tolstoy’s language and that this is a sound heard in the dark. The US-Russian husband and wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky live in Paris and turned another Tolstoy great, Anna Karenina, into a best-seller when their translation was promoted by Oprah Winfrey.

You have time on your hands now you have moved to Normandy, the winter evenings are long - time to give it a go.

New translation by the acclaimed translators Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky:




'Concise' version with a happy end, translated by Andrew Bromfield (NOT the traditional text):

Pictures: Tolstoy barefoot by Ilya Repin (left) and Napoleon battling the Russians by Vassili Vereshchagin (right).

© Review published in December, 2007, issue of the Rendezvous magazine.

Paris American Bookshop closes

Brentano's, the old shop at 37 Avenue de L'Opéra, whose customers included Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, was shut after its landlord, the BNP Parisbas bank, won a liquidation order for non-payment of rent. For some time, the store was locally owned, no longer part of the historic New York-based company which is now a brand in the Borders Group. The American bookstore has been a Paris fixture since 1895.

Charles Bremner's story is here

And a list of other English language bookshops in Paris is here

WH Smith in rue de Rivoli is still going.

Talking French: Hadley Pager's handy books

Hadley Pager do a neat series of subject by subject phrase books which are small enough to slip in your pocket and also run the glossaries both English - French and French - English so you could, for example, hand the book backwards and forwards between you and the doctor rather than knowing what to say but not understanding the answer.


The medical phrase book covers everything you could possibly want to say or understand at the doctors, chemist, as a hospital inpatient or at the pharmacy.

Other themes include legal terms, garden and horticultural, renovations etc.

Mail hpinfo@aol.com or write to Hadley Pager Info, PO Box 249, Leatherhead, KT23 3WX for latest publication list and prices.
www.hadleypager.com

© published in December 2007 issue of the Rendezvous magazine

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver is a brilliant writer, both gripping and thought-provoking. Nevertheless, I have had this on the shelves for ages because I never seemed to be in the mood to start a very long book set in the Belgian Congo in the fifties.

But with Kingsolver you are hooked from the opening line: We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.

This is the story, told by the wife and four daughters of the appalling, bible-thumping, Baptist Nathan Price, of the family’s Mission to Africa. First, it is the tale of one family’s adventure into “the heart of darkness’, its dysfunction and ultimate destruction. As a family saga alone, the book is utterly satisfying.

But of course, as always with Kingsolver who tackles wide, moral themes through her stories, it is more than that. Set just before and after Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the newly independent Republic of the Congo, is assassinated, it is also the story of the Congo - whose troubles continue to make the headlines today.

And it is about America, cultural imperialism and, as Kingsolver says in her introduction, exploring the “great shifting terrain between righteousness and what’s right”.

Nathan is, above all, a man of certitude. He is observed by his family and his would-be converts. “Tata Jesus is bangala!” he shouts during his sermons, unwilling to listen to the fact that in Kikongo meaning hangs on intonation: bangala may mean “precious and beloved” but it when spoken in a flat; foreign accent also means the poisonwood tree, a dangerous local plant.

Later, having absorbed the American message that democracy is good, the inhabitants of Kilanga vote, in church, on whether Jesus should be their personal God. Jesus loses.
Kingsolver says she waited thirty years for wisdom and maturity to dare to write this book. It is warm, funny and haunting.

Miranda Ingram

© published in the Rendezvous magazine, December 2008