Our friends over at The Guardian have asked some authors to recommend some holiday (that means vacation to you non-Brits) reading…
Adam Thirlwell, author of Politics and most recently The Delighted States, discusses the following….
France
The problem is that there is no such thing as France. There are infinite Frances – because there are infinite places, and infinite times. So the happy summer reader needs to choose both a place and a time.
For the Paris of the 19th century, there is the spiky novel by Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami (Penguin Classics), with its lovely comic structure, based on exponentially increasing, unassailable good luck. Which makes it the opposite of much sadder summer reading: the Normandy of the 19th century which Maupassant describes in his novel Une Vie (Wildeside Press), with its structure of exponentially increasing, unassailable bad luck….read the rest!
