Saturday 19 February 2011

The lasting reputation of novels

Sebastian Faulks current programme on the novel and its heroes has caused an upsurge of annoyance with many people criticizing the list for being male centric-Marielle Frostrop was particularly vociferous in her criticism of the list as being one sided.   Well maybe its because the clientele for A level French is predominantly female, books by young women almost predominate set text lists-or at least there was no shortage of them.   This is reflected in the titles covered by the A level french.com site.  The offshoot www.bonjourtristesse.co.uk offers a full range of exercises to get encourage language practice alongside comprehension of the ideas and plot of the novel.  Françoise Sagan rushed off the novel in her summer holidays and was catapulted to fame as a result.   True to form there has been a recent biopic of her called Sagan...


Sagan le film

Doria in Kiffe Kiffe Demain is a character in a different mould.  While Cécile in Bonjour Tristesse can certainly not be labelled a hero, Doria is very much the downtrodden victim who almost heroically achieves a happy life despite the obstacles being put in her path.   A visit to www.kiffekiffedemain.co.uk will show you the range of exercises and resources available for that title too.   As mentioned last mentioned last month Faiza Guene's latest novel is also very much worth reading.

Thursday 10 February 2011

Un Sac de Billes and L'étranger

I was captivated by Un Sac de Billes the first time I read it, the more so because I had spent a lot of time in my student days in some of the places mentioned like Menton.  The fact that the book is written in a humorous way on a difficult subject is also a big plus.   I am therefore adding at section to the site on the book;  all resources will be on the domain www.unsacdebilles.co.uk   It has overtaken L'étranger now in terms of sales.  I guess for me the only negative is that it is now recognized that Joseph Joffo was helped in editing the book quite considerably;  one does wonder which bits were embellished and which weren't-quite a good task to get students to consider although of course there are no right or wrong answers.

I also thought getting a domain for L'Etranger would be a good thing to give it its own identity on the site.  So more information on L'étranger, go to www.letranger.co.uk   There is quite a bit of controversy at the moment because all Camus' work has been made available to download on a Canadian site-authors only have to have been dead for fifty years for work to go out of copyright there although of course it more here.  Gallimard are rightly very upset about this and personally as a writer myself I agree-it's not fair on publishers as with the music industry.  Authors of course don't have the potential for doing gigs in quite the same way, particularly when they're dead.

Lots more resources are being added to the A level French resources on the site including all the content for the new A*ttitudes course for AS.  Have a look!