Blog Posts by Subject: French Literature

Note: for those of you just joining us, the following is a digest of the latest round of comments on Candide 2.0, an interactive edition of Voltaire's book mounted in conjunction with the Library's exhibition Candide at 250: Scandal and Success.

James Morrow names his 10th-grade World Literature teacher, James Giordano, as his literary hero. In the reader’s guide notes to his novel, The Last Witchfinder, Morrow describes how “Mr. G” assigned his high school students a challenging syllabus: Kafka’s Trial, Camus’s Stranger, Candide, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Flaubert’s 

The title page of the [Geneva]
1759 true first edition
(NYPL Digital Gallery)To say that Candide enjoyed an immediate success is an understatement. Candide was a phenomenon. The novel was published through the medium of print, a fact which we too easily take for granted. The print world of the eighteenth century was unlike our own and posed two particular challenges.

For the next ten weeks, the New York Public Library will host a public, interactive reading of Candide, in connection to its ongoing exhibition at 42nd St.. This edition will look familiar to readers who remember the story, or even just its famous lines about “the best of all possible worlds” and “we must cultivate our garden.” But the innovative format, which facilitates reader annotations and discussions in the digital margins, will also yield surprises, as we have taken that closing line and used it as inspiration for a “cultivated” edition, with “seeds” of discussion sown by readers, opening up the text for public 

Intellectually, I have nothing against modern opera, and I can usually steel myself to try it again, even if the result inevitably turns out to be another tepid stew of tedious language and monotonous music. Emotionally, however, it is the standard repertoire which draws me again and again. These so-called “warhorses” of the operatic repertoire have endured for so long because they speak directly to our adult passions. (Melodrama is, after all, only real life ratcheted up a notch.)

How many of us, like Rigoletto the court jester, have felt humiliated by our employers and plotted elaborate revenge? How many women, like Tosca, have fended off the advances of some 

If the New Year is to mean anything more than the difference between Wednesday and Thursday, it should contain a bit of reflection on the past, a glance over the shoulder to see where we’ve been and what we’ve done. Since this is a blog about books, reading, and libraries, I thought an examination of my personal reading list during this past year might be interesting. I’m always intrigued by the lists of others--even if, as with the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2008, I’ve only read one of the selections. My average with other people’s favorite movie lists is usually even lower.

Words or music? Which is more important to opera? This is a question which intrigues opera lovers, such as me, as it is endlessly arguable without being finally answerable. Richard Strauss devoted an entire opera, Capriccio, to the debate. The opera culminates in a lengthy scene of ecstatic, mesmerizing musical intensity* which might seem to give the nod to music, if not for what the soprano is actually singing: that words and music are both indispensible, take one away and whatever is left will not be opera.

This season, the Metropolitan Opera has plastered every nook and cranny of the city with posters of Renée Fleming as Thaïs (just as, last year, you 

Voltaire the author and father of the French Enlightenment—we know about him, of course. But this influential philosopher also loved handmade work. Voltaire has a place in my heart, and I have devoted time as a librarian to cataloguing eighteenth-century books in The Martin J. Gross Collection of works by Voltaire and his contemporaries for the Library’s Rare Book Division.

And so, on this most special of days, I want to share with you the following excerpt, from Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, which illustrates his appreciation for the handmade: “Physical experiments, ably conducted, arts and handicraft—these are the true philosophy. My 

Yes, Marlene Dietrich was our mystery lady. While none of us who pay attention to fashion history are surprised anymore by the furor over women wearing pants, it still remains more than a little surprising how little documentation there is on that specific piece of history. I’d recommend to those teaching costume and fashion studies that they get their most promising grad students to work on this aspect of women’s dress.

As I looked through literature on the subject, I was shocked at how sketchy information is about the true origins of something like the pantsuit. The obituaries for Yves Saint Laurent labeled him as the inventor with his “Le Smoking” 

From the start, my goal in this blog was simply to emphasize what I regard as highlights of the library’s collection, specifically in the realm of literature . . . but I’ve begun to wonder if there isn’t another unifying element, or, if you will, a hidden agenda. Whatever else I’m writing about, I always seem to end up trying to convey my profound love of books and reading. This has long been one of my defining characteristics, long before there was a blog (or even an internet).

Nabokov, in Lectures on Literature, writes:

“Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little 

The weekend before last, I saw the Roundabout Theater production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, an adaptation by Christopher Hampton of the 1782 novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. The production was fascinating, the acting generally superior, and I’ve been smitten with Laura Linney since Tales of the City. . .but I’d forgotten since I first encountered it what a nasty story this is. Not that anything involving two bored French aristocrats who concoct sexual games in order to degrade and humiliate their victims could be anything but nasty. Still, at least in fiction, French aristocrats seem to make the best libertines. (Americans can sometimes be