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Nausea
3.490 kr.Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which “spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time ― the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.”
Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature (though he declined to accept it), Jean-Paul Sartre ― philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist ― holds a position of singular eminence in the world of French letters. La Nausée, his first and best novel, is a landmark in Existential fiction and a key work of the twentieth century.
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The Little Prince
4.690 kr.The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. “In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don’t dare disobey,” the narrator recalls.
“Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket.” And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator’s imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions.
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Shame
3.490 kr.‘My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.’ Thus begins Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.
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The Young Man
3.190 kr.In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a student thirty years her junior – an experience that transforms her, briefly, back into the ‘scandalous girl’ of her youth. When she is with him, she replays scenes she has already lived through, feeling both ageless and closer to death. Laid like a palimpsest on the present, the past’s immediacy pushes her to take a decisive step in her writing – producing, in turn, the need to expunge her lover. At once stark and tender, The Young Man is a taut encapsulation of Ernaux’s relationship to time, memory and writing.
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Happening
3.190 kr.In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.
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Based on a True Story
3.190 kr.Overwhelmed by the huge success of her latest novel, exhausted and suffering from a crippling inability to write, Delphine meets L. L. embodies everything Delphine admires; sophisticated and unusually intuitive, she slowly but deliberately carves herself a niche in the writer’s life. However, as she makes herself indispensable to Delphine, the intensity of this unexpected friendship manifests itself in increasingly sinister ways. And as their lives become further entwined, L. begins to threaten Delphine’s identity and her safety.
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Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile
3.190 kr.Bonjour Tristesse tells the story of Cécile, who leads a carefree life with her widowed father and his young mistresses until, one hot summer on the Riviera, he decides to remarry – with devastating consequences. In A Certain Smile, which is also included in this volume, Dominique, a young woman bored with her lover, begins an encounter with an older man that unfolds in unexpected and troubling ways.
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The Penguin Book of French Verse 4
1.490 kr.The Penguin Book of French Verse 4
The Twentieth Century Introduced and edited by Anthony Hartley -
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A Woman’s Battles and Transformations
3.690 kr.One day, Édouard Louis finds a photograph of his mother from twenty years ago: a happy young woman, full of hopes and dreams. But growing up, Édouard only knew his mother’s sadness – what happened in those years since the photo was taken? Then, at the age of forty-five, Édouard’s mother frees herself from this life of oppression, to start a new one in Paris.
A Woman’s Battles and Transformations reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives – and with the possibility of escape. It is a tender portrait of a mother, and an honouring of her self-discovery as she chooses to live on her own terms.
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The Other Girl
3.190 kr.One Sunday in Yvetot, August 1950. Annie is playing outside in the sun. Her mother steps out of the grocery to chat with a customer, a few metres from her. The two women’s conversation is perfectly audible; its scraps become etched forever in Annie’s memory. Before she was born, her parents had another daughter. She died at the age of six from diphtheria. Annie will never hear another word from her parents about this unknown sister, nor will she ask them a single question about her: their family unit has formed in the image of its vanished predecessor. In The Other Girl, brilliantly translated for the first time into English by Alison L. Strayer, Annie Ernaux explores the meaning of this family secret, and the insurmountable distance that separates the two sisters.
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Dauðinn og stúlkan
4.590 kr.Fyrir tuttugu og fimm árum átti hin glæsilega nítján ára gamla Vinca Rockwell í leynilegu ástarsambandi við kennara sinn. Í hennar augum var ástin „allt eða ekkert.“ Þau áttu stefnumót eina vetrarnótt …
Manon, Thomas og Maxime hafa ekki talað saman síðan þau útskrifuðust, fyrir tuttugu og fimm árum, en munu nú hittast á bekkjarmóti. Mun sannleikurinn um það sem raunverulega gerðist þessa örlagaríku vetrarnótt koma í ljós?
Guillaume Musso er langsamlega vinsælasti höfundur Frakklands þessi árin og hafa skáldsögur hans verið þýddar á 40 tungumál og selst í yfir 33 milljónum eintaka um allan heim. Hann fæddist í Antibes í Suður-Frakklandi og býr í París. Þessi bók gerist í fæðingarbæ hans og er sannkallaður vegvísir um Antibes og sveitirnar umhverfis.
Kristín Jónsdóttir þýddi úr frönsku.
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History of Violence
3.490 kr.I met Reda on Christmas Eve 2012, at around four in the morning. He approached me in the street, and finally I invited him up to my apartment.
He told me the story of his childhood and how his father had come to France, having fled Algeria. We spent the rest of the night together, talking, laughing. At around 6 o’clock, he pulled out a gun and said he was going to kill me.
He insulted me, strangled and raped me. The next day, the medical and legal proceedings began. History of Violence retraces the story of that night, and looks at immigration, class, racism, desire and the effects of trauma in an attempt to understand a history of violence, its origins, its reasons and its causes.
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Who Killed My Father
3.490 kr.In Who Killed My Father, Édouard Louis explores key moments in his father’s life, and the tenderness and disconnects in their relationship.
Told with the fire of a writer determined on social justice, and with the compassion of a loving son, the book urgently and brilliantly engages with issues surrounding masculinity, class, homophobia, shame and social poverty. It unflinchingly takes aim at systems that disadvantage those they seek to exclude – those who have their expectations, hopes and passions crushed by a society which gives them little thought.
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Exteriors
3.490 kr.Taking the form of random journal entries over the course of seven years, Exteriors concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person’s lived environment. Ernaux captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris: poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive. Exteriors is in many ways the most ecstatic of Ernaux’s books – the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, and the first in which she is able to leave the past behind her.
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The End Of Eddy
3.490 kr.Édouard Louis grew up in a village in northern France where many live below the poverty line. His bestselling debut novel about life there, The End of Eddy, has sparked debate on social inequality, sexuality and violence. It is an extraordinary portrait of escaping from an unbearable childhood, inspired by the author’s own.
Written with an openness and compassionate intelligence, ultimately, it asks, how can we create our own freedom?
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Óbærilegur léttleiki tilverunnar
1.290 kr.Hvað gerir maður þegar fallega þjónustustustúlkan á hótelinu úti á landi stendur allt í einu á tröppunum hjá honum í borginni með hafurtask sitt og er bara komin…? Tómas er góður læknir og ennþá betri kvennamaður og ákveður að hleypa hinni ástföngnu Teresu inn í líf sitt. En framhaldið er ekki á hans valdi – þau eru leiksoppar sögunnar, fórnarlömb ytri afla eins og heimaland þeirra, Tékkóslóvakía. Örlög þess í greipum grannans í austri fléttast óviðráðanlega saman við örlög persóna bókarinnar. Samt er þetta engin harmsaga: Óbærilegur léttleiki tilverunnar er full af óvæntri gamansemi og lýsir samhengi stjórnmála, kynlífs og dauða með grátbroslegum hætti. Léttleiki frásagnarinnar og frelsi draumsins verður athvarf mannshugans andspænis óbærilegum lögmálum sögunnar.
Friðrik Rafnsson íslenskaði.
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Night Flight
2.490 kr.Fabien tonight was wandering over the vast splendour of a sea of clouds, but below him lay eternity.
Inspired by his career as an aviator, Saint-Exupéry’s soaring novel follows the journeys of three pilots delivering mail overnight. The author’s beautiful, weightless prose is as haunting as his own disappearance in flight, eerily foreshadowed by his protagonist Fabien, who becomes lost in otherworldly darkness. Letter to a Hostage, Saint-Exupéry’s meditation on displacement and friendship, also explores solitude and questions the human condition.
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The Image of Her
4.390 kr.She’s living a perfect life – so why does Laurence feel so torn? Weekends in the country, weekdays in Paris – Laurence’s life features all the trappings of 1960s French bourgeoisie. She has money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind writes copy while she’s at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office.
All her life she has strived to meet the expectations of others. But when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world, Laurence must finally grapple with a life that prizes image over truth. Slim but powerful, this is a classic story of womanhood and its oppressors, parents and their children, and the quest for personal truth – by the iconic feminist Simone de Beauvoir.
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Lily is Crying
3.990 kr.Lili is Crying, Hélène Bessette’s debut novel, explores the fraughtness and depth of the troubling relationship between Lili and her mother Charlotte. With a near-mythic quality, Bessette’s stripped-back prose evokes at once the pain of thwarted love – of desire run cold – and the promise of renewal. Lauded by critics on its initial publication in 1953 for its boundary-pushing style, unusual economy of expression, strange humour and sheer vivacity, Lili is Crying announces Bessette’s singular take on the ‘poetic novel’.
This edition marks the very first translation of Bessette’s work into English, by Windham-Campbell Prize-winning author and translator Kate Briggs.
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The Possession
3.190 kr.‘The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city – the whole world – with a person you may never have met.’ These words set the framework for The Possession, a striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Annie Ernaux pulls the reader through every step of jealousy, of a woman’s need to know who has replaced her in a lost beloved’s life. Ernaux’s writing, characteristically gorgeous in its precision, depicts the all too familiar human tendency to seek control and certainty after rejection.
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