Welcome to Litsy!

“It‘s most direct successor in modern French literature may be Baudelaire‘s post-romantic” Fleurs du mal”. It was only a few years after “The Regrets” that the wars of religion between varying factions of Protestants and Catholics (1562-98) profoundly changed French culture and set the stage for the more highly structured and often less personal literature of the 17th century”.

Reading Barzakh, a fantasy/SF novel by Mauritanian author Moussa Ould Ebnou. Doing a bit of research on Aoudaghost/Awdaghost, a city lost to the desert in the Middle-Ages, and on the Sahel region is helping a lot w/ timeline & geography.
Pic by Luca Abbate from https://wildmanlife.com/aoudaghost-economic-hub-of-the-sahara/ This page contains pics & detailed info & matches quite closely the descriptions in the book. Useful.
#Mauritania

This was a cute series of short stories and excerpts in relation to Colette‘s French bull dog and cat and various other animals throughout the book. She was a French novelist who wrote the Real Claudine series and Gigi. She has an amazing descriptive style, especially as this was in the first person in the animals perspective throughout the book. I picked this up at a used bookstore on my travels to San Francisco.

“Freed from words and images, released from books which sleep, spellbound, on library shelves, artistic inspiration remains, in Mirbeau‘s novel, on the level of pain that cannot be voiced in words.“ ~Robert Ziegler

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One of my issues with 19th-century novels is how many of them began life as serialized publications. When you get paid by the word, you're going to use a lot of words, and while I don't begrudge anyone trying to make a living, even a writer of Balzac's level can't make me care about the topography of the Indre River valley for four whole pages. The first 50-75 pages of this were like literary Ambien, but there were enough compelling parts...

I knew, we knew, that what we were experiencing was anything but the grand historical event, the vain, colossal judicial spectacle that we all had good reason to fear at the beginning. No: this was something else: a unique experience of horror, pity, proximity and presence. It was only very late in the day that I realised that the white box resembles a modern church, and that something sacred had been taking place there.
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Image: BBC news site

"To explain society through a theory of individual happiness expressly sought at the expense of others is a lethal doctrine, the harsh connotations of which drive man to believe everything he secretly gains, without the legal system, society, or individuals perceiving the damage done, is properly and duly acquired."

This book may be a slog, but there are some great (and painfully relevant) quotes scattered throughout.