I have been ordering books from Librairie Gallimard in Montreal for about ten years. My last order consisted of the books shown in the photograph. I list them below with brief comments, and will return to each as I finish reading it.

Three novels and one biography, or, I should say, a combination biography and autobiography. The two 19^th-century works are tomes: the novel by Zola weighs in at 500 pages, and Balzac’s, which is actually three novels under one heading, at a hefty 800. The contemporary works seem skimpy in comparison. Modiano’s novel, typically for him, is a little more than 100 pages, and the book by Adjani and Steiner is about 150. The brevity of these last two works is not so much a reflection on their authors, I think, as it is on their audience.

1. Honoré de Balzac, Illusions perdues (1837-1843). Lost Illusions is one entry in the vast undertaking that Balzac called The Human Comedy. This book belongs to that part of the comedy he named “Scenes from Provincial Life.” It deals with a young poet who comes to Paris from the countryside in the early 1820s on a quest for literary fame. There is the inevitable conflict between dreams and reality, between two vastly different ways of life, between idealism and the love of money. What becomes of the man who loses all his illusions? Does he achieve a kind of wisdom, or is he simply ground down and transformed into something less than human?
2. Emile Zola, L’Assommoir (1877). Usually translated as The Drinking Den or The Dram Shop, perhaps The Booze Can or The Bucket of Blood would make a better title. Like Balzac, Zola had a grand framework for many of his novels, which he grouped under the heading of Les Rougon-Macquart, a family whose members were afflicted by alcoholism and a propensity for violence. This book also deals with a person, a woman, who comes to Paris from the countryside in an attempt to better her fortune, but who is disappointed, time after time, by the men in her life. On publication, the book created a scandal in France for its depiction of the way alcohol was ravaging the lives of the Parisian poor.
3. Patrick Modiano, La danseuse (2023). The Ballerina is the latest novel from Modiano, who won the Nobel Prize in 2014 and has published a new book every year or two since then. Like many of his works, this novel is an attempt to recapture and understand events from the narrator’s past, in this case a youthful affair with a beautiful dancer whose name we never learn. And, as in many of his works, the city of Paris plays a prominent role. For Balzac and Zola, Paris was a place, the most important and exciting place in France, but still more of a geographical feature than anything else. In Modiano’s novels, we might say that Paris comes alive, that it actually assumes the status of a character who interacts with and influences the other characters that the author creates.
4. Isabelle Adjani, Olivier Steiner, Du côté de chez Marilyn (2024). This book has yet to be published in an English translation. Perhaps the title should be rendered as Beside Marilyn or even On Behalf of Marilyn. An adaptation of a piece de théâtre that Adjani and Steiner wrote and presented in Paris and several other cities. The book contains 36 chapters, one for each year of Marilyn Monroe’s life, but the focus is very much on the last night of her life, which is still wrapped in mystery and speculation. The narrative unfolds in a multiplicity of voices, now Marilyn’s, now Isabelle’s, and now a fusion of the two that reflects Adjani’s lifelong identification with the American actress. As far as I can gather, reviews in the French press were on the whole extremely positive.