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My father took about five years of French, but not read a lot in French over the last twenty years or so. Last year, my brother and his wife gave him french translations of the Harry Potter books, and he has been greatly enjoying them. However, now that he has gotten back into the language, he wants to move into reading books that were written in French, not translated from English. He was talking to me about trying to find out what a few of the books every high school aged French student reads either for school or otherwise, so he would have an idea where to start.
I figured Hatrack would be a good place to ask Posts: 894 | Registered: Apr 2000
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French Lit classes make you start with La Chanson de Roland and work forward in time, but the books that I found most enjoyable were the not-so-literary ones that I could get through more easily. Marcel Pagnol's Manon des sources is a good one. (It inspired the movie of the same name) And of course, you have to read the original Les miserables.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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I read "La Place" by Annie Ernaux for my advanced French course in secondary school and absolutely loved it. I found I could get through most of it without having to use a dictionary too often - she has a very terse, spare writing style which is quite easy to read while still being very powerful. I found Camus a bit more difficult, but I reckon L'etranger is still probably fairly accessible.
Posts: 1550 | Registered: Jun 1999
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I read Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, but I don;t know how into French Exitentialism he is. I had strange French and English teachers.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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Eesh. I had to try to read Sartre in French once... thought it was just my language deficieny until I picked up an English translation!
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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Well ! To retry to read french i think he may read Le petit prince. This book are simple in the language but so deep in the beauty and the sence. It's a merveille.
When i was in lycée (high school for you), i studied : Candide by Voltaire Le rouge et le noir by Stendhal Ménon by Platon Les illusions perdues by Balzac Le père goriot by Balzac Le présent et le mouvant by Bergson W ou le souvenir by Perrec Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Noces à Tipasa by Albert Camus Bouvard et Pécuchait by Flaubert La vie de Galilée by Brecht
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