This novel by the celebrated French actress, published here posthumously, follows the fortunes of some Jewish emigre families. Set in Paris between the world wars, her story is of people who find ways to survive both the memories of past persecution in Eastern Europe and the threats of Nazism on the rise in France. Numerous characters, most connected with the garment and theater industries, are brought in, but only Nicole, the nouveau riche neurotic who has created both a new identity and a new past for herself, seems to be flesh and blood. The others, despite some lively dialogue, are two-dimensional and unreal. But a sense of the era does emerge, with political events skillfully interwoven. --Laurie Spector Sullivan, Library Journal.
The incomparable Simone Signoret (1921-1985), one of the grand actresses of the twentieth century and one of France's most notable stars, considered herself the “oldest discovery” in Hollywood. After years of block-listing during the McCarthy era, she was thirty-eight years old when she entered Hollywood through the back door in the 1959 British blockbuster Room at the Top. Her portrayal of the endearing Alice Aisgill earned her the Academy Award in 1960, the first French actor to win a coveted Oscar. Though a latecomer to Hollywood, Signoret was already an international star who had survived the Nazi occupation of Paris, emerging in 1945 as a beautiful, promising actress capable of communicating more emotion through body language than dialogue alone could achieve. She gained a reputation as the thinking man's sex symbol and in several films portrayed prostitutes with subtlety and depth. She was fiercely protective of her privacy. But after winning the Oscar, she was dragged through the gutter when her second husband, Yves Montand, had a widely publicized affair with Marilyn Monroe. Many attributed her rapid aging and alcoholism to this betrayal. She endured this perception in silence, all the while demonstrating a remarkable capacity to reinvent herself as a bestselling author, respected social activist, and revered actress who remained in the cinema, her “garden of dreams,” for over four decades. Patricia A. DeMaio combines Signoret's courageous story with Montand's biography to reveal new information and insight into Signoret's humanitarian efforts and the vibrant film career that sustained her.
In what may be the most in-depth study yet published of a film star's body of work, Susan Hayward charts the career of Simone Signoret, one of the great Frech actresses of the 20th Century.Signoret- who won an Oscar in 1960 for her performance in Room at the Top- was a key figure in French cinema for 40 years. But it is not so much her longevity that impresses, as it is the quality of work she produced as her career progressed. She started out as a stunningly beautiful woman, winning major international awards five times for her roles, and yet was only moderately in demand during those years. From the 1960s onwards, when her looks began to decline significantly, Signoret was in greater demand, and produced most of her output. She insisted on playing roles consonant with her real age, and often chose to play roles that portrayed wher as even more ugly than she had become.Simore Signoret: The Star as Cultural Sign is a remarkable achievement, a labor of love from one of the world's leading scholars of French cinema.
Reviled by critics but loved by the readers, the bestseller has until recently provoked little serious critical interest. In The Myth of Superwoman, originally published in 1990, Resa Dudovitz looks at this international phenomenon, particularly at the origins of the bestseller system in the United States and France. Her cross-cultural study, including interviews with publishers, literary agents, and bestselling authors, gives a lively picture of the contrasting ways in which the bestseller is produced, marketed, and received in two countries. It pays special attention to the ‘international bestsellers’ of the 1980s, to writers like Judith Krantz, Colleen McCullough, and Barbara Taylor Bradford, all of whose novels are published in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. The book presents a general analysis of women’s bestsellers, ranging over a wide variety of novels, from popular nineteenth-century texts in France and the United States to the novels of today. Dudovitz shows how women’s bestselling fiction has, over the last two hundred years, kept pace with the social evolution of contemporary women, culminating in the myth of superwoman in women’s bestsellers of the 1980s. This fascinating account of an important aspect of popular culture will be of great value to students of women’s studies and cultural studies, especially those interested in the myths which structure women’s bestselling fiction.
America and France have always had a special relationship. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the two have enjoyed a love affair of sorts, with all the love/hate dynamics that suggests. From Benjamin Franklin charming Louis XVI to Jackie Kennedy enchanting Charles de Gaulle, the two peoples have fascinated and repelled each other. Mary Blume has cultivated her own love affair with this often inscrutable land -- France. It is an affair that spans more than thirty years, from the time Mary Blume first came to Paris, beginning her renowned columns in the International Herald Tribune with a fine eye for the charms, and no aversion to skewering the pretensions, of her adopted home. As with the best chronicles of a time and a place, the narrator begins to emerge through the text. Only Mary Blume could have written these essays. Hers is a unique voice that has won her a devoted audience who have turned religiously, over decades, to her weekend features. Quintessentially American, she has managed that fine trick of not assimilating, and yet coming to know, in the fullest sense, the place and the people in all their often sublime and sometimes ridiculous complexity. In the pieces themselves, whether she turns her penetrating lens on Frenchemen or their money or their socks, whether a bearded lady or Simone de Beauvoir, street performers or members of the Académie Française, whether the newest chic potato or the eternally chic St. Germain de Prés, whether the events of May '68 or the last presidential elections, she sees what would pass unseen -- were she not there to notice it. In the simplest things, Mary Blume reveals the telling detail. In a piece ostensibly about cooking lessons given by two well-meaning aristocrats, she lays bare the acute French sense of class; in a deadpan explanation of the byzantine process of changing street names, she captures the Kafkaesque French bureaucracy; in looking at one beloved Left Bank bistro, she gives us the essence of every such restaurant; by describing the French art of window shopping, she gives us a reflection of how the French see themselves. Whether plumbing the nuances of their language, their rites, rules, or rituals; whether looking at the Mona Lisa or the political arena, film-makers or winemakers, the places and personalities come alive with an uncanny ring of truth. Illustrated by Ronald Searle with the unique wit and delicacy for which he is world famous, A French Affair gives us not only a unique perspective on a time, a place, and a people, but a France that we can digest, distill, and revisit without ever leaving the comfort of home.
The Babel guide has 150 original reviews of books by over 100 authors from France, Quebec, North and West Africa, Belgium and Switzerland. Each review provides a kind of trailer for the work and is followed by an excerpt as a taster. It introduces big names of French literature such as Sartre, Camus, Colette and Duras, and a collection of less familiar writers, such as Driss Chraibi and Madeline Bourdouxhe. It includes a database of French fiction translated in the UK since 1950, with original titles and current prices. This is the third in a series of accessible and illustrated guides to world fiction available in English translation, aimed at journalists, academics, teachers and the ordinary reader. The reviews let potential readers have a idea as to whether a work might suit them.
This book, originally published in 1991, assesses how attitudes, political orientations and social values changed during the five decades after the Second World War. The case studies in the book focus on key ‘sites’ in political culture: in France, on the extreme right, the cinema, the impact of media personalities and changes of political discourse; in Germany, on the decline of regional identities, the emergence of specific issues and the concern of political parties with the effectiveness of language. This interdisciplinary study provides new insights into the way French and German people see themselves.
This volume comprises ten papers presented as plenary lectures on the occasion of the Second World Congress of the International Society of Applied Psycholinguistics (ISAPL) at the University of Kassel, Germany, from July 27 — 31, 1987. The articles collected in this volume focus on the production, comprehension, and acquisition of languages from various empirical and theoretical points of view. This volume is case-based in that it does not claim to cover the full range of present-day psycholinguistic enquiry. It attempts, though, to make a case out of a representational variety of psycholinguistic phenomena, which might provide a window on a unified theory of language production, comprehension, and acquisition. From this perspective this volume aims at the presentation and discussion of various cases which, through analogical reasoning, may serve to shed light on and to solve new cases.
The town of Dreux--60 miles from Paris--made history in 1983 when Le Pen's National Front earned startling electoral gains in the region, establishing it as the forerunner of neofascist advances across the nation. A trained historian and the city's socialist mayor from 1977 to 1983, Gaspard offers us a picture of a particular town in a broad context.
