Les Fleurs de Mal - Charles Baudelaire [image technically NSFW, but it's art, so that's ok?]

I finally finished reading Les Fleurs du Mal yesterday – it's taken two months exactly, which feels like quite a long time for such a small book. It's the first foreign language poetry I've read, and some of it really is beautifully written. I've always thought French is such a poetic-sounding language, and some of Baudelaire's lines are lovely when read aloud.

The subject matter is pretty gloomy, though, and having read the whole thing I got an overriding sense of depression, and even hatred – hatred of women, beauty, happiness and of himself as well. He seems to feel that none of those things are what they seem on the surface, and that below they surface all is evil, and death. (I guess I should have gathered that from the title...) That said, he uses some beautiful language to describe horrible things, and has definitely expanded my vocabulary. Here's part of the list of new words I've learned:

So at least that'll come in handy when speaking to real live French people.

Early birthday present!

I got home from work to find a big Amazon parcel waiting for me - an early birthday present from my brother! I've been trying to improve my French by reading (currently trawling my rather depressing way through Les Fleurs du Mal), so I wanted something a bit lighter and more approachable to be going on with.

Contents consist of:

La Princess de Clèves by Madame de Lafayette
Germinal by Émile Zola
Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant (I loved the film adaptation and have been really wanting to read this one)
Le Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu by Honoré de Balzac
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (which I have read in English but loved so much that I'll happily sit through the whole lot in French as well)

All shiny, new, sharp-edged and exciting!

Obscure genres

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

What’s your favorite genre that other people might not read? I mean, mysteries, romances, real-crime … these are all fairly widespread categories. But real readers don’t usually limit themselves to just the “big” genres … so what’s your favorite little-known type of book? Books on dogs? Knitting books? Stories about the space race? Mathematical theory?


I don't want to sound like a fancy pretentious person, but I think I'd have to say nineteenth-century French literature. And I mean in French.

That's not because I'm particularly good at French, in fact it's the opposite - I learned French in college, and I want to keep it up and improve it, but I don't actually know any French people, and don't want to feel like it's hard work. So, I decided to do things I enjoy, but sometimes in French, which results in classic literature and detective TV shows.

When I haven't read one in a while, I do find myself relying on Google Translate in every other sentence, to begin with, but then there's that wonderful feeling when, about halfway through, you've got so used to it you've forgotten you're reading a different language. It does give me some bizarre vocabulary - I started out gently with a Harry Potter translation, and ended up knowing far too many words for things like 'pumpkin', 'flying broomstick', and 'giant spider' (although what with that spider-plague, who knows if that last one might come in handy?)

I'd really like to get round to reading Victor Hugo in the original French, as I really enjoyed Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in English, but I have yet to find them over here, plus the sheer length of them makes it rather a daunting prospect. Most recently I read Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, which interested me because I'd heard it subverted narrative convention, most notably in that the 'hero' is a conniving, selfish maniplator who never really gets his 'rightful' comeuppance. Still to read on my shelves I've got Les Fleurs du Mal and Mauprat, and I'm particularly looking forward to the poetry as I do find that poetry in particular loses much of its beauty in translation.

What about you? What's your niche interest?