Have French Lost the Way in Fiction?

Read any new French novels lately? Unless you know the language, chances aren’t good. It’s easier to find English translations of Italian, Spanish, German, Russian and even Chinese works on local bookshelves.

Once a symbol of the avant-garde, the French novel is in the same doldrums as the country’s cinema--reduced to formulas and lacking new directions, some say.

But never lost for something to discuss, the French typically have turned the issue into a debate, which has grown serious enough so the French have even sought foreign comment, as in recent interviews by Telerama, the upscale media guide, of eight well-known authors about current French fiction. Joseph Heller confessed that he had read the classics but when it came to French writers--say, of the last 20 years--his mind was a blank. He added that he doesn’t read French and it seems that much less French writing is being translated into English these days.

Opinions Vary

The interviews were published to coincide with the Ninth Salon du Livre, the disastrous Paris book fair, staged in hot weather at a distant site and boycotted by some literary publishers, while others slashed their floor space. After the fair, the trade itself talked of a “crisis.”

Opinions vary on how to solve the problem, but what is missing, most agree, is the imagination of authors of the golden years. “When you have great people like Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir in the same place at once,” says Left Bank publisher Francois Bourin, “it doesn’t happen by chance. I think the French then had a lot to say because of what happened during the war. They gave us existentialism, the noveau roman and fresh ideas. But we haven’t redefined our positions since then. Our values--moral, religious, political--are so shaken up that the French people can’t get support from them any more.”

Bourin, whose business is small, also observes that “the big French publishers are no longer geared for literary works. They’ve diversified into the media--news magazines, television--and into encyclopedias, dictionaries and textbooks.” They sell information, not fiction.

Elusive Market

Another key to the French novel’s decline is translation. Consider the case of writer Marie Nimier, 32, whose two much-praised novels were issued by Gallimard, which published Proust, among others. Her latest, “La Giraffe,” a surreal work about a zoo-keeper’s love for animals, was short-listed for the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary award. Although her works have appeared in Dutch and soon in German, the English market remains elusive. Publishers, she laments, are “not making money out of French books, so they won’t even translate them.”

But Bourin sees another aspect to the dilemma: “The overseas market is declining because French is not spoken internationally as much (as it once was). But still I think that French writers would be translated if they imposed themselves as great writers throughout the world.