Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
occupation of Paris. Her view was from 9 rue de Beaujolais in the 1er, overlooking Jardin
du Palais Royal.
Literary Cafes
Café de Flore & Les Deux Magots (St-Germain & Les Invalides)
La Belle Hortense, L'Autre Café & Caffè Marcovaldo (Le Marais, Ménilmontant & Bel-
leville)
Existentialism
After WWII, existentialism developed as a significant literary movement around Jean-Paul
Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, who worked and conversed in the cafes of
bd St-Germain in St-German des Prés. All three stressed the importance of the writer's
political engagement. De Beauvoir, author of
Le Deuxième Sexe
(The Second Sex; 1949),
had a profound influence on feminist thinking. Camus' novel
L'Étranger
(The Stranger;
1942) reveals that the absurd is the condition of modern man, who feels himself an outsider
in his world.
L'Âge de Raison(The Age of Reason; 1945), the first volume of Jean-Paul Sartre's trilogy
Les Chemins de la Liberté(The Roads to Freedom), is a superb Parisian novel. His subse-
quent volumes recall Paris immediately before and during WWII.
Modern Literature
In the late 1950s certain novelists began to look for new ways of organising narrative. The
so-called
nouveau roman
(new novel) refers to the works of Nathalie Sarraute, Alain
Robbe-Grillet, Boris Vian, Julien Gracq, Michel Butor and others. But these writers never
formed a close-knit group, and their experiments took them in divergent directions.
In 1980 Marguerite Yourcenar, best known for her memorable historical novels including
Mémoires d'Hadrien
(Hadrian's Memoirs; 1951), became the first woman to be elected to
the Académie Française. Marguerite Duras came to the notice of a larger public in 1984
when she won the Prix Goncourt for
L'Amant
(The Lover).
Philippe Sollers, an editor at
Tel Quel,
a highbrow, left-wing, Paris-based review, was
very influential in the 1960s and early 1970s. His 1960s novels were highly experimental,
but with
Femmes
(Women; 1983) he returned to a conventional narrative style. Another
Tel
Quel
editor, Julia Kristeva, became known for her theoretical writings on literature and psy-
