Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
choanalysis but subsequently turned her hand to fiction:
Les Samuraï
(The Samurai; 1990),
a fictionalised account of the heady days of
Tel Quel,
is an interesting document on Paris in-
telligentsia life.
Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault are other notable 1960s and '70s authors and philo-
sophers. In the 1990s French writing focused in a nihilistic way on what France had lost as a
nation (identity, international prestige etc), and never more so than in the work of controver-
sial writer Michel Houellebecq, who rose to national prominence in 1998 with his
Les
Particules Élémentaires
(Atomised).
No literary genre has a bigger cult following in France than the bande dessinée(comic
strip) - Paris even has a museum, Art Ludique-Le Musée, dedicated to the art. The genre
was originally written for children, but comic strips for adults burst onto the scene in 1959
with René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's now-iconic Astérixseries.
France's top-selling writer is Parisian Marc Levy (b 1961). The film rights of his first novel
were snapped up to become Stephen Spielberg's Just Like Heaven(2005), and his novels
have been translated into 42 languages and sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.
His latest, Une autre idée de bonheur(Another Idea of Happiness; 2014) is set in the US.
