French Short Stories 1: Parallel Text [French]

I am trying to brush up my French language skills. I think this Parallel text is very helpful. It has the advantage of immediate reinforcement, without having to look up every word that I can't remember. I liked some of the stories better than others, but that is to be expected in any book with multiple stories.

This anthology offers an excellent sampling of modern trends (1940s - 60s), not contemporary trends, in French literature (and art-house cinema), from Robbe-Grillet's purposeful tedium in tediously recounting French social rituals (noteably rendered in Last Year at Marianbad) to Marcel Ayme's brilliant mixture of realism and wrenching fantasy (a la Red Ballon) to Philippe Sollers's apologia for pristine solipsism (here, an unintentional parody of a French intellectual's grapplings with the mind-body problem; Maitre Woody Allen does Eric Rohmer)--do dust off your past subjunctives. The translations are excellent: Norman Denny's rendering of Ayme's story deftly combines fantasy and urban reality; and Jean Stewart's rendering of Sollers's fluidly conversational, academic French is imaginatively intuituive. Essential reading for the intermediate to advanced student of French literature.