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The Discovery of France

by: Graham Robb

July 04, 2008
This is a superbly written history-cum-travelogue. Robb is known for his books on French writers (Balzac, Hugo and Rimbaud) but here he ventures into peasant France, riding on his bicycle to make the time for the small details of life in rural France. He writes extremely well about landscape, an the book throughout is enjoyable to read. Drawing on travelogues of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Robb accentuates the backwardness of peasant France - mainly for effect, it seems. I found this increasingly annoying. It is an imbalance in the book. The French peasants come across as a nation of troglodytes. The second half of the book is more conventional history on the theme of nation-building in the nineteenth century. This is perhaps better ... Read More:

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The Discovery of France

by: Graham Robb

September 07, 2007
"On the eve of the French Revolution, France was three weeks long ... and three weeks wide ... Journey times had barely changed since the days of the Romans."

Think you know France? Think again! Robb's argument is that "France was, in effect, a vast continent that had yet to be fully colonized." By turning his back on "the usual cast list of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French history", he seeks out the daily lives of "the faceless millions" and their attitudes to the France in which they supposedly lived. This is not a history of the French regions. Rather it is a history of how those regions culturally coalesced into the centralist state that is the France of today, "the celebration of home-grown diversity and the supreme importance of Paris ... Read More:

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Rimbaud

by: Graham Robb

September 07, 2001
The title of this review was Verlaine's description of Rimbaud.

I came to this book not by way of Arthur Rimbaud but by way of Graham Robb. Having read his biographies of Balzac and Hugo, and his recent `Discovery of France', I was so impressed by his distinctively humorous and no-nonsense style and by his clear and fresh approach to his subjects that I thought it worthwhile to read his biography of Rimbaud too. I came to this book with very little knowledge of its subject beyond the supposed scandal of his affair with Paul Verlaine; I had not consciously read Rimbaud's poetry before, save for the selection of `Illuminations' that Benjamin Britten had transformed into a marvellously evocative song-cycle for his lover Peter Pears to sing. By referring to Rimbaud ... Read More:

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Strangers: Homosexuality in the Nineteenth Century

by: Graham Robb

November 05, 2004
This book is a bit hit and miss. For a start, the title is a bit of a misnomer as the book covers the period from about 1700 to well into the 20th century. In fact, parts of the book seemed to begin at about 1895, drift into the 20th century and not bother to go back in time at all.

Also, because the author skimmed over so much, I wondered if there just wasn't the information available about the 19th century to put in a book, so he had to divert his attentions to cover a wider time period. I don't actually believe this to be the case, which made what little he did mention become frustrating because he never goes into the subject matter in any depth. It's all a quick skim across the surface.

This book serves as a basic introduction to homosexuality ... Read More:

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Victor Hugo

by: Graham Robb

October 09, 1998
This is one of the best biographies you could ever hope for, extremely insightful regarding the character of Victor Hugo and providing a superb overview of the upheavals in French society during the 19th century. The genesis of the major works is thoroughly dealt with, and there is a fascinating account of Hugo's affair with the spirit world (as well as his numerous other affairs). There are also some extremely amusing passages concerning Hugo's brushes with other writers and artists of the time. Highly recommended. It deserves six stars and several planets.

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Balzac

by: Graham Robb

September 22, 2000
"Nothing is insignificant" ... is a line of Balzac's. It is also the opening line of Robb's biography. And one would like to say that Robb's biography is a living example of Balzac's truism. But, if so, it would stretch to innumerable volumes. Alas, the first fourteen years of Balzac's 51 are contained in only the first chapter. That's thirty pages out of 420, or one-fourteenth of a book for two-sevenths of a life. (Later chapters would cover just one year of Balzac's life.) But you know how it is; none of us could describe our own childhoods in detail, let alone that of a then-obscure little love-forgotten boy in some Loire-valley backwater of turn-of-the-century Napoleonic France. And yet, as Robb says, "Balzac too would create an Empire, a fictional world so real that Oscar Wilde ... Read More:

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Balzac

by: Graham Robb

August 25, 1995
"Nothing is insignificant" ... is a line of Balzac's. It is also the opening line of Robb's biography. And one would like to say that Robb's biography is a living example of Balzac's truism. But, if so, it would stretch to innumerable volumes. Alas, the first fourteen years of Balzac's 51 are contained in only the first chapter. That's thirty pages out of 420, or one-fourteenth of a book for two-sevenths of a life. (Later chapters would cover just one year of Balzac's life.) But you know how it is; none of us could describe our own childhoods in detail, let alone that of a then-obscure little love-forgotten boy in some Loire-valley backwater of turn-of-the-century Napoleonic France. And yet, as Robb says, "Balzac too would create an Empire, a fictional world so real that Oscar Wilde would ... Read More:

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Victor Hugo

by: Graham Robb

October 24, 1997
This is one of the best biographies you could ever hope for, extremely insightful regarding the character of Victor Hugo and providing a superb overview of the upheavals in French society during the 19th century. The genesis of the major works is thoroughly dealt with, and there is a fascinating account of Hugo's affair with the spirit world (as well as his numerous other affairs). There are also some extremely amusing passages concerning Hugo's brushes with other writers and artists of the time. Highly recommended. It deserves six stars and several planets.

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Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century

by: Graham Robb

November 07, 2003
This book is a bit hit and miss. For a start, the title is a bit of a misnomer as the book covers the period from about 1700 to well into the 20th century. In fact, parts of the book seemed to begin at about 1895, drift into the 20th century and not bother to go back in time at all.

Also, because the author skimmed over so much, I wondered if there just wasn't the information available about the 19th century to put in a book, so he had to divert his attentions to cover a wider time period. I don't actually believe this to be the case, which made what little he did mention become frustrating because he never goes into the subject matter in any depth. It's all a quick skim across the surface.

This book serves as a basic introduction to homosexuality in history, but I think ... Read More:

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The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Signet Classics)

by: Victor Hugo

2001-04
Like many classic books, this one is quite hard work but definitely worth the effort. There are parts that I have to confess to skipping whole sale, overly long and verbose passages about gothic architecture, Paris of yore and the evils of the printing press. I'm sure these parts were fascinating to contemporary readers of Hugo but for modern readers they're incomprehensible and pointless so don't feel bad about skipping them. Ok Hugo wrote this book mainly in praise of the cathedral but I think for modern readers its allure is the characters.

Unlike the English title will have you believe, the hero of this book is not really Quasimodo. In fact there are no heroes, or heroines, in this book really. It's a study of human frailty, vanity, ignorance, lust and injustice. It's a compelling ... Read More: