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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
It is difficult to imagine a better biography: informed, objective and superbly written. Rimbaud - in all his incarnations, from the rebellious student 'loping' accross to the library in Charleroi leaving clouds of pipe smoke in his wake to the deliriously skeletal figure on his deathbed in Marseilles - comes off the pages as an outlandishly entrancing figure. Even if the poetry isn't to everyone's taste, the man himself is compelling.

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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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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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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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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, ... Read More:

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Baudelaire

by: Claude Pichois

June 29, 1989
A very useful introduction to Baudelaire's life and poetry.

The poetry quotations are presented in original French and translated (Graham Robb's valiant efforts - but which is the definitive Baudelaire in English?)as footnotes.

The poet appears as a mass of contradictions - impeccably dressed for example - and a blatant self-publicist - but essentially a genius, a genius with a sense of vocation which was to involve degrading expeditions through the seedoiest underbellies of French urban and Provincal life, all and ably and enjoyably described by the author.

This book will appeal to those wanting to know about the circumstances under which the poems were written rather than a detailed exposition of individual meanings.

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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 be ... Read More: