Belles lettres : manuscripts by the masters of French literature /

One cannot deny the beauty of this volume. The authors devote two pages to each of France's greatest writers, providing a biography of a few paragraphs and a collection of remarkably reproduced images ranging from manuscripts and signatures to photographs and portraits to personal effects and related paintings. The excellent translations by Goodman (editor and translator of Denis Diderot's Diderot on Art, CH, Apr'96, and Didier Grosjean and Claudine Roland's Rousseau: Still Voyages, 1995) bring the selected excerpts to life. Nevertheless, academic libraries will have little use for this book. For manuscript work, students and scholars will want to consult entire volumes devoted to specific authors (e.g., Arthur Rimbaud's L'oeuvre integrale manuscrite, Textuel, 1996, or even Gallimard/Biblioteque de la Pleiade's "Album" series). And although a specialist will certainly enjoy seeing, for example, the first page of the sixth chapter of J.-K. Huysman's manuscript of A Rebours, written on stationery from the Ministere de 1'Interieur, this reviewer cannot make a case for the scholarly use of that single reproduced page, however beautiful it is with all its crossed-out words. Though not recommended for academic use, this exceptionally handsome book will find fans among general readers and aficionados. S. Whidden University of Missouri--Columbia

Beautifully illustrated with more than 400 color plates, this book is not scholarly but sentimental. De Ayala (coeditor with Gueno of Brilliant Beginnings and Illustrated Letters) and Gu?no (former director of cultural development at France's Bibliotheque National) hope to "bring the past alive" and put the reader in touch with the "emotions of human life, language and culture." To that end, each writer (e.g., Proust, Colette, Sartre) is given a two-page spread: on the left-hand side appears a biographical sketch of some facet of his or her life with a small photo or sketch and an English translation of the excerpt from the handwritten manuscript that appears on the right-hand side. Of course, the literature scholar will not glean much information from the text, and one certainly wonders what criteria the editors used to select their materials. But it is fascinating to read these excerpts, and anyone with even a passing interest in French literature will derive much pleasure from this unique and beautiful book. Recommended for all libraries. Robert T. Ivey, Univ. of Memphis (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.