The French take an indescribable, meticulous fascination in
distilling every nuance from the slightest of emotions. I base this
conclusion on four years of reading France's answer to The Catcher in the
Rye mixed with Where the Red Fern Grows à la Slaughterhouse Five.
First, it is a law that characters must die in every single
work of fiction penned by a French hand. Not only that, but they must die
painfully, and their deaths must cause untold agony for those who once knew
them. (Readers included.) Death by drowning, by poison, by gunshot,
or simply by wasting away of misery--these are the only acceptable ends for
fictional residents of the Hexagon.
Second, the characters who don’t die (or who remain woefully alive until the end of the story) are required to be unhappy. Their wives or husbands should be unfaithful. Their shops should do badly. Their children or lovers should die. Extra points if they kill their own cat by throwing it against a wall.
Finally, since nothing resembling success ever occurs, these
characters have plenty of time to reflect on what a cruel beast is Fate.
One may spend an entire morning wandering hag-like through the boulevards
of Paris and wondering when the greenish, bloated, rotting visage of
one's drowned husband (whom one has killed) will fade from one's
memory and allow one to sleep. There's nothing better than a long
walk for fixating on nauseating imagery and the feelings it provokes. Ô la belle vie française!
I'm guessing that if you have read only one French book, it
was The Little Prince. The Little Prince was slightly
different from the trope in that (SPOILER ALERT) the certainty of the death of
the Little Prince is under debate. But this book contains another
important element of French literature, which is that it does not make sense.
I like this post. It is an amusing bit of insight into French culture. Maybe you should translate it so that the French can laugh at themselves.
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