French realism always has something dramatic, more affected. Perhaps as children of transcendent revolutions and also as inhabitants of cities of light and love. In the literary sense, this vision of realism is almost always passionate for better or for worse, with the frenzy capable of ascending us to glory or leading us to hell. Tell another current French writer like Marc Levy.
It happens like this, in addition to Marc, with other voices such as that of Anna gavalda. A writer turned into a narrator of that starry intimacy always against the wall of bad decisions; with its chronicle identified from the easiest possibility of the predestined defeat that leads to choosing the wrong path in every dilemma. And of his most explosive resolution as hope in the recomposition of our unfortunate future.
In her volumes of stories and novels, Anna Gavalda pulls that French emphasis, that existentialism dotted with color and life even when the plots darken. So in the richness of its contrasts there is no other choice but to recommend the reading of a Gavalda always capable of everything for some mimetic characters from the first scene.
Top 3 recommended books by Anna Gavalda
I wish you would wait for me somewhere
It is unusual for a short story book to reach the impact of any blockbuster novel. But sometimes it happens, just when that book of stories breaks out from a new creative imprint overturned to the open grave on the characters, making them more alive than ever, describing their little stories as chapters of the reader's own life.
A commercial who spends his life on the road discovers by chance the unsuspected consequences of taking a certain detour; a beautiful woman is excited to meet a stranger and in a few seconds she sees him with different eyes; a father of a family is reunited with the love of his life; a veterinarian faces two men who treat her like real animals. The twelve stories of I wish someone were waiting for me somewhere they expose essential human emotions that are most intense at crucial moments.
Anna Gavalda presents the stories of twelve people like those we might cross on the street on our way home. With a style that seems easy from so fluid, the protagonists face different daily tragedies. Each narrative reveals essential human emotions that take on their greatest intensity at crucial moments for the destiny of its protagonists.
Open heart
With the authenticity of her characters, always protagonists of a great stage as soon as they take their voice, Anna rescues a new compendium of lives, a new melting pot of existences with that energy, that power and that realism as achieved from voyeuristic observation of those who intervene black on white in this set of stories.
«I could say that it is a compilation of seven short novels, but I don't see them that way. For me, they are not stories populated by characters, they are people. Real people. Sorry, real people. They talk to try to see clearly, they get naked, they trust, they live with an open heart. Not everyone makes it, but watching it makes me emotional. It is pretentious to talk about my own characters announcing that they are going to move you, but for me they are not characters, they are people, real people, new people; authentic people”, Anna Gavalda. Deep and direct, tender and comforting, full of irony and, above all, benevolence, An Open Heart is an ode to those who recognize their weakness, face their vulnerability and shed all armor to reveal themselves as they are.
Together, nothing more
The novel that justifies all that of French realism as an energetic composition from the romantic to the dramatic. Something of idiosyncrasy captured to perfection that makes this author a best-selling phenomenon with stories sometimes of great romantic component. Of course, French-style, with its edges and uncontrollable drives ...
Camille is 26 years old, she draws beautifully, but she doesn't have the strength to do it. Frail and disoriented, she lives in an attic and tries to disappear: she barely eats, cleans offices at night and her relationship with the world is agonizing. Philibert, his neighbor, lives in a huge apartment from which he could be evicted; he's a stutterer, an old-fashioned gentleman who sells postcards in a museum, and Franck's landlord.
A chef in a large restaurant, Franck is a womanizer and vulgar, which irritates the only person who has loved him, his grandmother Paulette, who at 83 years old lets herself die in a nursing home, longing for home and visits from her grandson. Four survivors bruised by life, whose meeting will save them from a predicted shipwreck. The relationship established between these pure-hearted losers is of unprecedented richness; they will have to learn to know each other to achieve the miracle of coexistence.
Together, nothing else is a living story, with a rhythm suspended in the air, full of those tiny personal dramas that seduce by their simplicity, their sincerity and their immeasurable humanity. Anna Gavalda lets her characters speak, she has a keen sense of observing the fragility of the human being, of the delicate balance between happiness and hopelessness, between feelings and the words to tell them.
