Daumal's symbolic mountain represents a way to truth that "cannot not exist," and his classic allegory of man's search for himself embraces the certainty that one can know and conquer one's own reality.

    Russian writer Gaito Gazdanov arrived in Paris, as so many did, between the wars and would go on, with this fourth novel, to give readers a crisp rendering of a living city changing beneath its people’s feet. Night Roads is loosely based on the author’s experiences as a cab driver in those disorienting, often brutal years, and the narrator moves from episode to episode, holding court with many but sharing his mind with only a few. His companions are drawn straight out of the Parisian past: the legendary courtesan Jeanne Raldi, now in her later days, and an alcoholic philosopher who goes by the name of Plato. Along the way, the driver picks up other characters, such as the dull thinker who takes on the question of the meaning of life only to be driven insane. The dark humor of that young man’s failure against the narrator’s authentic, personal explorations of the same subject is captured in this first English translation. With his trademark émigré eye, Gazdanov pairs humor with cruelty, sharpening the bite of both.

    There is a series of jewel robberies on the Riviera that resemble his style and the police believe that the Cat is up to his old tricks again. A young lady vacationing in France suspects Robie at first, then offers to help him catch the burglar.

    1 An accident riveted him to a childhood memory, and this memory became sacred. In his early childhood, a liturgical drama was performed, a drama of which he was the officiant: he knew paradise and lost it, he was a child and was driven from his childhood. No doubt this "break" is not easy to localize. It shifts back and forth, at the dictate of his moods and myths, between the ages of ten and fifteen. But that is unimportant. What matters is that it exists and that he believes in it. His life is divided into two heterogeneous parts: before and after the sacred drama. Indeed, it is not unusual for the memory to condense into a single mythical moment the contingencies and perpetual rebeginnings of an individual history. What matters is that Genet lives and continues to relive this period of his life as if it had lasted only an instant. ____________________ 1 Pass?iste: one who is not adapted to the present age, who is not a man of his time, who "lives in the past."--Translator's note. ____________________ ? ? To say "instant" is to say fatal instant. The instant is the reciprocal and contradictory envelopment of the before by the after. One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life. One feels oneself to be one's own self and another; the eternal is present in an atom of duration. In the midst of the fullest life, one has a foreboding that one will merely survive, one is afraid of the future. It is the time of anguish and of heroism, of pleasure and of destruction. An instant is sufficient to destroy, to enjoy, to kill, to be killed, to make one's fortune at the turn of a card. Genet carries in his heart a bygone instant which has lost none of its virulence, an infinitesimal and sacred void which concludes a death and begins a horrible metamorphosis. The argument of this liturgical drama is as follows: a child dies of shame; a hoodlum rises up in his place; the hoodlum will be haunted by the child. One would have to speak of resurrection, to evoke the old initiatory rites of shamanism and secret societies, were it not that Genet refuses categorically to be a man who has been resuscitated. 2 There was a death, that is all. And Genet is nothing other than a dead man. If he appears to be still alive, it is with the larval existence which certain peoples ascribe to their defunct in the grave. All his heroes have died at least once in their life. "After his first murder, Querelle experienced the feeling of being dead. . . . His human form--what is called the envelope of flesh-continued nevertheless to move about on the surface of the earth." His works are filled with meditations on death. The peculiarity of these spiritual exercises is that they almost never concern his future death, his being-to-die, but rather his being-dead, his death as past event. This original crisis also appears to him as a metamorphosis. The well-behaved child is suddenly transformed into a hoodlum, as Gregor Samsa was changed into a bug. Genet's attitude toward this metamorphosis is ambivalent: he both loathes it and yearns for it.

    The astounding yet true story of the life of Ignacz Semmelweis provided Celine with a narrative whose appalling events and bizarre twists would have lain beyond credibility in a work of pure fiction. Semmelweis, now regarded as the father of antisepsis, was the first to diagnose correctly the cause of the staggering mortality rates in the lying-in hospital at Vienna. However, his colleagues rejected both his reasoning and his methods, thereby causing thousands of unnecessary deaths in maternity wards across Europe. This episode, one of the most infamous in the history of medicine, and its disastrous effects on Semmelweis himself, are the subject of Celine's semi-fictional evocation, one in which his violent descriptive genius is already apparent. The overriding theme of his later writing--a caustic despair verging on disgust for humanity--finds its first expression here, and yet he also reveals a more compassionate aspect to his character. Semmelweis was not published until 1936, after the novels that made Celine famous. -It is not every day we get a thesis such as Celine wrote on Semmelweis!- wrote Henry Miller of this volume.

    On the promise of a dowry fit for a king, Catherine has left her true love in Italy, forced into trading her future for a stake in the French crown.Amid the glittering fêtes and banquets of the most immoral court in sixteenth-century Europe, the reluctant bride becomes a passionate but unwanted wife. Humiliated and unloved, Catherine spies on Henry and his lover, the infamous Diane de Poitiers. And, tortured by what she sees, Catherine becomes dangerously occupied by a ruthless ambition destined to make her the most despised woman in France: the dream that one day the French crown will be worn be a Medici heir...

    Dupree October 15, 2008Probably few appreciators of French culture younger than 50 will be familiar with this book, but it deserves their notice as a beautiful compendium of knowledge, culinary and otherwise, about the country -- much of it first-hand. Chamberlain was in turn well loved by Frenchmen who knew him (among the latter, doubtless many chefs). The book is a culinary travelogue, a generous and representative exploration of French food and wine by region, from the ground up to its delectation. Along the way, one is effortlessly acquainted with some pertinent pieces of history, history relevant to whatever is at hand.Chamberlain was both jovial and staid, serious and light-hearted, practical and idealistic. Rather a universal man. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for service to France as an ambulance driver during WW1 , lived in France during most of the intervening years before WW2, and was awarded the Legion d'honneur for his service in that war. His association with Gourmet Magazine was long and fruitful, leading eventually to the first edition of Boquet de France in 1952. Samuel Chamberlain's numerous drawings, etchings, and photographs illustrating the book (340 indexed in the 1966 edition (which has a somewhat different selection of photos, a third more recipes, and a general updating)) have an architectural solidity combined with a dreamy sensibility that reflects , I think, the French aesthetic of physical beauty and well represents the beauty of the French landscape. Doubtless, some of the scenes are with us now only as history and do not exist outside the pages of the book.This handsomly printed and bound hardcover is suited to its large 7"X10" format. The "66 edition is 670 pages.(I recommend one buy the "52 edition as well, for the different photos). Finally, the picture that Amazon uses to advertise the book is a picture of the title page, not of the cover or spine, both of which make a better invitation to the delights one finds inside. Other Reference Data: Hardcover: 1825 pages (three Volume Set)Publisher: Gourmet Distribution Corp.; First American Edition edition (1952)Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 7.1 x 1.7 inchesASIN: B000OLDO3U (Probably the 3-book set)ASIN: B000OJKWBE ??First Edition: ASIN: B001L4DCJAFirst Edition ISBN:ISBN-10: 0241900735ISBN-13: 978-0241900734