PDF Le fléau 9782709612814 Books

Product details Paperback Publisher Jean-Claude Lattès; LATTES edition (May 19, 1993) Language French ISBN-10 270961281X

Le fléau 9782709612814 Books Reviews

• "The Stand" is my favorite Stephen King novel, and I've read it a couple of times in English, so I'm pretty familiar with the plot ("l'intrigue" en français). Recently, I've been taking some pains to brush up my rusty schoolboy French (I graduated from university in 1971, to give you some idea). Therefore, this past spring, while at Univerité Laval's excellent five-week French Immersion program, and casting around for a first novel to tackle, I was pleased to stumble upon this superb translation by Jean-Pierre Quijano. It's definitely not for beginners, but someone with the equivalent of six semesters of college French should be able to manage without too much trouble. I only had to use the dictionary once in a while, and less so, as I went on. At nearly 1200 pages, one picks up a lot of vocabulary by repetition without even trying, but what I particularly enjoyed was picking up on a more conversational register of French than I had been exposed to up to now. Stephen King, as his fans know, uses colorful expressions liberally, and it was fun to realize with a bit of a jolt what "un petit peu en cloque" ("a little bit knocked up") or "c'était lui qui lui avait flanqué un polichinelle dans le tiroir" ("it was him who had put a bun in her oven") actually meant. Not that one has the opportunity to use these phrases every day, but I would like to someday speak French at a level that, if I hear such language, I'm not completely mystified. OK. "Le Fléau" ("The Plague") is not Camus, but the French title does sound a bit like the English word "flu" - serendipitous, n'est-ce pas? - and that's basically how I feel about this book. Le Fléau/The Stand is one of the better apocalytic yarns in any language, but it was especially fun for this particular language learner, who painlessly expanded his French vocabulary considerably, while revisiting this well-known classic made fresh by this excellent translation.