Kafka's books are about absurdity, total, ultimate absurdity of life. Reading Kafka is a strange experience. You will come out of it one day feeling like you have spent all this time somewhere in a quiet place buried under the snow, and that you are magically brough back to normal life. After that, you see things in a way that make look even the most normal one as something extraordinary and impossible to understand.

"The trial", and "the castle", are typical of this feeling. "The metamorphosis" is more intimately related to Kafka's life, and to his painful relationship with his father. "Amerika" is something else: Kafka's last book, unfinished, and the only one that looks like it may not be about suffering and absurdity.

All of them are fascinating, a travel to a strange world that is nothing but our society.

Short before "Alcools" went into press, Apollinaire decided to take off all punctuation marks: words, he said, were to give the music and the rythm to the reader. The magic totally works, and this poetry, that inspired surealism, is a rare achievement: somewhere between the classical and the modern "explosed" form of poetry, "Alcools" is a moment of grace.

Arthur Rimbaud has been described as a comet in the sky of the French poetry. The most striking thing is that "A Season in Hell", according to me (and some otheres) the most beautiful of French poems, was written by a teenager, that rejected literature when he became an adult.
The violence and the intensity of his words go beyond imagination. Reading them will give you the impression that you are dancing in the flames of a burning book, and that heat is everywhere.

Novels by Marcel Ayme are all filled with a great taste for life, mixed with a crude knowledge of the human heart. Treating with humour and tenderness the big principles and the little failures that make a man, Ayme is famous for the honesty of his books. This is true even for those stories that escape from reality to open our daily life on the possibility of... well, of whatever you may think of, as long as men are still men.
The Green Mare is one of its masterworks: a simple story in a French village, and the secrets of sex are described from a political viewpoint, unless it is the opposite.

Poor but educated young men can have a hard time to reach the top of the social ladder. If they are capable of dissimulation, of disguise, if they are cold-blooded calculators, their story can be quite a frightnening and successful one. But who can be that cold for a whole lifetime? Indeed, on their way, Stendhal's heroes may use women, but they may also be overwhelmed by passion for one of them. Here begins the true drama. And Stendhal tells it the way he thinks life should be lived: with the speed of a racing horse, the intensity of a war, and most of all with art.

Flaubert describes with a subtle but strong humour the passions of the members of the “petite bourgeoisie” (or middle class) of its time. The absurdity and the contradictions of the behaviors he writes about show that, even though their standards of living were tremendously different from ours, those people had pretty much the same problems. Madame Bovary for instance lives in a small town, unhappily married to a typical merchant. She dreams of passionate love, and the novel tells us how she tries to fullfill her desires, confronted to the reality of life. Flaubert, a member of the middle class himself, once said: “I am Madame Bovary”.
Flaubert's work has inspired numerous authors. Its books have been the subject of one of the litterature courses by Nabokov, who seems to have been fascinated by Emma Bovary's character. The french philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has worked all his life long on a book about Flaubert, but has never been able to put an end to it.