Nature Stories

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

Jules Renard's Nature Stories is a deliciously whimsical classic from the era of the great French Postimpressionist painters. Renard mingles wonder and humour in a series of miniature portraits of subjects drawn from the natural world: dogs, cats, pigs, roses, snails, trees and birds of all sorts, humans of course, and even a humble potato. Ranging from a sentence to several pages, Renard's sketches are masterpieces of compression and description, capturing both appearance and behavior through a choice of details that makes the familiar unfamiliar and yet surprisingly true to life. Renard's animals not only feel but speak, and one species, the swallow, even writes Hebrew. These creatures fascinate Renard, who in turn makes them fascinating to us, instilling us with the sense that everything that has a life and grows in the hand of nature is to be respected, and that every creature and being is as individual as it is interrelated. In Douglas Parmee's inspired new translation, Renard's wonderful evocations of the natural world come to life as never before in English.

Reviews

Renards way with the detail is unforgettable. Renard writes about spiders, about the moon, and the poetry he makes from the things his eyes tell him is joyful.
Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm


Renards peopleand animals and plants, tooare not reflections of Renard. They are not metaphors for his moods. They are not steps in his argument. They are as close as he can come to describing being someone or something not Renard. Renards truthfulness is the truthfulness of a scrupulous, disinterested witness. You trust him as you trust a Quaker.
Naomi Bliven, The New Yorker


directly, or indirectly, Renard is at the origin of contemporary literature. Jean-Paul Sartre

"There is no real equivalent for the French word esprit which is somewhere between and beyond humor and wit and which is essentially what these short commentaries on the bird and animal world display." Kirkus Reviews

The farmyard beasts, hunted game, insects and birds of the Nivre were world enough for him [Renard]. Sometimes their activities add up to a story, sometimes an extended observation; or they might just provide a joyful momentfor instance, when a kingfisher comes and perches on his fishing-rod (I was swelling with pride at having been taken for a tree). And on almost every page there are brilliant descriptions and comparisons. Julian Barnes, London Review of Books

Author Bio

Jules Renard (1864-1910) was a French author and a member of the Academie Goncourt, most famous for the works Poil de carotte (Carrot Hair) and Histoires naturelles (Nature Stories). Among his other works are Le Plaisir de rompre (The Pleasure of Breaking) and Huit jours a la campagne (Eight Days in the Countryside). His Journal was published in the United States in 2008 Douglas Parmee (1914-2008) translated works by Flaubert, Zola, Baudelaire, and Chamfort, among others, including the NYRB Classics titles The Child by Jules Valle's and Afloat by Guy de Maupassant.