Word: abroader
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...Germany, but there the total number of English translations has nearly halved in the past decade, while it's still growing in France. Earlier generations of French writers - from Molière, Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert to Proust, Sartre, Camus and Malraux - did not lack for an audience abroad. Indeed, France claims a dozen Nobel literature laureates - more than any other country - though the last one, Gao Xingjian in 2000, writes in Chinese...
...breaks for freelance workers in the performing arts. Painters and sculptors can get subsidized studio space. The state also runs a shadow program out of the Foreign Ministry that goes far beyond the cultural efforts of other major countries. France sends planeloads of artists, performers and their works abroad, and it subsidizes 148 cultural groups, 26 research centers and 176 archaeological digs overseas...
With all those advantages, why don't French cultural offerings fare better abroad? One problem is that many of them are in French, now merely the world's 12th most widely spoken language (Chinese is first, English second). Worse still, the major organs of cultural criticism and publicity - the global buzz machine - are increasingly based in the U.S. and Britain. "In the '40s and '50s, everybody knew France was the center of the art scene, and you had to come here to get noticed," says Quemin. "Now you have to go to New York...
...French call autofiction - thinly veiled memoirs that make no bones about being conceived in deep self-absorption. Christine Angot received the 2006 Prix de Flore for her latest work, Rendez-vous, an exhaustively introspective dissection of her love affairs. One of the few contemporary French writers widely published abroad, Michel Houellebecq, is known chiefly for misogyny, misanthropy and an obsession with sex. "In America, a writer wants to work hard and be successful," says François Busnel, editorial director of Lire, a popular magazine about books (only in France!). "French writers think they have to be intellectuals...
...which France excels by absorbing outside influences. First, France is arguably the world leader in fashion, thanks to the sharp antennae of its cosmopolitan designers. Second, French cuisine - built on the foundation of Italian and, increasingly, Asian traditions - remains the global standard. Third, French winemakers are using techniques developed abroad to retain their reputation for excellence in the face of competition from newer wine-growing regions. Tellingly, many French vines were long ago grafted onto disease-resistant rootstocks from, of all places, the U.S. "We have to take the risk of globalization," says Villa Gillet's Guy Walter. "We must...