Word: englishness
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Only a handful of the season's new novels will find a publisher outside France. Fewer than a dozen make it to the U.S. in a typical year, while about 30% of all fiction sold in France is translated from English. That's about the same percentage as in 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...
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...
...cinema has also suffered from a nouveau roman complex. "The typical French film of the '80s and '90s had a bunch of people sitting at lunch and disagreeing with each other," quips Marc Levy, one of France's best-selling novelists. (His Et si c'Etait Vrai... , published in English as If Only It Were True, became the 2005 Hollywood film Just Like Heaven starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo.) "An hour and a half later, they are sitting at dinner, and some are agreeing while others are disagreeing." France today can make slick, highly commercial movies...
...heat of this summer day in 1935 that brings emotions to a boil; it's the erotic humidity. Two sisters in an upper-class English family are about to have their lives changed: lovely Cecilia (Knightley), by surrendering to a long-simmering attraction to the housekeeper's son (McAvoy); and 13-year-old Briony (Ronan), by catching them in the act of first love. Briony is intellectually precocious, sexually naive. The inferences she makes from what she's seen--and the vengeful uses she puts them to--open wounds that will take decades to heal...
...factor with sake selection is not only lack of exposure but also those pesky Japanese characters. Even after four years of college-level Japanese, Sidel couldn't read the labels, so he has tried to carve out what he calls a middle ground by incorporating more visual elements and English. Joto Sake's packaging now includes descriptions and a "bit of education." Oversimplifying the label, he says, as some competitors do, "might look cool but isn't helpful to Americans...