Word: nouveau
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Alain Robbe-Grillet's nouveau roman, a novel without coherent plot, characters, chapters or, at times, punctuation, began a literary movement in the 1950s that influenced a generation of French writers. Author of 10 novels, he also made several films that bordered on the pornographic. Although he was named one of the 40 "immortals" of the Académie Française--custodians of the French language and cultural patrimony--Robbe-Grillet perplexed and scandalized readers with his avant-garde storytelling. His last work, Un Roman Sentimental, was derided by some critics as obscene when it came out last year, but Robbe...
...music - just on the prestige of the performers. Tickets to the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic in January were snatched up as soon as they became available. In fact, the high cost of tickets for top-quality concerts keep many music lovers away - and encourage the nouveau riche to attend and yawn in their expensive seats...
...Russian fighter planes, Kalashnikovs and perhaps even submarines. Then it was Brazil, in August announcing a 53% increase in its military budget for 2008, the biggest such increase in more than a decade. The competition is still in the early stages but when two of Latin America's nouveau riche oil powers start splashing out on weapons, alarm bells ring over an arms race...
Certain aspects of national character may also play a role. Abstraction and theory have long been prized in France's intellectual life and emphasized in its schools. Nowhere is that tendency more apparent than in French fiction, which still suffers from the introspective 1950s nouveau roman (new novel) movement. Many of today's most critically revered French novelists write spare, elegant fiction that doesn't travel well. Others practice what the 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...
French 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...