Grey Souls, by Philippe Claudel

The Federation of Alliances Francaises USA book choice for 2005 is Les ames grises by Philippe Claudel, a murder mystery set in Lorraine during World War I. An English translation, titled Grey Souls, is due out in mid-April in the UK, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. It can be pre-ordered now at amazon.co.uk.

I am not familiar with this author’s work and cannot say if this book would be suitable for mixed company. For what it’s worth, it was an award-winner in France. From the write-ups, it seems that the greyness of the title refers to the mix of good and evil in people.

There are more than a hundred chapters of the Alliances Francaises in the United States, and every year they pick one book jointly.

As a side note, in French le roman is a general term for a novel. If they want to be more specific, they call it something like a roman policier, i.e. a detective story.

They are sticking closer to earlier English uses of ‘romance’ as applied to fiction than we are. This is why when you read older newspaper accounts or books, and they refer to, say, the latest romance by Walter Scott, they are referring to something altogether different from the current application.

Way back when, in fact, to call a piece of fiction a roumauns (Middle English) was merely to say that it was written in the local language instead of in Latin.

This is because, even before that, romanice, in Latin, meant ‘in the Roman manner’. People got used to saying it to mean ‘not in Latin’ and it morphed into meaning ‘in the local language’ or ‘in the vernacular’.

From there, since so many of the early roumauns books were about knights, chivalry, heroics and courtly love, the word came to be associated not with the language in which the books were written, but to the type of book or story.

Through the years, the meaning has shifted still more, until pretty much the only types of contemporary fiction called romance are ‘love stories’.