Notes: Shattuck has perfectly chronicled the combination of forces in art, literature and music that gave birth to the phrase “avant-garde”. Before the devastation that France would suffer during the Great War (WWI), the period at the turn of the century was called “La Belle Epoque”. The peaceful society of the day was ripe for the cultural revolution that arose. The painter Henri Rousseau, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the musician Erik Satie and the interloper Alfred Jarry are all profiled.

Notes: Marcel Proust was, of course, a writer, and not a painter, but paint a portrait he did in his opus Remembrance of Things Past. His description of Parisian high society in the 1920s is the ne plus ultra of literary masterpieces. The famous “madeleine” scene, in which the mere taste of a cake evokes delirious memories can be found in the first volume, Swann’s Way. A must read.

Notes: Everyone thinks of Rimbaud when asked to name a French poet who died young, but Guillaume Apollinaire did not live to see forty either. As a poet in pre World War 1 Paris, he came to embody the literary bohemian lifestyle. In addition to traditional verse poetry, he experimented with typographical poems called “calligrammes”, which might be considered a precursor to today’s emoticons.

Notes: Although, nearly ten years older than Apollinaire, Paul Valery did not publish anything of note until 1917, just one year before Apollinaire’s premature death. His most famous volume of poetry, Charmes, was published in 1922. This bilingual edition features the French and English versions on facing pages. Poems to savor in one or both languages.

Notes: Andre Gide is one of France’s most prominent 20th Century writers. The Immoralist, written in 1902, is undoubtedly his most famous work. Michel, the protagonist, falls ill on his honeymoon and finds himself falling in love with a young Arab man. Gide deals very frankly with homosexuality at a time when it was not openly discussed.

Notes: If there can be a reader’s guide to the Harry Potter series, there can be a guide to Proust’s massive opus, Remembrance of Things Past. Clocking in at 3,300 pages, a reader can get lost in the seven volume set. This book lists the names of fictional characters (79 pages), the names of real persons alluded to (51 pages), the names of places (18 pages), and an index of themes (42 pages). It’s a cheat sheet to one of the greatest novels ever!

Notes: Andre Gide won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. His journals offer an insight into the mind of this great novelist. Spanning from 1889 to 1949, both World Wars come into play.