Beyond the Letters

Biographies are generally a non-fiction genre, for even though they have some place for imagination and emotionality within them, they are mostly a collection of facts presented in an attractive way. But many writers, especially modern ones, try to reconsider this quite old genre and give a new life to it. Here I will tell you about some novels that depict images of famous people, and whose main aim is not to tell the story of someone’s life but to let the reader see these personalities through the author’s eyes. 1. Miss Charity by Marie-Aude Muriel Loosely based on the life of Beatrix Potter this little comedy however managed to create a very credible image of the acclaimed children author. Beatrix Potter was a talented writer with her own unique vision of the world and her own ideas about woman’s position in society. Living in highly conventional Victorian society, she dared to state that any woman could be more than just a wife or a housekeeper. The book is written in th...

Detective story as a genre is simultaneously new and worn-out as on the one hand it was developed in the middle of 19 th century, which makes it very young in terms of literary history, and on the other it is currently so overused by mass culture that you can hardly imagine it can bring something surprising to an experienced reader. Still the novel of Michel Bussi proves it possible. The house of Claude Monet in Giverny Jérôme Morval, ophthalmologist and passionate art collector is found dead in the acclaimed Monet’s gardens in the picturesque village of Giverny. In his pocket the police finds a postcard representing Monet’s famous “Waterlilies” which reads: “Eleven years old. Happy birthday”. This could be the beginning of a usual crime plot but for the fact that the book is not about Morval at all. His death and the mysterious connection of this event to the works of Claude Monet are merely a trigger to some much more dramatic and complicated events. This death is strang...