ABSTRACT
Foreign lovers of French literature usually seek out novels, or perhaps collections of poems, but far too few readers outside of France are attracted to French short stories and notably have discovered those produced by Annie Saumont. Saumont's writing skims over the surface of the perceived world, avoiding prolonged description and interpretation. With twenty-odd collections published to date, her oeuvre has become a monument to the genre. Saumont is a master of the on, and it is not without interest to juxtapose the hu-mankind she depicts through it, in her exceedingly down-to-earth tales, to the impersonalization analyzed by several twentieth-century philosophers, beginning with Martin Heidegger and his elucidation of the German man. Saumont reveals them only gradually or—even more subtly—obliquely, from an unexpected angle. In general, Saumont's characters struggle vainly to get a grip on their elusive, incomplete, or multiple selves, and on a harsh, merciless world governed by an implacable economic, social, or familial logic.
