"Like Jane Austen, Johnson delights in the worldly rituals surrounding courtship and marriage... she is a philosopher as much as a novelist."—The New Yorker From the author of the acclaimed bestseller and National Book Award finalist Le Divorce, a sparkling comedy of manners once again set in the world of Americans in Paris Anne-Sophie is a young Frenchwoman engaged to Tim Nolinger, an American journalist hot on the trail of a breaking story: The theft of a valuable illuminated manuscript from a private collection in New York, which may now be in the possession of a reclusive film director living on the outskirts of Paris. As Tim, Anne-Sophie, a pair of American antique dealers, and one amorous member of the local gentry converge on the director's chateau, the director's wife—a former actress—is accused of desecrating a national monument. Add to that a disappearing American; a hunting contretemps; a wrongful arrest; and murder, and you have this sexy, stylish, delight of a novel that celebrates the paradoxes of marriage and morality as they are perceived on both sides of the Atlantic. Filled with the author's pithy insights and hilarious asides, Le Mariage is Diane Johnson at her very best.

The story of one couple - first from the husband's point of view, then from the wife's. The husband, a painter in Casablanca, has been paralyzed by a stroke at the very height of his career and becomes convinced that his marriage is the reason for his decline. Walled up within his illness and desperate to break free of a deeply destructive relationship, he finds escape in writing a secret book about his hellish marriage. When his wife finds it, she responds point by point with her own version of the facts, offering her own striking and incisive reinterpretation of their story.

Dix historiettes qui racontent divers mariages.Des mariages de raison aux mariages coup de c ur. Des difficultes a s'adapter a des situations nouvelles. Le mariage, institution plus proche de la loterie que de la saine realite. Faut-il nier les differences entre hommes et femmes ? Sont-elles compatibles ? Autant d'analyses qui ne donnent en aucun cas le mode d'emploi ideal ! De l'humour dans ces recits ! Si la mariee est en blanc, ne nous efforcons pas de voir tout en noir !

Studie over het werk van de Engelse schilder William Hogarth (1697-1764).

Set in Paris, LE DIVORCE is an alluring and elegant comedy of love and divorce French-style. Isabel Walker, a young, not-so-innocent, American abroad, arrives in Paris to find that her sister's French husband ('the frog prince') has just walked out. While Isabel embarks on her own sentimental education - seduced by gourmet food, antiques, existentialism and an older man - her sister's marriage disintergrates into bitter Franco-American wrangles over money, titles and a mysterious painting. With a sharp tongue and an ironic eye for the foibles of the Parisian bourgeoisie, the French art world and American ex-patriots, Isabel is a collector of experience, even those she can't control. Comedy veers suddenly close to tragedy as passionate jealousy, self-interest and artistic intrigue interweave.