Village Stories : A Collection of Short Fiction by Lucette Desvignes

This work is a collection of short stories by French writer Lucette Desvignes.

Though all the stories have a decidedly 'French' flavor, each goes well beyond the concerns of provincial villagers to embrace global perspectives and universal values.

This fourth volume of "The Short Fiction of Lucette Desvignes" combines stories that focus on the way of life of villagers.

At the very core of Desvignes' writing are human relationships; hence we find here spirited narratives, internal monologue, verbal fugues, comments of sarcastic or sympathetic observers, epistolary clarification of the more refined nuances of difficult relationships, characters who reveal at once to themselves and to us the individual experiences to which they fall prey - in all a kaleidoscopic adventure that inexorably brings the reader into the fictional panorama both as spectator and participant. It is precisely our participation in the fictional spectacle that renders the repeated themes so cathartic: love and romance, birth and death, the cadence of time, recognition of generational differences, an obsession with verbal and non-verbal means of communication, gestures and facial expressions, somber and joyous tones, angry or amused reactions to almost-predictable stupidity of members of the human race, dramatic scenarios that could have been the focus of a play, dark mysteries and enlightening revelations that might have appeared in a detective story.

In short, this is a tapestry of the human condition.