Livraria Lello suggests...

In the month in which France Day is also celebrated, our window display will be altered and completely dedicated to the French book Candide or Optimism, by Voltaire.
The suggestion by Livraria Lello booksellers for the month of July was inspired by these events.

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux is currently one of the most important voices in French literature. In addition to her various achievements, she was also awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022.
This work is the diary that Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half that she had a secret love affair with a Russian diplomat, a younger, married man. At this point in 1989, Annie was in her late 50s, divorced and living outside of Paris.
Because it is a “forbidden relationship”, she cannot write to him then, she is forced to distract herself with other commitments, but always waiting for the next call from this man or the next meeting. When he's gone and the desire is gone, she feels like she's one step closer to death.
Appreciated for her simple writing, the author summarizes her writing as naked and vulnerable as possible. This is as strong a book as any other by the author, it is the desperate vision of a strong woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.

Voltaire's Candide or Optimism

Published anonymously in 1759, its Author is soon identified and in that same year the work has twenty editions, following its fame to Italy and England where it is translated.
Voltaire introduced a genre of short stories that used irony to critically reveal the reality of the world in which he lived: he used fiction as a question mark and his characters sometimes acted in contradiction with the common sense of the time.
In Candide, his hero is regularly confronted with the optimism conveyed by Leibniz's theories (the best of all possible worlds), or his name does not precisely express the idea of the candor that optimism generates in adversity through the existence of evil and divine justice.