Unusually for me (when it comes to multi-author short story collections), I went nearly all the way through this from start to finish, with very little skimming and only one skip (Simone de Beauvoir's dense, barely paragraphed "Monologue"). There's something about French literature in translation - the writing seems always so lucid and clear, transparent somehow. I don't know exactly what it is, nor whether it's intrinsic to 'French writing' or rather something which occurs in the translation into English, but that quality makes the writing a pleasure to read, and it's present to a greater or lesser extent in nearly all of the stories collected here.
It's an impressive collection, both in terms of authors (it seems that every second French writer of note in the last 200 years is represented - Balzac, Flauberty, Stendhal, Zola, Sade, Huysmans, Colette, Sartre, Camus) and quality of the stories; the chronological arrangement gives a sense of the development of the form (complete with splintering into different national/racial backgrounds in recentish times), and Fallaize includes a useful historical and thematic introduction.
I've read bits and pieces of a few of these authors before, but only one of the stories (Sartre's "The Wall") was already familiar to me. My favourites tended to be 20th C; the ones that I liked most:
* Villiers de l'Isle Adam - "Gloomy Tale, Gloomier Teller". One of several which are directly concerned with the acts of story-telling and narration, and a nicely barbed account of an account of an account of an account of a duel to the death (and, for the outer layers of 'accounting', a dinner party) in which pretensions are laid bare without any apparent interposition by any of the narrators (including l'Isle Adam).
* Joris-Karl Huysmans - "Knapsack at the Ready". Comes across like a French Catch 22, and it's just as ridiculous and as funny as that other. Following the adventures of a dissolute soldier during the Prussian War (he spends much more time in various hospitals and wreaking havoc in towns than actually en route to battle, never mind seeing actual combat, which never occurs at all) and slipping between present and past tense from sentence to sentence, it's a treat.
* Georges Simenon - "The Man on the Street". A Maigret detective story which at once plays by the rules and turns them upside down, almost Austerian but also an honest-to-goodness crime mystery with an eventually clear resolution.
* Christiane Baroche - "Do You Remember the Rue d'Orchampt?". A misty, allusive wend through memory and the present which also has some interesting things to say about character and relationships. Unfortunately, the only thing of hers that's been translated into English!
* Monique Proulx - "Public Transit". At about 1000 words, more of a vignette than a story as such: a man saves a woman from being hit by a train and discovers that he has won a live televised test of everyday heroism - ending with a deliciously acerbic aside.
