Grammar is a Gentle Song
Rights sold to Albania (Ditura), Bulgaria (Stigmati), Catalonia (Enciclopedia Catalana), Germany (Hanser), Italy (Salani), Portugal (Asa), Spain (Salamandra) and USA (George Braziler).
Grammar is a Gentle Song is an exuberant fantasy. Jeanne, the narrator, is a young teenager who could easily be the younger sister of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, launched into a world where all familiar points of reference are turned on their heads. She and her older brother Thomas do a lot of travelling: their parents are separated and live on opposite sides of the Atlantic. One day, the boat they are on sinks and they are the only survivors, miraculously washed up onto an uncharted island.
They are welcome by Monsieur Henri, a musician-poet-charmer, and they discover a magical land where words have a life of their own, putting on disguises, wearing make-up and getting married. This is a stroll through the city of words, full of humour and poetry, where the rules are spelled out with the lightest of touches. The tribes of verbs and adjectives, the timepieces of past and present are gradually tamed to the rhythm of Monsieur Henri’s gentle songs.
Erik Orsenna is a member of the Académie française and won the Gouncourt prize for L’Exposition coloniale (Seuil, 1988). His other books include Longtemps (Fayard, 1998), La Grammaire est une chanson douce (Stock, 2001), Madame Bâ (Stock/Fayard, 2003) and more recently Voyage aux pays du coton (Fayard, 2006), La Chanson de Charles Quint (Stock, 2008), L’Avenir de l’eau (Fayard, 2008), L’Entreprise des Indes (Stock/Fayard, 2010) and Princesse Histamine (Stock, 2010).
Accueillis par Monsieur Henri, un musicien poète et charmeur, ils découvriront un territoire magique où les mots mènent leur vie : ils se déguisent, se maquillent, se marient. C'est une promenade dans la ville des mots, pleine d'humour et de poésie, où les règles s'énoncent avec légéreté. Les tribus de verbes et d'adjectifs, les horloges du présent et du passé s'apprivoisent peu à peu, au rythme des chansons douces de Monsieur Henri.