Monsieur Lambert - Hardcover

Bell, Anthea; Sempé, Jean-Jacques

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0714846236 ISBN 13: 9780714846231

Publisher: Phaidon Press, 2006

Synopsis

Monsieur Lambert is a gentle, and unmistakably French, graphic novel with text and pictures by one of the world's best-loved illustrators. Jean-Jacques Sempe offers a glimpse of the everyday lives and secret passions of the regulars in a small Parisian bistro. When Monsieur Lambert does not turn up for lunch at his usual time, the other regulars speculate that he must have met a woman. How else can they explain his strange new behaviour? The diners start discussing women they have loved and lost and, in doing so, they reveal unexpected facets of their own lives and personalities.
The restaurant and its regulars are brought to life vividly in a series of drawings which, together with handwritten dialogue and a laconic commentary, display Sempe's signature unerring eye and ear for the telling details of human behaviour. The text was translated from French by award-winning translator Anthea Bell.

About this title

About the Author

Jean-Jacques Sempé (b. 1932) is one of the most successful cartoonists and illustrators in the world, and still regularly contributes to magazines such as THE NEW YORKER and PARIS MATCH. Born in Bordeaux, Sempé was expelled from school for bad behavior. He enjoyed a variety of jobs, from traveling toothpaste salesman to summer camp worker, before winning an art prize in 1952. Although Sempé was never formally trained as an artist, more than twenty volumes of his drawings have been published, in thirty countries. Sempé also enjoys iconic status with generations of children (and adults) around the world, thanks to his collaboration with writer Rene Goscinny on a classic series of books about a little schoolboy called Nicholas. Phaidon Press published NICHOLAS (Hardback, 2005) to great acclaim last year and won the Mildred L. Batchelder Honor Award. Sempé currently resides in France.

Anthea Bell (who with Derek Hockridge, also translated the entire ASTERIX THE GAUL saga comics) translated MONSIEUR LAMBERT into English from the original French. The recipient of a number of translation prizes and awards, among the first Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation for Christine Nöstlinger's A DOG'S LIFE (Andersen Press). Bell was selected as the recipient of the 2002 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for her exceptional translation of W.G. Sebald's novel AUSTERLITZ, published Random House. She recently translated the popular books, DRAGON RIDER (2004) and INKHEART (2003), both from Scholastic. Bell currently resides in England.

Review

"Sempe goes about showing us up with great good nature. ... his drawing is consistently delightful."-Anthea Bell, Sunday Telegraph "Drawings [that] are eloquent in every language."-Quentin Blake, The Week "[Sempe] is, par excellence, the master of the panoramic cartoon... Captions [...] have been brilliantly translated by Anthea Bell... There are many talented French cartoonists. [...] [Sempe] is the most universal... Sempe cartoons are a kind of illustrative haiku. In such small space he conveys a great amount of meaning... An infinite delight in the complexity and ambivalence - and the humour - of the everyday and the ordinary."-The Independent "[Sempe] started life as a journeyman cartoonist, drawing single gags. From there he has gradually broadened out and blossomed, acquiring colour and boldness and breadth, until it is hard to call him anything but an artist... You can't really lose with Sempe."-The Spectator

Edition details

• Publisher: Phaidon Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0714846236
• ISBN 13: 9780714846231
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64