UPCOMING EVENTS

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• LM201 Café Littéraire: "The Negotiator," by Francis Walder

  • When
    20 Mar 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    A member's apartment in the 11th. Details will be sent after registration.
  • Spaces left
    7

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  The Negotiator: The Masterclass at Saint-Germain, by Francis Walder, is a richly detailed historical novel that transforms diplomacy into high-stakes drama. Set in 1570, as France is riven by brutal wars of religion, the story follows Henri de Malassise, a seasoned royal negotiator summoned by Catherine de Médicis to broker a fragile peace between Catholics and Huguenots. The talks at Saint-Germain—real negotiations with real historical consequences—unfold as a tense battle of wills, strategy, and psychological insight rather than swords or armies.

  Malassise must read motives as carefully as words, weighing apparent divisions among the Huguenots and questioning whether they signal weakness or cunning design. Personal complications intrude as well, including the arrival of his enigmatic Huguenot cousin, whose presence blurs the line between private loyalty and public duty. Drawing on his own experience in military and diplomatic service, Walder gives the negotiations a striking authenticity, capturing the exhaustion, moral compromise, and subtle maneuvering that shape political outcomes.

  Elegant and intelligent, The Negotiator is part historical novel, part study in power and persuasion. A strong discussion angle is how Walder reveals negotiation itself as a form of conflict—one in which language, patience, and judgment determine the fate of nations.

  "The Negotiator" won the Prix Goncourt in 1958. 

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 15 March, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  
  

  The book group meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails, following registration.

  Registration for the March meeting opens on Saturday, 21 February.

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• LA171 Café Littéraire: "Lives Other Than My Own," by Emmanuel Carrère

  • When
    17 Apr 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    A member's apartment in the 11th. Details will be sent after registration.
  • Spaces left
    10

  Lives Other Than My Own is a deeply moving work of literary non-fiction that blurs the boundaries between memoir, reportage, and philosophical inquiry. The narrative centers on two devastating tragedies that occurred within months of each other: the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which Emmanuel Carrère witnessed while vacationing in Sri Lanka, and the terminal illness of his partner’s sister back in France. Through these interconnected stories, Carrère explores the profound randomness of life-altering events and the fragility of human existence.

  The first half of the book provides a haunting, firsthand account of the tsunami’s aftermath, focusing on a French couple who lost their four-year-old daughter to the waves. Upon returning to France, Carrère turns his attention to Juliette, a young judge and mother of three who is succumbing to a long battle with cancer. Rather than a simple wallow in grief, Carrère investigates the "wealth of human solace" that follows loss, detailing Juliette’s meticulous planning for her family’s future and her professional partnership with Étienne, a fellow judge and cancer survivor.

  Precise, sober, and emotionally astute, Lives Other Than My Own is a meditation on the "extraordinary beauty and nobility of ordinary lives". A strong discussion angle for the group is Carrère’s role as a "witness" and how he uses the suffering of others to interrogate his own capacity for love, commitment, and empathy.

  Winner of the 2010 Globe de Cristal for Best Novel/Essay.

  

  
  

  The book group meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails, following registration.

  
  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 15 March, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration for the April meeting opens on Saturday, 21 March.

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• LY151 Café Littéraire: "Adele," by Leïla Slimani

  • When
    15 May 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    A member's apartment in the 11th. Details will be sent after registration.
  • Spaces left
    10

  

  Adèle is a provocative and tensely strung character study that explores the "hellishness of the ordinary" through the lens of addiction. The novel centers on Adèle Robinson, a successful Parisian journalist who appears to have a flawless life, complete with a surgeon husband, a young son, and an elegant apartment in the 18th arrondissement. Beneath this polished veneer of bourgeois respectability, however, Adèle is consumed by a relentless and insatiable compulsion for anonymous sexual encounters.

  Written in "bracingly spare" and clinical prose, the narrative follows Adèle as she orchestrates her life around one-night stands and clandestine affairs, leading a double life that begins to unravel as her compulsions grow more reckless. Rather than an erotic exploration of pleasure, Slimani depicts Adèle’s addiction as an anhedonic struggle—a "perpetual flight from herself" fueled by a deep-seated sense of meaninglessness and an "aching void". The story reaches a turning point when her husband, Richard, discovers her secret, leading to a stark shift in control as he moves the family to the Normandy countryside in a desperate, suffocating attempt to "cure" her.

  Often described as a modern-day Madame Bovary, Adèle is a dark meditation on female subjectivity, maternal anxiety, and the stifling nature of social expectations. A strong discussion angle for the group is the novel's refusal to offer easy psychological diagnoses or redemption for its protagonist. Instead, it invites readers to interrogate whether Adèle is an aggressor destroying her family or a tragic figure trapped by her own "nothingness" and a society that offers no real liberty.

  Winner of the 2015 La Mamounia Prize for Moroccan literature.

  

  
  

  The book group meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails, following registration.

  
  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 15 March, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration for the May meeting opens on Saturday, 18 April.

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• LU191 Café Littéraire: "Life: A User's Manual," by Georges Perec

  • When
    19 Jun 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    A member's apartment in the 11th. Details will be sent after registration.
  • Spaces left
    10

  

  Life: A User’s Manual is often described as an "encyclopedic" tapestry of human existence. Set within a single fictional apartment block at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris, the novel is frozen in time at the exact moment of a resident’s death: June 23, 1975, at 8:00 PM. From this static instant, Perec meticulously "dissects" the building, moving chapter by chapter through its rooms to reveal the interconnected lives, histories, and secrets of its inhabitants.

  The narrative is famously governed by an intricate set of mathematical and formal constraints—a hallmark of Perec’s work with the Oulipo group. The order of the 99 chapters follows a "knight’s tour" across a 10x10 grid of the building’s layout, ensuring the reader visits every room without ever repeating a path. At the heart of these nested stories is the eccentric Englishman Percival Bartlebooth, who devises a 50-year plan to travel the world, paint 500 watercolors of seaports, have them turned into jigsaw puzzles, and ultimately destroy them so that no trace of his life’s work remains.

  Both a playful puzzle and a mournful meditation on the "unquenchable thereness" of objects, Life: A User’s Manual transforms a mundane apartment block into a microcosm of the world. A strong discussion angle for the group is Perec’s use of exhaustive detail—inventories of furniture, lists of books, and descriptions of paintings—and whether these rigid structures succeed in capturing the "totality" of life or merely underscore its ultimate incompleteness.

  Winner of the 1978 Prix Médicis.

  

  
  

  The book group meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails, following registration.

  
  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 15 March, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration for the June meeting opens on Saturday, 16 May.

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• LS181 Café Littéraire: "The Great Swindle," by Pierre Lemaitre

  • When
    18 Sep 2026
  •  
    3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    A member's apartment in the 11th. Details will be sent after registration.
  • Spaces left
    11

  

  The Great Swindle is a sweeping, picaresque epic that examines the "murky virtues of remembrance" in the hollow aftermath of World War I. The story begins in the final, desperate days of the war, when the ruthless Lieutenant Henri d’Aulnay-Pradelle orchestrates a senseless skirmish, an act of treachery that binds together the fates of two subordinates: Albert Maillard, a timid former bank clerk, and Édouard Péricourt, a brilliant artist from a wealthy family. While saving Albert’s life, Édouard is hideously disfigured—becoming a gueule cassée (broken face)—and subsequently fakes his own death to avoid returning to his estranged father.

  Moving from the trenches to the "glittering but dark" streets of 1920s Paris, the narrative follows the two veterans as they struggle with poverty, morphine addiction, and a society that seems to "revere its dead more than its survivors". In a cynical act of revenge against the country that abandoned them, they devise an audacious scam: selling fraudulent monuments to honor the very war heroes the nation is so eager to memorialize. Meanwhile, the villainous Pradelle launches a ghoulish swindle of his own, profiting from the exhumation and reburial of fallen soldiers in cut-rate coffins.

  Lemaitre, a master of suspense, employs a dry, ironic tone to craft a "darkly comic requiem" that feels like a 19th-century novel updated with modern clinical precision. A strong discussion angle for the group is Lemaitre’s exploration of the "great swindle" of the title—whether it refers to the characters’ specific scams or the broader, abominable treatment of the ordinary soldier by a state more interested in the aesthetics of grief than the reality of its victims.

  Winner of the 2013 Prix Goncourt.

  

  
  

  The book group meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails, following registration.

  
  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by five days prior to the meeting, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  Registration for the September meeting opens on 01 September.

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