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Book Club
Do you have permission?
by Alison Morton
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Disclaimer: this article is meant as a guide for general information and should in no way be construed as legal advice.
Copyright law is a minefield. In the UK, the creator of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is usually the first owner of copyright in it. Fair use of somebody else’s work is allowed for criticism, review and quotation, including for scholarly and research purposes. But you should only quote snippets in your own work. More here: https://www.gov. uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright If you’re quoting more than a few words, you’ll need to get permission, or you could run into (expensive) trouble. To be considered fair use, if challenged, authors will need to demonstrate they are adding value through context, commentary or transformation of the work.
Enter moral rights – A whole new ball game
French copyright law treats a protected work as an extension of the author’s personality and grants it a number of moral rights. Generally, the author has the right to “the respect of his name, of his status as author, and of his work” (Art. L121-1, Civil Code)
Moral rights are considered inalienable, perpetual and inviolable and pass to the author’s heirs on the author’s death but may not be otherwise transferred or sold by the author or legal successors. Authors cannot agree to waive their moral rights although they cannot be forced to protect moral rights to the work, and they retain the option not to exercise them.
Sometimes, the moral rights of the author may conflict with the property rights of the owner of the work. Then the lawyers get involved. Recent decisions have led to certain moral rights being weakened. Watch this space!
Beware brand names
Some large corporations can threaten legal action if you use their names in your work. Watch out for words like Coke/ Coca Cola, Hoover and Kleenex, names used widely as generic terms. The grey area is when you use a name in a general sense, e.g. a white Peugeot. The safest course of action is to use general words like cola, vacuum, tissue and a small white car.
Titles and lyrics
You can quote a song title in your novel, but you will need to get permission from the music publisher if you want to include lyrics written after 1925. Book titles are not copyright in the UK or US. Here in France, the rule is that if your proposed title could be confused with one already published, you could be breaking the very strong droit d’auteur. Best to look around for a different title….
So France?
The droit d’auteur was developed in the 18th century at the same time as copyright developed in the United Kingdom. The droit allows a creator to exploit their work for financial gain including authorising its publication and reproduction or to prevent either, or to transfer their rights to a third party, e.g. sell the book to a traditional publisher so they can publish it.
Public domain under French law
Breathe a sigh of relief here. A work enters the public domain (domaine public) once the droit d’auteur has expired. It may then be used without charge, so long as the moral rights of the author are respected by quoting the author’s name and original title of the work.
Quoting from other people’s works
Similar to UK law, using a short quotation is an exception to the droit d’auteur in France. In general, an author cannot object a limited extract of his work being reproduced, subject to certain conditions. The author’s name and the source should be clearly shown and be justified by the critical, educational, scientific or informational nature of the work in which they are included, i.e. relevant. It must also be proportional, in other words, short.
Complicated, isn’t it? You may need to get specialist legal advice, but in essence, if you want to quote another author’s work, at the very least, ask the author’s permission.
Alison has compiled a selection of articles from this column in ‘The 500 Word Writing Buddy’, available as an ebook and paperback. The sequel to her latest thriller, ‘Double Identity’ will be out in October.
SHARING THE BOOK LOVE
by Jacqueline Brown
You know you’ve stumbled onto a good idea, when you come across others doing and saying the same thing, so it was a happy coincidence to read the excellent article by Howard Needs in last month’s DeuxSèvres Monthly, Book Club section, all about reading books in French. This is exactly what I have been trying to promote at the library in Chef-Boutonne this summer.
I will always consider myself lucky to have arrived in France with a three-year-old, as it gave me the golden opportunity to learn to read in French alongside his early years at school. From first reads, to learning poems and weekly spelling lists, we worked together, even if my pronunciation would have hindered him rather than helped. When you move here and aren’t immediately thrown into working or learning in French, picking up the language can be difficult.
I’ll be the first to admit that despite my love of books and libraries, I didn’t think there would be much for me in a French library, but with the second request from an English-speaking person (in as many weeks), asking for French books with easy dialogue, it suddenly dawned on me what a vast resource the library was for us foreigners. The more I rooted through the shelves, the more treasures I discovered. With the help of Janet Hall and her conversational French group, I organised an open morning at the library, excited to share my findings with others. We are not a big library, but we do have a good selection of books in pretty much all categories, including French and English children’s and adult fiction, and nonfiction reference books, plus many bilingual French/English books at all levels. There is no shame in taking out a children’s book on a subject that interests you, just to use it to improve your French vocabulary. I’ve had great fun in the children’s section and learned so much, including interesting facts about Poitiers from a discover Poitiers book for children, despite regularly visiting the city and its museums over the years. Sharing my love of books has always been important but helping others to find books that have become a useful tool to improve their French vocabulary, has been very special. My top tips for choosing books in French are to look for subjects that interest you, or books set in a location that you are familiar with, as you will find these easier to relate to and remember the vocabulary. I also find that it is often easier to follow a French book that has been translated from the English version, rather than one written by a French author, and to begin with, it may help to read one that you’ve already read in English. Children’s storybooks with a listen along audio CD, will help tune your French ear and your pronunciation. I will be at the library in Chef-Boutonne until the end of October, so if you’d like to pop in, I’ll be more than happy to help you find books at whatever level you need.
www.frenchvillagediaries.com Email: frenchvillagediaries@gmail.com
This Month’s Book Reviews
Hope Nicely’s Lessons in Life by Caroline Day
Review by Jacqui Brown
My local author selection this month is Hope Nicely’s Lessons in Life, by Caroline Day. Caroline splits her time between London and the Deux-Sèvres, and this is her first novel. We meet twenty-five-year-old Hope Nicely as she takes her first steps to writing her autobiography and joins a local writing group. Hope isn’t like the others in the group, her head is a busy, noisy and crowded place with words and rules and counting, jumping around all over the place. Her concentration wanders, her ability to remember things is a bit hit and miss and I have to admit that to begin with, I struggled a little to keep up. However, it didn’t take me long to slip into Hope’s head and very soon her character seemed to accompany me even when I (reluctantly) put the book down to do other things.
This is a cleverly crafted read where you quickly learn what it’s like to be Hope, a young lady living with Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder and doing her best to understand both her past and the new situations she finds herself in. It was not always an easy read, some of the topics were difficult and uncomfortable, although always dealt with in a sensitive way. There were many emotional scenes that ripped open my hard heart and plenty of humour to offset the seriousness and sadness that Hope experienced in these life-changing few months we were privileged to be by her side.
The other characters who Hope met at her writing group all added something, whether it was friendship, conflict or understanding, and there were lots of twists in her story that kept me guessing along the way.
This is a lovely book that made me think about others and how we all view the world, and those around us, in a different way. I’d put money on the fact that no one who has read this book is likely to forget Hope Nicely, ever. In fact, I’d love to be able to visit her again someday.
Midsummer Magic at Miss Moonshine’s Emporium by Various authors
Review by Jacqui Brown
This is the third collection of short stories set around Miss Moonshine’s Emporium of Wonderful things and if you haven’t yet opened the door and stepped inside, then now is the perfect time. Waiting to catch your eye are nine short stories, by nine authors, set in different time periods, but with a common theme; making lives better with a bit of Miss Moonshine’s magic. I was over the moon when I found out that despite the year we’ve all endured with the pandemic, these wonderful writers had been busy putting together another great collection of stories to raise our spirits. A visit to Miss Moonshine’s was just what I needed, and I wasn’t disappointed. From a French perfumer who arrives in the Yorkshire village of Haven Bridge looking for inspiration, to old friends crossing paths once more, to music bringing young people together, and more, every story is carefully written to make you smile from the inside out. Miss Moonshine is eccentric, quirky, mysterious and a little bit magic, but she always knows how to make you feel better. We all need a bit of Miss Moonshine in our lives every now and then, if only to remind us of the pure joy escaping into a short story can give us.
This book is easy to dip in and out of, packed full of colourful characters to entertain and happy endings that will leave you with that contented feeling that everything will be ok in the end.
Peril in Poitiers by G M Haley
Review by Dawn Harvey
The fifth book in the ‘Catherine Patterson Mysteries’ series, I really enjoyed another chance to catch up with some favourite characters in the latest Catherine Patterson mystery. This time, Catherine herself comes under suspicion. It’s been great to lose myself in the story for a few hours - perfect rainy day reading. Looking forward to the next one!
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ENJOYING FRENCH
by Howard Needs
All great plans should have a logical beginning and an objective, and so was the case with this series of articles. However, the book I am reading at the moment is giving me cause to depart from my original idea, at least for the first try.
I will start by mentioning Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. I have read most of the Holmes books and have never been really impressed by them, either from a detecting point of view or as a piece of gripping literature. Too much rests upon Holmes revealing all at the end, with Watson bumbling along good naturedly as narrator and marvelling at the talents of his friend. Conan Doyle was, as I understand it, never a fan of his own work and tried to finish the series written for The Strand Magazine (with the supposed death of Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls) in 1891, with the intention of devoting his time to more serious works. However, public opinion caused him to revive Holmes and to continue writing about him for a while longer. Conan Doyle was more interested in history and historical novels, and four of these particularly come to mind: Sir Nigel, The White Company, Brigadier Gerard, and Micah Clark, all being excellent and interesting, if somewhat dated for our modern, super-charged tastes. But why write about Holmes in the context of French language and French authors? Now that has its origins with a French author, Jean d’Aillon, who writes a continuous stream of historical books, both series and individual novels. I had
been reading two of his series for some years when, all of a sudden, I saw he had started a new series. Of course I tried the first instalment and found that the series is set in the XV century, when the English, in the person of Henry V, had the regency and occupancy of the French throne for a time. The main character is an English cleric living in Paris, the bastard son of an English nobleman. His name is Edward Holmes, and his close friend is Gower Watson, an English archer who fought at the battle of Agincourt, where Holmes’ father had died. Their landlady, named Constance Bonacieux, was lifted from The Three Musketeers, written by Dumas père, a little tongue-in-cheek, I think. I have enjoyed the series, both from the “ ... the book I am reading at the historical and from the detecting aspect, which is more open than moment is giving me cause to depart from my original idea ...” that of the original Holmes. The times were uncertain, and Edward Holmes ran considerable risks with the arbitrariness of the law and the great people of the times. (More about that in a later article.) That was my first encounter with a Sherlock nearly-look-alike. The second was through a series by an American author, Laurie R. King . The first book, called The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, finds us in 1915, with a Holmes, at that moment 51 years old, retired to the Sussex coast and meeting a fifteen-year-old orphan girl of good family. She has a keen mind that matches that of Holmes, and they become partners in the fighting of crime. The series extends to thirteen or fourteen books, and I am still waiting for the last one, pre-ordered on Amazon.
This now takes me to a discovery I made just this month. The magic of Kindle e-readers is that the algorithm tries to present its owner with suggestions of new books that might interest based on past purchases (one venture into books for a teenaged granddaughter resulted in months of Young Adut (YA) books being presented). This time, it suggested The Case of the Colonels, by Eric Larrey. I read the description, which mentioned a French Dr Watson, called Edmond Luciole, and then looked at the author’s name and came to the conclusion that there might be a French version. Indeed, there was, the author being French, and the English version being one of the few translations of modern French novels into English.
I found the French version, L’affaire des Colonels, downloaded a sample (as I often do with Amazon), and started to read. The blurb at the start of the sample was sufficiently interesting to make me buy the book, and so I settled for a long read.
The book starts with Edmond Luciole, a reformed petty criminal from a good family, inheriting a house in Lyon and starting a new carrier as a journalist. Shortly hereafter, he is asked by a diplomat friend if he could look after a house guest of his for a couple of weeks. The narrator agrees and the guest turns out to be Sherlock Holmes, at the age of fifteen. Soon they become involved in a simple death, together with their housekeeper and a street urchin of nearly the same age as Holmes. One of the strengths of the book is the characterisation, as each character is well delineated and the speech and descriptions conjure up real and different people. In the first part of the book, Holmes is a well-educated teenager with a keen intellect, and as the book progresses, the typical Holmes attention to and preoccupation with detail develops and the character is recognisably the Holmes that Conan Doyle portrayed. However, this young Holmes in Lyon is a much more human and likeable character than the older, traditional Holmes. All I will reveal of the plot is that the story develops from a suspicious death to one involving the politics of late XIXth century France; to say more would risk spoiling the book for potential readers. The author uses real persons and refers to real persons and events with sufficient footnotes to enable a casual reader to stay attached to the story. So far I have discovered three books in this series Additionally and coincidentally, we have just watched the film Enola on Netflix, more or less by chance , and enjoyed it immensely. It was adapted from the first in a series of YA books about the adventures of Holmes’ young sister, Enola, who at the age of sixteen starts her own career as a private detective. It is curious, but the first mention of the name of the film brought up the image of a B29 bomber – the Enola Gay – famous, and infamous at the same time, for its atom bomb run on Hiroshima.
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My judgement of the use of French in the book is that the quality and complexity is of a high level, and I found the language itself enjoyable. I did not hit many places where it was hard to work out who did what to whom, and the few occasions where I had to use a dictionary, the word was found and explained. Here it is worthwhile noting that I sometimes use an Android tablet and sometimes a true but ancient Kindle. The old Kindle has an excellent dictionary, which seems to find the most obscure dialect or old French words almost without fail, whilst the tablet fails on even some everyday words. I have no explanation for this but continue to seek to improve matters.
Punctuation in English is already not everyone’s cup of tea, but the use of quotation marks – inverted commas – to indicate conversation and a change of speaker is something that readers of English are all used to, and the rules make sense. In French, one sometimes sees << >> as an indication of the spoken word, but mostly there is no indication at all and it is left to the reader’s judgement as to which person is speaking and, indeed, whether the person is speaking and not just thinking. This book goes halfway to helping the hapless reader by putting all conversation in italics and indicating a change of speaker by a paragraph indent. This works for me and eases the task of reading.
The number of Holmes sequel authors must run into the hundreds, and as I said, I am not a Holmes fan, but the three I have mentioned have, perhaps coincidentally, been well written and enjoyable.
Problematic Proverbs
This month’s proverb is:
It is commonly believed that this proverb attests to familial relationships being stronger and more important than friendships. However, the full proverb is “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”. In actuality, it states that chosen relationships should be valued higher than those dictated by family. It is the family you choose, not necessarily the one that you are born into, that you should hold closest in your heart.
