Novels
His style of writing mixes different literary genres, notably the saga, the science fiction of the inter-war years, and tracts of philosophy.
In most of his novels, Bernard Werber uses the same form of construction, alternating informative articles in the style of an encyclopaedia and normal prose. The articles define or enlarge upon the ideas in the main text.
Also there are connections between his novels. One finds characters like Edmond Wells both in the trilogy Les Fourmis (The Ants) and in the L'Empire des anges (The Empire of the Angels). Also there are recurrent themes like l'Arbre des Possibles (The Tree of Possibilities) of Isidore Katzenberg, or even the novel Nous les dieux, which treats the ideas first presented in the short story L’École des jeunes dieux (The School of the Young Gods).
In the eight novels, Werber describes various authors. We are presented with an author who, at the end of his life, writes a last book which makes sense of his previous work. Thus in having a certain similarity of characters, themes and styles, one can conclude that he is trying to give a certain coherence to the ideas that he is developing.
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Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“I have just opened Bacon’s “Advancement of Learning” for the first time, which I read with great delight. It is more like what Scott’s novels were than anything.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)