Recommendations
Books Like Tartarin de Tarascon
Best books to read after Tartarin de Tarascon by Daudet
Readers who respond to Tartarin de Tarascon's warm comic portrait of the Provençal boaster, the gap between imagination and reality, and Daudet's affectionate social comedy will find the wider tradition of French and European comic fiction.
- 1Buy
Tartarin sur les Alpes
by Alphonse Daudet
The direct sequel (1885) is equally brilliant and essential: where the first novel sends Tartarin to Africa to fulfill his big-game hunting fantasies, the sequel sends him to the Alps to conquer the Matterhorn — the same comic logic, the same warm absurdity, and the same affection for the character who believes in himself despite all evidence.
- 2Buy
Numa Roumestan
by Alphonse Daudet
Numa Roumestan (1881) is the serious treatment of the same Provençal character that Tartarin caricatures: where Tartarin is pure comedy, Numa is sociological and psychological analysis, and reading both novels together shows the full range of Daudet's engagement with the southern French character — its warmth, its exuberance, and its constitutional inability to live up to its own self-image.
- 3Buy
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
Cervantes's great novel is the founding text of the tradition Tartarin belongs to: the man who believes his own fantasies and is gently destroyed by reality. Daudet acknowledged the debt explicitly, and the comparison illuminates both what Tartarin inherits from Quixote (the warm sympathy for the fantasist) and what it adds (the specifically Provençal, specifically nineteenth-century social comedy of the bourgeois adventurer).
- 4Buy
Three Men in a Boat
by Jerome K. Jerome
Jerome's 1889 comic novel about three Englishmen who imagine a romantic boating holiday on the Thames and experience something considerably more mundane is the closest English contemporary parallel to Tartarin: the same comic gap between the imagination of adventure and the reality of tourism, the same warm affection for the protagonists' self-deception.
- 5Buy
Le Nabab
by Alphonse Daudet
Le Nabab (1877) shows Daudet's range from the pure comic fantasy of Tartarin to the serious social panorama: the Provençal parvenu Jansoulet who tries to buy his way into Second Empire Paris is a more socially realistic version of Tartarin's attempt to prove himself in the world, and reading both shows the full range of Daudet's treatment of the Provençal character in different social registers.
- 6Buy
Lettres de mon moulin
by Alphonse Daudet
Daudet's 1866 collection of Provençal tales is the earlier and more nostalgic portrait of the southern world that Tartarin also inhabits: where Tartarin is warm satire, the Lettres are pastoral affection, and the comparison shows the full range of Daudet's relationship to the Provence of his childhood.
- 7Buy
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
by Molière
Molière's great comedy of the bourgeois who imagines himself a nobleman is the French theatrical predecessor of Tartarin's social comedy: Monsieur Jourdain's pretensions and Tartarin's fantasies are both driven by the same gap between the man's social reality and his imagined self, and reading Molière alongside Daudet illuminates the long tradition of French comic social observation.
- 8Buy
Fromont et Risler
by Alphonse Daudet
Fromont et Risler (1874) is Daudet's first major social novel and the most useful companion to Tartarin for understanding Daudet's range: the serious bourgeois social world of the wallpaper firm is the world from which Tartarin is escaping through fantasy — the same Daudet who observes the bourgeoisie with affectionate clarity in Fromont et Risler observes it with affectionate comedy in Tartarin.
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