UPCOMING EVENTS

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• LD191 Café Littéraire: The Great Meaulnes (“Le Grand Meaulnes”), Alain Fournier

  • When
    19 Dec 2025
  •  
    3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    To be announced
  • Spaces left
    3

  Register

  

  The Great Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier, is a haunting coming-of-age novel that blends youthful idealism with nostalgia and loss. Narrated by François Seurel, the story follows the enigmatic Augustin Meaulnes, a charismatic student who stumbles upon a mysterious, dreamlike estate and falls in love with the elusive Yvonne de Galais. Meaulnes becomes obsessed with finding the estate and reclaiming that fleeting moment of enchantment. Set in the French countryside at the turn of the 20th century, the novel explores themes of lost innocence, romantic yearning, and the disillusionment that often follows the pursuit of idealized dreams. Alain-Fournier, who died in World War I shortly after the novel’s publication, infused his only work with a sense of tragic beauty and emotional depth that continues to resonate with readers today.

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 17 December, 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 December meeting opens on 25 November 2025.

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• LJ161 Café Littéraire: Missing Person, by Patrick Modiano

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

  Missing Person ("Rue des Boutiques Obscures), by Patrick Modiano, is a quiet, hypnotic mystery about identity, memory, and the scars left by history. The novel follows Guy Roland, a man living in 1960s Paris who suffers from amnesia and hires a private detective—then gradually turns detective himself—to uncover who he once was. His search leads through cafés, old photographs, vanished acquaintances, and the half-erased world of wartime France, where collaboration and persecution left deep traces. Rather than delivering a conventional solution, Modiano constructs a delicate investigation into the uncertainty of self: who we are when the past is lost, and how a life can be shaped by what remains unspoken. Lyrical, restrained, and suffused with melancholy, Missing Person transforms a detective story into a meditation on memory, disappearance, and the fragile act of trying to reclaim a life that may never have been fully one’s own.
  

  
  

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 09 January, 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 January meeting opens on Saturday, 20 December 2025.

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• LF201 Café Littéraire: The Life Before Us, by Romain Gary

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

  The Life Before Us ("La Vie devant soi"), by Romain Gary (writing as Émile Ajar), is a tender, bittersweet novel about an unlikely family formed on the margins of Parisian society. The story is narrated by Momo, an Arab boy raised in the apartment of Madame Rosa, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and former prostitute who now cares for the children of other sex workers. As Momo grows, he pieces together the truth of his origins and struggles to understand a world marked by prejudice, poverty, and the lingering traumas of the past. What might sound bleak becomes, in Gary’s hands, deeply humane—full of humor, affection, and luminous moments of connection. The novel explores how love can take unconventional forms, how dignity can flourish despite hardship, and how two wounded people can become each other’s home. Poignant, funny, and quietly devastating, The Life Before Us invites readers to see vulnerability and compassion where society often looks away.
  

  
  

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 13 February, 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 February meeting opens on Saturday, 17 January.

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• LM201 Café Littéraire: TBD

  • 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
    10

  The March book has not been chosen yet. It will either be "The Negotiator: The Masterclass at Saint-Germain," by Francis Walder, or "The House of Scorta," by Laurent Gaudet.

  
  

  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 17 December, 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.

  Show details