The French, who are great extrapolators, are pulled this week in two contradictory directions. The Nobel Prize awarded to J.M.G. Le Clézio reassures them that the inventiveness of France’s novelists is undimmed. Almost simultaneously, though, the weekly Nouvel Observateur ran a cover story on intellectual life in France, in which the pressing question seemed to be whether there was any such thing. The occasion was the publication of a book-length essay by the journalist Donald Morrison, called “What is left of French culture?”*

Mr Morrison caused a stir last autumn when an article he wrote for Time ran under a headline announcing the “death of French culture”. The actual article was more a love letter than an obituary. But Mr Morrison did note that French culture – which a few decades ago could be found in movie theatres all over Bombay and bookshop windows up and down California – today exports very poorly. Fewer than a dozen new French novels get translated in the US in a normal year, he claims. This ought to worry us not because French culture is weak but because it is strong.