SHORT STORIES:FRANCE, TO STATE the obvious, is big. And with its different landscapes and climates and ethnicities, also complex and varied. Apart from the unifying influence of the language, which is relatively recent - and perhaps the universal devotion to gastronomy - it's a diverse place.
There are several Frances; and most of us are aware that we don't, and can't, know them all. Helen Constantine's project, a collection of 22 stories associated with the 22 regions, would seem like filling simply but beautifully a gap. To contain France, whole but differentiated, in one book, to see it refracted in all its variety through the penetrating glance of the short story must have looked like a winner.
"If we want to find out what a nation is really like," as she says in her introduction, "we must read its literature."
What much of the regions are really like is probably no less hidden to the outsider than they always were. We may have our own entry points, our favourites - Flaubert's Normandy, Mauriac's Bordeaux, Colette's Burgundy - but there are great chunks that are probably shrouded from view unless we are very well-read. And Flaubert and the rest were writing a long time ago.
A disappointment with this book is that it's not more contemporary. Only eight of the 20 or so contributors were born in the last century and only a few of those in the last 50 years.
To see such old names as Maupassant (much as I admire him), Mérimée (even if his story about an honour killing in Corsica still delivers a forceful shock) and Daudet does not inspire a sense of discovery. And the selections from Maupassant do not show him at his best. They are both hardly more than travel vignettes - A Mother's Tale, in which the wild and windy Auvergne is depicted as a backdrop to the forlorness of a mother neglected by her son; and A Norman, where with unconscious condescension he depicts a picturesque rustic.
There is a general bias towards the picturesque and the folkloric. René Bazin's The Saviours of the White Wine (from Pays-de-la-Loire) for example, also more of a vignette, about the recouping by the wine-makers after the vines were struck with phylloxera. The Vanishing by Louis Pergaud (Franche Comté) sounds promising but is no more than a mildly diverting tale about two absent-minded village philosophers. Daudet's The Pope's Mule, widely anthologised, is here again.
And it may be a personal prejudice, but the inclusion of Daudet in any collection does give it the unfortunate whiff of a schoolbook.
To be fair, this qualitative deficit is squarely signalled in the title. These are French tales, rather than French stories. The story is a more evolved form of the tale, which is rooted in oral telling - and many of the tales here are certainly narrated in the style of someone who buttonholes you to say, "I met this fellow on the bus . . .".
In fact the other piece by Daudet, The Beaucaire Coach, is an impressively grim account of an encounter with a passenger, haplessly attached to a wife who's a serial bolter. It's rather better than diverting, however, partly because of the savage sadness of the man (a sadness that is not at all as well conveyed in Maupassant's A Mother's Tale) and also because it gestures at least towards an open ending.
A tragic fate awaits, we know, this husband and wife.
Constantine seems to have a taste for the grim and the tragic. In several stories the complacency and contentment of everyday life are shattered by a random and unforeseen event - serving to confirm the view from Paris of "the regions" as places of gloom and pessimism.
Paul Hervieu's The Bull From Jouvet strikingly describes the chill and grandeur of the mountains of Rhône-Alpes, where a shepherd meets his nemesis in the shape of a bull added to his flock. An entire extended family meets theirs in Zola's typically cool but empathetic The Flood, a faction piece about the catastrophe that resulted in the Midi Pyrenees in 1875 when the Garonne burst its banks.
This family's former bucolic bliss - the big table around which they gather of an evening for la soupe and wine, the sunlit meadows, the well-loved animals - is, oddly enough, about the only evocation of the happy French country life that we like to imagine. And it doesn't last! Colette evokes it in Where Are The Children? but this too presents itself as an elegy to her dead mother rather than as an artistically wrought story.
Naturally to us post-Chekhovians, the most achieved pieces - and worthy to be called "stories" - are the more modern. Jacques Chardonne, who, Constantine tells us, wrote often about marriage, and to me is a find, represents Poitou-Charentes with Julie. This exploration of a rift between a long-time couple is subtle and mysterious, the husband taking refuge from his emotions in philosophy, the wife gambling everything on her understanding of him.
In Julie, the brief strokes of description - the town "the colour of pearl", the houses "which look as if they are made of old ivory or old silver" - are an integral element of the story rather than scenery or backdrop. Modern Paris is fully recognisable in Marcel Ayme's Rue de lEvangile in which an Arab immigrant is toyed with and abused by the residents of his quartier. There are others of note, too, such as Anne Marie Garat and Christian Garcin.
It should be said that the shortcomings of this selection may be largely due to the limitations it imposed - the pieces could not be more than a certain length for instance.
All in all, however, it does not persuade us that writing in the regions - at least of the short story - is thriving in our time.
Anne Haverty's most recent novel is The Free And Easy (Vintage )
French Tales Stories translated by Helen Constantine Oxford University Press, 351pp. £9.99