What's the Name of That Book??? discussion

No idea when this might have been actually written, since this was a book my mom had on the shelf and I'd picked up and read. Furthermore it was actually a collection of several French sci-fi novellettes (or even shorts) and one novel-length piece, IIRC. The particular item I'm thinking of was probably the longer piece, not a short story.

This was a translation to Russian, and this is a French sci-fi, so I don't even know if it was ever translated in English which may complicate finding it.

The plot was that some aliens experimented on humans, trying to determine if we are intelligent, but every time misinterpreting the results, making us out to be fairly dumb, relying on instincts or even sometimes lacking certain instincts.

(view spoiler)[One of the experiments was splitting up houses. Then a part of one house is reattached with a part of a different house. Those houses had little babies that required breastfeeding, and the mothers got separated from their own babies. They still fed the other person's baby, because they needed feeding, because the fathers asked them, because they hoped the other woman would do the same to their babies, etc. etc. something reasonable. Aliens figured we can't distinguish which is our own baby!

Another experiment involved confining certain old scientists (who apparently acted the most intelligently) in a sort of transparent container in the middle of a field or something. People outside would try to get these confined scientists some help, and food. I think they had someone drop food from the airplane, hoping there was no barrier on the top, just on the sides. No such luck, but the aliens decided to use the food to further experiment. They arranged for a climbing rope. Now remember these were old folks confined. They looked at the rope and knew they couldn't climb it, so they didn't bother with it. Alien conclusion: they don't even have survival instinct.

IIRC, for each experiment there were two sections in the story: one from our viewpoint and the other a copy of the aliens' scientific papers written up about the experiments. Eventually, the humans make contact with the aliens and the misunderstandings are resolved, but the stuff was preserved for curiosity or something along those lines.

Aside: The only other thing I remember about that book is that one of the other stories was about a time-loop. Like someone arranges to arrive in the past (perhaps by accident) and now is forced to relive the same events that led up to that occurrence; just forced to repeat it forever. Kind of depressing, because I don't think he was freed from the time-loop; but it was an interesting series of events. (hide spoiler)]

I found it by looking for the Russian translation. Duh.

André Maurois - La Vie des hommes
Андрэ Моруа - Из "Жизни людей"

Hmm. I can't find an exact match at Goodreads.

If anyone can find and post a link here or find and shelve, it will be much appreciated. Thanks.

I manually added the exact book to Goodreads, and shelved.

Karina wrote: "I manually added the exact book to Goodreads, and shelved."

Thank you, Karina.