Yell, Sam, If you still can by Maylis Besserie

French fiction

Original title – Le Tiers Temps

Translator – Cliona Ni Riordâin

Source – Personal copy

I am back on with another book for WOman in translation month. I picked this up in Norwich on my recent holiday it is a book I hadn’t seen mentioned. It is also from a new publisher to me, Lilliput Press, and a writer I wasn’t that aware of. She had won the Goncourt prize for a debut novel. This book is the first of a trio of novels she is writing about literary connections between France and Ireland. The second book looks at the later life of the poet W B Yeats, and then a book about Francis Bacon’s Nanny. The other two books have already been translated by the same press. This book came out two years ago. Maylis Besserie lives in Bordeaux, and she works as a producer for a French cultural radio station. His connection to Irelan is the summers she was sent to Ireland by her family as a teen to learn English.

I could have spent happy days at Guinness’s, that radiant, flourishing brewery. Happy and hoppy. Alas, the memories come flooding back now that I’m finished. Now that I no longer know how to write. That I no longer write. Almost not at all.

I used to drink with Joyce too. In gorgeous glasses. We’d drink at nightfall, when the beasts return to the byre, huge quantities of white Fendant de Sion. Joyce converted everyone to his tipple – which reminded him of the urine of an archduchess, he used to say. Joyce converted everyone. Joyce was a real archduchess.

Guiness and drinking in the past with James Joyce

The book follows the last days of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett as he is in a nursing home, Le tiers Temps in Paris as we follow his life there, it is like he has become a character in one of his plays stuck in this nursing home the book is told by Samuel as we see his day to day life in the nursing home this has breaks asw e see his nursing reports the meds he was on and how he is doing viewed by the staff. The book sees a man looking back on his life and his complex relationship with his mother, May. Then, his time typing out Joyce’s Finnegans wakes up when he works for Joyce. Then, there are nods at his day-to-day life in the nursing home and the characters in his plays. It is waiting to die and, looking back, a great writer near the end haunted by his past and those ideas that have always been in his works of fiction.

May was a nurse. I could have taken advantage of a moment’s fatigue on the way back from a night shift in the wee small hours. I could have put an end to her suffering and to mine. No, to have done things properly I would have had to have killed her before my birth. Or in childbirth, giving birth to me, why not? That would have been ideal. A lucky birth – night and day. Of course, the best solution of all would have been if my grandmother hadn’t been born either. We would all have been nipped in the bud. That would have been the simplest solution. But chronologically, I admit, it’s a fucking mess.

One pieces of Beckett thinking of his late mother May

I enjoyed this. I like a book with an inventive idea of the connection between France and Ireland with writers and thinkers. Whether it is enough to last over the three books. For me, this worked. I don’t know Beckett as well as I maybe should, but I did watch a lot of his plays years ago, as channel four in the UK did a lot of them. But it worked; it is an old man looking back on his life and remembering working alongside Joyce as they drank, and he was typing out Finnegans wake for the great man and his mother, May. She was a significant influence on who he was as a person. Then, his nursing home has some characters he could have written himself. Are they his characters, or is that how he viewed the world? The next book in the series sees Yeats returning as a ghost in Paris, where he was buried. I think the Irish translator worked as it gave an Irish feel to the English. If that makes sense, well, it felt that way to me. Have you read any of the other books or this one by this writer? If you like quirky tales of famous writers, this is for you.

Winstons’ score – B solid novel about the last days of one of the greatest writers as he sees his world in a Paris nursing home.