Category: france

Like a sky Inside by Jakuta Alikavazovic

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Like a sky inside by Jakuta Alikavazovic

French fiction/ essay

Original title – Comme un ciel en nous.

Translator Daniel Levin Becker

Source – Personal copy

Is there ever a time when you see little bits about a book and you just know it will be one of those books that will be with you forever? There aren’t many books like that. They come along once in a blue moon, the ones. that touch you. I had an idea that this book might be one of those books. Firstly, it has a writer of Balkan heritage writing in French, and me, they are my two favourite places to read books, so I knew this book from the daughter of Yugoslavian parents born in Paris. Her parents were from Bosnia and Montenegro. She has also worked as a translator on books by David Foster Wallace and Ben Lerner, which means she also has great taste in literature.

The Louvre was the first French city where I felt at home, my father used to say. The official story: he came to Paris in 1971, for the love of my poetess mother. He stayed for the Louvre. He was twenty years old and the twenty years that followed – covering, in part, my childhood – would unfold as though in a dream.

His joie de vivre. His appetite for the world. His opti-mism, and the limits thereof. He had no money and still believed it made no difference, because he had enough to act like he did. To pretend.

Of course, his head must have spun. To imagine the City of Light, to dream of it, is one thing; to discover it, to be a body, a twenty-year-old body wandering its daytime and nighttime streets, is another. All forms of difficulty

– loneliness, poverty, the roundly accepted fact that the slightest cough, the slightest cold, is far graver in a foreign language — all forms of difficulty have disappeared from his official story. Among them, his reasons for emigrat-ing: Paris, certainly. My mother, of course. The Louvre, naturally. But it would take me years to learn that he did it the way he did to escape military service in Yugosla-via, his country of origin, which today no longer exists.

Her parents Home Yugoslavia imploded and split

The book has the premise that she spends an overnight stay in the Louvre Gallery, where her young son is at Over. Over the evening, we see how art, family, memories, and how you could steal the Mona Lisa all drift by. This is a book that is one of those you sink into as a reader. It shows us how art and memories can connect from a piece that remembers her heading to New York against her father’s wishes when she was younger. The satyr she saw has a fellow sculpture now in New York that she had seen on the trip her father didn’t want her to do, as it drifts in her mind. Like the star in the sky, it follows her life’s path and her relationship with her father, alongside her evident love of art and how she connects with art. A night that sees her move far out of the bounds of the walls of the Gallery and the sense of time and place.

When I think about my father, I often think of those strange and beautiful images of wild animals, great and mighty deer, descending upon cities, wandering through streets. What they are experiencing is also an exile -quite solitary, like my father’s, quite majestic.They seem immediately at home, and their presence breathes a new enchantment into what we thought we knew: the sidewalks, the intersections, the asphalt under our feet. Nonetheless, an exile. They come driven by hunger. Or curiosity. Which for some, such as my father, such as me, is more or less the same thing. Yes, there is something deerlike in the familiarity I feel for him; a hint of wildness, of the unknown, forever inaccessible to my words but not to my heart. My heart, of which it is one of the centers. One of the places most intimate to me and, in spite or because of this, one of the most foreign.

I loved this observation of her father

This is a book I read as it was on the Republic of Consciousness longlist. But when I put a picture up and people like Anthony at times flow stemmed said they loved this book, I knew it would be one I would like. I love books that deal with Art, travel, memory and that bond between father and Daughter. It captures how your mind can drift from it, and it is with my dad’s engineering or castles that is our connection. Edinburgh castles or a dam make me think of my father and his past his life. I connected with this work as I said, there are just some books you know before you turn over the first p[ages you hope and think will be with you for the rest of your life. This is one of those books like Panorama by Dusan Sarotar or Fireflies by Luis Sagasti or back even further for me the Encyclopedia of Snow by Sarah Emily Miano. Those books that just touch you in a way you can’t say other than it’s about a connection on an emotional level with the writer at that moment of reading that will last forever after you put the book down. Have you ever had that feeling about a book and that connection that makes you drift into your own life as a reader and son of a daughter, in this case!

 

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

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Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (in search of lost time Volume 1)

French fiction

Original title – Du côté de chez Swann

Translation by C.K Scott Moncrieff and Terrance Kilmartin (revised by D .J Enright )

Source – Personal copy

I have joined in the read-along of the Proust that is going along this year. I have done well to get so far, I am not the most organised at readalong which is why I haven’t done one since my rarther Shambolic Don Quixote many years ago which was a bit of a shambles. I have taken a two-pronged act on this book. I have read the modern library book and then listened to the free edition on Audible. This is the third time I have read the book. I will discuss Proust more in the other books, and I have five other posts to cover the man himself. Of course, this book has the most famous moment on the book, the Madeline moment. Of course, their book is about some themes in 5the books such as class, love, memory, a world in change, and family, so many it is hard to convey.

As she was the only member of our family who could be described as a trifle “common,” she would always take care to remark to strangers, when Swann was mentioned, that he could easily, had he so wished, have lived in the Boulevard Haussmann or the Avenue de l’Opéra, and that he was the son of old M. Swann who must have left four or five million francs, but that it was a fad of his. A fad which, moreover, she thought was bound to amuse other people so much that in Paris, when M. Swann called on New Year’s Day bringing her a little packet of marrons glacés, she never failed, if there were strangers in the room, to say to him: “Well, M. Swann, and do you still live next door to the bonded warehouse, so as to be sure of not missing your train when you go to Lyons?” and she would peep out of the corner of her eye, over her glasses, at the other visitors.

Young Marcel remebers the Swann visiting his family

The book shows the young boy Marcel, and when he has the famous cake, he returns to his boyhood years and summers at Combray. The many summers spent there, and of course, this is where we get introduced to Swann, the leading figure late in the book. We see the house where he spent his summer, his Aunt, one of those figures who knows everything, all the gossip and the world around her, and her ever-faithful servant for me, these good characters in Downton Abbey. Parisian families in the country have excellent descriptions of parties and the class system. But who is Mrs Swann? As she never came, the path he used to walk had names. The book then focuses on Swann, a man who is in demand but falls for a woman called Odette. He meets a family he has a metal with and becomes obsessed with not just that but also who she is meeting and what his very gesture means towards Swann. Then, in the later part of the book, we return to our narrator and his love for Swann’s daughter and his hunt for the mysterious Mrs Swann ? is she who we think she is? Now, an older woman with grey hair just stops, but is this woman the same in the middle part of the book?

The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

The last lines of the book I loved

I’m teasing a bit there, and this is just a quick view of the book it is a book you sink into the world of parties, artists, money, love and class. Where falling for one woman can cost a man so much. But this is also an age where their world is changing, but they don’t know it is also a world where you listen to music, look at pictures, read, and talk about all this. For anyone under thirty-five, this world may seem more distant than it did to me. I know there is a book of paintings in the book, which I hope to get at some point, but here is a question is the book about the music in the book that gathers it together. As I mentioned,e I am not a huge classical fan. But if there was a playlist of the music mentioned in the book, that would be great. I love the main narrator, a sickly book that loves his mother. Proust paints himself as this sickly boy in Cambrey awaiting a mother kiss so well. You feel for him when he doesn’t get one. Swann is a fascinating figure who makes everyone he seems to come into contact with talk about him. She also has this obsession with Odette, how she may have spent time with other men, and how she may view him. I no move on to within a budding grove. What did you like about Swann’s way ?

Eugéine Grandet by Honoré de Balzac

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Eugéine Gandet by Honoré de Balzac

French fiction

Origninal title – Eugéine Grandet

Translator – Slyvia Raphael

Source – Personal copy

In my first book of the year, I covered a relationship between cousins, and this is my second book of 2025. Another French book has that in part of one of the storylines; this was rewritten by Blazac after he wrote the original version so it would fit in with his grand plan of Human comedy. This fits in part about rural life and is set in a small village in the Loire near the town where Balzac grew up as a young man. So, for me, some of the characters may have been based on people he knew in that village when he was growing up.

In certain provincial towns, there are houses whose appearance arouses a melancholy as great as that of the gloomiest cloisters, the most desolate moorland, or the saddest ruins.There is, perhaps, in these houses, a combination of the silence of the cloister, the desolation of moorlands and the sepulchral gloom of ruins. In them life is so still and uneventful that a stranger would think them uninhabited, if his eye did not suddenly meet the pale, cold look of a motionless figure whose almost monk-like face appears above the window-ledge at the sound of an unknown step. These melancholy characteristics are to be found in the appearance of a house in Saumur, at the end of the steep street which leads to the château through the upper part of the town. This street, not much used nowadays, is hot in summer, cold in winter, and dark in parts; it is noteworthy for the resonance of its little cobbled roadway, which is always clean and dry, for the narrowness of its winding path, and for the peace of its houses that are part of the old town and are dominated by the ramparts.Dwellings there, three hundred years old, though built of wood, are still sound, and their varied exteriors contribute to the unusual appearance which commends this part of Saumur to the attention of antiquaries and artist

The opening of the book

The book focuses on the Grandet Family, who in the small town of Saumur, have become very wealthy. Still, the head of the household, Felix, is almost a Scrooge-like figure, a man who has, over the years, built up wealth from his wife’s estate. To start with, he married her. She was the daughter of a timber owner. Over the years, Felix built up the funds the family hands. But as he has done this, he has become cut off from everyone around him. So yes, he has money, but he only allows six people into his home. He has a daughter, Eugenie. She has many men in the village who want to take her hand, but Felix makes the house live on only a few francs a week as he gets tenants to pay him with produce. Enter to this is the dashing Charles, a cousin from Paris. When Eugenie gives him some gold coins, Felix overreacts and locks her up and sets out to get money from Charles. Along the way, Felix is told that Eugenie should inherit his wife’s money if anything happens to her. She and Charles stay connected after Felix strips him of money. We see how she becomes a woman wanted to be married by many men when she finally has her money.

Only six of the townsfolk had the right of entry into Grandet’s house. Of the first three of these, the most important was Monsieur Cruchot’s nephew. Ever since he had been appointed president of the county court at Saumur, this young man had added the name of Bonfons to that of Cruchot and had been working hard to make Bonfons supersede Cruchot. He already signed himself

C. de Bonfons. If any litigant was ill-advised enough to call him Monsieur Cruchot, he soon became aware of his blunder in court. The magistrate favoured those who called him ‘Monsieur le Président’ but he bestowed his most generous smiles on the flatterers who said ‘Monsieur de Bonfons’. Monsieur le Président was thirty-three years old and owned the estate of Bonfons (Boni Fontis), which brought in an income of seven thousand livres a year.

How Felix makes the money from his wives estate

This is the story of a girl crushed by her father. She is generous and lovely, but she is crushed by Felix and his decisions over the years. Balzac captures the stifling nature of being trapped in a small village that happens to Eugenie and her mother before her. It is hard to avoid comparing this to Dickens. There is a feeling Felix is the Anit Scrooge in a way. He is a miser like Scrooge, but unlike Scrooge, we see what happens when someone so focused on control of his family’s wealth, But there is also a way he could be compared to Miss Havisham as he goes through life his world shrinks like Miss Havisham. Eugenie isn’t like any Dickens character. She is crushed by her father. The generous soul she is is at every turn blocked and tried to be broken by her father. But like Dickens, it is a long look at how wealth has now dropped from the landowners to the merchants and how greed can cause men to act a certain way. Felix could have come from a Dickens novel in a way. He has touched on Mr Murdstone (I’m just rereading David Copperfield for later this month ). Have you read this or any other books by Balzac that may have influenced Dickens as both saw how greed can influence people to act.

 

Strait is the Gate by Andre Gide

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Strait at the Gate by Andre Gide

French Fiction

Original title -La Porte Étroite

Translator Dorothy Bussy

Source – Personal Copy

I pondered where to start this year, and I looked. Among those writers, I have the most books from is Andre Gide, but it had been too long since I picked him up and read a book by him . Then I thought I hadn’t seen his books around as much as you would twenty years ago. He seemed the perfect first choice for this year of reading classics and modern classics.  Gide won the Nobel in 1947 and was a hugely influential writer. When he wrote openly gay, he challenged the religious view of the timehe was brought up in. a strict religious background and a lot of his writing is him kicking against this view this book is an example of that.

My whole life was decided by that moment: even to this day I cannot recall it without a pang of anguish. Doubtless I understood very imperfectly the cause of Alissa’s wretchedness, but I felt intensely that that wretchedness was far too strong for her little quivering soul, for her fragile body, shaken with sobs.

I remained standing beside her, while she remained on her knees. I could express nothing of the unfamiliar transport of my breast, but I pressed her head against my heart, and I pressed my lips to her forehead, while my whole soul came flooding through them. Drunken with love, with pity, with an indistinguishable mixture of enthusiasm, of self-sacrifice, of virtue, Iappealed to God with all my strength – I offered myself up to Him, unable to conceive that existence could have any other object than to shelter this child from fear, from evil, from life.

I knelt down at last, my whole being full of prayer. I gathered her to me; vaguely I heard her say:

“Jerome! They didn’t see you, did they? Oh! go away quickly. They mustn’t see you.’

Not long after he arricves this connection happens

What happens when cousins live under the same roof when they are just at that age when we notice the other sex? This is what happens in the book we see Aiissa and Jerome. When Jerome comes to live with Alissa and her family on the northern coast of France. These events mirrored some events in Gides’s life when he was this age and drawn to a family member. They are drawn to each other, but at the same time, Alissa’s mother is having an affair. Add to this, ALissa is being brought up in a strict religious education. It all becomes too much for other young girls, and she seeks to escape from human connection and the world through religion and turns towards being without love. The book follows the years after this and the fact that Alissa’s sister is actually in love with Jerome, but he never notices it until much later. She carries his torch for him. Life takes twists and turns, most told through letters and meetings over time.

Was I alone to feel the spur of emulation? I do not think that Alissa was touched by it, or that she did anything for my sake or for me, though all my efforts were only for her. Everything in her unaffected and artless soul was of the most natural beauty. Her virtue seemed like relaxation, so much there was in it of ease and grace. The gravity of her look was made charming by her childlike smile; I recall that gently and tenderly inquiring look, as she raised her eyes, and can understand how my uncle, in his distress, sought support and counsel and comfort from his elder daughter. In the summer that followed I often saw him talking to her. His grief had greatly aged him; he spoke little at meals, or sometimes displayed a kind of forced gaiety which was more painful than his silence.

He remained smoking in his study until the hour of the evening when Alissa would go to fetch him.

the aftermath of her mothers affair have a knock on effect

What I found odd about this when I read it was that it mirrored Evelyn Waugh’s religious guilt of unrequited love traits in his books. I also thought of those triangles of connections in Brideshead, with love drifting between family members over the years or unseen. I wonder if Waugh had read this book?  It captures those years when you can see a connection with distant family members or classmates just before you hit high school. Those first sowings of love can often run deep or, like here, cause a knock-on effect. He is showing the effect religion can have on people, the leprosy of it all. I can also see how Waugh and Gide are at different ends of the spectrum. Unrequited love and religion can give writers at opposite sides of the divide a lot to write about. I did look to see if they were connected and found Waugh hated Giude. Still, for me, the parallels within a family can be seen, especially the other sister’s love for Jerome echos the scenes in Brideshead where Charles and Julia are drawn close, but then the other sister turns to religion but also seems to have a flame for Charles. This shows how my mind can connect two books together in a way. What do you think? I think I will return to Gide and may have a call with Waugh before the year is out !!

The Three Rimbauds by Dominioue Noguez

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The Three Rimbauds by Dominique Noguez

French Literary criticism

Original title – Les TROIS rIMBAUDS

Translator – Seth Whidden

Source – Personal copy

I looked when Seagull Books had a recent sale, and of the many great books they have, I couldn’t get them all, which, believe me, if I had the chance, I would. This title grabbed me as I was like many young men a Fan of Rimbaud when I was younger. The guy people like Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan said they loved to read. Of course, in a rock and roll way, he died at 39. He had just returned from Africa. The French Lit Critic and film Professor Dominique used this as a launch pad for the book. He had read a piece by Paul Claudel in. the 1912 edition of Rimabud’s complete works. We missed so much of what Rimbaud could have written had he lived.

When Arthur Rimbaud was inducted into the Académie française on 16 January 1930, no one seemed to remember the ‘man with the soles of wind’, the diabolical cherub from ‘Nina’s Replies’ and ‘The Seated Man’, or the Seer thug who had dominated the headlines in the little world of French poetry in 1872. Curiously enough, Paul Valéry, whose speech officially welcomed the new academician and who was known for being more meticulous (in his foreword to La Fontaine or Mallarmé, for example), made quick work of Rimbaud’s early works and dispatched them in three quick sentences:

The opning paragrapgh about the imagined 1930 academy speech

The book centres on another event that happened but was set a year earlier. We imagine Rimbaud has been given a seat in the French Academy. The speech Paul Valery gives teeth to the years we missed of what could have been Rimbaud’s life in 1930.(He gave an actual speech the year after when Marshal Pétain got seat 18 in the Academy). As I say, the speech follows his Life, which Rimbaud had written as solo novel on his return to France and wrote a story called African Nights. This book, and that very French idea, seems to be a piece of Autofiction of his time in Africa. It is imagined that he also married the sister of Paul Claudel. Claudel was a Catholic, and this saw Rimbaud become a Catholic. We see bits of letters to the like of Breton Cocteau, the great writers in France, in the years that followed his death, weaving his imagined life around actual events and people that show a poet that calmed and in the end, his verse became more serious and straightforward. One quote hit me, and this is so true. What would have happened if Gide had died after The Fruits of the Earth or James Joyce after Dubliners ? The question is, what if, like so many other poets, died to you ng, would Wilfred Owen be so well known or loved had he died young?

(It makes for a small literary game, not without interest and worth practicing on others: How would we view Gide if he had died after The Fruits of the Earth; Aragon after the Treatise on Style or Joyce after Dubliners?.. ). No. We will agree, how-ever, that this way of rewriting history has the advantage of revealing, in an ingeniously metaphorical way, that one Rimbaud dies in 1891 to give birth to another.

The thought of what if other writers had diedat a young age like Rimbaud

This is a short book of 60 pages, a homage to a great poet, a little play on what might have been. I was struck by the question of how far we are from the AI works of an Older Rimbaud or Kurt Kobain’s imagined works in this age of AI, an album of what might have been Tracks. I like this idea of what might have been for Rimbaud. He is one of those writers who died on the cusp of his wave. He could have been even more significant, or could he have been? We will never know. I like how he patched the Claudel quote to the speech many years later from someone Rimbaud knew for an Academy seat. The footnotes show how Noguez weaved his web around these and other events to make the imagined latter years of Rimbaud. Of course, this moves into an area that someone like Borges used to write about: reimagining the history of great figures. This is mentioned in the intro.I also thought of a couple of books I read ago by Peter Ackroyd, one about Milton and the other about Oscar Wilde, that imagined part of their lives. In this part, we see the Rimbaud, and no one ever saw the man tinged by North Africa. An event that profoundly affected Rimbaud from what is alluded to in the book. Do you have a favourite fictional or reimagined life of a writer?

The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

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The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

French memoir

Original title – L’usage  de la photo

Translator – Alison L Strayer

Source- personal copy

I heard Ernaux and Modiano the two most recent winners of the Nobel prize s, work described as a whole piece like a greater universe. Each book is almost a part of great work in the same universe like a Star Wars universe or Marvel universe. These writers’ books populate a world of there now each piece a little bit of a great worker in Enraux world is her life she mines. Still, here she is helped by the photographs of her affair (she is very french with all these affairs, isn’t she just ). The pictures are by the French photographer and writer Marc Marie, with whom she had an affair more than twenty years ago. There is a sense this is the time photos cross from an object maybe to something. We all have phones full of pictures at this time and dig cameras with great storage, so when she starts to take photos of the aftermath of their meeting, the crumpled clothes, it is like a moment caught in Amber.

Clothing and shoes are scattered all the way down an entrance hallway with big pale tiles. In the foreground, on the right, is a red jumper or shirt and black tank top that appear to have been torn off and turned inside out in the same movement, resembling a low-cut bust with the arms cut off. A white label is clearly visible on the tank top. Further on is a pair of curled-up jeans with a black belt attached. To the left of the jeans, the red lining of a red jacket is spread out like a cloth for cleaning the floor.

On top of that, a pair of blue-chequered boxer shorts and a white bra, one of whose straps is stretching out towards the jeans. Behind, a men’s boot lies on its side next to a rumpled blue sock. Standing far apart and perpendicular to each other are two black high-heeled pumps. Even further away, protruding from under the radiator, is the black splotch of a jumper or skirt.

There first meet with a photgraph

 

Annie was just recovering from chemo and had lost hair so this affair, with its burning passion, serves in the photos as she is recovering. The pictures capture the affair and recovery both in a way , capturing that passion in the crumbled discarded clothes between them on the floor as she recounts each encounter with Marc when he found out she was doing this she had said he had thought of taking pictures it is like an animal marking it territory or a bird building a nest these clothes the symbol of the previous night’s passion of sex between the pair. The lingering heap of clothes. Capture how an affair burned brightly and is remembered in her usual open style.

A black beast with a huge head and an atrophied body ending in a heart-shaped appendage seems to be tumbling down a yellow wall, along with an object bent into a V shape, a boot twisted into a V, and a large desert rose, made of stone. Underneath is another boot, folded over on itself, which has landed on a pale floor. There is no perspective in this tableau, in which the yellow wall and white floor are extensions of each other. Everything appears flat, weightless, immaterial, caught in a long slow descent, like Don Juan as played by Michel Piccoli in the Marcel Bluwal film, whirling towards hell to the music of Mozart’s Requiem.

The last meeting has a darkness and sorrow in the opening her

Discussing her books is hard as we know what we are getting from her life. It is a chronicle of her life. Her open look at her life captures her so well. Photos, I remember an interview with Wim Wenders, a prolific photographer. He said,”I see a young man who impulsively took photos. I still recognise the impulses, and seeing that some have remained the same is a pleasure. Some, of course, got into my body, so I sometimes wonder who took those pictures. Was it my body – my thumbs and hands, my eyes – or was it a conscious act”

I thought of this when I read this book. He is a man who has taken thousands of pictures and is like Ernaux, someone whose whole life seems to be a project. His films all have a theme of the journey of life. I ve drift and now going drift again into another favourite artist of mine is, Robert Smith. Of course, with the new Cure album due, I’ve been thinking back on his lyrics as I read this book and, of course, the opening of his song Picture of You. “I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you
That I almost believe that they’re real
I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you
That I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel”

Maybe that is the feeling of the affair in the pictures—that ripping of clothes, that brief fling captured in the crumbled discarded clothes of the evening before the flotsam and jetsam of passion on the morning shore, so to speak. I hope you don’t mind. I’m trying to be a little more fluid in my reviews and digressive, so belt up, and let’s see where in my mind the reads I am reading take me!

Have you a view on Ernaux?

 

 

Eden,Eden,Eden by Pierre Guyotat

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Eden ,Eden,Eden by Pierre Guyotat

French fiction

Original title- Éden,Éden,Éden

Translator – Graham Fox

Source – Personal copy

I saw this on the list of books published in 1970, I bought it up a couple of years ago just as it had Michel Leris’s quote on the back, and I knew he was a leading intellect in France around this time. Well, when I looked a little more into this book, I found out it is much more than that it was Banned in France for sale to minors. This caused figures like Pasplinl, Satre, Beuys and Genet, to name a few, to sign a protest to that happening. It also led to the Nobel-winning writer Claude Simon resigning from the Prix Medicis when it lost out on the prize by a single vote. This book is of its time in many ways , of the style of writing and the events of the time, It is also hard to describe as a work. Given the sheer power of the way he set out the book to the reader, it is an assault on you, and it is just so full of words and events just happening constantly told in a single breath.

Khamssieh moaning: nauseated by workers’ jism mixed, bland, with saliva in mouth; wrinkled penis retracting into pubic fleece / ; date-picker’s other hand grabbing, squashing Wazzag’s hardening member against belly, palm hollowing pubis, orgasm – thread of blood-scented jism streaming, without spasms, out of glans – shining and crying through whole body of date-picker; youth rolling, fastened to whore, over strip of floor along counter, pulling member from between Wazzag’s buttocks, standing up, bare legs spread planted on one side, other side of rump of whore sprawling on belly, toes delving into hairs, under armpits; slow, stroking, with dusty heel, shoulder, neck, greasy curls over sticky nape, palpating balls against jism-spattered thigh; toes closing eyelids of whore against wood:

One of the pasages much the same all the way through just relentless at times

How to describe this book well, the book is set in a hinterland of Algeria in what may now be a sort of apocalyptic future at a whorehouse, as the war is all around them. The book is a massive nod to writers like Beckett, Joyce, and Burroughs. It is a single breathless splattering of words in fact when IO put a picture of it up a fellow book lover described it as like a machine gun of words as bodies, sex, violence and the world they are in blur into just a stream of words are never ending no gaps no real breath in the text itself as the sex of the whore house and the violence of the Algerian war which he had seen for himself.

Hamza, running back to camp, crossing through bunk-house packed with

simmering bodies, naked, half-naked,

sprawled out away from scorching partitions, opening bag, taking out vapotizer of Eau de Cologne, stuffing bottle into pocket, running back in long strides, running back towards cirque: nomad, lizard devoured, wiping lips with strip of veil spread over shepherd’s chest; shepherd seated between thighs of nomad, crunching scales of lizard’s tail, claws, tongue of youth protruding, thick, between teeth, to lick greasy fingers of nomad; Hamza crouching down, breathless, vaporizing, between thighs of shepherd, rag sheathing sexual cluster; nomad wrenching vaporizer from Hamza’s fist, caressing blue bottle, grey bulb, vaporizing skull of shepherd huddled against chest, placing lips bridled by veil onto perfumed skull; beneath rag, shepherd’s member twitching, stiffening; nomad laying hand over shepherd’s sexual cluster: abscesses bursting with hardening of flesh:

Again just a barage of words and images actions for the read to work through

As you see with the quotes, it is hard to capture what is happening. It is more a mass of emotions, sex,horror, violence, body parts and bodily fluids drifting over you as you read the book. This isn’t a read for the faint heart and is very much a book of its time in many ways. I think it is a cousin to Penolpe from Ulysses, where we see Molly Bloom sexually outbursting in one breathless cascade of words like this book. Beckett’s play Not I, which is after this book, has a similar feel of that breathless torrent of words of images of prevents in a way this would be served performed like Not I is that mouth and those torrent of words. But for me, the work it hit most was the Burroughs Red Night Trilogy, a book that came out after this, but I wonder if Burroughs had read this book or if it was just the fact he had spent time in North Africa and in the desert. I can see its part in the books of the time as I said at the start. It isn’t a book for everyone, but more for those who like a challenge and love stream of consciousness as a writing style. This is it at its most abstract, though. The other image I had when I finished the book was what if the cinema Pardiso had been a bookshop, not a cinema and the priest had cut out the violence and sex and the bookshop owner pieced those cutouts together, like in the film, had put them all together well this is that book it is like the worst piece of the most sexual and violent books you have read thrown into one book! Have you read this book? my final read for this weeks Club 1970

Little Jewel by Patrick Modiano

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Little Jewel by Patrick Modiano

French fiction

Original title – La Petite Bijou

Translator – Penny Hueston

Source – Personal copy

I just started on to another Modiano after reviewing Sleep of Memory the other day just as we went away, and that was it I read it whilst we were away I always take a pile of books, but we get an early start to get places when away have a full day wandering and buying bit places by the time we get back we just chatted and watch a bit of tv anyway this is a later Modiano written a couple of years before he won the Nobel prize ad is a new translator to me and also is from another publisher of his books Text. As ever, it is set in Paris.

IT MUST HAVE been about twelve years since anyone had called me Little Jewel. I found myself at Châtelet metro station at peak hour. I was in the crowd heading along the endless corridor on the moving walkway. There was a woman wearing a yellow coat. The colour of the coat caught my eye and I observed her from the back on the walkway. Then she headed down the corridor marked DIRECTION CHÂTEAU DE VINCENNES. Now we were all squashedagainst each other in the middle of the staircase, waiting for the barrier to open. She was standing next to me. I saw her face. She was so like my mother that I thought it must be her.

The opening lines of the book and Therese seeing the woman in the yellow coat

What happens when you lose your mother, then one day you are on a metro and think you see her in a yellow coat and decide you want to follow this woman? This is the heart of this story as we follow Little Jewel as she says no one had called her that since she was twelve so now nineteen, Therese has broken memories of her earlier life and when she follows this woman that may be her mother, those memories come to mind as we see her follow this woman everyday life. In the hope that she can patch together her own past.As is the woman, the countess that had died years earlier? What is her life, this mystery woman as ever we see place drift, and her memories and where we follow the woman mix this is one of the things he does so well place and feelings. He is a teen viewing the world, and as we see her trying to grasp what happened in the past to answer those questions, does she need the answers?

SOMETIME BEFORE THE evening when I thought 1 recognised my mother in the metro, I had met a person called Moreau or Badmaev at the Mattei bookshop on Boulevard de Clichy. It stayed open late. I was looking for a detective novel. At midnight, we were the only customers, and he recommended a title on the Noir list. Then we talked as wewalked together along the median strip down the boulevard. Occasionally, his voice had an odd intonation that made me think he was a foreigner. Later, he explained that Badmaev was the name of his father, whom he had hardly known. A Russian. But his mother was French. At that first meeting, he wrote his address on a piece of paper, under the name Moreau-Badmaev.

I like this looking for a detective novel is maybe a summing up of his style a novel looking to be a detective novel always .

As I said in the previous post on his bookmI feel Modiano has a bag of ideas that he uses, and he also has used some truth in this book it is based on an actual news story he had read, and it turns out he had edited the book when he found out from the actual Little Jewel that her mother was still alive. He always uses his hometown of Paris as the backdrop for this book. At the point where he started the book, I was reminded of the scene in Wim Wenders’s film until the end of the world where William Hurt’s character is seen by Solveig Donmartin’s character on a platform and follows him. Then I was reminded of what happens when a parent is reunited with a child in the film Secret and Lies. Those secrets and unanswered questions may sometimes be best left unsaid. Another Modiano trait is the lost person. This time, it is a mother, not a daughter. Then, how we remember the past is another trait of his works. Those fragments we remember are often real, but what happens when the past is blurred by the present. It is fair to say I loved this again. I think he is a writer I click with as a reader. He makes me want to wander aimlessly around Paris or sit in a cafe, watch everyone go past, and imagine them in a Modiano way. Do you have a writer you click with as a reader?

Winstons score – +A Another dive

Sleep of Memory by Patrick Modiano

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Sleep of Memory by Patrick Modiano

French fiction

Original title –Souvenirs dormants

Translator – Mark Polizzotti

Source – personal copy

Am I the only one blogging-wise that you see you’re getting to a milestone? In this case, 1400 reviews on the blog are not wrong in 15 years of blogging, especially when the first few months I did very little, so I have averaged 100 books a year for the last 14 years. I have been trying to think of which book to pick, and then, in one of those weird things that happened, I ordered a few books from World of Books as I tried to move away from Amazon for my books. One of the publishers I love is Margellos World Republic of Letters, and I looked up books from them and ordered this book. Then this week looking for a podcast to listen to one morning whilst having a coffee out I listened to an old episode backlist on Patrick Modiano’s honeymoon. I then looked back and saw it had been a while SINCE I had reviewed him. I had reviewed Dora Bruder (search warrant) as before his noble win, it was the only book readily available, so I reviewed days before he won the Nopbel and then, in a couple of years after, reviewed a few more. I really liked his books so with the first wave of books post Nobel I reviewed a number nad then since not so many, which is a shame he is a writer I love his books have similar themes and subjects but are different enough to make them interesting. So this one of his most recent books has several things we expect from Modiano: a look back at war, Parents that are useless or have caused issues to the person in the book. Mysterious women. all are here.

Geneviève Dalame was always the first to ar-rive, and when I entered the café I would see her sitting at the same table, way in back, head bowed over an open book. She’d told me she slept barely four hours a night. She worked as a secretary at Polydor Studios, a bit farther down the boulevard, which was why we would meet in that café before she went to work. I had gotten to know her in an occult bookstore on Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire. She was very interested in the occult. I was too. Not that I wanted to submit to a doctrine or become some guru’s dis-ciple, but because I liked mystery.

One of the women he knew over this time and had relationship with

The book follows a writer as he looks back at his early years, his teens to early twenties, and the woman he had met and had relations with over those years. Add to this, he is the son of a couple that had issues during the war years a nod to the trouble he had with his own parents as we see the odd collection of women he had meet over those years from someone interested in the occult. A woman floats through her life in a way an older woman, and maybe it is the death he may have been involved with one of the the ladies. Like in his other book, the exact facts of these women blend and drift as he remembers the crumbs left behind of his memory of each of them in vary amounts from the family friends he met when young to an almost Mrs Robinson-like lady several years older than himself, that he says he remembers very little of, but one thinks there maybe more. It is all set on the backdrop of post-war Paris, the awakening that happened in the sixties and eventually led to the events of 1968.

My memory of Madame Hubersen is also rather vague. A brunette of about thirty with regular features and bobbed hair. She used to take us to dinner near her building, in one of those streets perpendicular to Avenue Foch-on the left side of the avenue, facing away from the Arc de Triomphe. And here I am, no longer afraid to provide topographical details. I tell myself that this is all so far in the past that it’s covered by what the law calls amnesty. We would go on foot from her house to the restaurant that winter, a winter that was as harsh as the ones before it, next to which the winters of today seem rather mild; a winter like the ones I knew in the Haute-Savoie

Mike Scott has a song from his early years of TH Waterboys about his girlfriends. This is Modiano’s take on that, Jean. The narrator, as ever, is a thinly veiled Modiano; he, unlike Ernaux, mines his life, but this isn’t auto-fiction. This is Modiano fiction. He rips apart his life almost like Burroughs did with his prose. Modiano cuts out the events of his life, adds themes, and then switches them back together so we have a mysterious collection of Exs. One feels these are maybe exs but made to seem more than they were. As always, parents and the past war years are added. Through a little mystery about death and Paris, we have a Modiano book unique a feeling of over books but unique at the same time. He is the master of the crumbs of our lives. Those polaroids of the mind we all have fade in a way, and the actual taking of the event is lost in time sometimes. I think this is a fitting book to be the 1400 book I have loved the Nopbel prize, I am a huge fan of french fiction and Modiano is a writer I want to read all his books over time to build the full picture of this man and his life. Do you have a writer from whom you want to read all the books?

Winston’s score – A – has set me back into Modiano World, a Paris of the post-war years, remembered in many ways and with many women over time.

 

Living with Our Dead by Delphine Horvilleur

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Living with Our Dead by Delphine Horvilleur

French non-fiction

Original title – Vivre avec nos morts

Translator – Lisa Appignanesi

Source – review copy

I had partly read this when I was sent it. Then, I felt it would be best to put it to one side for Woman in Translation month as there are never that many non-fiction works covered, and this book needs to be better known. Delphine Horvilleur was only the third female Rabbi in France and has been the editor of a popular Jewish magazine for several years.  A leading figure in the Liberal Jewish culture in France. She also became very popular during COVID-19 for her Zoom talks on Jewish texts, which even brought a non-Jewish audience to watch her videos. This book covers her dealing with the funerals, what she knew of the people, and how each person and funeral arrangement differs.

The Hebrew word for cemetery is a priori absurd and paradoxical. It’s beit chaim, the “house of life” or “the house of the living.” This isn’t an attempt to deny death or to conjure it away by erasing it. On the contrary: it’s an attempt to send a clear message to death by placing it outside language. It’s a way of making death know that for all its obvious presence in this place, it is not victorious; even here it will not have the last word.

The Jews understand this verse from the Torah, formulated in the book of Deuteronomy, as a divine injunction:

“I have put before you life and death… Choose life …

(Deuteronomy 30:19) To prove that they apply the commandment to the letter, the Jews invoke it and choose life in all circumstances.

L’Chaim, “To life!” they say each time they raise a glass, thumbing their noses at mortality

About Elsa funeral and the words chosen by Deplhine

She tells us of 11 services that she had been a rabbi and about the people, their families, and how she talked about their lives. I will pick two that really touched me; the first is the second funeral she talks about, and this is of the psychoanalyst of Charlie Hebdo, Elsa, who died in the massacre that happened at the magazine. Of course, the attack itself had to do with religion. This shows how she chooses quotes, and then in the service, a comment made me smile when she was described by a person at the funeral as a secular rabbi, which she takes well. But then, at the end, another person from Charlie Hebdo comes and says he would have her to do his service. I have seen this with a local person who has the talent she seems to have, and that is to connect with people. The second funeral is two funerals, but two people connected by one of the darkest moments. Simone Weil and Marcelina Lordina-Ivens, or as they called themselves, the Birkenau girls, had been in the same carriage to the Birkenau concentration camp. Both after the war wrote about the experiences Simone better known. I haven’t cover her but had reviewed Marcelina book a powerful book the two die with in months of each other when Simone dies she has many famous faces there and there is a line from Marcelina where she said Simone was the most beatuiful birkenau girl. A touching look at two women’s lives that saw the horrors of the world around them. This book is about how you deal with people’s lives, keeping them alive or the spirit alive to those a celebration of someone’s life.

Around us, a few women raised their eyebrows and gave us disapproving looks. I think the Simone within each of them was speaking loudly. Marceline, as ever, pretended not to hear.

At the end of his address, Emmanuel Macron announced that Simone Veil would be buried in the Pantheon. Marceline applauded noisily. “That’s wonderful for her,” she said, before adding, “But I’m warning you, I don’t want to be put in the Pantheon. Boring as hell there.”

Later, at Montparnasse Cemetery, Marceline spoke. She told us how her friend was a “hottie,” the most beautiful of the “Birkenau girls.” Her charm had worked on everyone throughout her whole life. Simone’s sons then recited the Kaddish, together with the two rabbis, a man and a woman, as they had wished, who pronounced the words of the ancestral prayer with them.

“Yitgadal veyitkadash shemei rabba …”

From Simone Veils funeral the comment about her from Marcelina

I said this book needed to be better known as it is a book that isn’t about death but more about how we celebrate those who pass and make them stay alive in those who attend the funeral. I said there was a local humanist preacher. I have been to several funerals where he has spoken about people I have supported or known. He has a great way of gathering information and making those he talks bout come to life. He is brilliant, and this is the sense I got from Delphine. There is a sense of why she is such a well-known Rsabbi in France. The way she talks about the people in the book makes them jump off the page. This book deals with death but makes you, as a reader, see the ghosts of those souls she is talking about. Have you ever been to a funeral and felt the preacher, no matter their religion, has done a great job at celebrating the life of those they are there to talk about?

Winston’s score- Just read it; I won’t score a book like this just feel you should read it!

 

 

Yell,Sam, If you still can by Maylis Besserie

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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.

Alice, The Sausage by Sophie Jabès

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Alice, The Suasage by Sophie Jabès

Italian fiction

Original title – Alice , La Saucisse

Translators – Catherine Petit and Paul Buck

Source – personal copy

Well , I’m a little late with getting off on this year’s Woman in Translation Month reviews. Actually, this is the fourth book I have read, so I have three more to review, I chose this as my first book as I think it is a hidden gem, and I always love the choices Dedalus make as a publisher. They have brought some great gems out in the last few years. We have Sophie Jabes, a French writer born in Italy and has lived in several countries. She has worked in both the US and France. This was her debut work and is one of those stories that is quite unique. This is a book about a woman who takes her own fable-like path after a stray comment from her father.

He remained silent for a while and then, with a suddenness that Alice took for lucidity, he adopted a solemn air that terrified her. He took hold of her hand and squeezed it very hard.

“Women, women, women… My dear, you re not Marilyn Monroe, so remember, you must be nice, very nice to men.”

Alice stared at him, horrified, as if an enormous storm had suddenly unleashed itself inside her head.

“I have to be nice to men?”

“Yes, very nice. If you’re a woman, either you’re beautiful, or you’re nice. You don’t have a choice, you understand?”

“No,” Alice whispered. She was shaking.

“It’s very simple.” He took her hands in his again. “Are you cold?” He rubbed her fingers absentmindedly. “You are not beautiful, so you must be … nice. I can’t find any other word. I mean very nice to men

The comment from her father that changes the course of the book.

 

Alice lives with some nuns. Her father and mother are divorced. Her father now lives with a Croatian woman and visits her infrequently, usually when they meet; she also meets her brother, a blind street artist. She feels the men’s eyes on her as she heads out on the street and feels she is very attractive to men. But there is a stray comment from her father when she meets him, and he has just fallen out with his lover. He tells Alice that she is no Marylin Monroe, so she must be nice to men. She tries to seek solace, but a. conversation with her mother is cut short as her mother is after an Asian man like her father. She is caught up in her own world, not her daughter’s life. This single comment is like a dagger through her heart and how she feels about herself. So the next day, her world is changed, and she seeks comfort, which she finds in food. We get a description of food she starts eating in large amounts, especially an ice cream cornet, which she delights in, as well as the tart and acid of raspberry and lemon ice creams. She then starts to change and put weight on as she sees. Even now, men are looking at her, but she continues to abuse her body.

Alice devoured all voraciously, forgetting for a moment the gaping wound she was dressing with provolone, parmesan and strained ricotta. Nothing satisfied her. Neither the tramezzini with ham, nor those with hard-boiled eggs, nor the slices of bread covered in mascarpone, or Nutella, nor the gnocchi with rosemary, nor those with tomato sauce. Each time she tried a new flavour, she hoped to find an answer to her anguish. Wanting to fill the intense emptiness in her being with penne and pappardelle

Next day she starts her eating and her is some of what see eats.

This is a tale about how we view ourselves and how a single comment can change a person’s life and how they view themselves as people. It has a fable-like description. It is about body image and how it can be twisted. Then there is the toxic nature of her parents toward her as a person. Her sorrow is drawn in the food she eats and the food is so well described the pizza ice creams jumped of the page. There is a hint of her descent into a world of food, the sexual nature of food, and her being caught in a Kafka-like descent into a world controlled by food. I found this a book that leaps off the page as we see Alice, whose body has changed, but in the later stages of the book, is starting to affect her health. A gem of a book, one of those that has a bit of this, and that seems like a book about a girl on the cusp of being a sexual object to men at that start until she is burnt, and she then sees food as her only escape from being nice to men. Have you read this or any other books from the Dedalus short series?

 

French Windows by Antoine Laurain

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French Windows bt Antoine Laurain

French fiction

Original title – Dangereusement douce

Translator – Louise rogers Lalaurie

Source – review copy

I have reviewed seven of the nine books that have come out so far from Antoine Laurain. He is the same age as me. I think that is why I connect with his fiction so well as a reader, as his points of reference are always things I remember. He is a light read. I chose today because I always read a book by him at the weekend. He is a weekend read. In fact, a warm day and an afternoon like this is the perfect time to get lost in one of his books. He mixes writing styles; this has nods toward Hitchcock’s rear window but other things as we meet a photograph that took a picture of a murder and now can’t take any more pictures.

‘You’ve spoken about your professional life, but not your private life.’ It’s a question I hesitate to ask, but it’s a necessary question all the same. Some patients develop an urgent case of verbal diarrhoea when they hear these words. But not here, not now.

All she says in reply is:

“Yes.’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ I ask. But her answer is a reassuring silence. I’m not sure I’m in the best frame of mind for a string of childhood stories, each more sordid than the last.

In truth, analysis is quite boring. Every now and then a patient will stand out from the crowd – gifted, intelligent, succinct in their answers – you can spot them straightaway.

Her frst visit to Dr Faber

Nathalia Guitry is a successful photographer. She lives in an apartment building with five floors, and whilst taking pictures, she sees a murder. This leads her to the door of Dr. Faber for therapy. When he suggests a way to get her mojo for photography back. Why does she not write about her fellow residents? This may explain what happened with the photograph, so we see Nathalia as she returns with a picture of all her fellow residents. Start with the actor come YouTube star. This captures a social infuser well in describing how they became a YouTube star. I loved a part later on a former resident that is in FIFE IN scotland as we see Nathalia paint the life o those around her or does she this is a great question is this the truth is she a reliable narrator? Who is the Japanese woman, and why does she only come home a couple of weeks a year to her apartment? Who is the killer?

‘Hi. Yes, I know where this is — it’s the Lady’s Tower in Elie, Scotland. I punched the name into my search engine straightaway and found more pictures of my tower, together with an explanation of its curious name. I’ll tell you about that later.

Now I’m passing by a tall mill on the edge of Saint Monans, a fishing village with a harbour, and a church that overlooks the sea. I pause to buy a small bottle of water – walking in the wind makes you thirsty. In front of the church, the cemetery’s dishevelled tombstones look as if they’ve been here since the dawn of time. I check my GPS; I’m on the right trail, I’m almost there. Keep to the coast path all the way along. I find a route right beside the water, before climbing up to the heathland once again. The sea is quite rough. I am showered with spray.

I remember walking between Elie and St Monans with my grandfater thirty odd years ago loved this part of the book.

I said I am a fan of his books. This is a great book as it mixes style, part therapy, middle-aged person on the edge, part mystery, then adds the scenes in Scotland as an aside. It is easy to mention books about buildings set in France. Perec jumps to mind, or the Jacobian Building, another around a building with interesting characters. With the murder she saw in the building, it is easy to see the Rear window as an influence, except he has flipped the story as the murder is at the start. But for me, the biggest influence may be Murders in the Building, the Disney comedy-drama that has been running for a few series. It has a murder like this and also quirky people living in the building a nod towards it with social media stars in both stories he has taken all this added a trip to FAife I loved this section talk about Elie where my gran and Aunt used to live. He is great at grabbing a reader for a few hours of wit and capturing Parisian life. Have you ever read any books from him? Do you have a go-to weekend easy-read writer ?

Winston score – A another slice of Laurain wit and Paris as we discover a murder or do we

 

Eastbound by Maylis De Kerangal

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Eastbound by Maylis De Keranngal

French fiction

Orignal title – Tangente ver L’est

Translator Jessica Moore

Source – Personal copy

This was a buy from Alnwick when I went to Barter Books. It had been on my radar since coming out. It is published in the UK by Les Fugitives, but in the US, one of my all-time favourite publishers brought it out, Archipelago Books. But her other books in the UK have been published by Maclehose Press, and I have reviewed two of them and read her short story collection. Maylis De Keranagal is a writer who is great at moments, people and how they interact. What drew me to this it was around a Russian soldier defecting and a French woman with her own story.

Aliocha locks himself in the first toilet cubicle that’s free, washes the blood from his face with plenty of water, examines the marks, makes himself a compress by tearing a length of toilet paper from the huge roll attached to the wall and soaks it in ice-cold water before pressing it to his red profile, his swollen nose. And then, ignoring the insults shouted by people waiting outside, their kicks against the door, he takes his time checking the mirror to make sure his face is slowly regaining its colour and volume.

But his bruises mark him out now as a victim, he knows it, and once he’s out of the toilet he seeks out the shadows, the darkness, and reaches his train carriage by slinking along the walls.

As he tries to find a way out of his military service in the train.

The story follows the Trans Siberian Express as it heads across Russia. On board is a young man, Aliocha, barely out of his teens, who is a conscript with his fellow conscripts on this train to spend time in the military in some far-flung hinterland in Siberia. He has tried to get out of it every way he can.So he is trying to find a way to escape of the train and hopefully find freedom. AS he initially hides in a toilet, he sees a woman unlike any he has seen before. This French woman has an air different to anyone else that he has seen. So he follows her and as he feels the fact he could be found he goes in her compartment and gets her to change her clothes so he can seem different she initially is hesitant but lets this young man and as the train g=cross the land we see Helene’s tale and that like Aliocha is on the run from her own problems a love affair with a man called Anton, the passionate affair started in Paris but as time goes on it has gone wrong hence she is escaping on the train as well. This is a tale of two lost souls, each with a reason to want to be as far away from their own lives as possible, colliding on this train.

THE DOORS slide open behind him. Someone has come into the compartment.

Aliocha turns: the woman who got on in Krasnoyarsk, the foreigner, it’s her. In one hand she holds a glass encased in silver mesh, and in the other, a lit cigarette. She stands in profile at a side window; she, too, is rummaging around in the night, the night that never closes completely here, but stays ambiguous, charged with an electric luminosity that always makes you think day is about to break. Aliocha observes her surrepti-tiously, swivelling his eyes in their sockets without moving his body: she’s smoking, very calm, her face faintly shining. He’s never seen women like her, awake at this time of night and alone on trains transporting troops, women in men’s shirts and big boots, not in Moscow;

Helene catches his eye she is so different than other on the Train

I had heard Mookse’s podcast about Hotel novels. I think this is maybe the next subject they may do about books set in a place as a train journey is such a great setting for a novel as it is always a cross-section of people, and this is so much the case here. How else would a young 20-year Russian conscript want to run away ever meet an attractive middle-aged French woman herself also wanting to escape an event in her life? The parallel in the stories is something she has touched on in other books,. The moment is a turning point in the book Mend the Living and the tale of two people connected by a single heart. This has a turning point of a disaster, whether it is death or her trying to escape her world. Then there is the pace of the book. It has that feeling of the train, and when you are on a long trip on a train, but the near you get to the end, the faster the world seems to go, and this is the case here. We find out the two of them stories and when they meet and he hides the book moves on from that point like an intercity 125 on course as the two of them are  Eastbound on the Trans Siberian Express, but maybe both wanting to be Westbound will the find Aliocha and will Helene escape the boredom of her life with Anton back to the city she loves Paris. Have you read any of her books?

Winstons score – +A a great novella from one of the leading French writers