Tag: french lit

The Witch by Marie Ndiaye

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The Witch by Marie Ndiaye

French fiction

Original title – La Sorcière

Translator  – Jordan Stump

Source – Review copy

I was pleased to see Marie Ndiaye’s name on the longlist when it came out, as I have reviewed three of her other books over the years. She won the Prix Goncourt for her book Three Strong Women in 2009, but it was published 13 years earlier, in 1996.  I’m pleased to see her older books have been coming out. I have a few of hers to catch up on, but this is a book that shows how good a writer she was before the Goncourt win, a book about small-town life with a clever twist.  This is one of two books on the longlist with a witch theme.  This is set in a version of the near past where magic is still alive but hidden.

When we first came to this little city, two years before, I made the mistake of telling Isabelle about my powers, optimistically thinking I might try to initiate her, since after all nothing forbade passing the gift on to women who weren’t my daughters, and because Isabelle seemed a person of some importance who, I thought at the time, 1 wanted on my side. She reigned uncontested over our little sub-division, her authority not founded in any store of objective virtues, for Isabelle was neither pretty nor intelligent, nor hardworking nor thoughtful, nor even subtly and perversely magnetic, but rather (that authority imposed as a historical fact, duly imparted from neighbor to neighbor.

Isabelle and her husband were the first to build here; from that arrival on the still-virgin land at the gates of the city she’d drawn the need to serve in some sense as the memory of us all, we who were appearing from all over the region, and even the country. It was from Isabelle that we learned what had to be known of this or that neighbor’s ways to keep from upsetting the general entente of the neighbor-hood, and should anyone attempt to break off with Isabelle so she wouldn’t come barging in several afternoons a week she made it clear that she would turn the entire subdivision against them with her unscrupulous gift for gossip.

Her powers were small but she told the town gossip

This is a book about family secrets and small towns. It happens that the witch’s nature in the book adds a clever twist. It is about being a mother and a wife in a loveless marriage.  At the heart iof the story is the split between the parents, Lucie and Pierot.  He is very controlling of Lucie. They have twin daughters, Maud and Lise, who are just at the cusp of becoming Teens.  Their mother, Lucie, is from a line of witches, and at this age the girls must discover whether they possess the clairvoyant powers passed down through the family’s female line. Will they bleed tears of blood, a sign you have the power, and will they have it more than their mother, who can only see things in the present moment, not inj the future?  What happens when their powers initially seemed like their mothers’ but over time grow, and the tears come? What happens is a story about secrets, the family’s past, other family members, as their gifts grow over time , and a mother trying to keep it all together. As real life and the surreal world of magic blend into one.

My father opened his big arms wide, and Maud and Lise, delighted by this display, rushed gigglingly toward him. I was surprised to see the gray streaks I knew so well dyed a bluish black that contrasted with his brown hair.

And on top of that he was tanner, thinner, he now had a certain dandyish, youthful elegance, but when, with overplayed enthusiasm, he ordered Maud and Lise to gallop through the rooms—and they launched off with a sound of furious hoofbeatsI saw that he seemed worried and jittery. He grabbed me by the shoulder and, in the tone he probably used to talk business in his Rue de Rivoli of-fice, he beseeched me to return, as quickly as possible, the 120,000 francs hed recently given me on the occasion of his promotion. Then he dropped onto his new couch, red leather, sueded, and added, avoiding my eye:

They Lucie parents as they discover more about the girls powers

I love Ndiaye’s writing style. She has twisty sentences that draw you in as a reader. This is a tale that blends the everyday with the fantastic in a small-town setting. A mother who struggles when her daughters have more power than she does is both a common tale of mothers wanting daughters nearby and a story about daughters having the chance to go further than their mother has because of their powers. It sees what happens when the daughter’s eyes are opened to the full scale of the powers and how it can change their lives, and what about their selfish Father in all this?  I was pleased when this arrived it was the last book I needed when it arrived and the one I most want to read when the short list came out as I am a fan of Ndiaye this is a book from a writer growing not a polished as the other books I have read but they are twenty years older this was her early on in her writing career and great to see a book that mix the everyday and a pinch of magirc realism all that and a tale of a family at a crossroads due to the twins powers and what it means for their mothe Lucie and them themselves!

The Deserters by Mathias Enard

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The Deserters Mathias Enard

French fiction

Original title – Déserter

Translator – Charlotte Mandell

Source – Subscription edition

One of the benefits of having a Fitzcarradlo subscription in recent years has been knowing I may have a couple of books that make the International Booker longlist and are in with a chance at least.  They publish so many great books in Translation.  So when this made the longlist, I was happy as I hadn’t got round to finishing his last novel after reviewing a number of his books.  It was nice to step back into his world, which is uniquely his. Enard has a writing style that is all his own. His books all vary.  Still, they are all well-written in various styles,s and this is an odd little gem.  It turns out this book was being written as the Ukrainian war started, and that led to the second narrative in the book, which follows a deserter from the war.

Angel, my holy guardian, protector of my body and soul, forgive me for all the sins committed on this day and deliver me from the works of the enemy, despite the warmth of the prayer the night remains a beast fed on anguish, a beast with breath of blood, cities in ruins full of mothers brandishing the mutilated corpses of their children faced with scruffy hyenas that will torture them, then leave them naked, dirty, their nipples torn with teeth under the eyes of their brothers raped in turn with trun-cheons, terror stretched over the country, plague, hatred, and darkness, this darkness that always envelops you and urges you towards cowardice and treason. Flight and desertion. How much time is there left to walk? The border is a few days from here, beyond the mountains that will soon become hills of red earth, planted with olive trees. It will be difficult to hide. Many villages, towns, farmers, soldiers, you know the region, you are home here,

no one will help a deserter,

you’ll reach the house in the mountain tomorrow, the cabin, the hovel, you’ll take refuge there for a little while,

There is a poetic touch to the Deserters story

As i said the book has two story lines they are seperate maybe at some point you could say the characters in each book have been in the same place the first story uses a point in history to look back in time that is 9/11 and instead of being inj America it follows an event that is happeniong on that day on a boat in Berlin there is a conferecnce i=on a Mathmatematician Paul Heudeber, One of the think I found is was this a real person it wasn’t but a mix of various figures that had walked a similar path and that was breinbg looked up for being against the  Nazis   Still, with his mind, he was in Buchenwald and opted to head to the east after the war.  We are learning about his life alongside his daughter, who is trying to find out more about her father: he was a mathematician and a poet. She didn’t know himmeanwhile the other story follows an unnamed man that has ruin off from war a deserrter as he finds a woman and a donkey in a hinterland of scrubland the beauty oif this mis the lack of place and time was it a event that has happened ort is going to happen as I say there isn’t much that runs in between the stories just the aftermath of war in different times and places and how it lays bare peoples lifes.

I have to go back over what happened over twenty years ago, on 11 September 2001, near Potsdam on the Havel, on board the cruise boat, a little river liner christened with the fine pompous name Beethoven.

Summer seemed to be wavering. The willows were still green, the days still warm, but a freezing fog would rise from the river before dawn and immense clouds seemed to be gliding over us, from the distant Baltic.

Our floating hotel had left Köpenick east of Berlin very early in the morning, on Monday. Maja was always alert, spry. She would go up to the top deck to walk, a stroll between showers, deck chairs and deck games. The green domes and golden spire of the Berlin cathedral captivated her, from afar, when we arrived. She was imagining, she said, all the little gilt angels leaving their stone prison to fly off into a cloud of acanthus leaves blown by the sun.

The water of the Spree was sometimes a dull, dark blue, sometimes a glowing green. During the preceding weeks, all of Germany had been rocked by storms; their aftermaths swelled the Havel and the Spree, which usually were quite low at summer’s end

We navigated through the swirling water.

the conference on the boat

I am a huge fan of Enarrd.  This book is an odd tale.  It is easy to see, with a panel of judges that includes two Mathematicians, that a book featuring a fictional Mathematician would make the longlist.  But the second narrative inspired by the Ukraine war shows the horror of war on the mind, the need to escape war, the way it affects not just the Soldier but also the woman and her donkey.  People may dislike the lack of detail in the story; in fact, they may think it is l lazyStill, forr me it is a brilliant touch of not placing that narrative in a place or time and thus making the story work now, in fact, with the Iran war, how many men and women are wandering out of the scrublands of Iran, lebabanon or the Gulf states it is weird how a book is maybe more relevant than when the longlist was announced a clever mix of family, war, the horrors of war lose and all this brought together by one of the best living writers Enard. Do you have a favourite book by Enard?

Sad Tiger by Niege Sinno

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Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno

French Memoir

Original title –Triste Tigre

Translator – Natasha Lehrer

Source – Personal copy

I’m not sure why I hadn’t got to this book sooner. I usually keep an eye out for books that have won the major book prizes across Europe as a guide to those that, at some point, we may see in English. Winning one of the various prizes associated with the Prix Goncourt usually means the book will reach us in English, so this book has won not just the Goncourt for books read by high school pupils; it still amazes me what great books have won that prize, and it also won a woman’s book prize in France. The book uses the writer’s own experiences from the age of 7 to 14, when she was repeatedly raped by her stepfather.

You like that? Yes, yes you do, you really like it.

The title is Lolita but Lolita herself is almost entirely absent. You see her through the filter of her predator’s gaze, and she almost never exists as herself; she is the perfect fantasy figure, the nymphet incarnate. At last, at the end of the book, Humbert the dreamer recognizes this. As he sits in the car he has deliberately driven off the road, waiting for the police to pick him up, he has a final epiphany. He recalls the morning when he was driving around the country trying to find the teenage runaway. Lost on a mountain road, he stopped the car. Looking down from the hill to a small town below, sounds floated up toward him like a choir: I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolitas absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

Lolita and her own life shows the darker side of that book

But in writing this book, she wanted it to be more than a book about the rapes. That’s when she was just seven and carried on until her mid-teens, all in a cottage that the family were doing up in the Basque Country.  But what we get is a book that shows the impact of these events on her from her youth through her life. The abuse suffered over those years from her stepfather, a man who loved the music of French rock star  Hailday and played it loudly. I could picture this hippy rocker it brought chills of my own stepfather a man that still had a fifties style rocker hair and would even as I write this sends a shiver down my spine not that I was sexually abused but over the years after my mum has died, I see the sheer mental and trauma he has caused both me my brother and in a lot of ways my mother by his personality and ability to gaskight us all anyway. I was connected to her life and to those men who slowly or violently tear apart lives . How lives get put back together and how books connect us to both our past and to think about how it is a prism to view the past, and here we see the rapes as a child and the impact on her. The book is part literary criticism, part cleansing, part sheer horror.

I remember places. The first place, a bedroom in dark-ness. I am woken by hands on me. Then his voice, when I open my eyes he is speaking in a low voice, he doesn’t stop talking. I don’t want to wake my sister asleep in bed beside me. I was seven when we lived in that apartment. I didn’t understand what was happening, but from the first moment, I sensed it was something serious and terrible. He was talking like a tamer speaks to a gentle but wild horse, one that needs to be held to keep it from getting away. He was talking as if nothing in all this should scare me, and if I was scared it was fine, he was there, he would help me get over my fear. But he, too, was afraid, and the fear enveloped us like a layer of night.

Virginia Woolf, who was abused by her two half-brothers, describes the bizarre experience of those first pawing caresses in an autobiographical piece in which she is trying to find a relationship between her old memories and the way her still-developing personality was being formed: … as I sat there, he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand touched my private parts.

THE first time he touched her  and how similar events effect Virginia Woolf

I read this book in nearly one sitting. The book has an almost-thriller feel and a non-linear way of describing her life, but it is so compelling that you hang on. Every word on the way she talks about the events but also the way she wants this book to be more than just that, as i say it is about the books she loves the title is a nod to the poem of William Blake elsewhere, Lolita is mention her mothers grief for a lost boyfriend that in some way blind her to the events that happened. THE book has other little events though her life, like how she got her name and how unusual it was at the time when most names had tpo be from an approved list of names in France. The book will appeal to fans of the autofiction of Ernaux and Louis. Still, for me, it has something more in common with writers like Kluge and Ester Kinsky, especially in its non-linear, polyphonic narrative style at times. Plus, it is a book I guarantee you won’t want to put down, which sounds so wrong given the subject matter, but it is so well written !!

Have you had a book that has hit you for six, so to speak ?

The Image of Her by Simone de Beauvoir

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The Image of Her by Simone de Beauvoir

French Fiction

Original title – Les Belles Images

Translator – Lauren Elikin

Source – Personal copy

I’m finally back. This may be a shorter blog than usual, as I read this over a month ago and had intended to review it sooner. However, with all that has happened, it’s just lovely to sit back behind the laptop and write a review of a book. This is the second book from de Beauvoir I have reviewed in recent years. This novel is from later in her writing life. It is hard to capture her life in what is usually my brief introduction to the writer. I have read she had such an impact on both French literature and philosophy, and in that very French way, is also tinged with scandal. I think my next book will be from. Her book will be one of the non-fiction books. Have you read her books or this book, even?

Laurence thinks of the king who turned all he touched to gold, even his daughter, who became a resplendent metal doll. Everything she touches turns into an image. Wood panelling: where urban chic meets the poetry of the forest. Through the leaves she glimpses the water, blackly lapping; a boat passes by, searching the banks with its white gaze. Its light splashes on the windows, brutally illuminating the lovers walking arm in arm, a flash of the past for me, just as I am now the tender image of their future, with the children they might guess are asleep in the bedrooms at the back of the flat. Children will feel as though they’ve climbed into a hollow tree, in their delightful bedroom with natural wood panelling.

An idea worth considering.

Lawrence thinking early on in the book a perfect life !

What I loved about this book, even though it was written in the late sixties, is that the narrative and themes of the book are maybe more relevant now than they were when the book was written. The book focuses on Lawrence, a high-flying female ad executive. From the outside, she seems to have it all. Her architect husband, Jean Charles, is perhaps the most modern and shallow, prioritising style over everything. She also has two children. The book has a turning point, and that is when her ten-year-old daughter, Catherine, points out how unfair she feels their world is to others. This then leads Lawrence to question her life and the choices she has made.  Consumerism, climbing the ladder to the perfect life, often comes at the expense of family time and other priorities. As 2e all know, de Beauvoir was a well-known Feminist. This is a book about what it means to be a woman, a mother, successful, and all that entails.

The merciless gaze of children who refuse to play the

game.

  • I help Papa support us. Thanks to me, you can go to school and cure the sick.
  • And Papa?
  • He builds houses for people who need them. That’s also a way of helping them, you see?

(Horrible lie. But what truth can she tell?) Catherine remained bewildered. Why don’t we give everyone food?

Laurence had again asked questions and Catherine ended up talking about the poster. Because it was the most important thing or to hide something else?

Maybe the poster was the real explanation, after all: the power of the image. Two thirds of the world go hungry, and the face of the little boy, so beautiful, with big, big eyes and some terrible secret behind his closed lips. For me it’s a sign: the sign that the struggle against hunger continues. But Catherine sees a little boy of about her age who is hungry.

When Catherine questions her parents world !

 

As I read this book, one of the things that came to mind most was the book “Perfection” I read earlier this year, which featured a couple living the perfect Instagram life in the 1960s, wanting to be on the pages of the French interior magazine that was the vogue at the time. What difference do children make to this ideal picture, and also when, like Her daughter Catherine, they ask about the world as they question the unfairness in it? Especially now, as the divide in our society continues to grow year after year. We need books like this to be read, reminding us of the class divide at that time. However, this is also a feminist book about the female role in society, and that has significantly changed since the book was written. A high-flying woman like Lawrence would have been rare to know, but it is now much more common. Any, this is a book about the early years of consumerism and can still be read as a question about the perfect life. As I say, it had parallels to Perfection in that regard, but actually followed a different way of looking at breaking the cycle of the ideal life. Have you read either book?

 

The Collection by Nina Leger

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The Collection by Nina Leger

French fiction

Original title – Mise en Pièces

Translator – Laura Francis

Source – Library

I was planning to review another book today, but I picked this up last night and read it in an evening. At the start of this year, Women in Translation month, I visited the library and found a few books that I had maybe missed over the last while, and this was one of them. I think I may have seen this when it came out about six years ago, but it was one I never got to iut was the second novel by the writer, and it won the Anaïs Nin prize.In an interview, I read an interview with her, and she said she had written the book to subvert the male gaze to a female gaze of the geography of Paris. We follow Jeanne and her quests around Paris. She has taught novel writing as well.

Drowsiness, tender and shadowy folds, abandonment to torpor. Dilation, rising, elastic rigidity, too narrow in form to contain the new mass, compressed, veins protruding.

Jeanne maintains utmost concentration.

Her gestures are slow, diligent. She passes the penis between her fingers, into her mouth, presses it against her face. She examines it, occasionally putting it to her ear to listen to the blood beating, follows the curve of the head with her thumb, feels for the slit which drinks up her saliva.

She isolates the penis between her two cupped hands, excludes the body, and fixates upon the mobility of the organ that gradually fills the space. The furniture dimin-ishes, the details blanch out. She remains alone with the penis which she has made her own. Even her own body has lost substance.

One of the numerous meets this early on in the book

Now Jeannequest is a woman who likes men, and the book follows her with her numerous encounters with men. But also her view of the various men’s penis and the way they make love. I don’t know Paris well enough to grasp the travelling around, but she seems to make arrangements to meet and just have sex with these men, and the book is complete with how she positions her body in the sexual conquests. She is a woman who seems to rule over the men, and as we drift from the various hotel rooms, they end up in or even more or less discrete situations. Even on a trip abroad, she has sex. Burt, with her added commentary on the various men’s parts and the multiple shapes and sizes they come in. I laughed as the cover art is mushrooms of various size and shapes a sort of sneaky wink to the penises within the book!

It is in hotels that Jeanne finds the necessary elements to furnish her palace. She appropriated a doormat and some candlesticks from the Hôtel Saint-Pierre, net curtains from Timhotel, bedspreads from the Hôtel du Delta and the Hôtel Cambrai, some obsolete ashtrays and two bedside lamps from the Hôtel de Nice. The palace is an exquisite cadaver of the Parisian hotel trade.

Jeanne passes through her domain in the evening, at bedtime, in the morning, upon waking; she roams around it between appointments, in the midst of loud dinners where conversations stream out without spilling a drop onto her, in the crystalline sharpness of the beauty counters in department stores, under the halogen bulbs of waiting rooms.

Sometimes, she interacts at length with a particular penis. Attentive to the fidelity of the memory, she approaches, observes, drinks in the details. Hours pass in slow meanderings and interminable pauses until she leaves the room, reluctantly, careful not to disturb the stillness of the forms.

Some of the hotel next I am in Paris I will see these hotels and think of this book

I think this is an excellent book as it is a very positive view of a female that would otherwise be looked down on by a male writer or made to seem a real man if she were a male bed jumping. She has changed the sort of sexual dynamic, and the men she is sleeping with get described like I have seen many a woman years ago when I used to read people like Roth, etc. But this has that French sort of normality to the numerous sexual acts. This is what would happen if Anne Eernaux were sex mad and sleeping with lots of men. Add to that the way she captures the male penis in it, in many strange and different styles, and how each one in her own way makes Jeanne approach in a certain way, it is like a guide of how she tackled these men and the style and techniques she used. The various rooms and types of men she met all this as she criss-crossed Paris to meet in various Hotels. Have you read any of her books?

The Child Who by Jeanne Benameur

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The Child Who by Jeanne Benameur

French fiction

Original title – L’Enfant qui,

Translator  Bill Johnson

Source – personal copy

I picked this up earlier in the year when I went to Cambridge for a holiday. I picked it up because Le Fugitives has been one of my favourite publishers over the last few years; they have been bringing out some excellent female writing, initially from French authors, but I know they are now also bringing out English writers. Jeanne Benameur was a French professor before becoming a full-time writer. She has written both for adults and children. She also runs writing workshops in prisons, as her father was also involved in the prison service. She also works with children in distress, and that has fueled her literature. I obtained a lot of this information from her French Wikipedia page, which connects with the book, which is about a small boy who has lost his mother, father, and grandmother.

You’re running. You’re running. So no eyes should have the time to see you, so your face should not be captured by anyone’s gaze. How long has it been since your mother’s eyes last rested on you?

How long since there’s been no mother?

The calendar counts in days in months in years. But you, you don’t know. You live with only darker moments and brighter moments. In your head, time finds room for itself where it can, the way that space threads its way among the trees in the woods.

Sometimes you lose your mother’s face. You haven’t yet learned to find it in a faraway icon, near a blue blue sea, looking up tenderly in a painting of the Italian Renaissance. You’re thrown into a panic. I hear your breathing. It bumps up against something hard in your chest. You run you struggle against the hard thing in there, a rock. Between your ribs the air is constricted, it whistles. At such times you feel you’re still alive. From the pain.

In the woods away from the pain

This is a book that looks in on these characters and how they deal, or in the most part don’t deal, with the loss of a daughter, a wife and a mother. IT is mainly about the small boy, there are a few names and little place names or the time when the events are happening, but for me, that means it can be any time, and makes it feel like a tale for all. The small boy likes to wander off to the woods, and he walks with a dog. Is it a dog or an imaginary friend he has made? Maybe it is his mother, my Amanda always says robins are my mum visiting me when we see them ,checking in on me. A father who has moved on, the mother was a sort of ghost in their lives. The way she is described evokes the kind of things that evoke a person’s past, as well as a place, a time, etc. The mother is never fully present, but her spirit is. The boy struggles. I loved him early on as he was off, and his grandmother turned, expecting him to be just by her elbow, but he was gone. I think this is a book that touches the silence of death and tries to bring words to it.

The dog is trotting next to you. No one aside from you can see it, this dog.But you don’t know that. Its presence by your side sets my mind at ease. It’s strong, and can smell things that you can’t see.You can push ahead with your journey. Your woollen top always hangs down on one side, you’ve buttoned Monday with Tuesday, your grandmother says.You don’t entirely understand what that means. It’s just that the days no longer know how to follow one another.You’re a child who leans. The dog restores the balance.

At times a burst of joy moves through you. You don’t know where it comes from.It’s the morning lark that finds its rising flight in you. From your feet to your head and much higher than your head, an irrepressible surge lifts you up. There’s no reason for the joy. It carries you. And you move forwards.

In the wooods with the dog but it captures as I said silence in this world

I can see how the things she has done around her writing in prisons with distressed children have given her a real insight into how to make silence fly off the pages in words, something that is hard to grasp. But she also captures how we may remember someone who was never fully present; that spirit of the mother is still with me. I wonder if the dog was hers or just a way for the boy to be in silence and not always feel alone, if that makes sense. This book brings me to book 179 in my review of 200 French books, and it’s from one of the publishers that I feel has brought some of the strongest female voices to us from France. Do you have a favourite book from French? Favourite publisher that has brought out French books?

Just a little dinner by Cecile Tlili

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Just a little dinner by CécileTlili

French fiction

Orignal title – Un simple Dîner

Translator – Katherine Gregor

Source – Subscription copy

If you haven’t been following the blog for a while, you may not know that I am a keen fan of the new publisher, Foundry editions that have been bringing us a great selection of books from around the med and they all have a blue cover design with a motif in the design linked to the place the book is set this time it is Paris. This was the writer’s Debut novel and was shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize in the section for Debut novels. There was a review of this book in The Times, which is great to see a small publisher getting coverage in a significant newspaper rather than the same few books that every paper, reviewer, and so on, has to discuss. But the reviewer mentions a connection between friends for them and this book. Well, for me, the mention of a dinner party brings back one memory, and that is the closed room drama that is Abigail’s party. Well, this isn’t quite as brutal as that, but as the reflection of Britain in the seventies, one could say this dinner party and its guests reflect the Paris of their day.

Johar walks in the twilight. She asked her driver to drop her off a few blocks away from Étienne’s building. She needs some air before getting cooped up for the evening. She walks slowly, in no rush to arrive at this dinner party she wasn’t expecting and is already finding annoying. She takes her time to inhale the heavy scent of this summer evening.

The avenues here are wide. There are windows with striped awnings swaying gently in the breeze. The rustling of the trees accompanies her footsteps and their canopy forms a protective arch above her head.

Here she is already on Boulevard Raspail, outside Étienne’s building. She sits on a bench and takes a deep breath. A few swathes of grey have appeared in the sky.

Gusts of wind toy with the dry leaves, warm blasts of air hitting her in the face. A thunderstorm is badly needed to break this late-August mugginess at last and wash away the day’s sweat and weariness.

As Johar heads to the dinner this sticky evening how will it end !

The dinner brings together two couples: Claudia, the hostess of the party, a timid young woman who is very nervous about the evening, and her partner. She is a physiotherapist. She has settled into a way of life, the way it is and isn’t ambitious. Her husband, Etienne, has invited Johar, a woman in the business world, driven and fast-rising, who is soon to be the big boss of the company where he works. In turn, Johar has brought her husband, Remi. But as they gather around the table, the course of the evening will see the two women reevaluate their lives as they all have secrets about what the evening is all about, with Johar turning a blind eye to her home life in a way. Is Claudia pregnant? How will the evening end? The tension is there as we see how each person has a reason for the evening being there or not wanting to be their, daydreaming about another woman.

Étienne won’t stop talking about pottery. Johar was hoping that her interest in the pomegranates would create a diver-sion, but he has gleefully grabbed this opportunity to describe his tastes, his travels, and his encounters. As usual, Étienne talks about himself. He briefly goes into the dining room, but before Johar can enjoy a minute of peace, he returns, carrying a vase with a delicate blue pattern.

“Here, look. Hold it. Does it remind you of anything?”

“No. I don’t know. Did it use to be on this mantelpiece?”

“No, no – I mean the pattern. Surely you recognise it?” Johar mechanically runs her fingers over the vase, following the geometrical outline of the turquoise stars. Étienne can’t contain himself any longer. “Nabeul. It’s pottery from Nabeul.”

Think we’ve all had a situation where we get drawn into talking about something else !!

This is a book about how we sometimes fail to express ourselves enough until it is too late, and how modern relationships have evolved. As I mentioned, this is a portrayal of 21st-century Paris and urban life through the lives of these four characters. Just as Abigail’s party captured the spirit of the seventies dinner party, it also explores how men and women interacted in the seventies. Each time I read a dinner party from the formal affairs in Waugh’s books to the post-war dinner parties of writers like Updike and Bellow in the US of those boom years. Through Abigail’s PART Y AND THINGS LIKE friends to a 21st century Paris, and four people with different agendas for the evening, and what is going to happen. This is a tight work that builds well into the evening, reflecting each character’s actions, feelings, and motivations, as well as what they are trying to achieve or hide. Ultimately, it is Etienne who brings the two couples together. It captures this generation’s view of dinner parties and how they interact, as well as their lives. Do you have a favourite book with a dinner party?

 

The Possession by Annie Ernaux

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The Possession by Annie Ernaux

French Fiction

Original title –  L’Occupation

Translator – Anna Moschovakis

Source – Subscription edition

This is the seventh book from Ernaux I have reviewed over the years the first 11 years ago in 2014 and by now her books to me have become like a letter from an old friend telling another snippet of there life over the years like a glimpse into her world every few months over the last 11 years. I plan to read all the other books I haven’t read over the years. But each is another picture of her fictional real life. Another view into her interesting personal life. Her personal life always seems a lot more colourful than my settled-down routine life, much the same as most people’s. She is that friend we all had with a life that looks pretty different from ours. I have never quite gone as far down the path of jealousy as she has in this book, which is a very slim novella, which sometimes has the feel of a detective novel without a crime, as she pieces together the picture of this unknown woman.

And yet I was the one who had left W, several months earlier, after six years together – as much out of boredom as from an inability to give up my freedom, reclaimed after eighteen years of marriage, for the shared life he so strongly desired from the start. We continued to talk on the phone; we saw each other from time to time. He called me one evening, told me he was moving out of his stu-dio, he was going to be living with a woman. From then on there would be rules about calling each other (only on his mobile phone) and about seeing each other (no nights or weekends). I was gripped by a sense of disaster, out of which something else emerged. At that moment, the existence of this other woman took hold of me. All of my thoughts passed through her.

She had ended the relationship

SO, a few months before the story opened, she had finished with a man she had seen for six years, merely called W. The two seemed like they were at different points in their respective lives when they met. Ernaux was shortly out of her 18-year marriage, and W was a man who wanted to settle down with her it seems like they had grown used to one another after these six years, and she described their relationship as boring. So they remain friends, frequently talking and meeting. So when a new woman appears in W’s life. He tells her very few details; the rest of the book is haunted at times, but also, like I said at the start, this book has the feel of a detective novel. As she wants to know more about this new wom an in his bed does she grab his cock the way she did. What is her Job? How old his she? All these breadcrumbs fall off the plate as she builds a picture of her. Is she near when she walks near where she lives? Is that here with similar hair on the metro she sees? The book sees how regret, obsession, jealousy, and wanting to know who had replaced her position in W’s affection.

When for some reason I had to go into the Latin Quarter – the part of Paris, other than the avenue Rapp, where I ran the highest risk of running into him in the company of the other woman – I had the uncanny feeling that I was in a hostile environment, being watched from all sides. It was as if, in this neighbourhood which I had filled with the other woman’s existence, there was no room left for my own. I felt like a fraud – to walk down the boulevard Saint Michel or the rue Saint Jacques, even when I had good reason to, was to expose my desire to run into them. With its vast, accusatory gaze bearing down on me, all of Paris punished me for this desire.

As she views the places in Paris she could be and live!

I loved this slim book;, it is a perfect slice of her life. The book’s kernel is the story of this obsession with wanting to know who this woman is. But the way it is written grips you as a reader; you wonder what she will do next and how far this obsession with this woman will take her! I know it is easy to find out who it is, but for me, the beauty of this is the lack of who they are; the more they are a pen picture of an ex-lover or his new lover, the other woman. What happens when she end the relationship sand soon after this woman now has access to his cock not her like she once did this forty year old woman with her long hair becomes a faceless ghost in the book for us as the reader but also for Ernaux as she flesh out a woman she never really want to met maybe the writing of this book was her way of cleansing her soul of it all! I think this is one of my favourites. Books from her it is just perfect, a little insight, a small gem of a book. Do you have a favourite book by her?

Winter Mythologies and Abbots by Pierre Michon

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Winter Mythologies and Abbots by Pierre Michon

French fiction

Orignal title – mythologies d’hiver  and Abbés

Trans;lator Ann Jefferson

Source – Personal copy

I read a number of years ago The Eleven by Michon. He is considered one of the leading writers in the French literary scene. His book Small Lives is regarded as a masterpiece. He is known for his short style of vignettes. This collection consists of two of his French books that have been put together. He has been compared to Borges and is one of those writers who should be better known. He has had many of his books translated into English, but he isn’t one of those names you see when people talk about great French writers. I loved these two books. You can see his love of history, but also how he reframes it through his own prose style.

They take communion in their white robes. Leary is there, wavering. He has combed his beard and donned his fur-lined cloak. They kneel, Patrick stands very tall above them, they receive the body of the Bridegroom from his hand. They are now in His presence, although He remains hidden. They have closed their eyes. Opening them, Brigid sees only the impassive face of the king. It is over. They step out into the May sunlight, and in the sunshine, one after the other, they fall to the ground: one on the steps, one on the path, and Brigid beside the rose-bush. One has her head in her arm, one in the dust of the track, Brigid is turned toward the sky, her eyes wide open. They are impeccably dead. They are contemplating the face of God.

The last lines of the first story Brigid’s Fervor

The first collection has the first three stories about Irish Christian history retold. The first tale is  Brigid Fervor. The first story is the tale of one of the tribal leaders in early Christian times converting to Christianity. AS there is much violence, he wants to see the god of Brigid face to face. I was reminded of when I was young at my grand house, there was a book of Irish mythology. They were all a little like these three tales, the second is connected to St. Columbkill, a saint who was one of the early figures in Irish Christianity and was buried in Iona and connected to Donegal, where I spent a number of childhood holidays. The second collection, Abbots, is the tale of three monasteries and the head abbots and the history of these monasteries told; he has made these men of religion all the more human with their many flaws and sins in the tales.

All winter long on horseback he raises his warriors, forty decades of young men in Drumlane, twelve decades in Kells, thirty in Derry. At the feasts of alliance, when he is drunk and weary, he pictures the incalculable blue that seems to rise from David’s harp. He is happy; he sings to himself the refrains from the psalms. In the spring all the O’Neills are under arms. He hurries to Moville with long day-marches and six hundred horse. Diarmait is waiting for him with a thousand horse in the bog of Culdreihmne beneath a clearing sky. Columbkill kneels down: he prays for Faustus, who is in heaven, the blue place which awaits us and favors us. He wants to laugh. He gets to his feet; they draw their swords. On the dark and slippery way they merge and set about each other; many young men are laid in the byre of death. At noon Diarmait lies in the marsh with a thousand horses, you cannot see them because it’s raining much harder now, but you can hear them dying and you can hear the crows cawing with delight. Covered in blood and mire, laughing and drunk, Columbkill takes forty horses and gallops flat-out to Moville

I connect with this tale most as my family has a history going back to the 16th Century connected to Derry

I loved the first three tales in this book. I sometimes struggle with historical fiction where I don’t know much about the history. Unfortunately, with trying to read several books from my TBR this month, I didn’t have time to look into all the history in the tales set in France, which I may later go back and learn more about. I loved the Irish stories at the start as they were bits of history I vaguely knew or had read similar tales over time, or had been to some of the old sites around Ireland when I was younger. He has a great way of telling historical events and gripping modern readers. I have two more books from Michon on my shelves to read, including his master piece Small Lives. He is a writer I want to read more from, so I won’t wait as long between his books this time. Have you read Michon?

A leopard skin Hat by Anne Serre

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A Leopard skin hat by Anne Serre

French fiction

Orignal title – Un chapeau léopard

Translator Mark Hutchinson

Source – Personal copy

Now of all the books that came out on the longlistt this year this writer is on my list of french writers to get to I had want to get the couple of earlier books that came out from another press by her but hadn’t got around to it so she her on this list is good as she is a writer that maybe needs a high profiler in English. There is a great LRB bookshop interview with her when this book came out. It makes you want to read her other books and see what an inventive writer she is. She is well known for her excellent choice of first lines. She also mentioned that the narrator in this book has cropped up in other books she has written. The book is in part about her sister.

Hardest of all for her friend the Narrator was Fanny’s astonishment – a perpetual, dumbstruck amazement, littered with question marks – at the lack of response that was her lot. That was why, on the rare occasions when she did fight back and flew into a terrible rage – even with the Narrator sometimes – he always felt relieved. There you are, there was life, there was frenzy, the desire to do battle! It was a sign she was rallying her forces, was about to march on the enemy and slay him perhaps – perhaps even slash him to ribbons, since the violence of these sudden outbursts seemed to know no bounds. They could last for days, weeks even. He can still see her, teeth clenched, seated beneath the trees in a park reading, glancing up to find her old friend there, happening by, and the look in her eyes, the language she had used to shoo him away. Had Fanny been armed she would probably have killed him that day. But sadly she had a loyal heart and would sit in judgment on herself.

Fanny could be very dangerous at times

The book is a two-hander about two friends. The book’s narrator is a man in his mid-forties who has been friends with Fanny for many years. Fanny is a woman that has some apparent issues The title of the book comes from when she steals a leopard skin hat and is so proud of stealing an item that no one really wears these days, She is the sort of person that has no idea of what to wear for the season is very unpredictable in how she interacts with people and seems to be the sort of friend that follows the others around her in the career paths. There is hints at some sort of mental illness or even neurodiverget condition but also a little of both. The book is formed of glimpses of the pair through the years, a life that, although bright, is very flawed and like a moth to likely to fly into the flame as Fanny does in her own way.

FANNY AND THE NARRATOR had been close friends since childhood, but within that friendship roles that would normally shift about and change had been frozen for years now, and that wasn’t good. Nor did it bode well. The Narrator was stuck in the role of the watchful friend, steadfast and reliable, Fanny of the one who strays, is forever losing things – possessions, lodgings, friends – and only with the greatest difficulty manages to maintain a semblance of stability. He would have liked to have broken out of this box, not because he wished to fall apart in turn, but so that his friend could play the role of the steadfast, reliable one for a change.They could manage this for a minute or two, but not much more. For though Fanny liked to poke fun, and cruelly at times, at the Narrator’s chronic good health, she couldn’t stand him being weak. It would have been too much of an upheaval in the order of things.

The narrator and Fanny have been very close over the years

It is strange that I chose this as the second book for this year as it has little in common with the first book. Both are takes on AUto fiction without being strict auto fiction. Both have a relative with a mental illness and flawed relationships. This is a story of a woman that has an obvious opinion. It is never quite pinpointed, and given that it was written nearly twenty years ago, it is excellent as to how we view mental illness, which has moved on so much in the last decade or two. What we get is a friendship down the years told in snippets as we see how Fanny copes with the world but also can be wild and free in many ways. The book is an ode to a sister. Like Fanny, the narrator is a man, but the book also has a thinly veiled version of the writer herself coping with her own past.  Serre has described writing each book as a chess game where each game takes its won course, and her books take their won course. Have you read any of her other books? If so, which would you tell me to get next? I hadn’t heard of the translator, but he had been a close friend of Serre for forty years and knows her well.

 

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!

 

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 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?