Tag: Prix Goncourt Roman

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?

 

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.

What became of the white savage by François Garde

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What became of the white savage by François Garde

French fiction

Original title –  Ce qu’il advint du sauvage blanc

translator – Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Source – Prize winner

 

In eighteen hundred and forty-six
On March the eighteenth day
We hoisted our colors to the top of the mast
And for Greenland sailed away, brave boys
And for Greenland sailed away

The lookout in the crosstrees stood
With spyglass in his hand
There’s a whale, there’s a whale
And a whalefish he cried
And she blows at every span, brave boys
She blows at every span

The captain stood on the quarter deck
The ice was in his eye
Overhaul, overhaul! Let your gibsheets fall
And you’ll put your boats to sea, brave boys
And you’ll put your boats to sea

I choose a Pogues song about Whalers in the 1800’s seemed fitting to this book .

This was a lucky win for the French inisitute on their facebook page , which ask for comments on the cover , I put this is what happens when you fall asleep and leave the pens out for the kids , which won me this book . The book is a prize winning French novel it won the Prix Goncourt Roman , which is the section of the french prize that is awarded to the best first novel . This is The first Novel by Francois Garde , he worked as a senior civil servant for many year in the french overseas territories in Pacific and Indian oceans .

When he reached the top of the small cliff he realised that he was alone . There was no sign of the dinghy drawn up on the beach , no sign of a boat floating on the blue-green water . The schooner lying at anchor in the entrance to the bay was nowhere to be seen , no sails visible on the horizon . He closed this eyes , shook his head .Nothing they had left .

The opening as he sees he is all alone .

This like an earlier Goncourt Roman winner I reviewed HHhH is a novel based on a historic event .This is the true life story of  Narcisse Pelletier a young French sailor who in the 1840 was apart of a french ship that left him behind and was shipwreck in the far reaches of Australia .He is lucky to have been found by a tribe of Aboriginals whom adopt him after he removes his clothes and they see he is a man just like them  . The  story starts when he is discovered after seventeen years in the wild and taken under the wing of a French geographer whom brings the young man named the White savage because of the way he looks .On the way back to France the two men try to discover what happened to Pelletirer , who he is where the rest of the crew are and what he has done for the last seventeen years .

“He belongs to neither the black nor the yellow races . This is evident from the colour of his skin , his build and the texture of his hair . Nor is he of the semitic races this can be seen from his high forehead , straight nose , straight brown hair and full beard . I must also point out that he is circumcised , not in the way that Jews and muslims are , but rather in the manner of the natives of this country .

Narcisse when he is first found is a mystery where did this White savage come from .

To be truthful I hadn’t heard of Narcisse Pelletier or his story before this book . But have always been a fan of Robinsonade  books like The island before tomorrow  , pincher martin or even my childhood favourite Abels island , books inspired or similar by Robinson Crusoe .This in a way is the flip of that story when Crusoe tamed the savage , This sees the white man go native to survive another reason I love these stories is traveling up every year to my grans we passed through the village of lower Largo the home of Alexander Selkirk , whom many thinks was the role model for Robinson Crusoe after he spent five years on an island of the coast of Chile . If you like a novel with a lump of true life this is the one for you as the story unfolds from the two mens points of view , Narcisse telling his story and Octave the geographer telling the story of the journey back via a collection of letters . A book about who we really are where we from or where we have grown !

Have you a favourite novel from the Robinsonade Genre ?