A grim story of a forgotten part of World War I: African soldiers from European colonies in Africa drafted by the colonial powers to fight in the trenA grim story of a forgotten part of World War I: African soldiers from European colonies in Africa drafted by the colonial powers to fight in the trenches in Europe. We follow the main character, a Senegalese man named Alfa who has a traumatic experience. He has a cousin drafted with him fighting beside him who was like a brother to him as they grew up together in Africa. His friend is severely wounded in battle and Alfa watches him die in agony. The cousin begs Alfa to kill him but he can't do it.
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After that experience, Alfa becomes a killer sneaking behind the lines at night and killing enemy sentries. He disembowels them and when they beg to be killed he indeed kills them. He brings back their rifles and their severed hand to show off his prowess to the amazement of his comrades and his white officers.
His exploits become legendary but both the Black troops and white officers become scared of him and start thinking that there's some kind of evil or satanic influence going on with him. After the seventh hand the officers send him on leave behind the lines to a psychiatric hospital. He starts falling in love with his white doctor’s daughter. And what has happened to his collection of hands? (view spoiler)[ Eventually he rapes and kills the young woman and he comes to believe that his dead cousin is now inhabiting his body. (hide spoiler)]
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It's a brief book, only 140 pages. It kept my interest but it's pretty much straightforward writing and, as I say, grim although not with too much gore considering the theme.
At Night All Blood is Black won the 2021 International Booker prize, an award for translated books. (This book was translated from the French). The novel was also included on various best book lists by the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and NPR.
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The author did a kind of reverse migration. He was born in Paris to a French mother and a Senegalese father. At age 5 the family moved to Africa, to Senegal, where he was raised until he returned to France to go to college. He's currently a professor of literature at a university in France.
Top photo of Senegalese soldiers fighting for France from encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net Senegal, capital Dakar, is a former French colony at the westernmost tip of North Africa. Map from Britannica.com The author from theguardian.com ...more
A man named Clamence spent much of his life as a lawyer in Paris working on behalf of ‘widows and orphans.’ He was the type of guy who helped blind meA man named Clamence spent much of his life as a lawyer in Paris working on behalf of ‘widows and orphans.’ He was the type of guy who helped blind men cross the street. He believed in “… rising to that supreme summit where virtue is its own reward.” One day though, he fails to react when he is crossing a bridge at night and hears a young woman throw herself into the water. She apparently drowned. Why didn’t he react?
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We learn about Clamence’s life from conversations in an Amsterdam bar between him and a stranger. The ‘action’ takes place in what was a real bar called Mexico City. “Have you noticed that Amsterdam's concentric canals resemble the circles of hell?” Supposedly that’s why Camus chose Amsterdam as the setting for this novel.
The sleazy bar in the red light district forms the innermost circle for Clamence’s new life, one of dissipation. The Holocaust is mentioned in the story and what is now the red light district was in the Jewish Quarter before WW II. (The book was published in 1956, the year before he won the Nobel Prize and three years before his death in an auto accident.)
The main character becomes more dissatisfied with some other major events in his life. He asks himself later, when the blind man thanked me for helping him cross the street, why did I doff my hat to him? He couldn’t see me do that. Clamence now feels the answer is that he wanted public acclaim for his good actions and that they were all self-centered. More things happen. (view spoiler)[ He has an altercation with a motorcyclist; he stores a stolen painting in his apartment; he goes to North Africa with a dream of fighting in the French Resistance but fails to do so. (hide spoiler)]
Here are some quotes:
“I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers, After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.”
“People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.”
“Moreover, we cannot assert the innocence of anyone, whereas we can state with certainty the guilt of all.”
“I didn't know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift... It's a chore, on the contrary, and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.”
Camus was famous for his existentialist writings. A lot of this comes across as cynicism but it looks like he is exploring the good and evil dual nature of us humans. Other novels I’ve read by Camus include The First Man, The Plague and The Stranger.
Image: A map of Amsterdam’s canals from amsterdamguiden.nu ...more
I guess I'll call this book an ode to consciousness. It's the true experience of the French author who suffered a stroke in 1995 that left him completI guess I'll call this book an ode to consciousness. It's the true experience of the French author who suffered a stroke in 1995 that left him completely paralyzed and reliant on a food tube. He refers to his condition as “locked-in syndrome.” He had been the editor of Elle magazine. He developed a way to communicate by blinking his left eye and managed to dictate this book which was published two days before he died in 1996. The blurbs say the book became a bestseller across Europe.
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I certainly admire the author for his ability to communicate and I sympathize with him when I think of how terrible his condition was. Imagine how much effort it took to communicate by blinking one eye. He seldom expressed anger except when he heard in the distance someone refer to him as ‘a vegetable.’ He reviews major events in his life for the reader and relates dreams and daydreams, understandably, many involving a lot of physical action.
Here are a couple of quotes I found insightful:
When he was wheeled daily to the physical therapy room, he writes of the patients: “Lined up like a row of onions, this human throng waves arms and legs under minimal supervision, while I lie tethered to an inclined board that is slowly raised to a vertical position. Every morning I spend half an hour suspended this way…people laugh, joke, call out. I would like to be part of all this hilarity, but as soon as I direct my one eye toward them [they feel] the sudden need to study the ceiling smoke detector.”
“Today is Father's Day. Until my stroke, we had felt no need to fit this made-up holiday into our emotional calendar. But today we spend the whole of the symbolic day together, affirming that even a rough sketch, a shadow, a tiny fragment of a dad is still a dad. I am torn between joy at seeing them living, moving, laughing, or crying for a few hours, and fear that the sight of all these sufferings - beginning with mine - is not the ideal entertainment for a boy of ten and his eight-year-old sister. However, we have made the wise collective decision not to sugarcoat anything.”
It's a short book of 130 pages made up of very short chapters. The first third or so I found slow-going, mostly a recounting of his conditions in the hospital. I considered giving it up, but I kept going. The writing is matter-of-fact with occasional twists of humor.
Photo from Wikipedia of the author dictating this book by blinking his eye....more
My second novel by this French author. It’s noir, and Stephen King-ish. The plot is based on a very odd kind of revenge. A married couple knew they weMy second novel by this French author. It’s noir, and Stephen King-ish. The plot is based on a very odd kind of revenge. A married couple knew they weren’t getting along and that it would end. Then the wife dies in a car crash which leads the husband to realize she had a lover. That leads the widower to stalk and seek revenge on his wife’s lover’s widow. The widow has a ‘protector’ – a female friend the main character has to get around.
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Yes, an odd premise and you know in advance (if you’ve read any other Garniers) that there will be an eruption of violence.
I liked the writing and I’ll give a few quotes:
“He knew that his father would never talk to him for the very good reason that he had nothing to say, and that was just fine. Fabien was the child of two phantoms, with the absence of one and the silence of the other providing his only experience of family.”
“There was something oppressive in the air, like when the metro stopped between stations.”
“He and Madeline detested each other, and Martine had served to give new vigor to a hatred that was dying down and which they could not live without.”
“Martine had become beautiful, in the way of women who are not used to being so.”
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The author (1949-2010) wrote a dozen psycho-thrillers like this one, as well as collections of short stories, and – oddly – children’s books. Most of his book are short - 140 pages or so - almost novellas. His writing has been compared to Stephen King and to the romans noirs by Georges Simenon. He’s not one to read to get local color or a sense of place. I also read by him The Islanders: Shocking, hilarious and poignant noir
Top photo of the Ardeche, the rugged, mountainous rural region of southeastern France where the author lived. The author from theguardian.co.uk ...more
Our main character is a young French man, so bright he doesn't make friends with the other boys. He tells us several times how easy and quick school wOur main character is a young French man, so bright he doesn't make friends with the other boys. He tells us several times how easy and quick school work is for him. Eventually he does make friends with another bright boy and they become snobs, looking down on the others. He’s sexually precocious and becomes a little Don Juan at an early age.
When he’s 16 he becomes friendly with an older woman (19 years old). He follows her around, even helping her pick out her wedding trousseau and furniture for her upcoming marriage. It’s 1918, wartime. She and her husband have a quick marriage before he is sent to the front during World War I. [image] (Photo of the author, left, and Jean Cocteau from theparisreview.org)
I should say SPOILERS FOLLOW in the next three paragraphs, but I encourage you to read again further down about the story of the publication of the novel.
His parents, especially his father, are too lenient with him. They let him drop out of school and study at home by himself. This gives him the freedom to tom-cat around. His parents don't drill him on his obvious lies. They know there's something going on and even when they find out they let him carry on. His father is okay with him having sexual experiences; his mother is not but she mainly worries about gossip.
The married woman falls harder for him than he does for her. She doesn't want to be bothered with her distant husband but he makes her write letters to him that he dictates, mainly because the young boy is worried that her terseness might drive him to suicide.
Then her husband is injured and comes to the home front but he has to stay in a distant hospital. She's pregnant. Who's child is it? We read about “…the situation of a boy coming to grips with a man's adventures.” She says “I would rather be unhappy with you than happy with him.”
It's not just sex; they genuinely love each other. With the boy’s obvious brilliance, he experienced not just puppy love but adult love. He writes about morality and jealousy. Here's a quote “A man who has been near to death thinks he knows death. When the day finally comes for him to meet it, he does not recognize it. ‘This is not it,’ he says, as he dies.”
As I read at times these deep philosophical thoughts written by a 19-year-old author, I'm reminded of two other books of young brilliance where I felt it would be impossible for a young person to understand such philosophical complexities. I’m reminded of Bonjour tristesse by Francoise Sagan and The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector.
[image] (Photo of the author from revistabula.com)
The author was born near Paris in 1903. He had an affair at 15 years old. His father was a journalist and a cartoonist, so he had colleagues in the literary world who helped his son get his start. Jean Cocteau, mainly a poet, took the boy under his wing and thought of him as a genius. In the afterward we are told Radiguet’s style is ‘sober, simple, unadorned.’ For some reason I can’t put down in writing, the atmosphere perhaps, the book reminds me of the French classic Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain Fournier.
The book was launched with a modern PR campaign France when the author was 17. The afterword also talks about the author starting to act as if he had a premonition of his early death at age 20 (1903-1923). He underwent a personality change, giving up alcohol and giving up hanging out with his friends so he could do serious writing, almost obsessively.
The book got publicity in the US after it received an American Literary Award. Then more publicity when that award was protested in the US by the American Legion because of the book’s storyline: a boy carrying on with a soldier’s wife while the soldier served at the front and later while the wounded man was recovering in a veterans’ hospital.
Was it a real affair or not? Radiguet was friendly with the married woman but he read and then stole her diaries. Maybe this was the simply the basis for a fantasy. However, since she was an actual woman whose name became known, her husband went through hell. The husband, a veteran serving at the front while his wife was friendly with Radiguet, felt his wife’s reputation and his own life was ruined by this novel. His wife died shortly after the war ended, so she wasn’t around to defend herself. Then the spurned veteran had to relive all this with another burst of publicity about 25 years later when the book came out as a film in 1947. ...more
This is a memoir and I didn't realize that when I picked this book out on interlibrary loan. I don't read a lot of nonfiction and I felt a bit at sea This is a memoir and I didn't realize that when I picked this book out on interlibrary loan. I don't read a lot of nonfiction and I felt a bit at sea reading a memoir by an author when I had never read a single one of his works.
It turns out the author is a fascinating young gay man who was a ‘boy wonder,’ publishing his first work, The End of Eddy, to awards and acclaim when he was only 21.
In this memoir the author focuses on his mother’s life story and his relationship with her during the period of her life from about age 25 to 45. One of the first traumatic incidents he recalls is his younger brother coming home from school furious with him because the other boys at school were bullying him saying his brother was a ‘fag.’ So his secret was out.
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Photo of Édouard Louis and his mother, Monique, from corriere.it
The mother has a hard time with a nasty self-centered husband abusive to her and her five kids – three kids at home by this husband and two adult children from her first marriage, off on their own. (view spoiler)[ Her oldest son has been a terrible disappointment, already an abuser and an alcoholic himself, taking after the father. (hide spoiler)] The young man in the story sometimes feels guilty himself for the things he recalls yelling at his mother in moments of anger. It's almost as if he's at times adopting his father's role.
As the boy becomes a young teen he's at an age where fathers start taking their sons with them for a while to the bars (this is France). But his father doesn't take him because of his “feminine ways.” The mother accepts her son’s sexual orientation better than her husband does but she still manages to get in a few snide remarks. (view spoiler)[ “Well, I just hope you're not the woman when you're in bed!” (hide spoiler)]
The father gets hurt at his factory job and things become even worse because now he's home all the time giving orders, monopolizing the television, and expecting to be waited on.
We learn a lot about class in French society Always lower class, now with the father’s inability to work, they rely on a food bank for meals. His mother has to get a job as a nurses aide to keep the family afloat. Their social class shows up in a particularly poignant story of the end of a friendship. (view spoiler)[ The boy’s mother becomes very friendly with a young woman who was recently widowed. But when the young woman remarries she ends the friendship and tells the narrator it was because of their lower class ways: -- the rudeness of his father; the constant drone of the television; the bad manners of the family. (hide spoiler)]
There's also a lot about language and class. The boy is the first in his family to go to high school. He learns not just new words but a new language and manner of speaking. He starts to look down on his parents. Later in the story, when his mother regains her freedom by leaving her husband, his mother’s language changes as she enters a new life. “Indeed, in Paris she started using new sentences, reflections of her new existence. I went for a stroll in the Luxembourg garden today. I had coffee on the terrasse at a cafe near my place. ”
All in all though, it’s more the story of the mother than the youth. Thus the title reflecting her choice to finally leave the abusive relationship and start a new life. “All of a sudden, happiness gave her youth.” Now at age 45 she is liberated. (view spoiler)[ His father is left by himself in his poverty and his sickness. First she moved out with the young children to housing assisted by social services. When she found a new partner she moved to Paris and eventually married. (hide spoiler)]
Although there are many events and transformations, this is a very short book - less than 100 pages. The author writes a lot of the book as if speaking directly to his mother.
I enjoyed the story and I do have to say that for such a young man he has a lot of brilliant insight into life and psychology at a young age. That reminds me of two other young authors remarkably filled with insight into human nature at young ages such as Françoise Sagan when she wrote Bonjour Tristesse at age 19 or Clarice Lispector winning Brazil’s highest literary award at age 23 for Near to the Wild Heart.
So now that I've read this author’s memoir, should I look into any of his work? He was born in 1992 and started writing his big hit novel at age 20 (published in 2014). I see from GR that it’s still the novel he’s best known for, The End of Eddy, a novel about a young gay man growing up poor in a rural village in France. It’s widely read with thousands of ratings and more than 2,000 reviews on GR. ...more
The title comes from the French. It’s an expression used at the roulette wheel: no more bets; the die is cast; it's up to fate.
We are treated to two sThe title comes from the French. It’s an expression used at the roulette wheel: no more bets; the die is cast; it's up to fate.
We are treated to two stories. The main character is a young woman author. She gives us one story of her marriage and another fictional story she is writing of that marriage. At times we're not sure which of the two stories we are getting.
I hid many spoilers but be aware that some remain. There’s a lot going on in each of the two stories even though it’s a relatively short book.
In one story, her husband is a veterinarian who doesn't like animals. He’s well off financially but a skinflint who won’t open their wedding presents so they can give them to other people as gifts. They live in separate apartments; she goes to his on weekends. He’s very controlling and even tells her what to read. He's furious when she shows up an hour early one day.
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Their sex life in this version is quite unusual. He’s bisexual. (view spoiler)[ She watches him watch boys. She enjoys being his ‘accomplice’ and watches him have sex with men. (hide spoiler)]
She tells us he told her “You're so handsome.” “Beautiful you mean.” “No. Handsome. You have the hips of a little boy. I adore you.” That aroused me.”
In the other version of the story, he’s straight and he genuinely loves just her. She has published the book. An American man, a fan, starts writing to her about her book and they end up exchanging pages of letters and emails. (view spoiler)[ Even when she was engaged to be married she traveled to Connecticut to meet this man and to live there for a month. It's a horror show but she meets a neighbor, an old Jewish man she adores and he thinks of her as his daughter. (hide spoiler)]
After she's married she gets friendly with a lesbian woman and she spends all her days with her, even taking an extended trip to Italy with her. (view spoiler)[ It looks like they never actually have sex. She wins big at a casino, leaves the woman in Italy and goes back to her husband. She gets pregnant. When she knows her loving husband really wants the child she has an abortion. (hide spoiler)]
She goes to a shrink and tells him she hates men because her father was never there for her despite his promises. She loves her dog and cigarettes more than anything else. (view spoiler)[ She goes on an eating binge watching romantic movies on television. She loses weight, becomes pregnant again, and divorces him. He is devastated. Then, after two years of absolutely no contact with him, she calls him up wanting to start over. (hide spoiler)]
“Alkis, [her loving husband version] I would have preferred if you had loved me less and understood me more... But perhaps you didn't love me enough, or didn't have the imagination, madness, or balls to become an alchemist of life like I was, to spin gold out of the boredom and the emptiness that surrounds us.”
There are a number of chapters, many just a sentence or a paragraph. I found the plot confusing in places because at times I wasn’t sure which is the real story and which is the fictional one, although I assume that’s intentional. The only thing we're sure of is that she loves her dog and her cigarettes and that she has some deep psychological issues. I’ll give this a ‘3’ but most GR folks rate it higher.
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The author, Margarita Karapanou (1946-2008) was born in Greece but raised and educated while living alternately with her mother in France and her grandmother in Greece. All her life she struggled with bipolar disorder and that struggle obviously informed this novel. It’s interesting to speculate how this dual upbringing might have interacted with her bipolar disorder. She wrote in French and she’s best known for her novel Kassandra and the Wolf.
Top image: Painting, La Tempesta by Giorgione that figures in the story. From Wikimedia Commons The author from atheniantimes.gr ...more
We’re in an eastbound train running across Siberia. The cars are mostly filled with a couple of hundred Russian army conscripts headed for a training We’re in an eastbound train running across Siberia. The cars are mostly filled with a couple of hundred Russian army conscripts headed for a training camp at the end of the line near Vladivostok. We are told that some young Russian men have gotten out of duty by faking medical problems, bribery, or by being married to a woman who is at least six months pregnant.
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We mainly follow Aliocha, one young man who was desperate to get out of the service. He's shy, still a virgin, and has had no luck with women. He can also be violent. He wants to desert and starts planning to get off at one of the stations along the way. At stops, the recruits, although guarded, get to walk around the station and buy snacks and beer.
The author has a good eye for the geography of the steppe, taiga and tundra, which can get pretty boring when watched day after day through a train window. Here’s a sample of the writing:
“Outside, it's still the same chrome-plated night and the train that rolls unerringly, crossing time zones one by one, breaking up time as it changes charges through space; the train that compacts or dilates the hours, concretes the minutes, stretches out the seconds, continues on pegged to the earth and yet out of sync with the earth's clocks: the train like a spaceship.”
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The other main character is Helene, a young French woman who has just left her Russian paramour. He's a big-deal bureaucrat who runs a dam and a power plant on Lake Baikal. He and she communicate in French because she hardly speaks any Russian – they met when he was in Paris.
Helene and Aliocha meet on the outdoor platform between trains where they smoke. They communicate largely by sign language. She figures out what he is trying to do and signals that she will help him.
Now we have a tension-filled atmosphere as the young man draws attention to himself as he initially tries but fails to flee at one of the rail stops. He ends up hiding in the young woman's sleeper compartment. The commander responsible for the recruits orders a train search to find him.
We also learn about the provodnitsas, the women train attendants who live aboard the train and apparently have a mystical standing in Russian culture dating back to communist days when freedoms were limited. Imagine being a woman and having a life where you were in constant travel for thousands of miles when other folks seldom left their village. The provodnitsas know all and see all, so whose side will they be on as Aliocha attempts his escape?
Pretty good writing and a decent story although it didn’t really grab me. I guess a 3.5 rounded up.
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The French author (b. 1967) received a lot of publicity and several awards for her book Birth of a Bridge. But her most popular book on GR is The Heart, a story about a heart transplant. She has written a half-dozen other novels.
Top photo: provodnitsas from wikivoyage.org Trans-Siberian train from rbth.com The author from frenchculture.org...more
With a lot of repairs and hard work, who knows, in a few years this French hotel in nowheresville might qualify for one star.
The woman who runs the hoWith a lot of repairs and hard work, who knows, in a few years this French hotel in nowheresville might qualify for one star.
The woman who runs the hotel has the problems of Job. It’s located on - just about IN - a swamp in France. It gets its few customers because it is the only hotel in the large region. Otherwise there’s nothing there besides the swamp. Most of the customers are teams of men doing geological exploration and railroad construction. It’s hard to figure out what the timeframe is but with railroad construction, firewood for heat, an outhouse and a neon sign, I’d say it’s probably early 1900s.
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The permanent inhabitants of the hotel are a younger woman and her two older sisters. The two older sisters both have a list of serious physical and mental health problems that would match the list of hotel problems. We could call them the Job family.
The backstory is that all three girls grew up in the house with their mother and grandmother and an absent father. The mother took the two older sisters off into the world, leaving the youngest girl behind to help grandmother run the hotel. The youngest woman grew to love the hotel, the way her grandmother had. Their mother and grandmother died and the two sisters returned from the outside world with shattered dreams, no money, and no purpose in life.
Now the youngest woman does all the running of the hotel and almost all the repair work. She waits on her sisters hand and foot, at times bringing meals on trays, serving them well while they lie in bed with their mental or physical ailment of the day.
The most continuous hotel problem is the lavatories. With an antiquated plumbing system sinking into the swamp, the lavatories only work on and off. At times they have to use the outhouse or buckets that the youngest sister empties for her sisters and for guests. You can see why the youngest sister thinks - and this line says a lot - “I am the youngest, but I look the oldest.”
Just some of the other problems she faces include (view spoiler)[ mosquitoes, repairing mosquito nets, swamp odors, rusty dripping pipes, roaches, positioning and emptying buckets from the leaky roof, a deteriorating outhouse, swamp disease, dead birds, mold and mildew, beams collapsing from wood rot, bedbugs, flies, undrinkable water, rats, termites, flooding when the swamp rises. (hide spoiler)]
The biggest theme is the perseverance of the youngest woman, facing, as I say, problems of Job. A second theme derives from the alternating. up and down cycles of the existence of the three women in the hotel. Sometimes the older sisters get out of bed and help out. (view spoiler)[ They might even play the piano or sing for the guests. But more often they fight with each other or with the younger sister. At times they hate her and gang up on her. One sister even makes work for her when she goes around deliberately blocking toilets. The oldest sister takes male guests into her bedroom. Does that help the hotel’s star rating? (hide spoiler)]
As the story went on, I found myself asking why am I reading this book? But I stuck with it. It’s short – 110 pages. There’s almost a macabre fascination with problem after problem after problem, the persistence of the youngest woman, and the cyclical story of good times and bad.
The writing is simple and straightforward with short sentences, nothing terribly literary. But in the end, I liked the book despite its flat ending. I gave it a four. I liked it a bit more than one other work I read by this author, Nevermore, Redonnet, a dystopian fantasy.
I wasn't sure how to classify the book on a shelf. I clicked fantasy but maybe 'exaggerated realism' is better? British critic James Wood coined the phrase hysterical realism - perhaps that's it.
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The French author (b. 1948) has written eight novels, most translated into English. She didn’t begin writing until her 40s. Some of her work has been compared to Annie Ernaux. An introduction by the translator tells us her work defies genre classification. She’s best known for Hotel Splendid but based on GR ratings her work is not well-known among English readers.
Top photo of the Camargue marshland in southern France near Arles from Wikimedia.commons The author from radiofrance.fr ...more
This novel is based on the story of a real-life serial killer in France. In 1993 Jean-Claude Romand killed his wife, two children, and his parents. ThThis novel is based on the story of a real-life serial killer in France. In 1993 Jean-Claude Romand killed his wife, two children, and his parents. Then he attempted suicide, and then set his house on fire. He survived the suicide attempt – it may have been fake - and it’s likely that he had killed his father-in-law several years earlier.
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It’s hard to tell fact from fiction in the novel, because it’s structured as the story of the author writing the story of the murderer. The author tells us he attempted to meet with the killer but was rebuffed, so he invents the story of how he would have interviewed the killer and the answers the killer would have given.
It’s basically a search for why the murderer constructed the life that he did, and how he himself was his own worst enemy – the book’s title - The Adversary.
For 18 years, the man lived the life of an imposter. He claimed to be a research physician at the World Health Organization in Geneva, just across the Swiss border from where the killer lived in France. But he wasn’t really an ‘imposter’ because he never worked there pretending to be a doctor. For 18 years he simply spent his days in idle time going to cafes, libraries, walking in parks. He even occasionally pretended he had to travel to other countries. So he would go to a distant town and stay in a hotel for a few days.
If you are thinking, maybe I’ll try this, you’ll need to know, how did he support himself? (view spoiler)[ His wife worked. Early on in his marriage he had loans from his parents and later from other family and acquaintances. Then he started pretending to invest money from friends and family and earn lucrative returns. His mother-in-law sold her house and gave him all that money to invest, as later, did a woman friend. Earlier, his father-in-law had invested his money with him but wanted his cash back. Romand was home alone with his father-in-law when the older man died from a ‘fall down the stairs.’ (hide spoiler)]
For your new lifestyle, you’ll also need to know the details of how he handled dozens of everyday things. Didn’t anyone ever call him from ‘his office?’ Didn’t his wife ever call him at work? Didn’t his wife ever say “let’s take the kids to the WHO office Christmas party this year?” He worked it all out.
The killer was an only child, a loner, who had at times made up a story of a fake girlfriend, and then a fake story of being attacked by thugs. He didn’t bother to take his final medical exam, making up a fake story about dealing with cancer. He simply pretended he passed that exam. Then he pretended he went on to medical school. And he did. Without ever being officially admitted he played the part of a student for years. He went to classes, even took exams, and hung out with other students. But he never earned a degree. His life became one lie after another.
I say he never earned a degree, but that’s only because they don’t award degrees for lying. The man’s basic skill, par excellence, was his ability to lie and to come up with believable stories. People who can’t lie or don’t lie about big things (certainly the majority of people) are the most gullible to fall for the liar’s bs.
I’m reminded of a liar in another story I read recently by Iris Murdoch. What made that liar so good was his ability, when caught in a lie that made him look bad, to come up with a better one that made him look to be an even worse person than the first lie did. It worked all the time. (Murdoch’s book is The Time of the Angels – I haven’t done the review yet.)
Inevitably Romand’s house of cards had to collapse. But we are left wondering: why did he have to kill his family? If he took pills in a suicide attempt, why didn’t he simply kill himself and let them live? A fascinating story with good, straightforward writing.
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The French author (b. 1957) is also a screenwriter and film director. Adversary is his best known of about 15 books he has written. I also enjoyed his novel Class Trip by Emmanuel Carrere, kind of Stephen-Kingish. The author wrote another true crime novel, V13, about terrorist attacks that killed 130 people in one day in Paris in 2015.
Top photo: the killer (top, left) and his victims – wife, children and parents from leprogres.fr The author from ft.com...more
When I picked up this book at a library discard sale, I thought I had discovered a French author new to me. After I started writing the review I realiWhen I picked up this book at a library discard sale, I thought I had discovered a French author new to me. After I started writing the review I realized that I had read two other books by him, The Mad and the Bad and Fatale. All three are alike in their action-adventure-crime theme. They are real shoot-em-ups with fights and explosions and car crashes.
About a third of the way through this book it occurred to me that this had been written to be made into a movie. Indeed it has been made into a movie called The Gunman (2015 – starring Sean Penn). Another book has been published with that title based on the film script.
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If you don't mind violence and a bit of gore this book may be for you. We follow a hired killer who grew up in a small French village and did a stint of killing in his French army service in North Africa. He seems to have his act together because he promises his true love back home that he will return in 10 years. Sure enough, in 10 years he quits the hired killer business and returns home expecting his love to be waiting for him. Big surprises are in store for him.
He reluctantly returns to the hired killer business. Should we say ‘he came out of retirement?’ The plot is full of double crossings, not knowing who you can trust, hired killers tracking down other hired killers. He is unfaithful to his women and, no surprise, they are equally unfaithful to him. I was surprised at the very deflated ending to the story. It's as if an exciting action-packed road adventure ended with a flat tire.
The writing style suits the topic – short sentences, almost a staccato pace to the writing. There are almost no literary flourishes and no character development. I gave it a ‘3.’
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The French author (1942–1995 - lung cancer) wrote short stories and ten-or-so novella-length crime novels like this one. About half appear to have been translated into English. With hindsight, I much prefer his book Fatale. That’s also his best-known work. I gave all three of his books I read a ‘3’ for the same reasons.
Top photo: a still of Sean Penn from the movie The Gunman from tampabay.com The author from the parisreview.org ...more
A classic French novel written in 1834 but set in Paris in 1819.
Pere in the title means Father, and it’s in part a story of an old man’s obsessive loA classic French novel written in 1834 but set in Paris in 1819.
Pere in the title means Father, and it’s in part a story of an old man’s obsessive love for his two married daughters. He was once a wealthy flour merchant but he gave all his money to his daughters while he lives in penury in a squalid pension run by a penny-pinching nasty lady.
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Pere has a few pieces of silver left that he sells when his daughters need a new gown for their high-society lives. Both have wealthy, controlling husbands who are stingy with their money. Both daughters and their husbands are embarrassed by the shabby old man. Pere seldom sees them and spends his days sitting in parks waiting to wave at them when their carriages go by. That’s about all the interaction he has with them.
There’s a cast of 18 quirky Dickens-like characters, men and women of all ages, also resident in the pension. We have a young male medical student (whose skills come in handy at various times), a young woman disowned by her wealthy father, a vicious wanted criminal in disguise, and many others.
Eugene, a young man resident in the pension, really becomes the main character in the story. Supposedly he’s a student but mostly he leaves classes after roll call. His goal is to leave his impoverished small-town background behind by marrying a wealthy woman and becoming a member of high society. Eugene has a well-placed cousin who is a high society queen and he works on her and Goriot's daughters to worm his way in.
We are presented with a very jaded and cynical outlook on the upper levels of French society filled with artificiality and deceit. All three society women Eugene gets involved with have other men in their lives besides their husbands, apparently with their husbands’ knowledge. And we know the husbands are not sitting by the fire reading Balzac. I say French society, but I should say Parisian society. It comes across very strongly in this book, as in many of Balzac’s novels, that Paris is the center, not just of France, but of the world.
One of the boarders makes a point of tutoring Eugene on the ways of the world. The boarder’s philosophy of society is basically ‘cheat him before he cheats you; kill him before he kills you.’
Combined with what Eugene sees himself, the young man grows to accept this sour view of society. He tells the medical student “Whatever evil you are told about society, you can be sure it’s true. It would take more than a Juvenal to describe the horror under the gold and the jewels.” [Juvenal was a Roman poet who wrote satires of society.] And Eugene thinks: “Finer spirits can’t stay long in this world. And how indeed can deep feeling reconcile itself with a society so shabby and petty and superficial?”
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Balzac (1799 – 1850) was a prolific author, publishing almost 70 novels and novellas with a goal of writing about every type of human character. Balzac called this endeavor The Human Comedy. The author praises Eugene at one point saying that as he matured he was learning to “distinguish the strata that compose human society.” His writing influenced Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James.
Balzac was an early realist writer who is credited with introducing the idea of using characters in multiple novels. The character of Eugene de Rastignac ended up in 22 novels. In fact, the French use the term ‘Rastignac’ to mean an ambitious social climber. Balzac spent much of his life banging out books to pay off debts. He didn’t get married until age 50 and then died, supposedly from overwork, six months later.
Balzac was paid by the word and it shows in this story which comes across as somewhat bloated and sometimes repetitive. For example, we get five pages on the urban setting of the pension and the physical description of the house and rooms. Although I must also say it is a well-written lush description. Characters are left dangling at the end of the book, so that you wonder ‘well what happened to her?’ But still a great story.
Paris photo by Julien Tondu on unsplash.com A daguerreotype of the author in 1842 from Wikipedia...more
This book is essentially an autobiography structured around a chronology of French history, politics and societal change from WW II to the present. WhThis book is essentially an autobiography structured around a chronology of French history, politics and societal change from WW II to the present. What follows is a summary rather than a review. While I avoid spoilers related to the author’s personal life, I really have to say SPOILERS FOLLOW.
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The author (the 2022 Nobel Prize winner) picked a bad time to be born: 1940, right at the start of WW II. She grew up in a small town in Normandy, 90 miles from Paris, when people still didn’t travel much. “…when you never leave home, even the next town is the ends of the earth.” People who had seen the Eifel tower “took on an air of superiority.”
Sections of the story are introduced by photos, later movies, and videos of a girl and her family as is someone is flipping through an old album.
Some of the things we read about:
Black and white TV, radio and television jingles for products; the annual Tour de France bicycle race where she tracked riders' progress with dots on a map. They had radios but saw TV only in cafes and in store windows where people gathered to watch. All the religious stuff: boys and girls sat on separate sides in church, no meat on Fridays. The hardship of poverty – never throw anything away. Newspaper used as toilet paper. Her schooling at a parochial girls’ school and all the crazy misinformation girls spread about sex.
We mark time by great events like a railway strike in 1953 and the fall of Dien Bien Phu, 1954. The fighting in Algeria. There are big international events too: the building of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, JFK’s assassination, Mao, the Beatles.
As a young teen she feels backward. Her family doesn't have a Frigidaire on indoor plumbing and she still hasn’t been to Paris. But there is an onslaught of new things: plastic cooking utensils replace metal ones; a gas stove replaces coal; a Formica kitchen table replaces the old wooden one covered with an oilcloth. Record players, hula hoops, transistor radios.
(This is not from the book, but from a magazine article I read recently mentioning how important the cheap transistor radio was that every kid could have. Parents controlled the music on the TV and the expensive big radio and record player in the living room. But now kids could listen to their own music in their rooms. Bing Crosby and Patti Page, parental favorites, did not promote rebellion.)
The author tells us that the feeling of endless progress was so strong in the 1960s that people talked of having a pill for food in 2000, robots would do the housework and people would be living on the moon. Did that happen?
There was ‘a pill’ though. In France, only available to married women. Girls thought “We’d be so free in our bodies it was frightening. Free as a man.”
The author makes much of the student strikes and political turmoil that upended the French nation starting in May 1968. That was a watershed in French history. She tells us that even years afterward, you might meet someone and think ‘What side was he on in 1968?’ After those events, “Now, everything one considered normal had become the object of scrutiny.” She writes “1968 was the first year of the world.” After 1968, ‘everyone was supposed to be listened to’: women, gays, miners, prisoners, prostitutes.
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Now the pictures in the album become those of a young married woman with kids, bringing in bags of groceries from a car. It was an era of materialism. “Spending was in the air.” And “The ideals of May 1968 were being transformed into objects of entertainment.” People dreamed of a country life (which most had gladly left behind by then), while they flocked to cities and suburbs.
But she tires of this life. Her new symbol is a shapeless dress that indicates “Fatigue and an absence of a desire to please.” She is seized “…for the first time by the terrible meaning of the phrase I have only one life.” [LOL When is GR going to let us use italics without special formatting?]
The socio-political environment changes again. It’s a time of concern about Arab immigration – the Banlieue ghettos. Catholicism has essentially vanished from their lives. Sony Walkmans and computer games amplify the process of walling oneself off from society that began with the transistor radio. At a later age the author tells us the computer was “…the first object to which we ever felt inferior.” “We never ceased to upgrade. The failure to do so meant saying yes to aging.”
I found it fascinating too that way back, starting in the 1960s, the anti-immigration platform of right-wing political leader Jean-Marie Le Pen (father of Marine Le Pen who has continued his prejudices) presaged the racism and antisemitism of today’s American political scene where Le Pen “…was the guy who said out loud what others were secretly thinking.”
Late middle age is a time of dispossession. The kids have left home; the husband is gone, furniture is being sold off, parents are gone or going.
Did you ever read a book where you WANTED footnotes? There are dozens of references to French events that most Americans will be clueless about. Just one example: she mentions ‘the Petit-Clamant attack.’ That’s it. You have to look it up if you want to know that’s the name of a town where a hit squad fired machine guns at President de Gaulle’s car in an assassination attempt in 1962. (There are 20 or so footnotes, I guess for references that even French people might find obscure, but believe me, an American needs many more footnotes. We know from context that many are references to grisly crimes, such as Bruay-en-Artois.
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I loved the book because I enjoyed learning about recent French history and politics. The author is a bit older than me but the timeline for innovations is about the same as it was for me since the US was probably a few years ahead of France in our ability to buy consumer stuff.
This is the second book I've read by the 2022 Nobel Prize winner (b. 1940). Almost all of her work is autobiographical. Her books in order, catalog her parents’ lives, her teenage years, her marriage, her affair with an East European man (Simple Passion, the first book of hers I read), an abortion she had, the onset of Alzheimer's, her mother's death, her battle with breast cancer.
Top photo the author in the 1960s from annie-ernaux.org Demonstrations in Paris in May 1968 from thenewyorker.com The author from nytimes.com
This is an intimate portrait of a woman in love. Everything she does, everything she sees, everyone she talks with is related back to HIM. She reads tThis is an intimate portrait of a woman in love. Everything she does, everything she sees, everyone she talks with is related back to HIM. She reads things he might be interested in. If she hears someone talk of a vacation she thinks ‘I’ll ask him if he’s been there.’ She dresses ‘just in case,’ and she looks at fashions in store windows daily. A phone call brings dejection if it’s NOT HIM. Everything else is simply filling time before their next meeting.
Of course, he’s married with kids. He’s from Eastern Europe (she never tells us where), assigned to France for his job, and has brought his family with him. She lives for his calls and his hurried visits. When they are together she dreads seeing him sneak a glance at his watch and then suffers dejection as she watches him dress to leave.
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The quick calls are all-important and infrequent. He can’t call from home and these are the pre-cellphone days of pay-phones on street corners. (It’s 1991.) She makes promises, in effect, ‘if he calls today I’ll make a donation to…’ She drops money into beggars’ cups with a wish.
The book is a primer on what it is like for a woman to be in love with a married man. She never tells us if he’s in love with her. (view spoiler)[ She doesn’t have to tell us. Sure he likes her, but we know he’s in it for the sex. (hide spoiler)]
The book is also a bit of a meta-novel. She tells us she is writing the book as therapy to get over him. There's an extended analogy between her obsession with writing a book and trying to make it perfect with the way she tried to make her relationship perfect. Some passages about this:
[On why she is writing.] “I do not wish to explain my passion - that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify - I just want to describe it.”
“Living in passion or writing: in each case one's perception of time is fundamentally different.”
“I stare at the written pages with astonishment and something resembling shame, feelings I certainly never felt when I was living out my passion and writing about it.”
She raises an interesting question. Once you are past a reality that happened to you, and then you have written about it, what’s the difference between having experienced something and just having read about it in the first place?
Her lover’s native language is not French so his French is imperfect. “…I was able to appreciate the approximate quality of our conversations. From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.”
Her lover is called back to his home country. She waits for a phone call that will never come. Or will it? (view spoiler)[ Months later, after absolutely no contact, he’s in town and he calls: “It’s me.” We know he just wants a quickie. Will she see him? (hide spoiler)]
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I liked the writing. The sentences flow; not necessarily short, but simple, sparse and to the point, nothing lyrical. It’s a very intimate portrait of a woman baring her soul in a way that I think few authors, men or women, would have the courage to do. There’s a bit of explicit sex.
This is the first book I've read by the 2022 Nobel Prize winner. Almost all of her work is autobiographical. Her books in order, catalog her parents’ lives, her teenage years, her marriage, her affair with an East European man (this book I am reviewing), her abortion, the onset of Alzheimer's, her mother's death, her battle with breast cancer.
Top photo: the author, age 18, with her mother at her parents’ café in Yvetot, Normandy from france.amerique.com (copyright by the author) The author (b. 1940) from newyorker.com
Ah, Madame Bovary. Isn't that the one where she has an affair and kills herself by jumping in front of a train? No, that's one by Tol[Revised 3/21/23]
Ah, Madame Bovary. Isn't that the one where she has an affair and kills herself by jumping in front of a train? No, that's one by Tolstoy. But I'm thinking of adding a new Goodreads shelf: 'Old classics I thought surely I had read years ago, but hadn't.'
There are thousands of reviews so I'll keep this short.
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Our two main characters are remarkably unlikable. Emma marries a divorced small-town doctor who's a widower. Isn't there a French expression: "How can a woman love a man who adores her?” Charles acts like a country bumpkin. He adores her and he’s such a cuckold that he is an enabler. If he found her in bed with another man, Emma would say “I was just showing Armande how comfortable our mattress is, and we took our clothes off because it was so hot.” And he would believe her.
The introduction tells us that Flaubert wrote in a letter “Women are taught to lie shamelessly. An apprenticeship that lasts all their lives.” So he created Emma to prove his point. Emma’s picture could appear in an illustrated dictionary under ‘self-centeredness.’ (We’ll put her husband, Charles’ picture, in under ‘cuckold.’)
The biggest red flag for me about Emma is her lack of interest in, dislike of, and even disgust with her baby daughter. She's forever pushing her away and sending her off to her nurse. Her extravagance creates financial problems that she seems not only unconcerned with but unaware of. That extravagance drives the novel to its tragic end.
If you are thinking of reading it, here are a couple of passages that I liked and that illustrate the style of writing. This one is about an old roadside inn: “…a good old house, with worm-eaten balconies that creak in the wind on winter nights, always full of people, noise, and feeding, whose black tables are sticky with coffee and brandy, the thick windows made yellow by the flies, the damp napkins stained with cheap wine, and that always smells of the village, like plowboys dressed in Sunday clothes, has a cafe on the street, and toward the countryside a kitchen-garden.”
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Here's a passage when Madame B and a future lover are beginning to feel attracted to each other: “Had they nothing else to say to one another? Yet their eyes were full of more serious speech, and while they forced themselves to find trivial phrases, they felt the same languor stealing over them both. It was the whisper of the soul, deep, continuous, dominating that of their voices. Surprised with wonder at this strange sweetness, they did not think of speaking of the sensation or of seeking its cause. Coming joys, like tropical shores, thrown over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.”
It's a good story and excellent writing, although my paperback edition by Harper Collins has problems. It doesn't name the translator, so it must be an old translation where the copyright expired. I know that Flaubert was a writer known for finding le mot juste. The translator, I think, tried to match that exactness of word usage in English with some fairly obscure English words: diligence (in the sense of a carriage), colza (rapeseed), bistoury (scalpel), faubourg (suburb). The back of the book gives us a glossary that has none of the obscure words I had to look up, but instead defines for us words like ruffian, trivet, penury and gruel! This is what happens when you turn over the glossary task to your graduate student intern and no one else looks over the finished product.
BTW, when is GR going to get around to letting reviewers use italics without having to insert formatting marks?
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A great novel and good writing. Indeed a classic. The sex, tame by modern standards, pushed the envelope when published in 1856, and the author was charged with obscenity. It’s a fascinating blend of romance and realism. Flaubert (1821-1880) was a pioneer in French literary realism.
Top photo of Emma from a 2014 20th Century Fox movie at befrois.com French inn from messynessychic.com The author on a French stamp from postbeeld.com...more
A French man is traveling by train to Versailles. It’s just before Christmas and he has come to bury his mother. The impending holiday and the ice havA French man is traveling by train to Versailles. It’s just before Christmas and he has come to bury his mother. The impending holiday and the ice have delayed the funeral. By coincidence one of his mother’s neighbors turns out to be an old flame, his first love from his teenage years. She lives with her blind brother, across the hall from his mother’s apartment.
The man and his old flame share a secret of two hideous crimes they committed in their youth – and got away with. Their love is rekindled.
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It's hard to categorize this book. I think the closest genre might be thriller. It’s certainly noir. Counting the old crimes, and the new ones committed by someone or another, and two semi-accidental deaths, the body count is seven by the end of the book.
A lot of this book is about addiction. The blind brother is huge and addicted to food. The old flame is addicted to cigarettes. She skips meals and fills two ashtrays with butts instead. Our main character was a recovered alcoholic, but the rekindled love, the stress of his mother’s death, and the other events that occur burst the dam. He drinks himself into a stupor with hallucinations and paranoia; so much so, and so well detailed, that I added this book to my alcoholism shelf.
The title comes from the lovers' teenage dreams of going to live on the tropical islands of Reunion and Mauritius. And, in a perverted way, they ultimately achieve their dream. But it’s not pretty.
There is good straightforward writing. A couple of passages that caught my eye:
Of a girl with a shaved head on the train: “…pretty enough to get away with making herself ugly.”
“Jeanne was always on time but since he was always early, it was as if she was always late.”
There’s some local color of Versailles but it’s not tourist Versailles. In fact, the area comes across as kind of dumpy. By coincidence, just a few reviews ago, I reviewed Guys Like Me by Fabre, Dominique (2015) Paperback, and that book was noted in the blurbs for its portrayal of a Paris that tourists never see.
I’ll say a 3.5 rounded up to 4.
I thank my GR friend Glenn Russell for recommending this book via a video interview he had on YouTube.
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The author (1949-2010) wrote about ten novels or novellas, all of which appear to have been translated into English. Mostly they are noir thrillers. His work has been compared to Georges Simenon’s romans durs.
Top photo, street scene in Versailles from heybrian.com The author from criminalelement.com
This is a good book although there is really no plot. We follow two unmarried middle-aged guys who are listless and [Edited, spoilers hidden 10/31/23]
This is a good book although there is really no plot. We follow two unmarried middle-aged guys who are listless and kind of purposeless, and a third who is a bit better off but still wondering what it is all about. These particular guys are in France but we suspect there are ‘guys like them’ all over the modern world.
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All three were childhood friends and grew up in the same neighborhood. They no longer live there, although they all live nearby. Much has changed in the old ‘hood' with demolition of old buildings and modernization. Now they are all around age 55.
The main character we follow has been divorced for many years but he has a son. The blurbs say he is ‘estranged from his son,’ but that’s not true. They meet more or less monthly, he visits at his son’s and daughter-in-law’s home, and they talk on the phone more or less weekly. The issue is that ‘guys like them’ can’t really get past banalities.
The main character uses the phrase “Time started up again” when he has a normal life of work, a lady friend, having lunch with his two old buddies, speaking with and visiting his son. It doesn’t sound like much to ask for but he struggles to keep all those things going. He’s lonely without wanting to admit it. He worries at times, is this all there is? He uses the expression “There are no second acts” several times in the story.
With his two buddies they reminisce about times gone by. Old girlfriends they all knew, places they hung out, many of which have been demolished or re-purposed. We get quite a bit of local color of the back streets of Paris, not the tourist Paris.
One friend is the worst off of the three. He has difficulty keeping jobs because he has no interest in them. He’s listless and unenergetic. Basically he does nothing. (view spoiler)[ He’s ready to move back in with his elderly mother to save on rent. He’s still pining over an unrequited love from when he was a teenager. Both of the other men have helped him out at times - financially and in helping him find work. (hide spoiler)] The main character visits him in his apartment and sees the chair "Where he spent hundreds of hours waiting, without finding.”
The lonely man tells his friends that he suffers from melancholia, and, in a way, that’s the topic of this whole book.
The second friend is married, with a son, and has done well financially, so much so, that this wife tells him “quit your job and do what you want to do.” But the problem there is that he has no idea what he would want to do. He has issues too. (view spoiler)[ His son in jail for drugs. (hide spoiler)]
The main character’s job is obviously unfulfilling because he seldom talks about his job or the people he works with. He has no contact with his ex- although he keeps up with her happenings through his son who visits his mother regularly.
What makes him snap out of it is a new woman, not a one-night stand, but someone he might get serious with. This relationship becomes a major part of the story so I won’t give any details. (view spoiler)[. She worries that he’s still in love with his ex- and tells him so. He worries about starting a relationship with a woman who has serious health problems and is scheduled for major surgery. Will he cut her loose? (hide spoiler)]
I liked the book although I found it a bit confusing in the first chapter trying to figure out which guy was which, and who was the son and who were the friends, but I was glad I stuck with it. I liked the author’s writing because he constantly drops little nuggets for us to think about:
“…there are hundreds of pointless evenings in a life…”
“We’re always more alone than we suppose…”
“They’re an old man’s thoughts, [his son says]. I’ve never told him that they’ve been lurking inside me ever since I was a child.”
“This Saturday was one of those when I hadn’t really lived.”
“I’m fed up with remembering, starting to talk to myself without being able to do anything about it.”
“Since I’ve been living alone, I’ve often been ashamed of who I am, as if I’ve been spending too much time with myself.”
“It had taken me so many years to forget that I think, in the end, I wasn’t sure anymore what it was I wanted to forget.”
“I did a lot of things, the kind of things you're always putting off until later and never doing. Most of the time it's as if these things are only there to make us think about them without ever going anywhere near them.”
“I'm one of those guys for whom work has become a kind of blessing, it stops you from having to think, basically.”
One other thing that comes across strongly in this book in the need of ‘guys like these’ for a woman in their life. Not for sex – there are bars – and not in the sense of my father’s generation who needed a woman after their wife died to cook, clean and do laundry because they knew nothing about those things. The author puts it this way: “They have nobody to get them into the flow of life, guys like me.”
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Top photo of a bar in Paris from theculturetrip.com The author from Wikimedia commons...more
Two passengers, a man and a woman, sit next to each other on a several-hour train ride to Paris. Each recognizes the other as a partner they had an afTwo passengers, a man and a woman, sit next to each other on a several-hour train ride to Paris. Each recognizes the other as a partner they had an affair with 27 years ago. It ended in disaster, especially for the woman, who still considers it the most humiliating experience of her life.
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Do they speak? Is either of them even sure the other recognizes them after all those years? If they speak, what do they say? “Oh, hi, how have you been?” LOL
So the novel becomes two interior monologues as each goes over their current life situation, analyzes the aging of the other, and assesses where they think the other person is at. Married? Kids? Career? Each thinks back to how they met, how the relationship progressed, and how it dramatically ended.
Meanwhile we learn a lot about each from their own and from each other’s thoughts.
The woman is 47 now; the man about the same age. (view spoiler)[ She is returning to Paris from visiting her parents who are “…elderly but not yet bedridden.” The once-a-month visits are unpleasant for her. She wonders “I don’t know if I’ll be sad when they pass away.” And “With parents, you have to make do with what you’ve got.” (hide spoiler)]
The man reviews his life and thinks (view spoiler)[ “I had a few promising but short-lived affairs. Of the kind that are good for your health.” (hide spoiler)]
The tension builds as they get closer to their destination and each weighs the risk of starting a conversation.
Here’s a line that summarizes the moral of the story: “Everything goes so fast, but twenty-seven years later, it is all still there.”
What they don’t know about each other is also a good part of the story. (view spoiler)[ She learned from her humiliation (which we learn about in detail near the end of the book) to reshape her approach to life. She has become successful in her marriage and career. He continued downhill. He’s divorced, in a low-level job, and still drifting from one woman to another. (hide spoiler)]
The story reminds me of two other novels I’ve read of a man and a woman romantically involved long ago and then getting back together later in life. One is Love in the Time of Cholera and the other is Journey into the Past.
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In addition to being a writer, the author (b. 1964) is a high school English teacher in France. He’s a prolific writer with two-dozen novels published. Many are young adult stories. About four have been translated into English. This one, The 6:41 to Paris, is his big hit and it has been translated into ten languages.
Top photo, Gare du Nord in Paris from Wikimedia Commons The author from frenchculture.org
A love story set in a time of war. In her introduction to this short novel of historical fiction (150 pages) the author implies this is a true story. A love story set in a time of war. In her introduction to this short novel of historical fiction (150 pages) the author implies this is a true story. I say ‘implies’ because she tells us this story was told to her by a good friend who was a friend of one of the principals. True or not true, it has a shocking ending, more so than the ending of a lot of thrillers that claim to be shocking. The author also tells us what the book is about: the moral disorder brought about by war.
I call it a love story, but only the woman is in love, so it’s a story of unrequited love. The object of her affection is a handsome young commander, billeted in her house with her soldier-brother. The two men have a bromance going – they have been best friends since childhood. The commander is busy fighting his war and tells us (and her) he is only interested in “women of the lowest sort.”
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The core of the story becomes his treatment of this beautiful 18-year old woman who is in love with him and her reaction to this unrequited love. He can be kind or cruel, attentive or dismissive, loving or nasty, considerate or callous. (view spoiler)[... (hide spoiler)] Oftentimes he wounds her unknowingly or unthinkingly; other times he’s just cruel. She offers herself to him and he rejects her. An example of how he is unknowingly cruel: she is sick for a time and he tends to her in bed, even dressing her. (Other members of the household assume they are lovers – they are not.) He sees her beautiful naked body and still doesn’t want her. How can the young woman in love react to that except by being devastated? (view spoiler)[... (hide spoiler)]
“…all our contrasting feelings bound us together like two lovers, or partners in a dance. That much-desired bond did actually exist between us, and for my Sophie the worst torture of all must have been to feel how suffocatingly close it was, and at the same time how slight.”
The object of her love initially commands a rag-tag group of soldiers fighting the Russian Bolsheviks in the ethnically complex area around Lithuania, Belarus, Poland and then-Prussia. The time frame is just after WW I and around the time of the Russian Revolution. (view spoiler)[ He’s promoted to commander of a larger brigade. Eventually he becomes a soldier of fortune in locations around the world. (hide spoiler)]
The story is structured as a tale he tells years later to a group of half-interested strangers in a railway station café in Italy.
In a way it’s a war story too but there’s not a lot of gore nor detailed discussion of battles. We know very early into the book that it’s a tragedy. (view spoiler)[ We know about ten pages in that his bff is dead and we learn 10 or 15 pages later that the woman has died as well. (hide spoiler)] There’s a lot more to the story that I won’t go into because I’ll risk giving away too much of such a short novel.
I enjoyed the story and the writing, although the writing had a somewhat stiff flavor, almost as if written in the late 1800s. Perhaps the author, a historical novelist, wrote it that way (in 1939) in keeping with the time period of the story. Plus it’s translated, so I don’t really know.
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The Belgian-French author (1903-1987) wrote collections of essays, poems, historical novels and her personal memoirs. She’s best known for Memoirs of Hadrian. (It must be good – a 4.3 rating on GR with 22,000 ratings and almost 2,000 reviews! It’s often called a ‘modern classic.’) Late in life she moved with her female partner to live on Mount Desert Island, Maine, where her home, Petite Plaisance, is now a museum dedicated to her memory.
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Prussian soldiers in WWI from colorostariu.files.wordpress.com The author from lesbianhistorytrailmdi.weebly.com The author's home in Maine from frenchheritagesociety.org
It's amazing to me that this completed novel was only just published, given that it was finished in 1954. The author died in 1986. The introduction byIt's amazing to me that this completed novel was only just published, given that it was finished in 1954. The author died in 1986. The introduction by Margaret Atwood tells us that it was thought ‘too intimate’ but I don’t think that's true even by the standards then. It probably has more to do with the author's relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. We are told that in the introduction (and also in this quote from a NYTimes review by Leslie Camhi): “Apparently, she showed the manuscript of this brief novel to Sartre, who “held his nose” at it, she writes in “Force of Circumstance,” the third volume of her memoirs. “I couldn’t have agreed more,” she tells us there; “the story seemed to have no inner necessity and failed to hold the reader’s interest.” So she set the manuscript aside.
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It's the semi-autobiographical story of de Beauvoir and her best friend, Zaza, starting at about ten years old. They met at an exclusive French Catholic school for girls from the ‘best families.’ They were the two best students and Simone was more dependent on the relationship than was the other girl who came from a large family with parents obsessed by their Catholic religion. Both parents were active in church groups and the religious family took an annual pilgrimage to the shrine at Lourdes. One daughter was already a nun, and one son a priest.
The author wrote many autobiographical and semi-autobiographical novels and Zaza is featured in four of her novels. Even in this story, we learn more about Zaza’s family and life than that of Simone’s. In the second half of the book it becomes Zaza’s tragic story, not the author’s. (view spoiler)[ Zaza, (Élisabeth Lacoin), died suddenly and somewhat mysteriously at age 21. (hide spoiler)]
Simone hung out with Zaza’s family. Zaza’s mother kept all her children occupied in an endless swirl of chores, visits to relatives, picnics and outings, so much so that Simone and Zaza seldom had a chance to converse together. (Idle hands are the devil's workshop, I guess.)
The mother also feared Simone was a bad influence on her daughter because Simone drifted away from religious feelings very early in her life. The mother broke up a romance between Zaza and a neighbor boy because he was half-Jewish. Simone later ‘gives over’ her boyfriend to Zaza. The mother, who ruled with an iron fist, felt that she would be ‘held responsible' for the ‘sins’ of her daughters. (I'm using too many little ‘quotes,’ I know!)
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A good read, worth a ‘5.’ I’m glad it finally got published. I've also enjoyed another novel by this author: The Woman Destroyed
Top photo, Simone and Zaza from newyorktimes.com The author from theparisreview.org