Perspective gave us depth. And depth opened the gates of infinity to us.
[image] Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572A matter of perspective and of perception
Perspective gave us depth. And depth opened the gates of infinity to us.
[image] Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) - Venus, Cupid, Folly and time (1545)
An epistolary murder mystery, set in 16th century Florence, revolving around Renaissance artists and the Medici family, action-packed, frothily humorous, full to the brim with colourful characters, juicy courtly intrigues, a splash of nudity, incisive reflections on art and power, a treaty on perspective in art– how many more reasons does one need to wolf down Laurent Binet’s delectable patchwork of historical fact and fiction in this suspenseful, exuberant and exhilarating historical novel?
The Manierist painter Jacopo do Pontormo (1494-1557) is found dead in the chapel of the Basilica di San Lorenzo in Florence, at the foot of the frescoes of The Last Judgment he has been painting for a decade. Destined to become Florence’s answer to the Sistine Chapel in Rome, he has been scrupulously keeping his work shielded for onlookers behind wooden screens. There are several indications that he has been murdered (the chisel embedded in his heart a strong contender), the possible blasphemous character of his frescoes together with the find of a painting in his studio showing Maria de ‘Medici, the oldest and nubile daughter of his patron, Duke Cosimo I de ‘Medici, in a lascivious light, putting his violent death even more under a cloud of suspicion.
None other than Giorgio Vasari (1511 – 27 June 1574) – yes, the painter, architect and author of The Lives of the Artists - is entrusted with the mission to investigate the case, find the murderer and clarify the enigmas posed by the frescoes and the salacious painting. Such requires poise but also delicatesse and diplomacy in a time and place characterized by fierce artistic rivalry and social, religious and political tensions, intrigues and scheming - which doesn’t stop Binet from depicting his sleuth Vasari and his footmen more often than not as the proverbial bulls in a china shop.
Framing the collection of 176 letters that he will dish up, Binet pledges the reader that all one needs to know is that the story takes place in Florence, at the time of the eleventh and final Italian war. Whether this bold statement rings true probably depends on the reader’s perspective and expectations when reading historical fiction.
From this gullible reader’s perspective, taking Binet on his word worked out fine. Even more, it feels almost a crime to reveal anything regarding to the plot or the characters, lest to spoil the thrill of the surprise at being handed over a letter by another divine correspondent – Binet generously offering a twenty-some, from artists like Bronzino, Michelangelo, Benvenuto Cellini, to Cosimo I de ‘Medici, his wife Eleanor of Toledo, his daughter Maria and her aunt Catherina de ‘Medici, to rebellious nuns still under the spell of Girolamo Savoronala.
As much as it doesn’t seem necessary to be able to enjoy and get carried away by Binet’s imaginative, riveting and playful epistolary whodunit, a little familiarity with the settings and the historical background of the novel nevertheless might enhance the reading pleasure. Profound knowledge on the period and the artists on the other hand seems to provoke a certain annoyance with anachronisms and misfits in tone and style that connoisseurs of this period have discerned. One reviewer assessed Binet’s novel (rather prissily) as likely appealing to an audience for whom the Italian Renaissance and the Cinquecento are no more than carnival backdrops. For history enthusiasts who struggle with the poetic license of historical fiction writing, Binet’s statement serves as a caveat as well as a cunning disclaimer.
Looking up more on some of the characters inspired by real historical figures like Maria de ‘Medici and the painters quickly shows that Binet used history as he saw fit to spin his own story. Ignorance, sometimes, is a reader’s bliss, and for the inquisitive reader, there is more than enough fascinating material here to start a quest for a more thorough exploration of the historical background and figures.
Although the pace somewhat slows down approaching the denouement due to a few long-winded and slightly repetitive accounts by Vasari and the distinctiveness of the multiple voices of the correspondents is not always fully reflected in the writing style - one of the qualities of the epistolary genre I thought more accomplished in John William’s Augustus, or in Jane Austen’s Lady Susan– for readers who are in the mood to let their hair down, Laurent Binet offers a fast-paced, pretty wildly entertaining and amusing story and a couple of hours of perfect escapism into the fascinating past. Raising some thought-provoking questions on representation, gender and power, Perspective(s) might help to stop yourself from doomscrolling and at least get a couple of hours of relief from despair – a welcome reminder that much might be only a matter of perspective (or from a more pessimistic point of view, just wishful thinking).
A translation of this novel into English will be published in April 2025. Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NetGalley and the author for giving me a chance to read an ARC....more
I have always thought that writing was close to music, only much less pure, and I have always envied musicians who to my mind practised an art which iI have always thought that writing was close to music, only much less pure, and I have always envied musicians who to my mind practised an art which is higher than the novel. Poets, too, who are closer to musicians than novelists. I began writing poems as a child, and that is surely why a remark I read somewhere struck such a chord with me: 'prose writers are made from bad poets'. For a novelist, in terms of music, it is often a matter of coaxing all the people, the landscapes, the streets he has been able to observe into a musical score which contains the same melodic fragments from one book to another, but which will seem to him to be imperfect. The novelist will then regret not having been a pure musician and not having composed Chopin's Nocturnes.
Patrick Modiano's 2014 Nobel lecture is a very moving, lucid, poetic and enlightening essay on writing, memory, Paris during the Occupation in the second world war, his use of telephone directories in the creative process, Proust, the importance of childhood experiences on writing, his views on his own writing and vocation as a novelist, the harmony which develops between the reader and the author. He finely brushes his themes ("Themes of disappearance, identity and the passing of time are closely bound up with the topography of cities"), touches on the writer as as seismograph who reveals the depths and reality hidden behind appearances and his literary influences - particularly other writers who - like Modiano is to Paris - are strongly linked to a single city (Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Söderberg).
With the passing of the years, each neighbourhood, each street in a city evokes a memory, a meeting, a regret, a moment of happiness for those who were born there and have lived there. Often the same street is tied up with successive memories, to the extent that the topography of a city becomes your whole life, called to mind in successive layers as if you could decipher the writings superimposed on a palimpsest. And also the lives of the thousands upon thousands of other, unknown, people passing by on the street or in the Métro passageways at rush hour.
I returned to my city familiar to tears, To my vessels and tonsils of childhood years, Petersburg, […] While you're keeping my telephone numbers alive. Petersburg, I still have the addresses at hand That I’ll use to recover the voice of the dead.
I was moved to tears by the stanza's of this poem of Osip Mandelstam that Modiano quoted - it reminded me of the moment I found the telephone guide 1997-1998 from Leuven that the French artist Christian Boltanski (1944-2021) used in his work of art "Les abonnés du téléphone, 2000" that one can see - and touch - in the basement of the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, and looked up the telephone number of the place where I had been living at that time with the one who I loved and who took me to Paris, and is no more.
[image]
Sometimes human existence is simply signified by lists of names, as in Abonnées du téléphone (‘Telephone Subscribers’), which was designed for the exhibition “Voilà” in 2000, where telephone directories from all over the world were displayed on shelves and could be consulted. Human presence here was reduced to its simplest expression: a surname.
[image]
Thank you very much Helga, for bringing this lecture of this author that I adore to my attention.
Modiano, toujours Modiano.
To me, Monsieur Modiano, your novels mean as much as the nocturnes, and preludes, and other pieces of Chopin - an almost daily necessity, a balm -thank you ♥.
The Nobel lecture of Patrick Modiano can be found here (in French, English and Swedish)....more
The silence between us was a bond stronger than words.
'A great book must have an unforgettable style, an unforgettable music', Patrick ModiDancing
The silence between us was a bond stronger than words.
'A great book must have an unforgettable style, an unforgettable music', Patrick Modiano asserted in an interview and his latest novel, La danseuse(Ballerina) would be a perfect illustration of his own artistic credo. Again, it is set into the familiar, atmospheric Modiano key of menace, memory and melancholy that makes reading his books so mesmerizing and addictive for the readers that are receptive to his music and his style. From the four novels he published since winning the Nobel Prize in 2014 (the others being Sleep of Memory, Invisible Ink, Scene of the Crime), I would denote La danseuse as the one that enchanted me the most - and as a highlight of this reading year.
Shadowy and ghostly figures that are perpetually walking the streets and squares of Paris, which are enveloped in a subdued light as if though illuminated by a light bulb not getting enough power, or sunken into a mist, resurfacing memories that blend past and present, reality and dream - with familiar themes and elements Modiano draws the reader in from the first paragraph, in which the narrator presents the duo his novel will revolve around, a dancer and her seven year old son, Pierre.
The mysterious dancer is a single mother, nameless, whom the narrator remembers after fifty years, when he presumes recognising the man who brought him into contact with the dancer. In his memory unfold images of a long-forgotten period of his life that have lain under a layer of ice, images of walking through Paris with the dancer, and of chaperoning her from dance class, as well as minding her child Pierre, while she is rehearsing of performing.
Following the advice of her Russian dance teacher Boris Kniassef, the young woman tries to get her life in line by the relentless self-discipline dancing requires, getting away from her difficult childhood and past, training her body steadily to reach that astounding level of finesse and elegance that creates that illusion of perfect lightness, of feet no longer touching the ground, of effortless flying. Inspired by her example and her strength, almost without realising it, the narrator is encouraged to gradually crawl out of his shell of emptiness and insecurity will grow towards what he will become, a writer. Like the discipline of dancing is a lifeline for the dancer, writing will give him what he needs to survive: And slowly but surely, the feeling of emptiness and stagnation at the bottom of my soul that crept up on me at certain times of the day disappeared. It was as if she pulled me along and pushed me back to the surface.
[image]
The search for lost time sometimes leads to a sunny clearing or a beach, and moments that have been saved from oblivion and give you the impression of an eternal present.
Particularly the scenes in which the narrator is looking after Pierre are moving, reminiscent of the numerous other neglected children in Modiano’s work (Vestiaire de l'enfance, So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood), Pierre’s making of puzzles with the narrator gently reflecting the narrator’s own attempts to puzzle the pieces of his and the dancer’s lives together. Parallelling the elegance and featherlight feel of dancing movements with graceful, gossamer writing, beautifully mirrored in Modiano’s subtle prose, La danseuse is a Modiano grand cru, dreamy and charming, striking a tender note with a heartwarming and playful finale.
And I ended up persuading myself that it was us, because the same situations, the same steps, the same gestures are repeated throughout time. And they are not lost, but eternally inscribed on the pavements, walls and station halls of this city. The eternal return of the same.
I see the elusive shadows of those floating bodies, always there, always hidden. Another age-related disturbance. Which seems obvious to me. My age beI see the elusive shadows of those floating bodies, always there, always hidden. Another age-related disturbance. Which seems obvious to me. My age becomes that of the floating bodies that populated my existence and that remain present and unreal.
Floating bodies (Corps flottants) – is a haunting, sensuous, and elegiac memoir, loosely shaped as a shadow play of impressions, observations and reflections.
A daughter of French expats, Jane Sautière spent her early childhood in Teheran and as an adolescent lived in Phnom Penh between 1967 and 1970 , until Lon Nol’s coup d’état and the start of the Cambodian civil war - a period in her life that is at the heart of this memoir, in which she attempts to face her repression of a past that seeks to sink into oblivion for good, impossible it has become to disconnect it from the killing fields in Cambodia. Starting as a piecing together of personal memories and a reconstruction of parts of her family history, Sautière’s memoir gradually transmutes into a serene and sobering memorial to the two million victims of the Cambodian genocide.
The masses of hitherto unknown fruits, which so accurately portray this earth: longans, lychees, rambutans, mango tans, papayas, sapodillas, cinnamon apples, dragon fruit, mangoes, wonderfully fragrant baby bananas, guavas, jackfruit and the unlikely durian, whose fermented corpse smell made us pinch our noses, but the coconut pulp-covered ice creams di were made from the fruit and served in rice dough cones tasted delectable. As if this listing communicates what the mouth can learn from a soil. The melody played by a tree with the score of the fruit. Constellations, flares, suns.
Initial experiences of the sensory colours and scents – the fauna and flora, streets and food - blend with first love, the unfolding of personal secrets, tragedies and losses, the background of her father (a former resistance fighter) and mother (from a Breton farmer’s family ), the deaths within her family- she was only told about the dead of a sister and a brother when she was twelve -– and of some of her classmates, who were tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge.
The memories of the dead flow into the reappearing of other memories, both resurfacing as floating bodies into her memory – a memory that to her feels obfuscated, impenetrable, effaced, tightly closed off – because it is forever stained by the bloody pages that the Khmer Rouge added to the history of Cambodia. With the help of books (L'image manquante), films and documentaries of a survivor (Rithy Panh), research, a musical tribute to the victims (Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia) Sautière carefully approaches the world she refused to see and closed herself off to, writing from the intimate and personal towards the horror, her research opening up a breach to the genocide, the years of stifling silence around it, marked by the shame of the survivor, or the shame of looking the other way, even if such seems all too human: Survival is irrevocably a crime.
Reminiscent of Ernaux’s focus on class migration, Sautière’s feelings of loyalty and treason towards the class of her family echo through her experiences (I too remained linked to my class by fleeing it.) In Sautière’s suggestive prose, W.G. Sebald seems to meetMarguerite Duras. Because of some striking parallels with Duras’ youth in Vietnam a few decades earlier – the lives of their mothers uncannily resembling each other - it is not hard to imagine the overwhelming impression that the discovery of the writing of Marguerite Duras had on Sautière. Recollecting her memories, her mind seems in a perpetual mode of dialogue with Duras, the writing of Duras permeating her own memories to an extent that from the first page on the memoir is imbued with allusions to the writing of Duras - waiting on a ferryboat, the Mekong river, the mother, insanity, desire, racism, colonialism. The Sea Wall, The Man Sitting in the Corridor, Practicalities, and ultimately, the crucial encounter with The Lover nurture Sautière’s growing consciousness of her own decisive years in Cambodia.
[image] (Cheanick Nov -Sitting)
Floating bodies should be that, a doubt about the existence of what animated us, the survival of a dance, a joy, a smile of what was also there, without possible return, but present and fragile, leaving us uncertain. The non-material matter (a shadow?) remains floating. We cannot see the floating bodies, they are there, we move our gaze towards them and they move just the same. Accept this approximation and therefore the inescapable failure to write them down. Wondering how to capture the intensity of things that have disappeared. A vacillation truer than certainties, more stable than creeds, more faithful to our lives.
In general, I am rarely inclined to read memoirs , but Jane sautière’s poetic, melancholy and meditative writing lured me to read Floating bodies twice - and browsing through it, it arrests me once more by a turn of phrase, an observation, by an evocation of the suffering and horror. Because Sautière’s style in some places glides into a rather fragmented and elliptical mode, her short book merits slow reading to stay attuned to her train of thought. Her profound admiration for Duras – bordering on an almost possessive love for the author - finally pulled me into reading The Lover – which turned out that beauteous, absorbing and brilliant that I am currently sinking into some Marguerite Duras obsession of my own, being wrapped up in Laure Adler’s bulky Marguerite Duras: A Life....more
She dives deep into the past, as into the depths of the sea. Ever lower, ever further, towards zones of shadow and silence that she thought had been aShe dives deep into the past, as into the depths of the sea. Ever lower, ever further, towards zones of shadow and silence that she thought had been abolished in her memory.
Elle plonge au fond du passé, comme dans les profondeurs de la mer. Toujours plus bas, plus loin, vers des zones d'ombre et de silence, qu'elle croyait abolies dans son souvenir.
This slender book consists of two novellas by Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942). A Kyiv-born novelist whose wealthy family went into exile in France after the Russian revolution, living in Paris and writing in French, Irène Némirovsky was an acclaimed author in France in the interbellum. Nowadays she is best known for Suite Française, a novel eventually published in 2004 of which the unfinished manuscript was kept in a suitcase by her daughters for more than fifty years after their mother perished in Auschwitz.
Drawn from the collection Film parlé, the novellas Ida (1934) and La comédie bourgeoise (1932) sketch a double portrait of two women whose lives at first sight come forth as quite different. Ida Sconin is an aging revue dancer and singer from Eastern European origin, performing in a music hall cabaret in Paris à la Moulin Rouge or Folies Bergère, famous and celebrated but living a lonely and isolated life, while Madeleine is the angel in the house of a prosperous upper middle class family, the daughter of a factory owner, married to the associate of her father, taking care of her parents, husband and son and daughter, living in a small community in rural northern France.
Both Ida and Madeleine deal in a similar way with the societal constraints their class, social position and gender roles impose on them. The taxing daily masquerade with heavy glitter costumes, wigs and feathers and hours of exercising to keep her body stage-fit gradually require more than Ida’s aging body can endure, even if there is no alternative but to carry on. Madeleine, trapped into a marriage of convenience, swallows the double standards on sexual freedom and conjugal fidelity for men and women for the sake of the happiness of others while seeing her life wasting away in the endless repetitiveness of the days, illustrated by her taking the same walks on the same roads in every stage of her life. Both are gritting their teeth to play their part, silently enduring and sacrificing what they hold dear, however rebelling quietly by keeping up to their own standards versus a hypocritical, merciless, and oppressive society and the indifference of their environment for their feelings.
[image]
(Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – Rousse(La Toilette), 1889))
By highlighting what these women living such different but equally unhappy lives have in common, Irène Némirovsky reveals the unenviable position of women in the early 20th century. Touching on the parallels emerging with Madeleine’s granddaughter, who just like her grandmother is bravely learning to play the piano required in every good bourgeois family – not for pleasure but to please others - she paints a rather pessimistic picture, discerning: no signs of change to expect soon in the future yet.
The melancholic tone and some of the wry turns in the lives of Ida and Madeleine bring Anton Chekhov to mind – Némirovsky wrote a biography on Chekhov that was published posthumously (A Life of Chekhov). The grittiness and the bleak portrayal of Ida’s exploitative milieu and the hypocrisy and suffocating boredom of bourgeois life stifling Madeleine echo Guy de Maupassant, particularly his novel Une vie. La comédie bourgeoise inexorably evokes Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, although Madeleine’s choices are quite unlike Emma’s. Set in the 1920s, Irène Némirovsky’s stories still seem to have one leg in the French 19th century realistic and naturalistic writing, yet they are also cinematographic and the dreamlike interior narrative of Ida slightly reminded me of La Femme de Gilles, the 1937 debut novel by Madeleine Bourdouxhe, a Belgian contemporary of Irène Némirovsky whose writing style however seemed already more in touch with modernity.
I don't photograph life as it is, but life as I would like it to be. — Robert Doisneau
For someone who is in love with Paris, this collection of 560I don't photograph life as it is, but life as I would like it to be. — Robert Doisneau
For someone who is in love with Paris, this collection of 560 photographs of the French photographer Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) is an absolute treat.
While I mostly associate images of nocturnal Paris with the photography of Brassaï, Doisneau’s photographs add a matutinal perspective on the city, widening the scope to street scenes in broad daylight. His exploring and documenting of Paris in black and white is often cheerful, with an eye for humour and the comical, shimmering with joie de vivre, celebrating life, love (Cosy kiss, 1950) and the beauty of Paris.
[image]
[image]
Thematically organised (Paris by surprise, Paris for Parisians (les Halles, everyday Parisians, a home for tenants, Paris-by –the-Seine) Paris in Upheaval (occupation, resistance, liberation, demonstrations), Paris at play (fairs, cabarets and nightclubs, society, fashion) Paris in concrete, the book offers enchanting vignettes from the multifarious facets everyday life in Paris, a couple of snapshots from children’s play, love, a couple of glamourous events and magnificent portraits.
Particularly with his choices on the human figure Doisneau illustrates breezingly the French national motto of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, juxtaposing casually portraits of ordinary Parisians next to photographs of personalities that might ring a bell with the reader (Charles de Gaulle, Vercors, Prévert, Francis Ponge, Raymond Queneau, Juliette Binoche, Orson Wells, Alberto Giacometti (1958), Picasso, Colette, some couturiers (Christian Lacroix, Jean-Paul Gaultier)
[image]
A couple of favourites are gems of storytelling condensed in just one image, for instance the accordionist on the cover picture or the picture of Anita, who could one of those characters with a shady past one encounters so often in the cafés and bars described by Patrick Modiano.
[image]
[image]
[image]
[image]
The photographs are accompanied by fragments from the personal notebooks of Doisneau and some of these witty comments made me smile, for instance when he recounts of loitering around and so coming late to work because he preferred to capture the poetry of a gracious moment, taking a snapshot from a street scene that he finds amusing, savouring the urban spectacle during his strolls:
“One morning I had an appointment with a clutch of advertising people who were preparing a campaign to launch new washbasins in polystyrene – or was it polyester?
As usual, I was late, and as I was crossing the Tuileries I was held up by a van marked ‘Gougeon: Fine Art Movers.’
Once I saw the statues by Maillol, the washbasins completely slipped by mind.
It must have been about that time that the advertising agency stopped returning my calls.”
[image] Venus gone bust, 1964
For half of a century I pounded the cobblestones, then asphalt, of Paris, wandering up and down the city. The few images that now rise to the surface of the flow of time, bobbing together like corks on a swirling stream, are those taken on time stolen from my employers. Breaking the rules strikes me as a vital activity, and I must say I enjoyed indulging in it. [image] Diagonal steps 1953
[image] The centaur town hall of the 6th arrondissement 1971
Charm needs to be fleeting, Doisneau reflects , but glancing through this wondrous collection, I am grateful for Doisneau’s art to stop and capture time in his photographs....more
Throwing the towel after 34 pages because Claire Baglin's writing comes across as too flat, banal and tasteless while I was expecting a wry and astuteThrowing the towel after 34 pages because Claire Baglin's writing comes across as too flat, banal and tasteless while I was expecting a wry and astute take on mind-numbing labour in the style of her compatriote Joseph Ponthus in his terrific and poetical On the Line: Notes From a Factory.
Even as a compulsive book finisher and despite its slimness, continuing this feels simply a waste of time....more
Just like the four books that I read previously of Annie Ernaux, reading her The young man left me conflicted, coaxing me into ruminating more than I Just like the four books that I read previously of Annie Ernaux, reading her The young man left me conflicted, coaxing me into ruminating more than I had suspected on the moment I closed the booklet, a flimsy forty pages one can read in the twinkling of an eye. This account was partly written in 1988-90, immediately after the end of this episode in her life, and picked up again and rewritten in 2022.
Reflecting on the relationship that she had in her early fifties with a student almost thirty years her junior, Ernaux in her typical clinical, pared-down style touches on her usual themes of time, memory, writing, class struggle and social mobility. She needs to write to live and she needs to live to write: "If I don't write them down, things didn't come to an end, they were only lived." Spending their time together in a room in Rouen in front of the hospital where she once had an abortion, being together with the young man catapults her back to her youth, her working class background, her past sexual experiences in shabby and unheated rooms with men that have become as impersonal and fungible in her memory like undergarments.
[image]
Openly affirming the relationship in the outside world, she questions the dominant views in society on relationships between men and women showing a huge age gap: admiring and envious towards older men with a woman at their side who could be their daughter; rueful, unforgiving and taunting towards women who dare to engage in a relationship with a much younger man. In Dutch there is a saying that an old billy goat still likes a green leaf which has rather a playful connotation; for old women comes the expression that an old barn burns easily which has more denigratory and furtive undertones, as if such desire of women at riper age is more dangerous.
In her radical honesty, she doesn’t beat around the bush. She sketches how she uses the young man for her own needs of reviving her youth memories and experiences: "He was the bearer of the memory of my first world". "With him I went through all the ages of life, my life." She revels in being able to dominate him intellectually and economically, also finding pleasure in rivalling with other women about him, cherishing the feeling of being the chosen one when he leaves the companion of his own age for her, enjoying the ambiguity of taking him to the same theater play like she took her son. She is his mistress, not in BDSM, but in initiating him, on her terms, to films, music and literature, more bourgeois food tastes. Somehow she seems to need society’s disapproving gaze, reminding her of dressing provocatively in her youth – maybe that gaze is mostly her own, one that she created in her own mind, a certain desire to be scandalous.
Perhaps unwillingly, in her fervent and ruthless demonstration that she is capable of acting in the same careless way with a younger man as men doing the same to a younger woman, she shows why an age gap might be problematic in a relationship, rather than giving an illustration of (mutual) empowerment and freedom. I admit I find witnessing this kind of instrumentalisation of people discomforting, whatever gender is on the receiving side and serves as a youth exilir - or writing material; it reminded me the undermining effects of toxic leadership in a work context, behaviour which is not a unique predisposition of one gender and of which one can wonder if the possibility of copying such imbalance of power into one’s personal relationships is really something that is desirable, only for the sake of advocating a certain concept of feminism (her statement that writing for her has been a kind of intimate revenge comes to mind).
[image]
The more I read by Annie Ernaux, the harder it becomes to attune to the voice of the persona emerging from her pages, while at the same time she takes me on a train of thought that I cannot stop, igniting a wish to understand why her voice at the same time sounds strangely familiar (the class issues, her political views) and disturbingly alien (the navel-gazing, the egotism) - bien étonné de me trouver ensemble with traditionalist, conservative and right-wing criticism of her prose as being “characterised by semantic poverty and minimal syntax in the service of a self-serving narrative”. (Le Figaro).
While reading this book, I came across a comment from Violeta in which she quotes this observation of Milan Kundera:
"Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel's wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil. Not that the novelist utterly denies that moral judgment is legitimate, but that he refuses it a place in the novel. If you like, you can accuse Panurge of cowardice, accuse Emma Bovary, accuse Rastignac—that's your business; the novelist has nothing to do with it."
Maybe reading Ernaux brings out the old grumpy moralist in me – just because her work isn’t novelistic and it has become impossible to separate the writer from the work. It is uncomfortably true to life, messy, edgy and disruptive. Maybe that is why I continue to read her....more