Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov – we have to read it
Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov (2018) translated by Boris Dralyuk. French title: Les abeilles grises.
Pashka’s garden looked out towards Horlivka, so he was one street closer to Donetsk than Sergeyich. Sergeyich’s garden faced in the other direction, towards Sloviansk; it sloped down to a field, which first dipped then rose up towards Zhdanivka.
I picked this quote in Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov because it struck me that I knew about Donetsk and Sloviansk and that many city names mentioned in the book are now familiar.
And only because these cities are theatres of war. I remember reading in one of Gary’s novels, I don’t remember which one, that in the West, we only learn geography through the news and when we know too much about a country’s geography, it’s not a good sign.
Grey Bees was published in 2018 and it refers to the war in the Donbas between Russian-backed separatists and government forces in eastern Ukraine. Russia had already annexed the Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Sergey Sergeyich and his nemesis Pashka Khmelenko are the two inhabitants left in Little Starhorodivka, a village in the grey zone in Donbass. The grey zone means that they live between the separatists’ positions and the Ukrainian ones. Shells fly over their heads regularly.
First, fathers bundled their wives and children off to safety, wherever they had relatives: Russia, Odessa, Mykolayiv. Then the fathers themselves left, some becoming “separatists”, others refugees. The last to be taken away were the old men and women. They were dragged off weeping and cursing. The noise was awful.
This is how they became the last men living in their village and this short paragraph says all about the drama of war for folks like you and me. One day you live your life and the next, you’re packing what you can and leaving.
Sergey is a retired mine safety inspector and beekeeper extraordinaire. He’s 49, his wife left him a few years ago, taking their only daughter with her to Vinnytsia, in the west of the country.
When the book opens, it’s winter and we follow Sergey’s daily life, a quotidian of survival. They have been without power for three years now, which means heating one or two rooms of the house with the wood stove, using it to cook as well and rely on candlelight. Sergey checks on his bees every day, they are hibernating during the winter, so nothing much happens on that side.
This first part shows a gentle man who likes his village, a pacific soul who cares about his bees, someone who wants to stay out of the conflict. However, contrary to Pashka, he leans towards the Ukrainian forces.
Spring arrives and he realizes there is not enough flowers for his bees to gather nectar and pollen. If he wants them to produce honey and survive, he has to take his hives somewhere else. Therefore he loads them in his Lada, packs his camping gear and his icon of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker and goes on the road to find a suitable place to put his hives and gather honey.
His travels will take him to a village on the east of the Donetsk district and next to occupied Crimea. He will show us how his compatriots see him as a refugee from Donbass and that for them, war doesn’t mean hearing shells over your head but seeing your husband or son join the army and maybe get killed.
When he enters the Crimea region, the Russians have set up a border between the annexed Crimea and Ukraine. Crossing this border is a risky endeavor. Sergey intends to find a fellow beekeeper, a Tatar he met in a beekeeper convention. His stay in occupied Crimea shows the Russian repression towards Tatars and the brainwashing they are doing to the Orthodox population. See here the discussion between Sergey and a Russian inhabitant of Crimea:
“Well, this is their land,” the beekeeper offered timidly. “The hell it is!” the woman said indignantly, but without malice. “This land’s been Russian Orthodox since time immemorial! Russians brought Orthodoxy from Turkey, brought it to Chersonesus, back before there were any Muslims. It was later that the Turks sent in the Tatars, along with their Islam. When Putin was here, he told the whole story – this is sacred Russian land.” “Well, I haven’t looked into the history,” Sergeyich shrugged. “Who knows what happened?” “What happened is what Putin says happened,” she insisted. “Putin doesn’t lie.”
Hmm.
Sergey travels around in these troubled areas, carrying his innocence on his sleeve. Grey Bees reminded me of Candide. His travels don’t seem totally realistic and yet, they are rooted in their time. Sergey navigates in these desolate times with a one-track mind, his bees. His moto is not “We must cultivate our garden” but “We must take care of our bees.” Why grey bees? They come from the grey zone, that’s for sure and there’s an explanation by the end of the book but won’t spoil anyone’s reading.
I liked Sergey and his obstinacy to make honey and keep his bees alive. Kurkov takes a candid character and asks all the difficult questions. He shows the intricacies of the local politics, the mixed Ukrainian-Russian culture of the area, the importance of religion and the power of religious leaders, Orthodox and Muslim. It is all here, in this exchange between a Ukrainian soldier and Sergey:
Petro shook his head. “And what’s your name?” “Me? Sergey Sergeyich – you can call me Sergeyich. So it’s probably Peter, not Petro.” “No, it’s Petro. Says so in my passport.” “Well, my passport says I’m Serhiy Serhiyovych – but I say I’m Sergey Sergeyich. That’s the difference.”
His name is in Ukrainian on his passport and he uses the Russian form. The languages are intertwined in him, probably as they are in the author’s psyche.
I read Grey Bees in February, the anniversary of the war in Ukraine. I don’t want to write the “first anniversary” because that means others are to come but I’m afraid we’re headed that way. The first part was the hardest to read because it delved into the consequences of war for Sergey. Living with a different kind of silence and having fear settling their ugly quarters in his soul.
Fear is an invisible thing, subtle and variable, like a virus or bacterium. It can be inhaled with a breath of air, or accidentally imbibed with a sip of water or vodka, or come in through your ears – and you can certainly catch it with your eyes, so badly that its image will remain in your pupils even after the fear itself has disappeared.
It was very poignant and hard to read sometimes but my discomfort is nothing compared to what the real Sergeys are living.
Grey Bees left me with a question: how could we be so blind and not see this war coming?
_______________________
PS: Boris Dralyuk won Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize for his translation of Grey Bees. Congratulations to him for a well-deserved award, his translation is outstanding.
I also read Death and the Penguin and my billet is here. I have The Good Angel of Death on the shelf.
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson – raw sensitivity
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson (2018) Original French title: “Arrête avec tes mensonges” English translation by Molly Ringwald.
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson is an autobiographical novel about his first teenage grand love, Thomas Andrieu, the one that structured his being for the future, whether he wanted it or not. This remained a secret until Philippe meets Lucas, Thomas’s son. Lie With Me tells Philippe and Thomas’s love story, makes it real and alive on paper.
We’re in 1984, in Barbezieux, rural France and Philippe is 17. He’s a senior in high school, in Terminale C., the Maths and Physics major, considered as the elite student track. He has a quiet family life. He knows he’s gay, he’s not open about his sexual orientation but he’s at peace with himself.
Philippe has a major crush on Thomas, who is in Terminale D. They don’t run in the same circles, they don’t talk to each other and Thomas is handsome and always surrounded by girls. In other words, Thomas doesn’t seem to be into boys.
Philippe lives with his unrequited crush until Thomas makes a move.
Their relationship is incandescent, it ignites from nothing and burns high but must remain a secret. Thomas imposes it, Philippe abides by it. They meet in hidden places until they use Philippe’s room when his parents are at work. They don’t talk much at the beginning but open up to each other. Thomas knows from the start that their relationship has an expiry date. Philippe doesn’t.
Thomas is a farmer’s only son. He feels tied up to the land, destined to take over the farm. He’s a good student too but he nixes his rights at a higher education. He feels that he needs to stay and he won’t change his mind. At least, that’s what Philippe perceives. Thomas hasn’t come to terms with his homosexuality. He can’t.
When high school graduation happens and they are separated for the holidays, Thomas knows he will remain in Spain with his mother’s family while Philippe expects him to come home and is crushed by the pain he feels when he understands he won’t see Thomas anymore.
| A la rentrée de septembre, je quitte Barbezieux. Je deviens pensionnaire au lycée Michel-de-Montaigne à Bordeaux. J’intègre une prépa HEC. Je débute une nouvelle vie. Celle qu’on a choisie pour moi, je me plie à l’ambition qu’on nourrit pour moi, j’emprunte la voie qu’on m’a tracée. Je rentre dans le rang. J’efface Thomas Andrieu. | At the beginning of September, I leave Barbezieux. I go to college at the Lycée Michel-de-Montaigne in Bordeaux, working toward a graduate degree in business. I begin a new life, the one that was chosen for me, bowing to the hope and ambition that have been placed in me. I erase Thomas Andrieu. (*) |
Besson describe their doomed love story with a perfect mix of openness and reserve. He looks at his younger self with the lucidity and indulgence of the adult. He writes about young love and raw desire the way Marguerite Duras writes about it in The Lover. Hidden love, impossible love and no feelings put into words. Feelings are told with their bodies. Besson blends immodest lovemaking and modest sensitivity and connects his reader with the pure beauty of his first love and the devastation it left in his soul when it ended.
Besson perfectly gives back the early 1980s in France. The Jean-Jacques Goldman posters on the walls in Philippe’s room. The clothes. The atmosphere at the high school and at home. His father is a primary school teacher, which gives Philippe the status of the teacher’s son and academic success is important at home. School is a social ladder.
Although I’m several years younger than Besson, we still have some things in common. A shared love for Veiller tard by Jean-Jacques Goldman. Same school track in high school and after. Same kind of family background. I bet he knows the scent of the spirit duplicator that all teachers used at home at that time. Ask about it to any teacher’s child born in the 1960s-1970s and they’ll know.
These years are the end of innocence, before AIDS. When I was Philippe’s age in the book, the AIDS epidemic was a major topic. The only good thing about AIDS is that it put homosexuality in the open. In the early 1990s, it gave us Philadelphia and showed a couple of gay men living normal lives and not Cages aux Folles lives. In France, we were reading To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life by Hervé Guibert and watching Les Nuits fauves by Cyril Collard. 10/18 published The San Francisco Chronicles by Armistead Maupin. Philippe Djian had gay characters in Maudit Manège. Both were huge successes.
But before AIDS became a hot topic, during Philippe and Thomas’s years, no one talked about homosexuality. After reading this book, I wonder who were the Philippe and Thomas in my school. Statistically, they exist and I’m sorry that they had to hide.
The English title of Besson’s novella has a double meaning: “tell lies with me” and “lie with me in bed” and both meanings are relevant. The French title is Arrête avec tes mensonges, which means Stop with your lies. Besson’s mother used to tell him that when he was inventing stories about the people around him. But it’s also addressed to Thomas who wouldn’t stop lying to others and to himself.
Thomas didn’t have the tools to become his authentic self. It’s a personal thing and a class thing. In the paragraph quoted before, the little sentence J’intègre une prépa HEC packs a lot for a French reader or at least for me. It emphasizes the difference between Philippe and Thomas. Philippe will leave home to go to prep school, then will move out of the region to go to a business school and move up the social ladder. Thomas feels that he needs to take over his parents’ farm, not out of love for farming but out of duty. There’s nothing more tying-to one-place than farming.
Lie With Me is a heart-wrenching story of doomed young love and of two men who suffered all their lives about it. One never recovered of being abandoned and not knowing whether he was loved, the other never overcoming his fear of people’s reactions to his sexual orientation.
To me, this novella goes with The Lover by Marguerite Duras and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
The Lover was published in 1984, the very same year Philippe and Thomas relationship happened. Like Lie With Me, it’s an autobiographical novella about a hidden love between teenage Marguerite Duras and a rich Chinese man. It’s about raw desire, the inexplicable force of attraction that draws to each other two people from very different backgrounds and who brave social conventions to be together.
The Lover has a detached narrator/author, a girl who puts up mental barriers and doesn’t want to voice her love for this Chinese man because it’s taboo, because it’s doomed and because the idea of its ending hurts too much.
In The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer condemns himself to live someone else’s life because he knows his limits. He won’t change and he’s not strong enough to live through the social and family disgrace that will come with marrying Ellen Olenska. Thomas reminded me of Newland: he knows his limits too and he’s the one who makes the difficult decision.
It is a truly beautiful novella, made into an excellent film by Olivier Peyon even if the storytelling varies from the book. Besson worked on the screenplay, so, he approves of the changes. Guillaume De Tonquédec plays an incredible Philippe Besson. He looks like him it’s confusing.
I read the book and watched the film the day after. Even if the film is good, nothing compares to literature when it comes to conveying subtle details about people’s souls.
Many thanks to Kim who took the time to find the English translation of the paragraph quoted before. I wondered how the translator had fared with the “prépa HEC” phrase. She remembered to look for it when she was at the library and you’ve got to love the international book community for having an Australian in Perth checking out a paragraph for another reader in France. Book lovers rock! Kim’s review is here , have a look at it.
Jacqui also reviewed it here.
Other billets about books by Philippe Besson:
The Morality of Senses by Vicomte de Mirabeau – a libertine novel
The Morality of Senses by Vicomte de Mirabeau (1781) Original French title: La Morale des sens.
The Morality of Senses is a libertine book by the Vicomte de Mirabeau (1754-1792) who is the younger brother of Mirabeau, a figure of the French Revolution. According to his bio on Wikipedia, I’m not sure I would have liked to meet the man. It is published by Libretto, a French independent publisher and this is my last contribution to Karen’s and Lizzy’s official #ReadIndies and to Marina Sofia’s unofficial French February.
In this novel published in London to avoid censorship, Mirabeau wrote a coming of age novel that relates the love escapades of an adolescent. My copy also includes the original illustration of the book, all of couples in various states of undress.
Basically, our narrator is horny all day long and chases after everything with a skirt. At the beginning of the book, he’s staying at a friend’s house. He’s pining after another guest, the young Eglé who is just out of convent but sleeps with the hostess of the house and has fun with the servant Julie.
One could say, as it is written on the back page of my copy, that his attitude shows some acquiescence to the ideas of equality between people promoted by this century of the Enlightenment. He doesn’t make any difference between a servant and her mistress. That’s one way to view it. I’m just seeing him as a shameless womanizer, which is fine by me as he doesn’t make any false promise to any of these ladies.
Some little piques here and there prove that he is a man of his century: Voltaire and Rousseau are mentioned, as well as the court and the power of literary salons.
What shocked me the most in this novel is the narrator’s attitude towards women. They are fortresses to be conquered and he uses military words for that. He explains that when they say no, it’s more to save appearances and tell themselves that they have resisted to temptation than anything else. It never comes to his mind that “no” might actually say “no”.
I know we mustn’t judge past behaviors according to today’s standards. I’m not judging the character or the author, I’m just pointing out where we come from and why we still have issues with women consent. He’s genuinely convinced that their protest is just for the sake of propriety and nothing else. This “no means yes” is a solid and old wall of belief that we are still fighting against. Not all the time, but often enough.
It’s a good reminder of our misogynistic roots and that we mustn’t give up the fight. Otherwise, La Morale des sens is an interesting testimony of the libertine world before the French Revolution.
I have no idea whether La Morale des sens has been translated into English or not. I imagine that, at some point, it must have been.
Three Crimes Is a Charm #2 : French crime fiction for #ReadIndies and French February
This month is #ReadIndies, where we read books published by independent publishers. It’s hosted by Karen and Lizzy. Marina Sofia decided to do a #FrenchFebruary for herself and I decided to join her and combine the two events.
So here we are with three French crime fiction books published by independent publishers (Les Arènes, Les éditions du Rouergue and Zulma)
Let’s start with…
Mamie Luger by Benoît Philippon. (2018) Not available in English. Publisher: Les Arènes, collection Equinox.
I came upon this book at Quais du Polar and its English title could be Nana Luger.
Berthe Gavignol, born in 1914 in a village in Cantal, France is the Mamie Luger of the book. Mamie, because she’s 102 when she greets the French police with her rifle and Luger because she owns a Luger gun acquired during the German occupation in WWII.
She’s taken to detention for shooting her neighbor and the police inspector André Ventura is in for a ride when she starts telling her life story.
Mamie Luger is a serial killer, out of circumstances. Her bad choice in men makes her a victim of domestic violence and she solves the problem with her Luger and her inhouse graveyard in her basement.
The author tells this incredible story on a tone laced with humor as a relationship builds between a bewildered Ventura and his new prison ward. It’s fun but a bit too long sometimes, less husbands wouldn’t have hurt.
Still, it’s a picture of what too many women have to endure and a take on rural life in France.
To read for fun and Marina Sofia’s thoughts on this one are here. Then, my February crime fiction journey led me to…
Par les rafales by Valentine Imhof (2018) Not available in English. Publisher: Rouergue noir.
It came as a blind book date as I asked the libraire of Un Petit Noir to pick books for me. This deadly road-movie took me from Lorraine, to Belgium, Louisiana and Canada. How?
Alex is a free-lance music journalist. When the book opens, she’s in a hotel room in Nancy after a music festival. She’s with a man, for a one-night-stand when their hookup spooks her and she kills her companion. Savagely.
Then she’s back to Metz, where she has her base camp and her lover, Anton. Alex is haunted, her skin is tattooed with excerpts from various works of literature. Her tattoo artist is Bernd, in Ghent, Belgium. He suggested to hide under ink all the marks of torture that covered her body. And they we learn how Alex got them and why she feels tracked like wildlife during a hunting party.
Each chapter of the book starts with an unreadable text, an excerpt of Alex’s tattoos. Par les rafales is Alex’s highspeed run race against the police, her imaginary hunters and her very real internal demons born with the assault she was victim of.
The book could have been written by Virginie Despentes, the one from Apocalypse Baby. Feminist. Full of literary and rock and blues references. (The playlist is at the end of the book and I’ll put in on Spotify when I have time). Crude with a strong female protagonist.
An unusual book, well-written, violent and haunting. It needs a translator.
After all the cold and rain of Par les rafales, I went to the French countryside, in the Drôme department, between Lyon and Provence for a wonderful book by Pascal Garnier.
Low Heights by Pascal Garnier (2003) Original French title: Les Hauts du Bas. Publisher: Zulma
Another book with a fiery old person. Edouard Lavenant is an old curmudgeon, forced to retire to a family property in Drôme Provençale, near Rémuzat after he had a bad stroke. He has a nurse and housekeeper, Thérèse, that he likes to torture. He’s as gracious a character by Thomas Bernhard. You see the drift.
He’s like a petulant child who’s sulking because he had to change his life and at the beginning of the book, we see how Thérèse manages to get him out of his shell with her unwavering kindness. It sounds all bucolic and the descriptions of the Drôme natural landscapes are gorgeous. It seems to go into the fluffy direction of the old man mollified by his housekeeper and learning to enjoy life again and make peace with his past.
Only it’s not a book by Elizabeth Gilbert, it’s a book by Pascal Garnier. Edouard doesn’t get out of his shell; he gets out of his personal Pandora box and all hell breaks loose, from Rémuzat, to Lyon and to Switzerland.
This is perfect noir literature, in less than 200 pages. Extraordinary sense of place with vibrant descriptions of the region that will make you travel to the Drôme Provençale area. A sense of humor that made me chuckle time and again. A storyline built like a well-oiled machine, like Hot Spot by Charles Williams or a roman dur by Simenon. There’s also a scene with snails that reminded me of the short-story The Snail-Watcher by Patricia Highsmith. The crime fiction gods are all approving of Low Heights.
Both Garnier and Tavernier are dead now but I could see them team up and make Low Heights into a magnificent film. We still have Jacques Audiard and it’s right up his alley. So, fingers crossed, eh?
Lucky you, out of the three French books I read for French February and Read Indies, this is the only one available in English, thanks to the indie publisher, Gallic Books and Melanie Florence who translated it. See also Marina Sofia’s take on it for Crime Fiction Lover and rush for it.
Born Content in Oraibi by Bérengère Cournut
Born content in Oraibi by Bérengère Cournut (2017) Original French title: Née contente à Oraibi. Not available in English.
Have you ever read a book and find yourself unable to know what to think about it? That’s how I felt about Née contente à Oraibi by Bérengère Cournut when I finished it.
Cournut is a French editor and writer born in 1979. That’s all I know about her, except that she wrote several books and spent some time among the Hopis.
Oraibi is a Hopi village in Navajo County, Arizona. There’s no precise timeline but I’m thinking we’re at the turning of the 20th century. At least, if I consider the photos included at the end of the book.
It’s a coming-of-age novel, a first-person narrative with Tayatitaawa’s voice. She’s “the one who salutes the Sun with a grin”, or in other words, the one who was born content in Oraibi. Tayatitaawa tells her childhood and her adolescence, describes her house, her family and her quotidian. She was close to her father and lost him at a young age. He wasn’t a usual Hopi man but he was well-respected in their community. His death carved a hole in her soul, one she had trouble healing to feel whole again. It’s a lovely book, written in a poetic tone and with a strong sense of place.
This book has the soothing quality of a folk tale. It’s full of Hopi customs and cosmology but they don’t come as a statement. They are in the book, described but not too much. They belong to the narrative because they belong to Tayatitaawa’s life and education. The lack of in-depth explanations about rites gives weigh and life to Tayatitaawa’s voice. If she’s a Hopi telling her life to other Hopis, she won’t explain things that are obvious to them. She will tell important facts that belong to oral transmission like the family bonds between clans, clans’ names and roles in the village.
I don’t know if what Bérengère Cournut writes about Hopi customs is accurate. I don’t care. She doesn’t pretend to write a scientific book. Née contente à Oraibi feels like the child of a writer who made a meaningful trip and absorbed her surroundings. She connected with other human beings from another culture and recognized them as other human beings. Nothing else. No awe for their culture. No judgment. No comparison. Her book is her way to share what she captured of Oraibi. She could have written a reportage. She wrote a novel to pass on what she felt about the place, its wilderness and its inhabitants.
We could debate upon the rightfulness of a French author writing a coming-of-age novel with a Hopi character in such a traditional setting. I’m a firm believer that authors may write whatever they want. Even if that means more clichéd books about Provence and mythical French lovers in postcard Paris. It’ll be the role of critics and readers to cull the best ones and point out flagrant inconsistencies or biased tones of the others. To me, there is no alternative. Discussion and debates are the only options. Otherwise, it’s like setting up a book police aka censorship.
If we say that Bérengère Cournut can’t write about Hopis because she’s French and not Hopi, where does it stop? An American historian cannot write about the French Revolution because he’s not French even if he has studied the period a lot more than any average Frenchman?
We’re already on an ice-covered slippery slope as examples keep piling up. A white poetess cannot translate a black poetess because she’s not black. Agatha Christie now wrote And Then They Were None instead of Ten Little Niggers. I call it laziness: it’s easier to change the book title than to take time to educate people and help them see this title as a symbol of its time and talk about slavery and colonization. Let’s erase it, it’s easier and we’ll all forget that people thought it was normal to use the N word.
And I heard that a new cleaned-up version of Roald Dahl’s book is on the way, that Anthony Horowitz was asked to delete the word scalpel from his book to spare Native Americans’ sensitivity as the word is close to scalp. What’s next? LGBT associations asking to rename Pride and Prejudice into a neutral Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam because the words pride and prejudice mean something specific to them?
We are living in an asinine world where there is no space left for nuance and discussion. Marketing gurus target individuals and tailor goods and services to their customers’ liking, leading them to expect that everything has to bend and accommodate to their tastes and way of life. Add the built-in bias of social networks: the contents they push to their users is based on what they liked before and keep them in their community, not exposing them to other ways of thinking and the ability to block content you don’t want to see seals the deal. All this keeps people in their own mental juice and doesn’t leave a lot opportunities to accidentally broaden one’s point of view.
These people who push to rewrite Roald Dahl want everyone’s specificities and sensitivities taken into account. It’s not possible to have a one fits all for everything. Or everything becomes bland because the middle ground on which everyone agrees upon is tasteless. Yes, I understand that Under the Volcano may not be a good book to a recovering alcoholic. The solution is not to change tequila into water in Lowry’s book. It is for readers to use their brain and make an educated decision about the books they read.
What does all this have to do with Née contente à Oraibi? Everything. I closed the book, puzzled because I fleetingly questioned her right to write it. This way of thinking has wormed its way into my brain in spite of me and I don’t like it one bit. Writing about Née contente à Oraibi helped me put things into perspective.
Bérengère Cournut wrote a beautiful book set in a place, time and culture totally foreign to her upbringing. She learnt enough about Hopi customs to write a plausible book and she extracted the essence of her trip. She captured the universal: after all, Tayatitaawa is just a girl who is growing up, who misses her father terribly after his untimely death, who tries to bond with her brother, who wants to understand where she comes from and what she’ll do with her life. No need to be French or Hopi for that. Only to be human.
PS: This book is published by Le Tripode, an independent French publisher. Its editorial line is to consider any book of any genre as long as its good literature. The books are beautiful too. The cover of Née Contente à Oraibi is a creation by Juliette Maroni and it’s a perfect fit for the book. I received it through my Kube subscription and the libraire who chose it for me did well.
This is one of my contributions to Karen’s and Lizzy’s official #ReadIndies and to Marina Sofia’s unofficial French February.
The Waltz of Trees and Sky by Jean-Michel Guenassia – Van Gogh’s days in Auvers-sur-Oise
The Waltz of Trees and Sky by Jean-Michel Guenassia. (2016) Original French title: La valse des arbres et du ciel.
The Waltz of Trees and Sky by Jean-Michel Guenassia was our Book Club choice for January. I’m writing this billet about a year after I got this book during a splendid afternoon of visiting bookstores, indulging in book buying and settling in a beautiful historical café in downtown Lyon.
The Waltz of Trees and Sky is a historical novel in which Marguerite Gachet relates the last months of Van Gogh’s life. She was 21 when Van Gogh arrived in Auvers-sur-Oise, to meet his new physician and lover of the arts, Dr Gachet. He spent his last months there from May to July 29th, the day he died and painted around 70 pictures in three months.
Marguerite was the doctor’s daughter. She was 21 at the time, an amateur painter and in his historical fiction, Guenassia imagines that, now that she’s eighty-years old, she’ll write about her love story with Van Gogh and explain that he didn’t commit suicide.
In his afterword, Guenassia lists his sources and thanks Benoît Landais, a renowned Van Gogh specialist for his help. He also explains that there are doubts about Van Gogh’s death but there is no proof that it wasn’t a suicide. Several rumors report a relationship between Marguerite and Vincent but she didn’t say anything before she died and there is no actual proof.
Now that this in the open, what did I think about Guenassia’s book? First of all, I read it easily, it was really pleasurable.
The descriptions of Auvers-sur-Oise, the beautiful weather of that late spring and summer are true-to-life. I felt I was leaving my cold January behind and that I was walking around in the fields with Van Gogh, his canvas, paint tubes and easel. It’s breathtaking, like entering into a Van Gogh’s painting and seeing the countryside with his eyes.
The picture of Dr Gachet is terrible. I saw him as a patron of the arts and a let’s say, a good man. According to Guenassia, he sounds like a selfish brute, ready to manipulate his children through money and power play. He saw helping his painter friends as an investment.
Guenassia portrays Marguerite as a strong-willed and intelligent young lady. She doesn’t want to conform. She passed her baccalauréat – something new for a woman – and wanted to push further her studies but her father didn’t want her to. She wanted to be an artist and was working hard on her painting. She saw the beauty, the novelty and the vibrancy of Van Gogh’s paintings when her contemporaries didn’t. Van Gogh painted her at least once, at the piano.
However, my more analytical mind detected flaws in the novel.
I wasn’t quite on board with his Marguerite Gachet. She seemed like a die-hard feminist, imprisoned by social proprieties and trying to beak free. A sort of Camille Claudel. I’m not sure in real life, she had all the freedom to walk around on her own that she has in the book. Bourgeois conventions and all that. I thoughts that chaperones were inevitable.
I also thought that the tone of the book wasn’t consistent from the beginning to the end.
Marguerite sounded more like a young woman writing her diary than an old woman reminiscing about a happy, tragic and life-changing moment of her existence. It lacked the hindsight and reflective thoughts that come with remembrance. Her language was also too modern, not consistent with an 1890 young woman or a 1949 old lady. I expected more of a Céleste Albaret manner of speech than what Guenassia wrote.
The book is peppered with vignettes about France and Paris at the time. I didn’t understand their purpose. They broke the flow of my reading and weren’t always relevant with what Marguerite was saying. If it was to make the reader feel the atmosphere of the time, then they could have been at the head of each chapter and not in the middle of the text.
And then, there’s the romance vibe; not quite to my liking even if I’m usually a good sport for that kind of development.
But in the end, these flaws weren’t important enough to spoil the pleasure I had reading about Van Gogh’s painting, about his hot, dry and productive summer in Auvers. The book immersed me in the painting, in the double vision of the canvas and the scenery he was watching.
The idea of his death being an accident instead of a suicide made me sad because of all the paintings he still had in him. He was only 37. And then I noticed that his brother Theo who supported him financially and emotionally died of syphilis 6 months after Vincent. Would he have fared well and survived without his brother? In the end, maybe things are better this way and, in any case, he left us with gorgeous paintings that go straight to your soul.
Now, I want to go to Auvers in the summer and do the Van Gogh trail. And hop on a train to Amsterdam to visit the upcoming exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum “Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months” and see the Vermeer exhibition that is opening soon.
La valse des arbres et du ciel isn’t available in English but according to Goodreads, you can read it in French, Greek, Italian, Czech, Arabic and Russian.
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata – highly recommended
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (1948) French title: Pays de neige. Translated by Bunkichi Fujimori.
Sometimes people ask whether you’d buy a book for its cover. My answer is always yes and Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata is the perfect example of it. I was drawn to the cover, a part of a 1858 painting by Hiroshige entitled Yugasan in Bizan Province. (see below: isn’t it beautiful?)
Snow Country is the improbable love story between Shimamura, a dilletante from Tokyo and Komako, a young geisha from a small watering town in the mountains. (Kawabata doesn’t mention the town’s name in the novel but it’s Yuzawa, in the Niigata prefecture.)
Shimamura is married, has children and comes from old money. He writes articles about ballet and he became obsessed with Western dancing after he got tired of Japanese traditional dances. He’s a dilletante without an actual profession. Shimamura enjoys hiking retreats in the mountains to refuel. This is how he landed in this town, tired but happy and re-energized after a week-long hike.
He’s staying at an inn and asks for a geisha. This will be his first encounter with Komako, who’s not a geisha at the time. Something moves him in her beauty and her attitude.
The second time he comes back is actually the opening scene of the novel. He’s looking forward to seeing Komako again. He’s on the train on his way to the watering town and he observes a young woman taking care of her sick companion in their train carriage. He watches their reflection on the train’s window and it allows him to stare at them without being impolite. They hop off the train at the same station as him and he’ll see them later.
He reconnects with Komako, who is now a geisha. She attaches herself to him, and they will spend a lot of time together. Her attitude is not in accordance with the codes of her profession and they try to stay under the town’s radars.
The third time he comes will be the last. Komako is now too attached to him for her own good and their relationship can go nowhere. Shimamura likes her but he’s not in love with her and anyway, he’s married. It’s time to end it.
The story is a traditional love story doomed from the start and details from Komako’s life are revealed in the course of the story. The baseline is not new but the novel is a masterpiece nonetheless, all due to the writing.
The first chapter when Shimamura looks at the young people in the train’s window is truly beautiful. It’s cinematographic and very Proust-like. I can’t help thinking about the scenes on the train in Normandy during the Narrator’s stays in Balbec. Shimamura is entranced by the young girl’s beauty.
The descriptions of the landscapes are poetic and the interaction between the surrounding nature and Shimamura’s moods reminded me of Nature Writing. He comes to this mountain town once in May and spring is in full swing, once in December and it snows and once in the Fall. These three different moments of the year bring a different atmosphere to the town and play on Shimamura’s state of mind.
So, the beauty of the painting on the book cover reflects the beauty of Kawabata’s descriptions. Snow Country also captures a side of a disappearing Japan, as the country turns to Western modernity.
Shimamura lives in Tokyo and is interested in Western culture. After all, he writes about ballet and translates Alain and Paul Valéry. His trips to the mountains are a way to reconnect with himself and with traditional Japan. The old world, before the country opened to the West, still lingers in this remote village. It’s disappearing fast and Komako herself has spent time in Tokyo for her apprenticeship. She’s not a country pumpkin who has never left her hometown. Shimamura and Komako have a connection because he’s eager to go back to traditional Japan and she knows his world too. They meet halfway.
I really don’t know much about Japanese customs and sometimes I think I should read a book like Japanese customs for dummies before diving deeper into Japanese literature. So, curious as I am, I truly enjoyed reading about the geisha world and its organization, the villagers’ life and other customs like traditional dances, the making of Ojiya-chijimi fabric, the way women dress, bath and do their hair. It’s part of Shimamura’s attraction to the place and it’s part of my attraction to Kawabata’s book.
Snow Country is my second Kawabata after Kyôto and I’m afraid I’ve no recollection of Kyôto except that I liked it alright. I should reread it now that I’m older. Snow Country is a classic of Japanese literature and it is understandable as the story is universal and the style stunning.
This is my participation to Doce Bellezza’s Japanese Literature Challenge.
Three crimes is a charm : England in the Middle Ages, high tech in Virginia and a haunting past in Finland.
Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin (2007) French title: La confidente des morts. Translated by Vincent Hugon.
This is the first instalment of a series by Ariana Franklin featuring the female doctor, Adelia Aguila. We’re in Cambridge, in 1171, during the reign of King Henry II of England. Adelia came from Sicily with Simon of Naples and Mansur.
They were sent by their king upon Henry II’s request. Children have been murdered in Cambridge and the local population accuses the Jews of the crime. They have been staying in a castle for months now and as valuable tax payers, Henry II wants them back to their occupations.
Adelia is an oddity for 12th century England: she’s a woman, a doctor and “mistress of the art of death”, in other word, the ancestor of medical examiners.
The book is a criminal investigation, a cool description of life in Cambridge at the time. I’m not sure that everything is totally accurate or that the characters are historically plausible but I didn’t care. I’m no historian, the main details were correct and I had a great time following this ad hoc team of investigators while they looked for the perpetrator of these gory murders.
Recommended to spend a good afternoon on the couch, with a blanket during a cold winter Sunday or lying on a towel on the beach during a hot summer day.
Livid by Patricia Cornwell (2022) Not available in French. Yet.
My daughter raised to the challenge of getting me a book for Christmas and the poor child sweated bullets and spent a lot of time in a bookstore wondering what to buy to her bookworm of a mother.
I hadn’t read anything by Cornwell in 25 years, I think. I used to read her, Mary Higgins Clark and Elizabeth George in my teens and twenties. Then I got tired of them, even if Elizabeth George is the best writer of the three. What Came Before He Shot Her is truly remarkable. But back to Cornwell.
Kay Scarpetta is back in Alexandria, Virginia, as the chief of medical examiners and let’s say that CSI techniques have progressed since Adelia’s time in Cambridge.
The book opens with an excellent trial scene where Scarpetta is testifying and put under unfair pressure by the Commonweath’s Attorney while the judge doesn’t intervene. The said judge is Annie Chilton, her college friend and by the end of the day, Scarpetta learns that the judge’s sister Rachael has been murdered and that there was an attempted terrorist attack against the president of the USA.
Scarpetta goes on the crime scene and the CIA and FBI have already invested the place as the victim worked for the CIA. Scarpetta quickly understands that Rachael was killed by a microwave gun, a very rare and specific weapon. Later, another body is discovered in the neighborhood.
Follows a family investigation since Scarpetta does the autopsy, her niece is on the case as an FBI agent and so is her husband Benton, as a secret services agent. What a family, eh?
It’s good entertainment even if the pace of the book is a bit weird at times. The description of Scarpetta’s work at the morgue seemed to drag on while the denouement was rushed and not detailed enough. The characters sounded a bit formulaic and I wasn’t too interested in the office politics and antagonism.
It was published in October 2022 and I couldn’t help noticing that the war in Ukraine was already mentioned in the book. Eight months after it started it’s already in a published book. There was no time wasted in editing and polishing this book before its publication, it seems.
Anyway, this is another Beach & Public Transport book, one you read as you watch a CSI episode on TV.
The Oath by Arttu Tuominen (2018). Not available in English. French title: Le serment. Translated by Anne Colin du Terrail.
The Oath is truly the best book of the three. We’re in Pori, Finland in 2018. Jari Paloviita is the interim head of the local police and Rami Nieminen is murdered by Antti Mielonen during a party in a cabin in the woods. The victim was stabbed in the back and Antti ran out of the cabin and was found in the woods with his sweatshirt full of the victim’s blood. There is no doubt he did it.
Inspector Henrik Oksman and his partner Linda Toivonen know it. All they have to do is follow procedures to the letter to ensure there is no room for doubt about Antti’s guilt when the trial comes.
But Jari Paloviita used to go to school with Rami and Antti. Antti was his best friend while Rami bullied him relentlessly. He and Antti share a heavy baggage as the story unfolds and we discover what happened to them during the summer 1991. They were 13 at the time and dramatic events pushed them out of childhood.
To what length is Jari prepared to go to in the name of an old friendship?
I’d say you’ll have to read the book to find out but sadly, it’s not available in English. It baffles me since Nordic crime is such a hit in the English-speaking world. It’s a real pity because the plot is tight, the back and forth between 2018 and 1991 is gripping and full of grey areas. The characters’ personal life is troubled and I can see the beginning of a great series.
This is also my contribution to Annabel’s event Nordic FINDS.
It strikes me that I didn’t choose the three books I just wrote about. I got the Ariana Franklin with my Quais du Polar entry ticket, my daughter gave me the Cornwell for Christmas and the Tuominen came with my Kube subscription. The Tuominen is probably the only one I would have bought myself, so kudos for the Kube libraire who blind-picked it for me.
The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy – great literature.
The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy (1987) French title: Le Dahlia noir. Translated by Frédéric Michalski.
The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy is probably one of the oldest books of my TBR. The mention inside says my roommate gave it to me in 1995. Ahem. I was reluctant to read it, not sure I’d get along with Ellroy. I only started to read noir fiction after I went online with Book Around the Corner and discovered Guy’s blog, His Futile Preoccupations. Guy’s a crime fiction and noir afficionado.
And now I wonder: what was I waiting for?
The Black Dahlia is loosely based upon a real case, the murder of Elizabeth Short that the press nicknamed the Black Dahlia. She was born in 1924 in Boston and was murdered in Los Angeles in 1947. Her case became famous because her body was horribly mutilated and it’s still unsolved.
Ellroy uses the Black Dahlia case as a basis to write a complex story with a striking picture of Los Angeles in the 1940s.
Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert is our narrator. He’s a former boxer and LAPD agent. He met Lee Blanchard, another LPAD agent when they covered the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles. Both have a checkered past. Bucky is the son of a German immigrant who doesn’t hide his racist tendencies. Bucky’s patriotism was tested during WWII and he agreed to give his Japanese neighbors up to keep his job with the LAPD. He’s still reeling from it.
Lee Blanchard is famous for solving a hold-up case and shacking up with Kay, the criminal’s girlfriend after the trial. He still lives with her and this scandalous relationship cost him a promotion. His little sister was murdered when he was a teenager and he feels guilty of not protecting her enough.
As semi-famous former boxers, their bosses ask them to fight against each other to raise funds for the LAPD and promote a bill that would increase the wages of the LAPD agents. They get a transfer to the Warrants department. They agree to it. The fight is highly publicized, they are nicknamed Fire and Ice. Their bond is based upon camaraderie and respect but is also tainted by politics and tactics. The relationship between Bucky, Lee and Kay is central to Ellroy’s book.
As you imagine Bucky and Lee are detached to the police force dedicated to solving Betty Short’s murder. They get swallowed in the case and the book moves to a classic investigation.
Ellroy follows the thread of a murder investigation and shows corruption and power fights in the LAPD. He takes his characters to the shadiest neighborhoods of Los Angeles and takes pleasure in describing brothels, dives, underground gay and lesbian meeting points and seedy hotels. He also brings us to rich neighborhoods and uncovers the ugliness present behind closed doors and polished manners. Greed. Sex. Perversion. They invade every corner of the city and Ellroy exposes what’s behind the Hollywood dreamy facade.
He conveys the pulse of the city, its rapid growth and real estate moguls, the Hollywood hype and the sordid world of hopeless hope of aspiring actresses.
He takes us across the Mexican border to Tijuana in an even more violent and corrupted country. He describes perfectly the intricacies of office politics in the LAPD, the violence against suspects and police procedurals. Or lack thereof.
It’s well-oiled book that keeps the reader on edge. I wanted to know how Bucky would come out of it, if Ellroy would make his characters solve the murder while reading about Los Angeles in the 1940s. I was curious about Bucky, Lee and Kay’s trio. I wondered if the big LAPD machine would run over Bucky or if he’d make it alright.
A brilliant book but I’m glad I waited to read it. There will be more Ellroy in my future.
For the record, I also have the graphic novel of this book by Miles Hyman Matz and David Fincher and it’s a good companion book.
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga – the dark sides of real-estate in Mumbai and of human behaviour.
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga (2011) French title: Le dernier homme de la tour. Translated by Annick Le Goya.
Bombay, like a practitioner of yoga, was folding in on itself, as its centre moved from the south, where there was no room to grow, to this swamp land near the airport.
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga is set in Mumbai, in the Vakola district near the airport, in a two towers apartment complex built in the 1970s.
Tower B, known as “Vishram Society” is like a vertical village of lower middle-class people. It’s also known as ‘cosmopolitan’ (i.e. ethnically and religiously mixed.) The various families have been living together in this building for years, they’ve raised children, grown old and have to share their private lives due to paper thin walls and building practicalities. Like in small town life, everybody knows everything about everyone and keeping a secret is illusory.
The Secretary [the concierge], not for the first time during his tenure, cursed the early – morning cat. This cat prowled the waste bins that the residents left out in the morning for Mary [The cleaning lady] to collect, in the process spilling beans, bones, and whisky bottles alike. So the residents of the building knew from the rubbish who was a vegetarian and who merely claimed to be one; who was a rum – man and who a gin – man; and who had bought a pornographic magazine when on holiday in Singapore.
What was I saying about secrets?
Now, in the ever growing and changing Mumbai, a property developer, Mr Shah, has set his eyes on two towers built in the 1970s. He wants to buy out all the current owners, demolish the towers and rebuild expensive condos on the land.
Mr Shah is ready to pay a hefty sum to all the owners based on the square meters of their apartment to encourage them to move out.
A useful note at the beginning of the book explains that Mr Shah’s offer is equivalent to $330,000 per family, in a country where the average per capita annual income in 2008 was around $800. So, if people accept Mr Shah’s offer, they become very rich and have enough money to relocate somewhere else.
Last important thing to know: Vishram Society is a Registered Co – operative Society. Not a jungle. If even one person says no that means that the Society cannot be demolished.
The novel shows the dirty methods used by property developers in Mumbai to put their hands on prime land, to throw working classes out of some neighbourhood to gentrify the area. In Mumbai, slums, older building and modern towers are near each other and this passage about a beach sums it up:
Here, in this beach in this posh northern suburb of Mumbai, half the sand was reserved for the rich, who defecated in their towers, the other half for slum dwellers, who did so near the waves. Residents of the slum that had encroached upon the beach were squatting by the water, defecating. An invisible line went down the middle of the beach like an electrified fence; beyond this line, the bankers, models, and film producers of Versova were engaged in tai – chi, yoga, or spot – jogging.
Builders have no qualms about bullying people into agreeing and they have special people to do it.
Every builder has one special man in his company. This man has no business card to hand out, no title, he is not even on the company payroll. But he is the builder’s left hand. He does what the builder’s right hand does not want to know about. If there is trouble, he contacts the police or the mafia. If there is money to be paid to a politician, he carries the bag. If someone’s knuckles have to be broken, he breaks them.
People in Vishram Society have heard stories about builders’ methods and swindles. They are cautious, they wonder where things could go and how they can be sure to get the money after they’ve signed the papers to sell their apartment.
Rather quickly, all the inhabitants agree to sell and the only one who doesn’t want to is Masterji, an old widower who refuses to leave the memories of his late wife and daughter behind. At least, that’s what he thinks his motives are.
This opportunity to get rich for the owners and to get richer for the promoter is like a bomb in a carefully built life balance between the inhabitants of the Vishram Society.
Last Man in Tower relates how Mr Shah manoeuvres to get what he wants. It also depicts how this tower-village copes with the one inhabitant who blocks their way to wealth.
Adiga’s book is cleverly done because it is not Manichean, the bad developer on one side and the poor old man on the other side. The greedy people and the virtuous one. Mr Shah intends to pay the money he promised, in the builder category, he’s not the worst one. But still. He counts on the neighbours to pressure Masterji into selling.
Masterji’s neighbours want the money, and most of them for good reasons: to provide for their son with Down’s syndrome after they die, to raise their children in a better neighbourhood, to help their grownup children to settle in life, to live a little and stop counting every penny.
And Masterji’s refusal is not just sentimental. There’s something else at stake here, someone who wants to stand up for himself when he wasn’t able to do it in this life, someone who sticks to his principle for the sake of them only.
Last Man in Tower is a dark tale, a book that shows how quickly people turn on each other when money is involved and circumstances push them to pick a side. We know that dark side of humans, we’ve witnessed it in wars and it’s the same mechanism at work here.
Adiga’s novel exposes the workings of the real estate market in Mumbai and digs into the dark corners of the human soul but it is also a vibrant picture of Mumbai and life in this sprawling city. The slums, the markets, the temples, the overcrowded public transports, the heat, the monsoon and the incredible pollution.
South Mumbai has the Victoria Terminus and the Municipal Building, but the suburbs, built later, have their own Gothic style: for every evening, by six, pillars of hydro – benzene and sulphur dioxide rise high up from the roads, flying buttresses of nitrous dioxide join each other, swirls of unburnt kerosene, mixed illegally into the diesel, cackle like gargoyles, and a great roof of carbon monoxide closes over the structure. And this Cathedral of particulate matter rises over every red light, every bridge and every tunnel during rush hour.
When I was reading, I thought it was a bit too long but now that I write about it I realize that the pace of the narration suits what the author had to show and say.
The book was published in 2011, wonder how the real-estate market is in Mumbai now.
The Hot Spot by Charles Williams – it’s a question of hooks
The Hot Spot by Charles Williams. (1953) – “Oh what a tangled web we weave when at first we start to deceive.”
The Hot Spot by Charles Williams was previously entitled Hell Hath No Fury. This noir thriller dates back to 1953 and I guess it was renamed after the film version of the book was released in 1990.
In French, it was translated by Bruno Martin for the Série noire collection in 1955. The French title was Je t’attends au tournant and I found a copy in a second-hand bookstore.
The original translation seems out of print which is good because it’s an abridged version. There’s no way to translate all the sentences of a 190 pages English book into a 185 pages French paperback, since the said French paperback is smaller than the English book and French takes more words than English to say the same thing. I checked a random paragraph and bingo, the original sentences are cleverly cut to keep the book under 200 pages as it was supposed to be read in one sitting on a train journey.
Lucky French readers, Gallmeister published a new translation by Laura Derajinski 2019 and kept the title Hot Spot. These different translations didn’t impact my reading though, since I read The Hot Spot in English.
Now, the book
I lighted a cigarette and smoked it out nervously, listening to the night sounds and thinking of the dangerous mess I was drifting further into all the time. I had twelve thousand dollars I couln’t touch, I was crazy about a girl who was in some kind of trouble she couldn’t tell me about, and I was getting more hopelessly fouled up every day with crazy Dolores Harshaw.
This is Harry Madox. He’s a twenty-eight drifter who comes to a small Texas town, finds a job as a car salesman and settles in a boarding house. He works for George Harshaw who also has a side-business in car loans to go with the dealership. Gloria Harper runs the loan office.
Harshaw is married to Dolores who seduces Harry for what he thinks is a simple hookup. She doesn’t see it that way and although she’s definitely not in love with him, she sinks her hook in him and wants him all to herself. He’s her ticket out of her boring marriage. But Harry falls for Gloria who has a lot of issues of her own. When Gloria and Harry start dating, it sends Dolores on the war path.
Besides the sex and love affairs, Harry put himself in a nice little mess of his own doing when he robbed the local bank.
Two events sparked this crazy idea: first, during a fire on Main Street, he noticed that all the people were focused on the fire and that the bank was left almost unattended and second, as Dolores asked him to help her move some boxes in an abandoned building near the bank, he noticed it was full of junk and that is was an incredible fire hazard. What if he set the building on fire, robbed the bank and made sure to be seen helping the firefighters?
That’s what he does it but the local sheriff is cleverer than he expected. He doesn’t buy it and intends to question him until he relents and spills the beans. He’s only released from custody because Dolores spontaneously lies and gives him an alibi. His relief is short-lived. Now she has him and she knows it.
Harry still thinks he can get out of it if he lays low but his feelings for Gloria get in the way. He feels protective of her and things get out of hand when he tries to help her with her own issues.
Harry is taken in a web of lies and crimes. Dolores is a skilled manipulator but she’s enabled by Harry’s actions. The robbery and his relationship with Gloria give her leverage. She’s poisonous but his actions leave him with his flesh exposed and she just sees where and how she can sink her hooks into him.
The Hot Spot is a masterpiece of noir fiction. All the right ingredients are there.
An unreliable narrator who would want us to forget he’s a bank robber. A beautiful young woman who’s not as innocent as she seems. A femme fatale who knows what she wants and how to get it. And the whole plot, clever and articulate as a Shakespearian tragedy is served by an excellent literary style. We are with Harry in this little Texas town. We imagine the heat, the town, the dealership, the cars and the characters in their 1950s outfits. We sweat with Harry and recoil from the violence and we see how events unfold in an implacable manner.
A must-read for all crime fiction lovers.
Have a look at Guy’s excellent review here.
My 2022 reading highlights : another excellent year with books
It’s already this time of year : the end-of-year wrap-up. I feel like I’ve been in a rush all year long but when I look at my reading year, I still managed to read 75 books (that’s my usual) and a lot of them were excellent.
As usual, I’m not big on statistics about genders, centuries, genres and translated books. I’ll give you my very subjective list of best books read in 2022 and in totally random categories that make only sense to me.
Best Least Commented Billet
I looked into my billets in search of the least commented ones. This year, the winner is Shiner by Amy Jo Burns. It could have been a solid contender for a Bleakest Book category too. What a terrible story of the domination of men over their wives and children, of ignorance, of lost opportunities, of poverty and of the dying way-of-life of the mountains.
It’s a good book, I wonder why almost nobody responded to this billet.
Is it well-known in America and in the UK?
Best Gallmeister Book
I’m fan of books published by Gallmeister. They publish excellent American literature with a focus on crime fiction and Nature Writing, the books that Oliver Gallmeister loves and wishes to promote. Since 2022, they’ve branched out and have Italian books too.
Among the ten books that I read this year from their catalogue, all of them could be on my best-of-the-year list.
For this category, I choose Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, it lives up to its reputation. I haven’t read a lot of westerns but this one is really beautiful on every aspect. The characters, the descriptions of landscapes, the atmosphere of the ending of the Frontier era.
Best Non-Book post
2022 was the centenary of Marcel Proust’s death and I’ve attended several exhibitions and read books by him or about him. I loved visiting these exhibitions and sharing them with you. Given the responses I received to these billets, you have enjoyed your travel armchair visits to Paris and Proust.
There has been two billets about Proust and Paris at the Musée Carnavalet, one about Proust’s life in Paris and one about People and Characters that compared characters of In Search of Lost Time and their real-life counterparts. I wrote about the exhibition Proust on his mother’s side at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme. This one explored Proust’s Jewish side as his mother was Jewish.
And the last one I attended was about the making of In Search of Lost Time at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Commenters were quite enthusiastic about it. Thank you for reading these billets about exhibitions you’ll most probably never attend.
Best Most Relaxing Book
Usually, this category includes lighter reads or books you read for entertainment only. This year I want to take “relaxing book” at face value and I pick Indian Creek Chronicles by Pete Fromm.
He describes his winter alone in the Idaho woods near Montana. It’s candid, well-pictured and it runs interference with whatever is bothering you.
Pure bliss, pure armchair travel and a book that reminds you what important and what isn’t.
Best Read With-Sister-in-Law
I read a book per month along with my sister-in-law. (Hi, S!).
In November, we had picked The Hot Spot by Charles Williams. I haven’t written my billet about it yet. I’m glad I waited until the beginning of 2023 to make my best-of-of-the-year list. This is a masterpiece of Noir crime fiction. Brilliant plot, excellent writing, convincing characters and all the Noir codes are respected. It was my first Williams and now he’s sitting next to Jim Thompson on my mental bookshelf.
Best Translation Tragedy
A Translation Tragedy is a book available in English but sadly not in French or vice versa. This year I’ve read twenty-three books that are not translated into English (more than last year, 15) and five that are not translated into French.
Only nine of the twenty-three books not available in English are French books, the others are from French-speaking Africa (Republic of the Congo, Benin, Algeria and Mali), Japan, Italy, Hungary, Mexico, Portugal and Sweden.
In this category, I also have Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami which is composed of various texts that exist in English but have not been gathered in a book. It’s the same for The Book of Christmas by Selma Lagerlöf.
On another note, I find it strange that The House Where I Once Died by Keigo Higashino hasn’t been translated into English since some of his books have been translated.
I’ve tried to read more books by African writers and I wish that Group Photo by the River by Emmanuel Dongala were translated into English. It’s a wonderful portray of women who fight for their rights in the Republic of Congo.
I can’t leave behind the wonderful Island of Souls by Piergiorgio Pulixi. It’s an excellent crime fiction book that mixes a fascinating murder plot, traditions from Sardinia, two catching investigators and a very atmospheric setting.
Among the five books not available in French, like last year, I wonder why Paul Thomas (New Zealand) is not available in French. Fallout was excellent just as Death on Demand in 2021. I’m would find its public in France as we are fans of crime fiction and his Maori maverick police officer would be a hit.
Best Book-I-Want-To-Buy-To-All-My-Friends
Well, it would depend on the time and the friend. I’d either pick All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren or The Marseille trilogy by Jean-Claude Izzo.
All the King’s Men is based on an actual politician and the author found the right balance between telling the rise and fall of a man, examine the life of his right-hand man and mull over the meaning of life and of right and wrong. Not a beach-and-public-transport book but still one I want to share and discuss. It has been republished in a revised translation and the book itself is beautiful.
The Izzo is more entertainment. I loved it and read it while I was in Marseille. It was a wonderful travel companion even if the city has changed a lot since Izzo wrote his books. The reason I loved it so much is the unique atmosphere of the books and how they transport you to Marseille and its area. And yet, Izzo doesn’t sugarcoat the Marseille reality and his tour-de-force is that you still want to hop on a plane and visit Marseille despite all the gritty places he takes his readers to in his books. You just wish that the main character, Fabio Montale, would take you on a ride by the sea and to a local restaurant.
Best Book Club Read
Our Book Club year picked In Cold Blood by Truman Capote and I’m really happy I have read it. I thought it could be too dry for me but not at all. I know it’s a controversial book because it’s based on a real case and it was written only a few years after it occurred but it’s still an excellent book.
Best Non-Fiction
I challenged myself with one non-fiction book per month. I’ve kept up with the list I had made, except for the “Derrida 101”.
The one I’d recommend, beside In Cold Blood and Indian Creek is Proust by Samuel Beckett. It’s an excellent companion book to In Search of Lost Time. Beckett wrote this when he was in his twenties and he’s incredibly insightful.
Best Recommended Book
My choice is Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk.
I started this reluctantly as I found it daunting but I trusted Bénédicte from Passage à l’Est when she told me I’d like it. I loved it and I’m grateful for book blogging or I wouldn’t have read it.
As we say in French, only stupid people don’t change their minds.
Best Book set in the Apalachees
I’ve read several books set in the Apalachees since we were travelling there in August. I read A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson and was a bit disappointed by it. I thought it didn’t age well but their hiking on the Appalachian trail was still a performance.
There’s Shiner by Amy Jo Burns that I mentioned earlier. Bleak but based on real patterns and events in the mountains. It’s set in Virginia or West-Virginia.
I loved Country Dark by Chris Offutt and its character, Tucker. This one is in Tennessee and hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park helped me understand Offutt’s novel even better as the constraints of nature became clearer. This billet didn’t get a lot of audience but you’re missing out on a great book.
North Carolina was represented by two books. The first one is Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash. I wish I had had the time to do a proper billet about this excellent novel. Vishy read it too and wrote a review here.
The second one is The Night That Held Us by David Joy. It’s in the top five of the best books I’ve read this year and the winner in this category. You bet I’ll be reading more by him. He’s got everything I love in a writer: short books that pack a lot, a precise writing, a wonderful sense of place, complex characters who have to deal with a set of rotten cards and sometimes take wrong turns in their lives.
Best Chilling Book
That’s definitely Vigilance by Robert Jackson Bennett as it really gave me the chills but I could have chosen Little Rebel by Jérôme Leroy.
Both describe horrific situations that could come true. Vigilance is about a reality show that involves mass-shootings and Little Rebel how ordinary people become terrorists. Both plausible, both terrifying.
That’s when you need the comfort read delivered by novels set outdoors and with characters who find their peace of mind in a river.
Best Fly-Fishing Book
I didn’t read a lot of books involving fly-fishing this year but I did pass by a fly-fishing museum. I read another book by Keith McCafferty, Dead Man’s Fancy and it was lovely to spend more time with Sean Callahan and Sheriff Martha.
Best Feminist Book
Our Book Club had included in The Awakening by Kate Chopin in our choices for 2021/2022. I thought it was very ahead of its time as the heroin refuses to stick to the position she’s supposed to fill as a bourgeois wife in New Orleans.
Best atmospheric crime fiction
Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden took me to the Lakota reservation in South Dakota. The crime fiction plot was excellent, well-driven and kept my attention. I got attached to the main character who’s struggling to sort out his life, raise his nephew who has lost his parents, grieve his sister and accept the support of his community.
As I’m always curious, I loved reading about life on the reservation and about Lakota customs. The author doesn’t reveal anything about secret rituals that hadn’t been described before. I am grateful that he managed to share about his culture without betraying confidentiality about certains rites.
Well, that was my year 2022 in books. I’ve spent a lovely afternoon among my books and plotting my 2023 reading year.
What about you? When you think of 2022, which book comes on top of your mind?
Happy New Year 2023! Bonne année et bonne santé!
I don’t know what to wish for 2023. 2022 has been pretty awful for the world, hasn’t it?
Heat waves, hurricanes, drastic cold, steady destruction of the planet and its inhabitants. A dreadful war in Ukraine, full of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Inflation. Covid 19 bouts. People killed for wanting to be free. Extreme-right rising everywhere. Dictators or populists in power in many countries.
It’s hard to be hopeful, isn’t it? It’s enough to have one’s anxiety shoot to the roof. My philosophy is to stick to what’s around me out of self-preservation. Concentrate on what’s within my reach.
Our bookish world has proved to be a safe haven again, even if our civilized Twitter corner is threatened by Musk’s take-over of the company. What a tool.
2022 has been full of excellent reads (more of that in another billet), I’ve kept up with the blog despite my new job that has put me on a learning curve and eaten some of my time and a lot of my energy.
Many thanks to all the readers and commenters who kept on reading my billets even if I couldn’t reciprocate and read theirs. It means a lot.
I wish you all the best for 2023. May you be safe, in good health, able to pay your energy bills and live in a place where you can express freely.
I wish us all another wonderful year full of books, bookish events, exchanges, recommendations, blogs billets and Twitter chats. I”m grateful for the book community. Let’s stick together and spend another book-filled year together.
May our ever-growing TBR be our main concern in 2023.
The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Baindridge – it puts the reader on edge
The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge (1974) French title: Sombre Dimanche. Translated by Françoise Cartano.
The Bottle Factory Outing is my second Beryl Bainbridge, after An Awfully Big Adventure and I can find similarities between the two books.
In The Bottle Factory Outing, we’re in London and our protagonists are two roommates, Freda and Brenda. They live in a boarding house and like each other well enough but have opposite characters. Freda is outgoing and flirty. She loves clothes and make up and wants to marry well. She’s energetic and knows what she wants.
Brenda landed in London after she escaped from an abusive marriage. She’s mousy, down-to-earth and wants to be left alone. She’s passive and her attitude sends mixed messages to people around her and gets on Freda’s nerves.
In the following passage, Freda and Brenda are watching a funeral from their window and their interaction gives away their personalities:
‘You cry easily,’ said Brenda, when they were dressing to go to the factory.
‘I like funerals. All those flowers – a full life coming to a close…’
‘She didn’t look as if she’d had a full life,’ said Brenda. ‘She only had the cat. There aren’t any mourners – no sons or anything.’
‘Take a lesson from it then. It could happen to you. When I go I shall have my family about me – daughters – sons – my husband, grey and distinguished, dabbing a handkerchief to his lips…’
‘Men always go first,’ said Brenda. ‘Women live longer.’
‘My dear, you ought to participate more. You are too cut off from life.’
See how Freda romanticize what she sees and projects her future and how Brenda remains practical and attempts to bring her back to reality? It’s typical.
Freda and Brenda work at the same bottle factory owned and managed by Mr Paganotti. He’s Italian and all the workers come from the same Italian village, except Patrick, an Irishman, Freda and Brenda.
Freda has a crush on Mr Paganotti’s nephew, Vittorio. He’s handsome, prances around the factory and flirts a little bit with Freda. She grows things out of proportion because she’s decided that he’s the perfect candidate for the handsome and rich husband she ambitions to marry.
She’s infatuated with him but she doesn’t know him well. In order to spend time with him outside of the factory, she organizes a factory outing on a weekend. But things don’t turn out so well…
Relationships between men and women are creepy in The Bottle Factory Outing just as they were in An Awfully Big Adventure.
Brenda was in an abusive marriage and even if nothing precise is revealed about her past, the reader guesses that it must have been pretty bad for Brenda to take action. And she’s barely started to work at the bottle factory for three days when she starts getting a lot of unwanted attention at work from Rossi, the foreman. She doesn’t know how to rebuff his advances because she doesn’t want to lose her job. Brenda the mouse also caught the attention of her coworker Patrick. He offers to fix her toilet to see her outside of work. At least this one seems respectful.
Freda has Vittorio’s attention but he’s unlikely to marry her and she sets herself up for deception. It’s a classic case of wishing to be the wife and being seen as a mistress. Usually, it only means a broken heart, nothing life-threatening. As far as Freda is concerned, the most disturbing events occur during the outing.
Beryl Bainbridge has a great sense of humour and it shows in her descriptions of her characters and of the outing. But the ending takes a very dark turn, one I didn’t expect. She’s an author who keeps her reader on their toes as her characters are a bit off, as they can sense that events are about to take a dramatic turn or that painful pasts lurk in the characters’ background.
This is a very well constructed novel.
Have you read books by her? What did you think of them? I still have The Dressmaker on the shelf.
Guy has reviewed several of them and his take on The Bottle Factory Outing is here.
Joyeux Noël from France!
I wish you all a Joyeux Noël from France!
Whatever you’re doing today, I hope you’re having a great day. If you celebrate Christmas, may it be among friends and family. I hope my American readers weren’t stuck at home because of this historical cold wave and bad weather.
Here the extended family was reunited for the first time since 2019. The children are back home from school and we’re enjoying our time together. It’s good to be back to normal.
Life got busy before Christmas, I rushed through December and struggled to get in the Christmas mood and as often I found help in Christmas books.
After reading As the Crow Flies by Craig Johnson, I spent some more time with Sheriff Longmire and read Christmas in Absaroka County.
Four short stories around Christmas time, with Sheriff Longmire and his daughter Caddy. In Ministerial Aid, he uncovers a swindle around selling luxurious bibles to people who are grieving. In Slick-Tongue-Devil, he lets an elderly lady believes he’s Jesus to help her in her case of domestic abuse. In Toys for Tots, he gives a veteran his dignity back, making him a hero. And in Unbalanced, he rescues a hitchhiker.
Each story has the same feel as all of Craig Johnson’s books, a mix of humour, of goodwill and empathy.
Then I turned to The Christmas Book by Selma Lagerlöf, the author of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. It’s a lot more traditional than Craig Johnson but just as delightful.
The book includes eight short stories mostly based upon Swedish legends: the legend of Saint Luce, how robin got their red breast…It brings this magical atmosphere that comes with legends and fairytales.
My favorite one is actually The Christmas Book, the only one that is a regular short story.
A little girl expects books for Christmas and is disappointed because she opens present after present of useful items for knitting, embroidering and sewing. What if she doesn’t get any book? She eventually gets one by La Comtesse de Ségur, all in French and she spends her holiday improving her French to read it.
I can totally relate to this young girl.
And now I’m reading short stories by Angela Thirkell, Christmas at High Rising.
I haven’t finished the book but I love the light and playful atmosphere. It’s an excellent introduction to the Barsetshire series and I think I’m hooked. I enjoy my time with Laura Morland, her friend George and her boisterous son Tony.
This is going to be a nice TBR of thirty light books to turn to. Many thanks to British readers for the recommandations, she’s not a well-known reader in France.
Finishing these stories will put a nice conclusion to the 2022 Christmas festivities.
And I wish you again a Merry Christmas!
Book Around the Corner 