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The Bachelor of Arts by R.K. Narayan – The 1937 Club
The Bachelor of Arts by R.K. Narayan. (1937) French title: Le licencié es lettres.
I’m happy to participate to the #1937Club hosted by Karen and Simon, especially since I get to share about The Bachelor of Arts by R.K. Narayan, a writer I discovered thanks to Vishy.
I’ve already read Swami and Friends and The Dark Room and my omnibus edition also includes The English Teacher. These novellas are set in the fictionnal town of Malgudi.
The Bachelor of Arts is a novella featuring Chandran, in the crucial years in one’s early twenties, when graduation is almost there and it’s time to find a profession and start one’s adult life.
In the first part of the book, Chandran is 22 and he’s in his last year at Albert College, soon graduating in History and Literature. He lives the usual life of students at that time except that there aren’t any girls around and that his professors are all British teaching to Indian students. The atmosphere of this first part reminding me of Kingsley Amis.
After cramming hard in the last months of the school year, he graduates but doesn’t have defined plans for his future. We see him fall in love, literally at first sight and getting all worked up about a girl he can’t talk to because it would be inappropriate. We see him struggle with heartbreak and eventually figuring out what job he’ll do. He lacks a bit of confidence.
Narayan is a very sensitive writer, nice to his characters and gently poking fun at them. He probably put a bit of himself in Chandran and we see a young man who lives between the culture of his very traditional Hindu family and the British culture he is taught at school. He’s torn between the respect he feels for his beloved parents and his yearning to break free from what he considers stifling traditions.
His parents are loving and understanding but they are also attached to the social rules of their community. They don’t want to stand out and Chandran bows to their wishes, not because they pressure him but out of love for them.
And me? I discovered the marriage traditions in his kind of family and I was flabbergasted. Sure, I expected the cast compatibility part and I wasn’t too surprised that the two young people couldn’t have much contact. What I didn’t expect were the rules about the matchmaker, who makes the moves and when and also the check of the compatibility of the future spouse through their horoscopes
When a girl is ready for marriage her horoscope will be sent in ten directions, and then different persons will see her and approve or disapprove, or they might be disapproved by the girl itself; and after all only one will marry her.
If the horoscopes don’t match, there’s no marriage. Wow. Imagine Mrs Bennett in this context.
Narayan doesn’t judge these traditions, he doesn’t rebel against them but he shows what they do to a young man like Chandran and what they mean for the Indian girls of his milieu and in this part of India.
As always with great literature, Narayan writes a novella that transcends the cultural specificities of Malgudi and the fact that we’re in the 1930s. He pictures a young man who struggles to find his path in life, who mourns the end of his childhood and of his carefree student days to become an adult and lead an adult’s life.
Very highly recommended.
There are other billets about books written or published in 1937 on the blog:
- Remembering Laughter by Wallace Stegner,
- Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
- Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb.
Many thanks to Karen and Simon for hosting The Club again. It’s really a great idea and now, I’m going to read all the posts about 1937 books that are waiting for my attention in my inbox.
The Sheep Queen by Thomas Savage
The Sheep Queen by Thomas Savage (1977) French title: La Reine de l’Idaho. Translated by Pierre Furlan.
I believed I lived in Maine because Maine is about as far as I could get from the ranch in Montana where I grew up, and where my mother was unhappy, my beautiful, angel mother.
The Sheep Queen by Thomas Savage was originally published under the title I Heard My Sister Speak My Name. The change was made in 2001 with the author’s approval.
When the book opens, Thomas Burton, a novelist who lives in Maine, receives a letter from Amy Nofzinger who claims to be his sister. She was born before him and was abandoned by their parents. From then on, Thomas tries to unearth the truth in order to know if her claim is founded. We’re in the 1970s, there are no DNA tests.
When and why would his mother have abandoned a child? How could he reconcile this fact with the mother he knew and loved? She’s dead, he can’t confront her. That leaves him with digging into his memories and writing to his aunts who still live in the west, even after the ranch was sold. The whole novel relates his quest.
Thomas was born in 1912 and came from Idaho royalty. His mother’s family ran a vast and rich sheep ranch and his grandparents were a powerful couple, unusual in their respective roles. His grandmother Emma wore the pants and had married someone who happily let her manage and develop their ranch. Grandpa Thomas was more interested in nature, in bonding with people and especially children. They were lucky to complement each other and back in the 19th, Emma was happy to find a man who let her develop her talents.
Emma was a force of nature and ran the show with an iron fist. She died at 88, which means she had influence over her children during most of their lives. His aunts still think of what their mother would say about their actions. Emma’s power hasn’t gone.
Thomas’s mother, Elizabeth, was obedient and closer to her father. She was supposed to marry a hotshot heir from the East coast when she fell for the charming Thomas Burton, married him, and left Idaho. She divorced him when Thomas was two and her mother married her to a rancher in Montana. Her life didn’t turn out so well.
In The Sheep Queen, Thomas Savage explores various themes around identity.
Amy and Thomas were both adopted, Amy by the parents who raised her and Thomas by his stepfather. As soon as she knew she was adopted, Amy wanted to know who her birth parents were. She loved her adoptive parents; they were lovely but she always felt that she was a second choice replacement as they adopted her because their son had died.
Thomas never felt at ease with his stepfather’s surname. He never felt he belonged to the ranch in Montana where he grew up after his mother remarried. He kept in touch with his father who wasn’t a reliable man. He had his mother, though.
Amy and Thomas lacked the unconditional love that children deserve to grow with deep and strong roots. Their foundations weren’t a given, they had to work for their steadiness. Thomas always feels a bit out-of-touch with the people around him.
Elizabeth is the product of her time. She had to obey her parents, what she truly wanted had no real value. Emma had a clan-based conception of the family. She expected loyalty and compliance to their status in Idaho. She was formidable and Elizabeth could not stand up to her.
The Sheep Queen is autobiographical. According to Thomas Savage’s bio on Wikipedia, a lot of details about Thomas Burton’s life are the same as his. He didn’t even change the first names.
I thought that the construction of the novel was a bit clumsy at times. We hear a lot about Amy at the beginning and then no more, except as a reference to the letters she exchanges with Thomas. The ending which discloses important information about Elizabeth has details already mentioned in The Power of the Dog, which means that they are based on true facts. I thought they were brilliant when I was reading a novel, but I found them appalling as being real events from Savage’s past.
A fascinating novel.
On Identity : Delphine Horvilleur, Romain Gary and Alexandra Lapierre
- There Is No Coincidence by Delphine Horvilleur – 2022 Original French title: Il n’y a pas de Ajar
- Hocus Bogus by Romain Gary (Emile Ajar) – 1976 Original French title: Pseudo.
- Belle Greene by Alexandra Lapierre – 2021. Original French title: Belle Greene
Delphine Horvilleur was born in 1974, she’s a rabbi, a journalist and a writer. She co-leads the Liberal Jewish Movement of France and she’s a public figure known for her humanist and moderate stands. If all religious leaders were like her, the world would be a better and a safer place.
Delphine Horvilleur is also a Romain Gary fan. The title of her essay, Il n’y a pas de Ajar is a play-on-word on Ajar, the penname Gary used when he secretly wrote Gros Câlin in 1974 and the word Hasard, as the pronunciations are close. In French, Il n’y a pas de hasard means There’s no coincidence, and that’s a sentence Momo, the character of Life Before Us could say.
Her essay is also subtitled Monologue contre l’identité. She wants to point out how our current societies tend to pigeonhole people in identity boxes. And you’re only allowed to have one box, French, immigrant, gay, Jewish or whatever the sticker on your forehead.
After a few pages, she refers to Romain Gary:
Her whole essay is a plea against introverted assertions of one’s identity. Trends to stay with likeminded people. Associate with people who share your background. Stay in your identity line and do not cross it. Hell, no, cross the lines if you want to, she says.
| Et dans cette tenaille identitaire politico-religieuse, je pense encore et toujours à Romain Gary, et à tout ce que son œuvre a tenté de torpiller, en choisissant constamment de dire qu’il est permis et salutaire de ne pas se laisser définir par son nom ou sa naissance. Permis et salutaire de se glisser dans la peau d’un autre qui n’a rien à voir avec vous. Permis et salutaire de juger un homme pour ce qu’il fait et non pour ce dont il hérite. D’exiger pour l’autre une égalité, non pas parce qu’il est comme nous, mais précisément parce qu’il n’est pas comme nous, et que son étrangeté nous oblige. | And in this politico-religious stranglehold, I always think of Romain Gary and of what his work tried to torpedo. He kept saying that it was allowed and beneficial to refuse to be defined by one’s name or one’s birth. Allowed and beneficiary to slip into someone else’s skin, someone totally different from you. Allowed and beneficiary to judge a human on their actions and not on their background. To demand equality for others, not because we are alike but precisely because they’re different and it’s our duty to acknowledge their strangeness. |
If I translated her essay into English, I’d translate the subtitle as Monologue for cultural appropriation, not to steal someone’s identity but to encourage people to cross identity lines.
I finished her thoughtful and vibrant essay and I had to read Pseudo by Romain Gary. He was also a chameleon, reinventing himself all the time, blurring the lines in his biography and playing hide-and-seek with the truth about his origins. He had a vague definition of identity as something fleeting and uprooted. Pseudo is the culmination of this, but first, a bit of context.
After Life Before Us won the Prix Goncourt in 1975, Emile Ajar couldn’t stay out of the limelight. The public wanted to hear and see the author of this book they loved so much. Romain Gary had his cousin Paul Pawlovitch pretend that he was Emile Ajar. Pawlovitch impersonated Emile Ajar in the media. Pseudo is a book Romain Gary wrote under the Ajar and here’s the blurb:
There, Pseudo, a hoax confession and one of the most alarmingly effective mystifications in all literature, was written at high speed. Writing under double cover, Gary simulated schizophrenia and paranoid delusions while pretending to be Paul Pawlovitch confessing to being Émile Ajar—the author of books Gary himself had written.
In Pseudo, brilliantly translated by David Bellos as Hocus Bogus, the struggle to assert and deny authorship is part of a wider protest against suffering and universal hypocrisy. Playing with novelistic categories and authorial voice, this work is a powerful testimony to the power of language—to express, to amuse, to deceive, and ultimately to speak difficult personal truths.
Not an easy book to read for this reader, despite my fondness-bordering-on-obsession for Romain Gary. All the pleasure came from his playful style, his comical and out-of-the-box comments about identity. He always had a way with words, a way to twist sentences, use images and play-on-words and be spot-on. He’s always spot on and the perfect definition of the phrase “many a true word is spoken in jest”.
If there is no coincidence, then some underlying current brought our Book Club to choose Belle Greene by Alexandra Lapierre for our February read.
It’s based on the true story of Belle da Costa Greene (1879-1950), a black woman with a light color of skin who decided to pass for white to have a better life. And indeed, she managed and developed the JP Morgan Library. She loved books and always wanted to be a librarian. She shed away her identity and became someone else, someone she never could have become if she had kept “black” on her identity card.
She crossed the identity line and belongs to this billet. Sadly, the book is not up to Belle Greene and I couldn’t finish it. Thanks Wikipedia, because Belle Greene is a fascinating person and I wanted to know more about her. She truly deserves a book about her life.
Unfortunately, Alexandra Lapierre has a tedious style, rather simple and verbose. There are too many vapid pages about feelings that seemed more like filling pages than truly exploring the dent that Greene’s decision made on her soul. Lapierre was more interested in love stories than in digging into what Greene’s transgression meant for her.
What a way to ruin a perfect opportunity to celebrate a brilliant woman who rebelled against her condition, the world she lived in, lied and made sacrifices to explore her talent.
I’ll leave you with a word by Delphine Horvilleur, something true for all of us book lovers, as it is for her and as it was for Romain Gary and Belle Greene.
| Nous sommes toujours les enfants de nos parents, des mondes qu’ils ont construits et des univers détruits qu’ils ont pleurés, des deuils qu’ils ont eu à faire et des espoirs qu’ils ont placés dans les noms qu’ils nous ont donnés. Mais nous sommes aussi, et pour toujours, les enfants des livres que nous avons lus, les fils et les filles de textes qui nous ont construits, de leurs mots et de leurs silences. | We forever are the children of our parents, of the worlds they built and of the worlds they lost and grieved, of the deaths they had to mourn and of the hope they put into the names they gave us. But we also are, forever, the children of the books we read, the sons and daughters of the texts that built us, of their words and silences. |
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – Very highly recommended
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1962-1973) French title: Une journée d’Ivan Denissovitch by Alexandre Soljénitsyne. Translated by Lucia and Jean Cathala.
The day we heard about the death of Alexei Navalny is the day I finished reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Talk about a coincidence. It’s hard not to superimpose images from Solzhenitsyn’s book on the description of Navalny’s prison camp in Siberia. 50 years later and nothing has changed.
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov has been in prison camps for eight years. He escaped from the Germans during the war and was considered as a spy by the Russian army. He got 10 years of imprisonment and hasn’t been home since 1941.
He’s in Gang 104 and he’s lucky because Tyurin, the gang’s foreman is a decent guy. The other men in his gang are from various backgrounds. Alyocha got years because he’s a Baptist and won’t give up his religion. Gopchit is a Ukrainian nationalist. Buynovsky is a former Soviet Naval Captain. Kildigs is Latvian and Senka Klevshin was freed from Buchenwald. It is just the illustration that no one was safe in Stalin’s days.
Solzhenitsyn tells us an ordinary day in the life of Shukhov, from his point of view. Shukov is street smart and has learnt all the little tricks to make his life easier at the camp. He does it the right way: he’s not walking over other people and his fellow inmates like him. He just knows how to provide useful services to the right persons. He works hard and is a team player.
His goals are simple: ensuring he gets acceptable tools at work, getting a second helping of food, staying near the stove, protecting his meagre possessions, trading tobacco here and there. All his mental energy revolves around his basic needs: to keep himself fed, warm, rather healthy and out of trouble. Bend the rule and stay safe. Help the right persons and keep one’s dignity. Stay under the radar and be seen as a reliable fellow.
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is based upon Solzhenitsyn’s own experience as a prisoner in such a camp. He describes the rules, the countdown of prisoners, the way meals are organized, the sleeping arrangements. They all wear a number, sewn on their clothes and mandatory.
The most ludicrous part is when Solzhenitsyn describes their working day. They go to work for a contractor and build walls for an upcoming electricity plant. It’s around -27°C that day. There’s snow everywhere and the prisoners are very cold. They spend the whole morning protecting themselves from the biting cold and setting up a stove. There’s no wood for it, so they burn whatever they can. It’s so cold that the mortar freezes before they can use it if they’re not cautious. Building a wall is a stupid idea in this weather.
It’s utter inefficiency: they are left to their own devices, so imagine a gang with no one who ever worked in construction. There’s no direction from a foreman, they have to guess how to build this wall. They are so cold that they destroy tools and scaffoldings to take the wood and feed the stove. Shukhov is a Jack of all trades and it helps that he can work with his hands. He knows how to build a brick wall.
Like in Fateless by Imre Kertész, Shukhov’s train of thought is pragmatic. He adjusts to his environment. Solzhenitsyn’s style also reminded me of Gogol. It’s inventive, humorous and according to the author, faithful to the argot language of the camps.
It’s not as hard to read as If This is a Man by Primo Levi because of Solzhenitsyn’s style. He doesn’t sugarcoat the living conditions of the prisoners but he pictures a down-to-earth character who adapts to the camp, makes the best of it and keeps his moral boundaries. He behaves like a decent human being and thus retains his humanity in a dehumanizing setting.
Very highly recommended.
This is part of my Tame the TBR project. I don’t know why it took me so long to get to this book.
Third crime is the charm #7 : Nice, Tokyo and Los Angeles
- After the Dogs by Michèle Pedinielli (2019) Not available in English French title: Après les chiens
- All She Was Worth by Miyabe Miyuki (1992) French title: Une carte pour l’enfer. Translated by Chiharu Tanaka and Aude Fieschi
- L.A. Noire – Collected Stories (2010) Not available in French.
These three crime fiction books are nothing alike and my favorite one is the Après les chiens by Michèle Pedinielli.
Set in Nice on the French Riviera, where the author lives, Après les chiens is the second volume of the Boccanera series.
We’re in 2017 and Boccanera, a private detective, stumbles upon the body of an Erythrean young man. He was an illegal immigrant who arrived in Nice through the border with Italy in the Nice countryside. It’s in the Alps, near the Vallée de la Roya. So, picture high mountains and dangerous trails. We’re also in 1943 and peasants in the same mountains helped Jews cross the border from France to Italy to save their lives.
Après les chiens is a political crime fiction novel. The Alps near Nice are a hotspot for migrants and there has been conflicts between a part of the local population who rescues them and the police who wants to block them out. Intolerance against migrants is more and more vocal and especially in the South East of France, where Nice is located. Pedinielli’s opinion is clear through Boccanera: there’s a tradition of crossing borders in the area and a tradition of assisting people who are in danger in the mountains.
The plot is secondary to the political message. It could be heavy but it’s not because of all the side characters around Boccanera, Pedinielli’s wonderful descriptions of Nice, a good way of tying together the two threads of her plot, the one in present times and the one in 1943. I just wanted to hop on a train and go visit Nice.
Après les chiens was our Book Club choice for December 2023 and is published by the independant publisher Les Editions de l’Aube. They also publish Stéphane Hessel and Gao Xingjian. I read it a few weeks ago but I’ll mention it for Karen and Lizzy’s Read Indies event anyway.
Totally different atmosphere but similar intention: In 1992 Tokyo, Miyabe also wrote a political novel with his book All She Was Worth.
It’s more oblique than Pedinielli’s intentions but it’s still there. Inspector Honman is on sick leave while his leg recovers after he got shot. A relative comes to him because his fiancée Sekine Shoko has disappeared. Honman quickly discovers that she stole someone’s identity to escape from mafia debt collectors. Miyabe describes the scandal of deregulated access to credit cards and debt overload.
The plot felt a bit sluggish to me but I enjoyed Honman and his family. His wife died a few years ago and he’s a single dad, raising his ten-years old son Satoru. His housekeeper is a man who chose this job while his wife has an office job. I don’t know much about Japanese culture but I imagine it goes against the usual vision of a family and what a man’s job should be.
I read it from the TBR and it’s my contribution to January in Japan, hosted by Meredith.
Our next stop is to L.A. in the 1940s for L.A. Noire – Collected stories edited by Jonathan Santlofer. It’s part of my Tame the TBR project. All the stories are set during the Golden Age era and I noticed that the title is L.A. Noire, with an e at the end of Noir. As a French, I see it as agreeing the adjective noir with the feminine form. It implies that L.A. is a woman.
The eight stories included in this collection are:
- The Girl by Megan Abbott
- See the Woman by Lawrence Block
- Naked Angel by Joe R. Lansdale
- Black Dahlia and White Rose by Joyce Carol Oates
- School for Murder by Francine Prose
- What’s in a Name by Jonathan Santlofer
- Hell of an Affair by Duane Swierczynski
- Postwar Room by Andrew Vachss
I’m not very good at defining literary genres but I thought that Noir implied femmes fatales, gang, hidden criminals and normal Joes who make a bad decision at some point and whose life turns for the worst.
Here we have a lot of naïve and helpless female victims. Young would-be actresses who get drugged, fall into prostitution, and get murdered. Only in Hell of an Affair and Naked Angel do we have actual take-charge women who are more cunning than the men around them. See the Woman was well-drawn too, a twisted story of solving a recurring problem of domestic violence.
Otherwise, I thought that the stories were a little weak. Duane Swierczynski is a hell of a writer, though, if you like pulp and Noir. I’ll point out again his Charlie Hardie series, that was a lot of fun.
So, my recommendation would be to read the Pedinielli for readers who can read in French and go for the Charlie Hardie series for the ones who love pulp entertainment.
PS: I also read In the Name of Truth by Viveca Sten (2015) translated by Marlaine Delargy. (French title: Au nom de la verité.) It’s the eight volume of the Sandhamn Murders series and it’s very good. It felt like Sten was finding a new breath with the series, more thriller than whodunnit. She also shifted her attention to Nora, the female character of the series as she made her change of job and go into a more investigative position. Excellent.
The books in this billet contribute to several blogging events or to my personal reading goals.
Blood Knot by Pete Fromm – Fishing and bonding
Blood Knot by Pete Fromm (1998) French title: Avant la nuit. Translated by Denis Lagae-Devoldère.
Blood Knot by Pete Fromm is a collection of the following short stories:
| Blood Knot | Père et Fils |
| The Net | Epuisette |
| Home Before Dark | Avant la nuit |
| Natives, Boxcars and Transplants | Indigènes, wagons et déménagement. |
| Trying to Be Normal | Le cours normal des choses |
| Stone | Stone |
| Grayfish | Ambre |
| My Sister’s Hood | Petite frappe |
| For the Kid’s Sake | Pour le gamin |
| Mighty Mouse and Blue Cheese From the Moon | Super Souris et le fromage bleu de la lune. |
You know how staying in a vehicle on a road trip loosens tongues and the car becomes this quiet and cozy place where meaningful conversations happen? It becomes a temporary place for deep bonding.
This is exactly the common point between the stories in Blood Knot by Pete Fromm. Instead of happening in a moving vehicle, the bonding occurs on fishing trips. Don’t forget Pete Fromm spent a winter on his own monitoring salmon eggs in the Idaho wilderness and that he lives in Missoula, Montana. Fishing is in his blood.
Each story is about a special fishing trip for the characters.
In Blood Knot, a father tries to reconnect with his son who moved to Georgia with his ex-wife. In The Net, Maddy and Dalton get married on the bank of the Buffalo Fork river in Wyoming. In Home Before Dark, the Narrator uses a fishing trip to make his stepson talk and mend his relationship with his mother.
In Natives, Boxcars and Transplant, a non-Montana native boy teaches a local how to fish, bringing him a much needed friendship. In Trying to Be Normal, a father takes his teenage children to their usual fishing trips, only this one is the first one after their mother died. In Stone, father and son finally reach a middle ground during their fishing trip between fishing and skimming stones.
In Grayfish, two brothers compete for fishing prowess and one of them makes a concession for the sake of the other. In My Sister’s Head, a young boy relates a fishing trip with his sister’s boyfriend; he’s so sure the older boy will drop him off at the first occasion. In For the Kid’s Sake, two old friends Monk and Rayney go fishing together with Rayney’s son, Brian. And Monk discovers that his friend enjoys fatherhood and his son’s company.
Mighty Mouse and Blue Cheese from the Moon is a strange title for a story and I’m not sure I truly got what it referred to. But I found the two characters endearing, a young man whose words are all bottled up inside and who is clueless to see that his wife has an important announcement to make.
In each story, fishing provides the character with a setting conductive to talking and sharing their thoughts and feelings. The nature surrounding them, the necessity to work as a team to steer the boat, prepare the fishing poles or hike to the river brings people together.
They have something to do together and soon, cut off from the noise of everyday life and its interfering business, they open to each other. They have quality time together and it strengthens their bond.
All these characters are common people, you, me, our neighbors. They go fishing with their spouse, their kids, their friends, their siblings. Catching fish is secondary; it’s about spending time with people you love, enjoying the quiet and the beauty of nature. Getting a break from the rat race of the quotidian.
Pete Fromm sounds like a solid, generous, and quiet man. He sounds grounded and it seeps into all his writing, nonfiction, novels and short stories alike. All these stories have a timeless quality. He writes from the heart and his deep knowledge of the Montana wilderness.
These stories ring true, they picture key moments of the characters’ lives, ones that will become both anecdotes and a brick of their being, if we think of ourselves as a Lego construction of tiny moments that stick together and make us who we are.
Highly recommended as it is soothing.
PS: The characters of The Net became the heroes of a novel, If Not For This, published in 2014.
Fools Crow by James Welch – Like shadows on the Earth
Fools Crow by James Welch (1986) French title: Comme des ombres sur la terre.
I do not fear for my people now…we will go to a happier place. But I grieve for our children and their children, who will not know the life their people once lived.
James Welch (1940-2003) grew up on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana. He was a student at University of Montana in Missoula and Richard Hugo was his teacher.
Fools Crow is his third novel, set in the north west of Montana between Missoula and Fort Benton. Set between 1868 and 1870 at the door of the final colonization of Montana by Euro-Americans, Fools Crow is both a coming-of-age novel and the death song of a way-of-life.
When the book opens, we’re at the summer camp of the Lone Eaters, a band of Pikunis Native Americans. White Man’s Dog is eighteen, knows that it’s time to be a man but doesn’t feel like one. He’s full of doubt about his self-worth and seeks for the help of the medicine man. His friend Fast Horse is his opposite, boisterous and cocky.
When Yellow Kidney takes them on a horse raid at a Crow camp, White Man’s Dog finds his courage and proves himself valuable. It is his first step towards manhood and leadership. We follow White Man’s Dog journey, his spiritual quest, his marriage, his war accomplishment. Somewhere along the way, he becomes Fools Crow and a pillar of the Lone Eaters band.
Fools Crow portrays White Man’s Dog inner struggles, his doubt and his deep attachment to his community, his commitment to the traditional way-of-life. But we are at a turning point in the Pikunis history. The white settlements increase and their presence is more and more visible.
The novel is told from the Plain Indians perspective, which means that all things related to the white man civilization have Indian names.
The Whites are the Napikwan, Fort Benton is Many Houses, smallpox is white scabs and the US Cavalry are the seizers. All natural elements have Indians names, for example the Missouri river is the Big River. Other Indian tribes have Blackfeet names, for example, the Cheyenne are the Spotted Horse People.
As a western reader, it is disorienting and it’s like crossing a mirror and see the world from the other side. The map at the end of the book was useful. Illustrations between chapters enforce the feeling of immersion in another world, another point of view.
Many Houses (Fort Benton) is the main settlement, where Indians trade furs and craft against rifles and other goods. Fort Benton founded in 1846 is the oldest continuously occupied settlement in Montana.
With the end of the Civil War, the conquest of the West starts again. White settlers arrive and build farms. It is still the time of open range grazing, fencing will become the norm in the 1890s. The Lone Eaters encounter more and more cows from white men’s herds. They see more and more farms. Some of them are attracted to the white men’s way-of-life. Some want to fight and get rid of theses invaders once for all.
Folls Crow knows his children will not live the same way as he did and the chiefs don’t agree on how to deal with the change. Welch shows us a people who knows their way-of-life is threatened and doesn’t know how they’ll adapt to the change. Violence and incomprehension prevail and the strongest will take over.
Some, like Rides-at-the-Door, Fools Crow’s father and chief of the Lone Eaters, think it is better to negotiate treaties and try to peacefully live side-by-side with the Napikwans. The fragile balance between the two communities, the two way-of-lives is crumbling. The Pikunis understand that the Napikwans are stronger. They are outnumbered. Smallpox decimates the camps. Raids from both sides increase fear and hatred.
We see the inexorable is coming. We know how it ended. They saw it coming too.
Through his character Fools Crow and his life, James Welch describes the organization of the camp, its traditions, the way power is shared between chiefs and medicine men and all kind of everyday-life details. He also explains how Lone Eaters’ worldview, their cosmogony, their customs and, for lack of a better word, their religion, and their ceremonies. Their vision of the world is very different from the white man’s.
And yet. When Welch describes White Man’s Dog and then later Fools Crow inner turmoil, we see a shared human condition. He’s insecure, he lusts after girls, he wants approval from his father, he seeks for acceptance. This is one of Welch’s accomplishments with Fools Crow: he propels you into the past, into another culture, into totally different way of seeing the world and yet he points out the familiarity of human feelings and questioning.
Welch shows the different views among the Blackfeet: they don’t know how to deal with the Napikwans anymore. They are wary because they heard of what happened to Indian tribes in the East. In a way, the first fur traders, the Whites they encountered were outsiders in the white man’s world. They are not typical white people. The usual ones are the settlers, with their farming, their religious beliefs, and their rules. The real encounter with the white men civilization is happening now. It’s like a tidal wave that cannot be avoided.
Fools Crow is not nostalgic but it makes the reader stand beside the Plains Indians and see the white hurricane coming, the inevitable destruction of their way-of-life and their helplessness to avoid it.
So imagine a novel that takes you back in time, makes you experience another culture, immerges you in the Montana wilderness, makes you understand a crucial moment in History. All this wrapped up in a sumptuous and poetical prose, a language suited for the time, the people, and the span of time it describes. I call this a masterpiece. In my opinion, James Welch has an Australian brother named Kim Scott.
The Good Shepherd by Gunnar Gunnarsson – a perfect Christmas Eve story.
The Good Shepherd by Gunnar Gunnarsson. (1936) French title: Le Berger de l’Avent. Translated by Gérard Lemarquois and Maria S. Gunnarsdóttir.
Christmas Eve sounds a great day for a billet about The Good Shepherd by Gunnar Gunnarsson.
Gunner Gunnarsson (1889-1975) was an Icelandic novelist. He went to university in Copenhagen, became a Danish speaker and wrote his books in Danish. They were first translated into Icelandic by Laxness and later by Gunnarsson himself. I read a French translation from the Icelandic, I wonder why they didn’t translate it from the Danish, after all it’s the original text. Oh well…
Benedikt is a shepherd and every first Sunday of the Advent, he goes to the mountains to chase lost sheep and bring them back to the village before Christmas. He’s fifty-four and this year is a kind of anniversary since it’s his twenty-seventh trip.
Benedikt was always alone on this Advent Journey of his – that is, no man went with him. To be sure he had his dog along and his bell-wether. The dog he had at this time was called Leo, and as Benedikt put it, he earned his name, for truly he was a Pope among dogs. The wether was named Gnarly; that was because he was so tough.
These three had been inseparable on these expeditions for a number of years now, and they had gradually come to know one another with that deep-seated knowledge perhaps to be found only among animas of such divergent kinds that no share of their own ego or own blood or own wishes or desires could come between them to confuse or darken it. Translation by Kenneth C. Kaufman
In French, the wether is named Roc because he’s as sturdy as a rock.
Gunnarsson describes Benedikt’s journey. His first stop is at the Botn farm, where Pétur and his wife Sigridur wait for him with a hot meal and fresh hay for Gnarly. Everything is as usual until Benedikt feels compelled to help another shepherd find his wandering sheep and the weather turns to blizzard. Benedikt doesn’t give up and goes to the mountain anyway.
The Good Shepherd is a mix between adventure and meditation. Gunnarsson describes Benedikt’s hike, the dangers of the weather, the heavy plodding in the snow covered tracks, the cold, the disorientation in this white and blinding universe. We fear for his life and yet we remain calm because we’re in Benedikt’s mind and he’s peaceful. He’s not afraid. He knows he might die but he concentrates on the task at end : find the sheep, bring them back, find the shelter on time, rest and start again.
He can count on the people who live in the mountains. They take care of their own and
I don’t think there is a biblical message in The Good Shepherd. It’s the story of a man who knows his place in the world, is happy doing his duty, bonds with men and animals as they are part of his life and is respectful of the majestic wilderness around him.
For readers who celebrate Christmas, I wish you a wonderful Christmas Eve and a Merry Christmas.
For English-speaking readers, you can find this book online here as it’s part of the Forgotten Books catalog.
The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge – creepy #NovNov23 & #ReadingBeryl23
The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge (1973) French title: La couturière. Translated by Françoise Cartano.
In English, The Dressmaker is a novella as it’s less than 200 pages long. My copy in French has 294 pages. Hmm. I’ll stick to the original and consider that it qualifies for Novellas in November on top of being my participation to Annabel’s Reading Beryl 2023 week.
The Dressmaker is my third Bainbridge after An Awfully Big Adventure and The Bottle Factory Outing and I know of her books only through blogging as I’ve never seen them in a French bookstore. I bought used copies or books in English.
The Dressmaker is set in Liverpool in 1944 and American soldiers are stationed in town. On Bingley Road, Nellie lives in her parents’ house with her sister Margo and her seventeen-years old niece Rita. Jack, the third Bingley Road sibling lives above his butcher shop and when his wife died, Rita came to live with her aunts.
Nellie is a competent dressmaker and her current job is to sew Valerie Mander’s dress for her engagement party. Valerie is engaged to GI Chuck and Rita envies her future blissful life in rich America. When Rita meets Ira at Valerie’s, she thinks she’s in love and is ready to a lot of compromise to pursue a relationship with him.
The atmosphere of the book is creepy on several levels. Nellie is stuck into the past and celebrates an unhealthy cult to her dead mother. She longs to meet her again in heaven and worships her mother’s furniture and belongings. Poor Rita must have been raised in a mausoleum.
Nellie refuses to acknowledge that times have changed and would gladly live under Queen Victoria. She despises her sister’s wish for male companionship and ten years ago ensured that she broke up with the man she was dating when he proposed. Now Nellie has decided that Ira won’t do.
The relationships in this family are toxic. Nellie rules the house as her mother probably used to. Jack is Rita’s father and she calls him “Uncle Jack”, he’s under Nellie’s influence and let go of his parental duties. Nellie and Margo took over.
Margo is a shameless flirt and she could be one of those ridiculous middle-aged persons who think they are still attractive when they’re not. She’s herself and oozes a je-ne-sais-quoi that appeals to the opposite sex, like Brenda in The Bottle Factory Outing. Margo works in a factory, something Nellie finds degrading and bad for her sister’s manners. Margo is more in tune with her time.
Rita is immature and lives in her own head. She loves the idea of Ira more than Ira himself. She doesn’t ask him any question about his life back home and she’s unable to answer simple questions about the man she’s dating such as where he comes from, what is profession is or what his parents do for a living. She intends to marry him and yet has no interest in him beyond the ticket to America he can provide. She’s not even ruthless, she deludes herself into thinking that she wants him when all she wants is his nationality. Like Freda in The Bottle Factory Outing, she wants a man to better herself in life.
The Dressmaker is an excellent picture of Liverpool in 1944, the people’s reactions to the American soldiers stationed in their town, the daily life difficulties and how the war moved the lines between men and women, with women working in factories.
However I felt uncomfortable during the whole story as Bainbridge builds a sense of foreboding. The whole thing can’t end well. I thought it was a lot like The Bottle Factory Outing. I’m not fond of the atmosphere of her books. She captures the daily lives of her characters very well but they all have something off and disquieting. There’s this feeling of domination, of sexual tension and abuse. Nellie is a dominating creep, Margo sounded better except for her disconcerting flirting choices, Jack is a wimp and Rita grew up among these disfunctioning adults and is a mix of cunning and naiveté.
The whole picture is chilling and while I’m aware that Bainbridge is an excellent writer, I don’t enjoy her books very much.
Three novellas with war as a background – Uhlman, Zweig and Rigoni Stern #NovNov23
- Reunion by Fred Uhlman (1971) French title: L’ami retrouvé. Translated by Léo Lack
- Chess by Stefan Zweig (1942) French title: Le joueur d’échecs. Translated by Jacqueline des Gouttes
- Story of Tönle by Mario Rigoni Stern. (1978) French title: Histoire de Tönle. Translated by Laura Brignon
November is German Lit Month and Novellas in November #NovNov. I managed to combine the two events with Fred Uhlman, a German who wrote Reunion in English after he emigrated to UK and the classic Chess by Stefan Zweig.
I received Story of Tönle by Mario Rigoni Stern through my Kube subscription and although it’s an Italian book, it goes well with the others as it is linked to Austria.
Fred Uhlman (1901-1985) was born in a Jewish middle-class family in Stuttgart and left Germany in 1933 after Hitler took power. He wrote Reunion in 1971 when he was 70, which explains the nostalgic tone of the book when he describes his hometown and Wurtemberg.
Hans Schwarz was a student at the Karl Alexander Gymnasium in Stuttgart in 1932 when a new student joined their class. Uhlman starts with a powerful paragraph, that sets the tone of the novel.
He came into my life in February 1932 and never left it again. More than a quarter of a century has passed since then, more than nine thousand days, desultory and tedious, hollow with the sense of effort or work without hope – days and years, many of them as dead as dry leaves on a dead tree.
I can remember the day and the hour when I first set eyes on this boy who was to be the source of my greatest happiness and of my greatest despair.
“He” is Graf Konrad von Hohenfels, an aristocrat, an adolescent who comes from a totally different background from Hans. And they become best friends until History comes in their way.
In a mere 120 pages, Uhlman manages to combine the story of a life-changing friendship, the implacable march of History and an ode to his hometown as he describes the beauties of Wurtemberg.
Hans and Konrad don’t run in the same circles. Their improbable friendship is based on shared interests and matching tempers. Hans looks up to Konrad who comes from a family with a prestigious past. It’s a strong bond and Hans says he was ready to die for his friend.
There’s a Proust feeling in this book and it is explicit when Hans mentions the Duchesse de Guermantes. Indeed, In Search of Lost Time pictures Swann, a Jew and close friends with the Guermantes until the Dreyfus affair. Proust’s narrator is as dazzled by aristocratic clout as Hans. In chapter 12, another reminder of Proust’s narrator: Hans tells an adecdote. His mother, all dressed up for ball, comes to kiss him goodnight before going out. It upsets Hans deeply and it reminded me of the beginning of Swann’s Way.
It could have been a Bildungsroman. But we’re in 1932 and the Nazi infiltrate the German society and reach the classrooms of their gymnasium. Families are split, teachers bring Nazi views in class, students start bullying Hans. In a few pages, we see a peaceful microcosm caught up by external evil forces. Propaganda turns people’s heads and in the blink of an eye, Hans turns from anonymous student to pariah. People change rapidly and we ought to remember that.
My friend’s daughter read it in school a few weeks ago and I’m glad her teacher picked it for their class as it is a literary gem and a good book to discuss. It is also a perfect companion book to Address Unknown by K. Kressman Taylor.
After Uhlman, I read Chess by Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), written during WWII. It also refers to Nazi persecutions albeit in an oblique manner. (Is that a chess-like literary move?)
We’re on a liner between New York and Buenos Aires. The narrator spots Mirko Czentovic, the world’s chess champion. He and a few fellow passengers challenge him to a game of chess.
During the game, another passenger, Doctor B. arrives, gives them pointers, and helps them win. Then Mr. B explains to the narrator how he became knowledgeable in chess when he was kept by the Gestapo in Vienna. Before the novella circles back to present time, Zweig leaves enough room to B to describe the mental torture he endured in detention.
Chess is Zweig’s last book, it was published in 1943 after he committed suicide in exile. I didn’t enjoy it as much as his other books I’ve read, probably because lots of chess references were lost on me since I don’t play the game.
After Chess, I moved to Story of Tönle by Mario Rigoni Stern (1921-2008). He’s an Italian writer, a WWII veteran and born in Asagio, in North East Italy, near the Austrian border. His work is laced with autobiographical elements.
Tönle was born in the 1850s on the Asagio plateau. He’s a shepherd who smuggles goods from Austria through the mountains. One day, he gets caught, injures a gendarme, and has to hide away.
For years, Tönle crosses the Austrian border and works somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian empire. He comes back to his village during the winters, brings money, hides in his home, spends time with his family and leaves again in the spring. It lasts until the king has a newborn and decides of an amnesty. (I guess it was in 1904). Tönle resumes his life as a mountain shepherd.
The news of the beginning of WWI reach the village and the reality of war catches up with the villagers. They are at the Austrian border and severe battles happened in the area such as the Battle of Asagio.
Tönle is a man of his time and of his birthplace. He was a soldier in the Austrian Landwehr and then in the Italian Alpini after the independence of Italy (1870). He was also born in the vast Austro-Hungarian empire and borders meant nothing. He was free to work in Vienna or Prague if he wanted to. Tönle speaks a local dialect with German roots. He also speaks German, Italian and Czech. It comes with the territory, people who live close to borders often speak several languages and cross borders in their daily lives. Until his death, Tönle remains a free spirit, an obstinate shepherd without borders, in love with his village, his house and his mountains.
Story of Tönle is only 120 pages long and like Reunion or Chess, it describes how History impacts common people. It was interesting to read about WWI in Italy. It is also a beautiful ode to Asagio and this mountain region. Rigoni Stern was an avid hiker, he was in the Alpini himself and loved his region. His novella sings the beauty of the mountains and pictures a lost world, the peasant and mountaineer way-of life of the turning of the 20th century. It reminded me of Ramuz.
It also reminds us that borders are political decisions that impact the people who change of countries according to the time but to an extend keep their identity and traditions. The Eastern border of France means exactly that: being German or French (Alsace & Moselle), belonging to Italy or France (Nice/Savoie) For Tönle, borders mean nothing but constraints. Until the end, he’ll play them and acts as if they don’t matter. Highly recommended.
Story of Tönle is close to Austria with its Asagio cultural background and this is why it belongs to this German Lit Month post.
Incidentally, the writers of these three novellas were born 20 years apart: Zweig in 1881, Uhlman in 1901 and Rigoni Stern in 1921.
From light to unbearable darkness, from Voltaire to obscurantism. – Cossery, Zeller and Rahimi
- Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery (1955) Original French title : Mendiants et orgueilleux
- The Fascination of Evil by Florian Zeller (2004) Original French title: La Fascination du pire.
- The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi (2008) Original French title: Syngué sabour. La pierre de patience.
Serendipity brought these three books on my To-Be-Reviewed pile at the same time. I read Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery as part of my Sister-In-Law readalong. I picked The Fascination of Evil by Florian Zeller and The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi for Novellas in November. After the Cossery, I read the Zeller because it’s been on the TBR for ages and I wanted to clear it from the pile. I read the Rahimi after Lisa’s strong reaction to it when I published my pile of books for #NovNov23.
And I see a link between these books, a sickening progression from a free society to intolerance dominated countries.
Albert Cossery (1913-2008) was an Egyptian-French writer. Born in Cairo, he lived most of his adult life in Paris, wrote in French but all his novels are set in Egypt or in an imaginary country of the Middle-East. (A bit like L’Autre by Andrée Chedid, who was also born in Egypt) For readers who have read Our Riches by Kaouther Adimi, Cossery was also part of Charlot’s roster. He knew a lot of the literary crowd back in the day and the foreword of Proud Beggars is by Roger Grenier, one Gary’s closest friends.
Proud Beggars takes us to Cairo in the 1950s. Gohar, a former university teacher has decided to leave his world behind. He doesn’t want to take part in the bourgeois society he comes from. He rejects their way-of-thinking, their attachment to property and their hypocrisy. He lives in a dirt-poor neighborhood in Cairo, does a bit of accounting for a madam and is addicted to hashish.
His days revolve around the café des Miroirs, where he holds court and meets with his acquaintances. He’s a sort of legend, seen as a wise man. There’s Yéghen, an ugly man who sells hashish, El Kordi, a foolish young civil servant in love with a tuberculosis-stricken prostitute, Set Amira, the madam he works for and later in the book, Nour El Dine, a police officer.
Gohar does his best to cut himself off of every material need, sleeps on old newspapers, and eats when he can. But he’s addicted to hashish and his need will lead him to murder Naïla, a girl in Set Amira’s brothel, blinded by her gold bracelets and wanting to steal them to buy drugs. Sordid. (This “blinded by the sun moment” sounds lot like Meursault in L’Etranger, no?)
So, Gohar failed to live untethered, despite his efforts.
Nour El Dine is on the case and he still believes in his job, not sparing his time and energy to discover who murdered Naïla, even if she’s only a prostitute. Nour El Dine is a homosexual and he’s struggling to reconcile his true self with his job. He has affairs in grim places in Cairo because he’s always worried that someone will recognize him. His enquiry will bring him to Gohar’s circle and their discussions will challenge him and his vision of the world.
Roger Grenier writes in the foreword that Proud Beggars was an oddity when it was published. It promoted the idea of chosen destitution when France was vibrating with economic growth and the need to rebuild the country after the war.
Proud Beggars is also an extraordinary description of the popular neighborhoods in Cairo. It’s really worth reading for the sake of the feel of the town, for the colorful description of Gohar’s crowd, their optimism and their pride. It will appeal to Mahfouz’s fans. Gohar, El Kordi, Yéghen and Nour El Dine walk around a lot and Cossery takes us to a journey among the poorest people of the city.
And let me tell you one thing, religion is not the center of their world. Sure, women are not as free as men, like in books by Naguib Mahfouz but there is no feeling of political and religious oppression, only restrictions due to customs. Gohar is a universalist, someone who loves his freedom of thinking and of being. He has Voltaire as a cultural heritage, on top of his Egyptian background. He’s still a child of the Enlightenment.
This is far from the atmosphere of Cairo in The Fascination for Evil by Florian Zeller. It was published in 2004, so, after 9/11 and a decade before the terrible terrorist attacks in France. I was annoyed with this book. The set up is the kind of French novel I don’t care much about and that only France seems to father.
Two writers are invited to a literary festival in Cairo, the narrator and a francophone Swiss writer Martin Millet. The narrator has a real fondness for Egypt and is open-minded. The Swiss writer is obsessed with sex, with finding hookers or getting laid with a local and all the pyramids and the literary talks of the world could not derail him of that track. A wonderful person, this Martin.
The French embassy in Cairo babysits our two writers and one of the embassy team members says right away that there is no way to find girls the way Martin suggests. They still embark on an embarrassing night on the town looking for booze and ladies. That annoyed me a lot. All this masculine entitlement to sex and its stale smell of white colonialism. It creeped me out.
The second part of the novella is set in Paris, in the aftermath of a book by Martin Millet and the narrator (and the author) discuss the growing place of radical Islam in Europe and the issue of the compatibility of Islam with democratic values. That part was interesting especially knowing what happened afterwards: the Arab Spring in 2010, the terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice in 2015 and 2016. Zeller keeps the discussion open and level-headed. He’s not Houellebecq with his stinking views. He’s more analytic and questioning the attitude of the French intelligentsia.
This obsession with sex and the discussion about sex in Muslim countries make me ill-at-ease, as if the sexual liberty or lack of in these countries explained everything. As if this topic overran anything else and were the crux and the root cause of all the power of radical Islamism.
I felt ill-at-ease too when I read Veiled Hookers Will Never Go to Heaven! by Chahdortt Djavann, a novel that deals with the constant sexual assault on women in Iran and the hypocrisy of the chastity belt imposed by the regime. It’s as if sexual freedom was the mother of all freedoms and as if it were women’s main concern and combat. No doubt, being safe from sexual assault is a priority, that’s a given.
But crude language and sex is also the angle Atiq Rahimi chose in The Patience Stone. Reading it, I understand why mild-mannered Lisa was so outraged. (Her review is here.)
We’re in a country at war, probably Afghanistan. A woman is stuck in her home with her children and her unresponsive husband who was injured at war. He seems to be in a coma and she takes care of him. For once, he’s at her mercy and she starts telling her life of humiliations.
Good premises for a book. Except that the author ruins this perfect opportunity to champion the cause of Afghan women by dwelling too much on sex.
Fair enough, the control over women’s bodies is the most appalling part of the Taliban regime. Sex is a tool of domination and our narrator reveals that her life revolves around sex: she must be a virgin at her wedding day, neighbors spy on her, she must get pregnant or might be repudiated and she’s under her in-laws’ rule.
This woman was subjected to terrible humiliations and her story is awful. However, the way she tells it does not sit right with me. She never says she longed to go to school, to be free to ride a bike or whatever innocent or futile things are forbidden to women in these countries, to go out on her own and speak freely. Simple things women in these countries must long for. She never mentions what her dreams were before her parents married her off to a man who wasn’t even there on their wedding day.
I can’t pinpoint precisely what bothers me but I can’t help thinking that only a man could write something like that. The woman’s voice is powerful, and sometimes I thought of Marguerite Duras and especially of Hiroshima mon amour. It’s a bit staged like a theatre play or a film. (It was made into a film, btw.) It feels fake, maybe that’s the issue. And see the cover of the book: it features the husband, and not the woman who narrates the story!
All these books have writers who don’t live in the country featuring in their books, either because they emigrated or because they were traveling. There’s nothing wrong about that but it’s good to keep it in mind.
These three books all talk about prostitution and the society of their time. Religious restrictions seem to strengthen as the years go on. Cossery reminds us that Egypt used to have a more secular society than now. The contrast between the atmosphere in Cossery’s Cairo and the wartime in Kaboul show that Islam isn’t the root of the problem, it’s what people make of it when they exploit religion to highjack political power in a country.
Novellas in November :Three Chinese novellas. #NovNov23
The list of novellas I chose for Novellas in November include three Chinese ones and I decided to do a group post.
- Children of the Bitter River by Fang Fang (1987) French title: Une vue splendide. Translated by Dany Filion.
- Treasury Map by Mo Yan (2004) French title: La carte au trésor. Translated by Antoine Ferragne.
- My Life by Lao She (circa 1936) French title: Histoire de ma vie. Group translation.
Unfortunately, the Fang Fang is out of print in English and I don’t think that the Mo Yan has been translated into English at all. The Lao She is available in ebook.
Let’s start with Children of the Bitter River by Fang Fang. She’s a writer from Wuhan, you know, were COVID started.
The narrator of this novella is Brother Number Eight, the youngest child of a poor working-class family in Wuhan. He died in infancy and was buried outside their home. His ghost witnessed the lives of his family members.
The siblings have numbers or nicknames. We have Big Brother, Brother Number Two, Brother Number Three, Brother Number Four, Brother Number Five and his twin Brother Number Six, Brother Number Seven and two girls, Big Perfume and Little Perfume.
The family lives in a shabby cabin by the railroad tracks and the walls shake each time a train goes by. The father loves to fight, beats up his wife and drinks. The mother is a flirt and under her husband’s spell. Both parents aren’t strong and loving caretakers for their children.
Brother Number Eight narrates the story of his family, focusing on the rise of Brother Number Seven, now a big shot in the area. He was beaten up by his father and nearly died of his injuries, had to sleep under the bed. Brother Number Eight explains how he escaped.
We hear of the destinies of the other siblings too and their different stories also browse through the history of China from the 1930s to the early 1980s. The tone of the narration is deceptively sweet and naïve. Brother Number Eight talks like a child and narrates the worst horrors in a candid tone. He doesn’t know anything else and relates events in a matter-of-fact tone that becomes funny but remain poignant.
Very highly recommended.
Treasury Map by Mo Yan is totally different and as weird as its French cover.
It’s set in Beijing, in the early 2000s, even if it’s not clearly said.
The unnamed narrator stumbles upon Make an old schoolmate from the countryside. Make forces the narrator to take him to lunch. He just threatens to couch surf at his apartment for an indefinite period of time. The narrator thinks he’d rather feed him now than introduce him to his wife.
They end up in a ravioli joint held by an old couple. The whole novella happens in this restaurant, from the crazy interactions with the owners to Make’s verbal logorrhea over their lunch. Make talks all the time, telling incredible stories about his life and everything is totally invented.
It’s fun because it’s bonkers but I found it tiring after a while.
The last novella is My Life, an older book by Lao She. It was written circa 1936 according to the book description on Amazon.
An old man reflects on his life. He lives in a hutong, the poor neighborhoods in Pekin. (Not Beijing yet!) He has little education and started out as an apprentice in paper crafts. What’s that? It’s a long-gone art related to Chinese traditions, like this one for funerals:
One of the traditions was to make a paper mock-up that looked like a backward-facing cart as soon as the person breathed his last. Most people don’t know about this tradition anymore. Then, on the third day after the death, the family would typically request a bunch of paper goods to burn to honor the dead. These include paper horses and carts, paper fairies, paper flags and paper flowers.
Fascinated stuff. The narrator tells us about his later career as a police officer, how boring it could be and how little money he made. He barely managed to support his family.
He lived through troubled times in China and he refers to the political changes and upheavals the country went through, like the end of the Empire. I enjoyed this novella for the journey into the past that it brings us. The narrator describes popular neighborhoods in Pekin and their way of living. He takes us to a world that no longer exists.
My Life tells the major changes that poor Chinese people experienced from the end of the 19th century to the 1930s. Then Children of the Bitter River shows what happened from the 1930s to the early 1980s. And Treasury Map is after all these changes and Make’s improbable tales and exploits make a link between today’s China and its folk traditions.
Last billet about my summer reads: Craig Johnson, Angela Thirkell and Ross Mcdonald.
- High Rising by Angela Thirkell (1933) French title: Bienvenue à High Rising. Translated by Elisabeth Luc.
- Spirit of Steamboat by Craig Johnson (2014) French title: Steamboat. Translated by Sophie Aslanides.
- Moving Target by Ross Mcdonald (1949) French title: Cible mouvante. Translated by Jacques Mailhos.
I still have three books I read during the summer and that I haven’t written about. Lucky me, we have a long Indian summer, so I’m writing this billet in a sort of summer anyway. Does that count? I’ll say it does. 😊
While traveling, I always look for good and entertaining books, the ones I file under the Beach & Public Transport category. You know the ones: page turners, easy to read in a distracting setting and wonderful to pass the time. I started with quite a classic adventure story, Spirit of Steamboat by Craig Johnson.
It’s a standalone novella, a Christmas story featuring Sheriff Longmire and his predecessor Lucian Connally. In this one, we go back in time. It’s Christmas Eve and there’s a terrible blizzard in Wyoming. A little girl is badly injured in an accident in Durant. She needs to be hospitalized in Denver or she won’t make it.
Lucian Connally flew Steamboat, a B25 during WWII and he flew them in combat. He’ll be the one flying them over to Denver, with Longmire and a doc onboard. It’s a classic and suspenseful adventure read; it would make a good action movie. The crew of characters is excellent, with tension, heroism, and a bit of humor. And kindness. My only issue is that I read it in English and struggled with the technical airplane vocabulary.
Kindness and humor was also what I expected when I read High Rising by Angela Thirkell, the first volume of her Barsetshire series. If no one has coined a name for these British novels that are set in the country, not too far from London, among well-off-but-not-stinking rich people, someone should. Books where pastors and vicars come to diner and spinsters live with their families.
You know the type. Jane Austen created them. In the 20th century, I’m talking about Barbara Pym, E.Nesbit or E.H. Young. The kind of books Elizabeth Jane Howard resuscitated in her Cazalet Chronicles. High Rising is a bit a sequel to Emma, set in modern-times where Emma is middle-aged lady named Laura, has four children, lost her husband, and became a writer to support her family.
We’re thrown in a microcosm of people where men are either absent or slightly ridiculous et servants have a mind of their own. And of course, a word in which single people need to be paired up and married. Angela Thirkell created a wonderful little world of people of the upper-middle-class, one you follow like you watch a sitcom. And the most prominent minor character is the flamboyant Tony, Laura’s energetic young son. He’s like a running gag, a comic thread in the book with his obsession with railroads, his chatter, his running around. He’s a riot.
Another character in Laura’s ciricle, is Adrian. He’s Laura’s publisher and he’s Jewish. The casual antisemitic comments thrown in the book are like a chilling reminder for today’s reader. See for yourself:
If Adrian had a touch of Jewish blood, it was all to the good in his business capacity and in his dark handsomeness. One could hardly question Adrian himself about it, but the suspicion was an immense comfort to such of his brother publishers as were being less successful on a purely Christian basis.
Or
Love or no love, you’re not going to publish her book unless you see money in it. You are a Jew and a shark, you know,’ said Laura dispassionately, ‘who battens on widows.
It’s not the first time I notice that kind of passing comment or casual comparison in books of the 1930s. I haven’t read Thirkell’s biography but I don’t think she was antisemitic, which in a way, is even worse. It means that such ideas were common, that they got firmly set in the people’s minds. Books provide the best reminders of the atmosphere of their time and should never, never be cleaned up to fit with today’s standards. Otherwise, where would the reminders be?
Besides this troubling paragraphs, the best description of High Rising is probably what Laura says about her own writing:
I thought if I could write some rather good bad books, it would help with the boys’ education.’ ‘Good bad books?’ ‘Yes. Not very good books, you know, but good of a second-rate kind. That’s all I could do,’ she said gravely. So in time her first story went to Adrian, who recognising in it a touch of good badness almost amounting to genius, gave her a contract for two more.
That’s Thirkell in a nutshell.
Perhaps that’s what Ross Mcdonald thought about his own writing. After all, wasn’t he writing in the subgenre of crime fiction? He’s a writer I’d wanted to read for a long time because bloggers I respect rave about him and Oliver Gallmeister is set on retranslating all of Mcdonald’s books to make them available to the French public in a fresh translation, even if it’s not profitable.
We’re clearly here in a bad case of “Why on earth did I way so long to read Mcdonald?” I won’t describe the plot, I don’t think it’s of much interest in a billet. This is classic noir literature and the first volume of the Lew Archer series, a former cop turned into a PI.
Mcdonald takes us to the Californian coast of the 1940s, from Monterey to LA and Hollywood, among a crowd of enriched businessmen, femmes fatales, starving artists, and seedy jazz clubs.
As a reader, you want to know what happened and that’s the entertaining part of the book. The bliss comes from Mcdonald’s style, a pure literary gem. The descriptions of California are sumptuous,
The light-blue haze in the lower canyon was like a thin smoke from slowly burning money. Even the sea looked precious through it, a solid wedge held in the canyon’s mouth, bright blue and polished like a stone. Private property: color guaranteed fast; will not shrink egos. I had never seen the Pacific look so small.
He has a wonderful way with words, one that suits me well, one we call in French “le sens de la formule”. In a few words, you get the feel of a place:
The night was no longer young at the Wild Piano, but her heartbeat was artificially stimulated.
Or of a person:
I opened the door of her car and helped her in. Her breast leaned against my shoulder heavily. I moved back. I preferred a less complicated kind of pillow, stuffed with feathers, not memories and frustrations.
And there’s a hint of humor here and there: “Perhaps you’d like a drink.” “Not before lunch. I’m the new-type detective.”
Yes. Mcdonald is a crime fiction writer you read for the plot and the style. I’m looking forward to discovering how the Lew Archer character develops in the following volumes of the series.
These three books did the trick, they were well-written and traveling companions. Now I know I can turn to Thirkell if I need a fluffy and uncomplicated read and I will explore more of the Lew Archer series.
1969, 2019, 2023: Three French novels.
- The Other by Andrée Chedid (1969) Original French title: L’Autre.
- The Night Eaters by Marie Charrel (2023) Original French title: Les Mangeurs de nuit.
- Gratitude by Delphine de Vigan. (2019) Original French title: Les gratitudes.
We had picked The Other by Andrée Chedid for our Book Club read in June and I’m slightly late with my billet, as usual. Andrée Chedid (1920-2011) was an Egyptian-French poetess and novelist of Lebanese descent. Like Albert Cossery, she wrote in French.
The Other is a novella where an old man, Simm catches a glimpse of a young man at the window of the Hôtel Splendide. A few minutes later, an earthquake strikes the village and the house and buildings collapse. Simm knows that the young man who caught his attention is somewhere in the ruins of the hotel.
The rescue teams arrive, do their work and the young man is missing. According to Simm. He’s the only one who’s seen him and who cares. This young man is a foreigner, a Western guy in this Egyptian village. Simm will not leave the premises of the seism until he knows where the young man is.
People think that Simm is crazy, putting himself at risk for someone he doesn’t even know.
Until Simm finds him stuck under a building. A rescue team assesses the situation and concludes that it will take a few days to get to the young man. Simm will stay with him, talk to him, tell him stories to nurture the young man’s hope and keep him alive.
The Other is beautifully written and mixes prose, poetry and artistic layout for the printed text. I’m not sure I understood all the messages that Andrée Chedid tried to convey. Simm reaches out to this young man and his gesture is purely gratuitous. He doesn’t want to be a hero or famous, he doesn’t want the young man’s gratitude. He just wants to do what feels right and it is enough.
In The Other, Simm treats the young man as his own, even if he’s a foreigner. How we welcome and treat foreigners and strangers is also a main topic in Les Mangeurs de nuit by Marie Charrel. Set in British Columbia, her novel covers several periods in time and goes back and forth between the characters and the timeline.
In the late 1920s, Aika is a picture bride: she leaves Kyoto to get married to Kuma, a Japanese who has emigrated to Canada. Her hopes are shattered when she realizes that Kuma is much older than her and that she’ll have to live in the woods, at a woodcutters’ camp. The couple has a daughter, Hannah.
We’re now in the 1930s and the hatred against the Japanese community grows until it reaches its peak during WWII. Hannah, her family and friends are sent to Greenwood, a camp for Japanese living in Canada.
We follow Hannah and the Japanese community’s story along with Jack’s. He’s a creekwalker; his job consists in walking in the woods and counting salmons in rivers to report their number to the administration. The goal is to establish fishing quotas to protect the environment.
Jack never knew his mother but was raised by his father Robert, a white man, and his second wife Ellen, a native Canadian of the Gitga’at tribe. Mark is their son, Jack’s half-brother and the boys were tight until Mark was sent to a boarding school for Indigenous people. He was never the same when he came back and eventually enrolled in the army. He was killed in the Pacific during WWII.
Jack is a solitary man who would like to break through the wall of grief Ellen erected around her after Mark’s death. Jack refuels in the woods, walking with his dogs, observing nature around him and living in an isolated cabin in the woods.
Until he finds Hannah badly injured after a bear attacked her and he’s sure it was by the white bear of the Gitga’at myth. She’s of Japanese descent but to him, she’s only a human who needs help until she can be on her own again and someone who is now marked by the bear.
Kuma told Japanese folks tale to Hannah and Jack listened to Ellen’s stories. Both grew up thinking stories and myths are important.
Les Mangeurs de nuit is well-written but what is it with all these books with short chapters that go back and forth in time? Is it me or it’s like nobody writes stories in chronological order anymore? And these short chapters sound like a creative-writing program’s mantra: a chapter a day makes the writer OK.
So, sometimes I was lost and I felt that the author wanted to tackle too many topics at the same time: the Gitga’at culture and myths and its link to the wilderness, the prejudice against the Japanese and their awful treatment by British Columbia during WWII and the discrimination against Indigenous people and the scandal of the residential system that broke Mark. The book got excellent reviews, my reservations are all mine.
But it is definitely a book about acceptance and generosity and we need them in this world.
Ellen raised Jack as her own. Hannah built a strong relationship with other Japanese women, including former prostitutes. She and Jack bond despite their differences. Jack welcomes her into his home and nurses her. He doesn’t expect gratitude. Like Simm in The Other, he just acts and helps another human in need.
This inherent generosity is also what pushed Mishka into taking care of little Marie, her neighbor’s daughter. They are the main characters of Gratitude by Delphine de Vigan.
Marie’s mother wasn’t able to raise her and Mishka, who had no children of her own, naturally watched and fed and clothed Marie. The little girl needed stability, and Mishka was there for her. She didn’t expect gratitude either but Maris feels thankful. She’s a well-adjusted adult and she knows that Mishka’s steady presence was instrumental to her growing up.
Now Mishka is old, her mind is slipping away from her and she lives in a nursing home. It’s Marie’s turn to take care of her with the help of the medical staff at the home. One of them is Jérôme, a speech therapist who tries to retain Mishka’s ability to speak. After learning about her past during WWII, he will help her settle an important matter. Mishka has gratitude to express and she wants it done before she dies.
Like in The Other or Les Mangeurs de nuit, Gratitude is about human bonding. Helping each other. Choosing oneself a family if the blood one is defective. Sticking together and doing what is right. Celebrating the beauty of human relationships.
Gratitude is also about old age and how people we love may slip away. Marie has to accept that Mishka will die soon. It’s also a heartfelt and accurate description of how our Western societies treat old people and baby them in nursing homes. Except for Jérôme, who loves working in nursing homes and is respectful of his elderly patients:
| Quand je les rencontre pour la première fois, c’est toujours la même image que je cherche, celle de l’Avant. Derrière leur regard flou, leurs gestes incertains, leur silhouette courbée ou pliée en deux, comme on tenterait de deviner sous un dessin au vilain feutre une esquisse originelle, je cherche le jeune homme ou la jeune femme qu’ils ont été. Je les observe et je me dis : elle aussi, lui aussi a aimé, crié, joui, plongé, couru à en perdre haleine, monté des escaliers quatre à quatre, dansé toute la nuit. Elle aussi, lui aussi a pris des trains, des métros, marché dans la campagne, la montagne, bu du vin, fait la grasse matinée, discuté à bâtons rompus. Cela m’émeut, de penser à ça. | When I see them for the first time, I always look for the same image, the one of Before. Behind their vacant gaze, their shaky moves, their crooked body, I look for the young man or the young woman they used to be, like discerning the original drawing under a bad one. I look at them closely and I think: he or she too has loved, yelled, come, dived, run until gasping for breath, leapt up the stairs and danced all night long. She also hopped on trains and metros, hiked in the country or in the mountains. She also drank wine, slept in and talked all night. Thinking about this moves me deeply. |
Delphine de Vigan writes simply and her voice rings true. She expresses what common people feel and think without any literary artifice or device. It’s heartfelt and her characters are plausible. She’s my kind of writer.
Go past appearances and see the human before seeing a foreigner and a stranger, a Japanese emigrant, an Indian or an old lady: this is what these three books have in common.
Simm, Jack, Ellen, Hannah, Mishka, Jérôme and Marie look at someone who needs help and provide help without expecting anything in return. Gratitude isn’t earned or accounted for, it’s given freely.
These three writers seem to tell us that bonding with others outside of mandatory family blood ties is the salt of life. Stating the obvious? Maybe. But reminders to focus on what makes us alike instead of stressing on our differences are never a waste of time. To me, it’s more a promotion of a fulfilling vision of life.
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger – I got a bang out of it
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951) French title : L’Attrape-Cœur.
I don’t think that I need to sum up The Catcher in the Rye, everyone’s read it, no ? And I’ll make no attempt at analyzing it because I have nothing new to bring to the discussion. I’ll only share my impressions.
I read it in French when I was a teenager and I remembered enjoying it and I wondered how I would respond to it now that I’m older and that I can read it in the orginal.
It’s a classic and no, it’s not overrated. For you, native English speakers, it may bring back boring literature classes in school the way The Magic Skin or A Woman’s Life does to me but to me, it’s just another classic.
This quote is page 19 of my Kindle edition and I connected to Holden Caulfield immediately.
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though. I wouldn’t mind calling this Isak Dinesen up. And Ring Lardner, except that D.B. told me he’s dead. You take that book Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maugham, though. I read it last summer. It’s a pretty good book and all, but I wouldn’t want to call Somerset Maugham up. I don’t know. He just isn’t the kind of a guy I’d want to call up, that’s all. I’d rather call old Thomas Hardy up. I like that Eustacia Vye.
Isn’t that true ? Don’t you sometimes wish you could call the author of a book and ask questions or congratulate them for their remarkable work? I do. I would call Pete Fromm and Delphine de Vigan. Who would you call ?
Back to The Catcher in the Rye. I loved it and my heart went out to Holden. Yes, he’s obnoxious sometimes but above all, he’s hurting and bristling at society’s rules. I loved his impertinence and let’s face it, his harsh comments are often true. He says aloud what people may think and keep to themselves. He also calls things as they are, never sugarcoating harsh realities:
You take a guy like Morrow that’s always snapping their towel at people’s asses – really trying to hurt somebody with it – they don’t just stay a rat while they’re a kid. They stay a rat their whole life.
I tend to agree with him. I often think that obnoxious people must have been jerks at school too.
In his way, Holden rebels against society’s expectations and doesn’t want to play by the rules and adhere to the American way of life, like here, when he describes his boarding school:
‘You ought to go to a boys’ school sometime. Try it sometime,’ I said. ‘It’s full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques. The guys that are on the basket-ball team stick together, the Catholics stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month Club stick together.
Clearly, he’s not ready to conform but sometimes caves in…
The Navy guy and I told each other we were glad to’ve met each other. Which always kills me. I’m always saying ‘Glad to’ve met you’ to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.
…Survival techniques…He also sees through people with disarming lucidity:
You take a very handsome guy, or a guy that thinks he’s a real hot-shot, and they’re always asking you to do them a big favor. Just because they’re crazy about themself, they think you’re crazy about them, too, and that you’re just dying to do them a favor. It’s sort of funny, in a way.
He’s an odd one in America in the 1940s. He doesn’t adhere to toxic masculinity standards. He despises using force to prove a point:
He was one of those guys that think they’re being a pansy if they don’t break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God, I hate that stuff.
He gets very worried when his former neighbor goes on a date with one of his classmates because he knows this boy won’t take no for an answer. Holden is more respectful and he’s almost sorry to be different…
‘You know what the trouble with me is? I can never get really sexy – I mean really sexy – with a girl I don’t like a lot. I mean I have to like her a lot. If I don’t, I sort of lose my goddam desire for her and all. Boy, it really screws up my sex life something awful.
…because even if he’s obsessed with girls like any boy his age, he still needs a connection to the girl he’s with. So, his encounter with a prostitute doesn’t go well…
I said earlier that he’s hurting. I should say he’s still grieving his brother’s death. He died of leukemia and Holden seems to suffer from survivor’s guilt. He’s not too fond of his parents and he’s not looking forward to going home for Christmas, especially since he’s been expelled from school again. His only solid anchor is his little sister. She’s the only one who’s important enough to keep living for. His parents can be grateful for his love for his sister as it saved him. And it saved them from losing another child.
Beyond Holden’s personal struggle, I enjoyed the ride to New York, its seedy jazz bars, its streets, its hotel and cinemas. And yes indeed, where do the ducks in Central Park go when their pond is frozen in winter?
The Catcher in the Rye reminded me of the Bandini quartet by John Fante and its description of Los Angeles in the 1930s. And Holden Caulfield and Arturo Bandini have things in common. Same maturity. Same bold and colorful language. Same obsession with girls. Same attraction to literature. I could go on.
Salinger’s style suited me. Holden writes as he speaks and his voice is clearer and truer with this kind of prose. He uses colloquial language and we can imagine talking like this with his friends, using fashionable words and expression to sound cool and stress his point of view.
I loved my ride with Holden. I enjoyed his funny descriptions of people, places and various encounters. I rejoiced in his rebellious ways, in his last hurray before the coming years change him into another adult. I empathized with his pain over his brother’s death and was glad that his little sister meant so much to him. I found his intelligence refreshing enhanced by his raw sensitivity and his foolishness.
Yes, this book is a classic because the reader connects to its hero more then 70 years after it was written.
Book Around the Corner 