Archive
Clean Slate #3 : Catching up with billets – ups and downs
- Prettier If She Smile More by Toni Jordan (2023) Not available in French.
- The Insolents by Ann Scott (2023) Not available in English. Original French title: Les Insolents.
- The Last Red Tiger by Jérémie Guez (2014) Not available in English. Original French title: Le dernier tigre rouge.
- The Man Who Wanted to Be Simenon by Marianne Jeffmar (2004) French title: L’homme qui voulait être Simenon. Translated from the Swedish by Philippe Bouquet.
- Land Beyond Maps / Attack by Pete Fromm (2024) French title: Sans carte ni boussole / Attaque. Translated by Juliane Nivelt.
It’s time again to clear the To Be Written pile and give you an overview of books I’ve read or abandoned and that I don’t have either the inclination or the time to write a proper billet about. I know it’s not always flattering for the books that find themselves thrown together like this but limited reading and writing time calls for desperate measures.
Let’s start with one I quite enjoyed, Prettier If She Smiled More by the Australian novelist Toni Jordan, a book a lot better than its appalling cover.
Kylie is 43, has a boyfriend Colin, no children, a stable job at a pharmacy and a demanding family. Her life is turned upside down within a week as she finds out that Coin cheats on her, that the pharmacy she dreamt of buying when the owner retired has just been sold to a corporation and that her mother hurt her ankle and needs assistance for everyday life.
As she tries to juggle with all the challenges at the same time, it becomes obvious that something has to give and that she needs change.
I enjoyed reading the tribulations of Kylie with her immature brother, her spoiled mother, her more understanding sister and with her new boss and her religion based on KPIs and feedbacks. It’s definitely a good Beach and Public Transport book, a perfect light read. It’s my fourth Toni Jordan, I got what I hoped to find in her books.
Another book read a while ago, Les Insolents by Ann Scott, a French book despite the author’s English name. It won the Prix Renaudot in 2023 and it just fuels my weariness of literary prizes.
Alex, in her late forties, just out of a relationship with a married woman, decides to move out of her apartment in the Marais in Paris to rent a damp house in Brittany. She leaves behind her life and her two best friends, Margot and Jacques with whom she has a co-dependant relationship.
If I transpose this in the UK, imagine she’s moving from Camden to a remote place in Cornwall. And she doesn’t have a car.
She’s a musician, a famous composer of scores for the film industry, so she can work remotely. She’s clueless about the house, lives like a hermit, goes to the supermarket and walks along the beach. And of course she reflects on her life, her former drug addiction, blah, blah, blah.
The kind of milieu Virginie Despentes writes about but this is without Despentes’s spunk. So I was bored to death, never engaging with Alex and her clique and the whole morosity of the characters who are all victims of some trauma or other.
It’s also true that I have little patience and empathy with Parisians who move out of Paris to the great outdoors in Brittany, Normandy or Provence. It was our Book Club read for March and none of us liked it.
Totally different style, The Last Red Tiger by Jérémie Guez. I didn’t finish it, but that’s on me, not on the author.
The premises were interesting as the main character, Charles Bareuil signed in the Légion étrangère just after WWII and he lost his wife during the war.
He’s sent to Indochina where the war against Ho Chi Minh is intensifying and we know how that went for the French. Unable to accept the independence of this colony, the French government went into a war against a whole population, in a territory that favored the Vietnamese and it ended up in the Dien Bien Phu debacle. Zola would have a field day with the French colonial wars, I’m sure.
The plot thread is a competition, a cat-and-mouse play between Charles Bareuil and Tran Ông Cop, a Vietnamese sniper. It’s nicely done but I gave up when it became more about combats in the jungle than anything else. I couldn’t follow what was happening in those combats and well, it’s just not my cup of tea.
I was most disappointed by The Man Who Wanted to Be Simenon by Marianne Jeffmar. The cover is gorgeous and the blurb says:
“In a back alley in Paris, the police finds a dead body. Bernard Wouters, a well-respected teacher and unpublished writer had spent his life mimicking his idol, Georges Simenon. A journalist decides to investigate this mysterious death. She gets inspiration in Simenon’s work to solve the case”
Sounded intriguing, no? I expected a classic investigation but no. Instead of focusing on Wouters’s story and what led him in this back alley, Jeffmar adds another disturbing story about Wouters’ adolescent daughter, Marie-Jo.
She wrote a book set in Paris among prostitutes. She’s 16 and she’s a instant success à la Françoise Sagan with Bonjour Tristesse. But she’s not happy and it appears that her father was very controlling and I even wonder if he wasn’t incestuous. Basking in her literary success, that’s for sure.
It felt like the author wanted to pack too much into one book and failed to organize everything nicely. Plus it had aspects about prostitution and sex that I wasn’t keen on reading. I’m not a prude but the abuse against a prostitute, the murky relationship between father and daughter felt icky.
Something sounded off in this book. It’s was written in 2004 and I had a hard time understanding when it was set. The Thalys between Brussels and Paris is working but Wouters still pays with French francs, so it’s before the euro. It’s between 1997 and 2001, with early cell phones and still VHS cassettes.
The Paris described in the book sounds more like the Paris of the 1950s than the end of the 20thcentury. Same with the teenagers’ names. Marie-Jo’s friends are named Laurent, Jean-Paul and Claire, not names of babies born in the 1990s.
The whole thing felt off to me, unless there were clever clues about Simenon all over the book that I totally missed because I’m not a Simenon expert.
Let’s end up with a positive note: two short stories by Pete Fromm, Land Beyond Maps and Attack, one of my Gallmeister goodies.
Fromm is his usual self, picturing turning points in the characters’ lives, a moment that lights the way for them. This moment brings them clarity about who they are, whether they like it or not and where they’re going. We find Fromm’s recurring themes, young love, happy times in the wilderness and fatherhood.
Next billet will probably be about A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane.
Job’s Coffin by Lance Weller – two people thrown into the horrors of slavery and the Civil War. #challengegallmeister
Job’s Coffin by Lance Weller (2021) French title: Le cercueil de Job. Translated by François Happe.
Lance Weller is an American writer born in 1965 in Washington State. He wrote three books of historical fiction, Wilderness (2012), American Marchlands (2017) and Job’s Coffin (2021) Wilderness and Job’s Coffin are set during the Civil War and American Marchlands is set on the Frontier between 1815 and 1846.
Wilderness is available in its original language but American Marchlands and Job’s Coffin are only available in French, translated by François Happe and published by Gallmeister. He’s one of those authors available to the French public and no other and I feel privileged. Lance Weller wrote a note to American readers on his website and you can read it here.
Back to the book.
When the book opens, we’re in 1864, in Tennessee and the Civil War is raging. Bell Hood is a young slave who fled from her plantation and hopes to reach the North, orienting herself with the stars. They’re in the Appalachians and she’s with Dexter, who’s also trying to reach the northern states. They don’t know where they’re going but they know what they’re running from. None of them has plans or a place to reach where people will help them.
Bell focuses on stars, on a constellation of stars that her father called Job’s Coffin. Dexter wants to meet Lincoln, that’s his goal, because one must have a goal.
Then we go back in time in 1862 at the terrible Battle of Shiloh in Hardin County, Tennessee. I didn’t know anything about it but Wikipedia says there were almost 24,000 casualties, 3,500 deaths. Jeremiah Hoke was there, a member of the Confederate Army, dragged in the battle by his friend Charlie King. Hoke was horrified by the battle, by the hatred and the violence he detected in his friends and around him. He was seriously injured and after a farmer took care of him, started a journey of wandering in search of redemption.
Weller describes the devastation of the Civil War. Bell and fellow slaves keep walking to the North but there’s danger everywhere: hunters who search for runaway slaves and two armies walking from one battle field to the other. Hoke doesn’t want to participate to anything related to slavery, like revealing where runaway slaves are or fighting among the ranks of the Confederate army. His actions put him in danger too.
As the novel progresses, we slowly understand what ties exist between Bell and Hoke, how their master’s and father’s actions defined their fates. Bell had to leave Locust Hall, the plantation she was born in and the traumatic experiences she lived through there, that’s all she knows. Hoke also left this plantation, the son of the foreman and witness of the violence against slaves. Both are silent rebels against the system they live in. It’s a tiny rebellion but it’s there.
Bell hopes to start a new life and Hoke hopes for redemption.
Reading about battles of the Civil War reminds me of reading about battles of WWI or the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The incompetence and ego of generals is staggering, leading a whole generation of men to butcher each other. Lives were worth nothing. I don’t know much about the battles of the American Civil War and I don’t care much for military strategy, so I didn’t investigate further the importance of the Battle of Shiloh.
I enjoyed reading about Bell and Hoke and see how individuals fare when war brings chaos into their lives, and as far as Bell is concerned, what slavery entailed. We need not forget that and apprehending the violence of it through the eyes of characters brings facts and numbers more tangible. Literature is a school for empathy and historical fiction is a worthy media to help us picture what happened to people in past centuries.
Weller is also an outdoor man and it’s reflected in his descriptions of the Bell’s and Hoke’s walks, bivouacs at night, life in the wilderness. I’d love to add quotes to this billet but I don’t have any one in English. His writing is fluid, perceptive and the characters ring true. They are nuanced and Bell has an aura, an inner strength that impacts and impressed the people around her. People want to help her and be the best version of themselves.
My friends say I read a lot of books related to the condition of black people in the USA and about racism. It’s true, I guess. It’s a topic I find fascinating and it goes a long way back. Back to White Dog and to some extent, to Proust and his description of the Dreyfus affair.
The issues of racism and slavery puzzle me and horrify me. I’ll never understand how people look at a black person and fail to see a fellow human being beyond the different color of skin. I guess that it’s hard to escape it when you were raised into this belief, something Lehane explores in his last book. I’m also interested in how countries overcome civil and colonial wars trauma, so there will be more about that too.
So yes, there will be more books about that in the future. Meanwhile, I recommend Job’s Coffin, at least to readers who can read in French, the only lucky ones who have access to this book. This was my March read for the Une année avec Gallmeister challenge. The theme for March was Girl Power and I think Bell fits the bill.
All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby – more Deep South noir and a masterpiece.
All The Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby (2023) French title: Le sang des innocents.
Blood and tears. Violence and mayhem. Love and hate. These were the rocks upon which the South was built. They were the foundation upon which Charon County stood.
All The Sinners Bleed is set up in Charon County, in a small town in Virginia, near Chesapeake Bay.
It’s a rural —and fictional—county of 20 000 inhabitants with twenty-one churches. This ratio of church per inhabitant is mind-blowing for a French who usually sees in a town, a Catholic church, a Protestant one and sometimes a mosque.
In this county, two murders were committed in the last fifteen years, and now, they had a shooting at the local high school. Mr Spearman, a well-known, respected and white history teacher was shot by a black student, Latrell McDonald. The deputies who arrived on the scene with Titus shot Latrell as he was going out of the school.
Charon County elected its first black sheriff, Titus Crown. And now, he has to solve the murder of the history teacher and make sure that his deputies shooting the murderer was actual self-defense.
An African American man had been shot by two white deputies. Didn’t matter who was sheriff, there were going to be serious questions asked. Titus knew this, and even though some people wouldn’t believe it, he agreed with them. The history of policing in America, especially south of the Mason-Dixon, made those questions necessary.
Titus struggles to find his place as the sheriff. The whites are weary of him and the king of their community and head of the most important job provider of the area, Scott Cunningham, didn’t support his candidacy. Jamal, the influential reverend of the New Wave church hoped he’d become a support for the black community. But Titus is aware of the position he’s in:
The moment he announced his candidacy he had made a choice to live in a no-man’s-land between people who believed in him, people who hated him because of his skin color, and people who believed he was a traitor to his race.
It’s a tough place to be and he walks on a narrow line. His attitude is clear: play by the book, only by the book and ignore the fact that he knows most of the people in this town since childhood.
A former FBI agent, Titus came back to his hometown to lick some wounds, be close to his ageing father and eventually became the sheriff. He detached himself from this town for years, and he makes a fair assessment of his hometown’s mentality when he gives this example:
A new pharmacist had tried to take over the Sommers building but Billy’s cousins, still stinging from his arrest and subsequent conviction, started a rumor she didn’t really have a degree, and within a month the rumor was an immutable fact, and by the fall the young woman who’d tried to help the good people of Charon with their medicinal needs soon lit out for greener pastures. Titus thought the fact that she’d been a Black woman hadn’t helped to endear her to the white citizens in the county. Normally the Black folks in Charon would have tried to rally around a sister taking on a new venture, but the young lady wasn’t a native of Charon. She was a come-here, and people in Charon were loath to cotton to new faces. In this the citizens, both Black and white, were united.
A small-town vipers’ nest at its finest.
Everyone knows everyone’s business since the beginning of times, people grew up together, families have reputations. And the money comes from two major sources: Cunningham’s factory and drug trafficking. Black and white communities don’t really mix and rampant racism personified by statues of confederate generals is an endemic disease.
And this murder and the subsequent shooting lifts the lid of the pot where the town’s secrets, sins and hatreds are stuffed. Titus knows right away that things will get ugly very quickly.
That was the thing about violence. It didn’t always wait for an invitation. Sometimes it saw a crack in the dam and then it flooded the whole valley.
All the Sinners Bleed is of course the investigation about the murder but it’s a so much more.
It’s the literary MRI of Charon County, a fictional county that looks a lot like Trickum County in The Devil Himself by Peter Farris. It’s the kind of place S.A. Cosby grew up in.
It’s also Titus’s personal journey. He still has open wounds from his mother’s death. He has scars from his career as an FBI agent. He has to reconcile with his family and his hometown. He wants to be a human, not a man defined by the color of his skin.
When they had discussed the possibility of Titus running, he’d gone to great pains to ensure that Jamal realized he was going to be a sheriff who was Black, not the Black community’s sheriff. He’d told Jamal he’d do everything he could to enact real change, but at the end of the day he couldn’t and wouldn’t ignore the law. Unfortunately, he’d failed in his attempt to make him understand that idea.
At the small scale of Charon County and according to the talks between Cosby and Lehane I attended at Quais du Polar, the election of a black sheriff unleashed the same fears and racism that the election of Obama did in the American society.
The unsolved issue of the consequences of the Civil War and slavery, its end and the Jim Crow laws are close to the surface and reappear.
All the Sinners Bleed is a masterpiece of crime fiction: excellent crime plot, state-of-the-nation exploration, and meaningful personal journey for Titus all wrapped in one book.
It questions the idea of identity on the level of a community and on a personal level with Titus’ inner struggles. And it’s summed up in two lines by Titus’ late mother:
You can stand in a pulpit and call yourself a minister. I can roll around in mud and call myself a pig too. Don’t mean you was called to preach, and it don’t mean I was meant to be pork chops,”
Rush for it if you haven’t read it already. I already bought another Cosby, Razorblade Tears.
PS : I should start a challenge: “Pick up trout and fishing references in American books”. They seem to be everywhere, even in the most unexpected pages: Roger’s face was pale as the belly of a trout. 🙂
Chameleon, Bear, Craws and wilderness – Kurkov, Krivak and McCafferty.
- The Good Angel of Death by Andrey Kurkov (2000) French title: Le caméléon. Translated by Christine Zeytounian-Beloüs.
- The Bear by Andrew Krivak (2020) French title: L’ours. Translated by Héloïse Esquié
- Crazy Mountain Kiss by Keith McCafferty (2015) French title: Le baiser des Crazy Mountains. Translated by Marc Boulet.
I bought The Good Angel of Death by Andrey Kurkov because its French title is Le caméléon and the blurb reminded me of Romain Gary.
When Nikolai moves into his new apartment in Kiev, the previous owners had left behind a bookshelf. He discovers an annotated book by the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko. He investigates until he finds out who left these comments in the book and embarks in an adventure in Kazakhstan, in search of a hidden treasury of great importance for the Ukrainian nation. It’s a bizarre journey where he meets Bedouins, ex-KGB members, members of the SBU (Ukrainian secret services) and is accompanied by a chameleon who represents the good angel of death.
It’s a funny tale of running after the spirit of the Ukrainian nation, a reference to the nationalists of the past and a thought-provoking commentary about who is truly Ukrainian. Are Russian-speaking people who have lived all their life in Kiev real Ukrainian or not? It was written in 2000, showing that things were already brewing at the time.
I didn’t like is as much as Death and the Penguin or The Grey Bees but it’s still a fun way to explore the concepts of nationality and patriotism.
Another style, another animal with The Bear by Andrew Krivak. This one came with my Kube subscription.
A father and his daughter are the only human survivors in their area. They live in the mountains, a place inspired by Mount Monadnock, where the author lives. The father spends his time teaching his daughter how to survive in the wilderness.
We don’t know why or how the human civilization ended or why these two people survived. We follow their journey, we discover their way-of-life and their connection to the nature and the animals arounds them. An indeed, a bear will keep the girl alive during a terrible winter, like a good angel of life.
The descriptions of the New Hampshire wilderness are terrific but I didn’t understand where the author was going with this book. If he wanted to teach me something, I didn’t get the message. If he wanted to write about our civilization collapsing, he didn’t really explore this plot thread. If he wanted to write a beautiful ode to the nature around him, he did it but he didn’t need the end-of-the-world trick to do that.
In other words, it didn’t quite work for me.
Now, let’s stay in the American wilderness with Crazy Mountain Kiss by Keith McCafferty, the fourth volume of his Stranahan and Ettinger crime fiction series.
A girl is found dead in the chimney flue of a cabin in the Crazy Mountains. She was Cinderella Huntington, a teenager who had been missing for five months. A craw was in the chimney and had pecked her eyes.
It brought to memory the counting crows rhyme. (One crow sorrow, two craws mirth, three crows a wedding, four crows a birth. Five crows silver, six crows gold, seven craws a secret never to be told.)
Sheriff Martha Ettinger is in charge of the investigation and advises the victim’s mother to hire Sean Stranahan. He’s a fishing-guide/painter/PI who cooperates with the sheriff and adds to her limited team of deputies. They want to understand what happened to Cinderella.
Why did Cinderella Huntington run away from home? Where was she during these five months? What is the Mile and a Half High Club who meets at this cabin in the Crazy Mountains?
McCafferty has a knack for quirky characters. He takes us to the Bar-4 Ranch where Cinderella was raised, among horses and as a rodeo prodigy. Her mother was also on the rodeo circuit, where she met Cinderella’s stepfather who works as a Western life consultant on TV sets. We also encounter a hermit, a free-spirited librarian, a couple of crazy lesbians and all these characters mesh for the best. The investigation kept me reading, McCafferty’s sense of humor enlightened the macabre discoveries. All this makes for a very entertaining book.
Our next stop at Book Around the Corner will take us to the Deep South with Peter Farris and S.A. Cosby.
Third Crime Is the Charm #8 : Boston, Québec and France
- Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson (2020) French title: Huit crimes parfait. Translated by Christophe Cuq
- The Garden Folly by Johana Gustawsson (2021) Not available in English. Original French title: La Folly.
- Alone in Her Mansion by Cécile Coulon (2021) Not available in English. Original French title: Seule en sa demeure.
Here’s a new episode in my Third Crime is the Charm series, and today’s about three very different crime fiction books that in the end, have something in common. And no, it’s not murder.
The narrator of Eight Perfect Murders is Malcolm Kershaw.
He owns and runs the crime fiction bookstore Old Devils in Boston and used to have a literary blog. Years ago, he wrote a blog post about eight crime fiction books with perfect murder devices, designed in such a way that the actual perpetrator gets off scot-free.
Gwen Mulvey from FBI comes knocking on the Old Devils’s door because she thinks that somebody is killing people according to this list. Malcolm has his own demons to fight and decides to cooperate and do a bit of sleuthing on his side.
I liked Eight Perfect Murders but I thought Swanson tried too hard to tie a perfect knot on a perfectly delivered crime fiction book.
The devices were a bit too obvious to me, doing too many nudge-nudges to the reader. It embraces the codes of the genre: first-person narration, femme fatale and a normal guy taking a wrong turn at some point and engaging on a criminal path.
It’s also a wonderful homage to crime fiction and I did note down the books Swanson refers to. (All Anglo-Saxon but one. The man needs to expand his horizons) It’s still great entertainment.
Since I’m sure you’re dying (haha!) to know the eight-book list, here it is:
| Book title in English | Book title in French | Author | Year | Country |
| The Red House Mystery | Le mystère de la main rouge | A.A. Milne | 1922 | UK |
| Before the Fact | Préméditation | Anthony Berkely Cox | 1931 | UK |
| The A.B.C Murders | ABC contre Poirot | Agatha Christie | 1936 | UK |
| Stranger on a Train | L’Inconnu du Nord-Express | Patricia Highsmith | 1950 | USA |
| The Drowner | Le bouillon rédempteur | John D. McDonald | 1963 | USA |
| Death Trap | Piège mortel | Ira Levin | 1978 | USA |
| The Secret History | Le Maître des illusions | Donna Tartt | 1992 | USA |
| Three of a Kind | Assurance sur la mort | James M. Cain | 1943 | USA |
After this one, my next crime fiction book was The Garden Folly by Johana Gustawsson. This one goes back and forth between present day in Lac-Clarence Québec, Paris in 1899 and Lac-Clarence in 1949.
It opens with the murder of Philippe Caron who was stabbed to death by his wife Pauline. They were known figures of the village and devoted to each other. Why would Pauline kill her beloved husband in such a horrific way? Lieutenant Maxine Grant, back from maternity leave and overwhelmed from trying to balance her job and her family life, leads the investigation.
Gustawsson takes us to Paris in 1899 where Lucienne Docquer loses her two daughters in the fire that burnt down their Parisian town house. And they we meet Lina in 1949 who is bullied in school and at the church choir. She’s 13 and struggling with her changing body.
As you may guess, we slowly discover the link between the women of these three different times.
I know from her interviews at Quais du Polar last year that Johana Gustawsson is fascinated by secrets and histories that carry on from one generation to the other and impact people’s lives. She explores that topic here and also the place of women in our world and the weight of biology on their lives, the complex relationship with motherhood.
My Book Club friends loved it more than me, probably because two elements put me off it.
One is the use of supernatural stuff which is always a no-no for me and the other is the style. These French Canadians didn’t speak French from Québec and it bothered me. That’s on me, the others really enjoyed it as it is very suspenseful and the ending keeps the reader on their toes.
Then I received my new book from my Kube subscription, Seule en sa demeure by Cécile Coulon. It means “Alone in her mansion” but the use of the word demeure holds something sinister, as dernière demeure is a metaphor for cemetery and it has an old-fashioned ring that brings back memories of Once Upon a Time stories.
The novel is set in the Jura mountains in France, near the Swiss border in the second half of the 19th century. Aimée marries Candre, the local lord of the manor. He’s very considerate, very religious but a bit creepy. Too perfect to be true and so different from the masculine standards of the time that I wondered if he was gay. He lost his parents when he was young and was raised by his nanny/servant Henria. She’s very protective of him.
Aimée arrives in this mansion set in the middle of the Forêt d’Or, as forestry is Candre’s family business. She has a hard time adjusting to the place and feels that some secret is lurking in its corners.
Cécile Coulon plays with the codes of fairytales, not the Disney ones with the little birds flying around the princess’s head but the Grimm/grim ones. It’s a very atmospheric novel with a main character who is determined to understand what happened between these walls that feel like a golden prison to her.
Like Gustawsson before, Coulon explores the condition of women and the little choices they have in their lives. Aimée isn’t free. Her life choices lie in “get married” or “get married”.
I enjoyed her style but I guessed where the story was going way too early. That’s the kiss of death for a book that walks the thin line between Lit fiction and crime fiction. That said, I might be too finicky, after all, 100 000 readers loved Seule en sa demeure.
These three books have in common one or several women whose life, death or life sentence were under the control of the men in their lives. They tried to break free, to love differently and paid dearly for it or turned into monsters themselves.
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. |
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.
Deacon King Kong by James McBride – Joyful and realistic, a tour-de-force
Deacon King Kong by James McBride (2020) French title: Deacon King Kong.
Deacon Cuffy Lambkin of Five Ends Baptist Church became a walking dead man on a cloudy September afternoon in 1969.
That’s the day the old deacon, known as Sportcoat to his friends, marched out to the plaza of the Causeway Housing Projects in South Brooklyn, stuck an ancient .38 Colt in the face of a nineteen-year-old drug dealer named Deems Clemens, and pulled the trigger.
These are the first paraphs of Deacon King Kong by James McBride. You know the time, the place, the names of two key protagonists. It opens like a crime fiction book but James McBride takes you to another kind of ride. Sportcoat is an old friendly drunk, shooting with an ancient firearm and he misses his target.
Deems Clemens is only injured but this event will trigger other ones as this neighborhood of South Brooklyn is about to turn a sad new leaf. Drug is taking over, the youth doesn’t go to church anymore, the organized crime changes gear too. The new generation is taking over.
McBride brings to life a whole housing block and through the lives of the characters, pictures the changes in South Brooklyn. This housing project was first built to provide lodgings to the Italian immigrants working on the docks. Then the Blacks came from the South and took their place as the Italians moved to better homes.
McBride depicts a community of black people, first immigrants from the South, who became the backbone of their neighborhood. They built the church, they did Sunday school, they coached the local baseball team, they took care of various social events. They are tightknit and later welcomed new immigrants from Puerto Rico or Haiti.
Sportcoat and his late wife Hettie used to be pillars of the community gathered around the Five Ends Baptist Church now operated by the pastor and his wife nicknamed Sister Gee. He spent a lot of time with the baseball team and Deems Clemens was a promising baseball player, he could have played professionally and instead he took the path of easy money from drug dealing. Sportcoat was his father figure and he’s as disappointed as a father could be.
On the other side of an invisible border lives Thomas Elefant, “the Elephant”. He’s of Italian origin, the heir of a small scale smuggling business on the docks. He doesn’t want to sell drugs and intends to stay small. His position is uncomfortable as the local mafia led by Joe Peck went into the drug business. The Elephant is forty and he wants out. His mother is ageing, he’d like to settle with a wife and do regular business. He always had cordial relationships with the Five Ends Baptist Church community.
As far as the police are concerned, things are changing too. This neighborhood belongs to the Seventy-Sixth Precinct. Potts Mullen – of Irish origin, of course—used to work in the Causes. He was transferred to another precinct for being too honest. Now, he has a few months left before retirement and he’s back at the Causes and must investigate the Clemens shooting.
Sportcoat’s gunshot is his drunken way to say enough is enough and it came at a tipping point. Perhaps there’s still room to bring Clemens back to the right path. The Elephant may find a way out. The community’s energy might slow down the drug invasion…
Deacon King Kong shows a first-immigrants vs second generation conflict in the Cause Houses among the black community.
Clemens was the New Breed of colored in the Cause. Deems wasn’t some poor colored boy from down south or Puerto Rico or Barbados who arrived in New York with empty pockets and a Bible and a dream. He wasn’t humbled by a life of slinging cotton in North Carolina, or hauling sugarcane in San Juan. He didn’t arrive in New York City from some poor place where kids ran around with no shoes and ate chicken bones and turtle soup, limping to New York with a dime in their pockets, overjoyed at the prospect of coming to New York to clean houses and empty toilets and dump garbage, hoping for a warm city job or maybe even an education care of good white people. Deems didn’t give a shit about white people, or education, or sugarcane, or cotton, or even baseball, which he had once been a whiz at. None of the old ways meant a penny to him.
This is a major change in the DNA of the community and it impacts the atmosphere and the choices people made. McBride describes this change very well, the passing of the guard as the old generation disappears.
Through the Cause Houses community and The Elephant, McBride writes about loyalty to your parents, the people who made you and owning one’s heritage. The Elephant is looking for a way out without throwing out his father’s heritage, Clemens forgot what Sportcoat taught him and turned to easy money.
McBride celebrates people who give back to their community, the ones who volunteer to take care of the kids, organize sports and activities, the ones who ensure that their neighbor’s blind son gets on his school bus even if his father is MIA. A community who takes care of their own and accept others with their idiosyncrasies.
McBride also praises the ones who remain faithful to their values, whatever the cost. Potts the cop who doesn’t condone corruption. The Elephant who loathes drug dealing.
This is the background story. Sportcoat shooting Clemens also started a drug dealers war and Potts warns Sister Gee about the changes in organized crime:
There’s a drug war brewing. You don’t want your guy or your church in the middle of it. These drug lords are a different breed. They don’t play by the rules like the old crooks did. There’s no handshake or silent agreements, no looking the other way. Nobody’s safe. Nothing’s sacred. There’s too much money involved.
And indeed, the Cause Houses is right in the middle of a territorial war between mafia Joe Peck and Earl, the new black gangsters. How will that turn out?
On top of this social commentary and the drug war plot, Deacon King Kong is a fun read. McBride is creative with the language, it’s lively, poetic and full of humor. See for yourself with this festival: If I was a fly and wanted to get to heaven, I’d throw myself in your mouth. A crook thinking about cops: Cops wrecked the economy—his economy anyway. A punchy dialogue: “You sound like some guy at a peace conference, Tommy,” Potts said, exasperated. “You’re full of questions with no answers.”
Potts and love at first sight:
In that moment he realized that all the experience of thirty-two years on the NYPD and all the formal police training in the world was useless when the smile of someone you suddenly care about finds the bow that wraps your heart and undoes it.
Deacon King Kong is a wonderful book, well-written, different from others, fun, optimistic without sugarcoating reality:
Nothing here would change. Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems. And who can you blame?
This is a poor neighborhood where people fight to survive and do their best.
Deacon King Kong is a lot better than Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead. Superior in style, in content and in the author’s ability to revive the past. Joyful and realistic, a tour-de-force.
This wasn’t my first McBride, I also read his Good Lord Bird. It had the same components of accuracy and fun.
PS : I read it in English but it must have been a lot of work to translate McBride’s inventive language into French. It’s published by Gallmeister and I see that their cover has been retained by McBride’s Italian publisher too.
Blizzard by Marie Vingtras
Blizzard by Marie Vingtras (2021) Original French title: Blizzard
Blizzard by Marie Vingtras isn’t available in English right now but you can pre-order it as it will be released in January 2024. I’ve found two different editions: one translation by Stephanie Smee (who also translated The Godmother which I highly recommend) published by Mountain Leopard Press, which seems fitting for this book and another one by Jeffrey Zuckerman published by The Overlook Press. That must be a question of legalities and rights because why waste time and money to translate twice the same novella when so many books are still looking for a translator. But back to the book.
A little group of misfits live in remote place near Anchorage, Alaska. It’s always been home to Benedict Mayer, Cole and Clifford while Bess and Freeman ended there to flee traumas from their pasts.
It’s winter, people are holed up in their houses and yet Bess walks out with Thomas, Benedict’s son. It’s freezing, the blizzard is blinding them and it takes a few second to lose Thomas. Bess stops to re-tie the laces of her boots and when she stands up, Thomas is nowhere to be seen. She starts looking for him.
In the houses, the men get worried about them and start a search party. They know Bess and Thomas will lose all sense of direction in such a blizzard and could freeze to death.
Blizzard is Marie Vingtras’s debut novel and she did very well. In a novella, she manages to build up the tension (will they find Thomas in time?) and tell the characters’ life stories, how they came into this isolated place. All of them are hiding from the world and from their past.
The narration alternates between Cole, Freeman, Benedict and Bess and slowly, their secrets are revealed. Why Cole stays put in this place. What Freeman is hiding and why he was sent there. How Bess came here to watch Thomas. And how Benedict carries a world of pain.
Ghosts from the past hover over the characters and the peace between them is only a careful lid put on darker events. And the past is about to burst out like a geyser, throwing the lid away and soaking everyone with undesirable truths.
To say more would mean spoilers, so…
Blizzard is another good strike for my Kube libraire because it’s a book I would never have bought myself. I’m wary of books set in hostile American wilderness and written by French authors. Are they really able to picture the weather conditions properly? Alexis Aubenque wasn’t convincing, Marie Vingtras definitely is.
This is a one-sitting read if possible to really feel the build-up and stay attuned to the characters. It’s also a good book for foreign readers who want to practice their French. (short sentences, short chapters…)
Very highly recommended.
Love in Case of Emergency by Daniela Krien – women, get up, stand up for your rights.
Love in Case of Emergency by Daniela Krien. (2019) Also published as Love in Five Acts. French title: L’amour par temps de crise. Translated by Dominique Autrand.
I don’t know why this book by Daniela Krien, Die Liebe im Ernstfall, has been properly published as Love in Case of Emergency and also as Love in Five Acts.
After reading Chess and Reunion for German Lit Month, I thought I’d read some contemporary German lit about common people and with no reference to WWII.
I found Love in Case of Emergency and saw that the Sächsische Zeitung wrote about it that “In a hundred years, when we want to know how today’s women lived, we’ll have to read Daniela Krieg’s novel”. I thought that this book fit my bill. And it did.
Krien describes the lives of five women in their forties in Leipzig but their men are also in silhouette in the background. And it’s not a pretty picture.
We’re in Leipzig, former DDR and yes, this piece of information is still relevant. Their names are Paula, Judith, Brida, Malika and Jorinde. They are all related one way or the other. They are friends, sisters or exes of the same man. We start with Paula and end with Jorinde. They all live in Leipzig. They are bookseller, writer, actress, medical doctor, or musician. They have children or not, by choice or not. They all have ups and downs in their love lives.
As I was reading, I was overcome with the tide of sadness that leapt from the pages. They are all depressed, stressed out and deprived of self-worth.
Judith is the only different one: she’s a MP, she chose not to have children, she prefers to be single and she loves her horses more than humans. It is implied that she’s not a full woman. The others seem to only find their worth in men’s eyes, their father, or their partner. Except for one, the men in their lives are difficult, grown children, dominant or sexist and selfish pieces of work.
“Partner” is a wrong word for these men as they never treat their wives or daughters as equal. They impose their vision of life in their quotidian: that’s Ludwig, the environment extremist, Torben and his extreme-left political views. Götz seems to have a magic penis, if you consider the sexual spell he puts on his partners, they are broken almost beyond repair when he moves to another woman. He’s not a womanizer per se, he moves from a soft-and-bending girlfriend to a more assertive wife to another soft-and-bending partner. He can’t live with a woman who, unlike mommy, doesn’t enjoy staying at home, leaving her career behind while he’s the breadwinner.
The general tone of the book is that if women try to have it all, marriage, children, and a career, they fail. If they don’t strive in motherhood, they’re weird. If they don’t have children they’re not accomplished. Even if their doctor’s practice is full and they’re a good doctor or even if they’re sought after music teachers or successful.
If they want to balance a demanding career and children, they feel guilty and they never feel entitled to their own time to write their book or shoot films. None of them has an equal partnership with their husband. Their support system is weak if a child is sick. (And as we know, they are always sick the day of an important meeting or of a business trip.) They fake it until they make it because there’s no other choice but they feel cheated on. They can’t have the lives they hoped for.
If Krien’s novel is an accurate picture of women’s lives in Germany in the 21st century, ladies, get up, stand up for your rights because your lives are miserable and men, what a terrible picture you project. Great news: it is possible to have it all and not be drowning. The two key success factors are equal pay and living with a partner who shares parenting and housekeeping, not with a partner who does nothing or helps. Helping implies it’s the woman’s job when it’s not. And it would be nice to knock motherhood off its pedestal, it would do good for everyone.
Unfortunately, old habits die hard and feminist movements have long years ahead of them. Meanwhile, it’s good that writers like Daniela Krien put these lives into words and show patriarcal societies take their tolls.
Marina Sofia has read it too and discover her thoughtful billet here.
PS : Almost all the covers have the same woman on a diving board but I wonder why sometimes she looks towards left and sometimes towards right.
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.
Third crime is a charm #4 : Harlem, Madrid and Calcutta
June has been a harassing month at work but there’s always crime fiction for entertainment and taking your mind off things. I don’t have time to write a full billet about each book and I’ll keep bundling crime fiction books by threes.
This time, I’m taking you to Harlem between 1936 and 1961, to Calcutta in 1919 and to contemporary Madrid.
Viper’s Dream by Jake Lamar (2021) French title: Viper’s Dream. Translated by Catherine Richard-Mas.
I bought Viper’s Dream at Quais du Polar where the author also did the “jazz & literature” encounter. Jake Lamar is from New York but he’s lived in Paris for more than 20 years now. Viper’s Dream was made into a radio show for France Culture and the book went out in French translation and will be released in English in September 2023.
Viper is Clyde Morton, a redneck from Meachum, Alabama who arrives in Harlem in 1936. He wants to be a jazzman but he’s so bad at the trumpet and so good at fighting that he becomes Mr O’s right hand, jazz club owner and head of the marijuana trafficking in Harlem.
Lamar describes 25 years in Harlem, before and after WWII, the changes in the neighborhood and the drug trafficking around jazzmen and club patrons. Viper sticks to dealing marijuana, rather harmless in his views and able to enhance jazz musicians’ performances. Heroin is introduced and things change.
The plot is around a man who’s about to get caught by the police for murder, who benefited from police protection thanks to under table money and whose life goes derailed each time Yolanda DeVray pays him a bit of attention.
We have here all the tropes of noir fiction: a femme fatale, a character going crooked under certain circumstances, crime and money.
I read it after Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead as I wanted to compare their depiction of Harlem. Whitehead is definitely better at describing the atmosphere, the people and the changes. I was disappointed by Viper’s Dream but I still want to listen to the radio show, I bet there’s good music.
Now let’s head to Madrid and meet Piedad de la Viuda…
Wait for Me in Heaven by Carlos Salem (2014) French title: Attends-moi au ciel. Translated from the Spanish by Judith Vernant.
Carlos Salem is another writer settled in another country. He’s Argentinian and has lived in Madrid for more than twenty years. I’ve read Swimming Without Getting Wet and One-Way Journey and I don’t think that his books are available in English. That’s a shame.
In Wait for Me in Heaven, the narrator is Piedad de la Viuda, a recently widowed bourgeois lady from Madrid. Her husband Benito died a month ago in a car accident. She’s mourning him a bit and slowly discovering that the company she inherited from her father and that was under his watch might go bankrupt. 100 million euros have evaporated and she wants to find them to jumpstart the company, her legacy. She also discovers that her husband was about to leave her and settle in Brazil with his mistress. And he left her clues to find the money.
Piedad has spent the last twenty years as an ice queen, playing the role of the trophy wife, confessing imaginary sins to Father Cesar and doing nothing. At the beginning of the book, she muses innocently: “I need to ask Father Cesar whether tax heavens are where catholic businessmen go when they die”
With Benito’s death, the ice thaws and Piedad becomes a volcano, as her wicked inner voice takes power. She liberates her anger, her intelligence, and her sexuality. It’s a hell of a ride and it was fun to watch her reclaim her independence, even if it meant violence and healthy doses of Southern Comfort.
Carlos Salem is a writer who draws good crime fiction plots and instills a healthy dose of humor in everything he writes. Side characters are colorful and add to the crazy. This would make a good film and I wonder why it’s not made it into English translation.
My next crime read took me to Calcutta in 1919 with…
A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee (2016) French title: L’attaque du Calcutta-Darjeeling. Translated by Fanchita Gonzales Battle.
I got this one at Quais du Polar too and it’s also historical crime fiction. Abir Murkherjee is a Scot from Indian origins. A Rising Man is the first instalment of his crime fiction series featuring Sam Wyndham as a recurring character.
In the first volume, the author sets the setting and the characters. We have Sam Wyndham, a newbie in India. He used to work for Scotland Yard and his boss Lord Taggart asked him to come to India. Sam was in the trenches, lost his comrades and came home to an empty house since his wife had died from the Spanish influenza. A change of air seemed a good idea. Since he’s just arrived to Calcutta, he’s still new and it allows the author to describe the city, the atmosphere and be educational.
Sam’s team is made of Digby, a white police officer and Sat Banerjee, an Indian one. Sam isn’t sure he can trust Digby but he acknowledges Banerjee’s intelligence and competence. Since he’s not been in India for long, he treats him better than Digby does.
The plot is around the death of MacAuley, the vice-governor right hand. He’s found dead in an alley, near a brothel and in a bad neighborhood. The investigation has political consequences and Sam’s team is not at liberty to work properly.
On top of that, a train was attacked by separatists to raise money to buy fire arms. The British colons have experienced riots in India and the fight for independence has started.
I’m always interested in historical crime fiction as I find it a good way to learn things. A Rising Man shows the atmosphere in colonial India. I knew of the riots and what Mukherjee describes isn’t different from what was happening in Algeria with the French colons. Same time, same methods, same results, except for the dreadful colonial war.
I liked A Rising Man but I expected better. I have Smoke and Ashes on the shelf, the third one in the series, I’ll see if it gets stronger.
That’s all for June, folks! 🙂 See you in July for another billet about crime fiction.
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead – Yeah yeah yeah to the Harlem Shuffle
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (2021) French title: Harlem Shuffle.
The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead was our Book Club choice for June. Set in Harlem in the 1960s, it features Ray Carney, the son of a crook who went to university on a scholarship and wants to better himself. He married well as Elizabeth is the daughter of a well-off Harlemite family.
Carney runs a furniture store in Harlem and would like to stick to clean business but it’s hard to shake off where you come from.
It would mean to turn your back to your cousin Freddie who is like a brother to you, to unlearn all the crook’s tricks your father taught you or to look down on his former business associates whom it’s better not to cross.
So, he has a foot on each side of the probity border.
Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked, in practice and ambition. The odd piece of jewelry, the electronic appliances Freddie and then a few other local characters brought by the store, he could justify. Nothing major, nothing that attracted undue attention to his store, the front he put out to the world.
And let’s face it, shady money from the crooked world helps funding the legit activities. Carney navigates between two worlds, the striver one on the surface, and the crooked one in the basement.
Striver versus crook. Strivers grasped for something better—maybe it existed, maybe it didn’t—and crooks schemed about how to manipulate the present system. The world as it might be versus the world as it was. But perhaps Carney was being too stark. Plenty of crooks were strivers, and plenty of strivers bent the law.
Each section of the book corresponds to one of Carney’s dives into the other side and to one of his steps forward on the social ladder.
Carney takes us into the Harlem of the 1960s, into its geography and its population. Where you live means something and Carney always lusts after an upper street for his family. Relocating as a proof to his social climbing.
Carney’s position between two worlds allows Whitehead to show us the black bourgeoisie on Elizabeth’s side and its aspirations as well as the crowd who survives in the shadows and on the edge of law. His in-laws are part of this black bourgeoisie, the same as the one Thomas Mullen describes in Atlanta, in Darktown.
They make good money, stick together, try to emulate their white counterpart while steering clear from them and believe in social progress. Being American. Carney’s father-in-law is a well-respected accountant. And his mother in-law Alma came from similar stock: teachers and doctors for generations, an uncle who was the First Negro to attend this Ivy League college, a cousin who was the First Negro to graduate from that medical school. First this, First that other thing. Race-conscious and proud, up to a point—light enough to pass for white, but a little too eager to remind you that they could pass for white. Carney spooned Gerber baby food into May’s mouth, saw his hand against her cheek. She was dark, like him. He wondered if Alma still recoiled when she saw her granddaughter’s skin, felt dismayed that she hadn’t turned out light like Elizabeth.
Reading between the lines, the whites have the Mayflower royalty and the blacks have the First Timers royalty.
Whitehead excels at revealing the class system inside the black community, mirrorring the one in the country. In his in-laws’ eyes, Elizabeth married below her class. They resent Carney and make him pay for it with an solid stream of tiny humiliations that burn him like a permanent rash. That’s the classic divide between the haves and the have-nots.
But there’s also a veiled discrimination between black people from New York and the ones who come from the South, as Miami Joe points out: These up-North niggers had an attitude about Southern newcomers, he’d noticed, a pervasive condescension that made him boil.
Tell me where you live, I’ll tell you what you’re worth.
The contacts with white New York are limited to three kinds of people. First, the Jews, their businesses and their cordiality:
He cleared his throat, he gestured, and remained a black ghost, store after store, accumulating the standard humiliations, until he climbed the black iron steps to Aronowitz & Sons and the proprietor asked, “Can I help you, sir?” Can I help you as in Can I help you? As opposed to What are you doing here? Ray Carney, in his years, had a handle on the variations.
In one little paragraph, Whitehead pins down the subtle nuances of everyday racism.
Second, the corrupted NYPD, as their deputy comes to the store every week to fetch the envelope that Carney decided to see as an investment in safety and peace-of-mind.
And third, the old money WASPs from Park Avenue. Their worlds collide when Freddie makes friends with Linus Van Wyck, the rich heir of the Van Wyck empire. Linus went off his family’s designed track, being gay and falling into drug addiction.
In the background, Whitehead refers to the ongoing fight for civil rights and reminds us of the condition of black people in the South. Some characters are close to the NAACP. He makes references to riots in the 1940s in Harlem and includes the 1964 riots after a white policeman killed a black man without reasons. And Elizabeth works for a travel agency specialized in finding a safe route to Northern black people who travel into Jim Crow states.
While writing about the riots in Harlem fit into the story as Harlem Shuffle is a portrait of this neighborhood, the elements about the South seemed penciled in for educational purpose. I don’t think it really mattered to the story.
All this social commentary and this immersion into the Harlem of the 1960s are the foundation of the book but Harlem Shuffle is also an homage to Chester Himes, which means shady transactions and lots of suspenseful moments.
Carney falls back into the crooked world, either because Freddie brings him back or because of a personal feud. And it is dangerous enough for the story to be peppered with scuffles, beating ups, chases, gunshots, and whatnots. It keeps the reader entertained while drawing a very cinematographic picture of Harlem and New York.
Harlem Shuffle was published in 2021 and James McBride published his Deacon King Kong in 2020, the two books seem to explore the same grounds, New York in the 1960s. Is there a newfound interest for the period?
PS: I need a little help with this sentence. “Everybody says Van Wick,” Carney said. “That’s dumb. It’s Van Wyck.” What’s the difference?
Third crime is the charm #3 – Nice, London and Tokyo
Boccanera by Michèle Pedinielli (2018) Not available in English. (Yet?)
This was our Book Club choice for April.
Ghjulia “Diou” Boccanera, the Boccanera of this crime fiction book by Michèle Pedinielli, is a PI who lives and works in Nice, on the French Riviera.
She’s hired by Mauro Giannini’s boyfriend after Mauro was murdered. The police would like it to be a homophobic crime, Diou thinks that it’s too easy a scenario for it to be accurate.
She starts investigating and takes us around Nice, its old town, its Promenade des Anglais and its gay scene. The story is well-sewn and the pleasure of this book lies in the suspense of the plot (who did it?), the colorful and attaching characters that populate Diou’s life and the author’s love for her native city.
Boccanera wants to be Nice’s Montale but I think that Izzo was a more gifted or more experienced writer. We’ll see how the author’s style and characters develop in the next volumes. It still is an excellent book for entertainment and armchair travelling. Nice is a few fours from Lyon, too, opposite direction of the Vosges mountains and totally different vibe but very tempting too.
Boccanera is a series and I got the second volume, Après les chiens, at Quais du Polar and got it signed by this friendly and enthusiastic writer.
Body Language by A.K. Turner (2020) French title: Body Language.
A.K. Turner is another author who was invited at Quais du Polar, I was reading her book during the festival and I attended a panel where she discussed the setting of her crime fiction series. Body Language is the first volume of her Cassie Raven series.
Cassie Raven is a mortuary assistant at the morgue in Camden Town, London. Her parents died in a car accident when she was four and she was raised by her grand-mother. She had a rather chaotic adolescence, lived on the margins for a while until her teacher, Geraldine Edwards, mentored and tutored her until she got her diploma.
On the police side, Camden Town has a new detective, Phyllida Flyte. She’s a transfer from the Winchester police and she’s a by-the-book police officer. She needs to adapt to policing in Camden Town while she works through her personal drama.
When Geraldine’s body arrives at the morgue after a death in puzzling circumstances, Cassie starts investigating. The police tends to think it was an accident, Cassie isn’t so sure.
Cassie, with her Goth style and her past as an outsider couldn’t be more different from her. Flyte’s first instinct is to be suspicious of this weird mortuary assistant. As the story progresses, the two will forge a tentative work relationship.
The plot moved forward at an good pace, Cassie and Phyllida have catching backgrounds and life in Camden town is part of the book. A.K. Turner explained that this neighbourhood’s culture sits well with Cassie and asks Phyllida to adjust.
Body Language is an entertaining book, like watching a TV series and I wouldn’t mind spending more time with Cassie but I left London for Paris and then Tokyo with Louise Morvan.
Baka! by Dominique Sylvain (2007) French title: Baka! Not available in English.
Baka! is a Japanese word that means idiot. Dominique Sylvain is a French author who lived a few years in Japan. She first wrote Baka! in 1995 and then rewrote it in 2007. I have the last version, the first one is OOP.
Baka! is the first volume of the Louise Morvan series. She’s a PI who lives in Paris. She inherited her uncle’s PI agency when he died in action. She’s still working through his death and is trying to find her footing at the head of the agency.
She’s hired by Bishop Chevry-Morvan to go and check on his nephew Florent who has moved to Tokyo. Florent has asked his uncle for a substantial loan and the bishop is worried. Or so it seems.
Louise arrives in Tokyo, speaking English but not a word of Japanese, like most of us, I guess. She quickly realizes that things aren’t as straightforward as the bishop said and that she got herself into a dangerous mess.
Tokyo and Japan are an important part of the book: the geography, the customs, the way-of-life. I thought that in this one, Dominique Sylvain tried to embrace too many things at the same time. As we say in French Qui trop embrasse mal étreint, literally meaning that if you try to hug too many things at the same time, you don’t hold onto them very well.
There are too many plot threads in the book, the characters are all connected and have their personal goal or issue in the global picture. I thought it was a bit too much.
However, I really liked Louise Morvan as a character. Unapologetic. Bold. Fearless. In Baka!, we didn’t stay long in Paris before and after the Tokyo trip, but Louise Morvan has the same kind of microcosm as Ghjulia Boccanera in Nice. Familiar faces in a local café and informal relationships with the cops.
Other reviews of books by Dominique Sylvain:
- A standalone also set in Japan: Kabuchiko an excellent one that needs an English translator who speaks French, knows France and Japan. (Wonder who that could be? 😊)
- A standalone set in Paris Les Infidèles
- The second volume of the Louise Morvan series Soeurs de sang,
- Also set in Paris, the first volume of the Lola Jost & Ingrid Diesel : Passage du Désir. This one is available in English and is entitled Dark Angel.
I also started and abandoned 19500 dollars la tonne by Jean-Hugues Oppel. It didn’t work for me.
Upcoming crime fiction billets: the excellent Darktown by Thomas Mullen, the incredible Dancing Bear by James Crumley and the masterpiece Moth by James Sallis.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan – stunning
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2020) French title: Ce genre de petites choses. Translated by Jacqueline Odin.
I owe Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan to my KUBE libraire. I didn’t like Foster that much when I read it and never tried another book by Claire Keegan after. I would have been missing out.
Small Things Like These is set in New Ross, Ireland, in the weeks before Christmas. It’s a busy time for Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man. He runs his company while his wife Eileen runs the house and takes care of their five children. His days are long as he delivers coal supplies to his clients before the holidays.
Among Bill’s clients is the local Magdalene Asylum. The Magdalen Asylums were convents where “fallen” girls were sent and worked for their keep as laundresses. In Ireland, they lasted from 1765 to 1998 according to Wikipedia and were run by the Catholic Church with the approval of the Irish government. They were workhouses with terrible living conditions.
One day, Bill finds a girl hidden in the convent’s coal shed who asks him about her baby. He’s deeply moved and can’t turn a blind eye to this young woman’s predicament. Indeed, Bill’s mother was a single mum, a perfect candidate for the Magdalene system.
Furlong had come from nothing. Less than nothing, some might say. His mother, at the age of sixteen, had fallen pregnant while working as a domestic for Mrs Wilson, the Protestant widow who lived in the big house a few miles outside of town. When his mother’s trouble became known, and her people made it clear that they’d have no more to do with her, Mrs Wilson, instead of giving his mother her walking papers, told her she should stay on, and keep her work. On the morning Furlong was born, it was Mrs Wilson who had his mother taken into hospital, and had them brought home. It was the first of April, 1946, and some said the boy would turn out to be a fool.
Bill’s and his mother’s life wouldn’t have turned out so well without Mrs Wilson. He knows he could have ended in the system. For Bill, it’s time to give back. For Eileen, it’s better not to stick your nose where it doesn’t belong. The Sisters at the convent are powerful and it’s better not to cross them.
Small Things Like These is a tour de force. In only 117 pages in French (less in English), Claire Forster manages to write a fully-formed story about a family, a man’s childhood and these terrible Magdalena asylums.
In a few pages, her characters, the town and the laundry business come to life. I imagined very well working-class Bill, his wife, their children, their home. They work hard to have a decent life and raise their children. They don’t want to stir trouble or be in the hot topic of the town’s conversations. They have a good life and are successful, in a sense that they improved themselves.
Bill is thankful for Mrs Wilson and as an adult, admires what she did for his mum and for him. He knows that having his mum in her home must have made people talk and yet Mrs Wilson did it anyway. He’s thankful for the small things, the little gestures and her rebellious act of keeping this girl and her son in her home.
Through the scenes at the convent, Eileen’s remarks and people’s reactions, we understand that the convent is a place of power. In helping this girl, Bill takes a risk and he knows it but he must to it. For her, for himself and for Mrs Wilson.
The contrast between Bill and the Sisters is striking. They are supposed to be the professional Christians, the experts in generosity and compassion. Yet, they set up a hard, unfair and inhuman system for these poor girls. One can argue that the Irish government and the Catholic Church hierarchy were the actual culprits. Indeed, they are responsible for the material living conditions, for not setting up proper education and for treating these girls as inmates. But each local convent is responsible for its sisters’s behaviour towards these girls. Being nice doesn’t come with a budget or with State allowances. Bill reminds us of the basis of Christianism.
Small Things Like These is an homage to all the quiet people who do the right thing, who help others and don’t make a fuss about it. It’s an ode to the rebels of the quotidian and to daily generosity. People who refuse to look the other way and take action.
Very, very highly recommended.
Thanks, Camille for sending me Small Things Like These in my KUBE package!
Other reviews:
Book Around the Corner 