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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.
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 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.
The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope: 770 pages for two weddings, two MP elections and a few hunting parties.
The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope. (1880) French title: Les enfants du duc. Translated by Alain Jumeau.
The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope is the sixth volume of the Palliser series and the only one I’ve read and it wasn’t an issue. This billet includes spoilers.
The book opens with a sad piece of news: Lady Glencora, wife of the Duke of Omnium dies unexpectedly and leaves her grieving spouse to take care of their grownup children. And to the poor duke’s dismay, they are a disappointment.
The oldest one, Lord Silverbridge got kicked out of Oxford, loves horse races, meddles with the unsavory Major Tifto and enjoys staying at his club. When he finally decides to enter Parliament, he chooses the conservative party instead of the liberal one, as customary for the Pallisers. Lord Silverbridge could redeem himself in his father’s eyes if he married the appropriate Lady Mabel Grex.
The youngest one, Gerald, is kicked out of Cambridge after disobeying one two many times and his most remarkable skill seem to lay in hunting. Clearly, he’s not on the right path to honor his father’s ways of hard work, no booze and no idle activity.
And finally, his daughter Lady Mary Palliser wishes to marry Frank Tregear, a gentleman of lower class and without fortune. Although Lady Glencora had given her blessing, the Duke of Omnium cannot give his consent to this marriage. Tregear is Silverbridge’s best friend, he’s an intelligent young man, educated and well-behaved. No drinking, no gambling, no bad habits but it’s not enough for the Duke. This misllaisance isn’t done, that’s all and she’ll get over it. So he thinks.
The whole book revolves around the characters’ shenanigans and the duke’s scheming to have his children marry people he approves of. It takes 770 pages to the poor duke to accept that his strong-willed daughter is truly in love with Frank Tregear and that this is not a passing fancy and to realize that Lord Silverbridge is madly in love with an American girl, Miss Boncassen and that no other spouse will do.
Hmm. He could have spared them and us a lot of anguish if he had been wise enough to listen to the advice of two of his late wife’s friends. Mrs Finn and Lady Cantrip, called to the rescue, concurred to say rather early in the book that Mary wouldn’t change her mind.
Despite his stubbornness and his clinging to propriety, I quite liked the duke. His wife was in love with someone else before they were married and he was the fiancé her parents chose for her. He needs to believe that his wife had forgotten this man and that she was happy in their marriage, that it was not a duty and a sham. This personal issue that he keeps to himself makes him resistant to the idea that Mary can’t turn her affections to someone else, forget about Frank Tregear and be happy. This makes him more human.
I also liked that he wasn’t in love with money. He’s filthy rich and can afford to be generous but it’s not always a given for wealthy people. He seemed like someone who enjoys what money can bring but money isn’t the end goal of his life.
And he truly loves his children. He’s grieving his wife and has trouble interacting with them without her around. He doesn’t give up though and eventually manages to get closer to them. He surrendered to the marriages for them to be happy and to salvage his relationship with them. He’s quite a modern father, in the end.
I have to confess that I was bored to death during the chapters about hunting with hounds, the politics and the sportive issues around it. And that the duke had no interest in that field at all made him even more loveable.
The chapters about politics went over my head. Things haven’t changed much in parliament scheming and law making, that’s all I’ll say.
The big loser in this game of love and marriage is Lady Mabel Grex. The poor girl was involved with Frank Tregear but they didn’t have enough money to get married. He forgot about her and fell for Lady Mary. She didn’t have that change of heart and could have settled with Lord Silverbridge. He was ready to marry her before he met Miss Boncassen but she didn’t take him seriously. Lady Mabel is the example of the terrible fate of these women whose only career could be to marry well. I felt a bit sorry for her.
All in all, I enjoyed The Duke’s Children even if Trollope could have said as much in less pages. But I understand that it was published as a feuilleton and more pages meant more money for the author. And I enjoy his smooth style and playful tone. He has his own brand of literature.
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata – highly recommended
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (1948) French title: Pays de neige. Translated by Bunkichi Fujimori.
Sometimes people ask whether you’d buy a book for its cover. My answer is always yes and Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata is the perfect example of it. I was drawn to the cover, a part of a 1858 painting by Hiroshige entitled Yugasan in Bizan Province. (see below: isn’t it beautiful?)
Snow Country is the improbable love story between Shimamura, a dilletante from Tokyo and Komako, a young geisha from a small watering town in the mountains. (Kawabata doesn’t mention the town’s name in the novel but it’s Yuzawa, in the Niigata prefecture.)
Shimamura is married, has children and comes from old money. He writes articles about ballet and he became obsessed with Western dancing after he got tired of Japanese traditional dances. He’s a dilletante without an actual profession. Shimamura enjoys hiking retreats in the mountains to refuel. This is how he landed in this town, tired but happy and re-energized after a week-long hike.
He’s staying at an inn and asks for a geisha. This will be his first encounter with Komako, who’s not a geisha at the time. Something moves him in her beauty and her attitude.
The second time he comes back is actually the opening scene of the novel. He’s looking forward to seeing Komako again. He’s on the train on his way to the watering town and he observes a young woman taking care of her sick companion in their train carriage. He watches their reflection on the train’s window and it allows him to stare at them without being impolite. They hop off the train at the same station as him and he’ll see them later.
He reconnects with Komako, who is now a geisha. She attaches herself to him, and they will spend a lot of time together. Her attitude is not in accordance with the codes of her profession and they try to stay under the town’s radars.
The third time he comes will be the last. Komako is now too attached to him for her own good and their relationship can go nowhere. Shimamura likes her but he’s not in love with her and anyway, he’s married. It’s time to end it.
The story is a traditional love story doomed from the start and details from Komako’s life are revealed in the course of the story. The baseline is not new but the novel is a masterpiece nonetheless, all due to the writing.
The first chapter when Shimamura looks at the young people in the train’s window is truly beautiful. It’s cinematographic and very Proust-like. I can’t help thinking about the scenes on the train in Normandy during the Narrator’s stays in Balbec. Shimamura is entranced by the young girl’s beauty.
The descriptions of the landscapes are poetic and the interaction between the surrounding nature and Shimamura’s moods reminded me of Nature Writing. He comes to this mountain town once in May and spring is in full swing, once in December and it snows and once in the Fall. These three different moments of the year bring a different atmosphere to the town and play on Shimamura’s state of mind.
So, the beauty of the painting on the book cover reflects the beauty of Kawabata’s descriptions. Snow Country also captures a side of a disappearing Japan, as the country turns to Western modernity.
Shimamura lives in Tokyo and is interested in Western culture. After all, he writes about ballet and translates Alain and Paul Valéry. His trips to the mountains are a way to reconnect with himself and with traditional Japan. The old world, before the country opened to the West, still lingers in this remote village. It’s disappearing fast and Komako herself has spent time in Tokyo for her apprenticeship. She’s not a country pumpkin who has never left her hometown. Shimamura and Komako have a connection because he’s eager to go back to traditional Japan and she knows his world too. They meet halfway.
I really don’t know much about Japanese customs and sometimes I think I should read a book like Japanese customs for dummies before diving deeper into Japanese literature. So, curious as I am, I truly enjoyed reading about the geisha world and its organization, the villagers’ life and other customs like traditional dances, the making of Ojiya-chijimi fabric, the way women dress, bath and do their hair. It’s part of Shimamura’s attraction to the place and it’s part of my attraction to Kawabata’s book.
Snow Country is my second Kawabata after Kyôto and I’m afraid I’ve no recollection of Kyôto except that I liked it alright. I should reread it now that I’m older. Snow Country is a classic of Japanese literature and it is understandable as the story is universal and the style stunning.
This is my participation to Doce Bellezza’s Japanese Literature Challenge.
Time Regained by Marcel Proust – a conclusion and a beginning.
Time Regained by Marcel Proust (1927) Original French title: Le Temps retrouvé.
Time Regained is the last volume of In Search of Lost Time and it was published five years after Proust’s death. We’re lucky that Proust’s brother had them published.
I’ve now finished rereading In Search of Lost Time. It took me several years because I wandered away, lost time and yet always found my way back to it. I never forgot where I left the Narrator and resumed reading as if I had stopped the day before. Proust’s prose and narration is a drizzle, it pervades into your brain and your soul. It goes deep and stays with you on a long-term basis.
I first read Time Regained in my last year of high school. My memories of reading it were of a brilliant conclusion to In Search of Lost Time, the book where everything starts and ends in a coherent way, a volume that made the whole journey worth all the reading time I devoted to Proust.
My memories were accurate, if it even makes sense to apply this adjective to memories after all Proust has written about their fleetingness and inaccuracy. I have twenty-five pages of quotes from Time Regained, all worthy of attention. I’m not qualified to write an essay about Proust, an imperfect summary is all I can hope for.
This last volume has three parts all equally fascinating and for different reasons.
The first part is about Paris during WWI and how things were for Parisians and Proust’s circle. The Narrator is back to Paris after two years in the country, in a nursing home. From a historical standpoint, this part is very interesting. He pictures the political context of the time and the attitude of the various characters of his novel towards the Germans and how they express or broadcast their patriotism. The war time has rearranged the cards in his friends and acquaintances’s position in the world. He unveils what the characters are up to during these difficult times. Who became a journalist. Who is on the front. Who is an army deserter. What women do and what salons have become. Who works for the government. What happened to Combray, Méséglise and a little bridge on the Vivonne river. Who is a spy. How Françoise lives through this.
But people are people and life goes on. Thanks to Charlus, Jupien runs a brothel for homosexuals, which provides for the Baron’s enjoyment of sadomasochism and the Narrator witnesses it all. (Proust used to go to this kind of brothels himself, he even got arrested in one once).
After the Narrator updates us on what happened to several of the characters, he goes to a matinée hosted by the Princesse de Guermantes, the new one, since the prince has remarried.
When he arrives at their mansion, he stumbles upon a paved stone and Venice is brought back to his memory with the same force as Combray with the madeleine. He enters the mansion and has to stay in the library until the musicians whon are currently playing have finished their piece. Then he’s be allowed into the salon. This time in the Guermantes library is a revelation. Several details trigger his memory and his brain and his literary mission downs on him. His artistic pursuit is not a pipedream after all. He now knows what he will write, how he will write it. He’s on a mission.
This second part is a breathtaking explanation of how Proust conceived In Search of Lost Time. He explains his vision of art and what was the starting point of the work we’ve been reading. The conception of his artwork is laid out here, in the book itself, in a brilliant mise en abime. We read about the aim and the blueprints of his literary cathedral. And right there, in this library, he can’t wait to start writing it. Unsurprisingly, his epiphany has something to do with the perception of Time.
But before shutting himself up to write, in a hurry to ensure he has enough time to finish it before he dies, he has to attend the party. And this party is the ultimate place to meet all kind of people from the past. Some are only there through the remembrance of guests as they are dead. Most of the guests have suffered from the assault of Time. They are grey, old, senile, forgetful. The social order is askew or even upside down. And the Narrator observes them with his acute perception, seeing through them and pointing out the changes and the ridicules.
An era is dying. Time has taken his toll and the Narrator is going to bring them back, not in a realistic way but through is perception of them. He will take us from the beginning of the Third Republic to WWI and describe a milieu and an era. There will be political, social and mored matters. There will be no judgment, no question of sin and morality. He will dig into himself and analyze others to show the mechanisms of love, jealousy, grief, habits, imagination and oblivion.
It’ll be a lie. It’ll be non-linear and impressionistic. It’ll be human. It’ll be a masterpiece.
Crazy me, I’ll do 20 Books of Summer again #20booksofsummer22
I’m crazy busy and yet, I plan on doing 20 Books of Summer again.
Cathy from 746Books is the mastermind behind this event. I could pick only 10 or 15 books but I wanted to have 20 books to choose from and then we’ll see how it goes.
I already have the books from my ongoing readalongs with my Book Club, my sister-in-law, my Proust Centenary event and my non-fiction challenge. That makes seven books.
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (USA)
- Thursday Night Widows by Claudia Pineiro (Argentina)
- The Survivors by Jane Harper (Australia)
- Dead at Daybreak by Deon Meyer (South Africa)
- Fall Out by Paul Thomas (New Zealand)
- Days of Reading by Marcel Proust (France)
- Proust by Samuel Beckett (Ireland)
In August, I’ll be travelling to the USA, going through Washington DC, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. I’ve already read The Line That Held Us by David Joy and Country Dark by Chris Offutt. I love to read books about the place I’m visiting, so I’ll be reading:
- Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup (Louisiana)
- Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (North Carolina)
- Serena by Ron Rash (North Carolina)
- Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash (North Carolina)
- All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (Southern Region)
- A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson (Appalachians)
- The Cut by George Pelecanos (Washington DC)
- The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Southern Region)
That’s eight more books and some of them rather long. I also wanted to do Liz’s Larry McMurtry 2022 readalong as I’ve had Lonesome Dove on the shelf for a while. That’s two chunky books in a beautiful Gallmeister edition.
And then I’ve selected four novellas, to help me reach the 20 books with one-sitting reads:
- Lie With Me by Philippe Besson (France)
- A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi (Algeria)
- The Miracles of Life by Stefan Zweig (Austria)
- Adios Madrid by Pablo Ignacio Taibo II (Cuba)
I’m not sure I’ll make it but who doesn’t love a little challenge? I’m happy with my choices, a mix of countries, of crime, literary and non-fiction and of short and long books.
Have you read any of the books I picked? If yes, what shall I expect?
If you’re taking part to 20 Books of Summer too, leave the link to your post in the comment section, I love discovering what you’ll be up to.
Albertine Gone by Marcel Proust
The Sweet Cheat Gone (Albertine Gone) by Marcel Proust. (1925) In Search of Lost Time, volume 6. Original French title: Albertine disparue.
Before diving into Albertine Gone by Marcel Proust, some information. I have read it in French, of course. Then I downloaded the cheapest translation available, the Scott Moncrief one. All the quotes in English come from this translation.
In the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time, the Narrator acts like an insufferable stalker and control freak with Albertine, who now lives with him. Imagine what it must have meant at the beginning of the 20th century, even if, officially, she was staying at his mother’s house. Here are my two billets about The Captive: billet one and billet two.
It took me nine years to move from The Captive to Albertine Gone. In this volume, Albertine leaves him and moves out. How I understand her. Before he can go after her and make her change her mind, she dies in an accident. (Albertine may have been modeled after Alfred Agostinelli, Proust’s flame, killed in an airplane accident in 1914.)
The first part of the volume is about the Narrator’s grief and his relentless research to understand once for all if Albertine was a lesbian and if she cheated on him. Yes, to both. He gets his answer after torturing us with soul wrenching what-ifs, sending out his valet to investigate Albertine’s last days, questioning her girlfriend Andrée, etc. The Narrator is sick with jealously and he seems to be missing Albertine only marginally, because he didn’t get all his answers before her death. Sometimes I felt like he was grieving because grief was what he was supposed to feel and not what he was actually feeling. The Narrator was such a gossip.
However, Proust wrote excellent passages about grief, the recovering process and the Narrator’s feelings. There are beautiful thoughts about memories of people who passed away and what remains of them after they’re gone.
| On dit quelque fois qu’il peut subsister quelque chose d’un être après sa mort, si cet être était un artiste et mit un peu de soi dans son œuvre. C’est peut-être de la même manière qu’une sorte de bouture prélevée sur un être, et greffée au cœur d’un autre, continue à y poursuivre sa vie même quand l’être d’où elle avait été détachée a péri. | We say at times that something may survive of a man after his death, if the man was an artist and took a certain amount of pains with his work. It is perhaps in the same way that a sort of cutting taken from one person and grafted on the heart of another continues to carry on its existence, even when the person from whom it had been detached has perished |
Then he starts going out again and traveling to Venice. He reconnects with his high society friends and tells us what have become of our former acquaintances: Gilberte, Robert de Saint-Loup, the Baron de Charlus, Madame de Guermantes…He’s found his wits and his irony again and this reader thought, “Yay we’re back to socializing and watching people with a magnifying glass!”
We’re back to witty observations and come-backs, this is the Proust I love.
| Le snobisme est, pour certaines personnes, analogue à ces breuvages agréables dans lesquels ils mêlent des substances utiles. | Snobbishness is, with certain people, analogous to those pleasant beverages with which they mix nutritionus substances |
It’s like having coffee with your parents when they start telling you all the news of people you used to know and have lost contact with because you moved out of your hometown. All distant cousins, uncles, acquaintances, neighbors, friends of friends. Who got married, who got sick, blah blah blah. Only Proust says it with a lot more style.
Although you don’t read In Search of Lost Time for the plot, I won’t spoil your reading and tell you the breaking news about Gilberte and Robert de Saint-Loup that are dropped like bombs in this volume.
In Albertine Gone, Proust also makes peace with homosexuality. In the first volumes, it’s described as something unnatural to be ashamed of. Towards the end of this volume, Proust says that Charlus loves doing visits with Morel because he feels like he’s remarried. He loves acting as a couple. This passage is explicit about the Narrator’s views on homosexuality and very modern:
| Personnellement, je trouvais absolument indifférent au point de vue de la morale qu’on trouvât son plaisir auprès d’un homme ou d’une femme, et trop naturel et humain qu’on le cherchât là où on pouvait le trouver. | As far as morality was concerned, it was indifferent to me whether one finds their pleasure with a man or a woman. I found it only too natural and human to seek pleasure where it could be found. (my translation) |
A century later, I wish this sentiment were more widely spread. It would avoid a lot of bullying and heartaches. These two passages about Charlus and this statement about homosexuality are missing from the Scott Moncrief translation. I don’t know if they were censored or if Scott Moncrief worked on a French version that didn’t include these paragraphs.
Albertine disparue isn’t the easiest volume to read, at least for me. It is nonetheless a masterpiece and I have bright memories of Le Temps retrouvé, the next and last volume.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa – unusual coming-of-age novel
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa (1977) French title: La tante Julia et le scribouillard. Translated by Albert Bensoussan.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa is based on the author’s youth. We’re in Lima in the 1950s. Mario is 18, he’s at university, studying law to pacify his parents. He wants to be a writer and he works at Radio Panamericana, writing news bulletins with his colleague Pascual. Meanwhile, he tries his hand at writing short stories and imagines moving to an attic in Paris to pursue his literary dreams.
Two newcomers disrupt his routine of studying, working, writing and hanging out with his friends. First, Radio Panamericana hires Pedro Camacho, a Bolivian scriptwriter and star of soap operas. Second, his aunt by marriage’s sister, Aunt Julia, moves to Lima after she divorced her Bolivian husband.
Pedro Camacho is a talented but manic scriptwriter and he soon befriends Mario, confiding in him and sharing his writing tips. Pedro quicky becomes the new star of Radio Panamericana, bringing in more and more listeners with his crazy plots. With the listeners comes the money from advertising and the radio has found their goose that lays the golden eggs.
Mario and Aunt Julia didn’t know each other before she arrived and soon begin a secret affair. She’s fourteen years older than him. Since they belong to a tight-knit extended family where gossip travels fast, their greatest fear is to get caught by a family member. Mario’s friends and cousin Nancy know about their relationship and cover for them. Mario and Julia have no place for real intimacy since they both live with their relatives. They spend time together at the cinema, at the radio or wandering in the streets.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a coming-of-age novel where we see Mario falling in love and taking charge of his future. Older Mario looks back on his younger self with humor and tenderness. The Lima of his youth comes to life with him, his friend Javier and his colleagues at Radio Panamericana. We also relive the golden age of radio, with its numerous soap operas that will move to TV when this new media is widespread.
The main difference with a “usual” coming-of-age novel is that chapters alternate between Mario’s life and Pedro’s soap operas. At the beginn
ing, I thought that the stories were Mario’s short stories but I realized it was Pedro’s. As months go by, Pedro is more and more absorbed by his stories and works longer and longer hours to keep all his balls in the air. He jungles between several soap operas and his workload is threatening his health. To be honest, I thought that the chapters with the soap opera stories were a bit too long and I struggled to keep reading and pay attention. I was more invested in Mario’s life.
Two side comments about Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.
The first one is about the title. The original Spanish title is La tía Julia y el escribidor. In English, it the straightforward Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. In French, it is La tante Julia et le scribouillard. Two things caught my attention in the French title. First, why la tante Julia and not just Tante Julia? Tante Julia sounds better but by choosing this, you link aunt and Julia and it becomes a sort of new first name and thus her identity. You can’t detach the family title from the first name and I can’t help thinking it makes the relationship sound more incestuous than la tante Julia. Mario and Julia are not blood related at all and he didn’t know her growing up, so la tante Julia works better in this context. I don’t know how the aunt Julia sounds to native English speakers. Is it really weird?
Then there’s the word scribouillard, which doesn’t mean scriptwriter –that would be scénariste—and is slightly derogatory as are words with the ard suffix in French. (like chauffard). Scribouillard means penpusher. The scriptwriter can only be Pedro Camacho but the penpusher can be Mario, aspiring writer and Pedro, writer of cheap soap operas. It’s not the same.
So, which translation is the right one?
Time to go back to the original Spanish title. I don’t speak Spanish so I went to my usual online dictionary to see the actual translation of escribidor. No official translation, just references to La tante Julia et le scribouillard. I kid you not. Escribidor doesn’t exist in Spanish. It means that Llosa made this word up and I bet that, after spending years in Paris, it is his Spanish translation of scribouillard. What do you think?
My second side comment is about the various covers of this book.
The Dutch one is close to the French one I displayed at the beginning of my billet. The German one seems to come out of a French or Italian film of the 1960s and has nothing to do with the novel. The Polish one implies that Aunt Julia is a loose lady.
The English cover with the lady and the city makes me think of a WWII novel. The Swedish one goes with the Polish cover. Imagine the disappointment of German, Polish and Swedish readers who based their purchase on the cover, thinking they’d be reading a torrid love affair, and ending up with tame kisses on street corners and wild soap operas. The Penguin cover is good: we see Mario or Pedro, their typewriter and the radio. There’s no emphasis on the Julia/Mario relationship.
I think that the best cover is the Spanish one with the lady and her half-radio face. It’s a good summary of the book: it’s in the right decade, it’s not lewd, it shows Julia and the radio as they are both important in Mario’s formative years. Which one do you prefer?
PS: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is set in the Miraflores neighborhood in Lima. It is also the setting of A World For Julius by Alfredo Bryce-Echenique, published in 1972 and also set in the 1950s. It’s a book I highly recommend too.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell – Gordon and his pride and prejudices
Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell (1936) French title: Et Vive l’aspidistra!
The aspidistra became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that. The aspidistra, flower of England! It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell is my second read for the #1936Club co-hosted by Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book.
Gordon Comstock lives in a boarding house in London. He’s almost thirty, works at a bookshop for two pounds a week and has declared war to the money-god. He barely survives on his wages.
He earns enough to support himself but has no money left after he pays for his essentials. He’s very proud and doesn’t accept any help from his friends. For example, his good friend Ravelston is rich and he’d rather not go to the pub than let Ravelston pay for a pint.
Gordon has a girlfriend, Rosemary, who also lives in a boarding house. Neither of them can invite someone of the other sex in their room. They are condemned to meet outside and stay outside since Gordon doesn’t have any money to invite Rosemary even to a tea-shop and of course, he won’t let her pay for them. As Orwell sarcastically points out:
It is not easy to make love in a cold climate when you have no money. The ‘never the time and the place’ motif is not made enough of in novels.
So, Gordon is sexually frustrated and Orwell has a go at the Nancy Mitfords of the world. It’s not easy to be in a relationship when you can’t invite your partner to your home or go anywhere.
Gordon used to have a ‘good job’ in an ad agency where he showed some talent as a copywriter. But he despises capitalism and doesn’t want anything to do with money making. He fancies himself as a poet, has published some pieces in several newspaper. He’s rather live off literature but when did poetry ever paid off?
The pretence was still kept up that Gordon was a struggling poet – the conventional poet-in-garret.
It also means a hungry poet. With principles. Strong enough to hate his ‘good job’, quit and take a lesser-paid but nobler job in a bookstore.
Gordon doesn’t want to succeed. At all. It would mean that the money-god won and he’s pig-headed to the point of stupidity. He’s prideful and won’t accept help. He’s prejudiced against the middle-class, represented by their aspidistras. He loathes the middle-class and doesn’t want to partake in their way-of-living.
The types he saw all round him, especially the older men, made him squirm. That was what it meant to worship the money-god! To settle down, to Make Good, to sell your soul for a villa and an aspidistra! To turn into the typical little bowler-hatted sneak – Strube’s ‘little man’ – the little docile cit who slips home by the six-fifteen to a supper of cottage pie and stewed tinned pears, half an hour’s listening-in to the B.B.C. Symphony Concert, and then perhaps a spot of licit sexual intercourse if his wife ‘feels in the mood’! What a fate!
He’s almost thirty and still thinks as a rebelling teenager, when you think you won’t have the same life as your parents and then reality catches up on you. Gordon has some growing up to do and I found him exasperating and immature.
It is true that Gordon has a point about capitalism and money as the goal for life.
What he realized, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion – the only really felt religion – that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success.
So, he sticks to his principles even if they make him sink further into poverty. Orwell has a very graphic way to make the reader understand what it means to be poor, to count every penny. Soon, Gordon understands that he cut his income himself in order not to yield to the money-god only to be tied up to it by poverty.
Money again, always money! Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure – above all, it means loneliness. How can you be anything but lonely on two quid a week?
Orwell shows how worrying about money takes all one’s mental space and Gordon realises that fighting the money-god is not as freeing as he thought it would be.
The devil of it is that the glow of renunciation never lasts. Life on two quid a week ceases to be a heroic gesture and becomes a dingy habit. Failure is as great a swindle as success.
Orwell portrays a Gordon who wants to be noble but his going against the flow is counterproductive. He loves Rosemary (a saint, IMO, to be able to put up with him) but their relationship is in a dead-end because they can’t afford to get married. Well, at least, according to middle-class standards. Orwell hints that if they were working-class, they’d get married and see afterwards how they’d get by.
Gordon enjoys Ravelston’s company but he can never get past their difference of income and social class. Ravelston doesn’t mind but Gordon lets it become a barrier between them.
Gordon thinks he’s over the middle-class way of thinking but it’s hard to escape the mental frame in which you were raised into. He struggles to set free but the ties are strong and his refusal to go Dutch on meals with Rosemary or to let Ravelston pay his beer show that he’s not free from the middle-class minset.
It’s exactly the same for Ravelston who comes from the upper-classes and claims that he’s a socialist while he secretly dislikes poor people.
The truth was that in every moment of his life he was apologizing, tacitly, for the largeness of his income. You could make him uncomfortable as easily by reminding him that he was rich as you could make Gordon by reminding him that he was poor.
He tries to play down his wealth but his social origin speaks up as soon as he’s caught off guard.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying mocks the English class system and its stultifying codes. It shows that it’s hard to change of social class, to shed one’s education and become someone else.
From the beginning to the end, Gordon got on my nerves. I was amazed at Rosemary’s patience with him and at Ravelston’s steady friendship. They don’t give up on him and he should be grateful for them. Disliking the main character doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy the book. Orwell gets his point through and shows the mechanism that changed the 1968 revolutionary students in what we call in France the “caviar left-wing”.
Something else. Each time I read a British book, I come across singularities that remind how not-British I am. In Barbara Pym, you’ve got all the subtle differences between churches and who goes to which. In several books, I noticed derogatory remarks against Welsh people and digs at Scotchmen.
‘Gordon’, ‘Colin’, ‘Malcolm’, ‘Donald’ – these are the gifts of Scotland to the world, along with golf, whisky, porridge, and the works of Barrie and Stevenson.
And somewhere else.
Mr McKechnie wasn’t a bad old stick. He was a Scotchman, of course, but Scottish is as Scottish does. At any rate he was reasonably free from avarice – his most distinctive trait seemed to be laziness.
I find this pretty harsh but what do I know, right?
Keep the Aspidistra Flying is well-worth reading, Orwell’s prose is witty, cutting sometimes but always excellent.
Highly recommended.
PS: Here’s Karen’s review.
Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie – The #1936Club
Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie. (1936) French title: Cartes sur table.
Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie is my first read for the #1936 Club hosted by co-hosted by Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book. I bought it during my stolen escapade to an English bookstore in Paris last February.
Mr Shaitana collects various objects but puts his life on the line when he decides to invite to diner four sleuths and four murderers who got away with it. After the meal is over, the guests are split into two rooms to play bridge.
The four sleuths are Superintendent Battle from Scotland Yard, Colonel Race from the Secret Service, Hercule Poirot, a private detective and Mrs Oliver, a crime fiction writer.
The four murderers are Dr Roberts, a middle-aged and jolly GP, Mrs Lorrimer, a very clever widow and skilled bridge player, Major Despard who seems to have been to every corner of the British Empire and Miss Meredith, a rather poor young lady who works as a paid companion.
Mr Shaitana stays in the room where the four criminals play bridge and is murdered, stabbed with one of his own daggers.
Scotland Yard opens an investigation and Superintendent Battle handles it in his official capacity. However, he decides to involve the other three. Each has their own method to dig out the truth and of course, Hercule Poirot and his little grey cells is always ahead.
Agatha Christie draws a very clever plot, full of suspense and with original premises. Colonel Race is less involved in the investigation than the three others but Christie shows three different and yet complementary ways to search for the culprit.
Battle has his official position and the means that go with it: he’s all about clues and interviews.
Poirot takes the psychological route and asks left-field questions to understand the murderer’s mindset and deduct who did it.
Mrs Oliver uses her literary clout to befriend Miss Meredith’s friend and collect gossip about the past. I suspect that Mrs Oliver is a sly caricature of mystery fiction writers like Agatha Christie herself.
When I was in my teens, I read a lot of Christie books, all in French. It’s the second time I read a book with Poirot in the original. It’s a delight to read Poirot’s English and its French ring. Poirot never makes too many blatant grammar mistakes but here and there, his turn of phrase sounds French. Like here:
Je crois bien – a Grand Slam Vulnerable doubled. It causes the emotions, that! Me, I admit it, I have not the nerve to go for the slams. I content myself with the game.
It causes the emotions implies an improper use of the, something French native speakers struggle with when they learn how to speak English. When do we have to use nouns without articles? That’s a tricky question for us.
The I admit it is the literal translation of Je l’admets, which is often used in French but sounds weird in English. It’s the same about I content myself with the game, which stands for Je me contente de jouer and means I only care about the game. I’m not a native speaker myself but I don’t think one would use sentences that include it causes emotions, I admit it or I content myself with.
Here’s another example:
It is not my business – no. But, all the same, it offends my amour propre. I consider it an impertinence, you comprehend, for a murder to be committed under my very nose – by someone who mocks himself at my ability to solve it!
In this passage, you comprehend is the literal translation of vous comprenez which, in this context, means, you see. And someone who mocks himself comes from the French se moquer, which is reflexive. Poirot means either that someone makes fun of his ability to find out the murderer or wants to test it.
It amuses me to spot the things in the text. However, the language I certainly didn’t understand in this book is the one regarding bridge. I don’t know how to play bridge and I was totally lost in the explanations of the game, like in the first quote. I get the general meaning but not the subtelties that helped Poirot solve the crime.
Cards on the Table is an entertaining book, published in 1936 but it is timeless. Nothing from the outside world and its political affairs interferes in the characters’ lives. It is a good Beach and Publish Transport book. Un roman de gare, quoi!
War With the Newts by Karel Čapek – still relevant, alas.
War With the Newts by Karel Čapek (1936) French title: La guerre des salamandres. Translated by Claudia Ancelot.
War With the Newts by Karel Čapek is our Book Club choice for December.
Published in 1936, it’s a dystopian fiction where Čapek imagines a world where a huge population of newts grows and lives under the sea. It sounds bucolic said like this but War of the Newts is more a humorous but serious declaration against the pitfall of wild capitalism.
When the book opens, Captain Jan Van Toch is a sailor who does trade in the Indonesian waters and he barely makes ends meet. One day, he hears about Devil’s Island, a place that the locals avoid because it’s populated by devils. Van Toch goes there anyway and discovers that the so-called devils are actually salamanders. Better than that, if he trades knives with them, they can fish oysters and help him find pearls. Van Toch likes the newts and strikes an agreement with them: he provides knives to help them fend off their enemies, they fish oysters for his pearl business. Van Toch is like a character by André Malraux, an adventurer.
Van Toch goes into business with G.H. Bondy, a tradesman who accepts this weird pearls/salamander business. Van Toch handles the newts on the field, GH Bondy manages the pearl trade back in Europe. It’s mutually beneficial.
Progressively, the territory of the newts expands, humans discover that they can learn how to speak and how to use tools. Scientists study the salamanders and name the species Andrias Scheuchzeri. (Knowing Čapek, I wonder if there’s a pun under that name.) The salamander become underwater workers. They are not paid but fed and armed. They work well in hydraulic jobs and their workforce is much appreciated.
The first book closes with Van Toch’s death. As soon as he dies, his legacy is trampled by triumphant capitalism, ie GH Bondy. The newts are not profitable enough, there are too many pearls on the market and their price dropped. And a new company is created to develop the salamander business as docile and efficient underwater workers.
The second book shows the expansion of the salamander phenomenon. They reproduce quickly, their predator is at bay and the collaboration with the humans means that they work against knives, steel, food. They colonize the waters of the whole globe.
A whole economy develops on this trade. Through articles from newspapers, Čapek shows us how the salamander issue impacts a lot of aspects of human life. They are shows with performing salamanders and scientific studies. All aspects of their presence beside humans raises questions: do they have a soul? Is it slavery? Are they citizen? Can they be enrolled as soldiers? Which language should they learn? What rights should they have?
A lady organizes the first schools for newts in Nice. Unions say nothing because protesting against the development of the salamanders would jeopardize the human jobs linked to the businesses with the newt colonies.
Čapek imagines the reaction of several countries and I laughed out loud.
France is the first country to impose strict social laws in favor of the newts. When the newts start stealing apples in orchards in Normandy, the farmers protest, resulting in the destruction of a police station and a tax office. Demonstrations were organized in favor of the newts and their outcome was a strike in Brest and Marseille and confrontations with the police. So, my dear foreign readers, if you hear anything about events like this in contemporary France, don’t worry for us, it’s part of our folklore.
The reaction of the British government to the newts settling in their fishing waters was priceless. Any likeness to recent events is fortuitous and demonstrates how much Čapek knew of the various European mindsets.
Intellectuals try to warn the world, especially the Houllebecq look-alike prophet of doom and gloom, Mr. Wolf Meynert.
There is a lot to say about War With the Newts and it’s still so relevant that it’s almost scary.
Reading this today, you could interpret the path taken with the salamanders as a metaphor of our destruction of nature, the inexorable climate change and how we fail to change of direction because the economy prevails.
Čapek shows how small-scale operations with a balanced relationship –ie the partnership between Van Toch and the newts – become destructive when mass capitalism and politics come to the playing field.
The minutes of the board meeting of G.H. Bondy’s company are edifying. Anything to cut the costs and increase the profitability. Anything to distribute dividends to the shareholders. Anything to have the biggest colony of newts and be stronger than the neighboring country. The 21st century is not even original.
And then there’s the underlying question of slavery, racism and colonization.
And then you have Mr Povondra, the one with a conscience.
He used to be G.H. Bondy’s doorman and he made the decision to open the door to Van Toch and was thus instrumental to their meeting. This tiny decision had huge consequences.
Like the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb, like the inventor of the internet or the early programmer of Facebook, Mr Povondra wonders if he made the right decision that day. His action has results he couldn’t have predicted but he’s still regretful.
War With the Newts wasn’t always an easy read because of its form.
The first part is rather straightforward, the second part is a patchwork of articles and speeches coming from Mr Povondra’s collection of all things salamanders. The last part was the consequence of the two firsts. I struggled at the beginning of part II but it was worth continuing.
I am in awe of Čapek’s ability to dissect human patterns, denounce capitalism through this fable.
He shows a very astute analysis of the economy, its mechanism and of politics and geopolitics. He lives in a dangerous world at the time. The 1930s. The aftermath of WWI, the Great Depression and the rise of dictatorships. The War of the Newts is a warning against human propensity to choose a path of destruction, ignore relevant warnings and renounce to profits for the common wellbeing.
We’re doomed, guys.
As often, I’ve played the book cover game and downloaded covers in different languages: French, Czech, English, Russian, German, Spanish and Swedish. They are very different and don’t give the same idea of the book. In the French and Swedish editions, the salamanders seem harmless. The Swedish newts look like Casimir, from a children show. The German cover transforms the newts into Goldorak and on the Spanish one, the newts are really hostile. The others are more symbolic. Now, you need to read the book to see which publishers are closest to the book. 🙂
Three novellas by Turgenev
Three novellas by Ivan Turgenev
My November reading didn’t go according to plan, I didn’t have the energy to read Concrete by Bernhard or The Confusion of Young Törless by Musil. I’m still at this uncomfortable stage where reading glasses are too much and small prints are too difficult to read at night. And my copies of Concrete and The Confusion of Young Törless are in small prints, not to mention the fact that Bernhard decided to forego paragraphs. The pages of his book look like concrete walls of words. No participation in German Lit Month this year, then.
I’m doing better with Novellas in November. I even managed to post this in the right week!
I did manage to read three novellas by Ivan Turgenev, all included in one book. The first one is An Unhappy Girl (1869) translated by Constance Garnett, whose French title is L’abandonnée. It is translated by Louis Viardot, who knew the author but no Russian. You can find the English translation here on Project Gutenberg. I browsed through it, lots of French sentences in some passages. They were not in italic in my copy, as it’s customary to signal French words or sentences in the original.
The narrator of the story is Piotr Gavrilovitch and he was 18 in 1835 when he got acquainted with Suzanne Ivanovna through his friend Fustov. She was living with her stepfather and his family and Fustov was courting her. Her fate is sad as she was the illegitimate daughter of a country aristocrat who took care of her but never acknowledged her as his daughter, even privately. When he died, she became a pawn in her step-father’s game to wealth.
The second story is Yakov Pasynkov. (1855), whose French title is Jacques Passinkov. It’s translated by Xavier Marmier, a name I’d never heard of but according to Wikipedia, what a man!
In this story, three young men are in love with the same young lady, Sophie Zlotnitski and the story is told by one of them, years later. It is the sad story of unrequited love and secret love never revealed.
The last story is Andreï Kolosov (1844), translated into French by Ernest Jaubert, another translator I didn’t know of.
The narrator, Nicolas Alexandrovitch goes to the country with his friend Andrei Kolosov. They go to the Semenitch household, because Kolosov is courting their daughter Varia. The narrator is a sort of wingman, he has to entertain Varia’s father while his friend spends time with the young girl. But things don’t go as planned in this scenario…
The three stories have common points, they’re about love and friendship.
Suzanne spent her life in the pursuit of love, her father’s, Michel’s and Fustov’s. Love may be fickle and petter out. It can be a blaze and die down after the conquest is done. It can be a slow, constant and hidden fire. It can be worth dying for. In all cases, the girls’ happiness depends on the boys’ behavior. They are recipients of young love, bask in it only to have it pulled under their feet by a father, a jealous brother or an inconstant lover who falls out of love. Women seem to have deeper feelings than men, according to Turgenev.
The stories all feature young men in their youth and their friendship with comrades. Gavrilovitch and Fustov are good friends, like the narrator and Pasynkov or Nicolas Alexandrovitch and Kolosov. As such, they assist their friend in their attempt at wooing a girl. They are sorts of chaperones, allowing their friends to spend time with their lady. In each case, it backfires and the friend’s meddling make things worse. This friendship has different texture in each story. It’s skin deep between Gavrilovitch and Fustov. The narrator looks up to Pasynkov as a better version of himself and it’s almost a bromance between N. Alexandrovitch and Kolosov.
Flaubert considered Turgenev’s stories were masterpieces. I’m not a literary critic and read only for pleasure. I sure admired them but didn’t enjoy myself that much reading them. I can’t pinpoint why, though.
PS: When writing in English about Russian books read in French translation, names are a hurdle. They’re not spelled the same way in English and in French. For example, Piotr Gavrilovitch is Pierre Gavrilovitch in the French translation. I’ll never understand why they translate first names. Another example: Pasynkov is Passinkov in French.
West of Rome by John Fante – two novellas
West of Rome by John Fante (1986) French version in two books Mon chien Stupide et L’Orgie. Both translated by Brice Matthieussent.
Life is quite busy at the moment and I’m late: the TBW pile keeps increasing, mostly because I’m too tired after work to open my personal computer and face a screen again. Let’s not talk about all the interesting blog reviews that sit in my inbox, unread. Sorry, fellow book bloggers.
West of Rome by John Fante was our Book Club read for…ahem…September. (see before)
The good news about being so late is that I can now cheekily add it to my November in Novellas reading since West of Rome is actually composed of two novellas, My Dog Stupid and The Orgy.
For French readers who’d read this in translation, it’s published in two different books, Mon chien stupide and L’Orgie. Both are translated by Brice Matthieussent.
John Fante died in 1983, these two novellas were published posthumously.
West of Rome
In West of Rome, we’re in Point Dune, California, not far from Santa Barbara, end of the 1960s, early 1970s. The Vietnam war is not over, it gives us a timeframe. Henry writes scenarios for Hollywood and he’s currently unemployed. Henry is 55, he’s been married to Harriet for twenty-five years, they have four children, Dominic, Tina, Denny and Jamie. The youngest one is Jamie and he’s 19.
But she was very good, my Harriet, she had stuck it out with me for twenty-five years and given me three sons and a daughter, any one of whom, or indeed all four, I would have gladly exchanged for a new Porsche, or even an MG GT ’70.
This is Henry for you. He’s offensive the way Post Office by Bukowski is offensive. (Bukowski rediscovered Fante and was instrumental to the republishing of his books) He’s a questionable father figure and has the nerve to be disappointed in his children. Dominic wants to go to New York and be an actor but he’s stuck in California because he’s in the army reserves. Tina is in love with a surfer, Rich. Needless to say, Henry despises Rich. Denny is in college, relies on his mother to writer his literature papers and has a black girlfriend which is not acceptable for Henry. Jamie is the only one he tolerates. Henry is terribly rude to his wife, even if he loves her:
Backing the Porsche out of the garage I sensed the flat deadness of my cheek, the place where Harriet had not kissed me goodbye. For a quarter of a century the habit of a goodbye kiss had been part of our lives. Now I missed it the way a monk missed a bead in his rosary.
Henry is one of these insufferable persons who are loud, obnoxious, rude and volatile. You never know what he’s going to say. He’s got a weird view on life, it’s like his internal camera always watches scenes at a weird angle that screws up is assessment of a situation. He’s unemployed (and lazy), 55 and not dealing well with the children growing up. Harriet is the eternal peacemaker, the communication channel between the children and their father who can be an insensitive prick and extremely hurtful.
When Henry finds an Akita dog sprawled on his lawn, he takes him in. He calls him Stupid. In White Dog by Romain Gary, the dog was white because he was trained to attack black people and Gary discovered it after he took him in. Here, Henry discovers that Stupid humps male humans and especially Rich. Imagine Henry’s glee when Stupid molests him.
Stupid becomes the catalyst that makes the family explode. He’s as obnoxious as Henry and when Henry decides to keep him, the kids rebel but Henry doesn’t change his mind.
I knew why I wanted that dog. It was shamelessly clear, but I could not tell the boy. It would have embarrassed me. But I could tell myself and it did not matter. I was tired of defeat and failure. I hungered for victory. I was fifty-five and there were no victories in sight, nor even a battle. Even my enemies were no longer interested in combat. Stupid was victory, the books I had not written, the places I had not seen, the Maserati I had never owned, the women I hungered for, Danielle Darrieux and Gina Lollobrigida and Nadia Grey. He was triumph over ex-pants manufacturers who had slashed my screenplays until blood oozed. He was my dream of great offspring with fine minds in famous universities, scholars with rich gifts for the world.
Henry knows that the kids are growing up and that they will leave the nest soon. It starts with meal independence…
Otherwise it had become a do-it-yourself kitchen, everyone cooking to his own taste. It had to be that way because everyone wakened at a different hour and nobody could be depended upon to show up for dinner except Harriet and me.
…and end ups with kids moving out. Henry fears the empty nest syndrome, despite his tantrums against his kids.
I can’t help thinking that My Dog Stupid is partly autobiographical. Indeed, Henry, like Fante is a semi-successful screenwriter who loves golfing. Harriet, like Fante’s wife Joyce has money of her own and the patience of a saint. The Fantes had four children, three sons and a daughter. If this is what their home life was like, he must have been a difficult man to live with.
The Orgy
The Orgy is totally different from My Dog Stupid. We’re in Colorado, in 1925 and the Narrator is a lot like Arturo Bandini, the hero of Fante’s Bandini Quartet. The narrator is ten, his family is Italian, his father Nick is a bricklayer and his mother a stay-at-home mom and a fervent Catholic. If in West of Rome, Stupid was the family member who divided the family in two camps, in The Orgy, the bone of contention is the friendship between Nick and Franck Gagliano. (Something also present in Wait Until Spring, Bandini.)
His name was Frank Gagliano, and he did not believe in God. He was that most singular and startling craftsman of the building trade—a left-handed bricklayer. Like my father, Frank came from Torcella Peligna, a cliff-hugging town in the Abruzzi. Lean as a spider, he wore a leather cap and puttees the year around, and he was so bowlegged a dog could lope between his knees without touching them.
And Often, but not always, Frank was my father’s best friend. But he was always and without exception my mother’s mortal enemy.
The boy works along with his father as a waterboy, he carries water to the crew on building sites. Once, a worker quits after getting rich on the stock market and as a farewell gift, gives Nick the deeds to a mine concession. Frank and Nick start going there on the weekends to dig for gold. Once, the boy goes with them and sees his father through a new light.
In The Orgy, Fante takes us back into familiar grounds: Nick, the Italian bricklayer, non-religious, womanizer and good friends with another Italian atheist. The mother, Catholic and judgmental, sprinkling holy water in the house, hardworking but kind of a harpy too. And the three children, taken back and forth between the two extremes, loving both parents and having a hard time finding a middle ground between the two.
Fante is a talented writer, he has an eye for descriptions, a fondness for his characters who are not always likeable and a wonderful sense of humor. Here’s Henry going grocery shopping:
And so my day began, a thrill a minute in the romantic, exciting, creatively fulfilling life of a writer. First, the grocery list. Varoom! and I roar down the coast highway in my Porsche, seven miles to the Mayfair Market. Scree! I brake to a stop in the parking lot, leap from the car, give my white scarf a couple of twirls and zap! I enter the automatic doors. Pow! The lettuce, potatoes, chard, carrots. Swooshl The roast, chops, bacon, cheese! Wham! The cake, the cereal, the bread. Zonk! The detergent, the floor wax, the paper towels.
I never knew that the difference between a writer and me was the Porsche because for the rest, I can relate. 😊
Book Around the Corner 