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Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov – we have to read it
Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov (2018) translated by Boris Dralyuk. French title: Les abeilles grises.
Pashka’s garden looked out towards Horlivka, so he was one street closer to Donetsk than Sergeyich. Sergeyich’s garden faced in the other direction, towards Sloviansk; it sloped down to a field, which first dipped then rose up towards Zhdanivka.
I picked this quote in Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov because it struck me that I knew about Donetsk and Sloviansk and that many city names mentioned in the book are now familiar.
And only because these cities are theatres of war. I remember reading in one of Gary’s novels, I don’t remember which one, that in the West, we only learn geography through the news and when we know too much about a country’s geography, it’s not a good sign.
Grey Bees was published in 2018 and it refers to the war in the Donbas between Russian-backed separatists and government forces in eastern Ukraine. Russia had already annexed the Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Sergey Sergeyich and his nemesis Pashka Khmelenko are the two inhabitants left in Little Starhorodivka, a village in the grey zone in Donbass. The grey zone means that they live between the separatists’ positions and the Ukrainian ones. Shells fly over their heads regularly.
First, fathers bundled their wives and children off to safety, wherever they had relatives: Russia, Odessa, Mykolayiv. Then the fathers themselves left, some becoming “separatists”, others refugees. The last to be taken away were the old men and women. They were dragged off weeping and cursing. The noise was awful.
This is how they became the last men living in their village and this short paragraph says all about the drama of war for folks like you and me. One day you live your life and the next, you’re packing what you can and leaving.
Sergey is a retired mine safety inspector and beekeeper extraordinaire. He’s 49, his wife left him a few years ago, taking their only daughter with her to Vinnytsia, in the west of the country.
When the book opens, it’s winter and we follow Sergey’s daily life, a quotidian of survival. They have been without power for three years now, which means heating one or two rooms of the house with the wood stove, using it to cook as well and rely on candlelight. Sergey checks on his bees every day, they are hibernating during the winter, so nothing much happens on that side.
This first part shows a gentle man who likes his village, a pacific soul who cares about his bees, someone who wants to stay out of the conflict. However, contrary to Pashka, he leans towards the Ukrainian forces.
Spring arrives and he realizes there is not enough flowers for his bees to gather nectar and pollen. If he wants them to produce honey and survive, he has to take his hives somewhere else. Therefore he loads them in his Lada, packs his camping gear and his icon of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker and goes on the road to find a suitable place to put his hives and gather honey.
His travels will take him to a village on the east of the Donetsk district and next to occupied Crimea. He will show us how his compatriots see him as a refugee from Donbass and that for them, war doesn’t mean hearing shells over your head but seeing your husband or son join the army and maybe get killed.
When he enters the Crimea region, the Russians have set up a border between the annexed Crimea and Ukraine. Crossing this border is a risky endeavor. Sergey intends to find a fellow beekeeper, a Tatar he met in a beekeeper convention. His stay in occupied Crimea shows the Russian repression towards Tatars and the brainwashing they are doing to the Orthodox population. See here the discussion between Sergey and a Russian inhabitant of Crimea:
“Well, this is their land,” the beekeeper offered timidly. “The hell it is!” the woman said indignantly, but without malice. “This land’s been Russian Orthodox since time immemorial! Russians brought Orthodoxy from Turkey, brought it to Chersonesus, back before there were any Muslims. It was later that the Turks sent in the Tatars, along with their Islam. When Putin was here, he told the whole story – this is sacred Russian land.” “Well, I haven’t looked into the history,” Sergeyich shrugged. “Who knows what happened?” “What happened is what Putin says happened,” she insisted. “Putin doesn’t lie.”
Hmm.
Sergey travels around in these troubled areas, carrying his innocence on his sleeve. Grey Bees reminded me of Candide. His travels don’t seem totally realistic and yet, they are rooted in their time. Sergey navigates in these desolate times with a one-track mind, his bees. His moto is not “We must cultivate our garden” but “We must take care of our bees.” Why grey bees? They come from the grey zone, that’s for sure and there’s an explanation by the end of the book but won’t spoil anyone’s reading.
I liked Sergey and his obstinacy to make honey and keep his bees alive. Kurkov takes a candid character and asks all the difficult questions. He shows the intricacies of the local politics, the mixed Ukrainian-Russian culture of the area, the importance of religion and the power of religious leaders, Orthodox and Muslim. It is all here, in this exchange between a Ukrainian soldier and Sergey:
Petro shook his head. “And what’s your name?” “Me? Sergey Sergeyich – you can call me Sergeyich. So it’s probably Peter, not Petro.” “No, it’s Petro. Says so in my passport.” “Well, my passport says I’m Serhiy Serhiyovych – but I say I’m Sergey Sergeyich. That’s the difference.”
His name is in Ukrainian on his passport and he uses the Russian form. The languages are intertwined in him, probably as they are in the author’s psyche.
I read Grey Bees in February, the anniversary of the war in Ukraine. I don’t want to write the “first anniversary” because that means others are to come but I’m afraid we’re headed that way. The first part was the hardest to read because it delved into the consequences of war for Sergey. Living with a different kind of silence and having fear settling their ugly quarters in his soul.
Fear is an invisible thing, subtle and variable, like a virus or bacterium. It can be inhaled with a breath of air, or accidentally imbibed with a sip of water or vodka, or come in through your ears – and you can certainly catch it with your eyes, so badly that its image will remain in your pupils even after the fear itself has disappeared.
It was very poignant and hard to read sometimes but my discomfort is nothing compared to what the real Sergeys are living.
Grey Bees left me with a question: how could we be so blind and not see this war coming?
_______________________
PS: Boris Dralyuk won Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize for his translation of Grey Bees. Congratulations to him for a well-deserved award, his translation is outstanding.
I also read Death and the Penguin and my billet is here. I have The Good Angel of Death on the shelf.
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson – raw sensitivity
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson (2018) Original French title: “Arrête avec tes mensonges” English translation by Molly Ringwald.
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson is an autobiographical novel about his first teenage grand love, Thomas Andrieu, the one that structured his being for the future, whether he wanted it or not. This remained a secret until Philippe meets Lucas, Thomas’s son. Lie With Me tells Philippe and Thomas’s love story, makes it real and alive on paper.
We’re in 1984, in Barbezieux, rural France and Philippe is 17. He’s a senior in high school, in Terminale C., the Maths and Physics major, considered as the elite student track. He has a quiet family life. He knows he’s gay, he’s not open about his sexual orientation but he’s at peace with himself.
Philippe has a major crush on Thomas, who is in Terminale D. They don’t run in the same circles, they don’t talk to each other and Thomas is handsome and always surrounded by girls. In other words, Thomas doesn’t seem to be into boys.
Philippe lives with his unrequited crush until Thomas makes a move.
Their relationship is incandescent, it ignites from nothing and burns high but must remain a secret. Thomas imposes it, Philippe abides by it. They meet in hidden places until they use Philippe’s room when his parents are at work. They don’t talk much at the beginning but open up to each other. Thomas knows from the start that their relationship has an expiry date. Philippe doesn’t.
Thomas is a farmer’s only son. He feels tied up to the land, destined to take over the farm. He’s a good student too but he nixes his rights at a higher education. He feels that he needs to stay and he won’t change his mind. At least, that’s what Philippe perceives. Thomas hasn’t come to terms with his homosexuality. He can’t.
When high school graduation happens and they are separated for the holidays, Thomas knows he will remain in Spain with his mother’s family while Philippe expects him to come home and is crushed by the pain he feels when he understands he won’t see Thomas anymore.
| A la rentrée de septembre, je quitte Barbezieux. Je deviens pensionnaire au lycée Michel-de-Montaigne à Bordeaux. J’intègre une prépa HEC. Je débute une nouvelle vie. Celle qu’on a choisie pour moi, je me plie à l’ambition qu’on nourrit pour moi, j’emprunte la voie qu’on m’a tracée. Je rentre dans le rang. J’efface Thomas Andrieu. | At the beginning of September, I leave Barbezieux. I go to college at the Lycée Michel-de-Montaigne in Bordeaux, working toward a graduate degree in business. I begin a new life, the one that was chosen for me, bowing to the hope and ambition that have been placed in me. I erase Thomas Andrieu. (*) |
Besson describe their doomed love story with a perfect mix of openness and reserve. He looks at his younger self with the lucidity and indulgence of the adult. He writes about young love and raw desire the way Marguerite Duras writes about it in The Lover. Hidden love, impossible love and no feelings put into words. Feelings are told with their bodies. Besson blends immodest lovemaking and modest sensitivity and connects his reader with the pure beauty of his first love and the devastation it left in his soul when it ended.
Besson perfectly gives back the early 1980s in France. The Jean-Jacques Goldman posters on the walls in Philippe’s room. The clothes. The atmosphere at the high school and at home. His father is a primary school teacher, which gives Philippe the status of the teacher’s son and academic success is important at home. School is a social ladder.
Although I’m several years younger than Besson, we still have some things in common. A shared love for Veiller tard by Jean-Jacques Goldman. Same school track in high school and after. Same kind of family background. I bet he knows the scent of the spirit duplicator that all teachers used at home at that time. Ask about it to any teacher’s child born in the 1960s-1970s and they’ll know.
These years are the end of innocence, before AIDS. When I was Philippe’s age in the book, the AIDS epidemic was a major topic. The only good thing about AIDS is that it put homosexuality in the open. In the early 1990s, it gave us Philadelphia and showed a couple of gay men living normal lives and not Cages aux Folles lives. In France, we were reading To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life by Hervé Guibert and watching Les Nuits fauves by Cyril Collard. 10/18 published The San Francisco Chronicles by Armistead Maupin. Philippe Djian had gay characters in Maudit Manège. Both were huge successes.
But before AIDS became a hot topic, during Philippe and Thomas’s years, no one talked about homosexuality. After reading this book, I wonder who were the Philippe and Thomas in my school. Statistically, they exist and I’m sorry that they had to hide.
The English title of Besson’s novella has a double meaning: “tell lies with me” and “lie with me in bed” and both meanings are relevant. The French title is Arrête avec tes mensonges, which means Stop with your lies. Besson’s mother used to tell him that when he was inventing stories about the people around him. But it’s also addressed to Thomas who wouldn’t stop lying to others and to himself.
Thomas didn’t have the tools to become his authentic self. It’s a personal thing and a class thing. In the paragraph quoted before, the little sentence J’intègre une prépa HEC packs a lot for a French reader or at least for me. It emphasizes the difference between Philippe and Thomas. Philippe will leave home to go to prep school, then will move out of the region to go to a business school and move up the social ladder. Thomas feels that he needs to take over his parents’ farm, not out of love for farming but out of duty. There’s nothing more tying-to one-place than farming.
Lie With Me is a heart-wrenching story of doomed young love and of two men who suffered all their lives about it. One never recovered of being abandoned and not knowing whether he was loved, the other never overcoming his fear of people’s reactions to his sexual orientation.
To me, this novella goes with The Lover by Marguerite Duras and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
The Lover was published in 1984, the very same year Philippe and Thomas relationship happened. Like Lie With Me, it’s an autobiographical novella about a hidden love between teenage Marguerite Duras and a rich Chinese man. It’s about raw desire, the inexplicable force of attraction that draws to each other two people from very different backgrounds and who brave social conventions to be together.
The Lover has a detached narrator/author, a girl who puts up mental barriers and doesn’t want to voice her love for this Chinese man because it’s taboo, because it’s doomed and because the idea of its ending hurts too much.
In The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer condemns himself to live someone else’s life because he knows his limits. He won’t change and he’s not strong enough to live through the social and family disgrace that will come with marrying Ellen Olenska. Thomas reminded me of Newland: he knows his limits too and he’s the one who makes the difficult decision.
It is a truly beautiful novella, made into an excellent film by Olivier Peyon even if the storytelling varies from the book. Besson worked on the screenplay, so, he approves of the changes. Guillaume De Tonquédec plays an incredible Philippe Besson. He looks like him it’s confusing.
I read the book and watched the film the day after. Even if the film is good, nothing compares to literature when it comes to conveying subtle details about people’s souls.
Many thanks to Kim who took the time to find the English translation of the paragraph quoted before. I wondered how the translator had fared with the “prépa HEC” phrase. She remembered to look for it when she was at the library and you’ve got to love the international book community for having an Australian in Perth checking out a paragraph for another reader in France. Book lovers rock! Kim’s review is here , have a look at it.
Jacqui also reviewed it here.
Other billets about books by Philippe Besson:
The Morality of Senses by Vicomte de Mirabeau – a libertine novel
The Morality of Senses by Vicomte de Mirabeau (1781) Original French title: La Morale des sens.
The Morality of Senses is a libertine book by the Vicomte de Mirabeau (1754-1792) who is the younger brother of Mirabeau, a figure of the French Revolution. According to his bio on Wikipedia, I’m not sure I would have liked to meet the man. It is published by Libretto, a French independent publisher and this is my last contribution to Karen’s and Lizzy’s official #ReadIndies and to Marina Sofia’s unofficial French February.
In this novel published in London to avoid censorship, Mirabeau wrote a coming of age novel that relates the love escapades of an adolescent. My copy also includes the original illustration of the book, all of couples in various states of undress.
Basically, our narrator is horny all day long and chases after everything with a skirt. At the beginning of the book, he’s staying at a friend’s house. He’s pining after another guest, the young Eglé who is just out of convent but sleeps with the hostess of the house and has fun with the servant Julie.
One could say, as it is written on the back page of my copy, that his attitude shows some acquiescence to the ideas of equality between people promoted by this century of the Enlightenment. He doesn’t make any difference between a servant and her mistress. That’s one way to view it. I’m just seeing him as a shameless womanizer, which is fine by me as he doesn’t make any false promise to any of these ladies.
Some little piques here and there prove that he is a man of his century: Voltaire and Rousseau are mentioned, as well as the court and the power of literary salons.
What shocked me the most in this novel is the narrator’s attitude towards women. They are fortresses to be conquered and he uses military words for that. He explains that when they say no, it’s more to save appearances and tell themselves that they have resisted to temptation than anything else. It never comes to his mind that “no” might actually say “no”.
I know we mustn’t judge past behaviors according to today’s standards. I’m not judging the character or the author, I’m just pointing out where we come from and why we still have issues with women consent. He’s genuinely convinced that their protest is just for the sake of propriety and nothing else. This “no means yes” is a solid and old wall of belief that we are still fighting against. Not all the time, but often enough.
It’s a good reminder of our misogynistic roots and that we mustn’t give up the fight. Otherwise, La Morale des sens is an interesting testimony of the libertine world before the French Revolution.
I have no idea whether La Morale des sens has been translated into English or not. I imagine that, at some point, it must have been.
Three Crimes Is a Charm #2 : French crime fiction for #ReadIndies and French February
This month is #ReadIndies, where we read books published by independent publishers. It’s hosted by Karen and Lizzy. Marina Sofia decided to do a #FrenchFebruary for herself and I decided to join her and combine the two events.
So here we are with three French crime fiction books published by independent publishers (Les Arènes, Les éditions du Rouergue and Zulma)
Let’s start with…
Mamie Luger by Benoît Philippon. (2018) Not available in English. Publisher: Les Arènes, collection Equinox.
I came upon this book at Quais du Polar and its English title could be Nana Luger.
Berthe Gavignol, born in 1914 in a village in Cantal, France is the Mamie Luger of the book. Mamie, because she’s 102 when she greets the French police with her rifle and Luger because she owns a Luger gun acquired during the German occupation in WWII.
She’s taken to detention for shooting her neighbor and the police inspector André Ventura is in for a ride when she starts telling her life story.
Mamie Luger is a serial killer, out of circumstances. Her bad choice in men makes her a victim of domestic violence and she solves the problem with her Luger and her inhouse graveyard in her basement.
The author tells this incredible story on a tone laced with humor as a relationship builds between a bewildered Ventura and his new prison ward. It’s fun but a bit too long sometimes, less husbands wouldn’t have hurt.
Still, it’s a picture of what too many women have to endure and a take on rural life in France.
To read for fun and Marina Sofia’s thoughts on this one are here. Then, my February crime fiction journey led me to…
Par les rafales by Valentine Imhof (2018) Not available in English. Publisher: Rouergue noir.
It came as a blind book date as I asked the libraire of Un Petit Noir to pick books for me. This deadly road-movie took me from Lorraine, to Belgium, Louisiana and Canada. How?
Alex is a free-lance music journalist. When the book opens, she’s in a hotel room in Nancy after a music festival. She’s with a man, for a one-night-stand when their hookup spooks her and she kills her companion. Savagely.
Then she’s back to Metz, where she has her base camp and her lover, Anton. Alex is haunted, her skin is tattooed with excerpts from various works of literature. Her tattoo artist is Bernd, in Ghent, Belgium. He suggested to hide under ink all the marks of torture that covered her body. And they we learn how Alex got them and why she feels tracked like wildlife during a hunting party.
Each chapter of the book starts with an unreadable text, an excerpt of Alex’s tattoos. Par les rafales is Alex’s highspeed run race against the police, her imaginary hunters and her very real internal demons born with the assault she was victim of.
The book could have been written by Virginie Despentes, the one from Apocalypse Baby. Feminist. Full of literary and rock and blues references. (The playlist is at the end of the book and I’ll put in on Spotify when I have time). Crude with a strong female protagonist.
An unusual book, well-written, violent and haunting. It needs a translator.
After all the cold and rain of Par les rafales, I went to the French countryside, in the Drôme department, between Lyon and Provence for a wonderful book by Pascal Garnier.
Low Heights by Pascal Garnier (2003) Original French title: Les Hauts du Bas. Publisher: Zulma
Another book with a fiery old person. Edouard Lavenant is an old curmudgeon, forced to retire to a family property in Drôme Provençale, near Rémuzat after he had a bad stroke. He has a nurse and housekeeper, Thérèse, that he likes to torture. He’s as gracious a character by Thomas Bernhard. You see the drift.
He’s like a petulant child who’s sulking because he had to change his life and at the beginning of the book, we see how Thérèse manages to get him out of his shell with her unwavering kindness. It sounds all bucolic and the descriptions of the Drôme natural landscapes are gorgeous. It seems to go into the fluffy direction of the old man mollified by his housekeeper and learning to enjoy life again and make peace with his past.
Only it’s not a book by Elizabeth Gilbert, it’s a book by Pascal Garnier. Edouard doesn’t get out of his shell; he gets out of his personal Pandora box and all hell breaks loose, from Rémuzat, to Lyon and to Switzerland.
This is perfect noir literature, in less than 200 pages. Extraordinary sense of place with vibrant descriptions of the region that will make you travel to the Drôme Provençale area. A sense of humor that made me chuckle time and again. A storyline built like a well-oiled machine, like Hot Spot by Charles Williams or a roman dur by Simenon. There’s also a scene with snails that reminded me of the short-story The Snail-Watcher by Patricia Highsmith. The crime fiction gods are all approving of Low Heights.
Both Garnier and Tavernier are dead now but I could see them team up and make Low Heights into a magnificent film. We still have Jacques Audiard and it’s right up his alley. So, fingers crossed, eh?
Lucky you, out of the three French books I read for French February and Read Indies, this is the only one available in English, thanks to the indie publisher, Gallic Books and Melanie Florence who translated it. See also Marina Sofia’s take on it for Crime Fiction Lover and rush for it.
Born Content in Oraibi by Bérengère Cournut
Born content in Oraibi by Bérengère Cournut (2017) Original French title: Née contente à Oraibi. Not available in English.
Have you ever read a book and find yourself unable to know what to think about it? That’s how I felt about Née contente à Oraibi by Bérengère Cournut when I finished it.
Cournut is a French editor and writer born in 1979. That’s all I know about her, except that she wrote several books and spent some time among the Hopis.
Oraibi is a Hopi village in Navajo County, Arizona. There’s no precise timeline but I’m thinking we’re at the turning of the 20th century. At least, if I consider the photos included at the end of the book.
It’s a coming-of-age novel, a first-person narrative with Tayatitaawa’s voice. She’s “the one who salutes the Sun with a grin”, or in other words, the one who was born content in Oraibi. Tayatitaawa tells her childhood and her adolescence, describes her house, her family and her quotidian. She was close to her father and lost him at a young age. He wasn’t a usual Hopi man but he was well-respected in their community. His death carved a hole in her soul, one she had trouble healing to feel whole again. It’s a lovely book, written in a poetic tone and with a strong sense of place.
This book has the soothing quality of a folk tale. It’s full of Hopi customs and cosmology but they don’t come as a statement. They are in the book, described but not too much. They belong to the narrative because they belong to Tayatitaawa’s life and education. The lack of in-depth explanations about rites gives weigh and life to Tayatitaawa’s voice. If she’s a Hopi telling her life to other Hopis, she won’t explain things that are obvious to them. She will tell important facts that belong to oral transmission like the family bonds between clans, clans’ names and roles in the village.
I don’t know if what Bérengère Cournut writes about Hopi customs is accurate. I don’t care. She doesn’t pretend to write a scientific book. Née contente à Oraibi feels like the child of a writer who made a meaningful trip and absorbed her surroundings. She connected with other human beings from another culture and recognized them as other human beings. Nothing else. No awe for their culture. No judgment. No comparison. Her book is her way to share what she captured of Oraibi. She could have written a reportage. She wrote a novel to pass on what she felt about the place, its wilderness and its inhabitants.
We could debate upon the rightfulness of a French author writing a coming-of-age novel with a Hopi character in such a traditional setting. I’m a firm believer that authors may write whatever they want. Even if that means more clichéd books about Provence and mythical French lovers in postcard Paris. It’ll be the role of critics and readers to cull the best ones and point out flagrant inconsistencies or biased tones of the others. To me, there is no alternative. Discussion and debates are the only options. Otherwise, it’s like setting up a book police aka censorship.
If we say that Bérengère Cournut can’t write about Hopis because she’s French and not Hopi, where does it stop? An American historian cannot write about the French Revolution because he’s not French even if he has studied the period a lot more than any average Frenchman?
We’re already on an ice-covered slippery slope as examples keep piling up. A white poetess cannot translate a black poetess because she’s not black. Agatha Christie now wrote And Then They Were None instead of Ten Little Niggers. I call it laziness: it’s easier to change the book title than to take time to educate people and help them see this title as a symbol of its time and talk about slavery and colonization. Let’s erase it, it’s easier and we’ll all forget that people thought it was normal to use the N word.
And I heard that a new cleaned-up version of Roald Dahl’s book is on the way, that Anthony Horowitz was asked to delete the word scalpel from his book to spare Native Americans’ sensitivity as the word is close to scalp. What’s next? LGBT associations asking to rename Pride and Prejudice into a neutral Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam because the words pride and prejudice mean something specific to them?
We are living in an asinine world where there is no space left for nuance and discussion. Marketing gurus target individuals and tailor goods and services to their customers’ liking, leading them to expect that everything has to bend and accommodate to their tastes and way of life. Add the built-in bias of social networks: the contents they push to their users is based on what they liked before and keep them in their community, not exposing them to other ways of thinking and the ability to block content you don’t want to see seals the deal. All this keeps people in their own mental juice and doesn’t leave a lot opportunities to accidentally broaden one’s point of view.
These people who push to rewrite Roald Dahl want everyone’s specificities and sensitivities taken into account. It’s not possible to have a one fits all for everything. Or everything becomes bland because the middle ground on which everyone agrees upon is tasteless. Yes, I understand that Under the Volcano may not be a good book to a recovering alcoholic. The solution is not to change tequila into water in Lowry’s book. It is for readers to use their brain and make an educated decision about the books they read.
What does all this have to do with Née contente à Oraibi? Everything. I closed the book, puzzled because I fleetingly questioned her right to write it. This way of thinking has wormed its way into my brain in spite of me and I don’t like it one bit. Writing about Née contente à Oraibi helped me put things into perspective.
Bérengère Cournut wrote a beautiful book set in a place, time and culture totally foreign to her upbringing. She learnt enough about Hopi customs to write a plausible book and she extracted the essence of her trip. She captured the universal: after all, Tayatitaawa is just a girl who is growing up, who misses her father terribly after his untimely death, who tries to bond with her brother, who wants to understand where she comes from and what she’ll do with her life. No need to be French or Hopi for that. Only to be human.
PS: This book is published by Le Tripode, an independent French publisher. Its editorial line is to consider any book of any genre as long as its good literature. The books are beautiful too. The cover of Née Contente à Oraibi is a creation by Juliette Maroni and it’s a perfect fit for the book. I received it through my Kube subscription and the libraire who chose it for me did well.
This is one of my contributions to Karen’s and Lizzy’s official #ReadIndies and to Marina Sofia’s unofficial French February.
The Waltz of Trees and Sky by Jean-Michel Guenassia – Van Gogh’s days in Auvers-sur-Oise
The Waltz of Trees and Sky by Jean-Michel Guenassia. (2016) Original French title: La valse des arbres et du ciel.
The Waltz of Trees and Sky by Jean-Michel Guenassia was our Book Club choice for January. I’m writing this billet about a year after I got this book during a splendid afternoon of visiting bookstores, indulging in book buying and settling in a beautiful historical café in downtown Lyon.
The Waltz of Trees and Sky is a historical novel in which Marguerite Gachet relates the last months of Van Gogh’s life. She was 21 when Van Gogh arrived in Auvers-sur-Oise, to meet his new physician and lover of the arts, Dr Gachet. He spent his last months there from May to July 29th, the day he died and painted around 70 pictures in three months.
Marguerite was the doctor’s daughter. She was 21 at the time, an amateur painter and in his historical fiction, Guenassia imagines that, now that she’s eighty-years old, she’ll write about her love story with Van Gogh and explain that he didn’t commit suicide.
In his afterword, Guenassia lists his sources and thanks Benoît Landais, a renowned Van Gogh specialist for his help. He also explains that there are doubts about Van Gogh’s death but there is no proof that it wasn’t a suicide. Several rumors report a relationship between Marguerite and Vincent but she didn’t say anything before she died and there is no actual proof.
Now that this in the open, what did I think about Guenassia’s book? First of all, I read it easily, it was really pleasurable.
The descriptions of Auvers-sur-Oise, the beautiful weather of that late spring and summer are true-to-life. I felt I was leaving my cold January behind and that I was walking around in the fields with Van Gogh, his canvas, paint tubes and easel. It’s breathtaking, like entering into a Van Gogh’s painting and seeing the countryside with his eyes.
The picture of Dr Gachet is terrible. I saw him as a patron of the arts and a let’s say, a good man. According to Guenassia, he sounds like a selfish brute, ready to manipulate his children through money and power play. He saw helping his painter friends as an investment.
Guenassia portrays Marguerite as a strong-willed and intelligent young lady. She doesn’t want to conform. She passed her baccalauréat – something new for a woman – and wanted to push further her studies but her father didn’t want her to. She wanted to be an artist and was working hard on her painting. She saw the beauty, the novelty and the vibrancy of Van Gogh’s paintings when her contemporaries didn’t. Van Gogh painted her at least once, at the piano.
However, my more analytical mind detected flaws in the novel.
I wasn’t quite on board with his Marguerite Gachet. She seemed like a die-hard feminist, imprisoned by social proprieties and trying to beak free. A sort of Camille Claudel. I’m not sure in real life, she had all the freedom to walk around on her own that she has in the book. Bourgeois conventions and all that. I thoughts that chaperones were inevitable.
I also thought that the tone of the book wasn’t consistent from the beginning to the end.
Marguerite sounded more like a young woman writing her diary than an old woman reminiscing about a happy, tragic and life-changing moment of her existence. It lacked the hindsight and reflective thoughts that come with remembrance. Her language was also too modern, not consistent with an 1890 young woman or a 1949 old lady. I expected more of a Céleste Albaret manner of speech than what Guenassia wrote.
The book is peppered with vignettes about France and Paris at the time. I didn’t understand their purpose. They broke the flow of my reading and weren’t always relevant with what Marguerite was saying. If it was to make the reader feel the atmosphere of the time, then they could have been at the head of each chapter and not in the middle of the text.
And then, there’s the romance vibe; not quite to my liking even if I’m usually a good sport for that kind of development.
But in the end, these flaws weren’t important enough to spoil the pleasure I had reading about Van Gogh’s painting, about his hot, dry and productive summer in Auvers. The book immersed me in the painting, in the double vision of the canvas and the scenery he was watching.
The idea of his death being an accident instead of a suicide made me sad because of all the paintings he still had in him. He was only 37. And then I noticed that his brother Theo who supported him financially and emotionally died of syphilis 6 months after Vincent. Would he have fared well and survived without his brother? In the end, maybe things are better this way and, in any case, he left us with gorgeous paintings that go straight to your soul.
Now, I want to go to Auvers in the summer and do the Van Gogh trail. And hop on a train to Amsterdam to visit the upcoming exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum “Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months” and see the Vermeer exhibition that is opening soon.
La valse des arbres et du ciel isn’t available in English but according to Goodreads, you can read it in French, Greek, Italian, Czech, Arabic and Russian.
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata – highly recommended
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (1948) French title: Pays de neige. Translated by Bunkichi Fujimori.
Sometimes people ask whether you’d buy a book for its cover. My answer is always yes and Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata is the perfect example of it. I was drawn to the cover, a part of a 1858 painting by Hiroshige entitled Yugasan in Bizan Province. (see below: isn’t it beautiful?)
Snow Country is the improbable love story between Shimamura, a dilletante from Tokyo and Komako, a young geisha from a small watering town in the mountains. (Kawabata doesn’t mention the town’s name in the novel but it’s Yuzawa, in the Niigata prefecture.)
Shimamura is married, has children and comes from old money. He writes articles about ballet and he became obsessed with Western dancing after he got tired of Japanese traditional dances. He’s a dilletante without an actual profession. Shimamura enjoys hiking retreats in the mountains to refuel. This is how he landed in this town, tired but happy and re-energized after a week-long hike.
He’s staying at an inn and asks for a geisha. This will be his first encounter with Komako, who’s not a geisha at the time. Something moves him in her beauty and her attitude.
The second time he comes back is actually the opening scene of the novel. He’s looking forward to seeing Komako again. He’s on the train on his way to the watering town and he observes a young woman taking care of her sick companion in their train carriage. He watches their reflection on the train’s window and it allows him to stare at them without being impolite. They hop off the train at the same station as him and he’ll see them later.
He reconnects with Komako, who is now a geisha. She attaches herself to him, and they will spend a lot of time together. Her attitude is not in accordance with the codes of her profession and they try to stay under the town’s radars.
The third time he comes will be the last. Komako is now too attached to him for her own good and their relationship can go nowhere. Shimamura likes her but he’s not in love with her and anyway, he’s married. It’s time to end it.
The story is a traditional love story doomed from the start and details from Komako’s life are revealed in the course of the story. The baseline is not new but the novel is a masterpiece nonetheless, all due to the writing.
The first chapter when Shimamura looks at the young people in the train’s window is truly beautiful. It’s cinematographic and very Proust-like. I can’t help thinking about the scenes on the train in Normandy during the Narrator’s stays in Balbec. Shimamura is entranced by the young girl’s beauty.
The descriptions of the landscapes are poetic and the interaction between the surrounding nature and Shimamura’s moods reminded me of Nature Writing. He comes to this mountain town once in May and spring is in full swing, once in December and it snows and once in the Fall. These three different moments of the year bring a different atmosphere to the town and play on Shimamura’s state of mind.
So, the beauty of the painting on the book cover reflects the beauty of Kawabata’s descriptions. Snow Country also captures a side of a disappearing Japan, as the country turns to Western modernity.
Shimamura lives in Tokyo and is interested in Western culture. After all, he writes about ballet and translates Alain and Paul Valéry. His trips to the mountains are a way to reconnect with himself and with traditional Japan. The old world, before the country opened to the West, still lingers in this remote village. It’s disappearing fast and Komako herself has spent time in Tokyo for her apprenticeship. She’s not a country pumpkin who has never left her hometown. Shimamura and Komako have a connection because he’s eager to go back to traditional Japan and she knows his world too. They meet halfway.
I really don’t know much about Japanese customs and sometimes I think I should read a book like Japanese customs for dummies before diving deeper into Japanese literature. So, curious as I am, I truly enjoyed reading about the geisha world and its organization, the villagers’ life and other customs like traditional dances, the making of Ojiya-chijimi fabric, the way women dress, bath and do their hair. It’s part of Shimamura’s attraction to the place and it’s part of my attraction to Kawabata’s book.
Snow Country is my second Kawabata after Kyôto and I’m afraid I’ve no recollection of Kyôto except that I liked it alright. I should reread it now that I’m older. Snow Country is a classic of Japanese literature and it is understandable as the story is universal and the style stunning.
This is my participation to Doce Bellezza’s Japanese Literature Challenge.
Three crimes is a charm : England in the Middle Ages, high tech in Virginia and a haunting past in Finland.
Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin (2007) French title: La confidente des morts. Translated by Vincent Hugon.
This is the first instalment of a series by Ariana Franklin featuring the female doctor, Adelia Aguila. We’re in Cambridge, in 1171, during the reign of King Henry II of England. Adelia came from Sicily with Simon of Naples and Mansur.
They were sent by their king upon Henry II’s request. Children have been murdered in Cambridge and the local population accuses the Jews of the crime. They have been staying in a castle for months now and as valuable tax payers, Henry II wants them back to their occupations.
Adelia is an oddity for 12th century England: she’s a woman, a doctor and “mistress of the art of death”, in other word, the ancestor of medical examiners.
The book is a criminal investigation, a cool description of life in Cambridge at the time. I’m not sure that everything is totally accurate or that the characters are historically plausible but I didn’t care. I’m no historian, the main details were correct and I had a great time following this ad hoc team of investigators while they looked for the perpetrator of these gory murders.
Recommended to spend a good afternoon on the couch, with a blanket during a cold winter Sunday or lying on a towel on the beach during a hot summer day.
Livid by Patricia Cornwell (2022) Not available in French. Yet.
My daughter raised to the challenge of getting me a book for Christmas and the poor child sweated bullets and spent a lot of time in a bookstore wondering what to buy to her bookworm of a mother.
I hadn’t read anything by Cornwell in 25 years, I think. I used to read her, Mary Higgins Clark and Elizabeth George in my teens and twenties. Then I got tired of them, even if Elizabeth George is the best writer of the three. What Came Before He Shot Her is truly remarkable. But back to Cornwell.
Kay Scarpetta is back in Alexandria, Virginia, as the chief of medical examiners and let’s say that CSI techniques have progressed since Adelia’s time in Cambridge.
The book opens with an excellent trial scene where Scarpetta is testifying and put under unfair pressure by the Commonweath’s Attorney while the judge doesn’t intervene. The said judge is Annie Chilton, her college friend and by the end of the day, Scarpetta learns that the judge’s sister Rachael has been murdered and that there was an attempted terrorist attack against the president of the USA.
Scarpetta goes on the crime scene and the CIA and FBI have already invested the place as the victim worked for the CIA. Scarpetta quickly understands that Rachael was killed by a microwave gun, a very rare and specific weapon. Later, another body is discovered in the neighborhood.
Follows a family investigation since Scarpetta does the autopsy, her niece is on the case as an FBI agent and so is her husband Benton, as a secret services agent. What a family, eh?
It’s good entertainment even if the pace of the book is a bit weird at times. The description of Scarpetta’s work at the morgue seemed to drag on while the denouement was rushed and not detailed enough. The characters sounded a bit formulaic and I wasn’t too interested in the office politics and antagonism.
It was published in October 2022 and I couldn’t help noticing that the war in Ukraine was already mentioned in the book. Eight months after it started it’s already in a published book. There was no time wasted in editing and polishing this book before its publication, it seems.
Anyway, this is another Beach & Public Transport book, one you read as you watch a CSI episode on TV.
The Oath by Arttu Tuominen (2018). Not available in English. French title: Le serment. Translated by Anne Colin du Terrail.
The Oath is truly the best book of the three. We’re in Pori, Finland in 2018. Jari Paloviita is the interim head of the local police and Rami Nieminen is murdered by Antti Mielonen during a party in a cabin in the woods. The victim was stabbed in the back and Antti ran out of the cabin and was found in the woods with his sweatshirt full of the victim’s blood. There is no doubt he did it.
Inspector Henrik Oksman and his partner Linda Toivonen know it. All they have to do is follow procedures to the letter to ensure there is no room for doubt about Antti’s guilt when the trial comes.
But Jari Paloviita used to go to school with Rami and Antti. Antti was his best friend while Rami bullied him relentlessly. He and Antti share a heavy baggage as the story unfolds and we discover what happened to them during the summer 1991. They were 13 at the time and dramatic events pushed them out of childhood.
To what length is Jari prepared to go to in the name of an old friendship?
I’d say you’ll have to read the book to find out but sadly, it’s not available in English. It baffles me since Nordic crime is such a hit in the English-speaking world. It’s a real pity because the plot is tight, the back and forth between 2018 and 1991 is gripping and full of grey areas. The characters’ personal life is troubled and I can see the beginning of a great series.
This is also my contribution to Annabel’s event Nordic FINDS.
It strikes me that I didn’t choose the three books I just wrote about. I got the Ariana Franklin with my Quais du Polar entry ticket, my daughter gave me the Cornwell for Christmas and the Tuominen came with my Kube subscription. The Tuominen is probably the only one I would have bought myself, so kudos for the Kube libraire who blind-picked it for me.
The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy – great literature.
The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy (1987) French title: Le Dahlia noir. Translated by Frédéric Michalski.
The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy is probably one of the oldest books of my TBR. The mention inside says my roommate gave it to me in 1995. Ahem. I was reluctant to read it, not sure I’d get along with Ellroy. I only started to read noir fiction after I went online with Book Around the Corner and discovered Guy’s blog, His Futile Preoccupations. Guy’s a crime fiction and noir afficionado.
And now I wonder: what was I waiting for?
The Black Dahlia is loosely based upon a real case, the murder of Elizabeth Short that the press nicknamed the Black Dahlia. She was born in 1924 in Boston and was murdered in Los Angeles in 1947. Her case became famous because her body was horribly mutilated and it’s still unsolved.
Ellroy uses the Black Dahlia case as a basis to write a complex story with a striking picture of Los Angeles in the 1940s.
Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert is our narrator. He’s a former boxer and LAPD agent. He met Lee Blanchard, another LPAD agent when they covered the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles. Both have a checkered past. Bucky is the son of a German immigrant who doesn’t hide his racist tendencies. Bucky’s patriotism was tested during WWII and he agreed to give his Japanese neighbors up to keep his job with the LAPD. He’s still reeling from it.
Lee Blanchard is famous for solving a hold-up case and shacking up with Kay, the criminal’s girlfriend after the trial. He still lives with her and this scandalous relationship cost him a promotion. His little sister was murdered when he was a teenager and he feels guilty of not protecting her enough.
As semi-famous former boxers, their bosses ask them to fight against each other to raise funds for the LAPD and promote a bill that would increase the wages of the LAPD agents. They get a transfer to the Warrants department. They agree to it. The fight is highly publicized, they are nicknamed Fire and Ice. Their bond is based upon camaraderie and respect but is also tainted by politics and tactics. The relationship between Bucky, Lee and Kay is central to Ellroy’s book.
As you imagine Bucky and Lee are detached to the police force dedicated to solving Betty Short’s murder. They get swallowed in the case and the book moves to a classic investigation.
Ellroy follows the thread of a murder investigation and shows corruption and power fights in the LAPD. He takes his characters to the shadiest neighborhoods of Los Angeles and takes pleasure in describing brothels, dives, underground gay and lesbian meeting points and seedy hotels. He also brings us to rich neighborhoods and uncovers the ugliness present behind closed doors and polished manners. Greed. Sex. Perversion. They invade every corner of the city and Ellroy exposes what’s behind the Hollywood dreamy facade.
He conveys the pulse of the city, its rapid growth and real estate moguls, the Hollywood hype and the sordid world of hopeless hope of aspiring actresses.
He takes us across the Mexican border to Tijuana in an even more violent and corrupted country. He describes perfectly the intricacies of office politics in the LAPD, the violence against suspects and police procedurals. Or lack thereof.
It’s well-oiled book that keeps the reader on edge. I wanted to know how Bucky would come out of it, if Ellroy would make his characters solve the murder while reading about Los Angeles in the 1940s. I was curious about Bucky, Lee and Kay’s trio. I wondered if the big LAPD machine would run over Bucky or if he’d make it alright.
A brilliant book but I’m glad I waited to read it. There will be more Ellroy in my future.
For the record, I also have the graphic novel of this book by Miles Hyman Matz and David Fincher and it’s a good companion book.
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga – the dark sides of real-estate in Mumbai and of human behaviour.
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga (2011) French title: Le dernier homme de la tour. Translated by Annick Le Goya.
Bombay, like a practitioner of yoga, was folding in on itself, as its centre moved from the south, where there was no room to grow, to this swamp land near the airport.
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga is set in Mumbai, in the Vakola district near the airport, in a two towers apartment complex built in the 1970s.
Tower B, known as “Vishram Society” is like a vertical village of lower middle-class people. It’s also known as ‘cosmopolitan’ (i.e. ethnically and religiously mixed.) The various families have been living together in this building for years, they’ve raised children, grown old and have to share their private lives due to paper thin walls and building practicalities. Like in small town life, everybody knows everything about everyone and keeping a secret is illusory.
The Secretary [the concierge], not for the first time during his tenure, cursed the early – morning cat. This cat prowled the waste bins that the residents left out in the morning for Mary [The cleaning lady] to collect, in the process spilling beans, bones, and whisky bottles alike. So the residents of the building knew from the rubbish who was a vegetarian and who merely claimed to be one; who was a rum – man and who a gin – man; and who had bought a pornographic magazine when on holiday in Singapore.
What was I saying about secrets?
Now, in the ever growing and changing Mumbai, a property developer, Mr Shah, has set his eyes on two towers built in the 1970s. He wants to buy out all the current owners, demolish the towers and rebuild expensive condos on the land.
Mr Shah is ready to pay a hefty sum to all the owners based on the square meters of their apartment to encourage them to move out.
A useful note at the beginning of the book explains that Mr Shah’s offer is equivalent to $330,000 per family, in a country where the average per capita annual income in 2008 was around $800. So, if people accept Mr Shah’s offer, they become very rich and have enough money to relocate somewhere else.
Last important thing to know: Vishram Society is a Registered Co – operative Society. Not a jungle. If even one person says no that means that the Society cannot be demolished.
The novel shows the dirty methods used by property developers in Mumbai to put their hands on prime land, to throw working classes out of some neighbourhood to gentrify the area. In Mumbai, slums, older building and modern towers are near each other and this passage about a beach sums it up:
Here, in this beach in this posh northern suburb of Mumbai, half the sand was reserved for the rich, who defecated in their towers, the other half for slum dwellers, who did so near the waves. Residents of the slum that had encroached upon the beach were squatting by the water, defecating. An invisible line went down the middle of the beach like an electrified fence; beyond this line, the bankers, models, and film producers of Versova were engaged in tai – chi, yoga, or spot – jogging.
Builders have no qualms about bullying people into agreeing and they have special people to do it.
Every builder has one special man in his company. This man has no business card to hand out, no title, he is not even on the company payroll. But he is the builder’s left hand. He does what the builder’s right hand does not want to know about. If there is trouble, he contacts the police or the mafia. If there is money to be paid to a politician, he carries the bag. If someone’s knuckles have to be broken, he breaks them.
People in Vishram Society have heard stories about builders’ methods and swindles. They are cautious, they wonder where things could go and how they can be sure to get the money after they’ve signed the papers to sell their apartment.
Rather quickly, all the inhabitants agree to sell and the only one who doesn’t want to is Masterji, an old widower who refuses to leave the memories of his late wife and daughter behind. At least, that’s what he thinks his motives are.
This opportunity to get rich for the owners and to get richer for the promoter is like a bomb in a carefully built life balance between the inhabitants of the Vishram Society.
Last Man in Tower relates how Mr Shah manoeuvres to get what he wants. It also depicts how this tower-village copes with the one inhabitant who blocks their way to wealth.
Adiga’s book is cleverly done because it is not Manichean, the bad developer on one side and the poor old man on the other side. The greedy people and the virtuous one. Mr Shah intends to pay the money he promised, in the builder category, he’s not the worst one. But still. He counts on the neighbours to pressure Masterji into selling.
Masterji’s neighbours want the money, and most of them for good reasons: to provide for their son with Down’s syndrome after they die, to raise their children in a better neighbourhood, to help their grownup children to settle in life, to live a little and stop counting every penny.
And Masterji’s refusal is not just sentimental. There’s something else at stake here, someone who wants to stand up for himself when he wasn’t able to do it in this life, someone who sticks to his principle for the sake of them only.
Last Man in Tower is a dark tale, a book that shows how quickly people turn on each other when money is involved and circumstances push them to pick a side. We know that dark side of humans, we’ve witnessed it in wars and it’s the same mechanism at work here.
Adiga’s novel exposes the workings of the real estate market in Mumbai and digs into the dark corners of the human soul but it is also a vibrant picture of Mumbai and life in this sprawling city. The slums, the markets, the temples, the overcrowded public transports, the heat, the monsoon and the incredible pollution.
South Mumbai has the Victoria Terminus and the Municipal Building, but the suburbs, built later, have their own Gothic style: for every evening, by six, pillars of hydro – benzene and sulphur dioxide rise high up from the roads, flying buttresses of nitrous dioxide join each other, swirls of unburnt kerosene, mixed illegally into the diesel, cackle like gargoyles, and a great roof of carbon monoxide closes over the structure. And this Cathedral of particulate matter rises over every red light, every bridge and every tunnel during rush hour.
When I was reading, I thought it was a bit too long but now that I write about it I realize that the pace of the narration suits what the author had to show and say.
The book was published in 2011, wonder how the real-estate market is in Mumbai now.
The Hot Spot by Charles Williams – it’s a question of hooks
The Hot Spot by Charles Williams. (1953) – “Oh what a tangled web we weave when at first we start to deceive.”
The Hot Spot by Charles Williams was previously entitled Hell Hath No Fury. This noir thriller dates back to 1953 and I guess it was renamed after the film version of the book was released in 1990.
In French, it was translated by Bruno Martin for the Série noire collection in 1955. The French title was Je t’attends au tournant and I found a copy in a second-hand bookstore.
The original translation seems out of print which is good because it’s an abridged version. There’s no way to translate all the sentences of a 190 pages English book into a 185 pages French paperback, since the said French paperback is smaller than the English book and French takes more words than English to say the same thing. I checked a random paragraph and bingo, the original sentences are cleverly cut to keep the book under 200 pages as it was supposed to be read in one sitting on a train journey.
Lucky French readers, Gallmeister published a new translation by Laura Derajinski 2019 and kept the title Hot Spot. These different translations didn’t impact my reading though, since I read The Hot Spot in English.
Now, the book
I lighted a cigarette and smoked it out nervously, listening to the night sounds and thinking of the dangerous mess I was drifting further into all the time. I had twelve thousand dollars I couln’t touch, I was crazy about a girl who was in some kind of trouble she couldn’t tell me about, and I was getting more hopelessly fouled up every day with crazy Dolores Harshaw.
This is Harry Madox. He’s a twenty-eight drifter who comes to a small Texas town, finds a job as a car salesman and settles in a boarding house. He works for George Harshaw who also has a side-business in car loans to go with the dealership. Gloria Harper runs the loan office.
Harshaw is married to Dolores who seduces Harry for what he thinks is a simple hookup. She doesn’t see it that way and although she’s definitely not in love with him, she sinks her hook in him and wants him all to herself. He’s her ticket out of her boring marriage. But Harry falls for Gloria who has a lot of issues of her own. When Gloria and Harry start dating, it sends Dolores on the war path.
Besides the sex and love affairs, Harry put himself in a nice little mess of his own doing when he robbed the local bank.
Two events sparked this crazy idea: first, during a fire on Main Street, he noticed that all the people were focused on the fire and that the bank was left almost unattended and second, as Dolores asked him to help her move some boxes in an abandoned building near the bank, he noticed it was full of junk and that is was an incredible fire hazard. What if he set the building on fire, robbed the bank and made sure to be seen helping the firefighters?
That’s what he does it but the local sheriff is cleverer than he expected. He doesn’t buy it and intends to question him until he relents and spills the beans. He’s only released from custody because Dolores spontaneously lies and gives him an alibi. His relief is short-lived. Now she has him and she knows it.
Harry still thinks he can get out of it if he lays low but his feelings for Gloria get in the way. He feels protective of her and things get out of hand when he tries to help her with her own issues.
Harry is taken in a web of lies and crimes. Dolores is a skilled manipulator but she’s enabled by Harry’s actions. The robbery and his relationship with Gloria give her leverage. She’s poisonous but his actions leave him with his flesh exposed and she just sees where and how she can sink her hooks into him.
The Hot Spot is a masterpiece of noir fiction. All the right ingredients are there.
An unreliable narrator who would want us to forget he’s a bank robber. A beautiful young woman who’s not as innocent as she seems. A femme fatale who knows what she wants and how to get it. And the whole plot, clever and articulate as a Shakespearian tragedy is served by an excellent literary style. We are with Harry in this little Texas town. We imagine the heat, the town, the dealership, the cars and the characters in their 1950s outfits. We sweat with Harry and recoil from the violence and we see how events unfold in an implacable manner.
A must-read for all crime fiction lovers.
Have a look at Guy’s excellent review here.
The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Baindridge – it puts the reader on edge
The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge (1974) French title: Sombre Dimanche. Translated by Françoise Cartano.
The Bottle Factory Outing is my second Beryl Bainbridge, after An Awfully Big Adventure and I can find similarities between the two books.
In The Bottle Factory Outing, we’re in London and our protagonists are two roommates, Freda and Brenda. They live in a boarding house and like each other well enough but have opposite characters. Freda is outgoing and flirty. She loves clothes and make up and wants to marry well. She’s energetic and knows what she wants.
Brenda landed in London after she escaped from an abusive marriage. She’s mousy, down-to-earth and wants to be left alone. She’s passive and her attitude sends mixed messages to people around her and gets on Freda’s nerves.
In the following passage, Freda and Brenda are watching a funeral from their window and their interaction gives away their personalities:
‘You cry easily,’ said Brenda, when they were dressing to go to the factory.
‘I like funerals. All those flowers – a full life coming to a close…’
‘She didn’t look as if she’d had a full life,’ said Brenda. ‘She only had the cat. There aren’t any mourners – no sons or anything.’
‘Take a lesson from it then. It could happen to you. When I go I shall have my family about me – daughters – sons – my husband, grey and distinguished, dabbing a handkerchief to his lips…’
‘Men always go first,’ said Brenda. ‘Women live longer.’
‘My dear, you ought to participate more. You are too cut off from life.’
See how Freda romanticize what she sees and projects her future and how Brenda remains practical and attempts to bring her back to reality? It’s typical.
Freda and Brenda work at the same bottle factory owned and managed by Mr Paganotti. He’s Italian and all the workers come from the same Italian village, except Patrick, an Irishman, Freda and Brenda.
Freda has a crush on Mr Paganotti’s nephew, Vittorio. He’s handsome, prances around the factory and flirts a little bit with Freda. She grows things out of proportion because she’s decided that he’s the perfect candidate for the handsome and rich husband she ambitions to marry.
She’s infatuated with him but she doesn’t know him well. In order to spend time with him outside of the factory, she organizes a factory outing on a weekend. But things don’t turn out so well…
Relationships between men and women are creepy in The Bottle Factory Outing just as they were in An Awfully Big Adventure.
Brenda was in an abusive marriage and even if nothing precise is revealed about her past, the reader guesses that it must have been pretty bad for Brenda to take action. And she’s barely started to work at the bottle factory for three days when she starts getting a lot of unwanted attention at work from Rossi, the foreman. She doesn’t know how to rebuff his advances because she doesn’t want to lose her job. Brenda the mouse also caught the attention of her coworker Patrick. He offers to fix her toilet to see her outside of work. At least this one seems respectful.
Freda has Vittorio’s attention but he’s unlikely to marry her and she sets herself up for deception. It’s a classic case of wishing to be the wife and being seen as a mistress. Usually, it only means a broken heart, nothing life-threatening. As far as Freda is concerned, the most disturbing events occur during the outing.
Beryl Bainbridge has a great sense of humour and it shows in her descriptions of her characters and of the outing. But the ending takes a very dark turn, one I didn’t expect. She’s an author who keeps her reader on their toes as her characters are a bit off, as they can sense that events are about to take a dramatic turn or that painful pasts lurk in the characters’ background.
This is a very well constructed novel.
Have you read books by her? What did you think of them? I still have The Dressmaker on the shelf.
Guy has reviewed several of them and his take on The Bottle Factory Outing is here.
Five crime fiction books, all different
Friendship Is a Gift You Give Yourself by William Boyle (2018) French title: L’amitié est un cadeau à se faire. Translated by Simon Baril
This is my second book by William Boyle after The Lonely Witness and he’s definitely an author I want to keep reading.
Friendship… is set in Brooklyn, in the Bronx and upstate New York. It all starts when Rena Ruggiero, the widow of a mafia gangster, kicks her eighty years old neighbor and thinks that she killed him as he lays unresponsive on her floor. High on Viagra, he tried to rape her.
Rena takes his car and drives to the Bronx where she wants to stay with her estranged daughter Adrienne and rekindle her relationship with her granddaughter Lucia.
She arrives there just as Richie Schiavano decides to steal money from a mafia gang.
Rena and Lucia find shelter at Adrienne’s neighbor’s house. Lacey, ex-porn star known as Lucious Lacey, welcomes them in her home and they end up fleeing the Bronx with the mafia on their tail.
The book takes a delightful Thelma and Louise turn and the reader is in for a fantastic ride.
William Boyle has a knack for a crazy plot, for attaching characters and an fantastic sense of place. A wonderful discovery by Gallmeister.
Alabama 1963 by Ludovic Manchette & Christian Niemiec (2020). Not available in English.
This is a French crime fiction novel set in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, just before President Kennedy was assassinated and right in the middle of the Civil Right movement.
Girls are rapped and murdered. Bud Larkin, a white PI, former police officer, is volunteered to help a black family find out who killed their daughter. His former colleagues also hire him a black cleaning lady, Adela Cobb. In segregated Alabama, she’ll be an asset to Larkin as black people talk to her but not to him.
As other murders happen, Bud and Adela get more and more anxious to find out who’s behind these crimes. And if this adventure can help them sort out their lives, all the better.
I’m always a bit suspicious about books written by French writers and set in America, written as if they were American writers. This one was OK, and the fact that the two authors’ day job is to translate American TV series into French probably helps writing a convincing story. They know all the codes.
I had a good time reading it, I got attached to Adela and Bud.
As the Crow Flies by Craig Johnson (2012) French title: A vol d’oiseau. Translated by Sophie Aslanides.
This is the 8th volume of the Walt Longmire series. I read them in English now since the French paperbacks are no longer published by Gallmeister but by Pocket. The books aren’t as nice, so, the original on the kindle is better.
This time around, Caddy, Longmire’s daughter is getting married in two weeks on the Cheyenne reservation when Walt discovers that she no longer has a venue.
He’s on his way to visit another location with his friend Henry Standing Bear when they see a woman fall from a cliff and die. She had her six-month old baby in arms when she fell. The baby miraculously survived.
Walt Longmire will mentor the new chief of the Tribal Police, Lolo Long during this investigation. She’ll learn a few tricks, soften some hard edges and see how to navigate the tricky relationship with the FBI. Very useful skills if she wants to keep her job or stay alive while doing it.
As always, Craig Johnson delivers. The plot is well-drawn, a part of fun is introduced with Lolo Long’s blunders and the relationship between Walt and Caddy is lovely. This volume is set on the Cheyenne reservation and it rings true, at least to my French ears.
Craig Johnson doesn’t disappoint and I’m looking forward to reading the ninth book.
Sœurs de sang by Dominique Sylvain (1997, reviewed by the author in 2010). Not available in English
I’ve read several books by Dominique Sylvain. Kabuchiko, set in Japan, Les Infidèles and Passage du Désir set in Paris. The three books are different and Soeurs de sang is closer to Passage du Désir than to the other ones.
We’re in Paris. Louise Morvan is a PI who is hired by Ana Chomsky to find a former lover that she spotted as a character in a video game. Louise starts investigating, discovers that he’s Axel Langeais, one of the creators of the game.
It could stop here but Victoria Yee, the lead singer of the group Noir Vertige is murdered on Axel’s barge, in front of his sister Régine. Louise embarks on a murder investigation that will lead her to Berlin and Los Angeles and into the strange artistic world of the Victim Art.
I read this with pleasure, a novel set in a very peculiar milieu, the one of extreme art and I was curious to see how the story would unfold.
Ames animales by JR Dos Santos (2021). Not available in English.
This was one of our Book Club choices and it was a promising read.
It’s a Portuguese novel set in Lisbon. The main character is Tomas Noronha whose wife Maria Flor is involved with a charity that works on animal intelligence. When the director of this charity is murdered, she’s the last one to have seen him and is accused of murder.
Chapters alternate between the crime plot and flash backs where the militant and director is enlightening Maria Flor about the latest researches about animal intelligence. These lengthy explanations were too didactical for me, cut the flow of the crime investigation and I lost interest.
I abandoned the book. I don’t read crime fiction to read scientific lectures, there are radio podcasts for that. A missed opportunity.
I have also read The Hot Spot by Charles Williams but this one is so good that it deserves its own billet.
Literary Escapade: the Proust Exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
For the centenary of Proust’s death, the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Bnf), the French equivalent of the Library of Congress, curates an exhibition entitled Marcel Proust – La fabrique de l’œuvre. It means Marcel Proust, the making of his work.
In French, A la Recherche du temps perdu, In Search of Lost Time in English, is nicknamed La Recherche and I’ll use that expression in my billet as it conveys a familiarity and a fondness for it.
This exhibition takes us through Proust’s creative process. For each book of we can see how Proust wrote and reviewed his work and, for the volumes published after his death, how his work came to us.
The exhibition shows 370 pieces from the Proust fund at the BnF. Marcel Proust had kept all of his manuscripts and his brother Robert inherited them when Marcel died. Suzy Mante Proust, Robert’s daughter, donated the manuscripts to the BnF in 1962.
Therefore, the BnF has almost all of Proust’s manuscripts from his school essays to La Recherche. They have 26 volumes of proofs and boards, 23 type-written texts, drafts typed by various secretaries, many paperoles, 23 notebooks of edited texts, 75 notebooks of drafts, hundreds of paper sheets, four other notebooks and one diary. That’s a lot of material and here’s a picture of the different sources.
Marcel Proust didn’t write La Recherche from the beginning to the end in a linear fashion. He wrote Swann’s Way and Time Regained at the same time. He wrote episodes of La Recherche here and there and put them in the volumes where he saw fit.
Now, let’s have a tour of the different volumes and I’ll share with you pictures and anecdotes.
Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way). 1913 (self-published) and 1919 (reviewed edition – Gallimard)
Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure is probably one of the most famous incipits of French literature, along with Aujourd’hui, maman est morte, from The Stranger by Albert Camus. The BnF showed the different versions of this incipit until Proust settled on Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. They did the same about the madeleine, from toast (1907-1909 drafts) to rusk to a madeleine.
It was fascinating to witness Proust’s thought process, the attention to details and have the evidence that the incipit and the key moment of the madeleine were thoroughly forethought. The first version of Swann’s Way was published in 1913 but it was in the making since 1907. It goes against the idea of a Proust who wasted his time in society life and didn’t start working hard until later in life.
The exhibition also features key objects of the books and for Swann’s Way, I was mostly interested in this drawing from a magic lantern telling the story of Geneviève de Brabant.
It’s a story that the young Narrator used to love and this shows us what kids saw in their magic lanterns.
Proust was a master of copy-paste, long before office solutions and computers were invented. This board from Swann’s Way shows how Proust worked.
Fascinating, no? (Or maybe a typist’s nightmare…) Now let’s move on to the Narrator’s adolescence with…
A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower) 1919 – Prix Goncourt
This volume is key as the Narrator gets acquainted with major characters of La Recherche: Robert de Saint-Loup, the group of girls to which Albertine belongs, the painter Elstir, the Baron de Charlus and the Verdurin clan. We’ll follow them all during our literary ride with the Narrator, from Balbec to Paris.
Le côté de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way) 1920-1921 (Published in two volumes)
The Guermantes Way is where the Narrator is of all the parties and in the heart of high society. It’s the turning point of his adult life: the high society isn’t a glamorous fairytale anymore, as the harsh words of the Duc de Guermantes to a dying Swann remind us. He’s about to explore the kingdom of Sodom and Gomorrha through Charlus and Albertine.
Sodome et Gomorrhe – 1921-1922 (Published in two volumes)
The discussion about homosexuality was conceived as soon as 1909. Marcel Proust didn’t know yet where he would include it. The reader understands as soon as the Baron de Charlus is introduced that he’s gay. The Narrator will only see the light when he catches the Baron de Charlus and Jupien.
Homosexuality is also a hot topic as the Narrator suspects that Albertine is a lesbian. He’s aware of lesbian relationships since Balbec when he saw Mlle de Vinteuil and her friend.
Sodom and Gomorrah were the last volumes published under Marcel Proust’s supervision. Marcel Proust changed the structure of La Recherche several times; for example, he toyed with the idea of three volumes for Sodom and Gomorrah.
The last three volumes were published by Gallimard with the help of Robert Proust. Here’s a letter from Gallimard to Robert Proust describing the final division of La Recherche in the current number of volumes.
The Narrator has now feelings for Albertine and their relationship mirrors Swann and Odette relationship.
La Prisonnière (The Captive) –1923
Marcel Proust wanted La Prisonnière to be the third volume of Sodom and Gomorrha and he sent to Gallimard his last review of the typed version of La Prisonnière a few days before he died.
The exhibition shows a report from A. Charmel, the concierge of the 8 bis rue Laurent Pichat where Marcel Proust lived from May 31st to October 1st 1919. This report is about all the cries from the street vendors and the various trades on a typical Parisian Street.
It will become a famous scene in La Prisonnière where the Narrator listens to the noises coming off the street. It’s a vivid passage that brings the reader to the Paris of this time, to all the street vendors and odd jobs that have disappeared now.
Except from 1909 to 1911, Proust wasn’t a solitary man. He had a lot of people around him, helping him. He sent out friends and servants to check certain details and facts and all this was included in his work.
Albertine disparue (The Fugitive). First title La fugitive 1925
Just before he died, Marcel Proust retrieved 250 pages of Albertine disparue, undermining the consistency of the volume. Robert Proust decided to keep these pages after Marcel died. I guess it was the best choice, no one knew how Marcel would have modified his work to straighten the narrative. I’m relieved to know that Marcel Proust thought that something was off in this volume as it’s the one I struggled the most with.
Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained) – 1927.
In Time Regained, Proust writes about Paris during WWI and here’s a picture of a bombing near the metro St Paul, rue de Rivoli (Night 12-13 April 1918)
It also means that the first version of Time Regained, written before the war started, has been augmented. Marcel Proust added a fascinating picture of Paris during WWI, life behind. He lost friends and acquaintances during the war and he adapted his characters’ fates to the events. He even changed the location of Combray from the West of Paris to the East.
In each room of the exhibition the visitor could see how the novel was finished and got ready for publication: drafts, notebooks, typed sheets, additions through paperoles, phrases crossed and rewritten…All precious testimonies of the making of La Recherche.
This is a major exhibition about Proust. I wasn’t aware of his writing process. I knew about the drafts, adds-on or paperoles and that he sent out Céleste or her husband to check out things.
I didn’t know that he wrote La Recherche in pieces and not in the chronological order. I didn’t know that his books were made of pieces stitched together and that Proust sewed his book together like a couture dressmaker.
I had this image of a Proust writing frantically, knowing his years were counted. It may stem from Time Regained where the Narrator understands late in the game what he has to write. But in Proust’s real life, this epiphany came a lot earlier than I thought and his work is even more astonishing.
We’re talking about a writer who had his masterpiece in mind from the beginning. Given the length, the complexity and the number of characters, his mind was more than a brilliant machine. He knew what he wanted to demonstrate but he didn’t have everything mapped out, or he wouldn’t have changed the structure of the volumes until the end or included historical facts along the way. He had key scenes written and the global idea of what he wanted to pass on about art, life, memory and our journey on this earth.
The key scenes are wonderfully polished because they were written and rewritten, his ability to adapt to real life events roots the novel in French history and this vision of society is also priceless. Proust has the amazing ability to dig deep into people’s inner life without cutting them off real life. He was like that too, having the vivid imagination of an introvert and living the life of a social butterfly.
Extraordinary.
Now, a last picture for the road, this is Marcel Proust’s writing material.
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren – magnificent
All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946) French title: Tous les hommes du roi. Translated by Pierre Singer.
I had never heard of Robert Penn Warren before receiving All the King’s Men through my Kube subscription. I read it in a French translation by Pierre Singer and in a magnificent edition by the publisher Monsieur Toussaint Louverture. It has a beautiful golden cover, the pages are on very nice paper, the text is published in an agreeable font. It has several tiny details that cost nothing but appealed to me as a reader and showed the reverence and the care this publisher has for books. Like that MERCI printed beside the price of the book on the back cover.
A gorgeous book as an object and a gorgeous piece of literature.
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) is a Southern writer who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for All the King’s Men a complex novel about politics, legacy and the meaning of life. A tall order.
The narrator is Jack Burden and we’re in 1936 in the Deep South. We know from the start that he’s recovering from a tragedy and the fall of his boss, Willie Stark.
Governor Willie Stark is the king mentioned in the book’s title and his men are composed of Sadie Burke, his secretary and long-time lover, Jack Burden, his right hand and sounding board, Tiny Duffy an obsequious man Stark would rather have with him than against him and Sugar Boy, his faithful driver.
Willie Stark comes from a poor farm, studied law by himself and decided to go into politics. He’s a populist who addresses to the redneck voters and who got genuinely angry when children died in the collapse of a school due to poor workmanship. Thanks to corrupt politicians, the contract wasn’t awarded to the most competent bidder.
Jack attached himself to Stark after he covered his first campaign for a newspaper. It was in 1922 and he was a journalist at the time. Now, he’s in his thirties, has a degree in history and he has no ambition. Jack comes from Burden’s Landing, a small town on the coast. His family is wealthy, at least his mother is. His parents are divorced and he despises them a little. He sees his mother as a serial monogamist who married for the third time, and to a much younger man. His father, a former lawyer, now devotes his time to religious endeavors. Jack thinks that his mother is materialistic and that his father is idealistic. During his younger years, Judge Irwin, a friend of the family, mentored him.
Willie Stark started out his political career with excellent ethics but he soon learnt that he had to play the same game as the current political circles if he wanted a chance to be elected and pass laws.
Now he’s powerful, has enemies and knows how to pull strings. He’s ruling the State as a dictator and his long-time opponent is still after him.
The beginning of the end starts when the virtuous Judge Irwin starts sniffing around him and Stark decides to use his usual method of threats and intimidation.
Jack tells us what happened from the moment the king’s men arrive at Burden’s Landing to threaten Judge Irwin. It doesn’t work and Stark missions Jack to investigate the judge’s past and unearth some dirt for Stark to gain leverage. From now on, Stark’s orders overlap with Jack’s private life. He’s known Irwin since he was a kid, it’s his hometown and this will set everything into motion.
Robert Penn Warren writes a perfectly oiled tragedy. The various characters ignite things here and there and lives blow up.
Jack is a man whose family picture doesn’t add up. He knows something is amiss and but he doesn’t know what. His background is like a jigsaw with a missing piece and he feels incomplete. He tends to be depressed. He never got over his adolescent love affair with Anne Stanton, his best friend Adam’s sister. He goes with the flow, trying to swim in clear waters and avoid joining the sewage that surrounds Stark.
Jack takes Stark as he is: he has no illusion about what man is ready to do to win an election and yet he forgives him a lot of things because he knew him before he became governor and because the local political scene is rotten to the core. If Stark doesn’t play by the corrupt politician playbook, how can he win an election? And if he doesn’t win, how is he going to implement his program and improve the people’s lives? Jack maneuvers to stay on Stark’s good side without getting his hands too dirty.
Stark is a complex character based on the real politician from Louisiana Huey Long. Yes, he’s a bully who manipulates people around him. Yes, he’s a shameless populist. But he did something for his fellow-citizen. He had roads built. He raised taxes to improve public services and transports. He wanted to have a positive legacy through affordable health care. Robert Penn Warren shows that some good comes out of Stark’s mandate despite his despotic ways.
Like in a Greek tragedy, Stark’s public fall and Jack’s private shattering come from their Achilles’ heels. I won’t say more to avoid spoilers.
All the King’s Men is a brilliant novel that allies Stark’s rise and fall and Jack’s private life as he finally finds some peace. The style is elaborate and stunning. It’s a novel from the South before air conditioning. It’s hot and the weather puts a lid of languor over Jack. Since Huey Long was the governor of Louisiana, the novel is supposed to be set there but there is no direct mention of a precise Southern state. I was thinking more about Alabama or Mississippi as there is no mention to Cajun culture in the whole book.
It’s also a novel from the South before the Civil Rights movements. There are no black characters in this novel except quick mentions to black servants. This microcosm around Stark lives in an all-white environment.
It’s also a novel from the South with its religious undercurrent. Religion is not present through churches and clergymen. It’s understood in Jack’s questioning about moral compasses and fate. I can’t explain it but the characters ooze some kind of Bible Belt vibe.
Robert Penn Warren writes an intelligent book with multidimensional characters. He could have written something really polarized, good versus evil, virtue against sin but he didn’t. He chose to draw complex characters, flawed humans who have their moments of darkness and their moments of generosity and loyalty. Their emotions overrule them sometimes, they are unethical and accept to have their hands dirty. I liked Jack’s voice, lucid and poetic. No sugar coating for Jack.
I don’t know if All the King’s Men is “The definite novel about American politics” as the New York Times says. I hope not because it would be depressing. What I do know is that it’s an exceptional piece of literature.
Highly recommended.
Book Around the Corner 