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Real Life by Adeline Dieudonné – a girl’s resilience
Real Life by Adeline Dieudonné (2018) Original French title: La vraie vie.
Real Life by Adeline Dieudonné was our Book Club choice for April. It is set in a suburb in Belgium and since the author was born in 1982, I think she used the time of her childhood as a reference. The way of life in the novel matches with the 1990s. There’s a before and after cellphones.
The narrator is a girl who is never named. She’s ten when the book opens and her brother Gilles is six. It’s the summer holiday and the two children spend their time playing around in their generic housing development complex. Their father works at an amusement park, their mom is a stay-at-home mother.
Their father is a hunter and they have a whole room in the house for his hunting trophies. His most prized one is a tusk. Yes, the man loves to hunt and doesn’t hesitate to travel abroad and break the law if need be. I’d despise him just for that. Between hunting trips, he spends his free time at home, sitting on the couch, drinking whisky and beating up his wife. Now he’s just gone up from despicable to scumbag.
His wife is mousy and loves to spend her time with her pet goats. The Narrator calls her an amoeba. Pretty telling. She acts like a wallflower, trying to fly under her husband’s predatory radar. If it means that she neglects her children, then so be it. She devotes all her time and pours her love into her pets.
This explains why the children are joined to the hip and the Narrator feels responsible for her little brother’s safety. They’re a team and Gilles is the Narrator’s sunshine. He brings warmth in her life and she’d do anything to keep this sunshine alive.
That summer, a terrible accident happens. The children’s daily pleasure is to buy an ice-cream cone at the ice-cream truck that drives through their neighborhood. The old man who serves them always adds whipped cream to the Narrator’s cone even if he knows that her father forbids it. That day, the whipped cream maker explodes as he’s serving the Narrator. The impact is such that it takes away half of his face and he dies on the spot. The two children are witness and they are traumatized.
As their parents are faulty, they do nothing to heal their trauma. Gilles stops speaking, behaves weirdly, becomes mean. The Narrator swears to herself that she will bring him back.
The book covers several summer holidays, each worse than the previous one. The reader feels the tension building, sees the Narrator fight against her family circumstances. School is her safe place and she discovers that she loves physics.
Her mother’s distraction plays in her favor when she wants to do things on her own. She babysits some children in the neighborhood to pay for her physics lessons. She hides everything to keep out of her father’s wrath.
As things deteriorate at home, the reader feels that a dramatic event is bound to happen and dreads the conclusion of the novel. I kept wondering how it would end.
Children narrators are hard to pull off but Adeline Dieudonné made it. For her sake, I hope that nothing in her novel is autobiographical except how it was to be a child and teenager in the 1990s. It’s a powerful book, a novel that has several cousins in Betty by Tiffany McDaniel, by Gabriel Tallent, or Blood by Tony Birch.
Not a fun read, but highly recommended. As it’s not an easy book to tuck into a nice little box, we have a festival of book covers when we look at the various translations of Real Life. Ready for the show?
I don’t understand the English cover, as everything happens in the summer. The Spanish one is lovely but the reader will expect something sweet. The Hungarian is … I don’t know what to say.
I see a rabbit pattern in Germany and Finland but I don’t understand why. I’m not sure bout the Little Red Riding Hood reference of the Russian version.
I really like the Japanese cover, it fits the Narrator’s tone and it reflects the fact that she’s a child. And she’s never whining but always resilient and fighting. The Persian one is puzzling and the Polish one has the same idea as the Russian one.
What a diversity of covers! I wonder what the author thinks about that.
Quais du Polar 2021 – Day #2
So, we’re Wednesday and until now, I didn’t have the time or energy to write about my second day at Quais du Polar on Sunday.
I had booked a seat at a Literary Cruise on the Saône River and the speaker was Florence Aubenas. She’s a famous French international reporter and a war reporter. She works at Le Monde. She was abducted in Iraq in 2005 and was kept prisoner during five months. She’s also well-known for going undercover as a cleaning lady in 2009. She wanted to live the life of underpaid blue-collar workers who work insecure jobs and report about it. It became a bestseller, Le Quai de Ouistreham and it has been made into a film by Emmanuel Carrère.
I was curious to hear her talk about her experience and about her last book, L’inconnu de la poste. She writes about an actual murder case that happened in Montréal-La-Cluse, in the Jura region. It’s a village of 3500 souls where the postmistress was murdered when she was on duty. Florence Aubenas was sent there to cover the story, got hooked up with the mystery around it and went there on and off during several years. She relates this story in her book.
It was a delightful hour as she’s fascinating to listen to. She’s very friendly, close to the public and we all listened with rapt attention. The setting was great too because we got a cruise on the river out of it and I think it was a great idea to organize a conference in such a neat setting.
After that, I had planned to visit the bookstores set up in tents on the bank of the Rhône River with a friend but the weather was not cooperating at all. We gave up and stayed put in a restaurant.
In the afternoon, we went to Noir in Lyon, a panel of writers who wrote crime fiction books set in Lyon. There was Coline Gatel for her second book set during La Belle Epoque, Gwenaël Bulteau for his novel set in the Croix-Rousse neighborhood during the Dreyfus Affair, Loulou Dedola, a BD author and François Médéline for two books, L’ange rouge and La sacrifiée du Vercors, set during WWII. This panel was a bit too messy for my tastes but I got to discover local writers.
I manage to spend some time at open bookstore, chatted a little with Dominique Sylvain and upon her recommendation, bought the fourth volume of her Lola & Ingrid series.
This festival was the first one I went to in this COVID times. They managed to reorganize it in the season (usually it’s the last weekend of March) and to relocate it in several places in the city. There was a lot less visitors than usual, probably because you had to book conferences in advance, because the weather was terrible and only a few international writers managed to come. But it felt good to go to a real book festival and hopefully, things will get back to normal in March 2022.
Many thanks to the staff and volunteers who gave their time and energy to celebrate crime fiction in Lyon.
Best of Book Around the Corner for 2020
After wishing us the best for 2021, let’s have a look at my 2020 reading year. I’ve read more books than the previous years (78) and that’s all the statistics I’ll give. Numbers and statistics are for my day job. Here, I’m happy to live without numbers and only go with totally subjective opinions about books I read.
So, here we go, with categories of my own.
Best Least Commented Billet
I looked into my billets in search of the least commented ones. Some of my favorite books of the year are in this category, sadly. This is a friendly reminder, I think that Death and the Good Life by Richard Hugo is really worth reading. Richard Hugo was a poet and a fan for Noir fiction. This is his only novel and his first attempt at writing crime fiction. His being a poet brings a melodic feeling to his prose and he proves that crime fiction can be excellent literature. It doesn’t help that my favorite one is out-of-print in English, but for French readers, it’s a 10/18 book.
Best Gallmeister Book
Frequent flyers of this blog know that I’m fan of books published by Gallmeister. Among the eight books that I read this year from their catalogue, my favorite is A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How to Do by Pete Fromm. It is the sad but hopeful story of Taz who loses his wife in childbirth and the slow rebuilding of his life after this trauma. It’s written with simplicity and truthfulness and it’s a masterpiece. Simple things are never easy to achieve and when a style seems “simple”, it usually means that the writer is a great author.
Best Fishing Book
Readings lots of books published by Gallmeister and Nature Writing books implies that a lot of them involve fishing at some point and often in Montana or Wyoming. It’s become a joke in the family and with readers. (Right, Bill?) This year, my favorite fishing book is…French! Ha! It’s Fisherman of Iceland by Pierre Loti, about the fishermen from Brittany who went fishing near the coasts of Iceland. I also did a Literary Escapade in the village where Loti stayed and made friends with local fishermen.
Best Non-Book Post
Last year I started a best-of category for my billets that are not a book review. This year, the most read and commented was my Blog Anniversary: 10 years of book blogging post. Thank you again for reading my clumsy endeavors at commenting literature. In 2020, blogging has more and ever been a window to the world.
You also seem to enjoy my Literary Escapade series and your favorite one was about Turin, right before the first lockdowns in Europe. Let’s hope I’ll do some more in the coming months!
Best Read-West-With-Sister-in-Law
I’m now in my second row of “Read West With Sister-In-Law”, readalong. Thanks, S! It’s a lot of fun to pick books together and talk about them whenever we see each other.
We’ve read a lot of great books in our readalong. I could mention The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage, Bless the Beasts and the Children by Glendon Swarthout or Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan. Since I have to make a choice, I pick The Lost Get-Back Boogie by James Lee Burke. It is the redemption story of an ex-convict who wants to be a better man, a story laced with violence, booze and blues, set in the landscapes of Louisiana and Montana. It dives into the psyche of America and its history. All this wrapped in a flawless style, courtesy of James Lee Burke. Stunning.
Best Translation Tragedy
A Translation Tragedy is a book available in English but sadly not in French or vice versa. This year I’ve read eight books that are not translated into English and seven that are not translated into French. I wish that more books by Dominique Sylvain were translated into English, and especially Les Infidèles. Knock, knock, Corylus Books! I heard that the rights of her books have not been sold for English translation. Just saying.
Most of the untranslated English books I read were Australian books by CH Spence, Ada Cambridge and Elizabeth Harrower. There is a niche in publishing for Australian Women Writers. Any candidate?
Best Book-I-Want-To-Buy-To-All-My-Friends
No hesitation, it’s Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. Each time I read something by James Baldwin, I’m bowled over. He was so intelligent. His ability to lay matters in an articulate way, to be militant without being pushy or disrespectful of others is outstanding. He never shies away from sensitive topics. He’s the master of grey areas, of nuanced thinking without falling into the pitfall of angelism or extremism. We need more writers like him in our world.
Best Book Club Read
Our Book Club year has been full of good books but IMO, no great one stands out. My favorite one is Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian, his memoir about his family and the Armenian genocide. The beginning is about his childhood and his growing up in his Armenian-American family, how it was different from others around him, and how he stumbled upon the story of the Armenian genocide by the Turks and how it’s been swept under an oriental carpet. Very moving and informative at the same time. Highly recommended.
I loved that our Book Club tour took us to France, Algeria, Nigeria, England, America, Armenia, Jordan, Greece and Turkey.
Best Non-Fiction
I’ve read eight Non-Fiction book this year, more than in previous years. While the Winock about Militant Writers in the 19thC and their fight for the freedom of speech was absolutely fascinating, I’d rather recommend to everyone The Book of Yaak by Rick Bass.
It’s a poetic, soothing and militant memoir about living in the Yaak Valley in Montana. Rush for it, Bass’s luminous prose will take your mind off mutant viruses, stifling lockdowns and lonely evenings. You’ll vicariously breathe fresh air with him.
Best Sugar-Without-Cellulite Book
In these COVID-branded times, I was in dire need of comfort reads, the ones I call Sugar Without Cellulite. Thanks to Jacqui, I had a lot of fun with Patricia Brent, Spinster by HG Jenkins. In case you need another fix of sugary read, I also recommend the Austanian A Humble Enterprise by Ada Cambridge and Mr Hogarth’s Will by CH Spence and the crazy funny Mrs Fletcher by Tom Perrotta.
2020 was an excellent reading year, a varied diet of fiction and non-fiction, of different countries and different styles. I did a series of Literary Escapades and will do more of those in the coming year.
I took part in several blogging events such as Australian Women Writers Challenge, Indigenous Literature Week, Japanese Literature Challenge, the #1920 Club, the #1956 Club, 20 Books of Summer and Novella in November.
And what about 2021?
I’ve got Book Club reads, Read-The-West-With-Sister-In-Law Season 2 and my monthly Kube subscription to a book blind date. I’ve reorganized my TBR and like every new year, my resolution is to read more from the TBR and decrease the pile. It seems as likely as riding a unicorn, but one never stops dreaming, right?
What’s your favorite 2020 read and what are your plans for 2021?
Literary Escapade: Ploubazlanec and Pors-Even, Brittany with Pierre Loti
As mentioned in my previous billet, today’s Literary Escapade takes us along the Icelanders’ walk in Ploubazlanec and Pors-Even, Brittany.
It starts at the Wall of the Missing Sailors in the cemetary. Since a lot of fishermen never came back from the fishing campaigns in Iceland, there was no burial and no grave. The families put plaques on the wall of the cemetary to remember them.
After a walk, we arrived at the Perros-Hamon chapel. Gaud, the young woman in love with Yann Gaos, stops there to pray on her way from Paimpol to Pors-Even. The chapel in its current form dates back to the 18th century. Here’s the entry side
Inside the chapel, there’s a replica of the boats used for the Iceland fishing campaigns. See how the ceiling looks like the hull of a boat.
Original plaques for the missing boats have been moved from the cemetary to the chapel, for preservation.
Here’s the chapel inside the chapel where Gaud stops to pray, reads the all the names of Yann’s family members who disapeared at sea. It makes her shudder.
In this chapel, families celebrated Easter while their beloved ones were at sea and they had a special ceremory for them. It’s called Le Pardon.
Then we arrive to Pors-Even, a fishermen village, even today. See the landscape:
After that, the trail takes us to the Chapelle de la Trinité. It was never used as an actual chapel but it is a tribute to sailors. Here’s the view from the chapel:
Families used to go there to say goodbye to the ships when they were leaving. They were so close to the shore that people could recognize each other.
Then we walk to the Croix des Veuves. (The Widows’ Cross).
This is were women used to go at the end of the summer to look for incoming ships. They were looking at the sea to wait for their husbands, fathers, sons or brothers’ return. Some of these women will become widows. Gaud goes there to wait for Yann’s return.
The Virgin Mary was a typical protector of sailors. Loti reports that they has this kind of ceramic sculpture on board:
The village still has the stops for the Pardon procession. Religion was an important part of life at the time.
At first, I thought that Ploubazlanec was fictional, then I saw the road signs. Then I looked it up in our tourist guide and found the articles about the museum and the walk.
I think it’s the first time I’ve been on the premises of a novel that I was reading and where I could see places of the novel that were close to being the same as in the novel. It’s incredible and I’m happy that our timing was so good.
It looks bright and beautiful with this incredible weather. It’s quiet, the sea looks like the Mediterranean but there are terrible tempests there. The wind can be really strong, so strong that since centuries, church towers have “holes” to let the wind go through. You can see it on the chapel picture before.
That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed our Literary Escapade with Pierre Loti. If you ever read Fisherman of Iceland after reading my billets, please let me know, I’m always glad to have feedback.
Literary escapade: Bookstores in Rennes, Brittany
Like all bookworms, I love visiting bookstores when I’m on holiday. Since this year I’m in France and we have a lot of bookshops, you might expect several bookstore-themed Literary Escapades.
This one is about the historical city centre of Rennes, (pop. 221 000). Of course, I will only mention the independant bookstores I saw while visiting the city.
The Librairie Le Faillier seems to be the biggest general bookstore, set in an old building.
The libraire at La Nuit des Temps was friendly and helpful. La Nuit des Temps is the title of a novel by SF writer René Barjavel.
Then you have themed bookstores.
La Rose Mystique, dedicated to spirituality…
Ariane, for travel books
L’encre de Bretagne for books about Brittany, by Breton writers or written in Breton.
Pecari, another general bookstore next to a pizza joint
The bookstore Critic…
A second hand bookstore, des Mots et des Choses:
And last, but not least, here’s the Gallmeister display window at Le Fallier:
In the end, trout fishing always seems to find me. 🙂
Have a nice Sunday!
Quais du Polar : Let’s celebrate anyway
Quais du Polar is this fantastic crime fiction festival that takes over the city of Lyon by storm every year.
Sadly, this year, like many cultural event, the 2020 edition is cancelled. No crime fest in Lyon from April 3rd to April 5th. Marina Sofia and I met at this festival, attended panels with writers who discussed around a crime theme, queued to have books signed and had a lot of fun browsing through the wonderful bookstore set up in the vast hall of the Lyon Chamber of Commerce.
We still want to celebrate crime fiction this year and have decided to publish a crime fiction billet for each day of the festival. We will choose books from writers who would have attended the 2020 session or books we got signed in previous editions. We would love for you to join us and do a virtual festival with us. You can find the list of writers here and if you want to listen to previous years’ panels, it’s available in replay here.
Choose whatever book you want as long as the writer has attended the festival and post a review on your blog on April 3, 4 or 5th. If you don’t have a blog, leave a review in the comments on this post and use #QDP2020. The festival’s team is also here @QuaisPolar.
There’s another initiative: Quais du Polar is also a crime fiction prize and Pat, at South of Paris Books has decided to read the six books preselected for this year’s prize.
Let’s get together and take advantage of our lockdowns. May this post go viral.
About reading, a quote by Margaret Atwood
In A Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing published in the magazine America, Margaret Atwood writes:
A book is a voice in your ear; the message is –while you are reading it –for you alone. Reading a book is surely the most intimate experience we can have of the inside of another human being’s mind. Writer, book, and reader –in this triangle, the book is the messenger. And all three are part of one act of creation, as the composer, the player of the symphony, and the listener are all participants in it. The reader is the musician of the book.
As for the writer, his or her part is done when the book goes out into the world; it is the book that will then live or die, and what happens to the writer is at that point immaterial, from the point of view of the book.
I agree with her about the intimacy of reading. Besides going to places I’ll never see in real life, being in someone else’s mind is the most fascinating experience of reading. Sometimes it’s a terrifying place to be, sometimes it’s comforting in a ah-you-too? kind of way and sometimes it’s eye-opening.
Her last paragraph about the writer’s role after the book is published? It probably explains why I rarely read interviews of writers about their books, especially when they are on tour to promote their new one.
Theatre: The Life of Galileo by Bertold Brecht and The Crucible by Arthur Miller
November was German Lit Month and a total miss for me. I still couldn’t read Berlin Alexanderplatz and didn’t have time to read anything else. But! I finished this month on an excellent note. I saw the play Life of Galileo by Bertold Brecht.
As frequent readers of this blog know, I have a subscription to the Théâtre des Célestins, a majestic theatre in Lyon. This Life of Galileo (1938) was directed by Claudia Stavisky and Galileo was played by the great actor Philippe Torreton.
Brecht relates Galileo’s life from the moment he figures out that the Earth rotates around the sun and subsequently destroys Aristotle’s vision of the cosmos. The play shows a Galileo who unknowingly works on the foundation of modern physics by putting emphasis on experimenting and demonstrating concepts. We know what happened, the Catholic Church felt threatened. Religions in general work on the basis of certainty and “absolute thinking”. They know the truth, which automatically means that what they say can’t be challenged and those who don’t think the way they do are in the wrong. And here we have a man who preaches doubt as a way of thinking: challenge everything you take for granted, you might be surprised. It can’t go well for him. Religions also hold their sacred texts as the truth and sometimes take them literally. How to reconcile the Bible with science? That’s another question.
Brecht’s point is also that the Catholic Church is an instrument in the hands of princes and kings to keep the people under their yoke. Don’t worry if your life is miserable, you’ll go to heaven and eternal life is way longer than this earthly one, so why bother. If the Church has to acknowledge that the Aristotelian vision of the world was a mistake, then it means that what they taught was wrong. It will undermine their power on the little people’s minds.
Galileo also believed in the democratization of knowledge. He wrote books in Italian instead of Latin because he wanted them to be accessible. That was another thorn in the Church’s side. (Remember that the mass was in Latin until 1962.)
The holy trinity of theatre was met for Life of Galileo. First we have a brilliant text by Brecht, easy to follow and engrossing. Then we have Claudia Stavisky’s wonderful direction. She managed –again—to give a contemporary vibe to a text and inject liveliness in something that could have been a dry argument. (Read here how she turned a play by Corneille into a fun rom com without betraying the original text). And last but not least, we have Torreton’s exceptional acting skills. I’ve seen him several time on stage, like in I Take My Father on My Shoulders by Fabrice Melchiot or in Cyrano de Bergerac and I’m always in awe. He’s on stage as if he were in his living room. His speech seems effortless and for the public, it’s magic. We’re catapulted into the story because he sounds real, not staged.
For the anecdote, I noted two small anachronisms in the text: once a character mentions “cm3”, when the metric system came with the French Revolution and another time, a character says “Versailles” to refer or France but Louis XIV moved permanently in Versailles in 1682 and Galileo died in 1642.
So, if you’re in France and you see La vie de Galilée in your theatre, hurry up and buy tickets for this play, it even has subtitles in English. As far as German Lit Month is concerned, maybe I should stick to reading plays, I enjoy Brecht and Bernhard.
Earlier in the theatre season, I also saw The Crucible by Arthur Miller, directed by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota. (In French, it’s translated as Les Sorcières de Salem). Miller wrote this play in 1953 as an allegory of McCarthyism. While I disliked the hysterical parts when the witches behave as if they were possessed, the process leading to the wrongful condemnation of twenty innocent people was implacable.
The play shows what happens when people are impervious to objective reasoning. It explores how quickly a community becomes suspicious and falls under the spell of people who are affirmative, who shout louder than the others and stir up our basest instincts.
It also pictures well how greed comes into the equation and how the witch hunt becomes an opportunity to put one’s hands on someone’s property. The play dissects the fight between Reason and Religious Belief. Here, Religion presses the buttons of intellectual laziness: nothing needs to be challenged and the scriptures are always right. Plus, you have to believe first and think after. The Crucible shows how difficult it is for sensible thinking to engage swords with objective reasoning. The mechanics of the trial is unstoppable and until the end, the spectator of the 21st century expects that the truth wins, that such a blatant mistake cannot be hold as the truth. But of course, that’s not what happened.
These two plays echo with our times. Social networks are an open agora where everyone’s opinion has the same weight. Opinions are the great influencers of our century. How long will real journalists and honest scientists have voices strong enough to be heard over the mayhem of unruly tweets and intellectual dishonesty? Seen from my European corner, the battle seems lost in the US. Sandwiched between an opinionated trash TV, a president who spouts nonsenses on a daily basis and loud fundamentalist Christians, is there room left for rational thinking? If Galileo came to visit the 21st century, wouldn’t he be distraught to see creationism taught in some schools?
But Europe is not out the woods either. These are hot topics here too. The fact that theatre directors pick these plays proves that it is a preoccupation. J’accuse, the film about the Dreyfus Affair made 0.8 million of entries in two weeks. (4th in the French box office) It is the breathtaking relation of the Dreyfus trial and the long way to his rehabilitation. It sure doesn’t show France into a favorable light, something Proust describes thoroughly under the apparent lightness of society life. Zola and Voltaire are pillars of our national Pantheon because they fought for someone trialed and condemned, not fort their acts but due to the biased functioning of the courts. Dreyfus for Zola, Calas for Voltaire. J’accuse coming out in 2019 is not a coincidence. We see extremists raise their ugly heads again and it is a cold reminder of what happens when they worm themselves into the workings of administrations.
It all comes down to safeguarding the concepts of the Age of Enlightenment.
Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossom by Anita Heiss
Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms by Anita Heiss. (2016) Not available in French.
This billet was due for Lisa’s Indigenous Lit Week but time went away from me and I’m late.
When Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms opens, we’re in 1944 in Australia. Japanese POW are kept in a camp in Cowra, in NSW, 300k East of Sydney. On August 5th, 1944, a thousand of these POWs escaped from the camp. Most of them died, either killed by Australian guards or because they committed suicide. Indeed, it was so shameful to a Japanese soldier to be held prisoner that it was better to die than come home with such a disgrace.
Hiroshi was among the Japanese who broke free from the camp in Cowra but he didn’t die. He managed to escape and reach the nearby Aboriginal station at Erambie. Banjo Williams, who lives at the mission, finds him and he and his wife Joan decide to hide Hiroshi until he can go home. It is a risky decision and their clandestine gust must stay hidden in a cave.
Banjo and Joan decide that their seventeen years old daughter Mary will bring him food and clothes. Hiroshi studied English at university – a convenient plot device –he can engage into friendly conversations with Mary and communicate properly with his hosts. Mary and Hiroshi get to know each other. Through their talks, the reader learns about Japan and life at the Aboriginal mission. And as expected, they fall in love.
Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossom is second Anita Heiss after Not Meeting Mr Right, a fluffy romance whose aim was to show the world that an Aboriginal young woman lived the same way as any Australian young woman of her age. Then I read Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, not written but edited by Anita Heiss. It’s a stunning collection of 50 texts written by Aboriginal people from all Australia and all ages. They describe what it means to grow up Aboriginal in Australia and share their experience. Extremely moving.
Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossom is a novel between the two. It’s romance and fiction based on historical facts. It’s a political novel wrapped in a romance cover. Anita Heiss gathered stories and anecdotes from Erambie’s inhabitants and changed them into literary yarn, knitting a novel with a thread of fiction and a thread of history.
I enjoyed reading about life at Erambie and learnt more about the status of Aborigines in the 1940s. I think it’s even worse than Native American living on reserves in the USA. Food resources are limited. Work is rare and Banjo is lucky to be gainfully employed. Aborigines are under the guardianship of the mission’s Manager. They live under Acts of Protection and Assimilation, which means that they don’t have basic civil rights.
Anita Heiss’s purpose is commendable. You don’t catch flies with vinegar and this romance has more chances to attract a wide public than a dry essay. It is effective. The reader sees life through Banjo’s and Mary’s perspective. We feel empathy for them and anger towards the asinine rules they have to abide by. A non-Aboriginal reader will learn things and the novel’s educational aim is obvious, even if subtly played. Whatever works is good if it means that the message of tolerance is heard.
I thought that the romance between Hiroshi and Mary was too obvious, too predictable. In my eyes, Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms would have been more powerful if Anita Heiss had chosen a male Aboriginal character who builds a strong friendship with a foreigner. The love card is a cliché that dims the novel’s lights. It’s good research and interesting but the romance is counterproductive and didn’t work for me.
If you want to know more about Aboriginal Australia, I’d recommend to read Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia. Meanwhile, I hope that Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms reached readers who don’t read non-fiction and that it helped Australians face part of their past, as this was also one of Heiss’s goal.
For a better written and better informed piece about this novel, check out Lisa’s review here.
If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin – A must read.
If Beale Street Coult Talk by James Baldwin (1974) French title: Si Beale Street pouvait parler.
Beale Street is a street in New Orleans, where my father, where Louis Armstrong and the jazz were born. Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street, whether in Jackson, Mississippi or in Harlem, New York. Beale Street is our legacy. James Baldwin
This is a way to tell the reader that what happens in Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk can happen everywhere in America. It’s painfully banal.
Fonny and Tish, the main characters, could be anyone. Fonny is twenty-two and Tish is nineteen. They live in Harlem in the early 1970s. They’ve known each other since they were children and are now a young couple in love. Marriage is in the air. Fonny wants to be a sculptor and works as a short order cook to make ends meet. Tish works in a fancy department store, in the perfume stand, where hiring a black clerk shows off how progressive the store is. They’re looking for a loft in the Village, to start their life together and for Fonny to have a workshop.
As soon as the book starts, we know that Fonny is in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. He’s accused of raping a woman from Porto Rico. Tish is pregnant with their baby. Tish is our narrator, her voice a haunting presence, aged by her circumstances. She recalls her life with Fonny, their love and tells us about their fight to get him out of jail.
If Beale Street Could Talk is the story of a young and hopeful couple crushed by a system who wants its black population staying in designated neighborhoods and nowhere else. Except jail.
Fonny had found something that he could do, that he wanted to do, and this saved him from the death that was waiting to overtake the children of our age. Though the death took many forms, though people died early in many different ways, the death itself was very simple and the cause was simple, too: as simple as a plague: the kids had been told that they weren’t worth shit and everything they saw around them proved it. They struggled, they struggled, but they fell, like flies, and they congregated on the garbage heaps of their lives, like flies. And perhaps I clung to Fonny, perhaps Fonny saved me because he was just about the only boy I know who wasn’t fooling around with the needles or drinking cheap wine or mugging people or holding up stores – and he never got his hair conked: it just stayed nappy. He started working as a short order cook in a barbecue joint, so he could eat, and he found a basement where he could work on his wood and he was at our house more often than he was at his own house.
And indeed, Fonny’s only crime is to move out of Harlem to the Village, to dare to be a sculptor.
That same passion which saved Fonny got him into trouble, and put him in jail. For, you see, he had found his center, his own center, inside him: and it showed. He wasn’t anybody’s nigger. And that’s a crime, in this fucking free country. You’re supposed to be somebody’s nigger. And if you’re nobody’s nigger, you’re a bad nigger: and that’s what the cops decided when Fonny moved downtown.
That’s probably his only crime.
Fonny’s fall is staged. The victim was raped on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side and Fonny lives on Bank Street in the Village. As Tish points out, it’s a long way to run with a police officer on your heels. I put random addresses in Google Maps to see the distance between Orchard Street and Bank Street and it says it takes two hours and a half to walk from one street to the other. What marathon runners Fonny and this cop must have been to cover this distance.
The system is meant to crush them and no one will lift a finger to point out the obvious: that this procedure is ludicrous and unfair. Fonny’s white lawyer, Hayward is genuinely on the case. But the system throws any hurdle it can on the way. And his dedication on the case is suspicious to his peers, he starts to be an outcast in his profession.
It’s a haunting story because of Tish’s voice. She’s dead calm, telling her story with precision and resignation. And yet she fights and stays strong. Her family and Fonny’s father Frank gather around the young couple. They fight with all their might but their power is limited by their financial means and the color of their skin.
The only ones who don’t fight are Fonny’s mother and sisters. These churchy persons rely on God’s goodwill. If Fonny is meant to go out of prison, God will take care of it. They even feed the white power’s fire by speaking ill of Fonny, their own family. It’s so against actual Christian values that it would be laughable if it didn’t have such tragic consequences.
From the beginning, the reader knows that this is real life, not some Hollywood tale with a fairy godmother who saves the day. I read Go Tell It on the Mountain recently. In his debut novel, Balwin, the son of a preacher, hadn’t made up his mind regarding religion. In Beale Street, he has.
Of course, I must say that I don’t think America is God’s gift to anybody – if it is, God’s days have got to be numbered. That God these people say they serve – and do serve, in ways that they don’t know – has got a very nasty sense of humor. Like you’d beat the shit out of Him, if He was a man. Or: if you were.
I also watched I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary that leaves you shaken. Beale Street includes a lot of Baldwin’s thinking about America. In an interview, he explains that he’s between Martin Luther King’s views and Malcom X’s position. His ambivalence toward religion makes him challenge the non-violent attitude. The power of love cannot conquer all, as Tish and Fonny finds out. Worse, pious people can be your enemies, through their passivity and their feeling of superiority.
But he also says that he cannot hate all white people because he had a white school teacher when he was little and she took him under her wing. Seeing a bright child, she brought him books, took him out and helped him be more than what society had decided a black boy should be. Her kindness rooted in him the knowledge that not all white people were made of the same cloth.
Beale Street reflects that as well, as three white citizen help Fonny and Tish along the way. A landlord who doesn’t mind renting a loft to a black couple. An Italian woman who comes to Tish’s defense when she’s harassed by a white man. And of course, Hayward, the white lawyer who doesn’t give up.
King’s views might be too optimistic and Malcom X’s views might be too extreme. Baldwin stands in the middle. He’s implacable in his description of America, both in Beale Street and in I Am Not Your Negro. He throws punches with facts and cold anger. He’s rational and spot on, except when he says he doesn’t believe that a black man could become president of the USA within 40 years. He doesn’t spread hatred, he just wants the white population of the USA to acknowledge that African-Americans contributed to the construction of the country, that America is their legitimate homeland.
But Beale Street is a lot more than a political novel. It’s a delicate picture of young love. Baldwin writes graceful pages about Tish and Fonny’s new love, how their friendship turned into something more, how strong they are together and how solid their bond is. It’s described beautifully, through little touches here and there, in small moves and looks. No grand gestures here, only feelings that grow timidly, find a suitable compost and bloom beautifully. Their love has solid roots, they should have a future together, one that is robbed from them.
Baldwin is a master at mixing a lovely romance with strong political ideas and a great sense of place. Even if Beale Street could be any place in America according to Baldwin, in this novel, there’s no denying that we are in New York. Again, I’m amazed at his talent. His voice walks on the difficult line of being accusing but not yelling. He chooses a love story to throw uncomfortable political truths at us. And yet the romance is not a prop for politics. It has its own beauty, its own worth. And, this, my reading friends, is only achieved by masters of literature.
Not “Highly recommended”, but like Going to Meet the Man, a Must Read.
The Weight of Secrets by Aki Shimazaki – Lovely
The Weight of Secrets by Aki Shimazaki (1999-2004) Original French title: Le poids des secrets.
Aki Shimazaki was born in 1961 in Japan. She emigrated to Canada in 1981, first living in Vancouver and Toronto before moving to Montreal in 1991. In 1995, she started to learn French and in 1999, she published her first novella. In French, her third language. I’m in awe.
The Weight of Secrets is her debut series and the original title is Le poids des secrets. It is a five-petal flower book. Each novella is a petal and the reader is like a little bee, going from one petal to the other, seeing part of the flower from a character’s point of view at different periods in time. After visiting the five petals, the reader has a global view of the history of two families who seem to live parallel lives but actually have open and hidden interconnections. It is the shared destinies of a woman, Yukiko and Yukio, born in Tokyo in the early 1930s and both living in Nagasaki in 1945 and survivors of the atomic bombing.
Each volume has a Japanese title, a name of flower or of an animal symbolic of this specific view on the story.
The first book is Tsubaki, (camélias/camellias), a flower symbolic of happy times for Yukio and Yukiko.
The second book is Hamaguri, a shellfish with a shell in two halves. It is a children’s game to have a bag of shells and try to find the exact other half to one shell. It is a symbol of a key person missing in the characters’ lives.
The third book is Tsubame (hirondelle/swallow). It is the nickname of a Catholic priest who plays a capital part in the story. He’s a swallow as he’s always dressed in a black-and-white cloth. In French we say that one swallow doesn’t bring back Spring but this man does, he brings life and hope after hard times.
The fourth book is Wasurenagusa (myosotis/forget-me-not). It belongs to Yukio’s father who was in Manchuria during WWII and separated from his family.
The fifth book is Hotaru (lucioles/fireflies), a way to symbolize dangerous attractions.
I’m aware that you still have no clue about the story. The truth is, I don’t want to give details about the characters. All you need to know is that it’s set in Japan, that it involves characters crushed by historical events like the 1923 earthquake in Tokyo and the subsequent massacre of Korean immigrants or the 1945 atomic bombing in Nagasaki. It is about racism against the Korean community and about the Japanese definition of what is proper or not. It tells the impact of customs on individual lives when they cannot meet society’s expectations. It’s the story of two beings who had a special bond, one they didn’t get to explore because their parents kept too many secrets and how they missed out. It’s the stories of two adults who healed each other and had a good life together, despite their own secrets and failures.
We go back and forth in time, we change of narrators and we unravel each character’s reasons to keep something or some part of themselves hidden. We only see people who do as best they can given the circumstances they are in. From one book to the other, we get a clearer picture of the characters’ lives and how some of the secrets get revealed to the next generation and how some die with the person. Each character has something they don’t know about their origins.
It’s written in a simple and lovely language and I wanted to know more after each volume. My favorite volumes were Tsubame and Wasurenagusa. I absolutely loved this series and I highly recommend it. If you pick it up, do not read the blurbs of the books, there are way too many spoilers in them and you want to keep the magic intact.
I don’t know if it’s a Japanese or a Canadian book. I’ve seen it in the Japanese section of my bookstore. I certainly thought it was Japanese until I wondered who was the translator, discovered there was none and started to research Aki Shimazaki. It’s difficult to qualify it. Its language is French but certainly not the French from Québec. Shimazaki’s native language probably left some marks in her way to think and write in French. It’s a Japanese book for its setting, its characters, its themes and its background culture. So, I don’t know, I’ll let you make your own mind about it but I feel privileged. I got to read a Japanese book in my native language.
Now the sad news and the ranting part. Sadly, it’s a Translation Tragedy. It’s published in Québec, it was a great success in the francophone world and it’s easy to read. And yet, it’s not available in English. Is there not an anglophone Canadian publisher to translate it into English? Like for Bonheur d’occasion by Gabrielle Roy, I really don’t understand how it’s possible that such books are not available in the country’s two official languages.
Good thing for readers who speak French, it’s a perfect way to practice reading in French. The books are short, the style is simple (short sentences, no very complicated words) and the story gripping.
Half Life by Roopa Farooki – A lovely journey back to full life.
Half Life by Roopa Farooki (2010) French title: Le Temps des vrais bonheurs. Translated by Jérémy Oriol.
It’s time to stop fighting, and go home. Those were the words which finally persuaded Aruna to walk out of her ground-floor Victorian flat in Bethnal Green, and keep on walking. One step at a time, one foot, and then the other, her inappropriately flimsy sandals flip-flopping on the damp east London streets; she avoids the dank, brown puddles, the foil glint of the takeaway containers glistening with the vibrant slime of sweet and sour sauce, the mottled banana skin left on the pavement like a practical joke, but otherwise walks in straight line. One foot, and then the other. Toe to heel to toe to heel. Flip-flop. She knows exactly where she is going, and even though she could have carried everything she needs in her dressing-gown pocket – her credit card, her passport, her phone – she has taken her handbag instead, and she has paused in her escape long enough to dress in jeans, a T-shirt and even a jacket. Just for show. So that people won’t think that she is a madwoman who has walked out on her marriage and her marital home in the middle of breakfast, with her half-eaten porridge congealing in the bowl, with her tea cooling on the counter top. So that she won’t think so either. So she can turn up at the airport looking like anyone else, hand over her credit card, and run back to the city she had run away from in the first place.
The opening paragraph of Half Life by Roopa Farooki has in itself most of the key elements of her novel. This is Aruna’s point of view.
It’s time to stop fighting, and go home is a verse of a poem by a minor Bengali poet, Hari Hassan. Hassan is dying in a hospital in Kuala Lumpur and reflects on his life. His last wish is to see his estranged son one last time. Hassan looks back on his love life, on past friendships and on the war that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. He and his best friend weren’t on the same side. He will be the second voice of Half Life.
Aruna read this verse in a collection of poems by Hassan that her childhood friend turned lover gave her. Jazz, that’s his name, lives in Singapore and will be the third voice of Half Life.
Aruna has been in London for two years after she fled from Singapore, leaving Jazz behind, never looking back, never contacting him again. She got married to Patrick, a doctor who works in a local hospital. She’s bipolar and struggles with her illness. Her tone is rather detached, as if she goes with the flow of her life without being truly engaged in it. Her description of her relationship with Patrick is quite harsh and I pitied him a bit. But is Aruna a reliable character? Is Patrick as oblivious as she thinks?
Jazz has stayed in Singapore, has a new girlfriend and tries to move on from Aruna. He doesn’t speak to his father Hari Hassan anymore and doesn’t know he’s dying in Kuala Lumpur. Aruna’s departure was brutal after they discovered a disturbing fact about Jazz and her. They grew up together, their parents living in the same neighborhood, two Bengali kids in school, looking alike and linked by a strong bond. Their relationship moved from deep friendship to lovers. Until a family secret shattered their love bubble.
And then Aruna left. Abruptly. Just like she does this very morning in London, leaving her husband, their flat and their life behind in the middle of breakfast. It’s time to go back to Singapore, see Jazz again and look for the answers behind the secret they discovered. It’s time to stop hiding, to learn the truth to finally heal.
The good part of writing billets about books I read a few months ago is to assess what stayed with me. If I don’t read my notes or reread passages of Half Life by Roopa Farooki, I’m left with a bittersweet impression of a main character, Aruna who goes on a few days journey to put together the puzzle of her identity and her life. It will take her three days and three nights.
I didn’t like her very much at the beginning, I thought she was cruel to others and quite selfish. But maybe she felt so bad that all her strength was used to keep living her everyday life, work, interact with Patrick, his family and friends. Perhaps it consumed all her energy and left nothing to reach out to other human beings around her. Nothing left to give. Selfishness in survival mode.
Jazz and Hassan need closure. Jazz does to move on, to have Aruna in his life as a friend and not as a partner. Hassan wants to die in peace and reconcile with his son and his best friend.
Half Life is what these three characters have been living. Hassan has forever been cut in half after the civil war that brought the creation of Bangladesh. His former life was in Pakistan. His heart was in Bangladesh. Aruna and Jazz cannot live a full life without a new foundation to their relationship. They have to move back to friendship because they need each other. Without this, they only engage half way in their life and current relationships. It’s time Aruna gives more credit to her feelings for Patrick. (In a way, she reminds me of Marguerite Duras in The Lover.) It’s time that Jazz invests in his relationship to June. Their partners deserve it. Half life also refers to geography. For the three characters, half of their life is in another country.
I enjoyed the setting, the descriptions of Singapore and of Aruna and Jazz’s childhoods. It brought me to places I’ve never been to. Farooki’s writing is fluid, with a pleasant melody, one that stays with you and makes you remember fondly of this unusual story and its engaging characters.
PS: According to her biography on Wikipedia, Roopa Farooki has moved from corporate finance and advertising to literature, a brave and radical change of career that she can be proud of.
PPS : I’m sorry but again, I prefer the French cover to the Anglo-Saxon one.
Pike by Benjamin Whitmer – Excellent American Neo-Noir
Pike by Benjamin Whitmer. (2015) French title: Pike. Translated by Jacques Mailhos.
We are now in December and I’m starting to realize I still have FIVE unwritten billets and that I have to catch up within a month. That’s going to be a challenge considering my current workload and family occupations. I would like to say that I have a method to tackle the pile, like alternating FIFO and LIFO methods but I don’t. So today, it’s going to be Pike by Benjamin Whitmer. It’s crime fiction again, a series of billets I might close with Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook.
Set in the Appalachees and in the 1980s, Pike is American neo-Noir brought to the French public by the excellent publisher Gallmeister.
Douglas Pike is retired from crime and murder. He’s back in his hometown in the Apalachees and makes a living doing odd jobs with his partner, Rory. Pike tries to survive, to leave the past behind and takes care of Rory in a gruff and discreet way. His life changes when he discovers that his estranged daughter Sarah overdosed and he’s the only one left to take care of his twelve-year-old granddaughter Wendy. A granddaughter he’d never heard of until that day.
While he’s busy settling into a new life with a kid and bonding with Wendy, he soon realizes that Derrick Kreiger, a corrupt cop from Cincinnati, takes an unhealthy interest in his granddaughter. Protecting Wendy will push him to investigate what happened to his daughter and to try to understand what Derrick Kreiger does behind his police officer uniform.
Pike is a pure Noir gem with a great gallery of characters. Pike is still haunted by his past, does his best to move on but Wendy will force him to dive back into his old world. He’s taken Rory under his wing, being a father figure to this young adult who tries to do something with his life and defy the odds his background put against him. Iris is a waitress at a diner Rory and Pike go to. She has a soft spot for Pike and is part of his new “family” or support system in Nanticote. There’s all damaged by life. Here’s Pike and Wendy’s first meeting at the diner, under the Iris’ and Rory’s incredulous eyes.
It gives you a idea of Whitmer’s style, of the atmosphere of the novel and of Pike’s task with Wendy. She’s a tough cookie and she’s not ready to open herself to this stranger of a grandpa.
The other side of the book is the manhunt in Cincinnati, the depiction of a corrupted police force and its meddling with organized crime. Derrick Kreiger is not someone you want to mess up with and Pike arriving in the picture doesn’t sit well with him.
You’ll have to read it to know more…
As always, Gallmeister did a wonderful job of bringing excellent American literature to the French public. Pike will be a success with fans of classic Noir. It’s like watching a movie. Benjamin Whitmer was in bookstore in Lyon recently for a reading and a book signing. I wish I could have gone and met him. *sigh* I need to work on this quote by Michel Serres Travailler moins pour lire plus. (Work less to read more)
PS: I can’t help commenting the American and French cover of the book. The French one is so much better, at least for me. It conveys everything, the main protagonists, the atmosphere and the danger.
His Kingdom by Han Han – caustic Chinese lit
His Kingdom by Han Han (2015) French title: Son royaume. Translated from the Chinese by Stéphane Lévêque.
This year our Book Club has decided to expand its horizon and read foreign fiction from countries we rarely read from. The first book meeting these new criteria is His Kingdomn, a contemporary book written in 2015 by Han Han, a famous Chinese blogger/author/rally racer. Yes, he’s all that and he was only born in 1982.
We are in Tinglin, a little fictional town in the South East of China. Zu Xialong works as a groundskeeper and has a lot of free time. What he loves most is to drive around Tinglin at high speed on his Japanese moto. He’s young, single and has yet to lose his virginity because each time he’s close to sealing the deal, his partner has her period. He has a crush on Ying with the sultry voice and bad reputation but he only catches the attention of the young Niba, a highschool student who’s been infatuated with him for a while. This is Xialong in a nutshell.
We follow Xialong in his wanderings around Tinglin, his interactions with Niba and Ying and his various small rebellious acts. His various trips in the city are an opportunity for Han Han to describe and make fun of the Tinglin life. It’s a town probably modeled on existing Chinese small provincial towns.
The officials from the Party who run Tinglin have authorized big corporations to come and set up huge factories. As a consequence, the city attracts lots of workers from other areas of China, suffers from pollution and is overcrowded with infrastructures that are not ready for so many inhabitants. The locals become landlords to the newcomers and the economy of the area goes upside down.
Han Han’s descriptions of wild industrialization are often comical and full of humor. See what happens at the end of the working day:
| C’est une route nationale mais il y a tellement d’usines implantées dans le coin qu’elle est remplie de piétons à la sortie du travail. La police de la route a été obligée de mettre en place une déviation à cette heure-là, ce qui fait de cette route la seule nationale de Chine dont une section a été transformée en rue piétonne. | It’s a main road but there are so many factories settled in the area that it is full of pedestrians after work. The traffic police had to arrange a detour at this hour and now this road is the only main road in China with a pedestrian section. |
The pollution resulting from the factories is part of Tinglin, a price to pay to the god of economic development. It becomes a permanent fixture, it’s in the landscape and Han Han points out how the inhabitants are so used to it that they embrace it.
| La lumière du crépuscule est magnifique, le ciel rougi par la pollution a des reflets pourpres, il souffle une petite brise acide. | The light at sunset is beautiful. The sky turning red because of the pollution has crimson glints. A slight acid wind is softly blowing. |
Poetic descriptions of the landscape are just another way to mock the good people of Tinglin. Critical minds are not a blossoming species in this town.
Xialong is a rather pathetic character, full of dreams but riding on an empty tank when it comes to make his dreams come true. He’s still a rebel to the general atmosphere of obeying blindly to the Party, bowing in front of apparatchiks and buying all the official speeches.
Sometimes he seems lazy but he’s ready to work his butt off to earn extra-money and repair his precious bike. He takes a second job in a thermometer factory, at the end of production line. He’s quality control and has to check that all the thermometers ready to be shipped actually show 37°C when used in live conditions.
Basically, Xialong tests the thermometers on himself, a job he can only perform well if he doesn’t run a fever. Han Han explains how Xiaolong improves his productivity by putting as many thermometers as he can in his body at the same time, even wishing to be a woman, you know, for the extra hole. Han Han’s dry wit makes fun of Xialong’s inventiveness to improve his job performance.
| Pour son travail, il enfile son jean devant derrière, la fermeture éclair côté fesses afin de pouvoir plus facilement se fourrer les thermomètres dans le cul. | When he goes to work, he slips into his jeans with the zipper on his backside in order to have a better access to stick the thermometers in his ass. |
Han Han selected the most ridiculous job for Xiaolong, only to enforce the comic effects and still denounce the stupid work cadences.
Han Han also picks on Party officials and their ludicrous policies to promote culture and encourage companies to build factories in their town. I wonder how he’s allowed to write such an abrasive caricature of local politics. He mocks the empty and long speeches that they deliver.
| On ne peut imaginer tirade plus creuse que celle du secrétaire du Parti, au point que l’on pourrait supprimer des passages entiers sans altérer le sens de l’ensemble. | One cannot imagine more boring monologues than the Party secretary’s. Whole passages could be cut out without altering the global meaning of the speech. |
There are hilarious passages about the codes to respect for speeches. Some stylistic devices are a must in every speech. They are expected, weighed, compared and officials observe each other and take notes of fellow speakers’ achievements.
| Mais un fonctionnaire qui entend quelqu’un utiliser une formule de rhétorique est pareil à un toxicomane profond qui en voit un autre sniffer un rail. | A civil servant who hears someone use a rhetorical phrase is like a full-in junkie who sees another junkie blowing coke. |
I could go on with other excerpts of Han Han’s caustic writing. I enjoyed my time with Xialong, even if he really sounds like a useless bum. Han Han’s style isn’t extraordinary but who knows how many innuendos and puns are lot in translation.
I liked his caricature of small-town China and his critical vision of high speed economic development. Some elements are dystopian or even fantasy, like in Murakami’s Kakfa On the Shore. I was happy to read a Chinese book that was not a historical novel set during the Empire or another opus about the Cultural Revolution.
It was a good pick for me, I enjoyed his brand of humor.
The Anarchist Banker by Fernando Pessoa
The Anarchist Banker by Fernando Pessoa (1922) French title: Le banquier anarchiste. Translated from the Portuguese by Françoise Laye.
The Anarchist Banker by Fernando Pessoa is a novella in which a banker explains to his audience why he is a true anarchist. It has been on my TBW (To Be Written) since April. Why? Mostly because I didn’t know how to write about it. So, it’s Catch 22. I can’t write about it properly but if I don’t, I’ll break my cardinal rule which is “write about all the books you read”.
I feel that if I start allowing myself to skip a billet, other books will be left behind as well. Where does that leave me? I still can’t write a passable billet about The Anarchist Banker but I can’t procrastinate anymore.
Solution? A short cut.
Read this witty, incredible novella where a banker will demonstrate with a lot of self-assurance that he is the only genuine anarchist in the world. If anarchist banker wasn’t such an oxymoron, the reader could believe in the banker’s reasoning.
He demonstrates that anarchism is a good system but since it’s impossible to implement, in the end the only possible system is the bourgeois system.
Pessoa has a fantastic sense of humour. His tone is both light and serious, the man totally convinced by his brilliant reasoning. He’s so ridiculous in his beliefs that it enhances the comedy of situation. This is something that could have been written by a philosophe from the Age of Enlightenment, like Montesquieu.
It is also a fascinating book to read when you think about politics and politicians. It makes you realize how a politician can convince you of something, step by step. He unfolds a reasoning in which each step holds some truth, he asks you to validate each step and one step after the other, he leads you to a path you would never have followed if you’d seen the whole journey on the map right from the start. It’s subtle and frightening and we’ve all heard politicians start with an assertion you cannot refute and then build something totally fallacious from it.
That’s what could happen to the reader here if the constant irony wasn’t a lifeline that reminds you that this reasoning is flawed.
The Anarchist Banker is also a masterful demonstration of how an idea can become the roots of a dictatorship, how radical changes in a society cannot be implemented because it’s impossible to do so everywhere at the same time and successfully. So the new system must be forcefed to the population and only an authoritative system can do it.
I really can’t tell you more about The Anarchist Banker. I highly recommend it as a masterpiece of literature but also as an educational read about all those politicians who want to attract voters through simplistic thinking.
Book Around the Corner 