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The Sheep Queen by Thomas Savage
The Sheep Queen by Thomas Savage (1977) French title: La Reine de l’Idaho. Translated by Pierre Furlan.
I believed I lived in Maine because Maine is about as far as I could get from the ranch in Montana where I grew up, and where my mother was unhappy, my beautiful, angel mother.
The Sheep Queen by Thomas Savage was originally published under the title I Heard My Sister Speak My Name. The change was made in 2001 with the author’s approval.
When the book opens, Thomas Burton, a novelist who lives in Maine, receives a letter from Amy Nofzinger who claims to be his sister. She was born before him and was abandoned by their parents. From then on, Thomas tries to unearth the truth in order to know if her claim is founded. We’re in the 1970s, there are no DNA tests.
When and why would his mother have abandoned a child? How could he reconcile this fact with the mother he knew and loved? She’s dead, he can’t confront her. That leaves him with digging into his memories and writing to his aunts who still live in the west, even after the ranch was sold. The whole novel relates his quest.
Thomas was born in 1912 and came from Idaho royalty. His mother’s family ran a vast and rich sheep ranch and his grandparents were a powerful couple, unusual in their respective roles. His grandmother Emma wore the pants and had married someone who happily let her manage and develop their ranch. Grandpa Thomas was more interested in nature, in bonding with people and especially children. They were lucky to complement each other and back in the 19th, Emma was happy to find a man who let her develop her talents.
Emma was a force of nature and ran the show with an iron fist. She died at 88, which means she had influence over her children during most of their lives. His aunts still think of what their mother would say about their actions. Emma’s power hasn’t gone.
Thomas’s mother, Elizabeth, was obedient and closer to her father. She was supposed to marry a hotshot heir from the East coast when she fell for the charming Thomas Burton, married him, and left Idaho. She divorced him when Thomas was two and her mother married her to a rancher in Montana. Her life didn’t turn out so well.
In The Sheep Queen, Thomas Savage explores various themes around identity.
Amy and Thomas were both adopted, Amy by the parents who raised her and Thomas by his stepfather. As soon as she knew she was adopted, Amy wanted to know who her birth parents were. She loved her adoptive parents; they were lovely but she always felt that she was a second choice replacement as they adopted her because their son had died.
Thomas never felt at ease with his stepfather’s surname. He never felt he belonged to the ranch in Montana where he grew up after his mother remarried. He kept in touch with his father who wasn’t a reliable man. He had his mother, though.
Amy and Thomas lacked the unconditional love that children deserve to grow with deep and strong roots. Their foundations weren’t a given, they had to work for their steadiness. Thomas always feels a bit out-of-touch with the people around him.
Elizabeth is the product of her time. She had to obey her parents, what she truly wanted had no real value. Emma had a clan-based conception of the family. She expected loyalty and compliance to their status in Idaho. She was formidable and Elizabeth could not stand up to her.
The Sheep Queen is autobiographical. According to Thomas Savage’s bio on Wikipedia, a lot of details about Thomas Burton’s life are the same as his. He didn’t even change the first names.
I thought that the construction of the novel was a bit clumsy at times. We hear a lot about Amy at the beginning and then no more, except as a reference to the letters she exchanges with Thomas. The ending which discloses important information about Elizabeth has details already mentioned in The Power of the Dog, which means that they are based on true facts. I thought they were brilliant when I was reading a novel, but I found them appalling as being real events from Savage’s past.
A fascinating novel.
On Identity : Delphine Horvilleur, Romain Gary and Alexandra Lapierre
- There Is No Coincidence by Delphine Horvilleur – 2022 Original French title: Il n’y a pas de Ajar
- Hocus Bogus by Romain Gary (Emile Ajar) – 1976 Original French title: Pseudo.
- Belle Greene by Alexandra Lapierre – 2021. Original French title: Belle Greene
Delphine Horvilleur was born in 1974, she’s a rabbi, a journalist and a writer. She co-leads the Liberal Jewish Movement of France and she’s a public figure known for her humanist and moderate stands. If all religious leaders were like her, the world would be a better and a safer place.
Delphine Horvilleur is also a Romain Gary fan. The title of her essay, Il n’y a pas de Ajar is a play-on-word on Ajar, the penname Gary used when he secretly wrote Gros Câlin in 1974 and the word Hasard, as the pronunciations are close. In French, Il n’y a pas de hasard means There’s no coincidence, and that’s a sentence Momo, the character of Life Before Us could say.
Her essay is also subtitled Monologue contre l’identité. She wants to point out how our current societies tend to pigeonhole people in identity boxes. And you’re only allowed to have one box, French, immigrant, gay, Jewish or whatever the sticker on your forehead.
After a few pages, she refers to Romain Gary:
Her whole essay is a plea against introverted assertions of one’s identity. Trends to stay with likeminded people. Associate with people who share your background. Stay in your identity line and do not cross it. Hell, no, cross the lines if you want to, she says.
| Et dans cette tenaille identitaire politico-religieuse, je pense encore et toujours à Romain Gary, et à tout ce que son œuvre a tenté de torpiller, en choisissant constamment de dire qu’il est permis et salutaire de ne pas se laisser définir par son nom ou sa naissance. Permis et salutaire de se glisser dans la peau d’un autre qui n’a rien à voir avec vous. Permis et salutaire de juger un homme pour ce qu’il fait et non pour ce dont il hérite. D’exiger pour l’autre une égalité, non pas parce qu’il est comme nous, mais précisément parce qu’il n’est pas comme nous, et que son étrangeté nous oblige. | And in this politico-religious stranglehold, I always think of Romain Gary and of what his work tried to torpedo. He kept saying that it was allowed and beneficial to refuse to be defined by one’s name or one’s birth. Allowed and beneficiary to slip into someone else’s skin, someone totally different from you. Allowed and beneficiary to judge a human on their actions and not on their background. To demand equality for others, not because we are alike but precisely because they’re different and it’s our duty to acknowledge their strangeness. |
If I translated her essay into English, I’d translate the subtitle as Monologue for cultural appropriation, not to steal someone’s identity but to encourage people to cross identity lines.
I finished her thoughtful and vibrant essay and I had to read Pseudo by Romain Gary. He was also a chameleon, reinventing himself all the time, blurring the lines in his biography and playing hide-and-seek with the truth about his origins. He had a vague definition of identity as something fleeting and uprooted. Pseudo is the culmination of this, but first, a bit of context.
After Life Before Us won the Prix Goncourt in 1975, Emile Ajar couldn’t stay out of the limelight. The public wanted to hear and see the author of this book they loved so much. Romain Gary had his cousin Paul Pawlovitch pretend that he was Emile Ajar. Pawlovitch impersonated Emile Ajar in the media. Pseudo is a book Romain Gary wrote under the Ajar and here’s the blurb:
There, Pseudo, a hoax confession and one of the most alarmingly effective mystifications in all literature, was written at high speed. Writing under double cover, Gary simulated schizophrenia and paranoid delusions while pretending to be Paul Pawlovitch confessing to being Émile Ajar—the author of books Gary himself had written.
In Pseudo, brilliantly translated by David Bellos as Hocus Bogus, the struggle to assert and deny authorship is part of a wider protest against suffering and universal hypocrisy. Playing with novelistic categories and authorial voice, this work is a powerful testimony to the power of language—to express, to amuse, to deceive, and ultimately to speak difficult personal truths.
Not an easy book to read for this reader, despite my fondness-bordering-on-obsession for Romain Gary. All the pleasure came from his playful style, his comical and out-of-the-box comments about identity. He always had a way with words, a way to twist sentences, use images and play-on-words and be spot-on. He’s always spot on and the perfect definition of the phrase “many a true word is spoken in jest”.
If there is no coincidence, then some underlying current brought our Book Club to choose Belle Greene by Alexandra Lapierre for our February read.
It’s based on the true story of Belle da Costa Greene (1879-1950), a black woman with a light color of skin who decided to pass for white to have a better life. And indeed, she managed and developed the JP Morgan Library. She loved books and always wanted to be a librarian. She shed away her identity and became someone else, someone she never could have become if she had kept “black” on her identity card.
She crossed the identity line and belongs to this billet. Sadly, the book is not up to Belle Greene and I couldn’t finish it. Thanks Wikipedia, because Belle Greene is a fascinating person and I wanted to know more about her. She truly deserves a book about her life.
Unfortunately, Alexandra Lapierre has a tedious style, rather simple and verbose. There are too many vapid pages about feelings that seemed more like filling pages than truly exploring the dent that Greene’s decision made on her soul. Lapierre was more interested in love stories than in digging into what Greene’s transgression meant for her.
What a way to ruin a perfect opportunity to celebrate a brilliant woman who rebelled against her condition, the world she lived in, lied and made sacrifices to explore her talent.
I’ll leave you with a word by Delphine Horvilleur, something true for all of us book lovers, as it is for her and as it was for Romain Gary and Belle Greene.
| Nous sommes toujours les enfants de nos parents, des mondes qu’ils ont construits et des univers détruits qu’ils ont pleurés, des deuils qu’ils ont eu à faire et des espoirs qu’ils ont placés dans les noms qu’ils nous ont donnés. Mais nous sommes aussi, et pour toujours, les enfants des livres que nous avons lus, les fils et les filles de textes qui nous ont construits, de leurs mots et de leurs silences. | We forever are the children of our parents, of the worlds they built and of the worlds they lost and grieved, of the deaths they had to mourn and of the hope they put into the names they gave us. But we also are, forever, the children of the books we read, the sons and daughters of the texts that built us, of their words and silences. |
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – Very highly recommended
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1962-1973) French title: Une journée d’Ivan Denissovitch by Alexandre Soljénitsyne. Translated by Lucia and Jean Cathala.
The day we heard about the death of Alexei Navalny is the day I finished reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Talk about a coincidence. It’s hard not to superimpose images from Solzhenitsyn’s book on the description of Navalny’s prison camp in Siberia. 50 years later and nothing has changed.
Ivan Denisovich Shukhov has been in prison camps for eight years. He escaped from the Germans during the war and was considered as a spy by the Russian army. He got 10 years of imprisonment and hasn’t been home since 1941.
He’s in Gang 104 and he’s lucky because Tyurin, the gang’s foreman is a decent guy. The other men in his gang are from various backgrounds. Alyocha got years because he’s a Baptist and won’t give up his religion. Gopchit is a Ukrainian nationalist. Buynovsky is a former Soviet Naval Captain. Kildigs is Latvian and Senka Klevshin was freed from Buchenwald. It is just the illustration that no one was safe in Stalin’s days.
Solzhenitsyn tells us an ordinary day in the life of Shukhov, from his point of view. Shukov is street smart and has learnt all the little tricks to make his life easier at the camp. He does it the right way: he’s not walking over other people and his fellow inmates like him. He just knows how to provide useful services to the right persons. He works hard and is a team player.
His goals are simple: ensuring he gets acceptable tools at work, getting a second helping of food, staying near the stove, protecting his meagre possessions, trading tobacco here and there. All his mental energy revolves around his basic needs: to keep himself fed, warm, rather healthy and out of trouble. Bend the rule and stay safe. Help the right persons and keep one’s dignity. Stay under the radar and be seen as a reliable fellow.
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is based upon Solzhenitsyn’s own experience as a prisoner in such a camp. He describes the rules, the countdown of prisoners, the way meals are organized, the sleeping arrangements. They all wear a number, sewn on their clothes and mandatory.
The most ludicrous part is when Solzhenitsyn describes their working day. They go to work for a contractor and build walls for an upcoming electricity plant. It’s around -27°C that day. There’s snow everywhere and the prisoners are very cold. They spend the whole morning protecting themselves from the biting cold and setting up a stove. There’s no wood for it, so they burn whatever they can. It’s so cold that the mortar freezes before they can use it if they’re not cautious. Building a wall is a stupid idea in this weather.
It’s utter inefficiency: they are left to their own devices, so imagine a gang with no one who ever worked in construction. There’s no direction from a foreman, they have to guess how to build this wall. They are so cold that they destroy tools and scaffoldings to take the wood and feed the stove. Shukhov is a Jack of all trades and it helps that he can work with his hands. He knows how to build a brick wall.
Like in Fateless by Imre Kertész, Shukhov’s train of thought is pragmatic. He adjusts to his environment. Solzhenitsyn’s style also reminded me of Gogol. It’s inventive, humorous and according to the author, faithful to the argot language of the camps.
It’s not as hard to read as If This is a Man by Primo Levi because of Solzhenitsyn’s style. He doesn’t sugarcoat the living conditions of the prisoners but he pictures a down-to-earth character who adapts to the camp, makes the best of it and keeps his moral boundaries. He behaves like a decent human being and thus retains his humanity in a dehumanizing setting.
Very highly recommended.
This is part of my Tame the TBR project. I don’t know why it took me so long to get to this book.
The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge – creepy #NovNov23 & #ReadingBeryl23
The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge (1973) French title: La couturière. Translated by Françoise Cartano.
In English, The Dressmaker is a novella as it’s less than 200 pages long. My copy in French has 294 pages. Hmm. I’ll stick to the original and consider that it qualifies for Novellas in November on top of being my participation to Annabel’s Reading Beryl 2023 week.
The Dressmaker is my third Bainbridge after An Awfully Big Adventure and The Bottle Factory Outing and I know of her books only through blogging as I’ve never seen them in a French bookstore. I bought used copies or books in English.
The Dressmaker is set in Liverpool in 1944 and American soldiers are stationed in town. On Bingley Road, Nellie lives in her parents’ house with her sister Margo and her seventeen-years old niece Rita. Jack, the third Bingley Road sibling lives above his butcher shop and when his wife died, Rita came to live with her aunts.
Nellie is a competent dressmaker and her current job is to sew Valerie Mander’s dress for her engagement party. Valerie is engaged to GI Chuck and Rita envies her future blissful life in rich America. When Rita meets Ira at Valerie’s, she thinks she’s in love and is ready to a lot of compromise to pursue a relationship with him.
The atmosphere of the book is creepy on several levels. Nellie is stuck into the past and celebrates an unhealthy cult to her dead mother. She longs to meet her again in heaven and worships her mother’s furniture and belongings. Poor Rita must have been raised in a mausoleum.
Nellie refuses to acknowledge that times have changed and would gladly live under Queen Victoria. She despises her sister’s wish for male companionship and ten years ago ensured that she broke up with the man she was dating when he proposed. Now Nellie has decided that Ira won’t do.
The relationships in this family are toxic. Nellie rules the house as her mother probably used to. Jack is Rita’s father and she calls him “Uncle Jack”, he’s under Nellie’s influence and let go of his parental duties. Nellie and Margo took over.
Margo is a shameless flirt and she could be one of those ridiculous middle-aged persons who think they are still attractive when they’re not. She’s herself and oozes a je-ne-sais-quoi that appeals to the opposite sex, like Brenda in The Bottle Factory Outing. Margo works in a factory, something Nellie finds degrading and bad for her sister’s manners. Margo is more in tune with her time.
Rita is immature and lives in her own head. She loves the idea of Ira more than Ira himself. She doesn’t ask him any question about his life back home and she’s unable to answer simple questions about the man she’s dating such as where he comes from, what is profession is or what his parents do for a living. She intends to marry him and yet has no interest in him beyond the ticket to America he can provide. She’s not even ruthless, she deludes herself into thinking that she wants him when all she wants is his nationality. Like Freda in The Bottle Factory Outing, she wants a man to better herself in life.
The Dressmaker is an excellent picture of Liverpool in 1944, the people’s reactions to the American soldiers stationed in their town, the daily life difficulties and how the war moved the lines between men and women, with women working in factories.
However I felt uncomfortable during the whole story as Bainbridge builds a sense of foreboding. The whole thing can’t end well. I thought it was a lot like The Bottle Factory Outing. I’m not fond of the atmosphere of her books. She captures the daily lives of her characters very well but they all have something off and disquieting. There’s this feeling of domination, of sexual tension and abuse. Nellie is a dominating creep, Margo sounded better except for her disconcerting flirting choices, Jack is a wimp and Rita grew up among these disfunctioning adults and is a mix of cunning and naiveté.
The whole picture is chilling and while I’m aware that Bainbridge is an excellent writer, I don’t enjoy her books very much.
Three novellas with war as a background – Uhlman, Zweig and Rigoni Stern #NovNov23
- Reunion by Fred Uhlman (1971) French title: L’ami retrouvé. Translated by Léo Lack
- Chess by Stefan Zweig (1942) French title: Le joueur d’échecs. Translated by Jacqueline des Gouttes
- Story of Tönle by Mario Rigoni Stern. (1978) French title: Histoire de Tönle. Translated by Laura Brignon
November is German Lit Month and Novellas in November #NovNov. I managed to combine the two events with Fred Uhlman, a German who wrote Reunion in English after he emigrated to UK and the classic Chess by Stefan Zweig.
I received Story of Tönle by Mario Rigoni Stern through my Kube subscription and although it’s an Italian book, it goes well with the others as it is linked to Austria.
Fred Uhlman (1901-1985) was born in a Jewish middle-class family in Stuttgart and left Germany in 1933 after Hitler took power. He wrote Reunion in 1971 when he was 70, which explains the nostalgic tone of the book when he describes his hometown and Wurtemberg.
Hans Schwarz was a student at the Karl Alexander Gymnasium in Stuttgart in 1932 when a new student joined their class. Uhlman starts with a powerful paragraph, that sets the tone of the novel.
He came into my life in February 1932 and never left it again. More than a quarter of a century has passed since then, more than nine thousand days, desultory and tedious, hollow with the sense of effort or work without hope – days and years, many of them as dead as dry leaves on a dead tree.
I can remember the day and the hour when I first set eyes on this boy who was to be the source of my greatest happiness and of my greatest despair.
“He” is Graf Konrad von Hohenfels, an aristocrat, an adolescent who comes from a totally different background from Hans. And they become best friends until History comes in their way.
In a mere 120 pages, Uhlman manages to combine the story of a life-changing friendship, the implacable march of History and an ode to his hometown as he describes the beauties of Wurtemberg.
Hans and Konrad don’t run in the same circles. Their improbable friendship is based on shared interests and matching tempers. Hans looks up to Konrad who comes from a family with a prestigious past. It’s a strong bond and Hans says he was ready to die for his friend.
There’s a Proust feeling in this book and it is explicit when Hans mentions the Duchesse de Guermantes. Indeed, In Search of Lost Time pictures Swann, a Jew and close friends with the Guermantes until the Dreyfus affair. Proust’s narrator is as dazzled by aristocratic clout as Hans. In chapter 12, another reminder of Proust’s narrator: Hans tells an adecdote. His mother, all dressed up for ball, comes to kiss him goodnight before going out. It upsets Hans deeply and it reminded me of the beginning of Swann’s Way.
It could have been a Bildungsroman. But we’re in 1932 and the Nazi infiltrate the German society and reach the classrooms of their gymnasium. Families are split, teachers bring Nazi views in class, students start bullying Hans. In a few pages, we see a peaceful microcosm caught up by external evil forces. Propaganda turns people’s heads and in the blink of an eye, Hans turns from anonymous student to pariah. People change rapidly and we ought to remember that.
My friend’s daughter read it in school a few weeks ago and I’m glad her teacher picked it for their class as it is a literary gem and a good book to discuss. It is also a perfect companion book to Address Unknown by K. Kressman Taylor.
After Uhlman, I read Chess by Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), written during WWII. It also refers to Nazi persecutions albeit in an oblique manner. (Is that a chess-like literary move?)
We’re on a liner between New York and Buenos Aires. The narrator spots Mirko Czentovic, the world’s chess champion. He and a few fellow passengers challenge him to a game of chess.
During the game, another passenger, Doctor B. arrives, gives them pointers, and helps them win. Then Mr. B explains to the narrator how he became knowledgeable in chess when he was kept by the Gestapo in Vienna. Before the novella circles back to present time, Zweig leaves enough room to B to describe the mental torture he endured in detention.
Chess is Zweig’s last book, it was published in 1943 after he committed suicide in exile. I didn’t enjoy it as much as his other books I’ve read, probably because lots of chess references were lost on me since I don’t play the game.
After Chess, I moved to Story of Tönle by Mario Rigoni Stern (1921-2008). He’s an Italian writer, a WWII veteran and born in Asagio, in North East Italy, near the Austrian border. His work is laced with autobiographical elements.
Tönle was born in the 1850s on the Asagio plateau. He’s a shepherd who smuggles goods from Austria through the mountains. One day, he gets caught, injures a gendarme, and has to hide away.
For years, Tönle crosses the Austrian border and works somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian empire. He comes back to his village during the winters, brings money, hides in his home, spends time with his family and leaves again in the spring. It lasts until the king has a newborn and decides of an amnesty. (I guess it was in 1904). Tönle resumes his life as a mountain shepherd.
The news of the beginning of WWI reach the village and the reality of war catches up with the villagers. They are at the Austrian border and severe battles happened in the area such as the Battle of Asagio.
Tönle is a man of his time and of his birthplace. He was a soldier in the Austrian Landwehr and then in the Italian Alpini after the independence of Italy (1870). He was also born in the vast Austro-Hungarian empire and borders meant nothing. He was free to work in Vienna or Prague if he wanted to. Tönle speaks a local dialect with German roots. He also speaks German, Italian and Czech. It comes with the territory, people who live close to borders often speak several languages and cross borders in their daily lives. Until his death, Tönle remains a free spirit, an obstinate shepherd without borders, in love with his village, his house and his mountains.
Story of Tönle is only 120 pages long and like Reunion or Chess, it describes how History impacts common people. It was interesting to read about WWI in Italy. It is also a beautiful ode to Asagio and this mountain region. Rigoni Stern was an avid hiker, he was in the Alpini himself and loved his region. His novella sings the beauty of the mountains and pictures a lost world, the peasant and mountaineer way-of life of the turning of the 20th century. It reminded me of Ramuz.
It also reminds us that borders are political decisions that impact the people who change of countries according to the time but to an extend keep their identity and traditions. The Eastern border of France means exactly that: being German or French (Alsace & Moselle), belonging to Italy or France (Nice/Savoie) For Tönle, borders mean nothing but constraints. Until the end, he’ll play them and acts as if they don’t matter. Highly recommended.
Story of Tönle is close to Austria with its Asagio cultural background and this is why it belongs to this German Lit Month post.
Incidentally, the writers of these three novellas were born 20 years apart: Zweig in 1881, Uhlman in 1901 and Rigoni Stern in 1921.
Clean Slate #1 : Catching up with billets before 20 Books of Summer starts.
As often, I read quicker than I write billets. It’s arithmetic. While I love to read after a work day, I can’t stand to open a computer again after the said work day and thus write billets only on weekends. Since there are more working days than weekend days and since I’m sometimes away on weekends, it’s easy to compute that my blogging is always running after the train of my reading.
This month, I’ve decided to cut my losses and write a sum-up post to clean my billet bill and start fresh on June 1st for the 20 Books of Summer challenge.
So, let’s have a tour of the not-reviewed books. It’s not in the order I read them.
First, Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy. (1970) The English translation from the Hungarian is by George Szirtes and the French one entitled Epépé is by Judith and Pierre Karinthy.
I suppose it’s dystopian fiction laced with Queneau and Perec tendencies.
Budai is a well-known linguist who is on his way to a convention in Helsinki. Somewhere along the way he hops on the wrong flight, conks out and arrives in an unknown city. Disoriented, he’s shuffled to a hotel in a country whose language he doesn’t understand. We follow his attempts at finding out where he is, how to communicate with others and find a way to go home. He’s in a metropole that looks like a western city. Very crowded with flows of people going from one place to the other, busy people who never stop to help him.
I’m not sure what Karinthy Junior wanted to say with this book. Denounce the absurd and inhumane life in big metropoles? Tell us something about language? Show us that even the best equipped linguist is at loss if he doesn’t have a Rosetta Stone?
It was fun at the beginning and then I was bored. I finished it thinking “OK, so what?” I’m probably not academic enough to have a coherent analysis of that kind of book. Have you read it? I’d love to discuss it.
The irony here is that Karinthy is Hungarian and speaks a language that is undecipherable for non-speakers. Let’s say you’re French and visit Hungary. If signs are not translated into English or with a pictogram, you wouldn’t be able to find the loo in the airport. That’s how different Hungarian is from French. Maybe Metropole is also a way to point this out.
Among the not-reviewed books are two abandoned books, one from my Kube subscription and the other from my Book Club list. I like to write my thoughts about abandoned books too as it’s good to understand why one couldn’t finish a book.
I received The Fire Starters by Jan Carson (2019) in my Kube subscription. The French title is Les lanceurs de feu and it’s translated by Dominique Goy-Blanquet. To be honest, it’s not a book I would have picked by myself in a bookstore.
The Fire Starters is set in Northern Ireland after the Troubles and features two fathers, Sammy Agnew and Jonathan Murray. The first one sees a bone-deep tendency to violence in his son and wishes he knew what to do. The second one is raising his baby girl on his own and doesn’t want her to look like her mother and hurt other people. The two fathers have something in common, even if they don’t come from the same political sides.
While I was ok with the plot thread involving Sammy Agnew, I couldn’t stand the one with Jonathan Murray and its magic realism elements. I really don’t like books with magic realism, ghosts, sirens and what nots. It put me off the book.
So, we’ll say that the book is good and I’m not the right reader for it. For an interesting and positive review, check out Lisa’s post.
The other book I abandoned was An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. (2018) and according to the blurb, I should have liked this one.
Celestial and Roy are African-American and newlyweds who live in Atlanta. Roy is sentenced to twelve years for a crime he didn’t commit. How do they overcome this?
I probably would have enjoyed it if I hadn’t read If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin. It’s disheartening that Tayari Jones can write the same kind of story in contemporary America, that’s for sure. But after reading Baldwin, a book on the same topic pales in comparison and I wasn’t involved in Roy and Celestial’s story the same way I was in Fonny and Tish’s.
A missed opportunity, I suppose but Karen at Booker Talk wasn’t blown away either.
Amidst this reading slump, I turned to a book about book lovers, that’s usually a safe place to go. Well, not this time.
The bookseller of Selinunte by Roberto Vecchioni (2004) French title: Le Libraire de Sélinonte, translated by Gérard-Julien Salvy
Selinunte is an Ancient Greek city in Sicily. It’s a beautiful place to visit as there are ruins of Greek temples in a beautiful place by the sea. So nowadays, it’s a dead city.
In the book, it’s an inhabited town where a strange bookseller wants people to connect with books. He opens his store at night and reads books aloud. He’s rapidly ostracized by the population. The only one who falls into the cauldron of the libraire’s book magic potion is Nicolino. He sneaks out of his bed every night to listen to books, hidden away from the libraire.
Then the libraire is assaulted and all the population of Selinunte loses the ability to speak. Only Nicolino retains the old words and the ability to speak properly.
We’re back to my issue with supernatural elements or magic realism or whatever the name they have. Or perhaps I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to let myself be caught up by the story. It felt stilted and had this I-want-to-deliver-a-message vibe that put a glass wall between the book and me.
To finish on a positive note, two collections of short-stories I really recommend.
Dog Run Moon by Callan Wink. (2016) French title: Courir au clair de lune avec un chien volé. Translated by Michel Lederer.
Dog Run Moon is a collection of ten short stories by writer and fly-fishing guide Callan Wink. Imagine that you live in Montana, take people fly-fishing and one of your clients is Jim Harrison. Lucky you, right?
Dog Run Moon is full of stories set in Montana and Wyoming, where nature has a front seat in people’s lives and with characters who are a bit bruised and battered.
The stories involve various types of characters who reflect on their lives, find themselves in a difficult situation, make life-changing decisions on impulse. There’s always a dark angle in these stories, with people who live a bit on the edges.
There is definitely something of Jim Harrison in Callan Wink’s writing, that’s for sure. Good for us readers who love Jim Harrison but a tall order for Callan Wink.
The other collection of short stories is…
Dry Rain by Pete Fromm (1997) French title: Chinook. Translated by Marc Amfreville.
There’s almost ten years between the publication of Dog Run Moon (2016) and Dry Rain by Pete Fromm. The collections are equally good but Pete Fromm’s characters are more average people than Wink’s. It makes it easier to relate.
Most of the sixteen stories are first person narratives by a white man. All pictures the narrator and their families at a landmark of their lives. It’s not a visible landmark like a wedding or the birth of a child. It’s in an internal landmark, an event that can be an anecdote but left a mark on the narrator’s tree of life.
It’s the remembrance of the fear that a father experienced when he lost his son in a corn maze. It’s a chance meeting with a girl that will push the narrator to think about his past. It’s the moment the narrator must acknowledge that his marriage is sinking. You see the drift. Small and big moments that become either a turning point or rearrange someone’s inner pieces.
Pete Fromm writes about us, small people with our average lives and there’s never any contempt. He has affection for people, their little quirks, their flaws and their hard-working lives. He doesn’t imply that they are losers because they didn’t go to university or never left their hometown. (Cf And Their Children After Them by Nicolas Mathieu). This is why I love Fromm’s stories and of course it doesn’t hurt that he’s a skilled writer.
He’s an author I’d love to meet. There aren’t many of them like that but I’m tracking down the Gallmeister newsletters to see if they set up a tour for him in France. He’s probably one of those writers who sell a lot more books in France than in their own country, so we have a chance he’ll come and meet his readers.
Meanwhile, we have his books and I highly recommend these two collections of short stories.
And… Mission accomplished! I’m all caught up with my billets before June starts!
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.
Theatre: Eve of Retirement by Thomas Bernhard – Horrifying
Theatre: Eve of Retirement by Thomas Berhnard (1979) French title: Avant la retraite. Translated by Claude Porcell (Original title: Vor dem Ruhestand. Eine Komödie von deutscher Seele)
I’m not a total novice with Thomas Bernhard’s work. I read and enjoyed Concrete, a novella I tagged as “a beautiful grumpy rant.” I’ve seen the play Elisabeth II, where Bernhard makes fun of the Austrians and their eagerness to welcome Queen Elisabeth II in Vienna. I’ve also seen André Marcon play the main role in The Theatre Maker, (Le Faiseur de théâtre, in German, Der Theatermacher.)
The three have in common the long monologues, the rants, the old cranky man irritated by everything and everyone and especially his fellow Austrian citizen. He despises them and his characters’ rants are so outrageous that they turn out funny. Berhnard has a scandalous and dry sense of humor.
I expected the same of the play Eve of Retirement, directed by Alain Françon, with André Marcon as Rudolf, Catherine Hiegel as Vera and Noémie Lvovsky as Clara. The three actors are known to be excellent, and I was keen on seeing Catherine Hiegel on stage.
The actors and the direction were incredible. You don’t have the impression that they play a role and the direction fit perfectly with the text. Nothing superfluous, it just enhanced the power of the text and boy, how uncomfortable we felt.
We’re in the 1970s, somewhere in Germany. Rudolf Höller is a ex-SS Officer lives with his two sisters, Vera and Clara. Vera is both his mother and his lover while Clara has been stranded in a wheelchair since the war. She’s bullied by her incestuous siblings. The play happens on a single day, the 7th of October, the most important day of the year for Rudolf as they celebrate Himmler’s birthday. He’s Rudolf’s hero and everything must be perfect. This year is even more special as Rudolf is retiring from his position as president of the tribunal of their Land.
The nausea starts right away in the first act. There are only Vera and Clara on stage and as Vera describes the preparations of the clandestine festivities of the day, the spectator’s mood sets to horror. Vera casually points out how she gave their deaf-and-dumb servant her day off and why it is mandatory for them to only have deaf-and-dumb servants. They can’t afford anyone to know what’s going on in their house.
The horror grows as the play unfolds: the special diner in Himmler’s memory reenacts the “good old days”. Vera carefully closes all the curtains so that no one can peak in and see the décor of their living room for the evening. They are in hiding, well aware that their continuous fidelity to Nazi ideas is not proper anymore.
Vera chatters away, thinking ahead of all the details needed for Rudolf to have a perfect evening. She lovingly irons Rudolf’s Nazi uniforms. She’s serious when she explains to Clara that she should be happy that this year she doesn’t have to wear a deportee’s uniform. The word vomiting that comes out of her mouth is terrifying and yet normal for her. The sideration grows as Rudolf comes out as a human monster. He has absolutely no remorse, remembers with Vera how he hid during ten years in their basement, until the authorities stopped looking for him, how he changed his name and became the respected president of the tribunal.
Clara is the only sane person in the household and she’s at her siblings’ mercy because she can’t live on her own. It is awful to enter into the intimacy of a man who sleeps with his sister and is nostalgic of the Nazi regime.
As always, Bernhard writes to rip off all illusions and to show facts in their naked ugliness. Indeed, this play is based on true facts. He hates hypocrisy and bending to social standards. He wants to dismiss false historical narrative and put people in front of their actual responsibilities.
Bernhard’s play shows what a true Nazi is and why this word shouldn’t be used lightly to qualify someone or another country’s political regime. Words have a meaning. Rudolf is both ruthless and childish, which painfully reminds us that inhuman behaviors are one side of humanity’s coin.
The Girls From the Five Great Valleys by Elizabeth Savage – The 1976 Club goes to Montana
The Girls from the Five Great Valleys by Elizabeth Savage. (1976) Not available in French.
Take five girls anywhere, at any time. Three will be all right, and one will make it. One won’t. There they go.
The Girls from the Five Great Valleys is Elizabeth Savage’s semi-autobiographical novel. It is set in Missoula, Montana, The Garden City where the Five Great Valleys meet: the Mission, the Missoula, the Blackfoot, the Hellgate, and the Bitterroot.
Five girls, Hilary, Amelia, Doll, Kathy and Janet. We’re in 1934, the summer between the girls’ junior and senior year in high school. Doll struggles with school, she knows she won’t go to university; the others will and Hilary, their leader, knows that this year is a turning point in their lives.
The novel is set during the Great Depression but among families who are doing fine. Hilary’s father has a coal & ice business that is struggling but he’s been investing in land to secure their future. Amelia comes from old money. Doll’s father has kept his job, money is tight but they make do. Janet’s father is a doctor, he replaced the old GP after he retired. Kathy’s father is a professor at Missoula university, a stable job that doesn’t pay well, as Savage cheekily points out: Kathy’s father drank but only right after payday, since that is the only time professors can afford it. Of course, the mothers have no job.
Hilary has a purpose. She wants to succeed and be someone. Her next step is to get into a Greek sorority and she trains her little group for that. She understands how things work and she intends to play by the rules, even if she doesn’t totally agree with them. She has great social skills and understanding of social status. They certainly weren’t city girls, but the fact of the Rocky Mountains didn’t make them country girls, either. They need a clean reputation and it means sticking together and avoiding getting too involved with boys.
Three characters are more developed than the others, Hilary and his ambition, Doll and her acceptance that she’ll marry young and will probably live like her family and Amelia who struggles to find her true self between Anne, her arrogant and selfish mother and her disabled little sister. Her father died (committed suicide?) in a car accident and she feels responsible for her mother and sister.
The Girls from the Five Great Valleys is a vivid picture of Missoula’s middle class in the 1930s. Hilary is the main character but we see her parents’ point view and Anne’s too.
Hilary’s parents, Myra and Hank, have a solid and loving relationship, a traditional one. Myra, the mother takes care of the house and defers to her husband for all decisions. Hank wants to provide for his family and free his wife of any financial concern. The couple has a daughter and a son, they are better off than their parents and impersonated the American middle-class dream.
Elizabeth Savage was born in 1918 and spent her youth in Missoula, where her father was a teacher at the university. She went to Missoula County High School before going to Colby College in Maine. I assume that Kathy is the character who looks the most like her.
Savage draws a portrait of western life and western mentality as opposed to the East and to California. We’re in the 1930s and it’s not good to be openly communist in Missoula. It costs Mr Barry, a teacher, his position at the high school, and it’s not only his ideas that are different:
And Mr. Barry did other things that were not wise. He wore a hat. To this day in the Garden City Where the Five Great Valleys Meet, men wear hats. But proper hats. Proper hats are Stetsons. They don’t make Stetsons anymore, but Monkey Ward makes a sort of Stetson and so does J.C. Penney. That kind of hat indicates that though you may not be a rancher, you live near where the ranchers live and have in mind the welfare of the West. Mr. Barry’s hat had a narrow brim. He said it was a Borsolino and he said it was the finest hat ever made.
It’s not good to stand out, in Missoula. Hilary understands it perfectly. And although Hank approves of Roosevelt’s politics, he will never acknowledge it publicly.
If the truth were known, in some ways Hank agreed with Mr. Barry. Everyone knew the big companies had too much muscle. He even agreed about the new President. Hank hadn’t voted for him, but next time he probably would. That didn’t mean he was going to go all around town saying so.
I enjoyed The Girls from the Five Great Valleys for its sense of time and place. I always love picking up details about everyday life. I was surprised that Capek’s play R.U.R was played in drama class in Missoula high school. I didn’t know that Milky Way candies already existed. (You took a sandwich and a Milky Way.) And I still wonder what eggshells do in coffee. (Then in a crisp housedress and in the kitchen, she started to make the coffee with eggshells in it, the way her husband liked it.)
I also relished in Savage’s sense of humor and observation skills. They come out in statements like Weak people often are unhappy; strong people can’t take the time. Or If your mother is plump it is comforting to know your father is not attracted to storks. Or You can put up with a real mean man; one who is trying to be mean is meaner, maybe because the one who’s naturally mean doesn’t have to try so hard.
The Girls from the Five Great Valleys is a way for Elizabeth Savage to write about Westerners’ ways and let her reader know about her youth in Montana. You learn facts of life from the area like that Any young person in Montana knows that chasing stock is not allowed. It makes them lose weight and it makes them drop their young. or that People on ranches don’t like knocks on the front door because anyone who belongs comes in the back.
As always when I read books set in the 1930s in the USA, I’m surprised by their way of life compared to Europe at the same time and how much we have been Americanized since then.
And the tradition of having a cabin up the mountain to roughen it up was already there and alive. Amelia’s family has one, by a lake, where people go swimming and (trout?) fishing.
No cabin was named, nor did any sign proclaim its owner. This was the result of the same agreement that forbade running water. You had an outhouse and a shallow well with a hand pump. You washed outside if you felt you must wash. Half the fun was pretending to be your own ancestor.
Right!
This is my participation to Karen’s and Simon’s 1976 Club.
Thank you for organizing this event, it’s always a fun way to explore one’s TBR.
I’m looking forward to reading other reviews about 1976 books and hope you’ll pick another year for the Spring.
Check out my billet about The Last Night at the Ritz, another excellent book by Elizabeth Savage.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa – unusual coming-of-age novel
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa (1977) French title: La tante Julia et le scribouillard. Translated by Albert Bensoussan.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa is based on the author’s youth. We’re in Lima in the 1950s. Mario is 18, he’s at university, studying law to pacify his parents. He wants to be a writer and he works at Radio Panamericana, writing news bulletins with his colleague Pascual. Meanwhile, he tries his hand at writing short stories and imagines moving to an attic in Paris to pursue his literary dreams.
Two newcomers disrupt his routine of studying, working, writing and hanging out with his friends. First, Radio Panamericana hires Pedro Camacho, a Bolivian scriptwriter and star of soap operas. Second, his aunt by marriage’s sister, Aunt Julia, moves to Lima after she divorced her Bolivian husband.
Pedro Camacho is a talented but manic scriptwriter and he soon befriends Mario, confiding in him and sharing his writing tips. Pedro quicky becomes the new star of Radio Panamericana, bringing in more and more listeners with his crazy plots. With the listeners comes the money from advertising and the radio has found their goose that lays the golden eggs.
Mario and Aunt Julia didn’t know each other before she arrived and soon begin a secret affair. She’s fourteen years older than him. Since they belong to a tight-knit extended family where gossip travels fast, their greatest fear is to get caught by a family member. Mario’s friends and cousin Nancy know about their relationship and cover for them. Mario and Julia have no place for real intimacy since they both live with their relatives. They spend time together at the cinema, at the radio or wandering in the streets.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a coming-of-age novel where we see Mario falling in love and taking charge of his future. Older Mario looks back on his younger self with humor and tenderness. The Lima of his youth comes to life with him, his friend Javier and his colleagues at Radio Panamericana. We also relive the golden age of radio, with its numerous soap operas that will move to TV when this new media is widespread.
The main difference with a “usual” coming-of-age novel is that chapters alternate between Mario’s life and Pedro’s soap operas. At the beginn
ing, I thought that the stories were Mario’s short stories but I realized it was Pedro’s. As months go by, Pedro is more and more absorbed by his stories and works longer and longer hours to keep all his balls in the air. He jungles between several soap operas and his workload is threatening his health. To be honest, I thought that the chapters with the soap opera stories were a bit too long and I struggled to keep reading and pay attention. I was more invested in Mario’s life.
Two side comments about Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.
The first one is about the title. The original Spanish title is La tía Julia y el escribidor. In English, it the straightforward Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. In French, it is La tante Julia et le scribouillard. Two things caught my attention in the French title. First, why la tante Julia and not just Tante Julia? Tante Julia sounds better but by choosing this, you link aunt and Julia and it becomes a sort of new first name and thus her identity. You can’t detach the family title from the first name and I can’t help thinking it makes the relationship sound more incestuous than la tante Julia. Mario and Julia are not blood related at all and he didn’t know her growing up, so la tante Julia works better in this context. I don’t know how the aunt Julia sounds to native English speakers. Is it really weird?
Then there’s the word scribouillard, which doesn’t mean scriptwriter –that would be scénariste—and is slightly derogatory as are words with the ard suffix in French. (like chauffard). Scribouillard means penpusher. The scriptwriter can only be Pedro Camacho but the penpusher can be Mario, aspiring writer and Pedro, writer of cheap soap operas. It’s not the same.
So, which translation is the right one?
Time to go back to the original Spanish title. I don’t speak Spanish so I went to my usual online dictionary to see the actual translation of escribidor. No official translation, just references to La tante Julia et le scribouillard. I kid you not. Escribidor doesn’t exist in Spanish. It means that Llosa made this word up and I bet that, after spending years in Paris, it is his Spanish translation of scribouillard. What do you think?
My second side comment is about the various covers of this book.
The Dutch one is close to the French one I displayed at the beginning of my billet. The German one seems to come out of a French or Italian film of the 1960s and has nothing to do with the novel. The Polish one implies that Aunt Julia is a loose lady.
The English cover with the lady and the city makes me think of a WWII novel. The Swedish one goes with the Polish cover. Imagine the disappointment of German, Polish and Swedish readers who based their purchase on the cover, thinking they’d be reading a torrid love affair, and ending up with tame kisses on street corners and wild soap operas. The Penguin cover is good: we see Mario or Pedro, their typewriter and the radio. There’s no emphasis on the Julia/Mario relationship.
I think that the best cover is the Spanish one with the lady and her half-radio face. It’s a good summary of the book: it’s in the right decade, it’s not lewd, it shows Julia and the radio as they are both important in Mario’s formative years. Which one do you prefer?
PS: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is set in the Miraflores neighborhood in Lima. It is also the setting of A World For Julius by Alfredo Bryce-Echenique, published in 1972 and also set in the 1950s. It’s a book I highly recommend too.
The Last Night at the Ritz by Elizabeth Savage – it deserves to be rediscovered
The Last Night at the Ritz by Elizabeth Savage (1973) Not available in French
The worst scars don’t show at all, but you can learn to live with them. Believe me.
When I read The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage, I went to Wikipedia to read his biography and discovered he’s been married to writer Elizabeth Savage. (1918-1989) I’d never heard of her –but would have I heard about her husband without Gallmeister? – and I got curious.
I am thankful for e-books and Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust because I could easily put my hands on The Last Night at the Ritz (1973) and The Girls from the Five Great Valleys (1976), her most famous novels. A woman of her time, Elizabeth Savage only started to write novels when she was 42, after her three children had grown up a bit, I suppose. I haven’t read The Girls from the Five Great Valleys yet.
The Last Night at the Ritz is set in Boston, at the end of the 1960s. The narrator of the book remains unnamed, so, we’ll call her the Narrator. She’s a middle-aged woman and she’s meeting with her fried Gay, her husband Len and her friend Wes for a luncheon at the Ritz. Gay and the Narrator have been friends since they were teenagers. They went to high school and college together. Gay and Len met in college as well.
We know from the start that there’s something final about this Last Night at the Ritz and Elizabeth takes us there in the last pages, building the suspense –you can’t help wondering what happened—and at the same time promenades us through the Narrator’s past and the present days issues.
The Narrator relates that luncheon, which turns into booking a room at the Ritz and attending a party organized by Len’s office. (Len works for a publisher, he’s an agent. Gay and the Narrator studied literature in school too but never made a career out of it.)
The Narrator is unreliable, and if the reader doesn’t guess it, she says it candidly: Nobody — except for Gay—has ever trusted me. And for good reason.
The Narrator comes back to her lifelong friendship with Gay. They are very different in their approach to life, Gay trying to tick all the right boxes and the Narrator doing whatever pleases her.
My poor friend: she is so good and so grave. And so vulnerable. She really thought she knew just how it’s done. First you work hard and thoughtfully and win all the prizes. Then you marry your true love and live passionately forever after. And your children call you blessed because simplicity and discipline and truth gird you in triple brass. It isn’t all that simple. You are going to say that I am jealous, and perhaps I am—it is an idea that I have entertained. But I think I love my friend, and I think I honor those fine and wholesome notions that she has. I just haven’t found them practical. In my book, it also takes a little laughter.
Gay sounds like a lady who behaves by the book, through discipline and a bit of blindness. The two girls had an unusual childhood. The Narrator lost her parents at a young age and was raised by an eccentric aunt. Gay was raised by her grand-parents, among a swarm of uncles. Her grand-mother was a literature teacher at university (like E. Savage’s mother) and the house was full of books. Her grand-father was a drunkard.
Having met the grandmother, I understood Gay’s passion for order; after I met the grandfather, I understood her passion for temperance.
The Narrator comes back to Gay’s marriage to Len, her relationship with their children, especially the oldest, Charley. We learn about her first marriage to Barry, her pain after his death, her long affair with Wes and her marriage to Sam. While her time with Barry was tumultuous, her affair with Wes was limited since he wouldn’t leave his wife, she now is into a calm, mature and loving marriage with Sam.
Her flashbacks alternate with the day’s events. Len and Gay are worried about their son Charley, who’s in Canada, fleeing the Vietnam war. Len is obviously tense and the Narrator suspects he had bad news about something. Gay doesn’t approve of Wes, wondering if her friend is cheating on her husband Sam with him. The Narrator says that Sam should be here, that she should call him but she doesn’t and we only learn in the last pages why she doesn’t.
Gay and the Narrator are like oil and water and I wondered how their friendship lasted so long. The Narrator muses:
The fact of the matter is that what everyone is looking for is total acceptance and unqualified approval. Some one person in the world who feels that everything you do is right. Not someone who tries to be a good sport while you make the old mistakes.
Usually, we have this unconditional love from our parents, maybe from our siblings. Gay and the Narrator didn’t have this kind of love, and may have found it in their friendship. Perhaps this deep need is the cement of the relationship between these two very different women.
Besides her life story, the Narrator comments on the changes in Boston. She obviously loves the city very much. The town destroys older building to build brand new skyscrapers. Old shops disappear, downtown neighborhoods aren’t as safe as before at night. She describes hippies on the street and a new way-of-life emerging from the 1960s. We’re in the Mad Men era, here.
Despite her flaws, and maybe because she owns them with gusto, I couldn’t help liking the Narrator. She lives with her mistakes and losses and doesn’t wallow, not because it’s the right thing to do (You know, the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”) but because it doesn’t make sense to wallow. As she points out, if you sulk your life away, who has won? I liked her attitude, even if she sounds careless sometimes.
She also accepts other people’s flaws and doesn’t judge them for being human. I think she’s a bit jealous of Gay, of her landing Len and having children but deep down she knows she wasn’t cut-out of that kind of life and had she been in Gay’s place, things wouldn’t have turned the same way. She has the kind of lucidity I am drawn to.
And last but not least, who wouldn’t like someone who thinks that It is very dangerous to get caught without something to read.
Highly recommended, especially to readers who enjoyed The Eastern Parade by Richard Yates.
PS: This is not available in French. Hence the Translation Tragedy Tag and Category.
A Good Day to Die by Jim Harrison – drugs, alcohol, ecotage and road trip
A Good Day to Die by Jim Harrison (1973) French title: Un bon jour pour mourir. Translated by Sara Oudin
A Good Day to Die by Jim Harrison opens in Key West, Florida. Two young men meet in a bar. One, the narrator, is in Florida on a fishing trip and the other ended up there after a tour of duty in Vietnam. During a drunken night, they conceive the crazy plan of driving west, buying a case of dynamite and destroy a dam on the Grand Canyon that they heard was under construction
On their way, they go through Tim’s hometown to fetch Sylvia, Tim’s ex-girlfriend. Sylvia goes along because she still hopes that Tim will change his mind and come back to the white-picket-fence dream she still entertains.
Follows a memorable road trip of three young people who don’t want to conform anymore. The narrator, an aspiring poet, was thrown out of his wife and child’s lives because she felt he was impossible to live with. He was probably not ready to bend to the routine life that children need. The booze he consumes didn’t help his case but he has an incredible capacity to wax poetry over trout fishing in mountain streams.
Tim is damaged by the Vietnam War and bonds with the narrator over fishing. They are both passionate fishermen. Tim has nightmares from the war and struggles to readjust to civilian life.
Sylvia finds herself in the middle of them, still in love with Tim but the narrator is soon growing on her. She tries to keep Tim out of trouble and ends up disappointed.
There is no way this is going to end well.
When I started to read A Good Day to Die by Jim Harrison, I had a sense of déjà vu. A road trip with three damaged young people driving west, with music, drugs and booze, passionate with fishing in the wilderness and on a mission to dynamite a dam on the Grand Canyon. It sounded like a merger between On the Road by Kerouac (1957), Trout Fishing in America by Brautigan (1967), The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey (1975) and Not Fade Away by Jim Dodge (1987). I’m almost sorry Abbey didn’t publish his book in 1977, it would have made a one-per-decade road trip book series.
Although the article about ecotage on Wikipedia states that the concept was popularized by Abbey’s book, Harrison wrote A Good Day to Die before The Monkey Wrench Gang, and according to the foreword by François Busnel in my copy, Harrison’s book influenced Abbey.
I suppose that Jim Harrison put a bit of himself in A Good Day to Die. I know from McGuane’s Outside Chance that he and Harrison went fishing in Key West. And the narrator comes from Michigan and his knowledge of fishing in Montana and Wyoming comes from Harrison’s experience too.
I know A Good Day to Die is an excellent book but since I read the ecotage/drunken poets/fishing gurus road trips out of order, the feeling of déjà vu tainted my reading. To be honest, I’m not a huge Kerouac fan. I loved Abbey for his playfulness. His characters are quirky, borderline crazy and he has a wicked sense of humor. As much as I love Jim Harrison, I didn’t enjoy A Good Day to Die as much as The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Still, the message is there. We’re in 1973 and Harrison worries about huge construction projects, wild deforestation and sprawling towns that disfigure the landscape, destroy ecosystems and ruin the environment. Maybe we should have paid more attention to these counterculture books at the time.
Women of Algiers in their Apartment by Assia Djebar
Women of Algiers in their Apartment by Assia Djebar (1980 updated in 2001) Original French title: Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement.
Women of Algiers in Their Apartment by Assia Djebar is composed of seven short stories. The first one, La nuit du récit de Fatima (Fatima’s Tale) features in my French edition but is not included in the English one. This short-story was not part of the original collection of stories from 1980. It has been added in 2001. The original collection includes:
Overture
Today
- Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1978)
- The Woman Who Weeps (1978)
Yesterday
- There Is No Exile (1959)
- The Dead Speak (1970 & 1978)
- Day of Ramadan (1966)
- Nostalgia of the Horde. (1965)
Postface : Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound.
The title of the collection comes from the painting by Delacroix, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment.
Delacroix painted it in 1834, from drawings that he did during his stop to Algeria in 1832 after a trip to Marocco. It was after the French conquered Algeria in 1830 and Assia Djebar’s postface is an essay about this painting and its significance.
All the short stories in this collection are centered around the condition of women in Algeria.
The Today section shows them at home after the war of independence. The Yesterday section includes stories set in the past. One is about women who fled to Tunis during the fights in Algiers. The Dead Speak is set in the countryside, at the burial of a respected and strong old woman, Yemma Hadda. Her grand-son has just come back from the maquis and the war has been over for eight days. Yemma Hadda was a character and never remarried after her husband died, probably to preserve her freedom. We see the customs in the country and how stifling they are for women. This was my favorite story.
We encounter women who have played an important part in the war of independence. Several characters were imprisoned at the Barberousse Prison in Algiers and were tortured. They suffered as much as men fighters but didn’t get the same recognition after the war.
In Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, we’re with Anne, a pied-noir who has come back to Algiers and Sarah, who’s married to Ali, a surgeon. (A pied-noir is a French person born in Algeria before the independence) Their friendship dates back to before the war and remains the same after.
Assia Djebar pictures women waiting for their husbands at home, not really allowed to come and go as they like. Aïcha came to stay with Yemma Hadda after her husband repudiated her. The Woman Who Weeps left her husband because he beat her. All women depend on their husbands and are more or less trapped. Their world revolves around their home and their family.
Assia Djebar’s point is clear, the Algerian woman has always been locked away in houses, living with the extended family. She’s never had a lot of freedom and the war didn’t change her status that much.
The essay in the postface comes back to Delacroix and his painting. It’s unique because he was allowed to enter into the harem of a raïs’s house. He had the opportunity to see these women in their quarters and to capture their way-of-life. It’s usually hidden from the eyes and his painting is a stolen glance; the myth of the Orient was fueled by paintings like this Delacroix.
These short stories are like a modern version of Delacroix’s painting. Assia Djebar proposes an answer to the question “What would Delacroix see if he entered into contemporary Algerian apartments?” The Algerian woman was locked up in domestic life and according to Assia Djebar, she was still there in the 1970s.
I thought it was an interesting peak into Algerian women’s lives but I had trouble connecting with Assia Djebar’s style. I’m glad I read it but I don’t think I’ll look for another of her books.
Has anyone read Women of Algiers in Their Apartment?
The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym – meet Leonora, the manipulative spinster
The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym (1978) French title: La douce colombe est morte.
‘Life is cruel and we do terrible things to each other.’ ‘Yes, that’s the worst of it.’
My reading of The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym was sandwiched between fluffy Patricia Brent, Spinster by HG Jenkins and nightmarish The Catherine Wheel by Elizabeth Harrower. Writing this billet after the others makes me realize that The Sweet Dove Died is a middle ground between the two.
Humphrey is a widower who has taken his orphaned nephew James under his wings. James is in his twenties and has started to work at Humphrey’s antique shop. His uncle is showing him the ropes, James works with him but has no artistic background, no real interest in the industry. It’s easy, that’s all. (James was not yet sure what he wanted from life, and had so far tended to avoid violent extremes of any kind.)
Humphrey and James meet Leonora at an antique book sale. She’s a middle-aged single woman. She’s attractive, old-fashioned, enamored with the Victorian era and the three strike an odd relationship. Humphrey hopes to woo her and win her over. On paper, she’s perfect for him and he’s perfect for her.
The problem is Leonora is attracted to James, who is charming and extremely handsome. She doesn’t act on it but she takes up all his attention.
I don’t want to reveal too much about the plot, to avoid spoilers. It is an interesting story to read as Leonora is a mix between a praying mantis and a pretty poisonous mushroom. Under her fragile appearance (“At the last minute she slipped a bottle of smelling salts into her bag – one never knew, there might be unpleasantness.”) is a cold hard and egoistic woman. She’s ageing, lonely and James is a satisfying toy to have:
Sometimes it seemed almost as if she had created him herself – the beautiful young man with whom people were always falling in love and who yet remained inexplicably and deeply devoted to her, a woman so much older than he was.
Leonora stages her life, her décor, her clothes and is performing as soon as someone might watch her. (She herself preferred crème de menthe; she had changed into a green chiffon dress which gave her a feeling for that drink.) She loves being the center of attention. It wouldn’t be an issue if she didn’t start manipulating James’ life to secure his attention.
And James in all this? Contrary to Clemency in The Catherine Wheel, he never stood a chance against Leonora or other people who want his attentions. He’s got a weak mind, doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s not sure about his sexuality either. He goes with the flow because it’s easy.
Leonora is always put together and her old-fashioned vibe suits him. For example, Leonora wears gloves. In the summer. In 1978. And like Jenkins’s characters in Patricia Brent, Spinster, she thinks that Tea is a panacea for all ills and a liquid for all hours. She likes Victoriana antiques and loves Tennyson’s poetry. (I’m not British, I’ve never studied British poetry but to me, Tennyson is Miss Silver’s favorite poet and he’s associated to old ladies who love to knit sweaters for their armful of grand-nephews or nieces. What does Tennyson evoke to a British reader?)
James is a pawn between several characters in the book. All are charmed because he’s very handsome, polite, kind and never makes a fuss about anything. He got on my nerves because I get irritated by spineless characters. While reading The Catherine Wheel, I was desperate to see Clemency fall into Christian’s net, I wanted her mind to win and set her free. Here, I was watching James be a toy and I never pitied him because he was weak from the start and rather happy to go with the flow and not have to make any decision by himself. It’s not really charitable of me, but I thought he deserved his fate.
The Sweet Dove Died could be as suffocating as The Catherine Wheel but it’s not, thanks to Pym’s constant and light sense of humor. She deflates the tension with amusing remarks (The young waiters darted about, responding with charming politeness to the halting holiday Italian some of the diners felt obliged to practise on them.) or with Humphrey’s clumsy attempts at wooing Leonora.
The Sweet Dove Died is an odd tale, very different from the other Pyms I’ve read. Excellent Women starred Mildred, the spitfire spinster. Some Tame Gazelle was all about Belinda, the clever spinster. The Sweet Dove Died pictures Leonora, the manipulative spinster.
Three unmarried women who have a different reaction to their spouseless status. Mildred decides that she’s better off without a husband, Belinda accepts to live with her unrequited love for Henry. Leonora decides she wants James as a companion and that the end justifies the means.
Highly recommended.
20 Books of Summer #13 : Equal Danger by Leonardo Sciascia – A masterpiece
Equal Danger by Leonardo Sciascia (1971) French title: Le Contexte. Translated from the Italian by Jacques de Pressac, revised by Mario Fusco.
After my trip to Sicily and after reading The Wine-Dark Sea by Leonardo Sciascia, I bought his novel Equal Danger. (Il Contesto, literally translated as Le Contexte in French) This book was made into a film directed by Francesco Rosi, with Lino Ventura as the main character. Equal Danger made a lot of noise when it was published. It is a thinly veiled attack towards the Italian political scene, on both side, the party running the country and the opposition.
Inspector Rogas investigates a series of murders. All the victims are judges. The more Rogas digs into the judges’ personal lives, the more he unveils muddy relationships between the judges and the political milieu. Nothing is fully honest, nothing is clean. The dice of the political game are loaded, just like they are in Sword by Bogdan Teodorescu.
Equal Danger is built as a crime fiction novel and written as a parody. It is a mix between Candide and political crime fiction. Sciascia blends the two genres perfectly and his book is like a literary bombshell thrown at the Italian ruling class.
The beginning is humorous, as we see Rogas start his investigation, tackle politics and navigate between what he wants to do and what his hierarchy wants him to do. We root for him and hope he’ll beat the system at its own game. But will he?
In the afterword, Sciascia says that he kept this book in his drawer for two years before publishing it, probably because when he started to write it, he was amused but when he was finished, he didn’t feel like laughing anymore. And that’s how I felt as a reader too.
Very highly recommended.
Book Around the Corner 