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Catching up on 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!
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson and Dancing Bear by James Crumley – sons of western Montana
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson (2014) French title: Yaak Valley, Montana. Translated by Nathalie Peronny.
Dancing Bear by James Crumley (1983) French title: La danse de l’ours. Translated by Jacques Mailhos.
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson and Dancing Bear by James Crumley have been written thirty-one years apart but when I read the Crumley, I thought about the Henderson, as if there were a parentage between the two.
The main character of Fourth of July Creek is Pete Snow. He’s in his early thirties, separated from his wife Beth, who just decided to move to Texas, taking their thirteen-year-old daughter with her. Pete is a social worker in the north-west of Montana, near the Yaak River.
His life is a mess, he drinks too much, his daughter hates him and he’s worried about his ex-wife’s lifestyle as she’s a junkie. His brother Luke is hiding from his parole officer and he doesn’t get along with his father. In other words, Pete is something who’d need to benefit from his own social services.
We follow him in his work area as he tries to do his job as best as he can. He’s mostly busy with two families, one where the mother is a drug user and has two children and another more mysterious one, the Pearls. Benjamin Pearl intruded into a school and the principal called Pete. Benjamin lives in the woods with his survivalist father. He’s homeschooled and his father is into conspiracy theories.
Pete wants to help Benjamin and his contacts with the Pearl family will get him into trouble. Meanwhile, his personal life turns to hell…
Milo Milodragovitch, the main character of Dancing Bear is a former PI, current security agent who lives in Merriwether, Montana. He comes from money but his father’s will says he can’t get the family money until he’s 52. He’s now 47 and is doing odd jobs to earn his keep until his age frees his inheritance.
He drinks too much but tries to monitor his drinking and stay in control. Let’s say that he switched from whisky to peppermint schnaps and cocaine. Not sure it’s a better combo. He’s bored with his security job but cares about his employer, Colonel Haliburton who hires veterans to help them adjust to civilian life.
His past life comes into his present when he’s hired by Sarah Weddington, one of his father’s former lovers. She’s an old lady now and she’s spying on her neighbors. She’s seen some weird rendezvous in the park near her house and she wants to know who the people are. She wants Milo to find out and she’s willing to pay well and as it sounds more like indulging an old lady than anything else, Milo agrees to dig into this couple’s life and find their identity.
Wrong move. Milo’s propension to attract troubles is out-of-this world. This easy assignment turns into a dangerous dive into drug and influence trafficking. Lots of cocaine-sniffing, brawls, gunfights, car chasing and housebreaking, that’s Milo for you. Same old Milo as in Wrong Case, the first Milo Milodragovitch book.
The two stories seem very different but the two books have common points. The most obvious one is that they are set in the same area in Montana and at the same time. Indeed, even if it was published in 2014, Fourth of July Creek is set in 1980/1981, after Reagan’s election.
Dancing Bear was published in 1983. Both books describe Montana and America at the turning point of the 1980s, Henderson with hindsight and Crumley with insight. The fun of the 1970s is fading away. Outsourcing public services like garbage collection to private firms has started. Economic liberalism is about to take over everything, cutting State budgets like the ones that finance Pete’s actions. It will deregulate lots of industries and allow more appropriation of natural resources.
Henderson and Crumley set their stories in Montana; they don’t show the ranchers or the farmers but the people in towns. (I don’t understand the French cover of Henderson’s book). The atmosphere in Merriwether is polluted by the paper mill near the city. They depict the poor workers, the people who live on the margins. The hopeless.
Pete and Milo have unfinished business with their fathers, a love-hate relationship that is corrosive to their souls. Pete and Beth got married very young because she was pregnant with Rachel. They were too immature to be parents and not ready to leave the booze and the partying behind. Milo has been married and divorced five times; he has no relationship with his son.
Pete and Milo are flawed and their personal life is a mess but you get attached to them. They have a lot of empathy for people around them. They care. See how Pete sees his job:
There were families you helped because this was you’re your job, and you helped them get into work programs or you set up an action plan and checked in on them or you gave them a ride to the god-damn doctor’s office to have that infection looked at. You just did. Because no one else was going to. And then there were the people who were reasons for you to do your job. Katie. Why. Fuck why.
She just was.
Pete cares about little Katie and isn’t comfortable to let her live with her mother. He goes out of his way to connect to Jeremiah Pearl, Benjamin’s father. Deep down he knows that a child who breaks into a school class is crying for help.
And Milo helps Mrs Weddington for the money, but also in memory of their former acquaintance and because he’s too kind-hearted to refuse. He’ll help a colleague at Haliburton Security. People around them acknowledge that they have good hearts and support them. They need it as they tend to get into a lot of trouble.
Henderson and Crumley have an excellent style with original, flawed but engaging characters. They have a beautiful way to describe the Montana weather and wilderness. I have these two novels in French translation but here’s the opening paragraph of Dancing Bear.
We had been blessed with a long, easy fall for western Montana. The two light snowfalls had melted before noon, and in November we had three weeks of Indian Summer so warm and seductive that even we natives seemed to forget about winter. But in the canyon of Hell Roaring Creel, where I live, when the morning breezes stirred off the stone-cold water and into the golden, dying rustle of the cottonwoods and creek willows, you could smell the sear, frozen heart of winter, February, or, as the Indians sometimes called it, the Moon of the Children Weeping in the Lodges, crying in hunger.
Both writers have an incredible sense of place, an ability to feel the time of their story and build vivid characters. Dancing Bear is crime fiction, a plot-driven genre but in Four of July Creek too, the reader wants to understand what happened to the Pearl family, who Jeremiah really is and if Pete will solve his personal issue involving his daughter Rachel. (Trying to avoid spoilers here.)
I don’t know if James Crumley influenced Smith Henderson but I saw a link between the two, probably because they have main characters who have a moral compass and question the model of the American psyche. Making money. Being sucessful. What does it mean, in the end? Through their actions, Pete and Milo question the system and its values. What’s actual freedom? Do I need to comply to laws I find unfair?
Malamute by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent – French Nature Writing
Malamute by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent. (2021) Not available in English.
Jean-Paul Didierlaurent is better known for his book The Reader on the 6.27 which I haven’t read. It sounds like a book about books and a rather feel-good novel. Malamute has nothing to do with that brand of literature and veers towards Noir and Nature Writing.
We’re in November, at the beginning of the ski season in La Voljoux, in the Vosges mountains. Germain Grosdemanges is in his eighties, a widower who lives in a remote farm. He’s getting older and his only daughter Françoise worries about him. She lives near Paris and can’t visit him very often. She strikes a deal with Basile, her cousin’s son. Basile is a snow groomer who will work in La Voljoux during the upcoming ski season.
The arrangement is mutually beneficial: Basile can stay rent-free at the farm if he keeps an eye on Germain and does a bit of housework. Peace of mind for Françoise. Savings for a broke seasonal worker. Basile accepts and Germain surrenders to Françoise’s command because it keeps the looming nursing home at bay.
Meanwhile Emmanuelle settles in the farm near Germain’s; she’s also a snow-grooming agent. Her father died a few months ago and she inherited that farm that she’d never heard of. Her parents were Slovak emigrants who came to the village in 1976. Her father Dragan wanted to be a musher and drive tourists around on his sleigh. Their business never took off, partly due to the hostility of the villagers. Her parents left their farm abruptly and never came back to La Voljoux. They were miserable after that and now Emmanuelle wants to know what happened.
She comes to introduce herself to Germain, who recognizes her mother in her. He’s unwilling to tell what happened all those years ago. Something he keeps as a very well-guarded secret. Something he’s ashamed of.
A snowstorm arrives and disrupts the village’s quiet life. Emmanuelle and Basile work in the same snow-grooming team and work very hard on the slopes but also driving snow-plows to clear the roads. Germain and them are forced to get closer. Secrets resurface…
Malamute by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent belongs to Nature Writing. It could be a Gallmeister book.
Germain used to work as a woodcutter and loves the forest and trees in general. He has a collection of woodcuts and he loves imagining what these trees went through. He looks at them as witnesses of times long gone. To him, they are pieces of History. He has this grumpy-old-man vibe that you meet in books by American Nature Writing authors.
The mountains and the woods surrounding La Voljoux are characters in themselves, they are part of the plot. The snowfalls lock Germain, Basile and Emmanuelle in the farm. They can go out because they drive snowplows, otherwise, they’d be totally snowed in. The impact of the heavy snowfalls moves the story forward. La Voljoux is a little village in the mountains, people live there and everyone knows everyone’s business. Its survival depends on the success of the ski season and the weather plays an important role in the villagers’ lives and how the events unfold.
Didierlaurent writes a very atmospheric book that rings true. His characters have names that are typical from the Vosges region. He’s from the area and it seeps through his style, giving the book an authentic flavor and an incredible sense of place. Despite the historical snow storm of the book, it made me want to go hiking in the Vosges mountains. It’s only a few hours away from Lyon, so who knows?…
Malamute has not been translated into English but The Reader on the 6.27 and its sequel The Rest of their Lives have been translated by Ros Schwartz. Malamute was published in 2021, let’s hope that Ros Schwartz is working on it too.
Highly recommended. And that was another very good choice by Camille, my Kube libraire.
Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov – we have to read it
Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov (2018) translated by Boris Dralyuk. French title: Les abeilles grises.
Pashka’s garden looked out towards Horlivka, so he was one street closer to Donetsk than Sergeyich. Sergeyich’s garden faced in the other direction, towards Sloviansk; it sloped down to a field, which first dipped then rose up towards Zhdanivka.
I picked this quote in Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov because it struck me that I knew about Donetsk and Sloviansk and that many city names mentioned in the book are now familiar.
And only because these cities are theatres of war. I remember reading in one of Gary’s novels, I don’t remember which one, that in the West, we only learn geography through the news and when we know too much about a country’s geography, it’s not a good sign.
Grey Bees was published in 2018 and it refers to the war in the Donbas between Russian-backed separatists and government forces in eastern Ukraine. Russia had already annexed the Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Sergey Sergeyich and his nemesis Pashka Khmelenko are the two inhabitants left in Little Starhorodivka, a village in the grey zone in Donbass. The grey zone means that they live between the separatists’ positions and the Ukrainian ones. Shells fly over their heads regularly.
First, fathers bundled their wives and children off to safety, wherever they had relatives: Russia, Odessa, Mykolayiv. Then the fathers themselves left, some becoming “separatists”, others refugees. The last to be taken away were the old men and women. They were dragged off weeping and cursing. The noise was awful.
This is how they became the last men living in their village and this short paragraph says all about the drama of war for folks like you and me. One day you live your life and the next, you’re packing what you can and leaving.
Sergey is a retired mine safety inspector and beekeeper extraordinaire. He’s 49, his wife left him a few years ago, taking their only daughter with her to Vinnytsia, in the west of the country.
When the book opens, it’s winter and we follow Sergey’s daily life, a quotidian of survival. They have been without power for three years now, which means heating one or two rooms of the house with the wood stove, using it to cook as well and rely on candlelight. Sergey checks on his bees every day, they are hibernating during the winter, so nothing much happens on that side.
This first part shows a gentle man who likes his village, a pacific soul who cares about his bees, someone who wants to stay out of the conflict. However, contrary to Pashka, he leans towards the Ukrainian forces.
Spring arrives and he realizes there is not enough flowers for his bees to gather nectar and pollen. If he wants them to produce honey and survive, he has to take his hives somewhere else. Therefore he loads them in his Lada, packs his camping gear and his icon of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker and goes on the road to find a suitable place to put his hives and gather honey.
His travels will take him to a village on the east of the Donetsk district and next to occupied Crimea. He will show us how his compatriots see him as a refugee from Donbass and that for them, war doesn’t mean hearing shells over your head but seeing your husband or son join the army and maybe get killed.
When he enters the Crimea region, the Russians have set up a border between the annexed Crimea and Ukraine. Crossing this border is a risky endeavor. Sergey intends to find a fellow beekeeper, a Tatar he met in a beekeeper convention. His stay in occupied Crimea shows the Russian repression towards Tatars and the brainwashing they are doing to the Orthodox population. See here the discussion between Sergey and a Russian inhabitant of Crimea:
“Well, this is their land,” the beekeeper offered timidly. “The hell it is!” the woman said indignantly, but without malice. “This land’s been Russian Orthodox since time immemorial! Russians brought Orthodoxy from Turkey, brought it to Chersonesus, back before there were any Muslims. It was later that the Turks sent in the Tatars, along with their Islam. When Putin was here, he told the whole story – this is sacred Russian land.” “Well, I haven’t looked into the history,” Sergeyich shrugged. “Who knows what happened?” “What happened is what Putin says happened,” she insisted. “Putin doesn’t lie.”
Hmm.
Sergey travels around in these troubled areas, carrying his innocence on his sleeve. Grey Bees reminded me of Candide. His travels don’t seem totally realistic and yet, they are rooted in their time. Sergey navigates in these desolate times with a one-track mind, his bees. His moto is not “We must cultivate our garden” but “We must take care of our bees.” Why grey bees? They come from the grey zone, that’s for sure and there’s an explanation by the end of the book but won’t spoil anyone’s reading.
I liked Sergey and his obstinacy to make honey and keep his bees alive. Kurkov takes a candid character and asks all the difficult questions. He shows the intricacies of the local politics, the mixed Ukrainian-Russian culture of the area, the importance of religion and the power of religious leaders, Orthodox and Muslim. It is all here, in this exchange between a Ukrainian soldier and Sergey:
Petro shook his head. “And what’s your name?” “Me? Sergey Sergeyich – you can call me Sergeyich. So it’s probably Peter, not Petro.” “No, it’s Petro. Says so in my passport.” “Well, my passport says I’m Serhiy Serhiyovych – but I say I’m Sergey Sergeyich. That’s the difference.”
His name is in Ukrainian on his passport and he uses the Russian form. The languages are intertwined in him, probably as they are in the author’s psyche.
I read Grey Bees in February, the anniversary of the war in Ukraine. I don’t want to write the “first anniversary” because that means others are to come but I’m afraid we’re headed that way. The first part was the hardest to read because it delved into the consequences of war for Sergey. Living with a different kind of silence and having fear settling their ugly quarters in his soul.
Fear is an invisible thing, subtle and variable, like a virus or bacterium. It can be inhaled with a breath of air, or accidentally imbibed with a sip of water or vodka, or come in through your ears – and you can certainly catch it with your eyes, so badly that its image will remain in your pupils even after the fear itself has disappeared.
It was very poignant and hard to read sometimes but my discomfort is nothing compared to what the real Sergeys are living.
Grey Bees left me with a question: how could we be so blind and not see this war coming?
_______________________
PS: Boris Dralyuk won Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize for his translation of Grey Bees. Congratulations to him for a well-deserved award, his translation is outstanding.
I also read Death and the Penguin and my billet is here. I have The Good Angel of Death on the shelf.
The Morality of Senses by Vicomte de Mirabeau – a libertine novel
The Morality of Senses by Vicomte de Mirabeau (1781) Original French title: La Morale des sens.
The Morality of Senses is a libertine book by the Vicomte de Mirabeau (1754-1792) who is the younger brother of Mirabeau, a figure of the French Revolution. According to his bio on Wikipedia, I’m not sure I would have liked to meet the man. It is published by Libretto, a French independent publisher and this is my last contribution to Karen’s and Lizzy’s official #ReadIndies and to Marina Sofia’s unofficial French February.
In this novel published in London to avoid censorship, Mirabeau wrote a coming of age novel that relates the love escapades of an adolescent. My copy also includes the original illustration of the book, all of couples in various states of undress.
Basically, our narrator is horny all day long and chases after everything with a skirt. At the beginning of the book, he’s staying at a friend’s house. He’s pining after another guest, the young Eglé who is just out of convent but sleeps with the hostess of the house and has fun with the servant Julie.
One could say, as it is written on the back page of my copy, that his attitude shows some acquiescence to the ideas of equality between people promoted by this century of the Enlightenment. He doesn’t make any difference between a servant and her mistress. That’s one way to view it. I’m just seeing him as a shameless womanizer, which is fine by me as he doesn’t make any false promise to any of these ladies.
Some little piques here and there prove that he is a man of his century: Voltaire and Rousseau are mentioned, as well as the court and the power of literary salons.
What shocked me the most in this novel is the narrator’s attitude towards women. They are fortresses to be conquered and he uses military words for that. He explains that when they say no, it’s more to save appearances and tell themselves that they have resisted to temptation than anything else. It never comes to his mind that “no” might actually say “no”.
I know we mustn’t judge past behaviors according to today’s standards. I’m not judging the character or the author, I’m just pointing out where we come from and why we still have issues with women consent. He’s genuinely convinced that their protest is just for the sake of propriety and nothing else. This “no means yes” is a solid and old wall of belief that we are still fighting against. Not all the time, but often enough.
It’s a good reminder of our misogynistic roots and that we mustn’t give up the fight. Otherwise, La Morale des sens is an interesting testimony of the libertine world before the French Revolution.
I have no idea whether La Morale des sens has been translated into English or not. I imagine that, at some point, it must have been.
Born Content in Oraibi by Bérengère Cournut
Born content in Oraibi by Bérengère Cournut (2017) Original French title: Née contente à Oraibi. Not available in English.
Have you ever read a book and find yourself unable to know what to think about it? That’s how I felt about Née contente à Oraibi by Bérengère Cournut when I finished it.
Cournut is a French editor and writer born in 1979. That’s all I know about her, except that she wrote several books and spent some time among the Hopis.
Oraibi is a Hopi village in Navajo County, Arizona. There’s no precise timeline but I’m thinking we’re at the turning of the 20th century. At least, if I consider the photos included at the end of the book.
It’s a coming-of-age novel, a first-person narrative with Tayatitaawa’s voice. She’s “the one who salutes the Sun with a grin”, or in other words, the one who was born content in Oraibi. Tayatitaawa tells her childhood and her adolescence, describes her house, her family and her quotidian. She was close to her father and lost him at a young age. He wasn’t a usual Hopi man but he was well-respected in their community. His death carved a hole in her soul, one she had trouble healing to feel whole again. It’s a lovely book, written in a poetic tone and with a strong sense of place.
This book has the soothing quality of a folk tale. It’s full of Hopi customs and cosmology but they don’t come as a statement. They are in the book, described but not too much. They belong to the narrative because they belong to Tayatitaawa’s life and education. The lack of in-depth explanations about rites gives weigh and life to Tayatitaawa’s voice. If she’s a Hopi telling her life to other Hopis, she won’t explain things that are obvious to them. She will tell important facts that belong to oral transmission like the family bonds between clans, clans’ names and roles in the village.
I don’t know if what Bérengère Cournut writes about Hopi customs is accurate. I don’t care. She doesn’t pretend to write a scientific book. Née contente à Oraibi feels like the child of a writer who made a meaningful trip and absorbed her surroundings. She connected with other human beings from another culture and recognized them as other human beings. Nothing else. No awe for their culture. No judgment. No comparison. Her book is her way to share what she captured of Oraibi. She could have written a reportage. She wrote a novel to pass on what she felt about the place, its wilderness and its inhabitants.
We could debate upon the rightfulness of a French author writing a coming-of-age novel with a Hopi character in such a traditional setting. I’m a firm believer that authors may write whatever they want. Even if that means more clichéd books about Provence and mythical French lovers in postcard Paris. It’ll be the role of critics and readers to cull the best ones and point out flagrant inconsistencies or biased tones of the others. To me, there is no alternative. Discussion and debates are the only options. Otherwise, it’s like setting up a book police aka censorship.
If we say that Bérengère Cournut can’t write about Hopis because she’s French and not Hopi, where does it stop? An American historian cannot write about the French Revolution because he’s not French even if he has studied the period a lot more than any average Frenchman?
We’re already on an ice-covered slippery slope as examples keep piling up. A white poetess cannot translate a black poetess because she’s not black. Agatha Christie now wrote And Then They Were None instead of Ten Little Niggers. I call it laziness: it’s easier to change the book title than to take time to educate people and help them see this title as a symbol of its time and talk about slavery and colonization. Let’s erase it, it’s easier and we’ll all forget that people thought it was normal to use the N word.
And I heard that a new cleaned-up version of Roald Dahl’s book is on the way, that Anthony Horowitz was asked to delete the word scalpel from his book to spare Native Americans’ sensitivity as the word is close to scalp. What’s next? LGBT associations asking to rename Pride and Prejudice into a neutral Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam because the words pride and prejudice mean something specific to them?
We are living in an asinine world where there is no space left for nuance and discussion. Marketing gurus target individuals and tailor goods and services to their customers’ liking, leading them to expect that everything has to bend and accommodate to their tastes and way of life. Add the built-in bias of social networks: the contents they push to their users is based on what they liked before and keep them in their community, not exposing them to other ways of thinking and the ability to block content you don’t want to see seals the deal. All this keeps people in their own mental juice and doesn’t leave a lot opportunities to accidentally broaden one’s point of view.
These people who push to rewrite Roald Dahl want everyone’s specificities and sensitivities taken into account. It’s not possible to have a one fits all for everything. Or everything becomes bland because the middle ground on which everyone agrees upon is tasteless. Yes, I understand that Under the Volcano may not be a good book to a recovering alcoholic. The solution is not to change tequila into water in Lowry’s book. It is for readers to use their brain and make an educated decision about the books they read.
What does all this have to do with Née contente à Oraibi? Everything. I closed the book, puzzled because I fleetingly questioned her right to write it. This way of thinking has wormed its way into my brain in spite of me and I don’t like it one bit. Writing about Née contente à Oraibi helped me put things into perspective.
Bérengère Cournut wrote a beautiful book set in a place, time and culture totally foreign to her upbringing. She learnt enough about Hopi customs to write a plausible book and she extracted the essence of her trip. She captured the universal: after all, Tayatitaawa is just a girl who is growing up, who misses her father terribly after his untimely death, who tries to bond with her brother, who wants to understand where she comes from and what she’ll do with her life. No need to be French or Hopi for that. Only to be human.
PS: This book is published by Le Tripode, an independent French publisher. Its editorial line is to consider any book of any genre as long as its good literature. The books are beautiful too. The cover of Née Contente à Oraibi is a creation by Juliette Maroni and it’s a perfect fit for the book. I received it through my Kube subscription and the libraire who chose it for me did well.
This is one of my contributions to Karen’s and Lizzy’s official #ReadIndies and to Marina Sofia’s unofficial French February.
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga – the dark sides of real-estate in Mumbai and of human behaviour.
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga (2011) French title: Le dernier homme de la tour. Translated by Annick Le Goya.
Bombay, like a practitioner of yoga, was folding in on itself, as its centre moved from the south, where there was no room to grow, to this swamp land near the airport.
Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga is set in Mumbai, in the Vakola district near the airport, in a two towers apartment complex built in the 1970s.
Tower B, known as “Vishram Society” is like a vertical village of lower middle-class people. It’s also known as ‘cosmopolitan’ (i.e. ethnically and religiously mixed.) The various families have been living together in this building for years, they’ve raised children, grown old and have to share their private lives due to paper thin walls and building practicalities. Like in small town life, everybody knows everything about everyone and keeping a secret is illusory.
The Secretary [the concierge], not for the first time during his tenure, cursed the early – morning cat. This cat prowled the waste bins that the residents left out in the morning for Mary [The cleaning lady] to collect, in the process spilling beans, bones, and whisky bottles alike. So the residents of the building knew from the rubbish who was a vegetarian and who merely claimed to be one; who was a rum – man and who a gin – man; and who had bought a pornographic magazine when on holiday in Singapore.
What was I saying about secrets?
Now, in the ever growing and changing Mumbai, a property developer, Mr Shah, has set his eyes on two towers built in the 1970s. He wants to buy out all the current owners, demolish the towers and rebuild expensive condos on the land.
Mr Shah is ready to pay a hefty sum to all the owners based on the square meters of their apartment to encourage them to move out.
A useful note at the beginning of the book explains that Mr Shah’s offer is equivalent to $330,000 per family, in a country where the average per capita annual income in 2008 was around $800. So, if people accept Mr Shah’s offer, they become very rich and have enough money to relocate somewhere else.
Last important thing to know: Vishram Society is a Registered Co – operative Society. Not a jungle. If even one person says no that means that the Society cannot be demolished.
The novel shows the dirty methods used by property developers in Mumbai to put their hands on prime land, to throw working classes out of some neighbourhood to gentrify the area. In Mumbai, slums, older building and modern towers are near each other and this passage about a beach sums it up:
Here, in this beach in this posh northern suburb of Mumbai, half the sand was reserved for the rich, who defecated in their towers, the other half for slum dwellers, who did so near the waves. Residents of the slum that had encroached upon the beach were squatting by the water, defecating. An invisible line went down the middle of the beach like an electrified fence; beyond this line, the bankers, models, and film producers of Versova were engaged in tai – chi, yoga, or spot – jogging.
Builders have no qualms about bullying people into agreeing and they have special people to do it.
Every builder has one special man in his company. This man has no business card to hand out, no title, he is not even on the company payroll. But he is the builder’s left hand. He does what the builder’s right hand does not want to know about. If there is trouble, he contacts the police or the mafia. If there is money to be paid to a politician, he carries the bag. If someone’s knuckles have to be broken, he breaks them.
People in Vishram Society have heard stories about builders’ methods and swindles. They are cautious, they wonder where things could go and how they can be sure to get the money after they’ve signed the papers to sell their apartment.
Rather quickly, all the inhabitants agree to sell and the only one who doesn’t want to is Masterji, an old widower who refuses to leave the memories of his late wife and daughter behind. At least, that’s what he thinks his motives are.
This opportunity to get rich for the owners and to get richer for the promoter is like a bomb in a carefully built life balance between the inhabitants of the Vishram Society.
Last Man in Tower relates how Mr Shah manoeuvres to get what he wants. It also depicts how this tower-village copes with the one inhabitant who blocks their way to wealth.
Adiga’s book is cleverly done because it is not Manichean, the bad developer on one side and the poor old man on the other side. The greedy people and the virtuous one. Mr Shah intends to pay the money he promised, in the builder category, he’s not the worst one. But still. He counts on the neighbours to pressure Masterji into selling.
Masterji’s neighbours want the money, and most of them for good reasons: to provide for their son with Down’s syndrome after they die, to raise their children in a better neighbourhood, to help their grownup children to settle in life, to live a little and stop counting every penny.
And Masterji’s refusal is not just sentimental. There’s something else at stake here, someone who wants to stand up for himself when he wasn’t able to do it in this life, someone who sticks to his principle for the sake of them only.
Last Man in Tower is a dark tale, a book that shows how quickly people turn on each other when money is involved and circumstances push them to pick a side. We know that dark side of humans, we’ve witnessed it in wars and it’s the same mechanism at work here.
Adiga’s novel exposes the workings of the real estate market in Mumbai and digs into the dark corners of the human soul but it is also a vibrant picture of Mumbai and life in this sprawling city. The slums, the markets, the temples, the overcrowded public transports, the heat, the monsoon and the incredible pollution.
South Mumbai has the Victoria Terminus and the Municipal Building, but the suburbs, built later, have their own Gothic style: for every evening, by six, pillars of hydro – benzene and sulphur dioxide rise high up from the roads, flying buttresses of nitrous dioxide join each other, swirls of unburnt kerosene, mixed illegally into the diesel, cackle like gargoyles, and a great roof of carbon monoxide closes over the structure. And this Cathedral of particulate matter rises over every red light, every bridge and every tunnel during rush hour.
When I was reading, I thought it was a bit too long but now that I write about it I realize that the pace of the narration suits what the author had to show and say.
The book was published in 2011, wonder how the real-estate market is in Mumbai now.
Shiner by Amy Jo Burns – drama in the Appalachians
Shiner by Amy Jo Burns (2020) French title: Les femmes n’ont pas d’histoire. Translated by Héloïse Esquié.
I received Shiner by Amy Jo Burns through my Kube subscription. It was serendipity to get a book set in the Appalachians just before my trip there. I read it during the summer and well, real life got in the way of blogging. (All for good reasons, though. Nothing to complain about.)
It’s a hard book to describe, for its bewildering setting, the story it tells about people who seem to live like their grand-parents and according to old-fashioned and self-made rules. So, to help you figure out Shiner‘s atmosphere, let’s hear Wren introduce her story:
Making good moonshine isn’t that different from telling a good story, and no one tells a story like a woman. She knows that legends and liquor are best spun from the back of a pickup truck after nightfall, just as she knows to tell a story slowly, the way whiskey drips through a sieve. Moonshine earned its name from spending its life concealed in the dark, and no one understands that fate more than I do.
Beyond these hills my people are known for the kick in their liquor and the poverty in their hearts. Overdoses, opioids, unemployment. Folks prefer us this way—dumb-mouthed with yellow teeth and cigarettes, dumb-minded with carboys of whiskey and broken-backed Bibles. But that’s not the real story. Here’s what hides behind the beauty line along West Virginia’s highways: a fear that God has forgotten us. We live in the wasteland that coal has built, where trains eat miles of track. Our men slip serpents through their fingers on Sunday mornings and pray for God to show Himself while our wives wash their husbands’ underpants. Here’s what hides behind my beauty line: My father wasn’t just one of these men. He was the best.
[…] “It’s a true story,” I begin, roosting in the back of an old truck. “I swear it.”
Then I tell them that these woods can turn eerie or romantic, depending on the company you keep.
[…] The story of the snake handler’s daughter began when I’d just turned fifteen. I knew little then of the outside world my father kept from me. Ours is an oral civilization, I used to hear him say, and it’s dying. He blamed coal, he blamed heroin. He never blamed himself. He thought he had the only tales worth telling, and he never understood what my mother had run from all her life because she’d been born a woman—
The truth turns sour if it idles too long in our mouths. Stories, like bottles of shine, are meant to be given away.
This is a long excerpt of the first chapter of Shiner and it sums it up beautifully.
We’re in West Virginia, in the mountains and the nearest village is Trap. Three families live scattered in the woods. The Birds, Ivy and her family and the Sherrods.
The Bird family is composed of Ruby, Briar and their daughter Wren. She’s the narrator in this introduction and Briar is the snake- handler, gift that supposedly gives him a direct access to God. Ivy is Ruby’s best friend; she’s married to Ricky and then have four children. The Sherrods are moonshiners and the son Flynn was in school with Ruby, Ivy and Briar.
Briar is a preacher and his prestige comes from his surviving to a lightning and handling snakes. He keeps his wife and daughter captive in their cabin in the woods, away from civilization. Ivy stays close to her best friend that she swore to never leave behind. She’s the only visitor to this uncomfortable cabin and Wren follows school syllabi from Ivy’s son who is her age.
When Briar performs a miracle on Ivy, it sets in motion a series of events that will lead Wren to liberate herself from her father and discover all her family secrets.
Honestly, I don’t know what to think about this book. It’s well executed and beautifully written. But it’s another bleak story about a domineering and religious man who imposes on his wife and daughter to live off the grid, according to his own rules.
I have trouble with these books because I can never relate to this religious frenzy. I want to slap these men who imprison their families into narrow lives and don’t practice what they preach. I want to shout at their wives to take their kids and leave and stop being so gullible or down on their knees with admiration for their impostors of husbands.
Not very empathetic, I know. I had the same problem with Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson or with the ghosts in Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward.
I have a feeling of incredulity with these books. In a way they seem realistic enough not to require a suspension of belief and at the same time the families they describe seem so disconnected from mainstream life that they appear to be unrealistic. And here I am with very ambivalent feelings about Shiner, a remarkable novel I didn’t connect to as much as I would have expected.
Shiner is the story of modern Appalachia, and yes, there’s everything Ron Rash, Chris Offutt or David Joy talk about: a dying culture, a terrible problem with opioids and heroin, poverty after the mines closed, sickness after tap water was poisoned and the utter beauty of the woods. So, I have to consider that people like Ruby, Briar, Wren, Ivy and her family and the moonshiner Flynn are true-to-life characters.
And in that case, it makes me sad and angry towards several States and their politicians who accept that their constituents live like this. Has anyone read this? I’d love to discuss it with another reader.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk – Thanks, Bénédicte!
Drive You Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (2010) French title: Sur les ossements des morts. Translated by Margot Carlier.
The other day, Arti left a lovely comment on my post about Time Regained, thanking me for my Proust billets because they prodded him into finishing In Search of Lost Time. I could deliver the same message to Bénédicte, from Passage à L’Est, for prodding me into doing her Olga Tokarczuk Lecture Commune (French for readalong).
I was worried about finding another Herta Müller in Tokarczuk and I’m happy to report that I was wrong and that I loved Drive You Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.
The narrator is Janina, an old spinster that people see as eccentric and dismiss as a nutcase. She’s sick, suffers from several chronic diseases but still walks around in the woods that surround her house on an isolated Polish plateau near the Czech border. She’s quite resourceful, considering her age and her condition. Stronger than she seems, even.
She’s rebellious, an animal lover who is outraged when animals are poorly treated. She hates hunting and poaching with fierceness. She reports crimes against animals to the police, writes letters which are promptly dismissed as coming from a crazy old lady. At the police station, they indulge her rants out of politeness but in their eyes, Janina has two major flaws: she’s old and she’s female.
She only has two neighbors who live all year long on the plateau and she nicknamed them Oddball and Big Foot. While Oddball is neat, Big Foot is dirty, untidy and a poacher. So, when Oddball wakes her up at night because he found Big Foot dead in his house, she’s not happy to go out and tidy thing up before the police comes.
That’s the first death. Others will follow, leading to police investigations.
It’s an odd and fascinating novel. It strays from the plot along with Janina’s thought process and yet remains on track as far as the murder investigations are concerned. Our narrator enrolls Dizzy and Oddball in investigating these deaths.
Meanwhile, we learn about Janina, her quirks and her life. I loved spending time with Janina as she’s so funny. She’s unconventional, always thinking out of the box, exercising her critical mind, describing her village, her country and the evolution of mores.
Janina doesn’t like her name and thus thinks nobody has the name they should have – hence the nicknames she gives to everyone around her. She’s obsessed with horoscopes and peppers her narration with bits like this one:
“He generally doesn’t say much. He must have Mercury in a reticent sign, I reckon it’s in Capricorn or on the cusp, in square opposition to Saturn. It could also be Mercury in retrograde—that produces reserve.”
It went all over my head but I suppose that if someone tells you this with enough conviction, you’ll either believe them or think they’re crazy. Janina is convinced that all things in the world are arranged under a grand scheme that can be deciphered through astrology.
She goes to the village from time to time, especially to teach English to pupils at the elementary school. Her lessons are …err…unconventional. She kept in touch with a former student, Dizzy, who comes to see her once a week to chat and work on his translation of William Drake’s poems.
The teaching is one of her sources of income, the other one is watching the summer houses on the plateau during winter. She’s like a concierge. People know her. As long as you don’t hurt animals, she’ll welcome you into her house and share what she has with you. She draws people to her, making up a new family.
Janina is an unreliable narrator because she sees life through her own unusual lenses. She believes that animals are taking revenge and that the Deer killed Big Foot to punish him for hunting and poaching.
On top of the mysterious deaths, the everyday life of the village and the construction of an odd family around Janina, Drive You Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a philosophical novel. Janina muses over the meaning of life and the essence of the human condition. Her reflections about our need to classify things and actions two categories, “useful” or “useless” are spot on. Who decided who and what fits in each category and why useful is considered better as useless? Fascinating question.
Drive You Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is full of random questioning that challenge our way of thinking, all done through Janina’s offhanded comments and vision of the world. It’s deep without weighing on the reader. It’s not a lesson but you still make a pause on the page and think a little bit.
It also has a fairytale vibe due to the woods, the hunters, the deer and the mysterious deaths. It brings back Grimm and Perrault, something I’m not usually fond of. But here, Tokarczuk manages to mesh these dreamlike elements with reality. She does it masterfully.
I’ll end this billet with a word about translations.
I’ve read this novel in French and downloaded the kindle sample of the English translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. It helped me find out what the nicknames were in English. Grand Pied became Big Foot, which I could have guessed but I have no clue how Matoga turned into Oddball.
I also noticed from the sample, that the English translation often has words in capital letters, something that isn’t included in the French translation. See:
| A ce moment précis, la personne au téléphone se mit à débiter un tel flot de paroles que Matoga écarta le portable de son oreille en lui jetant un œil dégoûté. Puis nous avons appelé la police. | Then the Person at the other end started gabbling at length, so Oddball held the phone away from his ear, casting it a look of distaste. Then we called the Police. |
See how person and police have capital letters in the English translation and not in the French one? I wonder how it is in the original.
And have you seen the variety of covers?
I think that the Dutch one is very creepy. The French one conveys the dreamlike elements but totally neglects the fun of Janina’s mind. The English one is puzzling. The Polish one would be better with a deer on it as this animal is central in the book.
I love the Portuguese cover. It would have drawn be to the book if I’d seen it in a bookstore. It’s intriguing.
For other reviews, see Jacqui’s, Ali’s and Marina’s.
I had a wonderful time with Drive You Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and it will probably make my best-of-the-year list.
Which Olga Tokarczuk should I read next?
Catching up on billets: six in one
I really really have a hard time keeping up with billets and blogging at the moment, so I’ll catch up on different books I’ve read and write mini-billets about them. Everything is fine, I’m just terribly busy.
I’ve been reading American literature again or books related to America. All were good, I’ve been lucky with my reading choices. They all deserve a full billet but I’m too knackered to tackle six billets at the moment.
The first one is a French book, set in Ellis Island, Those Who Leave by Jeanne Benameur 2019. (Original French title: Ceux qui partent.) We’re in 1910, in Ellis Island, New York.
Emilia Scarpa and her father Donato, Esther Agakian and Gabor are all candidatures to emigrate to America. Emilia and Donato are Italian and she wants to be free and be a painter. Esther is survivor of the Armenian genocide. Gabor is a Rom and is fleeing the pogroms. All aspire to start a new life, either to leave traumatic events back in Europe or to open to opportunities they wouldn’t have in their native country.
Andrew Jónsson, an American photograph also spends a lot of time at Ellis Island, recording the arrivals of new immigrants. His father emigrated from Iceland with his grand-mother when he was a child and Andrew chases his own history through the newcomers.
All the characters meet at Ellis Island and their lives intertwine for a while. Jeanne Benameur muses about leaving, about new beginnings. Can you start over or as the song says, “You don’t rebuild your life, you only go on”? What do “roots” mean? How to you survive a genocide? How are you linked to your lineage?
Jeanne Benameur has a lovely and poetic style. Her tone is smooth, contemplative and tries to convey the characters inner thoughts.
It was a good read but sometimes I felt she could have said the same in less pages.
Then I was in New York again with The Fire, Next Time by James Baldwin (1963). This non-fiction book is composed of Baldwin’s letter to his nephew James and an essay about being black in America.
The letter was very moving, one James giving advice to his namesake nephew. Words of wisdom and self-confidence.
As always, Baldwin is spot on, direct and unflinching. He’s intelligent, nuanced and never lets himself fall into the pitfall of simplification.
He explores the idea of violence and various schools of thought about the future of the black community in America. He’s not convinced by any extremist thinking.
There is no hatred in his words but a challenge issued to white people: the condition of black people will change only if they’re willing to acknowledge that they need to change.
Then I moved to Kansas, around the same time as The Fire, Next Time, with In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965) I read it in French (De sang froid) in the 1966 translation by Raymond Girard.
This translation needs to be updated, that’s for sure. It was done in a time where we were a lot less Americanized and the translation reflects this with comments about obvious American things or weird spelling. (“base-ball”, really?) I was intimidated by In Cold Blood and thought it would be best to read it in French but I think I could have read it in English.
Anyway. I’m not sure it’s necessary to remind you that In Cold Blood is about a true crime affair. The Clutter family, a well-loved family in the village of Holcomb, Kansas was savagely murdered without any reason. Capote reconstructs the crime, showing the murderers before and after their crime, including their time in jail and switching of point of view to picture the family and the KBI inspectors who work on the case.
It was a memorable time for many people and Capote’s various angles shows the trail of devastation and life-changing moment that such a crime entails for a broad cast of people.
I enjoyed it a lot more than expected and it was easy to read. The chapters cover the different moment of this terrible crime, with a bit of suspense. The writing is vivid, like a reportage and it’s well worth reading.
After Capote, I changed of scenery but remained with law representatives. I went to North Carolina, where Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash (2014) is set. It was my first novel by Ron Rash, as I had only read a collection of short stories before, Burning Bright.
In this novel, Les is 52, sheriff in a county in North Carolina. He’ll retire in three weeks, handing over his job to Jarvis Crowe. He has a burgeoning relationship with Becky, a park ranger. They both carry a heavy personal baggage.
Les has to handle two cases that represent the spectrum of country sheriff duties: on the one hand, he has to deal with Gerald who trespasses on his neighbor’s property and on the other hand he has a very precise intervention to close a meth lab, as drug is a major issue in this State.
Above the Waterfall is representative of books set in small towns America.
Like Longmire, the sheriff of the fictional Absaroka County, Les has to take into account the local history, the relationship between the parties and look the other way sometimes to preserve peace. They all have to live together anyway. Btw, this reminds me that I also read Hell Is Empty by Craig Johnson but I won’t write a billet about it as it’s not my favorite Longmire story. It felt like a long race in the cold, in the falling snow of the Rocky Mountains.
But let’s leave Wyoming behind and go back to Rash’s novel set in the Appalachians, where he lives.
His books are cousins to David Joy’s or Chris Offutt’s books. Should we call them the Appalachians School? They are in the same vein and as a reader, I think they give an accurate picture of their land. Rash is less violent than Joy and he’s also a poet. I know from attending his interview at Quais du Polar, that he reads his books aloud to ensure they ring well. Above the Waterfall has a very poetic side and I’m not sure I caught all the beauty of his descriptions of wilderness.
It was a story full of grey areas where what is right isn’t always legal and vice-versa. Life isn’t black and white and like with Baldwin, I appreciate that Rash doesn’t over simplify issues but turns his writing spotlight in different corners of this Appalachian county, near the Shenandoah National Park. He lets us see different point of views.
I still have another book by Rash on the shelf, Serena and I’m looking forward to it as I really think that Ron Rash is a talented writer.
Then I flew to Argentina and you may wonder how Thursday Nights Widows by Claudia Piñeiro (2005) belongs with a billet about America. Well, it does because it is set in a country, a gated community at 50 kilometers from Buenos Aires. This huge compound is modeled after its American counterparts and it’s a sort of Argentinean Wisteria Lane. Rich businessmen have their house there, they live in close quarters and their wives, who don’t work, have very few opportunities to spend time in real Argentina.
Everything is about status, not making waves and getting along with everyone. Buy a the end on the 1990s and early 2000s, a devastating economic crisis shatters Argentina and these couples’ carefully balanced life is at threat. Unemployment spreads at Covid speed. The husbands try to keep face, the wives are oblivious and everyone has dirty secrets that stay hidden (or not) behind closed doors.
Piñeiro excels at describing this microsociety and its unspoken rules. Their carefully assembled houses of cards is fragile and drama looms. We know from the start that a tragedy occurred and the author takes us to the genesis of it, coming back to recent events or to older ones with anecdotes that pinpoints the characters’ tempers.
I have read it in a French translation by Romain Magras. It is entitled Les Veuves du jeudi and I recommend it.
At my personal bingo of literary events, I ticket several boxes with these books. All but the Jeanne Benameur count for my 20 Books Of Summer Challenge. (Books 5 to 9) Thursday Nights Widow counts for Spanish and Portuguese Literature Month hosted by Stu.
Have you read any of these six books? What did you think about them?
Country Dark by Chris Offutt – In the Appalachian mountains, again.
Country Dark by Chris Offutt (2018) French title: Nuits Appalaches. Translated by Anatole Pons-Reumaux.
I discovered Chris Offutt at Quais du Polar in 2019 and I knew I’d like his books. I started with Country Dark, published in 2018. I could have read it in English, I suppose, but Gallmeister editions are gorgeous enough to make me read in translation.
Country Dark starts in 1954. Tucker is 18, he’s back from the Korean war where he was decorated and learnt all kinds of surviving skills. He’s going back to Kentucky, where his roots are and decided to walk and hitchhike home through the Appalachian woods.
On his way home, he saves Rhonda from her uncle’s clutches just when he was going to sexually harass her. She’s only 15. Tucker helps her, makes sure that her uncle stays out of her life for good and buys the uncle’s car in the process. Rhonda and Tucker are now an item, two kids starting their adult life together.
1964. Tucker and Rhonda are married, with five children. They’re poor. Tucker works as a driver for a bootlegger, so, officially, he has no stable job. Hattie, the social worker who visits Rhonda from time to time isn’t really worried about the family. She provides help but sees that the children are loved and that their parents do their best.
Things take a dramatic turn when Hattie makes her rounds with her judgmental boss. The social services now threaten Tucker’s family and he turns to his survival skills to protect his wife and children.
I liked Tucker. He’s a solid guy with a lot of good sense, some of it acquired at home and some in the army. He’s intelligent, sober, hardworking and gentle. Chris Offutt pictures it in two paragraphs, when he describes a moment in Tucker’s trip home:
Tucker sought share and found a strip cast from the leg of a billboard encouraging him to buy shaving cream. He needed a shave, but didn’t figure a giant picture would convince him to spend money on something he could make from borax, oil, and chipped soap. He dropped his rucksack, opened a can of Libby’s Vienna sausages and ate them with saltine crackers. He used a church key to open a bottle of Ale-8, and drank half.
A katydid landed on his forearm and he admired its silky green body, serrated back legs, and delicate wings. They were prettier than a grasshopper and didn’t piss all over you like frogs did. The insect leaned backward and swelled itself, the thorax expanding, wings distending as if preparing for battle. Tucker nudged it away. He dropped the empty sausage can in a ditch blooming with milkweed and set off walking.
Tucker comes from a poor family from Kentucky. Chris Offutt describes people’s life in this area, how isolated they are from one another. It means that people need to take care of themselves. They are far away from a maternity ward when women give birth. They are far from the sheriff if something happens. Their job prospects are not good, some live during the week to work in the factories up north. Poverty means that kids have to help around the house.
Offutt’s novel progresses nicely, showing Tucker and Rhonda’s characters. His writing relays the importance of their natural environment on their lives. They are who they are because they were born and are living in the Appalachians.
The doctor from the social services sets everything in motion and puts Tucker in corner. He’s smart, acts coolly and selflessly. He’ll do anything to protect Rhonda and the kids.
Tucker’s only wealth is his wife and children. He has a lot of love to give to Rhonda and his children and his ambition in life is to live a peaceful life with his family, in his house on an Appalachian hill.
He’s different from men of his generation, I believe, because he’s not full of this toxic masculinity I associate with his time. He doesn’t need to show off his strength, to go to bars, to be violent or despise supposedly feminine tasks. He’s a good man and the reader understands his motivations and his actions.
In a way, Chris Offutt writes another answer to David Joy’s question For whom are you willing to lay down your life?
Highly recommended.
Crazy me, I’ll do 20 Books of Summer again #20booksofsummer22
I’m crazy busy and yet, I plan on doing 20 Books of Summer again.
Cathy from 746Books is the mastermind behind this event. I could pick only 10 or 15 books but I wanted to have 20 books to choose from and then we’ll see how it goes.
I already have the books from my ongoing readalongs with my Book Club, my sister-in-law, my Proust Centenary event and my non-fiction challenge. That makes seven books.
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (USA)
- Thursday Night Widows by Claudia Pineiro (Argentina)
- The Survivors by Jane Harper (Australia)
- Dead at Daybreak by Deon Meyer (South Africa)
- Fall Out by Paul Thomas (New Zealand)
- Days of Reading by Marcel Proust (France)
- Proust by Samuel Beckett (Ireland)
In August, I’ll be travelling to the USA, going through Washington DC, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. I’ve already read The Line That Held Us by David Joy and Country Dark by Chris Offutt. I love to read books about the place I’m visiting, so I’ll be reading:
- Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup (Louisiana)
- Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (North Carolina)
- Serena by Ron Rash (North Carolina)
- Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash (North Carolina)
- All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (Southern Region)
- A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson (Appalachians)
- The Cut by George Pelecanos (Washington DC)
- The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Southern Region)
That’s eight more books and some of them rather long. I also wanted to do Liz’s Larry McMurtry 2022 readalong as I’ve had Lonesome Dove on the shelf for a while. That’s two chunky books in a beautiful Gallmeister edition.
And then I’ve selected four novellas, to help me reach the 20 books with one-sitting reads:
- Lie With Me by Philippe Besson (France)
- A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi (Algeria)
- The Miracles of Life by Stefan Zweig (Austria)
- Adios Madrid by Pablo Ignacio Taibo II (Cuba)
I’m not sure I’ll make it but who doesn’t love a little challenge? I’m happy with my choices, a mix of countries, of crime, literary and non-fiction and of short and long books.
Have you read any of the books I picked? If yes, what shall I expect?
If you’re taking part to 20 Books of Summer too, leave the link to your post in the comment section, I love discovering what you’ll be up to.
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.
Group Photo by the River by Emmanuel Dongala
Group Photo by the River by Emmanuel Dongala (2010) Original French title: Photo de groupe au bord du fleuve.
Group Photo by the River by Emmanuel Dongala is a book I received through my Kube subscription. It’s the tenth novel by this Congolese writer and chemist. I have to confess that I’d never heard of him before.
Group Photo by the River is set in Brazzaville, in the Republic of Congo. Méréana is a divorcée who raises her two sons and her baby niece Lyra. She’s an orphan because her mother Tamara, Méréana’s sister died of AIDS. Méréana and Tamara were close and Méréana took care of her sister during her illness, causing a rift between her and her husband Tito. He started to go out a lot and when she demanded a condom before sex, he slapped her. She left him and now has to raise the children on her own, with the help of her Auntie Turia.
Méréana was a brilliant student in high school when she got pregnant by Tito and dropped out of school. Now, she’s barely making ends meet and she needs money to go back to school and get a degree in IT . She knows she’ll have a better paying job.
This is how she found herself by the road, breaking rocks to make bags of gravel. She works with a group of women and they sell their bags to middlemen who supply construction contractors. It’s an exhausting job, outside, in the sun and with low selling prices.
One day, they learn that the sale prices that the middlemen have with the construction contractors skyrocketted because a lot of gravel is needed to build the new national airport. The ladies want a part o this profit and decide to stick together and ask for a higher price, even if it means that they won’t sell their bags right away.
The novel is about this fight for a decent income and for a decent life. This group of eight women will get organized to improve their daily life. They choose Méréana as their representative because she’s the most educated of them.
We follow their struggle, their actions and their doubts. Dongala has two goals with this novel: he wants to write a feminist book and an homage to Congolese women and he denounces the corruption of the power in the Republic of Congo and the hypocrisy around grand shows designed to appease international institutions.
This is a country where you can get poisoned for speaking up and imprisoned for nothing. Demonstrations are repressed with guns and real bullets. Méréana goes to a ministry and she berates herself because she forgot to tell someone where she was going. And in this country, you need people know you’ve been to a public office in case you just vanish into thin air and never come back.
Dongala shows us the condition of women in Africa through his characters’ life stories. They include rapes during the civil war, repudiations, expulsions from their home after their husband died, accusations of sorcery and agreement with fetishes and losing their son after the power in place kidnapped and killed them. One of them is a second office, a mistress, and there is an outstanding scene in the book where she’s in a bar at the same time as her lover’s wife and they have a verbal fight over him through karaoke. Brilliant.
Dongala points out the impacts of traditional beliefs and customs on the condition of women. Ignorance and fear of otherworldly creatures pushes villagers to act inhumanly. Family traditions allow brothers and envious sisters-in-law to strip a widow of her home, her business and her belongings. Nothing is done to stop them.
The author depicts husbands and fathers who are violent, unfaithful, lazy and cowards but not all his male characters are that way. Armando the taximan and brother to one of the women of the group provides them with free rides and contributes to their fight. One of ladies explains how her husband who had a fatal illness provided for her after his death by playing on the fear of fetishes. They built a scam to make people believe that she was protected by a powerful fetish and that people should leave her alone. It was his way of taking care of her after his death, she kept their home.
Group Photo by the River is a very attaching novel and Dongala manages to balance the militant side of his book with moving the plot forward and describing the women’s fight. As a reader, you root for Méréana and her friends and hope they will get what they want.
It would make a wonderful film and I truly don’t understand why it is not translated into English. What can I say, that’s another Translation Tragedy.
For another take on this book, see Nathalie’s, at her blog Chez Mark et Marcel. (Mark Twain and Marcel Proust)
The Day Will Come by Giulia Caminito – Italia Reading Challenge
A Day Will Come by Giulia Caminito (2019) French title: Un jour viendra. Translated from the Italian by Laura Brignon.
In A Day Will Come, Giulia Caminito takes us to Serra de’ Conti, a village in the Marche region in Italy. Nicola and Lupo are the two surviving sons of the poor baker of the village, Luigi Ceresa. They have two sisters, Nella, who becomes a nun and Adelaide, who dies in young age. The boys are close in age and Nicola is under Lupo’s protection because he’s too fragile and afraid of everything. Together with a pet wolf, they are a close-knit unit to face the world. Their parents are absentees at best, violent sometimes.
Lupo will do Nicola’s chores to allow him to learn how to read and get an education. Nicola loves to read and write and becomes the erudite of the duo. Lupo is more into action and he finds a good outlet for his energy in the Anarchist groups that spread their ideas in the country. The peasants were mostly sharecroppers, for the convent and for other landowners. This system was very inegalitarian and the peasants were open to Anarchism that promised to erase it.
Their village of Serra de’ Conti has a convent with Clarisse sisters. Their abbess is Sister Clara, a woman who became a nun after she was kidnaped in Sudan, her native country. The convent plays a steady role in the villagers’ lives, with work, shelter, help. And music. Sister Clara plays beautifully and the villagers can hear her play. The boys’ sister, Nella is there, against her will. She got pregnant out of wedlock and her father put her in the convent and took the baby.
Through Nicola and Lupo’s story, Giulia Caminito dives into the history of this corner of Italy and shows how politics and decisions made at national level drizzle and affect people’s lives even in remote villages.
The boys were born in the early 1890s, only twenty years after the independence of Italy, won over the Austrians. It also meant that the young State has to incorporate papal territories in the new country. The fate of the convent in Serra de’Conti reflects this evolution: the church land and properties are taken over. The Anarchist movements were strong, leading to the Red Week in Ancona (CHECk), the nearest city to Serra de’ Conti.
The Great War is another shock and I discovered battles between the Italian and the Austrian troops. I know more about the battles set in France than about the ones abroad. They were just as abominable.
The Great War washed away the Anarchist movements and the brothers’ illusions. The Spanish influenza was another tide over the Great War one. The country landed in the 1920s and Mussolini took over.
I see Nicola and Lupo as a modern and peasant version of Romulus and Remus. One is word and the other is action. They are the people who are the foundation of the new Italy. They are inseparable and they have a wolf pet who protects them and Lupo, whose name means wolf, is Nicola’s protector.
In a note at the end of the book, the author explains that her grand-mother came from this village of Serra de’Conti. The characters of this novel are based on real people. Her great-grand-father, Nicola Ugolini, was one of the Anarchists of the Marche region and Giulia Caminito dug into the archives of the movement, its roots and its actions. The participants really believed they would lead to happy changes for the people. Sister Clara really existed under the name of Zeinab Alif who, in real life, became Sister Maria Giuseppina Benvenuti.
Gallmeister, the publisher, included a note about the historical landmarks that are spread into the novel. It was very useful but I think that this note would be better as a foreword as it contains no spoilers but gives useful pointers to understand the historical references of the book.
Like Betty by Tiffany McDaniel, A Day Will Come is based on the author’s family story. There’s no way to know what’s true and what isn’t and honestly, I don’t care. I enjoyed Caminito’s book for its unusual characters, for the light it sheds on a specific moment in the history of the Marche and for the poetry of her writing.
Translation Tragedy, sadly. This is another contribution to Diana’s Italia Reading Challenge.
Book Around the Corner 