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Five crime fiction books, all different
Friendship Is a Gift You Give Yourself by William Boyle (2018) French title: L’amitié est un cadeau à se faire. Translated by Simon Baril
This is my second book by William Boyle after The Lonely Witness and he’s definitely an author I want to keep reading.
Friendship… is set in Brooklyn, in the Bronx and upstate New York. It all starts when Rena Ruggiero, the widow of a mafia gangster, kicks her eighty years old neighbor and thinks that she killed him as he lays unresponsive on her floor. High on Viagra, he tried to rape her.
Rena takes his car and drives to the Bronx where she wants to stay with her estranged daughter Adrienne and rekindle her relationship with her granddaughter Lucia.
She arrives there just as Richie Schiavano decides to steal money from a mafia gang.
Rena and Lucia find shelter at Adrienne’s neighbor’s house. Lacey, ex-porn star known as Lucious Lacey, welcomes them in her home and they end up fleeing the Bronx with the mafia on their tail.
The book takes a delightful Thelma and Louise turn and the reader is in for a fantastic ride.
William Boyle has a knack for a crazy plot, for attaching characters and an fantastic sense of place. A wonderful discovery by Gallmeister.
Alabama 1963 by Ludovic Manchette & Christian Niemiec (2020). Not available in English.
This is a French crime fiction novel set in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, just before President Kennedy was assassinated and right in the middle of the Civil Right movement.
Girls are rapped and murdered. Bud Larkin, a white PI, former police officer, is volunteered to help a black family find out who killed their daughter. His former colleagues also hire him a black cleaning lady, Adela Cobb. In segregated Alabama, she’ll be an asset to Larkin as black people talk to her but not to him.
As other murders happen, Bud and Adela get more and more anxious to find out who’s behind these crimes. And if this adventure can help them sort out their lives, all the better.
I’m always a bit suspicious about books written by French writers and set in America, written as if they were American writers. This one was OK, and the fact that the two authors’ day job is to translate American TV series into French probably helps writing a convincing story. They know all the codes.
I had a good time reading it, I got attached to Adela and Bud.
As the Crow Flies by Craig Johnson (2012) French title: A vol d’oiseau. Translated by Sophie Aslanides.
This is the 8th volume of the Walt Longmire series. I read them in English now since the French paperbacks are no longer published by Gallmeister but by Pocket. The books aren’t as nice, so, the original on the kindle is better.
This time around, Caddy, Longmire’s daughter is getting married in two weeks on the Cheyenne reservation when Walt discovers that she no longer has a venue.
He’s on his way to visit another location with his friend Henry Standing Bear when they see a woman fall from a cliff and die. She had her six-month old baby in arms when she fell. The baby miraculously survived.
Walt Longmire will mentor the new chief of the Tribal Police, Lolo Long during this investigation. She’ll learn a few tricks, soften some hard edges and see how to navigate the tricky relationship with the FBI. Very useful skills if she wants to keep her job or stay alive while doing it.
As always, Craig Johnson delivers. The plot is well-drawn, a part of fun is introduced with Lolo Long’s blunders and the relationship between Walt and Caddy is lovely. This volume is set on the Cheyenne reservation and it rings true, at least to my French ears.
Craig Johnson doesn’t disappoint and I’m looking forward to reading the ninth book.
Sœurs de sang by Dominique Sylvain (1997, reviewed by the author in 2010). Not available in English
I’ve read several books by Dominique Sylvain. Kabuchiko, set in Japan, Les Infidèles and Passage du Désir set in Paris. The three books are different and Soeurs de sang is closer to Passage du Désir than to the other ones.
We’re in Paris. Louise Morvan is a PI who is hired by Ana Chomsky to find a former lover that she spotted as a character in a video game. Louise starts investigating, discovers that he’s Axel Langeais, one of the creators of the game.
It could stop here but Victoria Yee, the lead singer of the group Noir Vertige is murdered on Axel’s barge, in front of his sister Régine. Louise embarks on a murder investigation that will lead her to Berlin and Los Angeles and into the strange artistic world of the Victim Art.
I read this with pleasure, a novel set in a very peculiar milieu, the one of extreme art and I was curious to see how the story would unfold.
Ames animales by JR Dos Santos (2021). Not available in English.
This was one of our Book Club choices and it was a promising read.
It’s a Portuguese novel set in Lisbon. The main character is Tomas Noronha whose wife Maria Flor is involved with a charity that works on animal intelligence. When the director of this charity is murdered, she’s the last one to have seen him and is accused of murder.
Chapters alternate between the crime plot and flash backs where the militant and director is enlightening Maria Flor about the latest researches about animal intelligence. These lengthy explanations were too didactical for me, cut the flow of the crime investigation and I lost interest.
I abandoned the book. I don’t read crime fiction to read scientific lectures, there are radio podcasts for that. A missed opportunity.
I have also read The Hot Spot by Charles Williams but this one is so good that it deserves its own billet.
20 Books of Summer #1 : Lisbon Poets
Lisbon Poets. French title: Poètes de Lisbonne. Translated from the Portuguese by Elodie Dupeau.
This is the first billet of my 20 Books of Summer challenge, one of the ghosts of trips past. I bought the poetry collection Lisbon Poets during a trip to Lisbon. Obviously.
It’s a lovely bilingual edition of poems by Luís de Camões, Cesário Verde, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Florbela Espanca and Fernando Pessoa. The same book exists in English, Italian, German and other languages.
The French translation is new, there’s a foreword by Anne-Marie Quint, professor at the Sorbonne. Original drawings by André Carrilho illustrate the book and all this attention to details makes of this edition a nice book to have in hands.
Now I’m not a great reader of poetry and imagine the challenge to write a billet in English about poems you’ve read in a Portuguese/French bilingual edition. I’ll be brief.
Poet seems to be a dangerous profession in Portugal if you look at these poets’ untimely death. Except for Luís de Camões who lived 56 years in the 16th century, they all died young. Cesário Verde was 31 when he died in 1886, Mário de Sá-Carneiro was 26 when he committed suicide in 1916, Florbela Espanca was 36 when she killed herself in 1930 and at 47, Fernando Pessoa was an old man compared to the others when he died in 1935.
Bilingual editions of poetry are great, at least for western languages. I wouldn’t get anything out of a Japanese/French book but for Latin languages, it’s wonderful. Portuguese is a funny language for me as a French: when I read it, I recognize a lot of words but when I hear it, I don’t understand anything. Since I read the poems, having the original beside the French translation was a treat and useful.
I wasn’t so keen on Cesário Verde and Mário de Sá-Carneiro. I found Verde a bit whiny and I disliked Feminina by Mário de Sá-Carneiro because I found it mysoginistic.
My favorite poems were by Luís de Camões, Florbela Espanca and some by Fernando Pessoa. I loved Alma minha gentil, que tepartite by Camões, a beautiful poem about his grief after his lover died. I enjoyed the sensuality in Florbela Espanca’s poems, her assertiveness as a woman. In A uma rapariga (To A Young Girl), she urges girls to live their life, to be bold and go for what they want. Fernando Pessoa’s poems are beautiful. I loved O livro de Cesário Verde, his others full of thoughts about life.
I’m aware that my comments are trite but think again of my challenge here. Even in French, I would struggle to have anything clever to say about poems, so in this context, it’s even worse. I’ll stop then and urge you to get this little gem if you ever go to Portugal. It seems like a good introduction for Portuguese poetry.
The Anarchist Banker by Fernando Pessoa
The Anarchist Banker by Fernando Pessoa (1922) French title: Le banquier anarchiste. Translated from the Portuguese by Françoise Laye.
The Anarchist Banker by Fernando Pessoa is a novella in which a banker explains to his audience why he is a true anarchist. It has been on my TBW (To Be Written) since April. Why? Mostly because I didn’t know how to write about it. So, it’s Catch 22. I can’t write about it properly but if I don’t, I’ll break my cardinal rule which is “write about all the books you read”.
I feel that if I start allowing myself to skip a billet, other books will be left behind as well. Where does that leave me? I still can’t write a passable billet about The Anarchist Banker but I can’t procrastinate anymore.
Solution? A short cut.
Read this witty, incredible novella where a banker will demonstrate with a lot of self-assurance that he is the only genuine anarchist in the world. If anarchist banker wasn’t such an oxymoron, the reader could believe in the banker’s reasoning.
He demonstrates that anarchism is a good system but since it’s impossible to implement, in the end the only possible system is the bourgeois system.
Pessoa has a fantastic sense of humour. His tone is both light and serious, the man totally convinced by his brilliant reasoning. He’s so ridiculous in his beliefs that it enhances the comedy of situation. This is something that could have been written by a philosophe from the Age of Enlightenment, like Montesquieu.
It is also a fascinating book to read when you think about politics and politicians. It makes you realize how a politician can convince you of something, step by step. He unfolds a reasoning in which each step holds some truth, he asks you to validate each step and one step after the other, he leads you to a path you would never have followed if you’d seen the whole journey on the map right from the start. It’s subtle and frightening and we’ve all heard politicians start with an assertion you cannot refute and then build something totally fallacious from it.
That’s what could happen to the reader here if the constant irony wasn’t a lifeline that reminds you that this reasoning is flawed.
The Anarchist Banker is also a masterful demonstration of how an idea can become the roots of a dictatorship, how radical changes in a society cannot be implemented because it’s impossible to do so everywhere at the same time and successfully. So the new system must be forcefed to the population and only an authoritative system can do it.
I really can’t tell you more about The Anarchist Banker. I highly recommend it as a masterpiece of literature but also as an educational read about all those politicians who want to attract voters through simplistic thinking.
Your Face Will Be the Last by João Ricardo Pedro
Your Face Will Be the Last by João Ricardo Pedro (2012) French title: La main de Joseph Castorp. Translated from the Portuguese by Elisabeth Monteiro Rodrigues.
I’m a little embarrassed with this billet. Your Face Will Be the Last by João Ricardo Pedro is not available in English. The original is in Portuguese and it’s been translated into French, Dutch and Italian. If anyone stumbling upon this entry has read it, please leave a comment and let me know what you thought about it. Because I’m totally baffled by it.
João Ricardo Pedro throws us head first in a family history. It opens with a murder in an isolated village in Portugal. Celestino is found dead and his friend, the doctor Augusto Mendes recalls how Celestino came to the village decades before. From there we wander into the doctor’s family tree and the history of Portugal. We discover how he came to live in this isolated village and how he met his wife, we hear about his son Antonió and his wife, his grandson Duarte. We go back and forth between the village and Lisbon. We are rolled around from one decade to the other with no real way to understand where we are apart from some light clues about Duarte’s age or an allusion to a historical event. Or maybe there are clues obvious to a Portuguese reader that I totally missed.
It left me puzzled, unable to set the story straight in chronological order in my head. On top of that, there’s a mystery around Duarte’s love for the piano, weird friendships and a vague link to Austria. I was totally lost.
Sure, the novel mentions major political events for Portugal in the 20th century. We guess that this family has been hit by the Salazar dictatorship (Duarte’s mother never talks about her dead parents) and has been deeply affected by the long colonial war in Angola. But it’s so messy that I got lost. I felt like walking in circle in a forest with no clue of how to make sense of what I was reading. Duarte is a very strange character that I couldn’t understand and till the end, I remained outside of the book, reading with a mind hovering over what I was reading but never immersed in the story. I never felt I was there with the characters but still wanted to know how it would end.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good novel from a literary point of view, it just didn’t work for me. It left me with the disagreeable feeling that I missed a major clue to understand it all. So I’d be grateful for explanations from readers who have read it. It’s almost German Lit Month, so Licht, mehr Licht, please!
Portuguese lit: The Memorables by Lídia Jorge
The Memorables by Lídia Jorge (2014) French title: Les Mémorables. Translated by Geneviève Leibrich.
| Elle serrait contre elle la copie des plans dessinés par la main de celui qui, trente ans plus tôt, avait mis en marche cinq mille hommes contre un régime décrépit, un de ces régimes si long et si séniles qu’ils laissent du fumier sur la terre pour plusieurs siècles. | She held to her chest a copy of the maps designed by the man who, thirty years before, had led five thousand men against a decrepit regime. It was one of those long and senile regimes that left manure on earth for several centuries. |
“She” is Ana Maria Machado, a young Portuguese journalist who works for CBS in Washington DC. The five thousand men mentioned in this quote are the military men who participated in the coup d’état on April 25th, 1974 in Lisbon, the one that led to the Carnation Revolution and the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship.
After reportages in war zones, Ana Maria’s boss asks her to go back to Lisbon and film a documentary about the Carnation Revolution and the miracle of this peaceful revolution where the military takes power to bring democracy to their country.
Ana Maria is reluctant to go back to Lisbon where she has unresolved issues with her father, Ántonio Machado, a famous political editorialist whose column always proved to be insightful. He was also close to the people who did the revolution. Ana Maria needs a crew for her mission and rekindles a working relationship with Margarida and Miguel Ângelo, two reporters she knew in journalism school.
Ana Maria decides against telling her father about her project, mostly because she doesn’t want him to interfere with her vision of the events. In Ántonio’s office, she borrows a picture taken on 21st of August 1975, in a restaurant, the Memories. This picture portrays all the people who were decisive participants in the revolution and close witnesses of the events. This photo will be the Ariadne thread of the documentary.
Ana Maria and her friends want to reconstruct the minutes this 25 of April 1974 and understand what everyone did and when. They will go and interview these key actors or their widow to discover what they did that day, how they felt, how they lived afterwards and how they reflect on the revolution, thirty years later.
Lídia Jorge autopsies the military coup that brought democracy to her country but more importantly, she questions what happened to the major players of the Carnation Revolution. Her book was published in 2014, for the fortieth anniversary of the 25 of April 1974 events. Ana Maria writes her story six years after she did her documentary and what she narrates happened in 2004, for the thirtieth anniversary of the revolution. Symbolic years. Time and remembrance are important in her book.
I wanted to read about the Carnation Revolution and it gave me a better vision of what happened and how extraordinary it was to have such a smooth transition to democracy. Lídia Jorge points out two disconcerting facts about these events: one, the major actors of the military coup were never properly thanked and none had a glorious career after that. And two, they were forgotten from the public. This is very different from what Petros Markaris describes about Greece in Bread, Education, Freedom or what Yasmina Khadra writes about Algeria in Dead Man’s Share. Both Markaris and Khadra explain how the actors of the country’s liberation cashed on their being on the right side, either during the decisive demonstration against the Greek regime or against the French. In these two countries, these men became untouchable heroes, grabbed on power and didn’t let it go.
According to The Memorables, no heroes were born from the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. Ana Maria knew the men on the photo because her parents gravitated in their circle. Margarida and Miguel Ângelo had to research them. Lídia Jorge wants to celebrate them, to remind them to the Portuguese and show how ungrateful the Republic was towards them. None of them benefited from their act.
In addition to the questioning about the place they have in the Portuguese collective memory, Lídia Jorge muses over the impact of living through such historical events. How do you go back to normal after that? How does one leave their glorious days behind and go on with a mundane everyday life? How do you survive to the I-was-there-and-part-of-it syndrome? There is a before and an after the 25th April 1974 for all the Portuguese who were old enough at the time to grasp the importance of this day, but for the people who prepared the coup and succeeded, how does the rest of your life measure up to this? (I’ve always wondered how Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr survived to being a Beatle)
Ana Maria’s personal story is also linked to the 25th of April. That day, her mother, Machado’s lover, was supposed to fly back to her country, Belgium. The beginning and the excitement of the Carnation Revolution convinced to stay in Portugal. So, Ana Maria’s existence is also an outcome of the revolution. As mentioned before, her parents were close to the new power and knew the key players. Coming back to Lisbon is a personal journey for her. She’s estranged from her father and never saw her mother again after she divorced her father when she was twelve. She doesn’t want him to ask questions about her current assignment and therefore avoids asking questions herself. They live together but barely talk to each other. This added a dimension to the novel.
What can I say about my response to The Memorables? Honestly, sometimes I found it very tedious to read. When I read Dubliners, I wondered Do you need to be Irish to love Dubliners by James Joyce? because there were so many precise political details in the short stories that I felt I was missing vital clues in the stories. I felt the same here and I wondered if I needed to be Portuguese to fully understand the meaning of The Memorables. All the historical characters mentioned in the novel through a nickname are pathetic in the interviews with Ana Maria and her friends. It’s puzzling. They all have issues and are eccentric. How real are they? It made the book difficult to read and I don’t know how much is true and how much comes from the novelist’s licence. On top of that, Ana Maria is not exactly a warm character and it’s hard to root for her. And that’s probably the major problem I had with The Memorables. I was never fully engaged in the reporters’ quest. It could have been suspenseful and it wasn’t, except for the last 100 pages when Ana Maria uncovers her father’s secrets.
All in all, I’m glad I read it but it was not an agreeable read. I’d love to hear about your response to it. Alas, this is not available in English so none of my English-speaking followers will have read it. So, I’d be glad to hear from French and Portuguese readers who might have read it.
Street Art in Lisbon. Salgueiro Maia, member of the MFA, the “Armed Forces Movement”
Portuguese Lit: Jesus Christ Drank Beer by Afonso Cruz
Jesus-Christ Drank Beer by Afonso Cruz (2012) French title : Jésus-Christ buvait de la bière. Translated from the Portuguese by Marie-Hélène Piwnik.
Preamble: I translated all the quotes myself and it wasn’t easy because Afonso Cruz is a poet-novelist and my English is not good enough to translate the poetical side of his prose. As usual, I did my best and don’t hesitate to suggest other translations in the comments.
| Une corde peut se tendre sur toute sa longueur, mais elle peut passer sa vie repliée sur elle-même, enroulée en dedans. Une longue corde peut n’être qu’un petit rouleau. Notre vie est comme ça aussi, comme une corde. Parfois elle se tend au-dessus de l’abîme, parfois elle est enroulée dans un placard. Elle peut unir deux lieux distants ou rester rangée, repliée sur elle-même. | A rope may be stretched on its entire length but it may spend its life coiled up, withdrawn into itself. A long rope may only be a small roll. Our life is also like this, like a rope. Sometimes it’s stretched over the abyss, sometimes it’s coiled in a cupboard. It can unite two distant places together or stay put, withdrawn into itself. |
This is the first glimpse of the atmosphere and style of Afonso Cruz’s Jesus-Christ Drank Beer. I was lucky to find a whole section of books in French in the Livraria Bertrand in Lisbon because I doubt I would have stumbled upon this Portuguese book in a French bookstore. It’s published by a Québec publishing house, Les Allusifs whose objective is to publish novellas from around the world, which makes them the francophone equivalent of Pushkin Press. Many thanks to these couture publishing houses that go out of the beaten paths. But, back to Jesus-Christ Drank Beer.
We’re in the Alentejo, the region of Portugal at the East of Lisbon to the border with Spain. It’s a rural area with cork oaks, olive trees and wheat fields. It’s hot in the summer and quite dry. This is where the young Rosa lives with her ageing grand-mother. Her mother left when she was little and her father died in an accident. She’s left alone on the farm with her nan. Rosa is not even 18 but she’s already out of school and her best friend is Ari, a shepherd. Rosa and her grand-mother Antónia are dirt poor and barely manage to survive in their remote village of the Alentejo. Rosa spends her days tending to her grand-mother and keeping Ari company, who’s quietly in love with her. As their financial situation deteriorates, Rosa decides to go and work as a maid in the city.
In a nearby village lives Miss Whittemore, an English millionaire who bought out a whole ghost village. She’s quite the eccentric –she sleeps in the skeleton of a whale— and decided to renovate the whole village and import a Hindi wise man, a Yoruba medicine man, a priest and Professor Borja to bring in atheist balance. This little world revolves around lunches at Miss Whittemore’s and philosophical conversations. Professor Borja sees himself as a contemporary version of the Epicurean philosopher Diogenes of Oenoanda.
These two worlds will collide when Professor Borja hits a wild boar with his car near Rosa’s village. Despite his being an old philosopher, he falls in love with young Rosa who seems to exude sensuality. Then Antónia has an attack and gets worse. Rosa comes back to the village and her grand-mother expresses the wish to do a pilgrimage to the Holy Land before she dies. Rosa can’t afford the trip to Jerusalem and in any case, the old woman is too ill to go there. Professor Borja convinces Miss Whittemore to transform her village into a Palestine-like place and make Antónia believe that she is near Jerusalem.
I won’t tell more about plot. The sheer beauty of Jesus-Christ Drank Beer comes from the perfect mix of craziness, eccentricity, poetry, fondness for the Alentejo and thoughts about life and human condition. Here’s a reflection on the work of firefighters who are called in case of a fire but more often when someone feels suddenly ill or has an accident. Afonso Cruz muses:
| Les pompiers devraient lutter contre le feu, l’élément d’Héraclite. Au lieu de ça, ils luttent contre le temps. Une lutte chimérique. Pour lutter contre le feu, ils utilisent son grand ennemi, l’eau, mais pour combattre le temps ils n’ont qu’un brancard, un tensiomètre et une bouteille d’oxygène. Et, bien sûr, les vieux continuent à mourir. Les pompiers devraient avoir des lances d’arrosage d’où fuserait la jeunesse, ils devraient s’occuper d’éteindre la vieillesse. | Firefighters should fight against fire, the element of Heraclitus. Instead of that, they fight against time. A fanciful fight. To fight against fire, they use its greatest enemy, water. But to fight against time, they only have a stretcher, a tensiometer and an oxygen bottle. And of course, old people keep on dying. Firemen should have fire hose that sprayed youth; they should be busy putting out old age. |
What a sight it would be.
The novel is set in a rural area and the characters’ vision of the world is deeply rooted in their surroundings, like in this quote with moth.
| Les rêves volent comme les mites et pondent des œufs dans les meubles, le linge, les seuils de porte, partout. Et de ces œufs naissent d’autres rêves, pareils aux mites qui pondent des œufs partout. | Dreams fly like moth and lay eggs in furniture, clothes, thresholds, everywhere. And from these eggs are born new dreams, like moths who lay eggs everywhere. |
Moths are part of Rosa and Ari’s environment. Using moths to compare them to dreams is a bit daring but somehow, under Cruz’s pen, it works. For the anecdote: in French, a moth is a mite. When I typed this quote, Word autocorrect “thought” I had made a mistake and suggested mythe (myth) instead of mite, especially since the pronunciation of the two words is very similar in French. To Word’s computer-programed mind, dreams can fly like myths but not like moth.
Jesus-Christ Drank Beer is set in the 1980s, in the decade after the fall of the Salazar dictatorship. (1974) It was a time of change for the country but also for the Alentejo since there were agrarian reforms after democracy was established. I know this thanks to the foreword by the translator but otherwise, there’s a timelessness about this novella. The only moment I remembered that it was written in 2012 is this tiny reminder of the violence of the 2008 economic crisis in Portugal and the pressure the country got from the EU and the IFM. Antónia is supposed to be in Jerusalem and she comments that it looks a lot like the Alentejo. Professor Borja explains:
| C’est méditerranéen, ça se ressemble partout, des chênes lièges, une économie déplorable et des oliviers et des fromages de brebis et de chèvre. Dieu savait ce qui était bon et a voulu s’incarner dans un lieu où le travail, l’esclavage, les finances, tout ça, étaient méprisés. Dieu fait tout au mieux et jamais il n’aurait voulu être allemand. | It’s Mediterranean. It looks the same everywhere, cork oaks, a poor economy, olive trees, goat cheese and sheep’s cheese. God knew what was good and wanted to be incarnate in a place where work, slavery, finance and all this were despised. God knows best and would have never wanted to be German. |
Unless I missed something, this is the only allusion to today’s world.
Afonso Cruz shows the life in Alentejo, makes its landscape come alive, evokes its popular belief and way-of-life. Jesus-Christ Drank Beer is a literary beverage flavored with Maupassant’s A Life, Cather’s My Ántonia, Giono’s Regain, Papadiamantis’s Murderess or Ramuz’s Aline.
Highly recommended. I’ll leave you with a last quote, one I particularly love because it tells why I’ll never do Botox or plastic surgery for the sake of looking young.
| Les souvenirs sont les cendres des mots, ils sont plus lourds que les pensées et finissent par se laisser choir au fond du corps, cendrier tête la première. Il ne faut pas les chercher dans les têtes blanchies, mais dans les corps. La mémoire s’enracine dans les os, les rides, la peau. Si un vieux écarte les rides que le temps creuse dans les peaux les plus âgées, dedans il y a des tas d’histoires, il suffit de regarder le corps muet et de lire les lignes qu’il a dessinées au fil des jours et des heures. Ce sont des histoires sans paroles, c’est pourquoi l’on a tendance à les négliger. | Memories are words’ ashes. They are heavier than thoughts and end up falling down to the bottom of our body, ashtray head-first. Don’t look for them in white-haired heads but in bodies. Memory takes roots in bones, in wrinkles and in our skin. If an old person opens the wrinkles that Time has carved in the oldest skins, you’ll see lots of story there. Just look at their mute bodies and read the lines Time has drawn day after day, hour after hour. These are wordless stories and this is why we tend to neglect them. |
I’ll add this as a contribution to Marina Sofia’s Reading the EU project for Portugal. I want to make this book knows.
Literary escapade: Lisbon and Pessoa
After spending a few days in Lisbon, it’s hard to ignore Pessoa. Lisbon celebrates him everywhere and not just by putting him on T-Shirts for tourists. One of his favourite cafés, Café Restaurante Martinho da Arcada…
has a plaque on it about Pessoa and the whole restaurant room is decorated with pictures of him.
Another of his favorite cafés, A Brasileira has his statue on their terrasse. You can sit near Pessoa and take a picture.
It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s statue in Galway.
As a major poet of the 20th century, Pessoa’s body has been transferred to the prestigious Mosteiro dos Jerónimos for the 50th anniversary of his death.
His picture is on the shop window of bookstores
His books are well stocked in bookshops. They even have them in English and in French.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have the chance to visit his house, which is now a museum. I would have liked to see his library.
In the Alentejo region, there’s a museum about coffee and Pessoa has his own corner because he embodied the culture of cafés, just like his contemporary generation of writers in Budapest.
In the end, I like this painting of him by José De Almada Negreiros.
Now that I’ve seen him everywhere, I suppose I should read him. Yes, I must confess that I haven’t read him…yet. I have The Anarchist Banker on my kindle and I’ll come to it sooner or later. I know I should read The Book of Disquiet but it’s on the Daunting Books List, along with Ulysses, Dom Quixote, Moby Dick, Satantango and others. I’m not sure I’m deep enough to read Pessoa and fully understand The Book of Disquiet. I’m not good with poetry either which doesn’t help but the idea of an anarchist banker intrigues me, though, so I’ll start small with this one.
Have you read anything by him? If yes, what would you recommend? In case, you have reviewed one of his books, please leave a link to your review in the comment section.
PS: Sorry for the poor quality of the photos. I’m afraid that my skills as a photographer have not improved.
Every human is an unknown island
The Tale of the Unknown Island by José Saramago. Read by Albert Millaire
The first time I heard of José Saramago is when he died. Then I read a review of Blindness and one of The Double. Neither of them convinced me Saramago would be an author I could like (or could be an author I would like?) So I did what I often do when I want to discover a new writer without investing too much time: I picked up a short story, and in this case, in an audio version – a way to spice my cooking time.
The Tale of the Unknown Island starts as many fairy tales: a man knocks at the king’s castle door to ask for an appointment with the monarch. He wants him to give him a boat, to find the unknown island. The king is puzzled and asserts all islands are known and drawn on official maps. The man insists and the king gives in: he can go to the harbour and get a royal boat for his quest. However, the king says he will not provide him with the crew, the man shall find himself the appropriate sailors. A servant, who overhears the discussion between the man and the king, decides to leave the castle and follow the man and be a crew member. The chief of the harbour gives him a caravel. The man says he does not know how to sail but he will learn with the boat, on the sea. The servant explains why she is there and becomes his partner in the adventure. We soon understand they shall probably never leave the pier.
The man says every human is an unknown island. He is looking for himself and is convinced he needs to leave physically to find his unknown island. At the end of their first day on the boat, after sharing their thoughts, their projects and their meal, the man and the servant go to bed separately . The man has a dream and she is not in the dream, which is painful.“Dreams are skilled magicians, they can change the consistency of things and people”. His dream makes him realise his unknown island is this woman, sleeping on the other side of the boat. The end of the tale echoes what Romain Gary wrote in Clair de Femme:
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J’avais patrie féminine et il ne pouvait plus y avoir de quête. Mon pays avait une voix que la vie semblait avoir créée pour son propre plaisir, car j’imagine que la vie aussi a besoin de gaieté, à l’en juger par les fleurs des champs, qui sourient tellement mieux que les autres. “I had found my feminine country and no quest would ever be necessary again. My country had a voice that life seemed to have created for her own pleasure, because I imagine life also needs joy, if one thinks of wild flowers, whose smile is so much wider than the others’.”
This tale is more than just this story, of course. The man has no name, he could be anyone, you, me. His journey is his life, as we often feel, a small boat floating on a sea of events, learning how to sail, day by day. The man could not find any other sailor than this woman, the men said they did not want to risk their comfort to find the unknown island, such a risky project. Yes, abandoning your certitudes for the unknown requires courage. So does deciding to turn your back on other people’s expectations to be yourself.
I was enchanted by the tale, the style. It sounded simple, sometimes ironic, sometimes poetic. The flow of words was natural to hear. I couldn’t remember why I was so sceptical about my liking Saramago after reading the reviews I mentioned before. Then I looked at the excerpt printed on the back of the CD and everything became clear. The style, so fluid, so easy when read aloud seemed impossible for silent reading: no point, only commas, capital letters after commas, only one sentence and the excerpt ends with suspension points revealing that the sentence is not finished. Now I wonder if the entire tale is made of one gigantic sentence. And I recall why I doubted I could read Saramago; I’m not build to read books with such creative punctuation and syntax. I may miss a remarkable writer, but I’m not tempted to try one of his novels.
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