Félicien Marceau: La Terrasse de Lucrezia (1993)

Casually looking for a job in Rome, the young Lucezia happens to find out that one of the most luxurious hotels in Rome want a laundry maid, so her luck is in. And while she's attending to the laundry in room 504, the most luxurious in the hotel and which has just been vacated, she notices that an electrician is fixing a socket. Their eyes meet, Lurezia bolts the door, and the bed sheets are waiting for them. Later, Lurezia slightly lies about this event and calls it her honeymoon night.

This sex romp is in fact not mentioned until Chapter VI of the book, which begins with the law Professor Lamberti rather innappropriately describing the wife of the former electrician as 'piquante' at a co-owners' meeting in a luxury block of flats on the outskirts of Rome. Lucrezia and Antonio are one of four couples who have applied to live in and attend to the daily activities in the block, and, heavily supported by the Professor who is of course smitten by Lucrezia, the couple are unanimously voted in.

And so Lucrezia begins to dominate the appartment block, in spite of her inappropriate behaviour, such as delivering the co-owners their mail and telling them the contents of the postcards' contents before they've looked at them. But she doesn't get criticised for this, and even when she thinks she's overstepped the mark by opening a telegramme for Mme Soardo she comes up trumps, and even receives a gift of a seventeenth century writing desk from Mme Soardo for her troubles.

Antonio and Lucrezia are discounted from a theft from one of the rooms by the Professor, who tells the police to investigate someone else, although Antonio has been frequenting a bar where some very rough criminal types go. But Antonio is killed shortly after when he speeds round a hairpin bend into a fire engine: the ever-smitten law Professor manages to find the pompiers guilty instead of Antonio, and Lucrezia receives a huge indemnity. She can't go wrong.

Lucrezia goes on to not only pocket her own and her husband's salaries for looking after the building, but she also easily wins over the Professor by telling him that she can run the flats better than the present manager, so she also snags that job (with a 10% increase) on top of what she's already earning.

Added to this, she has two children by Antonio – Alberto (who is to become Count Alberto and maybe a famous tennis player) and Isabella (due to marry Eric, the nephew of the king of Sweden). The reader might be tempted to call Lucrezia a scheming little bitch, which may be true, but she's also highly intelligent and extremely lucky. And Félicien Marceau does humorous novels very well.

Christian Signol: Dans la paix des saisons (2016)

The year is 1997. Mathieu is only forty and has just had an operation for a tumour on his lung, and although it will take him some time to recover, the doctor rather dismissively tells him that he'll cure if he changes his lifestyle: no more two packets of cigarettes a day, and a life free from stress. His mother lives in Paris, having to move to a city to find work, and his wife Odile is a city woman. But some time before, when Mathieu was between three years of age and eleven, he lived with his grandparents Paul and Louise near Bayac in the Quercy: Signol was born in Quatre-Routes-du-Lot in the Quercy.

To recuperate, Mathieu decides to see the grandparents he's not seen in ten years, and receives a very warm welcome. Paul is in his late seventies but is still very mobile, still making horse shoes even though he sold his last one in the 1960s, and still fishing (technically illegally). Louise was a midwife, although now that everyone goes to hospital she's found a new interest in making different concoctions from herbs: in fact, the whole book is shot through with the names of herbs, fish, birds, cooking and different smells. Mathieu's lung still hurts, he has a few funny turns, but he's re-living his youth.

All three people have deep scars: Louise, before the birth of Mathieu, lost her child and sees his new incarnation in Mathieu; and Paul bitterly regrets returning to Germany towards the end of the war and killing teenage soldiers who had no knowledge of Nazism: when his hammer fiercely strikes the metal on the anvil, he's really striking himself.

Both Louise and Paul have a different kind of wisdom: Louise is more accepting, hopeful, she can 'tame the unknown', whereas Paul is full of refusal, anger and rebellion. But they're both rebelling against the steamroller of the economic imperative, they're self-sufficient, even re-start baking their own bread. Paul is building walls for the people who'll return, and though this is not the Côte d'Azur, he really believes they will return. Forced to go back to Paris for medical tests, Mathieu feels much bettter physically, and much better mentally now he's got back in tune with his past.

I found this book much better than Au cœur des foréts, the only other book of Signol's I've read, as I understand much better now what he's doing.

Hélène Lenoir: Son nom d'avant (2005)

Son nom d'avant is in three parts, the second part being by far the longest. The first part is an obsessive view of a street, concentrating on a girl of about twenty who boards a bus where a man is standing and who stares at her.

In Part II the same girl appears, now a 39-year-old woman with children, and who we learn after some time is Britt Casella, married to a man very comfortably off with his own business. But, as with (all?) main characters in Hélène Lenoir's books, she's mentally asphixiated, as is quite clear from her interior monologue. Justus is employing the prominent photographer Johann Samek to photograph his building. Samek, it soon becomes evident, is the man who was standing on the bus about twenty years ago, the man who stared at the young Britt. And he's preoccupied by the photo of the older Britt in Justus's office.

Part III begins with Britt receiving two photos addressed to her from Samek, photos relating to her twenty years before, just before she took the bus. But she doesn't understand, thinks he's made a mistake. Of course, she hasn't, and she phones Samek, and what he mainly wants to know is her 'name before', which brings us to the title. She was Britt Ardell, but what the present Britt Casella is she doesn't know, and she must flee from her marriage. The conclusion is far from conclusive.

Hélène Lenoir: Entracte (2005)

In this collection of five short stories by Hélène Lenoir – which make far from easy reading – there's a short but oddly immensely revealing sentence towards the end of the final story: 'La vie, la vraie, grouille autour de ce qui est tu' ('Real life swarms around the unspoken.') I think my English translation of the sentence is reasonable, although there are several problems here, the first being that although 'unspoken' translates 'tu' (the past participle of the verb taire, meaning to be silent, tu here means more than that: it refers to the intense complications of that swarming real life, not just to the fact that nothing is said. Taire is not just about being silent, it is about witholding information that could disturb, be harmful, hugely disruptive. 'Unspoken' is also a participial adjective, and only very rarely used as a noun: 'the unspoken' (apart from as the name of a game) is rarely used in English, although the French noun 'non-dit' is common. A 'non-dit' usually belongs to that category of words which dangle, swarm around the unspoken, never really said. I'm convinced that there is no proper English translation of 'non-dit', not even as 'the unspoken', and yet this is very often what Hélène Lenoir's work is about.

In the final short story here, 'L'Infidèle (lit. 'The Unfaithful Man') we don't even know that the nameless man is in fact unfaithful to the woman, but she is obsessed with it, seems a little crazy over it,  but then many of Lenoir's characters are a little crazy. The man is actually going to Switzerland on a business trip, but moving away from the bed she mumbles 'Retourne voir tes putes' ('Go back to your tarts!'). And she's said it, she's given voice to a non-dit!  This is an utterance of seismic proportions, she waits for ages for the effect, an absurd cold blade because to her knowledge he's never used a prostitute, and anyway he makes no reaction. Maybe the sentence was never heard so remains in effect 'non-dit', and the woman's internal monologue debates that this is a good thing, he's not heard the earth-shattering sentence, but on the other hand maybe if he had heard then a cataclysmic row would have been, er, therapeutic, finalising?

There are a number of non-dits in this and the other stories, then: the title story 'L'Entracte', 'Les Étrangères', 'Les Escarpins Rouges', and 'Le Verger' being the others. But also present in most if not all of the stories are preoccupations of the main characters with questions of sex, identity, ideas of flight, but most of all the stifling power of other people, particularly the family (remember Le Magot de Momm). The word L'Entracte (meaning intermission or interval: the man and woman of the eponymous story meet during a classical concert) can be used for all the stories because they happen at a crisis point in a person's life, when the character has to make an important (perhaps vital) life decision. I can fully understand why people love Hélène Lenoir's books, but feel a bit sorry for those who like a quick read, those who are impatient with the (often multiple) internal monologues of her characters.

Claudie Gallay: L'Office des vivants (2001)

L'Office des vivants is Claudie Gallay's first novel, and like the other two novels of hers I've read – Les Déferlantes and Les Années cerises – is set in a very isolated place with its main characters having communication problems. L'Office des vivants reads like an epic novel, although only has 235 pages of many very short sections: but a great deal happens in them. Also, partly perhaps because of those many sections, it has an episodic feel to it, almost as if many of those sections (although written in chronological order) are short stories about the same topic.

It is certainly an epic depiction of living in a rural slum, with all its workshyness, filth, poverty, vile smells, lack of modern gadgets*, theft, casual rape, violence in general, frequent lack of food, lack of communication, lack of articulacy, lack of interest, etc. This is a kind of social horror story which wouldn't appeal to anyone who prefers feelgood fare with happy endings.

In a town up a mountain there is a farm mis-run by the mother and father of young Marc and Simone, with the grandparents (grandfather and M'mé Coche (his second wife)) living nearby –in similar squalor. The father seems not to like work much, is tyrannical and violent, and has a voracious sexual appetite, which is apparent from his regularly raping the young milkmaid Mado while she's milking a cow. The reader can't fail to agree with her when she calls the family completely mad and announces that she's leaving. Only, when she leaves she also takes what little savings the family has, and nine months later leaves her and the father's baby (whom she's called Monue) at the entrance to the farm.

Monue becomes part of the family and proves to be a revelation to Marc – a great change from his smelly one-eyed sister Simone – who's nicknamed 'Pue-la-Pisse' at school. And the lovely Monue and dreamy Marc become great friends.

The family leave the heights for the lower village Le Bas, although for reasons of space they also have to leave Monue in the care of the grandparents. But things get worse: although the father has a (very low-paid) job, he can't do it without taking a bottle of wine with him, and his drink-fuelled violence at home not only leads to him hitting members of the family but to a savage attack on the cow. Then the grandfather dies and – much to Monue and Marc's delight – the half-siblings are reunited, with Marc sleeping in the van. Later, Monue joins him in the van and the two enjoy a chaste sleeping relationship until the break comes when the unthought-of happens and Monue starts menstruating. And Marc starts going mad because his great childhood friend is not longer a little girl. Then, the blood really hits the fan, but I'll leave this fascinating (and often disturbing) novel there.

*At first the novel seemed timeless, although the existence of the petrol-driven van and mention of washing-machines set it in a more modern context.

Cimetière du Montparnasse revisited #13: Yann Andréa

Oddly, in spite of going there each year, I'd not before taken a photo of the inscription on the grave of Marguerite Duras/Yann Andréa.

Cimetière du Montparnasse revisited #12: Nardo Zalko

Nardo Zalko (1941–2011) was born in the San Cristobel area of Buenos Aires (an area noted for the tango dance) of Lithuanian parents. After living in a kibbutz and being a parachutist in the Israelian army, he moved to Paris and gained French nationality. He is noted for his work on the tango, particularly with the tango's relationship to Paris and Buenos Aires. He wrote two books on the tango: Un Siècle de tango : Paris-buenos Aires (1998), and Le Tango, Passion du corps et de l'ésprit (2001).

Cimetière du Montparnasse revisited #11: Jules Hetzel

The publisher, writer and translator into English, Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814–86), wrote as P.J. Stahl, which explains the second name on his tomb. He wrote an enormous number of books.

Jean de La Fontaine in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Pas-de-Calais (62)

Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95).

2018 brought the twelfth 'edition' of the jardin éphémère, dedicated this year to the Fables of La Fontaine. Eight illustrations of his Fables are on display  in the old town in Boulogne-Sur-Mer, just in front of the mairie. 2018 marks the 350th anniversary of the first edition of the Fables (1668). The illustrations are also inspired by the engravings of Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686–1755). The Fables are in verse, often modelled on Aesop's Fables, and are often criticisms of the court of Louis XIV, with animals usually serving the allegorical function.

'Le corbeau et le renard'. Here, the fox sees the large chunk of cheese in the crow's bill, and tells the animal how fine he looks. Unable to resist squawking about the compliments, and crow of course drops the cheese and the fox snatches it. The moral is a lesson to the crow as well as the reader: don't listen to flatterers or you'll regret it.

'La Grenouille qui veut se faire aussi grosse que le bœuf'. So the frog is envious of the ox and tries to puff itself up to be as big, but in the process explodes. The moral: don't try to do things that aren't in your nature, be content with your limitations.

'Le rat et le lion'. A rat escapes from the ground and the lion spares him. Then the lion is caught in a trap and struggles madly and roars in its attempts to escape. The rat slowly gnaws into the rope to free the lion. The moral: well, there are two here: be as obliging as you can to everyone; and don't go at everything like a bull at a gate, just be patient.

'Le pot de terre et le pot de fer'. The iron pot asks the earthenware pot to go out walking with him, but the earthenware pot is frightened because he might smash. The iron pot eventually persuades him that he'll protect him, so they go out and the earthware pot gets smashed to bits. The moral: keep to the company of your equals or you'll suffer the same fate as the weaker pot.

'Le rat de ville et le rat des champs'. The town rat invites the country rat to a meal in town, where ortolans (a kind of bunting once considered a delicacy in France) are on the menu with all the trimmings of a royal feast. But they're interrupted and have to hide for a while. They return when the coast's clear, but the country rat has had enough and invites the town rat to his place the next day where (the moral) things are very quiet, no interruptions, and no fears as in as in an urban environment, and you can be yourself without all the fancy stuff.

'Le renard et les raisins'. This looks a little like 'Le corbeau et le renard', and it is and it isn't. The fox is starving and sees the bunches of grapes on the tree, but there's no way he can get at them. In the end he decides that they're not ripe enough, too green, not fit for the likes of him. The moral: there's a bit of pre-Freudian rationalisation here, as you shouldn't complain about what it's not possible for you to have. (This is the shortest of La Fontaine's 240 Fables.)

'Le renard et la cigogne'. The fox invites the stork to dinner, but only serves it on a plate, which the stork can't manage to eat a crumb of, so the fox eats it all up. Then the strork invites the fox to dinner, which smells delicious. However, the stork serves it in a long-necked jug, meaning the fox has to go home hungry. The moral: expect to receive as much as you give – in other words, if you deceive people they'll in turn deceive you.

'Le chêne et le sureau'. The oak tree, being very important, is tremendously haughty, and pities the humble reed. Whereas the reed gets tossed about all over the place with the slightest wind, the oak tree stands firm. The oak tree monopolises the conversatsion, the reed says little but is content with its flexibility. There comes a storm and the oak tree is uprooted, dead. But the reed lives on. The moral: death is the great leveller, and a little humility doesn't go amiss.

Outsider Artists, etc

I've had another minor linking review, and while so doing I've now gathered together the several posts on outsider artists, or similar, which I've made in the past, and created links to them. I've no doubt forgotten a few, but these are the ones that spring instantly to mind:

Kevin Duffy, Ashton-in-Makerfield
The Outsider Art of Léopold Truc, Cabrières d'Avignon
Le Musée Extraordinaire de Georges Mazoyer, Ansouis
Le Facteur Cheval's Palais Idéal, Hauterives 
The Little Chapel, Guernsey
Museum of Appalachia, Norris, Clinton, Tennessee
Ed Leedskalnin in Homestead, Florida
La Fabuloserie, Dicy, Yonne (89)
Street Art City, Lurcy-Lévis, Allier (03)
The Outsider Art of Jean Linard, Neuvy-deux-Clochers

Patrick Modiano: Chien de printemps | Afterimage (1993)

There surely can't be many marks of similarity between San-Antonio's and Modiano's work, although both write detective stories. But whereas San-Antonio is obsessed with playing with language, Modiano plays with identity and memory.

Modiano is concerned with scraps of memory that can't be moulded into a whole, and sometimes the reader is reminded of Sartre's La Nausée, with the protagonist striving to hold the internal and the external together. One example of this is when the narrator visits the village of Fossombrone (Seine-et-Marne) in vague hopes of visiting the Meyendorffs, former friends of the photographer Francis Jansen whose life he's trying to retrace thirty years on. Meyendorff was once a doctor, and his American wife a spiritualist, trying to bring back the dead (which the narrator is probably doing). Adrift in a place he doesn't know, and desperately aware that his search here is no doubt fruitless, he reads the headlines of a newspaper he's bought in an attempt to put himself back in touch with some kind of reality.

Another example of existential crisis is on the last day the narrator ever saw Jansen in 1964, when the photographer briefly leaves him outside the Café de la Paix near l'Opéra. The narrator checks if the weighing machine is still in the nearby hotel entrance, where he and his father regularly went to weigh themselves. It is, so he takes a coin and repeats the same action. Then he feels strange and has to sit down at a table on the crowded café terrace, the only thing holding him to the external world being the pink ticket giving his weight. Jansen joins him, concerned about his young friend's problem, which he dismissively says he too has, and calls them 'black holes'.

Jansen has to leave Paris with the huge collection of photos the narrator's been cataloguing, but about which the photographer seems little concerned. Yes, Jansen too has an existential problem, and people and things are losing there distinctness for him.

Such is the nature of this slight book, a quest for a person who's gone without a trace: perhaps there would be no trace today, in a world where it has been said (obviously incorrectly) that if it's not on the internet then it doesn't exist. Télérama, in a sentence on the back cover, says that with this book Modiano has re-found the strength and profundity of his best works. That's quite possible, as I thought that Chien de printemps is quite a fascinating book.

My other posts on Patrick Modiano:
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Patrick Modiano: L'Horizon
Patrick Modiano: La Petite Bijou
Patrick Modiano: Rue des boutiques obscures | Missing Person

Patrick Modiano: Les Boulevards de ceinture | Ring Roads

San-Antonio: Certaines l'aiment chauve (1975)

My second San-Antonio, and certainly not my last. Yes, of course San-Antonio (Frédéric Dard) churned out several books a year, of course they all have impossible plots, unbelievable sexual feats, and make the eponymous hero look superhuman.

This is the tale of an impotent, but theoretically conventionally married, actor who's insured his life for one particular day – the coming 2 June – for a huge sum and his unwitting insurance agent employs the private dick San-Antonio to look out for problems and look after the safety of Christian Bordeaux.

Obviously things go wrong, Bordeaux is almost attacked by a bomb under San-Antonio's own nose, a couple of potential murderers arrive on the scene, Bordeaux kills them, but is himself poisoned by someone changing his normal medication  for cyanide.

Or is it anything like as simple as that? It'll take a great deal of investigation on San-Antonio's part, including a visit to Bordeaux's wife's tropical island haven – in drag – and a trip to the US before things are sorted out, but then what do you expect?

This was written some twenty years after the first San-Antonio novel I read – Messieurs le hommes – and of course it is packed with imaginative slang expressions (many of Frédéric Dard's own invention), plus some (often self-mocking) footnotes and asides, the sex is a little more explicit, but what ever is the M.... instead of Merde doing there in 1975? Was he frightened of putting off his older readers? Most odd.

Link to my other San-Antonio post:
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San-Antonio: Messieurs les hommes

Marcel Pagnol: Le Schpountz (1938)

Yet another Marcel Pagnol book (in fact a play) that was a film as well. You won't find schpountz in any dictionary as far as I'm aware, but it means 'idiot' here: it's used as idiolect, film language to describe a wannabee film star who has no chance. And of course Fernandel (Irénée Fabre here) plays the spountz in the film of the same year.

Irénée is the nephew of a hard-working but relatively poor grocer Baptiste and his wife, who have pledged to bring up Baptiste's dead brother's sons Irénée and Casimir, in the hope that they'll one day take over the business. Casimir welcomes it, but Irénée is useless, full of ideas that he has a gift for the cinema, and confident that one day he'll be a rich and famous actor. 

Irénée tags onto a film crew passing through the Marseilles area, who quietly make fun of him by giving him a 'film contract' which isn't worth the paper it's printed on, as his uncle knows. In spite of Françoise, a member of the film crew, trying to persuade him that the whole thing is a joke at Irénée's expense, Irénée spends his savings on a train to Paris only to be thrown out of the studios as one of the many wannabee clowns.

However, the schpountz isn't such a schpountz as he initially seems, and due to a number of circumstances turns the tables on those who mock or doubt him.

GiedRé: 21st century dadaist?

Doesn't she look a lovely cute singer? So wholesome she seems on the cover of Ma PReMièRe CoMPiL' (she likes to play randomly with upper and lower cases). In photos, we can see her adorned in flowers, surrounded by cuddly toys, as if she's about to burst into syrupy song. Far from it: note the 'PARENTAL ADVISORY EXPLICIT CONTENT' towards the top right, and the booklet containing the words of her songs show her hands describing what she told an interviewer is a symbol for 'trou du cul'. And what of that brown pile in front of her? There's more here than initially meets the eye. On On n'est pas couché (ONPC)', a late Saturday night discussion program, she appeared much like this, only along with flowers attached to her hair, there was also a tampon. Aymeric Caron described her songs as straight out of secondary school: GiedRé immediately responded that he is a victim of social codes. Natacha Polony, though, saw something of a contemporary convention-busting dadaist in her and mentioned her 'fausse naïveté'. The show host Laurent Ruquier asked her if she saw herself singing scatological songs for years, and she drew a number of laughs when she asked if he meant when she reaches maturity.

Oh, yes, those songs. There are far more here than when she appeared on ONPC, and there are more instruments now than a simple acoustic guitar, but the subjects haven't changed. There's 'On fait tous caca' (lit. 'We All Poo'), 'Ode à la contraception' (which doesn't need translating), 'Pisser debout' (in which she wishes she were a man, although she sings that her mother says that she has both sexes in her, as she swears like a guy). And she seems to have really gone out of her way to discover deviant sexual habits: although 'Les croûtons' doesn't mention the word croûtenard – how many French people would understand the meaning? – it's nevertheless about one, who has a wife, but chokes on the urine-soaked bread in his rush to get home.*

GiedRé has sold 20,000 records: OK, her albums can be found in the 'independent' music section, but it's still quite a number of sales for records that surely only appeal to the French-speaking market. Even if her songs were translated, I don't think England would welcome her: they'd see her as too extreme. But maybe Ruquier is right: how long before her audience tires, and how long before she runs out of subjects to sing about? (All the same, she is very unusual, very clever, and not without brilliance.)

* The 'glory days' of the smelly, green, male-only vespasiennnes, named after the Roman emperor Vespasien – who introduced a urine tax on the then highly valuable commodity for its dyeing and bleaching properties – have long gone, replaced in favour of the self-cleaning sanisettes.

Charles Aznavour: One of the greats of French song

As the world now knows, Charles Aznavour (1924–2018) died at the age of ninety-four on Monday morning. A Guardian headline calls him France's Frank Sinatra, which is a huge insult to Aznavour, who has nothing to do with easy listening, and many of whose songs contain a refreshing edginess.

The three-CD compilation of mine (great to listen to in the car) was bought last year at Montesson's Carrefour for a whole five euros: now, though,  I note that budget CDs are being replaced there by, er, budget vinyl albums. It's a weird world, but then what of 'Ostalgia', the huge nostalgia for East German culture?

I digress. Many papers have tried to find his best songs, but I prefer the five chosen by 20 minutes. 'Je m’voyais déjà' (1960), sung in the first person, is something of a self-parody: it's about a failed singer, and Aznavour certainly had a difficult beginning to his career. 'Emmenez-moi' (1967) tells of the joys of living at the other side of the world, a world where even the poor can take solace from the sun. 'La Mamma' (1964) was written by Robert Gall – France Gall's father – as a tribute to his own mother. Like a number of Aznavour's songs, 'La Bohème' speaks of passing time, particularly here of a long-gone period. And Aznavour had a great sympathy for the marginalised, in his own song 'Comme ils disent' (1972) for gay people, and (the gay) Charles Trenet went to congratulate Aznavour in his dressing room, jealous that he hadn't written it himself.

'Comme ils disent', though, wasn't banned from being played as the post-coital 'Après l'amour' was. My particular favourite is 'Tu t'laisses aller', a man singing about his once lovely wife in curlers, her stockings round her shoes, letting herself go and criticising him in front of his friends, etc: it has a rather more upbeat ending, but not before a great deal of drink-fuelled venom is employed. Easy listening, Charles Aznavour? No way.

Emmanuel Bove: Mes amis (1924)

This is the cult writer Emmanuel Bove's first novel, encouraged by Colette. Mes amis is something of an ironic title, as the main character, the first person narrator Victor Bâton, who lives on a small pension following World War I, has no friends. He's not smelly or mad or anything, although he lives in a crappy appartment block whose architect didn't bother to engrave his name, where there's no bathroom, just a communal sink with a curtain where people wash themselves.

Victor is a very aware person, no doubt too aware, too sensitive, and occasional sex sessions with the barmaid Lucie Dunois, from the local café, don't quite fulfill him. But then his short attempt to find a friend in Henri Billard doesn't please him either: it seems to be more Billard's live-in girlfriend who's the problem rather than Billard himself. The fifty francs that Victor's lent the obviously richer Henri, even though Victor only gets three hundred every three months? Forget it, it's not worth thinking about.

We could continue with Neveu, the poverty-stricken sailor who wants to kill himself along with Henri, but Henri won't find friendship in a suicide pact, in fact he won't find a friend. It's a cruel life.

My other posts on Emmanuel Bove:
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Montparnasse Cemetery / Cimetière du Montparnasse
Emmanuel Bove: Le Piège (1945)
Emmanuel Bove: Cœurs et visages

Christophe Tison: Il m'aimait (2004)

This should be a deeply shocking book, and indeed it is, as it's about homosexual abuse, pedophilia, although it's not condemnatory, not revelatory. That, perhaps, is one of the most disturbing things about this part autobiography. Or not: the past is a different country.

Separated, a mother is happy to leave a man with her child – the cute, (effeminate-looking?) kid on the cover, who could be, Tison muses, eleven, twelve, maybe older? Leaves him to be sexually abused frequently. Unsurprisingly, Tison grows up sexually mature beyond his years, and goes on to enjoy heterosexual relations.

But this isn't, say, Flavie Flament and David Hamilton: no, Christophe Tison isn't revealing the name of his sexual abuser: after all, when kids of his age were grooving on, for example, the likes of Claude François, he had been introduced to the worlds of Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan, David Bowie.

A disturbing book indeed, particularly as it neither asks nor answers any questions.

Christan Gailly: Dernier Amour (2004)

Christian Gailly's Dernier Amour (2004) isn't really even about what it announces in its title – a last love. Rather, it's a combination of narratives – the narrator's, words spoken by the characters, thoughts of Paul the protagonist, all melded into one short novel.

What's actually happening comes in fits and starts, and the narrative itself is like that: generally short sentences, frequently of only one or two words, which often interrupt themselves, tangle around each other, as if in suspension, waiting for an answer, or waiting for nothing.

And Paul is waiting for nothing, or rather nothingness, as his life seems extended by days, his death a long wait. Meanwhile he lives on, going to Zurich to see the first performance of his music which is only greetd by hoots of derision. And he goes back to Paris, from there to the north coast where he'll die, where his wife has, following his wishes, left him to die.

But yet there's a revival of sorts, in which Paul picks up his wife's bathrobe on the beach, although it isn't her bathrobe, it's an American's, who comes to pick it up. And who returns to the skeletal Paul and takes him for a ride in her car. A Mercedes, of course.

My other posts on Christian Gailly:
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Christian Gailly: Un soir au club
Christian Gailly: Lily et Braine

Christian Gailly: La Roue et autres nouvelles
Christian Gailly: Nuage rouge

Marie NDiaye: Hilda (1999)

Some people are vulnerable in Marie NDiaye's universe, and others take advantage of this vulnerability: the strong, the powerful, the arrogant, the rich, lording it over the weak, the dispossessed, the less rich. It's dog eat dog, depending on what kind of a dog you are. And it's not merely (or even?) a question of intelligence, just of planning the right way to get what you want, finding the right words to say, at the right time. Humans are birds of prey, awaiting their time to pounce, and then pile on the pressure until there's no more fight in the victim. Here, I found in some respects an odd kind of reversal of the much later Slimani's Une Chanson Douce, and a woman totally dominating a man, emasculinating him, depriving him of his wife, reducing his life to almost nothing. Such is how some rule the lives of others. As Franck grows weaker, Mme Lemarchand profits from this fact. There are also subdued lesbian undertones.

Madame Lemarchand wants to set Hilda, the wife of manual worker Franck Meyer, on as a house help, and is willing to pay over the odds for the service. This means that Franck will have to find guardians for their own children, which is done. Hilda herself has no word in the play: this is in effect essentially a dialogue between Mme Lemarchand and Franck, a kind of card game in which Mme Lemarchand always has the upper hand, her trump cards being her financial aces, which always win over Franck's duff cards. He is powerless as Mme Lemarchand washes the putative dirt from Hilda, gives her more superior clothes, makes Hilda work more and more hours until Franck can see her no more, until Mme Lemarchand takes over her life and leaves the work injured Franck to his own devices, to his sister-in-law Corinne, who is the third (very brief) voice in this quietly devastating play.

My other posts on Marie NDiaye:
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Marie NDiaye: La Sorcière
Marie NDiaye: Rosie Carpe
Marie NDiaye: Autoportrait en vert
Marie NDiaye: Ladivine
Marie NDiaye: Trois femmes puissantes
Marie NDiaye: La Femme changée en bûche
Marie NDiaye: Papa doit manger
Marie NDiaye: En famille
Marie NDiaye: Un temps de saison
Marie NDiaye: Mon cœur à l'étroit
Marie NDiaye: Les Grandes Personnes
Marie NDiaye: Quant au riche avenir
Marie NDiaye: Tous mes amis

Joël Dicker: Le Livre des Baltimore (2015)

I just looked at the popular French website babelio.com for comments on Joël Dicker's Le Livre des Baltimore (2015), read a few of the amateur reviews (514) to this follow-up to his hugely successful La Verite sur l'affaire Harry Québert (2012, with 1571 reviews) and breathed a silent sigh. I enjoyed Harry Québert to some extent, although the several hundred pages were a bit daunting, but the 600-page Le Livre des Baltimore went back to the boîte à lire only half-read: enough is enough, or too much. Harry Québert made it to the first selection of the Goncourt novel, garnered the Prix Goncourt des lycéens as well as the Grand Prix de l'académie française 2012, and yet I ask myself why. Both of these books, and it appears the latest Dicker, La Disparition de Stéphanie Mayer, are not only set in the US, not only about a mystery with many twists and turns, not only bear the markings of a young adult novel, but are also so obviously made to be filmed, causing Frédéric Beigbeder to remark that he'd written the same book three times: make as much money as possible seems to be the ruling instinct with the Swiss Dicker. And yet to me 'real' novels are written from the intellect, not with the bank account in mind. OK, all writers have to survive and make some compromises, but we're not talking about that here. I got bored with Le Livre des Baltimore halfway through, read Marie NDiaye's very short play Hilda (1999) in a very brief time, ditched Dicker permanently, and was struck by the effect Hilda was having on me: my conclusion is that Marie NDiaye is a brilliant writer, Joël Dicker merely brilliant at writing best sellers. The difference between the two is enormous. (Oh, by the way, Babelio doesn't give Hilda a single review, although Les Éditions du minuit contains several professional reviews of it. There must be a moral in there somewhere.)

My other post on Joël Dicker:
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Joël Dicker: La Vérité sur l'Affaire Harry Kleber

Le Cimetière parisien d'Ivry, Val-de-Marne (94): #7: Roger Stéphane

Roger Stéphane (né Roger Worms) (1919–94) was a writer and journalist, a member of the Resistance, and a co-founder of L'Observateur. He was an admirer of the work of Stendhal, Proust and T. E. Lawrence and a friend of Georges Simenon. He was one of the first campaigners for gay rights. He wrote several biographies on, for instance, Simenon, Lawrence and Cocteau, and, ill and in poverty, killed himself.

Le Cimetière parisien d'Ivry, Val-de-Marne (94): #6: Missak Manouchiank

Missak Manouchian (1906–44) was an Armenian poet and journalist who moved to France in 1925. As a member of the French Resistance, he was shot in 1944.

Le Cimetière parisien d'Ivry, Val-de-Marne (94): #5:Jules Boucher

Jules Boucher (1903 – 1955) was a writer, occultist, alchemist and free-mason. His works include La Symbolique maçonnique (1948) and Manuel de magie pratique (1941).

Le Cimetière parisien d'Ivry, Val-de-Marne (94): #4: Abdel Hafed Benotman

'Abdel Hafed BENOTMAN

1960 – [2015]

'Ça valait pas la peine

mais ça valait le coup !

Enfin libérable...'

Abdel Hafed Benotman was of Algerian descent and wrote detective novels, short stories, poems, songs, plays and film scenarios. He was guilty of many thefts and bank robberies and spent several occasions behind bars. He was born in France and spent his childhood in the Latin Quarter. Later, he set up theatre workshops for various groups of people: psychotic children, elderly people, delinquants, and the handicapped. Back in prison in 1990, his collection of short stories, Les Forcenés, was published in 1993. 

Le Cimetière parisien d'Ivry, Val-de-Marne (94): #3: Arthur Adamov

First recognized along with the likes of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco as a defining figure at the forefront of the theatre of the absurd, French playwright Adam Adamov had a fairly prolific career, writing twenty plays between 1947 and his death in 1970. Now though he has fallen into obscurity. John J. McMann provides a study of Adamov's work which traces the playwright's artistic development and explores his role in defining the avant-garde and political theaters of France.

Adam Adamov doesn't get much of a grave here, which is absurd, but then like Alfred Jarry's grave is pretty much to be expected. Adamov wrote about twenty plays, but is now almost forgotten: in 1962 Martin Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd lists ten authors in huge letters on the cover of the Pelican version, and Adamov is one of them. But Esslin accepting the OBE from her royal etc, now that really is absurd...

Le Cimetière parisien d'Ivry, Val-de-Marne (94): #2: Artur London

'Artur LONDON

GERARD

1915 . 1986 

-------

Lise RICOL

LONDON

1916 . 2012

-------'

The memorial on the grave to the brave work of Lise for the workers and the oppressed, with a translation in Catalan.

As a couple, man and wife published L'Aveu (lit. 'The Confession') in 1968, which was an autobiographical account of London's experience of the Prague trials. Costa-Gavras turned the book into a film starring Yves Montand and Simone Signoret.