Leos Carax's Merde (1980)

 

The 38-minute Merde is one of a trilogy of films which came out in 2008, creating a feature length one under the name Tokyo!, as all three are set in that city. Perhaps the main theme linking them is that they are all outsiders. The other contributors are Michel Gondry and Bong Joon-ho.

A wild-eyed man (possibly half-blind) emerges from a sewer via a man-hole cover in central Toyko, walks oddly, snatches a cigarette, a wallet (from which he takes a note, eats it and discards the rest, licks a young girl's arm, then disappears back down his cover and into the sewer, where he sleeps. Television is full of the story.

The following day he re-emerges from his cover, releases several salvos of an explosive device and kills a number of people at random. When the police find him naked in his sewer that night, they arrrest him and he risks capital punishment by hanging. Me (Maître) Voland (Jean-François Balmer) defends him, and he has a similar beard, a similar eye complaint, and also speaks the language of the man. And the man (Carax's acteur fétiche Denis Lavant) gives his name as Merde, so he becomes M. Merde. Merde hates the Japanese, hates everything in fact, but this nihilist serial killer oddly falls into two categories with the Japanese: those who want him to be executed, and those who are in his favour.

Merde is hanged, pronounced dead, although he appears to come back to life, escapes from his noose, and disappears.

Leos Carax's Strangulation blues (1980)

Leos Carax is the pseudonym of Alex Dupont, and an anagram of 'Alex' and 'Oscar'. Strangulation Blues (Carax tends to go in for English titles) is his first short and it won first prize for a short at the Hyères festival in 1981 and paved the way for his first feature, Boy Meets Girl, in 1984. Carax had originally begun filming a film to be called La Fille Rêvée, which failed to see the light of day because a projector exploded and led to a fire in the Chinese restaurant where a scene was being filmed.

The film is in black and white and in some respects resembles the days before the talkies, in others the Nouvelle Vague cinema. Paul (Erik Frey), a hopeful film writer, returns to Colette (Anne Petit-Lagrange), who looks a little like Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle when she's asleep. She has in way inspired Paul in his writing and the tension between the two is palpable.

Paul thinks he's strangled Colette while she's sleeping, or maybe he dreamed it, but he escapes in the car. Meanwhile Colette wakes up. Several critics have seen in this short a number of aspects of Carax's future cinema.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's La Cité des enfants perdus | The City of Lost Children (2005)

 

The prominent American film critic Roger Ebert was very enthusiastic about the design and visuals of La Cité des enfants perdus, although the plot escaped him. This doesn't surprise me: I'd call the film something of a whiz-bang steampunk nightmare.

This film, coming four years after Delicatessen (1991), is the second and final co-directed film with Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. Alien, la résurrection (1997) is the only Jeunet film I've not seen, although (certainly with the exception of Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009)) he has more recently tended to move away from the steampunk atmospheres.

Krank (Daniel Emilfork) lives on a disused offshore oilrig with clones of Dominique Pinon (one of Jeunet's acteurs fétiches), the very weird Martha (Mireille Mossé), 'Uncle Irvin' (a brain in a fish tank with the voice of Jean-Louis Trintignant) can't dream and is ageing. He seeks to kidnap children in order to steal their dreams. I could go on but it gets crazier and crazier.

Miette (the nine-year-old Monique Vittet) is for me the only saving grace of the film, but that's not saying a great deal about this disaster. After the brilliant Delicatessen, this is a very weird follow-up by a director who later came up with much better: an unfortunate blip.

NB. It could be that my lack of appreciation for this film was the impossibility for me to it listen to it in the original language, although I have my doubts.

Dominik Moll's Lemming (2005)

Dominik Moll's Lemming is a psychological thriller, although he deliberately makes few positive statements in it, well, mainly suggestions, which of course serve to emphasise the unease and raise questions. There are four principal actors, apart from the lemming(s): Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas), his wife Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg), Alain's boss Richard Pollock (André Dussollier), and his wife Alice (Charlotte Rampling). Alain is a talented engineer specialising in remote controlled webcams and seems to be very happy in his personal and his professional life.

Until, that is, a lemming blocks his sink. Or rather, the atmosphere due to the appearance of a Lemming in the plumbing potentially gives cause for concern: lemmings mythically kill themselves, but anyway they inhabit Scandinavian countries, and aren't known in Toulouse. Cause for concern there.

And then Robert and Alice come to dinner with Alain and Bénédicte, Alice is more than frosty, claims that the reason for their being late is because Robert was seeing his tart, throws a glass of wine in Robert's face, and the dinner is over almost before it's begun.

When Robert is away Alice tries to make Alain have sex with her, but although he's tempted by this older woman he doesn't: he wants to be faithful to his wife and not lose his job. But then Alice forces herself upon Bénédicte, says she wants to sleep in their home one afternoon, and then shoots herself dead in the evening. Robert has already arranged to go to Biarritz for the weekend with Robert, and Robert isn't too phased by Alice's suicide, although on learning of her pass at Alain he's angry because Alain didn't sleep with her.

Meanwhile Bénédicte is behaving weirdly, seems to have it in for Alain, and then starts a steamy affair with Robert: for one who's formerly been so cool about things, she's now adopting the persona of Alice, is even becoming Alice, which Robert is only too keen to accept as it makes him feel younger. Until, that is, she (or is it Alice's ghost haunting her?) gives Alain the key to his boss's flat and everything blows. Then back to normal, but without Robert. So tense you can't not love it.

More memories of summer, crickets in Bissy-sur-Fley, Saône-et-Loire (71)

 

It was 18 July 2020, in Bissy-sur-Fley, Saône-et-Loire (71), and the ground was thick with crickets, almost the only sound coming from these amazing creatures, thousands of them. Above, one landed on the bonnet of the car, presenting a wonderful view of these beings. I just wonder when we'll be allowed to see such sights again.

François Ozon's Potiche (2010)

Potiche is often called a camp, over-acted film set in the seventies and has a whiff of Douglas Sirk's melodramas, etc, and I have to accept these criticisms as they are true. But, as most reviews of the film (professional or amateur) say – that is one of its delights, and perhaps its major strength.

We have something of a starry cast with an ageing and apparently devoted Suzanne Pujol (Catherine Deneuve) as wife of Robert Pujol (Fabrice Luchini), who is her husband and the head of the Pujol-Michonneau umbrella factory, which of course reminds us of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Jacques Demy's celebrated camp film starring Deneuve. Suzanne's dead father is the Michonneau in the title of the firm, and the ageing Pujol is messing around with who he can, but particularly his secretary Nadège (Karin Viard).

But then there comes a strike, and the greedy Maurice's heart can't take it. He can survive, but Suzanne is forced to take over, but then she has a way of dealing with people that is far superior to Maurice's. This is women taking the upper role in the 1970s, and she goes on to achieve great things, with Ozon developing from Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy's play of the same name, although in English I'd prefer 'Figurehead' to 'Trophy Wife'.

Maurice Babin (Gerard Depardieu) – the communist mayor who's long ago had a one-off fling with Suzanne – doesn't make it to a second helping, although Suzanne makes mincemeat of both him and her husband to become a député MP: this woman is definitely on top.

Professor Harald Stümpke: Anatomie et biologie des Rhinogrades (1962; repr. with additions 2012)

This is in fact a translation by Robert Weill  from the original book published in German in 1961 and it's probably a good idea to translate the back cover of this first:

'In 1962 the scientific world learned with astonishment the existence of a new order of completely odd mammals, named rhinogrades. This extraordinary discovery was described and analysed in detail in a small book of about one hundred pages.

On reading this book, anyone with a little knowledge of zoology or biology couldn't fail to be gripped by a feeling of stupefaction mixed with wonder.

Since then research has contined and Professor Guillaume Lecointre, of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, details the present state of knowledge. He reveals the discovery of three new species, which could well have played a role in La Pérouse's mysterious shipwreck.

Be careful: the rhinogrades haven't yet finished making news!'

But I'll start at the beginning, which is in a poem by the German writer Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914), who first wrote about a creature called the Nasobēm, which could walk on its nose: these in fact were rhinogrades. But as far as anyone knew, Morgenstern had never been near the South Pacific. Perhaps he's heard of the story from someone else? Anyway, it was enough to spark Dr Gerolf Steiner's interest, but we'll leave that one for a second.

In 1941 the Swedish Einar Petersson-Skämtkvist escaped from captivity by the Japanese and landed on Assaa-Lor, one of the Hi-Iay Islands in the South Pacific. The group of islands at the time only had a population of 700, although within several months Petersson had inadvertently wiped them out as they succumbed to the cold he had. But at least he'd made the discovery of rhinogrades to tell the world about. 

Dr Harald Stümpke and a number of researchers were working on the rhinogrades in the Hi-Lay Islands in the 1950s when the entire archipelago was submerged as a result of nuclear testing. The only fortunate thing is that Stümpke had given Steiner his initial writings on the rhinogrades, so the book could be published.

And so we have the result of Stümpke's work on rhinogrades, of which there were 15 families and 138 species, 10 of the families having a single nose  and 5 more than one nose (either 2, 4, or 38). Rhinogrades varied even more radically from each other, some being able to take on the attributes of flowers (their noses serving as petals), a variety could fly using their ears, another fished with their (single) nose, and so on. The book is obviously fully researched with everyday and Latin names used, footnotes, scrupulous bibliography, etc.

The update is fascinating too, as it reveals that three new species were found in 2006 on Espiritu Santo island 400 miles away in Vanuatu, all having a powerful drill for a nose, all boring skilfully into wood. The writer of this is Guillaume Lecointre, who asks himself what the rhinogrades are doing there: they've not been known to exist anywhere else. Could it be that at the end of the 18th century – when Jean-François de Galaup de Lapérouse left Brest on Louis XVI's orders on a diplomatic and scientific mission – that Lapérouse's ships called at the Hi-Iay Islands to stock up on wood? And that, unbeknown to them, some rhinogrades were carried as stowaways? And that the mysterious sinking of both L'Astolabe and La Boussole was the work of rhinogrades?

This brilliant book – which feels like one of the most amazing I've ever read – is of course a magnificent hoax: Morgenstern was a writer of nonsense verse who gave Steiner the idea of the rhinogrades, Petersson is an invention, the Hi-Iay Islands are fictitious, and Harald Stümpke is a pseudonym of Gerolf Steiner. But Lecointre is real enough and he's moved the hoax forward: in fact, some museums still carry the story to show they have a sense of humour too.

This book doesn't appear to have been re-published in England as the only copies available are from 1967. But then the English title – The Snouters – is hopelessly stupid and virtually gives the game away.

Daniel Auteuil's La Fille du puisatier (2011)

This is a fairy story, the flipside of Frédéric Mistral's tragic Mireille, and a remake of Marcel Pagnol's film of the same name starring Raimu and Fernandel (which I've not seen). The prince is Jacques Mazel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), a guy born into wealth, and the princess is Patricia Amoretti (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey), the well digger's daughter.

This is set slightly before World War II breaks out, Patricia is pregnant with no hope of marrying the future father, the parents of Jacques won't entertain the thought of their son Jacques being the father, and anyway he's gone off to fight and is soon killed. Meanwhile, Patricia's father has to disown her because of the shame of having an 'illegitimate' child in the family. (We'll forget the sub-plot of Félipe (Kad Merad) wanting to marry Patricia so as not to complicate things.)

Anyway, Jacques comes back from the dead and wants to marry Patricia, which will be done as soon as possible, Jacque's parents are very pleased to be grandparents, and all things are resolved: a real fairy story with a happy end. The Mazel parents live in Salon, although I thought it a rather long way for Patricia (from a neighbouring hamlet) to go to Meet Jacques (before he went to war), but then this was called 'La Chapelle Saint Julien' so made out to be somewhere else, although the chapel shown in the still below is in fact the Chapelle Saint Sixte in Egalières, as shown on the cover of Maurice Pezet's book Egalières-en-Provence (1970):

José Luis Guerin's Dans la ville de Sylvia (2007)

A young man returns to Strasbourg to find a girl he met six years before, has several beers in a café terrasse just looking at every female, sees Slyvia, follows her for a long time, loses sight of her, sees her again boarding a tram, gets on it too, finds it's a different girl, goes to the bar Les Aviateurs to find her but doesn't, starts again the next day sitting on a bench at a tram stop, and still doesn't find her. The end.

It seems like so little, but it's not. In the 84 minutes the film has lasted, in spite of the apparent lack of events, in spite of the virtual absence of dialogue, we have been treated to a large number of things: the slow pace as the man watches, the sights of the city, the psychology of the timid, anxious man, the repeat of features already seen which creates an odd but comforting idea of familiarity: the same streets, in particular the Place Saint-Étienne with its Meiselocker statue; the appearance (at least three times) of the black guy with the parasol selling cigarette lighters for 5 euros; the corner with the bottles where the old alcoholic woman sits, the seemingly desperate 'Laure de t'aime' written on so many walls, etc.

Long before the end I realised Sylvia would never turn up, but then I started to wonder if she's like the rhinograde in the Musée Zoologique in the city: non-existent. A brilliant film.

Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris (2006)

Dans Paris is Christophe Honoré's third feature film and is something of a remembrance of Nouvelle Vague movies, in particular those of Truffaut, but there's also a hint of Godard. The film stars two brothers: Paul (Romain Duris) and Jonathan (Louis Garrel, the director Philippe's son). Paul is depressive after having split up from his long-term partner, and has joined his sex-crazy student brother at their father's flat overlooking the Tour d'Eiffel.

The father is the Italian Mirko (Guy Marchard), who reads La Repubblica and was the husband of their mother (played by Marie-France Pisier), who has a fleeting bit part in this. Mirko does his best to console Paul and control Jonathan.

Paul seems suicidal: he films himself with a mouthful of pills, only to spit them out; he appears on his father's balcony on tiptoe, as if about to join the mobile phone he has sent, splintering, to the pavement below; and, on the only 'trip' he takes out, he jumps into the Seine but survives: just before Christmas this seems unlikely, but then his brother will later do the same and survive too.

Johnathan (casting himself as the narrator and looking directly at the camera like a Truffaut character) is a very different personality: while Paul spends his time in his dressing gown and underpants crying in the room and listening and singing along to Kim Wilde's 'Cambodia' (on an old 45 rmp), Jonathan is out in Paris, wandering around much like Truffaut's Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) in the streets of Paris. In a day Jonathan beds three women and returns to his father's in the early hours of the morning to find some rapport with Paul, looking through a child's picture book about a wolf and a rabbit, which they knew by heart as children.

Samuel Scott Sudlow (1865–1951), Artist, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

I last mentioned Samuel Scott Sudlow in April 2015, although it wasn't until a few days ago that Stewart Sudlow, Samuel's grandson, contacted me with these photos of paintings by his grandfather. I have copied the contents of the original post below, thank Stewart for sending me these, and look forward to receiving more, which shall be added to this post. These are Stewart's recollections of his grandfather:

"As a young boy together with sister and younger brother, every Sunday our parents took us to Belmore where my grandparents lived for Sunday dinner, sometimes when we arrived my grandfather would be in the front garden doing some weeding in a collar and tie and waistcoat, you can’t take England out of an Englishman. There was sign by the front door, saying Delamere, which in later years I learned that it referred to Delamere forest. My brother had it on his house in Tasmania.

My grandmother would be in kitchen, and more often than not we would find my grandfather in his studio at the end of the shed. There would be my grandfather seated in a lounge chair in front of his easel painting. He was also a carpenter and joiner by trade. He made all of their furniture. Now and again he also played the piano.

I recall racks against the wall where he stored his finished paintings. I do remember a painting of a dog probably a neighbour dog. I was 12 when my grandfather died I don’t Know what happened to most of the paintings, but I know my grandmother got rid of all his oils,  watercolours and brushes. I think she was annoyed that he spent more time in his studio than in the house. That’s about all I can remember of my grandfather."

'Across the Park Early Morning 1950.'

 

'Cloud Effect, Cronulla NSW.' 

In Poets, Poems, and Rhymes of East Cheshire (1908) Thomas Middleton devotes a few pages to the forgotten Samuel Scott Sudlow (1865–1951), who was born in Delamere Forest near Frodsham in the west of Cheshire, and moved to Hyde (probably with his parents) in 1881. His father was simply named Samuel Sudlow (1838–1914), who is the first named person on the grave here, followed by his mother Fanny (c. 1840–1920).

As the sentence states above in Hyde Cemetery, 'ALSO SAMUEL S[COTT], THEIR SON, DIED IN AUSTRALIA, SEP. 17^TH. 1951, AGED 86 YEARS.' Middleton says that Sudlow hadn't published much, although he prints his 'To the Blue Bell' in full and says that it will 'take a high place in local verse'. At the time that Middleton published his book Samuel Scott Sudlow was about 43 and had yet to leave the UK for Australia, although he appears to have published nothing at all there. But he was obviously a little more successful in another field.

Samuel Scott Sudlow was a joiner by trade, although Middleton speaks more of Sudlow's artistic education and of his local fame as a portrait and landscape artist. He says '[h]is work is highly spoken of by those competent to judge, and he is one of the few local men who have been successful as a portrait painter'.

And interestingly, a little Googling tells me that 'S Scott Sudlow' was several times one of the finalists for painting prizes in Australia, including one called Self Portrait.

Cédric Klapisch's Casse-tête chinois | Chinese Puzzle (2013)

So, the third part of Cédric Klapisch's film trilogy, following on from L'Auberge espagnole and Les Poupées russes, with Xavier (Romain Duris) once more in the lead role, with the faithfuls Wendy (Kelly Reilly), Martine (Audrey Tautou), Isabelle (Cécile de France), but this time based in New York. Again, Xavier is in a mess (but much more unbelievable this time) but he's helped out by, er, Hegel and Schopenhauer.

Isabelle has moved to Brooklyn, where she lives with girlfriend Ju (Sandrine Holt), and Wendy is leaving Xavier (with their two children) for the American John (Peter Hermann), one of the reasons for the separation surely being that Xavier has agreed to trying (by artificial insemination) to get Isabelle pregnant so that she and Nancy can have a child. The almost penniless Xavier (who is nevertheless now a published novelist) decides that he must leave for New York too as he wants to be closer to his children. One of the more subtle jokes is that Xavier initially stays with Isabelle and Ju, although he's looking for a flat; Nancy asks where, and Xavier says he wants to be near to his children, and Wendy lives on 6th avenue near the main entrance to Central Park: he doesn't have a clue why Isabelle has a strange look, but he'll no doubt find out, and anyway Ju finds him a crummy place in Chinatown.

At less than two hours this movie moves really fast, also pulling in Xavier playing hero to an ever-grateful Chinese cab driver who rigs it up for him to marry Nancy (Li Jun Li); two visits from Martine from France; Xavier's father trying to find a symbol of his wife's and Xavier's mother's love in a paving stone; immigration officials questioning Xavier and Nancy not unlike Georges Fauré (Gérard Depardieu) in Peter Weir's Green Card (1990), and pursuing Xavier and Nancy to his flat when Isabelle and a young female baby sitter are having sex: the escape of the two naked women onto the roof recalls the naked Xavier chasing a naked girlfriend in Les Poupées russes; and so on.

In the end Martine agrees to move from Paris and live with Xavier in New York. Yes, with her two kids in a crummy flat with no fear of immigration officials returning? Pure fantasy, as the computer graphics have suggested, but an adorable film.

Cédric Klapisch's Les Poupées russes | Russian Dolls (2005)

This is a few years on from L'Auberge Espagnole, the first part of Cédric Klapisch's trilogy, and again we have Xavier Rousseau (Romain Duris), Wendy (Kelly Reilly), Martine (Audrey Tautou), Isabelle (Cécile de France) and William (Kevin Bishop) plus two new characters of significance: Natacha (Evguenya Obraztsova) and Celia Shelburn (Lucy Gordon). A number of things have changed, and instead of the setting being Barcelona, Les Poupées russes is set in Paris, London and Saint Petersburg, with probably more dialogue in English than French.

This second part is a little more episodic, played more for comedy, and contains some flashy experimental camera work. The main interest is again Xavier, who not only has trouble finding a permanent job but has temporarily shelved his plans to write a novel for more pragmatic writing – such as being ghost writer for celebrities, and in addition he's found work writing the screenplays of a slushy TV mini-series. At thirty he still has no steady girlfriend, only a succession of brief flings (including with model Celia Shelburn, who's biography he's helped her with), but then a stable love life demands a stable personality, and he doesn't seem to have one yet.

Xavier still sees (even sleeps with) his ex, Martine, who is now a single mother; and he also sees a great deal of his lesbian friend Isabelle (cue for transvestite humour, etc). In London he runs into William, who's wildly in love with Natacha, has learned Russian, and is going to be married there shortly. Oh, and he also comes to meet William's sister Wendy again, kicks out her abusive boyfriend and, well, takes his place.

All the group meet up at Natasha's parents in Saint Petersburg: cue for local colour, dancing, drinking, use of various languages, etc. But then Celia, who's in Moscow for a few days, calls him up and asks him to join her. As he's taking the train Wendy – who's seen through his lie and knows he's meeting Celia – tells him he's the love of her life. But he still takes the train, realises Celia's as childish as him, but it seems too late and Wendy feels she can no longer trust him.

But then the wedding – slowly – eases them back together. And that's how they'll have to take it: easily.

Claire de Duras: Ourika (1823)

Claire de Duras (1777-1828) is an almost forgotten name in French literature, and yet the few novels she wrote, being concerned with difference, disclose an almost modern theme. Olivier ou le secret (written in 1822 but only published in 1971), for instance, is concerned with male sexual impotence, and Ourika with the problems of a black woman brought up in France during the revolutionary period.

Ourika begins with an introduction by a doctor brought to a convent to see the black nun Ourika, although the bulk of the novel is taken up with Ourika's story. At the age of two she was about to depart from Senegal to be taken away as a slave until the governor of Senegal bought her and left her in the care of Mme la maréchale de B. in Paris, where she was brought up in the same way as any white person.

That, as her benefactor recognises towards the end, was the main problem: paradoxically, she was killing the girl with kindness. Ourika is educated to a high standard and grows up for several years with Mme de B.'s grandchildren, the younger of whom – Charles – she becomes very attached to until he leaves for college at the age of seven.

Several years later Ourika discovers her fate through overhearing a conversation: being black, she faces an extremely lonely future because no suitable man will be willing to marry her. She removes all mirrors, tries as much as possible to hide her black skin from others, and dreads meeting new people. But all the time she tries to hide her feelings from her benefactor.

When Charles returns her interest in him is renewed, and she delights in conversations with him until he leaves to marry the wealthy heiress Anaïs de Thémines, with whom they soon have a child. A child she can't have, and she begins to regret that she has been taken from the slave ship, feels  that she could have been 'happily' married with a child in the slave cabins. She begins to waste away and Mme de B. realises that it took Ourika so long to understand: that she is in love with Charles.

And so Ourika finds that her only choice is to devote herself to God. This brings us to the end of her story and the doctor reveals in the final paragraph that Ourika then dies in front of him.

Cédric Klapisch's Poisson rouge (1994)

In 1993 '3000 scénarios contre un virus' (lit. '3000 screenplays against a virus') was launched as a cultural educational preventative measure against AIDS. In fact over 4000 short screenplays were received from students in lycées as possible ideas for film shorts, of which 31 were used by directors, mostly working on a voluntary basis, with the actors doing the same. To a background of first Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf' and then of The Breeders' 'Noaloha', Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi acts. She is walking away, carrying a minimum of her belongings, which include a bowl with a goldfish in it. She is obviously distressed, but even more so when in the busy traffic she receives a jolt, drops the bowl, and retrieves the goldfish from the edge of the road. Dashing into a chemist's across the road, she jumps the queue and – desperate – explains the situation, that the fish is dying without water. The chemist produces a condom which a customer blows up, water is poured into it and the goldfish too. The motto: 'Un préservatif peut sauver la vie': 'A condom can save a life'. In just over three minutes, Cédric Klapisch has done more than many filmmakers take hours to say. The idea was from Jérôme Bettochi (aged 19) of Bessoncourt (90).

Cédric Klapisch's Ni pour, ni contre (bien au contraire) | Not For, or Against (Quite the Contrary) (2003)

This was a surprise film release from director Cédric Klapisch, as it is a film policier, but what surprises me more is the title, faithfully translated in the same way in English, although surely this must be one of the most clumsy titles on record, particularly with its words in parentheses? OK, the title alludes to the dilemmas of the protagonist, but relevant or not it's still a mess as a title. The film itself though, in spite of a number of professional critics writing otherwise, certainly isn't a mess.

Katy (Marie Gillain) works as a television camera operator but lives in a faceless HLM with little success of escaping her relatively poor surroundings: pathetically, she buys scratchcards in the very slim hope of improving her material situation. Until, that is, she chances upon the crook Jean (Vincent Elbaz), who wants her to film a hold-up for him. At first dubious, as she's entering a milieu foreign to her, she rapidly succumbs to the lure of potential wealth from illegal acts.

So she's introduced to the rest of the gang, a motley bunch aspiring for riches by whatever violent means they get them: there's the Armenian Lecarpe (Simon Abkarian), running a kebab house with his wife; there's Mouss (Zinedine Soualem), an aspiring choreographer working on strippers in a nightclub; and then there's the rather disturbed young Loulou (Dimitri Storoge): not exactly too promising a mob.

But Jean manages to seduce her with his apparently easy gunpoint hold-ups of jewellers and she soon fits into the scheme of things. More importantly, she performs her own hold-ups of jewellers on the quiet. Then comes the final raid, which will pay enough money for them all to live luxuriously for the rest of their lives. But it depends on her playing prostitute to the director of the bank, and she doesn't do prostitution: yeh, she's being used.

She does kill the director though, but fails to have the alarm silenced. However, an amount of money is salvaged from this, although (through her cunning, her intelligence and her betrayal) Caty manages to escape to an American 'paradise', the gang either dead or (in Jean's case) inside. Trouble is, that last long shot of her in her penthouse reveals that she has no idea of where to go from then on. Earlier in the film she mentions the word 'L'argent' and one of her new buddies adds '...ne fait pas le bonheur' ('Money doesn't buy you happiness'). So where is there to go now?

Marie Susini: Je m'appelle Anna Livia (1979)

Marie Susini (1916-93) is a surprisingly little known writer. She was born in Corsica, a place that had a very profound impact on her, although most of her life was spent in mainland France. Jean Daniel (1920-2020) of the Nouvel Observateur was a very important man in her life.

Je m'appelle Anna Livia isn't easy to understand: the time sequence is very scewed, personal pronouns are frequently used in place of actual names, the first person mixes with the third (especially with Anna Livia), but perhaps most of all the language is often just not quite within the grasp of comprehension: as I've mentioned before, I'm reminded of E. M. Forster's comment in Arbinger Harvest of Virginia Woolf's writing seen as a pen lodged in a coat lining: 'So near, and yet so far!'

The first sentence is 'Ainsi.', suggesting that the reader has missed what hadn't gone before: 'Thus'?, 'In this way'?, 'So'?, etc. The first paragraph, as I translate it, reads: 'So it was always there. It was there before it existed. As if drifting towards the surface of a black dream. Even before she could think. One day perhaps.' The back cover suggests a Greek tragedy, and this beginning seems to back that up: everything has been set up, there's an inevitability written into the text.

Gradually, the reader pieces together the characters and the elements in their story, which I briefly mention here in chronological order. The setting, the back cover suggests, is in Italy, although Corsica could also fit into this dreamy, anguished, timeless novel. A young girl from a modest but large family is chosen by a moderately more wealthy man at the age of 16, the bride price is paid and they live together for a short time until the wife leaves the family, leaving a small child behind. This is Anna Livia, who will live on her father's farm and mix with his employees Josefino, his wife Madelena and their son Francesco, who is the same age as Anna but will die at an early age. At 16 Anna Livia has sex with her father, and such an act seems so unstoppable that she first draws the curtains and undresses for him. He later hangs himself and her mother Elizabeta visits her as a ghost.

The fourteen cypress trees close to the horizon are almost characters in the novel, and are constantly counted by Anna and Francesco, and they often fail to reach the same number, which recalls Anna's grandmother counting her children as they sleep. Cypress trees can represent death. Here, Anna and Francesco see the trees frequently merge into a haze, wonder what lies beyond, and envisage a timeless future, the unknowable, the oneness of it all.

Antoine Chintreuil (revisited) in Pont-de-Vaux, Ain (1)

Precursor to impressionism, the painter Antoine Chintreuil (1814-73) was born in Pont-de-Vaux and died in Septeuil (Yvelines). Born into a modest family, he moved to Paris at the age of 22. He was advised by Corot and received support from the chansonnier Béranger. The Musée Chintreuil in Pont-de-Vaux is named after him and holds a permanent collection of his paintings. This is Chintreuil by Eugène Villain (1821-97).

La Ferme de Courgent, still a small village in Yvelines.

Bruyères et gênets en fleurs dans le bois d'Igny (Essonne).

Bois de Boulogne, long before tourists and night-time activities changed it.

Chemin à travers bois.

Patrick Lapeyre: Paula ou personne (2020)

Take two people like Jean Cosmo and Paula Wilmann – meeting quite by chance at a wedding reception – although Jean doesn't really know the bridegroom and suspects he's just been invited to make up the numbers on the groom's side, and Paula doesn't really like the bride (her cousin) and has only come because she was asked. In fact, neither Jean nor Paula would have been there under normal circumstances, it's just chance that brings them together. In addition, they met nearly twenty years before, as Jean recognises Paula as the younger sister of Alicia, whom he used to go out with when she was just thirteen. So they have something to talk about and agree to meet at a future time.

Jean is really excited about meeting Paula because it's a long time since he's had a date. But then, so many things separate them: she is a schoolteacher of German, whereas he works in a sorting office in a large post office and comes from a very humble family which didn't have a bathroom or have any books; she's a Catholic in a Catholic school, married to a German with a comfortable job; he lives in a lousy flat in 93 (in Montreuil), and she lives in les Invalides in the centre of Paris. On the other hand, he spent two years at university before leaving at the age of twenty and married a mythomaniac aged thirty for a few years; Paula loves her husband, but her sex life with Andreas is very poor and she has a separate flat near les Invalides where she can be herself. Plus, she doesn't see eye to eye with the other teachers, and the self-taught Jean can bowl her over with his philosophical ideas, particularly Heidegger's. Their impending fusion is a forgone conclusion.

And although it takes over five weeks for them to end up in bed, the wait (and Patrick Lapeyre's books are full of waiting) takes far less time than the central characters in his other books. But needless to say, waiting being something of a religion almost in Lapeyre's novels, it still exists in the time it takes Paula to turn up on a date, in the of number of days Jean has to spend until Paula comes back from her holiday with Andreas, etc. Waiting is desire, and desire is everything here.

The couple have taken a risk and both are aware that their time as lovers is limited: Andreas will inevitably be called back to Germany, and Paula will follow him: there is no way that Jean can support her, even if she wanted such a relationship. In any case, Paula tires in a year of leading a double life, and Jean's insatiable desire for sex is exhausting. But even as they part, Jean refuses to see Paula ever again, doesn't answer any of her calls, and just disappears.

Jean is a misfit, he didn't fit into university, he doesn't fit into his job, and most people don't talk to him at work. Even Jean's surname Cosmo suggests he's on another planet; but he thinks ordinary people are on another planet; he calls a disturbed co-worker who accuses him of sexual harassment a 'sexual' UFO; Reynaldo, a friend of a friend, looks like an extraterrestrial, and so on. Is Cosmo from some other place or does he dream other people are? As Paula puts it: 'You've invented a marginal, persecuted character for yourself and you enjoy him: you're his prisoner.'

At over 400 pages this is no doubt Lapeyre's longest novel so far, and is certainly the best I've yet read.

Monique Wittig: Les Guérrillères (1969)

I could write a great deal about Wittig's revolutionary feminist utopia, but much has already been written about the theories involved. Suffice to say that this novel shows its revolutionary colours very positively by taking the female plural 'elles' and using it at a default pronoun instead of the usual masculine singular 'il': not only are women being foregrounded, but collectivism as opposed to individuality.

The structure of the novel of course couldn't have been conventional: between the usually small paragraphs there are large white spaces, and every five pages a page is taken up by female names in large capital letters, always forenames, never surnames (or patronyms).

There are three roughly equal sections, each beginning with a huge circle in thick black: zero? vagina? Yes, but most of all the absence of linearity, the emphasis on continuity, a reinvention of time, and we think of Mary Daly and her expression 'the archaic future' in the title Quintessence... Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto (1998).

Ronald Firbank: Prancing Nigger, aka Sorrow in Sunlight (1924)

The original title of Roland Firbank's short 1924 novel, Prancing Nigger, has today been politically corrected to Sorrow in Sunlight. Partly written in Havana, this book – written by a person with much obvious affection for black people – contains a great deal of conversation, mostly that of the kind we would normally expect to find in fiction about the slave plantations. The narrative is equally colourful: there are not only references to exotic flora and fauna, but the language itself is strange and exotic:

'One evening, towards sundown, just as the city lifts its awnings, and the deserted streets start seething with delight, [Charlie] left his home to enjoy the grateful air. It had been a day of singular oppressiveness, and, not expecting much of the vesperal breezes, he had borrowed his mother's small Pompadour fan.'

This book is not set in the US but on an unnamed Caribbean island, where a family – Mrs Mouth and her husband (whom she calls 'Prancing Nigger') and their children Miami (or Mimi), Charlie and Edna. Mrs Mouth has decided that they are to move from the small village of Mediavilla to the city of Cuna-Cuna, where her children can be educated, where the family can 'enter Society': yes, it's a form of social improvement, where they will be wearing dresses, shirts and trousers instead of leaves and loincloths.

So they move to the bright lights but university isn't ready for the children, although (passing through an earthquake and a religious revival) two of them find an unplanned future: the younger Edna starts living in style with Madame Diaz's son (although probably not for long), whereas Charlie is 'fast going to pieces, having joined the Promenade of a notorious Bar with its bright particular galaxy of boys.'

Firbank's writing is delightfully odd, even when he occasionally seems to be slightly mis-translating from an unknown foreign language.

Lotfi Akalay: Les Nuits d'Azed (2016)

Lotfi Akalay (1943-2019) was a journalist who, for instance, published a short story in installments in Charlie Hebdo. Les Nuits d'Azed is his first novel, although he's perhaps better known for his work on Ibn Battûta (1304-c.1368), a pioneer world traveller born in Tangiers.

What we have here is a mise en abyme, or story within a story, and that mise en abyme, although rambling and seemingly losing the plot (what plot?) fits together nevertheless, but then the real meaning is the message, which is essentially feminist.

This is Morocco, and everyone, including the women, are sex-obsessed, yearning for more and indifferent ways (including homosexuality), maybe particularly sodomy whether hetero or homo, and yet this isn't a novel of sixties or seventies experimentation. And almost everyone (and not only but especially the law) is corrupt.

This is a kind of take on One Thousand and One Nights, with Azed, the narrator of the tales, fending off having sex with Kamel – who has just fucked his many wives and then divorced them, cast them adrift into a male-dominated, virgin-worshipping phallocratic society – where perhaps their only future is to be prostitutes. But why did she agree to marry Kamel? 'For the [sake of the]  women', she says.

Many authors are discovered quite by chance, such as browsing in libraries, bookshops – especially disorganised second-hand ones, in my experience: the important thing is the randomness, the lack of alpha order – but perhaps above all in France because of its huge numbers of boîtes à lire. I got this one from a boîte à lire, although I can't remember where, which is annoying as I like to know the provenance of a book, to have at least an inkling of its history. But nada – particularly frustrating as this is one I'll keep and mentally note the author. In an odd way, it's rather special.

Pascal Boniface: Léo Ferré, toujours vivant (2016)

And so we see the back of the hirsute Léo Ferré (at the PSU celebration on 30 May 1973). Many books have been written about Ferré, and this is by a writer who has also been a fan of Ferré for many years. It may not add anything to previous knowledge of the singer, but it certainly serves as an introduction to the man.

Boniface gives the main biographical facts about Ferré: his birth in Monaco in 1916 to a loving mother and a very strict father who wanted his son to be a dentist; his schooling in Italy with friars who permanently erased any sympathy he would ever have for religion; his initial lack of success with the female sex, initially leading him to use prostitutes; his three marriages: the first brief one to Odette, who was no encouragement to his work, and in the early years he lacked professional success; his second marriage to Madeleine, who helped him in his success for many years but became an alcoholic and destroyed his 'ménagerie'; his final marriage to his much younger employee Marie-Christine, who carried the torch for him many years after his death in 1993.

Ferré bought the tiny Gueslin peninsula, to which he brought the very young female chimpanzee Pépée which outgrew the island. Extending space, he then bought the Château de Pechrigal in Le Lot, then the end of the world in France. It became a hell perhaps in proportion as the chimpanzees, a goat, a pig, numerous cats, etc, were added.

Ferré's musical life grew from not being recognised, to success, a leader of the 1968 revolution, criticisms for being what some considered an 'anar à la Rolls' (for which read 'champagne socialist', although he never had a Rolls-Royce), to being accepted in the canon of 'chanteurs à textes'. Many of his songs he wrote himself, although (another delight) he gave music to such writers as Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Villon, Aragon, fostered a knowledge of Rutebeuf, and so on.

Most of all, Ferré is seen here as an anarchist and an advocate of free love: someone who loudly proclaims 'NO!' to all religions, all politics, all educational systems. all judicial systems, in  fact all systems because they imprison people, enchain them, indoctrinate them, torture them, force them into believing that their maniacal and brain dead ideas are the only systems we can pursue. More than ever, we need to listen to Léo Ferré's words. Ni dieu ni maître.

Hervé Le Tellier: L'Anomalie (2020)

Imagine Blake, or whatever his name is at a particular time, or rather whatever his many names are, who is a hired killer, or rather he owns a thriving international vegetarian cooking business (yes, the irony!) with his wife as he has a double life. But then along comes a double. Of himself that is, a REAL double, as this person is actually himself, as if carbon-copied in three dimensions, totally identical, living, breathing, feeling, etc: the same person in fact. When the two meet, he (that is the first Blake) must kill him(self) because how can two such individuals exist? Hardly credible, hardly bearable.

And then there's Victor Miesel, an unsuccessful author of his own books, but who makes his money translating other authors. He kills himself though, but as a result (sort of) becomes a posthumously well-known writer, ripe for publication in a number of languages. What a pity he's killed himself! Although he's not, or rather the Victor who's killed himself has called himself Victør in the new book, incidentally titled L'Anomalie the same as this, Hervé Le Tellier's book – not that that matters a jot though because they're the same person (and not, sort of).

Just to end a very short list of the many characters who have identical characters (and there are over 200, but we don't meet them all), there's Slimboy, the Nigerian singer who's always (sort of) denied he's gay but at the same time always (sort of) hinted that he is gay. He gets on well with his identical Slimboy, and they make a great musical duo. (Of course the same can't be said of all the other identical couples, as jealousy, incomprehension must exist in spite of the existence of psychologists who are really needed in certain situations.)

What situations? Oh, I didn't mention that one. You see, there was a plane (on which the above characters were travelling from Paris to New York) which landed in March 2021, but then there was an identical plane three months later carrying identical people with identical histories wanting to land in New York too. The pilot (who had died of cancer three months before and will die the same death later) doesn't understand (after considerable turbulence) why he is forced to land at a US air force base: after all, not passenger plane has done so before. What is going on?

Le Tellier, OuLiPo chief, is what's going on. This novel is not science fiction but, er, partly extra-dimensional, a kind of 'what if...'. What if what? Well, what if beings existed with far superior intelligence to ours, what if there were far more dimensions than our perceived four, what if – and let's be honest here – we are just products in a computer program, not the 'real' people we think we are?

When it happens a third time though, POTUS has had enough and just zaps them out of existence. We can't allow this thing to proliferate, can we? (Although surely POTUS would have gotten on really well with himself? Uh, maybe not.)

L'Anomalie is an engrossing and provocative novel, pulling mathematics, philosophy, psychology, literature, and many more subjects into its compass. It's a brilliant novel, and I can fully understand why it's the favourite for the Goncourt (whenever that will be announced in these bookshop-closed times).

Just three thoughts:

1. There's a small section called (in English) 'THE PEOPLE HAS THE RIGHT TO KNOW'. I agree, they certainly has: at the end of the book Le Tellier thanks a number of people, although unless this is deliberate for some reason, I fail to see why an apparent grammatical error (singular in French but plural in English) passed proof reading. Can an enlightened person explain? Thought not: it's just an error.

2. Less seriously, the section 'Recontre du deuxième type' (yeah, Le Tellier's novel is full of quotations and allusions to both academic and popular culture) speaks of the 'second' Blake (rather like Beckett's Murphy) tied naked to a chair, although four pages later the 'first' Blake undresses the corpse! Another error the proof reader missed?

3. The novel is set in 2021, mentions coronovirus in the past, but still gives words by a completely stupid 'POTUS'. Now, I write this on the eve of the US election result: I can understand that Le Tellier had to move the scenes on a year because he thought Covid-19 would be short-lived, but predicting the US election? Wow! Some things in the novel just haven't been thought out.

Djaïli Amadou Amal: Les Impatientes (2017 (in Cameroon)); repr. (in France) 2020

It's worth quoting the back page of this very powerful book – the first of this Cameroon author's to be published in France – and this is my translation of that page:

'Three women, three stories, three linked fates. This polyphonic novel traces the fate of the young Ramla, torn from her loved one to be married to Safira's husband, while Hindou, her sister, is forced to marry her cousin. Patience! That is the main piece of advice given to women by them by those around them, as it's unthinkable to go against the word of Allah. As the Peul proverb has it: 'At the end of patience is heaven.' But heaven can become a hell. How will these three women manage to free themselves?

'Forced marriage, marital rape, consensus and polygamy: this novel by Djaïli Amadou Amal breaks taboos by denouncing the female condition in the Sahel and gives us a staggering novel on the universal issue of the violence perpetrated on women.'

Munyal is a key word in the novel, which is based on Amal's experiences, and the word means 'patience', but as it's patience founded on violent coercion, suffering and mindless duty to the husband god, the title Les Impatientes takes on a whole other meaning to 'The Impatient women': disobedience, revolt, in fact rebellion.

Ramla comes from a large family, her father's four wives having given him thirty children. But she has always been different, viewed by her mother almost as a being from another planet: unlike the women around her, she was interested in study, wanted to have a profession, but was told to return to the 'real life', meaning lifelong subservience to men. She wants to marry Amidou, studying to be an engineer, she wanting to be a pharmacist, but... Hyatou, her uncle and the richest of the family, decrees that his biggest partner, Alhadji Issa, wants to marry her: Ramla isn't just her father's daughter, but a daughter of the extended family. Amidou is sent away and Ramla feels dead inside. She is forced, at the age of 17, to marry a man of 50, who has a co-wife, Safira, aged 35. 'How will these three women manage to free themselves?'. As regards Ramla, we don't know yet.

Formally, Les Impatientes resembles Mairie DNiaye's Trois Femmes Puissantes, and to some extent thematically too. Hindou is Ramla's sister, and they are both married on the same day. Hindou envies Ramla marrying the rich Alhadji Issa because she has to marry her cousin Moubarak, the son of her father's brother, an unemployable wastrel, an alcoholic, a chaser of women and a drug taker. Moubarak is also a violent rapist husband, but then he can almost escape with impunity for beating his impatient (meaning his disobedient) wife. Tacitly, the whole insane extended family (even the local doctor) has to agree that the male is always right. Until, that is, Moubarek is almost ready to kill Hindou for her 'impatience', in fact almost kills her, in spite of her futile attempts to escape the inescapable. 'How will these three women manage to free themselves?'. In Hindou's case, it seems to be via madness.

The third section of Les Impatientes comes from the words of Safira, for twenty years the only wife of Alhadji Issa, but now to be his co-wife as her husband has decided to marry a younger model: Ramla. Like many other co-wives in this devastating novel of familial insanity, Safira is jealous of the new intruder, jealous of her youth, of the fact that Ramla will make her a second-class wife, even though she in theory is to some extent in control of Raml baecause she knows the ropes and is (again to some extent) in charge. Insanity begets insanity and Safira's wholly understandable jealousy triumphs in the form of stealing a large amount of money from her husband (partly to pay for the 'skills' of witch doctors) getting people to falsely claim Ramla's adultery, etc. Alhadji discovers the theft which hardly makes a dent in his wealth, but he rashly repudiates both of his wives, and then relents. Safira learns that Ramla had no interest in him anyway, and Ramla is not long, on her (forced) return to Alhadji, to walk out on him with her computer on which she has been having contact with her brother, the friend of her (unrequited) lover Amidou. 'How will these three women manage to free themselves?'. In Safira's case, freedom is a long way away, as her husband is preparing for another wife. But as for Ramla, her forced marriage is now annulled, so she is truly free.

This novel made it to the Goncourt final in 2020 but is very highly unlikely to achieve final success: Hervé Le Tellier's L'Anomalie is the probable winner, although when the announcement will be is at the moment anyone's guess. Covid-19 rules, OK?

Fanny Martin (Marie Françoise Bertrand) versus Claude Bernard

Oddly, there seems to be as much if not more information on Fanny Martin (Marie Françoise Bernard (1819-1901)) in English than there does in French. She was a militant animal rights defender in strong support of the Société Protectrice des Animaux (SPA) and in time established an anti-vivisection society. Her daughters, Marie-Claude (1849-1922) and Jeanne Henriette (1847-1923) never married and espoused the animal rights cause.

The problem: her marriage of convenience (in 1845, the same year as the foundation of SPA) was to Claude Bernard (1813-78), who would become the father of experimental medecine and whose ideas would influence Émile Zola, who wrote Le Roman expérimental in 1878. And not only did Fanny's father's money go towards Bernard's experiments on the vivisection of animals, particularly dogs, but he carried out some of his experiments in the family home. Fanny tried her best to counter this by rescuing stray dogs. The very strained marriage came to an end in 1868, and they were officially separated the following year.

Poor before his marriage, Bernard originally went to Lyon to work in a chemist's and had the idea that his vocation lay in writing. At twenty he'd written a play, Arthur de Bretagne, although it wasn't published until 1887, some years after his death. It contains a truly awful and heavily biased Preface by a certain Georges Barral, who accuses Fanny and her daughters of deserting Bernard. Needless to say, the above shows that their attempts to destroy the book were fruitless, although the latest publication appears to omit the Preface. No, I haven't read the play, and certainly never will.

It would be interesting to see what the Musée Claude Bernard in his native town of Saint-Julien-en-Beaujolais says about Fanny Martin, who has become a recent martyr to the animal rights cause.

Samuel Beckett: Play (1964); repr. with Preface by S. E. Gontarski, 2009)

The heads of two women and one man each appear above 'identical grey urns about a yard high' and tell of unfaithfulness on the part of the phallocratic male. James Knowlson draws our attention to the real triangle between Beckett, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil and Barbara Bray.

Images of Ireland are here in the mention of Ash and Snodland, but Beckett also remembers his stay in London (where he was receiving psychiatric therapy under Wilfred Bion), lodging with the Frosts and drinking Lipton's tea.

Samuel Beckett: Come and Go (1967); repr. with Preface by S. E. Gontarski, 2009)

Flo, Vi and Ru are the protagonists of indeterminate age in this short play, three women sitting on a bench, each one leaving the bench for a short time in which one of the remaining women tells the other a secret about the woman's who's left, and the listener responds with shock. It isn't known if any of the women know of whatever terrible thing secret that's been mentioned is aware of it. The play has a stange mechanical, geometrical nature to it as seen by the women's behaviour.

Again, there is intertextual material, notably in the first (independently) complete sentence 'When did we three last meet?', which recalls Shakespeare's Macbeth, in which the First Witch, in the first line of the play, says 'When shall we three meet again'. And again, Ireland indirectly appears as a memory of Beckett's childhood: the mention of 'the playground at Miss Wade's recalls a former school in Dublin.

Samuel Beckett: Rockaby (1981); repr. with Preface by S. E. Gontarski, 2009)

Rockaby is another short play where a dying woman simply rocks in a chair which is moved without the woman's own effort, with a recorded voice poetically and somewhat repetitively speaking, urged on by the woman with just one word: 'More.' In the end the woman presumably dies: 'Rock her off / Rock her off' says the voice at the end.

Knowlson gives several sources in Beckett's life (including paintings) which may have inspired the play, which he wrote for Billie Whitelaw to perform.

Samuel Beckett: Footfalls (1976); repr. with Preface by S. E. Gontarski, 2009)

Footfalls is a short play centring on May, a woman in her forties almost constantly pacing up and down, and her elderly bedridden mother in darkness in the background. The first part (called the 'dying mother scene' by Beckett) is a conversation between the two; the second is the mother's voice saying that (the obviously seriously disturbed) May has not been out since she was a young girl; in the third section May speaks of herself in the third person and introduces the subject of a Mrs Winter and her daughter Amy (which of course is an anagram of May).

James Knowlson, in his Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, says that Footfalls 'grew out of Beckett's long-standing interest in abnormal psychology', and that May's pacing is an 'externalisation of inner anguish': Beckett had visited a psychiatric hospital in Beckenham in 1937, and two years before writing the play the daughter of a friend had told him of making similar pacing movements. But as Knowlson also says, there is more to this work than can be reduced to autobiographical instances, which of course holds for all of his works.

In Memory of Samuel Paty, Teacher

Following the tragic assassination by beheading in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines) of the teacher Samuel Paty, who had been threatened for several days for showing a few satirical cartoons from Charlie Hebdo in a lesson about freedom of speech, a French female Protestant pastor, Sandrine Maurot, has called on people of ALL beliefs to publish satirical portraits of their belief. I really like this one, an imagined assault on a (real) religious paper by an atheist maniac, screaming 'God doesn't exist!!', 'You're insulting my beliefs!', 'I want everyone to believe that they must not believe!!!'. 'Gloire à queuedalle!!!' (a distortion of 'Gloire à que dalle!!!', meaning 'Glory to bugger all!!!') is a hopeless misunderstanding of atheism, but then this is satire, and in any case we live in a very imperfect world. France is determined to make the name of Samuel Paty live forever, and the world should support that.

Samuel Beckett: Breath (1972; repr. with Preface by S. E. Gontarski, 2009)

Beckett's Breath, lasting about forty seconds and with no plot, no words and no characters, is theatrical minimalism virtually at its most minimalist, and was written as a contribution to Kenneth Tynan's Oh! Calcutta!* 'circus' (as Beckett described it). It consists of a pile of unidentified rubbish with a faint brief cry, then an intake of breath with light slowly increasing. This is followed by expiration and slowly decreasing light, ending in another brief cry. It was first performed in 1969 and first published in 1972.

As James Knowlson says, Beckett's intention was that this was an ironic comment on what followed, although someone had added 'with naked people' in the rubbish, and Beckett was very far from happy. The sequence was withdrawn from the London production of Oh! Calcutta!.

Breath is generally seen as a blurring of the difference between theatre and other art forms.

*This is a pun on Clovis Trouille's 'Oh quel cul t'as' ('Oh, what an arse you've got').

Samuel Beckett: Krapp's Last Tape (1959; repr. with Preface by S. E. Gontarski, 2009)

Krapps' Last Tape was first published in Evergreen Review in 1958, but not as part of a book until the following year. Here we have a 69-year-old man at the end of his life, making his last annual tape and listening to one he made thirty years before, when he was a person he hardly now recognises.

Light and darkness (the colours black and white), youth and age, reality and fantasy, all play a part here, but certainly the most important are light and darkness. Krapp (what a name!) has 'rusty brown' trousers and waistcoat, but a 'grimy white shirt' and a white face; the stage is in darkness apart from the lit desk; the thirty-five-year-old Krapp lived with Bianca in Kedar (Hebrew for 'black') street; the younger Krapp remembers seeing a woman, 'all white and starch' with a 'black hooded' pram; the white dog has a black ball, and so it goes on, with the light and the dark sometimes blended, as with the younger Krapp shielding his woman from the the sun.

The eyes of women are a theme too: Bianca's are 'incomparable'; the woman with the pram has eyes 'like chrysolite' (recalling a word used in Othello); the eyes of the woman Krapp shields were 'just slits' in front of the glare of the sun, although they opened in shadow; Krapp's last tape records 'The eyes she had!'. In such a short play there are a number of characters, but all come from only one man.

This is a book of memory, therefore time, and we can feel it in the movement not only of the tape spool revealing the past but also, in its unwinding, Krapp's delight in saying 'Spooool', his joy of words in themselves, another example being him forgetting the meaning of 'viduery', searching in the dictionary, finding the word and also the name of the 'vidua' bird, the sound  of which he relishes.

Charles-Emmanuel Borjon de Scellery, Pont-de-Vaux, Ain (01)

Charles-Emmanuel Borjon de Scellery (1633-91) was born in Pont-de-Vaux and became a lawyer who wrote a number of books on law, although he is perhaps better known for his interest in music, particularly for his Noels Bressands pour Pontdevaux et les paroisses circonvoisines. (Painting from the Musée Antoine Chintreuil, Pont-de-Vaux.)

Benoît Textor, Pont-de-Vaux, Ain (01)

Benoît Textor (approx. 1520-56) was born in Pont-de-Vaux and was a doctor, naturalist and ornithologist and the author of several works on the plague and the canker. He was a friend of Calvin and Pierre Viret. (This is a painting from the Musée Antoine Chinteuil, Pont-de-Vaux.)

L'Abbé Pierre-Philibert Guichelet, Pont-de-Vaux, Ain (01)

Pierre-Philibert Guichelet (1736-1830) was a priest and writer of fables who was born in Pont-de-Vaux. Originally expected to work in business, his parents agreed to him entering the church. Two fables he wrote are 'L'araignée et le ver a soie' ('The Spider and the Silk Worm') and 'Le Singe et les deux chiens' ('The Monkey and the Two Dogs'), which the bishop Jean-Irénée Depéry (1796-1861) mentions in his Biographie des hommes célèbres du département de l'Ain (1835), where several pages are devoted to Guichelet. (Painting from the Musée Antoine Chinteuil, Pont-de-Vaux.)

Silver-Washed Fritillary Butterfly, Bissy-sur-Fley, Saône-et-Loire (71)

Memories of summer. Will we be allowed to have one in another country in 2021? There is a buddleia bush in the shadow of the Château Pontus de Tyard, Bissy-sur-Fley, Saône-et-Loire, teeming this July with scarce swallowtail (flambés in French) butterflies, and also silver-washed fritillary butterflies (tabacs d'Espagne in French), so easily confused with the pearl-bordered fritillary (grand collier argenté).

Michel Déon: Un taxi mauve (1973)

Michel Déon's Un taxi mauve is a strange, and strangely haunting, novel. Set in his beloved Ireland, where Déon died, we have a motley group of characters, many of whom seem traumatised in some way. The American Kean siblings, from a very wealthy family, and who have Irish ancestry, are prominent, although only the young Jerry Kean lives there, albeit apparently only temporarily. He carries the guilt of his Iranian girlfriend being accidentally killed during an opium-smoking session in the States, and seeks something by moving to Ireland. His sister Sharon has married into the German aristocracy and is a princess, although many of her tastes are down to earth, and when she briefly visits Ireland she stays with Jerry in his primitive cottage without electricity, while her servant Li stays in a plush hotel. Jerry's other sister, Moïra, is a Hollywood film star and also makes an appearance. The final member of the Kean clan, Terence, is an astronaut who's only seen via the television.

We don't know the name of the narrator, although he had a son who's dead, and he has come to Ireland to live in peace, shoot game, read and listen to music. The presence of Sharon will disturb him, and she soon develops a liking for him, although the novel has nothing like the strong sexual hints of Yves Boisset's nevertheless well directed film with Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Noiret, Peter Ustinov, Fred Astaire, etc.

The strongest character in the book, which would be much diluted without him, is Taubelman, a huge guy who's a bit like, as the front flap of this France Loisirs (picked up in Bissy-sur-Fley, Saône-et-Loire) suggests, a mixture of Rabelais and Tartarin: he eats and drinks enormous amounts, and his stories are wildly exaggerated if not outright lies. He lives with his daughter Anne (who may or may not be his daughter), and (with the help of her) cheats at poker and wins a large amount of money from the players. Jerry, of course, is bound to fall in love with her.

All this is played out against an Irish backdrop, with the social centre being the pub with its rustic locals (plus a gay couple|), and the narrator's friend the supposedly retired Dr Scully, who drives the mauve taxi and views the natives affectionately and philosophically. An unexpected delight.

Samuel Beckett: More Pricks than Kicks (1931; repr. with Preface by Cassandra Nelson, 2010)

More Pricks than Kicks was, after his idiosyncratic booklet Proust (1930), Samuel Beckett's first published book, being a collection of ten short stories but without the additional 'Echo's Bones', which Chatto & Windus editor Charles Prentice had initially welcomed as the eleventh story, and over which Beckett spent some time and effort, but which Prentice had to reject as a 'nightmare' that gave him the 'jim-jams' and would certainly cause Beckett to lose a number of readers. As it happened the book only sold 550 over a few years, so the unsold books were pulped. Only after Beckett had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 was there renewed interest in More Kicks than Pricks, much to Beckett's displeasure because he now saw the book as a part of his juvenilia.

In itself More Pricks than Kicks is what Beckett called 'self-plagiarism', the best kind of plagiarism to him: much of the material came from his novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which Prentice (among others) had previously rejected and was only published in 1992, several years after Beckett's death: the title is in part a play on Tennyson's A Dream of Fair Women, and with the colloquial (working-class?) expression 'fair to middling' included, is perhaps an indication of the poly-linguistic nature of the work, which ranges from foreign, esoteric, learned, slang, and taboo expressions (included in later editions, but left as in the original 1934 edition here): 'arse' is left as 'B. T. M.' and 'Flitter the fucker' as 'Flitter the --', for instance.

The protagonist Belacqua Shaua is taken from Dante's fourth canto of Purgatorio, which is the second part of his La Divina Commedia (written from 1308 to 1320). The name is (coincidentally?) a reversal of Beckett's own initials, and Dante's Belacqua was a lute-maker, lazy like Beckett himself at the time of publication, and the name indicates 'beautiful water', but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Intertextual references abound in all of the stories in the book, often to Dante, the Bible, but also to many other books Beckett was reading at the time: there's a surviving manuscript (usually just called 'Dream') in which he noted any interesting expressions of sentences he met, along with autobiographical notes. More Pricks than Kicks is in many ways an autobiographical work.

'Dante and the Lobster' is the first story, set in 8 December 1926, in which Belacqua has three obligations, although not necessarily in the order given (this is Beckett, let's remember, and narrative sequence is of minor value): there's lunch, the lobster, and the Italian lesson. Lunch is a 'nice affair', with 'nice' meaning 'subtle' or 'exacting' rather than 'pleasant', so he locks the door so no one can 'come at him'. The most interesting thing here is that the bread is personified, it '[i]s spongy and warm, alive', and even has a 'face' which he'll soon remove. Why 8 december 1926? Well, the morning after Henry McCabe (mentioned several times in this story) was hanged then for the murder of the McDonnell family and servants (six in all) in their home in Malahide, Dublin. Beckett, who was far from sure of McCabe's guilt, was in any way against the death penalty. The destruction of the food in some way feeds into the story, and this is followed by the boiling of a living lobster. Beautiful water

'Fingal' is the second story, which Mary Power calls a 'Modern contribution to the duinschenchas tradition of place in Irish literature' (Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1981-82), pp. 151-156 (151). Belacqua walks in Fingal with Winnie Coates: the name is one of Beckett's jokes, as Donald Winnicott was a psychoanalyst. They are near where what was then called the lunatic asylum at Portrane, where Winifred knows the psychiatrist Dr Sholto, whom she meets. Belacqua then steals a bicycle and goes back to Dublin, where he happily goes to the pub.

'Ding-Dong' is the third story, in which Belacqua 'enlivened the last phase of his solipsism, before he toed the line and began to relish the world, with the belief that the last thing he had to do was to move constantly from place to place'. His movements are confined to going from pub to pub and in the end is conned into buying seats in heaven by a woman in a pub.

'A Wet Night' is the fourth story, and like Joyce's 'The Dead' has a festive Christmas setting with a number of people involved, although of course Beckett (like Belacqua) hated social gatherings. Of note are some of the characters, such as Caleken Frica, who represents Mary Manning (Howe), Beckett's friend who he helped with her play 'Youth's the Season'; the Alba, who represents Ethna MacCarthy, an unusually liberated woman Beckett met at Trinity College, and with whom he was obsessed; the Syra-Cusa represents James's Joyce's highly disturbed daughter Lucia, who was infatuated with Beckett although he did his best to avoid her; and 'Chas': Jean du Chas was Beckett's fictitious poet born on the same day as him, and with whom he took pleasure in introducing in a lecture to the Trinity Modern Languages Society. The party represented here (in a very distorted way) really existed, and was given by Susan Manning, Mary's daughter.

'Love and Lethe' is the fifth story, which concerns Belacqua picking up Ruby Tough from her home at her parents and driving off to a mountain where they have made a suicide pact, either by bullet or poison. Ruby accidentally fires the gun which doesn't find a target and as she has tempted him they have sex: love and death are much the same, aren't they? Dante's Purgatorio is an obvious reference, although there are biblical references, such as to Perugino's Pietà, as well to the temptation of Christ, with Ruby seen as Mary Magdelene, for instance: we have woman seen as both the sacred and the profane. More obscure references as to Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy’s fairy tale princesses Florine and Truitonne in L'Oiseau bleu, and Knowlson has also discovered an allusion to Tasso's Aminta.

'Walking Out' is the sixth story, the title referring to an expression of courtship, and sees Belacqua riding horseback in the countryside with his fiancée Lucy, only when Lucy discovers that her fiancé has gone there to spy on a German couple having sex (voyeurism isn't uncommon among Beckettian heroes) she leaves quickly, gets hit by a car driven by a drunken lord and spends the rest of her time in a wheelchair (again, a means of transport not unkown in the Beckett canon). Meanwhile Belacqua, unaware of the accident, is caught by 'the Tanzherr' (the male spied on) and beaten severely. Belacqua marries Lucy. 

'What a Misfortune' is the seventh story, referring to Voltaire's eunuch's comment on Cunégonde's beauty in Candide: 'O che sciagura d’essere senza coglioni ! (Oh quel malheur d'être sans couilles !)': both the Italian and the French are given in Voltaire, meaning 'What a misfortune not to have balls'. This story is a satire on the bourgeois Irish Protestant family. Two years after his marriage to Lucy, she dies. The narrative very much concerns Belacqua's and his wedding (plus reception) to Thelma bboggs [sic], who's the daughter of Otto (in, ahem, toiletries) and Bridie, who's been sexually serviced by Walter Draffin, with the full approval of Otto, who doesn't have to bother with the chore: so Walter (as the cicisbeo) receives a wedding invitation, which he accepts. The friendless Belacqua co-opts 'Hairy', or Capper Quin, into being best man. We learn in the final chapter that Thelma dies on the honeymoon night.

'The Smeraldina's Billet-Doux' is the eighth story, and is based on a love letter that a cousin of Beckett's, Peggy Sinclair, written to him. She had left with her family for Germany when young and had an affair later with Beckett, who several times visited her in Germany, although she died in 1931, when Beckett was in hospital in Dublin. Peggy's parents were angry with Beckett's mention of her letter to him, in which he parodies Peggy's poor English.

'Yellow' is the ninth story, which sees Belacqua in hospital for operations on his neck and toe (like Beckett). His reference to being frightened of 'wet[ting] the bed' is probably an allusion to Jules Renard's writing, which was a great source of pleasure to Beckett. Beckett too had been in hospital, although unlike Belacqua he survived: Belacqua's anaesthetic was too strong.

'Draff', which refers to dregs, is the tenth and final story, and concerns the Smeraldina (Belacqua's third wife) handling his funeral. The unnamed groundsman drinking his Guinness will becaome Doyle in 'Echo's Bone's'. There's a suggestion that the Smermaldina and Capper 'Hairy' Quin will become a couple, and as Hairy drives to Belacqua's former house the gardener has set it on fire: another reference to the Malahide murders.

Much ink has been spent on More Pricks than Kicks and no doubt will continue to do so, as stories in it seem endlessly re-interpretable.