I have always thought that writing was close to music, only much less pure, and I have always envied musicians who to my mind practised an art which iI have always thought that writing was close to music, only much less pure, and I have always envied musicians who to my mind practised an art which is higher than the novel. Poets, too, who are closer to musicians than novelists. I began writing poems as a child, and that is surely why a remark I read somewhere struck such a chord with me: 'prose writers are made from bad poets'. For a novelist, in terms of music, it is often a matter of coaxing all the people, the landscapes, the streets he has been able to observe into a musical score which contains the same melodic fragments from one book to another, but which will seem to him to be imperfect. The novelist will then regret not having been a pure musician and not having composed Chopin's Nocturnes.
Patrick Modiano's 2014 Nobel lecture is a very moving, lucid, poetic and enlightening essay on writing, memory, Paris during the Occupation in the second world war, his use of telephone directories in the creative process, Proust, the importance of childhood experiences on writing, his views on his own writing and vocation as a novelist, the harmony which develops between the reader and the author. He finely brushes his themes ("Themes of disappearance, identity and the passing of time are closely bound up with the topography of cities"), touches on the writer as as seismograph who reveals the depths and reality hidden behind appearances and his literary influences - particularly other writers who - like Modiano is to Paris - are strongly linked to a single city (Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Söderberg).
With the passing of the years, each neighbourhood, each street in a city evokes a memory, a meeting, a regret, a moment of happiness for those who were born there and have lived there. Often the same street is tied up with successive memories, to the extent that the topography of a city becomes your whole life, called to mind in successive layers as if you could decipher the writings superimposed on a palimpsest. And also the lives of the thousands upon thousands of other, unknown, people passing by on the street or in the Métro passageways at rush hour.
I returned to my city familiar to tears, To my vessels and tonsils of childhood years, Petersburg, […] While you're keeping my telephone numbers alive. Petersburg, I still have the addresses at hand That I’ll use to recover the voice of the dead.
I was moved to tears by the stanza's of this poem of Osip Mandelstam that Modiano quoted - it reminded me of the moment I found the telephone guide 1997-1998 from Leuven that the French artist Christian Boltanski (1944-2021) used in his work of art "Les abonnés du téléphone, 2000" that one can see - and touch - in the basement of the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, and looked up the telephone number of the place where I had been living at that time with the one who I loved and who took me to Paris, and is no more.
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Sometimes human existence is simply signified by lists of names, as in Abonnées du téléphone (‘Telephone Subscribers’), which was designed for the exhibition “Voilà” in 2000, where telephone directories from all over the world were displayed on shelves and could be consulted. Human presence here was reduced to its simplest expression: a surname.
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Thank you very much Helga, for bringing this lecture of this author that I adore to my attention.
Modiano, toujours Modiano.
To me, Monsieur Modiano, your novels mean as much as the nocturnes, and preludes, and other pieces of Chopin - an almost daily necessity, a balm -thank you ♥.
The Nobel lecture of Patrick Modiano can be found here (in French, English and Swedish)....more
The silence between us was a bond stronger than words.
'A great book must have an unforgettable style, an unforgettable music', Patrick ModiDancing
The silence between us was a bond stronger than words.
'A great book must have an unforgettable style, an unforgettable music', Patrick Modiano asserted in an interview and his latest novel, La danseuse(Ballerina) would be a perfect illustration of his own artistic credo. Again, it is set into the familiar, atmospheric Modiano key of menace, memory and melancholy that makes reading his books so mesmerizing and addictive for the readers that are receptive to his music and his style. From the four novels he published since winning the Nobel Prize in 2014 (the others being Sleep of Memory, Invisible Ink, Scene of the Crime), I would denote La danseuse as the one that enchanted me the most - and as a highlight of this reading year.
Shadowy and ghostly figures that are perpetually walking the streets and squares of Paris, which are enveloped in a subdued light as if though illuminated by a light bulb not getting enough power, or sunken into a mist, resurfacing memories that blend past and present, reality and dream - with familiar themes and elements Modiano draws the reader in from the first paragraph, in which the narrator presents the duo his novel will revolve around, a dancer and her seven year old son, Pierre.
The mysterious dancer is a single mother, nameless, whom the narrator remembers after fifty years, when he presumes recognising the man who brought him into contact with the dancer. In his memory unfold images of a long-forgotten period of his life that have lain under a layer of ice, images of walking through Paris with the dancer, and of chaperoning her from dance class, as well as minding her child Pierre, while she is rehearsing of performing.
Following the advice of her Russian dance teacher Boris Kniassef, the young woman tries to get her life in line by the relentless self-discipline dancing requires, getting away from her difficult childhood and past, training her body steadily to reach that astounding level of finesse and elegance that creates that illusion of perfect lightness, of feet no longer touching the ground, of effortless flying. Inspired by her example and her strength, almost without realising it, the narrator is encouraged to gradually crawl out of his shell of emptiness and insecurity will grow towards what he will become, a writer. Like the discipline of dancing is a lifeline for the dancer, writing will give him what he needs to survive: And slowly but surely, the feeling of emptiness and stagnation at the bottom of my soul that crept up on me at certain times of the day disappeared. It was as if she pulled me along and pushed me back to the surface.
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The search for lost time sometimes leads to a sunny clearing or a beach, and moments that have been saved from oblivion and give you the impression of an eternal present.
Particularly the scenes in which the narrator is looking after Pierre are moving, reminiscent of the numerous other neglected children in Modiano’s work (Vestiaire de l'enfance, So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood), Pierre’s making of puzzles with the narrator gently reflecting the narrator’s own attempts to puzzle the pieces of his and the dancer’s lives together. Parallelling the elegance and featherlight feel of dancing movements with graceful, gossamer writing, beautifully mirrored in Modiano’s subtle prose, La danseuse is a Modiano grand cru, dreamy and charming, striking a tender note with a heartwarming and playful finale.
And I ended up persuading myself that it was us, because the same situations, the same steps, the same gestures are repeated throughout time. And they are not lost, but eternally inscribed on the pavements, walls and station halls of this city. The eternal return of the same.
I don't photograph life as it is, but life as I would like it to be. — Robert Doisneau
For someone who is in love with Paris, this collection of 560I don't photograph life as it is, but life as I would like it to be. — Robert Doisneau
For someone who is in love with Paris, this collection of 560 photographs of the French photographer Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) is an absolute treat.
While I mostly associate images of nocturnal Paris with the photography of Brassaï, Doisneau’s photographs add a matutinal perspective on the city, widening the scope to street scenes in broad daylight. His exploring and documenting of Paris in black and white is often cheerful, with an eye for humour and the comical, shimmering with joie de vivre, celebrating life, love (Cosy kiss, 1950) and the beauty of Paris.
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Thematically organised (Paris by surprise, Paris for Parisians (les Halles, everyday Parisians, a home for tenants, Paris-by –the-Seine) Paris in Upheaval (occupation, resistance, liberation, demonstrations), Paris at play (fairs, cabarets and nightclubs, society, fashion) Paris in concrete, the book offers enchanting vignettes from the multifarious facets everyday life in Paris, a couple of snapshots from children’s play, love, a couple of glamourous events and magnificent portraits.
Particularly with his choices on the human figure Doisneau illustrates breezingly the French national motto of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, juxtaposing casually portraits of ordinary Parisians next to photographs of personalities that might ring a bell with the reader (Charles de Gaulle, Vercors, Prévert, Francis Ponge, Raymond Queneau, Juliette Binoche, Orson Wells, Alberto Giacometti (1958), Picasso, Colette, some couturiers (Christian Lacroix, Jean-Paul Gaultier)
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A couple of favourites are gems of storytelling condensed in just one image, for instance the accordionist on the cover picture or the picture of Anita, who could one of those characters with a shady past one encounters so often in the cafés and bars described by Patrick Modiano.
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The photographs are accompanied by fragments from the personal notebooks of Doisneau and some of these witty comments made me smile, for instance when he recounts of loitering around and so coming late to work because he preferred to capture the poetry of a gracious moment, taking a snapshot from a street scene that he finds amusing, savouring the urban spectacle during his strolls:
“One morning I had an appointment with a clutch of advertising people who were preparing a campaign to launch new washbasins in polystyrene – or was it polyester?
As usual, I was late, and as I was crossing the Tuileries I was held up by a van marked ‘Gougeon: Fine Art Movers.’
Once I saw the statues by Maillol, the washbasins completely slipped by mind.
It must have been about that time that the advertising agency stopped returning my calls.”
[image] Venus gone bust, 1964
For half of a century I pounded the cobblestones, then asphalt, of Paris, wandering up and down the city. The few images that now rise to the surface of the flow of time, bobbing together like corks on a swirling stream, are those taken on time stolen from my employers. Breaking the rules strikes me as a vital activity, and I must say I enjoyed indulging in it. [image] Diagonal steps 1953
[image] The centaur town hall of the 6th arrondissement 1971
Charm needs to be fleeting, Doisneau reflects , but glancing through this wondrous collection, I am grateful for Doisneau’s art to stop and capture time in his photographs....more
Oh, how fascinating it was! How she enjoyed it! How she loved sitting here, watching it all! It was like a play. It was exactly like a play. Who couldOh, how fascinating it was! How she enjoyed it! How she loved sitting here, watching it all! It was like a play. It was exactly like a play. Who could believe the sky at the back wasn’t painted?
Perhaps worse than becoming invisible when aging is to find oneself becoming risible, out of touch, the laughing stock in the merciless, condescending eye of youthful brashness. It is hard to cultivate and maintain an unconditional sense of self-worth when confronted which such cruelty. Who are you in the deepest parts of your fragile being, when nobody is watching?
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Miss Brill, a middle-aged English teacher residing in a seaside town in France, makes a habit of crawling out of her dark little room every Sunday, spending her idle afternoons in the park, observing the people, enjoying the tunes a band is playing, eavesdropping on conversations of the people surrounding her. As the season is changing and it is getting chilly, she cheerfully warms herself by taking out her cherished fur stole and basking in the radiant natural beauty that meets her eye: Behind the rotunda the slender trees with yellow leaves down drooping, and through them just a line of sea, and beyond the blue sky with gold-veined clouds.
Sitting on a bench, observing the people around her from a distance, sitting in other people's lives just for a minute while they talked round her, she feels part of the whole, without needing to participate herself – as if attending a play. Nevertheless some sense of belonging engulfs her and she permits herself some mildly cheeky thoughts and judgements on others, filling in their interactions with her own imagination as if she were a playwright - until her carefully self-created illusionary world is shred to pieces. Boxing herself in again like her fur stole, even her innocuous Sunday treat, a slice of honey cake, loses his lustre.
As ever elegantly written and well-composed, replete with well-chosen symbols, motifs, echoes and reflections this is a quietly devastating short story showing Katherine Mansfield in excellent shape. The emotional impact of this intense evocation of loneliness and disillusion on the reader corresponds to Mansfield’s dexterity in drafting mood pieces, making the allusions to her literary indebtedness to Anton Chekhov sound plausible (the puncturing of illusions in particularly bringing Chekhov's equally heart-rending The Kiss to mind).
I did not want to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from honeymoon, wI did not want to know but I have since come to know that one of the girls, when she wasn’t a girl anymore and hadn’t long been back from honeymoon, went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoned her blouse, took off her bra and aimed her own father’s gun at her heart, her father at the time was in the dining room with other members of the family and three guests.
Bang! What an explosive entry. From the first deliciously long, savoury, suspenseful sentence Javier Marías had me hooked, holding me dangling on his words like a fish that lost sense of its fish nature, oblivious if it is water or air that is essential for life – or both. Even if I thought having an inkling of what to expect with this second foray into his writing after reading Thus Bad Begins a few years ago, Marías brilliant writing took my breath away.
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Opening with the suicide of the sister of the narrator’s mother – a sister who as well had been married to the narrator father, Ranz, previously - Marías weaves an intriguing tapestry out of family secrets and mysteries, circling around the shady past of Juan’s enigmatic father Ranz and his two – or three? – marriages. At least one of these women being dead, allusions on Bluebeard slowly sneak under the skin. Why does Ranz give Juan the nuptial advice not to share all his secrets with his bride? What is he hiding? Juan’s bewilderment on his family’s past interferes with his feelings of mystification by his own recent marriage with Luisa, his ominous sense of foreboding that disaster looms over them, cunningly drawing the reader in by weaving variations on the book’s epigraph from Macbeth as a leitmotif throughout the novel:
My hands are of your colour; but I Shame To wear A Heart So White
Isn’t one of the pleasures of marriage that one is able to share and talk about ‘everything’ safely and at ease, finding a non-judging listening ear in the intimacy of pillow talk? Why would one keep things to oneself? Once something has been told, it cannot be untold. The listener’s heart might no longer be white, but tainted by knowledge that is unbearable.
The truth never shines forth, as the saying goes, because the only truth is that which is known to no one and which remains untransmitted, that which is not translated into words or images, that which remains concealed and unverified, which is perhaps why we do recount so much or even everything, to make sure that nothing has ever really happened, not once it's been told...
At first, because of the multiple scenes of eavesdropping and voyeurism (an important leitmotif in Marías Thus Bad Begins as well) and the complex and intriguing relationship of Juan with his father Ranz, I was reminded of Alberto Moravia’s The Voyeur. While Moravia’s novel however has heavy Freudian undertones, Marías doesn’t seem interested in such straightforward psychologising. By the figure of the mysterious father he rather evokes the elusiveness and intangibility of life– a point he returns to several times in the novel: We spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and thus can be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do.
Apart from the flowing sentences meandering the reader through the narrative in a slightly intoxicating pace, what makes this book so delicious are its many echoes, inner resonances of themes, reflections and motifs which are mirrored in Marías’ ample use of repetitions giving the novel the quality of a musical composition. From Juan’s fairly innocent duplicity in his work as a translator to Ranz’ dubious exploits as an art expert, Marías questions the sheer possibility of truth and truthfulness, making the point that one simply cannot know the truth. His irreverent, playful tone seems to suggest best to take the futility of truth and life lightly, but cannot conceal a subtle undertone of melancholy.
The novel is replete with amusing interludes and absurdist, almost slapstick scenes, showing Marías as a lover of the art of stylish digression. From an essay of Jonathan Coe on the book, I gathered that Don Quixote, rather than Tristram Shandy must have been on Marías’ mind as a type of digression (having read neither Don Quixote nor Tristram Shandy, Coe’s observations are a powerful reminder to try to squeeze them in before everything ends, which can happen any moment, Marías’ recent sudden demise a sad memento mori).
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Marriage and secrets, perhaps they are as inseparable as Siamese twins, the one unable to exist without the other?
Does something become true if we repeat it often enough? Revealing more would just spoil the reading pleasure of discovering the many delight this novel has in store for yourself, unnecessarily risking a stain on your reader’s heart still white....more
Even peoples without writing love their libraries.
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Mukamwezi’s silhouette floated and undulated in the grain of the dusty fog like a reflection Even peoples without writing love their libraries.
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Mukamwezi’s silhouette floated and undulated in the grain of the dusty fog like a reflection in the flowing water of a river. At times her pale face seemed to drift away from the rest of her body and hover on the swirls of mist.
Having been wanting to read France-based Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga since Katia’s fascinating review on Our Lady of the Nile put her firmly on my radar about five years ago, I was thrilled getting the chance to read Kibogo, the English translation of Kibogo est monté au ciel as a first acquaintance with Mukasonga’s work, as none of her books are available in the local library.
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Kibogo surpassed my (high) hopes and expectations. How to portend that Mukasonga would weave a fairy tale-esque, humorous, satiric folktale out of elements as drought, famine, (German and Belgian) colonisation and the supplanting of Rwandan mythology and cults by forced evangelisation?
Told in four interlocking fragments, Mukasonga’s tale is not only well-composed and written in a gorgeous, gossamer prose larded with Rwandan history and culture, but it is also an astute commentary on colonialism and exploitation. She lampoons Western Christian proselytism, superiority thinking and preposterous appropriation of African historiography. Notwithstanding the import and weight of these topics, this book surprises with its light tone, and so probably shows a quite different side of Mukasonga’s craft than her account on the Rwandan genocide (Cockroaches). The joy of writing this clearly splashes from Mukasonga’s imaginative storytelling. She breathes life into the priestess/sorceress Mukamwezi and the befuddled seminarian Akayezu with panache. Depicting the old men of the village rivalling to tell the tallest stories to give a French professor coming around to jot down their legends - hoping to find traces of cannibalism that fit into his theories - value for his money, she shows her keen eye for colourful detail.
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I was quite amused by the way Mukasonga toys with religious paradigms, drawing parallels between the pagan beliefs and some core points of belief in Christianity, applying her irreverent brush to the twists and connections between them (the worshipping of the statue of Maria, a circle of women as apostles, the self-sacrifice, Ascension and Assumption of Jesus/Mary and Kibogo/Akayezu/Mukawezi). With barbed understatement and irony Mukasonga shows how the padri, the white missionaries, don’t really practise what they preach on the Christian values but rather use their doctrines to scare off and intimidate their newly converted flock into obedience.
The legend of Mukamwezi became part of the storytellers’ nocturnal repertoire. In it, she was reunited with Kibogo and his retinue behind the clouds and dancing on the crest of the mountain, she adorned herself with pearls of rain. And the murmur of the story blended with the dreams of the child Akayezu nestled in his mother’s pagne, half dozing in the warmth of the heart, until they were one and the same.
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A wondrous tribute to the art of storytelling, I couldn’t have dreamt of a more marvellous introduction to a new-to-me writer. (****1/2)
(The illustrations are pictures of the textile art created by women belonging to the Savane Rutongo-Kabuye workshop from a mountain village close to Kigali).
Many thanks to the author, Netgalley and Archipelago Books for generously granting me an ARC....more
You don’t know nights of love? Don’t petals of soft words float upon your blood? Are there no places on your dear body that keep rParis is beyond compare
You don’t know nights of love? Don’t petals of soft words float upon your blood? Are there no places on your dear body that keep remembering like yes? (Paris, Summer 1909, Rainer Maria Rilke)
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I love Paris. And I love poetry. So what else would you expect me to do after reading this lovely, lovely anthology which combines both Paris and poetry from cover to cover than sing its praise, as it hit the mark in every respect?
Streets, people, parks, monuments, artists, ideas, revolution, war, liberation, love, exile, the poems Emily Fragos comprised in this collection range widely over time (from the 14th to the 21th century) and themes, juxtaposing French poets in translation with poems written by the motley crew of poets from all over the world who descended on Paris for short or longer periods of time, living there in exile or by choice or just dropping by as a tourist - all united by their experience of Paris, imagined and/or real.
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From frivolous (Zelda Fitzgerald) to bitter (James Fenton, In Paris with you), from erotic (Andre Breton, Free Union) to elegiac (Tristan Tzara, The death of Guillaume Apollinaire), covering art, revolution, war (Paul Eluard, Curfew), bringing homage to composers (Frank O’Hara, Poulenc), artists and poets (René Char, Max Jacob), expressing joie de vivre (Sara Teasdale, Paris in Spring and grief, ranging from fourteen words (Ezra Pound, In the station of the métro), haiku (Richard Wright) to prose poem, the variety of themes, poetic forms and tones kept on surprising and enchanting me.
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Re-reading the poems I had marked when I was reading the collection the first time in order to select a couple for sharing here to give an idea of the width and range of the collection, I had the intention to make a list of ten favourite ones to which I would add a little note each. I ended up with a list of thirty poems and a nagging inability to choose. There is Rilke, of course. And Paul Éluard. Prévert, Prévert and more Prévert (did I already mention Prévert?). The selection of French surrealists and kindred spirits (Desnos, Breton, Soupault, Éluard, Tzara, Apollinaire) in the chapter dedicated to love struck me as outstandingly beautiful (I also enjoyed the corresponding surreal feeling of reading them in English translations). Paris approached from the perspective of poets in exile or washed ashore in Paris from abroad draws different colours and views on the city than the average romantic or swooning tourist (like yours truly) is capable of – evoking melancholy, loss, loneliness as well as city’s spellbinding lure (Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Nabokov, Osip Mandelstam, Adam Zagajewski, César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Rita dove, Oscar Wilde, Czeslaw Milosz, Leopold Sédar Senghor (In memoriam). The dazzling cosmopolitism of the collection make me curious to find out more about each poet’s relationship with Paris and about their time spent there, wondering if they all have effectively been there, wondering for instance if the Paris Nazim Hikmet evokes so stunningly in his poem Before the time runs out, my rose arose purely from his imagination of the city or from memories on it.
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All strangers love her, will always find her fair, because such elegance, such happiness, will not be found in any town but this: Paris is beyond compare.
Maybe the words Eustache Deschamps wrote on Paris in the 14th century are still valid?
Having already spent many a delightful hour savouring these poems, I feel fortunate I’ll have the chance to keep this book company when it will travel to Paris next September....more
The mystery of the appearance of a new being; it’s a great and inexplicable mystery', Shahtov mumbled incoherently, stupefied and enraptured. ‘There wThe mystery of the appearance of a new being; it’s a great and inexplicable mystery', Shahtov mumbled incoherently, stupefied and enraptured. ‘There were two people, and all of a sudden there’s a third being, a new spirit, whole and complete, such that no human hands could ever create; new thought and new love; it’s frightening, actually…There’s nothing greater on earth!
Thoughts and notes in the meantime got lost in the chaos of life, but not the imprint this masterpiece left on me, nor the truth of this observation on the miracle that is the birth of a child....more
And there, when he went walking at nightfall, in the quiet little snowy streets that were filled with a gentle indulgence, he would run his hands lighAnd there, when he went walking at nightfall, in the quiet little snowy streets that were filled with a gentle indulgence, he would run his hands lightly over the red and white bricks of the houses and, clinging to the wall, sidewise, through fear of being indiscreet, he would look through the clear panes into downstairs rooms in which green plants on china saucers had been set in the window, and from where, warm, full, heavy with a mysterious denseness, objects tossed him a small part—to him too, although he was unknown and a stranger—of their radiance; where the corners of a table, the door of a sideboard, the straw seat of a chair emerged from the half-light and consented to become for him, mercifully for him, too, since he was standing there waiting, a little bit of his childhood.
Usually I tend to struggle with writing that is regarded as experimental, even in case the eloquence, erudition or playfulness of it stuns me. A few years ago I pencil-marked lots of lush sentences in the amazingly poetical Passages by Ann Quin because they resonated with me aesthetically, but I was relieved when arriving at the last page of the book, finding it hard to make sense of it and postponing a re-read, assuming a revisit wouldn’t bring much reading joy. So why Sarraute’s fragments, without continuing narrative or plot, without names or identifiable characters - a character could as well be a china doll, a marionette as a human being, there are children, a grabby family friend, a grandfather who holds a grandchild’s hand teaching it how to cross a zebra crossing, cooks, servants, housewives devouring chocolate éclairs in tearooms, only denoted by personal pronouns,‘they’, ‘he’ and ‘she’ – elicited the kind of reading rapture that prompted me to read it a second time within a month after I finished it ?
I was charmed by the lyricism of some of Sarraute’s fragments and the wild variety in moods (unsettling, menacing, tender, pensive, slight disquiet). The evocation of how one bends oneself under expectations of others, of one’s family, especially as a child touched a chord (several fragments reminded me of her autobiographical Enfance, the child sitting on her bed in a room, contemplating, her intellectual greediness). Sarraute opens windows where there are none, observing the characters as living dolls moving around in doll’s house, offering the reader the position of a privileged outsider who can look through the walls of an apartment block and observe how life is lived intensely within the rooms at view, showing slices of life in slow motion, the succinctness of the vignettes intensifying and enlarging the exteriorised inner experience of every day drama. In Sarraute’s own words: “What I tried to do was to show certain inner “movements” by which I had long been attracted; in fact, I might even say that, ever since I was a child, these movements, which are hidden under the commonplace, harmless appearances of every instant of our lives, had struck and held my attention.”
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The changes in perspective, the shape and the observing angle found in these fragments reminded me of some of the few short stories of Virginia Woolf I have read, essentially A Haunted House - Virginia Woolf and The Lady in the Looking-Glass. Sarraute named Woolf as one of her influences and particularly the way both writers conjure up the feeling of being in a room, a subtle sense of how one’s body relates to other bodies, objects, furniture and the intensity and precision of the prose when gracefully evoking detail. However Sarraute’s exploration on the edges of consciousness is a darker and more haunting one, the recurrent dissonances which surface in the fragments in the form of slightly disconcerting animalistic metaphors (jellyfish, hungry pitiless parasites, leeches, slugs stuck everywhere, spreading their mucus on corners of Rimbaud) are as many caveats for the readers not to let themselves soothe asleep. The weight of expectations on children, the burdening pressure to conform, the menace undercutting the false security ostensibly offered in the bosom of the family is tangible in most fragments in which Sarraute outlines the muted inner screams provoked by the everyday madness within the bourgeois family.
A sense of power struggle and subdued domestic violence and oppression pervade some of the fragments. Even a hand gesture speaks volumes, a motionless sitting becomes significant and softness means menace, forcing one to dance to the mute tune of the sitter, a suffocating presence needs to be appeased. He felt that she should be set straight, soothed, at any cost, but that only someone endowed with superhuman strength would be able to do it, someone who would have the nerve to remain there opposite her, comfortably seated, well-settled in another chair, who would dare to look her calmly in the face, catch her eye, not divert his own from her squirming.
The interior responsiveness of characters to others which Sarraute likens to the natural phenomenon of tropisms, in which organisms move in response to an external stimulus such as sunflowers twisting toward a light source, resembles the interacting of dancers in an intricate choreography of push-pull movements, captured in the words which dance on the pages:
How exhausting is all this effort, this perpetual hopping and skipping about in his presence: backwards, forwards, forwards, forwards, and backwards again, now circling about him, then again on his toes, with eyes glued to him, and sidewise and forwards and backwards, to give him this voluptuous pleasure.
The rhythm, the cadence, the dark undercurrents of emotions give the impression that the twenty-four fragments stand on the pages as prose poems, an impression enhanced by the copious use of white space in the edition I read. The lack of narrative arch, some of the pieces seem in close connection to each other, mirroring, enhancing each other, having whispering conversations with each other, reflecting for instance contrasting movements, as in counterpoint, the stillness and powerlessness while sitting on the bed, waiting in fragment V is followed by a hectic power struggle chasing the ones present in fragment VI around. Characters are chirping like birds in an aviary, thoughts patter, shuffle, push away.
When sharing thoughts on a poetry collection, I am often tempted to single out a favourite poem I cherish; trying to do the same with Tropisms, reading it a second time makes it harder to choose just one, as the resonance of the fragments seems to grow reading them once more.
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One of my favourite, more mellow, fragments (XVI) describes an older couple and the little they need:
Now they were old, they were quite worn out, “like old furniture that has seen long usage, that had served its time and accomplished its task”, and sometimes (this was coyness on their part) they heaved a sort of short sigh, filled with resignation and relief, that was like something crackling.
On soft spring evenings, they went walking together, “now that youth was finished, now that the passions were spent”, they went walking quietly, “to take a breath of fresh air before going to bed”, sit down in a café, spend a few moments chatting.
They chose a well-protected corner, taking many precautions (“not here, it’s in a draught, nor there, it’s just beside the lavatory”), they sat down – “Ah! These old bones, we’re getting old. Ah! Ah!”- and they let their cracking be heard.
The place had a cold, dingy glitter, the waiters ran about too fast in a rough, indifferent manner, the mirrors gave back harsh reflections of tired faces and blinking eyes.
But they asked for nothing more, this was it, they knew it well, you shouldn’t expect anything, you shouldn’t demand anything, that’s how it was, there was nothing more this was it, ‘life’.
Nothing else, nothing more, here or there, now they knew it.
You should not rebel, dream, hope, make an effort, flee, you had only to choose carefully (the waiter was waiting) whether it was to be a grenadine or a coffee? With milk or black? While accepting unassumingly to live – here or there – and let time go by.
No wonder this magical work seem to have inspired the name-giving of a bookshop in Brussels.
My edition included as an extra the fragment VI that Sarraute originally published in the 1939 edition but chose to eliminate in the 1957 edition because she thought it too dated by its references to past events.
Powerful and brilliant, the joy of new musical details vibrating in delicate turns of phrases to discover with each reading, Tropisms feels very much as a book to be read again and again....more
This, and much more, she accepted - for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case – mere possibThis, and much more, she accepted - for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case – mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.
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Sublime, sprightly, brilliant – returning to Nabokov again, I am tripping over superlatives. Further thoughts to come....more
Whoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.
I was elated by this line the moment I first came across it some years ago – and now encouWhoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.
I was elated by this line the moment I first came across it some years ago – and now encountering it at its home, embedded in in this brilliant novel was like a finally visiting a place I have been dreaming of going to for a long time.
Poetry, coffee, irreverent and at times absurd philosophical conversations touching on religion and history, a playful tribute to the Ewig Weibliche – this turned out an excellent and fun holiday reading choice.
The excellent afterword of Susan Sontag singing the praise of it is a lovely bonus - unlike her, I just wouldn't postulate that Under the Glacier is unlike every other book Laxness wrote; the light and witty tone and his toying with the import of poetry and history in Iceland reminded me a lot of Wayward Heroes – besides, both novels made me laugh out loud quite a few times.
Not (yet? or not anymore?) up to forge a review for the time being, I recommend reading this review - it encapsulates this delectable novel better than I ever could, even in my wildest dreams.
It is better to stay where I am once and for all. Where should I go? Here I have reached the edge of the world and time stands still.
Jean Moreno, It is better to stay where I am once and for all. Where should I go? Here I have reached the edge of the world and time stands still.
Jean Moreno, alias Jimmy Sarano, is a novelist in self-imposed exile. From Paris, he escaped to an unnamed heat-stricken town after a car accident. He is living a secretive life, hiding for anyone who could possibly have known him in his former identity. Is it Tangier? Perhaps Gibraltar? Is it even a real city? As a French expatriate he writes a serial for Radio-Mundial titled "The Adventures of Louis XVII", which recounts the life of the Dauphin of France who became a planter in Jamaica – counterfactual historiography which is in fact a collage of fragments Moreno copies from other authors. He has given up on writing fiction, his imaginative powers apparently frozen since his flight – the use of his imagination likely to endanger his carefully constructed dam against memory.
After twenty years of ignoring his past and trying to live in the eternal now, Moreno’s repressed memories of the past are rekindled when he encounters Marie. He wonders whether this elusive young woman could be the small child he used to know and babysit in Paris. Could she be the daughter of the actress Marie-Rose Jean Moreno was in love with in those days– a woman so much reminiscent of Modiano’s own actress-mother, blameworthy of a similar neglect and abandonment Modiano wrote about in Pedigree: A Memoir, depicting his mother as the pretty girl with the arid heart? Or is the Marie he thinks to recognize and seeks the company of just a lightning rod, a girl he needs to spin a story round enabling him – a writer and so an unreliable narrator par excellence – to gloss over his own painful memories of childhood, up to a certain point touching on them covered by the graceful veil of a curious blending of memory and amnesia?
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(Photograph by Marta Losiewicz)
Moreno, disorientated in the half-vanished, defective memories which he tries to reshape through Marie is lost in an emotional void. He is caught in the eternal present of a ghost town, in which his radio colleagues appear as phantoms, his state of mind echoed by the monument dedicated to the local hero and founder of the radio station Javier Cruz-Valer of which only lasts an empty base, leaving a powerful image of desertion reminiscent of some of the surrealist and troubling dream sequences in Bergman and Buñuel. Emotional emptiness makes him lose grip on present reality, in which he seems a phantom to himself, having to repeat his name, address and occupation to himself to anchor. Several echoes of Camus’s L'Étranger round the picture of Moreno’s feelings of existential emptiness (the heat, the name Marie, the town).
As per usual with Modiano, mysteries remain unresolved. Why does the chauffeur of an American lady he used to know is tasked in her testament to follow and watch Moreno’s days in such detail? Moreno’s involvement in and the consequences of the car accident are left in the dark. Is it a crime of omission, the criminal offence of Non-assistance to a person in danger – a crime that, not unlikely with Modiano, might be ominously referring to the Parisians who were looking away from the deportation to the death camps during WWII?
Loss, family trauma, childhood neglect, abandonment and the connected sense of guilt mould this into a characteristic as well as a particularly moving and haunting Modiano – maybe even more when seen through the lens of the autobiographical clues that can be found in other novels (like Pedigree: A Memoir and Family Record).
Awaiting the arrival of his most recent novel Chevreuse in the local library, Vestiaire de l’enfance (1989) was the fourteenth novel I have read of Modiano; hooked on Modiano’s idiosyncratic fusion of beauty and sadness, the melancholic, almost elegiac tone and suggestive and lyrical writing as well as his dreamlike world of memory and enigma once again enchanted me....more
A Few Figs from Thistles, the second collection I read by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was the sWhat should I be but just what I am?
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A Few Figs from Thistles, the second collection I read by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was the second collection of hers that was published (in 1920). As with the first collection I read by her, Second April, I was mesmerized by her blending of the beauty of classic lyrical forms (sonnet, tercet, eulogy) with emotional self-expression in various moods and registers, swerving from feisty, vital and playful educing her freedom of mind to the more considerate, confessional stanza’s revealing heartbreak.
FIRST FIG
MY candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends– It gives a lovely light!
Gracefully musical in her rhythms and rhyming, the melodious writing energizes. The poems testify of a passionate lust for life of a young woman who wasn’t to hang her head acquiescing to the coercion of the gender roles of her time, as the cheerful rebelliousness in Daphne and The philosopher illustrates:
THE PHILOSOPHER
AND what are you that, missing you, I should be kept awake As many nights as there are days With weeping for your sake?
And what are you that, missing you, As many days as crawl I should be listening to the wind And looking at the wall?
I know a man that's a braver man And twenty men as kind, And what are you, that you should be The one man in my mind?
Yet women's ways are witless ways, As any sage will tell,– And what am I, that I should love So wisely and so well?
There is exuberance, there is laughter. Flippant and scoffing, witty and at times a little naughty in a childlike way, the free-spirited woman is entitled to be as inconstant in love like men:
THURSDAY
AND if I loved you Wednesday, Well, what is that to you? I do not love you Thursday– So much is true.
And why you come complaining Is more than I can see. I loved you Wednesday,–yes–but what Is that to me?
(Does this poem remind you of a certain pop song too?)
Thank you so much, dear Vesna, for sending me this delightful breeze of refreshing lyricism on a wonderfully sunny spring Sunday.
Three brothers, Galal, Rafik and Serag, live together with their father Hafez and their wistful uncle Mustapha at the outskiIn praise of slothfulness
Three brothers, Galal, Rafik and Serag, live together with their father Hafez and their wistful uncle Mustapha at the outskirts of Cairo. The family is well-known and highly regarded in the neighbourhood, as having elevated the art of laziness to another dimension. Legends go around on the oldest brother Galal that he has been sleeping for seven years, only waking up to eat. But as Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world’ and their somnambulist world pivoting around the delights of sleep as a drug of oblivion is threatened by the wish of the youngest brother, Serag to free himself from the smothering arms of sleep and to venture looking for work (the horror!). Also the plans of the father Hafez to remarry are alarming, as a woman can only cause trouble when coming into a house ruining a state of sleep established since eternity: 'Uncle Mustapha, why do you play the fool? A child would understand. How can we sleep with a woman in the house? A woman who runs in and out all day, arranging everything around her. She’ll want everything right and proper to impress the neighbours. She’ll begin by getting a maid. Imagine it, Uncle Mustapha, a maid in the house! It makes me tremble! Without counting all her relatives! They’ll come to visit us. We’ll have to get up and dress to meet them. We might even talk to them. What kind of life would that be, I ask you! Rafik, the middle brother, had once been on the verge of marrying the prostitute Imtissal, but could in time change his mind as such would have meant he would have to earn a living by working, which would have killed him.
By painting the indolent life of this ‘nest of Oblomovs’ (dixit the Dutch translator fittingly describes this bunch of arch sloths in her post-face to the book) the Egyptian-French writer Albert Cossery (1913–2008) derides work ethics, exposing society’s obsessive preoccupancy with work and ambition by creating a topsy-turvy world, where masterful inactivity is extolled and attributed high status and work is something to be shunned at all costs, as disgraceful and repulsive.
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Particularly the dreamlike scenes in which the youngest, naïve Serag considers the (theoretical) possibility of work (how to know if it really exists if one has never seen it?) and so becomes the outlier in the family are sweetly absurdist, the inversion having optimal, ironic effect, for instance when his father gets wind of his audacious plans: 'What do I hear? You want to work! What do you dislike in this house? Ungrateful son! I have fed you and dressed for years and here are your thanks!'
Cossery’s tale is one of refusal of what he sees as a form of voluntary servitude, underpinned by a snappy, wayward view on freedom in which idleness is the ultimate wisdom and work is slavery, so-called progress bringing only subjugation. A labouring humanity is a trapped humanity. Possession means nothing, freedom means everything, and is there anything that curtails one’s freedom more than having to work to earn a living?
This novel is to be read with caution, it is not unlikely that one might hiccup with laughter here and there and I would recommend to make sure one can yawn ahead in peace and to have a pillow and a soft blanket at hand as the sleepiness of the brothers is pretty contagious(z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z)....more
I do love second-hand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt cameA love letter to letters and books
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I do love second-hand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to 'I hate to read new books,' and I hollered 'Comrade!' to whoever owned it before me.
84, Charing Cross Road is a sheer delight for lovers of bookshops and of the art of letter writing, brimming with charm, wit and nostalgia – and evidently, with book talk.
I adore reading letters – so much that as a child I dreamt of becoming a postie (such a shame that, just like one cannot read the books while working in the library, a postie isn’t supposed to read those letters). An epistolary novel like Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, the correspondence of Flaubert, Kafka’s Letters to Milena, or this– a selection of the transatlantic correspondence between Helene Hanff, a script writer in New York and the employees of Marks & Co (mostly with book buyer Frank Doel), an antiquarian bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road, London over the course of 20 years (1949 to 1969) - whether they come in the monophonic, dialogic or polyphonic type, compilations of letters spur my curiosity and interest.
This is one of the singular books that for a change not made me dream of visiting Paris once more but going to London instead. Or maybe just knowing it’s there is enough?
But I don’t know, maybe it’s just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I’d go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: “It’s there.”
The animated business correspondence initiated by Helene Hanff in her quest for old and rare books over time widens into more congenial exchanges, involving the families of the employees, thanking her for the food parcels (with meat and egg powder) Hanff sends to the bookshop on festive occasions like Christmas to supplement rations (food rationing in Britain went on until 1954), also giving a fascinating glimpse into the everyday concerns of that time.
Just read it to bask in the warmth of its gentleness and generosity and treat yourself to a dash of Hanff’s exuberant book love and punchy sense of humour.
Thank you again for the beautiful book. I shall try very hard not to get gin and ashes all over it, it's really much too fine for the likes of me.
Thank you so much Paul, for bringing this lovely and affecting book to my attention. ...more
It was a melancholy August night—melancholy because it already smelled of the autumn : the moon rose behind a purple cloud and hardly lighted the roadIt was a melancholy August night—melancholy because it already smelled of the autumn : the moon rose behind a purple cloud and hardly lighted the road and the dark fields of winter corn on either side. Stars fell frequently, Zhenya walked beside me on the road and tried not to look at the sky, to avoid seeing the falling stars, which somehow frightened her.
Anton Chekhov’s The house with the mezzanine (A Painter’s story)(1896) revolves around a rather despondent landscape painter staying on a friend’s estate who gets into contact with a mother and her two quite different daughters, Lydia (Lida) and Zhenya (Missyuss) Volchaninova, living on a neighbouring estate, in the titular house with the mezzanine. Lida, the elder daughter, is a school teacher with strong opinions, and in a way reminiscent of Irina Prozorova in Chekhov’s play The Three Sisters (when she exclaims “What we must do is work, and work, and work”), focused on action (“Ah ! My God, but we must do something!”). In fierce debates with the painter she shows scornful and antagonistic to the painter’s ‘useless life’ and idleness, while he mocks her political views and charitable actions in the community, which according to the disillusioned once utopian painter rather than structurally change the situation of the peasants keep them in place and render them even more unhappy
"Teaching peasants to read and write, giving them little moral pamphlets and medical assistance, cannot decrease either ignorance or mortality, just as the light from your windows cannot illuminate this huge garden," I said. "You give nothing by your interference in the lives of these people. You only create new demands, and a new compulsion to work."
While Lida gets annoyed by the painter’s idle passiveness and trenchant nihilism, he criticizes her activism as a superficial one, only making the peasants life harder by making them more aware of their deprivation and lack of life of the mind, dismissing the actions Lida undertakes – actions which are exactly those who Chekhov performed in his personal life too (giving medical care to the peasants free of charge, establishing schools). This left me wondering if Chekhov here was self-deprecating on his own actions and thought them futile or rather suggested such actions are worth the trouble anyway even if one is aware a more sweeping, structural change of society is necessary to really solve the issues one tries to tackle.
Despite the clashes with Lida, the painter keeps being drawn to the neighbouring house because of the younger sister Zhenya, nicknamed ‘Missyuss’ – she is of a dreamy, receptive and sensitive nature, tender, book-loving. She admires the painter and almost triggers him into overcoming his feelings of isolation and his unproductivity. They are kindred souls, and spend hours together in the garden, or walking.
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(Lithograph by Oleg Vassiliev which the artist was asked to produce in response to ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, 1991)
Even if the tensions between artistic-intellectual passivity (symbolised here by painting and reading) and the more activist stand might have been specific to the Russian society at that time, Chekhov’s story, apart from its beauty and poignancy, came across as touching on issues which are still relevant today, echoing a society’s prejudices and distrustful attitude towards artists of which some traces can be still seen today. Does art matter? Is art more than a mere adornment or allurement to life? Can art co-exist peacefully next to the suffering and deprivation from a moral point of view? Can art stay indifferent and aloof to the society that gives birth to it? Rather than financing art, shouldn’t we focus on and put our energy and resources in alleviating and solving societal needs which seem more pressing and urgent instead? Shortly before the lockdown, discussions and protests in my country were the order of the day, as one of the governments intended to cut the means for the cultural sector, so giving the impression of taking a populist stance and docilely following those who like to depict artists as idlers and profiteers (‘subside-slurpers’), a bunch of leftist and elitist criticasters biting the hand that feeds them and contributing nothing useful to society. Nihil novum sub sole?
The battle of ideas between Lida and the painter ends undecided as there simply isn’t an easy solution to the societal issues they both sense but on which their response is so different. Neither Lida nor the painter wins this fight, but there is another one going on of which the outcome will be much more affecting.
Chekhov beautifully contrasts the rundown estate and orchard where the painter is staying and the picturesque house with the mezzanine, both sisters who embody stern austerity versus poetry, the tense and sharp scenes of discussion and confrontations with Lida in the house and the happy, idyllic moments the painter spends with Zhenya in the garden, the forest or the field.
As not uncommon in Chekhov’s stories, chances on happiness, dreams on living a more meaningful life, more often than not vanish into thin air precisely at the moment they might seem within reach, on the moment one almost experience the honeysweet taste and smoothness of happiness on one’s tongue.
I have already begun to forget about the house with the mezzanine, and only now and then, when I am working or reading, suddenly—without rhyme or reason—I remember the green light in the window, and the sound of my own footsteps as I walked through the fields that night, when I was in love, rubbing my hands to keep them warm. And even more rarely, when I am sad and lonely, I begin already to recollect and it seems to me that I, too, am being remembered and waited for, and that we shall meet.
I try not to use the word ‘heart-breaking’ too lightly not to banalise it, but Chekhov’s closing sentences here seem to leave me little choice....more
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