Category: Books

Out of France

Patrick Modiano & annie Ernaux

Read in the last days, two of my most favored French writers. Two novels with significant differences and some intrinsic similarities. Both modest in length and profound in content.

Firstly, Patrick Modiano’s newest work Chevreuse (Gallimard, 2021), read by me as Unterwegs nach Chevreuse (Hanser, 2022) and with an English translation due to be published as Scene of the Crime by Yale University Press next year.

I remember repeating – to only then deny – the oft heard criticism that one Modiano is some how not much different to the one that came before, and it would not surprise if the same arguments are not still to be heard in respect of Chevreuse. I even admit to brief moments of déjà vu, during which I did wonder whether I hadn’t strayed into familiar territory, situation. But why should I not, for that uncertainty is essential to memory. So one reads on, and is again seduced by that particular atmospheric that Modiano effortlessly conjures; imbued with images of the past; of person and place; haunting and defining each future until they too bow to the dictates of time.

Out of the city, westward beyond the 16th arrondissement with its bourgeoisie enclave of Auteuil on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne and into the idyllic country side of the Chevreuse via the Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne in Jouy-en-Josas. These are the main places of the journey that our writing protagonist Jean Bosmans takes us on as he excavates his childhood, his more youthful years and some intermittent; in search of the past and in the interest of his literary form – and that of Modiano; the third person, if you will, in command of the narrative. (A choice of perspective that perhaps allows for some distance – whether reliable is another matter.)

Typically (for Modiano), this narrative exists in multiple time frames – the elderly writer Bosmans in approximately the here and now, his younger self during the mid-1960s, and the child of fifteen years previously. Whereby it is those middle years that drive the particulars of the story; those youthful years of first experiences and great expectations. And, it is no wonder, for they are his formative years as a writer, and he is beginning to understand that one of the greatest tools for his craft lay in the fusion of memory – that is, lived experience and emotion as it roots itself in the subconscious and takes on its on life over time – and the creative processes of imagination.

Chance meetings that aren’t (for instance, with the lovely Camille, incongruously called “tête de mort”, about which I note an English translation predicament: “dead head” is very literal but perhaps too much “Grateful Dead” for my tastes!), a sinister cast of characters with changing names, too many coincidences, too many echoes from blurred childhood memories, all stimulate the young writer’s imagination, and all the time Modiano, with his wonderful gift for blending the stations of his own life with those of his fictive, half-fictive characters, is creating a new reality – for the page, the reader and maybe even himself.

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Reading at intervals

For the last days, sleep has come at intervals, and when it arrives then never lasting very long. Too warm nights interrupted by god knows what, and accompanied by mentionable – and not – bodily needs, including the cerebral. Unable to return to sleep, this latter (the head bit) is satisfied only by reading until the eye lids become heavy and then drop. At times such as these, it is not usually to the book(s) I am presently in the midst of that I turn, rather I reach to short stories or essays that I can read through in one fell swoop.

So it was, during one disturbed night last week, that I picked up Hilary Mantel’s 2014 short story collection “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher”.

I remember at the time of publication, there was a right royal hoo-ha at the title – lent from the final story of the collection. (Printed somewhere pre-publication, and read by me back then.) This was, after all, not very long after Thatcher’s death and the bells (in our heads) still rung with the sounds of: Ding dong! The Witch is dead. That, a rather distasteful appropriation I thought, and those chanting said ditty (not as the Munchkins do in the Land of Oz; rather, substituting a word that rhymes with ‘witch’ I seem to recall) too young and too privileged to have been affected by Thatcherism and the social coldness it brought. The title Hilary Mantel gives to her story, which very much describes the substance of it – not a metaphor, not a dream – doesn’t particularly concern me; I am confident that the author’s disaffection of Thatcher would be well informed and well felt, and could hardly surprise. Margaret Thatcher, after all, may have been a lot of things, but boring was she not, and offers a perfect template for a fictional character. And, a writer of the Mantel magnitude can well afford the well earned luxury of artistic risk and transgression. In my opinion. And, one could surmise she knew she would be asking for trouble; perhaps she was looking for it!

The collection (eleven stories) is framed by its opener and the said Assassination, and while the latter gets the title and ISBN, most of the attention and the tut-tuts, it is the first, “Sorry to Disturb”, that paves the way (one is tempted to again return to Oz and trip along a yellow brick road) that leads to the grisly end, via a series of various degrees of grotesque interludes. I say framed, because both stories evolve from male strangers intruding into the constricted domestic space of a woman; their motivations may be other but both are accompanied by an aura of deceit and the suspicion of a ‘not good’ agenda. In the first story, that agenda is based on opportunism, cultural expectations and misunderstandings and is, in the end, warded off and ultimately harmless, in the last, both the intent and the outcome are clear – and deadly.

“Sorry to Disturb” is written in the first person and is a memoir piece (first published as “Someone to Disturb“ in the LRB in 2009 and referencing diary notations) set in Saudi Arabia where Mantel lived with her husband during the 1980s. An excellent read, in my opinion, that illustrates well, and gives perspective to, the daily dilemmas Westerners living for a time in countries with vastly different social and cultural norms are confronted with – the atmospherics (in an extended sense), the solitude, and just the sheer strangeness of the whole adventure.

After reading the Assassination story again, I was struck, not just by how extraordinarily similar the narrative voice was, but the odd sameness of the structure. Almost like the same story spun on its axis and transplanted from the suffocating heat of Jeddah to the leafy green of the English home counties. In both stories the narrator is not just complicit in the chain of events that follow, but makes herself almost into a co-conspirator, even as she – or is it another entity – stands outside the plot considering the action. Do I recognize the magnificent style of the Cromwell trilogy here?

In-between are, of course, ten other stories. Maybe some are better than others but, to my mind, all have a peculiar slant and psychological depth. They are short and succinct, and with the fine composition one would expect from Hilary Mantel. Mostly in the first person, but not all. Some are grotesque, some tragic. There is often humor where good taste says it shouldn’t be – which just shows how overrated good taste is. They are very idiosyncratic.

In the end, Mantel’s stories may well have worked magic – but not upon my eyelids; in fact, I devoured the entire volume. However unsettling the subject matter, my conscious self was not over stimulated. Rather, my intellect nourished, sleep became my reward.

A couple of stories from this collection and other works from Hilary Mantel are available in the London Review of Books archive (usually subscription is required).

[22nd June 2022] Well, who would have thunk it! Some things have a longer life on the internet than others – at The Guardian (where it was that I probably first read it) – is, still, the fictional demise of Mrs. Thatcher, titled: Hilary Mantel: The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – August 6th 1983.

Either/Or

Elif Batuman is another of those writers – and there are enough – known to me through various long forms of journalism but whose books I haven’t read. But, having just listened to her and been reminded, I am encouraged to remedy this omission in the near future. Batuman’s recently released novel, Either/Or, has been very well received, and I have always had a penchant for the bildungsroman (as do some whose bildung only ever got so tend to have), or as which it was so described somewhere. This new work is, in fact, a sequel to her 2017 – also highly praised – book, The Idiot, and so I may have to read that first – if only to find out what Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard have in common, and what they both have in common with Batuman and her protagonist (be they not somehow the same!). Anyway, below is a Kindle preview that entices, and there is more information on the publisher’s website.

And, here, Alex Clarke’s review at The Guardian a couple of months ago that further whets the appetite.

& another bloomin’ 16th June …

One hundred of them; if counted from the 1922 publication of James Joyce’s modernist novel, Ulysses. Or, if one will, add another eighteen to count from the 16th June of 1904; the Dublin day fictionalized by Joyce, and presumably lived by him in a first carnal – or romantic, or both – encounter with Nora Barnacle.

Some resources for Bloomsday 2022, sponsored by The James Joyce Centre in Dublin, can be found here.

Enough that I castigate myself – again! – for not having read this bloomin’ legendary book. And, swear – again! – that I will. I will, I will! Or thus do I will myself.

Out of Essex

My copy of The Essex Serpent, pub. UK Serpent’s Tail (new paperback resplendent with Claire Danes & Tom Hiddleston!)

Sometimes a darn good yarn is in order, and it is as such that I would describe Sarah Perry’s 2016 novel The Essex Serpent that I have just finished reading. I recall that it was well received at the time of publication and quickly became a public’s darling (in the first instance, very much through ‘word of mouth’) and having read of a newly released streaming series (about which I heard the author speak on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme a short time ago), I was easily enough tempted by a bookshop display.

Not a complex book, but an intelligent and thoughtful one – well structured, with original, well formed characters and very nicely written indeed. If so inclined – and Perry encourages the inclination – it can also inspire to some historical and philosophical reflection on the last decades of the 19th century in Victorian England – a tumultuous time in which the social consequences of the industrial age were still settling, rigid class structures showing signs of fracture and Darwinism already being hijacked to explain “the evils” in society. Specifically, Perry uses this latter; imagined as a new “religion” based on science and rational thought, in conflict with the mysticism and belief system of the Christian tradition, and fought in proxy and along different lines by several of the characters.

Here, a review from 2016, a 2020 piece by Sarah Perry on how she came to write the novel, and, here, her thoughts about the Apple TV adaptation which premiered at the end of May (all in The Guardian). Like the author, I didn’t exactly envisage a Claire Danes sort as Cora, but Perry embraces the choice (so so will I!), and is very satisfied indeed with the production. Below, the trailer. I don’t have Apple TV but I will certainly try to see the series some time in the future.

Whose country is it anyway?

Nations and nationality. Land and people. Well worth contemplating at any time, but more so in these anxious days as an unjust war continues on the European continent, as a sovereign country is invaded and by a more powerful aggressor declared to as such not exist; these tangled roots of conflict inextricably entwined in the historical paths of the new nation states that were formed in accordance with the treaties made at the end of World War I, only to be viciously torn asunder, to then re-form (and again …) in the post World War II years as the old colonial powers retreated further out of lands strewn wide and two distinctly different conceptions of freedom and governance faced off and redefined the geo-political order. During those years, conflicts burgeoned in all corners of the world, one such being that region in the north-west of the African continent called the Maghreb.

Excerpt for the opening of “In the Country of Others” by Leïla Slimani, pub. Penguin, 2021.

In the Country of Others is the first novel in a planned series from Leïla Slimani; set in Morocco and exploring the fraught relationship between the peoples of that country and the French colonial power, and framed between the years immediately following the Second World War and the splintered nationalistic allegiances and revolutionary fervor of the mid-1950s that were to lead to independence. I should say, though this novel is removed with the war that rages in the Ukraine as I write – geographically, culturally, historically, that conflict informs and casts a shadow over all my reading at the moment, Slimani’s book is a powerful literary rendering of just one of the many failures of reconciliation left over from the last century and in that sense is informative of the situation in the conglomerate of states that (re-) formed after the break up of the Soviet.

As in her previous works of fiction, Slimani develops her narrative from very real circumstances, but this time very close to home indeed, and in every way. Home, here, is not the Parisian suburbs and their contemporary, middle-class milieus but, rather, the post-war colonial Morocco and a family blended out of French and Moroccan, like that of Slimani’s, and, as they, enmeshed in a profound and sometimes violent struggle for personal and cultural identity.

Calling upon an array of analogy and metaphor, like that of the hybrid orange and lemon trees that bring forth the most bitter of fruit, and through some wonderfully realized descriptive passages and imagery – visual and sensual – of a landscape and its inhabitants, at once harsh and seductive, juxtaposed against a reality defined by extreme hardship and poverty and the indignities of subjection that bring forth not the best in man, Slimani tells her story of the Belhaj family; seeking to take root upon harsh ground that is sparse in the emotional nourishment needed to grow and flourish.

Slimani’s characters, and with them their very personal searches for freedom and meaning, converge in Meknès and on the Belhaj farm in the rugged hilly terrain beyond. Mathilde sought an escape from the rural Alsatian monotony and found one in the small, dark and beautiful man out of the Maghreb, and Amine saw in the young French woman – sturdy, blonde, vivacious – a just reward for services rendered to a land not his own. In the hills sufficiently remote from the stringent cultural norms of the medina, Amine will shed himself of the traumas of war and realize his father’s interrupted dream of a prosperous fruit farm and, at the same time, raise his family insulated from the gossip and politicking of the old town and the old ways. But, old ways are hard to shed and, for this uncommonly attractive pair, the passion that promised so much, is hard to sustain.

For Mouilala, Amine’s mother, her only freedom is to be found shrouded in rigid custom and widowhood, and the confines of house and terrace. Who are we to say freedom must know no boundaries. And for the lovely young sister Selma, it is in the pursuit of Western pleasures; not knowing that pleasure comes at a cost. For the angry, oft absent brother, Omar, held captive to an ideology and the tricolore, freedom will come only in its demise.

There is the baby, Selim (to be heard from later I expect), and then there is Aïcha. Oh, and what a girl she is! (I allow myself to imagine her as Slimani’s maman!) For the greater part of the novel she is about seven years old. We go to school with her on her first day; to a Catholic institution in the city, at the insistence of Mathilde. A disaster to be sure, but a heralding in of many colorful narrative strands to come. There is nobody like Aïcha; neither physically nor intellectually. She gives back as much as she gets from the pampered colonial daughters, and in Jesus she finds a friend. (And has the good sense to keep this to herself.) And in the nuns, allies; for it is – perhaps, surprisingly – clear to them that she is an exceptional little girl.

Slimani allows all her characters’ viewpoints to come to the fore, but though it’s the voice of Mathilde that initially reverberates most, that sets the tone, that drives the narrative forward from the time of their arrival in Morocco in 1947, in the end it’s Aïcha’s way of seeing that lingers most. Once she lets us inside her precocious head, crowned with untamed locks, we see the people and the land, both near and dear, as a child would for sure – with love and anger, with envy and with confusion – but there is something more, an uncanny wisdom rooted in something more, something that makes her seem as old as the earth beneath her feet.

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The other half

Somewhere in her slight, but written with almost existential urgency, 1987 memoir, Une femme, Annie Ernaux recalls how her mother, in her quest to improve the family’s standing, her striving for upward mobility in the firmly entrenched social structure of post-war France, at some stage began referring to her husband in the oh so formal language imagined (by her) to be that of the bourgeoisie. Now, having read this book in German (Eine Frau, Suhrkamp, 2019), the class difference to be discerned in the “upgrading” of (presumably in the original French) mon mari to mon époux (in German: mein (Ehe)Mann to mein Gatte), and especially in respect to the social norms of the time, is clear in the formalities of both languages, but I am not so sure how that would transpose in modern English nor how that was handled in the English translation. When did you last hear anyone casually – or seriously – referring to their “spouse”? In this respect the English formal is often confined to tax forms! And, complicated further by the social and linguistic improvements (or at least changes) of the last decade or so, I do wonder where the translation would have gone with this.

French original, pub. Gallimard (1987)

But, I divert, for it is not so much this (not uninteresting) nuance of language that concerns me, but rather how powerfully that seemingly simple but inherently complex play with words describes the life and the ambitions of Annie Ernaux’s mother, and that were so inextricable from husband and child. I read this book very much as a memorial to this life – giving it the respect and meaning in memory and reflection that it was often denied in the course of its living. And, because Ernaux’s mother is never named, it may be, more generally, read as about a woman of a certain stand and certain generation in a certain place – or any place really.

Unlike La place which I have previously written on, in which Ernaux disentangles her relationship with her father, and which is rendered with the rational distance from events and emotions that only distance in time affords, Une femme is written with immediacy and in the midst of grief and the lonely struggle against feelings of guilt and shame that that brings. But, it is also written by “a writer”, and as such Ernaux can do nothing other than write her way to some point of reconciliation; remaining attentive to her craft – assembling fragments, observations, narratives to a captivating whole. This book touched me deeply. I could write about all the “class” stuff that could be extricated from the text, but I won’t here – not now – rather I will just pay tribute to the courage of this wonderful French writer who, in confronting her own imperfect place in the world, dignifies that held by others. And gratitude, for sharing that experience that many of us have had, or will have, when faced with the realization that someone near and dear will never again exist upon this earth; one who connects us to our past, of finding ourselves for a short time or long set adrift; flaying, disoriented.

A comprehensive collection of Annie Ernaux’s work is available in English translation at Seven Stories Press.

Housekeeping at the Dalloways

With the end of year two of the pandemic, I note with pleasure – whereby, in these complicated days, that a relative state of being – where it was that one of our literary flights of fancy led. And, that was back to the London of a century ago, and all that could happen on just one day traversing the topography between Westminster and Bond Street – on the ground, in the heart and in the head.

Penguin ed. 2021

A particular literary journey inspired, at least to some extent it seems, by the publication of two new editions of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway – one from Penguin Random House (with a forward by Jenny Offill and introduction and notes by Elaine Showalter) and an annotated edition from Merve Emre published by Liveright (w.w. norton). Or was it the other way round, and these publications came with an awareness of renewed interest and the potential of a new readership amongst younger generations?

Whichever, as a matter of ‘housekeeping’, and before they go astray amongst my chaotic collection of bookmarks and the like, following are links to just three of the articles that I have collected during the year. (Some other good pieces, unfortunately, require subscriptions.)