I was visiting family near Washington D.C. this weekend and took the opportunity to visit Bonjour Books, a French-language book store created by Jennifer Fulton (bonjourbooksdc.com). Jennifer has been running the store since 2013, but I somehow learned of it only in June. I’m so glad I did!
The store comprises two rooms, one for adults and one for children. Jennifer reports that they carry 3500 distinct titles. Nearly all of them are in French, with a smattering of English-language books on French subjects. There is a small amount of language learning material, but the vast majority of the offerings are high quality French books that rival what you would find in any small bookstore in France (I’ve been to many). The collection for adults includes contemporary and classical novels of all stripes (literature, mysteries, romance, thrillers, fantasy, sci-fi); an assortment of B.D. and graphic novels; a range of non-fiction (biographies, history, science, philosophy, business, art); a small selection of plays and poetry; and a small selection of gifts, prints, and novelty items. The children’s room includes board books for the youngest customers, picture books for early readers, plus an assortment of early-teen fiction and adolescent fiction. There are also juvenile B.D. and various non-fiction books. Jennifer also stocks items from the summer reading lists of the French schools in the area, including Lycée Rochambeau and French Academy D.C.
Bonjour Books sells books online as well as in the store, but I had plenty of space in my suitcase so I was free to stock up then and there. I picked out a few titles that piqued my interest and then asked Jennifer to recommend three or for more. She walked me through her favorites, chatting away in French with me the whole time. Here are the new additions to my fall reading list:
I was intensely curious about how a French bookstore could operate in America in the modern day, when so much of the book trade is now done through online merchants. Before turning the conversation to that subject I volunteered that I had started a French theater company in Boston and Jennifer was delighted to learn of our efforts and eager to learn how it came to pass. So we spent some 45 minutes swapping stories about creating small enterprises in America that cater to francophone audiences, and about the differences between for-profit and non-profit businesses. Jennifer was wonderfully forthcoming about her experiences, and gave me some good ideas for ways to develop the French Theater Project.
I’m so glad to have made a new friend, and to have found an American supplier of French books. Bonjour Books DC ships anywhere in the US, and when you factor in shipping their prices are way less than online French merchants like Lireka, Cultura, FNAC, or Amazon.fr. With so many titles in stock, I can get new French books for less money and much sooner than ordering them myself from overseas. An unexpected find – I expect I’ll be making regular visits every time I’m in town.
Happy Independence Day to one and all! No celebrations here, but I will partake in the French festivities 10 days from now.
I woke up to a wonderful email offering me a volunteer post at the Festival Avignon ! I’ll be helping out as a box-office assistant for one of the shows of the Festival OFF (think “fringe festival”). It’s the usual kind of box-office thing: selling tickets at the door, distributing Will Call tickets to folks who purchased in advance, answering basic information questions. I’ll be working for 60 or 90 minutes before each show, 6 days a week. It’s a very small job, and it’s unofficial, but I’m delighted to have the experience. I’ve already started practicing saying «Je vous souhaite un bon spectacle, Madame.»
The job came about through a combination of being in the right place at the right time and being relentlessly outgoing. Last year in Avignon I hatched the crazy idea of trying to bring a French play to perform in Boston. At the time I spoke with a number of companies, an agent, one or two playwrights. After I got home I did a bunch more legwork to develop the idea, created an LLC for the venture, threw together a basic website (www.frenchtheaterproject.com), spoke to a bunch of relevant French and American cultural players, and tried to make something happen. So the only concrete thing that has come out of it is the theater club at the French Library, but I’ve decided these things take time to build.
One of the companies that pursued this idea with the farthest is named La Ruche Musicale, producers of the show Contretemps. I saw the show twice, had breakfast with a production assistant and the company’s president, swapped several emails, and even developed a proposal with them. In the end, things didn’t come together (yet?) for a Boston engagement, but we stayed in contact. A couple days ago I sent an email reminding them of my plans to be in Avignon again this month and proposing we get together (they are reprising Contretemps this summer at Avignon). As an aside, I offered that if by any chance they could use an extra hand to help out with the show, I’d be happy to volunteer in any capacity they liked. And sure enough, today came the response that indeed they find themselves unexpectedly short-handed, and if I was willing to work the box office on the schedule outlined above, they’d be grateful for the extra staff. Absolutely made my day.
So I expect to have interesting insights this year from the other side of the desk, and perhaps will get to do some socializing with one or more members of their company. We will see. Last time I worked a retail counter was 1990 at Holy Cross College bookstore: it was a temp job I was able to do because they started a week or two before Harvard did, so I was available for their start-of-year rush.
Starting from that high-point, the rest of the day here was OK. After usual breakfast and conversation qua instruction, we headed out to the cinéma in Carcassonne to see a morning screening of a recently released film. Éliane selected something likely to have a lot of slang or familiar language, which is something I identified to her as an area I struggle with. We saw Sexygénaires, starring Thierry Lhermitte and Patrick Timsit, in a sleek but totally empty theater (11am on a Tuesday not being peak movie hours). The film was a mix of a broad comedy and a reflection on life in one’s sixties. Michel (Thierry Lhermitte), age 65, is a struggling hotel owner, grandfather, and widower in Bandol, 50 km southeast of Marseille. With the hotel on the brink of insolvency, he goes to Paris to ask his friend Denis (Patrick Timsit), also in his 60s, to buy out his share of their jointly owned Paris restaurant.
It turns out that Denis has been keeping Michel in the dark, but the restaurant didn’t survive Covid. This could happen under any management, one imagines, but it is completely believable that it happened to Denis, who is an unsympathetic and coarse clown, a low-class parasite of the first order. Harder to believe is that Denis now makes ends meet by working as … a model in television and print advertising ? Somehow the industry keeps hiring him even though he is an obnoxious schlump of a character. Michel accompanies Denis to one of his photo-shoots where an agent spots Michel and discovers his fine figure and handsome visage. Apparently 60 is the new sexy for advertising luxury goods like watches or tuxedos.
Michel stays in Paris for a few weeks while his windfall modeling career flourishes, Denis’s tanks, and the hotel limps along under the interim management of Jean-Claude, another sixty-year-old of their childhood friends. Michel has a couple of romantic interests – a thirty-something in Paris and a sixty-something long-time friend, recently divorced, in Bandol. Finally something happens to make Michel realize what’s important in life. He quits modeling, returns to Bandol, sells the hotel, pays off his debts, invests in a small ice-cream store, and pursues a relationship with the age-peer divorcée. Ah, to be sixty and sexy.
A pretty formulaic, mediocre film, one that can’t be rescued simply by the fact of being French. I’m not sure it was all that effective as a language-learning tool, either. I understood enough of the dialogue to follow the story with minimal difficulty, but at the same time I was missing easily 20% of the lines. There were no captions (in any language) and so if I heard a word or expression I didn’t understand, I had nothing to help me remember it later so I could ask Éliane. We couldn’t pause the film, of course, and even in a theater all to ourselves I didn’t find it attractive to pose questions for each mumbled line or slang expression that I missed. But a good reminder of how far I have to go in oral comprehension, and how big a difference there is between French audio books, read with professional diction, and French film or television, delivered in a more realistic manner.
We came back to the house and I read stories to Éliane’s daughter while her parents prepared lunch. The 18-month-old walks confidently, but doesn’t yet speak a word. So interacting with her is more of a one-way conversation than I was anticipating. Still, I think she’s taken a liking to me and I’m hearing in passing words that are particular to young childhood. I read her a version of Le Chat botté (originally written by Charles Perrault) and also a modern adaptation of La Poule aux œufs d’or (originally by LaFontaine). She smiled and giggled throughout as she sat next to me in her stroller, but was pretty much in her own world and not paying attention to the story. But I enjoyed myself.
After lunch I took a break to write and read, and then at 5pm we went to a nearby winery for a private wine tasting. I’ve done several wine tastings in France and in the US, and this one was fairly ordinary, both in terms of wine and in terms of narration / conversation. The winery is named Château de Pennautier and is part of a large group named Lorgeril. They’ve been operating since 1620 and currently produce over 3 million bottles of wine each year. I’m not particularly knowledgeable or discerning in wine, but it turns out I can distinguish between wines made at this scale and wines from small producers. Or maybe they simply served me unremarkable wines.
I went into the village after the wine tasting and picked up a few things at the grocery and the bakery (open today at 6:45p in the afternoon). Dinner was on my own, leftover pizza, some new fruit and some new cheese. I think I’ll post this, go have my chocolate croissant for dessert, and call it a night.
La rivière à l’envers, by Jean-Claude Mourlevat, is a two-volume fantasy series published in 2000 and 2002 and aimed at a pre-teen or early-teen audience. In the first volume (named Tomek), an exotic teenager named Hannah walks into a small village general store and asks Tomek, the teen behind the counter, if he happens to have any water drawn from the river Qjar. Tomek’s store has nearly everything imaginable, but he’s never heard of Qjar and has no water from it. Hannah admits it was a long shot, buys a candy stick for one sou, and leaves. In the days that follow, Tomek can’t get Hannah off his mind, so eventually seeks out the village elder to get information on this river. The elder has heard only rumors of Qjar, located in some magical land far away, a land full of incomparable people, plants and animals. The river Qjar has two distinctive properties: it runs backwards, from the ocean to the mountain, and its waters can cure any illness. Tomek decides to leave his village and go in search of Hannah and the Qjar river. His fig leaf reason? One sou is far too much to pay for a candy stick.
We get to follow Tomek on his 200 page trek across these mythical lands, meeting all the strange flora, fauna, and people who live there as well as various episodic characters who help Tomek on his quest. We pass with Tomek through La forêt de l’oubli, entry into which causes a person to be temporarily forgotten by all others. We follow him through a vast meadow of flowers, one of which issues a perfume that causes people to fall into a long-term sleep from which one can be awakened only by a magic phrase – but each victim’s rousing words are different. The neighboring community of perfume makers routinely hosts sleeping guests for months on end while round-the-clock shifts of volunteers read aloud to them from a vast library in hopes of finding just the right words (Tomek’s were «sous le ventre du crocodile»). And we follow Tomek as he takes to the sea and accidentally stumbles into L’île inexistante, a place shrouded in fog and always-in-flowing tides. Boats that arrive can never escape again … unless they can answer a riddle that Tomek divines at the last moment.
It’s all kid stuff, and Tomek overcomes each obstacle with relatively little difficulty or tension. This is a storybook more than a thriller. It does paint a luxurious picture of each new landscape and fantastical ecosystem, which made it a great source of new vocabulary words for me. I find it rather curious that there are so many unfamiliar words, as they are presumably in the working receptive vocabulary of a 10 or 11 year old child. Here’s a collection of some of these words, without definitions.
se dégourdir
sucre d’orge
un bocal
laisser en plan
une échoppe
s’asseoir en tailleur
friandise
mâchouiller
dompter
un passe-montagne
la loutre
grappiller
badaglang
rapiécés
borgne
un miche de pain
rassasier
joncher
pardessus
queue leu leu
bancals
élancée
brinquebaler
bossus
une brassée
la croupe
la moelle
se dandiner
couche de fortune
balluchon
à votre guise
une passerine
sortilège
un moineau
piler
rondelette
rondeur
rêvasser
des vivats
en apparat
la liesse
jeu d’adresse
un pantin
se morfondre
jouer aux petits chevaux
drôles de pitres
à la dérive
aux embruns
pagnes
une étreinte
juteu
une natte
rebrousser
une brouette
un coup de jarret
un pitre
à qui mieux mieux
une pagaie
un lamantin
accroupi
barboter
s’ébrouer
escarpé
grassouillet
With a few chapters to go, Tomek does find Hannah, who has somehow acquired a giant living panda-bear pet. Together, they eventually find the headwaters of the Qjar with next to no drama. There’s no particular significance to the river’s flowing backwards, and they harvest a few drops of water so that Hannah can bring it home to heal … her pet songbird who’s really a princess trapped in a bird’s body. A bit random, but perhaps the author ran out of good ideas.
Mourlevat seems to have recognized that in the first-volume Hannah was little more than a motivating prop for Tomek’s story. So he wrote a second volume (named Hannah) in which a now elderly Hannah tells us all the adventures she was having on her own while Tomek was following her trail. A complete life with a dessert caravan that turns out to have been all a dream. A case of mistaken identity with a princess who will be kidnapped should she ever see her reflection. A trek across a mountain into a long-abandoned ghost-town with a centenarian. I found these adventures distinctly flatter and paler than Tomek’s, which reinforces my theory that the author ran out of good ideas after the first 150 pages of Tomek. I’m guessing he decided to write this sequel either for economic reasons or to try to make up for having relegated Hannah to second-class protagonist status in the first volume. Either way, the most valuable thing I got from Hannah was another clutch of vocabulary words. Here are some:
la rade
une marmite
déguerpi
détalé
menton en galoche
frayé
les hardes
prélasser
les bas
l’oseille (f)
ronchonner
ma dodue
une apparat
démordir
bougon
être en cheville avec
un psyché
le taillis
la rocaille
pisé
déglingué
rapiécée
ébréché
comme un coup de trique
dégrisé
un réduit
On the whole, I’m happy I read these 400 pages. It was light reading that went quickly, and it was good to reinforce a subdomain of outdoor vocabulary that I don’t often encounter in plays or news stories. Unremarkable, but unregretted.
I’ve read / watched to a lot of excellent English language books / movies / television. I’ve also consumed a lot of ordinary stuff, and more than my fair share of absolute junk: insipid novels, low-brow sitcoms, cringeworthy comic books or comic-book movies. In French, though, I’ve mostly read things recommended to me by someone, and that’s mostly good stuff. The past couple weeks, though, I’ve strayed from the recommendations path a bit, with the predictable result that the stuff I’ve consumed has … a range of quality. But it’s all part of expanding my cultural literacy, so it’s all good.
Le viandier de Polpette: L’ail des ours
Le viandier de Polpette is a quirky but charming volume of bandes desinées by Julien Neel and Olivier Milhaud. I picked it off the shelf of the French Library completely at random. It features Polpette, a former army cook who now runs the kitchen for the adult son of a nobleman in their mountain redoubt, Le Coq Vert. The book interleaves lovingly presented country French recipes with a vague plot about the Count’s father coming to visit. There’s a lot of running gags among the other denizens of the Coq Vert, including a retired British colonel and a stereotypical French proletariat. And there’s also a firebrand of a young woman who walks around with an entourage of unleashed pet ferrets. Oh, somewhere in there we encounter the rather large titular animal who may or may not be a bear, and who seems to have no relationship to garlic. The overall effect is off-beat, shall we say.
I did pick up a number of vocabulary words from this book:
capiteux – se dit d’un vin, d’un alcool qui monte à la tête, d’un parfum très fort.
la minerai – roche présentant une concentration élevée minéraux utiles (si inutiles, on l’appelle la gangue).
châtelain – propriétaire d’un château.
chaland (vieux) – celui qui achète habituellement chez un même marchand.
gargote (f) – restaurant où l’on mange à bas prix une mauvaise nourriture.
amenuiser – rendre quelque chose plus fiable, moins important. réduire, diminuer. Cf la menuiserie, «amenuiser une planche».
la guigne – (familier) malchance persistante; déveine, poisse. Avoir de la guigne.
ça barde – (populare) cela devient dangereux, en parlant d’une action; cela devient violent, en parlant d’une discussion.
être givré – (familier) être fou.
couver – entourer quelqu’un de soins attentifs et excessifs de tendresse.
un encas – repas léger préparé pour être servi en cas de besoin.
un fantassin – militaire de l’infanterie.
Balle Perdue
The movie Balle Perdue (2020) is available on Netflix, and is in French, so I watched it. I haven’t seen any films from the Fast and Furious franchise, but I imagine they are similar. There’s a great deal of high speed car chases, various souped up vehicles with enhancements like hardened front grills, turbo thrusters, and sharpened forklift attachments. Inevitably, most of the cars crash, with the exception of our hero’s. It endures one non-fatal collision after another, yet somehow not only keeps functioning, it magically appears without dents or scapes just seconds later during the same chase. Not a great job of film editing. There’s also a lot of shooting, as there’s a lot of (corrupt) police officers involved. The plot, such as it is, involves a brilliant but wayward young car mechanic who enhances cars for a criminal gang, gets arrested and sent to jail, but is then paroled under the sponsorship of a police captain who wants his own fleet of enhanced police cruisers to catch the bad guys.
This works out great, until the police captain figures out too many bad guys are still getting away, and starts to suspect a leak in his department. Naturally, this being a French police movie, large parts of the brigade are corrupt and in the pay of the drug gangs. The police captain is murdered by his lieutenant, who then pins the crime on the wunder-mechanic, who flees and then has to clear his name and expose the corruption. This gives the film an excuse for lots of gun battles and dead bodies in addition to the high-speed car chases.
Not a lot of vocabulary here, but always good to hear rough accents and street language.
Skidamarink
Guillaume Musso is one of the best-selling French authors of the 21st century. He’s written over twenty books, primarily mysteries and thrillers, and sells more than a million copies a year. His first novel, entitled Skidamarink, appeared in 2001 and made very little impression. It sold a few thousand copies and got tepid reviews before going out of print. But it was re-published in 2020 with a new forward by the author, and was subsequently recorded as an audio-book. This is how I came to listen to it — I browsed Audible.com for French mysteries, saw this as a recent publication, looked up the author and found he was widely celebrated in French popular literature and clicked “buy”. Only when I listened to the forward did I learn that it was Musso’s first book and not a recent one.
The forward also had an interesting bit about the book’s place in the Musso canon. Apparently, Musso doesn’t think much of it: it was a first novel, he wrote it while he was teaching school, his editor for the book was his mother. But when his later works became popular, fans went looking for this early work. Prices for used copies skyrocketed on auction sites, and low-quality pirated scans circulated on the web. Musso writes that he held off from republishing the work because he thought he’d revise it first, but then kept prioritizing new works. So in 2020, he finally greenlighted the re-issuance of the book with its original text. In the forward, he notes “the faults in its quality, but also the quality of its faults.” He also notes the similarities with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, but points out that his book was published two years before Brown’s blockbuster.
Skidamarink book isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty shoddy. The mystery is shoddy somebody stole the Mona Lisa painting, cut it into pieces, and sent them to four seemingly unconnected people. The thief also sent literary quotes from Victor Hugo, John Dunne, and the like and summoned the four civilians to a secret meeting in an Italian church. Subsequent events convince the four that their lives are in danger if they don’t work together to decipher a series of cryptic criminal threats that the thief issues through the media, like murdering prominent business leaders and poisoning gated communities. The whole thing is a bit too rococo and (as Musso writes in the forward) romanesque for my tastes.
But the audio book is in French, which is really all it promised to be. Listening is a bit of a challenge, not because of the clichéd expressions, but because of the narrators unfamiliar accents, especially as he tries to differentiate three Americain characters and one Italian.
Glenn, naissance d’un prodige
Glenn Gould was a Canadian classical pianist who lived from 1932 to 1982, dying of a stroke at the age of 50. His 1956 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations was one of the best-selling classical recordings of all time. He had an unusual style, crouching over the keyboard as he played and humming audibly to himself. After a short concertizing career as a young artist, he retreated to the studio where he made dozens of recordings right up to his death. He was a pop icon and a bit eccentric, but recorded interviews make it clear he was quite intelligent and could speak affably about his life and his music without difficulty.
I point this out because Ivan Calbérac’s play Glenn, naissance d’un prodige, paints the title character as far more eccentric, to the point of being paranoid and incoherent. Perhaps Gould was that way in private or in down periods, but there’s enough public footage and interview recordings of him being fairly normal that the play’s presentation rings hollow. The script is otherwise undistinguished, presenting a sequence of biographical sketches that offer little beyond the biography section of his Wikipedia page. There’s a homey portrayal of Glenn’s father, and a depiction of Glenn’s mother as both narcissistic and obsessive, but given the distorted presentation of Gould himself I put little stock in these as accurate characterizations of his parents.
But the play was featured in the September 2022 issue of L’avant-scène théâtre, so I read it. I noted several unfamiliar vocabulary words as I went, which are always valuable to me:
un brochet: poisson ésocidé des eaux douces [pike en anglais].
écueil (m): (litéraire) tout ce qui fait obstacle, met en péril; danger, piège. Litéralement, une tête de roche couverte par moins de 20 m d’eau.
espiègle: personne vive; malicieuse mais sans méchanceté. De Till Eulenspiegel. espièglerie.
voilage (m): Grand rideau de fenêtre en voile.
limace (f): mollusque pulmoné terrestre sans coquille externe [slug en anglais].
décoifant: surprenant; dérangeant les cheveux de quelqu’un.
dithyrambique: très élogieux, d’un enthousiasme emphatique, outré. Dithyrambe – cantique consacré à Dionysus.
clavecin (m): instrument de musique à cordes pincées et à clavier.
parti pris: opinion audacieux; idée fixe a priori.
fêlure (f): fracture incomplète d’un os.
luxation (f): déplacement des 2 extrémités osseuses d’une articulation.
convier: inviter
accaparer: occuper exclusivement quelqu’un, lui prendre tout son temps; absorber.
foutoir (m): (populaire) endroit où règne un désordre extrême.
fiston (m): mot d’affection adressé à son fils ou à un jeune garçon [kiddo en anglais].
Other than that, I’ve been doing French crosswords and collecting vocabulary words from children’s books. But this post is long enough, so I’ll write about that in an upcoming article.
Victor Hugo is a giant of French literature, whose mark on the language is rivaled perhaps only by Molière. He was also politically active during the heart of the 19th century, a period I know shamefully little about. Hugo is best known today, especially among Americans, for his two novels Notre Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), each of which has been adapted for the stage and screen many times.
The 30 year gap between these two masterpieces has three explanations. First, during the 1800’s novels were not considered the preeminent literary form. They shared the stage, as it were, with theater and, to a lesser extent, essays. The many modern French prizes for best novel (from Prix Goncourt on down) were originally marketing gimmicks by publishers struggling to get the theater-focused public interested in novels. Although Hugo wrote one other novel between Notre Dame and Misérables (the 1834 Claude Gueux), most of his literary output during that period was in the form of plays, poems, and political pamphlets. The second reason for the publication gap was the death of his oldest daughter Léopoldine in 1843 at the age of just 19. Léopoldine drowned in the Seine river while Hugo was visiting the southwest France, and overcome with grief he stopped publishing entirely for nearly a decade.
The event that pushed him back onto the literary stage was also the third explanation for his 30 year abstention from novel writing: the coup d’état by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1851, which brought the end of the Second Republic of France and began the Second Empire. Hugo was serving as a deputy in the Assembly when the coup happened, and organized a failed resistance movement. He fled from France to Belgium in December 1851, and in January 1852 he was officially exiled from France (along with 60 other former Assembly members). Later that year he judged Belgium too precarious a resting place and retreated further to the Channel Islands, which were British protectorates at the time and so relatively safe from French interference. From this remove he wrote scathing critiques of the Second Empire government, including both polemics and poems. Hugo lived on the island of Jersey for 3 years, and then on the island of Guernsey for another 15, until finally returning to France on September 5, 1870, the day after the declaration of the Third Republic (the date of which is immortalized by the downtown Paris metro station named “Quatre-Septembre”).
Quatre-Septembre: I’ve used this station many times, rarely looked up the origin of the name.
All of this preamble is to explain how it is that Hugo came to set his 1866 novel Les Travailleurs de la Mer on the island of Guernsey, an otherwise odd choice for a French literary giant. I listened to Travailleurs in audiobook form after Steven Galante (of the French Library of Boston) recommended it to me as his favorite of Hugo’s work. It’s a relatively short novel, whose unabridged recording weighs in at only eight hours. I finished it in three or four weeks of irregular listening during my commute to work. (Note that most modern paper editions of the book include an 80 page introduction (!) that Hugo wrote for the 1883 edition, and which presents a non-fiction treatment of the island of Guernsey. The audio edition I listened to omits this text).
Illustration by Achille Granchi-Taylor
Les Travailleurs de la mer, the proper novel, also starts off as a portrait of island life and the people of Guernsey. There’s a lot of initial descriptions of landscapes, seascapes, buildings, social classes, and individuals. After this rather slow, extended set-up, we move on to what critic Marc Eigeldinger dubbed “an Iliad of one”. Gilliatt, a 30-year-old sailor, has fallen hopelessly in love with the much younger Déruchette. He is a loner, considered an odd duck by his fellow islanders, but recognized as a polymath who has mastered sailing, fishing, boat-building, and iron-smithing (plus reading and writing). She is the delicate niece of Mess Lethierry, a rough but wealthy steamboat owner, who has vowed to give her every comfort imaginable and to keep her cosseted until the perfect husband can be found. When the prized steamboat aground on a mid-channel rocky outpost (un écueil), Lethierry promises Déruchette’s hand in marriage to anyone who can save the vessel. Gilliatt announces he will go, spends the better part of 4 months completing the task single-handedly, and returns to claim his bride. Alas, he finds that she has fallen in love with another (the Reverend Ebenezer Caudray), and so he selflessly helps the young couple elope before tranquilly drowning himself in the incoming tide off Guernsey. There’s also some stuff about a treacherous captain who sabotaged Lethierry’s boat, which is how it came to crash on the rocks in the first place.
Illustration by Gustav Doré
On the whole, I enjoyed the book greatly, especially hearing Hugo’s rich vocabulary and poetic sentences read aloud. I don’t have statistics for this, but I suspect that the total number of distinct words in this novel is much higher than in contemporary novels of comparable length. There’s all kinds of boat words and waterfront words and words for ropes pulleys and winches and cords and barricades – all the stuff you need to describe meticulously the operation of one man solo freeing an engine from a crashed steamboat and loading it onto a sailboat. To top it off, after the false climax of withstanding the onslaught of a hurricane, we get the real climax of Gilliatt surviving a giant squid attack by means of cutting out its eye and brain with a knife. Prior to Hugo’s book, the French word for squid was «poulpe». But Hugo coined a new word for the monster, «pieuvre» (possibly a blend of two other words from French fishermen, «poufre» and «pouvre». Shortly after Les Travailleurs de la Mer was published, «pieuvre» became the dominant form (according to Wikipedia; however the Google N-gram viewer suggests the two forms are pretty much equally frequent since 1870).
Since I was listening while driving, I did not note unfamiliar vocabulary words or underline memorable phrases. But every few minutes I remarked to myself “now that’s a sentence.” One example that I can recall occurs after Gilliatt has spent countless weeks carefully preparing for the engine-hoisting operation. When the day approaches and the weather turns threatening, he abandons his usual caution and hurries to complete the final steps. Hugo writes: «À ce point d’achèvement et si près de la fin, la hâte est prudence.» Good stuff. I am not usually a fan of poetry, but based on the poetic language of this novel, I went to the French Library of Boston to look for some of Hugo’s most famous collections of poems works (Les Châtiments, Les Contemplations, La Légende des siècles). Unfortunately, they are still unboxing their collection from a multi-year renovation… and the boxes of poetry are last on the schedule to be reshelved. So I guess I’ll just have to wait.
I recently finished the novel Quand sort la recluse by Fred Vargas. I’ve read seven or eight books by Vargas since a bookseller in Paris recommended one to me in 2013, but this is the first one I’ve experienced as an audio-book. Indeed this is the first full-length audiobook I’ve ever listened to in French (I’ve listened to dozens of audiobooks in English). I listened to it over a period of a month or more, off and on during the half-hour blocks that are my commute to the office. It runs about 12 hours in total, surprisingly little for a 477 page printed book. I don’t think I read French silently at 40 pages an hour, though I haven’t timed myself recently.
I enjoyed the book enormously, but that’s almost certainly a combination of enjoying the content and enjoying the medium. I remember being elated when I first reached the point where I could read a full-length French novel without constant reference to a dictionary. The first several French books I read that way seemed to me marvelous, wonderful tomes of literature simply because I experienced them in French. It wasn’t until I had 10 or 15 under my belt that I was able to start assessing the book independently of the things my brain was doing to read the book in French. I assure you, Sigmund Fred ne répond plus is pretty dreadful, even acknowledging that it’s written by a master and intended as a pastiche. Just awful.
I knew from watching plays or listening to the radio that trick to comprehending an audiobook is accepting that one won’t catch every word or understand every expression. Instead, the goal is to understand enough of what’s being said to have a decent chance of following the next sentence, and the next. With the audiobook, I have an escape hatch of hitting the rewind button and going back to re-listen to the most recent 10 or 30 seconds. But I tried to use that very sparingly with Quand sort la recluse. While it’s true that I didn’t catch every word, I was delighted to find that I caught 90-95% of them.
Even more enjoyable was that I found this didn’t take all my brain power: I was able to think about other things while following along with the recording. One of the things I was able to think about was: “wait, what was that he just said?”. To use a programming analogy, it was like my brain would launch a new execution thread whenever it hit a difficulty. That thread would dwell on the word and try to recall its meaning, or dwell on the sounds and try to resolve them into the correct words, while the main part of my brain program continued on ingesting and understanding the recording as it went. I could maintain this for 15 or 20 seconds before having to shut down the auxiliary thread if it hadn’t reached a conclusion. My success rate at figuring out these puzzles in not-quite real-time was something like two-thirds, and those successes were enormously satisfying. I drove to work with an odd expression on my face, a mix of intense concentration but also repeated reward. I arrived at the office with my brain tired but abuzz, although somewhat mystified about how exactly I had gotten to the office — all the attention on the book left me with scant memories of the drive. I hope I didn’t run any red lights….
As to the book itself, it’s pretty decent. Quand sort la recluse is the ninth book in the series featuring Commissaire Adamsberg, head of a criminal brigade in Paris (Vargas writes other books not in that series). The brigade has a well-established cast of supporting characters whose signature traits make for a sort of Commedia dell’arte feel. We already know and love the lieutenant with the eidetic memory, the hypersomnolent computer specialist who must sleep every three hours, the tall, heavy-set female detective, and the confidant who grew up with Adamsberg in the Pyrénées. There is a bit more tension among this crowd than usual, as the story features an internal plot of division within the brigade as well as an external plot of who is behind a series of murders. Adamsberg does his usual thing of investigating without method, following as the wind blows, and letting “tiny bubbles of gas” float around in his brain (a process he himself hesitates to dignify with the word “thinking”). There’s a French expression for this lack of method, which I learned elsewhere: proceeding «à tatons», i.e. by feel. We would say “flying by the seat of his pants”.
Une recluse
As always, Vargas has done her research on an offbeat topic and has something interesting to share with us. This time it’s a venomous spider named «la recluse», rare in France though common in the US (the brown recluse). Although the spider seldom encounters humans and its bite is not fatal if treated with antibiotics soon enough, multiple octogenarian men living around Nîmes die from the poison within a matter of days despite medical treatment. This attracts the attention of the Adamsberg, though the investigation must be unofficial as insect bites are not typically in the purview of the police. Sure enough, the victims share an unlikely and sordid history, and their deaths turn out to be a revenge scheme executed (pardon the pun) with an unusual and symbolic weapon.
A second meaning of «la recluse» dates from the middle ages and refers to a woman who sequesters herself in a tiny stone enclosure, perhaps a meter squared, entirely sealed except for a small window (une fenestrelle) to allow for food to be passed in. The women who became recluses in this way were almost always unmarried rape victims who were deemed impure, too damaged to be desirable as a wife by any man, and too impure to be accepted at a medieval convent. They semi-voluntarily cut themselves off from society, living in sordid conditions and dependent on the charity of anonymous others to provide food. Most died within a few years of this from malnutrition or lack of exercise, but perversely, towns viewed having a recluse as a sort of totem who brought God’s blessing upon the local community for maintaining the recluse. Towns allegedly took pride in having a recluse, and the enclosures (often pigeonniers) could be found under bridges, up against church walls, or in cemetaries.
But wait, didn’t Commissaire Adamsberg encounter a modern-day recluse living in a pigeonnier many decades ago when he was just a boy?! Why yes, now that you mention it, he did, although it takes many chapters for this memory to surface. Somehow the murders, the victims’ history of being a gang of rapists in their youths, the spider poison as the means of killing, and the medieval practice of semi-forced sequestration of rape victims all come together in a well-constructed (if slightly contrived) mystery plot. There are a suitable number of twists and turns (rebondissements) and enough suspects introduced to keep me guessing until the end who dunnit and how. I would certainly recommend the book, as apparently would others: Quand sort la recluse won the Prix Audiolib 2018.
One final note: when I read a paper book these days I typically underline unfamiliar words or expressions and sometimes (when I have the energy) go back afterwards to compile lists of vocabulary words to study. Listening to this book while driving, I could not do that, and I find the lack of such a list unsettling. Or maybe it’s the lack of a physical volume to place on my shelf now that I’ve finished the book. It’s as if I have nothing to show for having read the novel, which feels hollow somehow. I guess this is a property that all audiobooks share, but I feel it pronouncedly with this, my first French audiobook. I suppose I’ll just have to listen to more of them to get over it.
Two recent issues of L’avant-scène théâtre feature plays that each, in their own very different ways, examine the relationship between a pair of people with long histories of conflict and amity. In Les Soeurs Bienaimé, playwright Brigitte Buc gives us an unexpected reunion of two sisters in their 40s, Michèle and Pascale, who meet after a 25 year hiatus. Pascale, the younger, long ago fled the dysfunctional family and its rural farm for Paris. Michèle stayed all these years and struggled to care for parents who aged poorly and then died in this provincial community that itself has decayed with time. Now it is Paris that Pascale is fleeing, as her life there has recently been complicated by mental health problems, marital issues, and drug addiction. Michèle is none too happy to have Pascale back, with her notions of rediscovering “authentic village life” and fantasies of converting the farm into a tourist hotel. The interactions are dominated by adolescent-worthy insults, competition, physical scuffles, and recriminations, but in and among the gaps there is some exploration of their shared past and commiseration at their shared dissatisfaction with their separate presents.
I found Les Soeurs Bienaimé rather weak: the themes were well-worn, the characters were flat and unengaging, and the writing was unremarkable. A few days after finishing the play, I happened to listen to an episode of the podcast Le Masque et La Plume that reviewed it, and I discovered that they had a similar critique of it. Glad to have my opinion backed by competent authorities.
Élysée, by Hervé Bentégeat, is an entirely different kind of work, but one that again features two long-time rivals: French Presidents François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac. The play exhibits several imagined but historically possible conversations between them and at various points in their storied political careers.
Mittérand was elected twice back when presidential terms lasted 7 years, and served from 1981 to 1995. Chirac succeeded him and was also elected twice, serving from 1995 through 2007. However, their relationship is far deeper than predecessor and successor. Chirac ran in the first round of the 1981 election as a candidate of the center-right, but was not among the top two vote getters. Those were Mitterrand, a socialist with grandiose ideas, and incumbent President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. D’Estaing had entered office as a center-right candidate, but had moved to be more and more conservative over time, especially on immigration. Chirac had been d’Estaing’s prime minister, but resigned in 1976 and ran against him in the 1981 contest. After his defeat in the first round, Chirac remained opposed to d’Estaing, and his opposition was so intense that he formed an alliance with Mitterrand and threw his support behind the Socialist. It was enough to bring Mitterand to power, and would eventually lead to Chirac being named as Mitterand’s prime minister in 1986. This Left-Right alliance was unusual enough that it earned its own sobriquet: the relationship was dubbed la première cohabitation. It didn’t last long, though, and Chirac quit in time to run against (and lose to) Mitterrand in the 1988 elections. Chirac prevailed on his third presidential campaign in 1995, by which point Mitterrand was old and sick with an abdominal cancer that claimed him a year later. As you can see, the two men had a long, deep, and complex relationship.
The play opens in 1996 with Chirac preparing a funeral oration for Mitterrand and musing on the legacy of the old man, both for the nation and for Chirac personally. From there we go backwards in time, first with a brief scene in 1995 showing the transfer of power from Mitterand to Chirac, and then with another in 1994 showing Mitterand exhorting Chirac to run for president a third time. However the bulk of the play takes place in 1981 and shows the uneasy negotiations around Chirac throwing his support to Mitterand against d’Estaing. The alliance was orchestrated by a third French political figure, Philippe Dechartre. He was a government minister under de Gaulle and then Pompidou in the 1960s, and somehow a trusted friend and advisor of both Chirac and Mitterand. According to the play, Dechartre was instrumental in bringing the two men together in 1981. Historically, Dechartre was indeed the person who arranged to release his own statement of support for Mitterrand, ostensibly a personal opinion but published on stationary branded with the letterhead of Chirac’s party, Rassemblement pour la République. The statement was widely viewed and thought to sway over 100,000 votes in Mitterrand’s direction, well more than the margin of victory.
I don’t know how Élysée comes across for an audience already deeply (or superficially) familiar with all of this French politics from the 1970s, 80s, or 90s. I was only vaguely familiar with the outcomes and knew nothing of the intrigues that made it happen. I knew the names Mitterrand and Chirac, of course, but couldn’t have told you the dynamics of any of their elections. Cohabitation was a hazy thing that I knew the French did at some point, but I was just as likely to confuse it with colocateur if I wasn’t careful. So for me, the play was an impetus to go read several Wikipedia pages about French elections from 40 years ago. But I can’t say I found much else in Élysée to recommend it, and I doubt it will have any staying power as a piece of literature. Still, curious to contrast the “we’re adversaries but not enemies” attitude of French politics back then with the “you are my mortal enemy” attitude of American politics today.
One curious footnote: the play debuted in January 2021 and the role of Philippe Dechartre was played by his real-life son, Emmanuel Dechartre. Dechartre fils is an established stage actor who has been treading the boards since the late 1960s. One has to imagine that he was sought out for this role, if only for the publicity value. He probably does an excellent impression of his father, though, and the age is now right. His Wikipedia page has an extensive list of theatrical appearances, but stopped in 2018. I just now updated it to include Élysée.
This holiday weekend I finished reading the novel L’anomalie by Hervé Le Tellier, winner of the 2020 Prix Goncourt, one of the biggest annual literary prizes in France. I learned of the book from a New York Times article in late November, 2021, which announced the publication of the English translation of this work. The article noted that the original work had been a smash success in France, selling over 1 million copies despite (because of?) being published in August 2020 amidst the various confinements and disruptions of Covid. I figured it was worth a read and so got a hold of a French copy. It sat on my shelf for a while, but I picked it up early this month and polished off its 327 pages in a couple of weekends.
The book is interesting in and of itself; but after I finished it, I read some reviews, looked up the author’s background, and listened to an interview with the author, all of which gave another dimension to the book that I had missed in my ordinary reading. The book begins with a vignette of a professional hitman: his back-story, his methods, and the double life he leads. In the open he’s a successful entrepreneur with a small international chain of vegetarian restaurants, a wife and two children, and a bourgeois Paris apartment. But behind it all he’s a killer for hire with a second apartment, secret bank accounts, multiple passports, a presence on the Dark Web, and any number of lethal toys. This duality gives us the theme of the book right from the outset, though hardly in a way I expected at the start.
Hervé Le Tellier
The book is divided into three parts. In the first part we meet character after character, one or two per chapter, seemingly without rhyme or reason. Some live in France, some in New York, one in Nigeria, another in New Jersey. What eventually becomes apparent is that they were all on the same Air France flight from Paris to New York in March 2021, a flight which encountered violent turbulents shortly before landing safely at JFK airport. As the first part ends, we learn that a second instance of this airplane – and its full complement of passengers – somehow also appears in June 2021 just after the violent turbulents and tries to land as well. Air traffic control goes nuts at the sudden appearance of the airplane and then they and the military Air Force get very confused as the pilots insist over the radio on their identities and the plane’s designation. All the physical evidence backs their claims, and they are eventually escorted to an Air Force base in New Jersey.
Page 212 of L’anomalie
In the second part of the novel we see a lot of U.S. and then world government officials dealing with this unprecedented situation. There are DoD and NSA and CIA meetings. There are mathematicians and physicists and philosophers. There are religious leaders and world presidents. And of course there are the passengers themselves, whose “March-landing” instances we have already met in the first part, and whose “June-landing” (who are 3 months younger and still think it’s March) counterparts we follow in the makeshift camp / prison that the military has set up in a giant hangar. The experts offer various explanations for what has happened, along with citations of which work of science fiction has already illustrated the phenomenon, but come to no conclusion. Meanwhile global intelligence services coordinate a round-up of the March-landing versions of each passenger and bring them to a separate part of the Air Force base. Finally, word leaks out to the public of what has transpired. In a somewhat unbelievable plot twist, the authorities decide to introduce each passenger to their double, provide them with counseling services and economic assistance, and release them back “into the wild”.
The last part of the novel is surprising in that it drops the whole science-fiction bit entirely. Who knows how these people got here, they are here. Once again we are treated to a parade of episodes, each chapter following another character. We get to see ten different ways that this “meet your double three months in your past/future” plays out. Some meetings are violent, others are venomous, some are blassé, others joyful, and some are painful (the cancer didn’t go away, so now the children have to bury their father twice). There are apartments to be shared – and jobs, and husbands, and children. The situations described are very awkward, though the writing is quite good. There’s some slight surprise twist at the end that is left unexplored, but does a nice call-back to the philosophical and science-fiction aspects of the middle part.
So there you go, a traditional if somewhat intricately structured modern French novel with a lot of American flavors running through it, right ? Not sure why it caught the eyes of the Prix Goncourt jury, but surely a decent book, glad I read it. Come to find out (with an hour or two of post-book web surfing) that I missed some fairly major bits. First of all, each chapter in the first part is not only treating a different character, it is written in a totally different style: noir detective pastiche, hackneyed romance, psychological introspection novel, Africain exoticism, littérature blanche. Sure, I got all the settings and the stories, but the exaggerated stylistic changes went over my head completely. Next, it turns out that the author is a mathematician, linguist, journalist, and since 2019 the president of the International Oulipo Society.
What is Oulipo you ask ? Ah, that could be a blog post all of its own. In brief, a group of intellectuals who liked thinking about pushing the boundaries of creation and expression started meeting regularly in 1960 and subsequently founded a literary / philosophical movement they called L’Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (the Workshop for Potential Literature) or Oulipo for short. Its most famous members have been the writers Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, and Georges Perec. Although some members were authors, their goal wasn’t so much to produce literature as it was to produce new forms that had the potential for yielding interesting literature. It was very meta, and many of the participants had far more interest in the forms than in the actual literature that could come from them.
Getting back to L’anomalie: the author explicitly pitches it as a work of the Oulipo genre, in the tradition of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (I haven’t read it, but there’s a main story involving international book thieves, and then 10 intruding chapters which are the opening chapters of 10 different novels). There’s an obscure final 20 lines of text that are masked versions of some underlying text, with the masking getting more disruptive as the text flows down the page in the form of an hourglass. The last escaping grains of sand spell out «fin» (“End”), while earlier lines have winks to other Oulipo works. And the three major parts of the book are named with lines from poems by founding Oulipian Raymond Queneau (who wrote: “Oulipians: rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”). Needless to say, this was all lost on me, but it helps explain why the Prix Goncourt jury would have been more inclined to take the book seriously: Oulipo has a proud place as an off-beat but home-grown literary genre.
Despite all these hidden oddities, the book is perfectly easy to follow, at least if you are practiced at reading speculative fiction where a situation is revealed little by little. I haven’t read the English translation yet, but I will have no hesitation recommending it to my English-speaking friends. Come to think of it, I think I’ll go out and purchase a copy for that friend who introduced me to Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes …
Yesterday I read the play Jacques et son maître: Hommage à Denis Diderot en trois actes. The play was written (in French) in 1971 by Czech writer Milan Kundera. It is a «variation – hommage» on a novel that I haven’t read, Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et son maître, which was started in 1765 and published in installments from 1778 to 1780. The novel is apparently a series of philosophical dialogues between a servant and a master, including numerous digressions, bawdy stories, and presentations of new fables (e.g. La Gaine et le Coutelet).
The play is much the same, although Kundera fiercely corrected anyone who called it an “adaptation” of the novel. Instead, it honors Diderot’s original but uses modern theatrical devices like breaking the fourth wall from the opening lines, having characters openly question the talent of the (absent) playwright who is scripting their lines, and staging multiple plays-within-a-play. For all that, though, it remains light-hearted and easily accessible, more entertainment than social commentary. At a guess, it has updated the dialogue of Diderot and dropped most of the philosophy.
The original Diderot
To the extent that is philosophical investigation remains, it centers on whether our destinies are our own to shape, or whether «ce qui nous arrive de bien et de mal ici-bas est écrit là-haut». If our fates are already written, then what sense does it make to hold others responsible for their actions, good or bad? In the case of Man and God, this question has one import, but of course Jacques and his master consider it in the context of Character and Playwright, where the answer is (perhaps?) more clear. However as his master asks, «est-ce que tu es un salaud parce que c’est écrit là-haut ? Ou est-ce que c’est écrit parce qu’ils savaient, là-haut, que tu étais un salaud ? Quelle est la cause et quel est l’effet ?» Kundera doesn’t offer much by way of answer, but the audience doesn’t really care.
The bulk of the play is telling and retelling variations of the same story of love triangles (well, really lust triangles) gone wrong: man dallies with woman, then manipulates his friend into marrying his pregnant mistresses; woman is spurned by man, then manipulates her former lover into marrying a disguised prostitute; man offers to help friend hide a secret tryst with a woman, then sleeps with her himself; man offers to arrange a night of debauchery for his friend, then tips off the authorities to expose friend in compromising position. Throughout it all, Jacques tries to tell his master the story of how Jacques lost his virginity, and how that lead to his falling in love with a different woman. There’s lots of ribald details about the sizes of the women’s breasts and butts. It’s a little cringy, but the women are triumphant and the men ruined often enough that it’s still possible to produce this play in 2021 (Théâtre Montparnasse) without attracting too much opprobrium.
The play reminded me a bit of Fin de Partie by Beckett, which was written 14 years earlier. Each has the central dynamic revolve around a servant and a wheelchair-occupying master. Each has a lot of recurrent bits of dialogue and stories that are lengthened each time they are told. And each questions what controls and is controlled by the world we see on stage. But Beckett’s work is far more brooding and gloomy while Kundera’s is whimsical and ironic. None of Kundera’s characters take themselves all that seriously. Moreover, the Kundera dialogue is far more familiar and free than Beckett’s, which is turgid and formal. Perhaps it’s just easier for a Czech to write in French than an Irishman?
Some Vocabulary I Learned
There were a number of words and colloquialisms I learned while reading the play:
faire la noce – faire une partie de plaisir ; mener une vie de débauche.
un bambocheur – Personne qui aime faire la fête.
se toquer – Avoir brusquement un vif engouement pour quelqu’un ou quelque chose
un ardillon – Pointe de métal d’une boucle de courroie, de ceinture.
un tendron – Très jeune fille (d’âge tendre).
une grue – Populaire. Femme de mœurs faciles et vénales ; prostituée.
se fourrer – S’engager dans (une situation embarrassante).
une crécelle – Moulinet de bois formé d’une planchette mobile qui tourne bruyamment autour d’un axe.
voix de crécelle – aiguë, désagréable.
une raclée – Volée de coups.
filer (= donner) une raclée à qqn.
pouilleux – Misérable et sale.
une jante – Partie circulaire à la périphérie d’une roue de véhicule.
un essieu – Pièce transversale d’un véhicule, dont les extrémités entrent dans les moyeux des roues.
Now that I’m done with Camus, I can catch up on some back issues of L’avant-scène théâtre. Last night I did a quick read of their July 2021 issue, which featured the play Un prince by Émilie Frèche. Weighing in at just 21 pages it’s barely more than an extended scene, an unbroken monologue by a single character (“un homme”) played by Sami Bouajila. The play first made an appearance at théâtre d’Antibes in November 2020, then had a much delayed and then abbreviated run at the same theater in July 2021. I had heard of Antibes, but didn’t really know where it is until I looked it up on a map (it’s in the far south east of France, between Cannes and Nice, just 60 miles from the Italian border).
The play shows a French man of Algerian descent, now homeless (as the the French say SDF = sans domicile fixe) and living in an abandoned construction site. The man’s father moved from Algeria to France in search of a peaceful life with economic opportunity, but the man’s own life didn’t work out that way. After 20 years of growing up poor and another 20 years of working at low wage jobs, he finds himself destitute after the factory he spent years at relocates to Algeria (!) in search of cheaper labor. The man sits among the piles of sand and gravel, somewhere between half- and fully-deluded about the nature of his situation, speaking of his goats and his fields of agranier.
Des chèvres dans un arganier.
We learn in bits and snatches the story of the man’s father, his own childhood, his life as a young married person, his economic dissipation, and his multiple refusals to accept help from the French social services. In the end the man concludes that France is not a land of peace at all, but one of constant economic warfare. Throughout the tone seems wistful rather than harsh, and at times a bit playful.
The solo actor Sami Bouajila is apparently quite famous; he’s appeared in over 50 feature films since 1991 and garnered 2 César awards, including the 2021 prize for Best Actor in the film Un fils. I’ve never seen him in film, but you can get a small taste of his stage performance from this teaser promotion for the July 2021 production of Un prince.
https://vimeo.com/596663608
Not a bad play, and one which I would have enjoyed more live than reading. But nothing that makes me want to go seek out more by this playwright.
