I’m beginning my promenade through my last two years of reading in French. There are many bad ideas built into this project. I am going to ramble through books I read as long as two years ago, with who knows what memory or comprehension – surely with many outright errors in comprehension. That is what I want to find out, I guess. All translations, unless otherwise noted, will be mine. This will be another fascinating source of error.
Let’s start with this beauty, the July 2019 issue of Lire:, which I would translate as Read!, stretching out that semi-colon, and more importantly the little book that was packaged with it, The Return to Literature 2019: The Best Extracts Before the Fact! In September, everyone in France is returning from vacation to – everything – to school and literature and arts seasons and neighborhood clubs. For some reason it seems like a good idea to publish a large fraction of the year’s novels at the same time. This year there are 524 novels, “the fewest in twenty years” Michael Orthofer notes, in the rentrée littéraire. That still seems like a lot to me, all at once.
For a couples of months, the attention paid to the rentrée littéraire is enormous, even more than the high French baseline.
So, fifteen first chapters of books that back in July had not even been published. Now they are all out and have presumably all been longlisted for some prize or another. What an opportunity to quickly “catch up” on the French novel of today!
The first book is from Baroness Amélie Nothomb, who has contributed a book a year to the rentrée littéraire since The Hygiene of the Assassin in 1992, among the very silliest books I have ever read. Her new book is Soif (Thirst) and it is, of all things, a comic novel from the point of view of Jesus Christ. People are still writing these things? “Who else, in the rentrée littéraire, would have the ambition to write a fifth gospel?” asks the anonymous introducer (each extract has a helpful introduction).
Here is some of the humor. The recipients of Christ’s miracles are testifying against him, “airing their dirty laundry.” The couple who got married at Cana are now upset that Christ turned water into wine.
Because of him, we served the better wine after the worse. We have become the laughing-stock of the town. (6)
Not a funny joke, surely not even original, but quite French. The most interesting thing to me is the voice of the novel is so audibly that of the only other Nothomb I have read, that debut from twenty-seven years ago.
Here’s the worst extract: Marie Darrieussecq’s La Mer a l’envers (The Upside-Down Sea or maybe The Backwards Sea). A French woman with a case of ennui is on an Italian cruise; the ship rescues some African migrants in distress; the woman’s life becomes entangled with one of the migrants which presumably gives her new meaning etc. etc. there is no way this can be good, is there? I mean, if you want to write about current issues in immigration, you could write about the migrants themselves, yes?
How is the prose? This is the beginning:
It was her mother who convinced her to take the cruise. A way of getting some distance. To reflect on her marriage, her job, on her upcoming move. To be alone without the kids. A change of air. A change of water. The Mediterranean. For a girl from the Atlantic. It’s flat. A little sea. (28)
An entire novel written like this would drive me bonkers. I checked an earlier Darrieussecq novel; this is her signature style. Not every line. Not every page. But many lines, many pages. “It’s flat.” Is it ever. Odds are that an English-language translator would toss in some commas and hide some of the fragmentation, maybe a lot of it.
More extracts tomorrow. I will not write about all fifteen books, but just those that, like these, have some unusual, or possibly all-too-common, feature.
