What I really enjoyed about France

I am going to make some comments here that are likely wrong.  They are based on my observations at the moment, that is all.  Please sprinkle liberally with the phrase “to me.”

What is so appealing about France?  Culture – the arts, history, even philosophy – is a normal part of public and private life.  Quotations of poetry, references to painters, discussions of wine or food or you name it that includes the history of the subject.  The humanities historicize everything.

Why are the humanities so prominent in normal life?  Because French humanities education is so good.

Why is the education good?  I suppose this goes in a circle. Because the culture values the humanities.  I don’t know.  But French school children are taught directly how to think about – no, let’s be careful, how to talk about, how to write about, but there begins thinking – art, novels, film, and so on.

I would routinely go to films where large blocks of seats were reserved for school groups.  Wong Kar-wai, King Kong, Charlie Chaplin.  High school kids at the former, grade school in the middle, quite little children at the Chaplin.  I began to expect it.  Similarly, I learned to expect large numbers of children at the opera, or certain music and dance and theatrical performances, and most of all at art museums.

At a different level, the French president can, in public speeches, say things like “Who understood Baudelaire better than Walter Benjamin?” and no one bats an eye.  This is normal.  Sorry, I could only find the speech, from the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair, in German.

The French criticize their own music education.  I suspect they are comparing themselves to their neighbors, to Germany and Austria – hardly fair.  They criticize their language education.  Why can’t they accomplish what the Dutch do?  An American hardly has any place to comment.

French culture is more top-down and elite-driven than in the U.S., yet the split between high and low culture is less important – maybe unimportant.  Everyone reads Asterix.  The resentments I see in the U.S., in both directions, are minor in France.  Liking poetry or jazz or theater is all right; having no interest is all right, too.  The arts do not work so well as class signifiers.

It must be hard to be a genuine cultural protester in France, to try to reject French culture, which has a literature full of weirdos and literal criminals.  Everything is embraced so easily.  Maybe too easily.  Maybe that is a criticism of the French arts, that the appreciation is too enthusiastic.  I am not the one to make that criticism.  I loved it.

In the United States, literature, reading, feels like a hobby, one of many.  In France, it feels like participation in civilization.  This is appealing, for many reasons.  Perhaps it just pumps up the importance of my hobby.  I don’t think so.

***

I remind myself that although I am writing at the blog again, I have no fixed schedule, no quota of pieces, no godly purpose.  The easy ways to see if I have written something are an RSS reader – how I keep up with all of you – and the email subscription off to the right somewhere.

Thanks for the immediate comments on my adventure with French.  Encouraging!

Even more French books, mostly appropriate for children

Since I could read, I read.  I studied French in the winter and spring mostly by reading French, lots of it, in many forms, constrained only by the sense that I should stay near my collège reading level, which was barely a constraint.  Don’t get stupid and jump to Rabelais or Proust.  Plenty to read right here.

I could assemble, for example, a little Theater of the Absurd unit: Jean Anouilh, Jean Cocteau, Jean Tardieu, and Eugène Ionesco, ending with a trip back to Alfred Jarry.  Ubu Roi is strictly speaking assigned at the lycée, the secondary school, level, but once in a while I would push the boundary.

Or in preparation for the Quais du Polar, I could read crime novels, mysteries – books that were on the collège reading lists since, as part of what ought to be a basic literary education, the French teach literary history, including the histories of specific genres.  Thus my annotated edition of Thierry Jonquet’s La Vie de ma mère! (The life of my mother!, 1994) included essays on the history of the mystery from Poe onwards, with an emphasis on the French contribution, which is heavy on the anti-hero, like  the gentleman burglar who stars in Arsène Lupin gentleman cambrioleur gentleman (1907).  There is a student edition of this collection of crime stories, as well as one for Gaston Leroux’s locked room mystery La mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907).  The editions exist, but how often are these books actually assigned?  A mystery of its own, how the potential curriculum relates to the actual one.

I was on a guided tour of the chateau of the Duke de Uzès, the tourists being the middle-aged French people one might expect.  The guide at one point said (I translate) “I now propose to you a visit to” (arches eyebrows) “the Yellow Room,” and everyone laughed.  Everyone got and enjoyed, more than I did, the reference to the century-old Leroux mystery, or perhaps one of it film adaptations.

A curious feature of both the Leroux novel and Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin stories is that they are both explicitly competing with Sherlock Holmes.  The thief or detective cannot just be ingenious, but has to defeat his English competition.  They both have explicit Holmes characters.  Leblanc’s is named Herlock Sholmès, which is a great gag, but Leroux’s use of Holmes is even more outrageous.

Speaking of outrageous, it is outrageous that that Thierry Jonquet novel is not available in English.  It is of high ethical interest.  A Parisian schoolkid, a Serbian immigrant, is torn between his criminal friends and a more normal French life.  But he does not know that he is torn.  How would he know, he is twelve.  It is a battle between innocence and experience.  Experience, at the end of this bleak novel, is destructive, at least for someone that young.

This book was a productive mistake for me, and not the only one I made.  The language was extremely difficult, with a lot of slang including the subset where the protagonist takes the “tromé” to the mall and then listens to some “zicmu.”  It’s like a word game.  Between the language, the violence, and the sexual content (things the character observes), I thought, this is for junior high kids?  But collège extends to 9th or 10th grade, which is a long ways from 6th or 7th.  I made this mistake several times, trying a book that was not too hard for me but was very hard.  The mistake was so valuable that now I do it deliberately.

I could keep going.  I have not written about J. M. G. Le Clézio, or Marguerite Yourcenar, or Joseph Kessel, all collège level, or Annie Ernaux or Raymond Queneau, successful lycée-level experiments.  At some point, I do want to read Proust and Montaigne in French, that seems achievable, but I am patient.

Some books I read in French

What did I read when I was, in French terms, 9 years-old?  Just some examples, aside from Le Petit Prince and Petit Nicolas and Asterix and Tintin.

My first great discovery was a series of poetry collections for children of poems not written for children.  Please see them here.  I read the collections of Victor Hugo, Max Jacob, and Louis Aragon.  Other writers in the series include warhorses like Baudelaire and Rimbaud through difficult avant-gardists like Jean Cocteau and Henri Michaux.  Michaux for children!  In English, Michaux was difficult enough.  These are, again, not collections of poems written for children, but poems appropriate for children, which presumably means, in part, subject matter but as far as I could tell mostly meant reading level, which is just what I needed.

At some point I “graduated” to complete books by French poets, but these were great.  Yes, in France Baudelaire and Rimbaud are poets suitable for tiny little children.  If you poke around at that link, you might find Dadaïstes et surréalistes for children.

Is it true – an aside – that there is not even a selected poems of Louis Aragon in English?  What is wrong with us?

Once I discovered that I was reading at the junior high level, and that French junior high students read good, good, good books, I just read what they read.  Or might read.  The days of the universal French curriculum are long gone, but aside from some conversation with Book Around the Corner, I do not really know what goes on in the French classroom.  This Gallimard website suggests, at least, what might be read.

I loved the Folioplus classiques editions.  They were like Norton Critical Editions for junior high students operating at the university level.  Or is all of that supplementary material for the teacher?  Every edition includes, for example, a ten page essay about the cover art!  The fundamental basis of analysis was historical, literature as literary history, art as art history.  But again, I don’t know what is actually taught.

I could observe, occasionally.  Standing in line at a bookstore to buy an annotated edition of Charles Perrault’s Contes – Bluebeard and Cinderella and so on – I saw that the girl behind me was buying Michel Tournier’s Vendredi ou la vie sauvage (Friday, or the Savage Life, 1971), which I was reading, and carrying with me, at the time.  Evidence!

Tournier’s first novel was a Robinson Crusoe rewrite, Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (Friday, or the Limbs of the Pacific, 1967), available in English as Friday.  For some reason he wrote a shorter, simpler version – not a children’s version, he insisted – and the result is that the simple one is assigned in junior high and the more complex one in high school.  It is like a literary pedagogical experiment.  The simple one is quite good.

Molière is assigned incessantly, beginning with the short prose farce Les Fourberies de Scapin (1670) and advancing year after year to the complex verse masterpieces like Tartuffe.  I just read the simple stuff, like The Flying Doctor and The Doctor against Himself, culminating, to my surprise, in George Dandin or Le Mari confondu (George Dandin, or the Confused Husband, 1668), which inverted the standard jokes of the farces by the writerly magic trick of making the central characters real.  What was funny when they were cardboard becomes pathetic, perhaps even tragic, when they are real people. Even though I know full well that they are not real real people – what a trick, what a genius.  A local theater put on the play in March – what luck – and Emma wrote about it.

I could just keep going.  I will, tomorrow.

Endless thanks to the Lyon public library, my home away from home away from home, for all of these books.

How I read some French

What do I do, I read, right, so I was reading French from the beginning.  French books and French bookstores identify reading level clearly, so the only question was how old I was.  At first I was maybe 9, maybe 10, but with effort I aged quickly.

Another barrier adult language-learners face is a reluctance to read children’s literature.  Overcome that neurosis, is my advice, although with French I would add first that a number of important authors have written for children, so read those; second, a number of French children’s books are of such high cultural significance that you ought to read them anyways, Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (1943) being the most famous example although René Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé’s Petit Nicolas (1959?), a kind of French Peanuts in prose, was even more instructive.  Goscinny is the creator of Asterix, also essential.

The latest Asterix volume, the 37th, now written by someone else, was released in October, and I saw it almost literally everywhere, read by almost literally everyone; it was easily the best-selling book in France in 2017.  When was the last time we had a book like that in the U.S.?

And third, the important thing here is forward motion, to read anything readable, anything not so difficult and frustrating that I stop reading.  My breakthrough came in November, after less than three months of intensive French, when, trying a Maupassant collection, I discovered that I had turned let’s say 12 and that I had entered the collège as a 6ème, or in U.S. terms that I was in junior high.  I have no idea what is read in American junior highs now, but in France, they read literature.  I love literature.  Balzac and Hugo, Molière and Maupassant, Michel Tournier and Marguerite Yourcenar.  I could – I did –  read Molière in French.  Kinda dumb Molière, one-act prose imitations of Italian farces, but still, real Molière, in real French.

This felt like some kind of accomplishment.

More breakthroughs: the first time I decided I did not need a book in English over lunch – my French book would do.  Reading without a dictionary, an exercise I still regularly use.  Each increment of pages: twenty French pages in a day, thirty, sixty.  My first book longer than two hundred pages.  I have yet to read one over three hundred.  Five hundred – that hardly seems possible.

As a matter of energy expenditure, I could feel my improvement.  At first, ten pages in an hour, of a book written for 10 year-olds, exhausted me.  But soon enough it was twenty pages an hour, and of something harder.  Now, twenty pages of struggle an hour is for Flaubert.  Something simpler, like the Jules Verne novel I am now reading, I merely read, although slowly.

So now I can read in French, more slowly and less accurately than I could read in English translation.  There are more books that I can read, but I was hardly running out of books.  What good does that do me?  Why did I bother?  Let’s not pursue this idea.

I fear that my new skill could easily rust with neglect.  It is necessary that I read French every day.  Almost every day.  If you see, in my Currently Reading box to the upper right, that there is nothing French, please, give me a poke with a sharp stick.  “Get reading!”

Tomorrow: what I read.

How I learned some French

Is language learning interesting?  I mean, other people’s language learning?  I mean, mine.  I am not sure.  Maybe someone will find this useful.

I spent the last year working on my French.  Here’s what that meant.

Where I Started

I had taken French for a couple of years at the Alliance Française in Chicago, a slow once-a-week course, and I vacationed in France frequently.  A year ago in May, I took a week of French at CAVILAM in Vichy.  CAVILAM is an endless rolling French course.  Take a test Monday morning; start class at the appropriate level a couple of hours later.  Whee!  Just plunge in.

To my surprise – those Alliance Française classes, those were several years ago – I tested at level A2, “Basic / Elementary” in the framework commonly used in Europe, and a big step above A1, “Basic / Beginner,” what I had expected.  In American terms, I had made my way through the first semester of college French, however raggedly, and was ready for the second semester.

That test was amusing.  The first piece was five true-or-false questions.  Listen to a sentence, read another sentence about the first.  True or false?  My responses were:

Q1.  Hey, I understood that!
Q2.  Hey, I think I understood that.
Q3.  Well, I can make a guess.
Q4.  No idea.
Q5.  Hey, trick question – that wasn’t even French!

So, A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 in a few minutes.  I guess the rest of the test was to identify lucky guessers.

Class in Lyon

In August, I took another placement exam, this time for the Alliance Française in Lyon.  Again, A2.  I spent September studying French for about six hours a day, half in class and half in the library.  To many people, this would sound miserable, although I will bet that many people who read Wuthering Expectations would like it pretty well.  Throughout the fall, I kept pushing hard on French study, sometimes in class, sometimes on my own, until I had completed what was effectively second-semester French.

I spent the winter and fall studying French by means of reading in French.  I’ll write about that tomorrow.

To skip to the end, my level is still A2.  My reading level is higher.

I had accumulated a number of ideas about the obstacles adult learners face, or create for themselves, in language classrooms.  It is possible that knowledge is a form of inoculation.

I cannot say, for example, that I was bothered by being among the older students in the class, thirty years older than the youngest, who seemed to be accomplishing more with less effort.  Eh, good for them.

Adults in the Language Classroom

I knew that adults often have, compared to children, more anxiety about making mistakes, about looking like fools.  Perhaps I had imagined my way through this fear already, or perhaps my temperament is otherwise – it is clearly otherwise, see Wuthering Expectations for no end of evidence – but I jumped in, volunteered, babbled until silenced, whatever I needed to do.  I had one great teacher in Lyon, who tailored her corrections to each student’s specific weaknesses.  “Anglicism,” she would tell me over and over, “anglicism, anglicism.”  I was ambitious.  “Let’s see if this word works – it might!”  But the important thing is I wasn’t shy.

Is the brain of the adult learner, the actual capacity to learn, different?  I don’t know.  Win some, lose some, I think.  The adult’s capacity for imitation is probably lower.  And my hearing is worse than it used to be, that was clear enough.  But I had learned a lot of ways to compensate – to study, to organize, to theorize.

I would do this again.  I would do it with a language new to me.  Spend the first week of a vacation in Italy in a language class, for example.

Next: I slowly shift back to literature.

My final presentation in France - book blogs are good

If you find yourself in France for an extended period, a couple of months, even, you are crazy not to track down and join the local branch of the Acceuil des Villes Françaises, the AVF.  The organization is for people new to the city, the members a fascinating mix of French and non-French.  Many of the French members are themselves new not just to the city but to France, having lived abroad for many years.

The benefits: meeting people, parties, practicing French, food, French, wine, French, parties.  The members are self-selected to be the friendliest people in France, and the most welcoming to outsiders.  They are also saintly in their patience, as I will demonstrate here.

Last week I gave a half-hour presentation on book blogs to an AVF audience, about a dozen people.  In French, a language I do not really know.  My French is a lot better than it was in September.  This was not a final presentation in a French course, but it sure felt like it.

An AVF member had organized a series of talks on “Passions,” meaning true amateurism, hobbies taken seriously.  Material for a blog, right?  Using myself as a case study, I showed what a blog is, how it works, and why it is useful, without putting much emphasis on literature as such.  The blog is an all-purpose form.

With no internet connection, I could not play around with the blog but had to screenshot every relevant item in advance.

So: screenshots, half-hour, general interest, and French-in-progress.  Those were the constraints.  That suggests the level of the talk.  I doubt I said anything that would surprise anybody.

I defined some terms.  I deployed the Samuel Johnson quote about how only blockheads write for free.  If I were writing for the blog, I would just drop in the word “blockhead” and assume every possible reader knew the Johnson quote already.  I used Wuthering Expectations to show some bloggy features, especially the comments and commenters.

I emphasized two things, really, first, the community or interactive side of blogs, the mysterious process by which actual humans who know a lot wander by and help me, and second, the remarkable international diversity of bloggers and blog readers.  I showed some examples, maybe even your blog!  Who can say.  Whatever arguments I might have against social media, the global connections among people with shared passions have worked as advertised.

I ended the talk with a bit of French-flattering English-bashing, all true, I am afraid, arguing that book blogs have had a special role in countering Anglophone insularity and connecting the small number of English-reading people interested in non-English literature, in so-called “literature in translation,” and have had a real, expansive influence on publishers, translators, and readers.  And how we need those books.

Before the talk, I asked for advice on Twitter – many thanks to everyone who contributed.  Some hint of every suggestion was somewhere in the talk.  Ma femme gave a short, illustrated talk on beautiful libraries before my section, which surely helped put the audience on a good mood.  And there was, as always, wine, and snacks, and pastry.  I guess there were worse things than enduring my talk.  Still, what kindness.  Endless thanks to the Lyon AVF, international branch.

Today at the Quais du Polar: French class and translation class - maybe it's not perfect but maybe it's great

A better view of the Quais du Polar bookstore on Sunday morning.  I figured out that I could go upstairs for a picture.  While we were waiting in line for the building to open, employees were hauling in more books.

Today was like a school day for me.  Aural comprehension day.  I went to a discussion of the social noir by my new anti-hero Jean-Bernard Pouy and several other writers, all in French, too fast, too difficult.  Pouy has written, I learned today, a crime novel featuring and partly narrated by a telepathic cow.  Larchmütz 6532 (1999) is the title.  I am learning a lot.

The next panel was about food in mysteries, this time in French and Italian but fortunately much easier to understand, but still exhausting, eventually, and the writer who was hardest to understand – who spoke most rapidly – seemed honestly way more interested in food as a vehicle for the delivery of poison than as an expression of culture.  I know, a mystery writer  who can’t stop talking about poison – a comic figure I have now encountered in so-called real life.

I ended the festival at a Translation Joust, a friendly but rigorous public translation seminar.  Two young French translators independently worked up the first chapter of a novel-in-progress, Blackwood, by Michael Farris Smith, not really a mystery or detective writer at all, but a testament to the expansiveness of the French term polar.  The two translations and the original were projected, side by side, for all to see.

I first thought that this process would be painful for the translators, but at least as much wincing came from the author.  More than once, after the translators went over a difficult phrase, Smith would say a bit about what he had been thinking and finish with “But I think I’m going to cut that.”  Once, we, the audience, or at least some of us, had to overrule him.  “Noooo, noooo!”

Smith is, in this book, this chapter, at least, a blatant Faulknerian.  Light stream of consciousness, long sentences with biblical cadences and surprising intrusions, followed by strings of fragments.  If these translators were expecting a mystery, boy were they surprised.  This text was hard.

There was one relatively simple sentence where the translators made different choices for every possible word.  As one translator noted, they had just three words in common, and those were the equivalents of “he,” “the,” and “of.”  Different nouns, verbs, and adjectives.  For “street lamps,” one “réverbères” and one “lampadaires.”  And – here is the great lesson – both sentences were good translations!

In ten years of reading book blogs, I rarely saw anyone reading William Faulkner, and much of what I did see was in a spirit of fear and loathing.  I don’t, as usual, get it.  But today I saw a real Faulknerian get the same response.

A few older members of the audience seemed genuinely freaked out by the end of the phrase “he walked in the satisfaction of night,” which both translators had as “la satisfaction de la nuit,” just word for word.  An “anglicism,” the protestors said.  A translation error.  But the translators pushed back – “satisfaction” is an ordinary French word; it is the English that is unusual, poeticized.  Over-written, maybe, but truly Smith’s, an example of his style, which has a strong flavor.  It is the common problem, that a reader dislikes an author’s style but blames the translator.

It was to a different example, but this response of Smith's was good: “maybe it's not perfect but maybe it's great.”  I like authors who think like that.

This was an instructive session, an instructive book festival.  Nerve-wracking for the author, in this case, but they usually seemed to be having a good time.  Get your mystery novel written and get invited, that is my advice to you.

noir, metaphysical and hopeless - having fun at the Quais du Polar

The core of the Quais du Polar is a giant bookstore.  The big hall of the Bourse, the 19th century stock exchange, is occupied by ten local booksellers, all medium to small independents, with huge heaps of books, the piles sometimes concealing the authors.  How the authors are assigned to particular bookstores I do not know.  C. J. Tudor, signing away, took better photos than I did.

The last time I was in this hall, it was for an organic wine expo.  That was also nice, and much less crowded.  The French are more serious about crime novels than about organic wine!

The other surprise has been how muted the publishers have been.  Aside from sponsoring the hamburger truck, they are concealed.  I cannot help but contrast to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which was about publishers, agents, and book rights, not books.  The Quais du Polar is about books and writers.  And readers.  I see people reading more here, reading one of their new, newly-signed books.

I had the public library’s copy of Jean-Bernard Pouy’s A Brief History of the Noir Novel with me, and I wanted to get him to sign it, but ma femme seemed to be against that.  I asked Pouy and he seemed fine with it, but he would be, since one chapter of his book is devoted to pessimists and nihilists and two chapters contain nothing but weird stuff, the craziest books.  Has anyone wandering by read Peter Loughram’s The Train Ride (1966), for example?  “[T]his descent into hell is one of the most noir, metaphysical and hopeless novels that the history of the genre warms in its moist and malodorous folds” (p. 80, translation mine, be suspicious).

So anyway I bought my own copy; he signed that; the library book is pristine.

I went to an event featuring Patricia MacDonald, Camilla Grebe, C. J. Tudor, and two debut novelists, all of whom have recently written novels about old crimes that have returned, so that the novels have multiple time frames.  The moderator said that his Belgian teen students hated flashbacks because flashbacks are for adults, who look into the past, while young people look to the future – I congratulate whichever Belgian kid came up with that bit of sophistry.  The mystery writers were dismayed, visibly dismayed, every one of them.  Otherwise, this panel of professionals gave predictably professional answers.  Patricia MacDonald only spoke in French, which impressed me.

More doomy and interesting was a panel of Deon Meyer (South African) and Yana Vagner (Russian), both mystery writers who have written disease-apocalypse novels.  Meyer’s book was openly a kind of Year Zero Utopia, but Vagner’s seemed truly grim.  Her direct quote about her characters, transcribed into my notebook: “They all know that they are doomed.”

The happy part of the story is that Vagner, not a professional writer, not a fiction writer, wrote the novel directly to her blog, a chapter at a time, picking up an audience, and a publisher, and a movie deal along the way.  It’s the blogger dream!  Meyer was stunned, and kept interrupting her with questions.  Stunned and impressed.  Me, too.

One more crime day.

The Quai du Polars, Lyon's big detective novel festival, begins tomorrow - everything is in everything

The Quais du Polar, Lyon’s author-centered celebration of the polar, the crime novel, begins tomorrow.  Readers of Book around the Corner are well aware of the pleasures of this book festival.  My impression, not just from her but from other things I have read, is that it is a favorite of authors, which is why it attracts such a substantial group of international mystery authors.  Camilla Läckberg, Harlan Coben, and Ian Rankin are the biggest names this year.  I think.  See below.

Of course the festival is attractive to authors.  It is in Lyon.  Just think of what they will be given to eat and drink.  I am thinking of it now.  I plan to eat and drink more or less whatever they are having.  Lyon is so pleasant, and so well-fed.

The second* real problem, for me, is that I do not particularly care about crime novels, not as such, not as a fan, and thus the third problem is that I do not feel like I know that much about them.

The latter problem I know how to fix, by reading.  Over the last several months, with the help of the surprising English-language collection of the Lyon municipal library, I read many crime writers I had never read before, one book apiece: Agatha Christie, John Buchan, Erle Stanley Gardner, B. Traven, Anthony Berkeley, Francis Iles (the last two are the same person, I know), Geoffrey Household, Eric Ambler, Len Deighton, Stanley Ellin, Craig Johnson (he’ll be at the festival – maybe he is also one of the biggest names).  I relied heavily on the “Top 100” lists of the British Crime Writers’ Association and the Mystery Writers of America, alongside the odder and more interesting 100 Best Crime & Mystery Books by H. R. F. Keating.

I also read, in French, books by Maurice Leblanc, Gaston Leroux, Fred Vargas, Thierry Jonquet (plus another Georges Simenon).

My tastes in the genre run to weird stuff, anti-mysteries, but I enjoyed all of these writers on their own terms.  They all had their surprises.

Maybe I like crime fiction more than I realize.  Jean-Bernard Pouy’s Une brève histoire du roman noir (A Brief History of the Crime Novel, 2009) invokes, in the first chapter, Robert Louis Stevenson, Émile Zola, and Thomas de Quincey along with many other examples that I have mostly read.  He argues for, well:

For example.  Oedipus Rex ( - 430), by Sophocles, is a crime novel.  The proof is that it has been published in the “Série noire” in 1994, and that was at the time more than a cultural provocation, but the confession, late, that in literature also, and maybe mostly, everything is in everything.  (p. 13, translation mine)

The “Série noire” has been the French prestige series for mysteries, home of Chandler and Hammett, for example, since 1945.  I had a tiny suspicion that Pouy was joking (and he is, with the word “proof,”) but the bookstore at the mall had three copies of this specific Oedipe roi on the shelf.  In the mystery section.  Three copies of a translation of Sophocles.  In the bookstore at the mall**.

This Pouy book is great fun.  He’ll be at the Quais du Polar, too.  The festival should also be great fun.  My hope is that I will come across things worth writing about here.

*  The first problem is that the language of the Quais du Polar is French.  How good is Ian Rankin’s French?  I guess I will find out.

**  The mall is adjacent, almost attached, to the big public library, where I am writing this piece.

Literary branding in Lisbon and Lyon

In Lisbon, where I vacationed recently, images of Fernando Pessoa were everywhere, in street art, on mugs and shirts and puzzles, even on books.  This lovely tile example is near the Pantheon, overseeing the Saturday flea market where I bought my own Pessoa souvenir, a €1 tile with the image of Pessoa used on the cover of one of the many Richard Zenith translations.  There were three different Pessoa tiles available.  That seems like a lot to me.

Maybe it is not.  Maybe more cities than I know use once-obscure Modernist writers as their mascot, as their brand.  Kafka in Prague.  Others?  There should be others.  The portrait of Pessoa amounts to a moustache, glasses, and a hat, so it is endlessly flexible and instantly recognizable.  Why is New York City not full of stylized Marianne Moore art?  She wore a distinctive hat.  She was even famous while alive.

Lisbon’s pride in its writers is so great that it was easy to find souvenirs for other writers, the most thorough being a little box meant to contain a tealight; one side of the box had a caricature of Pessoa, of course, and the others had Luís de Camões, José Maria de Eça de Queirós, and José Saramago.  I know that Saramago has had international best-sellers, but it is hard to believe that this is an item for non-Portuguese tourists.  More Eça stuff is visible on the right.

I wondered about Lyon.  It should be more heavily stamped with writers.  The airport is named after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, but images of the Little Prince are rare.  Even this snowy statue of the Prince and the Aviator is almost hidden, a surprise.  Maybe the Little Prince is too expensive.

François Rabelais is public domain.  He was only in Lyon for a few years, working as a doctor in the Hôtel-Dieu, the big Renaissance hospital, and editing humanist texts with his printer friends, but these are also the years that he wrote and published both Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534).  The renovated hospital is about to reopen as a gargantuan International City of Gastronomy, whatever that is, the perfect setting for cartoons of Rabelais, Gargantua, and Pantagruel.

Too openly gluttonous, maybe, and anyway Lyon already has its literary restaurant mascot, the puppet Guignol, created in Lyon in the early 19th century.  Although here he has a popsicle, he is normally carrying a wooden club.  It makes a deeply satisfying thwack against the heads of other puppets.  “Should I hit him [the pirate] again, or has he had enough,” Guignol asked the children at the performance I saw.  Guess how the children responded.  Guignol is a version of Punch, but friendlier and much less weird.

That performance, at La Maison de Guignol, included a surprise guest appearance by another Lyon icon, not exactly literary, although he is responsible for a number of books.  Please see this article in the regional paper Le Progres for the origin of the puppet of Paul Bocuse.  The pirates, in this play, kidnap M. Paul for their ship’s mess, as is logical.  Bocuse had died just a few weeks before we saw the play, which was not stopping anybody.  They even added a line: “You can’t kill me, I’m already dead!”  French theater works fast, and is ruthless.

Images of Paul Bocuse are everywhere in Lyon, is my point.  Maybe they will fade away, but maybe not.  Maybe a hundred years from now, this will be the Platonic ideal of what a chef looks like. He is not a literary character yet, but might become one.  Still, the city’s branders should make room for Rabelais and Gargantua, for the legendary gluttons who swallow of all that great, bold, heavy Lyon food and wine.

Playing with fire in France - Lyon's Fête des lumières

For the last four days, for just two hours a day, a big chunk of the center of Lyon has been converted into a kind of artsy urban theme park.  The theme is light – illuminations, light sculptures, and short films projected against every convenient large flat surface.  It's the Fête des lumières!

It is something to see, a French city emptied of cars and buses, surrounded by soldiers, and packed with people – several million people – wandering around, sipping hot wine, and taking what must be some desperately bad cell phone photos of light-based art exhibits.  I know most of my photos were awful.

This one is not bad.  An example of a light sculpture, the flying fish flapping around.  Or perhaps it is a bird, since I know, in spite of the bad crowd, that there is a nest in middle of the fountain, because I saw people constructing it earlier in the week.  I know there is a fountain because etc.  This is one of the pleasures of living in Lyon, witnessing not just the festival but the preparations for the festival.  To see a bubble appear around a fountain.

The short films attract large enough – enormous – crowds that I was being literal about the theme park.  Ordinary city streets are converted into cattle chutes, or whatever they call the crowd-control corridors at Disney World.  Get in line, wait, advance, wait, and emerge in one of the big city plazas to watch the cartoon.  The highlight for me was the tribute to film (visible on Youtube) that made simultaneous use of the facades of the City Hall and the Art Museum.  Only in France would the films selected for a cute cartoon make a pretty decent syllabus for an Intro to Film course; only in Lyon would the spectacle start with a long excerpt from Workers Leaving the Factory, the first film.

Curiously, the festival has a religious purpose as well.  The first sign that the festival was upon us was the appearance of the illuminated words “MERCI MARIE” on the hill over the city.  A religious procession mounts the hill and thanks Mary for protecting the city from pestilence and revolution and so on.  I glimpsed the procession on Friday while helping build a candle-sculpture at the base of a Roman amphitheater.  You can see the shape of the head, yes?

That night, the wind and rain and sleet were so bad that there were not many candles lit when we gave up.  Saturday, the weather was good and the artist was more ambitious, so it was a solid two hours of lighting candles with a gas campfire starter.  I am not sure what the design is, exactly, because by the time we had the whole thing lit, the crowds above us were too thick to bother with.

I was supposed to help again tonight, but the weather was and is too miserable.  Still: constructing candle art that a million people will see in a Roman theater while a procession of priests pass by – when else will I have the chance to do this?

Lyon dispatch - the Lumière film festival

The Lumière film festival is wrapping up as I write.  Lyon is the city where film was invented, more or less, by the Lumière brothers, and the festival, a recent invention, only in its ninth year, is a tribute to that history.  It is not a showcase for new films, but a massive course in film history, from the French perspective.  The big – or biggest – retrospective features were for Wong Kar-wai, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Harold Lloyd, which gives an idea of the scope.  It is a festival where five thousand people fill a giant hall to see Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, and on another night five thousand fill the same space to see The Lion King.

I have perhaps alluded in the past to some aspects of French culture that I envy.  The Lumière festival was in this sense a painful week for me.  I will describe a single event.

Here we see the Hangar of the First Film at the Institut Lumière.  The festival’s screenings are scattered all over the city, but this theater is the headquarters.  The movie theater is literally built on the site of the first film, Workers Leaving the Factory (1895).  The theater is built out of and around the remnants of the building featured in the first film ever made.

I mean, come on.  I am going to see King Kong (1933) here.  I had already been here, before the festival, to see the restorations of Jean Vigo’s L’Atlante and Zero de Conduite.  The regular programming of the Institut Lumière is a year-round film festival.

The chairs at the hangar have little brass plaques on the arms with the names of important filmmakers.  I am sitting “between” Buster Keaton and Stanley Kubrick.  As with every event at the festival, nearly every seat is filled, a substantial number of them by schoolchildren.  Almost every film I saw was attended by school groups.  Every film is introduced, often by someone well-known.  A random early Clouzot movie I saw was introduced by Vincent Perez.  But this time we get:

On the left is the director of the festival; in the center is Bertrand Tavernier, president of the Institut and one of France’s greatest living directors; on the right is Michel Le Bris, who is talking about (see screen) Kong, his new 950-page novel about the directors of King Kong.  Le Bris is among other things a Robert Louis Stevenson expert.  How I would like to read this book.  Maybe someday.

My point is that at a screening of King Kong, the first twenty minutes are spent in the discussion of a novel, and the film itself is discussed as if it is something serious, as if it is a work of art, and this is all taken as entirely normal not just by the film buffs but by a hundred or two French school kids.

To top it off, Tavernier, who presumably has things to do, sits down to watch King Kong with the rest of us.  Afterwards, on the way out, I speak to him.  I tell him that he had created a beautiful film festival.

A footnote to the food in Lyon – the Spicy Dallas Burger Pizza

The point of photographing this horror, advertised all over Lyon, is not to note that potheads are everywhere but rather to puzzle over the culinary associations French marketers attached, and expect some segment of the French pizza audience to attach, to the word “Dallas.”  Does the city go with “spicy”?  Or “burger”?  Steaks would not be so strange, in a generalized Texas sense.

The café chain Flunch has a Tennessee Rosti Burger that is just as puzzling.  The rösti is Swiss, and Tennessee evokes – nothing at all?  Maybe the burger is tobacco-flavored.  Memphis, now Memphis has a lot of associations, not one of which are present in the Tennessee Rosti Burger.

Someday I will write something about food I have actually eaten in France, good good food.

Lyon dispatch - "the food" - the best thing that will happen to you

“The food” is good in France, I am told.  And it is.  After a month in Paris, we have relocated more permanently to Lyon, long known as the “gastronomic capital of France,” which sounds like the food here ought to be even better.  Arguable.  Arguable both ways.

The nutshell story of Lyon is that a generation or two of chefs, mostly women, converted a regional urban cuisine into high culinary art and in their restaurant kitchens trained a couple of generations of chefs, mostly men, who continued and extended the tradition.  Many of the chefs were part of the nouvelle cuisine movement of the 1970s, an innovative time in French cooking.

At a street food festival I acquired a piece of propaganda about Lyon’s food that is full of statistics.  Four thousand restaurants in Lyon, or one per 334 people.  Michelin stars: 23, three of them belonging to the legendary Paul Bocuse, making Lyon the fourth-most “starred” city in Europe, greatly disproportionate for its size.  477 bakeries, 298 butchers, a paltry 28 fish sellers, but Lyon is not exactly near the sea.  I have little idea what these numbers actually mean.  The density of restaurants does feel thick compared to anywhere else I have been in France, and the bakeries do feel like they are on every other corner.

Lyon’s reputation as a restaurant city means it gets massive numbers of restaurant tourists, thus supporting not just all of those Michelin stars but several more levels of restaurants, including the famous bouchons, specialists in a particular strain of traditional Lyonnaise cuisine.  For writers like Ruth Reichl or Elizabeth David, this food is not especially good, heavy and brown when good food should be light and green.  I love it, but how often can a person really eat at such a place?  Sausages, liver, tripe, huge amounts of butter – I would quickly develop gout.  Similarly, what do all of those Michelin stars have to do with me?  If I ate at those too often, I would quickly develop poverty.  (Please click on “À LA CARTE AND SET MENUS” to see a PDF of the current menu at Paul Bocuse).

It seems that Lyon has become in some ways a kind of restaurant museum city, providing perfect copies of a range of classic dishes rather than innovating.  On an individual level, of course, who cares?  Cooking is in many ways the art of the perfect copy.

Lyon did add an innovation to French cuisine recently.  The taco Lyonnais was invented circa 2001 in a suburb a bit west of me.  It is a North African sandwich, meat and cheese wrapped in a flatbread and grilled in a panini maker.  It thus resembles a Mexican-American burrito quite a bit, a Mexican taco very little.  How the word “taco” got attached to it I do not know, but the sandwich has permeated not just Lyon but France more generally.

See, for example, Takos King, in the Place Joachim-du-Bellay in the center of Paris, the home of “Authentic French Takos” which promise, on the left, to be “The Best Thing That Will Happen To You.”  Just to the right – I took a photo but sadly it stinks – is an O’Tacos, which on that August evening had a long line.  O’Tacos is a franchise that has dropped the identification with Lyon, and has made its own innovation with the Gigataco – more than two kilograms! – and with, I wish I were kidding, eating contests.

The taco Lyonnais is now established French food, even if it is not eaten universally.  My guess is that people with or who will soon have high blood alcohol levels make up a lot of the customers at O’Tacos.  But it is part of “the food” in France, which is perhaps not always good.

Paris dispatch - empty, except for all the people

Paris is empty in August, I read, a “ghost town.”   It is like having it to myself.  “Everyone” goes on vacation for a month.  I am Googling around, finding these descriptions.  Sure, I think, except for all of the people, and I do not mean the tourists, who are thick on the ground but in predictable locations.  But everywhere I go, Paris is full of people.  I like to think I know how hyperbole and metaphor work, but a metaphor should mean something, yes?  The stark exceptions are the residential and moneyed 16th and 17th arrondisements.  Some fraction close to “everyone” may well be away.

In the 13th arrondisement, in the southeast of Paris, where I am staying, “everyone” is far from everyone.  I have been confused since our first night here, when the Tuesday-night crowd at Bercy Village, a line of restaurants tucked into cute little 19th century wine caves, looked exactly like, and presumably were, young professionals having dinner after work.  Just as the even younger crowd having lunch outside of the Create Zone, Share Zone, and Chill Zone, “the world’s largest startup campus,” look like they work there.  Or chill or share or whatever they are do.  They are not on vacation.

Nor are the dozen or more African immigrants, all men, wandering around the Champs du Mars with their plastic Eiffel Towers on wire rings.  I suspect that their vacations are more accurately called “seasonal unemployment.”  I wonder who they work for.  When someone says that Paris is “empty,” they are not counting any of these people.

I believe it is the roof of the Chill Zone visible in the view from my apartment window, at the bottom.  On the left are two of the four towers of the National Library, and on the right a glimpse of the other two; in a better view they would look like open books, set on end, maybe.  The structure in progress is one of a long line of post-modern apartment buildings, classic decorated boxes, being built atop the train lines running south form the Gare d’Austerlitz.  I would not call Paris a construction site, any more than I would call it empty, but construction workers are another group not on vacation.

I have no idea what any given neighborhood looks like normally.  I’ll have to come back some time to see.  Meanwhile, I am enjoying the relative emptiness of the city by bicycling all around it, trying to learn how the pieces of the city fit together.  There is no good substitute for physically moving among spaces.  Well, maps are a good substitute.  There is no great substitute.

I hope that in novels, history, and news stories, Paris will now have a new concreteness for me.  Who knows.  I’m covering a lot of ground, at least.  The greatest danger of bicycling in this city, at least in the lighter August traffic, is that there are too many distractions.  It is all too continually interesting.

Thanks for everything - leaving the 19th century

With a deep sigh of relief, the traveler turned back to France.  There he felt safe.  (Education, Ch. XXXI)

The Education of Henry Adams (1907) would be, I thought as I was reading it, the perfect last book to write about at Wuthering Expectations.  It is more or less exactly about the disintegration of the 19th century in the 20th, a memoir of change, of obsolescence.

So I am using it this week as a source of context-free quotations that I find hilarious.  There are many more that I am not going to use.  What a great book!

Today, finishing Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), I have completed my non-neurotic chronological reading of Western literature through 1909; Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge awaits in 1910, based on a list I made twenty years ago and have fussed with and expanded ever since.  Any such list is capricious and arbitrary, but everything I have read has been displayed in public for the past ten years, so it should be clear enough that I have not been all that capricious.  It has been a little more substantial than a push through some “100 Greatest” list.   In the sense of dragging my eyes a single time across the pages of well-known books, I have covered a lot.  I make no claim beyond that.  Real experts do not read like this.

I keep the list in a spreadsheet.  No, you cannot have it.  It is essential, for your education, that you make your own.  I mean, if you are tempted by this kind of thing.

My 19th century Humiliations, the most famous 19th century books I have not read, are now, I don’t know, The Last of the Mohicans, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, The House of the Dead, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.  I should read a Maupassant novel some time, right?  We could extend this list.

As happy as I am to extend the long 19th century to November 11, 1918, if I were not going to France I would still face this problem a year from now – I am moving away from the 19th century.  My chronological drift has taken me far from the 1830s, where I happened to be back in 2007. I am, aside from the usual re-reading, more curious about what is going on in the 1910s and 1920s.  My real Humiliations are The Magic Mountain, The Age of Innocence, Sons and Lovers, and The Master and Margarita.  I want to revisit some writers I have not read for a long time, maybe decades – Kafka, Faulkner, Woolf.  Heck, I am more interested in finally trying The Tale of Genji or The Dream of the Red Chamber than reading my fifteenth Trollope novel, as much as I would enjoy it.

None of this will happen now, or for a long time.  Instead, I will go to France.  I do not want to guess how much reading I will do, much less what reading, or what I will do with it, or what I will want to read, or write, once I return.

What an adventure!

As a final note, I want to thank everyone who had the energy to leave a comment or correction, here or elsewhere.  I have learned so much from other readers.  This is my selfish, but selflessly selfish, reason for writing Wuthering Expectation.  On paper, all of my factual errors, bad arguments, and conceptual mistakes sit there uncorrected; they are repeated, magnified, and ideas shrivel.  Not on the blog. The conversation with all of you has been so helpful.  I am a better writer than I was ten years ago, and a better reader, and a lot of the credit goes to everyone who took the time, and fought Blogspot, and said something.  Thank you so much.

I’m going to France – so the long wind-up begins

I’m going for a long time, I mean, for ten months or so.  I’m going in a week.  What an adventure!  But it means this other adventure will have to adapt.  To end, in an important sense.  The tenth anniversary of Wuthering Expectations would be at the end of September, so I appreciate the pleasing, non-neurotic irregularity of changing now.

A decade ago when I embarked on this folly, I knew – oh, I knew so many things – I knew that I needed a strong structure to keep myself going.  Few things in life are easier than not writing a blog post.  Thus the idea of writing something every workday, something, something.  And I think I have done it, five days a week, excepting vacations and holidays and, to my memory, one day.

I won’t miss giving up that.

It is time to consider other kinds of writing: other lengths, venues, subjects, forms.  France will give me a chance to play around, perhaps even, who knows, to think.  Perhaps I will convert the website into an early film blog, or the glutton blog I have always dreamed of.  Whatever I do, I will put it here, somehow.  Why not?

I have no preconceptions.  No idea what I will write, or how much, or for that matter – more importantly, right? – what I will read, or how much.  The funny thing is that my reading will be more English-language than ever, since my French is too poor to read much – my hope is that I can convert my bad A2 French into decent A2 French – and the hardest books to find in France will be anything in English translation.  But I will have Conrad’s Under Western Eyes for the airplane, and I’ll have the internet, and France has libraries, good ones.  And bookstores, oh what bookstores, although the last thing I should do in France is buy books.

I do plan to be at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, and the Quais du Polar in Lyon in April, not to buy books, but just to see them.  They should be interesting, yes?  I can file dispatches, pretending I am a bookish reporter.

Henry Adams wrote about himself in The Education (1907) “that what he valued most was Motion, and that what attracted his mind was Change” (Ch. XV).  Me too, mostly, and I will be getting plenty of that.

I had the idea, once, that I would wind up Wuthering Expectations with a series on Daniel Pennac’s The Rights of the Reader (1992) – please see Book around the Corner, off to the right somewhere, and down a bit, for all ten rights – which was appealing in part because #10 is “The right to be quiet.”  But I’m not going to be quiet, so that won’t work.

But this five posts a week nonsense has to go, except for this week, the last one.  Four to go.

soup plates like crow's nests - Jean Giono's Blue Boy

The Horseman on the Roof (1951) was so unusually good that I tried another Jean Giono novel, Blue Boy (1932, tr. Katherine A. Clarke), one of those autobiographical numbers, only barely a novel in form or content.  Little Jean is let’s say ten or so when the novel starts, which would put it in 1905.  Giono is exactly the same age, within two days, of his fellow Provencal writer Marcel Pagnol, so the autobiographical stories of his Provence childhood are contemporary.

Giono lives up in the hills, and his father is an anarchist cobbler, and his Provence is not as tourist-friendly as Pagnol’s.  Lots of death, especially, from disease, accident, suicide.  Jean is sent to a village for his health just in time to witness a kind of suicide epidemic, an infectious melancholia.  Not that Pagnol’s Provence is all sunshine and lavender.

Blue Boy is full of the bold, even over-written descriptive imagery that so impressed me in Horseman:

A maze of little streets twisted in a net about the church, just beneath the campanile.  It seethed like the veins in an ash leaf: it was blacker than the night, it smelled of stink and the stable.  There were odors of bread and dried fagots.  The dull sounds of stamping could be heard behind the walls.  A small window bled great globs of light that splotched the pools of liquid dung.

“The oven,” said my father.  “They are making the bread.”  (Ch. 3, p. 41)

Now that is some vigorous translation.  Globs, splotched, dung.  And it turns out to be bread.  Life over here; filth and disease and death over there – but almost right here – is perhaps the argument of the novel.

Jean is at the animal fair, where

… the inns cooked great cauldrons of beef stew, and when it was one of those dry winter days with open sky, hard and round beneath the sun like granite stones in the river bed, the stew was served outdoors on long trestle tables.  All the animal dealers lined up by class or by villages and they began to mop up the gravy with hunks of bread.  They stood before the bench, they took the dipper and poured dippersful of stew into deep dishes.  For they were given soup plates, broad and deep, like crows’ nests.  And so, from the very beginning of the afternoon, when they all settled down, in the sun, to digesting and belching in their moustaches, an odor more terrible than that of the penned-in creatures rose to terrify the fleeing birds, and then the sky became still as death.  (VI, 94)

There, that has many of the novels motifs in one place.  Bread, death, bad smells, birds.  Perfect.  This stew is not the food for which tourists visit Provence, but I am not exactly kidding about Giono’s novels, even with their cholera and suicides, being tourist books.  It is a place that gets astounding numbers of visitors; here are books that show aspect of it that cannot be seen now.  They are hidden to outsiders, or they are gone forever, except in books.  Good books, luckily.

If some other book blogger would systematically work through the available Giono in English, that would be quite useful – thanks in advance.

it was impossible to recognize anything familiar - Jean Giono makes it strange

The Horseman on the Roof is full of magnificent, original imagery of the Provence landscape.  The story is about Angelo, the horseman, trying to avoid quarantines, murderous mobs, thieves, and cholera, the latter the cause of all of the former.  Meanwhile, earth abides.  Perhaps there is irony here.  Giono’s numerous, repulsive descriptions of death by disease are not exactly clinical, but nor are they voyeuristic.  Death by disease is part of nature.  The novel is full of nature.

The light, crushed to a fine irritant dust, rubbed its sandpaper over the drowsy horse and rider, and over the little trees, which it gradually spirited away into worn air, whose coarse texture quivered, mingling smears of greasy yellow with dull ochers, with great slabs of chalk wherein it was impossible to recognize anything familiar.  (Ch. 1, p. 14)

The book, the imagistic side of it, is an exercise in “make it strange,” the human world made strange by the cholera, the natural world distorted by the heat.  The next sentences:

The slopes poured down into the valley the stale reek of everything that had died within the vast radius of these pale hills.  Tree stumps and skins; ants’ nests; little cages of ribs the size of a fist; skeletons of snakes like broken chains of silver; patches of slaughtered flies like handfuls of dried currants; dead hedgehogs whose bones looked like chestnuts in their burrs; vicious shreds of wild boars strewn over wide threshing-floors of agony; trees devoured from head to foot, stuffed with sawdust to the tips of their branches, which the thick air kept standing; carcasses of buzzards fallen into the boughs of oaks on which the sun beat down; or the sharp stink of the heated sap along the hawthorn trunks.

This is some mix of close observation and hallucination.  Provence is consumed by death before the cholera comes (it comes in the next paragraph).  “The heat reached [Avignon] the same day, and its first blasts crumbled the sickliest trees” (16).  Then comes the nightmare in the Orange train station I quoted yesterday, and a series of other horrors.

Nature turns against man.  Angelo is sleeping on the roofs of the town of Manosque, Jean Giono’s home, in order to escape the plague and give the novel a title:

His eyes had been shut for an uncertain length of time when he felt himself being slapped by downy little paws, struck painfully about the temples, and claws raking through his hair as if someone were trying to plow it up.

He was covered with swallows, which were pecking at him.

They thought he was a corpse, as was entirely likely.  Even more horrifying is a later passage in which the butterflies, “yellow, red and black, white ones spotted with red, and huge ones, almost as big as sparrows,” become a menace, or at least, in this world, feel like one.

They had invaded and covered the road; they floated between the horses’ legs.  Their colors, endlessly darting, tired the eyes, induced a kind of vertigo.  They were soon mingled with swarms of blue flies and wasps, whose heavy humming urged sleep in spite of the morning.  (Ch. 11, 312)

Later, though, viewed from above, “[t]he butterflies sparkled like sand” (332).

The great beauty of Giono’s descriptive writing is thoroughly mediated, ironicized, and distorted.  The historical event, the epidemic, allows Giono to use the landscape in which he spent his whole life without the usual sentimentality.  The result is the perfect book for Provence tourists with a sense of history and irony.

Jean Giono's The Horseman on the Roof - ill suited to any romanticism

Thinking ahead to a likely visit to Provence, I read what must be the best possible book for Provence tourists, Jean Giono’s The Horseman on the Roof (1951, tr. Jonathan Griffin).  An Italian nobleman is passing through Provence for some reason.  He has the bad luck, although in a sense his luck is better than that of many, to be there when the Asiatic cholera of 1832 breaks out, killing about a hundred thousand people in France on this pass.  Giono describes, in repulsive detail, I would guess about ten thousand of those deaths as Angelo rides and fights his way to – well, not safety but rather more comprehensible dangers.

I am quoting historian Jürgen Osterhammel’s passage on cholera from The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (2009, tr. Patrick Camiller, p. 190):

Its symptomatology underlined its horrifying nature: it appeared suddenly and could theoretically strike anyone, leading with plague-like probability (more than 50 percent of cases) to death in a time that might be as short as a few hours.  Unlike smallpox, which causes a high fever, cholera is always described as a “cold” illness; unlike tuberculosis or “consumption,” it is ill suited to any romanticism.

The Horseman on the Roof is a historical post-apocalyptic novel, not a genre I know well.  It is as unflinchingly disgusting as the visual post-apocalyptic works I have seen, meaning comic books like The Walking Dead and Y the Last Man that seem to want their artists to draw every drop of escaped human fluid.  How much time do today’s comic book artists practice drawing viscera?   I would love to read a comparison of Giono’s novel and The Road.  Here is a sample that is horrifying but not so disgusting:

At Orange station the passengers in a train from Lyon began to pound as hard as they could on their carriage doors to get someone to come and let them out.  They were dying of thirst; many had vomited and were writhing with colic.  The engine-driver came along with the keys, but after opening two of the doors he could not open the third: he went away and rested his forehead on a railing; after a time he fell against it.  (Ch. 1, p. 16)

How handy for certain kinds of plotting to have a disease that makes characters drop dead on the spot.  The perverse thing is that The Horseman on the Roof, although constructed on a pile of blue corpses, is at heart 1) a complex and artful depiction of the Provence landscape and 2) a work of deep humanism.  Angelo, the Italian horseman, is deeply, existentially, concerned with heroism, with honor and glory, which makes him a plausible man of his time, but also with serious questions about how to live that are more those of a French writer of 1951, or of today.  How to do good.

I will make some attempt to pursue those ideas in my next couple of posts.

The 1995 Jean-Paul Rappeneau film, and how else could it function, tones down the horror quite a lot and turns the story into more of a Dumas-like adventure.  Much of the pleasure of the film is spending time gazing upon two actors who were among the best-looking humans on earth; too much body horror would spoil the effect.  I likely remember the movie poorly.  That was over twenty years ago.