Paris, with a stench

Nana - Emile Zola (trans. George Holden) (Penguin Books, 1972 [1880])

Once upon a time (college) a friend recommended this novel. She was a great reader of classic literature, and while I forget the details, this was among her very favorite.

Nana is a courtesan. Or more than a courtesan, rather a force of nature. She takes Paris by storm, attracting lovers and riches. And spending both just as freely. And around her, constellations of other courtesans and the well-born men who keep them, constantly trading places in some whirling dance. And anyone who ascends from the gutter to rise as high as Nana does... can her end come with anything other than a fall?

This novel is highly readable. It's well-paced and rarely bogs the reader. I confess that a lot of French literature makes me very sleepy - this did not. On the other hand, I can't tell if Zola hated women, or just hated sex. Nana is less a person than a creature, almost like an exquisite tiger kept by a prince. She acts according to her whims, pouting and smiling and changing moods on a dime. She gives up her body for money, or for laughs, or out of pity, or... Zola's descriptions often verge on the grotesque. And the sights and (especially) smells of anywhere that women gather... those go well past the tipping point.

These two qualities made for an unsettling reading experience. I enjoyed reading, and I was curious about the fates of the characters, and yet I found them all reprehensible (Zola's intent) and found Zola himself fairly repugnant. Why so hateful?

Love and history

Overseas - Beatriz Williams (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2011)

Very early on in reading this novel, I described it as Fifty Shades of Grey meets The Time Traveler's Wife. Except then I realized that I haven't read Fifty Shades, and besides I wasn't talked about the kinky sex parts. I meant the deal with the superhot bazillionaire who is head-over-heels for a girl who sees herself as totally average. So perhaps the better comparison is Twilight meets Time Traveler's Wife. Okay.

That's it. End of review.

Except I guess I should flesh it out so that I can argue for why you should consider reading it. First of all, it's set mostly in 2008, on Wall Street. So you have a fun look at that world from the standpoint of junior analyst, both before and during the crash. (Well, during the crash she's living with her bazillionaire, so her perspective there is a little different.) And then when it's not in 2008, it's back in 1916, in France during the First World War. Kate ends up back there because she needs to stop the man she loves from .... well, it's complicated.

Time travel stories can create fun conundrums (conundra?) but this one does a pretty good job of dancing around how the characters' actions could change history, even if the characters act almost blindly in that regard. On the other hand, that meant that I sort of saw the shape of the story pretty early on. But that's okay, because what makes for a beautiful love story often isn't the plot twist.

All's fair in love, war, and politics

Queen Margot - Alexandre Dumas (Hyperion, 1994)

In high school, my friends and I watched the film adaptation of this novel a whole bunch of times. the people in it were all too beautiful. It was ... well, memorable. So while I found the book at some book sale, I bought it. And it languished on my shelf. Until a couple weeks ago.

"Queen Margot"is Marguerite de Valois, daughter of one French king, sister of two more, and wife (pre-annulment) of a fourth, Henri de Navarre. But the novel, thick as it may be, covers only two years in her eventful life. It begins with her marriage to Henri, intended to settle unrest between Catholics and Protestants, and ends when Henri flees back to Navarre, to stay safe until he can one day assume the throne. In between: the St. Bartholomew Massacre, several assassination attempts (most engineered by the queen mother, Catherine de Medicis), and a couple pretty fantastic love affairs.

The most memorable part of the film (well, to 16-year-old Erin at least) was the love between Marguerite and a lesser noble, La Mole. (There is also an unintentional murder that was pretty amazing.) But in the book, this relationship is almost surpassed by a strange and enduring friendship that extends unto death. And also much more about the machinations of Queen Catherine. In the book, it becomes a point of humor. She started to remind me of Wile E. Coyote, devising ever more certain plots to take out Henri de Navarre, and having each go awry.

I had far too much fun reading this, as I'm sure did the 19th-century audience that first encountered it in serial form. First of all: history! I mean, I'm not sure entirely where Dumas' imagination takes over, but still... And then romance and intrigue and beautiful costumes and and and. Does it come as any surprise that I have the DVD waiting for me to watch this evening?

Struggling with the concept of "never forget"

Sarah's Key - Tatiana de Rosnay (St. Martin's Griffin, 2007)

Let me start with the frivolous. I somehow found myself, in conversation with a friend, comparing this book to The Da Vinci Code. And then feeling terrible. What I meant is that both novels employ the use of short chapters to create a propulsive effect. You're driven to continue reading.

And secondly, I was drawn to the use of font (typeface? I never know when to use which term). The narrative cuts back and forth between a little girl in 1942 - and her efforts to save her brother when all the Jews in Paris were rounded up before being sent to death camps - and a middle-aged American expat reporter in 2002, whose investigation into the events of July 1942 unearths secrets that remained hidden for six decades. Um... where was I before I got caught up in that rambling sentence? Oh, right, the font. Each of these narrative lines employs a different font, which somehow both emphasizes the difference between them and adds internal coherence within each plotline. If that makes sense. (Also, can you do this on an e-reader? I'm guessing yes, but would like confirmation.)

This novel deals with some pretty horrific stuff. (Obviously.) But there's a lot of room for beauty without it being some sort of paean to the triumph of the human spirit. People act out of love, fear, hate, decency, confusion, and pride. Not everyone gets a happy ending. (Again, obviously.) But there's catharsis, and above it all rises American Julia's insistence that the truth should - must - out.

I feel sorta babbly. Like all the above were comments I would make in a book club discussion, rather than forming some sort of coherent reaction to the novel. This book, by the way, has Book Club written all over it. Which reminds me that I want to join a book club. All of which brings me back to the "babbly" point, and leads to the question of whether this is the sort of book that one must talk around, rather than through.

Trying to mix great literature and sunshine

Swann's Way - Marcel Proust (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff) (Dover Publications, 1913, 1922, 2002)


So, I finally started on In Search of Lost Time. Or, since it's the Moncrieff translation, maybe I should call it Remembrance of Things Past. This has been hovering around as a thing I should do for years now. But it was a slog. I started on or around Memorial Day, and finished sometime last week.

Why I had problems with the book: for starters, I kept getting sleepy. This was a fun vacation-y month, and the amount of mental power involved in parsing these long loooooooooong sentences was more than I could handle. (By the way, there should be a limit on the number of clauses allowed in a single sentence.) Also, I couldn't really get into the narrator. I kept pushing through, because eventually we were going to go back in time and find out about how Swann fell in love and ended up in this ill-advised (per the narrator's family) marriage. Except that wasn't really any better. Until it was. What does the reader find so reassuring about the idea that love was similar enough a century(ish) ago? Is it just that Proust does such a good job of showing how a lover can persist in reformulating a relationship in his head, again and again, to rationalize and justify staying in a position that grows ever more untenable? At any rate, it was sort of fascinating. And then we jump back to our narrator, as he falls for Swann's young daughter...

And it all made me think maybe I'd keep reading after all. Except I know that I'd just fall back into the part where I was grumping my way through the work. So what do I do? Stop after volume one?

A dish best served....

The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas, translated and abridged by Lowell Bair (Bantam Classic, 1844, 1956, 2003)


My boyfriend and I had the following exchange after he encouraged me to read this book since it was a) one of his favorites, and b) both a movie and (especially) an anime series that he liked quite a bit:

Him: I don't know if you'll like [the anime]. I mean, it's pretty different from the book.
Me: [quizzical]
Him: Like for starters, it's set in the future.

Hmm, in typing this story, I suppose I can see how you the reader would not be quite as tickled by it as I was. I don't know if I'm very good at telling jokes. Anyway, I thought it was hilarious, and I definitely want to see a version of the Count where they travel around in spaceships and he is maybe a vampire. But that isn't the novel, so.....

I felt a little bad about getting the abridged version, but when I realized it weighed in at 531 pages I got over my shame. Fortunately, it is a quick-moving 531 pages. I felt like I got through big chunks of text and events every time I picked up the book. Seriously, so much happens.

Basic premise: poor guy spends years in prison, and when he gets out (and how!), he sets about taking the most intricate revenge on those who wronged him. Along the way, we get to see how often the bad guy finishes first. But we know that the race isn't truly over, because the Count has a different ending in store.

Except.... the Count kinda creeped me out. I think I already get why he is (maybe) a vampire in this anime adaptation. He knows all and does all and has everything and ... I don't know. It's creepy. You start to think that his younger self really did die in prison. He redeems himself for me, but I can't reveal much more than that. Suffice it to say that I appreciate it when passion overtakes a cool, hardened facade.

...and I'm babbling. Anyway, good book. Sad I waited so long to read it. And can't wait to watch it on screen.

CHOCOLATE (and magic)

I read Chocolat sometime during the spring of my sophomore or junior year in college. I am unclear on how I had time to read a pretty little tale on domestic witchcraft and the joys of food and love and identity and acceptance and friendship, etc. while I was taking classes. But I have very clear memories about where I sat in our backyard and everything. The movie was not as good, despite my love for Juliette Binoche. In part I blame an intransigent movie-mate, and in part I blame the subterranean theater, and the NYC subway trains that shook the whole place every 5 minutes or so.

All of which leads me to Joanne Harris' sequel, The Girl with No Shadow (or The Lollipop Shoes in the UK) which I read in a great big rush at the beginning of the week. [We emphatically do not like the LAPL's new loan period. It is hard to begin a 440 page book on Sunday and turn it in on Tuesday.] But this was a good book to read all at once. It's immersive and fast and mysterious and (literally) magical. We meet Vianne and her daughter four years after the events in Chocolat. They have new names, and there is a new daughter, and a new witch on the horizon. Plus Vianne has abandoned magic in an attempt to create a normal and safe life for her family. And obviously this is not going to work. No surprise.

I was often swept away by the book in that lovely way that books can sweep you away. Where the magic of storytelling just makes you feel safe and free and alive with possibility. But I was also very deeply troubled. The dark aspects of the book were very dark, and the villain's cynicism seductive. The result for me was a kind of dissatisfied turmoil, not a black mark against the novel, but all the same enough to knock me off-kilter.

too busy to read :(

It's been awhile since I've posted. Why? Well, it all started with Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, an intellectual history of the march to the Russian Revolution (well, the October one anyway). This book was on my list from my grad student days, and I thought it was time to get around to it.

But it's a loooong book, and I had a tendency to fall asleep while reading it. Just thinking about it makes me feel a little sleepy. French thinker after French thinker after... and then some utopian communes in America, and then finally Marx and Engels, and their rivals. And then Lenin. And Trotsky, who comes off as quite the peacock. (The original edition of the book came out in 1940, just before Trotsky was killed in exile.) This is the kind of book that I'm glad is around, but that I wish I could have read in a condensed form. In retrospect, I should have just started with Marx.

I digress. I wanted to get to the excuses for not writing. I was slogging through Wilson, and thus not blogging. And then I finally get through it, right in time for work to become INSANE. So there hasn't been time for reading, for writing, for checking e-mail, etc. (On the other hand, somehow I found time on Wednesday night to read a truly ridiculous chick lit novel - Some Nerve, by Jane Heller - about a journalist for a celebrity mag who loses her job when she can't get an interview with a superhot but elusive actor. She goes back home to the Midwest, and lo and behold finds the perfect opportunity to prove her journalistic chops. Unless love gets in the way. Oh, and she battles panic attacks, which are intermittently believable.)

I think that after tomorrow, work will calm down some. And then maybe I'll get to catch up on New Yorker's, and books, and posting. And springtime, damn it!

Sweet Suite

After finishing Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise, I decided I needed a few days to mull over what I wanted to write here. But then I waited too long, and I have to return the book right after work. So here is my capsule review:

This novel is gorgeous - the descriptions are so lush, and the people are real even as they are archetypes. (I also loved the scene in which the cat goes exploring, arriving back at his owner's bed seconds before an air raid.) The juxtaposition of love and life with invasion and occupation is fascinating and very moving - the French were not innocent in their loss to the Germans, but nor should they be held fully accountable for collaboration. There were so many shades of grey.

But what makes the book truly amazing is the story of its genesis. Nemirovsky was a well-known writer in France before the war, a Ukrainian Jewish refugee from the Soviet Revolution. She wrote the novel essentially contemporaneously with events, and while struggling to survive. A losing battle, it turned out; she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in summer 1942. Her husband followed her a few months later, but her two daughters lived, hidden, with her notebooks.

In the 1990s, they revisited the notebooks, which were previously too great a source of pain, and discovered that in addition to notes and a journal, there was a full-fledged novel taking shape. Suite Francaise is only the first two sections of what was to be a full "suite" of France during the war and occupation, a difficult task for Nemirovsky, as she did not know France's fate. After the body of the novel, the book includes Nemirovsky's journal and notes, laying out a rough sketch of her plans for the future parts. One guiding light was Tolstoy and War and Peace, which should give you a sense of why I liked this book so much.

Anyway, it is stunning. Purely stunning. I will be looking for more of her work in translation (or possibly even in the original French).