{review} incidents in the rue laugier

hosted by Karen (Bookbath)
& Tamara (Thyme for Tea).

hosted by Ali at Heavenali

Argh! What happened to July? I've been reading a lot and writing near to zero. Fortunately in this post I can cunningly cover the two bases of Paris in July and Brookner in July. I feel wonderfully efficient...  

Anita Brookner Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995) 

    

It took me a while to warm to this book, I have to say, and I think that this was due to my expectations about the structure being somewhat confounded from the beginning. When I finally became swept up in the narrative, something clicked, and by the time I had finished I rather thought I had just read something remarkable. 

At its most simple (which it isn't), Incidents in the Rue Laugier tells the story of the meeting and marriage of Maud Gonthier of Dijon and Edward Harrison of London. Since this is a Brookner, one expects - and finds - little evidence of great passion, profound happiness or exciting events. (I should say, at this point, that I would be horribly disturbed to find these in a Brookner.) 

It is 1971: Edward is trying to escape the burden of an unexpected inheritance (appropriately enough, a bookshop) that will put an end to his dreams of travelling the world. His Cambridge chum, the rich, charismatic and predatory Tyler (Apolline is an apt description his "atavistic" nature) has put him on to a good thing - he can stay in a room of an acquaintance's empty apartment in the Rue Laugier in Paris (for people like me who love to know if a place really exists, yes it does, in the 17th arrondissement near Place des Ternes). Then comes another invitation from Tyler - to join him at another house near Meaux. And it is at La Gaillarderie near Meaux that Maud is visiting her aunt and falls for... Well, I'm not going to give that away, am I?! 

There are a number of familiar threads running through this novel - the main characters possess a great deal of reserve (Edward "would not be adverse to celibacy"; Maud has inherited her mother's "natural hauteur"; she desires her "prelapsarian integrity"), both are trapped by a need to maintain a personal, almost physical integrity, and forced to do what is expected rather than enter into risk (risk is such a point of vulnerability in a Brookner). Hope must always be sacrificed to reality. Passion is to be sacrificed to respectability. Silence replaces communication. Love cannot save one from loneliness.

They were not marrying for love, whatever he might think. She had only to glance across the table and meet his unhappy smile to understand that. They were marrying because of one false step, one regrettable encounter, one shared shock; they were marrying because their lives were already going wrong, because they understood how and when they had gone wrong, because events that had taken place in the rue Laugier had bound them together, while at the same time making them incapable of explaining those events, and their prehistory, to a third party.

This is such an interesting quotation for me, because of what I have thus far omitted to tell you about the structure of the book. At the beginning and the end of the book, Brookner provides a framing device that overarches the narrative -- of Maud and Edward's daughter packing away her late mother's possessions and finding a notebook:

The notebook was old, slightly bent at the corner, the pages stuck together. There were only a few notations, apparently written on the same day. 'Dames Blanches. La Gaillarderie. Place des Ternes. Sang. Edward.' Further down the same page, and written with a different pen, a recipe for Sauce mousseline. Then a short list of book titles. Last of all Proust's opening line: 'Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.'

The daughter contemplates the impossibility "that a life could be covered by those so brief notations" -- this lack of knowledge is "frustrating": "Something predated me, and I had no idea what it was." What is this mysterious, missing "prehistory", from which the daughter is excluded, given that the "indelible" nature of her parents' histories is also an indelible part of who she is today? She wants their memories:

And the lives of those we love must hold some meaning for us, and if that meaning is withheld, who can blame the survivor for his or her curiosity, even if that curiosity holds as much mourning as celebration?

And, so, the reader comes to understand that the lives s/he has followed may well be "fantasy", the product of a self-proclaimed unreliable narrator; and this adds another level of uneasiness to the narrative itself. For it is, I think, an uneasy read when one remembers the structure and starts to think about who is really narrating these events: then the hints of sexual aggression, the strangely angry silences, the sense of entrapment take on other, darker shades of meaning. And how do we feel about recreating a parent's life when they've deliberately revealed nothing?

There's another little joy to be found in the text -- references to books. Apart from Proust -- of immense importance and likely the key to this book -- we are offered an image of the ideal European lady transposed to England reading "her Elizabeth Bowen and her Rosamond Lehmann and her Elizabeth Taylor". And Edward, owner of a bookshop, brings his wife home books with women's names:

Out of a delicate feeling for his wife, the feeling that subsisted when all others seemed stale and crude, he concentrated on French books, putting on one side for her books with the names of women, La Cousine Bette, or La Petite Fadette, or Germinie Lacerteux, books he thought suitable to her frail composure, having forgotten what quiet horrors such titles concealed...

I've gone on a bit longer than I anticipated, as I always think I need to defend Brookner from her detractors who note how little happens, how literary everyone is, how much the heroines needs a kick, how everyone seems a good twenty to forty years behind the times (there's sex, post-natal depression and aeroplanes in here you people!!). But what about how limpidly beautiful are her sentences, how quietly insightful and incisive her descriptions, how brilliantly constructed her narratives [and so on!]? I suspect that this particular Brookner will not convert anyone, but I came to think that it might be one of her best. 

Thanks to Ali for hosting Brookner in July and to Karen & Tamara for hosting Paris in July. I've thoroughly enjoyed this month of reading.

{paris in july} the sweet life in paris (and some cheese)

hosted by Karen (Bookbath)

& Tamara (Thyme for Tea).

Hmmmm... It's already way into July and I haven't posted anything yet for Paris in July. I suspect that this is because I know that as soon as I open my photo folder and see the pics I took last July when I was in Paris, then I'll get itchy feet for travel, and who knows what could happen... 

But, maybe if I eat some French cheese... that'd help? Have a cheese:

We are blessed with a wonderful market here in Adelaide, and some truly divine cheese shops. I can't resist a cheese that comes in its own little ramekin like this Saint Marcellin. It's a cow's milk cheese, very soft and gooey -- as David Lebovitz notes, St Marcellin has a tendency to try to escape. It can be eaten as is, but I think that one night, very very soon, this little pot is going into the oven and there will be some crusty bread and at least a couple of very nostalgic thoughts about France over a glass or two of vin rouge...

BTW, if you like cheese, you might like this very informative 'wheel' (appropriate!) for identifying cheese. It's not comprehensive, but it really helped me sort the sheep from the goats (and cows):

(you can magnify it at the pop chart lab site) 

Drooling is not really helping me think about my Paris in July reading, but I am reminded that I have not yet written about David Lebovitz's book, The Sweet Life in Paris (2009). I really enjoy his blog - he has a lovely sly wit, he adores food, and he lives in Paris. What more could one ask?

Lebovitz, a dessert specialist who worked at Chez Panisse (link plays annoying music!), moved to France to make a fresh start after his partner died, and his blog wonderfully details the day-to-day discoveries (and disasters) that he made settling down to a new life in Paris. The book is a deeper exploration of these days, and is a great light read for Francophiles. It is interspersed with some recipes and a lot of good practical advice on what Lebovitz calls "the World's Most Glorious - and Perplexing - City."

This is a city where one dresses up to take out the garbage, always says 'Good Morning' on entering shops, and never cuts up salad leaves. Everyone wears a scarf "arranged with a complex series of knots so elaborate, I think some of them use a sailing primer for guidance." Lebovitz is great on the little, quirky details - the dynamics of the non-queue (carry a basket of vicious proportions!), the etiquette of hot chocolate, a (vain) attempt to overcome his fear of squid by working for a fishmonger, life in a socialized health system (less startling for Australians, who also have near-free access to healthcare), the fascination of foreign supermarkets and kitchenware shops, and the terrors of all those new French words to learn: "And a jug of wine can be a carafe, pichet, pot, décanter, cruche, or fillette, which is also a young girl. So be careful where you are when you order one."

I was a little surprised by the recipes - this seemed like the place for some classics, but Lebovitz has included an eclectic range of recipes drawn from far further afield than France alone: peanut slaw and chicken mole sit happily among mousse and clafoutis and dulce de leche brownies (the clafoutis - plum and raspberry - is definitely on my list of things to make). I rather liked the mix, though, as I say, it was surprising. One minor detail - macaron is rendered (in a translation context) as macaroon. Eeek! Oh là là!

In sum: a funny, anecdotal book - a delightful, quick read that will remind you of all the things that make visiting Paris so very, very sweet.

P.S. -- on a somewhat macabre and definitely non-food note -- last year I visited THE BEST PLACE IN PARIS I HAVE EVER BEEN, namely the Pet Cemetery (Cimetière des Chiens et Autres Animaux Domestiques) at Asnières-sur-Seine. If you love animals, and you love a wander in a delightful green shady place, and you don't mind these two things being in a cemetery, then I urge you to visit when next in Paris: my post from last year is here.

{review} creepy, noir, & memoir

What have I been reading? 

Michel Faber Under the Skin (2000)

I cannot actually say anything about this book as almost anything could be a spoiler! Um, it's about Scotland, hitchhikers, and a woman with a lot of scars. The setting is contemporary. I loved it. Anything else? It is nothing like The Crimson Petal and the White. If you like well-written, creepy books with slow and horrible revelations, this is for you. (Hmm. That rather sums up The Crimson Petal as well!)

Dorothy B. Hughes The Blackbirder (1943)

A fine, albeit highly melodramatic read for noir fans. The Blackbirder is someone who smuggles people and other cargo in and out of the United States during the Second World War. If you can afford the service, the blackbirder will organize your escape – whether that be from Nazi occupied France, or from justice.

"I didn't even know there was a Blackbirder, not really. It's all been whispers, a legend, something a refugee believes in because he needs to believe in it, because he might have a desperate need for such a man some day."

"To escape a murder charge?" Schein pointed.

Her mouth hardened. "To escape Gestapo agents who somehow manage to reach this country despite the F.B.I."

Blaike's voice was quiet. "Couldn't it be they enter by such a method as blackbirding?"

This was why the F.B.I. was searching for the Blackbirder. They couldn't chance the entrance of dangerous aliens among honest refugees. Nor the escape dangerous aliens over the same route. Somehow she hadn't thought of it that way. The Blackbirder to her had been only a shadowy figure of refuge. He was still that but a sinister blackness darkened his shadow. His helping wings could be abused. She shook away the tremor.

The heroine of Hughes' gripping thriller has been in hiding in the States since her perilous escape from France. She cannot take her safety for granted, for she is connected to some very powerful and very bad people. Moreover, she has lost contact with the love of her life. Then, one night in New York, she is recognised, and must flee for her life – south to New Mexico to find the blackbirder and search for her lover. But the FBI is on her track, and it looks like the Gestapo is catching up too… 

The atmosphere of a country that may not be sanctuary it seems is brilliantly evoked by Hughes – who can you trust? If you want to read some Hughes, I suggest In a Lonely Place {REVIEW} -- one of the best books I read in 2011.

Molly Lefebure Murder on the Home Front: A true story of morgues, murderers and mystery in the Blitz (1954 [2013])

I had very high hopes for this book, hoping it might be a bit of a World War Two meets CSI with better frocks. And it is that. Molly Lefebure was a journalist in the early 1940s when she accepted a secretarial post with the not-quite-as-famous-as-Spilsbury pathologist Dr Keith Simpson. She took her type-writer and shorthand pad into the mortuaries of London and the surrounding areas to take down Dr Simpson's autopsy findings verbatim. Throughout the war she was witness to some of the most famous investigations of horrible crimes; then, in 1954 she published this book as a record of her wartime service. 

The reissue comes at an interesting time, I think – as the romanticized vision of Londoners in the Blitz is being subject to a bit of a more or less candid debunking. Yes, people were tremendously brave – but the war also allowed a lot of clandestine activity to flourish under the blackout. It was also often hard to bring criminals to justice – given the ease with which they might be shipped out or return overseas or be blown to bits before they could be charged. Lefebure's narrative is perhaps not for the squeamish, though I was more troubled by something else, namely her constant air of occupying the higher moral ground to her victims: she has little sympathy for a fifteen year good-time girl who is strangled by two US soldiers, "more a matter of sordid accident than murder". The same judgement is not applied to a fourteen year old innocent, assaulted on her way home from Sunday School. Her remarks on prostitutes (that 'ancient but abysmal profession'), the lower classes, and the poor in general are achingly snobbish ("I wondered… why the State cannot prosecute people for being dirty"). She's quite a fan of hanging. 

However, if you can swallow that as a product of its time (and as part of a journalistic love of sensation, where everything is to be regarded as 'material'), the book is a fascinating insight into the daily dangers of life in the Blitz for a professional woman. Her writing is occasionally absolutely striking – such as the shrapnel at Southend which "fell in little showers, more cruelly than the summer rain", or the corpses of babies, "like weary imitation flowers". This memoir is apparently being turned into a TV series, and I shall be fascinated to see if our heroine becomes more empathetic and less judgmental in the transition.

Oh, and some July things... I'm gearing up for my third year of Paris in July, hosted by Karen at BookBath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea. Sadly this year I won't actually be in Paris, as I was last year. But I'm prepared to make the best of it... ;-)  And HeavenAli is hosting Anita Brookner Reading Month too: I'm hoping to find a Brookner I haven't read, but, it's long been my problem that they all seem to similar (in a good way) that I can't remember what I've read... Something to work on!

{review} swimming home

Deborah Levy Swimming Home (2011)

 

Swimming Home belongs to one of my personal favourite literary 'genres': short books set in France. I have experienced many happy instances of this, both 'authentic' - Chéri {REVIEW}, Zazie in the Metro {REVIEW}, Bonjour Tristesse, Le Silence de la Mer - or Anglophone (e.g., Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes {REVIEW}).

Swimming Home is a disturbing little book - one knows that it will never end well, but precisely how badly will things go? While I was reading, I kept thinking how familiar it all sounded: dysfunctional family holiday, adulterous father, distant mother, daughter vs. menarche, Maenadish mentally troubled interloper, hot sun, dangerous roads, poetry and loss (artistic, financial and personal).

To assemble such an overtly significant set of quasi-archetypes does run the danger of reworking cliché or rewriting tragedy-with-a-capital-T. Interestingly, I read Bonjour Tristesse just after I finished Swimming Home, which probably enhanced my sense of how familiarity does not necessarily breed contempt in the hands of an exceptional writer.

The writing of Swimming Home - the language, the repetitions, the ambiguities, the characterisation - lift it beyond the slightness these hackneyed themes might suggest. I thought it a very successful attempt. Its little tragedies do linger on in the mind. 

And it was short. Did I mention that?! ;-) Will this be the year that a short book wins the Booker?

If you liked this... there's that little French book list above. I am thinking about Vercors (aka Jean Bruller), because Le Silence de la Mer was a set text in my French class at university, and was thus the first 'real' French novel(la) I ever read. He also wrote a 'fox into lady' response to David Garnett's wonderful Lady into Fox, called Sylva. Anyone read that? 

Source

{paris in july} farewell paris...

This is a (final) post for Paris in July,

hosted by bookbath and thyme for tea.

Normal book posts will resume soon, but one last look at Paris in July. I've so enjoyed reading the posts and devouring everyone's pictures. This Paris in July was particularly relevant for me, since I was in Paris for a good chunk of the month, but am now, {sad face}, back home and back at work. To finish off an enjoyable month, here are some completely gratuitous and hardly literature-related highlights of my time.

A window at Basilica St Denis

The lovely curvy wall of secondhand books at Merci (the café is excellent)

Jacques Genin - the best lemon tart
I've ever ever ever ever eaten
(the eclair wasn't bad either. A very nice tea-room.)

Tart p*rn

My favourite department store - BHV - is being renovated. 

Even the renovation signs are amusing. 

This is the place to go for your holiday quincaillerie.

I cannot resist prowling the supermarket aisles. 

In the Grand Epicerie, I note that Joël Robuchon
has sold out to the ready meal market (Parmentier de Canard!)

I wish we had crevettes in Australia -
I think they're some sort of scampi?
The best dish I had with them was really simple -
green beans with crevettes at Le Petit Pontoise on the Left Bank.

I could spend all day browsing the butter aisles...

Less so the body part aisle...

Gold ballerinas! 

My shoes were more comfortable but decidedly less stylish.

Goat cheese crisps. (Twisties, if you're Australian)

A book on good manners to read the nieces and nephew.  

A fairytale building near the Marais: 

the Hôtel de Sens (now the Bibliothèque Forney) 

The view from...

...my cup of tea at the Petit Palais. 
Another nice place to sit down. 

Sitting down in Paris seems to have become a priority for me.

This lady could have done with a cup of tea, I suspect (Petit Palais).
Perhaps some ballerinas too.

Across the road: Greeks on the Grand Palais' mosaic frieze.

A myrtille (?bilberry) & violet 
condiment at the mustard shop. Hmmm.

Everyone associates Rue Cambon with Chanel.
I prefer...

Pierre Hermé

Pierre Hermé cakes (from the Rue Bonaparte store).
Clockwise from left: Jasmine; Peaches; Coffee; Rose/Lychee

The Village St Paul brocante was filled with things
too large to bring home. Pity. 

A 2CV. I drove one when I lived in the UK in the 90s. 
You can drive anything after you've driven one of these.

A day at the Jardin des Plantes

It's a really gorgeous oasis over by the Gare Austerlitz 
and includes a zoo, 
where I saw another Australian a long way from home:

Kookaburra in the Paris "Ménagerie".

Danger de morsure! 
I need this on a t-shirt for when I go to cake shops.

And my penultimate day in Paris: I went to the Tuileries...

...and sat under a shady brolly at Le Saut du Loup,
the restaurant of Les Arts Décoratifs

And just after lunch, the final stage of 
the Tour de France came through behind me.

I needed another cup of tea after that 
(Mariage Frères in the Marais)

A ginger cat on my way to do some shopping on the final day. 
(I hate this use of animals by beggars 
tho' at least this bloke is doing something 
for his money even if listening to organ grinding 
is right up there with nails on blackboards)

And one final pastry from Ladurée before I was 
off to the airport (this is a Rose Saint-Honoré). 

I already miss Paris.