{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

{review} lamberto, lambero, lamberto

Gianni Rodari Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto (1978; English translation 2011 of C'era due volte il barone Lamerto)

I had to read this after I saw Marg's enthusiastic review. This book was such fun.

The aged and infirm Baron Lamberto, owner of 24 banks, possessor of 24 illnesses and "the world’s greatest chamomile collection", takes a tip from a fakir and employs a group of people to speak his name over and over and over, continuously 24 hours a day -- growing mysterious younger, fitter and handsomer in the process. But will his miraculous renaissance be hijacked by his greedy heir and a gang of Red Brigade-style bandits?

This book is wonderful and witty. The language (translation by Antony Shugaar) is gorgeous and I desperately want to read it in Italian, though being appallingly lazy I probably won't. Preferably, I'd like to read it again during a lovely holiday in the Italian Lakes region.

"We should also speak to Signora Zanzi about the way she draws out the second syllable of Lamberto, and then clips off the third and final syllable. She sounds like a sheep bleating—be-e-e-eh, be-e-e-eh—and we can’t have that." …
"I’ll attend to it, My Lord. If I may venture to do so, I shall also ask Signor Bergamini to be a little less emphatic in the way he punctuates each of the three syllables. There is, if I may say so, the faintest reminiscence of a soccer cheer: Lam-ber-to! Lam-ber-to!"

Rating: 5/5.

If you liked this... something somewhere between Andrew Kaufmann's The Tiny Wife {REVIEW} and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

 

{weekend words}

Baron Lamberto has the world’s greatest chamomile collection. He has chamomiles from the Alps and the Apennines, from the Pyrenees and the Caucasus, the Sierras and the Andes, and even from the high valleys of the Himalayas. Every variety of chamomile is carefully catalogued and stored on special shelves, with an index card indicating the place, year, and day it was harvested. 

“I would suggest,” said Anselmo, “a 1945 Campagna Romana.” 

“Quite so, you’re the expert.” 

One day every year, the villa opens its wrought-iron gates and hardwood portals, and tourists are invited in to see Baron Lamberto’s collections: the chamomile collection, the umbrella collection, the collection of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings...

Gianni Rodari (1978)

Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto

{review} berlin

Pierre Frei Berlin (2003 [German]; tr. 2006)

Berlin is a high quality crime novel, which I'd recommend if you like historical crime fiction set in Germany (post-war in this case, unlike so many of the similar efforts around which riff on the 1930s).

It had been like that the first time, and it was the same whenever his craving grew too strong and there was only one way to satisy it: with a young, blonde, blue-eyed woman and a cattle chain.

Yes, Berlin is another serial-killer novel, but is raised above the usual beautiful-woman-hacked-to-death-with-nasty-sexual-angle by detailed characterisation of the characters and their settings. This is a book where you can smell and feel the brutalised post-war city. It is jammed packed full of details about the workings of the occupied city as the Germans and Americans attempt to liaise about what may or not be a serial killing crime-wave imported straight from the States with the military occupiers.

This could have been a very ordinary book, given the basic serial killer premise (indeed, if you know any German, the killer's identity doesn't take long to figure out). But what worked really well for me in this - very long - book was how Frei took one victim at a time and transported the reader back in time to the character's early life (and a nice chunk of 1930s' Germany as well) and her journey towards that moment when her path crossed with that of the killer. The victims come (um, briefly) alive in these biographies and it is a really effective means of ensuring that the apparent randomness of their murders evokes our full sympathy for rich lives cut brutally short. This is classy historical crime fiction.

There are many other threads which stitch this book together: the life of the German detective who has to figure out what is going on; the life of the American liaison officer as he falls for - you guessed it - a potential victim; and a quirky little strand about the the life of the son of the detective which should really be quite extraneous to the narrative but which manages both to add depth to the depiction of the city and to stitch up the plot. Incidentally, this youth is exactly the same age that Frei would have been in Berlin in 1945.  

A small[type] warning: Berlin is a big book and the writing is very, very small in the Atlantic Books paperback (2006). The font is hideously narrow. It was painful to read. Maybe this explains proof-reading slips such as would/wound, acused, fourth/forth.

Rating: not the most original of crimes, but the settings and characters push it to the next level. 7/10.

If you liked this... I am very sentimental about M. M. Kaye's Death in Berlin (1955) - a rather gentle post-war Berlin detective novel/romance.

{one book, two books... redux}

I loved Simon's quiz on Stuck in a Book the first time, back in May. Let's have another go:

1. The book I'm currently reading.

I have a lot of books on the go at once, but I'm closest to finishing (one in my study and one in the loo) these two rather different books: The Complete Book of Aunts by Rupert Christiansen (2006) and Pierre Frei's Berlin (2005).

They are different in genre (commonplace book/anthology vs. crime fiction) and other things (e.g., Berlin is a translation from German), but their biggest difference is quality: Berlin is a unputdownable story of a series of murders set in immediate post-war Berlin. It offers an interesting twist by tracing the lives of the victims from roughly ten years before the crime up to the circumstances that led to their being in that particular place at that specific time. It is an excellent and intelligent thriller.

The Complete Book of Aunts, which seemed so promisingly amusing when I saw it in a secondhand store, achieved the fate of relegation to the bathroom, where books go to die force me to finish them in the absence of anything else to read. It is superficial and pretty sloppy in content. It needed a good editor and it certainly is not "The Complete Book of Aunts", given that the author claims very early on that there is no adjectival equivalent of 'avuncular' for aunts. Um, yes there is: materteral. Wouldn't you at least Google if you were interested in auntly completeness? It also contains sentences that should never have made it into print, such as: "After she died, Virginia wrote a memoir of Caroline Emelia..." Clever woman, Virgina Woolf, writing from beyond the grave... As I said, s-l-o-p-p-y.

 

2. The last book I finished:

The last book I finished was very enjoyable: Tess Gerritsen's The Silent Girl (2011). It was a crime novel too (I seem to be wallowing in crime at the moment) and the current last in the Rizzoli/Isles police procedurals by Tess Gerritsen. I had read none of her books before I read the other Simon's review of Keeping the Dead. Next thing I knew I had consumed the entire series in two weeks and was living in fear that even locked doors and windows won't keep out a serial killer who wanted nothing more than to mummify me for posterity. OK, I exaggerate a little, but these books are totally addictive, well-written and full of moments that are so frightening you will need to go and turn on all the lights and hide under the bed. For some reason there was always a gruesome autopsy scene just when I wanted to have dinner. I haven't read much along these lines since I gave up with Patricia Cornwell when her plots and characters got so ridiculous they made me laugh instead of tremble in fear, but I thoroughly recommend Gerritsen if you want to be scared out of your wits. My only quibble is that why is it generally women who meet gruesome and graphically described ends (and from women writers)? This article gave me pause for thought (and somewhere recently I've read something else about book jackets on these books always featuring anonymous chunks of naked women, but I can't find the link; I don't think it was this). Of course, Gerritsen does provide balance with her strong female protagonists who defy victimization.

3. The next book(s) I want to read:

Non-fiction? Rosemary Auchmuty's A World of Women: Growing Up in the Girls' School Story (1999). Why? I enjoyed her first book on this theme, about the elaborate worlds created in girls' stories set in schools.

Fiction?  Mary Wesley's The Camomile Lawn (1984). Why? Love books set in the 1930s/Second World War.

Crime-fiction? Imogen Robertson's Anatomy of Murder (2011) - I enjoyed the first one in the series.

4. The last book I bought:

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (2008). Yes, I'm about two (and the rest) years behind on what everyone else has read. I like it that way.

5. The last book I was given:

As I was leaving work one day, a lady in the lobby was handing out the Friendly Street Poetry Reader 26 (eds. Ioana Petrescu and David Adès, 2002). Many passersby looked a little suspicious that someone was giving away (a) anything and (b) poetry and (c) something not involving enrolment in a religious cult or pyramid selling scheme. There was a lot of Don't Make Eye Contact going on. But the Friendly Street Poets are an Adelaide institution: a poetry collective established way back in 1975. They hold poetry readings, open mike nights and so on, and publish anthologies of their members' work. Poetry is food for the soul, so here's a taste:

To be a moth, once more, at the lamp
of a woman's eyes; seeking that flame
in the knowledge of cinders; and the
darkness when the lamp is turned away...
(excerpt from David Adès, 'To Hazard This')

{review} paris in july: chéri

This is a post for Paris in July, hosted by BookBath and Thyme for Tea.

 

Colette Chéri (1920)

At the age of forty-nine, Léonie Vallon, called Léa de Lonval, was nearing the end of a successful career as a richly kept courtesan. She was a good creature, and life had spared her the more flattering catastrophes and exalted sufferings. She made a secret of the date of her birth; but willingly admitted – with a look of voluptuous condescension for Chéri’s special benefit – that she was approaching the age when she could indulge in a few creature comforts. She liked order, fine linen, wines in their prime, and carefully planned meals at home. From an idolized young blonde she had become a rich middle-aged demi-mondaine without ever attracting any outrageous publicity.

The year is 1912. Come wallow in luxury and a rather gentle form of vice with Colette's Chéri. Chéri is the young lover of the ageing courtesan Léa; not, of course, that she has allowed herself to age (note to self: rose-silk walls are very flattering to the complexion). But, after six years, a crisis looms: Chéri is to marry, and Léa must face starting over:

‘It serves me right. At my age, one can’t afford to keep a lover six years. Six years! He has ruined all that was left of me. Those six years might have given me two or three quite pleasant little happinesses, instead of one profound regret. A liaison of six years is like following your husband out to the colonies: when you get back again nobody recognizes you and you’ve forgotten how to dress.’

She finds, too, that she loved her young man; and at 49 is she - gasp! - too old to start again, after a vampiric "thirty years devoted to radiant youths and fragile adolescents"?

Chéri (a.k.a. Fred) is a quite unsympathetic character, for all his beauty: he is odiously spoiled by his doting mama (a former showgirl and colleague of Léa: "Chéri had enjoyed the full freedom of a profligate upbringing"); is abundantly aware of his good looks; has a bad temper and no sense of humour.

Every now and again a fleeting glimpse in a glass would remind him that he was wearing a becoming felt hat, pulled down over the right eye, a loose-fitting spring coat, large light-coloured gloves, and a terra-cotta tie. The eyes of women followed his progress with silent homage, the more candid among them bestowing that passing stupefaction which can be neither feigned nor hidden. But Chéri never looked at women in the street. He had just come from his house in the Avenue Henri-Martin, having left various orders with the upholsterers: orders contradicting one another, but thrown out in a tone of authority.

But he too finds that his life is empty without Léa and he is stung by a rare jealousy that she may have moved on to another man without a thought for him. His wife Edmée is in for a bad time, especially given his taste in interior decorating:

‘You simply clutter up your head with all that stuff and nonsense, what’s your name, yes, you, Edmée. An idea for the smoking-room? All right, here’s one: Blue for the walls – a ferocious blue. The carpet purple – a purple that plays second fiddle to the blue of the walls. Against that you needn’t be afraid of using as much black as you like and a splash of gold in the furniture and ornaments.’
‘Yes, you’re right, Fred. But it will be rather drastic with all those strong colours. It’s going to look rather charmless without a lighter note somewhere . . . a white vase or a statue.’
‘Nonsense,’ he interrupted rather sharply. ‘The white vase you want will be me – me, stark naked. And we mustn’t forget a cushion or some thingumabob in pumpkin-red for when I’m running about stark naked in the smoking-room.’
Secretly attracted and at the same time disgusted, she cherished these fanciful ideas for turning their future home into a sort of disreputable palace, a temple to the greater glory of her husband.

Chéri is predominantly set in Paris. Certainly the funniest scenes - between the spiteful ageing courtesans - occur there.

They had known each other for twenty-five years. Theirs was the hostile intimacy of light women, enriched and then cast aside by one man, ruined by another: the tetchy affection of rivals stalking one another’s first wrinkle or white hair. Theirs was the friendship of two practical women of the world, both adepts at the money game; but one of them a miser, and the other a sybarite. These bonds count. Rather late in their day, a stronger bond had come to link them more closely: Chéri.

Chéri's mother delivers some of the most wonderfully snappy digs at her son's mother-in-law and at Léa herself (especially at Léa's continued good looks). As she says to Léa:

'Heavens, how good you smell. Have you noticed that as the skin gets less firm, the scent sinks in better and lasts much longer? It’s really very nice.'

An admirable character with a strong sense of fair play, Léa is growing old gracefully as well as disgracefully; not for her the slatternly habits of her former colleagues:

Their unbuttoned siestas disgusted her. Never once had her young lover caught her untidily dressed, or with her blouse undone, or in her bedroom slippers during the day. 'Naked, if need be,' she would say, 'but squalid, never!'

This is another wonderful book from Colette - so beautiful and witty with wonderful descriptions of lush and opulent Parisian scenes and no nasty moral messages to spoil this gentle dip into a world of such gorgeous depravity. I loved it.

Rating: 10/10.

If you liked this... I'm going to read the other Chéri book, The Last of Chéri. Both are available on Kindle for Australia - yippee!

{review} paris in july: zazie in the metro

This is a post for Paris in July, hosted by BookBath and Thyme for Tea.

 

Raymond Queneau Zazie in the Metro (1959; English tr. Barbara Wright, 1960)

There was about a twenty year gap between my becoming aware of Zazie in the Metro and my actually summoning up the courage to read it. 

 

O why o why o why did I wait? Well, my first meeting with Zazie was in a French lesson at university where a chunk was presented to see if we could make anything of it. [Answer: no.] And then - jump a few years - and I directly blame Roland Barthes for my further neglect of Zazie, thanks to his essay 'Zazie and Literature' (1959; republished in Critical Essays, 1972 [Google books link]). Zazie didn't sound much fun; indeed, Zazie sounded like hard work. But I was wrong (not unusual!) for Zazie is absolutely brilliant. (Um, at least in English.) 

The translator of anything by Raymond Queneau deserves whatever is the translator's equivalent of an Oscar combined with the Nobel Prize. This is the opening line:

Doukipudonktan, se demanda Gabriel excédé. 

(Howcanaystinksotho, wondered Gabriel, exasperated.)

The language of Zazie is filled with colloquialisms, elided strings of French words (the first word above is, thank you Wikipedia, meant to be D'où qu'il pue donc tant?) and dialectic in-jokes and, I won't lie, it is sometimes hard work to sort it out until you get into the swing and start talking like that yourself (OK, not quite...). It is well worth the effort: the book is hysterically funny and it is a wonderful celebration of Paris.

The young teenaged (anti-)heroine, Zazie, is sent to Paris to stay with her uncle Gabriel while her mother has some R&R with a lover. Gabriel's only wish is that having Zazie to stay does not interfere with his job as a cross-dressing nightclub performer (and that she does not get raped). Zazie is a foul-mouthed and far from naïve country-girl and her only wish is to travel on the métro; which is on strike. She escapes her uncle's apartment and so a whirlwind of bad language and behaviour is set loose on the inhabitants of the city as Zazie sets out to achieve her secondary ambitions of owning a pair of blue jeans ("blewgenes") and drinking Coca-Cola ("cacocalo"). There are run-ins with fake policemen, sleezy gents in raincoats, busloads of tourists, a flea-market, Gabriel's taxi-driving brother-in-law (who seeks love in the lonelihearts columns), and many unforgettable minor characters, until the grand and bloody finale with its deus ex machina surprise twist.  

Source

Zazie is an astonishing journey through a Paris where all of the landmarks take on a blurred sense of our disbelief in their very existence: are we really passing the Panthéon? We become discombobulated by the frenzy of inversions of our expectations - those of geography, architecture and the correct behaviour of young girls, elderly widows, taxi-drivers, gentle wives and proper uncles.

'How about that!' he roars, 'look!! the Panthéon!!!'

'The things you hear,' says Charles without turning around.

He was driving slowly so that the child could see the sights and improve her mind into the bargain.

'Maybe it isn't the Panthéon?' asks Gabriel.

There's something crafty about his question.

'No,' says Charles forcefully. 'No, no and no, it isn't the Panthéon.'

'Well what would it be then in your opinion?'

The craftiness of his tone becomes almost insulting to his interlocutor who, moreover, hastens to admit defeat.

'I don't really know,' says Charles.

'There. You see.'

'But it isn't the Panthéon.'

...

'And that,' he exclaims, 'that's . . .

But he's cut short by a eurequation from his brother-in-law.

'I've got it,' roars the latter. 'The thing we've just seen, twasn't the Panthéon, course it wasn't, it was the Gare de Lyon.'

'Maybe,' says Gabriel casually, 'but it's past history now...'

Zazie is unexpected and brilliant and farcical and sexy - and a must-read for lovers of Paris. Oh, and it's only really novella-sized.

Rating: 10/10.

If you liked this... and can deal with more Queneau, I'm picking my way very slowly through his Exercises in Style in which he retells the same paragraph of narrative in umpteen different ways (e.g. Dog Latin, or in the persona of a woman; in the English translation there's even Cockney). There's an excellent review by Jenny at shelf love. Incidentally, Zazie - written on the cusp of the nouvelle vague movement - was made into a film in 1960; the heroine is cast as a much younger girl (she is firmly teenaged in the book).

 

{weekend words}

‘You simply clutter up your head with all that stuff and nonsense, what’s your name, yes, you, Edmée. An idea for the smoking-room? All right, here’s one: Blue for the walls – a ferocious blue. The carpet purple – a purple that plays second fiddle to the blue of the walls. Against that you needn’t be afraid of using as much black as you like and a splash of gold in the furniture and ornaments.’
‘Yes, you’re right, Fred. But it will be rather drastic with all those strong colours. It’s going to look rather charmless without a lighter note somewhere . . . a white vase or a statue.’
‘Nonsense,’ he interrupted rather sharply. ‘The white vase you want will be me – me, stark naked. And we mustn’t forget a cushion or some thingumabob in pumpkin-red for when I’m running about stark naked in the smoking-room.’
Secretly attracted and at the same time disgusted, she cherished these fanciful ideas for turning their future home into a sort of disreputable palace, a temple to the greater glory of her husband.

Colette (1920)

Chéri