The Godmother

I heard about The Godmother on Episode 120 of Chat 10 Looks 3. Possibly my favourite ever podcast. I've listened to all of it, bar one episode. Annabel Crabb had just read The Godmother as her friend Stephanie Smee translated it. I was immediately intrigued. I do love a French book in translation, so it wasn't a particularly hard sell. Annabel gushed over it and described it as "spiky, original and laugh out loud funny", and said that it was like "a very original hat". 

The Godmother is a French Noir crime book. And yes it really is "spiky, original and laugh out loud funny".  The Godmother is Patience Portefeux, a 53 year old widow, who has lived a tough life. Patience had a very unorthodox childhood. 

My parents were crooks, with a visceral love of money. 

The family home was "in the no man's land between a motorway and a forest". Her father was a French Tunisian pied-noir (not a term I'd heard before) and her mother an Austrian Jew. Both of them were displaced, they had "lost everything ..... including their country". Her father uses his trucking company to ship drugs then later weapons and ammunition. 

To get a job with Mondiale you had to have first done time, because according to my father, only somebody who'd been locked up for at least 15 years could cope with being stuck in a truckie's cab for thousands of miles, and would defend his cargo with his life. 

Patience grows up to marry young, and is then widowed young, at 27, and left with two young girls to bring up. She begins working as a French/Arabic court interpreter to support her family. She offers many fascinating insights into the modern multicultural country that is France. Patience like all of us is initially enthusiastic and empathetic to those she interprets for. 

I felt infinitely sorry for many of the Arabs whose words I reproduced in those trials. Men who were extraordinarily poor, with little education; impoverished migrants looking for an El Dorado that didn't exist, forced into a life of small-time skullduggery and petty crime so as not to die of hunger. 

But she becomes disenfranchised with the French court system. 

The interpreter was simply a tool to accelerate the act of repression. 

Patience is now interpreting police wiretaps from drug surveillance operations, and becomes personally involved in one of her cases. This is all set amongst the common baby boomer scenario of being trapped between elderly parents in care, and young adult children. Patience's mother is dementing and in a nursing home, which appears to be very expensive in the French system. 

There we all were, part of that great middle-class mass being strangled by its elderly. 

I loved so many things about The Godmother. The writing. The plot (although yes it does go a bit OTT at some stages, but I'll allow it, given the rest of the book). The humour. The Chamonix Orange Cake references (yes, I need to try one now, although I really suspect they won't be my thing). The view of French society that I haven't seen before. 

Fourteen million cannabis users in France and eight hundred thousand growers living off the crop in Morrocco. The two countries are friendly, and yet those kids whose haggling I listened to all day long were serving heavy prison sentences for having sold their hash to the kids of the cops who were prosecuting them and of the judges who were sentencing them, not to mention to all the lawyers who were defending them. It didn't take long for them to become bitter and poisoned with hate. I can only think, though ..... that this excess of resources, this furious determination to drain the sea of hash inundating France, teaspoon by teaspoon, is above all else a tool for monitoring the population insofar as it allows identity checks to be carried out on Arabs and blacks ten times a day. 

Hannelore Cayre is a practising French criminal lawyer and author. The Godmother is her fifth novel, but I think this is the first of her works to be translated into English. I certainly hope the others will follow. 

Stephanie Smee did a cracking job with the translation, Stephanie is also a lawyer, and has translated work from French and Swedish, she also speaks German and Italian! Wow. 

I really don't like the Australian cover, it looks more Mother Superior to me than Godmother. I tried to buy the original French version, La Daronne, on kindle but haven't managed to get around Amazon's geoblocking as yet. I must try harder. 

The Godmother Book Club Notes

Bowraville

I just inhaled this incredible six episode podcast, recommended repeatedly by Leigh and Annabel on several episodes of the mighty Chat 10, Looks 3.  As I listened I was mystified that I'd never heard about the disappearance and murder of these three children.

Now that I've listened to Bowraville: OMG I can't believe that I've never heard of this case before. Three (Aboriginal) children were murdered on the same street in Northern NSW over five months in 1990-1991. Three (white) children disappeared in Adelaide in 1966 and I know all about it, and have heard about it for decades. This one? Nothing. Never heard of it before. Is it really because these three children were Aboriginal? I really hope that it isn't, but fear that it is.

The three Bowraville children were 16 year old Colleen Walker, 4 year old Evelyn Greenup and 16 year old Clinton Speedy-Duroux. The bodies of only two of them, Evelyn and Clinton, have been found. Although Colleen's clothing was found weighted down in the nearby Nambucca River.

Extraordinary claims are made during the podcast. That the police refused to record Colleen and Evelyn as missing initially, stating that they had gone walkabout! Sure 16 year olds do run away, but a four year old!

One man, Jay Hart, was tried, separately, for the murders of Evelyn and Clinton. He was acquitted both times. I presume that there has been no trial into Colleen's death because her body has still never been found. Incredibly at the end of the podcast, Jay Hart rings the reporter Dan Box. They have a 45 minute conversation (which is available in full after the final episode).

Look away now if you want to listen to the podcast (and I recommend that you do) and don't want to hear my thoughts.

During Bowraville I thought Dan Box did a great job of presenting a fairly even view of events, and yet it was inevitable I guess that you would think that Jay Hart must be guilty. While the evidence is all circumstantial really, noone else was even presented as a suspect. The police have tried him separately, i.e. twice, for the murder of two of these children. They must think he's guilty. There is currently consideration in the NSW Court of Appeal as to whether there should be a retrial. Apparently a decision is expected soon.

Bowraville was produced by The Australian in May 2016.

It seems I did miss quite a bit of media about the murders over the years.

A 2006 Australian Story Truth Be Told (video no longer available sadly, but a transcript available)

A 2010 article The Mission - Malcolm Knox (The Monthly)

Justice Just Us Bowraville Special Forum

Dan Box is currently writing a book about the Bowraville murders! YAY. Although I was hoping to get through a podcast without growing the TBR. Oh well. 

Chat 10 Looks 3

I came rather late to worship at the Chat 10 Looks 3 altar- but boy am I there now! I'd heard about it a little bit somehow over time but really leapt into it late last year when it was announced that a live show would be near me in May. So I immediately bought tickets. And then I looked out for the podcast- not really understanding what podcasts where at that stage but I wanted some background so I could really enjoy the live show.

Chat 10 started in late 2014 as a somewhat erratically timed podcast, it's basically just friends Leigh Sales and Annabel Crabb chatting about things they've been doing. They are both keen readers and consumers of modern entertainments- movies, Netflix shows and other podcasts. They also love to cook (and eat) and discuss what they've been making for dinner, or for pudding. Which I realise sounds a bit unprepossessing, but it's fantastic. It's like having a couple of intelligent, chatty friends round for dinner and you can't get a word in. 

I've now gone back and listened to every single episode. And loved every minute of it. Well occasionally they did delve into American politics a bit much. Every episode is chock full of wondrous chat, it's intelligent and humorous. I laughed out loud more than once whilst out walking the dogs. 

My major problem with becoming a Chatter is that it makes me want to read, watch or listen to (and of course eat) everything they talk about. And I just don't have the time for it all. The website is just loaded with links. There's a Facebook group that can chew up a lot of time too, but it's an amazing community, and incredible things can happen there. 

So far I have also listened to Alone: A Love Story, a Canadian podcast by journalist Michelle Parise that documents her marriage and the breakdown of her marriage. It's so honest, brutally raw and powerful especially for those who have recently been in a similar place.

I've started watching Chef's Table on Netflix, and I am a few episodes into Series One of The Crown. I've bought Season 1 of VEEP, but am yet to load the disc into the player.

Podcasts are great to listen to whilst out walking the dogs, driving the car, or lounging about at home.
They're certainly having a moment now. I find it rather amusing that what is essentially portable radio programming is the big new thing in the modern world, when we have so much more amazing technology and visual mediums at our beck and call. But they're so very beguiling, and there seems to be podcasts for every taste, and on every subject. True crime seems to be a major theme though. Serial (2014) probably lead to the rise of the podcast. I still haven't listened to it. But now that I'm up to date with Chat 10 I can now cast around and find more. Leigh and Annabel have of course given me lots of great ideas to go on with.

I may be likely to listen to these sooner rather than later:
Conversations
Dirty John
S-Town
The Dollop

Or there's plenty of great podcast lists out there.

Wired UK List of Best Podcasts

Esquire's 20 Best Podcasts 2017

Time's The 50 Best Podcasts to Listen to Right Now

The 101Best Podcasts for 2018

And once you conquer the world of English podcasts there are lots available in French.

10 Awesome French Podcasts for French Learners

15 Advanced French Podcasts You'll Absolutely Love

SBS French

Leigh and Annabel discuss their childhood reading

at the Wheeler Centre

Our Souls At Night

I don't often take the opportunity to read a book in a day, or even have the possibility of reading a book in a day, but I'm so glad that I did with Our Souls At Night recently. It's an easy, quick and rather beautiful read.

I first heard about this book last year on The Bookclub (which sadly aired it's last ever episode last night), and they all loved it. "A beautiful plea for tolerance." I'd read another Kent Haruf book (Plainsong) quite some years ago, and remember enjoying it but not much more so I was keen to get to Our Souls at Night because I really liked the premise. 

In a small town in Colorado seventy year old widow Addie Moore approaches her neighbour Louis Waters for companionship at night. 

I mean we're both alone. We've been by ourselves for too long. For years. I'm lonely. I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk. 

Addie and Louis have known each other at a distance for years, they knew each others deceased spouses and the major events of their lives in the way that people in a small town know each other. But now they are able to share their real stories, their history, their tragedies, their grief, their marriages.

We had that long time of joined life, even if it wasn't good for either of us. That was our history. 

Our Souls At Night is gentle and funny. It has a sparse and simple text without punctuation. 

So, life hasn't turned out right for either of us, not the way we expected, he said. 

I was a bit disappointed with the ending, I wanted better for the characters. Actually I was quite upset by it, Addie and Louis had really got under my skin, I liked them both. It felt like a Life of Pi Throw It Across the Room Moment, but it didn't spoil the whole after taste of the book like it did for Life of Pi. 

I've recently started listening my way through the marvellous Chat 10 Looks 3 podcast and Annabel has somewhat ruined this book for me with pointing out (rather correctly) how the title sounds when spoken by Australians. It's not good.