Mirror, Shoulder, Signal

What a delight this quirky little Danish novel is! I came across Dorthe Nors in the first story I read from Found in Translation last week. I had decided to read the 20 short stories written by women in this collection for Women in Translation Month #WITMonth. And I was very quickly off to an auspicious start with Dorthe Nors' She Frequented Cemeteries (from the short story collection Karate Chop).

I enjoyed the writing and translation of She Frequented Cemeteries so much that I searched for anything  by Dorthe Nors on Audible. And there I found Mirror, Shoulder, Signal. A few days later I was downloading it. And what an utter delight it is!

Sonja is 40 something. She lives alone in Copenhagen, and works as a translator of Stieg Larsson style Swedish crime fiction novels, violent tomes with many murdered women strewn about the Swedish countryside. Sonja grew up on a Danish farm among the rye fields in remote Jutland. She has vivid childhood memories of playing in the rye fields, and the calls of the Whooper Swans are evocative. She reminded me somewhat of Eleanor Oliphant with less vodka and less childhood trauma. Sonja is afflicted with BPPV as is her mother. It was fascinating to see this condition used in a story. 

There are a small cast of supporting characters, Sonja's two driving instructors at her driving school where a lot of the action of the book happens, Ellen, Sonja's New Age masseuse, and her friend Molly who is a psychologist and overshares about her patients. 

and Molly proceeds to talk about her clients. Sonja's certain that that's forbidden but noone's very concerned about oaths of confidentiality anymore. The private has become so trivial and pawed over anyway, and who cares? So she sits there and watches Molly expand on someone else's catastrophe.

Sonja has become estranged from her family, and she mulls over them and her rural origins. She writes cards and letters to them that she will never post.

The place you come from is a place you can never return to.

There is much humour to be had in Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, something that is not always easy to achieve in translated fiction. Or in any fiction to be fair. A large part of this must come down to the considerable skill and wonderful translation by Misha Hoekstra (@mishap). The last chapter and especially  the very last few pages/minutes of the book confused me somewhat. I went back and listened to the last chapter to see if I had missed something, but I don't think I did. This was a mere quibble really and not enough to staunch my joy at finding this wonderful book, and an intriguing new author. One that I hope will become a firm favourite. I ordered all her books today! I can only imagine that I'll love them all. 

Denmark is rather high on my travel wish list. Not that I know all that much about it really. Princess Mary. Hygge. Hans Chrisitian Andersen. No-one is travelling internationally in 2020, and I can't imagine I'll be travelling anywhere like Europe before 2022 and yet I was able to spend a delightful few days driving around Copenhagen with Sonja.

I really enjoyed Kate Rawson's delightful narration. Although it feels a bit odd when she slips into rural British accents for the rural Danish characters. Her pronunciation of many Danish place names and words seems very good to my uneducated ear. I always enjoy it when the narrators can seamlessly pronounce the meaningful words of the text. 

Mirror, Shoulder, Signal has many echoes of She Frequented Cemeteries, both female characters like to spend time in the lonely, quiet parts of cemeteries as they hide away from friends, family and the modern world.

Dorthe Nors writes fiction in Danish, and essays in English!
Dorthe has given us her Top 5 reasons to go to Denmark

Convenience Store Woman

For some reason I've been very drawn to books by Japanese and Korean writers of late. Particularly to books by women writers. I've bought quite a few of them of course, but hadn't got to reading any of them yet. Most of them are tantalisingly short and with my attention span and concentration all but shot by the disaster movie that is 2020 I was looking for a nice short comforting read, and I was hopeful that Convenience Store Woman would fit the bill. I think it mostly did.

Keiko Furukura is 36 years old, she somewhat accidentally started working at a convenience store in Tokyo when she was 18 years old, and she's never left the security that she found there. 

The tinkle of the door chime as a customer comes in sounds like church bells to my ears. When I open the door, the brightly lit box awaits me - a dependable, normal world that keeps turning. I have faith in the world in that light-filled box. 

Keiko has always been unusual. Particularly literal as a child, she becomes quite a loner as she grows up. As a young uni student she finds a part time job at a Smile Mart. 

At that moment, for the first time ever, I felt I'd become a part in the machine of society. I've been reborn, I thought. That day, I actually became a normal cog in society. 

Keiko is comforted by the routines and rhythms of the store. The store training, the uniform, the scripted phrases and preferred facial expressions, all make her more comfortable. "It was the first time anyone had ever taught me how to accomplish a normal facial expression and manner of speech." 

For breakfast I eat convenience store bread, for lunch I eat convenience store rice balls with something from the hot-food cabinet, and after work I'm often so tired I just buy something from the store and take it home for dinner. I drink about half the bottle of water while I'm at work, then put it in my eco bag and take it home with me to finish at night. When I think that my body is entirely made up of food from this store, I feel like I'm as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine. 

I've long held a similar notion, but about the culinary highlights of my life, not the slapdash lunches I eat at work. I like to think that at least a few carbon atoms that I ate for lunch at the Ritz in Paris in 1998 are still rattling about inside me somewhere. The carbon that made up those truffles on the pasta or the Golden Wine of the Jura that I had for lunch that day are still locked away in my cells. I'm sure they are. Better that than thinking the remnants of some chicken nuggets that I scoffed in a car one day are still there. 

I did like how Keiko (Ms Furukura really to me) refers to the many store managers she has seen come and go in numerical order. Currently Manager #8 is in charge. I didn't enjoy the change to the narrative when a new employee Shiraha arrives later in the book. 

On the whole though I did enjoy this quirky tale about an unusual woman. And now not only do I want to read more Japanese and Korean books, I want to go to a Tokyo convenience store on a hot summer day, and have some rice balls (onigiri) or spicy cod roe pasta, and a cold drink, and wonder about the staff working there, and what their life is like.

Convenience Store Woman is the first of Sayaka Murata's ten books to be translated into English.  Translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori.

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

Captain Rosalie

I've been meaning to read Timothée de Fombelle for some time. He's probably most famous for his Toby Alone series, about little folk living in trees, which I have in the house somewhere, but it's a big chunky book and I knew I wouldn't get it finished for Paris in July. Captain Rosalie is a delightful little morsel, and I easily read it in July, but then dragged the chain with blogging about it. An illustrated story for older readers, Captain Rosalie is not a picture book in the traditional sense.

Captain Rosalie is a young French girl, 5 and a half years old. Her father is away fighting in the trenches of the First World War. Her mother works at the munitions factory. Rosalie is not yet old enough for school, but her mother has nowhere else to take her, so Rosalie spends her days sitting at the back of the school room drawing pictures in her notebook. Or so it seems. Rosalie has other plans. 

.... I am a soldier on a mission. I am spying on the enemy. I am preparing my plan. 

It is 1917, and every morning the schoolmaster reads aloud progress of the war from the front page of the newspaper. "The master always gives us good news, never bad."

He tells them that they must think of our soldiers who are giving up their youth, their lives. 

At night Rosalie's mother reads her the letters her father has written home from the front line. 

Delightfully illustrated by French Canadian Isabelle Arsenault, who makes the most of Rosalie's flame red hair. It was initially published in French in 2014, and in English in 2018. 

Timothée de Fombelle talking about Captain Rosalie

(in French)

Lullaby

I was so looking forward to reading this book. I'd bought the book, and I'd bought into the hype back when it was newly released. We all know what happens next don't we? Yes, of course I ultimately found this a disappointing read.

Lullaby was never going to be an easy read. The cover gives us a major clue with the first two sentences of the text.

The baby is dead. It took only a few seconds. 

But it gets off to a sizzling start.

The baby is dead. It took only a few seconds. The doctor said he didn't suffer. The broken body, surrounded by toys, was put inside a grey bag, which they zipped shut. The little girl was still alive when the ambulance arrived. She'd fought like a wild animal. They found signs of a struggle, bits of skin under her soft fingernails. On the way to hospital she was agitated, her body shaken by convulsions. Eyes bulging, she seemed to be gasping for air. Her throat was filled with blood. Her lungs had been punctured, her head smashed violently against the blue chest of drawers. 

And that's certainly a first paragraph to make you sit up and pay attention. Even if you don't recognise how terribly she is being managed in the back of that ambulance. Like my recent read Scrublands (see my review) this is another whydunit. The crime is once again graphically portrayed in the first few pages. There is no mistaking what has happened, only why. But I never got to why.

After that arresting, short first chapter we go back to fill in the story of how these two young children came to be dead.  It starts with Myriam and Paul, their parents selecting a nanny.

'No illegal immigrants, agreed? For a cleaning lady or a decorator, it doesn't bother me. Those people have to work, after all. But to look after the little ones, it's too dangerous. I don't want someone who'd be afraid to call the police or go to the hospital if there was a problem. Apart from that ... not too old, no veils and no smokers. The important thing is that she's energetic and available. That she works so we can work.'

Soon Louise is hired with glowing references. Yes the murderous nanny is called Louise which makes Lullaby the second book in a row for me with a main character, the baddie, called Louise. See my recent post on State of the Union. Louise has smooth features, an open smile, and lips that do not tremble. "She appears imperturbable. She looks like a woman able to understand and forgive everything."

Soon Louise has become invaluable to the household.

'My nanny is a miracle-worker.' That is what Myriam says when she describes Louise's sudden entrance into their lives. She must have magical powers to have transformed this stifling, cramped apartment into a calm, light-filled place. Louise has pushed back the walls. She has made the cupboards deeper, the drawers wider. She has let the sun in. 

Of course no honeymoon can last, and it is the same with this one. Cracks appear, and the relationship between the family and the nanny deteriorates. 

I found Lullaby ultimately disappointing as a psychological crime novel. I didn't understand Louise, or her motivations, how she came to do what she did. Yes, Louise has a sad backstory and a sad current reality, and she comes under new pressures, but still, horrificly killing the kids is where that takes her? I did enjoy the Parisian slice of life aspect of it. The glimpse into the life of a nanny in Paris. 

Around the children- who all look alike, often wearing the same clothes bought in the same shops, with their names written on the labels by their mothers to avoid any confusion - buzzes this swarm of women. There are young black women in veils, who have to be even gentler, cleaner and more punctual than the others. There are the ones who change wigs every week. 

Louise keeps to herself even here, and they wonder about her like we do.  

About Louise, the nannies know very little..... The white nanny intrigues them .... They wonder who she is this fragile, perfect woman...

Lullaby won the Prix Goncourt in 2016. The Prix Goncourt is the most prestigious and well known of the French literary prizes. I have to wonder about that. I doesn't seem literary enough to be a literary prize winner in English.  Lullaby was inspired by a real life American crime. 

The New Yorker did a big profile piece on Leïla Slimani in 2018. I read two American articles about her, both made the point that she was "laying claim" to an American story, or "cashing in" on it. Yes, I realise that second one is from the New York Post but it's an interesting view that they take on it. 

Lullaby was my first read for Paris in July 2019.

Les Misérables A Few Pages of History/ Quelques Pages d'histoire V4B1

Well this is a tough book to get through when you're trying to sprint to the end of the volume. A  Few Pages of History, yes. More like Five Chapters of History. Dense, intellectual history that I wish I knew enough to truly appreciate and understand. 

In (very fast) French

but with subtitles

The first five chapters of this book are a history lesson about the two years following the July Revolution of 1830. Much quieter than the well known French Revolution of 1789, the July revolution saw Louis-Philippe installed as King of the French. It seems Victor Hugo was quite the Louis-Philippe fan, even though he said that "the hour has not yet struck when history speaks in its venerable and impartial voice" to pass the "final verdict on this king". Yet he is "one of the best princes who ever sat  on a throne". "He was born a prince and believed that he had been elected king."

Louis-Philippe was a king of total transparency. While he reigned there was press freedom, parliamentary freedom, freedom of conscience and freedom of speech.

Louis-Philippe sounds a rather fascinating man. 

He was a bit of a builder, a bit of a gardener, a bit of a doctor. He bled a postilion who fell off his horse. Louis-Philippe went nowhere without his surgical knife, any more  than Henri III without his dagger. The royalists jeered at this ridiculous king, the first ever to shed blood as a cure. 

We now know of course that the last thing a horse rider needs after a fall, and presumably decent trauma is further blood loss, and we would do the exact opposite and transfuse them if required, but the 19th century was interesting times. 

There is just so much detail and knowledge jam packed into every sentence of this book. I have a particular fascination with Joan of Arc, and so I was most interested to read:

One of Louis-Philippe's daughters, Marie d'Orléans, won for her distinguished family's name a place among artists, as Charles d'Orléans had won for it a place among poets. She carved a statue of her soul and named it 'Joan of Arc'.

Fascinating! This statue still exists and is on display at Versailles. I've visited Versailles many times. I don't remember seeing this statue in particular, but will have to trawl through my photos sometime, as I always take a picture of any Joan statue that I see. I'd thought that I'd visited Versailles enough but perhaps I will need to return. It seems the original is marble and there are several bronze replicas about the place (New York, Orleans and Domrémy at least), and there is even a painting by Auguste Vinchon of Louis-Philippe visiting the statue that I now need to see. 

The royal family in front of the statue of Joan of Arc
Auguste Vinchon, 1848

Aaaah, If only I could get to Versailles before February 3 I could see the current exhibition Louis-Philippe and Versailles! Louis-Philippe turned Versailles into a museum, and now 32 rooms not normally open to the public will be open for this exhibition. (There is a magnificent 76 page Press Kit to download from that page for those of us stuck in the Southern Hemisphere, or otherwise not near Versailles)

This book is really quite philosophical as well. 

Some people have wanted wrongly to identify the bourgeoisie as a class. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented section of the people. The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down. A chair is not a caste. 

And I think gives us an insight into Victor Hugo's own vision of the future. 

Solve the two problems, encourage the rich and protect the poor, eliminate destitution, put an end to the unjust exploitation of the weak by the strong; curb the iniquitous envy, in the one who is making his way up, of the one who has arrived; set the wages for a job fairly and in the spirit of fellowship, foster the development of childhood with free compulsory education and make knowledge the foundation of manliness, develop minds while keeping hands busy; democratise property not by abolishing it but by making it universal, so that every citizen without exception may be a property owner, something easier to achieve than people think. In short, lean how to produce wealth and how to distribute it, and you will have both material greatness and moral greatness. And you will be worthy of calling yourself France. 

In chapter 6 Enjolras and His Lieutenants we once again get back to the narrative. Enjolras is assessing the strength of numbers.

How many are we?... Revolutionaries should always feel a sense of urgency, progress has no time to lose.

All quotes are from the 2013 Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, translated by Christine Donougher. 

Les Misérables V3 Marius

Oh dear. I've had such a bad reading (and blogging) year. I've been becalmed for months, and not just in Les Mis. I was so excited about the #LesMisReadalong at the start of the year. I really thought I could keep up with it. It seemed doable. Manageable. Even though I am notoriously bad at books over 500 pages I thought that tackling a chapter a day might help me get over the line on time. Well, nope.

I was stalled in May for a long time, and then managed to get caught up to August. Although sadly in the Real Life World it's December, and not August. It's not like I don't like Victor Hugo's writing- I really do. There is something quotable or profound on pretty much every page. I do still very much want to finish it, I don't want to DNF Les Mis. I'm always more optimistic about my reading capabilities than I will ever achieve in this life time (which goes much of the way to explaining my TBR) , so much so that it was only yesterday that I realised that I really wouldn't finish Les Mis in the allocated 2018 reading time. 

But last night I finished Volume 3, Marius, and now I'm going to make a last ditch effort and try to read V4 The Rue Plumet Idyll and The Rue St-Denis Epic before the end of the year. This is optimistic I know. Especially as I go back to work on Sunday, and have multiple social engagements to fit in too. 

Marius is of course very much the subject of his own volume. Despite qualifying as a lawyer Marius falls onto very hard times after his estrangement from his grandfather. 

Life became hard for Marius. Using his clothes and his watch for food was nothing. There was much worse he had to stomach. Terrible hardship, consisting of days without bread, nights without sleep, no candle in the evening, no fire in the hearth, weeks without work, a future without hope, a coat worn through at the elbows, an old hat that makes young girls laugh, a door found locked a night because the rent was not paid, the insolence of the doorman and the eating-house keeper, the sneering of neighbours, humiliations, dignity trampled underfoot, having to accept any kind of work, demoralisation, bitterness, despondency. 

We learn that "Marius was now a handsome young man of medium height, with thick jet-black hair, an intelligent high forehead, flared, sensuous nostrils, an air of sincerity and calm", and when he first sees a young girl sitting with an old man in the Luxembourg Gardens, she is "a slip of a thing of thirteen or fourteen years of age, so thin as to be almost ugly, awkward, unremarkable, but with some promise perhaps of having quite attractive eyes."

Having all my prior Les Mis knowledge based on the stage and movie versions I was quite surprised at this first description of teenage Cosette (not that Marius knows her name yet, and doesn't throughout this whole volume). Still, six months passes without Marius seeing the girl on the bench, and she has become quite changed when next he sees her. 

Only, when he came close, it was certainly the same man but it seemed too him it was no longer the same girl. The person he now saw was a tall and beautiful creature with all the loveliest of womanly curves at that very moment when they are still combined with all the most artless of childish graces. A fleeting and innocent moment that can only be conveyed by these three words: fifteen years old. 

Which almost sounds a bit creepy to the modern reader. Although Marius is a young man and he soon falls in love with Cosette merely by sight. I was delighted that there was some hanky dropping as in The Three Musketeers. 

Most of the rest of the volume is Marius trying to find Cosette again after having become too obvious and drawing her father's attention, and the rather dramatic events in the Gorbeau tenement when  Jondrette lures his benefactor into an ambush. There is much beauty in Hugo's prose about poverty and the misery of the 19th century French human condition. 

Cities, like forests, have their dens, and inside them lurks whatever they have that is most savage and fearsome. Only, in cities, what lurks there is ferocious, foul and small, that is to say, ugly. In forests, what lurks there is ferocious, wild and big, that is to say, beautiful. Den for den, that of the beasts, is preferable to that of man. Caves are better than slums. 

The contrast between rich and poor. 

"Villain! Yes, I know that's what you call us, you rich folk! Well, it's true my business went bust, I'm in hiding, I've no food, I've no money, I'm a villain! I've not eaten for three days, I'm a villain! Ah! you lot keep your feet warm, you have shoes made by Sakoski, you have padded overcoats like archbishophs, you live on the first floor in houses with caretaker, you eat truffles, you eat asparagus at forty francs a bunch in the month of January, and green peas, you gorge yourselves, and when you want to know whether it's cold you look in the newspaper to see what Engineer Chevallier's thermometer says. We're our won thermometers, we are! We don't need to go down to the embankment and look on the corner of the Tour de l'Horloge to find out how many degrees below zero it is. We feel the blood freezing in our veins and the ice reaching into our hearts, and we say: "There is no God!" And you come into our dens, yes, our dens, and call us villains!"

I was surprised at one of the villains of the Patron-Minette gang was called Montparnasse, and wondered if the famous left bank region was named after a fictitious criminal, or indeed a real criminal. Although I can't find anything out there to suggest that this is the case. Wikipedia suggests that Montparnasse has been part of Paris since the 17th century, obviously long predating Victor Hugo. 

Also fascinating to see a direct reference to the les misérables of our title:

They seemed very depraved, very corrupt, very debased- heinous, even - but rare are those who fall without sinking into vice. In any case, there is a point where the poor and the wicked become mixed up and lumped together in the one fateful word: les misérables- the wretched.

And now onward and upward to Volume 4...

All quotes are from the 2013 Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, translated by Christine Donougher. 

Les Misérables - catching up May to June, in October

For some unaccountable reason I put Les Mis aside back in May, and didn't pick it up again until very recently. I really can't explain why. I have been in quite a reading slump this year, and for some time I haven't been "reading" as such, but predominantly listening to audiobooks. I've enjoyed these immensely but still couldn't find an urge to actually read. Anything. Even Les Mis. Then the October Dewey's Readathon was coming up and I knew that if I didn't somehow pick up Les Mis again that weekend I wouldn't finish it this year, and maybe I would never finish it at all. Ever. And I really want to finish it. 

I had been stalled at the start of V2B8C2 Fauchelevent Faces Difficulty. So I went back to the start of Book 8 and got reading. And what do you know? I loved it all over again. I read 53 pages of Les Mis in that 24 hours, not that much in reality, but still significant progress when I had made absolutely none since May and so I was happy. Since the readathon I've read another 88 pages and have now caught up to where I should have been on June 30. Yes, I'm  finally halfway through!

Here I'll post some musings from V2B8C1 toV3B4C6. Which covers quite a bit of territory. 

V2B8 has Jean Valjean and Cosette inside the convent but needing to get out so they can return legitimately through the front door. Much hilarity ensues in the cemetery with drunk gravediggers, and a close call for Jean Valjean. 

It is frightening to see a dead body, it is almost as frightening to see a resurrection. 

V2B8C10 Cloistered features a lengthy section, three pages of Hugo brilliance comparing the lives of prisoners and nuns. "Now, after the prison hulks, he saw the cloister."

These human beings, too, lived with their heads shorn, their eyes downcast, their voices lowered, not in disgrace but amid the world's jeering, not with their backs bruised by the rod but with their shoulders lacerated by self-mortification. Their names, too, had died among men. They now existed only under an austere nomenclature. They never ate meat and they never drank wine. They often went without food until evening. They were dressed not in red tunics but in black woollen shrouds, heavy in summer, light in winter, unable to take anything off or to put on anything extra, without even the possibility, according to season, of thinner clothing or a woollen overcoat. 

Two places of slavery, but in the first, the possibility of being freed, a legal term always in sight, and even escape; in the second place a life sentence to be served, the only hope in the far distant future that glimmer of freedom men call death. 

In the first the enslaved were fettered only by chains, in the other they were fettered by their faith.  

I'm so thrilled to get to Book 3 Marius. As A) I've finally made it out of Book 2 after being stalled there for so many months and into Book 3. And B) I get to learn much more about Marius (and Gavroche it seems). A lot of this detail and plot line doesn't make it into the movie and stage versions, so I'm not familiar with it. Firstly we meet Marius' grandfather, and then his father, and discover the terrible relationship forced on them by Monsieur Gillenormand. 

Twice a year, on the first of January and on St George's Day, Marius wrote dutiful letters to his father, dictated by his aunt, that read as if they had been copied from some primer. This was all that Monsieur Gillenormand would allow. And the father replied with very loving letters that the grandfather stuffed into his pocket unread. 

Of course Marius discovers the truth, but all too late, just after his father has died. This leads to an undoing of a relationship between Grandfather and Grandson, not so coincidentally the name of Volume 3 Book 3. Marius is thrown out of the house, never to be spoken of again. Although Monsieur Gillenormand tells his daughter to send Marius six hundred francs every six months, so he is not quite cast adrift financially. 

I particularly enjoyed V3B4C1 A Group That Came Close to Becoming Historic. Here we are formally introduced to Marius' friends. Enjolras. Combeferre. Jean Prouvaire. Feuilly. Courfeyrac. Bahorel. Lesgle (Bossuet). Joly. Grantaire. Of these the only names that I have picked up from the stage shows and movie are Enjolras and Combeferre, but I certainly don't have any significant understanding of either. We are treated to more lovely imagery from Hugo. 

Enjolras was a leader, Combeferre was a guide. You would have wanted to fight with one and march with the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable of fighting. He not unwilling to grapple with any obstacle and tackle it by direct force and explosive power. But making the human race gradually conform to its destiny through the teaching of basic principles and the implementation of practical laws was more to his liking. And between the two types of brightness he was inclined to favour illumination over conflagration. A fire can certainly create a glow, but why not wait for daybreak? A volcano gives light, but dawn gives even better light. 

I do wish that I could grasp even 1/5 of his references. Historical, classical, any of it. How much it would add to my reading. 

There are men who seemingly are born to be the verso, the inverse, the reverse. They are Pollux, Patroclus, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja.

How much better informed, read and educated the 19th century French reader must have been. Early on, before I stalled in May, I was looking up each and every unknown name or reference in the Notes at the back. Now I need to read quicker, to try and catch up so am skimming over these clues laid for the reader by Victor Hugo. 

V3B4C4 The Back Room of Café Musain contains the drunken ramblings of Grantaire. I was fascinated to learn that "Charles II knighted a Sir Loin". Sirloin. Really? Although it seems that this has been attributed to most British monarchs at some stage or other. And of course any brief mention of Charles II brings me back such happy memories. 

And now I've really made it to June 30! I'm halfway!!! Onward and upward into July.

I tweeted a few quotes back during readathon. And now I've worked out how to put a tweet in a post! It's a technological breakthrough for me.

Inhaling Paris preserves the soul. V3B1C6 #LesMisReadalong #readathon #anzreadathon pic.twitter.com/LKy3kDGCiD

— AStrongBeliefWicker (@AStrongBelief) October 21, 2018

 

Les Misérables Silent Stalkers in the Dark/À chasse noire, meute muette V2B5

One of the very few advantages of being more than 100 pages behind in the #LesMisReadalong is that I can, indeed I must, read more than one chapter a day at the moment. Sometimes that can be a bit difficult with a book like this, deep in the more technical aspects of Waterloo for instance, but sometimes it can really pay off.

And V2B5 is one of those times. As the name would suggest Silent Stalkers in the Dark is quite an exciting read. Jean Valjean has realised that someone is onto him, and that he and Cosette must move from the Gorbeau Tenement. A thrilling late night chase ensues.

Sure enough, not three minutes had gone by before the men appeared. There were four of them now, all of them tall, dressed in long brown frock-coats, with round hats, and big truncheons in their hands. They were no less alarming for their tall stature and huge fists than for the sinister way they skulked in the shadows. They looked like four spectres disguised as respectable citizens. 

Crossing from the left bank and the Jardin des Plantes to the right bank, via the Pont Austerlitz and Jean Valjean comes to the (sadly) fictional Petit-Picpus. A very quick google showed me the sad facts, on a great Les Mis site I don't think I've seen before. Of course I was already making plans to visit on my next trip to Paris.

Petit-Picpus, which in fact scarcely existed and was never more than a roughly defined area, had the almost monastic appearance of a Spanish town. The roads were rarely paved, the streets not much built up. Apart from the two or three streets we area going to talk about, it was all blank walls and desolation. Not one shop, not one vehicle, only the occasional lighted candle here and there at the window, and all light extinguished after ten o'clock. Gardens, convents, yards, allotments, the odd low-built house, and solid walls as high as the houses. 

Of course Jean Valjean prevails and finds safe harbour, but not before using his superhuman strengths to climb a wall of eighteen feet, and narrowly escape Javert.

It was a characteristic of Jean Valjean that he might have been said to carry two bags: in one he kept his saintly thoughts, in the other the formidable talents of a convict. He dug into one or the other, depending on circumstances. 

Jean Valjean's bond with Cosette deepens as he watches her sleep with her head on a stone. 

He clearly perceived this truth, the bedrock of his life from now on, that so long as she was there, so long as he had her by him, he would have no need of anything but for her sake, more fear of anything except on her account. He was not even aware of being very cold, having taken off his coat to cover her with it. 

Every so often Victor Hugo inserts his unnamed narrator into the text. I had wondered initially if it was himself, or some character that we hadn't met as yet. Hugo does this again at the beginning of Silent Stalkers in the Dark, clearly referring to his own exile from France. 

Reluctantly obliged to speak of himself, the author of this book has not been in Paris for many years now. Since he left it, Paris has been transformed. 

Victor Hugo lived in exile from France from 1852 to 1870 during the time of the Napoleon III/Baron Haussman transformation of Paris. Hugo wrote Les Miserables while living at Hauteville House in Guernsey, where he lived for the majority of his exile. Hautville House is currently in need of renovation, the full price of which has just been recently donated by a billionaire benefactor. 

All quotes are from the 2013 Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, translated by Christine Donougher. 

The Latecomer

I happened upon this delightful little book when I was browsing in my favourite Basement Books recently. It's tiny (139 pages) and it had the look of a book in translation and so curious I picked it up. Indeed it is a book in translation. Dimitri Verhulst is Belgian, and writes in Dutch. I'd never heard of him, or this book before. 

So, I opened it up and read the first paragraph standing there in the aisle. 

Although it's completely deliberate, night after night, I loathe shitting in bed. Debasing myself like this is the most difficult consequence of the insane path that I've taken late in life. But holding back in my sleep could only arouse the suspicions of my carers. If I want to continue to play the role of a senile old man, I have no choice but to regularly soil my nappies. Because that's what this is: a role. I am nowhere near as demented as those around me believe!

Right. Someone is faking dementia. I'm in. I turned the page, and snorted to myself while reading the second page. It's in the basket. Yes I need a basket when I shop at Basement Books...

I've probably only read a handful of Dutch books, or books written in Dutch, in my life. So it's kind of funny that the last two have been the first person point of view by old men in a Dutch nursing home! That can't be a genre can it? And I loved both of them. I remember The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen 83 1/4 Years Old very fondly (see my review), can it really be two years ago already? Both are first person narrations by somewhat curmudgeonly old men. 

Here Désiré Cordier is in his early 70s when he starts faking dementia. He lives with his wife Moniek and they have two adult children. 

People my age don't have Facebook or other sociable computer whatnots to cheat loneliness; no, we bump into each other in real life with gruesome frequency a funerals, the most natural occasion for us to maintain contact with our diminishing outside world. 

He has a lot to say about ageing, dementia, older people, and the care in nursing homes.

Recently my most faithful companion has been, somewhat surprisingly, a dog. Pablo by name, even though many of the residents address him with the name of the dog that played a role in their own past and has been buried for decades in the vegetable garden of a residence that will soon be divvied up between relatives who are united only by their mutual loathing. 

Désiré saves even more of his scorn for his wife and marriage. And religion comes in for a good swipe too. 

But a person - and I'm talking about myself here - who grew up in a society in which religion went unquestioned and considers his agnosticism an achievement, the product of deep and courageous thought, can only feel ridiculed by having the label 'Catholic' stuck to his forehead. I felt philosophically swindled by my lawfully wedded wife and regretted not being able to step out of character for a minute to point this gruesome misrepresentation out to Winterlight's nursing staff. It annoyed me immensely, being henceforth noted down on death's waiting list as a believer. The first rattle in my throat or tiniest bit of coughed-up blood will have a priest scurrying to my bedside with a breviary and an aspergillum. 

There were a couple of minor medical errors that other readers possibly wouldn't notice, but my joy was compounded when Désiré was taking a Mini Mental State Exam as part of his diagnosis. 

My final score was 17 out of 30. 

'See! He's passed' 

I am most intrigued to read more of Dimitri Verhulst. Thankfully my library has two of his other books. Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill and The Misfortunates, which seem to be his most famous books. And both are under 200 pages. Perfect. 

Les Misérables The Gorbeau Tenement/La masure Gorbeau V2B4

Oh how have I got myself into such a sorry state of affairs? I've kind of stopped reading over the past month or two. Well I am reading, but just a little bit, one book every few weeks, and then I'm not blogging them. I'm not quite sure why, or how, this has happened, but it has. I guess I'm slumped. Which when I read at a snail's pace at the best of times is more than a little bit dispiriting. Especially as it relates to #LesMisReadalong. 

I thought I was behind when I got back from Cambodia in March, but that was just a minor disruption compared to now. I'm too scared to look at how far I'm behind at this stage. I just need to get back on the reading, and blogging, horse and get on with it. 

The Gorbeau Tenement is quite a short book. It's predominantly scene setting as Jean Valjean and Cosette arrive in Paris. They take up residence in a rundown tenement at one of the very edges of Paris. "Like birds of the wild, he had chosen the most deserted spot in which to build his nest."

It was an inhabited place where there was nobody, it was a deserted place where there was somebody. This was one of the city's boulevards, one of the streets of Paris, a greater wilderness at night than any forest, bleaker by day than any cemetery. 

But naturally there are flashes of Hugo's humour and insight along the way. 

The building as a whole is no more than a hundred years old. A hundred years is young for a church and old for a house. It is as though a man's house is, like himself, short-lived, and God's house shares his eternity. 

We do get some more insights into Jean Valjean, and his relationship with Cosette in Chapter 3 Happiness in Shared Misfortune. 

Jean Valjean had never loved anything. For twenty-five years he had been alone in the world. He had never been father, lover, husband, or friend. In prison he was ill-natured, sullen, celibate, ignorant and unsociable. 

And yet "he felt stirred to the roots of his being" when he rescued Cosette.

This was the second vision of whiteness he had experienced. The bishop had brought the dawn of virtue to his horizon. Cosette brought the dawn of love.  

Cosette of course benefits from her rescue and begins to change. She has become cold-hearted by the age of eight, and no wonder. 

She was so young when her mother left her, she could not remember her any more. Like all children, resembling the tendrils of the vine that cling to everything, she had tried to love. It had done her no good. Everyone had rejected her, the Thénardiers, their children, other children. She loved the dog, which died. 

But I was most surprised when I came upon this sentence:

At times he imagined with a kind of gladness that she would be ugly. 

I initially read that as saying that Jean Valjean saw Cosette as ugly, but now I think that's wrong. He's hoping that Cosette would not grow up to be a beauty, to protect her and keep her with him.

The Pigeon

When I borrowed The Pigeon from one of my bookgroup ladies a few months ago I'd never heard of it. Naturally I'd heard of one of Patrick Süskind's other books, indeed his debut, Perfume. It was a sensation in the 80s, and I read it way back then. I remember loving it. But I barely remember anything about it. A little, but not all that much. I don't think that I even knew that Peter Süskind had written any other books.

I did borrow The Pigeon some months ago now, and even though my bookgroup lady has been very gracious about letting me borrow it for so long I wanted to get it read. So I picked it up during the Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon this weekend. And I'm so very glad I did, it was simply amazing. Mind blowing really.

The Pigeon is the story of a simple, rather nondescript man, who is really rather unusual. Jonathan Noel is a 50 something security guard working what could be a rather dreary job at a bank in Paris. Everyday is the same routine. Although Jonathan revels in this. He takes pleasure in the "total uneventfulness" of his life. Which is not surprising really, as every significant person is despatched with in the first three pages of the book- his parents to the Nazis, his sister to Canada, and his wife to a "Tunisian fruit merchant from Marseilles". His rather spartan room has become "his beloved".

As a result of all these many acquisitions, the room had of course become smaller still, growing inwardly, as it were, like an oyster encrusted with mother-of-pearl, and in its diverse sophisticated installations resembled more a ship's cabin or a luxurious Pullman compartment than a simple chambre de bonne. But its essential character had been maintained down through those thirty years: it was and would remain Jonathan's island of security in a world of insecurity, his refuge, his beloved - yes, for she received him with a tender embrace each evening when he returned home, she offered warmth and protection, she nourished both body and soul, was always there when he needed her and did not desert him. 

The Pigeon is largely set over a single day in Paris (that's always a good start for me at least). And more particularly on the Left Bank. Jonathan works on Rue de Sèvres, which is where I stayed for six weeks in 2013, so I know the area the book is set very well. Naturally that thrilled Francophile me. Jonathan lives nearby and when he walks rue du Bac, visits Bon Marche (which was my corner shop back in 2013), or walks rue de Vaugirard to the Jardin du Luxembourg (one of my very favourite spots in Paris) I pretty much squealed with delight. I've done all those things, and walked those streets many, many times. I've even eaten my lunch in Square Boucicat where Jonathan eats his lunch. I didn't however watch a homeless man shitting in the street and have existential thoughts about the "essence of human freedom". Next visit to Paris I'll have to visit rue de la Planche, where Jonathan lives. 

The story starts when Jonathan finds a pigeon outside his door one morning on the way to the share bathroom. It is a hot Friday morning in August 1984 and Jonathan is getting up and ready for work. Jonathan was in the habit of listening at his door to ensure that noone else was in the hall, or heaven forbid meeting a fellow resident at the toilet door. That had already happened once, "in the summer of 1959, twenty-five years before". 

He had almost set foot across the threshold, had already raised the foot, his left, his leg was in the act of stepping - when he saw it. It was sitting before his door, not eight inches from the threshold, in the pale reflection of dawn that came through the window. It was crouched there, with red, taloned feet on the oxblood tiles of the hall and in sleek, blue-tray plumage: the pigeon. 

Jonathan's controlled life then spirals out of control. He ponders how he is allowed to kill a person (because of his work in security) but not a pigeon

... a pigeon is the epitome of chaos and anarchy, a pigeon that whizzes around unpredictably, that sets its claws in you, picks at your eyes, a pigeon that never stops soiling and spreading the filth of havoc of bacteria and meningitis virus, that doesn't just stay alone, one pigeon lures other pigeons that leads to sexual intercourse and they breed at a frantic pace, a host of pigeons will lay siege, you won't be able to leave your room ever again, will have to starve, will suffocate in your excrement, will have to throw yourself out of the window and lie there smashed on the pavement...

As Jonathan's life spirals the writing changes. Some pages are completely full of words. No paragraphs, no breaks. And yet this slim little novella (a mere 77 pages) is utterly captivating. I really loved it. It's one of those books that you want to reread straight away, and I think I will reread it this week. Even I can inhale it very quickly. 

I can't remember the style of Perfume after so many years but there are blurbs for it on the back cover of The Pigeon, that compare it to Kafka. "In a manner reminiscent of Kafka in its fearsome triviality and its bleak description of vulnerability." The back cover also says that The Pigeon is on the same theme as Perfume, which they described as obsession and disgust. Although I'm not exactly sure that The Pigeon is about either. 

Patrick Süskind hasn't published anything for over 10 years. He is apparently a recluse. He is German, writes in German, and yet both of the books I've read have been set in Paris. As he doesn't grant interviews I guess I won't find out why. Still I plan to seek out all of his work. I want to reread The Pigeon for a start. I should reread Perfume too. And have a go at Kafka. I think it's time.