"Journey to the End of the Night" by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The life journey of an Everyman teaches him to be a cynical misanthropist.

Ferdinand Bardamu joins the army at the start of the First World War; after being wounded he is invalided out although he spends some time at a psychiatric hospital to be assessed as to whether his developed reluctance to be killed is a mental disease or cowardice. He then travels to colonial Africa to become an agent. Escaping, he is shanghaied and made to work as a galley slave before finding freedom in New York. Returning to Paris he becomes a doctor in a poor suburb and becomes embroiled in a plot to murder an old lady. Throughout he does his best to avoid being killed, to earn enough money to survive, and to have sex as often as possible. 

I was reminded of Voltaire's Candide in which the eponymous hero travels the world having repeatedly dreadful experiences, except that Bardamu is the very opposite of Dr Pangloss, seeming to espouse the philosophy that everything is for the worst in this the worst of all possible worlds. Perhaps more obvious influences would be Rabelais and Jonathan Swift.

Incredibly this long, difficult book with its unstructured picaresque plot was a best-selling debut for the pseudonymous author (a real doctor who had been wounded and decorated in World War One and spent time in French colonial Africa). This was, perhaps, the reason why this rambling discursive style influenced later writers such as Jean Genet, Henry Miller and William Burroughs. 

Here's an example of his work which captures both his negativity towards the world, his discursivity, and his gloriously original description. “Leaving the delirious gloom of my hotel, I attempted a few excursions in the main streets around about, an insipid carnival of dizzy buildings. My weariness increased at the sight of those endless house fronts, that turgid monotony of pavements, of windows upon windows, of business and more business, that chancre of the world, bursting with pustulant advertisements. False promises. Drivelling lies.” (p 169) 

At various intervals on this odyssey he encounters his alter ego, a sort of negative doppelganger, Leon Robinson, first during the First World War, as a fellow soldier, again in Africa, and again when he is working as a doctor. Robinson does what Bardamu dreams of doing.

Bardamu is haunted by death. This starts with the first world war but he is repeatedly reminded of death, of course, when he's a doctor. Death is the night at the end of the journey. Almost exactly halfway through, in New York, trying to keep up his spirits, Ferdinand thinks to himself: “What with being chucked out of everywhere, you’re sure to find whatever it is scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that's why they're so dead set against going to the end of the night.” (p 182) This is repeated at the 75% stage: “The clock at the top of the little church started striking the hours and more hours, and on and on. We had reached the end of the world, that was becoming obvious. We couldn't go any farther, because farther on there were only dead people.” (p 297) Then, at the end: “The bar opened just before dawn for the benefit of the bargemen. As the night draws to an end, the locks open slowly. And then the whole countryside comes to life and starts to work. Slowly the banks break away from the river and rise up on both sides. Work emerges from the darkness. You begin to see it again, all very simple and hard. Over here the winches, over there the fences around the work site, and far away on the road men are coming from still farther away. In small chilled groups they move into the murky light. For a starter they splatter their faces with daylight as they walk past the dawn. All you can see of them is their pale, simple faces ... the rest still belongs to the night. They too will all have to die someday. How will they go about it?” (p 408)

Trigger warnings should include a negative attitude towards black people with the occasional use of racial slurs including the n-word  although on the whole this is in the context of his damning descriptions of French colonial Africa. Celine developed far-right political views and wrote anti-Semitic polemic in occupied France during world war two.

Selected quotes:

• He has some stunningly original descriptions:
• “His face like a rotten peach.” (p 23)
• “When he walked, it was with nervous, pigeon-toed steps, as though walking on eggs. Seeing him in his enormous greatcoat, stooped over in the rain, you'd have taken him for the phantom hindquarters of a racehorse.” (p 27)
• “Outside the kiosk the soda-water lady seemed to be slowly gathering the evening shadows around her skirt.” (p 48)
• “The rickety dribbling children with nosefuls of fingers.” (p 80)
• “People moved flabbily about like squid in a tank of tepid, smelly water.” (p 94)
• “An old man crumpling under the enormous weight of the sun.” (p 117)
• He doesn't like the countryside!
• “One thing I'd better tell you right away, I've never been able to stomach the country, I've always found it dreary, those endless fields of mud, those houses where nobody's ever home, those roads that don't go anywhere.” (p 11)  
• “Nature is a frightening thing, and even when it’s solidly domesticated as in the Bois, it gives real city dwellers an eerie anxious feeling.” (p 46)
• Other quotes:
• “You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex.” (p 12)
• “That blackness ... was so dense you had the impression that if you stretched out your arm a little way from your shoulder you’d never see it again.” (p 20)
• “In this business of getting killed, it's no use being picky and choosy; you've got to act as if life was going on, and that lie is the hardest part of it.” (p 29)
• “Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it's the present that counts. Invoking posterity is like making speeches to worms.” (p 29
• “In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavour, it's indispensable.” (p 52)
• “We have got into the habit of admitting colossal bandits, whose opulence is revered by the entire world, yet whose existence, once we stop to examine it, proves to be one long crime repeated ad infinitum, but those same bandits are heaped with glory, honours and power, their crime are hallowed by the law of the land, whereas, as far back in history as the eye can see ... everything conspires to show that a venial theft, especially of inglorious food stuffs, such as bread crusts, ham or cheese, unfailingly subjects its perpetrator to irreparable opprobrium, the categorical condemnation of the community, major punishment, automatic dishonour and inexpiable shame, and this for two reasons, first because the perpetrator of such an offence is usually poor, which in itself connotes basic unworthiness, and secondly because his act implies, as it were, a tacit reproach to the community.” (p 56)
• “There were several young ladies from the entertainment world - actresses and musicians - who came with more debts than clothes.” (p 64)
• “She had no doubt that poor people like her were born to suffer in every way, that that was their role on earth.” (p 80)
• “That tropical steam bath called forth instincts as August breeds toads and snakes on the fissured walls of prisons. In the European cold, under grey, puritanical northern skies, we seldom get to see our brothers’ festering cruelty except in times of carnage, but when roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the surface.” (p 94)
• “When you stop to think about it, at least a hundred people must want to dead in the course of an average day, the ones in line behind you at the ticket window in the Metro, the ones who look up at your apartment when they haven't got one themselves, the ones who wish you'd finish pissing and give them a chance, your children and a lot more.” (p 97)
• “Fear is probably, more often than not, the best means of getting you out of a tight spot.” (p 101)
• “Men have a hard time doing all that’s demanded of them: butterflies in their youth, maggots at the end.” (p 122)
• “In Topo the raw, stifling heat, so perfectly concentrated in that sandpit between the combined polished mirrors of the sea and the river, would have made you swear by your bleeding buttocks that you are being forced to sit on a chunk of sun there's a just fallen off.” (p 126)
• “The war had burnt some and warmed others, same as fire tortures you or comforts you, depending on whether you're in it or in front of it. you've got to work the angles, that's all.” (p 179)
• “Medicine is a thankless profession. When you get paid by the rich, you feel like a flunkey; by the poor, like a thief.” (p 217)
• “The prevailing smell by far is cauliflower. A cauliflower can beat ten toilets, even if they're overflowing.” (p 220)
• “Well, anyway, all those sons of bitches had turned into angels without my noticing! Whole clouds full of angels, including some very far-out and disreputable ones, all over the place.” (p 298)
• “‘You're a bourgeois!’ I told him finally (at that time I could think of no worse insult).” (p 319)
• “He looked as if he were trying to help us live. As if he had been trying to find us pleasures to go on living for. He held us by the hands. One hand each. I kissed him. That's all you can do in a case like that without going wrong. We waited. He didn't say anything more after that. A little later, maybe an hour, the haemorrhage came, internal and profuse. It carried him off.” (p 403) Even the death bed scenes are different.

A fascinating and original book. July 2024; 405 pages

Other works by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Germinal" by Emile Zola

Corn, Jack, 1929-, Photographer - Wikimedia commons File:FIRST SHIFT OF MINERS AT THE VIRGINIA-POCAHONTAS COAL COMPANY MINE ^4 NEAR RICHLANDS, VIRGINIA, LEAVING THE ELEVATOR.... - NARA - 556393.jpg

A classic of Proletarian Literature, this no-holds-barred story tells of the people living in a French mining village in the 1860s. Hugely realistic, it chronicles their lives as men, women, children and horses go down into the pit to extract coal. It describes their poverty and the near-bestial lives they lead, unable to make ends meet, living together in single rooms, taking their pleasure in one another's bodies in the fields. They are struggling to survive. But there is a recession and the Company, awash with surplus coal, seeks to reduce the wages of the workers. This leads to a strike and to violence.

The title, which refers to a spring month in the French revolutionary calendar, relies on the last lines of the novel which, after so much bleakness and hardship, seem to promise a fresh start and hope for the future: "Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upwards for the harvests of future ages. And very soon their germination would crack the earth asunder." (7.6; last lines)

The central character, Etienne, is previously seen in another of Zola's twenty volume novel sequence in which he set out to write a a naturalistic and realistic mirror to society focusing on a single family.

Germinal is generally recognised as Zola's masterpiece. Its unrelenting focus on poverty reminded me of George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier but it was written in 1885, fifty years before Orwell. Its political views reminded me of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, written in the 1910s. I cannot think of any contemporary English novel that comes anywhere close to Germinal as an unrelenting 'warts and all' portrait. Yes, there are elements of Victorian prose-style, there is a touch of melodrama, and there is a clear cut division between the 'salt of the earth' poor and the decadent and selfish bourgeois, but it is as honest a portrait as anything I have read of the time.

It is the descriptions that make this a masterpiece. But Zola also works on the characters. Many of these are flat and one-dimensional, but others, such as Etienne and Catherine and Maheuse and Moquette are beautifully complex.

It might help to know that there were twenty sous to a franc, so a sou is worth five centimes. 

Selected quotes:

• "She sweated and panted and her joints cracked, but she never complained, for familiarity had brought apathy, and you would have thought that being doubled up like that was part of the normal course of human suffering." (1.4)
• "Perhaps he found in his new friend the good smell of the open air, the long-forgotten smell of the sun-kissed grass, for all of a sudden he burst into a resounding whinney, a song of joy with a sob of wistfulness running through it." (1.5) The horses have a stable in the pit, once sent down they never see daylight, and the old horse is a character all of his own.
• "Girls don't grow very fast hereabouts." (1.4) Catherine, despite being fifteen, has not yet had her first period, presumably because of malnutrition.
• "He pushed her to the table, cracking jokes to celebrate the one good moment a chap can enjoy during the whole day, calling it taking his dessert - and free of charge, what's more!" (2.4) There's a lot of sex in this book and very little romance. The poorer classes are described as if they are animals reproducing so that the bosses can have a constant supply of workers. 
• "Now who could pretend that the worker had had his fair share of the extraordinary advance in wealth and living standards over the last hundred years. It was a mockery to call them free - yes, they were free to die, and they did that all right!" (3.1)
• "It was ... her boast that not a single haulage girl became pregnant without first having lost her virtue at her establishment." (3.2)
• "Were they just cattle then, to be herded together like this in the fields, so on top of each other that nobody could change his shirt without showing his behind to his neighbours?" (3.4)
• "But even the Gregoires came back to the strike, expressing their astonishment that there was no law to prevent workpeople from leaving their work." (4.2) Following the recent public sector strikes in the UK, Conservative MPs have called for precisely this: laws to force public servants to work to provide minimum standards of cover. Has anything changed since Zola's day?
• "Even if you do have fun with men that doesn't mean you're a slacker." (4.5)
• "As though everything in the garden were lovely just because you had bread to eat." (5.5) Zola even-handedly shows that rich people have their problems ... and some of them are made to suffer as a consequence of the strike.
• "Everywhere, in the morning mist, along the shadowy roads, the trampling herd could be seen, lines of men plodding along with their noses to the ground like cattle being driven to the slaughterhouse." (7.6) 
• "Was Darwin right, then, was this world nothing but a struggle in which the strong devoured the weak so that the species might advance in strength and beauty?" (7.6)

A triumph of realism and a book set in the past which has so many uncomfortable echoes for our own days.

November 2023; 720 pages

There is a podcast about this novel on the BBC Radio 4 In Our Time website; it can be accessed here.

Other books by French authors which have been reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Golden Droplet" by Michel Tournier

 Idris is a goatherd living in a remote oasis village in the Sahara. One day a blonde woman leaps from a Land Rover and takes his photograph, promising to send him a copy when it is printed in Paris. It's non-appearance awakens a wanderlust in Idris and he travels to the coast and thence to Marseilles and finally Paris. 

The narrative is punctuated by folk stories, from the tale of Khair-ed-Din, known as Barbarossa, to the legend of the portrait of the Blonde Queen, and the story of a folk singer,

Photos and photography are a running theme, usually presaging disaster. Immediately after Idris has had his photo taken, his best friend is killed in an accident. The only photo in the oasis is that of his Uncle and two friends from the army ... taken the night before they were killed. Old Lala wants to adopt Idris because he resembles a photograph of her son, who died. Idris has a photo taken for his passport ... but it is of another man, with a beard. In Paris he goes to what he thinks is a bookshop and sees lots of porno magazines with images of naked men and women. When he finds the woman who took his photo there is a scene in a bar and he is arrested ... having his mugshot taken. A collector of (male child) shop mannequins takes photographs of the parties he holds with them. Even when he earns money as an extra in a film and forms a friendship with the director, going to his flat to look through an album of photographs, Idris is subsequently mugged by the pimp of the boys who normally go with the director. 

If it isn't photos, it is the making of images: 

• Khair-ed-Din's portrait painter says "I am a painter of the depths, and the depths of a human being are transparent on his face once the agitation of day-to-day life ceases." (p 36).
• Idris sees his first TV on the ferry to Marseilles: it shows adverts and the news of a riot in Paris.
• Another job he gets is to have a plaster cast made of his body to be turned into display mannequins.
• Idris learns calligraphy

And there is the theme of the golden droplet, a jewel found by Idris before he leaves the oasis and lost by him when he loses his virginity to a whore in Marseilles at the midpoint of the book. 

Selected quotes:

Page numbers are from the Barbara Wright translation published by Methuen in paperback form in 1988

• "These men had become impalpable, colourless, odourless and insipid, because they had been reduced to figures, to signs, to abstract shapes." (p 71)
• "A defence against the maleficent power of the image, which seduces the eye, might be found in the acoustic sign, which alerts the ear." (p 171)
• "And there, poor among the poor, he did what the poor have an inexhaustible vocation for, he waited, motionless and patient." (p 79)
• "If what you have to say is not more beautiful than silence, Then keep quiet!" (p 177)
• "There is more truth in the ink of scholars than in the blood of martyrs." (p 177)
• "The faculty given to the calligrapher to lengthen certain letters horizontally introduces silence into the line, zones of calm and repose, which are the desert itself." (p 178)
• "The hand must be a ballerina and dance lightly over the parchment, not weigh down on it like a farm labourer with his plough." (p 179)
• "The sculptor's chisel; liberates the girl, the athlete or the horse from the block of marble. In the same way, signs are all prisoners of the ink and the inkwell. The reed pen liberates them, and releases them on the page. Calligraphy is liberation." (p 179)
• "The image is always retrospective. It is a mirror turned towards the past." (p 178)
• "The image is endowed with the power to paralyse, as for instance the head of Medusa, which turned to stone all those who came within its gaze." (p 185)

A short little book, delightfully written and full of incident. Idris ia a great Everyman. There are some very strange and very funny moments. Above all, it is thoughtful and challenges the reader to think. I'm not sure I understand it fully; I will probably need three or four more reads to get much from it. But it is beautifully constructed and works even if only on the level of a good story, well told.

'Moni Boni', another reviewer on goodreads, points out that the Idris finds only "visual fictions of himself" and that the book critiques the "Western world's cultural obsession with images."

Other books by French authors which have been reviewed in this blog can be found here.

September 2023; 198 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Around the World in Eighty Days" by Jules Verne

 I was inspired to re-read this after watching the first episode of the recent BBC adaptation which utterly changed the story. 

When I first read this book, as a kid, I loved it. Fundamentally, it is a race against time. Phileas Fogg, an English gentleman of fixed habits who is almost catatonic in his reserve, bets that he can travel around the world in eighty days and sets off with his newly hired manservant Passepartout, whose role in the novel is to provide comedy and to do stupid things which will cause delays. On the journey Mr Fogg acquires a tail, a detective called Fix (never Mr Fix!) who believes Mr Fogg is a bank-robber and follows him in the hope that he will land in an English territory where an arrest warrant might be served. During the journey, the travellers rescue a lady from the clutches of murderous savages who becomes the love interest. But the excitement is provided mainly when missed connections require the improvisation of unorthodox means of travel. 

There is also quite a lot of 'travel writing', describing the scenery and customs of foreign lands. For example:

• "Mocha, surrounded by its ruined walls whereon date-trees were growing, was sighted, and on the mountains beyond were espied vast coffee-fields. Passepartout was ravished to behold this celebrated place, and thought that, with its circular walls and dismantled fort, it looked like an immense coffee-cup and saucer." (Ch 9)

The fundamental problem to a modern reader (or a BBC scriptwriter) is that the book was written at the height of the British Empire and the indigenous peoples visited are invariably described in blatantly racist terms:

• "They first passed through the “black town,” with its narrow streets, its miserable, dirty huts, and squalid population; then through the “European town,” which presented a relief in its bright brick mansions, shaded by coconut-trees and bristling with masts, where, although it was early morning, elegantly dressed horsemen and handsome equipages were passing back and forth." (Ch 15)
• "the Indians were in the act of plunging themselves into the drunkenness caused by liquid opium mingled with hemp" (Ch 13) Later Passepartout visits an opium den.

 In addition, the only female character is essentially passive. 

When you add the fact that a large part of the excitement requires that the reader/ viewer realises that in Victorian days steamships and locomotives were cutting edge travel, it makes me wonder why they bothered to adapt this book; why not simply take the premise of a race around the world and write your own tale?

But the first episode added a shoot-out in which Passepartout's brother was trying to assassinate the French president. I suppose the BBC believe that the average viewer is unable to be gripped by the fundamentally simple tensions set up by Jules Verne. They must think that we have degenerated to now be in need of such dumbed-down entertainment.

Selected quotes:

• "Passports are only good for annoying honest folks, and aiding in the flight of rogues." (Ch 7)
• "the days were shorter by four minutes for each degree gone over, Passepartout obstinately refused to alter his watch, which he kept at London time. It was an innocent delusion which could harm no one." (Ch 11) Brilliant foreshadowing; of course the 'inaccuracy' of Passepartout's watch is the key to the twist at the end.

Unusually for Jules Verne, this isn't scifi. It was a classic in its time and it is still a good read but it reveals racist and sexist attitudes that were typical of its time but make uncomfortable reading today.

December 2021

Other books by French authors which have been reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"In the Cafe of Lost Youth" by Patrick Modiano

 Reading this hard on the heels of Modiano's The Black Notebook was a disconcerting experience. Both books revolve around old people remembering when they were young. Both books focus on a young woman who has a number of aliases, about whom there is some mystery. Both books feature a detective, both have an author who narrates some if not all of the book. Both involve an iconic Parisian cafe, and students, and walking the Parisan streets and taking the metro. It is as if Modiano has reworked the material.

Especially since both books include the line: "We live at the mercy of certain silences." 

Whilst The Black Notebook was contextualised by revolutionary politics, this is contextualised by an interest in magic and the occult. It seems that Louki's favourite book is Lost Horizon, which is a potboiler that may or may not reference the earthly paradise known as Shambhala, or to modern ears Shangri La.

The title is a line taken from ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’ [We Wander in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire], a 1978  film by Guy Debord, the revolutionary and Situationist.

Selected quotes:

• "If everything was down in black and white, it meant that it was over, just like tombstones that have names and dates carved on them." (p 73)
• "Intermediary zones existed in Paris, no-man's-lands where you were on the fringes of everything, in transit, or even suspended. You enjoyed a degree of immunity there." (p 112)

September 2020; 153 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here

Other books by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Black Notebook" by Patrick Modiano

 M Modiano is a Nobel Laureate. This short novel is about a man trying to reconstruct, using his writer's notebook, events that happened twenty years ago, when he became involved with a woman called Dannie and the other people he met at the Unic Hotel in paris: Paul Chastagnier, Duwelc, Gerard Marciano, Aghamouri and Georges. For some reason the police interviewed him at the time. He tries to understand what was going on.

Not a lot, to be honest. The first half of the book is very unstructured, as you might expect from someone trying to remember, and he visits and revisits episodes, such as the occasions that he and Dannie went to an empty old house in the countryside, or when they let themselves into to Dannie's old flat and helped themselves to things. 

Half way through we learn that there was something sinister about the group, and that something terrible happened. 

But even as we learn more about what happened, we never see anything very clearly. And still the narrator wanders around Paris and oscillates between the present and the past, and between reality and his vivid dreams. 

There are some great moments:

• "Even though most of the buildings were still the same, they made you feel as if you were looking at a taxidermied dog." (p 7)
• "The present no longer  counted, with its indistinguishable days in their doleful light, which must be the light of old age, when you feel as if you're merely living on." (p 38)
• "We live at the mercy of certain silences." (p 134)

But in the end I thought it rambled and I was never sufficiently interested in what had happened to care about the main character. He just seemed a little lost and confused. And I couldn't understand why these events that had happened to him long ago should bother him now.

September 2020;157 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here:

Other books by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

 

"The Way by Swann's" by Marcel Proust

This is the first volume of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time) of which the other volumes are:

• In the Shadow of Young Girls In Flower
• The Guermantes Way
• Sodom and Gomorrah
• The Prisoner and the Fugitive
• Finding Time Again

This book contains three, more or less stand alone, stories.

Part I: Combray
In the first part the narrator is a young boy who finds it difficult to sleep at night. He obsesses over his need for a good night kiss from his mother. She is downstairs at a dinner with the family and M. Swann, a neighbour. He pens a note to her (!) to ask her to come to him and the faithful maid takes it but she won't come up. This is described in great detail, with long, convoluted sentences, full of sub-phrases, until I, if not the young boy, was nearly asleep. It is obsessively detailed. After nearly fifty pages of insomnia (on the author's part, not necessarily on the part of the reader) comes the famous part in which, presumably as an adult (Proust can be somewhat jumbled and confusing about chronology), the narrator tastes the Madeleine cake crumbled in tea which awakens memories of his childhood and then returns to his memories of childhood in Combray where he went walking either the Way by Swann's or the way by the Guermantes and of the various people in the village. And he hears a lot of social snobbery from his parents and grand-parents.

Some of my favourite lines:

• “If, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and allowed my mind to relax entirely; then it would let go of the map of the place where I had fallen asleep and, when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was.”
• “summer bedrooms where you love becoming one with the soft night, where the moonlight leaning against the half-open shutters casts its enchanted ladder to the foot of the bed, where you sleep almost in the open air, like a titmouse rocked by the breeze on the tip of a ray of light.”
• “Even the very simple act that we call ‘seeing a person we know’ is in part an intellectual act.”
• “What I fault the newspapers for is that day after day they draw our attention to insignificant things whereas only three or four times in our lives do we read a book in which there is something really essential.”
• “Once in my room, I had to stop up all the exits, close the shutters, put on the shroud of my nightshirt.”
• “Unfortunately, having acquired the habit of thinking out loud, she did not always take care to see that there was no one in the next room.”
• Two panels of the bookshop door are “more sown with ideas than the door of a cathedral.”
• “What should we care for if we don't care for our lives, the only gift the dear Lord never gives us twice over?”
• “Even women who claim to judge a man by his appearance alone see that appearance as the emanation of a special life. This is why they love soldiers, fireman; the uniform makes them less particular about the face.”

Part II: A love of Swann's
The second part relates the story of Swann, a young man about Paris, and his introduction, in a salon, to Odette de Crecy, a member of the demi-monde, that is to say a kept woman, with whom Swann falls in love, whom he starts to give presents, and the subsequent events when the Verdurins, in whose exclusive Salon Swann meets Odette, exclude him from their circle so that he is parted from Odette, who nevertheless continues to see other men; it is the story of Swann's growing jealousy; again it is chronicles in minute, obsessive detail and described in sentences such as this one, which go on and on and on:

• “Then, suddenly, he wondered if this was not precisely what was meant by ‘keeping’ her (as if, in fact, this notion of keeping could be derived from elements not at all mysterious or perverse but belonging to the intimate substance of his daily life, like that thousand-franc bill, domestic and familiar, torn and reglued, which his valet, after having paid the month’s accounts and the quarter’s rent for him, had locked in the drawer of the old desk from which Swann had taken it out again to send it with four others to Odette) and if one could not apply to Odette, starting from when he had come to know her (because he did not for a moment suspect that she could ever have received money from anyone before him), those words which he had believed so irreconcilable with her - ‘ kept woman’.” Wow! A single sentence containing two pairs of brackets!
• “Once or twice on such evenings he experienced the sort of happiness which, if it had not been so violently affected by the recoil from the abrupt cessation of anxiety, when would be tempted to call the tranquil happiness, because it consisted of a return to a peaceful state of mind: he had dropped in on a party at the painter’s home and was preparing to go off again; behind him he was leaving Odette transformed into a brilliant stranger, surrounded by men to whom her glances and her gaiety, which were not for him, seemed to speak of some sensual pleasure that would be enjoyed there or elsewhere (maybe at the ‘Bal des Incoherents’ where he trembled at the idea that she would go afterwards) and that cost Swann more jealousy than the carnal act itself because he had more difficulty imagining it; he was already on the point of passing through the studio door, when he heard himself being called back with these words (which, by cutting off from the party that end which had terrified him so, made the party seem in retrospect innocent, made Odette's return a thing no longer inconceivable and terrible, but sweet and familiar and abiding next to him, like a bit of his everyday life, in his carriage, and divested Odette herself of her too brilliant and too gay appearance,shows that it was only a disguise which she had put on for a moment, for its own sake, not with a view to mysterious pleasures, and that she was already tired of it), with these words that Odette tossed at him, as he was already on the threshold: ‘Wouldn't you wait five minutes for me? I'm leaving, we’ll go back together, you can take me home’.” An even longer single sentence containing, again, two pairs of brackets, and innumerable commas.

He seems to be endeavouring to do with these sentences that which he discerns in Chopin: “When she was young she had learned to caress the phrases of Chopin with their sinuous and excessively long necks, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by seeking out and exploring a place for themselves far outside and away from the direction in which they started, far beyond the point which one might have expected to reach, and which frolic in this fantasy distance only to come back more deliberately - with a more premeditated return, with more precision, as though upon a crystal glass that resonates until you cry out - to strike you in the heart.”

But he can be brief and concise and to the point. Well, nearly:

“curiosity, that excessive interest in life which, when combined with a degree of scepticism concerning the object of their studies, gives certain intelligence men in any profession ... a reputation of having minds that are broad, brilliant, and even superior.”

One of his many strengths is his updated descriptions. He might be writing about French social snobbery in the 1890s but some of his metaphors are incredibly up-to-date and everyday:

•  “He would get into his carriage, but he would feel that this thought had leaped into it at the same time and settled on his knees like a beloved pet which one takes everywhere and which he would keep with him at the table, unbeknownst to the other guests.”
• “You're only a formless stream of water running down whatever slope it finds, a fish without a memory, without a thought in its head, living in its aquarium, mistaking the glass for water and bumping against it a hundred times a day.”
• “You don't choose to go holiday-making in latrines in order to be closer to the smell of excrement.”

Great lines:

• “‘You wouldn't want her to live the way you do, with your broken furniture and your threadbare carpets,’ she said to him, her bourgeois difference to public opinion prevailing, again, over her cocotte dilettantism.”
• “Swann immediately recognized this statement as one of those fragments of true fact which liars, when caught unprepared, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood they are inventing, believing they can accommodate it there and steal away its resemblance to the Truth.”

Part III: Place-names: the name

And the final part is back to the narrator who meets Gilberte, the daughter of Swann and Odette (whom he had already met, by chance, in part one), and falls in love as a child, playing childhood games with her, and then becomes obsessed about seeing her, and when he can no longer see her he becomes obssessed about seeing her mother in the parade at the Bois de Boulogne, where he hears other men talking about her reputation and admitting that they too have slept with Odette.
Great lines:

• “That day which I had so dreaded was, in fact, one of the only ones on which I was not too unhappy.”
• “The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions that formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is only regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.” (Last line)

But is it any good?
Three stories about obsession then, described in obsessive detail, and in long intricate sentences. A lot of the obsession involves the place of a person in society (Proust's obsession with the finer details of social life is perhaps why Virginia Woolf loved him rather than James Joyce, whom she thought common; Woolf was a massive snob; Proust says that Swann married "a woman of the worst social station, practically a cocotte"; it might be argued that Proust attacks and satirises the pretensions of social snobs and that he is therefore not a snob but he certainly feels that educated and intelligent people are superior to ill-educated and ignoratn people and he is therefore clearly an intellectual snob), as if he or she were an organism whose place in the grand ecosystem that is life cannot be understood without a microscopic examination of each facet of their ecological niche. And on that level, it is a masterpiece.

But it is exhausting to read.

Is Proust a genius?

• "The trouble with Proust is that sometimes you go through an absolutely wonderful passage, but then you have to go about 200 pages of intense French snobbery, high-society maneuverings and pure self-indulgence. It goes on and on and on and on." Kazuo Ishiguro
• "If you have read all of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, you should be very worried about yourself. As Proust very well knew, reading his work for as long as it takes is temps perdu, time wasted" Germiane Greer
• "I find the endless sentences distancing, the people without interest." Susan Hill

Arthur Quiller-Couch, in Shakespeare's Workmanship, states that “The half of artistry consists in learning to make one stroke better than two. The more simply, economically, you produce the impression aimed at, the better workman you make all yourself.” If he is right then Proust, who routinely used ten words when one might have done, apparently under the impression that brevity was simply laziness, was not an artist, let alone a genius.

Other French books which are reviewed in this blog may be found here

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Fall" by Albert Camus

This strange story is told in the form of a monologue. Jean-Baptiste Clemence, lawyer turned 'judge penitent' does the Ancient Mariner thing with someone he meets in an Amsterdam bar and, over five nights, reveals the story of his life.

Despite its brevity (92 pages in the Penguin edition) it is quite difficult to read because it is a monologue and so the intensity is unrelieved. But the turning point in the life of Monsieur Clemence comes on page 44, thus conforming almost exactly to the 'turning point at the 50% mark' theory.

Intense as it is, there are many moments of profundity.

Selected quotes:

• "Style, like poplin, all too often conceals eczema." (p 5)
• "I always thought our fellow citizens were crazy about two things: ideas and fornication." (p 5) 
• "Have you noticed that the concentric canals of Amsterdam are like the circles of hell? A bourgeois hell, inhabited of course by bad dreams." (p 10)
• "A sense of legality, the satisfaction of being right and the joy of self-esteem: these, my dear sir, are powerful incentives to keep us on our feet and moving forward." (p 13)
• "One could not meditate in cellars or prison cells (unless the later were situated in towers, with an extensive view)." (p 17)
• "'Please accept my sympathy' comes right before 'now let's get on with something else'. It's the emotion felt by a prime minister or company chairman: you get it cheap after some disaster." (p 20)
• "That's what men are like, sir: two-faced: they cannot love unless they love themselves." (p 22)
• "servitude, preferably with a smile, is unavoidable." (p 29)
• "sensuality alone governed my love life. I looked solely for objects of pleasure and conquest." (p 37)
• "I did have principles, of course, one of which, for example, was that my friends' wives were sacred. It was just that, quite sincerely, I would stop being friends with the husbands a few days in advance." (p 37)
• "not taking what you don't want is the hardest thing in the world." (p 40)
• "Isn't that the finest of negative landscapes? Look, n the left we have that pile of ashes that they call a dune here, with the grey dyke on our right, the pallid beach at our feet and, in front of us, the sea, the colour of diluted washing powder, its pale waters reflected on the sky above." (p 45)
• "There is no merit in being born honest or intelligent." (p 51)
• "Because I desired eternal life, I slept with whores and drank for whole nights on end." (p 64)
• He blames Jesus for the massacre of the innocents because, as God, he must have known it would happen because of His birth. (p 70)
• "Someone I used to know would divide people into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie; those who prefer to lie than have nothing to hide; and finally those who like lying and concealing at the same time." (p 75)
• "they're putting make-up on the corpse." (p 76)
• "beds that are so hard, and their immaculate sheets, it's like dying in a shroud already, embalmed in purity." (p 76)

His last completed novel, published the year before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature and four years before his death at 47.

Camus also wrote The Outsider, The Plague, and The Myth of Sisyphus

January 2018; 92 pages

Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Works by other Nobel laureates that are reviewed in this blog can be found here.

Other works by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Outsider" by Albert Camus

Another novel with a stunning first line: “My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.” Mersault, a Frenchman living in Algeria, reacts to the death of his mother with what, to all the world, seems like a total lack of emotion. Having attended the funeral he goes back to work, meets and beds a girl, helps an old man who has lost his dog, and intervenes in a neighbour's domestic dispute with fatal consequences.

It is written in short, matter of fact sentences that feel like the stunned bewilderment of a man who confesses that physical sensations in the here and now interfere with his feelings, and who is too honest with himself to subscribe to the 'normal', socially acceptable and socially constructed, emotions of others.

But society can't tolerate someone like Mersault, someone who sees through the pageant that we like to pretend is reality.

Divided exactly into two parts by the killing, The Outsider is a perfect miniature portrait of an emptied soul.

Selected quotes:

•  “But today the sun blazing down upon the shimmering landscape made it inhuman and depressing.” (p 14)
• “I felt a bit lost standing between the blue and white of the sky and the relentless darkness of these other colours: the sticky black of the blistering tar, the dull black of the morning clothes, the shiny black of the hearse.” (p 15)
• “Although actually, everyone is always a little guilty.” (p 18)
• “I thought that it was one more Sunday nearly over and done with, that Mama was now dead and buried, that I would go back to work, and that when all was said and done, nothing has really changed.” (p 22)
• “when all is said and done, no one really knows.” (p 25)
• “I replied that you can never really change your life and that, in any case, every life was more or less the same and that my life here wasn't bad at all.” (p 38)
• “Out in the street the sun was already so hot that ... it felt like a slap across the face.” (p 43)
• “All I could feel was the sun crashing like cymbals against my forehead, and the knife, a burning sword hovering above me.” (p 53)
• “I fired for more times into the lifeless body, where the bullets sank without leaving a trace. And it was as if I had rapped sharply, four times, on the fatal door of destiny.” (p 54)
• “Their muffled whispers, rising from below, created a kind of soft background music against the conversations that criss-crossed above their heads.” (p 66)
• “I didn't understand how the natural qualities of an ordinary man could be turned into overwhelming proof of his guilt.” (p 91)
• “I knew that it didn't matter much whether you died at thirty or at seventy, because in either case other men and women would of course go on living, and it would be like that for thousands of years.” (p 103)
• “He wasn't even sure he was alive because he lived life as if he was dead.” (p 109)
• “standing before this symbolic night bursting with stars, I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world.” (p 111)

I devoured this book. The aching honesty of the protagonist was devastating.

Camus also wrote The Plague, The Fall and The Myth of Sisyphus

December 2017; 111 pages

Accolades

The Outsider was judged by the readers of Le Monde to be the most memorable book of the twentieth century.

Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Works by other Nobel laureates that are reviewed in this blog can be found here.

Other works by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God