BtLS has been in France

 

Book Review - The Flâneur

The Flâneur – Edmund White

In a sense this is a history of Paris. Not an official history of the city and buildings and politics and arrondisements of Paris, or that search for the true, essential, very soul of Paris that Americans sometimes get a little hung up on. I almost want to call it a personal history, but that would make White sound egocentric, and that’s not the sense I get from this book at all.

I suppose I would define it as a history of the Paris Edmund White lived in when he lived there, and the things that interested him about the places he walked, and the history of those places and the people, including his compatriots – White is American – who came to Paris before and after he did; and the personal relationships they had with the cafes and Parisians and culture of their time.   

White is a social commentator as well as a literary one, and the book takes in racism and politics, but smoothly, readily, neither blinking nor labouring over the more uncomfortable points. He delivers facts like nuggets, like a curator showing you the things he likes best in his collection, fired by your own enthusiasm. They may not be the ‘best’ things from an objective standpoint, they may not be the things the public crowds to see, but they are the things he has found that he would like to share with you.     

It made me think about Paris in the way Hemingway does – in the way I think about Trieste when I read Jan Morris, or London, when I walk through it sometimes. As a place which moves through your mind as you move through it. Where every individual’s relationship with the city can be unique, and every resident’s personal. 

Highly recommended. In fact, my favourite book so far this year.

The Black Book - Lawrence Durrell

Published in 1938 in Paris (it wouldn't have been possible to publish it in England) The Black Book seems to have been written in reaction to the hypocrisy and sentiment of earlier eras but goes a little too far the other way. Like Kay in The Snow Queen with a bit of distorting mirror in his eye, unable to even see anything but ugliness. 

And nothing in this book is uglier than sex and friendship seem to be. (When I was early on in the book I made a note that Durrell drags in sex everywhere in this one, but that's not true, he drags in sexual organs everywhere, and menstrual blood, and the womb, and various other bodily fluids, none of it very prettily described). Human relationships are portrayed as a kind of bitter imperative or a power struggle with the desired object, and there is an awful lot of pleasure taken from the failings of others, as if all the characters are playing snakes and ladders, and as one goes down the others get closer to winning. The fact they are clearly not competing for anything in particular just makes it all that much more depressing. 

Durrell himself claimed (in the foreword to my 1959 edition, published in Montreuil this time) not to have written The Black Book with any thought of publication but as an attempt to find his own 'voice', and there is a certain amount of groping around for the right words - some of his metaphors are discordant, and some are heaped on top of other metaphors to the point where you can't work out which is the metaphor and which is the actual narrative thread - which make this very believable.

However, it is, I think an honest book - not a childish attempt to shock (which the reader might very easily think at first, mostly because of all the taboo words he uses). I’ve been more shocked by Victorian books that were supposedly moral and actually disturbing, and in a way I think it is better to have the ugliness on the outside, on the page, than festering underneath. It is better not to fetishise virginity, and force women to kill themselves in despair when they fall.  So there’s a catharsis to these kind of books written in the 20s and 30s and to this book in particular.

But.. but does it really need to be quite such a bloody business? And although I don’t think he’s writing in a difficult way just for the sake of making himself look clever, it does get incredibly involved and meta at points. There are at least three men trying to write in the book, and they may all actually be aspects of Durrell himself, and after a bit it becomes obvious that this obsession with the womb is because of the birth of his book and his own self as a writer. The reader is almost cast in the role of midwife.

So – and I think this is the biggest question – are the birth agonies interesting enough to hang an actual book on?

I’d have to say no, not really. Durrell has written better books, funnier books, more thought-provoking books, and I would recommend any one of those first. Then, perhaps, if curious, come back and read this to get a flavour of the style in utero. 

Bring forceps.

This book was reviewed for the 1938 Club. Thanks to Simon and Karen for hosting. 

Dear Reader by Paul Fournel

This week's library read was Dear Reader, by Paul Fournel with translation by David Bellos. 

Bellos' name didn’t register at the time, but I realised later that I've read his book on translation (Is that a Fish in Your Ear) which was fascinating. Highly recommended.

I'll start with my very favourite thing about Dear Reader, which is that it's nice to see a book about publishing that isn’t all doom and gloom, and it's nice to see a middle aged male protagonist who does something to cope with the way the world is changing instead of sitting and whining about his actually quite comfortable existence (Disclaimer: It's probable that the latter comment has more to do with the kind of books I’ve read in the last year than books – or indeed middle aged men – in general). 

Cons: I nearly didn't read it at all purely because it's a novel about a publisher. In my experience novels about publishers are second only to novels about aspiring writers in the navel-gazing-please-move-out-of-your-comfort-zone-stakes. In this case I would have been wrong, Fournel's publisher focusses outwards not inwards; on books and other people, the future of publishing, dinners with his authors, getting a present for his wife.   

I liked the narrator, I cared what happened to him, the story jogged along nicely and yet.. Yet there was something about the way he put things, some feeling of constraint that I was constantly conscious of but couldn’t identify and which never quite allowed me to forget that I was reading a book rather than entering someone’s mind.

I should add at this point that I had not read anything about the book except what was in the book as I've been spoilered so many times before. 

And if you also want to go into the book cold you should look away now.... 

 Not gone yet? Ok then...

Of course I couldn’t stop trying to work out what it was that was bothering me. Perhaps something about the way it translated from the French? The choice of words or syntax did occasionally seem odd, not quite as fluid as expected, but definitely not incorrect. Why should that be a distraction? 

Perhaps it was stilted because the translator was American and trying to sound English? (No. Bellos is English).

Was the translation too complete? Did it perhaps just not feel French enough anymore? 

...and so on. 

Then I read the blurb at the end. Ah. Apparently the book conforms to a rhythmic pattern where the same words are repeated at intervals, like a poem (or literally a poem perhaps, if read aloud). 

A clever trick to perform once, let alone twice in separate languages, but to me a constant subconscious irritation. I admired this book rather than enjoyed it.  

Via train.

I have no shortage of subjects for this blog post. Since last time I was here I’ve been to the proms – not the last night, which is all a bit flag wavy – but the Ode to Joy, as well as some more modern pieces that I hadn't previously known. We queued for the cheap tickets, one of us from 3, and the others after work. They dispense raffle tickets to mark your place in the queue, so the person who came at 3 was able to find a good spot for us in the gallery.

And it was brilliant, completely different from the experience of playing something from a recording. More distinct and, of course, LOUDER in the forte parts and softer in the piano.

The Albert Hall is plush inside, red and gold like Christmas. Critics complained at the time that the exterior made it look like a hatbox, but now that so few people wear hats the nearest metaphor I can think of is red velvet cake.

I’ve also had a mini grand tour to Paris, Milan and Venice (pics below) taking in Notre Dame, Musee D’Orsay and other cultural monsters. Better than that though were the random snippets – the most lackadaisical lion I’ve ever seen lounging in red brick over a doorway near the Seine, the view of Sacre Coeur through the clock face at the Musee D’Orsay, scattering crumbs of pizza to sparrows at a cafe by the Accademia bridge. 

Details. 

Notre Dame, Paris

Balcony, Venice

And I walked miles, Gare du Lyon to the Seine, to Notre Dame, to the Louvre, through the Tuilleries, along to the Petit Palais. Paris is a city of vistas, tempting you on to the next thing, forever trying to catch up with the horizon. Venice on the other hand is a place to get comfortably lost, narrow streets and small bridges connecting piazzas, each or almost each with it's own cafe and church and children playing football in the evenings.

I was less impressed with Milan, but I suspect I didn't really give Milan a chance. I was only there a day, and it seems unreasonable to squeeze Milan's Cathedral between Notre Dame and St Mark's and expect it to look at it's best. I shall have to go back.

Paris. The unfamiliar familiar city.

I've recently (well relatively recently. The blue sky in the picture below probably makes it clear it's not as recently as this actual month) been on a short holiday to Paris. My first trip to Paris since I was 10 years old. It felt very foreign then. Now it feels familiar. It feels very like London. The countryside the Eurostar took me through after the tunnel was very like Kent.

That ought not to have surprised me. Paris is over a hundred miles closer than Glasgow; the capital city of a country that industrialised about the same time we did. Their metro is a little younger, their roads more congested, but the food is much the same - eggs, potatoes, bread, apples, jam, butter, fresh milk, ham, cheese, wine, beer. In theory it's more logically laid out - courtesy of Napoleon apparently - but in fact there's the same slightly rambling streets and cross streets that have patently been there forever, leading you all unaware onto unexpected pleasures, churches, parks.

Not that I did stumble unaware onto very much. There is a map at street level at every metro station and I also brought my 1904 Baedeker, whose maps ought surely to be obsolete but, apart from the odd change of street name, were surprisingly useful. The only time I felt a bit lost was in the Louvre.

Le Louvre is monumentally vast. Preposterously big. The British Museum tacked onto the National Gallery with the ceramics from the V&A and a couple of Hampton Court Palace interiors thrown in for good measure. The cafeteria confirmed everything I've ever learned about never eating in tourist traps though. I fled and purchased a much nicer, cheaper and more generously filled baguette elsewhere.

I kept hearing English being spoken, and not just by waiters politely amused by my attempts at stringing sentences together or tourists taking the lift up the Eiffel Tower. It was in the cafes, the streets, the shops, just as you might hear French or Italian or Polish on a bus here.

British people speak differently in France than they do at home though. They speak more quietly, as if they're ashamed of being heard. They speak as if they're secretly thinking 'I really ought to be able to remember some of the French I learnt in school.'

Which is fair enough. So they should.

After Paris, Compton.

Compton is a village near Guildford where the painter G F Watts once lived and where there is now a gallery, recently refurbished courtesy of donors and the lottery fund. It's gorgeous. And the cream tea completely confounds my earlier remark about eating in tourist traps.

Better though than the gallery is the Chapel designed by Watts' wife Mary. I couldn't take a photo of either interior or exterior that could possibly do it justice so here is a link: http://www.wattschapel.co.uk/ although none of the pictures on there really do it justice either. You'd have to go.

I did however take a picture of one of the headstones in the graveyard, clearly crafted along the same lines, and probably by one of the many villagers who belonged to Mary's craftman's collective and helped to build the chapel itself.

Mary was 30 years younger than Watts, who (according to Gallery literature) initially discouraged her (romantically, not as an artist). He had previously been married to Ellen Terry, also 30 years younger, and it had not been a success. When I found that out I realised I'd read about the period in Ellen Terry's autobiography, her move to the countryside with Watts, her running into an old friend and fleeing back to London, all while she was still in her teens, but it had made very little impression. There is nothing in there of why she married, or why she gave up on the marriage so rapidly. Did she realise she'd made a mistake? That he was too old, and she too young? Did living in the country make her miserable? Impossible to tell from the text.

In fact, that was the main reason I abandoned the book a short way through. I became frustrated not only by the lack of introspection but the lack of any sort of emotion or judgement. Nothing in Ellen Terry's autobiography is ever anyone's fault. Things just sort of happen. She makes decisions, but there seems no catalyst for them. It would be maddening in any biography.

The second marriage seems to have been more successful. They had art in common, and Watts was a man who still sculpted gigantic statues - big enough that he had to climb into scaffolding to work on them - in his 80s.

And, as I don't like in cutting and pasting any photos not my own, here is another link: http://www.gardenvisit.com/blog/2009/06/16/gf-watts-physical-energy-in-kensington-gardens/

Merry Christmas.