Serena by Ron Rash – one formidable woman #20BOS26
Serena by Ron Rash (2008) French title : Serena.
Serena by Ron Rash is a historical fiction book set in Waynesville, North Carolina in the early 1930s. George Pemberton comes home with his bride Serena. He runs a logging company. The welcome committee includes Harmon with a bowie knife who intends to kill him for impregnating his daughter Rachel. Spurred by Serena, they fight and Pemberton kills Harmon. Rich man or not, sheriff McDowell makes Pemberton sign a statement.
We have a first glimpse of the characters that we’ll follow during the novel. And it’s a first glimpse at Serena’s temper: she’s fierce and has no compassion. At all.
The same mechanism of local despotism and nepotism as in Dirt Music is at work in this community. The logging industry provides a lot of jobs in the area and that gives Pemberton a lot of leverage during the Depression era.
Serena is not the usual wife: she knows the logging industry like the back of her hand from her childhood in Colorado. She immediately imposes herself among Pemberton’s crew and they soon respect her for her skills and fear her for her harshness. She becomes their mistress like a Southern belle on a plantation.
The months confirmed what we saw at her arrival: she has no compassion. She despises any show of weakness and only cares about Pemberton and their business. She’s ambitious and vindictive.
The story moves forward as the Pembertons become increasingly powerful and reckless. They bulldoze their way towards Serena’s goal: to raise enough funds to start a timber operation in Brazil. There are obstacles in North Carolina, though. Their current business partners don’t share these grand ambitions. Lobbies and the government are pushing for the creation of what we now know as the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They are raising money to repossess the land needed for the park.
For Serena, the end justifies the means and she has no patience for the weak or anyone who shows an ounce of humanity. The past has no hook on her and she lives for the present and for the future.
Murder, betrayal, intimidation and corruption are acceptable tools according to her. Vengeance is her fuel anytime she thinks she’s been wronged by someone or that life cheated her.
Pemberton and her have an intense relationship that keeps him into her orbit. He’s under her spell and she knows how to keep the fire of his lust burning. She’s possessive of him, jealous of anyone or anything that could divert his attention from her. Like Jacob, the baby he had with Rachel. Their relationship borders on magic.
Serena’s gold band settled over Pemberton’s. The current he’d felt since entering the room intensified, as if the touching gold provided a conduit for the energy to flow directly through Serena into him. Part of Pemberton ached to move his hand so he could lead her to the bed, but another part did not want to move, even slightly, lest the touching bands separated and the current became more diffuse. Serena seemed to feel the same energy, because her hand remained where it was.
Rash implies there’s some magical bond between the two, anchoring the story into Southern gothic. Ron Rash also shapes his characters with the clay of the country they live in. They are influenced by the climate and the natural elements around them.
He shows the environmental disaster in the wake of the logging industry in his beloved North Carolina mountains. The hills are bare. The woods don’t act as a natural barrier to protect the towns of heavy snows or icy winds. Mud slides happen since the trees aren’t there to retain the soil on the mountains. He depicts the consequences of the Pembertons’ greed. They are a representation of these logging empires who had no qualms cutting anything as long as was of market value.
On Saturday evening Pemberton followed the black drop through the declining hills and into the Pigeon River valley. A month earlier the last dogwood blossoms had wilted and fallen in the passing forests, the understory now the bright green of dogwood leaves and scrub oak, the denser green of mountain laurel and rhododendron. Pemberton suspected someday soon there’d be a poison to eradicate such valueless trees and shrubs and make it easier to cut and haul out hardwoods.
Workers get killed or injured at the timber camps. They are bitten by rattlesnakes, slide into swamps, killed by logs or trees that don’t go the right way. They are injured by tools and the doctor on site is so incompetent it’s almost criminal. The Pembertons don’t care about all these human disasters. Human lives have no value in their eyes. They are blinded, Serena by her raging ambition and Pemberton by his willingness to please his wife.
This is a great novel of passion and revenge coupled with a plea to protect our landscape and stop exploiting natural resources without thinking of the next generation. Serena and George are two hunters who act as predators in every aspect of their lives. Business, friendship and love.
Ron Rash plays with the codes of noir fiction and Southern gothic. He’s from North Carolina, anchored in this land and keeps writing stories set in this area. He says that human stories are alike, whatever the setting, so he might as well write about his favorite state. This knowledge and this fondness for the land and its inhabitants leaps from the pages in the descriptions of the landscape.
Serena is the story of a formidable woman but also the story of this part of the USA. Ron Rash also writes poetry and his prose is sumptuous. Beautiful prose, great story mixed social and historical commentary, what’s not to love?
For other reviews, see Vishy’s here and Marina Sofia’s here.
Other books by Ron Rash on the blog : Burning Bright and Above the Waterfall.
Serena is part of my 20 Books of Summer challenge. I’ve just finished my sixteenth book, I might read the twenty books before the end of the month but I’m not sure I’ll make it.
Dirt Music by Tim Winton – welcome to Western Australia #20BOS26
Dirt Music by Tim Winton (2001) French title : Par-dessus le bord du monde. Translated by Nadine Gassie.
Whenever you ask for recommendations about Australian literature, Tim Winton is always on the list. I don’t know why it took me so long to read one of his books. Well, I finally got to Dirt Music.
We’re in White Point, a fictional fishermen village in Western Australia. Georgie Jutland is in her late thirties, and she’s in a limbo. A housewife without being married or mother of the children she helps raising. Indeed, she’s in a relationship with widower Jim Buckridge and lives with his two young sons.
Georgie is adrift and rattled after Jim’s younger son called her stepmother. It reminds her that she never felt at home in Jim’s beach house or found her place in his family or in the village. She didn’t make any friends, and she wonders what she’s doing in this small fishing town with Jim gone at the sea all day long.
Their relationship is tepid, she’s bored, aimless and drinks too much. Jim never says a word about her destructive behavior though.
Things change one morning when she spots a stranger on the shore and realizes he’s a poacher. His name is Luther Fox and he’s barely surviving on his remote farm after he lost his entire family in a car accident. Before they died, he was growing vegetables and playing the guitar in the family band.
These two will meet, connect and have a short, passionate and life-changing affair. They both have a troubled family life where they had an odd place in the family and they recognize each other without sharing their life stories.
Jim is a prominent and successful fisherman in the village, and it’s almost organized as a feudal community or the close-knit community you see books set in small-town America. No secret remains a secret for a long time. Families have a reputation almost impossible to get rid of and the Foxes have a reputation of bad juju. Since fishermen are terribly superstitious, they don’t go near them.
Jim loathes poachers and Luther, therefore the whole village loathes him too and take unfortunate intitiatives to protect their leader’s honor.
When Georgie’s and Luther’s affair is known, it’s like he’s poached into Jim’s territory and White Point isn’t a safe place for him any longer. He leaves and the book turns into a road movie.
The novel also turns into three quests, one for each character. Georgie, Jim and Luther need to move on from their past, to forgive themselves something that weighs on them, to atone for their past and find their place in their new reality.
The book plays on the well-known tropes of love triangle, revenge, forbidden love and Winton makes it work thanks to his poetic style and his brilliant sense of place.
Dirt Music is a nature writing book, a good one. It makes you want to visit Western Australia and see everything with your own eyes – if readers from Western Australia stumble upon this billet, can you tell me if what he describes is the usual landscapes of the state or if he focuses on special area that almost nobody ever visits?
It is nature writing because it includes a lot of descriptions of the landscapes but also because the natural elements play a central role in the lives of the characters. It shaped who they are. It influences their decisions. It is a parameter to take into account in daily life. Nature is a key element of the story as Jim’s profession is linked to the sea, Luther depends on it for its income and it’s a soothing place for Georgie. She’s also a good boatwoman.
Tim Winton excels at describing the beauty of beaches, the wilderness in the north of the state. I enjoyed the descriptions, the sense of place, the way the characters are attuned with the wilderness around them. I’m happy I read it in French translation, though. These descriptions would have been hard to follow in English.
The love and lust story between Georgie and Luther is of those dramatic love affairs that seem to mostly exist for the greater good of literary fiction. It’s a bit like Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, except that Winton is a better writer. Both books are tagged as romance on Goodreads.
Georgie and Luther cannot be together, not without cutting some serious strings. I’m not much into love drama and here I shut out all inner comments about this incredible bond between Georgie and Luther, rock solid after a few days together and a roll between the sheets. *rolls her eyes*
I let it slide to enjoy the ride, the road trip in the bush where they are seriously weird people if Winton is accurate. I love nature writing books and this story sounded a lot like the American literature that Gallmeister publishes and that I love so much.
So, I really enjoyed Dirt Music and I’m willing to read another book by Tim Winton. Don’t hesitate to leave a recommendation in the comments.
Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves by Jonas Gardell – an important book and a translation tragedy. #20BOS26
Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves by Jonas Gardell (2012-2013) French title: N’essuie jamais de larmes sans gants. Translated by Jean-Baptiste Coursaud et Lena Grumbach.
I’m supposed to write a billet about Dirt Music by Tim Winton but I’m so emotional after reading Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves by Jonas Gardell that I have to write about it now. Tim Winton will wait.
The title of the book is explained in the first chapter. We’re in Stockholm, in a hospital where a man is dying from Kaposi’s sarcoma. He’s in pain, he’s crying and one of the nurses who is tending to his disintegrating body mechanically wipes his tears with her hand. The other nurse in the room scolds her immediately and says “Don’t ever wipe tears without gloves”. The young man is dying from AIDS, alone in his hospital room.
Immediately after this scene, an omniscient narrator explains:
| Ce qui est raconté dans cette histoire s’est passé simultanément dans beaucoup d’autres lieux, à la même époque, mais c’est à d’autres d’en faire le récit. (…) Raconter est une sorte de devoir. Une manière d’honorer, de pleurer, de se souvenir. Une manière de mener la lutte de la mémoire contre l’oubli. | What is told in this story happened simultaneously in many other places, at the same time but others will have to tell their story. (…) To tell this story is a sort of duty. A way to honor, to grieve and to remember. A way to lead the fight of memory against forgetfulness. (my translation from the French) |
Jonas Gardell is going to tell us about the AIDS epidemic in Stockholm in the 1980s. He wrote them in three books published in one tome in French: Love, Disease, Death. The narration isn’t linear, as my introduction points it out. We go back and forth in time, getting to know a group of gay men in Stockholm.
We have Rasmus who grew up in a village in Vårmland. We have Benjamin who grew up in Stockholm in the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect. We have Paul, the older one, the most extravagant, the most affectionate of them all, who plays the mother hen and welcomes the country guys looking for a haven in Stockholm to be themselves. We have Lars-Åke and Seppo from Finland, a couple of militant for gays rights. We have Bengt who wants to be a famous actor. We have Reine who falls in love in a minute and is always heartbroken.
Rasmus and Benjamin are born in 1963 like the author and find each other at a Christmas party hosted by Paul. Jonas Gardell was born in 1963 too, he’s gay and writes about a community he knows well. In an interview, he says he’s a survivor.
All along the 812 pages of this page-turner of a book, we get to know the group, their loves, their story and how they coped with their sexual orientation in a society where they were barely starting to be in the open.
In 1982, when the story begins, the gay community is raising their heads after a decade of militantism that resulted in a timid wind of freedom. Gardell explains that the gay movement turned to the same methods as the ones used by feminist and black movements. He mentions how influential Harvey Milk had been.
Jonas Gardell has done a lot of research to write this book. He mentions newspapers articles, the management of the epidemic by the authorities, the behavior of nurses and doctors, the statements of pastors. He describes the humiliation, the terrible way gay men were treated and all the crazy rumors that flew around the epidemic. He shows a panicky society who turned hateful instead of compassionate.
He shows that the authorities took time to acknowledge the issue, despite alerts from gay associations. The gay community wasn’t informed enough and to be honest, nobody knew much in the first years. The disease spread like an unstoppable wild fire. This is the official part, the visible side of the epidemic. It could be dry if the novel was just an exposé of what happened or a literary trial to the Swedish society.
Gardell avoids this pitfall masterfully. His characters sound real, they come alive under his pen and he goes into their psyche. They are all well-developed and loveable despite their flaws. We follow them in all the gay places in Stockholm, from the sex shops, to the bushes, to the pissoirs near the railway station, to strange cars, gay cafés and nightclubs. We witness their lust for life, for love, for friendship and acceptance.
We see each of them struggle with who they are. Rasmus knew quite early that he was different, he’s this white elk he saw in Vårmland. His father, as a hunter, said it should be killed because its DNA was flawed, that it could spread its bad genes in the flock and that it shouldn’t live. Rasmus got really upset as he understood he was one of these white elks. He moved to Stockholm to meet other gay men.
Benjamin is a devoted member of the JW sect in his area. He spends a lot of time preaching and going door-to-door to spread his religion. This is how he stumbles upon Paul who throws at him “You know, right, that you’re homosexual?”. Deep down he knew it. To be recognized as such within a few minutes makes him understand that he won’t escape who he is. And then he meets Rasmus and there’s no trying to fight the truth. His inner combat is terrible because of his religion: he knew he’d lose his family forever, that they wouldn’t be able to contact him after his coming out.
The others have the same kind of history: a deep feeling of shame, the impossibility to tell their family who they really are, a lot of years in the dark, trying to understand who they were and that they weren’t alone. Reine is the first to die of AIDS and he never told his mother he was gay or sick. She discovers everything at his funeral and realizes she never knew her son.
Gardell pictures young men who came to the city to live their lives and to be true to themselves. Benjamin says it beautifully to Paul:
| Je veux dans ma vie pouvoir aimer quelqu’un qui m’aime. | I want in my life to be able to love someone who loves me. |
This simple request implies a lot of conditions to be fulfilled, the most important one is that the society be ready to accept it. It’s a longing against loneliness, the condemnation to solitude that Holger, Rasmus’s neighbor in his village had to endure his whole life because he hid his sexual orientation. It’s exactly the sentence I should have written to describe the longing I mentioned in my billet The Gay Pride was cancelled in Paris but I just happened to read three gay books.
Of course I knew about the AIDS epidemic. I’m ten years younger than the characters. In France and for my generation, several things happened within a few years and gay men became visible. Philippe Djian published Echine (1988) and it was my first book with gay characters that had a “normal life”. (Not like Charlus in Proust). Les Nuits Fauves by Cyrille Collard went out (1992) and a lot of debate happened about AIDS and unprotected sex. We read To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life by Hervé Guibert, published in 1990. Then Philadelphia went out (1993). And 10/18 published Tales from the City in French translation (1994). Then the charity Sidaction was launched (1994). And we were all taught about safe sex, condoms and condoms negociations.
But all this was AFTER the 1980s. I didn’t realize how extensive the disease had been among gay men, what a toll it took on their community, how they had to take care of themselves, of each others and lose friend after friend to the disease in horrible conditions. In the book, when the AIDS hecatomb accelerates, Seppo goes to so many funerals that he keeps a suit in the office to attend them directly after work. They took care of their sick and their dead since a lot of them were cut from their families or never made their coming out.
Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves also points out something I never suspected. The early 1980s started as a hopeful decade. Gay rights were improving, a wind of freedom was breathing on the community in Stockholm. Those were the years of sexual liberation and these men paid a hefty price. A young generation of men lost their lives and nobody really cared about it, let’s be honest.
As the author mentions it, if you weren’t directly impacted, life went on and you didn’t suspect the tragedy happening in these years. The way our characters lose their friends, their new family in horrible conditions in hospitals is gut-wrenching. It’s even more upsetting because the reader knows that Gardell writes nothing but the truth. As he says, the only positive outcome of this decade were laws granting same sex marriage, co-adoption and improving gay rights.
Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves is an important book for its message but most of all for its literary achievement. It remains a work of fiction, a fictional memoir of a generation and yes, it’s a good way to celebrate their memory and raise awareness.
At the moment, according to Goodreads, it’s only available in translation in the following languages: Finnish, Polish, Norwegian, Dutch, Turkish, Chinese and French. A translation tragedy for English-speaking readers as they are missing out on a major book.
Again, many, many, many thanks to Aymeric, libraire at Kube who picked this book for me. I wouldn’t have chosen it myself because it’s a chunkster and because I would have shied away from its sadness. And yes, it was very sad but a few emotional moments in my armchair are worth the awareness raised by this book.
Very highly recommended.
The Gasp / Charge d’âme by Romain Gary. Not his best books. #20BOS26 #ParisInJuly2026
The Gasp by Romain Gary (1973) French title: Charge d’âme. (1977)
As much as I love Romain Gary, The Gasp is not a good book. It’s sloppy, it would have needed a lot of rewriting and editing. It felt like the outburst of a man concerned by the news and where the world was headed in terms of nuclear weapons, and use of natural resources. The blurb is intriguing, though:
Marc Mathieu is a brilliant creator – a scientist whose experiments have led him to the very essence of man’s life-energy. Leading a team of top French physicists, Mathieu develops a method to capture and harness this incredible life-force as it escapes from a man’s body at the moment of death. The result is the gasp: a pulsating sphere of energy that looks as harmless as a ping-pong ball but contains a power source that makes the atom obsolete.
Gary imagines that Marc Mathieu found a way to capture the souls of people at the moment they die, stock their energy in batteries and turn them into a clean and inexhaustible. The issue is political as it implies using human souls and having on hand an extremely powerful kind of energy. The kind that surpasses all nuclear weapons.
Marc Mathieu is aware of the risks and doesn’t want to regret his invention like other nuclear scientists regretted nuclear weapons. He shares his discoveries with all the powers ruling the world, until he picks Albania for a full-scale test of his invention.
The president of the USA and his Russian counterpart decide to send a mixed-nationalities commando to destroy the facility.
The novel is quite farcical. Marc Mathieu, whose named is composed of the names of two Evangelists, is a sort of crazy scientist victim of bouts of existential angst due to an itchy conscience. He knows his invention can lead to the worst and wants to prevent it from happening. He also knows it raises ethical questions. Who’s soul is going to power which object?
The elite military team built for the sabotage is unorthodox and comical. Gary plays with clichés based on nationalities to define each character and uses the rules and patterns of action movies to describe the operation.
Now, we’re facing something weird, the kind of literary stunt Romain Gary was able to manufacture. The Gasp is a novel Gary first wrote in English; it was published in 1973 in the USA. Its French version was published in 1977 and it isn’t the exact translation of the original English one.
The Gasp is a political novel. Between 1973 and 1977, some world leaders have changed: President Nixon left in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Jimmy Carter won the presidential election of 1976. Mao died in 1976. Ecological matters became more pressing after the Seveso catastrophe in Italy (1976), the energy crisis that started in 1973 and the conference on nuclear energy in Istanbul in September 1977. (explicitly mentioned in Charge d’âme.) In 1976, there were also demonstrations in Europe against the construction of Superphoenix nuclear plants.
That makes a lot of changes in the political, economic and ecological context of the book. A lot happened in four years, resulting in a update of the book and a rewriting to adapt the text to French readers. He had already done that with The Ski Bum / Adieu Gary Cooper.
The two books could not be identical if Gary wanted to stick to his ecological and political message. I haven’t read The Gasp but I browsed through it on Archive.org where you can borrow it for free. I looked for passages I had highlighted in Charge d’âme and found them either written in a different way but with a similar meaning or totally absent. The general meaning of the book is the same but the content is different.
As I said at the beginning of my billet, this is not Gary at his best. He was putting his best in Emile Ajar at the time, after Gros Câlin in 1974 and Life Before Us in 1975. I wouldn’t recommend reading The Gasp or Charge d’âme but as always, I’m amazed at Gary’s ability to understand the state of the world and foresee political and societal changes.
Here’s his description of the newly elected PODUS in Charge d’âme:
| L’élection de ce fermier du Nebraska était due, ainsi que l’avait écrit le Washington Post, au besoin profond de simplicité du people américain. « Les électeurs semblent avoir estimé que, face à la complexité du monde, il fallait un président des Etats-Unis qui ne fût pas un homme compliqué lui-même » | As the Washington Post put it in an editorial, the election of this Nebraska farmer was due to the American people’s deep yearning for simplicity. “The voters seem to have considered that, faced with the complexity of the world, they needed a president of the United States who wasn’t a complicated man himself.” (my translation) |
In The Gasp, the same passage was:
| The most powerful man in the world had been a last-minute compromise convention choice and the underdog candidate during most of the campaign. The election of his Nebraska farmer was due, as one editorial had put it, to his very lack of charisma and of so-called greatness; it was almost as if the people had voted for themselves. | L’homme le plus puissant du monde était un compromis de dernière minute et un outsider pendant presque toute la campagne. L’élection de ce fermier du Nebraska était due, comme un édito l’a mentionné, à son manque évident de charisme et de grandeur. C’était comme si le peuple avait voté pour lui-même. My translation |
Isn’t that striking for 1977?
I also found very interesting that he was already concerned by climate change, resource depletion and the future of humanity. In Charge d’âme, he mentions scientific studies that show that if we keep using energy resources at the same pace, the temperature of the world would raise by 50°C in 250 years. In 1977. Fifty years ago. See where we are now.
In Charge d’âme, I hear a writer who disagrees more and more with where the world is heading, who is concerned for the future of humanity and humanist values, who seems to have worn out his abilities to live with the absurdity of political decisions and who turns to irony and laughter to keep going.
So, not recommended but still interesting underlying issues.
This was part of my Tame The TBR challenge, my 20 Books of Summer endeavors and a last contribution to Paris in July.
We Were Wolves by Sandrine Collette – a brilliant novella. #ParisInJuly2026 #20BOS26
We Were Wolves by Sandrine Collette (2022) Original French title: On était des loups.
This is another book for July in Paris, although the only French thing about it is the author’s nationality.
We Were Wolves by Sandrine Collette is a novella and it’s hard to write about it without spoiling the story. This billet will have to be short even though there’s a lot to discuss about this literary gem.
The location of the story isn’t clearly disclosed in the book but it’s in mountains where there are deer, bears and fish. It looks a lot like the Rocky Mountains, so I’d say it’s set in Montana, Wyoming or Alberta.
Liam and Ava are a young couple who live in the mountains. Their home is quite remote from their nearest neighbor. Ava wanted a child, Liam didn’t but gave in. They now have Aru who is five years old.
They live in harmony, Liam hunts for food, Ava tends to the chicken, the vegetable garden and takes care of the house. She’s Aru’s primary caretaker. Liam doesn’t have a great bond with Aru, he hasn’t come to terms with the fact that he has a kid. He sees him more as Ava’s child than his. He doesn’t know how to connect to his child, even if Aru is always waiting for him at the end of the day.
Then the unthinkable happens : Liam comes home after a hunting day and finds Ava dead, killed by a bear. Aru is under her and alive, she protected him with her body.
Liam is distraught. He’s devastated by Ava’s death and thrown off balance about Aru. He doesn’t know how to take care of his son and doesn’t want a child living with him in the mountains. He decides to go to town and leave him with his uncle and aunt…
This is how their father-and-son journey in the woods starts.
Liam is the narrator of the story and being in his head is often very uncomfortable. His thoughts are brutal sometimes but make sense. He didn’t want a child because he didn’t think it was smart to raise a kid in the mountains and he wasn’t able to live anywhere else.
Now he’s grieving Ava’s death and has to take care of his son and find a way to connect with him. He doesn’t know how to be a father and his own father wasn’t a good example.
His travel with Aru is a transformative journey, something that isn’t far from a fairy tale by Grimm. Some elements of the story reminded me of Tom Thumb, of all these stories where a child loses a parent and all the obstacles and challenges a character needs to conquer to find their real place in the world.
Liam grows during his time in the woods with Aru. He grows as a man and as a parent, getting to really know his son and to love him deeply.
And Sandrine Collette is a very talented writer. She has a knack for including the wilderness as a character in her story, revealing the skills of a true Nature writing author. Liam has a distinctive voice, he’s not like any other character and the story doesn’t always go the way you’d expect it to go. Her characters live in a tough but beautiful world. Liam sounds incredibly har towards Aru sometimes but he’s also capable of letting him be.
| S’il perd du temps à regarder un papillon quand je l’envoie chercher de l’eau c’est qu’il est capable de poésie, cette poésie il la perdra bien assez vite tout seul, la vie s’en chargera et ce n’est pas la peine de l’engueuler. | If he wastes time watching a butterfly when I send him fetch some water, it means he’s capable of poetry. This poetry, he’ll lose it soon enough, life will take care of it and there’s no need yelling at him. |
And Aru knows how to behave to win his father’s heart. It’s instinctual. He doesn’t speak much, we never see his POV but we guess his angst, his fear of abandonment and the pain of losing his mother.
We We Wolves is a brilliant novella, as good as Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan and it would make a beautiful and quiet movie, in the like of Brokeback Mountain.
I don’t know why it has not been translated into English, it’d make an excellent book club choice and the publisher would be able to include an interesting list of topics to discuss. – Btw, I hate those guidelines for book clubs, only seen anglophone copies of books. Nobody tells me what to think or talk about as if I were in middle-school. I read therefore I think by myself is my motto. So, back off, publishers!— Back to Sandrine Collette.
Is there a translator or a publisher around and ready to look into this story? If it helps, it won the Prix Renaudot des Lycéens and the Prix Jean Giono. If you’re interested in Sandrine Collette, here’s a replay of her interview at Quais du Polar.
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich – Minneapolis & tough times
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich (2021) French title: La Sentence. Translated by Sarah Gurcel
Welcome to the new episode of my Reading With Séverine project. In May – yep, late again with the billets!— we had picked The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.
We’re in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 2005, Tookie, young Ojibwe woman is arrested by the police because she helped a friend move a body from one place to another after the man overdosed. The body was stuffed with drugs and her so-called friends framed her. She’s a junkie and she’s spiraling, trusting the wrong people. She’s sentenced to 60 years of prison and we know that the police officer who arrested her is a friend, Pollux, a Potawatomi.
Fast forward to 2019. Thanks to her lawyer who managed to prove she was framed, Tookie is now free and a literature junkie. She works in Minneapolis in a bookstore specialized in First Nations literature. Her boss is named Louise, and the boss and the bookshop look a lot like Louise Erdrich’s own store in the same city.
We get acquainted with the staff working for the bookstore, with some of their remarkable clients and Tookie’s married life with Pollux. Yes, she married the man who arrested her and who no longer wears a badge. Despite the love between them, did she really forgive him for arresting her?
The novel is centered around Tookie and the people who gravitate around her. Several of them are, like her, either questioning their identity or researching the meaning of Indigenous identity. We are in the Ojibwe and Potawatomi communities of Minnesota.
The novel covers several years in Tookie’s life including the traumatic events of George Floyd’s death in her city and the brutality of the COVID 19 epidemic.
These are years of maturation for her in her relationship with Pollux, with his daughter Hetta and her coworkers. I enjoyed reading about her favorite books, her job at the bookstore, about her life with Pollux and Hetta and about her identity as an Ojibwe. She still has a lot of issues: forgiving herself for her stay in prison, moving on from those years in detention, learning about herself, making peace with who she is and where she comes from. Finding her footing with parentality and her grand-child when Hetta and her baby Jarvis stay with Tookie and Pollux.
There’s one thread I really disliked and thought was superfluous : the magic realism part of the book. Flora, a faithful client of the bookstore dies and starts haunting the place, targeting Tookie. I thought it brought nothing to the book, I just wanted to skip the parts featuring Flora’s ghost. I usually don’t like magic realism in books and this book won’t change my mind about this literary device. Séverine agreed with me on that part and so did Ali who happened to read it recently and with whom I discussed The Sentence on Bluesky.
The Sentence is still worth reading because Louise Erdrich draws engaging and unique characters and mixes state-of-the nation questions with everyday life. The city around them is depicted through different angles, its violence but also its bouts of solidarity. Tookie is such a literature enthusiast that I had to bond with her and I really loved Pollux as well. Erdrich’s characters are flawed and terribly humans. She digs into their inner turmoil and raises the unanswered question: what does it mean to be a Native American in the 21st century? The endless discussions about wild rice in the Native American community amused me as it is such a serious matter. It sounded as serious as baguette in France.
And last but not least, Louise Erdrich is a damned good writer. I really love her prose.
I would have loved it more if Flora had remained dead and buried and had haunted Tookie through a diary rather than as a ghost.
Literary escapade : Frédéric Dard & the village of Saint-Chef, France. #ParisInJuly2026
I thought I’d take you to another literary escapade in France, in the village of Saint-Chef in the Isère department. This is where Frédéric Dard (1921-2000) , aka San Antonio spent part of his childhood and this is where he’s buried.
Frédéric Dard was a prolific writer. He wrote 298 novels and 30 theatre plays. He’s famous for his Commissaire San Antonio series which has 175 volumes. In comparison, Simenon wrote 103 books featuring Commissaire Maigret. He started out as an intern in a newspaper in Lyon, where he met Edmond Locard, a physician who founded in Lyon the first police forensic laboratory in the world. (He was also an advocate of international cooperation between police departments, leading to Interpol)
In his lifetime, Dard was the French best-selling writer. He must have made a fortune to his publisher, Fleuve Noir, with which he remained all his life. Yet most of you have never heard of him. You might have seen the movie The Old Lady Who Walked in the Sea directed by Laurent Heynemann with Jeanne Moreau as the lead actress. It was based on a book by Frédéric Dard.
I tried to read a book of the San Antonio series, Ceci n’est pas une pipe and it turned out his kind of stories isn’t for me. Lad Lit isn’t my cup of tea and Dard’s incredible style didn’t make up for the kind of espionage stories he wrote. I’m not interested in espionage books, whoever wrote them, so I’m not a good advocate for Frédéric Dard but I should try his “noir novels”romans noirs”.
You won’t find a lot of San Antonio books translated into English but Pushkin Press published six of his other noir fiction books. They are probably worth checking out since the publisher did the hard work of picking out gems among the 298 novels.
Now that we’ve settled how famous and peculiar this author was, let’s have a tour of St Chef. First, here are the town hall and the abbey where I got married.
Here are a few pictures of the interior of the abbey, except of the Middle-Ages frescoes that are locked up unless you go there with a guide.
Inside the abbey, where the masses are held. It has lovely stained-glass panels.
The mayor who married us was a local figure and friends with Frédéric Dard. They now have their picture on the town hall wall.
The village has a museum with floors dedicated to the local agricultural and architectural history and a floor dedicated to the local celebrities, Frédéric Dard and Louis Seigner, grand-father of the actresses Mathilde and Emmanuelle Seigner.
The plaza outside the abbey has an old fountain and a new sculpture of Le Chat by Philippe Geluk.
Geluk was friends with Frédéric Dard and Le Chat holds a book that says L’oeuvre de Dard est une oeuvre d’art. (Dard’s work is a work of art) He’s a Belgian cartoonist whose iconic hero is Le Chat, a blasé character with a poetic and caustic sense of humor. See for yourself.
Last but not least, Saint-Chef also has its very own crime fiction festival, Sang pour Sang Polar.
The name is à la Frédéric Dard, a play-on-words on cent (one hundred) and sang (blood). It means both 100% crime fiction and blood for blood crime fiction. I hope I’ll have time to attend the next edition.
So, if you ever travel around Lyon or Grenoble, Saint-Chef is an easy detour. You’ll discover a lovely village with stone buildings, a great abbey and, strangely, an Irish pub owned and run by an Irishman. You can also do one of the four local hikes and see the Mont Blanc in the distance.
I hope you enjoyed our little tour in Sain-Chef!
This is another contribution to July in Paris hosted by Emma.
20 Books of Summer 2026 – my midway pitstop #20BOS26
Annabel, who hosts 20 Books of Summer has suggested a midway check in the form of a road trip. Thanks, Annabel for hosting this event again. Hmmm. I looked at the nine books I’ve read or abandoned so far and our road trip will have to include plane rides.
Our trip starts in a summer camp on Poland in 1980 with Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski (2020). It’s not a R&R campsite but a mandatory work camp for the youth under the Communist rule. This is where Ludwig and Janusz meet and fall in love.
Society is not better ready for gay relationships as it was in Teleny attributed to Oscar Wilde (1893). We’ve now moved to our next stop, Paris, to listen to the dramatic love story between two young men, Teleny and De Grieux.
Homosexuality is a sin and a crime by then. (still is in some countries, alas). It’s not a topic Montesquieu tackles in his Persian Letters (1721), set in the 1710s. We’re still in Paris, most of the time but we follow two Persian travelers who visit France and other European cities and comment on them. Montesquieu makes a lot of fun of the French upper classes, the aristocracy, the clergy and the Roman Catholic church. He criticizes the French institutions while promoting more democratic ones, even if he never uses this word.
He paved the way to the French Revolution which is the background of Le Fleuve guillotine by Antoine de Meaux (2015), a book I didn’t finish, sadly. It’s partly set in Paris and in Lyon.
We need to hop on a plane for the next part of our journey. Indeed, my Book Club pick took me to Western Australia with Dirt Music by Tim Winton (2001). It’s another dramatic love story and a magnificent nature writing book. The billet is upcoming and I still wonder why I waited so long to read Winton. It’s such an ode to Western Australia that you want to actually hop on a plane and see the landscapes with your own eyes.
The French translation of Dirt Music is entitled Beyond the Edge of the World which fits with the final destination of Island of Point Némo by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès. It’s an adventure, a trip à la Jules Verne that takes the reader from France to London, from Scotland to the Trans-Siberian train, to Sydney and Island of Point Némo, somewhere between Australia and New Zealand. It’s a road trip inside this reading trip. The adventure is the centerpiece of the book but it’s also laced with questions about books and literature and about nature.
Sandrine Collette is also French writer but her book We Were Wolves (2023) takes us to the Rocky Mountains in the USA or in Canada. The setting is unclear but according to the descriptions of the wilderness and the names of the characters (Liam, Ava, Henry…), it fits with Montana best, or maybe Wyoming or Alberta. The billet is upcoming, stay tuned it’ll be on my best-of-the-year list.
As frequent flyers of this blog know, I read a lot of books set in Montana and Wyoming, so it’s no surprise read Open Range by C.J. Box (2006) This time Joe Pickett is filling in temporarily for the Fish & Game position in Jackson, near Teton National park. The town is the meeting point of hunters, outfitters, environmentalists, businessmen and other activists. An explosive combo. Joe still has issues with the crooked sheriff of Saddlestring and his family who stayed back in town when he was in Jackson was under threats.
Joe’s not the only one dealing with corrupt police forces. The same thing happened at our next and last stop in Northern California. In Turn on the Heat, his crime fiction book published in 1940, Erle Stanley Gardner has his PI duo Bertha Cool and Donald Lam looking for a vanished ex-wive and land in a hornet nest of local politics. An excellent crime fiction book in my opinion. It was unearthed by Hard Case Crime and it’s a wonderful Beach & Public Transport book.
This is the beginning of my summer trip in books. So we’ve been to Poland, France, Western Australia, on an island between Australia and New Zealand, Montana, Wyoming and Northern California. Let’s see the map!
The second half of the summer implies going back to Montana and visiting Northern Carolina, Georgia, New York, New Zealand, Japan, the French Riviera, Serbia and Sweden. Pack your suitcases and take this next trip with me!
What about you? What have you been up to since the beginning of June? How your reading roadtrip ? What does it look like?
Island of Point Némo by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès — a crazy adventure à la Jules Verne #20BOS26
Island of Point Nemo by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès. (2014) French title : L’Ile du Point Némo.
I received Island of Point Nemo by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès last year in one of my Kube packages. It’s rather long and it took me a while to get to it. It’s hard to describe, so here’s the blurb:
A stolen diamond and three right feet, wearing shoes of a non-existent brand, that wash ashore in Scotland set into motion the first plot of Island of Point Nemo, a rollicking Jules Verne-like adventure narrative that crosses continents and oceans, involves multilingual codes, a world-famous villain, and three eccentrically loopy detectives.
Running parallel is the story of B@bil Books, an e-reader factory in France filled with its own set of colorful characters, including the impotent Dieumercie and his randy wife, who will stop at nothing—including a suspect ritual involving bees—to fix his “problem,” and their abusive boss Wang-ilWong, obsessed with carrier pigeons and spying on his employees.
With the humor of a Jasper Fforde novel, and the structure of a Haruki Murakami one, Island of Point Nemo a literary puzzle and grand testament to the power of storytelling—even in our digital age.
This book is a wild ride and you need to shed your skin of reader of the real world to go back to your child self, the one who loved listening to stories and was open to any kind of story as long as it was fascinating. Once you’re in this frame of mind, Island of Point Némo becomes a crazy adventure, a wonderful piece of literature where books are kings.
It’s crazy, poetic, humanist, philosophical, funny and stuffed with loving references to books. It is a book written by a book lover who want to recreate for adults the magic of a child’s first encounters with the sheer pleasure of adventures and stories. Books are not the boring stuff you read in school or daunting stack of pages, they’re playmates.
Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès has a luxuriant imagination and his master is Jules Verne. The blurb mentions Murakami but I don’t agree with that. Murakami’s characters are always mildly depressed. Here we are with a writer who will describe places, people, trains, cars and boats with lots of details and yet he’s never boring.
Here, the characters are as eccentric as in Jules Verne and science has a lot of space in the book. I also thought about The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb or War with the Newt by Karel Căpek for their exuberance, their humor and the sense of imagination of their writers.
The characters in Island of Point Némo are all unique and eccentric with incredible life stories. They are Edmond Dantes, Jean Valjean or Philéas Fogg kind of characters. They are weird, intense and yet they work. They love hard and are faithful friends. The circus characters of the book reminded me of Katherine Dunn.
The author tells us that books are powerful, safe havens, providers of joy, places of freedom where everything is possible and everyone can be a hero. They are an endless source of comfort. Island of Point Némo is erudite but not highbrow. It celebrates literature through the pleasure angle. Read to learn, to be happy, to evade from your daily life and to reconnect with the child inside you.
If you’re in the mood for an adventure peppered with literature, rush for this book. Be adventurous yourself.
In France, this novel is published by Zulma, an independant publisher. In English it is published by Open Letter Books and translated by Hannah Chute. She must have had a lot of fun translating that.
Let’s face it : this is a book I would have never read without my KUBE subscription where I receive a literary box with a book picked out for me by an independent libraire. All the books sent that way are through indie bookshops and I love my monthly blind date with a book. I especially had wonderful times with books handpicked by Aymeric, libraire in Montrouge near Paris. Thanks, Aymeric, this one is no exception.
This is also a contribution to Paris In July hosted by Emma where we focus on anything French and this is French literature. It belongs to my selection for 20 Books of Summer.
The Guillotine River by Antoine de Meaux – A DNF for Bastille Day and #ParisinJuly2026. #20BOS26
The plan was simple and good, I think: read Le Fleuve guillotine by Antoine de Meaux (2015) for Paris in July and Bastille Day. The plan was derailed when I wasn’t able to finish the book because I didn’t like it.
Le Fleuve guillotine (The Guillotine River) is set during the French Revolution in Lyon, which is the metropolis I live in. This is why I bought it in the first place, I thought it would be a good way to learn about the city during this period.
The book opens during the Insurrection of 10 August 1792 in Paris, three years after the fall of the Bastille. King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette are held prisoners at the Tuileries. Some pro-monarchy forces attempted to free them from their apartments and the revolutionary forces arrested them and sent them to the Temple prison. This will result in the abolition of monarchy and the execution of Louis XVI on January 21st, 1793.
Three men, the marquis Louis du Torbeil and his two brothers-in-law Charles and Jean de Pierrebelle are in Paris on that day, fighting on the aristocratic side to save the king from imprisonment. Charles dies in Paris during this mini civil war. They come from the Forez region, east of Lyon, near Saint-Etienne. It wasn’t clear why they were in Paris in the first place, some 450 kms from their home.
Louis and Jean go back to Lyon in a stagecoach, lying low as they don’t want to be recognized as aristocrats. Among the other travelers is Rambert Conche, a former priest who embraced revolutionary ideas and supports the most extreme political current. He’s the right arm of the violent revolutionary governor of Lyon.
Upon their arrival, Jean de Pierrebelle stays in Lyon with his former classmate Irénée Conche, Rambert’s younger brother. He’s a “soyeux lyonnais”, a silk manufacturer from Lyon. The city is famous for its silk factories on the Croix Rousse hill.
Meanwhile, the third man of the family, Barthélémy de Pierrebelle is a prêtre réfractaire –a priest who didn’t want to renounce to priesthood after religion was abolished—and he’s imprisoned in Roanne, in the Forez region.
Add to the mix a Sophie de Pale, a young mother and widow of aristocratic upbringing and you have a set of characters who represent almost all the component of the society of the time.
It’s a promising pitch, it’s set in the city I’ve grown to love and sure, it was wonderful to know exactly the places the characters go to or where their lodgings are or what the rivers look like. I was looking forward to reading this piece of history but I was bored out of my mind and couldn’t finish the book. I struggled during 150 pages and couldn’t make myself read the 300 remaining ones. In small print.
Writing historical fiction is a challenge that Antoine de Meaux didn’t win. The historical fiction author needs to do their homework and track inaccuracies while writing good fiction with the right level of historical details.
The author must fight the urge to share all the fascinating historical data they learnt during their research or they will lose non-historian-buff readers along the way. And yet, they need to include enough details to give a good sense of the time along with subtle educational details to enlighten the readers who don’t know much about this historical period.
Setting a book during the horribly complicated times of the French Revolution is a tall order.
In this case, Antoine de Meaux researched the historical facts, his writing is good and polished but he lacked a good editor to carve out useless details and push forward educational insights to his readers, either in the course of the novel or through relevant footnotes.
For example, the Insurrection in Paris lasted 45 agonizing pages where he describes the belligerents with the names of their time and the moves of the fights in Paris. I was LOST. I didn’t remember if the Suisses were Louis XVI’s personal army and the description of the forces in presence wasn’t clear enough for me. I didn’t remember much about the specific vocabulary of the French revolution and kept wondering if I understood things properly.
I couldn’t figure out the moves of the troops and where the battle happened despite going to Paris several time per year and knowing the current area around the Tuileries.
This was far too long and not necessary for the rest of the story. It should have taken 15 pages tops, it would have been enough to give the info about the main event – the king was arrested and it was a blood bath—and introduce Louis du Torbeil and Jean de Pierrebelle.
The same happened with the description of the battle in Lyon to overthrow the revolutionary local power. Again, it was too detailed and unclear. I had a hard time understanding who was fighting against whom and for what reasons. I was confused, not interested in the characters and also missing out on historical details.
When the story moved to Lyon and to Forez, the point of view alternated between the characters. They interacted but didn’t mesh. It was clear that the book was headed toward the story of Louis, Jean, his friend Irénée, Rambert the revolutionary, Bathélémy the faithful priest and Sophie the widow but I never felt invested in their fate. I felt like they were here to turn a history textbook into a novel rather than being characters who happened to live their story in the past.
After 150 pages, I just gave up. I figured I should have been caught in the story by then and since I didn’t give a damn about the characters, I stopped reading.
So, sorry, I hoped to write an enthusiastic billet about a great historical fiction book set in Lyon and I end up writing about a novel I didn’t finish. C’est la vie!
Did this ever happened to you while reading historical fiction?
It’s still Bastille Day, and Paris in July is in full force, so here’s a painting by Monet about patriotic celebrations to make it up to you. 😊 It’s June 30th, 1878. Bastille Day didn’t exist yet and the government toyed with the 30th of June (middle of the year) for a National Day before settling to July 14th and the Marseillaise.
Persian Letters by Montesquieu – for Paris in July and the 4th of July. #20BOS26 #parisinjuly2026
Persian Letters by Charles de Montesquieu. (1721) French title: Lettres persanes.
All the quotes in English come from the translation by John Davidson available on Wikisource. It sounds stiffer in English that the original French but it’s a free translation and better that what I could have done.
| Mon cher Usbek, quand je vois des hommes qui rampent sur un atome, c’est-à-dire la terre, qui n’est qu’un point de l’univers, se proposer directement pour modèle de la Providence, je ne sais comment accorder tant d’extravagance avec tant de petitesse. Lettre LIX | My dear Usbek, when I behold men, mere crawlers on this atom, the earth, which is but a point in the universe, proposing themselves as exact models for Providence, I know not how to harmonise such extravagance with such littleness. Letter 59 |
I am happy to start Paris in July, the event hosted by Emma at Words & Peace, with Persian Letters by Montesquieu, an epistolary book I should have read a long time ago.
It was SO MUCH FUN. We have two Persian travelers, Usbek and Rica, visiting France and other European countries from 1711 to 1720. In France, it is the end of the reign of Louis XIV (1638-1715) and the Regence of Louis XV (1710-1774).
Montesquieu uses them to point out the specificities of the French people, their mores, their vision of life, their social habits and their government. Usbek and Rica make faux-naïve comments about what they see and expose their views about lots of topics. They cover many concepts and realities including religion, the state of the nation, the idea of justice, slavery, racism, the place of women, war, suicide and divorce.
As the characters are rich Persians, they have a serail and quite a few letters are about home and how things are going in the serail between Usbek’s wives and the eunuchs in charge of them during their master’s absence. I have to confess these letters were of no interest to me but they contributed to give an air of authenticity to the letters.
I loved how Usbek and Rica mocked French people in general and the nobility, the king and the organization of the French elites in particular. Like here:
| La fureur de la plupart des François, c’est d’avoir de l’esprit ; et la fureur de ceux qui veulent avoir de l’esprit, c’est de faire des livres. Lettre LXVI | The passion of nearly every Frenchman is to pass for a wit; and the passion of those who wish to be thought wits, is to write books. Letter 69 |
When I see the number of memoirs “written” by politicians and celebrities nowadays, I think Montesquieu is still spot on. He doesn’t stop here with the irony:
| Le roi de France est le plus puissant prince d’Europe. Il n’a point de mines d’or comme le roi d’Espagne son voisin ; mais il a plus de richesses que lui, parce qu’il les tire de la vanité de ses sujets, plus inépuisable que les mines. Lettre XXIV | The king of France is the most powerful of European potentates. He has no mines of gold like his neighbour, the King of Spain; but he is much wealthier than that prince; because his riches are drawn from a more inexhaustible source, the vanity of his subjects. Letter 24. |
In his mind, a good citizen –even if the use of citizen is linked to the Revolution— is industrious and respectful of laws and has a family.
The aristocracy are idle, vain and useless to the country. He doesn’t go as far as saying that France should be a republic but it’s hard to think otherwise when he describes the aristocracy as fully occupied with vapid discussions, bowing down to the king and following insane Versailles etiquette to the letter.
He also criticizes the Catholic church and its wealth, its willingness to bend the rules against sums of money. He points out the hypocrisy of the whole system.
| Le pape est le chef des chrétiens. (…) Il se dit successeur d’un des premiers chrétiens, qu’on appelle saint Pierre : et c’est certainement une riche succession, car il a des trésors immenses et un grand pays sous sa domination. Lettre XXIX | The Pope is the head of the Christians (…) He declares himself to be the successor of one of the first Christians, called Saint Peter: and it is certainly a rich succession; for he possesses immense treasures, and a large territory owns his sway. Letter 29. |
The celibacy of priests and nuns also bothers him because they don’t contribute to the development of the country since they don’t get married and don’t have children.
I really approved of his vision of a good government:
| De tout ceci on doit conclure, Rhédi, que pour qu’un prince soit puissant, il faut que ses sujets vivent dans les délices ; il faut qu’il travaille à leur procurer toutes sortes de superfluités avec autant d’attention que les nécessités de la vie. Lettre CVI | From all this, one may conclude, Rhedi, that if a prince is to be powerful, it is necessary that his subjects should live in luxury; he ought to labour to procure all sorts of superfluities with as much care as the necessities of life. Letter 107. |
We should make posters of this quote and send them to political parties.
His vision of the judicial system is worth reading too. I don’t think he saw death penalty as an efficient way to prevent crime. I intend to read an abridged version of The Spirit of Law.
The place of women in society is often discussed, in comparison with the condition of the Persian women of Usbek’s serail. I can’t tag Montesquieu as feminist, it would be anachronistic, but he is very modern for his time, like here:
| C’est une autre question de savoir si la loi naturelle soumet les femmes aux hommes. Non, me disoit l’autre jour un philosophe très galant : la nature n’a jamais dicté une telle loi. L’empire que nous avons sur elles est une véritable tyrannie ; elles ne nous l’ont laissé prendre que parce qu’elles ont plus de douceur que nous, et pas conséquent, plus d’humanité et de raison. Ces avantages, qui devoient sans doute leur donner la supériorité si nous avions été raisonnables, la leur ont fait perdre, parce que nous ne le sommes point. Lettre XXXVIII | Another much-discussed question is, whether women are intended by nature to be subject to men. “No,” said a very gallant philosopher to me the other day; “nature never dictated any such law. The dominion which we exercise over them is tyrannical; they yield themselves to men only because they are more tender-hearted, and consequently more human and more rational. These advantages, which, had we been reasonable, would, without doubt, have been the cause of their subordination, because we are irrational. Letter 38 |
I agreed with a lot of his thoughts about societal topics. He thinks that divorce should be authorized because it’s not fair to force two people who don’t get along to stay together. He suggests that suicide is a private affair and shouldn’t be condemned. He implies that he doesn’t approve of slavery and the enslavement of Africans in the colonies. He’s critical of excessive greed and I was floored by this passage:
| Mais toutes les destructions ne sont pas violentes. Nous voyons plusieurs parties de la terre se lasser de fournir à la subsistance des hommes : que ne savons-nous si la terre entière n’a pas des causes générales, lentes et imperceptibles, de lassitude ? Lettre CXIII | But all destructions have not been violent. We see many parts of the earth tired out with providing subsistence for men; how do we know that the whole earth has not within itself general causes of debility, slow-working and imperceptible? Lettre 114. |
I agree with his vision of war since he says that the only acceptable wars are the ones to defend one’s people after an aggression or to help an ally in trouble. And this struck me as extremely clever:
| Je tremble qu’on ne parvienne à la fin à découvrir quelque secret qui fournisse une voie plus abrégée pour faire périr les hommes, détruire les peuples et les nations entières. Lettre CV | I dread always lest they should at last discover some secret which will furnish them with a briefer method of destroying men, by killing them off wholesale in tribes and nations. Letter 106 |
Welcome to the 20th century, my dear Montesquieu. We made them, used them and destroyed people, countries and nations.
He was so insightful. I feel very close to the ideas of the Enlightenment because they push for the best for everyone and promote the best in everyone. If you strip the book of its 18th century attributes, it’s extremely contemporary. It reminds us of the founding concepts of our democracies, ones that were a mere dream in Montesquieu’s time and that are currently joyously trampled on by far-right movements or dictators.
Montesquieu influenced the Founding Fathers in the writing of the American constitution. As Wikipedia mentions on Montesquieu’s page, He is the principal source of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. He is also known for propagating the term despotism in the modern political lexicon.
This billet is published on the 4th of July on purpose as today is the 250th anniversary of the USA. Poor Founding Fathers. I hope for them that life after death doesn’t exist and that they don’t have to contemplate today’s festivities organized by the Agent Orange and the state of the country.
Meanwhile, I wholeheartedly recommend reading Persian Letters by Montesquieu.
The Gay Pride was cancelled in Paris this week-end, I just happened to read three gay books. #20BooksofSummer
- Teleny or the Reverse of the Medal. Attributed to Oscar Wilde (1893) French title: Teleny ou le revers de la médaille.
- Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski (2020) French title: Les nageurs de la nuit. Translated by Laurent Bury.
- Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park (2019) French title: S’aimer dans la grande ville. Translated by Kyungran Chol and Pierre Bisiou.
Never pretending to be what we are not, we shall find (…) true contentedness of mind, and our bodies will be able to develop those faculties with which nature has endowed them. Not being either hypocrites or dissemblers, the dread of being seen such as we really are can never torment us. Teleny or the Reverse of the Medal.
I read three gay stories in the span of a few weeks, all about gay men in their twenties, having their first love relationship in an environment that rates from unfriendly to hostile. I haven’t read them in the order of this billet but I want to write about them in chronological order. Teleny is set Paris in the 1890s, Swimming in the Dark in Warsaw in 1980 and Love in the Big City in Seoul in the 2020s.
Sadly, these three books have common points they shouldn’t have. They all feature a narrator who relates a lost love and each time it involves shame, social pressure and the difficulty to navigate a sexual orientation that needs to remain under wraps. Relationships nipped in the bud because these young men had no gay role models, because they couldn’t be out in the open and it put a strain on their love and their daily lives. Three narrators who have lost partners who couldn’t cope with what society expected of them vs who they were and who they loved.
The first book is Teleny or the Reverse of the Medal whose author might be Oscar Wilde, on his own or with friends. I first heard of it at the British Library in London where they held an exhibition about Queer Lives in Literature from 1600-1900. I can’t imagine what Wilde would say about this book being in the British Library after all he had to endure because of his sexual orientation. The narrator of the novel is Camille des Grieux and I stand by what I wrote in my previous billet about this name for a character.
Later I checked out Teleny since Oscar Wilde probably contributed to its writing. I saw that one of the main characters is named Camille des Grieux which immediately reminded me of Manon Lescaut by l’abbé Prévost and its hero, the Chevalier des Grieux. This novel published in 1731 was controversial in its time for the indecency of the love story, was banned and became one of the most successful books in French literature. Can you imagine Wilde behind that reference? Definitely.
Teleny is the tragic love story between René Teleny, a young and gifted pianist and Camille des Grieux. It’s set in Paris where the two men live. Camille is the narrator who relates his first love to a friend, now that he’s much older.
It’s a novel of the 19th century in its tone –the fear of God and religious beliefs are embedded in the characters— and in its style. The author describes genuine love and passion between the two men, exposes the hypocrisy of social codes and questions them. With good reason. What harm do these two lovers do? Why is it forbidden? Why is it worth imprisoning someone? Camille –a unisex firstname, btw – is deliriously in love and his joy is snuffed out by the obligation to keep quiet and stay under the radar.
Teleny includes graphic MM scenes, almost a textbook for young gays, but these are not the ones that made me ill-at-ease. To me, the most shocking scene in the book is the rape of a maid and I loathed it for its violence and because it’s not frowned upon, it’s the droit du seigneur. And the author seems to tell us: what’s the matter with this world? It’s common business to rape a maid but it’s a scandal to be in love and have sex with someone of the same sex?
Teleny is a romance, a plea, a political stand against the hypocrisy of Victorian social rules and an educational book for younger gay men. It’s a literary lifeline gay teenagers.
And it’s still a sword in Warsaw in the 1980s. Ludwig has just graduated from university and now must go to a summer work camp where the Polish Communist regime sent all students after graduation. He’s gay and has a forbidden book in his suitcase, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. An epiphany for him, a place of solace, a this-book-has-been-written-for-me moment. At camp, he meets Janusz and they fall in love and go camping by a lake in a forest. Far from prying eyes. Far from state control. A bubble of freedom in a rigid world.
Back in Warsaw, things aren’t as easy as politics get in the middle. Ludwig wants to start a PhD in Literature while Janusz gets a job where he needs to play by the Party’s rules. There are political upheavals in Poland at the time, it’s Solidarnosc times. Ludwig believe they should stand by the workers to improve the people’s lives and Janusz wants to play the game and get what he can out of it.
Ludwig wants more freedom, for common people and for himself. Janusz thinks it’s pointless and intends to exploit the regime’s cracks and live better thanks to appropriate connexions. Their
Ludwig knows he’s gay, knows that won’t change and he wants to find a way to live his love life as freely as possible, even if it means leaving the country. Janusz still thinks he can live a double life and play the game. In any case, the Polish society wouldn’t let them live together in the open, they have to pick one or the other option. I don’t think they would have been better off in a Western country. After all, in France homosexuality has been decriminalized in 1981 and a French translation of Teleny was only published in 1934 when it was written in 1893.
The political angle gives an extra-layer to the story, taking the reader to Warsaw in communist times, with its long waiting lines in front of grocery stores and the constant surveillance of the population. Ludwig and Janusz are as much in danger as Teleny and des Grieux. They might go to prison too or at least be pressured by the regime.
Swimming in the Dark is a bittersweat romance doomed from the start, reminding us of the brutality of communist regimes. It was my readalong with Séverine for June.
Now let’s move forward to the 2020s in Seoul. Our narrator is Young, a student and then young professional in Seoul. He’s gay, adrift, hiding his relationships from his mother. Although Young doesn’t face imprisonment, homosexuality is still not in the open. Since the 1980s, AIDS has reared its ugly head, a new factor in the story compared to the previous ones.
The novel is more the collection of four stories, each section dealing with a part of Young’s life. We see him as a student with his friend Jaehee (a girl), dealing with his mother’s cancer, having his first job, having a first significant relationship and then a most meaningful one.
Young relates his love with Gyuho and how it ended. Well, the same cause produces the same effect. Shame, clandestine rendezvous, no clear future as an official couple eat away the best feeling. Add AIDS to the mix and disaster is awaiting at the next corner.
When he was a teenager, his mother saw him with a boy and sent him to the psychiatric ward to become straight. No need to say it was a traumatic event in Young’s life. All his relationships implied they’d remain behind closed doors and that PDAs were not welcome. And he’s tired of this.
Sang Young Park writes beautifully about Seoul, a city he obviously loves and he describes terribly well the loneliness of his character. His sense of humor is an armor against the constant little blows of the quotidian but the reader isn’t fooled.
The underlying question of these three characters is not about sex, there are places for one-night-stands. They existed in Paris, in Warsaw and they exist in Seoul. The question that eats at them is about companionship. They crave in-the-open companionship, acceptance of their partner in their family circle, in their professional circle and among their friends. They want to stop pretending they are someone else in social settings and be their true selves in private. They want to know they are not condemned to loneliness.
I didn’t plan on writing this billet this weekend, but I just finished reading Swimming in the Dark. The Gay Pride in Paris has been postponed yesterday due to the intense heatwave we have in France at the moment, consider this billet as a remote contribution to their cause. Shame has to switch sides.
For further reading about these books :
- Here’s Lisa’s excellent review of Swimming in the Dark
- Tony read Love in the Big City and reviewed it here.
Other books on the same theme, here on the blog:
- Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956) set in Paris in the 1950s
- Lie With Me by Philippe Besson (2018) set in France in the 1980s
La Bonne Mère by Mathilda Di Matteo – Paris, Marseille and class-passing
La Bonne Mère by Mathilda Di Matteo (2025) Not available in English.
La bonne mère is Mathilda Di Matteo’s début novel. Set between Marseille and Paris, the title of the book is a double entendre: la Bonne Mère is the nickname that people from Marseille have given to their city’s iconic basilica, Notre Dame de la Garde, and it also means the good mother.
Clara is in her early twenties, she lives in Paris and is a student at Science Po, the French Ivy League university for political science. Clara grew up in a blue-collar family in Marseille. Her mother Véronique is a cagole, a word from Marseille to describe someone loud and flashy. The dictionary says “a tart”.
Clara is torn between two worlds, the one she comes from and the one she aspires to fit in. Her two worlds collide when she takes her boyfriend Raphaël home. She’s deeply in love with him, he comes from an aristocratic family, the kind of Parisian circles that live among themselves, with customs of their own. (cf Laure Murat’s book.)
He’s tall and lean, the exact opposite of Joseph, Clara’s father and Véronique’s husband. Véronique calls him the baby giraffe and can’t fathom what her daughter sees in him.
The novel is a two voices narration, alternating between Clara’s and Véronique’s point of view. Clara left Marseille when she was eighteen and struggles to live her present without denying her past. She was already odd in her family, too bookish for her family who had trouble understanding her hobbies and preferences. She loves her mother but doesn’t enjoy her company. And Véronique feels judged by a daughter who moved to more intellectual circles, for lack of a better word.
Véronique doesn’t know and can’t imagine how many social codes and clues Clara was missing when she met her fellow students at Sciences Po, how much energy she had to put to catch on. And she still feels out-of-sorts each time Raphaël takes her to new experiences – a weekend in Britanny turns into a fitting challenge. But Raphaël’s love is a sort of validation for her, he proves that she fits in.
The story starts with the complicated relationship between Clara and Véronique because they have nothing in common and Raphaël is the personification of the gap between the old Clara and the new Clara. Véronique and Clara don’t get along but when things get tough, they have each other’s back. For example, Véronique hates Paris but will drive all night to get there if she knows Clara needs her.
Véronique might sound obnoxious but she’s one of these women who are loud, warm, and get things done, even if it’s tough like taking care of her ageing mother-in-law when her own daughters don’t show up for the hard stuff. She may be loud and flashy, but she truly cares about the people around her.
She doesn’t shy away from problems and tackles them head on. I could see why she gets on Clara’s nerves but also that she had her heart in the right place. Véronique is real, what you see is what you get and that’s the exact opposite of Raphaël, who was brought up in a world of appearances. Clara needs to learn how to navigate into Raphaël’s world when she was brought up in a world where things are in the open. Well, almost.
La bonne mère starts as a classic tale of a transclass – Clara follows the same path as Annie Ernaux. However, just when Raphaël’s social class seems to be superior to Clara’s, Mathilda Di Matteo turns the tables on the reader and takes the story to another direction, leveling the playing field, answering the underlying question: Is Véronique a good mother? And putting fathers on the grill as well.
In the background of La Bonne Mère is the opposition between Paris and Marseille, between the capital and the regions. It’s very French I suppose, with two cities very different from one another.
I read La bonne mère just after reading L’autre moitié du monde by Laurine Roux and the difference between the two was striking. While Roux’s book was well-written and well-executed, Di Matteo has a voice. Her characters sound real, I could easily imagine Véronique, Clara, Joseph, the father and husband in the middle of them. I could picture Véronique’s clothes, her laugh, her attitudes and see Clara’s as well.
I stayed up one night to finish this book, it struck a cord in me, I guess. Hopefully, someone will translate it into English.
La bonne mère is published by the independant publisher L’Iconoclaste. It was our Book Club choice for May and it was an excellent one.
Third Crime is the Charm #21 – classic crime and Greece
- These Names Make Clues by E.C.R. Lorac (1937) – Not available in French
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (1926) French title: Le meurtre de Roger Ackroyd.
- Offshore by Petros Markaris (2016) Not available in English. French title: Offshore. Translated by Michel Volkovitch.
Here we are for the 21st episode of my Third Crime is the Charm series. I’m still catching up billets about books I read in previous months which means none of these books belong to my 20 Books of Summer challenge.
I bought These Names Makes Clues by E.C.R. Lorac when I visited the British Library. It’s one of their British Library Crime Classics.
We’re in London in a mansion in Marylebone. Graham Coombe owns a crime fiction publishing house. He organizes a treasure hunt party at his house. He invites ten guests who are named after writers. Chief Inspector McDonald is among the guests as Izaak Walton.
And then Samuel Pepys dies in the telephone room. Follows a classic whodunnit with the mischievous addition of characters disguised as Jane Austen, Laurence Sterne or Fanny Burney. It’s entertaining, not the best-in-class in its genre and oh-so-British.
I had a lot of fun with all the French words peppered in the text, like pied-à-terre or contretemps. The funniest French saying I stumbled upon was “Chacun à son métier et les vaches seront bien gardées” which means literally “To each their job and the cows will be well kept”. It’s so out-of-place in a British mansion that it made me chuckle.
Then, on a whim, I decided to reread The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie and in the original this time.
We’re in a small English village, King’s Abbot and Dr Sheppard is our narrator. Poirot is in retirement and is now Dr Sheppard’s neighbour. He’s rather bored and trying his hand at gardening and proves that having a lot of grey cells does not transfer into having a green thumb. He also misses Hastings who now lives in Argentina and hopes to find a new Hastings in Dr Sheppard.
When Roger Ackroyd is murdered, Poirot is asked to investigate the case. As his reputation precedes him, the local police is rather eager to take him on their team or is it the other way around?
You know Agatha Christie’s books, no need to get further in the plot. I didn’t remember the story at all but this time I guessed who the murderer was.
Like with the E.C.R. Lorac before I had a lot of fun with the all the French I hear in Poirot’s English. Like here: « Mademoiselle Caroline, believe me, I do everything possible to render you service. » with this render service as the literal translation of rendre service. I loved the I comprehend (Je comprends) instead of I understand.
Once, Dr Sheppard sets him right:
“I thank you, no,” said Poirot, rising. “All my excuses for having deranged you.”
“Not at all, not at all.”
“The word derange,” I remarked, when we were outside again, “is applicable to mental disorder only.”
“Ah!” cried Poirot. “Never will my English be quite perfect. A curious language. I should then have said disarranged, n’est-ce pas?”
“Disturbed is the word you had in mind.”
“I thank you, my friend. The word exact, you are zealous for it.”
It really made me laugh and I’ll read other Poirot mysteries just for the fun of Poirot’s English. Now I’m a bit self-conscious: I hope I don’t write as Poirot speaks! 😊
Our next stop is a lot less playful. I read Offshore by Petros Markaris, the tenth volume of the Kostas Haritos series.
We’re in Athens in 2015 and the country is recovering from the severe economic crisis of 2008. Money and investors are back in Greece, people are starting to breathe a little bit and make plans for the future.
Then Costas Lalopulos is murdered. He’s the head of a tourist office service. Haritos is on the case with his usual team. Something is going on and Haritos suspects corruption and drug trafficking. Then the case solves itself when culprits are handed to the police on a platter.
Haritos is suspicious about these sudden confessions but can’t do anything against it, especially since the new chief of police is knee-deep in political matters and is happy to wrap up the case.
Besides the murders (because they will be others in the same fashion), Markaris questions the sudden turn for the best of the Greek economy. Why is the country suddenly so attractive to investors? Where does the money invested in the country come from?
His vision –documented or not, I don’t know— is that international criminal organizations saw in Greece a weak country in the EU and targeted it to settle some of their operations there. In other words, all the money flooding in is dirty money.
Offshore is an interesting book but not a great book. It’s not available in English, in case you’re wondering. I still enjoy reading the Haritos series because there’s always a focus on a political issue in Greece and because Haritos’s family is so warm and funny. Markaris makes me travel and discover Athens with his characters and I love armchair traveling with books.
Next billet will also be a catch up before I finally start writing about 20 Books of Summer reads!
The Nix by Nathan Hill – ghosts from the past and state of the nation
The Nix by Nathan Hill. (2016). French title: Les fantômes du vieux pays. Translated by Mathilde Bach.
“What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.”
I tend to shy away from big books, which means I wasn’t thrilled when my Kube subscription brought me The Nix by Nathan Hill. Holy hell, 720 pages in small print. Good call from the Kube libraire though, as it was surprisingly easy to read. Now it’s hard to sum up.
We’re in 2011. Samuel Andresen-Anderson is in his early thirties, he’s a literature teacher in a small university in Illinois. He’s single, likes his job but doesn’t love it, escapes from his life to play World of Elfscape, an online video game. He’s a bit adrift. He has published one novel and is late delivering his second book to his publisher. He hasn’t seen his mother Faye since 1988 when she left him in the care of his father and disappeared from their lives.
Now she has thrown gravels at the face of a potential candidate to the presidential election. She has been arrested and painted as a dangerous activist with a seedy. She might spend years in prison. Her lawyer reaches out to Samuel to help him save her from prison. He needs to reconcile the mother he knew (married to her high school sweetheart) with this supposed activist.
Meanwhile, Samuel is having trouble with a student who doesn’t want to study, plagiarized her essay, got caught and doesn’t want to acknowledge she cheated. She is ready to ruin his reputation to save her grades. His publisher threatens to ask for the payback of his book advance if he doesn’t send him a draft of the novel immediately, unless he replaces the unwritten novel by a book about Faye.
Samuel is in a bind. He’s threatened financially, in his job and he has unsolved abandonment issues since he doesn’t know why Faye left. He folds and agrees to write this book about a mother he hasn’t seen in years. He embarks on a journey to reconnect to his mother and understand who she is, what she did and why.
Hill’s novel goes back and forth between Samuel’s and Faye’s POVs. We start in 2011, then go back to 1988 and 1968. These were the turning point years.
- 2011: Faye reappears in Samuel’s life and his professional life is at risk.
- 1988: Samuel is friends with Bishop and Bettany Fall. They are twins who go to the same school as him and live in the same neighborhood. Bishop becomes his best friend and Samuel falls in love with Bettany. This is the summer where Bishop and Bettany move away and Faye disappears.
- 1968: Faye leaves her small town in Iowa to go and study in Chicago. Life-changing events happen there.
Nathan Hill draws two wounded characters both hurt by their parents. Faye’s father emigrated from Norway and told his daughter about “the nix”, a ghost that settles in houses. He always longed for his old country and was never truly happy in Iowa. He transferred his angst to his daughter.
Faye is haunted by her past, conflicted between what she wanted to be and what she had to settle for. She transferred her angst to Samuel.
The book includes this thread about family traumas and how they travel from one generation to the other. Samuel is on a healing journey, he needs this investigation about his mother to understand his past and move on and really live his life.
Besides the family story, Nathan Hill pictures the American society from 1968 to 2011. There’s a long part about the demonstrations in Chicago in 1968. He reflects on how the media influenced what the country thought about these demonstrations, he shows how activists were manipulated and he reveals the hypocrisy of the system.
It is the same with Samuel and the issue with his student. She spreads lies, she utilizes the system to her own benefit and has absolutely no conscience. She’s a criminal in her ways but so are the administration of the university who fail to fight for a member of their faculty. This part reminded me of The Stain by Philip Roth.
All along the pages, Nathan Hill points out the absurdity, the greed and the total lack of principles that govern the American society. (and other ones too, but this is a book about America) He puts the stress on endless consumerism, politics as a show and violence. He published his book in 2016, which means it was written in 2014 at the latest. He had not seen the worst, i.e. what happened when the Agent Orange became PODUS.
His analysis is never in plain sight but seeps through passing comments, futile discussions or plain statements. Like here:
“Steak and chicken have too much baggage these days. Was it free-range? Antibiotic-free? Cruelty-free? Organic? Kosher? Did the farmer wear silken gloves to caress it to sleep every night while singing gentle lullabies? You can’t order a fucking hamburger anymore without embracing some kind of political platform.”
I can relate to that since someone once explained to me that I should only eat eggs if I was sure that the hen was happy to give them to me.
Nathan Hill stresses upon three years: 1968, 1988 and 2011.
In 1968, the students rebel against the Vietnam war, the hippies want another kind of society and the Civil Rights movement had won major battles but took a blow after Martin Luther King was murdered. Conservative people play on people’s fears to maintain the status quo. Be afraid of Communists, of hippies, of blacks who want to become citizen. Anything to win their support in the urns. Television is powerful but as volatile as dynamite.
1988 is important to Samuel and his family but it’s also the beginning of Reagan’s second term. In these years, the USA gave themselves away to unbridled capitalism and turned their back to the welfare state born after WWII.
2011 is the year of Occupy Wall Street, an attempt at opposing to wild capitalism. Social networks are invading our lives and video games become addictive. Hill depicts a character who is addicted to World of Elfsape and the description is absolutely terrifying – and probably accurate.
As you can see, this is an ambitious book and it’s difficult to write about it. Hill managed to merge Samuel and Faye’s story into a state of the nation book. And this state-of-the-nation book is easy to read, dark and funny, appalling and full of grace sometimes. It shows the workings of the USA, whether we like it or not. And Samuel is on his own small boat, trying to navigate in the middle of all this. He’s like us and I liked him a lot.
Verdict: Worth reading. Don’t worry about the 720 pages in small print. If you’ve read it, I’ll be happy to discuss it with you.
Book Around the Corner 