Maitresse

Charlotte Mandell reads from Zone

(I am two weeks behind on this one, but had to feature this here, as Charlotte is a friend and someone whose work I admire very much.)

Charlotte Mandell was recently awarded an NEA Translation Fellowship for her work translating Mathias Enard's award-winning 2008 novel Zone from French to English. The novel has the neat trick of being composed of one long sentence stretched over 517 pages, but this doesn't only function as a gimmick, or as some wacky constraint: it actually serves the narrative, cradled as it is during one long train ride from Milan to Rome, deviating down rail lines not taken or taken long ago, reliving and imagining getting off at other places.

But there is more here than one man's ride on an Italian train; Zone contains multitudes. I read much of it this summer, although I still haven't finished, but from what Charlotte reads in this video, she's captured exactly that feeling of a civilization trundling down a railway track at night, en route to the inevitable.

Via Open Letter.

undergrad, redux

When I was an undergrad I remember having difficulty scheduling time to shower, much less to do all of the reading and writing for all of my classes.  Then things calmed down and I forgot what that was like. Then when I started graduate school I remembered again. Then grad school calmed down and I forgot again.

And now, because I took on extra teaching hours for a few weeks, I am teaching so many hours a week that I barely have time to prepare my lessons, much less eat/sleep/shower. I am not kidding. It's a good thing my man is all the way in Hong Kong! Like a PC perilously close to crashing, I am running in safety mode.  Last week I taught the Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and the Odyssey-- none of which I had read in their entirety, much less taught, until very recently. This week it's been the Odyssey, the Canterbury Tales, and a lecture, with slides, on Greek Art.  When a student complained the other day about the amount of reading they have to balance with going on trips to the ballet and Burgundy, you can imagine how wryly I smiled.  I never imaged, when I was in college, that my professors were as overloaded as I was.

Next week it's the Ramayana and Shakespeare's Sonnets.  And then, finally, finally, my teaching schedule will revert to usual, I can go back to eating (cooking even!), sleeping (more than 6 hours a night!) and showering (might even wash my hair!).  And next year, if I teach this class again, the prep will already be done, and I'll breeze through on my notes from this year. But next year is so far away...

unfinished

Since I've been back in Paris I've all of a sudden become a shockingly lazy reader. I've spent more time planning my lessons and watching "Big Love" than doing anything else.  So Wolf Hall sits, halfway finished, next to my bed, joined by Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind (which I'm reading for a Thursday evening Barnard Alumnae book group), David Foenkinos's La Délicatesse, and Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole.

The only book I did manage to finish was Beigbeder's Un roman français, and the only reason I blew through that is because it was mediocre enough that it didn't take much concentration. I didn't hate it, but I didn't feel like it was worth the time it took to read it.  Here's a summary: Beigbeder gets caught sniffing cocaine with a friend outside some nightclub from off the roof of a car.  They are too messed up to notice they're getting high right in front of a police car.  They're arrested and hauled into jail.  Being in jail is a terrible experience, Beigbeder finds, and, much like that other writer-guy dipping a madeleine into some tea, or whatever, Beigbeder finds the fact of imprisonment summons up his entire childhood. Being locked up--oh so paradoxically!--gives him access to all these memories he thought were locked away inside himself.

Although it has real moments of tenderness (when he thinks about his daughter, or his relationship with his brother, verging into full-blown, large-scale sentimentality, weeping about his mother while sitting in prison, his tears dripping into his beard), the rest of the guy's strut and performance seriously undercuts any lasting affect the book might have had. He tells us over and over that he's such a loser-- but it just feels like part of the act. We never for a moment believe that Beigbeder really believes he's a loser.

Occasionally funny, but often not, the novel's worst offense is its complete unwillingness to trust the reader.  Beigbeder can't just tell a joke without immediately telling you why it's funny; he can't build on a theme without pointing it out to you-- how do you like my theme?-- which is just insulting. Even the dimmest Beigbeder fan is capable of noticing different passages and ideas seem to circulate around the idea of imprisonment.

Other ideas that he tries to bring in-- such as his childhood summers spent in the southwest, or his family history-- don't really work. As he said the other night at Literary Death Match, lamenting the fact that the only thing that interests people in his book is the coke-sniffing scene: "No one seems to care about my great-grandfather." Maybe it's because Beigbeder doesn't seem to care that much about his grandfather. The man is there, one suspects, just as an opportunity to share details about his aristocratic lineage. The grandfather in question died on the field of battle in the First World War, "like a Japanese kamikaze or a Palestinian terrorist, this father of four children sacrificed himself knowing full well what he was about. This descendant of Crusaders [oh yes, apparently he is descended from Crusaders] was condemned to imitate Jesus Christ: to give his life for others. I am descended from a valiant knight who was crucified on the barbed wire of Champagne." With all due respect to the soldiers of World War I and their families: Oh, lord. Eye-roll.

What does work nicely are the descriptions of the various houses and apartments in which he grew up; Beigbeder evokes quite nicely the different spaces, how it felt to be in them, and how they determined who he would become. (There are some scenes with his father and his friends that could have been taken from the adult Beigbeder's life-- we certainly understand why he became such a fétard.) But Beigbeder doesn't seem interested in asking hard questions of himself, and hard questions are the only ones that really matter in a memoir. Otherwise it's just a show, just a shallow depiction of what it's like to be Beigbeder, without yanking the reader into that hulking physique. 

More on Foenkinos, Toltz, et al, when I finally finish reading them.

For more on Beigbeder at Literary Death Match, see here.

Scenes from a Paris night, in the key of A

Badaude has outdone herself.  Here, she has immortalized the Five Dials launch party in one of her trademark sketches-- shunning all vowels except the letter A.  Why do such a thing? Because the reading included a brilliant almost-Oulipian poem by the not-Oulipian Joe Dunthorne, in which he used only the vowel I. On which, more later. For now, enjoy the drawing, and check out Badaude's account of the evening.

Can you spot me and Coquette? And Badaude? (hint: she's wearing Isabel Marant) And Sylvia and George Whitman?

In Paris this week

Well, I'm back from Hong Kong, and back to being a literary girl about town. (Which is kind of a contradiction in terms. I don't actually get around that much because mostly I am in my apartment, reading.)  This is a busy week! Let me tell you about it.

Last night I headed up to Belleville with Elisabeth for the semi-monthly Spoken Word poetry happening.  It was only my second time going, but I really like the atmosphere there-- part Beat, part bobo, with a dash of dada.  The series' host and founder, David Barnes, rules the stage in a top hat and, lately, arm cast.  The game goes like this: you read for 5 minutes.  Or you sing. Or you chant. But you only have 5 minutes, and the most dynamic your performance, the better. (It's an open mike format, and unfortunately, you do get a few mumblers and lacklusters mixed in with your dynamos.)

For writers who are also performers,  it's really a great forum. For those of us less dramatically-inclined*, there's beer on hand and the prospect of seeing some really special performances.

(*In fact I am super dramatically-inclined, just not when I'm myself. Give me a role in a play, however, and I'll tear up the scenery.)

*

So that was last night.  Now, tomorrow night is going to be really something: Opium Magazine are bringing their Literary Death Match to Paris! The always effervescent Todd Zuniga will be MCing--in French-- with the magazine's European editor, Kevin Dolgin.  Again, there's a game, and here's how it goes: four writers read their best stuff.  Three judges assess their performances on the basis of literary merit, originality, and panache. Hilarity ensues, or so I'm told.

Jean Hannah Edelstein summarized the buzz when LDM came to London:

The Literary Death Match is the brainchild of Todd Zuniga, the affable editor of Opium, an American literary magazine now (despite the bad odds of print) going strong in its eighth year. (Full disclosure: Zuniga is a friend of a close friend, although this week was the first time I met him.) Launched in New York, but now a key event on the cultural calendar in several American cities (last night was the European debut), the Death Match runs in three rounds, like a sort of manic, jolly, literary talent competition mixed with a bit of a game of chance.

The writers on trial tomorrow night are Frédéric Beigbeder (sigh), Philippe Jaenada, Max Monnehay, and Mohamed Razane.  The judges are David Foenkinos (whose latest novel, La Délicatesse, is the only author of la rentrée to see his book nominated for four different awards, including the Goncourt and the Femina), Yorgos Archimandritis, and a person called Bo.

Trust me, if you are any kind of literary-type person and you live in Paris and you like to think of yourself as savvy and with-it, you will not want to miss this event.

When: Wednesday, September 23; Doors at 7:00, show at 8:00 p.m. (sharp) 
Where: Le Reservoir: 16, rue de la Forge Royale, Paris 11.  Remember that you can have dinner at Le Reservoir.  For reservations call 0143563960
Cost: €10

*

Then on Friday night, issue #8 of the London-based online literary magazine Five Dials is having a launch party at Shakespeare and Company. What's so special about issue #8? Why, it's an issue dedicated solely to Paris! And in it you will find the work of an illustrious group of writers on the City of Light: Ali Smith, Albert Camus, Susan Sontag, Badaude, and Lauren Elkin.

Yes, you read that right! I have a piece on the bookselling scene in Paris, and I will be sure to link to it when it goes live. But that will not happen until 11 pm Paris time on Friday evening! So come on down to Shakespeare and Co and be there when the editors, Craig Taylor and Simon Prosser, hit send.  There'll also be readings from Steve Toltz and Joe Dunthorne. I guess they're in it too, or something. 

Friday September 25th, 7 pm

Shakespeare and Company

38 rue de la Bûcherie, 75005

On Cromwell

ARGH. Is it Snow Leopard's fault that all my applications are freezing today? I don't know. But I just wrote a whole post about historical fiction and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and-- you guessed it-- Safari decided to freeze and I lost the damn thing. Typepad is supposed to autosave drafts.  HA. That's a good one.

Anyway.  Here's what I said, in a nutshell: I like historical fiction.  Went through a phase in my teen years where I was obsessed with pre-modern English history, mostly thanks to Sharon Kay Penman.  This caused me to mostly hate the Tudors.  Now, however, I like to watch "The Tudors," so I guess I'm over it.  I'm psyched that Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is on the Booker list because it means I get to read historical fiction and feel like it's not just a guilty pleasure.  So far, 50 pages in, it's really good, except I keep picturing James Frain as Thomas Cromwell.  

I would say it might be interesting for Frain to read Mantel's book before filming next season, but if you watched last season's finale, well, you know how that turned out.  

I do wonder if Mantel watched "The Tudors" while she was writing this, and to what extent Frain could have influenced her image of Cromwell...

Here's how Mantel sees him:

Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old.  He is a man of strong build, not tall.  Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement.  His hair is dark, heavy and waving, and his small eyes, which are of very strong sight, light up in conversation: so the Spanish ambassador will tell us, quite soon.  It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt--ready with a text if abbots flounder.  His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard.  He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.  He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again.  He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed.  He makes money and he spends it.  He will take a bet on anything. (p. 31)

In case you too would like to learn how to train a falcon, here are some instructions.  

playing at trains

Emily Gould posted a video with the view from the subway train as it goes over the Manhattan Bridge and it made me all nostalgic for New York:

Almost every day I get to look out the window at the water and the sky and the advancing skyline from the window of the Q or B train as it crosses the Manhattan bridge.  I have heard more than one person say that “The moment I stop noticing this view is the moment I know I should just leave New York,” and when they’ve said this I have fervently nodded my agreement.  But of course I don’t always look up and have a magical transformative moment or even a tranquil reflective moment every day.*

So I thought I'd reply in kind. This is the view from the 6 train as it crosses the Seine from Passy to Bir Hakeim, which I used to take when I taught at Nanterre, and which I will take now that I'm teaching at NYU. (Except I go in the other direction, Left Bank to Right.)

 

(I love the dour-looking woman sitting in the strapontin who's like "mais qu'est-ce que vous foutez avec ce caméra, putain")

*Emily doesn't mention what used to anchor the city at its base, that is now missing from that video, but she posted on September 10th, so I think the connection is clear, if unconscious.

hong kong you're nice but paris je t'aime

Toy Soldiers from Alta Media Productions on Vimeo.

I'm going home in less than a week and I can't wait.

Jean Rhys: Life and Work

Anytime Jean Rhys is mentioned outside of the academy (and very often inside the academy), it's to discuss on the autobiographical aspects of her life, and very often to substitute the fictional events of her novel for those of her life. Often these discussions are engrossing and revelatory-- witness the recent exchange between Maud Newton and Alexander Chee over at Granta, who discuss Rhys's affair with Ford Madox Ford, the "affair that spawned four competing narratives."  But just as often they are infantile, narcissistic, and sleazy (But I'm not naming names here. Ahem, David Plante.).  

Of course a writer's life is worth wondering about, but I wish there were more discussion of her work. Or at least of the problematic relationship of her life to her work.  This is what I've tried to address in my own recently-published essay on Rhys, which begins as a review of the lame new biography (sorry, "portrait") of Rhys, The Blue Hour, and works outward to consider the particular challenges Rhys presents to biography, and the usefulness (or not) or trying to pin down what, in her work, really happened, and what was invented. 

From my review:

As Pizzichini points out in her Afterword, she wanted to go in a different direction from Angier, who, she says, “leaves no stone unturned”; she elected to “present the facts in such a way that the reader is left with an impression of what it was like to have lived such a life.” Pizzichini improvises, conjectures, assumes, and imagines herself into Rhys’s shoes. The “facts” are culled largely from Angier’s volume (as far as I can tell she did not consult the Rhys archives in Tulsa where Angier herself got more of her primary source material); a good deal is cobbled together from Rhys’s own work, resulting in a narrative that reads like a mash-up of everything Rhys ever published. Were I to cut up my copies of Angier’s biography, the Collected Novels and the Collected Stories and paste them back together, the result would not be so far off from what Norton has just brought out.

When she isn’t rewriting as biography what Rhys already wrote as fiction, Pizzichini is engaged in an ongoing pastiche of Rhys’s own inimitable style. “It was winter 1925 and Jean was back in a Paris as cold and grey as London after love has left you.” It sounds like Rhys, but—is it Rhys? The clue that it is not—or at least, if it is, it has been lifted out of context—is that moaning kind of wistfulness in the rhythm and the alliteration. Rhys herself would never have let such a sentence stand. It may have her trademark simplicity and sinew, but it is also utterly sentimental, something Rhys never was. Anytime she felt herself verging towards sentiment—which is really just a plea for pity, or an expression of self-pity—she would stop herself, go off in a different direction, or self-criticize. Pizzichini aims to channel Rhys’s blues, but what lets Rhys get away with it is her fight—her spunk, her refusal to take herself seriously. Pizzichini herself says she took a “more poetic approach” to writing this biography, but there is neither poetry nor biography here, only a weepiness and self-indulgence for which Rhys is utterly blameless, and ought not to have attributed to her.

This essay is about the meanest thing I've ever published, and I want to stipulate that I do commend Pizzichini for her interest in Rhys and her effort to promote her work. But it just doesn't fly with me as a serious contribution to the body of work on Rhys, I'm afraid. "We live indeed in a Golden Age of female literary biography," Terry Castle wrote in 2000, reviewing Judith Thurman's biography of Colette. "Thurman’s life can easily slide in alongside Hermione Lee’s recent biography of Virginia Woolf as a somewhat unlooked-for end-of-century masterwork, being vital, absorbing, delectably written and psychologically astute beyond anything anyone had any right to expect, especially given the mass of books (many excellent) already devoted to her subject’s life and career." I dearly hope this golden age is not at an end-- but the fact that Norton would publish this very poor biography of Rhys certainly seems to signal its apocalypse.

what I read on my summer vacation

I forgot to mention, I told Critical Mass about what I'm reading this summer in Hong Kong and Thailand...

Nocturnes

I read Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes while I was on vacation last week, and cannot say enough good things about it. Stories about music and nightfall, is the subtitle; it's a sequence of five stories, thematically related not only through music and nightfall as we literally understand them, but through the music and nightfall of romantic love and partnership. 

Lydia Kiesling says it best, I think, over at The Millions:

Ishiguro manages to suggest a lot, while saying not a lot.  It is brief and lovely and achy, like smelling a long-forgotten smell, or hearing a snatch of song you recognize (to borrow one of its themes). (...) Like telling someone else your dream, describing the stories in any detail would be sort of incoherent, and boring.  And I think, had I not been in my reading rut, that I might have felt bereft at the end of the book.  It is short, and while I sometimes confuse length with quality, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that it’s a touch spare.  But, given the listless summer I’ve had,Nocturnes was the perfect thing, a real rut-breaker.  Acting upon me like an exquisite and prudently-sized hors d’oeuvre, it left me, finally, ravenous for reading and anxious to see what else is possible.

My review of Kate Cambor's Gilded Youth: Three Lives in Paris's Belle Epoque (FSG, Sept) has just run at Bookforum.  An excerpt:

In 1913, the French writer Charles Péguy observed that “the world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has changed in the last thirty years.” Kate Cambor’s new study, Gilded Youth, tracks the changes of that era through the figures of Léon Daudet, son of the beloved French writer Alphonse; Jean-Baptiste Charcot, son of the groundbreaking neurologist Jean-Martin; and Jeanne Hugo, granddaughter of Victor. These childhood friends, all born in the late 1860s, were caught between two epochs, between the “pessimism and pensiveness” of the nineteenth century and the “energy and activity” of the twentieth. Sigmund Freud, Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, and Gustave Flaubert were frequent visitors to their family homes; once the trio came of age, they gained renown in the press—Daudet for his politics, Charcot for his explorations, and Hugo for her social life. All three figures, Cambor argues, battled “with private demons and public expectations to be both worthy of and free from their gilded legacies.”

Read more here.

In the quartier Grenelle

On Words Without Borders: Sigfried Kracauer gets to know the 15e. 

It’s been almost three years since I ended up on that street in the Grenelle quarter. Chance led me there—or rather, not so much chance as intoxication. The intoxication of the streets that always seizes me in Paris. At the time I encountered the street, I was spending four weeks completely alone in Paris and would walk for several hours each day through the quarters. It was an obsession that I couldn’t resist. Its power is best attested by the fact that I felt it to be a betrayal if I once remained in my hotel room during waking hours or sacrificed an evening to the theater. Even the occasional meetings with women seemed to me like a dereliction of duty, a foolish distraction from the streets, which claimed me far more powerfully than did any individual maiden. I enjoyed them blindly and let them consume me, and though I always returned home spent from the excesses, nothing kept me from yielding to my passion the next day. On the contrary: behind the fog spread around me by increasing exhaustion, the streets beckoned me all the more seductively.

Translated by Ross Benjamin.

Photo: Philippe Petit, of a flooded Boulevard de Grenelle, 1910. (More images here.)

sorry so quiet

...we were in Thailand for 10 days, and have now been preoccupied with moving into our new apartment. No internet as of yet so I have to hang out in a nearby cafe to get my fix. Still in Hong Kong for another two weeks but getting revved up for la rentrée...

Celebrating Simenon

Well. I had a whole post on Georges Simenon and Typepad erased it. (Thanks, Typepad. So much for "autosave.") And now I'm out of blogging time for today. So to recap-- if you like Simenon, and you speak French, go to French Culture where they're celebrating Simenon as travel writer this week.  Simenon as travel writer? Yes, dears-- as Pierre Assouline reminds us on his blog, the detective novels of Inspector Maigret only comprise about a third of Simenon's oeuvre. Not that we should think of him as a travel writer-- but his travels were an important aspect of his identity and his work, and certainly inform that part of it for which he is best known.