Clean Slate #3 : Catching up with billets – ups and downs

• Prettier If She Smile More by Toni Jordan (2023) Not available in French.
• The Insolents by Ann Scott (2023) Not available in English. Original French title: Les Insolents.
• The Last Red Tiger by Jérémie Guez (2014) Not available in English. Original French title: Le dernier tigre rouge.
• The Man Who Wanted to Be Simenon by Marianne Jeffmar (2004) French title: L’homme qui voulait être Simenon. Translated from the Swedish by Philippe Bouquet.
• Land Beyond Maps / Attack by Pete Fromm (2024) French title: Sans carte ni boussole / Attaque. Translated by Juliane Nivelt.

It’s time again to clear the To Be Written pile and give you an overview of books I’ve read or abandoned and that I don’t have either the inclination or the time to write a proper billet about. I know it’s not always flattering for the books that find themselves thrown together like this but limited reading and writing time calls for desperate measures.

Let’s start with one I quite enjoyed, Prettier If She Smiled More by the Australian novelist Toni Jordan, a book a lot better than its appalling cover.

Kylie is 43, has a boyfriend Colin, no children, a stable job at a pharmacy and a demanding family. Her life is turned upside down within a week as she finds out that Coin cheats on her, that the pharmacy she dreamt of buying when the owner retired has just been sold to a corporation and that her mother hurt her ankle and needs assistance for everyday life.

As she tries to juggle with all the challenges at the same time, it becomes obvious that something has to give and that she needs change.

I enjoyed reading the tribulations of Kylie with her immature brother, her spoiled mother, her more understanding sister and with her new boss and her religion based on KPIs and feedbacks. It’s definitely a good Beach and Public Transport book, a perfect light read. It’s my fourth Toni Jordan, I got what I hoped to find in her books.

Another book read a while ago, Les Insolents by Ann Scott, a French book despite the author’s English name. It won the Prix Renaudot in 2023 and it just fuels my weariness of literary prizes.

Alex, in her late forties, just out of a relationship with a married woman, decides to move out of her apartment in the Marais in Paris to rent a damp house in Brittany. She leaves behind her life and her two best friends, Margot and Jacques with whom she has a co-dependant relationship.

If I transpose this in the UK, imagine she’s moving from Camden to a remote place in Cornwall. And she doesn’t have a car.

She’s a musician, a famous composer of scores for the film industry, so she can work remotely. She’s clueless about the house, lives like a hermit, goes to the supermarket and walks along the beach. And of course she reflects on her life, her former drug addiction, blah, blah, blah.

The kind of milieu Virginie Despentes writes about but this is without Despentes’s spunk. So I was bored to death, never engaging with Alex and her clique and the whole morosity of the characters who are all victims of some trauma or other.

It’s also true that I have little patience and empathy with Parisians who move out of Paris to the great outdoors in Brittany, Normandy or Provence. It was our Book Club read for March and none of us liked it.

Totally different style, The Last Red Tiger by Jérémie Guez. I didn’t finish it, but that’s on me, not on the author.

The premises were interesting as the main character, Charles Bareuil signed in the Légion étrangère just after WWII and he lost his wife during the war.

He’s sent to Indochina where the war against Ho Chi Minh is intensifying and we know how that went for the French. Unable to accept the independence of this colony, the French government went into a war against a whole population, in a territory that favored the Vietnamese and it ended up in the Dien Bien Phu debacle. Zola would have a field day with the French colonial wars, I’m sure.

The plot thread is a competition, a cat-and-mouse play between Charles Bareuil and Tran Ông Cop, a Vietnamese sniper. It’s nicely done but I gave up when it became more about combats in the jungle than anything else. I couldn’t follow what was happening in those combats and well, it’s just not my cup of tea.

I was most disappointed by The Man Who Wanted to Be Simenon by Marianne Jeffmar. The cover is gorgeous and the blurb says:

“In a back alley in Paris, the police finds a dead body. Bernard Wouters, a well-respected teacher and unpublished writer had spent his life mimicking his idol, Georges Simenon. A journalist decides to investigate this mysterious death. She gets inspiration in Simenon’s work to solve the case”

Sounded intriguing, no? I expected a classic investigation but no. Instead of focusing on Wouters’s story and what led him in this back alley, Jeffmar adds another disturbing story about Wouters’ adolescent daughter, Marie-Jo.

She wrote a book set in Paris among prostitutes. She’s 16 and she’s a instant success à la Françoise Sagan with Bonjour Tristesse. But she’s not happy and it appears that her father was very controlling and I even wonder if he wasn’t incestuous. Basking in her literary success, that’s for sure.

It felt like the author wanted to pack too much into one book and failed to organize everything nicely. Plus it had aspects about prostitution and sex that I wasn’t keen on reading. I’m not a prude but the abuse against a prostitute, the murky relationship between father and daughter felt icky.

Something sounded off in this book. It’s was written in 2004 and I had a hard time understanding when it was set. The Thalys between Brussels and Paris is working but Wouters still pays with French francs, so it’s before the euro. It’s between 1997 and 2001, with early cell phones and still VHS cassettes.

The Paris described in the book sounds more like the Paris of the 1950s than the end of the 20^thcentury. Same with the teenagers’ names. Marie-Jo’s friends are named Laurent, Jean-Paul and Claire, not names of babies born in the 1990s.

The whole thing felt off to me, unless there were clever clues about Simenon all over the book that I totally missed because I’m not a Simenon expert.

Let’s end up with a positive note: two short stories by Pete Fromm, Land Beyond Maps and Attack, one of my Gallmeister goodies.

Fromm is his usual self, picturing turning points in the characters’ lives, a moment that lights the way for them. This moment brings them clarity about who they are, whether they like it or not and where they’re going. We find Fromm’s recurring themes, young love, happy times in the wilderness and fatherhood.

Next billet will probably be about A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane.

Job’s Coffin by Lance Weller – two people thrown into the horrors of slavery and the Civil War. #challengegallmeister

Job’s Coffin by Lance Weller (2021) French title: Le cercueil de Job. Translated by François Happe.

Lance Weller is an American writer born in 1965 in Washington State. He wrote three books of historical fiction, Wilderness (2012), American Marchlands (2017) and Job’s Coffin (2021) Wilderness and Job’s Coffin are set during the Civil War and American Marchlands is set on the Frontier between 1815 and 1846.

Wilderness is available in its original language but American Marchlands and Job’s Coffin are only available in French, translated by François Happe and published by Gallmeister. He’s one of those authors available to the French public and no other and I feel privileged. Lance Weller wrote a note to American readers on his website and you can read it here.

Back to the book.

When the book opens, we’re in 1864, in Tennessee and the Civil War is raging. Bell Hood is a young slave who fled from her plantation and hopes to reach the North, orienting herself with the stars. They’re in the Appalachians and she’s with Dexter, who’s also trying to reach the northern states. They don’t know where they’re going but they know what they’re running from. None of them has plans or a place to reach where people will help them.

Bell focuses on stars, on a constellation of stars that her father called Job’s Coffin. Dexter wants to meet Lincoln, that’s his goal, because one must have a goal.

Then we go back in time in 1862 at the terrible Battle of Shiloh in Hardin County, Tennessee. I didn’t know anything about it but Wikipedia says there were almost 24,000 casualties, 3,500 deaths. Jeremiah Hoke was there, a member of the Confederate Army, dragged in the battle by his friend Charlie King. Hoke was horrified by the battle, by the hatred and the violence he detected in his friends and around him. He was seriously injured and after a farmer took care of him, started a journey of wandering in search of redemption.

Weller describes the devastation of the Civil War. Bell and fellow slaves keep walking to the North but there’s danger everywhere: hunters who search for runaway slaves and two armies walking from one battle field to the other. Hoke doesn’t want to participate to anything related to slavery, like revealing where runaway slaves are or fighting among the ranks of the Confederate army. His actions put him in danger too.

As the novel progresses, we slowly understand what ties exist between Bell and Hoke, how their master’s and father’s actions defined their fates. Bell had to leave Locust Hall, the plantation she was born in and the traumatic experiences she lived through there, that’s all she knows. Hoke also left this plantation, the son of the foreman and witness of the violence against slaves. Both are silent rebels against the system they live in. It’s a tiny rebellion but it’s there.

Bell hopes to start a new life and Hoke hopes for redemption.

Reading about battles of the Civil War reminds me of reading about battles of WWI or the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The incompetence and ego of generals is staggering, leading a whole generation of men to butcher each other. Lives were worth nothing. I don’t know much about the battles of the American Civil War and I don’t care much for military strategy, so I didn’t investigate further the importance of the Battle of Shiloh.

I enjoyed reading about Bell and Hoke and see how individuals fare when war brings chaos into their lives, and as far as Bell is concerned, what slavery entailed. We need not forget that and apprehending the violence of it through the eyes of characters brings facts and numbers more tangible. Literature is a school for empathy and historical fiction is a worthy media to help us picture what happened to people in past centuries.

Weller is also an outdoor man and it’s reflected in his descriptions of the Bell’s and Hoke’s walks, bivouacs at night, life in the wilderness. I’d love to add quotes to this billet but I don’t have any one in English. His writing is fluid, perceptive and the characters ring true. They are nuanced and Bell has an aura, an inner strength that impacts and impressed the people around her. People want to help her and be the best version of themselves.

My friends say I read a lot of books related to the condition of black people in the USA and about racism. It’s true, I guess. It’s a topic I find fascinating and it goes a long way back. Back to White Dog and to some extent, to Proust and his description of the Dreyfus affair.

The issues of racism and slavery puzzle me and horrify me. I’ll never understand how people look at a black person and fail to see a fellow human being beyond the different color of skin. I guess that it’s hard to escape it when you were raised into this belief, something Lehane explores in his last book. I’m also interested in how countries overcome civil and colonial wars trauma, so there will be more about that too.

So yes, there will be more books about that in the future. Meanwhile, I recommend Job’s Coffin, at least to readers who can read in French, the only lucky ones who have access to this book. This was my March read for the Une année avec Gallmeister challenge. The theme for March was Girl Power and I think Bell fits the bill.

All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby – more Deep South noir and a masterpiece.

All The Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby (2023) French title: Le sang des innocents.

Blood and tears. Violence and mayhem. Love and hate. These were the rocks upon which the South was built. They were the foundation upon which Charon County stood.

All The Sinners Bleed is set up in Charon County, in a small town in Virginia, near Chesapeake Bay.

It’s a rural —and fictional—county of 20 000 inhabitants with twenty-one churches. This ratio of church per inhabitant is mind-blowing for a French who usually sees in a town, a Catholic church, a Protestant one and sometimes a mosque.

In this county, two murders were committed in the last fifteen years, and now, they had a shooting at the local high school. Mr Spearman, a well-known, respected and white history teacher was shot by a black student, Latrell McDonald. The deputies who arrived on the scene with Titus shot Latrell as he was going out of the school.

Charon County elected its first black sheriff, Titus Crown. And now, he has to solve the murder of the history teacher and make sure that his deputies shooting the murderer was actual self-defense.

An African American man had been shot by two white deputies. Didn’t matter who was sheriff, there were going to be serious questions asked. Titus knew this, and even though some people wouldn’t believe it, he agreed with them. The history of policing in America, especially south of the Mason-Dixon, made those questions necessary.

Titus struggles to find his place as the sheriff. The whites are weary of him and the king of their community and head of the most important job provider of the area, Scott Cunningham, didn’t support his candidacy. Jamal, the influential reverend of the New Wave church hoped he’d become a support for the black community. But Titus is aware of the position he’s in:

The moment he announced his candidacy he had made a choice to live in a no-man’s-land between people who believed in him, people who hated him because of his skin color, and people who believed he was a traitor to his race.

It’s a tough place to be and he walks on a narrow line. His attitude is clear: play by the book, only by the book and ignore the fact that he knows most of the people in this town since childhood.

A former FBI agent, Titus came back to his hometown to lick some wounds, be close to his ageing father and eventually became the sheriff. He detached himself from this town for years, and he makes a fair assessment of his hometown’s mentality when he gives this example:

A new pharmacist had tried to take over the Sommers building but Billy’s cousins, still stinging from his arrest and subsequent conviction, started a rumor she didn’t really have a degree, and within a month the rumor was an immutable fact, and by the fall the young woman who’d tried to help the good people of Charon with their medicinal needs soon lit out for greener pastures. Titus thought the fact that she’d been a Black woman hadn’t helped to endear her to the white citizens in the county. Normally the Black folks in Charon would have tried to rally around a sister taking on a new venture, but the young lady wasn’t a native of Charon. She was a come-here, and people in Charon were loath to cotton to new faces. In this the citizens, both Black and white, were united.

A small-town vipers’ nest at its finest.

Everyone knows everyone’s business since the beginning of times, people grew up together, families have reputations. And the money comes from two major sources: Cunningham’s factory and drug trafficking. Black and white communities don’t really mix and rampant racism personified by statues of confederate generals is an endemic disease.

And this murder and the subsequent shooting lifts the lid of the pot where the town’s secrets, sins and hatreds are stuffed. Titus knows right away that things will get ugly very quickly.

That was the thing about violence. It didn’t always wait for an invitation. Sometimes it saw a crack in the dam and then it flooded the whole valley.

All the Sinners Bleed is of course the investigation about the murder but it’s a so much more.

It’s the literary MRI of Charon County, a fictional county that looks a lot like Trickum County in The Devil Himself by Peter Farris. It’s the kind of place S.A. Cosby grew up in.

It’s also Titus’s personal journey. He still has open wounds from his mother’s death. He has scars from his career as an FBI agent. He has to reconcile with his family and his hometown. He wants to be a human, not a man defined by the color of his skin.

When they had discussed the possibility of Titus running, he’d gone to great pains to ensure that Jamal realized he was going to be a sheriff who was Black, not the Black community’s sheriff. He’d told Jamal he’d do everything he could to enact real change, but at the end of the day he couldn’t and wouldn’t ignore the law. Unfortunately, he’d failed in his attempt to make him understand that idea.

At the small scale of Charon County and according to the talks between Cosby and Lehane I attended at Quais du Polar, the election of a black sheriff unleashed the same fears and racism that the election of Obama did in the American society.

The unsolved issue of the consequences of the Civil War and slavery, its end and the Jim Crow laws are close to the surface and reappear.

All the Sinners Bleed is a masterpiece of crime fiction: excellent crime plot, state-of-the-nation exploration, and meaningful personal journey for Titus all wrapped in one book.

It questions the idea of identity on the level of a community and on a personal level with Titus’ inner struggles. And it’s summed up in two lines by Titus’ late mother:

You can stand in a pulpit and call yourself a minister. I can roll around in mud and call myself a pig too. Don’t mean you was called to preach, and it don’t mean I was meant to be pork chops,”

Rush for it if you haven’t read it already. I already bought another Cosby, Razorblade Tears.

PS : I should start a challenge: “Pick up trout and fishing references in American books”. They seem to be everywhere, even in the most unexpected pages: Roger’s face was pale as the belly of a trout. 🙂

The Devil Himself by Peter Farris – Deep South noir

The Devil Himself by Peter Farris (2017) French title: Le diable en personne. Translated by Anatole Pons-Reumaux. In my copy of the book, the original title is Ghost in the Field. I don’t know which one is the title the writer chose.

We’re in Trickum County, Georgia. Maya is a prostitute who works for a pimp, Mexico. He’s the head of a vast drug-dealing and prostitution network. He has cops and politicians in his pocket. Maya is young, black and the mayor of the city is infatuated with her. He requires her all the time and he ends up oversharing information in bed.

Problem? Maya has an extraordinary flash memory and she’s a liability for Mexico now. Since he and the mayor are in cahoots and protect each other’s interests, Mexico sends two of his best goons on a mission. Javon and Willie have to kill Maya. But, she resists, escapes and ends of up on Leonard’s property. It’s the kind of property where you see a No trespassing sign and your instinct tells you you’d better comply and stay off these grounds.

Leonard is an old eccentric who lives like a hermit on a property covered with woods and swamps. He fishes, hunts, grows vegetables and only goes to town for absolute necessities. His wife is gone (either she died or she left him) and he lives with a doll he dresses like her and talks to as if she were with him. He looks like a dangerous basket case and the good people of Trickum steer clear of him.

He’s well-known as a former bootlegger, one & who played cat-and-mouse with the police and never got caught. For years. The man is mean, independent, and clever. He welcomes Javon and Willie with a shotgun and leaves them beaten up and dead.

The local sheriff, Jack Chalmer, gets involved. He quickly suspects that something big is happening and that their local detective won’t do anything about it. And indeed, he’s crooked and belongs to the mayor and Mexico.

Leonard takes care of Maya, heals her wounds, feeds her with hearty meals, hides her in his house and basically adopts her as his long-lost granddaughter. He teaches her how to survive in the area and he’s ready to risk his life to protect her.

He is true to himself. He lives with a tragedy in his past, one that concurred to his self-imposed isolation. Maya comes like a breath of fresh air and she needs help.

And she welcomes the rough love because for the first time, someone is fighting in her corner. She’s been on her own for a while, an easy prey to Mexico and his prostitution houses. She’s in danger but she’s free. For the first time too, a man pays her attention and it’s gratuitous, no sexual favors involved. It’s also a novelty.

The Devil Himself is an atmospheric book full of fascinating descriptions of the grounds surrounding Leonard’s property. It’s deep in the woods, and a bit creepy, with swamps, alligators, Spanish moss on trees. The heat is humid and suffocating. It’s on Leonard’s side and it’s a weapon again the people who want to reach Maya and kill her.

No such luck. Leonard is dangerous with firearms, and he’s got a lot of them at his house. He lives according to his own code of conduct, his own set of values. He’s in the wrong, what he does is illegal but the reader understands his motives and his logic anyway. His past is unveiled page after page and he’s a true bastard but I liked him anyway. Perhaps because his helping out Maya without asking anything in return is his way to redemption.

The whole book is like a thriller, even if it’s not tagged as crime fiction. Maya’s life has been hard, she was practically a sex slave in one of Mexico’s brothels. She reclaims herself, enjoys her freedom and grows attached to the place even if she’s more a city girl than a farm one.

Peter Farris writes well, takes us to a small town where criminal organizations are taking over, where opioids are a plague, where politicians are crooked and people too focused on living from pay check to pay check to care about politics.

The Devil Himself is a novel from the Deep South. Readers who enjoy books by Jim Thompson, David Joy or Chris Offutt will love it.

Highly recommended.

Chameleon, Bear, Craws and wilderness – Kurkov, Krivak and McCafferty.

• The Good Angel of Death by Andrey Kurkov (2000) French title: Le caméléon. Translated by Christine Zeytounian-Beloüs.
• The Bear by Andrew Krivak (2020) French title: L’ours. Translated by Héloïse Esquié
• Crazy Mountain Kiss by Keith McCafferty (2015) French title: Le baiser des Crazy Mountains. Translated by Marc Boulet.

I bought The Good Angel of Death by Andrey Kurkov because its French title is Le caméléon and the blurb reminded me of Romain Gary.

When Nikolai moves into his new apartment in Kiev, the previous owners had left behind a bookshelf. He discovers an annotated book by the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko. He investigates until he finds out who left these comments in the book and embarks in an adventure in Kazakhstan, in search of a hidden treasury of great importance for the Ukrainian nation. It’s a bizarre journey where he meets Bedouins, ex-KGB members, members of the SBU (Ukrainian secret services) and is accompanied by a chameleon who represents the good angel of death.

It’s a funny tale of running after the spirit of the Ukrainian nation, a reference to the nationalists of the past and a thought-provoking commentary about who is truly Ukrainian. Are Russian-speaking people who have lived all their life in Kiev real Ukrainian or not? It was written in 2000, showing that things were already brewing at the time.

I didn’t like is as much as Death and the Penguin or The Grey Bees but it’s still a fun way to explore the concepts of nationality and patriotism.

Another style, another animal with The Bear by Andrew Krivak. This one came with my Kube subscription.

A father and his daughter are the only human survivors in their area. They live in the mountains, a place inspired by Mount Monadnock, where the author lives. The father spends his time teaching his daughter how to survive in the wilderness.

We don’t know why or how the human civilization ended or why these two people survived. We follow their journey, we discover their way-of-life and their connection to the nature and the animals arounds them. An indeed, a bear will keep the girl alive during a terrible winter, like a good angel of life.

The descriptions of the New Hampshire wilderness are terrific but I didn’t understand where the author was going with this book. If he wanted to teach me something, I didn’t get the message. If he wanted to write about our civilization collapsing, he didn’t really explore this plot thread. If he wanted to write a beautiful ode to the nature around him, he did it but he didn’t need the end-of-the-world trick to do that.

In other words, it didn’t quite work for me.

Now, let’s stay in the American wilderness with Crazy Mountain Kiss by Keith McCafferty, the fourth volume of his Stranahan and Ettinger crime fiction series.

A girl is found dead in the chimney flue of a cabin in the Crazy Mountains. She was Cinderella Huntington, a teenager who had been missing for five months. A craw was in the chimney and had pecked her eyes.

It brought to memory the counting crows rhyme. (One crow sorrow, two craws mirth, three crows a wedding, four crows a birth. Five crows silver, six crows gold, seven craws a secret never to be told.)

Sheriff Martha Ettinger is in charge of the investigation and advises the victim’s mother to hire Sean Stranahan. He’s a fishing-guide/painter/PI who cooperates with the sheriff and adds to her limited team of deputies. They want to understand what happened to Cinderella.

Why did Cinderella Huntington run away from home? Where was she during these five months? What is the Mile and a Half High Club who meets at this cabin in the Crazy Mountains?

McCafferty has a knack for quirky characters. He takes us to the Bar-4 Ranch where Cinderella was raised, among horses and as a rodeo prodigy. Her mother was also on the rodeo circuit, where she met Cinderella’s stepfather who works as a Western life consultant on TV sets. We also encounter a hermit, a free-spirited librarian, a couple of crazy lesbians and all these characters mesh for the best. The investigation kept me reading, McCafferty’s sense of humor enlightened the macabre discoveries. All this makes for a very entertaining book.

Our next stop at Book Around the Corner will take us to the Deep South with Peter Farris and S.A. Cosby.

Third Crime Is the Charm #8 : Boston, Québec and France

• Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson (2020) French title: Huit crimes parfait. Translated by Christophe Cuq
• The Garden Folly by Johana Gustawsson (2021) Not available in English. Original French title: La Folly.
• Alone in Her Mansion by Cécile Coulon (2021) Not available in English. Original French title: Seule en sa demeure.

Here’s a new episode in my Third Crime is the Charm series, and today’s about three very different crime fiction books that in the end, have something in common. And no, it’s not murder.

The narrator of Eight Perfect Murders is Malcolm Kershaw.

He owns and runs the crime fiction bookstore Old Devils in Boston and used to have a literary blog. Years ago, he wrote a blog post about eight crime fiction books with perfect murder devices, designed in such a way that the actual perpetrator gets off scot-free.

Gwen Mulvey from FBI comes knocking on the Old Devils’s door because she thinks that somebody is killing people according to this list. Malcolm has his own demons to fight and decides to cooperate and do a bit of sleuthing on his side.

I liked Eight Perfect Murders but I thought Swanson tried too hard to tie a perfect knot on a perfectly delivered crime fiction book.

The devices were a bit too obvious to me, doing too many nudge-nudges to the reader. It embraces the codes of the genre: first-person narration, femme fatale and a normal guy taking a wrong turn at some point and engaging on a criminal path.

It’s also a wonderful homage to crime fiction and I did note down the books Swanson refers to. (All Anglo-Saxon but one. The man needs to expand his horizons) It’s still great entertainment.

Since I’m sure you’re dying (haha!) to know the eight-book list, here it is:

Book title in English	Book title in French	Author	Year	Country
The Red House Mystery	Le mystère de la main rouge	A.A. Milne	1922	UK
Before the Fact	Préméditation	Anthony Berkely Cox	1931	UK
The A.B.C Murders	ABC contre Poirot	Agatha Christie	1936	UK
Stranger on a Train	L’Inconnu du Nord-Express	Patricia Highsmith	1950	USA
The Drowner	Le bouillon rédempteur	John D. McDonald	1963	USA
Death Trap	Piège mortel	Ira Levin	1978	USA
The Secret History	Le Maître des illusions	Donna Tartt	1992	USA
Three of a Kind	Assurance sur la mort	James M. Cain	1943	USA

After this one, my next crime fiction book was The Garden Folly by Johana Gustawsson. This one goes back and forth between present day in Lac-Clarence Québec, Paris in 1899 and Lac-Clarence in 1949.

It opens with the murder of Philippe Caron who was stabbed to death by his wife Pauline. They were known figures of the village and devoted to each other. Why would Pauline kill her beloved husband in such a horrific way? Lieutenant Maxine Grant, back from maternity leave and overwhelmed from trying to balance her job and her family life, leads the investigation.

Gustawsson takes us to Paris in 1899 where Lucienne Docquer loses her two daughters in the fire that burnt down their Parisian town house. And they we meet Lina in 1949 who is bullied in school and at the church choir. She’s 13 and struggling with her changing body.

As you may guess, we slowly discover the link between the women of these three different times.

I know from her interviews at Quais du Polar last year that Johana Gustawsson is fascinated by secrets and histories that carry on from one generation to the other and impact people’s lives. She explores that topic here and also the place of women in our world and the weight of biology on their lives, the complex relationship with motherhood.

My Book Club friends loved it more than me, probably because two elements put me off it.

One is the use of supernatural stuff which is always a no-no for me and the other is the style. These French Canadians didn’t speak French from Québec and it bothered me. That’s on me, the others really enjoyed it as it is very suspenseful and the ending keeps the reader on their toes.

Then I received my new book from my Kube subscription, Seule en sa demeure by Cécile Coulon. It means “Alone in her mansion” but the use of the word demeure holds something sinister, as dernière demeure is a metaphor for cemetery and it has an old-fashioned ring that brings back memories of Once Upon a Time stories.

The novel is set in the Jura mountains in France, near the Swiss border in the second half of the 19^th century. Aimée marries Candre, the local lord of the manor. He’s very considerate, very religious but a bit creepy. Too perfect to be true and so different from the masculine standards of the time that I wondered if he was gay. He lost his parents when he was young and was raised by his nanny/servant Henria. She’s very protective of him.

Aimée arrives in this mansion set in the middle of the Forêt d’Or, as forestry is Candre’s family business. She has a hard time adjusting to the place and feels that some secret is lurking in its corners.

Cécile Coulon plays with the codes of fairytales, not the Disney ones with the little birds flying around the princess’s head but the Grimm/grim ones. It’s a very atmospheric novel with a main character who is determined to understand what happened between these walls that feel like a golden prison to her.

Like Gustawsson before, Coulon explores the condition of women and the little choices they have in their lives. Aimée isn’t free. Her life choices lie in “get married” or “get married”.

I enjoyed her style but I guessed where the story was going way too early. That’s the kiss of death for a book that walks the thin line between Lit fiction and crime fiction. That said, I might be too finicky, after all, 100 000 readers loved Seule en sa demeure.

These three books have in common one or several women whose life, death or life sentence were under the control of the men in their lives. They tried to break free, to love differently and paid dearly for it or turned into monsters themselves.

On Identity : Delphine Horvilleur, Romain Gary and Alexandra Lapierre

• There Is No Coincidence by Delphine Horvilleur – 2022 Original French title: Il n’y a pas de Ajar
• Hocus Bogus by Romain Gary (Emile Ajar) – 1976 Original French title: Pseudo.
• Belle Greene by Alexandra Lapierre – 2021. Original French title: Belle Greene

Delphine Horvilleur was born in 1974, she’s a rabbi, a journalist and a writer. She co-leads the Liberal Jewish Movement of France and she’s a public figure known for her humanist and moderate stands. If all religious leaders were like her, the world would be a better and a safer place.

Delphine Horvilleur is also a Romain Gary fan. The title of her essay, Il n’y a pas de Ajar is a play-on-word on Ajar, the penname Gary used when he secretly wrote Gros Câlin in 1974 and the word Hasard, as the pronunciations are close. In French, Il n’y a pas de hasard means There’s no coincidence, and that’s a sentence Momo, the character of Life Before Us could say.

Her essay is also subtitled Monologue contre l’identité. She wants to point out how our current societies tend to pigeonhole people in identity boxes. And you’re only allowed to have one box, French, immigrant, gay, Jewish or whatever the sticker on your forehead.

After a few pages, she refers to Romain Gary:

Her whole essay is a plea against introverted assertions of one’s identity. Trends to stay with likeminded people. Associate with people who share your background. Stay in your identity line and do not cross it. Hell, no, cross the lines if you want to, she says.

Et dans cette tenaille identitaire politico-religieuse, je pense encore et toujours à Romain Gary, et à tout ce que son œuvre a tenté de torpiller, en choisissant constamment de dire qu’il est permis et salutaire de ne pas se laisser définir par son nom ou sa naissance. Permis et salutaire de se glisser dans la peau d’un autre qui n’a rien à voir avec vous. Permis et salutaire de juger un homme pour ce qu’il fait et non pour ce dont il hérite. D’exiger pour l’autre une égalité, non pas parce qu’il est comme nous, mais précisément parce qu’il n’est pas comme nous, et que son étrangeté nous oblige.

And in this politico-religious stranglehold, I always think of Romain Gary and of what his work tried to torpedo. He kept saying that it was allowed and beneficial to refuse to be defined by one’s name or one’s birth. Allowed and beneficiary to slip into someone else’s skin, someone totally different from you. Allowed and beneficiary to judge a human on their actions and not on their background. To demand equality for others, not because we are alike but precisely because they’re different and it’s our duty to acknowledge their strangeness.

If I translated her essay into English, I’d translate the subtitle as Monologue for cultural appropriation, not to steal someone’s identity but to encourage people to cross identity lines.

I finished her thoughtful and vibrant essay and I had to read Pseudo by Romain Gary. He was also a chameleon, reinventing himself all the time, blurring the lines in his biography and playing hide-and-seek with the truth about his origins. He had a vague definition of identity as something fleeting and uprooted. Pseudo is the culmination of this, but first, a bit of context.

After Life Before Us won the Prix Goncourt in 1975, Emile Ajar couldn’t stay out of the limelight. The public wanted to hear and see the author of this book they loved so much. Romain Gary had his cousin Paul Pawlovitch pretend that he was Emile Ajar. Pawlovitch impersonated Emile Ajar in the media. Pseudo is a book Romain Gary wrote under the Ajar and here’s the blurb:

There, Pseudo, a hoax confession and one of the most alarmingly effective mystifications in all literature, was written at high speed. Writing under double cover, Gary simulated schizophrenia and paranoid delusions while pretending to be Paul Pawlovitch confessing to being Émile Ajar—the author of books Gary himself had written.

In Pseudo, brilliantly translated by David Bellos as Hocus Bogus, the struggle to assert and deny authorship is part of a wider protest against suffering and universal hypocrisy. Playing with novelistic categories and authorial voice, this work is a powerful testimony to the power of language—to express, to amuse, to deceive, and ultimately to speak difficult personal truths.

Not an easy book to read for this reader, despite my fondness-bordering-on-obsession for Romain Gary. All the pleasure came from his playful style, his comical and out-of-the-box comments about identity. He always had a way with words, a way to twist sentences, use images and play-on-words and be spot-on. He’s always spot on and the perfect definition of the phrase “many a true word is spoken in jest”.

If there is no coincidence, then some underlying current brought our Book Club to choose Belle Greene by Alexandra Lapierre for our February read.

It’s based on the true story of Belle da Costa Greene (1879-1950), a black woman with a light color of skin who decided to pass for white to have a better life. And indeed, she managed and developed the JP Morgan Library. She loved books and always wanted to be a librarian. She shed away her identity and became someone else, someone she never could have become if she had kept “black” on her identity card.

She crossed the identity line and belongs to this billet. Sadly, the book is not up to Belle Greene and I couldn’t finish it. Thanks Wikipedia, because Belle Greene is a fascinating person and I wanted to know more about her. She truly deserves a book about her life.

Unfortunately, Alexandra Lapierre has a tedious style, rather simple and verbose. There are too many vapid pages about feelings that seemed more like filling pages than truly exploring the dent that Greene’s decision made on her soul. Lapierre was more interested in love stories than in digging into what Greene’s transgression meant for her.

What a way to ruin a perfect opportunity to celebrate a brilliant woman who rebelled against her condition, the world she lived in, lied and made sacrifices to explore her talent.

I’ll leave you with a word by Delphine Horvilleur, something true for all of us book lovers, as it is for her and as it was for Romain Gary and Belle Greene.

Nous sommes toujours les enfants de nos parents, des mondes qu’ils ont construits et des univers détruits qu’ils ont pleurés, des deuils qu’ils ont eu à faire et des espoirs qu’ils ont placés dans les noms qu’ils nous ont donnés. Mais nous sommes aussi, et pour toujours, les enfants des livres que nous avons lus, les fils et les filles de textes qui nous ont construits, de leurs mots et de leurs silences.

We forever are the children of our parents, of the worlds they built and of the worlds they lost and grieved, of the deaths they had to mourn and of the hope they put into the names they gave us. But we also are, forever, the children of the books we read, the sons and daughters of the texts that built us, of their words and silences.

Third crime is the charm #7 : Nice, Tokyo and Los Angeles

• After the Dogs by Michèle Pedinielli (2019) Not available in English French title: Après les chiens
• All She Was Worth by Miyabe Miyuki (1992) French title: Une carte pour l’enfer. Translated by Chiharu Tanaka and Aude Fieschi
• L.A. Noire – Collected Stories (2010) Not available in French.

These three crime fiction books are nothing alike and my favorite one is the Après les chiens by Michèle Pedinielli.

Set in Nice on the French Riviera, where the author lives, Après les chiens is the second volume of the Boccanera series.

We’re in 2017 and Boccanera, a private detective, stumbles upon the body of an Erythrean young man. He was an illegal immigrant who arrived in Nice through the border with Italy in the Nice countryside. It’s in the Alps, near the Vallée de la Roya. So, picture high mountains and dangerous trails. We’re also in 1943 and peasants in the same mountains helped Jews cross the border from France to Italy to save their lives.

Après les chiens is a political crime fiction novel. The Alps near Nice are a hotspot for migrants and there has been conflicts between a part of the local population who rescues them and the police who wants to block them out. Intolerance against migrants is more and more vocal and especially in the South East of France, where Nice is located. Pedinielli’s opinion is clear through Boccanera: there’s a tradition of crossing borders in the area and a tradition of assisting people who are in danger in the mountains.

The plot is secondary to the political message. It could be heavy but it’s not because of all the side characters around Boccanera, Pedinielli’s wonderful descriptions of Nice, a good way of tying together the two threads of her plot, the one in present times and the one in 1943. I just wanted to hop on a train and go visit Nice.

Après les chiens was our Book Club choice for December 2023 and is published by the independant publisher Les Editions de l’Aube. They also publish Stéphane Hessel and Gao Xingjian. I read it a few weeks ago but I’ll mention it for Karen and Lizzy’s Read Indies event anyway.

Totally different atmosphere but similar intention: In 1992 Tokyo, Miyabe also wrote a political novel with his book All She Was Worth.

It’s more oblique than Pedinielli’s intentions but it’s still there. Inspector Honman is on sick leave while his leg recovers after he got shot. A relative comes to him because his fiancée Sekine Shoko has disappeared. Honman quickly discovers that she stole someone’s identity to escape from mafia debt collectors. Miyabe describes the scandal of deregulated access to credit cards and debt overload.

The plot felt a bit sluggish to me but I enjoyed Honman and his family. His wife died a few years ago and he’s a single dad, raising his ten-years old son Satoru. His housekeeper is a man who chose this job while his wife has an office job. I don’t know much about Japanese culture but I imagine it goes against the usual vision of a family and what a man’s job should be.

I read it from the TBR and it’s my contribution to January in Japan, hosted by Meredith.

Our next stop is to L.A. in the 1940s for L.A. Noire – Collected stories edited by Jonathan Santlofer. It’s part of my Tame the TBR project. All the stories are set during the Golden Age era and I noticed that the title is L.A. Noire, with an e at the end of Noir. As a French, I see it as agreeing the adjective noir with the feminine form. It implies that L.A. is a woman.

The eight stories included in this collection are:

• The Girl by Megan Abbott
• See the Woman by Lawrence Block
• Naked Angel by Joe R. Lansdale
• Black Dahlia and White Rose by Joyce Carol Oates
• School for Murder by Francine Prose
• What’s in a Name by Jonathan Santlofer
• Hell of an Affair by Duane Swierczynski
• Postwar Room by Andrew Vachss

I’m not very good at defining literary genres but I thought that Noir implied femmes fatales, gang, hidden criminals and normal Joes who make a bad decision at some point and whose life turns for the worst.

Here we have a lot of naïve and helpless female victims. Young would-be actresses who get drugged, fall into prostitution, and get murdered. Only in Hell of an Affair and Naked Angel do we have actual take-charge women who are more cunning than the men around them. See the Woman was well-drawn too, a twisted story of solving a recurring problem of domestic violence.

Otherwise, I thought that the stories were a little weak. Duane Swierczynski is a hell of a writer, though, if you like pulp and Noir. I’ll point out again his Charlie Hardie series, that was a lot of fun.

So, my recommendation would be to read the Pedinielli for readers who can read in French and go for the Charlie Hardie series for the ones who love pulp entertainment.

PS: I also read In the Name of Truth by Viveca Sten (2015) translated by Marlaine Delargy. (French title: Au nom de la verité.) It’s the eight volume of the Sandhamn Murders series and it’s very good. It felt like Sten was finding a new breath with the series, more thriller than whodunnit. She also shifted her attention to Nora, the female character of the series as she made her change of job and go into a more investigative position. Excellent.

The books in this billet contribute to several blogging events or to my personal reading goals.

Three coming of age novels

• Think of the Stones Under Your Feet by Antoine Wauters. (2018) Original title: Pense aux pierres sous tes pas.
• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. (2018) French title: Là où chantent les écrevisses. Translated by Marc Amfreville.
• The Highest Tide by James Lynch (2005) French title: Les grandes marées. Translated by Jean Esch.

I didn’t purposely read three coming-of-age novels almost in a row but it happened anyway.

The first one is Pense aux pierres sous tes pas by the Belgian writer Antoine Wauters.

As far as I know, it’s not been translated into English and the original is in French. I got this one through my Kube subscription and I still don’t know what to think about it. I have mixed feelings.

Set in an imaginary world, in unknown times but at the tuning point between rural and consumer-based societies. A family of peasants struggles to make ends meet. Their children Leonora and Marcio are twins and are eleven at the beginning of the story. They are incestuous and their parents separate them, sending Leonora at her uncle’s house.

At the same time, we know that the government of this imaginary country is a dictatorship and the people elect someone else who becomes another dictator. Their country changes from a rural country to a shop-and-consume country. At some point, the peasants rebel and start disobeying the government’s orders.

In my opinion, the author tried too hard to write a good book. His style is polished but unnatural and I think he should have picked a side: either write a twisted love story between the twins or write a political novel about the people’s plea. None of the two threads seemed accomplished enough.

Then my Sister-In-Law readalong led me to Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.

We are in the marshes in North Carolina. Kya grows up there in a cabin. She’s ten when her mother leaves the house and never comes back. In the following weeks, her brothers and sisters also leave her behind with their drunkard father. Kya learns to survive on her own, fishing mussels and oysters. She befriends Tate and becomes a specialist of the marshes.

Meanwhile there’s a side plot where the police tries to understand how Chase Andrews, the former hot jock of the town, fell from a tower in the marsh. The chapters alternate between Kya’s life from childhood to 1969 when Chase’s body was found dead.

Honestly? Much ado about nothing. I know it’s a best-seller and lots of readers loved it. My colleague was reading it as the same time as me and has the same opinion. Same for one of our book club members. Unpopular opinion maybe, but I’m not alone in this.

The lovely descriptions of the marsh are the best thing of the book. The story is just flat and unconvincing. It hesitates between crime fiction and police procedural and plain romance. The HEA was too much, really.

Once again, the publisher matters. It was a Pocket book and not a Gallmeister book. My last coming-of-age novel was my Gallmeister of the month for the challenge A Year With Gallmeister. The theme for January was “Why haven’t I read it yet?”

I picked the oldest Gallmeister on the TBR, The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch. I crossed the USA from North Carolina to Olympia, Washington.

Miles O’Malley is thirteen and lives with his parents in a house on the beach of Puget Sound. He loves to explore the tidal flats around the house, fishes for all kinds of sea wonders. He’s precocious, passionate about the ocean and the creatures living there. He sneaks out of the house at night to explore the bay.

One night, he finds a giant squid and becomes a celebrity. His fame grows as he continues discovering sea wonders.

But Miles remains a typical thirteen-years old boy. He’s still tiny for his age and worries a bit about growing up. He’s infatuated with a girl, Angie, his former babysitter. He understands that his parents are on the verge of divorcing and he doesn’t want to leave this house on the beach.

Jim Lynch successfully creates a character who is both quirky and like any other boy of his age. He’s friends with Phelps, his opposite in many ways but this friendship keeps him grounded in preteen preoccupations. Girls, music, trying cigarettes and alcohol.

Miles is at this turning point between childhood and adolescence. He doesn’t want to leave the magic of childhood yet, represented by his small size and his friendship with an elderly neighbor, Florence. She earnt her living with divinations. He likes to hear her talk about it because he still wants to believe in magical things. The atmosphere of magic also comes from all the descriptions of sea life and the mysterious discoveries and events of this summer on the beach.

I bought this novel in a bookstore at the Mont Saint-Michel in France, also a place about tides. I fully understand why a libraire in Mont Saint-Michel would have The Highest Tide on display. It suits the place.

The Highest Tide is a lovely book about entering adolescence and a plea to all of us to open our eyes and really look at the nature around us.

So, the only book of the three I’d recommend is The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch. In my opinion, don’t bother with the Owens. If you’ve read it, let me know what you thought about it in the comments, I’m curious. I’m going to lend the Wauters to a friend and see what she thinks about it because I’d like to discuss it with another reader.

Clean Slate #2 : catching up on books read in 2023.

• Marzhan, Mon amour by Katja Oskamp (2021) French title: Marzahn, mon amour.
• The Sound of Keychains by Philippe Claudel (2002) Original French title: Le Bruit des trousseaux.
• Treatise on Tolerance by Voltaire (1763) Original French title: Traité sur la Tolérance.

I still have four books read in 2023 and without their billet.

So today, I’ll catch up and write about Marzhan, Mon amour by Katja Oskamp, The Sound of Keychains by Philippe Claudel and Treatise on Toleration by Voltaire. I’ve read the Oskamp in the English translation by Jo Heinrich, the others were in French.

The three of them are non-fiction to me, even if Marzhan, mon amour is tagged as literary fiction.

Marzahn, Mon amour is set in a prefab housing estates neighborhood in former East Berlin. The author decided to train as a chiropodist and is hired as such in a salon in Marzahn. She explains her choice:

In early 2015 you took your usual trip to Marzahn for the full works, and you told Tiffy about your novella being turned down, about your daughter going to England for a year and about the cancer therapies prolonging the life of your partner, which had brought you both low. Tiffy did the right thing: she listened, said little, always lent an ear. While she was kneading your back with firm hands, you said, through the hole in the massage table where your face was resting, that something had to change, that you couldn’t bear listening to yourself moaning any longer. You looked through the hole at Tiffy’s feet as she said, ‘Come and be a chiropodist here with me.’ She gave you the name of the school in Charlottenburg. At home, online, you saw the next course was starting in ten days. You talked it over with your partner and you signed up.

Each chapter of the book is about a fun fact of the neighborhood and the portrait of a client. We go from one quirky character to the other, learning about their lives, their habits at the salon, the author’s work with her boss Tiffy and her colleague Flocke. They bring wellbeing to their customers, they are part of the neighborhood and enjoy being there.

It’s hard to shift preconceptions about the prefab housing estates in eastern Berlin. They say Marzahn is a concrete wasteland, but in reality it is exceptionally green. There are wide streets, ample parking spaces, good pavements and dropped kerbs at crossings.

It’s a lovely book, as the author is protective of the people she describes and wants to show the good side of this neighborhood. It doesn’t mean that she looks at everything through rose-colored glasses. Some of her customers are mean or haughty. Some have hard lives. She gives them a voice, a little space in forever. I always enjoy books that give a bit of visibility to the silent masses than make most of the population of this Earth.

For a full review of the book, check out Claire’s here.

The second book I wanted to share with you today is The Sound of Keychains by Philippe Claudel.

It’s a succession of vignettes, of stolen moments and thoughts about his time as a literature teacher in prison in the 1990s.

It lasted more than ten years and I felt like he had to write about the overwhelming emotions that his frequent visits to prison brought. It was hard on him but he never complains as he’s well aware that if it was hard on him, it was harder on the inmates.

He’s very humble about his experience, never plays the hero but tries to make us understand how unsettling spending time in prison was.

Le regard des gens qui apprenaient que j’allais en prison. Surprise, étonnement, compassion. « Vous êtes bien courageux d’aller là-bas ! » Il n’y avait rien à répondre à cela. Le regard me désignait comme quelqu’un d’étrange, et presque, oui, presque, quelqu’un d’étranger. J’étais celui qui chaque semaine allait dans un autre monde. Je pensais alors au regard qui se pose sur celui qui dis « Je sors de prison. » Si moi, déjà, j’étais l’étranger, lui, qui était-il pour eux ?

The pointed look that people gave me when they learnt I went to prison. Surprise, astonishment, empathy. “You’re very brave to go there!” There was no response to that. The look pinned me as someone stranger, almost, yes, almost a stranger. I was the one who went to another world each week. I thought about the look on someone who says “I’m an ex-convict.” If I was a stranger to them, what was he? (my clumsy translation. Claudel’s style isn’t easy to translate.)

He doesn’t pretend to know how it feels to be a prisoner because, as he says, he went home at the end of the day and he never spent a night.

It’s still a very moving account of the atmosphere, the system and the people who are in prison or work there. He doesn’t sugarcoat what he sees but also shares rare moments with inmates and through his words, give them back their humanity that the institution tends to erase.

I think that the prison he mentions is the now-closed maison d’arrêt Charles III in Nancy.

Then, at the end of December, I went back to basics and read Treatise on Tolerance by Voltaire. It was written in 1763, just after Voltaire got involved in the Jean Calas affair.

Jean Calas was wrongly accused of killing his own son, he was condemned and executed. Voltaire got involved to have the sentenced annulled, guessing that Calas was a victim of anti-protestant fanaticism.

Treatise on Tolerance advocates freedom of conscience and is a violent charge against the Catholic church. Chapter after chapter, he demonstrates the intolerance of the Catholic church, that the clergy has a long bloody history. He argues that freedom of conscience was normal in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, that the intolerance didn’t come from the Bible but from its interpretation by the Catholic church, and this, since the early days.

He shows that intolerance only brings violence and misery and never improves anything. It irks me that he has to state the obvious.

Lots of academics have commented this Treatise on Toleration and they’re better than me at analyzing Voltaire’s messagge. I’ll give you my impressions as twenty-first century reader: Voltaire is still relevant. Like all great writers, you might say. His arguments could be transposed in today’s world. And his plea to let everyone pray whatever god they want as long as they don’t bother their fellow citizen and undermine the country’s peace remains relevant.

Sometimes, it’s good to go back to the basics and remind ourselves on which principles our western societies were founded. Highly recommended.

At the beginning of this billet, I mentioned four books to write about and you’ve read about three of them. The fourth book is the somptuous Fools Crow by James Welch and it deserves its own billet.

Where Rivers Change Directions by Mark Spragg

Where Rivers Change Directions by Mark Spragg (1999) French title: Là où les rivières se séparent.

I loved An Unfinished Life by Mark Spragg and I wanted to read his memoir about his childhood on a dude range near Yellowstone National Park.

It was on my list of books to bring back home from our trip to Montana and Wyoming and I found it at Beartooth Books in Red Lodge, Montana. Incidentally, that’s where Mark Spragg lives now, according to Wikipedia.

Spragg was born in 1952 and he was raised at Crossed Sabres Ranch, the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming, in operation since 1898. It is located 10 miles from Cody, on the Yellowstone plateau. You can still spend a week there, if you can afford $4100 for your stay.

Spragg writes about his childhood on this ranch, working for his father, growing up without TV but with a lot of books.

My brother and I use books when we want to leave Wyoming.

There are beautiful chapters about formative moments of his childhood and adolescence. If you love horses, there are incredible passages about them.

He was raised more as an apprentice than as a son. During winters, he sleeps in a cabin with his brother. During summers, he bunks with John, a ranch hand who’s in his forties:

We have lived together, in the same bunkhouse, for two summers and falls. I’ve seen him drunk, and I’ve seen him naked, felt his rage and his laughter. He’s told me elaborately obscene jokes while sitting on the bunkhouse toilet. There is no door to the bathroom. There has been no place to closet ourselves from the other. I know the sound of his steps on a board floor in the night, his cough, the rhythm of his breathing when he works, the tunes of the three songs he knows to whistle. I recognize his scent. He smells like home.

What an odd way to raise one’s son! And the other way round, how did John feel about sharing his living space and intimacy with his boss’s boy? He sounded more like a second father, patiently training Spragg to do all kinds of tasks.

Each chapter is a specific episode of his life in the Wyoming wilderness.

Bringing an injured John back the ranch. Working with horses, bonding with a weird cat, encountering a bear in the forest, hunting, taking tourists on tours, going to school in such an isolated area…The last chapters are about his life when he’s much older. Bonding with his godson, taking care of his ageing mother.

Spragg’s writing is somptous and his descriptions of his surroundings are breathtaking. When he writes the chapters about his childhood and adolescence, he conjures up his younger self and his perception of life at the time. He didn’t know anything else and some habits we may found strange were his normal.

However, I was a bit frustrated about the lack of biographical details. We don’t know how he felt when he left the ranch for college or why his parents sold the ranch and how he felt about that. We gather he lived in New York for a while but he doesn’t explain how he transitioned from Wyoming to New York. He doesn’t say much about his parents except:

When I’m thirty-six my mother divorces my father. It is not a surprise. She is sixty-four. My father moves to Las Vegas. My mother has hip-replacement surgery. She buys a house in Cody and asks me to help her move.

I suppose his father was a hard man to live with. (And just wow. From Wyoming to Las Vegas, how is that even possible? Las Vegas is the antithesis to Wyoming!)

We never know the path he chose as a young man and what happened. He’s suddenly married. Then divorced and remarried. No detail, just clues left here and there in the pages.

Just beneath the surface, his memoir explores his relationship to guns, hunting and killing animals. He was raised to kill animals if necessary. For their meat, to protect oneself in case of danger, to be merciful to a deadly injured animal. I gathered that he didn’t like the man he became when he had to kill an animal. He silently questions his upbringing and the path to become a man. I’d even say he quietly challenges the notion “being a man” in his corner of the world. Virility attached to guns, drinking whiskey, working hard, suffering in silence, rough love and greeted teeth is how I’d sum it up.

Above all, like Wallace Stegner, his roots are in the West and he can’t shake that off.

Everything that means home to me is a by-product of the North Fork of the Shoshone river.

This is a good companion book to Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt. They are almost the same age and were both raised on an isolated ranch.

Deacon King Kong by James McBride – Joyful and realistic, a tour-de-force

Deacon King Kong by James McBride (2020) French title: Deacon King Kong.

Deacon Cuffy Lambkin of Five Ends Baptist Church became a walking dead man on a cloudy September afternoon in 1969.

That’s the day the old deacon, known as Sportcoat to his friends, marched out to the plaza of the Causeway Housing Projects in South Brooklyn, stuck an ancient .38 Colt in the face of a nineteen-year-old drug dealer named Deems Clemens, and pulled the trigger.

These are the first paraphs of Deacon King Kong by James McBride. You know the time, the place, the names of two key protagonists. It opens like a crime fiction book but James McBride takes you to another kind of ride. Sportcoat is an old friendly drunk, shooting with an ancient firearm and he misses his target.

Deems Clemens is only injured but this event will trigger other ones as this neighborhood of South Brooklyn is about to turn a sad new leaf. Drug is taking over, the youth doesn’t go to church anymore, the organized crime changes gear too. The new generation is taking over.

McBride brings to life a whole housing block and through the lives of the characters, pictures the changes in South Brooklyn. This housing project was first built to provide lodgings to the Italian immigrants working on the docks. Then the Blacks came from the South and took their place as the Italians moved to better homes.

McBride depicts a community of black people, first immigrants from the South, who became the backbone of their neighborhood. They built the church, they did Sunday school, they coached the local baseball team, they took care of various social events. They are tightknit and later welcomed new immigrants from Puerto Rico or Haiti.

Sportcoat and his late wife Hettie used to be pillars of the community gathered around the Five Ends Baptist Church now operated by the pastor and his wife nicknamed Sister Gee. He spent a lot of time with the baseball team and Deems Clemens was a promising baseball player, he could have played professionally and instead he took the path of easy money from drug dealing. Sportcoat was his father figure and he’s as disappointed as a father could be.

On the other side of an invisible border lives Thomas Elefant, “the Elephant”. He’s of Italian origin, the heir of a small scale smuggling business on the docks. He doesn’t want to sell drugs and intends to stay small. His position is uncomfortable as the local mafia led by Joe Peck went into the drug business. The Elephant is forty and he wants out. His mother is ageing, he’d like to settle with a wife and do regular business. He always had cordial relationships with the Five Ends Baptist Church community.

As far as the police are concerned, things are changing too. This neighborhood belongs to the Seventy-Sixth Precinct. Potts Mullen – of Irish origin, of course—used to work in the Causes. He was transferred to another precinct for being too honest. Now, he has a few months left before retirement and he’s back at the Causes and must investigate the Clemens shooting.

Sportcoat’s gunshot is his drunken way to say enough is enough and it came at a tipping point. Perhaps there’s still room to bring Clemens back to the right path. The Elephant may find a way out. The community’s energy might slow down the drug invasion…

Deacon King Kong shows a first-immigrants vs second generation conflict in the Cause Houses among the black community.

Clemens was the New Breed of colored in the Cause. Deems wasn’t some poor colored boy from down south or Puerto Rico or Barbados who arrived in New York with empty pockets and a Bible and a dream. He wasn’t humbled by a life of slinging cotton in North Carolina, or hauling sugarcane in San Juan. He didn’t arrive in New York City from some poor place where kids ran around with no shoes and ate chicken bones and turtle soup, limping to New York with a dime in their pockets, overjoyed at the prospect of coming to New York to clean houses and empty toilets and dump garbage, hoping for a warm city job or maybe even an education care of good white people. Deems didn’t give a shit about white people, or education, or sugarcane, or cotton, or even baseball, which he had once been a whiz at. None of the old ways meant a penny to him.

This is a major change in the DNA of the community and it impacts the atmosphere and the choices people made. McBride describes this change very well, the passing of the guard as the old generation disappears.

Through the Cause Houses community and The Elephant, McBride writes about loyalty to your parents, the people who made you and owning one’s heritage. The Elephant is looking for a way out without throwing out his father’s heritage, Clemens forgot what Sportcoat taught him and turned to easy money.

McBride celebrates people who give back to their community, the ones who volunteer to take care of the kids, organize sports and activities, the ones who ensure that their neighbor’s blind son gets on his school bus even if his father is MIA. A community who takes care of their own and accept others with their idiosyncrasies.

McBride also praises the ones who remain faithful to their values, whatever the cost. Potts the cop who doesn’t condone corruption. The Elephant who loathes drug dealing.

This is the background story. Sportcoat shooting Clemens also started a drug dealers war and Potts warns Sister Gee about the changes in organized crime:

There’s a drug war brewing. You don’t want your guy or your church in the middle of it. These drug lords are a different breed. They don’t play by the rules like the old crooks did. There’s no handshake or silent agreements, no looking the other way. Nobody’s safe. Nothing’s sacred. There’s too much money involved.

And indeed, the Cause Houses is right in the middle of a territorial war between mafia Joe Peck and Earl, the new black gangsters. How will that turn out?

On top of this social commentary and the drug war plot, Deacon King Kong is a fun read. McBride is creative with the language, it’s lively, poetic and full of humor. See for yourself with this festival: If I was a fly and wanted to get to heaven, I’d throw myself in your mouth. A crook thinking about cops: Cops wrecked the economy—his economy anyway. A punchy dialogue: “You sound like some guy at a peace conference, Tommy,” Potts said, exasperated. “You’re full of questions with no answers.”

Potts and love at first sight:

In that moment he realized that all the experience of thirty-two years on the NYPD and all the formal police training in the world was useless when the smile of someone you suddenly care about finds the bow that wraps your heart and undoes it.

Deacon King Kong is a wonderful book, well-written, different from others, fun, optimistic without sugarcoating reality:

Nothing here would change. Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems. And who can you blame?

This is a poor neighborhood where people fight to survive and do their best.

Deacon King Kong is a lot better than Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead. Superior in style, in content and in the author’s ability to revive the past. Joyful and realistic, a tour-de-force.

This wasn’t my first McBride, I also read his Good Lord Bird. It had the same components of accuracy and fun.

PS : I read it in English but it must have been a lot of work to translate McBride’s inventive language into French. It’s published by Gallmeister and I see that their cover has been retained by McBride’s Italian publisher too.

Blizzard by Marie Vingtras

Blizzard by Marie Vingtras (2021) Original French title: Blizzard

Blizzard by Marie Vingtras isn’t available in English right now but you can pre-order it as it will be released in January 2024. I’ve found two different editions: one translation by Stephanie Smee (who also translated The Godmother which I highly recommend) published by Mountain Leopard Press, which seems fitting for this book and another one by Jeffrey Zuckerman published by The Overlook Press. That must be a question of legalities and rights because why waste time and money to translate twice the same novella when so many books are still looking for a translator. But back to the book.

A little group of misfits live in remote place near Anchorage, Alaska. It’s always been home to Benedict Mayer, Cole and Clifford while Bess and Freeman ended there to flee traumas from their pasts.

It’s winter, people are holed up in their houses and yet Bess walks out with Thomas, Benedict’s son. It’s freezing, the blizzard is blinding them and it takes a few second to lose Thomas. Bess stops to re-tie the laces of her boots and when she stands up, Thomas is nowhere to be seen. She starts looking for him.

In the houses, the men get worried about them and start a search party. They know Bess and Thomas will lose all sense of direction in such a blizzard and could freeze to death.

Blizzard is Marie Vingtras’s debut novel and she did very well. In a novella, she manages to build up the tension (will they find Thomas in time?) and tell the characters’ life stories, how they came into this isolated place. All of them are hiding from the world and from their past.

The narration alternates between Cole, Freeman, Benedict and Bess and slowly, their secrets are revealed. Why Cole stays put in this place. What Freeman is hiding and why he was sent there. How Bess came here to watch Thomas. And how Benedict carries a world of pain.

Ghosts from the past hover over the characters and the peace between them is only a careful lid put on darker events. And the past is about to burst out like a geyser, throwing the lid away and soaking everyone with undesirable truths.

To say more would mean spoilers, so…

Blizzard is another good strike for my Kube libraire because it’s a book I would never have bought myself. I’m wary of books set in hostile American wilderness and written by French authors. Are they really able to picture the weather conditions properly? Alexis Aubenque wasn’t convincing, Marie Vingtras definitely is.

This is a one-sitting read if possible to really feel the build-up and stay attuned to the characters. It’s also a good book for foreign readers who want to practice their French. (short sentences, short chapters…)

Very highly recommended.

Midwinter by Fiona Melrose – Suffering in Suffolk

Midwinter by Fiona Melrose (2016) French title: Midwinter. Translated by Edith Soonchindt.

Fiona Melrose is a South-African writer born in 1973 who used to live in Suffolk. Midwinter is her debut novel, one I got for free after buying many books. 🙂 Serendipity was at work that day and I got a great book out of it.

Midwinter is both the surname of the main characters, father and son Landyn and Vale Midwinter and the time of year when the novel takes place. It’s a two-voices novel and chapters alternate between Landyn and Vale speaking.

The book opens on a tragedy. Vale and his best friend Tom are drunk after a night at the pub and borrow a boat at night, in cold and windy weather and sail on the river near the sea. They lose control of the boat and Tom is badly injured.

Vale and his father Landyn fight all the time and they haven’t recovered from Cecilia’s death, ten years ago. She was Landyn’s wife and Vale’s mother. He was only ten when she was murdered.

Landyn is a farmer who struggles to keep his land and make an income out of farming. About twelve years ago, he and Cecilia were about to lose the farm, they were fighting all the time and they decided to take a chance and candidate to run a farm in Zambia. That’s where Cecilia was killed.

Now father and son are back in Suffolk, in their old village and they live side by side with their festering pain. Vale thinks his father is responsible for his mother’s death. Landyn would like to be closer to his son but doesn’t know how to. Their relationship was already strained and Tom’s accident shatters their status quo. They must address what happened in Zambia, confront their feelings and find a way to move on.

Landyn and Vale live with an emotional glass wall between them. They see the other’s misery but can’t help each other.

Landyn is sixty and looking back on his life, analyzing his mistakes, and drowning in what-ifs. He longs for a better relationship with his son and is worried about his well-being. He’s also Tom’s substitute father as his own father is a drunk. Meanwhile, he’s grateful for the support he finds in the village like with his old friend Dobbler. Landyn also finds comfort in his dog, the old Pup. She’s an emotional crutch.

Vale is angry with Landyn for his mother’s death and he seems clinically depressed. He’s twenty, awkward and a bundle of living pain. I rarely felt such a bone-deep sadness in a character except in The Catcher in the Rye or in A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How to Do. He’s drowning in it, he doesn’t know how to express his feelings. Until he starts a true grieving process, he’ll be on a destructive path. He gets angry, he avoids people and new and uncomfortable situations, he skirts around hard topics. He’s a hot mess. He feels guilty for his mother’s death, for Tom’s injury. This guilt triggers his reaction to the accident and obliges him to think again about Cecelia’s death.

Midwinter is about these two men who must find a way to each other again because Vale’s future depends on it. He needs to heal to live his own life.

The novel is deeply rooted to the Suffolk countryside. The characters are farmers, they are attuned to the nature around them. Fiona Melrose introduces a fox who is like Cecilia’s Patronus, watching over Landyn and Vale.

Think about a fox.

The vixen knows when to let her kits fight it out. It’s with the push and pull that they learn when to hide, when to growl and claw, and when to sit so still a bee might mistake small whiskers for a dandelion.

She’ll not leave them entirely, mind. She’ll keep watch.

I was gone, but never really left you, heart. I never will.

She’s introduced in the prologue quote before and Landyn sees her around the house, checks on her and finds strength in thinking his late wife is watching over them. This and the poetic connection to the land seeps through the pages and give extra-power to the story.

For another and better written review, find out what Marina thinks about Midwinter here.

Highly recommended.

Love in Case of Emergency by Daniela Krien – women, get up, stand up for your rights.

Love in Case of Emergency by Daniela Krien. (2019) Also published as Love in Five Acts. French title: L’amour par temps de crise. Translated by Dominique Autrand.

I don’t know why this book by Daniela Krien, Die Liebe im Ernstfall, has been properly published as Love in Case of Emergency and also as Love in Five Acts.

After reading Chess and Reunion for German Lit Month, I thought I’d read some contemporary German lit about common people and with no reference to WWII.

I found Love in Case of Emergency and saw that the Sächsische Zeitung wrote about it that “In a hundred years, when we want to know how today’s women lived, we’ll have to read Daniela Krieg’s novel”. I thought that this book fit my bill. And it did.

Krien describes the lives of five women in their forties in Leipzig but their men are also in silhouette in the background. And it’s not a pretty picture.

We’re in Leipzig, former DDR and yes, this piece of information is still relevant. Their names are Paula, Judith, Brida, Malika and Jorinde. They are all related one way or the other. They are friends, sisters or exes of the same man. We start with Paula and end with Jorinde. They all live in Leipzig. They are bookseller, writer, actress, medical doctor, or musician. They have children or not, by choice or not. They all have ups and downs in their love lives.

As I was reading, I was overcome with the tide of sadness that leapt from the pages. They are all depressed, stressed out and deprived of self-worth.

Judith is the only different one: she’s a MP, she chose not to have children, she prefers to be single and she loves her horses more than humans. It is implied that she’s not a full woman. The others seem to only find their worth in men’s eyes, their father, or their partner. Except for one, the men in their lives are difficult, grown children, dominant or sexist and selfish pieces of work.

“Partner” is a wrong word for these men as they never treat their wives or daughters as equal. They impose their vision of life in their quotidian: that’s Ludwig, the environment extremist, Torben and his extreme-left political views. Götz seems to have a magic penis, if you consider the sexual spell he puts on his partners, they are broken almost beyond repair when he moves to another woman. He’s not a womanizer per se, he moves from a soft-and-bending girlfriend to a more assertive wife to another soft-and-bending partner. He can’t live with a woman who, unlike mommy, doesn’t enjoy staying at home, leaving her career behind while he’s the breadwinner.

The general tone of the book is that if women try to have it all, marriage, children, and a career, they fail. If they don’t strive in motherhood, they’re weird. If they don’t have children they’re not accomplished. Even if their doctor’s practice is full and they’re a good doctor or even if they’re sought after music teachers or successful.

If they want to balance a demanding career and children, they feel guilty and they never feel entitled to their own time to write their book or shoot films. None of them has an equal partnership with their husband. Their support system is weak if a child is sick. (And as we know, they are always sick the day of an important meeting or of a business trip.) They fake it until they make it because there’s no other choice but they feel cheated on. They can’t have the lives they hoped for.

If Krien’s novel is an accurate picture of women’s lives in Germany in the 21^st century, ladies, get up, stand up for your rights because your lives are miserable and men, what a terrible picture you project. Great news: it is possible to have it all and not be drowning. The two key success factors are equal pay and living with a partner who shares parenting and housekeeping, not with a partner who does nothing or helps. Helping implies it’s the woman’s job when it’s not. And it would be nice to knock motherhood off its pedestal, it would do good for everyone.

Unfortunately, old habits die hard and feminist movements have long years ahead of them. Meanwhile, it’s good that writers like Daniela Krien put these lives into words and show patriarcal societies take their tolls.

Marina Sofia has read it too and discover her thoughtful billet here.

PS : Almost all the covers have the same woman on a diving board but I wonder why sometimes she looks towards left and sometimes towards right.