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.

Metz Book Festival & books about books

Serendipity brought me to Metz the very weekend the town hosted its book festival, Le livre à Metz. Littérature et Journalisme.

I didn’t have time to attend any panel or conference but I had time to browse through books in the giant book store set up in a tent on the main plaza of the city. The talks were nearby and the festival has its own literary prizes. I’m not much interested in literary prizes in general, so I didn’t bother enquiring what these ones were about.

I looked at the list of writers invited and signing books but I didn’t know many of them, probably because I don’t read a lot of contemporary French literature. Anyway.

There were quite a lot of people at the Grande Librairie and I loved wandering from one bookshop to the other, looking at the displays they had designed for the day. I stayed a bit at La Pensée sauvage, an independent bookstore with a poem dispenser. I loved the idea.

They also had a whole display of books about bookstores (librairies) and libraries (bibliothèques). I was taken aback by the number of books about books. Let’s see the ones I saw and the ones I knew about. Books as remedies to soul searching and various pains.

Bookshops and libraries seem to inspire writers from different countries and different genres. In my impromptu sample, we have books from Japan, France, Italy, Sweden, the USA and the UK. There are also several genres: magic realism, romance, feel-good books, cozy mysteries, and chick lit.

They use bookshops as places to keep your dreams alive or as to fight against loneliness thanks to books and like-minded people. Apparently, cats and books are an item, if we look at the covers of these books. According to the French book titles, bookstores are comforting and hopeful places. See the Second Chance Bookshop or the Bookstore of Buried Dreams.

And we have Jenny Colgan who is on a roll with her Happy Days Charming Bookstore, Christmas Charming Bookstore and, my favorite, the Charming Bookstore by the Tranquil Waters. These are not the original English titles but the literal translation of the corny French ones.

Bookstores and their content are also healing places, according these three books. The middle one has a play-on-word on the expression aux grands maux, les grands remèdes, (The English equivalent is Desperate times, desperate measures) and on the words mots (words) and maux (troubles), same pronounciation, different meaning. The expression is changed into something implying that words have healing powers.

Blue and pale pink seem to be the go-to colors for these books, btw.

Bookstores are lovely place but don’t forget libraries! They also are magic places who help readers heal and find themselves. Midnight Library, Library of Broken Hearts, Library of Secret Dreams.

I wonder where this trend stems from. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, we all need comfort books from time to time. However, if going to a bookstore or a library as a reader is a wonderful and appeasing experience, I don’t think that running a bookshop or a library is a cake walk. Even if these bookstores include a coffee shop and serve cake too!

Lots of independant bookstores are struggling financially and their owners work really hard to remain open. And think about the irony: I bet that most of these books featuring quaint independent bookstores are bought online or at chain bookstores!

And what about you? Have you read any of these books and what do you think of this books-about-books trend? I’m not immune to it. I acquired La Librairie de la Place aux Herbes by Eric de Kermel, the only one highly recommended by the libraire. It does sound corny but I decided to trust the libraire at La Pensée sauvage, owner of the poem dispenser.

Then I came back to my senses and got two historical crime fiction books, one by Anne Villemin-Sicherman and one by Laurent Joffrin

La Nuit de la sage-femme is set in Metz and L’Enigme du Code noir involves something about the Code noir, the awful legal code written by Colbert in the 17th century to organize slavery in Louisiana. To think it was considered as a positive development at the time…I hope they’ll be good, I trust the publishers on these ones.

Let’s end this billet with a few pictures of Metz, a beautiful city in the North East of France.

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 Bachelor of Arts by R.K. Narayan – The 1937 Club

The Bachelor of Arts by R.K. Narayan. (1937) French title: Le licencié es lettres.

I’m happy to participate to the #1937Club hosted by Karen and Simon, especially since I get to share about The Bachelor of Arts by R.K. Narayan, a writer I discovered thanks to Vishy.

I’ve already read Swami and Friends and The Dark Room and my omnibus edition also includes The English Teacher. These novellas are set in the fictionnal town of Malgudi.

The Bachelor of Arts is a novella featuring Chandran, in the crucial years in one’s early twenties, when graduation is almost there and it’s time to find a profession and start one’s adult life.

In the first part of the book, Chandran is 22 and he’s in his last year at Albert College, soon graduating in History and Literature. He lives the usual life of students at that time except that there aren’t any girls around and that his professors are all British teaching to Indian students. The atmosphere of this first part reminding me of Kingsley Amis.

After cramming hard in the last months of the school year, he graduates but doesn’t have defined plans for his future. We see him fall in love, literally at first sight and getting all worked up about a girl he can’t talk to because it would be inappropriate. We see him struggle with heartbreak and eventually figuring out what job he’ll do. He lacks a bit of confidence.

Narayan is a very sensitive writer, nice to his characters and gently poking fun at them. He probably put a bit of himself in Chandran and we see a young man who lives between the culture of his very traditional Hindu family and the British culture he is taught at school. He’s torn between the respect he feels for his beloved parents and his yearning to break free from what he considers stifling traditions.

His parents are loving and understanding but they are also attached to the social rules of their community. They don’t want to stand out and Chandran bows to their wishes, not because they pressure him but out of love for them.

And me? I discovered the marriage traditions in his kind of family and I was flabbergasted. Sure, I expected the cast compatibility part and I wasn’t too surprised that the two young people couldn’t have much contact. What I didn’t expect were the rules about the matchmaker, who makes the moves and when and also the check of the compatibility of the future spouse through their horoscopes

When a girl is ready for marriage her horoscope will be sent in ten directions, and then different persons will see her and approve or disapprove, or they might be disapproved by the girl itself; and after all only one will marry her.

If the horoscopes don’t match, there’s no marriage. Wow. Imagine Mrs Bennett in this context.

Narayan doesn’t judge these traditions, he doesn’t rebel against them but he shows what they do to a young man like Chandran and what they mean for the Indian girls of his milieu and in this part of India.

As always with great literature, Narayan writes a novella that transcends the cultural specificities of Malgudi and the fact that we’re in the 1930s. He pictures a young man who struggles to find his path in life, who mourns the end of his childhood and of his carefree student days to become an adult and lead an adult’s life.

Very highly recommended.

There are other billets about books written or published in 1937 on the blog:

• Remembering Laughter by Wallace Stegner,
• Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
• Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb.

Many thanks to Karen and Simon for hosting The Club again. It’s really a great idea and now, I’m going to read all the posts about 1937 books that are waiting for my attention in my inbox.

Quais du Polar 2024 : Day three!

Hello everyone, this is Day 3 of the Quais du Polar.

We got up early because we had tickets for the 9:15am Literary Cruise with Peter May. It’s like the Bateaux Mouche in Paris, but in Lyon on the Saône river. Quais du Polar has done these events for a few years now and it’s a way to discover the city from another angle and hear an author talk about his books.

Only this year two things happened. One is that we had so much rain in the last month that the Saône river is improper for cruises, the boats stayed at quay. Two, can you believe that both my friend and I left our phones at my house and were without our tickets and a means to contact the husbands for our lunch date.

My first thought was that we could manage the old way and live without our phones for a day but even if we could have hopped on the boat thanks to the list of the participants that Quais du Polar had, we couldn’t imagine how to keep in touche with the husbands.

So, no literary cruise for us and a trip back home to get the damned phones. (Notice how we don’t bother saying cell phones any longer? There are barely any other kind of phones anyway.)

That said we were back in time for the panel with Cosby and Lehane about the 60^th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. The journalist was excellent and the authors chatted about this anniversary, the topic of racism as it is central in their books. They went beyond talking about their books and shared personal experiences and beliefs with the audience. I felt privileged to be in the gorgeous Chapelle de la Trinité with them that morning.

Fun fact: they were rather pleased to discover they have their birthday on the same day, like Barak Obama as Lehane pointed out. As always, it struck me that these talks keep the authors on paths they relate to but keep them away from the usual book-promotion path. It’s refreshing.

I had a fascinating talk about American Southern literature with another reader on the pavement outside the chapel, and these delightful moments are a great part of the festival experience.

Thanks to our phones (!!), we had a wonderful lunch with the husbands in a nice and affordable restaurant. Yes, this is France and yes, sometimes clichés are clichés because they are true. Lyon is a top city for gastronomy and the festival included a Polar et gastronomie event. The theme was Brunch at Manchester because Tim Willocks and Caryl Ferey wrote a polar together for the festival.

We had a nice stroll on the quay of the Saône river and as you can see, we have our own bouquinistes on the banks of the Saône river, like the ones in Paris.

This is another view of Lyon from the Saône river’s bank.

Another fun fact: I saw that the city has reached a new level of refinement as far as recycling is concerned: dedicated trash cans for empty pizza boxes!

I don’t know if I should be happy that we try to recycle as much as we can or sad that we have so many pizza boxes that a special trash can is necessary. It sure amused me, though.

We attended a last talk about French rural noir. The authors were Jean-Charles Chapuzet, Manon Gauthier-Faure, Anne Percin and Nicko Tackian.

I haven’t read any of them but I’m sure interested in Anne Percin now. She wrote a book set on the Plateau de Millevaches in Limousin. Literally, it means the Thousandcows Plateau, really, that’s as close as to can get to a Montanan name in France.

And that’s all, folks, until next year! 😊 Thank you for reading about my three days at Quais du Polar.

If you’re curious about the festival and the authors, check out the festival’s website here. If you are interested in any of the conferences, they are available in replay here.

Quais du Polar 2024 : Day two!

Hello everyone, here’s my billet about Day Two à Quais du Polar. First of all, look at my new notebook for the panels, talks, interviews and whatnots!

Early morning I attended a panel entitled Between the map and the terrority, someone at Quais du Polar was quite facetious with titles this year.

The authors invited to this talk were Cécile Cabanac, Franck Bouysse, Joseph Macé-Scaron and Piergiorgio Pulixi. They were together in this because they all write books deeply rooted in the land they chose as a setting.

Cabanac wrote a book set in Basque country, Bouysse’s last book takes place in Montana, Macé-Scaron chose Roquebrune-sur-Argens in the Var department and Pulixi is from Sardinia.

I’ve only read a book by Pulixi and I remember that Sardinia was a character in the plot as its wilderness and culture were imbedded in the story. It’s a shame it hasn’t been translated into English but it’s avaible in Italian, French and Dutch. Incidentally, the epigraph of Pulixi’s new book is a quote by Bouysse as he is a writer he admires very much. He sang his praises.

It was interesting to hear them explain how they work to write these books, from unearthing local stories to exploring the aftermath of a crime in a village. Bouysse says he’s never been to Montana. I’ve been there and I can tell you that all the books I had read before my trip had not prepared me properly to the immensity of the landscapes. So, I’m a bit wary of his book but I’ll download a sample anyway.

After this talk my friend and I wandered a bit in the giant library in the Palais de la Bourse. There were a lot of people inside the Palais, where the heart of the festival beats. Around 11:30 am, the queue to get in was all around the building, and it is a big one. I don’t know how long the wait was but we were happy to escape and have a wonderful lazy apéro and lunch at a brasserie, near the Théâtre des Célestins. The weather gods were still on our side, even if it was windy.

We stayed put until it was time to enter into the theatre and attend Darkness, take my hand, a one-hour talk with Dennis Lehane. Christine Fermiot was impressed to interview him and I think that both of them were in awe of the setting. The theatre was full, up to the second balcony and this is what it looks like from the stage when it’s empty. Impressive, no?

The whole theatre was silent, listening to the interview and many thanks again to the wonderful interpreter, even Lehane’s accent is easy to understand. Lehane felt a bit stiff at the beginning but eventually opened up, talking about Boston, his upbringing, racism and his career as a writer.

A big crowd attended the festival on Saturday. It was crazy and what really struck is that us, book lovers are a very civilized crowd. What we see on social networks between book lovers transfers into real life: we are a gentle, polite and attentive crowd.

Lines may be long but people read books, chat with their friends or bond with strangers who are fellow readers. There’s a brotherhood and sisterhood of readers and I can’t help thinking that the world would be a better place if everyone got the reading bug. Now where are those pangolins when we need them.

A lovely walk later, we were at the City Hall again, browsing through books. Here’s the day’s book haul.

I loved the Peter Farris I read recently, I want to read another one. And after that interview, I had to get another Lehane. The Barton was included in my Quais du Polar membership. Has anyone read it?

I also snatched a few Gallmeister goodies, yay! Short stories by Trevanian, Johnson and my beloved Pete Fromm found a good home.

I was time for our next panel with Terry Hayes, Jo Nesbø and DOA. I haven’t read any books by them. There are so many Nesbøs that I don’t know which one I should start with. Any recommendation? The theme was about crooked investigators. What happens when your main character falls off the wagon? The journalist didn’t really keep the line of the debate but there were interesting interactions between the writers.

The next event was a first at the festival: a crime fiction quiz in the Grand Salon! The anchorman was the Belgian journalist Michel Dufranne.

The audience was split into five teams with a writer as a captain. Ours was Franck Thilliez and the others had Bernard Minier, Alexis Laipsker or Claire Favan. Forget what I wrote earlier: that crowd was very rowdy and noisy. And knowledgeable.

Despite the noise, the technical issues with the slideshow and the fact that Michel Dufranne speaks too fast, it was fun and it confirmed that my knowledge of crime fiction is tiny.

It was time to join the husbands for a Moroccan diner at what you’d call a hole-in-the-wall restaurant but the food and the service were great. A wonderful end to a great day and time to get some sleep for the next day of the festival.

Quais du Polar 2024 : Day one!

As mentioned in my previous billet, the crime fiction festival Quais du Polar was all over the city of Lyon from April 5^th to April 7^th. It was an exceptional edition for the festival 20^th anniversary. 135 writers were here to meet 100 000 enthusiastic readers from Lyon and other places. It was a very civilized crowd despite the waiting lines and it was heartwarming to see so many young people in attendance. The weather cooperated, it was warm and dry. Yay!

It was a good weekend for the independent libraires who have the exclusivity on the sale of books at the festival. Quais du Polar reported that they did a turnover of 330 000 euros over the weekend.

So, what did I do on that first day?

Friday morning, I met a group of middle schoolers who were doing workshops as reporters. They had drawn up a few questions, I answered them and it was soon over. Cute kids, very polite and I felt ancient when they looked at me with round eyes when I told them I’d been going to the festival for something like ten years.

I met up with my good friend Isabelle who came for the weekend and we stayed in line half an hour until I could read S.A. Cosby and get my book signed. First purchase of the weekend, La colère, the French translation of Razorblade Tears. He was patient with his readers and willingly posed for a little picture.

He was sitting next to Gabino Iglesias who was in France for the first time and enjoying himself. I knew of him since David Joy sings his praises and he told me that indeed, Joy made the connection between him and Sonatine, his French publisher. And we have another Southern writer translated into French. I asked him to recommend me one of his book, the less graphic one, and I got Les Lamentations du coyote, the French translation of Coyote Song.

I had time to browse books at the giant librairie and I got Lightseekers by Femi Cayode and Dreadfulwater by Thomas King, a writer who inspired Craig Johnson.

At five, we attended a talk featuring Dennis Lehane, John Grisham, S.A. Cosby and Gabino Iglesias about the American presidential election. It was set up in the grand salon at the City Hall, the mayor made a speech (totally unnecessary, IMO) and the consul of the USA in Lyon introduced the authors. Incidentally, Lehane and Grisham had never met each other before. And Iglesias was like “Wow, I’m sharing the floor with Lehane and Grisham!”

As you can see on this picture, S.A. Cosby has a headset where an interpreter translates the questions of the journalist. They lend headsets to the public too and we are blessed with a wonderful simultaneous translation and it’s a luxury. I’ve seen the same interpreter for several years now and she’s very good. She won’t read this but I really thank her for the quality of her job at the festival.

As far as I’m concerned, this panel was a lesson in American accents. I’m good with Lehane and Grisham, ok with Texas and Iglesias and struggling with Cosby’s Southern accent. I needed the translator.

Then we rushed to our next activity: riddles at the museum! This was a first. We got a card, a highlighter and we had to highlight the word we found each time we solved a riddle, all of them written by different writers. Here’s one:

Each riddle was on an easel and we walked through the rooms of the museum. It was nice to be there after hours and it was fun to decipher the riddles. Many thanks to the writers who submitted their riddle, it was a nice gesture for the participants.

Once we completed the challenge – got a tote bag out of it – we went to a talk by Interpol about art trafficking, also at the museum. A carabinieri who works for Interpol explained how they try to track down stolen works of art. He also told us where we could download the Interpol app to check out if a work of art is on the stolen goods database and how we can use the app to register our work of art. It was interesting and kind of flattering to have such institution doing this conference.

It was something like 9pm when we went out of the museum, time to have diner in a brasserie, go home and crash. Day one’s book haul:

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.

Quais du Polar 2024, let’s get ready!

Long time readers of this blog know that Quais du Polar in a crime fiction festival set in Lyon. This year, it’s the 20^th anniversary of the festival and it will take place from April 5^th to April 7^th. Let’s hope the weather gods are with us and that rain will stay away.

Quais du Polar is a literary festival that expanded its horizons and now caters to anything related to crime fiction.

You’ll have the usual panels, talks with writers and book signing booths. But you’ll also get music-and-literature hours, literary cruises on the Saône river, crime fiction games in various places of the town, painting-and-literature tours at the art museum, visit of the school for police commissaires and their NICS lab, conferences done by judges and lawyers at the courthouse and crime fiction films at the Institut Lumière, where the cinema was invented. Each year, the festival has new ideas for entertainment and knowledge about crime and crime fiction. This year, there’s even a literary brunch.

Police and justice are also involved in the festival. Policemen, experts, judges, and lawyers talk about their work. They give us a glimpse of real crime solving and subsequent trials. Imagine that a team of CSI policemen have turned into playwrights, actors and director: they have created a theater play about CSI that shows how they work. It’s already sold out but I would have loved to see that.

There’s also a side festival for literature professionals who work around crime fiction. (publishers, translators…)

The program is out and the number of events you can attend is mind-blowing. 135 authors are invited and will participate to panels and book signings. Check them out here. Festival goers could book some events in advance and that’s what I did. I also checked out the program to outline what I’ll do during these three days. Beside buying books at the giant bookstore, of course. 😊

Here’s what I intend to do during these three days.

Friday.

At 11 am, I volunteered to be interviewed by middle school students. They’ll ask questions about my time at the festival. It should be fun.

At 5:30 pm, I hope I’ll get into the panel about the US presidential election. The writers involved in this discussion are S.A. Cosby, John Grisham, Gabino Iglesias and Dennis Lehane.

At 6:50 pm, I have ticket to play a “mystery game” at the art museum. Writers will be scattered in various rooms in the museum and we’ll have to solve the riddles that authors have written for us.

At 7:45 pm, my friend and I will attend a conference by specialists from Interpol who fight against art trafficking. It sounds fascinating.

Saturday

At 10 am, there’s a panel about the importance of places and the atmosphere of books. Franck Bouysse, Cécile Cabannac, Joseph Macé-Scaron and Piergiogio Pulixi will discuss how places become a character in their books.

At 2 pm, Dennis Lehane will give an interview at the beautiful Théâtre des Célestins.

At 4 pm, there’s a panel about French crime fiction from 2005 to 2024 with Hannelore Cayre, Didier Daeninckx, Nicolas Mathieu and Patrick Raynal.

At 6:45 pm, we got tickets to do a giant quiz about crime fiction. It’s going to be a fun competition between readers and writers. It sounds so fun!

Sunday

At 9:15 am, our day will start with a literary cruise with Peter May and we’ll learn more about his last book.

At 11:30 am, S.A. Cosby and Dennis Lehane will discuss racism in the USA, 60 years after the Civil Rights Act.

At 2 pm, Jérémy Claes, Abir Mukherjee, Maryla Szymiczkowa and Joe Thomas have a talk about how crime fiction handles hard topics such as racism, homophobia, and all kinds of extremisms.

At 3:30 pm, I’m also tempted by the panel about rural crime fiction in France with Jean-Charles Chapuzet, Manon Gauthier-Faure, Anne Percin and Niko Tackian. I don’t know any of these authors, so it could be a good opportunity to discover new writers.

That’s the plan for the weekend. Plans can change, we’ll see how it goes. There are tons of exciting events I won’t be able to attend and I’m like a kid in a candy store.

Great news, everything will be available on replay at the Quais du Polar website! So, if you want, you can attend vicariously through replays.

Meanwhile, I’m reading All Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby and I hope I’ll have time to read A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane before the festival starts.

The Sheep Queen by Thomas Savage

The Sheep Queen by Thomas Savage (1977) French title: La Reine de l’Idaho. Translated by Pierre Furlan.

I believed I lived in Maine because Maine is about as far as I could get from the ranch in Montana where I grew up, and where my mother was unhappy, my beautiful, angel mother.

The Sheep Queen by Thomas Savage was originally published under the title I Heard My Sister Speak My Name. The change was made in 2001 with the author’s approval.

When the book opens, Thomas Burton, a novelist who lives in Maine, receives a letter from Amy Nofzinger who claims to be his sister. She was born before him and was abandoned by their parents. From then on, Thomas tries to unearth the truth in order to know if her claim is founded. We’re in the 1970s, there are no DNA tests.

When and why would his mother have abandoned a child? How could he reconcile this fact with the mother he knew and loved? She’s dead, he can’t confront her. That leaves him with digging into his memories and writing to his aunts who still live in the west, even after the ranch was sold. The whole novel relates his quest.

Thomas was born in 1912 and came from Idaho royalty. His mother’s family ran a vast and rich sheep ranch and his grandparents were a powerful couple, unusual in their respective roles. His grandmother Emma wore the pants and had married someone who happily let her manage and develop their ranch. Grandpa Thomas was more interested in nature, in bonding with people and especially children. They were lucky to complement each other and back in the 19^th, Emma was happy to find a man who let her develop her talents.

Emma was a force of nature and ran the show with an iron fist. She died at 88, which means she had influence over her children during most of their lives. His aunts still think of what their mother would say about their actions. Emma’s power hasn’t gone.

Thomas’s mother, Elizabeth, was obedient and closer to her father. She was supposed to marry a hotshot heir from the East coast when she fell for the charming Thomas Burton, married him, and left Idaho. She divorced him when Thomas was two and her mother married her to a rancher in Montana. Her life didn’t turn out so well.

In The Sheep Queen, Thomas Savage explores various themes around identity.

Amy and Thomas were both adopted, Amy by the parents who raised her and Thomas by his stepfather. As soon as she knew she was adopted, Amy wanted to know who her birth parents were. She loved her adoptive parents; they were lovely but she always felt that she was a second choice replacement as they adopted her because their son had died.

Thomas never felt at ease with his stepfather’s surname. He never felt he belonged to the ranch in Montana where he grew up after his mother remarried. He kept in touch with his father who wasn’t a reliable man. He had his mother, though.

Amy and Thomas lacked the unconditional love that children deserve to grow with deep and strong roots. Their foundations weren’t a given, they had to work for their steadiness. Thomas always feels a bit out-of-touch with the people around him.

Elizabeth is the product of her time. She had to obey her parents, what she truly wanted had no real value. Emma had a clan-based conception of the family. She expected loyalty and compliance to their status in Idaho. She was formidable and Elizabeth could not stand up to her.

The Sheep Queen is autobiographical. According to Thomas Savage’s bio on Wikipedia, a lot of details about Thomas Burton’s life are the same as his. He didn’t even change the first names.

I thought that the construction of the novel was a bit clumsy at times. We hear a lot about Amy at the beginning and then no more, except as a reference to the letters she exchanges with Thomas. The ending which discloses important information about Elizabeth has details already mentioned in The Power of the Dog, which means that they are based on true facts. I thought they were brilliant when I was reading a novel, but I found them appalling as being real events from Savage’s past.

A fascinating novel.

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.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – Very highly recommended

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1962-1973) French title: Une journée d’Ivan Denissovitch by Alexandre Soljénitsyne. Translated by Lucia and Jean Cathala.

The day we heard about the death of Alexei Navalny is the day I finished reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Talk about a coincidence. It’s hard not to superimpose images from Solzhenitsyn’s book on the description of Navalny’s prison camp in Siberia. 50 years later and nothing has changed.

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov has been in prison camps for eight years. He escaped from the Germans during the war and was considered as a spy by the Russian army. He got 10 years of imprisonment and hasn’t been home since 1941.

He’s in Gang 104 and he’s lucky because Tyurin, the gang’s foreman is a decent guy. The other men in his gang are from various backgrounds. Alyocha got years because he’s a Baptist and won’t give up his religion. Gopchit is a Ukrainian nationalist. Buynovsky is a former Soviet Naval Captain. Kildigs is Latvian and Senka Klevshin was freed from Buchenwald. It is just the illustration that no one was safe in Stalin’s days.

Solzhenitsyn tells us an ordinary day in the life of Shukhov, from his point of view. Shukov is street smart and has learnt all the little tricks to make his life easier at the camp. He does it the right way: he’s not walking over other people and his fellow inmates like him. He just knows how to provide useful services to the right persons. He works hard and is a team player.

His goals are simple: ensuring he gets acceptable tools at work, getting a second helping of food, staying near the stove, protecting his meagre possessions, trading tobacco here and there. All his mental energy revolves around his basic needs: to keep himself fed, warm, rather healthy and out of trouble. Bend the rule and stay safe. Help the right persons and keep one’s dignity. Stay under the radar and be seen as a reliable fellow.

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is based upon Solzhenitsyn’s own experience as a prisoner in such a camp. He describes the rules, the countdown of prisoners, the way meals are organized, the sleeping arrangements. They all wear a number, sewn on their clothes and mandatory.

The most ludicrous part is when Solzhenitsyn describes their working day. They go to work for a contractor and build walls for an upcoming electricity plant. It’s around -27°C that day. There’s snow everywhere and the prisoners are very cold. They spend the whole morning protecting themselves from the biting cold and setting up a stove. There’s no wood for it, so they burn whatever they can. It’s so cold that the mortar freezes before they can use it if they’re not cautious. Building a wall is a stupid idea in this weather.

It’s utter inefficiency: they are left to their own devices, so imagine a gang with no one who ever worked in construction. There’s no direction from a foreman, they have to guess how to build this wall. They are so cold that they destroy tools and scaffoldings to take the wood and feed the stove. Shukhov is a Jack of all trades and it helps that he can work with his hands. He knows how to build a brick wall.

Like in Fateless by Imre Kertész, Shukhov’s train of thought is pragmatic. He adjusts to his environment. Solzhenitsyn’s style also reminded me of Gogol. It’s inventive, humorous and according to the author, faithful to the argot language of the camps.

It’s not as hard to read as If This is a Man by Primo Levi because of Solzhenitsyn’s style. He doesn’t sugarcoat the living conditions of the prisoners but he pictures a down-to-earth character who adapts to the camp, makes the best of it and keeps his moral boundaries. He behaves like a decent human being and thus retains his humanity in a dehumanizing setting.

Very highly recommended.

This is part of my Tame the TBR project. I don’t know why it took me so long to get to this book.