"A girl was never ruined by books," my mother used to say. I've spent most of my life trying to prove that wrong.

Sunday, May 19, 2019

Returning to the Past: Patrick Modiano and Pedigree

Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014 for the body of his work which includes a couple of dozen novels and "autofictions:" the Nobel citation says the prize was given "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation. " Obviously there is a lot of imaginative work here, because Modiano was born in July 1945, just as the War was ending, and knew the Occupation only through the memories of others.

Pedigree purports to be the truth behind his fictions, the story of his life up until the time he published his first, widely acclaimed novel, La Place de l’Étoile at the age of 23. The title of this work is a pun, referring both to the Paris landmark and to the wartime joke about the Jew who was asked where la Place de l'étoile was, and who pointed to the left side of his chest where Jews were supposed to display the yellow star that marked them for Nazi persecution.

What happened to one's family in the past is a question that many writers return to again and again. In Modiano's case finding out has required much sleuthing, and more than once he's prepared a partial answer. A case in point is La rue des boutiques obscures , which is almost surrealistic in its presentation of tantalizing hints about what the truth is. In Pedigree: A Memoir the portrait he paints of his dysfunctional family is damning. He suggests at one point that his mother cared more about her little, pedigreed lap dog than she did about her two sons. He reports near the end his father's heavy-handed machinations designed to get him to follow a conventional path. He chronicles the way he defied his father, and adds with only a little regret, that he wishes his father had lived to see his success.

But one person's obsessions, however strangely fascinating when encountered for the first time, can grow boring. Dany Laferrière, the Haitian-Québécois now a member of the Académie française, says his literary work is like a house that he has returned to many times, remodelling it and adding new rooms. In his case, I would advise reading The Enigma of the Return where his story is presented in its most poetic and searing version to date.

Similarly, Modiano seems trapped by his past and France's past. He writes well, but my advice would be to read this book and not to bother with his others.

Thursday, May 16, 2019

Picking Books to Read Next: The List for the Awater Library 2019-2020 Is Finalized!

Gearing up for another season of good reading at the Atwater Library! Here are the books and the dates for the 2019-2020 season: all the books are in the library, so start reading! (Of course, we have one more session set for Wednesday, June 12 when we'll talk about Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology. The discussions are open to anyone.)


2019
Sept 11
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
It is 1945, and 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women with a shared history, all of whom seem determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be?

Oct. 9
Small Country by Gaêl Faye
Burundi, 1992. For ten-year-old Gabriel, life in his comfortable expatriate neighborhood of Bujumbura with his French father, Rwandan mother and little sister Ana, is something close to paradise. But dark clouds are gathering over this small country, and soon their peaceful existence will shatter when Burundi, and neighboring Rwanda, are brutally hit by civil war and genocide.

Nov. 13
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth

Dec. 11
MILKMAN Anna Burns
In Northern Ireland during the Troubles of the 1970s, an unnamed narrator finds herself targeted by a high-ranking dissident known as Milkman. The 2018 Man Booker Prize winner.


2020
Feb. 12
Songs for the Cold of Heart by Éric Dupont (Peter McCambridge, translator)
A yarn to rival the best of them, a big fat whopper of a tall tale that bounces around from provincial Rivière-du-Loup in 1919 to Nagasaki, 1990s Berlin, Rome and beyond. This is the story of a century — long and glorious, stuffed full of parallels, repeating motifs and unforgettable characters — with the passion and plotting of a modern-day Tosca. (Originally published as La fiancée américaine.)

March 18
Women Talking by Miriam Toews
One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.

April 8
The Break by Katerena Vermette
When Stella, a young Métis mother, looks out her window one evening and spots someone in trouble on the Break — a barren field on an isolated strip of land outside her house — she calls the police to alert them to a possible crime.

May 13
Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield - the weary, demoralized men marching in the rain during the German attack on Caporetto; the profound struggle between loyalty and desertion

June 10
American War by Omar El Akkad
In the not too distant future, the United States is again at war with itself. Fossil fuels, which have decimated the environment, are banned, but the states rich in them refuse to comply and thus break away from the union, resulting in biological warfare, drones as killing machines, and state fighting against state. 
 
P.S. The painting is by Gotthard Kuehl and done in 1894. 

Friday, May 3, 2019

The Rich Are Still Different from You and Me...

Kevin Kwan's books about the rich and famous in China, Singapore and environs are compulsive reading, I find. The first one Crazy Rich Asians I picked up because I liked Singapore a lot the couple of times I visited. I continued reading because it really is a remake of a Jane Austen novel, like Pride and Prejudice where the major intrigue is about marrying off rich young men and somewhat poorer women. The background is how the wealthy lived in early 19th century Britain: here it is the recent wealth of the Asian Tigers.

The richest people in  China Rich Girlfriend , the second of the trilogy, are mainland Chinese who are worth billions and billions. We don't learn anything about how they got their money: that's lost in the mist of what happened in the last 30 years of the 20th century as China changed its way of doing business. What we see is extravagance and nary a thought for ordinary folk. Rachel Chu, who functions as the Austenian heroine, provides some semblance of a moral compass, but otherwise the novel is enough to make one wonder what happened to the Revolution, any revolution...

I thought of that this morning as I found this story in the New York Times: "Admissions Scandal: When ‘Hard Work’ (Plus $6.5 Million) Helps Get You Into Stanford" https://www.nytimes.com/…/yusi-molly-zhao-china-stanford.ht… truth is right up here with fiction.
The photo, BTW, is of construction in Shanghai 12 years ago, as the city was being rebuilt.