William Alexander – Flirting with French

Tags

Book Review, Flirting With French, France, French Language, Humour, Language, William Alexander

Enchantée! Formidable!

(Nervously worries whether that extra e is correct, and whether I rolled the r properly)

I do hope William Alexander won’t mind me making the obvious connection between him and that other American ‘Billiam’ – Bryson – that there are a lot of similarities between the two. Both (from author photos) are genial appearing bear-like men. Both are clearly extremely erudite, wonderfully, subtly witty, weave magic with words, have a fine line in self-deprecating humour, and a light-touch wearing of their evidently extensive knowledge. Both also have minds and a writing style which does not go from London to Edinburgh in a straight line, grimly in pursuit of the journey’s end, instead preferring to ramble about delightfully on the scenic route, taking in Japan, Alaska and other surprising destinations along the way. And paradoxically, they both manage to cram all the rambles into a probably shorter (well, it certainly feels that way) journey than that taken by a more linear, less joie de vivre-ish sort of writer.

William Alexander, a dedicated Francophile, with fantasies of being French is presented with a couple of challenges to this fantasy. One is that he doesn’t speak French. And the second is that he is in his 50s, long past the ‘window of opportunity’ for becoming bilingual, or even fluent, according to various experts on the learning of language itself, and the learning of a second or additional language in particular.

This wonderfully good humoured book explores William’s sterling, perhaps foolhardy efforts to become someone who thinks and speaks like a Frenchman. Along the way, he even adopts a new name, in case this will help. ‘Guy’ pronounced the French way naturellement comes from a shortening of the French version of his own name (cue opera by Rossini)

Less happily along the way William discovers he suffers from atrial fibrillation, and more seriously ventricular fibrillation and has several shocking (literally) medical experiences, whilst he half-idly wonders whether the extreme stress and struggle of his attempts to engage with the language have hastened the ‘breaking’ or break-down, of his heart.

(Here is a lesson for all those of us who are not French : this is how to do it, magnificently, and with impeccably rolled rs – come on, now rrrrrrrrrregrrrrrrrrrrette rrrrrrrrrrrrien – you too will be applauded like this, by an ecstatic audience, if you get those rolls as brilliantly executed as this lady manages:)

There are marvellous, fascinating and witty explanations of language theory, an exploration of the frankly illogical (sorry!) language which assigns the masculine gender to breasts and the feminine gender to beards. Unless the French were always just more nuanced than the English around fixed positions on gender. In which case, kudos, amis et amies. Or is this an fine example of French humour?. The French clearly also are streets ahead of us English speakers in mathematical ability, since their numbering system oddly at times includes multiplication and addition – quatre vingt , quatre vingt dix and the like.

I have now become as fixated on wanting to read more of William’s writing as he is about wanting to speak better French. A book on growing tomatoes (!) and one on baking bread awaits. The man is a raconteur to the manner born, and probably has a whole fleet of shaggy dogs to take out on rambles

Flirting with French Amazon UK
Flirting with French Amazon USA

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Mary Stewart – Nine Coaches Waiting

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1950s setting, Book Review, France, Gothic Romance, Jane Eyre, Mary Stewart, Nine Coaches Waiting, Romantic Thriller

Now I am not, in the general run of things, a reader of the Romance genre. Not unless there is a lot more going on than just the simple story of boy/girl meets boy/girl, there is some sort of problem, there may also be some sort of rival boy/girl and the main couple will/will not surmount the obstacle and live happily ever after/die a horrible death.

In fact, it has to be said I infinitely (in literature!) prefer the tragic end/star crossed lovers scenario than the Hollywood, sunset, hearts, flowers, wedding bells wrap. Unless skilfully done, with lots more going on (yes, that’s you, Jane Austen, incomparable writer of fine romance and much more) the genre leads to a sugar overload which might predispose regular readers to diabetes.

So, it is no wonder that I never encountered Mary Stewart, as she does belong firmly on the Romance shelf – and, but, and, but I would therefore never have ventured there – till my interest was piqued by fellow blogger Fleur In Her World who likes the same sort of lit-ficcy stuff I do, and for very similar reasons. She was praising Stewart to the skies. So I asked her to recommend one. And this is it.

Cinderella’s glass slipper, JennaLee27, Deviant Art Commons

Now, for sure this sits firmly within the genre, in that there is a man and a woman who will meet, there are problems ahead, there is indeed some possible rival and there will be/or not some resolution of satisfaction or dissatisfaction for our central characters (and no, I shan’t tell, you’ll have to read the book if you really want to know) Suffice it to be said though that Mary Stewart, now having some of her work re-issued in the `Modern Classic’ category, was a prolific writer of Gothic romance-thrillers. Oh, and ‘Gothic’ is not used in the twenty first century sense to mean that you are going to be unpleasantly surprised to find a job lot of vampires werewolves zombies and ghosts have somehow got trapped within the pages. Think, more, the idea of dark secrets, high drama, possibly an isolated setting, or the idea of all this in the mind of our doughty probably female protagonist. She writes with a history which happily acknowledges `Gothic’ in the sense of Austen’s Northanger Abbey, or, even more pertinently for THIS book, Jane Eyre, rather than Hammer Horror Central Casting. The Gothic is very real and very human.

Still from Robert Stevenson’s 1944 film of Jane Eyre

I was hooked from page one to page-the-end. There is indeed a dark thriller, we have men tall, dark, handsome, charismatic and probably not to be trusted. It is the 1950s. Our central character , Linda Martin. (shades of Jane Eyre, which even she acknowledges, as she is a well-read young woman) is an orphan, whose parents died when she was young. She spent the second half of her childhood in an orphanage, and then, as a young assistant in a dreary school. Chance comes Linda’s way to become a governess (hello Jane!) to a little boy, scion of a family with a dark past and a probably darker future, deep in the French countryside. The family have a slightly different version of Mr Rochester on board. For reasons which are perfectly intelligent Linda, who is half-French (French mother, English father) and who lived in France until her parents’ death pretends that she speaks very little French and understands even less – the employer was strict in their requirement for an ENGLISH governess as they wanted the boy spoken to only in English – though there may be other reasons for this. Linda’s hiding of her perfect French and her French ancestry gives rise to a lot of intentional humour for the reader.

if filet mignon can be translated as darling steak this was the very sweetheart of its kind

Linda is a most attractive heroine, given to self-mockery, and is someone who rather enjoys winding up the bad-tempered people she meets with deliberate mangling of `Franglais’ to annoy. And her incisive thoughts about certain people are a joy:

She radiated all the charm and grace of a bad-tempered skunk

Thonon-les-Bains, Haute Savoie, where the book is set. Wiki Commons

There are apposite little quotes, often from Shakespeare, as sub-chapter headings – our heroine/narrator, as stated earlier, is a reader.

Stewart is a wonderful writer – and particularly, a wonderful evoker of landscape. As I did some exploration into her life and works, I was utterly unsurprised to find she was a passionate gardener. Anyone who can so beautifully and evocatively describe plants, trees, skies, light and the scents, sights and sounds of the natural world is someone who has spent loving time within that world.

….the little dell…was sheltered and sun-drenched, a green shelf in the middle of the wood. Behind us the trees and bushes of the wild forest crowded up the hill, dark holly and the bone-pale boughs of ash gleaming sharp through a mlst of birch as purple as bloom on a grape

And, just like Miss Austen and Miss Bronte, Miss Stewart comes from a time when what is undoubtedly sex and desire is rendered much more potent for the fact it is not laid out for us. She is much more interested in exploring the subtle workings of the human psyche, than the rather more prosaic exploration of removed garments and anatomical diagram!

Haute Savoie region, Wiki Commons

And, suffice it to say I have now downloaded Stewart’s My Brother Michael, also highly praised by Fleur, and will be skulking the Romance shelves of my local library to find more by this fine author.

Nine Coaches Waiting Amazon UK
Nine Coaches Waiting Amazon USA

Miranda Richmond Mouillot – A Fifty Year Silence

Tags

A Fifty Year Silence, Biography and Autobiography, Book Review, France, Miranda Richmond Mouillot, Second World War

For the love of France, and of Family

Simply, I loved this book, though it took me quite some time to realise that.

Miranda Richmond Mouillot, an American woman whose maternal grandparents were Jews living in France at the time of the Second World War, was driven to discover the truth about the effects of that devastating time on her grandparents, individually, and on their relationship

Her grandparents had a seemingly rather unusual story : they met, at some point in the 40s, as two very different people, trying to make sense of themselves in a time and place without sense. Anna was a doctor, specialising in lung medicine. Armand did not have such a clear vocation, although later he was an interpreter at the Nuremburg trials (he spoke German as well as French) More specifically he was one of the interpreters and translators involved in translating Goering’s spoken testimony.

Alba la Romaine, Ardeche

At some earlier point, as part of a group of Jews trying to stay a step ahead of the Nazi occupation of France, the two met. Actually, they seem to have met, lost contact and made contact on a few occasions. It is assumed that they fell in love. They certainly married and had two children. And at some point bought a house in Alba-la-Romaine. However, something hidden, not addressed by either, some family secret, happened in that marriage, and after a very short period Anna left France with her children, and the two never spoke to each other again, though certainly Anna’s daughter, Miranda’s mother, and Miranda herself, stayed in contact with both of them. Armand moved to Switzerland. Armand particularly would neither speak to, nor about, Anna. Mention of her threw him into cold rages

Anna and Armand in happier times

Miranda needed to understand what had happened in her family, but for more than purely individual reasons.

The book is her quest, through visits and conversations with her beloved grandmother and her more distant, erratic grandfather, to get to the narrative of those lives – and the lives of others, in that time. Through her own experience as the grandchild of European Jews, she shows how the dark events of those times still continue a presence handed down to later generations.

….my grandparents were hounded not only by the memory of what they’d lived through in the war, not only by the loss of all that had been destroyed in those six years, but also by the exhausting injunction, “never forget”

The book is fascinating as a piece of investigation, but is much more than that. There is the objective truth which might be provided by records and the like, and then there are the personal stories, the memories which overlay the stories, and indeed may come to feel more real than what may be indicated by records. There is something also, mysterious, some sort of ‘collective unconscious’. For example, Miranda’s potent, overwhelming response to the sight of the dilapidated, decaying, neglected house her grandparents had bought half a century earlier – her sense of coming home.

I’m not revealing any of the rather complex personal stories which Miranda found, as answers to her quest, as that is the reader’s journey to make. There is also much that she failed to discover, and the failures, the not-knowns, became in the end as potent as what was known, in terms of what the whole process of finding precise causes and effects to her family mystery, means to the one desperately searching for meaning. It’s about the journey, the reasons we have for making and needing a journey, not about the revelations of solution to mystery. Indeed the mystery of that time, goes wider than purely the narrative , or attempt at a narrative, of one particular family; so much of what happened in Europe at that time still seems beyond any rational comprehension

Castle, Alba (and, no this wasn’t the dwelling Anna and Armand bought!)

Mouillot writes very well – and, at times, but not too often, she writes beautifully, arrestingly. And what I mean by that, is that the reader is along for the journey, and from time to time the author will make a comment which stops the reader in their tracks, and makes them think – often a statement which needs to be reflected on, and sometimes a passage of description of the landscape, the country, the people, which rather grabs the reader by the heart and takes them inside the experience she wishes to help us feel.

That you even exist is a miracle; a miracle that you’re here; a miracle that we’re alive; a miracle that we survived. As a child, I’d thought miracles were good. But Jewish tradition teaches that miracles are ambiguous. After all, if the universe really was created in the image of the Divine Spirit, there should be no need for miracles

As I progressed deeper onwards through the book, I found myself, often, with tears pouring down my face, because something of the heart of the experience of ‘another’ – other lives, had struck me. And I did not always rationally know where those tears had come from. In the end, I discovered pages and pages of highlighted text, where Mouillot had made me pause, pause, pause again and understand something of experiences of another time and place, filtered down the generations.

Who could wear a wedding band after learning of the stacks of them stripped off perished fingers? Who could read by the light cast through a lampshade?

This is a very tender book, soulful and authentic, and took me to many more reflective places than I initially expected. Recommended without reservations

This is released on the 28th January to download and in hardback in the UK, and in America on 20th January. I received it as an ARC from the publisher, via NetGalley.

A Fifty Year Silence Amazon UK
A Fifty Year Silence Amazon USA

And I’m grateful to Cleopatralovesbooks who alerted me to this one on one of her Friday Finds memes, last month

Anthony Doerr – All The Light We Cannot See

Tags

All The Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr, Book Review, France, Germany, Second World War

Almost unbearably delicate, almost unbearably tender; strong as diamond.

This is one of those properly fabulous books which gently, carefully wraps skeins of gossamer around the reader, taking its time, settling into character, relationship and location, until it steals upon you, that for all the quietness and subtlety of the scene setting, you are wrapped up, little fly, in Doerr’s spider’s web of a novel, which traps you more deeply, line by line

Paris, 1934 and later St. Malo, before and during the war. Marie-Laure is a young girl, whose father works as a locksmith in the Museum. She is precocious, intelligent, sensitive, with a thirst for knowledge. Loved and loveable. And she is blind.

1934, an orphanage in Zollverein, a coal mining complex near Essen. Werner Pfennig, a scant year older than Marie-Laure, is another young child with huge potential. He is fascinated by how things work, and has a gift for making, repairing, deconstructing in order to improve. He too is precocious, intelligent, sensitive, with a thirst for knowledge, Loved and loveable.

What divides these children is formative influence, although both are lucky enough to have their humanity and potential fostered enough at an early age to mean that the boy who will be swallowed by the propaganda machine of Fascism and the Fascists, will not quite have that early potentiality for the curious, connecting, mutuality that life also is, crushed.

Though the State worked its hardest to crush out individuality and curiosity for ‘the other’ out of their young men and women, some kernel of something else may remain unscathed, like a dormant seed.

The book’s structure jumps between various times, back and forth, and between short chapters which alternate between Marie-Laure’s world, and Werner’s. Doerr takes us to the edge of certain events, then back tracks, to show a part of the journey that led there, jumps forward again, then back, but always switching between the two worlds of Marie-Laure and Werner, in the ten years between 1934 and a particular event in St. Malo. The reader is absolutely aware the two will meet, and is absolutely aware that there is a very human integrity in both children – and moreover, Doerr is careful to show that despite the most vicious and brutal efforts of any ideology which seeks to educate out the humane response, this survives, more or less strongly, in some individuals.

Knobbed Whelk Shells, Wiki Commons

What I particularly loved (amongst many things) in this book, was the undercurrent of connection to the natural world – Marie-Laure has a fascination with molluscs, and how shells are slowly formed, how life slowly built up. Werner has a friend who shimmers with a love of birds – these connections to ‘other’ are both real and metaphor. Music, reading, an appreciation for the beautiful which has no connection to its material value – but is some evidence of ‘soulfulness’ is shown.

Venality, brutality, bleak violence, the other side are of course also revealed.

Historical Postcards of St. Malo

Holding this complex, thought inspiring book together is not just fabulous, layered, surprising authentic characterisation, but a plotline which provides a drive, cohesion and both a ‘real’ and a metaphorical meaning of its own.

Within the Paris museum which Marie-Laure’s father works at, is a fabulous, hugely valuable jewel. And like many fabulous, valuable jewels it comes with its own story, and has accreted fables to itself, over the generations. People invest things with meaning, magic and metaphor. Are these real, or not?

As the German army move closer to Paris, the museum curator takes steps to break up and hide some of France’s artistic and crafted treasures.

The army of occupation is also on a quest of plunder, to search for and steal the treasures of conquered nations.

There is a game of hide and seek, and this is played out in several ways

This book is definitely a page-turner – but it is one which urges the reader to take time with the turning, because so much is going on, unfolding, evolving, revealing.

Doerr writes beautifully, but not ostentatiously so. He has also kept his story simple and clear. Yes, of course, like any story there will be ‘coincidences’ but life is full of these. And most of the ‘coincidences’, other than the ones of sheer happenstance, why this person might be in this place and not another, are authentically driven by who characters are.

There is that lovely sense of a writer, sure, who knows what he is doing, but one who has surrendered to the complexity of the arising characters. This is not a writer who picks up a character and plonks him or her like a cog in a machine, so that the reader spots manipulation.

Replica of Koh-I-Noor Diamond, Wiki Commons

From the molten basements of the world, two hundred miles down, it comes. One crystal in a seam of others. Pure carbon, each atom linked to four equidistant neighbors, perfectly knit, octahedral, unsurpassed in hardness. Already it is old : unfathomably so. Incalculable eons tumble past. The earth shifts, shrugs, stretches. One year, one day, one hour, a great magma gathers a seam of crystals and drives it towards the surface, mile after burning mile; it cools inside a huge, smoking xenolith of kimberlite, and there it waits.

Doerr’s beautiful description of the forces which produce diamonds, also spoke to me both of the evolution of life itself, human endeavour and development and of creative impulse.

The writer too, may be percolating a story, hidden in the darkness, for a lifetime. It too with one year, one day, one hour get driven towards the surface, a burning mile. And cool, and wait, and allow process to arise, work to be done, the jewel to be cut, crafted, polished, revealed – and released to the reader, to give it the fables and the stories they will.

I loved this, profoundly.

Doerr was named as one of Granta’s Best Young American novelists. Well deserved.

And, for once the dust jacket comparisons to a couple of other books, if you loved, you will love, type of thing, (Atonement, Birdsong) I think are compliments to those earlier books, that they share a space with this fine one.

I received this from Amazon Vine UK as a copy for review. Lucky me. One to keep and re-read, for sure.

All The Light We Cannot See Amazon UK
All The Light We Cannot See Amazon UK

Rosemary Say – Rosie’s War: An Englishwoman’s Escape From Occupied France

Tags

Autobiography, Book Review, France, Rosemary Say, Rosie's War, Second World War

Curiously Flat Restraint Eventually Becomes Absorbing

This book, an account written after Rosemary Say’s death, was completed by her daughter and son-in-law. Say was a young woman working as an au-pair in France at the time of the German invasion. This is the story of her left-it-too-late-didn’t-really see-it-coming 2 year attempt to keep her head down, and stay in France – and, when it-had-already-come and she was interned, to survive and escape. The subject matter was of interest to me, as I hadn’t really given much thought before to non-Jewish foreign nationals, living in France once Great Britain and Germany were at war.

The preface, by Rosemary Say’s daughter, talks about how getting her mother to express how she FELT while the events were happening, or how she FELT after the reflections of decades, was a little like drawing teeth. I guess part of it was the time itself, when emotional baring of the soul was far less common, when keeping a stiff upper lip and just getting on with things was the modus operandi, but, coupled with this, I surmise was Say’s own character. She does not seem to be a person particularly overburdened with imagination, which can be a good thing as well as a bad thing! It was possibly that lack of imagination – and a political naivite and disinterest which led to her not leaving France at an earlier time in the first place.

Initially, I struggled a little with the book, as that very absence of emotion in the writing meant it was harder to be drawn in to imagining what it must have been like. She doesn’t paint the pictures, there’s a fairly dry recounting, but as I got further into the book, I became more and more absorbed by her very economy of words, her brisk, rather self-effacing personality and style of writing, and her very lack of emotionalism. This is not a shock-and-weep-fest. She continues to hide more than she reveals, and is pretty brisk and terse about the various love affairs. Ms Say was clearly no prude, and recounts without emotion both encounters in which she used her sex to bargain for favours with officials, as well as relationships with lovers for pure pleasure. She seems to have been pretty pragmatic about the former, and there is no suggestion that rape or coercion was involved (however much the inequality between her and the man offering something she needed in return for sex, is obvious) Much more emotion accrues to her sense of injustice involved in the pecuniary transactions she and her family had, with the British Government, over the financial cost of her eventual return to the UK, following her escape. Although she chose to ignore the original advice to get out, the fact remained that when she eventually set out to leave France, the Embassy official gave her some rather extraordinarily bad advice, telling her to go back to Paris as part of the route, when everyone was fleeing in the opposite direction as the Germans invaded.

In the end, I concluded Say’s at times irritating reserve and refusal to ‘spill her soul’ was a real and positive advantage, giving me more of an insight to how times have changed, and how sometimes our over-readiness to emote can be too much. Less can be more

Rosie’s War Amazon UK
Rosie’s War Amazon USA