Mme. Barbery's Divine Gallic Charm

"Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate while others are born. And in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb. So let us drink a cup of tea."

Wise words from Parisian concierge Renee, who makes pedagogical efforts to appear semi-retarded so as not to upset those bourgeois notions about intelligence and class still tenderly held by the majority of her oblivious, self-absorbed employers. 

French author Muriel Barbery's delicious novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog (now available in paperback) merits its runaway success, and much credit must go to Alison Anderson's rich and skillful translation. The quiet story of how the intellectual Renee is coached out of her shell by the arrival of a Japanese tenant, is delicately mirrored by the precocious musings of twelve-year-old Paloma, the daughter of another tenant, as she calmly plans her own suicide.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog's combination of bourgeois mise-en-scene, cinematic references, lush reveling in la table, philosophical and metaphysical debate and Japanese esthetics makes this book so irresistibly, well, French. Barbery's light touch triggered a surprisingly strong emotional response from this reader.  A particular highlight is Renee's flinching in the face of an employer's grammatical confusion between the verbs "to bring" and "to take." A confusion, I fear, which is so rampantly out of control in American English that it may need to be given up as a lost cause.

(Note to fans: Barbery's first book, Gourmet Rhapsody (Une Gourmandise) will be released in the USA this coming August.)

International Man Booker Prize

Canadian author Alice Munro has been awarded the 2009 International Man Booker Prize, in recognition of her "practically perfect" short story collections, chronicling small town Ontarian life. She could be considered a 'domestic' writer,(to use that slightly derogative term so associated with the concerns of us little women) following in the footsteps of Austen and Eliot, though she is more similar to Muriel Spark than Anita Brookner, as she tackles big issues in the miniaturist form (though without Spark's bite). The announcement was a minor upset, as Australian author Peter Carey had been deemed the favorite to win this time around. 

(photo: Andrew Testa / Rex Features)

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned...

Wells Tower's first story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, appeared in my in-box weeks ago, but I only got around to it during our recent break by Chesapeake Bay - an appropriate landscape of Waspish towns and lobsters shacks, pick-up trucks and yacht yards, foreclosed condos and back-creek ranchers in which to read his derisive assessment of our uncanny ability to balls-up the American dream. Tower's book has been extensively reviewed since idling on my desk, with raves from such as the New York Times to the Independent - so I guess the short story is not, quite, dead. So many raves that it seemed heavily freighted to disappoint.

It didn't. It is a remarkable debut about dysfunctional fathers and sons, sibling rivalry, bickering buddies, and messy love affairs, whose relentless catalogue of misery is saved - made bearable, made un-putdownable - by a combination of savage humor and literary agility. In "Retreat," a brother's festering jealousy peaks in the nastiest of conclusions, in "Wild America," adolescent despair and competitiveness swerves by disaster, and in the title story, a speedy yarn of gut-churning violence recounted in chirpy American-ese, two happy-go-lucky Vikings learn the unsettling side-effects of developing a conscience. Man's inability to vanquish lust, greed, envy, and careless destructiveness, Tower implies, stands between us and the potential for paradise. And the price paid for love is to lie awake night after night, waiting to hear "the sounds of men rowing toward your home." A chewy, heartbreaking collection - heartily recommended. 

I'm doing this for your own good...

Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers, published in 1981, is a menacing novella about a violent and erotic misadventure in the gorgeously dank seediness of Venice. I can't say I enjoyed it but observing McEwan wield his scalpel against his defenseless characters is hypnotic and addictive. James Woods, in an article in the April 30th issue of The London Review of Books, explores McEwan's literary focus on trauma, which, he argues, McEwan uses as a metaphor to explore loss of innocence. Woods characterizes McEwan as a distinctly manipulative author, but an author who manipulates in order to underscore the very fictive nature of fiction itself. Using Atonement as an example, he explores, convincingly, reasons why some readers were so offended by this novel's structure and denouement, and concludes that our yearning for happy endings is in some way indicative of the "banality" of our own literary pretensions. McEwan, it could be said, is teaching us a lesson by relieving us of our innocence. Ouch.

A Hidden Gem Revealed

Scottish author Robin Jenkins wrote over thirty novels, collections of short stories and various articles, in a long career that spanned from his first publication in 1951 till his death in 2005. Many of his books are sadly out of print in the US (though second-hand copies can be tracked down), and I try to find them whenever I return to Scotland. My latest import was Poverty Castle (1991), a novel-within-a-novel, in which an author, respected but rarely read, tries to finish one final work before he dies; he want to write a novel about happiness deserved. He invents the captivating Semphill family; a guileless and gentle father and five daughters all named after Walter Scott heroines, whose self-contained contentment is put at risk by the mother's inability to grasp her astounding good fortune and her desperate yearning for more. Into the family comes Peggy Gilchrist, a poor student from Glasgow, and the story becomes, as all Jenkins's do, a parable about class. Peggy's education is beginning to alienate her from her own family, but she resents her feelings of admiration for the Semphills. "The working class grudge the rich being rich," her mother says. "Whit they hate is for one of themselves to rise in the world. You should ken, Peggy." Poverty Castle begins like a fairy tale, as beguiling as its setting in Argyll, and ends with human nature having extracted its toll.

Annie's Ghosts

Steve Luxenberg recently released a family memoir, entitled Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret. Not long before his mother's death Luxenberg had discovered that she was not the only child she had always claimed to be; after her death he decided to find out more about this elusive missing aunt. My review for WYPR, Maryland Public Radio, can be heard here, and an excerpt appears below:

Steve Luxenburg has been with the Washington Post for many years and his book stands as a testament to his stringent adherence to the best practices of the news profession and to his determination to sift his own prose for sentimentality or unqualified assumptions. "I felt somewhat trapped between the roles of son and journalist," he writes. As a son he was often tempted to rise to his mother's defense...

Annie's Ghosts proves, as the best non-fiction does, that true facts about true lives need no embellishments to be startling or moving, and while Luxenburg rattled inside his family closet it was inevitable that other skeletons would fall out. "What is the relationship between secrets and the ability to keep secrets and the integrity of the family? he asks, probing his own intentions, because he uncovers more than he bargained for.

            

Red: the Color that Advances...

Recently I had the good fortune to interview the Maryland-based poet, Michael Salcman, about his life and work, and his complimentary careers as neurosurgeon and bard. We talked of many things, of testing metaphors and art collecting, of the social responsibility of the writer and the challenge of language. And while re-visiting his poetry, I encountered a perfect articulation of how important comparison (and therefore criticism) is to human perception and understanding, in the poem "Red: The Color that Advance" from his collection, The Clock Made of Confetti.  I post it as a defense (albeit small) for the role of the book critic, and the value of being able to sift the wheat from the chaff, (which need not temper the enjoyment of both, because without one we could not distinguish the other - a thought which, taken to its conclusion, could argue for the necessary existence of the devil but that's a subject for another post...).  Resist the temptation, dear readers, of settling for "good-enough"; brave the slur of elitism.

When you try to make a point, they always say

"who are we to judge?" as if it weren't

a question but a fact that everything in the world's

of equal value. But the brain is built to compare

and can't see red unless there's a green nearby,

can't know comfort without some painful contrast.

Cezanne intuitivly knew the brain sees red,

knew the eye was his touch extended,

that a green cloth and blue salver made

the apple red, that it takes two colors

to make a parade or a procession.

In a bowl of painted fruit

red is the color that advances.

Heart and Soul

Heart and Soul is Maeve Binchy's fifteenth novel, and my first taste of her work. It has torn to the top of the best-seller lists in Australia and Canada and is hurtling upward in the US and the UK. Having had my own work compared to Binchy (flattering for me, not so much for Ms. Binchy, I suspect), I had thought to find it more literary, more miserable, more dense, and less susceptible to the lure of the happy ending. Heart and Soul may be marked as novel but it is actually linked short stories set in and around a heart clinic in Ireland. Old-fashioned, chirpy, dialogue -heavy, it reminds me of those large-print books my grandmother loaned from the library, with their obvious pitch to entertainment and romance. I can't decide if Binchy has a light touch or is light-weight. Like a good soap opera, her book was addictive. Still, I was concerned - not by Ms. Binchy who enjoys a loyal following (and how could you say anything derogative about an author who appears from her photo to be nicest human being ever to pick up a pen?) - but on my own abilities to give my work heft. Hmm.

Ok, we can keep it....

Recent home renovations have resulted in a very messy basement, and last weekend his nibs and I began trying to whip it into shape. On dusty shelves at the back skulk books on death row - a mere judgement away from the re-cycling bucket, their stringy spines saved only by nostalgia - tatty thrillers, out of date guidebooks, bargain basement glossies. One of the grubbiest of all is a Thomas Cooke European railway timetable from July 1988, whose yellowed pages and miniscule type once saved his nibs and I from crashing homeless with our backpacks on the floor of Paris's Gare du Nord by informing us of the sleeper train to Rome. 

I voted to toss it; he voted to keep. A hung jury until today, when I found it slotted at number 7 on Malcolm Pryce's list of the top ten expatriate tales - ever. Ok, you win, boss, we can keep it...

New British Poet Laureate Named

The Glasgow-born poet, Carol Ann Duffy, has just been named Britain's first female Poet Laureate. The appointment was expected but controversial, with some loving her work, and others seeing the selection as politically or culturally motivated - being both a Scot and a lesbian, she riles some on many fronts. Read a short bio and some samples of her work here. (Photo credit: Anvil).