Monthly Archives: September 2010

Katherine Pancol: Un homme à distance (2001) An Epistolary Novel about Books

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This little book, Un homme à distance, only 160 pages long, is a real gem. I was so enchanted by it. In the evenings I could hardly wait to get back from work and go on reading. Why it has not been translated is a total mystery to me as it would find a multitude of readers in the English-speaking world.  It is also surprising since Katherine Pancol lived in the States where she took creative writing courses at the Columbia University. It is a novel in letters and a novel about books that has been compared to 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. We find the same passion for books, the same enchantment. The story is quite simple. A young woman, owner of a book shop in Fécamp (a fishing port with an attractive seafront promenade located between Le Havre and Dieppe, in the French Normandy region), starts a correspondence with a mysterious man. They exchange their thoughts on all sorts of books, some I had never heard of before but, as a true addict, had to buy immediately since I knew the others and they are all outstanding.

The tone of this novel is quite melancholic. The young shopkeeper is heartbroken about the end of an affair which makes her live like a recluse. This correspondence brings her back to life. The end stunned me. It was not what I had expected.

Let’s hope  she will be translated or that the one or the other reader of this post does read  French.

As many of the books mentioned are absolute favourites of mine and the others seem to be must-reads too and for all those who are curious, I made a list.

Contrary to Pancol’s books they are all available as translations.

The Great Meaulnes or The Lost Estate by Henri Alan-Fournier. The Princess de Clèves by Mme de Lafayette. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids  Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke. The Wild Palms by William Faulkner. Three Horses by Erri de Luca

Bakunin’s Son by Sergio d’Atzeni. The House of Others by Silvio d’Arzo. What Maisie Knew by Henry James

Les liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos. Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan  Zweig. The Letters of a Portuguese Nun.

Cousin Bette by Balzac. Les Diaboliques by Barbey d’Aurevilly. Doomed Love Camilo Castelo Branco. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert.

A Selection of the Chroniques by Guy de Maupassant. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Sonnets from the Portuguese by  Elizabeth Browning. The Journal of Delacroix

The only one that has not been translated is Confidence africaine by Roger Martin du Gard.

One that would need to be rediscovered is The Lost Estate. It is probably the novel that influenced Fitzgerald in writing The Great Gatsby. But, as stated before, all the books on this list are excellent and remarkable.

Katherine Pancol has written quite a lot of books. They have all been very successful in France, even more so than this one. The most notable seem to be Les yeux jaunes des crocodiles, La valse lente des tortues and Les écureuils du Central Park sont triste le lundi.

You can visit Katherine´s French/English Homepage.

Margaret Carroll: A Dark Love (2009) A Novel of Romantic Suspense

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I just recently discovered that I like Romantic Suspense. I thought I did not like any kind of romance too much, with the exception of some Paranormal Romance that is and… There are other exceptions. As a matter of fact, the genre is better than its reputation. I’m just not into the sugar-coating kind. And marriage at the end? I couldn’t care less.  And explicit sex scenes are not my thing either. When it comes to Romantic Suspense, there is quite a wide range. Keren Rose is known to write Romantic Suspense, but Tess Gerritsen, bettern known as a plain thriller writer (The Mephisto Club) has also written some books that are labelled Romantic Suspense (I read The Surgeon and found it very good). When I was still at the university I had a Victoria Holt/Jean Plaidy phase as I had no TV and needed something to unwind from the exam preparations. She is definitely the mother of Romantic Suspense or “Woman-in-Jeopardy” or Gothic Suspense as she has been labelled. When it comes to more contemporary writers, apart from Keren Rose and Gerritsen I haven’t read that many so when I recently read some enthusiastic reviews on amazon. de of Margaret Carroll who has just been translated into German I had to give it a go.

Sure this is not the height of literary perfection but is an extremely entertaining read. Even tough it is a bit predictable. Margaret Carroll’s style  has a lot in common with Mary Higgins Clark and Carlene Thompson + romance.  The romance part was quite nice actually.

Caroline Hughes is a young woman who has married the wrong man. At the beginning of the novel, we see her leave her husband. All she has taken are 4000 dollars and her Yorkshire terrier Pippin. She flees from Washington D.C. to Colorado where she wants to hide somewhere high up in the Rockies. Before she boards the Greyhound she dyes her brown hair blond. One more measure, she hopes, to not get found. Her husband, Dr. Porter Moross is a renowned psychiatrist but, as we soon understand, he is by far more deranged than any of his patients. Bit by bit, all through the novel, we see how sick he really is. A real pervert. There is a scene that made me cringe. It even haunted me at night in a dream.

How a young promising art student and aspiring painter did fall for a man like this is not a hundred percent clear. We get hints that something terrible happened in Caroline’s childhood that Porter exploited. Somehow he made her believe she was to blame.

Caroline and Pippin escape to Storm Pass Colorado. A little town in a spectacular setting. Luck is on her side and she gets an employment with an elderly woman who owns a Scotch terrier. There are quite a lot of animals in this book which gives it a very nice touch. They seem very real with individual traits like the people in the novel.

Soon after her arrival Caroline meets Ken a former football player who has been left by his wife after he’s been injured and had to abandon his career. Ken is a very appealing person. Good looking in a very masculine way but not too macho. He even seems to be a bit of an introvert and he certainly is a very sensitive man. Caroline who so far only knew contempt and ridicule feels understood for the first time in her life. She even tells Ken she hopes to be a painter once. They are both admirers of  Georgia O’Keeffe.

As the days go by, winter approaches which gives the author the opportunity of some nice descriptions. Snow flakes falling against a grey sky, a cozy fire inside the house.

Of course we know all along that Porter will track her down sooner or later. I am not giving away how he did it and what follows after he does. You need to find out for yourself.

All in all this was a satisfying and entertaining read. I found it psychologically believable even though maybe at bit stretched. It is quite suspenseful and the characters are well rendered. The descriptions of the landscape and  the weather are well done. This remote place of great beauty in the wilderness does come alive.

I wouldn’t go as far as saying I prefer Romantic Suspense to other kinds of thrillers or crime but I enjoy reading a good book of this genre for a change. Considering this was Margaret Carrolls first novel I think she did a good job and I would probably read her latest Riptide if I felt in the mood for the genre again.

Enid (2009) TV BBC 4: The Complex Personality of Enid Blyton

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How I loved this movie. Enid is absolutely great and I am glad I bought it as I will watch it again very soon.

I am such a fan of Helena Bonham-Carter and have always been ever since I first saw her in A Room with a View that gorgeous Merchant-Ivory production. And I am also a fan of period drama and movies about the lives of authors. I totally enjoyed Finding Neverland and was enchanted by Miss Potter. A BBC production about the life of Enid Blyton seemed just the thing to look forward to. I was not disappointed. It is very good and Helena Bonham-Carter is, as so often, at her very best. However, as good as it is, it was absolutely not what I had expected. Of course, like most children, I did read Enid Blyton. Maybe not as many books as a British child would read but still quite a few. I had no idea what kind of a person she was. At best I thought of her as a Beatrix Potter type of woman or maybe like Astrid Lindgren who invented Pippi Longstocking. Enid Blyton was nothing like this. She was a complex, tormented and at times frankly mean person if we should believe this movie. Still she is fascinating and to look into the life of a writer is always interesting.

When she was a young girl her father, whom she was very attached to, left the family. It seems as if she never recovered from this trauma and fled into her dream world where she dwelt in a never-ending childhood full of adventures. At an early age she started to write down those stories. Being also a very determined person, she managed to find an editor who later became her first husband. As much as she loved her little readers and was totally addicted to her fan mail, she hated babies and did not get along with  her own children that she treated like trained monkeys.

She constantly escaped into her dream world and lied about a lot of things to herself and to others. When her mother dies she is really shattered. And so is her family since no one knew she had still been alive.

Enid Blyton wrote some 750 novels. She wrote 6000 words a day. At a certain point of her career she was accused of not writing all of her novels herself. She was almost devastated by this rumor. All in all, we see a very fragile person, a very self-centered and selfish person too. But still someone with a great talent.

The movie is beautifully filmed. The way she dresses, paired with  her eccentric ways, make the Enid of this movie appear like a fairytale character. Sure,  a bit of a wicked witch, but far from the ordinary. Despite the depiction of the negative aspects of Enid´s character, all these elements together make this a very enchanting movie.

Lauren Groff: The Monsters of Templeton (2008)

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This is quite an unusual, hybrid book. There were passages I enjoyed a lot. The atmosphere and description of Templeton were something to savour. The idea of a monster living in the lake and the ghost in Willie’s bedroom appealed to me a great deal as well. But as much as I loved the beginning and many later parts I lost patience at times. My biggest problem was that I found it too exuberant and too artificial. It is full of great descriptions but totally lacks any psychological depth. The characters, Willie, her mother Vi, Cassandra and many others are charming but they are two-dimensional. Still I can understand that this book found his ardent fans.

At the beginning we see Willie depressed and sad. She is pregnant from her affair with her professor and comes back to Templeton where she grew up looking for refuge. She considers this to be a total failure. She has left Templeton for San Francisco a few years back. Templeton, as we read in the foreword, is actually Cooperstown, Groff’s hometown. It is also the hometown of James Fenimore Cooper. A small town with all the charm of a small town. While away in California Lauren Groff was so homesick that she decided to write about her town.

Apart from being pregnant and desperate, Willie hears from her mother,  that she is actually the daughter of someone from Templeton. After having thought she was the offspring of her mother’s casual encounters with different men during her hippie days, this comes as quite a shock. Willie being an archeologist and trained in research takes this bit of information as a challenge. She starts to investigate the story of her illustrious family, descendants of the great Marmaduke Temple (aka James Fenimore Cooper) in order to find out who her father is. She knows that one of the men in her genealogical tree is illegitimate and this information will lead her to her father.

The story of Willie is interspersed with journal entries, letters, diaries, stories of her ancestors. They are quite different in tone, some are like short stories in their own right and seem to have been written in another century, some were, for me, just tiresome diversions.

In the end, Willie knows the name of her father. She has learnt a great deal about her family and her town. The weak and depressed Willie of the beginning is strong again and able to go out into the world where a brilliant future is waiting for her.

This book deals with some heavy and important themes like illegitimacy / legitimacy / roots /origins /  parenthood/ history. In the beginning there are a lot of  signs of the insecurity of the times we live in but throughout the novel this is more and more abandoned. It is as if the author wanted to say: When you know your origins and where you belong you can never get lost and nothing can really harm you. I am not sure I agree with this.

Be it as it may, this is an original book and some parts are memorable. It’s just somewhat flawed as  a whole.

I would really like to do Lauren Groff justice so maybe I should let her speak for herself:

Taking the R.I.P.V Challenge

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Thanks to Danielle from A Work in Progress, I found this challenge that is truly to my liking. Being a Goth at heart I am really looking forward to this. Participating and reading alike. It has started end of September and finishes on October 31st. Since I am maybe the only or one of a few non-native English speakers participating I tought it might be my own personal little challenge to find German examples.

And here goes:

My choice for a novel is going to be one of Gustav Meyrink’s. It will be either :

The Golem

The Green Face

The White Dominican or

The Angel of the West Window

The short story has already been chosen. It is going to be the following:

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman

Last but not least., I chose a classic movie namely   M.F. Murnau’s Nosferatu.

Anyone who sees this and would like to join, please got to Stainless Steel Droppings for details.

Carson McCullers: The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951)

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I remember reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter years ago. What a special book but quite sad. All these people confessing to someone who is mute. I was very touched. Right after I also read The Ballad of the Sad Café which I have finally read again.
Carson McCullers was such a gifted writer. The way she tells this story of friendship, love and betrayal is so full of foreboding. Melancholic and gloomy at the same time. But also nostalgic. The narrator whose presence is very strong leaves no doubt as to the outcome of this story.  The title already gives away the tone, since ballads are not often joyful and one about a sad café is even less likely to be so.
Miss Amelia, the central character, is very unusual. She takes pride in things that are normally rather attributed to men like great physical strength. She can fight a man with her bare fists and often she will win. She is also a cunning  business woman and a healer. And an introvert who lives a lonely life on her own, although, as we are told, there was a ten-day marriage once. The setting, a small town in the rural South in the  forties of the last century, is described with a lot of detail. We are drawn into the story right away. We see, feel, hear and smell the place. We see the people sit together on the porch during the hot summer nights and sipping their drinks. I always idolized the South and the literature about it with its Gothic feel that can even be found in a lighthearted book like To Kill a Mockingbird. In this much gloomier tale the setting seems to have a life of its own.
If you walk along the main street on an August afternoon there is nothing whatsoever to do. The largest building, in the very centre of the town, is boarded up completely and leans so far to the right that it seems bound to collapse at any minute. The house is very old. There is about it a curious, cracked look that is very puzzling until you suddenly realize that at one time, and long ago, the right side of the front porch had been painted, and part of the wall—but the painting was left unfinished and one portion of the house is darker and dingier than the other. The building looks completely deserted. Nevertheless, on the second floor there is one window which is not boarded; sometimes in the late afternoon when the heat is at its worst a hand will slowly open the shutter and a face will look down on the town . . .However, here in this very town there was once a café. And this old boarded-up house was unlike any other place for many miles around. There were tables with cloths and paper napkins, coloured streamers from the electric fans, great gatherings on Saturday night. The owner of the place was Miss Amelia Evans. But the person most responsible for the success and gaiety of the place was a hunchback called Cousin Lymon. One other person had a part in the story of this café—he was the former husband of Miss Amelia, a terrible character who returned to the town after a long term in the penitentiary, caused ruin, and then went on his way again. The café has long since been closed, but it is still remembered.

The slow pace of the story changes when the hunchback arrives and pretends to be Amelia’s cousin Lymon. What unfolds is as incredible as touching. Amelia, who is no beauty,  falls in love with this being than seems to be even less fortunate than herself. With the influence of the chatty, lively cousin, her store turns into a café that soon becomes the center of this small town in lack of amusement.
We know from the beginning that the cheerfulness will end. When her ex-husband who was in the penitentiary for robbery reappears, he is announced like an evil spirit.
The cousin soon associates with this man whom he must have known before.
The ending is one of the saddest ever. I remember that I was really shaken by it the first time I read it.
I never knew much about Carson Mc Cullers but recently found out that apart from being a prodigy writer she led quite a sad life. She suffered from strokes, one of which left her paralyzed on the left side, since an early age. She had a tumultuous marriage, got divorced but married the same man again. She attempted suicide and he eventually committed suicide. As we know, she died at a relatively young age, leaving us her wonderful books that are so rich in unusual characters and  haunting intense atmosphere.
I know there is a Merchant Ivory film of this story. I would quite like to see it.

Gretchen Rubin: The Happiness Project: Or, Why I spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean my Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle and Generally Have More Fun (2009)

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This is not going to be one of my better reviews as I am highly annoyed by this book and the live style it propagates. So instead of a review this is rather a rant. I do however still like Rubin’s blog as it is very colorful and many people tell little stories of their lives.

A word of caution at the beginning seems appropriate:  The Happiness Project is not about happiness, it is about having fun. And if you want to have fun the way Gretchen Rubin teaches it you will need money.

I felt a bit uneasy with her book early on. It is well written and entertaining to read but did not feel right. When I finally came to her view on Buddhism I realised what had bothered me subconsciously right away. There is a big difference between attachment and non-attachment. If you are influenced or attracted by Hinduism and Buddhism then this book will be a great disappointment  to you since it does equal  happiness to materialistic well-being. This is frankly infuriating. It takes a certain arrogance to show means how to improve your life through things and activities that will cost money. Gretchen Rubin’s way to happiness is not for free.

Just read the following quote taken from the chapter “Mindfulness” and you will see, what I mean regarding attachment/detachment:

I’d always been intrigued by Buddhism, so I was eager to learn more about both the religion and the life of the Buddha. But although I admired many of its teachings, I didn’t feel much deep connection to Buddhism, which at its heart, urges detachment as a way to alleviate suffering. Although there is a place for love and commitment, these bonds are considered fetters that bind us to lives of sorrow – which of course they do. Instead, I’m an adherent of the Western tradition of cultivating deep passions and profound attachments; I didn’t want to detach, I wanted to embrace; I didn’t want to loosen, I wanted to deepen. Also, the Western tradition emphasizes the expression and perfection of each unique, individual soul; not so in the Eastern tradition.”   (p. 235/236)

I think this about sums it up.

If however you want to improve your daily life, de-clutter your apartment, hear how to better your relationships with your husband, children, family and friends, then you might enjoy this book. It will show you how to spend and buy things, how to hoard your memories and so on and so fort.

I admit that if I had read the subtitle more carefully I wold have known what to expect. Still, leaving aside the detachment/attachment dichotomy, I believe there is no happiness without creativity and this is an aspect that is not covered at all. Apart from a little paragraph on scrapbooking there is no exploring creativity.