What you’ll find below is an excerpt from the very start of Vladivostok Circus by Elisa Shua Dusapin & Aneesa Abbas Higgins. You might remember Dusapin & Higgins as the winners of the 2021 National Book Award for Literature in Translation for Winter in Sokcho, and as the stellar team behind the English-language follow-up, Pachinko Parlor.

Vladivostok Circus is coming out from Daunt Books in the UK in February 2024 () and ours drops in May 2024 . . . which is quite some time from now! (Kind of.) Anyway, since it is #WITMonth, since this one of our lead titles, and since I’m feeling generous (?), you can . (Only available in the U.S.) That discount is only good until midnight Pacific Time, August 31st. So, time is of the essence!

Here’s the jacket copy:

Tonight is the opening night. There are birds perched everywhere, on the power lines, the guy ropes, the strings of light that festoon the tent . . . when I think of all those little bodies suspended between earth and sky, it makes me smile to remind myself that for some of them, their first flight begins with a fall. 

Nathalie arrives at the circus in Vladivostok, Russia, fresh out of fashion school in Geneva. She is there to design the costumes for a trio of artists who are due to perform one of the most dangerous acts of all: the Russian Bar.

As winter approaches, the season at Vladivostok is winding down, leaving the windy port city empty as the performers rush off to catch trains, boats and buses home; all except the Russian bar trio and their manager. They are scheduled to perform at a festival in Ulan Ude, just before Christmas.

What ensues is an intimate and beguiling account of four people learning to work with and trust one another. This is a book about the delicate balance that must be achieved when flirting with death in such spectacular fashion, set against the backdrop of a cloudy ocean and immersing the reader into Dusapin’s trademark dreamlike prose.

Enjoy! And order now! As soon as the finished copies arrive—well in advance of the pub date—I’ll personally ship these out to everyone who preorders.

Vladivostok Circus

They don’t seem to be expecting me. The man in the ticket booth checks the list of names for the hundredth time. He’s just ushered out a group of women, all with the same muscular build, their hair scraped back. I can see the glass dome of the building on the other side of the barrier, the marbled stone of the walls beneath this season’s posters. I’m here for the costumes, I tell him again. In the end he turns away, stares at a television screen. He probably doesn’t understand English, I think to myself. I sit down on my suitcase, try calling Leon, the director, the one I’ve been corresponding with. My phone battery flashes low, only 3 per cent left. I hear myself laugh nervously as I look around for somewhere to charge it. I’m about to walk away when I hear someone calling out to me from inside the circus building. A man comes running towards me, steadying his glasses on his nose. Tall and lanky, not at all like the girls I saw a moment ago. I’d say he was in his thirties.

“Sorry,” he says in English. “I wasn’t expecting you until next week! I’m Leon.”

“Beginning of November. Isn’t that what we said?”

“You’re right, I’m all over the place.”

Elisa Shua Dusapin

He leads me round the outside of the building to a small courtyard, fenced on one side. Beyond the fence, the ocean, the shoreline visible through the gaps. Paper lanterns dangle from the branches of a tree. A beige-colored caravan looms large over the metal furniture set out beside it. Tables littered with plates, some doubling as ashtrays, others streaked with tomato sauce. Scrunched-up sportswear and lace-trimmed undergarments strewn on chairs.

I follow him inside the building, down a dark, curving hallway. He translates the signs pinned to the doors for me: offices, backstage access, arena floor. Bedrooms and dressing rooms upstairs. We come to a staircase. He excuses himself for a moment saying he needs to catch the circus director at dinner and runs up the stairs.

A cat gazes at me from the top of the staircase, its coat is white, almost pink. I stretch out my hand and the cat pads down the stairs towards me. The peculiar pinkish hue is its skin color. A cat with almost no fur. It rubs up against my legs. I pull myself upright, feeling vaguely repulsed.

Leon comes back, another man at his side, fiftyish, platinum-colored hair, firm handshake. He starts talking to me in Russian; Leon translates for me as he speaks. He’s sorry about the misunderstanding, I’m a bit early. A short laugh. He’s certainly not going to turn me away, I’ve come such a great distance. He’s honored to be hosting a talented young designer from the European fashion world. Vladivostok Circus’s major autumn show is still running. It’ll be closing for the winter at the end of the week. Until then, I’m welcome to come to as many shows as I like. The only problem is accommodation: the rooms are all taken by the artists. I can move in after they’ve left.

I force a smile, say I’ll manage just fine. The director claps his hands, perfect! I mustn’t hesitate to ask him if there’s anything I need.

He disappears into his office before I have a chance to respond. I thank Leon for translating. He shrugs. He used to teach English, he’s Canadian. He’s happy to help me. I tell him what’s on my mind: I’ve only just finished college, my training’s been in theatre and film, I’ve never worked for a circus, he did know that, didn’t he? And I’m not sure I understand how this is all going to work if the artists are all leaving at the end of the season. Leon nods. Yes, it wasn’t really made clear. Usually, everyone leaves, the performers all go and work for Christmas circuses. But our group, the Russian bar trio, have arranged with the director to stay on here at the circus rent-free while they work on their new number. They’ll perform it at the Vladivostok spring show in exchange.

“Anton and Nino are big stars,” Leon explains. “It’s a good deal for the circus. Not sure if it’s so good for Anton and Nino, but that’s the way it is.”

I try and look convinced, sizing up the gulf that separates me from this world. All I know about the three I’m working with is that they’re famous for their Black Bird number, in which Igor, the flyer, performs five perilous triple jumps on the Russian bar. I’ve looked it up and gleaned some information about this piece of equipment: it’s a flexible bar, three meters in length with a diameter of twenty centimeters. The two bases carry the bar on their shoulders while the third member of the group executes moves on it, leaping high in the air and flying free, without a wire. It’s one of the most dangerous of all circus acts.

“Were you the one who created the number with Igor?” I ask.

“No, not me. I didn’t even know him before his accident.”

“Accident?”

“Didn’t you know? He hasn’t jumped for five years. They have a new flyer. Anna.”

He says she’s gone into town with Nino, but Anton’s here, in his room. He can introduce me if I like, or else tomorrow after the show. I tell him tomorrow will be fine.

“Yes, that’s probably best. Anton can get by in quite a few languages but he doesn’t speak much English.”

The show has finished for today. He has to tidy up. Would I like to come with him? I’m very tired, I say, I have to find a hotel, and what about my luggage? Oh, he’ll help me with all that, he says, with a sweeping gesture of the hand.

*

Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Backstage, a pungent animal smell hits me. Straw scattered on the ground. Streaks of dirt on the walls. Like a stable but with velvet lining—hoops instead of horses, waist-high wooden balls, metal poles, tangles of cables, drones in the shape of planes, straw hats hanging on hooks. Leon tugs a cord and the curtains part.

I walk out into the ring. Carpeting on the ground, rumpled here and there, talcum powder and splashes of water, traces of the show that finished earlier. The space seems smaller than I’d expected, less imposing than when seen from the outside. Four hundred seats at the most. Red risers, velvet-covered seating. A platform overhangs the public entrance, with six chairs, music stands, a drum set, and a double bass.

“Do you need a hand?” I ask, watching Leon climb up one of the towers located at intervals around the edge of the ring.

He doesn’t respond and I breathe a sigh of relief. I can’t see myself going up there to join him. He unhooks a trapeze, disturbing one of the spotlight projectors as he moves around. The spotlight begins to wobble, its beam falling on a torn curtain over a window. I can see a section of the sky through the tear in the fabric. It’s dark outside, and still only six o’clock. The sky is studded with stars.

Leon starts rolling up a carpet.

“Can I do anything to help?” I say again.

He shakes his head, straining from the effort. With the dirt floor freed from its covering, the odor intensifies, as if the smell emanated from here, from unseen animals trampled beneath our feet.

“It smells pretty strong.”

“It stinks, you mean!” Leon exclaims.

He says the circus doesn’t use animals now. He hasn’t seen any in the seven years he’s been working here. The smell hasn’t gone away though. No one seems to know why.

“It’s not so bad right now, but in the summer, with the heat, the lights, the people. It really stinks.”

He glances around the ring and adds in a hushed voice: “I don’t think any of this has ever been properly cleaned.”

He goes backstage again. The lights go down. I turn back to look at the ring again before joining him. A gleam of light from a lamppost filters in through a gap in the curtains, casting a yellow glow on the risers. It makes everything look much more old-fashioned, a scene from another century. The beam of light hits the double bass. Lying on its side, the bow across its hips, the bass looks as if it’s resting, weary of carving out its tune, waiting for tomorrow’s performance.

If you’re in the UK, preorder from ! If you’re in the States, for 40% off! (If you’re in Canada, email me at chad.post [at] rochester.edu and we can figure something out.)

Today’s #WITMonth post is an excerpt from 

is available from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.

Take a French dinner party. In Paris. Chez Armand. A chic dinner. The kind I don’t go to. Pearls, crystal, the works.

Observe the guests. Scientifically. They turn to the left and right. Shake their heads. Gesture repeatedly with their right arms in a manner known as pronation. Devote themselves to mastication, mouths closed, I should add. And between two tiny mouthfuls, I should add, they move their lips constantly. Like this.

Because for them, ladies and gentlemen, conversation has replaced everything else. They neither laugh nor belch. Belching went out of fashion with regicide. That’s the remark my brother-in-law made just to mortify me. At the table. In front of everyone. The day of the funeral. As I was choking back a hiccup between two sobs.

In the time of the Bourbon Louis, he announced with ludicrous pedantry, there was an official called the hastener who was in charge of the king’s belches. Sometimes the king’s belch was slow in coming, and all the courtiers would wring their hands, quiver with impatience, and turn sorrowful countenances toward the royal valve: But let him hasten, then, let this hastener hasten the sacred belch of the king! The hastener and his king have been done away with. And belchery with them. Those are great losses indeed.

Still, I thought, not so great as Lucienne’s death. Forgive me, but my grief is as fresh, if I may say so, as a vegetable. I said vegetable. I really shouldn’t have. That’s the word I often use to evoke her, so calm, so—how shall I put it—so superbly lumpish. But let us stifle our grief. And let us return to that dinner party with which I opened my lecture. We may conclude, from our thorough investigation, that while it is generally admitted that speech is the achievement of all mankind, conversation is a specialty that is eminently French.

*

conversation is a specialty that is eminently French.

*

That is our first and most heartening axiom. A specialty, I emphasize this, that is not exportable. Because it is not merchandise. It is even quite the opposite. I shall come back to this essential point. At the proper time. With the methodical turn of mind that is my wont.

We French, I was saying, are champions at conversation. This distinguishing trait, long elevated to the status of a national virtue, made the reputation of France and secured its reign.

Well, that art at which we excel is today in peril. I am sounding the alarm in our little town in hopes of alerting the highest authorities. Mediocrity, ladies and gentlemen, is going international. The fear of offending prevails more and more over the taste for talking. A generous spirit is discredited, if not condemned outright. It is taken for weakness of intellect. From one end of the planet to the other, conversations are all the same. Their poverty of ideas is now in fashion. And their insipidness is sickening.

*

Conversation is going downhill.

*

That will be our second and most distressing axiom. We live, increasingly, without talking to one another. Is no life, then, worth the telling? We live without talking to one another and soon we will live without living, which gives me the shivers.

Conversation is going downhill and the country with it, they go hand in hand. And it is greatly to be feared, if nothing is done, that they will both wind up in the garbage. The vultures will finish the job. You can count on them.

So here, dear ladies and gentlemen of Cintegabelle, is my rescue plan, conceived in the utmost urgency and which I unhesitatingly declare to be of national utility, since by proposing to restore the luster of speech in the eyes of a world that has forgotten how to speak, it aims at nothing less than the civic renewal of our country and the polishing of its image so that, I’m catching my breath, so that, strong in its recovered prestige, the France of tomorrow may assure throughout the world the civilizing mission that has fallen to her from time immemorial. Might I ask you, children, to please stop snickering. And to stop moving your chairs around. It’s irritating.

The subtle art of conversation, however—to which, I venture to say, I have devoted my genius—offers, aside from that patriotic virtue I have just mentioned, other advantages no less excellent albeit less directly civic. And which to my astonishment have not yet been the object of any detailed study.

The first of these advantages is that conversation is very useful for seducing women.

The second is that it’s even handier for succeeding in society.

The third and most surprising is that in bringing joy to mankind, it contributes appreciably to reducing the deficit of the National Health Service. A subject of satisfaction for our government.

Lydie Salvayre

In the interest of clarity, my lecture will scrupulously observe each step of the following outline, which I ask you to please keep in mind.

Part One: The advantages of conversation, already noted, and upon which we will elaborate with a most mathematical rigor.

Part Two: Those conditions favorable to the flowering of conversation, which are ten in number:

—the presence of at least two persons;

—the comfort of the derrière;

—the ability to keep silent;

—c�dzܰ��ٱ����;

—c���������ٲ�;

—j�dz��ܱ��������ٲ�;

—the principle of equality;

—a sense of proportion;

—an insouciant disregard for time;

��������dz�.

Part Three: Five examples of conversation selected from among the most common categories:

—amorous conversation;

—literary conversation;

—political conversation;

—patriotic conversation;

—conversation with the dead.

The whole thing enlivened by a number of axioms with which I am not at all displeased. I’m rather fond of axions.

*

So, Part One: The advantages of conversation.

The first of the advantages of conversation, as I was saying, and not the least of them, is that conversation always finds remarkable favor with women. Every last one of them goes into raptures before a clever conversationalist, be he cross-eyed, pot-bellied, warty, a journalist, or deformed. Take me: noticeably ill-favored, with big ears, and a cowlick I spend hours plastering down, I was an immediate hit with Lucienne (a woman impervious to poetry and little given to linguistic acrobatics) the second I began to babble. And I must confess that my verbal vivacity and florid declarations (I commanded, at the time, a whole battery of tricks, classified by genre) did more to lift up her redoubtable skirt than any fumbling gesture I’d never have dared make anyway. I wasn’t that stupid. And kew for a fact that

*

women’s genitals communicate with their ears.

*

If, gentlemen—for it is to you, men of Cintegabelle, that I speak—if nevertheless you prove unable to resist the summons of the flesh, if you are seized with the desire to place your hand on the knee of an altogether too concupiscible woman, I urge you most emphatically: under no circumstances interrupt your harangue. Without ceasing to chatter, keep gaining ground. Advance stealthily and with ingratiating ploys. Like the sinuous serpent of desire. Pursue your reputation garlanded with pretty turns of phrase. In perfect synchrony, lay compliments at her feet and hands on her modesty. From poems to promises, from promises to prattle, you will proceed without mishap to the inevitable place. Once there, stop talking! Pounce!

The second advantage of conversation concerns in particular those scheming, bloodthirsty youths who crave a brilliant career in the Arts and Letters. You will find such young men everywhere, and our town is no exception.

That’s right, my little wolf cubs in the first row, I’ll have you know that you will achieve more through a funny remark, a turn of phrase, or a flash of wit than through your girlfriend’s sex appeal, a complete familiarity with the twelve volumes of Quintilian’s De Institutione Oratoria, and even the outstanding dishonesty that in France ranks demonstrably among the most important factors of success.

You see, I have a friend (who shall remain nameless), a regional writer, an expert on the arts and crafts of Languedoc, who, whenever he goes out in society, flounders, stammers, stares like an idiot at his perfectly ordinary shoes, and can only bleat “Ah” and “Oh” and “Uh” and sometimes “Hee-hee.” Now, although each of these onomatopoeias contains a world of perplexity and terrifying apprehension, they do absolutely nothing to fuel the fires of literate conversation. As for the few times when this friend is invited to appear on a television program, it’s just pitiful to hear him sputter away! Result: he gets no name recognition, as the rabble say.

*

Lousy conversation is social suicide.

*

Through a quite common misunderstanding, his poor speaking skills make a poor impression on people, whose low opinion of him we find most unfair. But the world is made in such a way that

*

it is not enough to be talented,

one must also look the part.

*

This will be our inevitable axiom. The corollary to which is equally inevitable:

*

To appear to be what one is not is ridiculous,

like dressing up a monkey in a three-piece suit.

*

Linda Coverdale

Or wearing one myself. The results are guaranteed!! am grotesque. Lucienne always told me so. She preferred me in a track suit. To my great sorrow. So is better, it seems, to suit one’s style to oneself. And what’s more, one must know one’s own style. And oneself. And how to make them work together. All that isn’t easy. I feel I’m getting bogged down. Which happens whenever I try to think. I see no other way to land on my feet again (one couldn’t dream up a more appropriate expression), no other way than to quote Baltasar Gracián, a philosopher whom I’ve discovered since my Lulu left me (mourning has its good points, you must admit).

When the bottom has fallen out of everything, this thinker wrote, nothing can replace it. And although you can spruce up what the English refer to as the “packaging” (it’s me speaking now), try as you may to decorate the emptiness with ruffles, doll it up, swathe it in tissue paper, beribbon it with fancy words and frills, the emptiness stubbornly, imperturbably, remains. I will let you meditate a moment on what I’ve just said, before issuing the following warning.

Warning:

Whoever considers the subtle art of conversation simply a useful skill for social climbing is a fool and a cipher. For conversation presupposes, ladies and gentlemen (before swelling into chamber music, or jazz, or rock, depending), an incubation period when the riches of the mind ferment, I don’t like that image because it reminds me of cheese, whereas, we’ll get back to this, conversation is not a cheese, another French specialty along with champagne and the famous spirit of collaboration, and if we absolutely had to find a metaphor here, I’d propose that

*

conversation is a wine that improves with age.

*

Which means that in my eyes, it possesses every virtue.And not only does it not preclude either thought or culture. Which are not acquired in one day. Or a hundred. Or a thousand. Lucienne, for example, barely attained their outer edges. And died as lightweight as the day she was born. I’m not speaking of her body, that poor shell, but of her soul, which had the thickness of a blotter. And not only, as I was saying, does conversation not preclude either thought or culture. It positively requires them. Sanctifies them. And celebrates them. Just listen to me, for instance.

The preceding assertion might seem like a perfidious attack against certain modern writers whose profundity of thought and cultural capital—I love that last expression, simply saying it makes me feel rich, but not for long—whose cultural and more particularly syntactic capital is limited to pocket change. But God forbid we should wish them harm! Every poor man is our friend!

Melville by Jean Giono
Translated from the French by Paul Eprile
108 pgs. | pb | 9781681371375 | $14.00

Review by Brendan Riley

In The Books in My Life (1952), Henry Miller, devoting an entire chapter to French writer Jean Giono (1895-1970), boasts about spending “several years. . . . preaching the gospel––of Jean Giono. I do not say that my words have fallen upon deaf ears, I merely complain that I have made myself a nuisance at the Viking Press in New York, for I keep pestering them intermittently to speed up the translations of �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s works.”^[i]

Indefatigable gusher, self-mythologizer, and, among many other things, enthusiast of whatever struck his fancy at the moment, (including, in Black Spring, the joy of open-air urination behind the blind of a Parisian pissoir) Miller tenders this lugubrious caveat:

“Fortunately I am able to read Giono in his own tongue and, at the risk of sounding immodest, in his own idiom. But . . . I continue to think of the countless thousands in England and America who must wait until his books are translated. I feel that I could convey to the ranks of his ever-growing admirers innumerable readers whom his American publishers despair of reaching. I think I could even sway the hearts of those who have never heard of him––in England, Australia, New Zealand and other places where the English language is spoke. But I seem incapable of moving those few pivotal beings who hold . . . his destiny in their hands. Neither with logic nor passion, neither with statistics nor examples, can I budge the position of editors and publishers in this, my native land. I shall probably succeed in getting Giono translated into Arabic, Turkish and Chinese before I convince his American publishers to go forward with the task they so sincerely began.” (Miller 100).

Whether or not Miller’s translation mission prodded Viking into action, a search of various online publication sources shows that some 16 of �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s 33 finished novels have, so far, been translated into English. Some notable examples include Hill (trans. Paul Eprile, NYRB, 2016), the third English-language translation of �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Colline, which has also appeared in English as Hill of Destiny (translated by Jacques Le Clercq, published by Brentano’s 1929), and again, in 1986, translated by Brian Nelson, bearing the French title Colline. �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s adventure novel The Horseman on the Roof was translated by Jonathan Griffin in 1982—many people have seen the well-regarded 1995 film adaptation starring Juliette Binoche and Oliver Martinez—and a collection of essays, The Battle of Pavia, was translated by A. E. Merch in 1985. In 2017, nearly half a century since Miller’s effusion, and 76 years after its initial publication in 1941, NYRB issued the first English translation of �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Melville, a splendid read, also translated by Paul Eprile. Henry Miller singled out Melville for high praise:

“When [Giono] touches a man like our own Herman Melville, in the book called Pour Saluer Melville (which the Viking Press refuses to bring out, though it was translated for them), we come very close to the real Giono––and, what is even more important, close to the real Melville. This Giono is a poet. His poetry is of the imagination and reveals itself just as forcibly in his prose. It is through this function that Giono reveals his power to captivate men and women everywhere, regardless of rank, class, status or pursuit.” (Miller 102)

Miller also confesses that Herman Melville “is not one of my favorites. Moby-Dick has always been a sort of bête noir for me,” but says that “After reading Pour Saluer Melville, which is a poet’s interpretation of a poet,––‘a pure invention,’ as Giono himself says in a letter––I was literally beside myself. How often it is the ‘foreigner’ who teaches us to appreciate our own authors!” (Miller 110-111).

In his introduction to this NYRB edition, Edmund White offers a different sort of appreciation: “[Pour Saluer Melville] began as the introduction to [�Ҿ��DzԴ�’s] translation of Moby-Dick (the first in French)” and “still the standard translation into French.” The short novel that evolved from that introduction, says White “must be one of the strangest homages from one major author to another.”^[ii]

A slender, captivating work, barely 100 pages, �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Melville, is clear, colorful, lyrical, and light on its feet. A really fine short novel whose limpid concision feels instructional, and whose chromatic emotional depth feels inspirational. �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s propulsive story of a middle-aged Melville falling in love far from home is consistently lively, interesting, pleasant, surprising, and memorable. Strange, yes, but also beautiful, gentle, and humane.

�Ҿ��DzԴ�’s luminous, finely crafted prose, via Paul Eprile’s meticulous, elegant translation, has depth and affective resonance, whispering repeated invitations to revisit its simple, wonderfully human scenes.

Wrapping himself in a fictive nineteenth century Melvillian cocoon in which the famous writer connects with, captivates, and is captivated by all sorts of people, Giono frames his fantasia in broad swaths of biography: Melville’s early life in New England, then as an apprentice seaman and mate, his voyages inspiring his early bestsellers: Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and Redburn.

�Ҿ��DzԴ�’s memorable portrait of Melville’s mother—foreshadowing Melville’s later meeting with the fictional Adelina White, an Irish Nationalist who becomes his muse for Moby-Dick—mixes precise and varied detail, stinging satire, bookish allusions, and wry humor, attributes with which the novel as a whole is strongly and effectively imbued:

Now, in 1814, Herman’s father — or, shall we say, in order to become Herman’s father — Allan took Maria Gansevoort as his wife. Poor, dear Mama! To be able to think about her now, Herman would be forced to flush the sweet balm out of his head. The loveliest month of May could never have borne any sort of perfume for poor Maria. She was cold, thin, materialistic, dry, methodical, angular, and arrogant. This truly unique specimen, a perfect combination of these various emotional and physical elements, clothed in austere, two-bit fustian and fortified with whalebone stays, became Mistress Melville. She made immoderate use of these womanly restraints, which her son would later mention with such innocent humor. God might have intended her to use them to drape voluptuous fabric around her body! But since her — one couldn’t really say tender — youth, she’d torn all the love poems out of her Bible and, though already a mother many times over, she still blushed at the sight of the names of Ruth, Esther, Judith . . . those women who, when you came down to it, had put their unmentionable female parts at the service of the glory of the Lord. (Giono 8-9)

Giono also creates effective, sometimes captivating working-class characters including a stable boy, a second-hand goods shopkeeper, and Captain Pearse, commander of the whaler Acushnet, where the young adventurous Melville signs on and becomes a man of the sea. Giono crafts some heady reminiscences about Melville cutting his sailor’s teeth under the rough command of Pearse, a model for Melville’s own “grand, ungodly, god-like” Ahab^[iii]: “Has he ever lashed you? Yes, I mean with a whiplash, on your bare skin? Has he ever stuffed you down in the hold, bound hand and foot, with only a drop of water to drink? . . . I tell you, he does do all these things!” (Giono 18)

And on the hunt for whales, Pearse “doles out slaps and kicks in the rear. Thousands of times, in a sort of perfect, gigantic, arithmetical progression, he’ll blaspheme the name of God with curses that become more and more outrageous and original” (Giono 20). This abuse and blasphemy effect Herman’s own spiritual struggle:

“For fifteen months since he went to sea, he’s been wrestling with an angel. Like Jacob, he’s plunged in darkness, and now dawn comes. Wings—unbearably rigid—beat him, raise him up above the earth, hurl him back down, snatch him up again, and smother him. He hasn’t had a moment’s respite from the fight. No matter if he’s reached his limit; no matter if he’s completely worn out; no matter if he sinks like a stone into his berth: He wrestles with the angel. If he’s leaping into the whaleboat; if he’s riding out an iron-gray tempest; if he’s staring into the sickening maw of one of the giant creatures of the abyss. At the very same time he wrestles with the angel.” (Giono 21).

This wrestling becomes an extended metaphor throughout the novel, which is concerned naturally enough as much with Melville the sailor as Melville the writer—without the former there would have been no latter. When we see Melville sail to England to deliver his manuscript of White Jacket, Giono skips the voyage itself because Melville goes as a passenger, not a sailor, it would have been nothing like his Acushnet experiences.

In London, Herman’s publishers surprise him by immediately agreeing to all of his contractual requests and conditions, leaving the handsome, robust adventurer flush with money and satisfaction and with two weeks to kill in England before his return ship sails. In a perfectly American impulse prescient of his restless, peripatetic Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Melville, who cannot abide a fortnight’s layover in London, and feels driven, wing-beaten, to seek some new adventure, follows his wanderlust and decides to quit the big city (Giono emphasizes Herman’s Yankee pride amid stodgy, smoggy London) and light out for the West—of England. He reaches this decision by asking a stable hand what he would do if he had five pounds and “ten days of freedom to do whatever you liked.” The answer is he’d go to Woodcut, “a little hamlet . . . out Berkeley way, over there above Bristol,” adding “if you do go there, drop by Joshua’s place—-that dirty swine—at the Sign of the Old Sea-Fish. Tell him to do you a rum the way he does one for Dick. The way he does one for Dick. You tell him that.

“Now this is just the kind of adventure Herman likes best.” (Giono 31)

The Melville whose course we then follow is a funny, resourceful, gregarious, and vulnerable confection. Before undertaking his land voyage by mail coach, Herman first decides to outfit himself in secondhand sailor’s clothes. There follows an excellent scene of him haggling for items in a shop in Limehouse, in East London: “fine, blue homespun pants . . . a bargain for a striped sweater . . . made from the best quality Scottish wool . . . a splendid old pea coat: roomy, cozy, genuine, worn by rain, wind, and work, the color of night at sea, something worthy of veneration. A true shelter from the storm, a real ‘sailor’s house,’” along with “Chinese shoes made from elephant hide, as supple as gloves, the toes turned slightly upward in the Tibetan style; a greenish hide––never polished, never greased––with all of its grain; an item both artistic and practical, something absolutely unusual, yet useful everywhere, a true piece of maritime equipment.” (Giono 32-33).

Some of those phrases (supple as gloves; artistic and practical, absolutely unusual, yet useful everywhere) seem indicative of the overall quality of this resonant work whose perfect sentences and water-smooth transitions feel seamless as the segues in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The usefulness, the practicality lie within the novel’s combination of smart storytelling, arresting imagery, and wise, spirited reflections on the human condition.

Melville meets a mysterious woman, Adelina White—a very far cry from Mistress Melville—lawyer’s wife, mother, and Irish nationalist secretly fighting to save the starving Irish by using her social status, beauty, and style to help smuggle contraband wheat into famished Ireland. The passages devoted to Melville’s shy fascination with, and bumbling introduction to her are comical and tender. �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s homage is also an exploration of inspiration: Herman’s attraction to and pursuit of her establish the novel’s dramatic wellspring, while the development and revelation of her character form the story’s moral nexus.

�Ҿ��DzԴ�’s The Solitude of Compassion, translated by Edward Ford (2002) carried Miller’s chapter from The Books in My Life as a foreword. Miller noted that in “In �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s works we have the somberness of Hardy’s moors” (Miller, 103); true enough, some moments during Herman’s mad dash across England with Adelina are suffused with a gloom reminiscent of Hardy, Dickens, or Charlotte Bronte, especially when she asks the driver to make a stop so she can comfort some friends in need but the novel’s thrilling power comes from something else Miller noticed: “We no longer know, in reading his books, whether we are listening to Giono or to ourselves. We are not even aware that we are listening. We live through his words and in them, as naturally as if we were respiring at a comfortable altitude or floating on the bosom of the deep or swooping like a hawk with the downdraught of a canyon. The actions of his narratives are cushioned in the terrestrial effluvium; the machinery never grinds because it is perpetually laved by cosmic lubricants. Giono gives us men, beasts and gods––in their molecular constituency.” (Miller 109)

A gorgeous scene of Herman and Adelina riding atop the coach, exemplary of numerous pastoral moments in the novel, offers a fine illustration of the sort of things Miller was seeing in the novel:

“Morning was brushing the land the way green willow boughs brush the water’s surface. Ripples of liquid light were spreading out across the meadows and the woods, and splashing back as gold dust against the grass stems and the branches. Because of the noise of the wheels, it wasn’t possible to talk. But from time to time, when a new range of sunlit hills emerged from the mist, the two of then looked at each other.” (Giono 69)

Lyrical Giono becomes poet-magus Melville who imparts mystical Blakean visions to Adelina’s eyes and mind. Herman “started to talk about the world that lay before them,” then in a series of power verbs, he “rolled up the sky . . . rolled [it] open again.” He places the forms of nature into her hand and eye, makes “the woods come closer”; he names, fuses, summons, revolves, takes hold of, makes the world rise up, sustains it, turns it upside down and inside out, all to make “her come to life,” imagining “a world––unlike the real one––where he wouldn’t lose her.” (Giono 75)

If Melville’s powers of sight offer the aesthetic locus, Adelina’s story of her early family life, marriage, and commitment to social justice offer Herman a moral lens. Their final moments together, a noble scene upon the broad rolling sweep of the downs overlooking the River Severn estuary and Bristol Bay, the places from which departing boats will smuggle food to Ireland, are the moral and intellectual apogee of the novel. Melville’s boast that “To be a poet is to stay a step ahead of human destiny. The poet doesn’t follow; he isn’t against anything; he’s a step ahead. And he doesn’t serve” (Giono, 98) is countered and tempered by the fact that Adelina has chosen, precisely, to serve those in need, to struggle against inhuman political degradation, risking prison or worse for defying British law. Thus, Herman finally admits to her that his wrestling angel is both “guardian” and “prison guard” (Giono, 98). Indeed, the novel’s message is that we must elevate one another, as Melville and Adelina White do for each other during their brief platonic romance. The lovers’ spirits merge just as their paths diverge.

Melville, a novel about remaining true to one’s own character amid the gnawing squall of mundanities, is a sleek, sometimes uncanny, amalgamation of biography and fantasy, a pared-down modernist echo and distillation of Melville’s best compositional traits: deep learning, a brilliant, droll, insouciant voice—lusty adventurous narrator at odds with the world—breezy, stichomythic conversations, and an enthusiasm for nature, and an ability to render it in broad, luminous strokes and fine details that are inspirational, celebratory, and sacred, for one of Melville’s achievements (like Shakespeare’s Lear on the Heath, Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe and Kurtz in the Congolese rain forest, and, more recently, Peter Matthiessen’s Edgar Watson in the Florida everglades) is to test man on nature’s sacred stage.

Many of these traits that make Melville excellent and invigorating can also be found in Melville’s 1853 story “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! or The Crowing of the Noble Cock Beneventano.”

In addition to his many novels, Giono, as mentioned, was also the first translator into French of Moby-Dick, which he dubbed his “foreign companion.” It’s interesting to read “Cock-A-Doodle Doo!” as a potent and conspicuous influence on Melville, and the latter as an inspired response to the former, a deliberate chromatic riff on the Melvillian satirical paradox. Melville wrote the story within the lengthening shadow of diminishing reputation and growing financial strain, after Moby-Dick, after Pierre; or The Ambiguities, in the same year that he composed the bleak, utterly pessimistic, gallows humor of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a satire on transcendental solipsism, but also, probably, on his own absorption in composing his masterpiece; as Melville scholar David Dowling notes:

“There are many histories to this fine book, and Melville’s herculean effort to write Moby-Dick is certainly one of them. Like the whaling history that undergirds the tale, Melville’s personal history does not bespeak the ordinary. He often locked himself in his room without food, writing in a creative white heat until evening, when his wife and daughters would admonish him to return to the land of the living . . .”
^[iv]

In an excellent 1948 essay, Egbert S. Oliver analyzed “Cock-A-Doodle Doo!” as “a satire on the buoyant transcendental principles which Melville heard echoing and reechoing in the New England hills . . . particularly, a passage from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by Henry David Thoreau,” calling it “a reductio ad absurdum of the transcendental disregard of materialism.” ^[v] In a complementary analysis from 1970, Harold Beaver, (reader of American literature at the University of Warwick), deemed Melville’s story to be a satire of Wordsworth’s poem Resolution and Independence: “The whole of ‘Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!’ is, in effect, a parody, or paradoxical commentary on Wordsworth’s poem: both open in the ‘plashy’ or ‘squitchy’ damp, but whereas in Wordsworth a bright sun is already rising, in Melville the air is raw, misty and disagreeable;”^[vi] That bright sun portends Wordsworth’s concluding revelation when he is able to behold, within the old leech gatherer’s “shape, and speech,” a spirit his younger self does not possess:

And soon with this he other matter blended,
Cheerfully uttered, with demeanour kind,
But stately in the main; and, when he ended,
I could have laughed myself to scorn to find
In that decrepit Man so firm a mind.
“God,” said I, “be my help and stay secure;
I’ll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!”^[vii]

 

Beaver continues: “Wordsworth’s opening mood is of joy, Melville’s of cynical depression; in Wordsworth joy turns to dejection, in Melville hypochondria to defiant bravado; Wordsworth ends with stoic resolution, Melville with a continual crow.” (Melville 425) Continual, indeed; throughout the story, Beneventano’s crowing is at first bracing and inspiring but then becomes incessant, absurdly irrepressible, oppressive, and deadly.

It’s also possible to read Melville as a paradoxical parable about the spiritual richness of radical optimism—certainly appealing to an exuberant bon vivant like Henry Miller—and its practical danger in the face of illness and death. Though Wordsworth could, in his famous sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge, celebrate a quiet Friday dawn in London 1802 (significantly not a Sunday but one of the busiest days of the work week) he also, in “Tintern Abbey,” famously despaired of the city

how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart)^[viii]

In “Cock-A-Doodle-Do!” Melville’s narrator also rants against mid-nineteenth-century social conditions and ills: poverty, disease, financial worries, “rascally despotisms,” and “many dreadful casualties, by locomotive and steamer” (Melville 103). His avowed elixir is Beneventano’s crowing, “equal to hearing the great bell of St. Paul’s rung at a coronation! In fact, that bell ought to be taken down, and this Shanghai put in its place. Such a crow would jollify all London, from Mile-End (which is no end) to Primrose Hill (where there ain’t any primroses), and scatter the fog.”^[ix] And Herman’s excursion in Melville is an extended and (temporarily) successful attempt to do just that, to quit the funk of London and head west. Giono has Melville, antsy as his Ishmael who wants to step into the street and knock mens’ hats off their heads, flee London and travel West across all of southern England, from the Thames to the Bay of Bristol, but in a sly undercutting of Melville’s disdain for trains and those who stoke them, celebrates his overland trip in rapid, rattling mail coach. Along the way, there is a thrilling and delightful near miss between the hurtling Bristol Mail and a farm cart bound for market; the scene brings to mind the wonderfully dramatic coach driving scenes in Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.

And it’s significant that the west, overlooking Bristol Channel is where Giono leaves Melville in England. Once that scene there is concluded, we are suddenly back in New England, and newly inspired Herman is flush with the frenetic concatenative energy that he will channel into writing Moby-Dick.

If, as Beaver claims, “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” is a satirical inversion of Resolution and Independence, we see this when Melville’s narrator describes himself as “as good a fellow as ever lived – hospitable – open-hearted – generous to a fault: and the Fates forbid that I should possess the fortune to bless the country with my bounteousness” (Melville 117). For him, Beneventano is a sort of celestial lightning rod, a vivifying clarion in effulgent plumage as Merrymusk, the rooster’s owner, confirms when asking the narrator about the cock’s majestic crowing:

“Ain’t it inspiring? Don’t it impart pluck? give stuff against despair?” (Melville 124)

And the message he interprets from Beneventano’s lusting crowing, described variously as “cheerful,” “magic,” “extraordinary,” “noble,” “a jolly bolt of thunder with bells,” “all glorious and defiant,” “a perfect paean and laudamus,” and “a trumpet blast of triumph” is “Be jolly!”

Melville is an empathetic amplification and tempered refinement of “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!”—instead of moping Melville hating the railroad and fearing his creditors who dog him even to church and tavern, �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Melville, just as Henry Miller loved to be, is free and easy, away from wife and home responsibilities, flush with money, and in his independence, riding across the land (replicating American flight from London, later from New England and the East Coast), meets a woman of steadfast resolution.

Melville is about chaste, ideal, unobtainable, ultimately vanished love. Adelina enjoys Melville’s company, briefly sees the poetical wonders he conjures but the vision he receives from her is greater because he is young, flush with success, yet to be tried fully in social matters. Her craft is evading unjust laws, helping the oppressed which makes Herman’s concerns, by comparison, seem solipsistic, the very solipsism he satirizes in “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” because Melville’s strange story is also a satirical parable of sexual fancy: man’s urgent need and desire to remain hard, upright, and ejaculatory right up to the moment of death—Merrymusk and his family, and trumpeting cock Beneventano smile and crow through their misfortunes, and all perish; the blithely, blindly optimistic narrator wants to believe that their spirits defy death: he pays for their burial, family and cock together all in the same plot, headstone inscribed with the immortal rhetorical questions from Corinthians: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” Death’s victory is self-evident: the family dies of poverty, disease, and hunger, the very maladies Adelina pretends to fight against. But wagonloads of contraband wheat did not solve the Potato Famine, save millions, prevent mass exodus, or change English law. Adelina asks Herman:

“Do you remember the famine of ’46?”
“Very well. I saw the boats loaded with emigrants arriving in our country, and I brought them a good many kettles of soup myself.”
“Nothing has changed.”
“I assumed so. An entire population doesn’t stop dying of hunger all at once.”
“No, but it stops faster if you think about the starving bellies and work to fill them, instead of spending your time philosophizing about the doctrines of Adam Smith and Ricardo. I know that thousands of English men and women were in agony because they knew what was happening in the Irish cottages. You saw the boatloads of emigrants; we saw the cartloads of corpses thrown into the pits” (Giono 86-87).

Melville’s revelations with Adelina, Giono fancies, inspire a new kind of hallucinatory and amalgamative energy for him to compose Moby-Dick. Of course the novel’s epic genius and some strong reviews did not sustain Melville’s good fortunes or keep the hellhounds (literary and otherwise) off his trail. From there, Giono hastens Melville to his final end—somberly, soberly, but gently, too, and no less reflective. Melville keeps writing after Moby-Dick to ever-diminishing enthusiasm, including close friend Nathaniel Hawthorne’s embarrassment about Pierre. And though Harold Beaver affirms that “Moby-Dick marks not the end but the middle of Melville’s miraculous span” and “astonishing creative outpouring,” he also notes that the novel’s reception was “disheartening”: “Two years after the publication of Moby-Dick, he was still in debt to Harpers for 700 dollars advance royalties,” and that in 1855 “after the failure of Israel Potter, �ʳܳٲԲ���’s associate editor, G.W. Curtis had advised [�Ჹ������’s] new publisher, J. A. Dix ‘to decline any novel from Melville which is not extremely good’” (Melville 10-12).

Ultimately, though, �Ҿ��DzԴ�’s Melville is fantasia, a confection, not biography. And perhaps what really elevated the novel for the supremely solipsistic Henry Miller, paradoxical misogynistic woman(izer) worshipper so anxious to get Giono into readers’ hands, perhaps what taught him to appreciate Melville was that the imaginary Herman’s final concern is not so much his writing or his general reputation but whether ardent Adelina White—who writes him a few precious letters from England, and then no more—ever read and was ever captivated by Moby-Dick the way that he was captivated by her.

*

Works Cited

^[i] Miller, Henry. The Books in My Life. New Directions Publishing, 1952, via Internet Archive PDF (Digitized 2008).

^[ii] Giono, Jean. Melville – A Novel (Introduction by Edmund White), trans. Paul Eprile. New York Review Book, 2017.

^[iii] Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. W. W. Norton & Company, 1967, p.76

^[iv] Dowling, David. Chasing the White Whale – The Moby-Dick Marathon; or, What Melville Means Today. University of Iowa Press, 2010.

^[v] Oliver, Egbert S. “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” and Transcendental Hocus-Pocus, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jun., 1948), pp. 204-216

^[vi]Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Beaver, Penguin English Library, 1970, p. 425.

^[vii] Wordsworth, William. “Resolution and Independence.” English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1967, pp. 284-85.

^[viii] Wordsworth, William. “Lines: Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1967, p. 209-211.

^[ix] Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Beaver, Penguin English Library, 1970.

Odd Jobs by Tony Duvert
Translated from the French by S. C. Delaney & Agnés Potier
56 pgs. | pb | 9781939663290 | $11.95

Review by Kaija Straumanis

I’ve long been a fan of Wakefield Press, ever since I first read , though I don’t get to read nearly as many of their titles as I would like. Do you guys also have a press whose overall aesthetic and output you just like? I mean, I of course love what Open Letter does (biased!) but if I’d have to choose another press, Wakefield would be at the top of my list. They’re just rad.

Moving on. Tony Duvert’s Odd Jobs is the most recent title I can add to my “read” (and “2018”) shelves, both at home and on Goodreads—and though it’s another one of those titles that I didn’t quite “understand,” this one I actually enjoyed reading, even considering the parts that made me squeamish (which, oddly, did not include the job that includes skinning children alive for their pelts).

Odd Jobs is a quick read, but chock-full of disturbing and often black-humor detail about a list of “odd jobs” that serve the inhabitants of an imaginary French village. The jobs, which range from “snot-remover” to “wiper” to “snowman” (so sad), lay out the “grotesque small-town occupations that defined a once reliable, now presumably vanished way of life.” Remember what life was like before smart phones? Before aloe vera and menthol-infused facial tissues? I do, though barely, but these odd jobs certainly make you not only relieved to live in a real world where people can wipe their own asses (generally speaking), and certainly happy to live in a time that is not (yet) a Margaret Atwoodian novel come true. Though, as mentioned, some of the jobs are funnier than others, and even seem to serve an actual purpose (that reminds me of Mercè Rodoreda’s Death in Spring in some ways!). Here’s one of the odd jobs that I found the least disturbing but most entertaining:

THE WINDOW-BREAKER
_____
It would sometimes happen that a wife, suffocated by her marriage, became crankier than usual. If it was a day that the window-breaker passed by, all would be well.
This man, boyish and grinning, would enter with his provision of rocks; he’d tell you a few jokes; playfully give your tush a little smack; and then, moving by turns from one room in the house to the next, he’d calmly break all the windows, shards falling and glittering outside.
The din would draw out the gossips, make children run off and husbands tremble: these were good days. Next, the woman in crisis would go off to stay with a neighbor, remaining as long as it took for new windowpanes to be set in their frames.
One would come across then, in the village, a number of houses whose broken windows had never been repaired. This was the method men and children had found to be free of certain women, leaving themselves, back at home, in a draft to catch cold.

For a short read that gives you what I believe is a taste of what Wakefield is all about, Odd Jobs is a good one to pick up and look through, though some jobs and descriptions may be disturbing to some. But based on the author bio, this is the exact effect Duvert was going for.

translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely
220 pgs. | pb |9781935744603 | $17.00 
Archipelago Books
Reviewed by Brendan Riley

For English language readers, like this reviewer, whose literary sense of North Africa is delimited by periodic forays into the stories and essays of Paul Bowles, the horror vacui of a sun-blanched Oran in Camus’s The Stranger and The Plague, Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo, the bygone world of The Travels of Ali Bey, or William S. Burroughs’s cutup interzone skew, then Abdellatif Laâbi’s autobiographical The Bottom of the Jar is an exquisite must-read.

Superbly translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely, this novel mainly focuses on the seriocomic musings and peregrinations of the author’s alter-ego, Namouss, a young boy of Fez, seven or eight years old, as he starts to become aware of the complexities of life in his family and the surrounding city during Morocco’s struggle for independence from France in the mid-1950s.

If Europeans are obsessed with background music, Moroccans have invented the background image, and without skimping on decibels either. In our home, clamor and din seemed to be inextricably mixed with our joy at coming together as a family.

This, the novel’s second paragraph, indicates one of the operating principles that make The Bottom of the Jar so memorable as it leads readers through the clamor and din and confusion of a Morocco trying to establish a modern, national identity.

The narrative seamlessly blends three areas and levels of concern: the background of 1950s Morocco on the cusp of independence from France; the family’s basic interest and concern in these events––their desire for liberation from the French coupled with disputes and worries about the potential dangers involved in supporting various factions vying for the leadership of a new Morocco; and how these fears are manifest in the misadventures of the eldest son, Namouss’s brother Si Mohammed, a rising star in the family, and a supporter of Moroccan independence.

Employed as a postal clerk––thanks to serious study and good performance on government exams, and thus a step up from his father’s artisanal status but also, because of its governmental and colonial character, a position that brings both admiration and controversy to his family and neighborhood––Si Mohammed ends an altercation with a French lieutenant by punching the man in the face. As a consequence he is imprisoned and Laâbi, setting forth with the color, humor, and arch meditative quality that characterizes the novel, describes the sacrifice of money, time, labor, and reputation which Namouss’s father, Driss, and extended family must endure to save the brother from prison and restore the family’s good name.

Driss is a saddlemaker in Fez’s Sekkatine souk and, as Namouss says, “[my father] was a saint. It took me some time to understand this.” Saintly for tolerating his shrill harridan of a wife, Ghita, for providing a humble but stable life for his family, for his good faith, and for his unwillingness to condemn anyone.

The fear and humiliation caused by the oldest son’s brief imprisonment are also echoed later in the novel during an episode in which the family must frantically hide and destroy possessions that might compromise their safety during house-to-house searches amid the country’s turbulent clashes for independence.

Namouss’s reveries include memories of his loving but quarrelsome family, the focal point and highlight being his mother, the salty, thorny, colorful Ghita––the novel’s dramatic anchor and the central presence in Namouss’ his young life––and her endless stream of unsolicited, acid-tongued imprecations as she elbows her way through daily life in a changing Morocco. In stark contrast to the even-tempered Driss, Ghita is a vicious scold, an old-fashioned Moroccan wife; hardworking, demanding, petty, caring, profane, and righteously selfish when the situation warrants it.

The novel’s early chapters also present Si Mohammed’s arranged marriage, Ghita’s pitiless machinations to procure for him the ideal bride (and thus bolster the family’s reputation), and, amusingly, the gathered family’s hushed expectation as the newlyweds retire to their room together for the first time and everyone eavesdrops to hear their cries of consummation.

Atop the richly developed background of social and political turmoil, Laâbi constructs a wonderful human comedy of family life and growing up in and around Fez, and the great, memorable charm of The Bottom of the Jar comes from the minutiae of his richly textured sketches and portraits of daily life in and around the Spring of Horses neighborhood and the Sekkatine souk, presented as Namouss’s memories and what he and his family hear through “Radio Medina” his nickname for the local grapevine of gossip and intrigue.

One of the many memorable sequences follows Namouss’s introduction to a modern, secular French colonial school where he is, much to his astonishment, introduced to the French language and the mysteries of books and handwriting, things he had not been exposed to at his previous Qur’an school; his pride in learning a foreign tongue is a sweet contrast to the political menace overhanging parts of the novel due to the strains of independence and, in some cases outbreaks of violence; thus when Namouss returns home and tries out his new words on his mother:

“Bonjour madame.”

Ghita, who as soon as she steeped on a raisin could promptly feel its sweetness rise up into her mouth, or so she claimed, had understood.

“Is that Freensh or is it Freentasia, as they say?”

And she erupted into a roar of laughter

 

Other episodes include family outings: a colorful, daylong picnic in a beautiful orchard on the edge of Fez, or a short vacation at the Sidi Harazem oasis out in the desert where Namouss learns to swim; Namouss’s first forays to the cinema (learning how to nab the best seats and, no less important, helping the unsophisticated Ghita to not confuse the cinematic illusion with reality) and soccer matches (too poor to get tickets, watching the game through the fence), a visit to the blacksmith in the El Haddadine souk, and getting caught up in a dangerous political demonstration, nearly trampled, and fainting from the crush of the crowd.

Chief among the novel’s many virtues is its wonderful, unflagging good humor. Like the best books rooted in cities, the atmospheric detail, the evocative power of setting is strong, flavorful, sensual. The novel provides many vibrant, interesting vignettes, which variously fade like dreams or linger like the scent or taste of a pungent spice. As he begins to know and understand, and be baffled by his city beyond the familiar confines of the family home, Namouss finds amusement, delight, and amazement scouring the bustling streets, and the narrative moves from the boy’s innocent errands in the marketplace to increasingly far-ranging and even dangerous excursions: “‘tramping and traipsing the streets,’ for which Ghita used to reproach him, or playing with the neighborhood kids right up to nightfall, mixing with the crowds in the Medina and taking in the flow of its sights,” and coming close to getting crushed by a heavily-laden donkey in the nearly deserted souk on one of the sleepy days of fasting during Ramadan. But Namouss’s innocence is also reflected in the pleasure he takes in simply seeing the city laid out before his eyes as he gazes at its panorama:

He loved looking out over the city whenever he climbed up to the rooftop terrace. From his promontory, he could see the minarets of all the important mosques . . . Wholly absorbed, he watched the clouds of steam dancing slowly above the grid of houses, and lent his ears to the noises made by workshops and street-sellers. Crowning this scene, the sky offered him another perspective on visual digressions, a canvas that an inspired hand was painting ceaselessly using colors that Fez held the secret to and had given the original names to: zebti (flesh color), quoqi (artichoke-mauve), fanidi (bubble gum), hammoussi (chickpea), ����â�ڰ����Ծ� (saffron), fakhiti ( azure), zrireq (violet).

 

Moving in closer, down to the ground, Laâbi’s mid-novel tour of the Sekkatine souk is a descriptive marvel that encapsulates the spirit and virtue of this book: “Namouss’s olfactory memory stored a variety of smells: goatskin, calfskin, hemp yarn, wax, natural or colored wool, bits and stirrup irons, wood, some flour-based adhesive, and of course snuff, which Driss, like the majority of the people in the Sekkatine, consumed vast quantities of.” And this fine description serves to set up deeper, more complex and impressive memories of the heart of social life in Fez, challenged by the changing times:

After the woolen carpets, the secondhand saddles, stirrups, and moukhala guns made the rounds. It got to the point that items completely unrelated to saddlery were peddled: samovars, copperware, engraved daggers . . . But eventually business slowed down and the souk would recover a little tranquility. The shopkeepers did their paperwork ad the craftsmen went back to work, albeit less energetically than before. The local café was flooded with orders, people asking Mrimou, the owner, for coffees or mint teas, which were served in chebri glasses. Out came the nuts or the snuffboxes and everyone gave themselves over to pleasure. This was also the time when passing visitors were welcomed and gossip was exchanged: weddings, divorces, deaths, houses that had gone on the market, inflation, new products, and—naturally—the arm wrestling between nationalists and the colonial authorities.

One of the most vivid recollections the reader might take away from The Bottom of the Jar is Laâbi’s cavalcade of portraits of the colorful local characters and relatives who inhabit their own moral and psychological realities, in moments that feel Dickensian, or perhaps, more appropriately, Mahfouzian, authentic pillars of a portrait of Fez in its turbulent fifties. This excellent series of sketches is anchored by Namouss’ eccentric Uncle Abdelkader who arrives from out of town and brings in the modern world with manufactured and imported goods and, after the right amount of kif, regales his relatives and neighbors with tales from the north; through him Laâbi presents Tangiers with its exotic international palette as an almost non-Moroccan sort of city, as opposed to Fez––by contrast a cradle of tensions. There is also Mikou, an itinerant poet who lives off neighborhood charity: “the scion of a large family, which he had left behind in favor of a free, wandering lifestyle that had in turn led to his family disowning him.” Then there’s Chiki Laqraâ, “the bald spook,” a Muslim woman who goes about unveiled, begging and haranguing the locals with her invective: “Who does that son of a bitch take me for? I am a woman, and the daughter of an honorable woman. My head is bare and I have nothing to hide. Let him come near me and I’ll show him which hole the fish piss out of.” We also meet Bou Tsabihate, the “rosary man,” who preaches harsh sermons but not for alms: “Faith and prayer are the only remedy. But what is it that I see? The mosques empty when it’s time to fill your stomachs. You are still snoring when the muezzin calls you to your duty. And what about the orphans, what do you do for them?” But the mosque can also be a perilous place for the boys because it’s there where they are likely to encounter Bou Souita, “Father Whip,” charged with preventing Namouss and the other boys from messing around. His namesake whip is:

A quince handle with a long leather lash attached to one end, which allowed him to strike the fugitives even in the farthest reaches of the square, dealing out blows in a most democratic fashion. Once the delinquents had been beaten and had dispersed, Bou Souita was free to attend to his other tasks, at which point the rabble-rousers would regroup, this time in a slightly more organized way.

Father Whip is offset by the kind Si Abdeltif, “one of the few adults in the neighborhood who didn’t look down on children and was always willing to exchange a few words with them.”

Other equally colorful residents include Bidous, the one legged beggar, Aâssala, the vagabond cat lady, a virtual mute, and Harrba the captivating storyteller who works hard for his money:

Harrba would jump and twirl and about. He would mimic the sound of waves, the wind, thunder, rain, animal calls, evoking sounds as varied as explosive farts to the silent ones weasels make, and would stop – all of a sudden and without warning – to allow the audience to give credit where credit was due.

“Would you like me to carry on?”

“Yes!” they would yell in unison.

“Very well then,” he would say, the show isn’t free. Dig deep into your pockets and let me hear those coins.”

But of all these characters it is, once again, Ghita who is the narrative touchstone, poison punchline, and earthy, unexpected guide to local custom and occult rituals, best displayed when she allows Namouss to tag along to a meeting of a religious sect to which she’s devoted, a cult dedicated to Lalla Mira, which translator Naffis-Sahely’s helpful endnotes define thus: “The ‘yellow spirit,’ a jinni that loves perfume, music, and dance and leaves laughter and happiness in her wake. When she takes possession of an individual, she sharpens their wit.” Indeed, Ghita seems to be a sort of coarse embodiment of this spirit. And when Namouss confuses his mother’s patron spirit with a demon he’s quickly corrected:

“Who is Lalla Mira? Some sort of ghoul like Aïcha Kandisha?”

“May your lips go numb! I never want to hear you mention that scrap of carrion again, otherwise she will come and eat you and pick her teeth clean with your bones. Lalla Mira is a real Muslim. She is the spirit that dwells within us and who watches over us. Oh Lalla Mira, taslim, I surrender to you. Here I am, just as you like, wearing your color on my head. Keep evil away from me and my children, and may the evil eye go blind before it manages to reach us.”

The curious boy insists on accompanying his mother but gets more than he bargained for, and Laâbi’s description of the rite, with its clouds of cloying incense, frenzied music and dancing, which overwhelm Namouss and cause him to faint, provides one of the most vivid and intense set pieces in a novel that is rich with them:

[Namouss’s] gaze is then drawn to a group of women dancing in the middle of the room. Dancing is not quite the word for it. Their agitation has nothing to do with swaying arms and hips or quivering bellies and shoulders, movements Namouss associated with dance as he knew it, the sort that women threw themselves into with a coquettish air at fêtes and festivities. Instead, the only movement these women are making is snapping their heads back and forth in an increasingly staccato rhythm the rest of their bodies remain immobile, except for when one of them sinks to her knees and begins shaking her torso back and forth with extraordinary strength. Freed from her head scarf, her hair would fall free and toss back and forth, then it began to fly around like a giant eagle experiencing turbulence in flight. Inspired by this ecstasy, the Gnaoua musicians play faster and faster, shouting hoarse sounds to egg the women on. The women reply by ululating in unison. At its climax, the ceremony takes an unexpected turn: A young female spectator leaps into the middle of the ring, and as if she’s been bitten by a scorpion, collapses on to the ground. Gripped by convulsions, she starts rolling and wriggling every which way on the floor. At this sight, a few dancers who haven’t yet lost all sense of reason run over to her, but instead of calming her down, they merely restrict her freedom of movement by surrounding her in a tighter circle. In doing so, these women look not only delighted but even envious of this ‘poor epileptic.’

 

Finally, beyond its alluring, kaleidoscopic mise en scène, this novel is also about the author’s birth as a writer, evidenced explicitly––by passages about his fascination for and growing love of books which bring foreign lands to his awareness:

Not only could he understand what he was reading but he was even beginning to forge a connection between the written words and the images associated with them: images shrouded in mystery and which seemed to come from another world – houses unlike any he’d ever seen, with plenty of space between them, topped by chimneys where smoke rose like a snake into the air, and surrounded by gardens where blond, chubby-cheeked children played on a seesaw.

 

––and implicitly by the resultant masterly compositions which paint glorious pictures of life in Fez, The Bottom of the Jar itself, replete with comedy and well-timed, properly proportioned injections of pathos, constructed on vivid, detailed, imagistic descriptions festooned with lively similes and finely wrought extended metaphors. It’s a novel that patiently elaborates a fascinating coming of age story, masterfully buffering its more sharp-edged historical concerns with Namouss’s naïveté and Laâbi’s deep love of life.

A classic novel of modern Moroccan literature, The Bottom of the Jar is an endless wellspring, a bottomless jar of riches, humane, hilarious, spicy and ribald, deeply captivating, always charming, never offensive––a serious, meticulously crafted memoir of revelatory erudition that superbly blends and balances the political, philosophical, and picturesque.

The Island of Point Nemo by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès
translated from the French by Hannah Chute
450 pgs. | pb | 9781940953625 | $17.95

Reviewed by Katherine Rucker

The Island of Point Nemo is a novel tour by plane, train, automobile, blimp, horse, and submarine through a world that I can only hope is what Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès’s psyche looks like, giant squids and all.

What begins as a seemingly simple case of jewel-thievery affecting a high-class widow takes a twist for the dystopian and absurd as the heroes chase severed limbs and diamonds the size of your fist across the globe. Every clue toward the recovery of the jewels is another knot in the storyline, and every character they meet is a new disaster, a new twist in the road.

On the advice of hookers, sword-swallowers, and train car strangers, always dandily dressed to the nines, Martial Canterel, our hero, races toward Point Nemo (the place in the ocean geographically farthest from land) in search of the stolen diamond while Point Nemo (the book) barrels deeper into a world that, every time you think it’s gotten too fantastical, you’re reminded how real it is.

The book’s English translator, Hannah Chute, says she likes the book for its particularly dark brand of absurd. “I like books,” says Chute, “where the world is quietly ending in the background.”

The state of reality in the Point Nemo world is certainly casually crumbling, from mobs of mercenaries hijacking trains to islands of circus-troupe rejects. But what seem like some of Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès’s more absurd creations aren’t actually creations: grotesque models of the human body displayed as art (), guerrilla groups out to save the world one good deed at a time (), and bicycle-powered e-readers (Christmas 2017?).

The good news is that all of this is just a story we’re being told! Or, rather, it’s the story being read to factory workers to quell their boredom as they build e-readers the whole monotonous day long. This novel encasing the novel isn’t a bit fantastical: Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès shows us the lecherous boss peeping into the locker rooms, the sexless marriage (complete with creative, cringe-worthy, porny attempts at reawakening desire), the long hours working for nothing, and the beloved dying wife inspiring the author.

In the end, of course, the world is still in chaos around all of them. Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès’s novel ends up not so unlike the riveting story-within-the-novel told to the enraptured factory workers to keep them on task: an entertaining yet haunting distraction from a world quietly crumbling around the reader.

The nonfiction book is divided into what Quignard terms 10 treatises, but it often reads like a collection of connected fragments from the author’s journal. Entries are separated by a small bullet point, and the book feels in sections like a prose poem, or really, at times a riddle. As The New Yorker has noted, Quignard is a writer with “an oblique, aphoristic bent.” In an interesting and detailed Translator’s Note at the end of the book, the author is quoted as saying the work falls into a category called “speculative rhetoric,” and it’s a type of writing, he says, that dates back to the invention of philosophy. Readers schooled not only in the classics but in the classics in their original language (Greek, Latin, French, et al) will be in good stead since the superb translators, Matthew Amos and Fredrik Rönnbäck, preserve the richness of the original text by including snippets of the original languages.

Quignard, a noted novelist, music aficionado, and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, is adept at illuminating the overlooked role that our sense of hearing plays in all things and all thoughts. One of the most poignant examples is St. Peter, the Catholic Apostle who is considered the religion’s first Pope. According to the Christian Bible, Peter thrice denied Jesus as he was being led off to slaughter, only to hear the sound of a cock crowing, as his master had warned. Quignard tells us in the book’s first treatise, called “The Tears of Saint Peter,” “It is said that as Peter grew older he could no longer bear cocks.” Indeed, he had any kind of animal of flight in and around his home killed. As I read this, I found myself grieving, if you will, for St. Peter, across the centuries. How he must have regretted his denial, how he must have been hemmed in by his mistake, which was marked forevermore in an inescapable shorthand by the sound of a bird’s call. None of that ever occurred to me before reading Quignard’s book.

In the book’s eponymous, seventh treatise, he also makes the painfully astute observation that music was the only art to have been an instrument in the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews. The Germans used marches and other songs to reinforce discipline and compliance. Quignard quotes none other than Primo Levi as saying that the music heard in the camps “will be the last thing from the Lager we will forget” because it is “the voice of the Lager.”

Yet as dense and erudite as the book is, “The Hatred of Music” abounds with short, pithy thoughts that cause the reader to wonder why these ideas aren’t routinely bandied about in everyday conversation. In the second treatise, Quignard writes, “To hear is to be touched from afar.” Oh, yes, c’est vrai! A page later, he writes, “Before birth, until the final moment of death, men and women hear without a moment’s respite. There is no sleep for hearing.” Well, now that you mention it. In another section, a fragment reads simply, “Not knowing the name of what haunts us in sound.” Yes, that. These ideas are collected in the chapter called, “It So Happens That Ears Have No Eyelids.”

All of these straightforward yet profound statements build a case for hearing as perhaps the most powerful of the five senses, a hidden motor of activity that can be blamed for all manner of problems and conditions and predilections that travel with us from birth to death. It’s as if he’s peering into our thoughts.
In one especially evocative section, he speaks of the continuity of sound, even within our heads when nothing external could potentially reach our ears. He uses the term “surging hums,” which strike us as we walk, modulating “according to the rhythm of our gait.” What are these “surging hums”? Hymns, he says. Old songs. “Childish and protective refrains. Lullabies and nursery rhymes. Polkas and waltzes. Singalong tunes.” He’s probing an internal soundtrack of which we are often dimly aware even as it’s broadcast inside of our heads.

Indeed, he’s often writing about things we sense but cannot articulate. He’s writing about sound in a way that’s arguably rare for the common reader in America to come upon, including this reviewer, but which nonetheless is germane and perceived on some level by every single person alive. That’s because he’s approaching sound as a primordial force within us, that is common to all of us, whether we routinely read the work of French essayists or not. To wit, he writes, “Nonvisual sounds, forever withdrawn from sight, roam within us. Ancient sounds tormented us. We did not yet see. We did not yet breathe. We did not yet scream. We heard.” The thought is so true and essential that, though it appears only on page 9, one could put the book down, having already grasped something vital about the connection between sound and consciousness.

Yet a reviewer should issue this warning: Abandon all hope—ye who read this book—of traditional structure or tight narrative weave. As the journal Quarterly Conversation has noted about Quignard’s oeuvre, “One is struck by the feeling that they are witnessing someone transcribing his thoughts, pure and fresh as they form in the mind, or to use a fitting mythological connection, Athena springing from the head of Zeus.” Indeed, in the translators’ notes at the end of the book, they say Quignard strives to “make language an endeavor of disorientation,” which often gives his prose a “refined coarseness.”

Some of the sentences in the book are almost prohibitively arcane, including this gem: “There is a fragment by Pacuvius that formulates what interrupts the plurimillennial hammering march.” This sentence is followed first by a sentence in French that is translated only in the footnotes and then by the same thought in Latin, which is untranslated. Which is not to suggest the translators, Amos and Rönnbäck, phoned this job in. On top of writing a comprehensive afterword, they have been careful to insert footnotes throughout the text, even indicating at one point where the popular definition of a word (formidable) deviates from Quignard’s usage in the text. (Oh and, if ever a book needed a team of translators, it’s this one.)

Here and there in the early sections of the text, Quignard signals how sound in the form of music has become his own personal torture device. For example, he writes, without elaboration, “The recent religion of happiness turns my stomach.” Then in the book’s ninth treatise, which is tellingly called “To Disenchant,” he writes by way of explanation that music is now so ubiquitous in modern life that “it has become incessant, aggressing night and day, in the commercial streets of city centers, in shopping centers, in arcades, in departments stores . . . even at the beach . . .” In the translators’ afterword, we learn that in 1994 Quignard suddenly retreated from all of his professional activities—including his senior roles at the Gallimard publishing house and the International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theater at Versailles. He resolved only to write in solitude.

One hopes Quignard will find the solitude he needs to write because this reviewer believes he could recount the entire history of literature through the lens of sound. And here’s hoping he does just that.

Twenty-One Cardinals by Jocelyne Saucier
translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins
176 pgs. | pb |9781552453070 | $19.95

Reviewed by Natalya Tausanovitch

Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals is about the type of unique, indestructible, and often tragic loyalty only found in families. For a brief but stunningly mesmerizing 169 pages, Twenty-One Cardinals invited me in to the haunting and intimate world of the Cardinal family, and left me wishing I could stay for more. With its elegiac prose and sensitively developed characters, the novel is an original, emotionally potent, and heartbreakingly real exploration of the forces that bind and break families.

In addition to Saucier’s nuanced portrayal of a unique family dynamic, the inventiveness of her various characters and settings kept me constantly intrigued. The Cardinals are a fierce and feral clan of twenty-one siblings who grew up together in Norco, a now desolate and poverty-stricken mining town in Quebec. Norco was built on the short-lived prosperity of a zinc mine discovered by their obsessive and elusive prospector father; in the original, instigating tragedy of the family, he would never see an ounce of the wealth that came from his discovery, an event that would spiral into the family’s demise. As a consequence of this underlying anger, the siblings grew up united in a war against anyone outside their exclusive, isolated family: for most of their childhoods, it was Cardinals against the rest of the world. They despised the outsiders that profited from the mine and ridiculed any sign of weakness within their own ranks. The Caboose, the youngest boy, romanticizes his family’s history more than anyone (but also knows the least of its secrets):

There are plenty of parts of our story that I can’t tell. People are too narrow-minded to accept such a lust for life. We don’t belong to the same species. We never wanted their lives, and I can see in their eyes that our defiance sends them scurrying back to their doghouses the second a particularly Cardinal episode comes up. Over the years, I have figured out which things are most remarkable, and I don’t pour it on any thicker. I stick close to what’s deemed acceptable.

With fire and dynamite as their weapons of choice, they were an intrepid, scrappy tribe of child bandits, terrorizing the town, mercilessly tough on each other but unconditionally united. The Neverland that Saucier creates as the Cardinal children’s domain is as interesting and imaginative as the rough-and-tumble camaraderie of the siblings themselves:

I was five, maybe six, and the town seemed to go on forever. Yet I simply had to stand on the sheet metal roof of the dynamite shed, which we would slide down winter and summer, and I could see the entire expanse of it. From the disused fire station that gleamed white in the sun (it was built just before the mine closed) to the flimsy hovels scattered along the forest’s edge, there were three large, square, grassy plots of land and, lost in the desolation, a few houses in ruins or well on their way. It was the same when you looked along the other axis: space, tall grass, grey asphalt roads full of potholes, a few forsaken buildings and, just about anywhere you looked, the mounds left by houses that had been transported elsewhere: the cement foundations, the sagging sheds, the body of a car that didn’t want to follow. And sometimes, lo and behold, a smart, tidy house cultivating flowers and hubris. Like the Potvins’, which had once been the city hall. Just two children. The son was going to college, the daughter to convent, and their mother played the organ at church. Rich people we cheerfully despised.

The novel actually takes place years later, though, once the “golden age” of the Cardinal children has passed, and their clan has grown up and all but dissolved. For the first time in years, the entire adult family is reunited, forcing them to come to terms with an event that has haunted them all for decades: their involvement with (and as we learn more, perhaps responsibility for) the mysterious disappearance of one of their own.

Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different sibling, consisting of introspective, intimate monologues and memories from several members of the family. The novel owes much of its suspense, mystery, and thought-provoking ambiguity to this multi-perspectival form. The fragments of the Cardinal family’s unusual past are pieced together through these accumulating shards of memory and knowledge: their story cannot be fully told by any one member, and the troubled past that poisons the family can only be resolved through bringing together the combination of secrets, big and small, that all of them keep. It is immensely satisfying how Saucier strategically unfurls the details of the Cardinal saga through the lenses of the different “generations” of its children; from the oldest child, Émilien with perhaps the most perspective, having had the full view of the family history, to the youngest, The Caboose, who, in his worshiping naïveté relishes the romanticized stories of the Cardinal children’s peak years. It is fascinating to see how the Cardinal children’s lives have diverged, and how they have each dealt with the aftermath of their former life together—they are scattered around the world, all living in drastically different ways. Each glimpse into these lives yields a depth and investment in the characters that is remarkable for the brief chapters they inhabit; I often found myself wishing that I could dive even deeper, linger a little longer, in each of their divergent worlds.

Saucier’s melancholy family mystery has a natural flow and an intimate, dream-like atmosphere that kept me reading, hypnotized, to the end. It was intriguing to read along as the Cardinals literally put together the pieces of a former life that often seems too surreal to be true. I loved how, on so many levels, this novel approached the simultaneous strength and weakness in the inescapability of family bonds; even living their separate adult lives, decades later, the Cardinals cannot avoid the pull that brings them all together to confront their once-shared lives. It is this same inescapability that leads to so many of the family’s tragedies, yet also some of the tender and vulnerable moments they share. Offered an opportunity by a wealthy family to get an education and participate in the “finer” parts of life, Angèle, (the sister who disappeared) was mercilessly teased and tormented by her siblings. Nicknamed “The Foster Child,” she was a misfit in her gentle nature, but she always returned to her siblings: “The keys to the world were handed to her with all the honors due to the first class. Why would she agree to leave that peaceful world for the den of the deranged, who started quarreling over the scraps of her soul as soon as she set foot in the house?” Her simple, perfect answer, and a summary of Saucier’s powerful message: “‘Family is an encounter with the deepest parts of your soul.’”

Despentes doesn’t merely explore what it’s like to be a woman in the world. Some of her books are about what it’s like to be anyone in a world that keeps people unequal, whether they be men or women, rich or poor. They’re about how everyone is affected, and affected negatively, by our society’s status quo. Bye Bye Blondie is one of these books.

Published by the Feminist Press earlier this month and translated from the French by Siân Reynolds, Bye Bye Blondie is a story about Gloria and Gloria’s rage. At first we are made to think Gloria’s outbursts are immature, the enactment of “the crazy girlfriend,” costing her relationships with lovers, friends, and family. We learn Gloria was previously placed in a psychiatric hospital by her parents because of these outbursts. And yet as the book goes on, we realize Gloria’s rage is incredibly right and true. It’s the only sane course of action for anyone who sees the world for what it is.

It’s when Gloria is locked away in a mental hospital for a few months that she starts to understand, to crack. There she starts to see the way of the world, how power operates. She realizes that to exist within the system is to betray herself; to get along with others, to have friends or boyfriends or money, she has to be someone else. In the most revealing scene of the book, the scene that feels most directly to have come from Despentes’s life (her memoir King Kong Theory starts out, “I am writing as an ugly one for the ugly ones”), a specialist asks Gloria why she chooses to be ugly, why she is “refusing to be a woman.” Gloria doesn’t respond, knowing it won’t help her get out of the hospital, but Despentes tells us: “Because agreeing to be a woman means suffering in silence, not fighting back.” And the reader knows this to be true: Gloria is in the hospital “because [her] father started yelling at [her] and instead of keeping quiet, [she] answered back.”

Her saving grace in the hospital is a young man named Eric, a rich boy who’s temporarily lost his memory and remains there until his bourgeois parents come to rescue him. After he leaves, they begin to exchange letters. As main characters tend to do, they fall in love. Eric is the first person she’s ever met who loves her “precisely for what she was most afraid of in herself.” Namely, her rage, her distaste for the world, her ability to see the world and those playing into it for what they are. Because her rage soothes him, makes him think that he too holds the world at an ironic distance, that he too has not betrayed himself and does not live a life of compromise. Being with Gloria allows Eric to forget who his parents raised him to be. In turn, Eric lets Gloria feel it’s okay to be herself.

Once Gloria is out of the mental hospital, they realize there’s only one thing to do: run away. They live on the margins of society for a while. They’re bums, they’re poor, they’re punk rockers, they’re happy. Despentes tells us, “All this time, other people their age were learning to be competitive, disciplined, learning not to set their sights too high, not to ask questions, and that money is what matters most in this world. Eric and Gloria were learning nothing at all . . .”

Suddenly Eric goes missing, and after months of searching for him, Gloria receives a letter from him saying he has decided to enter back into society, or in his words, “reality.” In order to search for him, Gloria, too, re-enters society, where she’ll remain, but always with a disdain for herself and everyone else living this “reality.” Her outbursts of rage are against the world, but also against herself for giving in to what she calls the “pure surrender” of going along with this cruel world.

Twenty years later, Gloria and Eric run into each other in the street following one of her outbursts, and this is where the plot of Bye Bye Blondie begins. They are now in different places in their lives—Eric is a famous talk-show host who is incredibly depressed, and Gloria is a poor and barely functioning member of society living off of government aid. They have their ups and downs and their love story plays out over the course of the book. Gloria seems to be caught in a trap: as soon as she finds herself edging toward success, money, and acceptance in society, she loses herself more and more, and ends up flying off the handle in rebellion, landing back at square one. We watch Gloria and Eric explore how far they’re willing to compromise before they wind up disgusted with themselves, Gloria manic and Eric depressive. But the most interesting thing Despentes does in Bye Bye Blondie is show us how these two ultimately fit together. In this world, love does not conquer all, does not bridge differences. A soul mate is not someone who balances us, or shows us the beauty of the world. A soul mate isn’t even someone who allows us to tolerate the world. Rather, a soul mate is someone who enables us to stomach the compromises we inevitably make to live within it.

And to be honest, for the first time in a long time, I found the accompanying texts to be more interesting than the book itself. I know, I’m still kind of reeling. The book has two afterwords, which provide a lot of history on Violette Leduc (who is best known for her autobiography La Bâtarde), her writing, her style, and her attempts and later small victories in getting published:

Thérèse et Isabelle formed the first section of a novel, Ravages, which Leduc presented to the publisher Gallimard in 1954. Judged “scandalous,” this work was censored by the publisher. . . . In its original version, Ravages was intended to retrace the three love stories of its heroine, Thérèse. These were inspired by, if not calqued on, the three liaisons that had marked Leduc’s youth . . .”

The first of these liaisons was a “carnal coupling with a fellow schoolgirl.” And that’s basically what the book is about. A schoolgirl, Thérèse, who envies and claims to hate another girl, Isabelle, and who then wind up fingering each other (and more) in Isabelle’s bed (among other places). (The manuscript even made Raymond Queneau, then a member of Gallimard’s reading committee, nervous.) The moments captured by the two girls are sweet and youthfully panicked/self-discoveryish enough, but it also more often than not read in a way that was robotic. In-between all the frantic fingerings and whispered nothings are extended moments of imagery, both poetic and broken (mostly broken), that, for some reason, I found more forced than charming:

Isabelle is kissing me, I tell myself. She was drawing a circle around my mouth, she encircled my trouble, put a cool kiss at each corner, she dived down to place two notes, returned, rested. Beneath their lids my eyes were wide with astonishment, the thundering of the conch shells too vast. Isabelle continued: we descended knot by knot into a night beyond the school’s night, beyond the night of the town and of the tram depot. She had made her honey on my lips, the sphinxes had gone to sleep once more.”

I may not be the audience for this kind of narrative—or dialogue, for that matter, which struck me as equally robotic—but, going back to those afterwords, I was time and again fascinated by Leduc’s history. The first afterword quotes a letter of hers that at least puts her writing into perspective:

“I am trying to render as accurately as possible, as minutely as possible, the sensations felt in physical love. In this there is doubtless something that every woman can understand. I am not aiming for scandal, but only to describe the woman’s experience with precision. I hope this will not seem anymore scandalous than Madame Bloom’s thoughts at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses. Every sincere psychological analysis, I believe, deserves to be heard.”

As a reader, I wholly appreciate this, both for its insight into the author’s process-related goals, and for her desire to break the mould of what then-conventional emotions in literature were “accepted.” I also find it interesting that a country such as France would want to censor sensual things (I may have missed that part in my French history course as an undergrad, but I may have also been too distracted by scenes of a young Gerard Depardieu in the numerous French movies our professor made us watch), but then again, it’s not that surprising. What I also like is the promise of Leduc’s attention to detail combined with said detail—all of which I, as a reader, am to experience.

The actual “scandalous” part aside (this is 2015, after all, and I’ve seen enough episodes of True Blood to know a thing or two), the rest of what Leduc was aiming for didn’t resonate with me. In terms of her extremely close attention to detail, her efforts certainly show, but I frequently felt there was too much going on all the time—though do I realize that the overload of detail can be compared to the cloudburst of emotions one feels when in love, or lust. Some of the dialogue made me squeamish as well, not because of its “scandal,” but because I found it to be abstract and random in a way I found distracting—and not in a good way:

I threw myself at her sex. I would have preferred it to be simpler. I almost wanted to sew it back up all around.

“My darling trout, my beloved submarine pout. I’m coming back to you. I’m here. . . . It’s the pink brute. I love it, it devours me. I adore it without illusions.”

Okay. While I could agree with an argument stating that young people in a first-time, socially-forbidden relationship may say words just to say them, regardless of how said term of endearment comes across, some of the sayings are more-than-foreign to me. Darling trout? Submarine pout? The Bloodhound Gang’s “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” lists more inventive, and ultimately less awkward, names for the female genitalia. Maybe it sounds sexier in the French.

Overall, my reading experience was admittedly not what I wanted it to be. This is also, truthfully, the first book I’ve read by Feminist Press myself—as opposed to book reviews of their books—so I was hoping my own reaction would be different. (That’s right, I’m saying this is an “It’s not you, it’s me” scenario.) What I found was an abstract and stilted narrative that doesn’t fit into what I gravitate toward as a reader. However, Leduc’s writing and struggles as a writer—a female writer—and her desire and need to express an understanding of sexuality that was so deep and personal should not go overlooked. Thérèse and Isabelle will surely push the right buttons in other readers—possibly someone more in-tune with the history of writing and publishing in France, and that Feminist Press is giving further voice to these women authors is highly commendable; I look forward to reading more from them.