Nana - A 1927 Silent Film Directed by Jean Renoir- 2 Hours 27 Minutes. Available on YouTube with English Captions- A Paris in July 2024 Movie

 

Paris in July 2024

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.

Nana - A 1927 Silent Film Directed by Jean Renoir- 2 Hours 27 Minutes. Available on YouTube with English Captions- A Paris in July 2024 Movie

Jean Renoir.

Born: September 15, 1894, Montmartre, Paris, France

Died: February 12, 1979 (age 84 years), Beverly Hills, California, United States 

Renoir's most famous films were made during the 1930s, including La Grande Illusion (1937), The Rules of the Game (1939), and The Woman on the Beach (1943). These films are all considered masterpieces of world cinema.

Renoir left France for the United States in 1941, and he made several films there, including The Southerner (1945) and The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946). He returned to France in 1949, and he continued to make films until his death in 1979.

Nana, Renoir's second film Nana is on based a novel by the French naturalist author Émile Zola. Completed in 1880, Nana is the ninth installment in the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series.

I very much enjoyed watching Nana. It is a strikingly good depiction of the transition of Nana from a girl from a very poor family, to a dancer in a burlesque show, to a prostitute and eventually a very wealthy courtesan, mistress to wealthy nobles. Renoir shows us the impact of Nana on the men in her life, they competed for her favour with extremely expensive gifts including a mansion. The sets are really well done. 

Nana is a bit sadistic but also a victim. Her servants added a lot to the movie.  There are undercurrents of Lesbian relationships.

Mel Ulm 

The Reading Life 

The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain - 2015. Translated from the French by Emily Boyce and Jane Aitkin - 242 Pages - A Paris in July 2024 Novel

 

Paris in July 2024

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.

The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain - 2015. Translated from the French by Emily Boyce and Jane Aitkin - 242 Pages - A Paris in July 2024 Novel

The Red Notebook is my introduction to Antoine Laurain.  I admit I never heard of him until I saw another of his novels as one of the gift books on the Paris in July 2024 homepage.   I loved this book. It really made me feel I was in Paris.

The Red Notebook opens with a terrible scene of the mugging of a woman, Lauren 

The Red Notebook is about Laurent, a bookseller you can’t help but like as you learn things about him, and Lauren, a woman whose mystery you’d want to know about as much as does Laurent, but she sadly is in a coma. On the way to the bookstore one morning, Laurent sees a beautiful bag thrown aside. After a bit of tinkering around with the bag, he thinks it was probably stolen and takes it to the police, but when the police do not help much, he decides to hand the bag to its owner.

However, in Paris, a city where millions of people live, of course, he cannot predict how he will find the owner of this bag, which has no identity. As we glance over the contents of the bag and especially read the contents of the red notebook, one cannot help but think that the bag’s owner is a fine person.

 This is the magic of The Red Notebook. The beautiful mystery combined with the charm of Paris and the beautiful world Laurain creates.

The Red Notebook is a full of fascinating literary references, Patrick Modiano even appears as a character, there is a suitably charming cat named Putin, lots of interesting  secondary characters, time in the bookstore.  The ending is emotionally gratifying.

"Antoine Laurain is a novelist, screenwriter, journalist, director and collector of antique keys. A truly born and bred Parisian, after studying film, he began his career directing short films and writing screenplays. His passion for art led him to take a job assisting an antiques dealer in Paris. The experience provided the inspiration for his first novel, The Portrait, winner of the Prix Drouot.

Antoine’s novels have been translated into over twenty languages, including Arabic and Korean. Sales of his books across all formats in English have surpassed 180,000 copies, and The Red Notebook (2015) has become one of Gallic Books’ bestsellers both in the UK and the USA, and has been selected for HRH the Duchess of Cornwall’s Reading Room.

Also published: French Rhapsody (2016), The Portrait (2017), Smoking Kills (2018) and Vintage 1954 (2019)." from Gallic Books 

I have already begun his latest novel An Astronomer in Love and hope to post upon it this month 

Mel Ulm

The Reading Life

"The Orange Fish" - A Short Story by Carol Shields- 8 Pages - Included in The Collected Short Stories of Carol Shields - 2004

 

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.

Like several of her other stories, in "The Orange Fish" in just a few pages Shields takes us into the dynamics of years of a less than perfect marriage. It also has a very strange intriguing ending.

"LIKE OTHERS OF MY GENERATION I am devoted to food, money and sex, but I have an ulcer and have been unhappily married to Lois-Ann, a lawyer, for twelve years. As you might guess, we are both fearful of aging. Recently Lois-Ann showed me an article she had clipped from the newspaper, a profile of a well-known television actress who was described as being “deep in her thirties.” “That’s what we are,” Lois-Ann said sadly, “deep in our thirties.” She looked at me from behind a lens of tears. Despite our incompatibility, the two of us understand each other, and I knew more or less what it was she was thinking: that some years ago, when she was twenty-five, she made up her mind to go to Vancouver Island and raise dahlias, but on the very day she bought her air ticket, she got a letter in the mail saying she’d been accepted at law school. “None of us writes our own script,” she said to me once, and of course she’s right. I still toy—I confess this to you freely—with my old fantasy of running a dude ranch, with the thought of well-rubbed saddles and harnesses and the whole sweet leathery tip of possibility, even though I know the dude market’s been depressed for a decade"

The Carol Shields Trust in a good source of information 

Clara Reads Proust by Stéphane Carlier - 2022 Translated from the French by Polly MacIntosh - 155 Pages- Paris in July 2024 Novel

 

Paris in July 2024

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.

Clara Reads Proust by Stéphane Carlier - 2022 Translated from French by Polly MacIntosh - 155 Pages- A Paris in July 2024 Novel

(This book is one of the prizes available to participants.)

Clara Reads Proust by Stéphane Carlier was a total delight. If you love Proust, Reading, Paris then you cannot go wrong with this marvelous novel. Plus there is a reallllly. neat cat, an inside look at a Parisian hair salon, and lots of fun stuff.

"Clara is a hairdresser at Cindy Coiffure, a sleepy French salon with an identity crisis. Her relationship is fizzling out. Her tanoholic boss Madame Habib worships Jacques Chirac and talks longingly of her days in Paris. The highlight of the week was when the dishy technician came to repair the display cabinet. And now Madame Lévy-Leroyer wants to go blonde. Clara can’t help but wonder if there’s more to life . . .

Everything changes when a customer leaves behind the first volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. As Clara reads, she discovers a whole new world, leading her to strike up an unexpected friendship. And slowly but surely, she will work out who she wants to be." From the Publisher 

90 percent of the novel has has Clara in her middle 20s.  An epilogue takes her decades forward where we see how Reading Proust completely transformed her life.

Stéphane Carlier grew up around Paris in the 1970s. He worked for the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs for several years, with whom he spent a decade in the United States. He has also lived in India and Portugal. Clara Reads Proust is his eighth novel and the first to be translated into English. Polly mackintosh is an editor and a translator from French. She has translated the work of Alain Ducasse, Antoine Laurain, Serge Joncour and early French feminist Marie-Louise Gagneur. She currently lives in London.

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert ; edited and translated from the French by Francis Steegmuller.- 2023 - 715 Pages - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Paris in July 2024

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert / by Gustave Flaubert; edited and translated from the French by Francis Steegmuller.- 2023 - 715 Pages - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Gustave Flaubert 

Born 12 - 12 - 1821

Madame Bovary - 1857

Salammbó 1862

Sentimental Education 1869

The Temptation of Saint Anthony 1874

Dies 5- 8 - 1882

 Madame Bovary is without dispute among the greatest of all novels. Sentimental Education is masterpiece. His other two novels are "strange".  

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert -edited and translated from the French by Francis Steegmuller.- 2023 - 715 Pages is an extraordinarly valuable work for all seriously into Flaubert but lacking fluency in French.

--“If there is one article of faith that dominates the Credo of Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence,” Francis Steegmuller writes in the introduction to this selection of Flaubert’s letters, “it is that the function of great art is not to provide ‘answers.’” The Letters of Gustave Flaubert is above all a record of the intransigent questions—personal, political, artistic—with which Flaubert struggled throughout his life.

Here we have Flaubert’s youthful, sensual outpourings to his mistress, the poet Louise Colet, and, as he advances, still unknown, into his thirties, the wrestle to write Madame Bovary. We hear, too, of his life-changing trip to Egypt, as described to family and friends, and then there are lively exchanges with Baudelaire, with the influential critic Sainte-Beuve, and with Guy de Maupassant, his young protégé. Flaubert’s letters to George Sand reveal her as the great confidante of his later years.

Steegmuller’s book, a classic in its own right, is both a splendid life of Flaubert in his own words and the ars poetica of the master who laid the foundations for modern writers from James Joyce to Lydia Davis. Originally issued in two volumes, the book appears here for the first time under a single cover.-- From The New York Review of Books

 

Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to The Revolution by Caroline Weber - 2007 - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Paris in July 2024 

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.

Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to The Revolution by Caroline Weber - 2007 - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Marie Antoinette 

Queen of France 1755-1793

Born - October 16,1730 - Vienna

Marries (at age 14) May 16,1770

the heir to the throne of France in an arrangement meant to build an alliance between the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons

May 10, 1774 - her husband succeeds to the throne as Louis XVI

Bastille Day - July 14, 1789

Executed- September 3, 1792

"When her carriage first crossed over from her native Austria into France, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette was taken out, stripped naked before an entourage, and dressed in French attire to please the court of her new king. For a short while, the young girl played the part.

But by the time she took the throne, everything had changed. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber tells of the radical restyling that transformed the young queen into an icon and shaped the future of the nation. With her riding gear, her white furs, her pouf hairstyles, and her intricate ballroom disguises, Marie Antoinette came to embody--gloriously and tragically--all the extravagance of the monarchy." From Publisher 

As Weber vividly details as the wife of a future king, every aspect of the life of Marie Antoinette was prescribed by rigid etiquette.  At the huge Palace in Versailles there were  nobles whose only function might be giving Marie water, putting on her shoes. Arriving shy from a sheltered less rigid life in the Hapsburgs court, Marie was at first overwhelmed. Slowly she became a favourite of her husband's grandfather. This brought her into conflict with his mistress Madame de Pompadour. Many at the court did not want an alliance with the Hapsburgs.

Her only purpose as Weber explains was to produce an heir to the throne.  However her husband was either too shy or simply not interested in having sex with her.  In the intense gossip of the court this was portrayed as her fault. (They would eventually have four children.)

Weber's focus in on the clothing worn by Marie, her make up, and the incredibly elaborate hairstyles worn at court.  Tradition demanded she have the most expensive outfits.  

Weber also provides a detailed very informative social and political account of the period.  

Caroline Weber (Barnard) is a Professor of French specialized in the literature and history of the 17th- and 18th-century royal court, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. At Columbia, she has offered seminars on Rousseau, modern literary theory, May 1968, and Images of the French Revolution, team-taught with Professor Elisabeth Ladenson. A graduate of Harvard (A.B., summa cum laude) and Yale (M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.), she was a junior faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania before coming to Barnard and Columbia in 2005; she has also been a visiting professor at Princeton. Focused on the intersections between literary, political, and visual culture (including fashion), she has contributed articles to such scholarly journals as PMLA, Philosophy and Literature, Eighteenth-Century Culture, and Nineteenth-Century French Studies, and to such mainstream publications as the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, W magazine, Town & Country, and Vogue. Professor Weber has published the following books: Fragments of Revolution (Yale UP 2002), an anthology of essays coedited with H.G. Lay; Terror and Its Discontents: Suspect Words in Revolutionary France (U of Minnesota P 2003); Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (Holt 2006/Picador 2007), a New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Best Book of the Year; and Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Knopf 2018), a finalist for the American Library of Paris Book Prize and the winner of the French Heritage Society Literary Award. 

Mel Ulm 

The Reading Life 

Paris Echo- 2018 - by Sebastian Faulks. - 278 Pages - A Paris in July Novel

Paris Echo.- 2018 - by Sebastian Faulks. - 278 Pages - A Paris in July 2024 Work

Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome

"A haunting portrait of Paris past and present from the bestselling author of Birdsong.

'Superb... Weaves winningly between the present and the Second World War, between Tangier and Paris' Observer

American academic Hannah and runaway Moroccan teenager Tariq have little in common, yet both find themselves haunted by the ghosts of Paris.

Hannah listens to the extraordinary witness of women living under the German Occupation and finds a city bursting with clues, connections and past love affairs, while in the migrant suburbs Tariq is searching for a mother he barely knew. Urgent and deeply moving, Paris Echo asks how much we really need to know in order to live a valuable life." Penquin House 

 My feelings on Paris Echo are mixed. I found the two central characters overly concerned with seeking out sexual partners in Paris. I am glad I did drag myself to the end of Paris Echo. The most interesting aspects of the book were the stories of Parisian women who lived through the war.

Mel Ulm

The Reading Life