The Black Notebook by Jean Patrick Modiano (2016, 144 pages)

Paris in July - Hosted by Thyme for Tea

The Black Notebook by Jean Patrick Mondiano (translated by the award winning Mark Polizzotti) centers on the quest of a writer, Jean, to attempt to discover information concerning a woman, who was his occasional lover, fifty years ago, right after the close of The Algerian War for Independence, 1964.  Paris then was ripe with suspicion, full of contrasts between the respectable and the dangerous.  We see the character of the city being impacted by new comers from what was once French colonial North Africa.  The Black Notebook is deeply saturated with an almost hallucinatory miasma of memories of walks around Paris.

Using a black note book in which, fifty years ago, he recorded his activities and his contacts Jean attempts to discover if this woman may still be alive and to unravel the secrets of her troubled past she kept deeply veiled.  

The Black Notebook is very much about the nature of memory.  We see the voluntary and involuntary memories Jean has as he wanders Paris, fifty years ago he was a struggling young writer, now he is quite successful.  The days of the poverty stricken streets of his youth begin to come back to him, intertwined with his thoughts on Paris, a city he loves and knows intimately.  As he walks the city, he begins to think of an even almost imagine he sees Jean Duval (1820 to 1862),  lover for twenty years in a very volatile relationship with Charles Baudelaire.  We almost enter the narrator's subconscious as we know he equates this relationship to his of fifty years ago.  I admit I loved this touch.

The Black Notebook is a fascinating book, very much worth reading. 

One sees the profound influence of Proust in this book.

I hope to read his Trilogy set during the occupation of Paris by the Nazis, highly praised by the Nobel Committee, this month.

Jean Patrick Modiano (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ paˈtʁik ˌmɔdjaˈno]; born 30 July 1945) is a French novelist and recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. He previously won the 2012 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the 2010 Prix mondial Cino Del Duca from the Institut de France for lifetime achievement, the 1978 Prix Goncourt for Rue des boutiques obscures, and the 1972 Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française for Les Boulevards de ceinture. His works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have been celebrated in and around France, but most of his novels had not been translated into English before he was awarded the Nobel Prize. - from Amazon

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Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (2015, winner of Hugo and Nebula Award, 98 pages)

African Reading Challenge 2017 - Hosted by Kinna Reads

If you want to read top quality Science Fiction or Fantasy works but you don't really know what to read you pretty much cannot go wrong by picking a Hugo or Nebula Prize Winning work (both awards have webpages listing all the winners from past years).  Awards are given for best novel, best short story and best novella.  

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor won both awards for best novella in 2015.  The description on Amazon and the publisher's website (tor.com) sounded very intriguing, reading time under two hours.  

Binti is a 16 year old mathematics genius, called a harmonizer, a member of the Himbi people, living far in the future.  The Hambi live in Northern Namibia, in 2017 the population is estimated at 50,000.  In our story, they are very into technology, computer design, and mathematics.  They are also very devoted to their own ancient culture, almost insular.  They rarely leave their home area and they fear the idea.  No one in Binti's family has ever left their area, let alone Earth.  

Binti receives an invitation to study at the most advanced academy in the universe, the very prestigious planet Oomza, the population there is only five percent human.  Binti is so worried about how her family will react that she sneaks off to catch the space ship the planet.  Okorafor is super creative and imaginative.  I loved the idea that the space ships were Bio-engineered living creatures.  Everyone at the space port is surprised by the red clay caking the face of Binti and in her braided hair.  This is an ancient Hambi tradition, going back to very old times when the red clay as used as protection from dangerous insect bites and to demarcate tribal identity.

Something very exciting and scary happens on the trip but I don't want to tell anymore of the so much fun, so very intelligent plot.  There is a sequel to Binti and I hope to read it this year.

I read this as part of my participation in The African Reading Challenge 2017 (see the link above for details.

From Nnedi.com

Nnedi Okorafor has made a name for herself with novels that combine politically complex science fiction and lyrical fantasy. 
-- The New York Times

Nnedi Okorafor is an international award-winning novelist of African-based science fiction, fantasy and magical realism for both children and adults. Born in the United States to two Nigerian immigrant parents, Nnedi is known for weaving African culture into creative evocative settings and memorable characters. In a profile of Nnedi’s work titled, “Weapons of Mass Creation”, The New York Times called Nnedi’s imagination “stunning”.

Nnedi’s books include Lagoon (a British Science Fiction Association Award finalist for Best Novel), Who Fears Death (a World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novel), Kabu Kabu (A Publisher’s Weekly Best Book for Fall 2013), Akata Witch (an Amazon.com Best Book of the Year), Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), and The Shadow Speaker (a CBS Parallax Award winner).

Her latest works include her novel The Book of Phoenix (an Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist), her Binti Trilogy ( the first of which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella) and her children’s book Chicken in the Kitchen (winner of an Africana Book Award). The final installment of the Binti Trilogy (titled The Night Masquerade) will be released in September and the sequel to Akata Witch (title Akata Warrior) is due out in October. Nnedi is an Full Professor at the University at Buffalo, New York (SUNY).

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How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance by Marilyn Yalom (2012)

Paris in July, Year Ten-- Hosted by Thyme for Tea

How the French Invented Love:  Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance by Marilyn Yalom was an enjoyable read.  She attempts to substantiate her claim that the concept of romantic love is a creation of French writers, starting with poetic epics in the 12th century about knights and their lady loves.  I found her claim  not really substantiated but that does not stop the work from being of interest to those quite into French literature.

As I know very little, ok nothing, about medieval French literature I did find her chapters on this kind of a slog through.  My thoughts as I read was that surely the reading matter mocked in Don Quixote testifies to romantic literature in Spain and that the Decameron shows the same is true of Italy. Is there not romantic love all through Shakespeare?

I have read a few plays by Moliere and I am not sure his comedies of mistaken identity are quite romances.

Yalom does talk a good bit about the treatment of the idea of "The Sentimental Education", the initiation into sex of a young man by an older woman, often a near relative.  Is this something that actually was a normal occurrence in France in the 18th and 19th century?  Socially History wise, Yalom deals only with the upper crust in French society.  She occasionally makes generalizations about French society, comparisons to America.  I would speculate her life experiences are largely with wealthy, very educated people.

Her discussion of Rousseau's sentimental education was interesting.

Her observations on Stendhal's The Red and the Black seemed really acute.  She talks about the romantic events portrayed.  I must say she answered the question for me of "what is so great about Stendhal?"

Of course Balzac must have a central part in any history of love in French literature
(I am currently about 90% through a read through of The Comedie Humaine) and Zola as well.  I think Yalom missed something important in both these writers.  Their fixation on virginal pure young girls.  Once a woman has sex, she becomes corrupt and a potential danger.  Yalom also says that Zola writes about the lower levels of society, true of course but about half twenty novels of the Rougon Macquart cycle involve the rich or upper middle class.

I enjoyed her treatment of Flaubert, focused on Madame Bovary, and profited from it.  She helped me see what a supreme work of art he produced.  She states, correctly of course, that Emma Bovary was partially led to adultery by the books she read.  She details her two romances but she does not mention what seems to be Flaubert' very humorously done suggestion she also slept with a neighborhood farm book.  I see this as very important.  I did really enjoy Yalam's account of her own changing attitude toward Emma as she herself matured from young college student to wife and mother.  This was extremely well done.

She next proceeds to Proust, who she loves and knows very well.  From here she proceeds to the Existentialists, Marguerite Duras, focusing largely on the lover, concluding with some contemporary writers.

Yalam lets us see the big role of infidelity in French literature.  In her concluding remarks she generalized her comparisons of French and American society.

This is an interesting book, maybe one only those really into French literature will want to read and I am sure they will find fault with some of her remarks.  That being said I am glad I read it.  If you have not read the basic texts you may be bored at times.

I was given a review copy.  The style and manner are friendly.

From the author's website


Biographical Sketch
Marilyn Yalom grew up in Washington D.C. and was educated at Wellesley College, the Sorbonne, Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She has been married to the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom for fifty years and is the mother of four children and the grandmother of five. She has been a professor of French and comparative literature, director of an institute for research on women, a popular speaker on the lecture circuit, and the author of numerous books and articles on literature and women's history.

Her books have been translated into 20 languages. In 1991 she was decorated as an Officier des Palmes Académiques by the French Government.
Books by Marilyn Yalom include Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness (out of print), Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women's Memory (1993), A History of the Breast (1997), A History of the Wife (2001), Birth of the Chess Queen (2004), The American Resting Place (2008) and How the French Invented Love: 900 Years of Passion and Romance (2012).

"The Children" - one of Junichiro Tanazki's early short stories (1911, in translation by Anthony Chambers,)

The Japanese Literature Challenge 11- Hosted by Dolce Bellezza 

I am very glad my initial post for Japanese Literature 11 is upon one  of the very first short stories of one of Japan's greatest and most popular writers, Junichiro Tanazaki (1886 to 1965).  I have posted extensively on Tanizaki.  Up until about two months ago I thought I had read all his novels.  However, vintage has just published translations of two more of his novels. The Maids, his last novel, tells the story of The Makioka Sisters (itself a good choice for your first Tanizaki) from the point of view of the maids of each sister, I really want to read this soon.  

Sexual sadism, with the male on the receiving end from a woman is one of the consistent themes of Tanizaki.   Receiving pain and orgasm are tied together in the more than a bit disturbing and strange "The Children".  As it opens a young boy, maybe 14, is on a playground.  A boy his age, from a much wealthier family, invites him, through his yaya (applicable Tagalog word for a household helper dedicated to a child) to a party tomorrow.  He is very thrilled to be invited.  At first the party is more or less the rich family inviting the kids, rich and poor, of the neighborhood to a nice party. Tanizaki describes all the wonderful delicacies served, giving us a look at gourmet dining circa 1911.  The young host then tells the narrator they should retire to a western style house on the estate, getting away from the disgustingly poor children.  Anything western suggests decadence and depravity.  The sister of the host, a year older, will join them.   On the first of several encounters over a period of days, the two boys cover the sister in assorted filth.  As days go on the host begins to subject both his sister and his guest to physical abuse, done in a ritualistic fashion which seems to culminate with them lifting their kimonos followed by him nibbling on their private parts.  Tanazaki is vague on what happens but it appears they are experimenting with the opening stages of oral sex.  As they days progress roles are reversed and the sister becomes dominant.  In one funny interlude the boy's maid walked in on them and let out a scream to stop or she will tell his parents but she never does.  

The activity is quite rough, progressing to knife cuts which the narrator must hide from his mother.

"The Children" is a very interesting story, valuable as a cultural artifact from the start of the career of a great writer, and a thought provoking look at sexual sadism in children.  Ok and it is fun too!  

Incidentally Tanazaki was very much a cat lover and his novella, A Man, A Cat, and Two women is one of the all time great cat books.

I read this story in a new collection of his short fiction, The Gourmet Club and Other Stories, translated by Anthony Chambers and Paul McCarthy, with a very informative introduction.

In the interest of full disclosure The University of Michigan gave me a review copy of this book and an additional new collection.  If they had not, I would have bought them.  These two books are very valuable additions to Japanese literature in translation.  I hope over the course of Japanese Literature 11 (ending January 31, 2018 to post on all nine of the stories in this collection.

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"A Duel" - A Franco - Prussian War Short Story by Guy de Maupassant (1883, newly translated by Sarah Smith, 2015)

Paris In July - Hosted by Thyme for Tea

"A Duel" by Guy de Maupassant - in public domain translation





I cannot let July in Paris on The Reading Life pass without doing a post on a short story by France's master of the form,  Guy de Maupassant.  He is nearly universally considered one of the founders of the modern short story.  He wrote some three hundred stories.  De Maupassant supported himself by his writings and I am sure there was a big demand in 1883 for anything that made Germans look bad.  France was still smarting from German attack on France and occupation of Paris during the Franco Prussian War (July 1870 to May 1871).  Maupassant published a number of short stories in which German soldiers are depicted as boorish swaggering bullies.  The brief "A Duel" is a perfect example of such a work.

We are in a train compartment during the occupation.  The occupants are three Englishmen there to observe France, a Frenchman, and a German soldier.  The German is depicted as a Teutonic beast, bragging to all about he killed twenty French villagers more or less for sport.  The Frenchman knows at first to keep silent.  The German tells him at the next train stop he is to get of and buy him some pipe tobacco.  He tells the Frenchman he will give him a tip.  The Frenchman leaves the train but comes back with no tobacco.  The enraged German says ok I will take your mustache and smoke that.  The Frenchman has had enough and gives the German a sound thrashing.  The German demands a dual at the next train stop.  I won't totally reveal the ending but I bet it was very popular in Paris.

I read this in a collection of stories translated by Sandra Smith, the award winning translator of Irene Nemirovsky, The Necklace and other Stories:  Maupassant for Modern Times.  In her very informative introduction she tells us that most people in English now read his works in 100 year old translations and she wanted to reproduce him in contemporary English.  Of course contemporary does not mean better but Smith tells us de Maupassant wrote in the idiom of contemporary France.  She also talks very interestingly about literary translations.  You can read "A Duel" at the link above but if you want a new selection of her works, Sandra Smith's collection would work well.

In the interest of full disclosure I was given a review copy of this book.


Mel u

The Hotel on Place Verdone: Life, Death, and Betrayal at The Hotel Ritz in Paris

Paris in July - hosted by Thyme for Tea

If you have stayed or eaten at The Ritz, please leave a comment on your experiences 

The very word "Ritz" conjures up visions of elegance, opulence, luxury, decadence, and wealth.  Founded by Cesár Ritz in 1898 it quickly became known as the epitome of the grace, service, comfort of Paris Hotels.  It was among the first hotels to have private bathrooms in suites, telephones and electricity.  The Hotel on Place Verdone:  Life, Death and Betrayal at The Hotel Ritz in Paris, goes into detail about the Early Years of The Ritz but the central focus is on the period from May 10, 1940 when the Germans occupied Paris up to August 8, 1944 when Paris was liberated.  

By the order of Adolf Hitler, The Ritz was the only luxury hotel allowed to remain open.  The Luftwaffe  made The Ritz their French headquarters, Herman Goering maintained a Suite there as did numerous other high ranking German officers.  As a side effect, this meant the hotel restaurant was not subject to war time shortages.  Famously Coco Chanel lived there during the war and had an affair with a German count.  Chanel was probably being used as a possible source of intelligence.  Ernest Hemingway also stated there at times.  Lots of intrigue.  We also see the impact of staff shortages caused by the war.

Mazzeo details all the intrigues, deceptions, treachery and romances of the war years at the Ritz.  We get to vicariously enjoy the amazing suites, the impeccable service, the five star food while we wonder who the other guests think we may be. Of course we must stop in Coco Chanel's boutique.   Marcel Proust also had a suite there, for a mere 3000 Euros you can spend the night these just as they were rooms.  If you want something a bit better, The Coco Chanel Suite, July seven is available, is a trifle more at 25,000 Euros.

The hotel was sold to an Egyptian business man in 1979.  It is still considered one of the great hotels of the world.  

I enjoyed this book a lot.  Amazon reviews are very mixed.  I do recommend this book for anyone who has ever dreamed of Paris and "Putting on the Ritz".  

Dr. Mazzeo is the Clara C. Piper Associate Professor of English at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine. She is the author of numerous works of narrative nonfiction, and several of her books have been New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times bestsellers.  She divides her time among coastal Maine, New York City, and Saanichton, British Columbia, where she lives with her husband at Parsell Vineyard.  - from the author's website

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The Reading Life Review - June, 2017

My June Featured Authors 

In June I posted on 12 fiction writers.  Nine were women, three men.  Two have been awarded McArthur Genius Grants, one won the Booker Prize in 1990.  Seven are deceased.  Movies have been made based on the works of two, a third is in the works.  Five are Americans.  One is from Italy, one 

was born in the Ukraine but moved to Brazil as a child with her family.  One was born in Nigeria, another in Kenya, three in the U.K.  One is actually more famous for her surrealistic art than her writings.  Two are at the opening stages of what I think will be very rewarding literary careers.  I have gotten back into SF/F and five write in that genre.  Three of them are giants of the Science Fiction/Fantasy World, one has already won major awards.  At least two wrote in a language not their first.  There is an academic society devoted to Octavia Butler.  

Starting from the large Top left image, Leonora Carrington.

On the bottom row from the left, Natalia Ginzburg, Frank Herbert (author of Dune, a candidate for greatest Sci Fi novel of all time), Clarice Lispector, the Olivia Butler, a Pulitzer Prize Winner.

On the row above that Alyssa Wong, Farah Ahamed, A. S. Byatt, and Jack Vance

Top left (next to large image) Dean Wolfe, Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  

Blog Stats

As of today The Reading Life has had 4,664,346 page views.

Last month the top visitors home countries were The USA, the Philippines, India, the U.K. and for the first time in history, China made the top five.

The most viewed post was on "Dr. Patel" by Farah Ahamed, followed by the usual top posts on short stories of the Philippines and one by the great R.K. Narayan.

Non Fiction 

Weimar Culture by Peter Gay

Poetry Will Save Your Life - A Memoir by Jill Bialosky

White Mughals Love and Betrayal in 18th Century India by William Dalrymple 

With Ballet in My Soul - A Globetrotting Memoir by Eva Mazda

Literary biographies - I hope to read at least two a month 

Katherine Mansfield The Early Years by Gerri Kimber. Must Reading 

A Surprise Queenhood in the New Black Sun The life and Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks by Angela Jackson 

I offer my great thanks to to all who leave comments.  

In July I anticipate posting on a number of Paris themed works and returning to Japanese literature.

To my fellow book bloggers, the world's greatest readers, keep blogging.  

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