Multiple Reading Personalities

Today, finally, is a gothic day full of anguish!

Well, I mean this in a good way. For one thing, I’ve finally come to a place in Udolpho where there is action and drama to sink my teeth into, but more importantly – my lovely husband has soft-launched The Blood that Bonds, the website on which he offers his vampire novel as a free ebook.

 Now, you can’t expect me to be objective, but… I’m bursting with pride! The site is a wonderful mirror to his talents as a writer and a webdesigner, and more than that it reflects his generosity and his need to share. He poured love, time and effort on the site, and he took the opportunity to work with a great comic book artist. And and and… and it’s just FUN!

For all you vampire fiction fans out there, I hope you enjoy it!

Last week, the acceptance from Paris III finally in hand, the first thing I did was check the course syllabus and make a list of the books I would need. I then sent it to my favorite library in Paris (yes, it specializes in History and Law, but the owners are close friends with exquisite literary tastes, who have been sending me boxes of French books every few months since I moved to the US – I generally let them pick for me, unless I have a specific yearning, and they never disappoint). I could not help but add two novels to my list: La vengeance du traducteur (Translator’s Revenge), by Brice Matthieussent, and Démon (yep, that would be Demon), by Thierry Hesse. I don’t think either of them is translated in English (yet), as they are both part of the ’09 rentrée littéraire, the active French Fall literary season. Both books have garnered wide attention: Translator’s Revenge (which part keeps wanting to translate as Revenge of the Translator) appears to be a lighter read, a novel on a translator working on a novel about a novel, its author and its translator – if I add that Matthieussent is better known as a translator… Is your head spinning yet? Based on reviews, Démon is another beast altogether - a heavyweight, tragic masterpiece about a journalist investigating the suicide of his father, a Russian Jew who lived through the persecutions of the 20th century. I cannot wait to open it, though I must admit a little dread mixed in with anticipation.

But these are books are not there yet. For now, I am still on The Iliad, which I now have had open for several weeks. It is a much more entertaining and rewarding read than I expected, but to an extent that’s making matters worse: I just do not manage to “fast forward” through the extended (and gory) battle descriptions. The rhythm of the poem is fascinating and hypnotic, and surrender to it feels necessary before the unavoidable ending. It’s a false complaint (I’m absolutely thrilled to be engaged by poetry in English), but it makes me feel like I’m not progressing with my reading. Meanwhile, I started Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, which so far is very readable, but not as captivating as I’d hoped. My first impression is that Radcliffe started her narrative way too early in the story, developing a background that would have been more effectively evoked. I also listened to an audio-book of Gauthier’s La Morte Amoureuse (and decided that I’d like to spend a little more time with the text), received the copy of Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls I ordered for the R.I.P. IV challenge, and picked up three books in French at my local bookstore(which does not, for the record, sell book in French, but happened to have three second-hand copies for $2 a pop – how could I resist?): Maupassant’s Une vie (A Woman’s Life), Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black) and Beaudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) joined my pile. Oh, and so did the Kindle version of The Well-Educated Mind, which I picked up on a whim after reading about it on So Many Books. I started reading it immediately, and spent a couple hours on it, and while it is interesting, I am quite annoyed with myself for the impulsive purchase, which I would never have made at a physical bookstore.

This is all too much and I am feeling a little overwhelmed — I am generally a “one book at a time” girl, two at most (when one is so demanding that I want a side of entertainment with it). I guess the solution to this crisis is very simple, and I am therefore going to return to Radcliffe and her heroin immediately!

“Maintenant vos volontés seront scrupuleusement satisfaites, mais au dépens de votre vie. Le cercle de vos jours, figuré par cette peau, se resserrera suivant la force et le nombre de vos souhaits, depuis le plus léger jusqu’au plus exorbitant.”

“Henceforward, your wishes will be accurately fulfilled, but at the expense of your life. The compass of your days, visible in that skin, will contract according to the strength and number of your desires, from the least to the most extravagant.” (all translations lifted from project Gutenberg’s online edition).

It must be the Eugénie effect — no sooner had I finished putting together my reading list for the RIP IV Challenge that I began reading La peau de chagrin, hungry for more Balzac. I know I read it as a child, but could not remember anything except the story’s basic premises and how much I love the French title (unfortunately translated either by The Magic Skin or The Wild Ass’s Skin in English – “Chagrin” has a double meaning in French, one shagreen – a rough, exotic type of leather that emphasizes the skin’s natural grain - the other grief, the French word chagrin being derived from shagreen via the sensation of the material’s roughness). Very poetic, and not giving away the true nature of the skin.

This famous skin comes to Raphaël de Valentin in a scene evocative of other literary pacts with the devil. His heart broken by the courtesan Feodora, his meager fortune dissipated in desesperate debauchery, the young man is on his way to throwing himself in the Seine when he stops in a curiosity shop to wait for the cover of the night. There, he is offered the talisman by an old man who sternly warns him against accepting it, explaining that for every wishes it grants, it will shrink, and so will Raphaël’s life.

The young man jokingly wishes for a feast and for wealth; however, he does not believe in the skin, and still intends to commit suicide. Leaving the shop, he runs into a few friends who have been looking for him all over Paris: Raphaël has been chosen to head a new magazine, and the launch party is about to start. The festivities are wild, and at their close, Raphaël miraculously finds out that he has inherited a fortune. His two wishes are granted. The skin has shrunk. Doubt is no longer possible.

From this moment, Raphaël’s motivations change drastically: he no longer wishes to obtain the love of his cruel mistress, he no longer tries to prove his genius, and most of all – he passionately wants to live. Is it because live is so much worthier when one is rich, is it the newly-perceived reality of death, is it a change wrought by the skin? The story does not explain, content with showing a rich Raphaël now living a life sheltered of any desire in a semi-retreat from the world. Love however will reach out to him again in the form of Pauline, the angelic girl Raphaël could not bring himself to love when they were both poor. Now also become fabulously rich, Pauline captures Raphaël’s heart. The two lovers are happy for a while, but passion soon means the end for Raphaël, who dies in the arms of his love.

While I choose this story for the fantastic element, the supernatural is not what will stay with me. There’s indeed a central mystical element, and it stubbornly resists scientific explanation: the skin is at some point brought by Raphaël to famous scientists, but they fail to understand anything about it. Later, the doctors who examine Raphaël also fail him – but their failure is a more familiar one (they come across as learned charlatans Molière would be proud of). Balzac even leaves the dubitative reader a way to deny the supernatural entirely: Raphaël falls asleep just before the skin is given to him, making it a possibility that everything that follows is a dream. Much as in a dream, echoes of his former life are woven through the rest of the narrative: a small example is that of a fanciful prediction made by Pauline’s mother, which is realized to T; a more significant one is that the whole question at stake in Raphaël’s life with the magic skin is that of the will – precisely the subject on which he had written his philosophy masterpiece. That would furthermore explain his otherwise mysterious change of life goals after obtaining the skin.

Also substracting from the skin’s interest is its unimpressive appearance and lack of “special effects”. Balzac is an author with incredible descriptive abilities, and he revels in them: his light touch with the skin has to be deliberate. It comes across a pure narrative device, the touch of a writer still learning his craft.

What does come across with incredible force is the fascination of the material world: the accumulation of exotic objects in the shop, the banquet scene, the tiny details of Raphaël’s life as a rich men are just fascinating. They can at times get overwhelming, but the sensuality of things through Balzac’s eyes has incredible power. It also stands in stark contrast to this Hemingway-esque observation at the beginning of the book: “Où trouverez-vous, dans l’océan des littératures, un livre surnageant qui puisse lutter de génie avec ces lignes: Hier, à quatre heures, une jeune femme s’est jetée dans la Seine du haut du Pont-des-Arts.” (Where will you find a work of genius floating above the seas of literature that can compare with this paragraph: “Yesterday, at four o’clock, a young woman threw herself into the Seine from the Pont des Arts.”) Brevity is not what Balzac made his name with – and from me, that is not a complaint!

(and since we’re on the subject of the fantastic: for the francophones out there, Les nouveaux chemins de la connaissance on France Culture has a recent podcast on anguish in Maupassant. The guest speaker seems to overventilate with excitement at several points in the show, but aside from this minor complaint, it is well worth listening to.)

Well, let this be a cautionary tale of what happens when you decide of a book to buy based on the fact that it is available for the Kindle: it might be pretty terrible.

While I haven’t read too many fantasy books recently, they usually are a steady part of my diet. I love supernatural creatures and twisted parallel universes, and while not every author is a Tolkien or a Gaiman, I usually enjoy myself a lot more with an average fantasy book than with an average novel. I guess I am much more forgiving to weaknesses in the story or the writing when I have dragons to make up for it.

I have however had a run of bad luck recently: my random selections were mostly mediocre, and even in one case atrocious. That decided me to go with a recommended book this time; my original pick was The Birthgrave (also from Tanith Lee), based on an enticing review in Coilhouse.

But The Birthgrace wasn’t available for Kindle. Neither was The Silver Metal Lover, also highly recommended (in the tearjerker category – I am also a sucker for those). That disappointed me, as I prefer my “light” books (the ones I am not terribly likely to re-read or reference) in electronic format: they are much easier to carry with you when you move, and I enjoy the reduced price that fits the reduced usage. I foolishly solved my dilemma by deciding to go with any Tanith Lee that would go on my Kindle, thinking something glib like well a good author is a good author, right?

Hm. What a disappointment. I guess I’ll use the library next time I’m feeling cheap, something I should do more often anyway.

Metallic Love is the story of Loren, who warns us from the start that we won’t like her much — giving us to guess that it is because she’s not overly romantic. Well, thought I, I do actually like a tough gal; we’ll go along just fine. Then she proceeded to mope, whine and exhibit all the sign of teenage passion (i.e. talk about her undying love while it’s obvious that 1) she knows nothing about her lover, and 2) there is no sense of joy in their story). She act depressed and impotent for the rest of the book. My dislike of Loren, together with the fact that the central story was a fancy SF version of ”prince sleeps with peasant girl/ princess in hiding” , pushed all my annoyance buttons, making it impossible for me to root for the the girl.

A couple things about the universe were interesting – living under the threat of a poorly-stabilized asteroid and the religious deviancies it feeds, the class differences, etc. – and I have no complaints with the writing, so I might indeed try another Tanith Lee sometime. In the meantime, the hunt for decent fantasy continues!

“l’épouvantable éducation de ce monde, où, dans une soirée, il se commet en pensées, en paroles, plus de crimes que la Justice n’en punit aux Cours d’assises, où les bons mots assassinentles plus grandes idées, où l’on ne passe pour fort qu’autant que l’on voit juste; et là, voir juste, c’est ne croire à rien, ni aux sentiments, ni aux hommes, ni même aux événements“

“the abominable education of this world where, in an evening, more crimes are committed in thoughts, in words than the Law punishes, where soundbites murder the highest ideas, where one is only considered as strong as he sees clearly; and there, seeing clearly means believing in nothing, neither feelings nor men, nor even events” (quick and dirty translation)

Eugénie Grandet by Danielle Scarpa Kos

With perhaps the exception of Thomas Hardy, I am unfamiliar with non-French authors as preoccupied with questions of class and the major social changes of the 18th and 19th century as the holy trilogy of Flaubert, Zola and Balzac. Of these, Zola was long my favorite, probably because of his more easily understood idealism; re-reading Eugénie Grandet, however, was a great occasion to let Balzac grow on me – the elegance of his writing, the delicate irony married to acuity of observation (“ce combat secret… occupait passionnément les diverses sociétés de Saumur” – “this secret battle… engrossed the diverse societies of Saumur“), the neatness of the book structure where every scene felt necessary.

There are very few characters to like here: le père Grandet, the formidable shadow hovering over the entire book, is probably the most detestable of all. A devoted miser, he has built a huge fortune on ruthless cunning, breaches of trust and tireless exploitation of his fellow humans. For all this he is enormously admired in his home town of Saumur. The man lives like a pauper with his wife, his daughter Eugénie and his maid Nanon, an outcast he opportunistically rescued. Some vague reasons are provided for his greed: a destitute childhood, a predator’s taste for victory in business matters – but most of all, the picture is that of a man obsessed beyond reason or understanding, for whom is impossible to feel sorry.

Grandet has only one child, his daughter Eugénie, whose prospects attract suitors whose only charms are money and ambition. She herself is quite oblivious to all things romantic, until one day her cousin Charles is sent to spend some time in Saumur. They fall in love. Alas, the true motive for Charles’s visit is that his father, on the verge of bankruptcy, has sent him away while he commits an “honorable suicide”. Grandet arranges to have his nephew sent to the colonies to try and remake his fortune – and to keep this poor suitor away from his daughter. Charles gone, life goes back to its mean routine, with Grandet descending ever more into avarice while Eugénie endlessly waits for her lover’s return.

It will be years before Charles comes back to France. By then he has become the Grandet he was always meant to be, a selfish, obdurate man who dismisses his past promises to contract a marriage he thinks more advantageous. Eugénie discovers the truth at the same time she learns that the disgraceful bankrupcy is still looming. She decides to settle her cousin’s debts and resigning herself to a loveless, sexless marriage to one of her suitors. The rest of her life will be spent in quiet resignation, first at the sideof her callous husband, then as an even-richer widow.  While she will do some good with her immense fortune, she will remain a prisoner to it to the end – isolated from every true feeling and living in the barren existence that is all she has ever known.

Quite peculiar to Balzac is his extremely harsh indictment of individuals. Society, place, circumstances – these are understood to play a role in the human tragi-comedy, but Balzac’s cynicism is unmissable. Individuals are despicable and society heinous; this is made worse by the growing fascination with money he denounces, but he doesn’t see human barbarity as either new or receding. The only admirable characters, individuals touched by a true idea of religion, are represented by Eugénie and her mother; they are frankly so angelic as to lack nerve. Nanon is an exception, the only other character who is overall positive despite some flaws – and my favorite in the book, with her obstinacy to make the best of life and her readiness to compromise for it.

What this year is all about is re-orienting my life towards books and literature; and I just found out that I am accepted in Télé-3′s (La Sorbonne remote school) licence de lettres modernes (modern lit 3-year diploma); I’m going straight to year 3, with just a few credits from year 2 to validate.

I’m incredibly excited to start — though for right now, what I should be doing is preparing the administrative file you have to send them after they officially accept you.

And I will put it together in a couple hours — but for right now, compiling a list of class materials and informing everyone is the priority!

“dark nights; decaying, haunted castles; menacing forests; pervasive gloom; ancient prophecies; damsels in distress (or at least at the wrong place in the wrong time); blood-curdling screams…stories with atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a knife.”

artwork by Jennifer Gordon. Isn’t it beautiful?)

Presented like this… How could I not do the RIP challenge? So sure, it’s been on forever, but I just discovered it (via So Many Books – one of my favorite blogs and a frequent exclamation of mine). So let me jump on the bandwagon now!

 The challenge is initiated by Carl V. of Stainless Steel Droppings (another great blog… So Many Blogs! So Little Time!). What better to read than dark fantasy, gothic, horror and supernatural stories in the months leading to Halloween? My favorite genres in my favorite season… I’m tingling with excitement.

As soon as I’m done publishing the reviews of recently finished books, I’ll dive into the following stories(picked from my long list):

• Wilde’s The portrait of Dorian Grey
• Marlowe or Goethe’s Faust**
• Shakespeare’s McBeth
• Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
• Gaston Leroux with The Phantom of the Opera*
• Balzac’s Peau de Chagrin (The Magic Skin or The Wild Ass’s Skin, says Wikipedia)…
• … and Gautier’s La morte amoureuse*

Half of these would in fact be re-reads (I’ve marked with a * the books I’ve never read), but it is fair play within the context of my project for this blog. They’re probably more classic than what most other participants are reading, so it will be interesting to compare notes.

I could not resist adding two extra books: Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls. I’ve wanted to read both these writers forever and never gotten around to it, so that’s an excuse.

I’m not promising to read everything on this list for October 31^st, but I’ll try to go for 5 of them. Let there be dark!