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.
September overwhelm
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!