“Je suis un optimiste aussi, répondit Igor. Le pire est devant nous. Réjouissons-nous de ce que nous avons.”
(“I’m an optimist too, replied Igor. The worst is yet to come. Let us rejoice in what we have.”)


Most of my reading these days is class-oriented, and it is an interesting experience in and of itself. There’s Proust, which represents an enormous amount of reading and demands close attention: I’ve never really read like this, taking notes, consulting commentaries, reading a novel and its author’s critical writing in parallel, and generally making myself be so deliberate (some would say mechanical!) about it. Some days it’s really hard and brings too much effort between the text and me; other days (like today), it can be really rewarding and glorious, when some deeper understanding, some new connection appears.

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

At the beginning of the week, I went through a rough reading patch. Proust tasted dry and pompous. I decided to break my “one book at a time” rule, at first with very short reads. Nice… but unsatisfying. So I went to my TBR pile intending to pick a book at random: I choose Guenassia’s novel out of pique, because with its 750 pages, it was the thickest of the pile and mocking me and my Proust block.

It was of course a little paradoxical, looking for a breather in the longest book available, but Le Club turned out to be the right choice. A simple, generous book, it leaves its reader ample space to daydream and feel without demanding too much thinking. It is unfortunately not translated in English yet, but it’s been published so recently that I hope it will be soon: I’d love to share it with my husband, as it tells a lot about Paris without ever making it its subject (which avoids all the nostalgia and cliches and generalizations that seem to go hand in hand with this city).

The book’s hero, Michel, is 12 years old when the book starts in October 1959. We follow him through the next five years, until the summer after his baccalauréat. I guess if one was looking to criticize the novel, the main issue might be that in these five crucial years, Michel doesn’t seem to change a lot. The story, or rather the stories, are not in him but around him: in the collapse of his parents’ marriage, in the experiences of the Eastern European refugees who gather at the café Michel and his friends go to, in the political and intellectual effervescence of the early 60′s, in the books Michel reads voraciously, in his first love stories, in the repercussions of the Algerian War on French society… There’s an undercurrent of bitterness in the book — as Guenassia said in an interview, there’s probably not one character in his large cast who doesn’t commit a betrayal at one point or another, Michel included.

And yet the overwhelming feeling left by the book is one of delight, of the richness of the world and of the human experience. All these betrayals, even the worst, stem from aspirations, desires, idealism; and no matter how low men (and women!) fall, there’s always a measure of redemption for them. There is something very comforting in this book, something optimistic in the ease with which Michel makes friends with everyone, in the way the book tells us we all belong, we all have have fascinating stories to tell, in its amusement with human weakness which isn’t so much oblivious to the amount of pain it might inflict as deliberately forgiving, a choice of to smile and take it lightly.

I imagine there might states of mind where this glibness is not welcome, but for cold, damp winter days when one needs to know that the world of men is alive and well, and that not every motion of the soul needs to be scrutinized, nor can be – it is perfect.