Monthly Archives: September 2007

Around the internet on a Tuesday

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I had a really good headline for my most recent Gridskipper piece: "Get Your Geek On in Paris." They changed it to “Paris for Apple Geeks." Ah well. Genius is always underappreciated. Check out the article anyway.

Rushdie gets in the game. This debate is getting seriously silly– are we seriously casting book reviewers, the very bottom of the literary food chain, as the elites versus bloggers?– and I myself am going to have to get into it soon. As soon as I have time. Which may not be until, like, January. So watch this space…

The Académie Française has seven empty spots! Dider Jacob reports on why there is such a shortage. I mean, if they’re that hard-pressed for members, I think I could probably work it into my schedule, were they to get in touch. (in French)

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there are a lot of books sitting in my "Reading" nook on the lower righthand sidebar of this website. I am by no means currently "Reading" all of them, but I am in various places in all of them (plus a ton more which I have not added to the website, some of which I have added to my Faebook bookshelf). According to The Millions, I am not alone! Hurrah.  Who else is in the middle of at least 5 books at a time out there? Let us all band together in support of non-linear reading!

Event of the year

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Paris and burlesque go together like champagne and caviar– it can be a bit difficult these days to find them both in the same place.

But when you do, oh my word.

May I say that I am royally bummed to not be in Paris for the below event, coming to you from my dear friend Gentry and her posse of the fabulous, top-hatted and silken.

Gentry_de_paris_burlesque_revue_for

around the internet on a Tuesday

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It’s a book-heavy morning… with a little Broadway tra-la at the end to send you on your way.

But serious matters first: Daniel Mendelsohn talks to Alain Finkielkraut about his recent book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, on Répliques this week (recently published by Flammarion under the title Les Disparus).  It is the account of Mendelsohn’s search for family of his who perished in the Holocaust, inspired by the discovery of letters from his uncle Schmiel writing from Poland to beg for help from his brother, Mendlsohn’s grandfather, an immigrant to America. 

I’ve long considered Mendelsohn to be a very decent and engaging writer, the kind that gets the job done without distractions, but his writerly integrity (as well as his French) impressed me in this interview; he says here that he consciously chose not to fictionalize his story or narrate any of it as if he were there because he did not want to imagine himself into the position of his deported family members– not only because it would be painful for him personally, but because he feels it to be inauthentic. He condemns the American obsession with facsimile and simulacrum, citing by way of example the cattle car on display at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, which offers visitors the possibility of standing for a moment in the same vehicle which transported a fraction of the 6 million to their deaths. " ‘Oh, I knew just what they felt like, the poor Jews,’ " Mendelsohn mocks a visitor to the museum. "That’s the most offensive thing to me." (I’m paraphrasing and translating here from memory, FYI) "They don’t know what it’s like to drink your own urine out of desperation." That is the kind of effective use of detail that Mendelsohn doesn’t shy away from in interviews– I’ll have to read the book to see if it carries over into his writing.  (Interview in French)

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More compelling for some of us than "Star Wars," Rachel Donadio takes a look at the Canon Wars for the NYT Book Review. There’s not much that’s new here but it’s a pretty accurate summary of the state of the canon in academe these days.  The moral of the story comes from Elaine Showalter:

a feminist literary scholar and a former president of
the Modern Language Association, who retired from Princeton in 2003,
today urges a reconsideration of some of the changes made in past
decades. “This period of discovery and recovery (for example, of women
writers) has been stimulating, exciting and renewing,” Showalter wrote
in an e-mail message. “But now it’s time for a period of evaluation and
consolidation.”

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In the Columbia Journalism Review, Steve Wasserman’s lengthy état de lieux on the so-called crisis in book reviewing. And if you’re in the New York area this evening and have nothing planned, you might wander up to Columbia, where they’re hosting a panel discussion based on this article, with Wassermna, Carlin Romano, Peter Osnos, and Mark Savras of The Elegant Variation.  7 p.m. tonight (Tuesday Sept 18)  in the third-floor Lecture Hall of Columbia
University’s School of Journalism, 116th and Broadway. No RSVP needed.

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Speaking of The Elegant Variation, Mark has a nice little compare and contrast piece on two books which explore how to talk about a book you have not read. In other words, how to be a grad student. Those of us who live in France have been hearing about Pierre Bayard’s Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus depuis toujours il me semble but it’s only just been published Stateside.

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Finally, also via dear Mark at TEV, this Q&A with Jonathan Franzen in New York Magazine in which he terms the musical adaptation of Franz Wedekind’s 1891 play "Spring Awakening" "an unholy disaster." I haven’t seen the show but judging from what I did see of it on the "Tony Awards," "insipid" and "facile" don’t even begin to cover it.  The way I see it, "Sunset Boulevard" was indeed the end of the world for Broadway. It died, and we died with it, and now we’re all in Broadway hell, where "Spring Awakening" wins "Best Musical," the cast of "Mary Poppins" mispronounces "Chim-chim-in-nee," and there are no more Sondheim musicals.

 

On Writers’ Homes

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A few months ago, I paid a visit to Charleston House, a country estate an hour an a half train’s ride from London and a half hour from the coast at Brighton. I went not so much to visit the house where Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell lived and painted, as to attend the Charleston Literary Festival, and to meet a writer/blogger/critic who I esteem very highly, one Olivia Laing (of the lately-defunct Toast and Honey and the nowhere-near defunct Guardian). It was a glorious day, but much as I tried, I could not conjure up Woolf’s ghost anywhere. Perhaps had I gone inside – but the festival took place outdoors, and N and I were on a tight schedule. I elected to leave the interior to another trip, one which would include visits to her homes at Richmond and Rodmell, obligatory stops on the Virginia Woolf pilgrimage which all Woolf scholars must make, if I am to believe what I’m told every year at Woolf conferences.

But lately I’m rethinking the spirit in which such a trip could be made. Last week in The Guardian, an article appeared by Lucasta Miller, author of The Bronte Myth, on the subject of Heritage Open Days, an event in which the sites of English cultural heritage are opened to the public (part of a Europe-wide National Heritage movement—we know this in France under the name Journées du Patrimoine Européenne).  Miller set off to discover some famous writers’ homes, with the following caveat in mind:

Visits to writers’ houses work only if one can capture some fleeting sense of emotional connection with the quondam inhabitant. Unlike the stately homes built by rich aristocrats, always intended as show-off public spaces, they tend to be architecturally and decoratively modest. Their appeal lies instead in what they can tell us about the writers’ private selves, or, perhaps, in what they can draw out of the visitor’s imagination.

For support, Miller looks to Virginia Woolf, writing about her first visit to the Bronte Parsonage in 1904. "’I do not know whether pilgrimages to the shrines of famous men ought not to be condemned as sentimental journeys,’ she opined."

Though she found the personal relics on display "touching", Woolf recoiled from the dubious pleasures of ogling Emily Brontë’s tiny shoes as if it were an emotional indulgence that detracted from "the chiefly memorable fact that [Brontë] was a great writer". All we need, Woolf implies with bracing rationalism, is the writers’ books; reminders of their humanity are trivialising and vulgar. One imagines her shuddering in horror at the thought of Charleston throbbing with paying visitors as it does today.

Gulp. Well, what’s done is done, and the gardens at Charleston really are lovely, and the scent of horse dung in the air quite bracing after the pollution of London.  It is here that Miller goes awry.

Yet the rejection of the cult of authors’ houses is perhaps a form of denial, suggesting a desire on Woolf’s part to cordon the writer off from reality. Great literature does emerge from the messiness of lived experience as much as from the intellect, and if Emily Brontë fed her mind with German texts as she made bread in the kitchen at Haworth, seeing her kitchen can only get us closer to the creative process that resulted in Wuthering Heights, in which domestic detail features as much as the literary influence of ETA Hoffmann.

Yes, from the perspective of one who, like Miller, is steeped in cultural studies, the bread Bronte baked is as important as the books she read. But can we expect Woolf to be a proponent of cultural studies? And can we really attribute to Woolf a desire to "cordon the writer off from reality"?? I beg to differ at the top of my voice.  Suggesting Woolf wished a firmer boundary between the writer and reality is utter nonsense. Woolf herself was deeply stimulated by the reality of the city around her, and often went tramping around London by herself, “plung[ing] into London, between tea and dinner, and walk[ing] and walk[ing], reviving my fires, in the city, in some wretched slum, where I peep in at the doors of public houses.”

Miller gestures at the ambivalence we all feel at times– Woolf certainly felt– about writers’ homes.  Woolf writes in her sketch "Carlyle’s House," of her third visit to that writer’s home in Chelsea, "I don’t know what I expected to find– something at any rate less cold, and formal." But Miller cites another section of “Carlyle’s House,” which she spins in order to give her article an upbeat, journalistic ending.

In 1909, a few years after publishing her piece on the Brontë Parsonage, Woolf described in her diary a visit she’d made to Thomas Carlyle’s house in Chelsea. The tone was less brittle, more accepting of the ambivalence that such experiences can engender, an inevitable combination of disappointment and yearning. The house was "a silent place, which it needs much imagination to set alive again", glass cases suffocating its domesticity. Yet this time Woolf did allow her imagination to work, hearing snatches of Carlyle’s Scottish accent and looking behind the surface of his wife’s portrait to bring her living expression – "mockery for the most part with a background of pathos" – back from the grave.

In fact, Woolf finds the house cold, like the portraits of Mrs Carlyle which adorn the walls. “The most natural thing was the garden, with its flags, and the stump of a tree.” Miller gets the ambivalence but she seems uncomfortable with it.  She does, however, grasp that any visit to a writer’s home is governed by emotion, which is anything but rational.

I like to visit writerly spots, though perhaps not their homes. A visit to the pink house next to the Piazza di Spagnia in Rome where Keats died was odd; it left me feeling closer to the writer, but in a spooky way. I left with no further insights into his poetry, but I did feel the chill of tuberculosis.

On the other hand, my heart speeds up when I walk past Victor Hugo’s home in the Place des Vosges, and a walk through Tavistock Square, where Woolf lived and worked, is always a potent and emotional experience for me. But the difference is that Woolf is more than a writer to me: idol and mythic figure who is all the more delicious for her humanity and her immortal mortality. My feelings for Woolf are a blend of how I feel about my mother and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

And then I find, just in time for Heritage Open House and the Journées du Patrimoine, that a new novel has appeared from Algonquin Books called An Arsonists’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England, by Brock Clarke.  The story of a man who accidentally burns down Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst (killing two people in the process), this would seem the perfect read for anyone who is interested in mulling over the ambivalence we feel towards great writers’ homes.  Burning them down– now that’s revolutionary, and much more in key with Woolf’s view that Miller’s. 

Journalism

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bookforum

“Believing is Seeing,” Bookforum, Oct 19 2011

    Errol Morris argues that a photograph alone does not tell us the whole story of its reality.

“The Noel Coward Reader,” Bookforum, Oct 22 2010

This selection of Coward’s plays, lyrics, poetry, short stories, radio broadcasts, and excerpts from his diaries and letters shows Coward shifting between his “frivolous” best work, and his more serious (but less successful) attempts to make art that would endure beyond the tastes of the moment. As Day writes, Coward “was a great writer—except when he was trying to be a great writer.”

“Proust’s Overcoat” Bookforum, August 6 2010

In the preface to his translation of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, Marcel Proust wrote that while some people decorate their rooms with things that reflect their taste, he preferred his room to be a place “where I find nothing of my conscious thoughts, where my imagination is thrilled to plunge into the heart of the not-me.” Anyone who has stood looking at Proust’s reassembled cork-lined bedroom at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris—his armchair, his pigskin cane, his brass bed—and tried, unsuccessfully, to feel kinship with his spirit would be relieved to know that he had such a desultory relationship to his personal possessions.

“Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris, by Graham Robb”   Bookforum, April 27 2010

In his new work, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris, Graham Robb depicts a Paris that is similarly “a composite place built up over the ages, a picture book of superimposed transparencies,” where “even the quietest street is crowded with adventures.”

“Chorus Girls,” Bookforum, Dec 30 2009

From the cabaret to the nightclub, from the theater to the ballet, women who perform in public have attracted writers and artists for as long as women have performed in public. Unlike the prostitute, who, as Walter Benjamin once said, is “saleswoman and wares in one,” the chorus girl is not exactly selling herself—she’s selling a dream of who she might be. The gaze that falls on her is sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes singular, sometimes multiple. Onstage or off, the chorus girl is defined by her relationship to a necessary other—her audience—who, after all, may just be the reader.

“Paris Mismatch,” review of Gilded Youth, by Kate Cambor. Bookforum, Fall 2009

This portrait of a prewar Lost Generation takes an against-the-grain look at a volatile moment in French history, when these famous “children of” stood poised on the edge of greatness but never made it past the threshold: Léon Daudet, son of the beloved French writer Alphonse; Jean-Baptiste Charcot, son of the groundbreaking neurologist Jean-Martin; and Jeanne Hugo, granddaughter of Victor.

the quarterly conversation

“How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti” The Quarterly Conversation, June 2011

“Alix’s Journal by Alix Cleo Roubaud” The Quarterly Conversation, December 2010

“How Jeanette Winterson Makes Fiction” The Quarterly Conversation, July 2010

“The So-Called Other Europe: Best European Fiction 2010″  The Quarterly Conversation, Feb 18 2010

“When a Biography is not a Biography: The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys” The Quarterly Conversation, Fall 2009.

“Susan Sontag’s Cabinet of Curiosities,” The Quarterly Conversation, Winter 2009

“Reading Claude Cahun,” The Quarterly Conversation, Fall 2008

“Becoming Simone de Beauvoir (review of the Cahiers de jeunesse),” The Quarterly Conversation, Summer 2008

the guardian

“National Literature: an international question,” The Guardian, October 6 2008

“Writers: Beware the drive-by when you blog,” The Guardian, July 7 2008

barnes & noble review

Venice, Pure City. The Barnes & Noble Review, November 2, 2010

five dials

Paris, République des lettres. Five Dials Issue 8, Fall 2009. 

bomb

 Letter from Cornwall: the Port Eliot festival. Bomb Magazine, August 9 2010.

the millions

Interview with Nikolai Grozni. The Millions. September 26 2011.

“Kicking Around the Shakespeare and Company Festival.” The Millions. June 24 2010.

the london review of breakfasts

The University Women’s Club, Mayfair. Nov 26 2011.

the second pass

“Trouble on the Set,” review of Rose Alley, by Jeremy M. Davies. The Second Pass, Nov 23 2009

her royal majesty

Interview: Gavin James Bower, Dec 8 2011

“Locked Room Scenario,” Nov 28 2011

 Back to Port Eliot: Parts One, Two, and Three Summer 2011

nextbook/tablet

“Resistance Fighter” (Interview with Tatiana de Rosnay) Nextbook, Aug 7 2007

upstairs at duroc

“Rue de Montmorency,” Issue 11 (2010)

huffington post

“Paris Cafe: the Select Crowd,” The Huffington Post, April 3 2008

“Casse-toi, pauvre con!” The Huffington Post, March 6 2008 (on Sarkozy’s lapse of manners)

“Through a mirror, bizarrely,” The Huffington Post, June 26 2007 (on teaching in a French university)

“In Paris, you’re only as good as your dossier,” The Huffington Post, June 6 2007  (on real estate in Paris)

gridskipper
 

“Veni, Vidi, Venice,” Gridskipper, Sept 29 2006

“Saint Germain’s Sweetest Spots,” Gridskipper, April 30 2008

“Snogging in Paris,” Gridskipper, April 24 2008

“Eco-friendly Paris,” Gridskipper, April 10 2008

“Strong fashion, weak dollar: Shopping Guide to Paris,” Gridskipper, April 2 2008

“The Musical Theater Dork’s Guide to Paris,” Gridskipper, March 6 2008

“Paris Art Blogs,” Gridskipper, February 29 2008

“Unconventional Paris Tours,” Gridskipper, February 27 2008

“Literary Watering Holes in Paris,” Gridskipper, February 21 2008

“Top Picks: Paris Chic & Trendy Designers,” Gridskipper, February 12 2008 

“Paris to Make Your Bubbe Proud,” Gridskipper, February 6 2008

“Portable Paris for the Home Enthusiast,” Gridskipper, Jan 28 2008

“Occult Paris,” Gridskipper, Jan 23 2008

“Secondhand Paris Boutiques,” Gridskipper, Jan 10 2008

“Paris for Philosophers,” Gridskipper, Nov 27 2007

“Armstice Day Redux,” Gridskipper, Nov 12 2007

“Get Melty in Paris,” Gridskipper, Nov 5 2007

“Paris’ Viaduc des Arts,” Gridskipper, Oct 29 2007

“Shopping the 13th Arrondissement,” Gridskipper, Oct 23 2007

“Gentry Lane’s Paris in Satin and Lace,“ Gridskipper, Oct 16 2007

“The Naif’s Guide to Eastern Montmartre,” Gridskipper, Oct 1 2007

“Paris for Apple Geeks,” Gridskipper, Sept 24 2007

“Southwestern French Cuisine in Paris,” Gridskipper, Sept 17 2007

“Fall Gallery Openings in Paris”, Gridskipper, Sept 7 2007

“Rue des Martyrs Shopping Spree,” Gridskipper, Aug 31 2007

“A Guide to Literary Paris,” Gridskipper, Aug 22 2007

“Eat Your Way Through the Butte-aux-Cailles,” Gridskipper, Aug 20 2007

“La Dolce Vita in Paris”, Gridskipper, Aug 8 2007

“Paris in the Movies,” Gridskipper, Aug 2 2007

“Artazart: Paris’s Design-y Bookstore,” Gridskipper, Aug 24 2007

parisist

“The Scene” (Paris Theatre Update), Parisist, Jan 24 2007

“Venice in Paris,” Parisist.com, Jan 17 2007

“Battle of the Faux French Bands,” Parisist, Mar 2 2007

“Rufus and Judy and Me, Oh My!” (Music Review), Parisist, Feb 22 2007

“Nous aimons Nous Non Plus” (Music Review), Parisist, Feb 7 2007

“Paris littéraire: the get-out-of-the-house edition,” Parisist, Mar 12 2007

“The Devil Wears Poofs” (Review of Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the French Revolution), Parisist, Feb 21 2007

paris voice

“The Apothecary’s House” Review, Paris Voice, Sept 2005

“Anglo Readers Seduced by French Touch,” Paris Voice, June 2005

reconstruction

“Blogging and (Expatriate) Identity,” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, 6.4 (2006)

 

jewish telegraphic agency (highlights)

“English, French, Hebrew spoken at inclusive Paris Shul,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Sept 26 2005

“Debate rages over Le Monde Verdict,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 7 2005

“French Jews Conflicted on Constitution,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 27 2005

Interview with Joann Sfar, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 12 2005

 

 

around the internet on a Tuesday

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Hello from the former colonial outpost known as the US, where everything is fat-free but the people, and everyone talks? like they’re asking? a question? Here are your Tuesday links!

As an undergraduate at Barnard I had to write two senior theses, one per semester. The first semester I had a dragon lady for a professor and I wrote the thesis on Jean Rhys’s Quartet and the crisis of femininity after the First World War. The crisis? Too much alcohol and not enough mans to go around. Like "Sex and the City" but there’s a man shortage not because they’re all married or won’t commit but because they all died in the war.  The dragon lady professor, a hardened New Critic, gave me a C or something because she didn’t like my New Historicist reading, thereby f*cking up my GPA and making grad school applications really fun (sample interview question: "so if you want to do modernism, how do you explain this C on your first senior thesis?").  And look at that: Virginia Nicholson, author of "Among the Bohemians," daughter of Quentin Bell and grand-niece of Virginia Woolf, has written a book on precisely the same topic. It’s called "Singled Out" and the Guardian’s review is here.  Meanwhile the dragon lady retired soon after I graduated– not soon enough for my GPA’s liking.   I did appeal the grade, by the way, but final authority was given to the professor, and she stuck to her dogmatic guns.  B*tch.  (But I’m over it.)

Speaking of Barnard, the New York Times informed readers yesterday that there is a "fracas" about the recent decision to give tenure to Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist and assistant professor at Barnard since 2002.  Professor El-Haj is of Palestinian descent, and apparently in her book provides a "they’re just misunderstood and colonialized, poor things" explanation for the "ransacking by thousands of Palestinians" of Joseph’s Tomb back in 2000.  I can’t believe Barnard denied Lynn Chancer tenure but gave it to this one.

Ok enough politics and enough Barnard. Pierre Assouline weighs in on the plagiarism dispute between Marie Darrieussecq and Camille Laurens.  And this piece on Pascal Quignard is great as well (in French).

Just in time for Rosh Hashanah (for which we here in Jew York get 2 days off from school– now that’s one thing NY has over gentile France!), Lars von Trier tells Ha’aretz he wishes he were Jewish.

Finally, on this Tuesday in New York six years after another fateful Tuesday in New York, it would be appropriate to take a non-nationalistic, non-partisan moment to remember.

browser troubles resolved

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Dear kind, patient Internet Explorer readers:

I understand you’ve been having some trouble viewing the blog in its normal 3-column format.  Blame Typepad and blame IE; my Safari and Firefox readers have been having no trouble whatsoever.  However, with the help of a close family member who uses IE, I have finally ironed out the problem.  The blog should load correctly now in all internet browsers.

That said, I strongly recommend that you switch to Firefox.  The tabs load much more quickly than a whole new window, no unwanted pop-ups, more privacy, more customizable toolbars, and what’s more, you get to stick it to Microsoft. Why on earth would you give up all that? And no, Firefox is not paying me to say this. Although they are welcome to.

Get Firefox here.

around the internet on a Tuesday

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First things first.  The answer to the question I posed last week– what are the locations for the "Paris je t’aime" spread in the September US Vogue– went largely unanswered.  So without further ado, I unveil the response, and you are not going to like it. No, not one bit. Why? Because it’s not in Paris! It’s here, where I am, in New York, at Le Cercle Rouge restaurant in Tribeca. That is, the interior shots were taken there; the exterior shots are still a mystery to me.  I don’t recognize any of them.  However, not all is lost: my tongue-in-cheek reference to the Prix Maîtresse has given me rawther a good idea… we’ll come back to that a bit later.

For now, here are your Tuesday links.

I feel like Roberto Bolano is everywhere all of a sudden: he seems to be the writer people who know from writers are saying to read.  So ok, I ordered a copy of The Savage Detectives over the weekend and am looking forward to seeing what the big deal is about.  Until then, Benjamin Kunkel explains it all.

Gopnick gets it right again in this piece on Sarkozy
in last week’s New Yorker.  He seems to get French politics, I think,
as much as an outsider can; see on page 2, his description
of Bonapartism as opposed to "monarchism or Republicanism or the
monarchical-republican hybrid of Gaullism."

Writers tell The Guardian their favorite underappreciated novels.

Finally, here’s Jeanette Winterson on the threat of the  "illiterate educated" in our society who believe that  "their mixture
of television, tabloid, and texting argot is as good an English as any."

I don’t mind the signs for “Iternity” rings, or being told not to leave
luggage in the “vestible” [...] As a country dweller,
I am glad there is now such a thing as a “hare stylist”, and I will take my
hares to be styled as soon as I can catch them.

It’s snarky as hell but a great read, and I think she’s on to something:

Our school system, which tries, but not hard enough, because that would admit
differences in ability and also failure, is turning out half-prize students
who will fail us because we have failed them.

Her thesis is definitely applicable to the States and even more so in France (where there is an entire cult of mediocrity which derives from the current understanding of republicanism).  But it’s not so much a flaw in pedagogy, so much as of the culture in general.  I can’t expect my students to be any more literate than their environment allows them to be.  I can only try to motivate them to rise above it.

It’s basically a rehashing of George Orwell’s "Politics and the English Language." But Winterson’s point, as ever (god love her), comes back to literature:

A good standard of general literacy would also make it easier for writers to
write books that actually do something with language, rather than just tell
a story.

That’d be nice.

   

Problems in reviewing: the challenge of Vie Française

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Vie_francaise_2

I was going to let this post slide because I thought it was too severe.  Then I read the New York Times this morning.  And now I’m going forward with it.

Every so often a book review rubs me the wrong way.

This week [NDLR: the week of July 30th, 2007] it was a review in the San Francisco Chronicle, and the problem– well, I’m trying to put my finger on it.

Usually a review will chafe because the critic has no business reviewing the
book under consideration, or because the critic has no respect for the
intelligence of his reader.  Whenever this happens, I usually embark on
a journey of rather circular reasoning and never manage to break out of
my hermeneutic thought pattern.  Am I being too demanding, too elitist?
What does the average person want from a book review? To know what it’s
about, and if it’s any good.  Is that all? What about the context of
the book and its subject? And what are the requirements of pairing a critic with a book to review? This past weekend’s New York Times Book Review [August 5th, 2007] handed a review of two books on Eisenhower to Michael Beschloss, who I learn at the bottom of the page is himself the author of a book called Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989. So he seems a good match.  On the other hand, The Septembers of Shiraz was given to Claire Messud, which makes sense because its author, Dalia Sofer, looks like a young Messud.  And because it is book about Persians, who (I guess from an editor’s perspective) are kind of like North Africans, about whom Claire Messud herself wrote a book (The Last Life).   In the first case we have an intellectual match; in the second an emotional match (which is less precise but perhaps sufficient). 

The review in question, the one that has prompted me to share my circular reflections, is a review of Vie Française, a Prix Femina-winning 2004 novel by Jean-Paul Dubois which was recently published in English by Knopf.  [Full disclosure: I have not read this book in either language.]  The review is mainly negative, but I believe it is negative for the wrong reasons.  It’s legitimate that the critic disliked the book, but the reasons she gives for disliking it indicate she may have missed the point.  Would a reviewer more familiar with French literature and society have written a completely different review?   I wonder.  I do not wish to cast aspersions on the reviewer, Susan Comninos, or her capabilities as a critic. But a quick Google search of her name yielded nothing even vaguely related to France, and so I wonder if she was the best choice to review a book called Vie Française. It seems a mismatch to me. 

But then, it is precisely this question which merits reflection: should a book critic have some knowledge of the culture of the book, or will she better serve a general audience by knowing approximately as little as they do? Does the reviewer serve the book or the audience, or both, and in what ratio? Would it be acceptable to have a novel about Hiroshima reviewed by someone who knew nothing about the way the event is understood in Japanese culture? And is it genre-specific? You would never hand a non-fiction book in France over to someone who hardly knew the country. The NYT gave Sarkozy’s book to an actual Frenchman to review! But are the rules different for fiction? Why? How important is it, when reviewing fiction, to give the book to someone with some knowledge of the context?

After first pointing out that in spite of its title the book "explains little about Gallic society," Comninos, "can’t help but be puzzled" by the main character’s "fury at French politics (given his
complete remove from it) and his focus on the revolving door that has swept
French leaders in and out of office since World War II."

So let me get this straight: the main character complains about the government, all the while doing nothing to change anything.  No, that doesn’t sound very Gallic to me.  Lord no. Paul Blick, we learn from Comninos, is at once alienated from and incensed by the doings of his country’s leaders.  Comninos seems  unable to recognize one of the fundamental truisms of the Gallic character. 

But what really gets Comninos is the vitriol directed at the United States. 

Blick waxes eloquent on
the mistakes of the United States, a pastime he undertakes to amuse his adult
daughter, an anorexic/schizophrenic mutely installed in a French hospital.

On visits, he "tried to describe to her the international disorder caused
by the war that began in Iraq in March 2003," Blick tells us, "and the
Christian, imperialist, fanatic, and stockmarketed America that had started it
all."

"Knowing Marie," he says of his catatonic daughter, "and the sincerity of
her youthful convictions, I was sure that if she hadn’t been imprisoned in that
psychiatric cell, she would have joined the millions of people marching in the
streets against the absurdity of an oil crusade, a war for the fun of it."

Comninos finds this passage laughable: "Because of its overblown earnestness, the passage comes across as funny,
though it’s not clear Dubois means it to be."

Two things.  One, although I have not read the book, it seems clear to me from what I’ve read in this article that Marie’s catatonic state might be said to stand in for the catatonic trance which has fallen over France and prevents Blick’s compatriot’s from effectively standing up to the US.  Two, there is a certain earnestness inherent in the French language that enables the Frenchman to make such statements.  It’s hard to be sarcastic in French the way you can be in English; the only recourse to sarcasm the French speaker has is litotes, or making a point by stating its opposite.  Accusations of "overblown earnestness" are a pitfall of translating from French into English.

Is this useful to keep in mind when reviewing such a book? Or is it more important to have an American response unsullied by an understanding of the French language and psyche? If we accept that the point of a book review is to vet the book under consideration– telling readers if it’s worth their time or not– then the latter writer seems the more useful choice, because the reviewer’s response will have more in common with the general response of the American reading public.

But shouldn’t the reviewer have some idea of what he’s dealing with if he is going to pronounce it good, bad, or mediocre? Say, a French wine merchant brings a bottle of Bordeaux to a restaurant in San Francisco, and the sommelier tries it to see if he’s going to accept it.  One would hope that the wine taster has some knowledge of French wine before he judges it, so that his gold standard is more objective than the wine that comes out of Sonoma.  But maybe he knows better the palate of his customers, who  may be put off by the foreignness of a full-bodied Bordeaux.  But more likely, his customers couldn’t tell a Bordeaux from a Pinot Noir produced in Napa.  They just want it to taste good.  They trust that the sommelier know what he was doing when he chose it.

"Do we really need him to lead
us to the top of this fictional mountain just to show us the bleakness
of his view?" Comninos asks rhetorically at the end of her review.
This statement seems to me to misunderstand the entire point of
literature.  But then maybe my understanding of literature is too
influenced by modernism, post-modernism, existentialism, and all the other movements of the 20th century. I ask that a novel reveal some
truth of human existence. But does this make me a more tolerant critic or a more
widely-read one? Am I less effective as a critic if I try to understand
the book on its own terms rather than criticizing it on my own or those
I imagine my reader to possess?

–In the interest of brevity, I’ll stop this here and pick up part two in a few days.

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