Category Archives: France

The eBook and the French reader

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I know. You don't have to say it. I'm sorry. But I'm here now, aren't I? 

So I've been teaching. And working on my dissertation. And trying to keep myself sane in an apartment gone haywire. And last week I flew to Montreal to participate in a panel on Thirties Modernism and a seminar on Woolf and modernism. (I write to you now from my parents' kitchen on Long Island; back to Paris on Saturday.) So things have been busy. But I know, it's no excuse. 

One thing I did do a couple of weeks ago was attend a panel at the Centre national du Livre on digitalization. I was there because the panel was part of the study trip a couple of friends had made to Paris to learn about the way French publishing works. Here's how it works, for those of you who were not on the trip: protect, protect, query nervously, protect. 

That policy of protectionism is mostly a good thing. (For more on that, see my article in issue 8 of Five Dials magazine, downloadable here). It's occasionally seen as a bad thing (cf Donald Morrison and Antoine Compagnon's Que reste-t-il de la culture française) because it encourages a kind of stasis in French letters; it could be said to perpetuate a dominant tone of mediocrity amongst the writers, publishers, and readers' expectations. But hey, it's better than the dominant tone of trash you find in the US and UK. 

For years now, the French have been  talking about the digitalization of the book, and what that might look like. No one could have imagined at the beginning of the '00s that people would actually want to read a book on a screen, much less on a cellphone; and so for years now, the conversation has remained hypothetical. But with the success of the Kindle and other e-readers in the US, the French are starting to get a little nervous, and a little excited, like a seven year-old standing at the edge of the high diving board, about to jump for the first time, but terrified of how very far down there is to fall.  

French readers, however, are no more ready than the publishers are to take the plunge.  A poll currently being conducted by Le Figaro asks "Are you ready to read a novel on a screen?" A resounding 75% percent is saying Non! "[An e-book is] not a book!" declares one commenter, who compares the e-book to margarine and decaf coffee (with whom I happen to agree). "Right or wrong, I want my books on paper," says another. Only a very few readers are able to identify this as a false dichotomy, pointing out that the advent of one does not necessarily imply the decline of the other. 

But I'm only scratching the surface of what was discussed at that panel. For a more in-depth view of the Great Franco-American Publishing Exchange, do read Chad Post's write-up of what the American editors learned on their trip.  And to be continued, when the French come to New York early next year…

unfinished

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Beig

Since I've been back in Paris I've all of a sudden become a shockingly lazy reader. I've spent more time planning my lessons and watching "Big Love" than doing anything else.  So Wolf Hall sits, halfway finished, next to my bed, joined by Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind (which I'm reading for a Thursday evening Barnard Alumnae book group), David Foenkinos's La Délicatesse, and Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole.

The only book I did manage to finish was Beigbeder's Un roman français, and the only reason I blew through that is because it was mediocre enough that it didn't take much concentration. I didn't hate it, but I didn't feel like it was worth the time it took to read it.  Here's a summary: Beigbeder gets caught sniffing cocaine with a friend outside some nightclub from off the roof of a car.  They are too messed up to notice they're getting high right in front of a police car.  They're arrested and hauled into jail.  Being in jail is a terrible experience, Beigbeder finds, and, much like that other writer-guy dipping a madeleine into some tea, or whatever, Beigbeder finds the fact of imprisonment summons up his entire childhood. Being locked up–oh so paradoxically!–gives him access to all these memories he thought were locked away inside himself.

Although it has real moments of tenderness (when he thinks about his daughter, or his relationship with his brother, verging into full-blown, large-scale sentimentality, weeping about his mother while sitting in prison, his tears dripping into his beard), the rest of the guy's strut and performance seriously undercuts any lasting affect the book might have had. He tells us over and over that he's such a loser– but it just feels like part of the act. We never for a moment believe that Beigbeder really believes he's a loser.

Occasionally funny, but often not, the novel's worst offense is its complete unwillingness to trust the reader.  Beigbeder can't just tell a joke without immediately telling you why it's funny; he can't build on a theme without pointing it out to you– how do you like my theme?– which is just insulting. Even the dimmest Beigbeder fan is capable of noticing different passages and ideas seem to circulate around the idea of imprisonment.

Other ideas that he tries to bring in– such as his childhood summers spent in the southwest, or his family history– don't really work. As he said the other night at Literary Death Match, lamenting the fact that the only thing that interests people in his book is the coke-sniffing scene: "No one seems to care about my great-grandfather." Maybe it's because Beigbeder doesn't seem to care that much about his grandfather. The man is there, one suspects, just as an opportunity to share details about his aristocratic lineage. The grandfather in question died on the field of battle in the First World War, "like a Japanese kamikaze or a Palestinian terrorist, this father of four children sacrificed himself knowing full well what he was about. This descendant of Crusaders [oh yes, apparently he is descended from Crusaders] was condemned to imitate Jesus Christ: to give his life for others. I am descended from a valiant knight who was crucified on the barbed wire of Champagne." With all due respect to the soldiers of World War I and their families: Oh, lord. Eye-roll.

What does work nicely are the descriptions of the various houses and apartments in which he grew up; Beigbeder evokes quite nicely the different spaces, how it felt to be in them, and how they determined who he would become. (There are some scenes with his father and his friends that could have been taken from the adult Beigbeder's life– we certainly understand why he became such a fétard.) But Beigbeder doesn't seem interested in asking hard questions of himself, and hard questions are the only ones that really matter in a memoir. Otherwise it's just a show, just a shallow depiction of what it's like to be Beigbeder, without yanking the reader into that hulking physique. 

More on Foenkinos, Toltz, et al, when I finally finish reading them.

For more on Beigbeder at Literary Death Match, see here.

Behind the scenes at the Prix du Livre Inter

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The Prix du Livre Inter was bestowed earlier this week on Mathias Enard for his novel Zone (to be published by Open Letter in May 2010). Via Three Percent, I came across this video, which takes us behind the scenes at the final meeting and voting of the jury.  It's really interesting to get a look behind the process of choosing a winner, although I would have like to have heard a little of what went on during the 4 hour long final debate:

The jury, we learn, was divided between Stephane Audeguy (for Nous Autres), Emmanuel Carrère (for D'autres vies que la mienne)  and Enard. But Zone carries the day!

And then through the miracle of cell phone and public transportation, Enard shows up, all bearish and happily surprised. He thanks everyone, and explains that he, Emmanuel Carrère, and a couple of the other nominees had been planning a "dîner des déçus" [dinner of the disappointed]. But he is the winner! I wonder if he paid for dinner.

The cool thing about this prize, as EJ points out, is that it's
composed of France Inter listeners, not book professionals, and not
thousands of anonymous voters.

For more on Zone, check out François Monti's review in The Quarterly Conversation, and my interview with Charlotte Mandell, who is presently translating the novel into English.

around the internet on a tuesday

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Well, I'm back in Paris after a prolonged stay in Tokyo, and my, oh my, am I glad to be back.  There are all kinds of people in the world, my friends, and there are people who love Tokyo, and there are people who love Paris, and I belong to the second camp.

Also, I missed my dog.

And the internet has been busy while I was gone! Lots to report.  First of all, Wyatt Mason is no longer going to be blogging at Sentences.  Wyatt: we hardly knew ye. A year may seem like a decade in the blogosphere, but it's not really that long, and your dispatches will be missed.  Luckily I subscribe to Harper's, but there's something about a blog post that print book reviews and essays can't touch.  The sketch-like quality, the half-formed thought, the gesture toward one's interlocutor to further the idea… it's valuable not only for the blogger but for the reader.  This post, for example, in which Mason throws out some ideas on Beckett and translation, got me thinking, and may turn into a longer project.  So, thanks.

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Last month the Oulipians gathered in New York. Artforum gives us the play by play.  Stephen Mitchelmore has an excerpt from Jacques Roubaud's The Loop, published in English last month by Dalkey Archive Press. And for those of you in Paris wanting a little action from the OUvroir de la LIttérature POtentielle, they'll be doing their thing Thursday May 14th at 7 pm at the BNF.  The theme of the evening will be "Proses liquides."

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Feneon
If you liked Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines, which came out last year from NYRB, you will love Joanna Neborsky's illustrated version of Fénéon's texts.

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I was thrilled to find, via The Valve, that this intrepid soul is (re)reading Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle backwards. Oh! how I long for the time to do the same. There is nothing better than curling up with a chunky Folio paperback and losing yourself in the minutiae of Second Empire France.  Sigh. 

(Did I just out myself as the biggest dork in the land?)

On a related note, Scott Esposito asks, and I echo: what's your favorite Zola novel?

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ReadySteadyBook has a review of J-M.G. Le Clézio's Wandering Star.

It feels like now, in the aftermath of Israel/Hamas war, might be the saddest of times to be reading J.M.G. Le Clézio's Wandering Star.
Yet I couldn’t help feeling, too, that this novel was confirming,
affirming. The simple fable-like quality of the prose offered up a
place where I found shelter from all the shouts — the noisy rhetoric
and rigid absolutes which seem to be filling up the media pages about
Israel and the Arab World. Le Clézio has achieved a revisiting of
modernist sensibilities which serve to place the subjective "I" into
the center of our reader’s mind. This voice is a singular, isolated
voice who is more witness than victim, and more reliable as the teller
of historical truths than all the objective reportage we have come to
rely on and believe in. Paradoxically, then, a literature based on
subjective sensibilities serves to become one of our most objective
looks into the Israel/Palestine conflict. Unlike the many "embedded
journalists" (a term I always found sort of funny, imagining these
Western newspaper guys stuck in sand dunes or ensconced inside rocky
limestone caverns) this fiction reaffirms and redefines the possibility
of the novel. Again, the novel can exist as a history-bearing fruit,
immerse us inside a forgotten and buried world history. When the very
writing of a novel asks the question: "can a novel be useful?" then,
for me, the novel is once again operating at the top of one of its most
exciting peaks.

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And if you're still on a Japanese kick, Marie Mockett has a piece up at Maud Newton's blog. 

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Thanks to a resourceful reader named Joe (Thanks again, Joe!), I am happy to provide you with the text of the recent London Review of Books article dealing with the French university strikes, by Mat Pires, a fellow angliciste who teaches in Besançon. Download it in pdf format here.

Christophe Claro on “French literature”

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Claro_couv_demo2
Meandering around the internet last week, I came across the blog of Christophe Claro, who is one of the more unique voices writing the French language, as well as the French voice of Pynchon, Rushdie, and Vollman, whose works he has translated.  Claro's blog, called Le Clavier Cannibale [the Cannibal Keyboard] after his latest novel (Editions Inculte), is a collection of odds and ends and occasionally the site of compelling discursions on matters literary and non-. One in particular, "Aux écrivains la patrie méconnaissante," caught my eye, since I'm interested in the problematic concept of national literatures, and, thinking it might be interesting for an English-speaking audience as well, I took it upon myself to translate it, with Claro's permission. For more on Claro, see François Monti's interview in The Quarterly Conversation.

Writers Without Country*

A cultural magazine (doesn't matter which, alas) has devoted a recent cover article to the following question: "Is French literature dead?" Of course, we have no doubt that the ten writers asked to "respond" are going to nuance, or even contradict this staggering possibility.

We also vaguely imagined that the article would serve as a kind of response to the incredibly dull polemic which grew up around Donald Morrison's article for Time magazine not long ago [Ed: The Death of French Culture].  Nevertheless, the very fact of using this kind of question to hook the reader speaks volumes. The question is provocative, though in a way I can't quite put my finger on.  What bothers me is not that it is provocative (and, to say the least, absurd); no, what bothers me (not that I'm losing sleep over it) is that it contributes tot he reification of this disastrous notion of "French literature" as a defined body of work, a paper entity, go figure– and the question of the morality of this corpus, whether or not this is in question, conspires to personify an object of study which is all the same difficult to define. 

Because really, what is "French literature"? Books written by French authors? French-speaking authors? French-speaking French authors? A translation doesn't count? Although? If it's written in French? By a French person? What are the necessary conditions to be considered an author of French literature? How many months a year do you have to live in Paris or in Laval? Does French have to be your mother tongue? Does your subject have to wear a beret? When Raymond Federman writes in French, is that French literature? If Jim Harrison were naturalized tomorrow, would he count retroactively?

In short, it's all very complicated. And if "French literature" is a less precise idea than it would seem to be, how can we imagine that this imprecise idea could, like a body, be subject to an organic phenomenon like death? How can a literature die? Did it have to be born first? Is it possible for it to get sick? Does it grow up, or get old? These kinds of questions only reinforce the rancid notion of "generational literature" [a kind of literature that is associated, for better or for worse, with a group of writers of about the same age, and treating the problems of their generation] — we had more fun, even, with the invigorating notion of the "death of the author."

So contested is the idea of French literature in the writers' responses in said article, that the mere fact that [the editors] thought it might produce something useful says more about literary criticism than it does about literature.  The scare quotes, I hate to say, don't change much.  The word "French" is pretty and all that, but as soon as we apply it to literature, that great destroyer of borders, or, for that matter, with the idea of death, well, we become aware of a a certain anxiety that– how to put it? Perhaps we ought to reserve this kind of questioning for the obituary section (i.e. "It is with regret that we announce the death of French literature," and a memorial service would be held upstairs at the Café du Flore) or for the medical journals ("Researchers in Marne-la-Vallée have perhaps found the miracle drug to counteract the degeneration of French literature.  Preliminary testing has been carried out on the afflicted inhabitants of St Germain-des-Prés").  However, we look forward to reading the responses generated by this cultural magazine, which we hope is safe from nasty existential headcolds.

*I'm not entirely happy with this title.  Anyone want to suggest something better?

around the internet on a tuesday

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I have been completely laid out by one of those strange French strains of a cold they call a rhinopharyngite.  But today I feel a bit more lucid than I have, just in time to take a look around and see what's been going on.

Here in France, the teachers' strike continues, and the manifestations are getting more and more original. On Friday, in honor of Valentine's Day, a group of people stood outside Valérie Pécresse's office holding red and white balloons, which they then released.  Yesterday a group of people read La Princesse de Clèves out loud (see here for video, starts around 43 seconds in) in front of the Pantheon.  (They did this because Sarkozy has a weird little fixation with this book that I don't entirely understand.) And tomorrow there will be a "flashmob" at 12 noon exactly at Place St Michel.  Here's what to do:

"1. Bring your favorite book (or any book)
2. Show up at Place St Michel at noon on the dot, Wednesday February 18th
3. When the whistle blows, begin reading aloud from your book as loud as you can
4. When the second whistle blows, scatter!"

The whole thing will last precisely 5 minutes.

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I was very shocked to learn via Caroline Weber that it was apparently Grégoire Bouillier who sent Sophie Calle the infamous "Prenez soin de vous" [Take Care of yourself] text message, the one that inspired a hundred creative interpretations, a Biennale exhibit, and many deconstructions of whether or not it is still appropriate to vousvoyer someone you're sleeping with. What's even more shocking is the cavalier way Weber tosses off this information– as if everyone knew about it.  Did everyone know about it? I knew she was a central figure in his memoir L'invité mystère [The Mystery Guest], but didn't know they were ever involved. It makes me think he did that just so she would turn it into one of her projects.  Does that make him more or less of a cad? I can't decide.

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Earlier this month was the 100th anniversary of the Nouvelle Revue Française. For the anniversary issue, Jonathan Littell provided an appreciation of Maurice Blanchot, which This Space is currently featuring, in a translation by Charlotte Mandell. An excerpt:

Writing does not describe, does not relate, does not signify, it does
not represent a thing, existing in the world of men or even only in the
world of the imagination; it is neither more nor less than "the test of
its own experience" (Blanchot again, I forget where, unless it's
Bataille – so indistinguishable is their thinking on this point), the
faithful account of what happened at that moment, the moment
when the one who, seized by the desire to write, sat down in front of a
blank piece of paper and began putting language onto it. It's not that
the text that results from this experience – poem, story, novel – is
deprived of meaning, is not shot through with elements referring to the
reality of life; rather it's that these elements function (to use a
comparison that Blanchot would no doubt have discreetly avoided) like
what Freud called the manifest content of dreams: the rags of reality
they cloak themselves with so as both to manifest and veil their truth,
their very reality. Thus, if writing is related to truth – and it
certainly is, it has to be, or else not be at all, or in any case fall
outside of the realm we designate by that mysterious word, literature
– it is not by way of knowledge. Literary writing does not explain,
does not teach: it simply offers the presence of its own mystery, its
own experience, in its absence of explanation, thus inviting not some
illusory "understanding" ("Reading either falls short of understanding
or overshoots it," writes Blanchot), but precisely a reading.

[UPDATE: Charlotte writes in to let us know the original French is here, and there's lots more on Blanchot at Pierre Joris's blog. Thanks!]

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Finally, Wyatt Mason gives a very patient explanation of the differences between reading as a reader and as a writer, and what this means for ltierary criticism.

Academics take to the streets

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Last Thursday we were out in the streets protesting again; this one was even better than the last! This time there was chanting, singing, and even a little dancing. The energy was high, the press was everywhere, and everyone seemed to be having a grand old time– all the while completely serious about our cause, but happy to be out marching on such a beautiful day.

We began the march at Jussieu, walked past the Jardin des Plantes, down to Censier, up rue Claude Bernard, hung a right on rue d’Ulm, continued past ENS, up to the Pantheon, where the march came to a halt.  We were supposed to finish in front of the Education Minister’s compound, but since the protests had turned ugly that morning in Strasbourg (where the Minister, Valérie Pécresse, had inaugurated a new university), the police had blocked off all the streets leading to the ministry.  So the cortège continued up rue Victor Cousin (“A la Sorbooooooooonne!” cried the leaders), left on the rue des Ecoles, right on Boulevard St Michel– and here things got out of hand.  Half of the marchers took off leftward on the Blvd St Germain, walking right into traffic, between the cars, who stopped in their tracks and began honking to show their support for the demonstrators.  The other half stayed on Blvd St Michel, where the demonstration ended about a half hour later. 

For a summary of the issues in English, see The Guardian.

’round and about the internet this tuesday

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A new book argues that women prefer to “devote hours to planning a pumpkin patch excursion or to scrapbooking our most recent family vacation” to going out and working for a living. Ladies and gentleman, this is post-feminism! What a relief! I can stop pretending to care about my career!

I mean, sure. Who wouldn't rather stay home and watch Oprah than go to work? But suggesting that women are secretly devoid of professional ambition is preposterous. And suggesting that staying home and raising children is somehow opting out and relaxing is equally preposterous.

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Conversational Reading sits down with Soft Skull/Counterpoint publisher Richard Nash to discuss "How to publish in a recession."

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Galleycat rounds up 6 stellar blogs by publishing companies.

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Daniel Mendelsohn is thinking of moving to Paris for a year, reports Pierre Assouline. Daniel. Call me.  We'll do lunch. [FR]

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Professors here in France are officially on strike now, unlimited and endlessly renewable, until the Minister of Education, Valérie Pécresse, takes back the reforms she proposed to the status of enseignants-chercheurs, to the concours, and the obligatory "masterization" of future professors. Basically all the universities in Paris are closed, and many more around France, except for those scabs in Toulouse and Montpellier. [FR]

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I'm newly obsessed with a blog called Wuthering Expectations, whose mysterious author left me a comment last week, and who is super good at talking about 19th century literature.  Well worth the detour. Even if s/he hasn't read Middlemarch.