Fallait laisser tomber

Beside the Sea, by Véronique Olmi, is an amazing little novella, simple and powerful. Recently available in English, several reviewers are raving about it (eg, 1, 2, 3).

It's about a mother taking her two boys to the seaside, and from the start, something doesn't feel right. Why, for example, are they travelling by night? And Kevin is worried about missing school. Mother's planning for this ideal vacation is pretty half-baked — she doesn't seem to know where they're going, they're poorly packed (did they leave in a hurry?), she just doesn't have much of a grip. Everything is going wrong and it's thoroughly disheartening.

As the mother tells the story, we learn a little bit about her, but very little: she's afraid of talking to people, she's missing teeth, she goes to the free clinic. There's a social worker, there are meds. Money's tight. At first I thought she must be young, and quite simply overwhelmed by motherhood, but later I didn't think so, though maybe that's simply her weariness aging her beyond her years.

Since I couldn't track down a copy of this book easily, I picked it up in the original French (Bord de mer).

J'ai regardé par la fenêtre, on voyait rien. Moi j'ai l'habitude de donner sur les immeubles d'en face et j'aime ça, voir les gens bouger derrière les rideaux et toutes les petites lumières allumées quand le soir arrive, c'est beau et on est tous ensemble, bien rangés dans nos boîtes, c'est l'ordre des choses, ça me plaît. Là, on voyait rien, même pas des phares de voitures, un réverbère, rien. Qu'est-ce que ça donnerait en plein jour ? Qu'est-ce qu'il y avait derrière ma fenêtre ? La mer ? Non, j'entendais rien et puis un hôtel au bord de la mer ça aurait été trop cher, je me serais méfiée tout de suite. Alors ? Qu'est-ce qu'il y avait en face de moi que je voyais pas ? Le terminus des cars ? Un chantier avec des grues des camions et tout le tintouin, quelque chose qu'on construit ou qu'on démolit ? Je déteste ça, les maisons à moitiées arrachées, je supporte pas de voir la couleur des tapisseries de maisons à moitiées arrachées, y a rien de plus triste à mon goût. Fallait pas que je commence à imaginer, tout était possible derrière cette fenêtre, on pouvait s'attendre à tout, fallait laisser tomber, laisser tomber tout de suite avant de se faire des cauchemars.

It turned out to be slow going for my far-from-fluent self, about 10 pages a day (and I think now this kind of slowdown was just what I needed), but the experience — as much as the book itself — has given me a lot to think about.

I've been thinking about tone, and how it is that we glean what we do from what we read. Choice of words, their social register. Uneducated? Melodramatic? From grammar, how casual the tone, whether a character (or her thoughts) is care-free, sloppy, rigid, organized; from punctuation, how breathless and panicked, or slow and thoughtful. This is hard enough to do when reading in one's mother tongue — we process so much of this information subconsciously, it's hard to point to direct evidence for the conclusions we draw. In a second language, well, it's harder.

I'm pretty proud of myself for getting what I did from this exercise, but my knowledge of French grammar is piss-poor, and it turns out my vocabulary's pretty limited too. And then there's the fact that I filter it all through my knowledge of English-language writing conventions, which don't necessarily apply. On top of this, my entire reading is coloured by my preconceptions of the material.

For all that, I did come away with some very strong impressions — of the characters and story, and favorable of the book as a whole as an intense and provocative read — but I can't say how true they are. (I'm curious to try this book in English someday.) I do look forward to tackling the second Olmi novella in my French volume.

Être ailleurs

Il m'a pas répondu. Il était barré quelque part, il sait bien faire ça, Stan, larguer les amarres — c'est pas mon môme pour rien. La maîtresse lui prête des livres et quand il lit c'est pareil : il nous quitte. Des fois je crois qu'il continue à lire ses livres, quand il les a rendus il y pense encore, il lit même sans les mots, il est vraiment très fort pour être ailleurs.

— Bord de mer, Véronique Olmi.

From there to here

I'm having a hard time carving out some time to write in any reflective kind of way. I've been back from away for days, but tired, stressed, and busy.

In particular there are two books I finished reading before leaving and want to write about. You Lost Me There, by Rosecrans Baldwin, which was wonderful in ways I didn't expect it to be, and Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, which is mindfuckingly amazing. (Stay tuned for more!)

And I finished reading The Passage (all 800+ pages!). The pacing is good, and the characters are (mostly) believable, and ohmygod postapocalyptic biofreak vampires! so it's a good summer read, or long train ride read, or stormy night read, or snowbound winter cabin read (I'm guessing). I'll definitely be reading whatever books follow this one in the series, and I'll probably even see the movie.

I saw some clip of an interview with author Justin Cronin in which he discusses the book's genesis and the tradition he sees it following, being somewhat epic adventure, like, for example, Jules Verne (or am I confusing this with the China Miéville interview I saw? or was that element common to both?), but it's got me wondering, what kind of book is this really?, it's not exactly literary, but it's a far cry "better" than many a blockbuster à la Dan Brown (but how? by what objective criteria?), and I'd like to think this book will be read and enjoyed 100 years from now, maybe not as the cream of the literary crop, and not as some obscure gem, but as something people, real people, read and enjoyed, and it's pretty good dammit, and I wonder is this, say, Dumas-calibre? I mean: an adventure story! with heroes and villains and moral ambivalence and romance!

The vampires, I'll point out, are wholly original vampires, and I shouldn't even call them that — they're referred to as "virals." They are the result of biogenetic manipulation gone wrong, and have no relation to Vlad the Impaler and myths of that ilk, barring a few superficial similarities (but virals love garlic — you can set traps with it). I think Cronin owes a lot to Anne Rice (will people read Anne Rice 100 years from now?), actually, in terms of the vampire/viral sense of "family" and their manner of connection/communication.

(Note to self, apropos of nothing: Read Stephen King's The Stand someday before I die. No, I haven't read any Stephen King.)

There was only one expedition to a bookstore while we were away (I shouldn't call it that. Really, it was an expedition to get mommy an espresso-based beverage, the site of which caffeine-proffering establishment is on the premises of a bookstore, so I had to take a gander...), and I picked up only something for the kid, In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories, by Alvin Schwartz, which was a big hit, in particular the story of "The Green Ribbon." Helena's reading skills are better in French than in English, so it's a coup for me, a huge relief, to find something that both involves and challenges her in a language I can more easily relate to her in.

My sister was lovely enough to bring me The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy, which I've been wanting for ages, but then my daughter was careless enough (but no, it's not her fault, it's an accident of circumstance) to set a sopping wet paper towel beside it on the table on which it was resting, so the back third of it now is pretty severely warped, and this made me sad and angry, but I'm past it, it's still the same book I want to read, with all the same words, all still legible, a beautiful book, it's what's on the inside that counts.

The week (that is, the week since I've been home already) being what it was, I thought I deserved to treat myself to a book, and I specifically had in mind Beside the Sea, by Véronique Olmi, the reviews of which are overwhelmingly good (see for example, 1, 2, 3), but a little internet legwork showed I wouldn't find a copy within a reasonable radius of here, and not wanting to wait for one to be delivered, I decided, I'm smart enough to handle this in its original language (hah!), so today I got off the metro a station early to check out the French bookstore, and now I have for my very own a slim volume containing 2 novellas: Bord de mer / Numéro six. I've read a couple pages, I get the gist, but I know I'm missing out on nuances. We'll see how it goes...