Oh boy, I am in such a jam. I was visiting the revered geologist minerologist Professor Otto Lidenbrock, or as I call him, uncle, and I was idly flippOh boy, I am in such a jam. I was visiting the revered geologist minerologist Professor Otto Lidenbrock, or as I call him, uncle, and I was idly flipping through a priceless unique 16th century Icelandic manuscript he had acquired, when I found a mysterious page inserted within the parchment. It was in an unknown code. How exciting. Naturally we spent many amusing hours trying to figure it out, hoping that it wasn’t just a recipe for asparagus soup but something of critical worldshaking scientific importance. But we couldn’t crack it. He ran out of the house to find some other eccentric professor to interrogate. Meanwhile quite by chance I realised that if you just cross-diagonal the words on this paper then translate them into Latin and hold them up to a mirror, the message is plain. It’s an instruction telling how to find the tunnel that leads to the centre of the earth!
I know that when uncle comes back I should tell him, but I have a feeling he will immediately drag us both off to Iceland, hire a broadshouldered taciturn hunter with unlimited brawny skills, and force the three of us down some endless gloomy corridors where there will no doubt be prehistoric beasts, underground oceans, vortexes and whirlwinds and the Lord knows what else and we will be very lucky not to be killed in twenty different ways before next Tuesday. But, I am wondering, if I could just let this troublesome document accidentally fall into the professor’s cosy fire, and burn up entirely, I could stay in Hamburg and get married to my little tootsiewootsie, and not have to bother with the centre of the earth at all. What to do....more
I read this a long time ago but the only thing I could remember about it was that I read it a long time ago. Also that some lady was married to some rI read this a long time ago but the only thing I could remember about it was that I read it a long time ago. Also that some lady was married to some really boring guy. This turned out to be true. Madame Bovary was like the young Juliette Binoche from Three Colours
[image]
And her husband was like Jessie Plemons from The Power of the Dog
[image]
He is the guy who the instant he gets married puts on fifty pounds and ages 20 years so it is not to anyone’s surprise that the hot tomato that is his wife gets so she glazes over as soon as she hears the chilling phrase "Honey I’m home." Here is Juliette’s – sorry, Emma’s very own father, pondering Charles Bovary :
It was true he thought him a bit of a loser, and not what he’d have chosen as a son-in-law, but people said he was careful with his money
Not a ringing endorsement.
Emma, she is grabbing Charles to get out of the house where she feels like a prisoner, the impulsive fate of many young women. Quite soon she is feeling like she swapped one prison for another.
Flaubert can make exquisite phrases, here is one :
Her will, like the veil attached to her hat, flutters with every breeze; always there is the desire inviting her on, and, always, convention holding her back.
Desire for what? Well, her husband's idea of passion was to have sex once a week on Saturday night in the exact same position if he wasn't too tired. She thinks life should have more possibilities. She is looking for something other than the smothering blandness and monotony of being a rural doctor’s pretty missus, something to get her blood surging, something, anything.
What enraged her was that Charles seemed quite unaware of her anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her a mindless insult…. She was sometimes astonished at the appalling possibilities that came into her head; and yet she must go on smiling, go on hearing herself repeat that she was happy, and let everyone believe it!
Eventually she meets a local rich guy who is a Player, which, the Urban Dictionary reminds us, is
A Man or Woman that has MORE than ONE person think that they are the ONLY ONE.
This Rodolphe takes one look at Emma and thinks
Poor little thing! Gasping for love like a carp gasping for water on a kitchen table. With just three little words of love, it would worship you, I’d bet on it, it would be so tender and charming! Yes, but how to get rid of it afterwards?
So they have this years-long affair and she almost melts his heart – but no, not really. Are you kidding, not Rodolphe! Eventually, as you might predict :
Certain of being loved, he stopped taking pains to please her, and imperceptibly his manner changed.
Flaubert skewers this boyfriend without mercy, allowing us into his player brain most uncomfortably :
He had heard all these things said to him so many times that they no longer held any surprises for him. Emma was just like all his mistresses, and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion., which never varies in its forms and its expression. He could not see – this man of such broad experience – the difference of feeling beneath the similarity of expression.
People say that Flaubert doesn’t comment on his characters and just pins them up like a butterfly collector, but as you see, he is explicit in telling us Rodolphe is a nasty nasty man, but, you know, normally nasty. Here’s another great turn of phrase about this creep :
His pleasures, like boys playing in a school yard, had so thoroughly trampled on his heart that nothing green would grow there
There is a great moment when he has to write a big goodbye letter to Emma – she’s preparing to run off with him, abandon her husband and daughter in a snap – she is so in love with him – and he finished the letter then thinks hmm, there’s something missing, and drips a single drop of water onto the page. Yes, a tear will make it look more heartfelt.
The intimate story of Emma’s decline and fall is psychologically gripping, even though this is a simple age-old story we have had before in a thousand variations. Flaubert was the great anti-romantic, he was the auditor of human disillusion. You are with Emma so closely throughout this novel that her death, even though you know it will come, is still shocking. It was very similar to watching the great documentary Amy, about Amy Winehouse. The final scene where we see her being taken out of her house in a body bag gives you a real jolt of horror.
Readers should be warned of one thing however : James Joyce said he wanted to write Ulysses so that if Dublin burned to the ground they could rebuild it by referring to his novel. He may have got that super-realist detail mania from Flaubert who thinks that Madame Bovary should be the encyclopedia of rural France, so prepare for boring conversations between pharmacists and doctors and farmers and other farmers and a 60 page description of an agricultural fair. Some of this can be zzzzzzz. I would normally knock off half a star for that kind of thing but not in this case.
Madame Bovary is a great novel. 5 stars, of course....more
The concept is frankly creepy – a morose but truly arrogant (“if everybody was like me, all would be well with the world”) 30 year old guy is living iThe concept is frankly creepy – a morose but truly arrogant (“if everybody was like me, all would be well with the world”) 30 year old guy is living in a hotel in Paris and notices there’s a hole in the wall at the top :
A rotten plank, a couple of bricks out of place, some plaster has come away
So he begins to spy on all the people who come and go in the next room. And it begins like you might predict, with him goggling at a woman undressing.
My gaze, to which my convulsive hands lend their strength, my gaze as heavy as flesh, needs her belly. In spite of laws and dresses the male gaze always thrusts and crawls towards a woman's sex like a reptile towards its hole.
That pretty much sets the tone right there. Not much ooh-la-la to be had here, even though an unexpurgated version had to wait to be translated into English for 54 years. But this is more like Leonard Cohen on a pretty bad night.
The spying turns out to be a device by which our mournful miserablist listens to and comments on a succession of conversations featuring such laugh a minute types as a dying old man and a priest, two bitter adulterers, a couple whose marriage is on the rocks, and so forth. Here’s a flavour of the rather dispiriting cogitations we encounter :
They were parted by the whole extend of their sufferings. To suffer together was to be entirely separate.
Since the world began, death has been the only palpable thing. It is on death we walk and towards death we move. What is the use of being modest and beautiful, when others will one day walk on us?
What havoc we wreak on the whole of Nature around us, and what a world of suffering we bring into the world!
Our misery is here : we can see and touch it. You can deny all the rest, but who could deny our wretchedness?
So I was thinking maybe Henri Barbusse lays it on a little too thick.
But then I thought…. this novel needs to be rewritten, rebooted, updated for modern readers. The missing brick in the top of the wall is transformed into.... a computer that lets you look at the internet. Our modern guy would begin by innocuously goggling ladies undressing, but quickly would flit via youtube channels and Instagram accounts into darker and darker encounters. He finds scammers and catfishers, he stumbles on detailed descriptions of the MDPOPE videos, he trips over camgirls, he falls through the many levels of horrible porn, and finally the virtual ground opens up and he’s in the dark web.
A tour of hell 2021 style.
Somebody should do that.
[image]
This is my copy showing the back and front cover - what a design. 1966 hardback....more
Returning one evening from one of their fossil gathering expeditions (this was during their palaeontology phase which was the 23rd phase since they stReturning one evening from one of their fossil gathering expeditions (this was during their palaeontology phase which was the 23rd phase since they started all this nonsense) Bouvard and Pecuchet were exhausted. Heaving their complete edition of the works of George Cuvier off the sofa, they collapsed into the soft cushions and fell asleep. Mysteriously, when they awoke it was in the year 2021. Even more mysteriously Bouvard found a Razer Blade 15 laptop in front of him and Pecuchet found a MacBook Pro. Being the inquisitive fellows we know them to be, in five minutes they had discovered the internet.
“This is most excellent”, said Bouvard. “We can get rid of all these old books. Everything is on the internet!”
“Just what I was thinking,” said Pecuchet. “Imagine the time we could have saved if we had this all along. All that stuff we read on agriculture, chemistry, anatomy, geology, archaeology –“
“And now we can just click click and know everything all at once!”
“Clearly my dear friend, our task is now simple. We must read the whole internet.”
Some weeks passed and finally Pecuchet announced
“My dear old pal, I have read the very last page of the internet. We have finished our great task.”
“Yes at last. Let’s summarise what we have learned.”
They gazed into space. At length Bouvard said
“We know what beanie babies are now!”
“We know what a mockbuster is!”
“I spent a whole afternoon trying to understand the Mach–Zehnder interferometer. Perhaps we don’t need that information just now.”
“I feel the same way about Kac-Moody algebras and why there are only five superstring theories. Oh the headache I got!”
“But we have seen a woman yelling at a cat and we have seen Baby Yoda."
“And many 45 second videos of really cute baby animals."
“And we should look into this interesting proposal from a director of the Nigerian National Bank. This man says he will give us 15 million francs if we first of all give him a million francs.”
“And I have found there are many lovely young women who are anxious to meet us, Bouvard. Imagine! Us old fools! All they need is money to buy a plane ticket to France.”
"And Pecuchet, we really have to do the ice bucket challenge, I think that is a must.”
“Yes, and the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge."
“Ah, I did not see details on that one, it sounds most interesting.”
By page 130 I ran out of patience with this thing so I channeled my inner irritable 14 year old and composed the following review:
This Ballsack is a gBy page 130 I ran out of patience with this thing so I channeled my inner irritable 14 year old and composed the following review:
This Ballsack is a great writer I am told but one problem is that he wrote 4,578 novels, so which one should I read. I saw that Old Goriot has mostly 4 and 5 star reviews, so it looked like a good choice, but I was so so wrong. For the first 70 pages Ballsack describes buildings and characters, as if nobody knows what anything looks like or has ever met a student or an old dame or a boring old fart before. Everyone has met those types before, I meet them every day. No one needs 5 pages about what an old fart does. So nothing happens. Then after 70 pages people start to go into rooms and make speeches and go out of rooms. Not so often but sometimes, they take a carriage which is French for taxi to another house so they can go in another room and make a speech. There is no story but if there is it is about this old Goriot who gave all his dough to his daughters who surprise turned into ungrateful bitches and don’t give a stuff about their old dad anymore and it breaks his heart but he should of thought of that earlier. Like King Leer, another windbag.
But then I read ten pages more and found – wait! – a little bit of plot appeared, and then some more, and pretty soon Old Goriot was bowling along spiffily, there were evil schemes, criminals were unmasked, there were huge rows, there was police involvement, there were gold lame dresses… it was most entertaining!
There is a fabulous villain named Vautrin - here he is being very cheeky to some old dear who has just squeezed herself into a dress two sizes too small :
“Ah! Here comes Ma Vauquerre, fair as a star-r-r, decked like a Christmas tree – do we not feel just a shade too tight, Ma?” he asked, laying a hand on the lady at the place where her corset took most strain. “Our little front is well squeezed in. If we get worked up there will be an explosion; but I will gather up all the fragments with an antiquary’s care.”
Now and then Balzac throws in some zingers like
You can do without a King but you can’t do without your dinner
and most of the time (after page 130) he writes with great comic energy, but he still doesn’t know when to shut up, so that when the big dramatic scene rolls round at the end we have to put up with a whole lot of eyerollingly ridiculous wildly overstated camped-up drama-queening
He stopped abruptly looking like a thunderbolt had struck him
He fell on his bed as if a bullet had struck him
“Papa! Papa!” the two young women cried, clinging to him to prevent him dashing his head against the walls
I cannot risk meeting your husband again, I should kill him on the spot
And perhaps the most ridiculous line in all of French literature
I wish I were God so that I could throw the universe at your feet
So..... this is a fairly infuriating mixture of the tedious and the fabulous. You may need amphetamines to get through the first 100 pages but after that this is pretty much a bittersweet tragicomical King Learish hoot.
3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 to make me look better...more
I am from that laid back generation that liked to tell people to do their own thing and not judge anyone and all that, but if Story of the Eye is yourI am from that laid back generation that liked to tell people to do their own thing and not judge anyone and all that, but if Story of the Eye is your thing then I would like to run quite a long way away from you and never have to speak to you again and I will judge you.
To say it’s rather pervy would be to say the pope is a bit of a Catholic, or that God is really quite potent.
Now, it’s true that pervy erotic porn sounds like some kind of fun, just ask your grandmother, but it turns out it really isn’t if it’s George Bataille’s kind of fun. Because his kind of fun is going to involve a lot of really unpleasant stuff. Oxymoronically, this is total turn-off porn. Each and every sex scene, meaning each and every paragraph, will involve eggs, eyeballs, dead people, blood and fountains, geysers, and bucketloads of urine. If you’re going to take a walk on this wild side, you will need an umbrella and a raincoat and I would think gloves too.
A FELLOW READER’S ANGUISH
Over at The Reader’s Room blog *, where they are ploughing through 1001 Books you must Read Before the Next Global Pandemic Overtakes Us, Bookworm wrote :
Yet again the 1001 editors have managed to select a book that no sane person could enjoy. They appear to be obsessed with perversion and the more disgusting the descriptions of sex, the better. There is no need for anyone to read this before they die. In fact, it should be on the “don’t read this even if you have only days to live” list.
You see blurb-writers lazily describing this book as
one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.
I am on the side of Bookworm here. What we seem to have is two completely different concepts of the erotic or the pornographic. The intellectual version includes Story of an Eye, Story of O and all of De Sade. I suggest that none of that stuff is likely to excite or turn on most people, they all involve extreme cruelty and dismemberment and death along with all the major and minor bodily fluids so it seems to me that the intellectual version of porn could only be enjoyed by Ted Bundy. And Bundy wannabes. And Susan Sontag, whose 1967 essay included here appear to celebrate them all, or at least redesignate them as literature.
Simone was tall and lovely. She was usually very natural; there was nothing heartbreaking in her eyes or her voice. But on a sensual level, she so bluntly craved any upheaval that the faintest call from the senses gave her a look directly suggestive of all things linked to deep sexuality, such as blood, suffocation, sudden terror, crime; things indefinitely destroying human bliss and honesty.
Yes, in Georges’ world sexuality involves blood, suffocation, sudden terror, and crime. Also many many raw eggs (never poached or fried or boiled).
HE LOOKED LIKE A PRIEST OR A CHEMISTRY TEACHER
[image]
Georges said :
In general, people savour the 'pleasures of the flesh' only on condition that they be insipid.
By people I think he means me – my pleasures, even those of my wildest imagination, are all from Georges’ point of view, irredeemably insipid. They never involve eggs, eyeballs, dead people and buckets of urine.
My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.
I will spare you any quotations relating to the eggs, eyeballs, orifices and unlikely genital manipulations that festoon the pages but I need to give you an idea of what some intellectuals appear to think of as horny. But before I do, here’s a funny thing I found.
THE AGE OF THE CHARACTERS
It says before each story on the website Literotica
All characters are eighteen or older.
But Georges breaks every rule (as well as every egg). He doesn’t care. He says :
I was nearly sixteen when I met Simone, a girl of my own age
So it appears all of these very unhygienic goings-on are performed by 15 years olds. Why hasn’t this book been busted for underage sex ?
A BIKE RIDE
So anyway, our two teenagers go for a bike ride. Now, many of us probably did this in our carefree youth. This is how Georges describes it :
It struck me that …if Simone and I were killed, then the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars, fully unrelated to any external gazes and realizing in a cold state, without human delays or detours, something that strikes me as the goal of my sexual licentiousness: a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating.
It doesn’t sound like any bike ride I ever went on in my youth. Also, it doesn’t sound like it makes any kind of sense to me.
BATAILLE IS AN ALIEN PLANET
Apparently he had a tragic childhood. Also apparently he gets thrown in with all of those other terrifying French thinkers like Baudrillard, Derrida, Barthes, Lacan and so on. But this novella was enough and too much for me. I have a naïve idea that eroticism and porn should in some way evoke pleasure in the reader. I know, I’m hopeless.
We had abandoned the real world, the one made up solely of dressed people, and the time elapsed since then was already so remote as to seem almost beyond reach. Our personal hallucination now developed as boundlessly as perhaps the total nightmare of human society, for instance, with earth, sky, and atmosphere.
(Note : there may be a few spoilerish things here, just saying)
Julien Sorel is a handsome young peasant with a freakish memory. He doesn’t like his da(Note : there may be a few spoilerish things here, just saying)
Julien Sorel is a handsome young peasant with a freakish memory. He doesn’t like his daddy and his brothers because they beat him up all the time. Like actually, not metaphorically.
WORKING CLASS HERO : JOHN LENNON
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool But I memorised the whole of the New Testament in Latin So I think I’m pretty cool
So he impresses some priest with his huge memory and the priest gets him a job as a tutor for the local mayor Monsieur de Rênal, who has a hot wife.
STACY’S MOM : FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE
Stacy, do you remember when I mowed your lawn? (mowed your lawn) Your mom came out with just a towel on (towel on) I could tell she liked me from the way she stared (way she stared) And the way she said, "you missed a spot over there" (a spot over there)
Things get real steamy with Madame de Rênal's wife
MAD ABOUT THE BOY : DINAH WASHINGTON
Will it ever cloy This odd diversity of misery and joy I'm feeling quite insane and young again And all because I'm mad about the boy
Like, he is only 19 and she’s like 30 at least. So there’s that. Anyway, after some shagtastic weeks the secret gets out and Julien has to vamoose. So his next career move is to a seminary which is a name for where they train to be priests, yeah, like mind-blowingly dull. His blazingly good looks and enormous memory don’t win him any friends, and he has like the worst time. So then he gets a break, he’s recommended to some local aristocrat and lands a gig as this guy’s secretary. The family name of these aristos is de la Mole, which is funny because they are not moles. Anyway guess what there is a hot daughter Mathilde and she takes one look at Julien and she is all
CALL ME MAYBE : CARLY RAE JEPSEN
Your stare was holding Ripped jeans, skin was showin' Hot night, wind was blowin' Where you think you're going baby?
Naturally Julien does not object to this frou-frou babealiciousness but at the same time is appalled and horrified at the crass materialism of French aristo life
PRICE TAG : JESSIE J
Seems like everybody's got a price I wonder how they sleep at night When the sale comes first And the truth comes second
It's not about the money money money We don't need your money money money Forget about the price tag Ain't about the uh cha-ching cha-ching Ain't about the yeah b-bling b-bling
So Mr Mole gets Julien involved in some political stuff that I frankly couldn’t follow. This part is skippable. Anyway, this Julien and Mathilde thing is going on and of course shagging the boss’s daughter is always a turn on
UPTOWN GIRL : BILLY JOEL
I'm in love with an uptown girl You know I've seen her in her uptown world She's getting tired of her high class toys And all the presents from her uptown boys
And one thing leads to another and before you can say Papa Don’t Preach, yes, she’s up the duff. Mr Mole is not pleased but he does the right thing and stumps up, showers Julien with ducats or louises or whatever they used for money, and everything looks tickety boo but then along comes a letter from Stacy’s mom and kind of wrecks the whole situation, saying all these awful things about our Julien. When he finds out about the letter what does he do… yeah that’s right
WOKE UP THIS MORNING : ALABAMA 3
When you woke up this morning Everything was gone By half past ten your head was going Ding-dong ringin' like a bell From your head down to your toes Like some voice tryin' to tell you There's somethin' you should know Woke up this mornin' Got yourself a gun
He jumps on a horse, which they used to do, and goes and buys some guns, which they still do.
If Celine had shut his trap around the 300 page mark he might well have clung on to that elusive fifth star, but as it is, finishing his amazing horriIf Celine had shut his trap around the 300 page mark he might well have clung on to that elusive fifth star, but as it is, finishing his amazing horrible novel composed of ten thousand variations on the theme of human life being 95% unbearable misery and 5% boredom and everybody smells bad becomes an exercise in readerly self-flagellation.
How many times do we need to be told this doleful message? Around 15 times per page. The industrial-strength vitriol keeps us awake, though. There’s no nodding off with Celine.
This is the grand original of all those novels where guys rant and rage about how terrible everything is – it’s a whole sub-genre – we have most of Philip Roth, a world-class ranter, there’s William (The Tunnel) Gass, there’s Michel Houellebecq, and Thomas Bernhard, and when the unending unedited vomited-forth stream of volubility is not as rancid and bitter because more drunk or stoned, it’s there in Jack Kerouac’s and William Burrough’s books. Will Self wrote an article for the NYT saying he learned everything he knows from Celine. Catcher in the Rye is a rich teenage Celine. It goes on - in the first section of Journey, the hundred pages that deal with World War One, you can hear Catch-22 clearly – he’s the only guy that realises that everybody is trying to kill him. He knows it’s nothing personal but that really doesn’t help.
"I reject the war and everything in it… I don’t resign myself to it… I don’t weep about it… I just plain reject it and all its fighting men, I don’t want anything to do with them or it. Even if thee were nine hundred and ninety-five million of them and I were all alone, they’d still be wrong and I’d be right. Because I’m the one who knows what I want : I don’t want to die.” “But it’s not possible to reject the war, Ferdinand! Only crazy people and cowards reject the war when their country is in danger…” “If that’s the case, hurrah for the crazy people! Look, Lola, do you remember a single name of any of the soldiers killed in the Hundred Years War? Did you ever try to find out who any of them were? No! As far as you’re concerned, they’re as anonymous, as indifferent, as the last atom of that paperweight, of your last bowel movement… Get it into your head, Lola, that they died for nothing! For absolutely nothing!”
Via a period skulking in a veteran’s hospital he gets discharged and signs up to a company running one of those colonial outposts in darkest Africa (Cameroon). He’s in for a different onslaught of ghastliness, this time from nature in all its insect life and unpleasant diseases. He attempts to flee from the horror, the horror ™ and gets captured and sold into slavery on a galley ship just like he might have in the second century BC. This was the part I thought did not ring entirely true – galley slaves in 1917? Seriously?
Anyway, up to that point Journey is a stone classic, wonderful frothing at the mouth page after page and exactly the kind of thing you would froth about, too. Here’s one of my favourite Sayings of Ferdinand :
When you stop to think about it, a hundred people must want you dead in the course of an average day, the ones in line behind you at the ticket window in the Metro, the ones who look up at your apartment when they haven’t got one themselves, , the ones who wish you’d finish pissing and give them a chance, your children, and a lot more.
Then, with his brother galley slaves (!) (they also had sails on this boat) he reaches New York. His miserable existence improves greatly. He travels to Detroit and gets a job there. But he’s still ranting about the hideousness of everything. He decides to go back to France and complete his medical studies and become a doctor. Still ranting and frothing and badmouthing everything in sight,
Still further down, it’s always the Seine, winding from bridge to bridge like an elongated blob of phlegm.
he becomes the poorest general practitioner ever and so bumbles along for the rest of the book, the same old sour-minded misanthrope we know and love by now,
My patients were mostly people from the zone, that village of sorts which never succeeds in picking itself entirely out of the mud and rubbish, bordered by paths where precocious snot-nosed little girls play hookey under the fences to garner a franc, a handful of french fries and a dose of gonorrhoea from some sex fiend.
a few anecdotes here and there, a few “characters” to entertain us (mostly unhinged) but no improvement in our guy’s attitude to life even though his situation has improved from catastrophic to dire to scraping a living. He slouches and slimes his way around France spewing forth maledictions and depressing maxims like an out of control I Speak Your Doom machine.
As for sick people, patients, I had no illusions… in another neighbourhood they’d be no less grasping or jug-headed or weak-kneed than the ones here. The same wine, the same movies, the same sports talk, the same enthusiastic submission to the natural needs of the gullet and the arse would produce the same crude, filthy horde, staggering from lie to lie, bragging, scheming, vicious, brutal between two fits of panic.
Are there any chinks of light at all? For a few pages, not more than five at a time, he hooks up with a woman and blow me down, arch-cynic Celine serves us up not one but two examples of that most familiar of bit parts, The Tart with the Heart of Gold. That surprised me.
Well – fans of this book, and there are a great many, will disagree with me when I say that there is just TOO MUCH of it, and 99% of it is one long monotone, one endless screech, so sorry, I have to say 4 stars only. But, you know, hell of a book. Man!...more
Yeah well how immoral could things really get when this thin novel was published in 1902? It turns out – quite immoral. Our narrator, Michel, graduallYeah well how immoral could things really get when this thin novel was published in 1902? It turns out – quite immoral. Our narrator, Michel, gradually finds out that what he really wants to do is not to write dry essays on Gothic antiquities and buy another elaborate hat for his pallid wife, no, what he really wants to do is have sex with young boys. So he does.
Michel is the very person who these days would be arrested at the airport on returning from his three month holiday in Vietnam. In his case it’s Algeria. Michel’s proclivities are not unique, they are shared by many, alas. Football coaches, priests, etc. If Michel had gone back to his haunts forty years later he might have run into William Burroughs doing the same things. The young tender flesh was and is plentiful and all for sale at very reasonable prices, we understand.
Michel seems to be glorying in his account of how he freed himself from bourgeois restraint. Yes, it probably killed his wife and bankrupted him, but he is free! Free!
In his preface Andre Gide says “I intended to make this book as little an indictment as an apology and took care to pass no judgement”.
It turns out that a lot of this story is directly or queasily quasi autobiographical. Andre married to please his parents and did not have sex with his wife. Michel is the same except he kindly consented to have one-time sex with his wife and she immediately became pregnant, so that relieved him of further responsibility.
This wife is a barely-there cipher. Michel’s first person confession is so claustrophobically self-involved that she drifts like a ghost through the whole sorry tale. I think she says about two sentences before dying of TB. Whereas Charles the 17 year old lusty peasant lad who entrances Michel, he gets pages and pages about hedging and ditching and making hay.
Andre Gide writes in a suggestively decorous and quite maddening style. Most of the time you are wondering what he actually means.
I reached a point of enjoying in others only the wildest behavior, deploring whatever constraint inhibited any excess. I came close to regarding honesty itself as no more than restriction, convention, timidity.
And again
I ended by enjoying the dissimulation itself, savoring it as I savored the functioning of my unsuspected faculties. And I advanced every day into a richer, fuller life, toward a more delicious happiness.
Spit it out, man, of what does this wildest behavior and this delicious happiness consist? But there are only nods and winks, and in 1902 a nod was as good as a wink to a blind horse.
This was a quick but grotesque read. I’m not sure why it gets all those 4 and 5 stars....more
This is a hell of a story, told very engagingly. The last 50 pages are agonizing and heroic and you won’t forget them. RecommendREVIEW : SHORT VERSION
This is a hell of a story, told very engagingly. The last 50 pages are agonizing and heroic and you won’t forget them. Recommended.
REVIEW : LONG VERSION : A QUESTION OF DEFINITION
If I waddled around in an elaborate penguin costume loudly proclaiming that I was a penguin while swallowing fish whole, it wouldn’t make me a penguin. Even if I got all my friends to violently nod their heads and point at me and say yes, he’s a great old penguin, that one, sure he is. Even if I took a plane to Antarctica and joined one of the vast throngs of penguins there, and you filmed me David Attenborough-style, creeping up on me real close while I was looking after my egg which I got a friend to make for me before I came, looks pretty realistic, I still wouldn’t be a penguin.
Whatever everybody – the author, all the critics, and every last review says, this is not a novel. But Mr Binet persuaded the entire universe to go along with his penguin impersonation. And before him, other books have done this too :
Bartleby & Co – a long biographical essay about writers – not a novel Problems, The Wallcreeper, Love Me Back, What is the What and a zillion others – memoirs, not novels The Pale King - a random collection of experimental writings, not a novel
None of HHhH is fictitious, it’s either the precise historical information about the events leading to the assassination of one of the all time hall of fame Nazi bastards Reinhard Heydrich – presented in a refreshing casual conversational style (“anyway, let’s talk about something else” he says at one point) but still accurate (getting the details right is one of the main things LB agonises over) or it’s LB’s personal commentary about how he got this book written and the research he did and the problems he found, including such hilarious stuff as telling us that he should have bought a particular book online from Amazon since it was Heydrich’s widow’s memoir (pretty relevant) but he didn’t because it was too pricey and in the wrong language. Several pages later he tells us he finally did get it.
This whole kind of jokey (but really, about such a grisly no-joke subject) self-dramatising angst-ridden approach is exactly the same as a brilliant book by Geoff Dyer called Out of Sheer Rage , an account of how he didn’t write a book about DH Lawrence. Geoff could have called his book a novel, but for some reason he didn’t. Oh wait, that would be because it wasn’t a novel. What about historical novels like Schindler’s Ark, I Claudius, Wolf Hall, etc? Well in those you can see all the novelistic art, the dialogues, the plotting, the inhabiting of the famous person’s brain and so forth so yes, they are novels.
SOME QUOTES
Unbelievable – I’ve just found another book about the assassination! It’s called Like a Man and it’s by a certain David Chacko. The book is extremely well researched. I get the impression the author has utilized everything currently known about Heydrich and the attack … [LB discusses this novel for a page, pointing out some stuff Chacko made up completely e.g. some sexual scenes]…He’s a skillful cheat. A trickster. Well…a novelist, basically.
[as opposed to LB himself!]
If this were a novel I would have absolutely no need for Valcik. He is more of an encumbrance than anything else
[so, it’s not a novel]
I don’t even know how they reacted when they heard about Heydrich’s death, although that ought to make one of the best bits of my book.
My story has as many holes in it as a novel. But in an ordinary novel, it is the novelist who decides where these holes should occur. Because I am a slave to my scruples, I’m incapable of making that decision.
[so, it’s not….]
LAST MINUTE UPRUSH OF STARS
Around two thirds the way through I was getting a little tired of Mr Binet’s posturings (“look at me having problems writing my book, let me tell you all about them”) and frankly this is way too horrible a subject to be parading like a loud peacock with a tail of woe – just shut up and get on with it – but the last third gets a mighty grip as the assassination plan springs into life and all of what followed makes this – almost – a must read, & swerved the rating from a huffy 2.5 stars to a confident 4 stars....more
The author says she wanted to write about nannies. You know, the uneasy ambiguity, how they’re an intimate part of your family but they’re an employeeThe author says she wanted to write about nannies. You know, the uneasy ambiguity, how they’re an intimate part of your family but they’re an employee, how they’re poor (mostly black, mostly immigrant) and they live in the middle of wealth during working hours, returning each day to the other side of the tracks; how they’re everything and they have your total trust (they look after your children more than you do) and nothing (they can be got rid of just like that).
In an interview with The Guardian Ms Slimani explains that after she wrote 100 pages of stuff about the life of a nanny she was bored, bored, bored. Then – lightbulb moment!!!! She found a horrible story in the papers from New York.
It was the murder of two children by their nanny. Happened on 25 October 2012 and the details are here
She was able to electrify her boring nanny sociology with the closely copied details of this real life case, and they are very closely copied indeed. In fact it’s the precise same story transferred from Manhattan to Paris.
Now really, this is kind of calculating, ain’t it. I’m not saying authors haven’t taken real life cases and built crackerjack novels out of them, of course they have, and anyway, when it comes to gruesome crimes, anything an author can imagine has been done out there in the actual world a hundred times over.
The quote from the interview is, when she saw the account of the New York murders,
Whoah! I thought, I have to start with this. Now the reader is going to be very interested in this very normal family.
And we can’t say she was wrong, you must have seen all the rave reviews too. Not to mention the Prix Goncourt and two other Prixes. I’ll bet a movie is on the way as well. So that was some lightbulb.
Well, leaving all that aside, does this short sharp you can read it in a day novel work? Well, yes, it does in two really big ways.
One, it is really compulsive. It opens with the murders then of course the 200 following pages are all build-up, all a horrible up-piling of psychological tension awaiting the known bloodletting release, so you the reader are like a truffle hound, snuffling out the clues which will explain the crime, as this is not a whodunnit but a why-on-earth-did-she-do-it.
Two, it brilliantly delineates the crammed together but world’s apart lives of the rich couple and the nanny and the underlying toxic nature of the relationship which starts rather tentatively, grows closer and more loving by the week and then begins to rot from the inside. This is the soul of Lullaby and why it’s worth reading. The very exact same thing is explored from a male point of view in the well-known novel The White Tiger, a story of a chauffeur in India, perpetually 18 inches apart from his employer, but in reality 400 million light years between them. In that novel too there is an act of murder unleashed by the servant.
So Leila Slimani was dead right, about her material and about the way to pitch it. Would I have read an earnest long article about the bad situation of nannies in France? Not a chance. But this 207 page long article about the bad situation of nannies in France kept me turning the pages, turning the pages, and isn’t that the thing we all like to do?
This one is often described as “the novel to end all novels” and I understand why – when you are reading it you say to yourself very frequently “if thThis one is often described as “the novel to end all novels” and I understand why – when you are reading it you say to yourself very frequently “if this is what novels are like I am never going to read another one in my entire life”.
From about page 50 until when I stopped, I was having these strong bibliocidal fantasies. I thought – maybe I will leave this accidentally on the bus to work. But I forgot to forget it, like that country song. Then I thought – maybe a column of army ants will chomp it up so that not a shred remains. But army ants are never seen in Nottingham, only the friendly variety who bid you good day as they pass by. I tried to donate my copy to Oxfam but the shop assistant, having turned very pale when she saw the title, summoned up a courage I had not thought her to possess and said they could not accept that particular title. When I asked why she referred me to the Oxfam standard operating procedures, something about health and safety, which includes of course mental health. They had accepted copies of Sentimental Education in previous years but there had been some incidents and now all shops had been explicitly warned not to.
I see that many of my most respected GR friends hand out the big four and five stars to this novel and describe it as brilliantly comic. I was trembling in my boots until I found that none other than Henry James was on my side. Here is his considered opinion:
Here the form and method are the same as in "Madame Bovary"; the studied skill, the science, the accumulation of material, are even more striking; but the book is in a single word a dead one. "Madame Bovary" was spontaneous and sincere; but to read its successor is, to the finer sense, like masticating ashes and sawdust. L'Education Sentimentale is elaborately and massively dreary. That a novel should have a certain charm seems to us the most rudimentary of principles, and there is no more charm in this laborious monument to a treacherous ideal than there is interest in a heap of gravel.
However I did notice something what Henry James did not notice, and felt quite smug about that. It is this – that the main part of the plot of Sentimental Education is almost the same as the plot of Shampoo, the Warren Beattie movie from 1975, which I saw only last week so it was fresh in my memory. In Shampoo, hairdresser George’s former girlfriend Jackie now has a rich sugar daddy boyfriend Lester, whose wife Felicia is one of George’s best customers. Naturally George is shagging Felicia as it would seem unkind not to, and, because he keeps bumping into Jackie as they move in the same social circles, he realises he never wanted to break up with her so he starts shagging Jackie as well. Then comes the really shocking scene – Lester’s daughter who I guess is supposed to be around 16 or so comes on to George when he’s visiting Felicia. And she is played by none other than 19 year old Carrie Fisher, two years before Princess Leia. What a shock that was. So in Sentimental Education Frederic, the world’s most dreary young bachelor, wants to shag the wife of Monsieur Arnoux, a publisher. And eventually this guy introduces Frederic to his mistress Roseanne who he’s got fed up with, the idea being that Frederic will take her over, I suppose they used to do this in those days as they did not have Tinder. So Frederic is nearly shagging the guy’s wife and nearly shagging the guy’s mistress at the same time. Just like in Shampoo, except that George the hairdresser was a lot less dreary. Also in Shampoo and Sentimental Education there are these long long long boring party scenes where I think the effect is supposed to be scintillatingly socially satirical.
I did not notice any specific Star Wars connections in Sentimental Education, but neither did Henry James.
If I am ever taken hostage and this is the only reading material available in my rat infested dungeon then I will definitely finish this. ...more
I did read this some years ago so honesty compels me to list it here. For those of you who haven't yet had the pleasure, I can save you some time. AllI did read this some years ago so honesty compels me to list it here. For those of you who haven't yet had the pleasure, I can save you some time. All you need are these few verses from Tom Lehrer - the book itself is much less amusing. I quote them here because it's just possible some of you will not know this lovely ballad.
I ache for the touch of your lips, dear, But much more for the touch of your whips, dear. You can raise welts like nobody elts, As we dance to the masochism tango.
Say our love be a flame, not an ember, Say it's me that you want to dismember. Blacken my eye, Set fire to my tie, As we dance to the masochism tango.
Your eyes cast a spell that bewitches The last time I needed twenty stitches To sew up the gash That you made with your lash, As we danced to the masochism tango.
Bash in my brain, And make me scream with pain, Then kick me once again, And say we'll never part.
Take your cigarette from it's holder, And burn your initials in my shoulder. Fracture my spine, And swear that you're mine, As we dance to the masochism tango...more
If you don’t want to read about the gory details of fleshy entangulations and of bodily fluid by the bucketfulAn 18-rated review of an 18-rated book.
If you don’t want to read about the gory details of fleshy entangulations and of bodily fluid by the bucketful, then you need to steer well clear of M. Houellebecq. He’s all about that.
The sex is like the worst kind of bad cartoon porn and we can’t possibly be meant to take it seriously. I don’t really know what it’s doing in here. He’s trying to make a serious or black-comedy ironic point about the state of first world/third world relationships and how everyone could be made happier if we only just lightened up about sex tourism. And he scuppers his own novel because he includes this stuff :
(Michel – that’s the protagonist, yes, same name as the novelist, and his brilliant girlfriend Valerie are out on the town in Paris. Now read on!)
It was a Saturday night, the place was quite full. We met a really nice black couple; she was a nurse and he was a jazz drummer. …[three sentences later] We finished our drinks and headed up to the rooms. He suggested a double penetration to Valerie. She agreed, as long as I was the one to sodomise her.
So the two guys do the two girls and I must admit I lolled at this :
Everything went smoothly, I was agreeably surprised by my own stamina.
Well, bien sur, mon ami, that’s what happens in porn. The sex is always stratospheric, the orgasms always geyser forth like an Icelandic hot spring, and everyone is able to have about five or six per hour, the gentlemen’s members are always like several iron bars welded together, they never ever suffer from erectile dysfunction, and the girls always regard what comes out of the end of them like normal people regard a glass of Vosne-Romanee burgundy, the girls are always gagging to have everything shoved everywhere, and they always want to do it again ten minutes later, and no one has any diseases.
So Michel and Valerie’s evening struck me as a little unlikely, but maybe I should get out more. Or not, of course.
A few pages before that, they were in Cuba on holiday having sex in their hotel room, and they’ve left the curtains open. A maid sees them.
Valerie got up, walked towards her, and held out her hands.
And that’s all it takes – the maid is young, gorgeous, and completely into the idea of a threesome at the drop of a broom. Mais bien sur, again. She’s not 52, varicose-veined and asthmatic. Well, this is all ridiculous French Swingers A-Go-Go, and it makes it Platform a very silly novel indeed.
This novel is about sex tourism and never mentions drugs, or the miserable lives of the sex workers. In fact, all the sex workers are happy hookers who are glad to be able to work that thing to bring joy to the face of whatever potbellied manbreasted Western male they are lucky enough to have copped off with. I should say that this did not make Platform resound with believability for me.
Anyway, in Platform we get the narrative of a disenchanted loner who goes on a sex holiday to Thailand and hooks up with one of his fellow tourists Valerie and falls in love. And they have great and plentiful sex (see above). He’s in his 40s, she’s 28 with a cleavage to drown in and she likes girls too. Naturellement! So this is standard male fantasy territory (in porn and in Hollywood, all males over the age of 40 are able to captivate a knockout girl in her 20s. Also in arty movies, same thing. Look at all Woody Allen movies. I saw Manhattan recently - in that a late 30s Woody is sleeping with Marielle Hemingway who is 17. Sorry, I digress).
Added to that, and given equal prominence, is a steady stream of piquant miserablist ruminations on the state of life in the West. I cannot deny, these are hysterical.
Men live alongside one another like cattle; it is a miracle if once in a while they manage to share a bottle of booze.
It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it’s that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.
In most circumstances of my life, I have had about as much freedom as a vacuum cleaner.
Gradually everything becomes too difficult : that’s what life comes down to.
When all’s said and done, the idea of the uniqueness of the individual is nothing more than pompous absurdity.
Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.
And, the aphorism which seems to sum up MH’s jeremiad pretty well :
We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live; and what’s more, we continue to export it.
Anyway, MH-the-protagonist goes on at length about how in the West we all run around working like mad and making money and in the process becoming so exhausted that sex – never mind love – becomes far too much trouble. We’ve become so picky and self-centred we wouldn’t dream of devoting ourselves to the pleasure of others, even for 15 minutes. So we have money but we’re miserable, because we still want the sex and the affection. Therefore, we should all – men and women – go to Thailand for 2 weeks every year. There the natives have nothing except their extremely attractive bodies. They love nothing more than to devote their entire working lives to making you – yes you! come on, no false modesty please – achieve the kind of orgasms you never knew were possible. You know you want to!
To sum up the rest of the novel – “and we’d have gotten away with it too, ifn it weren’t for them pesky Muslim terrorists!”
This was a fun novel to read – it was so odd, so ridiculous, so pompous, so off the scale unrealistic, so almost-racist, so insulting to all and sundry including specific Frederick Forsyth and John Grisham novels (he takes a page or so to slag off these books, quoting from them without any acknowledgement anywhere), so downbeat and so raving mad that I should give it 3 stars, except that it really is almost complete rubbish.
I saw the movie Gigi - it was made in the late 50s.
[image]
There was this total gush of praise that flowed from the orifices of the critics :
"Gigi is I saw the movie Gigi - it was made in the late 50s.
[image]
There was this total gush of praise that flowed from the orifices of the critics :
"Gigi is a charming entertainment that can stand on its own two legs. It is not only a charming comprehension of the spicy confection of Colette, but it is also a lovely and lyrical enlargement upon that story's flavored mood and atmosphere"
"...Skillful casting, performance and presentation have endowed realism to the sum total . . . Director Minnelli's good taste in keeping it in bounds and the general sound judgment of all concerned . . . distinguishes this Arthur Freed independent production."
And you remember it got like a billion Oscars. They had to get a truck it won so many.
So I read Colette's original short story to find out what the hell is going on here. Because in the movie the story is so amazingly creepy, most of the characters in it would, if they were transported to contemporary Britain, either be in care (Gigi) or in jail for grooming a child for sexual abuse (Gigi's aunt and mother) or be on the Sex Offenders Register (Gaston and probably Maurice "Tank Evven for Leedle Grrls" Chevalier). Dig it - the mother and the aunt are training Gigi to be a - what was the polite word - courtesan. What's one of those? It's a high class call girl you rent by the month or year. So for the whole movie the aunt and the mother are trying to improve Gigi's posture and attitude and female accomplishments and be a bit less hearty and gawky and more seductive and like practise oral sex techniques on asparagus so that she can get a better customer and hence a better price when the time comes to launch her on the market (16th birthday? probably). The whole concept is ghastly, but in 1958 Hollywood and its audiences didn't bat an eyelid. Not one eyelid! It was just those saucy French .. c'est chic n'est-ce pas? (But you know, Hollywood likes on occasion to portray prostitution as an acceptable career choice for young women - check out Pretty Woman for instance.)
So another one which proves that they thought very differently in the past - in 19th century France, but also, in 1958 America....more
This was the one which convinced me that I didn't have to finish a book if it became as painful as having my toes gnawed off one by one by the neighboThis was the one which convinced me that I didn't have to finish a book if it became as painful as having my toes gnawed off one by one by the neighbour's strange nine-year-old son. I realised the author was the guy who wrote the script for Last Year at Marienbad which is the all time quintessence of French cinematic 60s avant-gardery. Dig the Wikipedia plot summary
Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorientating shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships between the characters. Conversations and events are repeated in several places in the château and grounds, and there are numerous tracking shots of the château's corridors, with ambiguous voiceovers.
The characters are unnamed in the film; in the published screenplay, the woman is referred to as "A", the first man is "X", and the man who may be her husband is "M".
I'm not saying the book is as bad as the movie, not at all. It's worse. But something happened on page 84, which broke the terrible monotony. I found an insect squashed there. I imagined its last thoughts : Oh no, this is not a large flat black and white flower petal, it's something else... what's that up above me... aargh...
I took the tiny corpse to be a sign saying that if I carried on Alain Robbe-Grillet would squash the life out of me too. Metaphors can be helpful, even obvious ones.
Thank you little dead bug, you did not die in vain.
A lot of this book consists of a tirade of hatred against the author's dear mama. Now finally, the 83 year old hippy herself has emerged from her retrA lot of this book consists of a tirade of hatred against the author's dear mama. Now finally, the 83 year old hippy herself has emerged from her retreat with all guns blazing. Hilarious article about the whole rancid argument here
"If it hadn't been my son, I wouldn't read that kind of crap, I would put it down straight away, because if there's one thing I detest in the world it's pornography. That book is pure pornography, it's repugnant, it's crap. I don't understand its success at all, that just shows the decadance of France." In her own book, she speculates that he writes about sex because he doesn't get enough. "What's this moronic literature?! Houellebecq is someone who's never done anything, who's never really desired anything, who never wanted to look at others. And that arrogance of taking yourself as superior ... Stupid little bastard. Yes, Houellebecq's a stupid little bastard, whether he's my son or not." ...more
In a grimy underground locked public toilet The Little Prince wakes slowly, he’s been out cold for hours. He’s bleeding from a gash on his upper arm. In a grimy underground locked public toilet The Little Prince wakes slowly, he’s been out cold for hours. He’s bleeding from a gash on his upper arm. He finds he is chained by leg irons to the wall. There is another person sharing his predicament. It’s a bear, also chained to the opposite wall. In the center of the floor is the corpse of what appears to be donkey in a pool of blood. Near the corpse are a gun, a tape recorder and a saw.
“Grownups are very strange,” said the Little Prince to himself, sadly. ...more
Loading...
