The reader is Neville Jason who Washington Post called “the marathon man” after his 70 hour recording of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  Jason is well equipped to [...]]]> Naxos, the renowned producer of classical music recordings is publishing a complete and unabridged recording of Marcel Proust’s epic work, Remembrance of Things Past (À la Recherche du Temps Perdu).

The reader is Neville Jason who Washington Post called “the marathon man” after his 70 hour recording of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  Jason is well equipped to read this even longer work by Proust, having received the Sir John Gielgud prize for fiction while he was at RADA and having then gone on to perform with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Old Vic Company.  Indeed, while reading an earlier abridged version of Proust he did the abrigement himself and also translated the final volume (see article in Audiofile magazine).

The first volume alone, Swann’s Way (amazon link here) is over 23 hours on 17 CDs –  - six more volumes are to be added to the project and will eventually run for 140 hours and will be completed in October of this year.

I have had a rather mixed relationship with Proust’s great work.  I’ve read three volumes of it so far, but as I began about fifteen years ago perhaps that’s not very good going.  While the book is fascinating, if it takes me a long time to get into each one and I know that by spreading it out over such a long period I lose some of the connections across each volume and have forgotten how the characters relate to each other.  The books are hugely detailed (as you would expect with their huge size) and it can be a daunting task to start another one.

Neville Jason

With this background I was wondering how I would cope with Swann’s Way on an audio recording.  I was pleasantly surprise to find myself totally absorbed, particularly while driving.  Jason’s voice is exactly right for Proust – as a professionally trained actor, his intonation and tone is perfect for the rhythmic cadences of the Scott Moncrieff translation.  My own version of Proust is the newer Penguin edition which uses different translators for each volume.  The translation is flatter and more colloquial, whereas Scott Moncrieff’s sounds slightly more “classical” – which Neville Jason’s voice suits rather well.

Of course, you have to wonder how exactly you would get through 140 hours of audio recording.  It almost seems like a life’s work – something that would accompany you over many years as you dipped in and out of it and kept coming back to it.  If I was still at the stage of my life where I was driving up and down motorways it would be ideal, but for now it’s going to be an occasional treat over the next few years.  What a lovely thing to own though, a rich resource for some point in the future when I have more time on my hands.

By the way, should you wish to read along with the audio version, the  text of Proust’s work in the Scott Moncrieff translation is available for free download in various ebook formats on Project Gutenburg here.

I am selling a few books on Amazon at the moment, most of which have been reviewed on these pages.  If you would like to look at them, please see my Amazon Storefront.

As an avid reader I enjoy “books about books” and this one certainly falls into that category.  Imagine a couple of lovers of literature who get the opportunity to open a book-shop which only sells “good” books, those which meet a criteria of literary worth, deliberately ignoring the current literary prizes and the year’s [...]]]>

As an avid reader I enjoy “books about books” and this one certainly falls into that category.  Imagine a couple of lovers of literature who get the opportunity to open a book-shop which only sells “good” books, those which meet a criteria of literary worth, deliberately ignoring the current literary prizes and the year’s crop of much-lauded novels.  The premise of A Novel Bookstore is that a wealthy woman, Francesca, is able to work with Ivan, a like-minded book-shop manager, acquire some prime real-estate in Paris and indulge their tastes without fear of bankruptcy.

A team of eight people is recruited (all writers of quality literature or having other suitable qualifications) and are required to provide a list of 600 books which the book-shop should stock. When the lists are received, the manager and owner correlate the eight lists together to compile an overall list which will provide the shop’s initial stock. The shop will not stock new books until they have proved themselves and the committee has agreed that they should be added.

But trouble soon arrives on their doorstep, beginning with physical attacks on three members of the selection committee.  Who is behind them?  Before long a vicious campaign is launched to vilify the shop and to present is as an elitist enterprise run by people who have contempt for the tastes of most readers.  The rest of the book follows the attempts to uncover the source of the plots and personal attacks, while a couple of romantic relationships are developed along the way with the usual joys and sorrows.

On the whole, I quite enjoyed the book.  Despite its 400+ pages, its an engaging read which held my interest, despite the basic implausibility of the story, the occasionally clunky dialouge and the flaws in the out-working of the plot.  A Novel Bookstore relies on the presupposition that the opening of a book-shop in Paris that only sells “good” novels, will provoke an angry response from the mainstream literary world, leading to poster campaigns, articles in newspapers, speeches from government ministers and even attempted murder.  We even find the opponents of the shop are so incensed by the Novel Bookstore that they go to the lengths of setting up three other book-shops opposite and next-door  to the Novel Bookstore selling “pleasurable books” and “good books”.   I found this sort of thing stretched my credulity more than it should and rather spoiled the book for me.

Perhaps Paris is different to London: I am certain that the opening of a book-shop in central London where the books were hand-picked by an anonymous committee would lead to nothing other than a few laughs – not least because readers who may require such a service have surely by now migrated to the Internet where their needs are met by Amazon, Ebay and Abebooks.

Slightly Foxed bookshop

In fact, the idea of specialised book-shops for devoted readers is not new and for example, London already has a new book-shop that “stocks an eclectic but carefully chosen range of old books, a selection of new books and classic reprints from interesting small publishers” for people who “tend to be independent-minded too – people who don’t want to read only what the big publishers are hyping and the newspapers are reviewing.” Hmm, this sounds rather like A Novel Bookstore, though on a smaller scale, and I’m sure that Slightly Foxed would be immensely grateful for even a fraction of the attention, whether critical or not, that was attracted by the fictional book-shop in this novel.

The whole book has a rather archaic feel to it. The correlation of the lists is done laboriously by hand – it would have been quite possible to have done this in moments with Microsoft Office or similar.  Its as though the shop exists in the 1970s, before the days of cheap personal computers and the Internet.  The creation of a website is a sort of after-thought, and is achieved by the manager going on a “webmaster” course – Laurence Cossé obviously knows little about the complexities of setting up an inventory management system with a related database and the merchant services to enable customer to use credit cards. Even the sourcing of obscure or out of print books is solved by the manager saying, “I know an excellent network of used book dealers.  I’ll get in touch with them, and get them to find us those unobtainable books”.  Evidently he has not heard of Google or the search facilities on sites like Abebooks.

But I am being unfair! The purpose of this book as far as I can tell is as a sort of hymn to good reading, where a special clientele of sophisticated and refined people can indulge their literary tastes in a discrete atmosphere where an old-fashioned library-silence reigns.  This is the power of fiction which the author puts in the mouth of one of her characters like this:

Literature is a source of pleasure . . . is it one of those rare inexhaustible joys in life, bit it’s not only that. It must not be dissociated from reality.  Everything is there.  That is why I never use the word fiction.  Every subtlety in life is material for a book.  Novels don’t only contain exceptional situations, life or death choices, or major ordeals; there are also everyday difficulties, temptations, ordinary disappointments; and in response, every human attitude, every type of behaviour, from the finest to the most wretched.  Literature informs, instructs, it prepares you for life.

I got the impression throughout that the concepts of the Novel Bookstore are close to the author’s heart. She really couldn’t have written 400 pages about this shop and its ethos without being convinced of its value. For myself, I was impressed by the counter-arguments put forward by an opponent of the shop -

We have to ensure the life of a popular culture which has given us great works. Some of those works, which were looked down on when they were published, are now unanimously revered, such as works by authors such as Alexadre Dumas, Jules Verne, or Hergé. The essential problem raised by the notion of literary value is that the value changes with time. A work that might have been hailed by its contemporaries seems trivial a hundred years later, perhaps even thirty years later. Our love of the novel and of the book is so great that we cannot see why, or even how, once could exclude, by means of a selection process, 99 percent of the titles available. Our passion and our cause is to respect the diversity of cultures, and the diversity of individuals.

I thought this was a rather good argument against the Novel Bookstore, but the managers of the Novel Bookstore responds with a blunt – “what a load of sophistry”.

Despite my reservations, this book is still a “good read”.  I have no doubt that most readers will not actually quibble at the things I found annoying – which are probably due to my lifetime working in the IT industry. The book is beautifully designed and presented – one of the most attractive books I have seen in a long time.

Incidentally, the publishers have created a website for the fictional shop – a bit of fun which may well convince quite a few people that A Novel Bookstore is more than a work of fiction.

I was inspired to read this book after reading reviews by Guy Savage and Mary Whipple, both of whom seemed to think it was pretty good.

I’d read quite a few of de Maupassant’s short stories of course, but not one of his novels, so Pierre et Jean seemed a [...]]]> I have wanted to read more Guy de Maupassant for some time and my interest was confirmed by reading some of Guy Savage’s collection of de Maupassant articles on his blog.

I’d read quite a few of de Maupassant’s short stories of course, but not one of his novels, so Pierre et Jean seemed a good place to start, particularly as it is set in an area of France I visit frequently, the Normandy Coast from Dieppe to Caen.

I often mention the location of novels, because when they are set in real-life places, I enjoy plotting their course on Google Earth and this edition of Pierre et Jean does the work for me, by providing three maps: Normandy in general, a town plan of Le Havre, and a chart of the Seine estuary – all places my wife and I have recently visited.

The novel is set in Le Havre, but a Le Havre which would be totally unrecognisable to us, due to the destruction of the town in the Second World War and its subsequent rebuilding ( largely in concrete!).  However, many locations are only a little changed since de Maupassant’s day and I’m sure a walk on the sands today at Trouville would be not be very different to the walk taken by the Roland family on their excursion to celebrate a remarkable inheritance.   Many of the little towns of Normandy still maintain their antiquated atmosphere and its easy to imagine the Rolands walking by the water at Honfleur or Quillebeouf sur Seine.

Anyway, to get to the story, Pierre and Jean are two brothers, five years apart in age, but both living at home and about to start their careers.  The family return home one evening to hear that their lawyer had called and wants to see them on a matter of urgency.  The next day they find out that the younger brother Jean, has become the sole beneficiary of a will left by an old friend of the family from their days in Paris, and can now look forward to an income of 20,000 francs a year.

In the general rejoicing that this event provokes, the family seem to forget about the plight of the older brother Pierre.  He is newly qualified as a doctor, so maybe they feel that he will become prosperous anyway.  Pierre tries to be as big-hearted about his brother’s inheritance as he can, but he struggles when his mother returns home with the news that she has rented the very apartment for Jean that Pierre was trying to raise the deposit on for himself.  This is the first of several humiliations for Pierre, and he begins to be beset by dark thoughts about the reasons for his brother’s incredible good fortune.

Quillebeouf sur Seine

Before long, the poison of resentment and blame begin to work their way through the family and the rejoicing of at least one member of the family turns to sorrow and humiliation.  Pierre is eaten up by terrible thoughts and ultimately has to depart on his travels to find his own resolution.

It goes without saying that this is a well-crafted story.  The characters are well-drawn, and the book is humerous at times, while dealing well with the complex family relationships that change dramatically with their new circumstances.  There are many memorable scenes; the fishing expedition from Le Havre on a small boat, the visit to Trouville, a marriage proposal on a beach.

The book held my interest throughout.  On reflection afterwards however, I am very aware that despite its length as a “novella”  (130 pages), Pierre et Jean is very much a short story.  It deals with one event over a relatively short period and follows a straightforward course from beginning to end with little in the way of unexpected deviation or tangential development.  There are no great surprises in the book, and there is no real resolution of the family conflict generated by the inheritance.  I am not sure that it was enough for Pierre to leave his family in order to get out of his unbearable conflict.  I wonder if some other resolution was possible, or whether there could have been some twist at the end which showed the readers that they were barking up the wrong tree all along?

The strength of the book is its charm.  The characters are well drawn, the the description of middle class life in a provincial town is as much social history as fiction.  Altogether a satisfying if rather slight read but definitely a good introduction to de Maupassant’s longer works.

The production of the novel by Oxford University Press is excellent with copious notes, bibliographies, chronologies (and the excellent maps!).  I am not qualified to comment on the accuracy of the translation but the novel reads naturally and flows well.

Book blogger reviews:

His Futile Preoccupations

I don’t think there’s much point in writing my usual style of review [...]]]> I sometimes like to read one of the French classics, so effective are they at reminding me of travels through that beautiful country, with all the pleasures of warmer weather than England, and the cultural and historical interest encountered on the way.

I don’t think there’s much point in writing my usual style of review of a book as well-known as Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert.  The web is awash with articles and opinions on the classics, often by people with far more knowledge of them than I have, so I will confine myself to describing my experience in reading it and what it meant to me.

The book tells the story of Frederic Moreau, a law student sailing up the Seine to his home in Normandy, where he meets Madame  Arnoux, forming an infatuation which lasts a lifetime.  He befriends her husband and their paths cross over many years, throught finaincial and political upheaval, and countless other relationships and frienships.  Frederic’s love for Madame Arnous in a constant throughout his life, doomed to be unfulfilled, but acting as a reference point through which he views all other relationships.

The book is an example of literary realism.  As the Wikipedia article says, “realist authors opted for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation”.  This is exactly what Flaubert does, providing his readers with day to day descriptions of Frederic’s life, his money problems, lists of what he buys in the shops and how he furnishes his rooms.  We read little details such as, “the wine bottles were warming on the stove”, and during Frederic’s visit to a pottery we read, “in another room the pots were being decorated with fillets, grooves and projecting lines”.   While some might find this level of description tedious, I found them very interesting in giving an insight into everyday life.

Gutave Flaubert is a master of scene description, and draws the reader into his stories as if into an impressionist painting.  The richness of his images remains well after the reader has finished the book – I shall mention just three of many:

the initial boat ride up the Seine,

. . . people stood about, chatting, or they squatted on their luggage; some slept in corners; some were busy eating.  The deck was littered with nutshells, cigar stubs, pear skins, and bits of charcuterie which had originally been wrapped in paper.  Three cabinet-makers in overalls stood in front of he bar; a harpist dressed in rags was resting with his elbow on his instrument . . .

the exotic and debauched fancy-dress ball which Frederic attends with Monsieur Arnoux,at which

. . . an old buck, dressed as a Doge of Venice in a long cassock of purple silk was dancing with Madame Rosanetter, who was wearing a green jacket, knitted breeches and soft boots with gold spurs.  The couple opposite consisted of an Albanian loaded with scimitars and a blue-eyed Swiss girl as whihe as milk and as plump as a quail, in shirtsleeves and a red bodice.  In order to show off here her hair, which came down to her knees, a tall blonde from the Opéra ballet had come as a savage; she had nothing on top of her brown tights but a leather loincloth, some glass bracelets  and a tinsel tiara adorned with a huge spray of peacocks’ feathers . . .

Frederic’s coach-ride from Nogent to Paris in which Flaubert describes the way Paris is shooting up among fields and derelict land,

. . . this part of Paris had changed beyond all recognition.  It looked like a town in ruins.  On the unpaved paths edging the road there stood small branchless trees protected by battens bristling with nails.  Chemical factories alternated with timber-merchants’ yards.  Tall gateways like those of farmers revealed between their half-open doors sordid yards full of refuse with pools of dirty water in the middle.  Long dull-red taverns displayed crossed billiard cues in a wreath of painted flowers between their first floor windows, here and there flimsy hovels had been left half-finished. . .

Flaubert is a master of these vivid descriptions and they provide rich interludes between the various episodes of the story.

Monet: On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt

But the book is primarily about Frederic and his “sentimental education”.  The sad thing is that if this is education, then Frederic learns very little.  We see no real character development at all, other than the moderating effect of the advancing years.   He seems to be distracted over and over again by people and events which work against him.  He forms friendships but then finds himself called upon to make loans to these friends to get them out of money trouble.  In his relationships with women, he seems to vie unnecessarily with other men for the attentions of women who we just know will turn out to be trouble.  He lets down his childhood neighbour who has blossomed into a beautiful heiress, and with whom he could perhaps have been truly happy.  And all the time, the illusory image of Madam Arnoux spoils his appreciation of the people he is with, although her unavailability is the one constant in his life.  Poor Frederic is doomed to failure, and this reader at least wondered whether the habit of Frederic and his friends of taking strings of mistresses rather than finding a true long-term partnership wasn’t at the root of his problems.

In the end, Frederic doesn’t find what he is looking for.  He grows up in years, but not in “emotional intelligence”, and in a last passionate meeting with Madame Arnoux he finds himself taken aback by her now white hair and finds he experiences a “dread of committing incest, and the fear of being “disgusted later”.   Frederic is not the most appealing character in classical fiction but the story of his life has been a fine roller-coaster ride of a novel, full of interest and for me at least, driving me on through page after page without any sense of boredom or desire to reach the end.  This of course shows the skill of Gustave Flaubert – he makes no attempt to romanticise his characters but in true modern style we encounter them with all their foibles and failings.

To finish with a couple of commendations of Sentimental Education from other writers: Emile Zola was so impressed with this book that he committed whole pages to memory.  Flaubert was Franz Kafka’s greatest literary influence and Sentimental Education was one of his favourite books.  Amateur Reader read somewhere that Ford Madox Ford claimed to have read this novel 14 times.

A map of Sentimental Education produced by Peter Biggins

Wikipedia articles on Sentimental Education and Gustave Flaubert

This skilfully written [...]]]> . . . its hard living up to a child’s hopes.  Right!  I said we’re going to buy some biscuits and a bottle of water, and we’re going to have a picnic down by the sea!  Its raining, Stan said, like it was my fault, and that was when I’d had enough.

This skilfully written novel, Beside the Sea, tells the story of a troubled single mother, who takes her two young sons for a visit to the seaside.  She describes the long bus journey through the rain to the unnamed coastal town, arriving at night, to book into a dismal hotel where she is assigned a tiny room on the sixth floor.  This is going to be no holiday, for despite the woman’s desire to give her boys a treat, shortage of money and a mother’s trouble mind dog their days, plus of course the unremitting rain.

I was quickly drawn in to this tragic tale, and finishing the book this morning, I found myself full of pity for this little family.  If only someone had noticed.  If only those men in the café had been more helpful.  If only the hotel owner had called social services.  But then no doubt they would have met with an uncomprehending response – they aren’t my patch, they’re just visiting, they’ll be all right.  Alas, they aren’t all right, and we privileged readers see all the clues, the references to social workers, the neglect of essentials . . .

. . .I hadn’t taken my medicine, but no one sat on me that night. I was like everyone else that night . . . I slept like I do during the day.

It takes money to organise a holiday, not a pitiful tea-tin containing loose change “scrimped from the change at the baker, and sometimes the supermarket”.  You really don’t want to take your children to an hotel where. . .

. . . there was a tiny night light on the counter, and everything was brown: the walls, the lino, the doors, it was an old-fashioned brown – the can’t have repainted the place for centuries, and it looked like years of dirt had stuck to the walls and floor.

Véronique Olmi describes every detail of this couple of days with painful precision.  The mother is trying so hard to make things work, but just doesn’t have the ability to do so.  They trudge through the rain to see the sea, but they find, “great waves stretching furiously . . . gathering high to reach us then falling back down”.

The other side of La Manche

They find a café and meet hostility from the owner and his other customers who mutter about the children not being in school today.  What can a young mother do other than go back to the hotel and pull the sheets over her head?  Her boys play listlessly with coins and watch the raindrops falling down the window-pane, apparently well-accustomed to their mother’s withdrawals from the world.

When she eventually surfaces the mother provides a meal of chocolate biscuits and water for her boys and then takes them to a funfair, where again, little joy awaits.  Back at the hotel the heating is off, but at least the rain has stopped and the moon shines through the windows.  The story soon reaches its inevitable conclusion and left this reader at least thinking of all the families who struggle so hard against impossible odds and find only despair at the end of their journey.

In Beside the Sea, Véronique Olbi has perfectly captured the harshness of life where loneliness and poverty represent insuperable barriers to contentment.  The voice which narrates the tale is perfect.  We are not told the woman’s history, but its all there in her speech, the familiarity with bargain-basement life, the little flashes of humour emerging from a tormented subconscious, the maternal love for her boys, marred by too much struggle to keep her head above water.  The first person narration works perfectly and I was reminded of other author equally adept at depicting the outworking of a damaged psyche such as M J Hyland (This is How) or Neil Cross (Burial).

From time to time we see glimpses of a more equable personalty which show what might have been if life hadn’t dealt this young mother such a difficult hand, and it is impossible to feel judgemental about her – would we fare any better under such circumstances?  And its Véronique Olmi’s ability to seek out a sympathetic response in her readers which makes this book work – her readers are not just causal observers of this seaside holiday but find themselves longing for this intractable set of problems to be solved.

A final word about the translation – the book is translated by the hugely-skilled Adriana Hunter (who has many titles to her credit including that notorious book about Catherine M!),  who as always presents a work which makes her readers feel that they are reading in the original language.

The book is beautifully produced by Peirene Press, a new imprint “bringing the undertapped riches of contemporary European literature”.  The production values are extremely high – nice design of cover and content, substantial flaps on the cover and even a little themed bookmark is provided with the book.  Peirene Press evidently feel that despite the alleged rise of e-books there are still plenty of people out there who appreciate the tactile and visual elements of reading.