Michael Lucey

"The child conceived during the marriage has, as a father, the husband" - Napoleonic Code. 

Alain Veinstein spoke to Michael Lucey (Du jour au lendemain 10/22) about his book, The Misfit of the Family, which has just been translated into French (Les ratés de famille).

Lucey pored over the Code civil ("an extraordinary literary work") as a prerequisite to his close look at some of the relationships in Balzac's novels, especially those that depicted diversity. "Homosexuality" was not part of the lexicon, and anyway for Balzac the term would define a narrow category for the varieties of interactions that his characters experience. Lucey cites as examples two late novels: Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons, both characters leading single, and therefore suspicious, lives. 

Du jour au lendemain for iTunes

Bernardo Carvalho

Kathleeen Evin (L'humeur vagabonde - 10/22) interviews the Brazilian auther Bernardo Carvalho whose book, Le soleil se couche à San Paulo, has just come out in French (translated by Geneviève Leibrich). 

Near closing time in a restaurant in Sao Paulo, the owner asks one of the lingering customers if he is a writer, and the customer, Setsuko, becomes the narrator of a story that begins in Japan during WWII and leads to Brazil. The love triangle between Masukichi, Michiyo and Jokichi is just the backdrop to another story, which is the history of Japan at war and the consequences that this has on the Japanese community living in Brazil. The narrator realizes, as he recounts the Brazilian adventures of Tanizaki and the Emperor's cousin, that it's also his own story - that of second generation Japanese immigrants coping with humiliation and exile.

Carvalho talks about his fascination with Japan, while claiming to know next to nothing about it, and shares his thoughts on Tanizaki, Mishima and the notion of national identity.

Download L'humeur vagabonde for iTunes

Eric Holder

Monday's episode of L'humeur vagabonde was an interview with Eric Holder and a poetic portrait of Médoc where life is too short to drink bad wine.

The pace and tone of the interview was set first by the deep médocain accent of one of Holder's neighbors describing the estuary, and then by Alela Diane singing Oh My Mama.

Holder just published De loin on dirait une île (From a Distance, You'd Think It Was an Island) in which he describes the natural beauty, the people smiling at each other candidly as they pass one another, but also the "inherited distrust" of outsiders. The cafes would fall silent when he would enter them at first, like a saloon in the wild west when a stranger throws open the swinging doors, and it took him some time to adjust his habits to the local pace and tone and etiquette. You must never, for example, interrupt a conversation, even if you are waiting at the cash register and the conversation is long.

Soapkills opens the last segment. Asked if he felt he'd arrived at "port", Holder responds that he prefers to think he has arrived at the last place before eternity, the last saloon before the desert.

Download L'humeur vagabonde for iTunes

Valentine Goby

In her novel, Qui touch à mon corps je le tue, Valentine Goby retells the true story of Marie-Louise Girard who was a faiseuse d'anges, or avorteuse who was guillotined in 1943 by the Vichy government which had just one year before made abortion a capital offense. 

On Du jour au lendemain (10/6), Goby discusses the three characters of the book: Marie G, the faiseuse d'anges who is one of the last women guillotined, Lucie L., the woman having the abortion, and Henri D., the executioner. 

I remember walking out of Claude Chabrol's Une affaire de femmes, also based on Marie-Louise Girard, and I wouldn't want to read a book that left me with that feeling. But the novel, and Goby, sound intriguing. 

Du jour au lendemain for iTunes

Martin Page

Page discusses his fifth novel, Peut-être une histoire de l'amour, with Alain Veinstein on Du jour au lendemain (10/2).

The main character of the novel is Virgil, a name inspired both by the Roman writer and the Woody Allen character in Take the Money and Run. Virgil is excentric, slightly obsessed with yoga, and won't watch films in color (he adjusts his tv to black and white). 

Though he is used to women leaving him, he is confounded when "Clara" leaves him a message telling him that she would "prefer" that they break up, because he doesn't recall having a relationship with anyone named Clara. Inspite of this detail, he decides that he must strive to win her back. 

Page has written children books as well as an essay on rain which opens with this sentence:

Rain is the password for those who have a taste for a kind of suspension of the world. To say that you like rain is to affirm difference.

And Gwenaël Jeannin writes on Buzz-littéraire that his characters are "raindrops traumatized by their fall and infused with light."

Du jour au lendemain for iTunes

Atiq Rahimi

Both Affinités électives (10/2) and Du jour au lendemain (9/25) interviewed Atiq Rahimi last week to talk about Syngué Sabour. 

Though the book is written in French, the title is Persian. It means "patience stone" and is the name of a magic black stone that absorbs the stress of those who believe. Some, in the book, say it is the stone at Mecca, around which millions of pilgrims walk. One day it will explode, overloaded with human misfortune, and that will be the apocalypse.

But in the book, Syngué Sabour is an Afghan man who has been paralyzed by a bullet in his neck. His wife resents his bellicose nature that has left him a vegetable, but she cares for him, and talks to him, never knowing if he can hear. Her confessions become increasingly unfettered by the social, religious and conjugal oppression of Afghanistan. Until one day the stone explodes.

Rahimi depicts the oppressive reality of everyday life in Afghanistan, and especially that of women living with a particular notion of Islam.

Download Affinités électives for iTunes

or

Du jour au lendemain for iTunes