Hubert Haddad

The Fox Sisters. A novel

Théorie de la vilaine petite fille

 

Martine Lavaud

Théophile Gautier, the best of the B writers

Théophile Gautier et le Second Empire

 

Vigarello

Proust's body, Balzac's body. Water as hero. 
Histoire de la beauté : Le corps et l'art d'embellir de la Renaissance à nos jour 

Houellebecq

My thoughts on not finishing Plateforme
Plateforme by Michel Houellebecq

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I couldn't finish this. Houellebecq's books seem to be mostly porn, not so much for those scenes, but for the drab writing and non-movement of time that comes between them.



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Sylvain Tesson

Sylvain Tesson suggests that there is a quality to vodka that sets it off from other drinks and which may explain why pyschotherapy has not taken hold in Russia. Instead of engaging in talk therapy with a stranger for pay, the Russian, at least in Siberia, will simply barge into a hut uninvited, share his vodka, and pour out his inner soul.

"Some midlife crises are more charming than others. To change wives, apartment, Rolex, to begin to find that the Right Wing is after all more responsible than the Left, to start eating more vegetables that come exclusively from your own garden and replace psychoanalysis with spiritual retreats, nothing is more banal now in the cities. But to retreat from this asphyxiating society, reduce needs to extreme necessities, cease to flee in order to face the passing hours, days and seasons next to an immense and deserted lake deep in the Siberien forests, alone, virtually without ties to the rest of the world, that is an attractive personal challenge. Especially if it results in a superb book.

"Journal of a voluntary solitude, of a stillness lived as a stripping of the soul, an intimate exploration of being."

Dans les forêts de Sibérie

 L'humeur vagabonde - Sylvain Tesson

Marie Darrieussecq

I listened to Marie Darrieussecq twice this month, once on l'Humeur Vagabonde and once on Du Jour au lendemain, and among the things she repeated in the second interview was her reaction to her second reading of Lolita. She had forgotten, or never realized, how violent the book was. It is, she said in so many words, a story of constant rape, full of violence and told uniquely from the point of view of the perp.

Clèves is Darrieussecq's latest novel and it is the retelling of The Princess of Cleves (on Sarkozy's must-not-read list and available free on the Kindle).

"Solange is 12, then 14, then 16. Before arriving at the sweet life that she imagines - a handsome husband, a pool, tennis with her friends - she must, like everyone else, cross the difficult passage from infancy to adolescence, from adolescence to the life of woman. The body undergoes its discomfiting changes, nothing is known about sex aside from slightly terrifying stories told by the most daring, you keep your eyes on the most handsome guy in high school and all the while let yourself be fondled by the sweaty guy with pimples. Between rose water dreams and the triviality of life, Solange-Lolita will make herself into a fille fatale."

Mathieu Lindon

"What you hear when you listen to Michel Foucault, twenty six years after his death, is the beautiful freedom of thought that is both formidably structured and joyously iconoclastic. Ceaselessly interrogating our most obvious beliefs, questioning what seems evident.... Today as we suffocate under timid dogmas, arrogant political correctness, class egocentrism erected with money and indifference to others presented as politics, the generous freedom of a Foucault is noticeably lacking in this country.


"Mathieu Lindon knew Michel Foucault as a friend for six years. It was a friendship that nourished him, raised him and made him discover himself. He has just published What To Love Means." 

Gratitude is too sweet a sentiment to carry: you have to leave it somewhere and a book is the only honorable place, the only compromising. Whatever the particular value may be of several protagonists in my story, it's the same for each person in every civilization: the father's love weighs down on his son, the son has to wait until someone has the power to show him otherwise in order for him to finally perceive what it consists of. It takes time to understand what to love means.

l'humeur vagabonde - January 3, 2011

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