Tag: france

STRAIT IS THE GATE by Andre Gide

A mystifying and annoying book which for some reason is very famous. Basically this guy and his first cousin fall in love as teenagers. He has to go away to travel and study, while she stays at home (because, gender). They embark on a long correspondence. Over time she gets more and more religious, and somehow convinces herself that what she really needs to do is sacrifice his love for her so he can more fully love god. And apparently the sacrifice is only good if she does not tell him what she is doing. I mean: there are a lot of weird issues here from this lady. Though the guy needs to take some responsibility, because this nonsense goes on for YEARS. Doesn’t he have any friends to tell him he needs to block her number? (Metaphorically only, as it is 1909). Eventually she goes off to die poetically in a sanatorium. So dumb.

Apparently the real Gide married his cousin after an eleven-year courtship. Apparently also he was a self-confessed ‘pederast’ and eventually ran away from her when he was 47 with a 15 year old boy (!!), at which point she burnt all his letters (that he called ‘the best part of me’). In the novel, his travels take him to North Africa, from where he writes to her of his love. In real life, this is where we know he discovered his really gross interest in young boys. I didn’t like this book, but I can see that it has a weird kind of emotional charge. I think it is because it is telling one messed-up story to cover the much more messed-up story that is actually going on.

AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM by Nicolas Mathieu

Here is a story about being poor on the outskirts of Luxembourg. Though let’s not get carried away: no one in Western Europe is poor by global standards. Perhaps it’s better to say, here is a story about perceived inequality on the outskirts of Luxembourg, but that’s not quite as snappy.

Anthony had just turned fourteen. He could devour an entire baguette with Vache qui Rit cheese as a snack. At night, wearing headphones, he sometimes wrote songs. His parents were idiots.

This is the first paragraph, and I’m already loving it. Here is a description of Anthony’s community:

The men said little and died young. The women dyed their hair and looked at life with gradually fading optimism.

The story covers four summers in the late nineties as Anthony, his friends, and his frenemies, grow into adulthood. It provides a microsm of a small French town that is struggling with de-industrialisation. Like kids everywhere, they are convinced against all evidence that they will lead big lives, unlike those fools their parents:

She couldn’t grasp how much determination and humble sacrifice was required to keep an average existence afloat, to bring home a salary, plan holidays, maintain the house, cook dinner every evening, and be present and attentive, while still giving a novice teenager the chance to gradually earn her autonomy

One of the kids gets out of their small town, but the rest get conventional jobs and are on course for conventional lives. Here’s Anthony:

(His mother) believed in killing herself working. . . . An idea Anthony was starting to subscribe to. At least he had right on his side. It was now his turn to complain about taxes, immigrants and politicians. He didn’t owe anyone anything, he was useful, he complained, he was exploited, he was dimly aware of being part of a vast majority, the mass of people who could do everything and were sure there was nothing to be done.

THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH by Raymond Radiguet

This guy has an affair with a married woman when he is 15; writes a book about it at 17; and is dead by 20. Now this is what I call living. That said, I am grateful for the vaccination against Typhoid.

This lightly fictionalized story caused a scandal on publication because the husband being cheated on is away from home because he is serving in the frontlines of the First World War.

The woman is 19, and she and the author have an affair of high passion and higher risk. He goes to visit her to talk about literature (a gossamer thin excuse). Here we are:

She liked going to sleep in front of the fire with her hair unpinned. Or rather I thought she was asleep. In fact, her sleep was only an excuse to put her arms around my neck.

They end up making out, and eventually, after she gives him a bit of help, having a lot of sex. However, they know their love is doomed. Not because she is married, but because she is apparently too old for him:

In fifteen years life would still be just beginning for me, and women of the age that Marthe was now would be in love with me. . . . I was too well aware of the attractions of youth not to realize that I would leave Marthe when her youth was beginning to desert her and mine was still at its height

Truly, we have no idea how long an uphill battle feminism has had to fight in the twentieth century. Meanwhile he has some other interests. Try this on for an extra taste, when he is alone with a friend of hers :

I did not assume from her silence that my kisses had given her any pleasure; but she was incapable of indignation and could think of no polite way of rejecting me in French. I nibbled at her cheeks, fully expecting a sweet juice to squirt out, as from a peach. . . . Her only gesture of refusal was to move her head feebly from left to right, and from right to left. I did not delude myself, but my mouth took this t be the response it desired . . . I was naive enough to imagine that things would continue in the same fashion and that I would succeed in raping her without difficulty

I don’t even know what to comment on this.

In an unrealistic and abrupt turn of events the woman he is having an affair with dies. In real life, she lived, and her husband spent the next fifty years trying to prove to everyone the book was fiction. He was eventually buried with his wife’s letters and a book that celebrated the heroism of the soldiers of WWI. I feel bad for him, but then on the other hand he did get that extra fifty years to protest his wife’s virtue, while the author got fifty years of being dead.

THE GREENGAGE SUMMER by Rumer Godden

Here is a novel about getting your period.  It also involves some jewelry theft and desecration of the Glorious Dead.  

It’s 1923 and a single mother of five children gets so tired of their sass that she decides to take them to a First World War battlefield so they will be shamed into good behavior. Once in France she is bitten by a horse fly and nearly dies because before antibiotics everything was apparently serious. She spends the summer in hospital while her children run unsupervised around an elderly hotel that smells of “warm dust and cool plaster… Gaston the chef’s cooking, furniture polish, damp linen, and always a little of drains.”  The hotel makes a business of the battlefields. They re-bury a soldier’s skull in the garden for the dogs to dig up before each group of tourists arrive, and make sure the machine gun holes are never painted over. Good behavior from the children does not markedly improve. 

Instead they spend the summer exploring their budding sexuality (older children) and the greengage orchard (younger children).  The oldest girl has a romance with someone who turns out to be a murderer and a diamond thief, which sounds about right for the judgement calls you make when you are 16. Our narrator, her 13 year old sister, is very jealous, through the thief kindly helps her getting her the female sanitary products she needs.  

This also sounds wildly unbelievable as I write it, but was in fact based on the author’s own experience.  What I really enjoyed about the book in fact was not so much the lurid plot, as the great charm of her vivid recollection of her siblings and the French countryside. It was somehow very sweetly melancholy as a bottled memory of a time and a place, that is now slipping out of human memory.  Only the very oldest people still recall that summer of 1923, and it was touching to hear about it as we approach 2023.