Today I have short reviews of two novellas set in unspecified French locations by Parisian authors, and one set partly in Paris by a Danish author for Paris in July, hosted by Emma at Words and Peace. These three novellas are also books #9-11 of my 20 Books of Summer.
The Garden Square by Marguerite Duras
Translated by Sonia Pitt-Rivers and Irina Morduch
The premise of this 1955 novella is very simple. A young woman, a maid, takes her charge to the garden square to play. Sitting on the bench she strikes up conversation with a stranger, a travelling salesman. They have that ease between them in which it is perfectly possible to tell each other their deepest hopes and desires and corresponding despair. She wants to meet the man of her dreams, he, living out of a suitcase, is effectively homeless and prone to dark moods.
It is written almost entirely in dialogue, apart from a few short paragraphs of scene-setting, and the child occasionally butting in. Duras adapted it for the stage, and you could see it making a good two-hander. However, I found the conversations boring, repetitive and slightly stilted in the translation.
I looked up Sonia Pitt-Rivers who did the translation for the 1959 original, and she proved more interesting than the book! She was George Orwell’s second wife, marrying him shortly before he died in 1949. Some years later, she then went on to marry Michael Pitt-Rivers, great-grandson of the Pitt-Rivers whose ethnographic collection, donated to Oxford University is now the Pitt-Rivers Museum. Pitt-Rivers was a closeted homosexual, and had been convicted for buggery before marrying Sonia in what was presumably a lavender marriage!
Source: Own copy. Calder paperback, 118 pages. BUY at Amazon UK or Waterstones via my affiliate link.
Gratitude by Delphine de Vigan
Translated by George Miller
I was searching my shelves for Vigan’s work of autofiction, This is a True Story, but came across this novella from 2019 first. It is the beautifully told story of Michka’s last days, narrated by Marie, her sort-of-adopted granddaughter, and Jérôme, the speech therapist who visits her in the care home to help with her aphasia. It begins with Marie musing on the meaning of ‘gratitude’ and how she will be ever grateful to Michka for taking her in. Now they’ve agreed that Michka should go into a care home.
It happened suddenly. From one day to the next.
I don’t mean it came completely out of the blue.
… then that autumn day that arrived unannounced . . .
Before then, she’d coped. Afterwards, she didn’t.
So Michka moves into a home. Marie comes to see her often, but she and Jérôme don’t cross paths. Jérôme and Michka, however, get on very well.
I go into her room. She looks tired. I can tell immediately she isn’t in a very cooperative mood. But she sits up and furtively pats her hair into place. She tried to give me a smile. I’m always really struck by old ladies’ coquettishness.
On one of Marie’s visits, she asks Michka about how she’s getting on with the speech therapist. Michka hands her a sheet with words and drawings on.
“Do you have to guess the opposites?”
“No, the cinnamons.”
“Synonyms?”
“Exactly. …”
“… You can’t know when the body will pack up, of course, but the head’s already started. The words pack their bags and off they go.”
Over the course of the novella, Michka comes out with some superbly amusing Malapropisms, but it’s clear that the exercises aren’t really helping, as she is more concerned about something else, and she wants to repay an old debt while she still can. She asks Marie to put an ad in the paper searching for a particular family from during the war. What happened back then will be teased out, but will she get an answer in time? Added drama comes through Michka’s encounters with the ‘nasty director’ of the home, who she thinks wants her out because Michka is a kind of quietly subversive old lady; the reality is, naturally, quite different.
This is a superb novella, sympathetically showing Michka’s decline as told by the two much younger narrators. It also highlights the trauma caused by the war that that generation carries with them. What shines through is Marie and her adopted grandmother’s love for each other, which made this a truly lovely read.
Source: Own copy. Bloomsbury, 2021, 145 pages. BUY in paperback at Amazon UK or Waterstones via my affiliate links.
On the Calculation of Volume – I, by Solvej Balle
Translated from the Danish by Barbara J Haveland
This is going to be shortish, as there will be another six in the series (four of which are now published, the fifth arriving in November). And I’m really glad it hooked me from the very beginning, having already bought the four available.
Balle originally, so I read, had the idea for this series way before the film Groundhog Day (1993), but it took her years to start to write the books. The base premise may be the same – a woman wakes up each day to find it is still November 18th – but the execution of what happens and the mechanisms within are very different.
Tara and her husband Thomas run an online antiquarian bookselling business from their home in northern France. She goes to Paris on November 17th to buy books at auction the next day. She has a successful auction, and afterwards visits her old friend and coin/book dealer Philip’s shop and she has supper with him and his partner. During the evening, she manages to burn her hand on the shop’s heater. She returns to her hotel. The next morning she awakes and something is off…
The novella actually starts on day #121. Tara is at home, hiding out in the spare room while Thomas, who thinks she’s in Paris, goes through his daily routine. So obviously right from the beginning, Tara is able to change location, but not key events.
My name is Tara Selter. I am sitting in the back room overlooking the garden and a woodpile. It is the eighteenth of November. Every night when I lie down to sleep in the bed in the guest room it is the eighteenth of November and every morning, when I wake up, it is the eighteenth of November. I no longer expect to wake up to the nineteenth of November and I no longer remember the seventeenth of November as if it were yesterday.
She didn’t start out by hiding in the spare room, but gradually couldn’t bear explaining what had happened to Thomas every day and seeing his incomprehension. She tries to understand the mechanism for what is happening: for instance,
It had been plain from the very first day that my body followed me. The burn from Philip’s shop had adhered to my hand, it had stayed with me as a small swollen and painful wound, it wept, it formed a scab which eventually fell off, leaving a red scar which gradually, day by day, had contracted and grown smaller.
Also, the books she bought in Paris begin to stay with her once she’d put them under her pillow at bedtime every night. However, there are problems too – by day #228 she explains how the things she buy in the local supermarket remain bought – she’s gradually emptying the never-refilling shelves of her favourite foods. She has to shop further away. The first book ends as day #365 becomes day #366.
I’m not going to analyse things much here – I feel I need to get on and read the next ones in the series to see where we’re going. However, I love the detail and thought that Balle has put into making her protagonist’s predicament as believeable as it is. I appreciated the world-weariness that has settled onto Tara – and we’ve only just finished the first year. Can Balle keep it up?
Source: Own copy. Faber flapped paperback, 2024, 179 pages. BUY at Amazon UK or Waterstones via my affiliate links.
I do like the beautiful cover of Gratitude.
It is lovely, isn’t it, and it was a lovely book to match.
I have the next two in Balle series, intrigued by what direction she’ll take over seven installments. I wasn’t at all sure that I’d stick with it but Brona at This Reading Life is completely hooked on it and spurred me on.
My friend Fiona has read all four available and has assured me that they are all fab with superb cliffhangers…
Funny that the translator’s life is more interesting than the translation. These things happen sometimes. Gratitude sounds like a good read though. I tried Balle, but could not continue. Although I do love fantasy and other such stuff, there are certain things I just find too unrealistic and cannot abide with. But, I know she is popular so maybe I should really try out the book. Your review makes it quite tempting.
Obvs living near Oxford, I’ve been to the Pitt-Rivers Museum many a time, so I had to check if she was related! The Balle was very grounded – she made Tara’s experience feel very real – I shall be reading the 2nd one soon!
I think I’ve only read one of Duras’ books and I don’t know that I actually got to grips with it. She turned up in my recent read of Women of Iron and Velvet, and I would like to give her another try!
This was my first encounter with her, and I’d probably give her another go, but this one was felt like a transcribed play rather than the other way around. She’s very highly thought of though isn’t she?
I’d never heard of that Duras! I read several of hers, in French, for my degree course and I remember they were all fairly similar to that — lots of dialogue, a slightly detached style, small cast and narrow setting.
(I love the Pitt-Rivers backstory!)
I’m going to request that my library system buy at least the first Balle book so I can try the series.
I’m willing to give Duras another go sometime, but I’m in no hurry.
I think you’ll be be requesting the other Balles if the first hooks you!
So glad De Vigan came to the rescue to redeem Duras for you!
I also have mixed reactions to Duras. I enjoyed Moderato Cantabile, but right now I’m read The Lover with one my French students, and it’s too depressingly French (even worse when you realize it’s autofiction!)! At least the descriptions of Vietnam landscapes are gorgeous.
OMG, I had no idea that On The Calculation of Volume was set in France!!
The de Vigan was absolutely lovely. Highly reccommended.
Yes, the Balle is set in the fictional town of Clairon-sous-Bois in northern France, with Tara’s buying trip to Paris as the trigger (it seems).
Oh dear, yes that is not Duras’s finest hour, lol. Her habit of endlessly rewriting the same books/situations sometimes produced really intriguing things and sometimes books that are excellent for helping you get back to sleep at night. But I always found her better to write about than to read, if I’m honest. The de Vigan sounds excellent and goes straight on my list. I do have that first Balle to read! Picked up a cheap copy, and hoping to get to it before the end of the year.
Your Duras comments made me chuckle! The de Vigan and Balle were both excellent – I know you’ll like the first, and hope you’ll enjoy the second.
I was surprised to find that I did not enjoy On the Calculation of Volume – I. I like books that take me places I don’t expect, and this one did that, but I tired of the trip. Just me, I’m sure.
I can see how it’s not for everyone.
The Vigan comes across as worth investigating, thanks, though I wouldn’t say no to either of the others if someone placed them in my hands! (No, I’m not angling for them to be passed on to me!) I liked the idea of a mystery in the background while aphasia is foregrounded.
I am intrigued by the role of translators – I read “Exophony: voyages outside the mother toungue” which picqued my interest further – Translators have such a powerful role in conveying the authors intentions and descriptions. I had to have a giggle that you thought Sonia Pitt-Rivers life was more interesting that the book… perhaps her translations we’re on point? or the original book wasnt great anyway…
I gather from other comments, that’s typical Duras style – so she was probably doing a great job. But her choice of husbands definitely made her very interesting!
Absolutely, the whole exophony thing fascinates me. I wasn’t overkeen on Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories but I read an interview with her about her mixed heritage then her switch to Italian and I got more interested in her approach. India is the most exophonic country you can imagine, the whole Anglo-Indian culture. I am wary now though of some writers using English as it gets you access to the bigger prize lists – The Safekeep had some curious twists of language.
That’s interesting – I’d not considered that writing in English for that reason!
Sonia Brownell is one person I could never take to, forgive me, obviously I never met her. I had not seen her publish under the Pitt-Rivers name before. I think she did some translation work for an Oxford prof early on which gave her a taste for the literary life – and hanging around in the Horizon office. I was mesmerised by Balle’s Vol I but when I came to Vol II after a long library wait, I found it disturbing and put it down. This was due to my own peculiar circumstances at the time but was a strong reminder of what a book can do to you at the wrong moment. I am sure I will try again but 7 ! Perfect for #julyinparis but maybe not if you are actually in Paris!
I don’t think I’d take to her either, but she was interesting. I’m just starting Balle #2… let’s see how I go!