Summer 2015 Readings

Mid-August I "attacked" Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle (volume 1 of 6). 

I discovered him after reading his Part 1 and Part 2 article in the NYT's Magazine and then a friend's Danish husband mentioned him again when we had dinner and that brought back the enjoyment I felt while I read the long NYT Magazine article . 

Knausgaard is The Proust of Scandinavia and he keeps you entertained and thinking all the while. He is a fairly dark tormented author (not enough sun maybe?) but his style is so delectable... All the 6 volumes focus only on him, they are his "memoirs", a sort of Proust's La Recherche, but with fewer socialites. "As I sit here, I recognize that more than thirty years have passed.";  "When I was at home on my own, every room had its own character, and though not directly hostile to me they were not exactly welcoming, either." Read further: "Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?" BTW, Knausgaard has read Proust and studied French! Of course, the title is a bit of a shocker (Hitler's My Struggle, anyone?) and I am sure the author intended to shock. I am half-way through volume 1 and  will report later on the other volumes.

I also read Per Petterson: Ashes in my mouth, Sand in my shoes. 

Another Scandinavian favorite of mine. 

Written solely in the point of view of Arvid (a young boy), it is a collection of short chapters/stories that thread together like a novella on coming-of-age situations from age 5 to 13. Great character descriptions of the adult world around him too. Unusually "light" for another somber author (Out Stealing Horses (2005), To Siberia), but it was in fact its first published book in 1987, just finally translated into English in 2015!

 I read Soumission (in French) by Houellebecq and cannot recommend it enough. Please forget any literary reviews that you may have read when the book was released, which was just a couple of days after the Charlie Hebdo/ Hypercacher supermarket attack. Houellebecq had NOT planned the attack and is NOT a racist. Houellebecq is like a prophet preaching in the desert: no one listens to him or takes him/ his visions or his preaches seriously. The book is more a futuristic and political satire than anything else and for once, not as rude or crude than his previous works in which he denounced sexual tourism (but everyone ended up thinking he was a pervert or a "vieux degueulasse"... which proves that people either did not read him at all - or not properly-  or understood everything literally). I'll say that Houellebecq is more of a very depressed, hopeless man than a pervert or a racist. He denounces our weaknesses and includes himself in the lot. He has no hope for humanity. I am not far behind in thinking the same way, especially after the events in Europe and the Mediterranean sea in the last few days and weeks. For full disclosure: I bought the book in January in Paris, two weeks after the Charlie Hebdo event which was also two weeks after its release, while I was attending the Fondation AF Colloque. I read the first chapter and stopped because it was SO GOOD that I told myself I first needed to re-read Huysmans (a late 19th century / beginning of 20th century writer who is somehow a character in the book)... whom I had last read in 2009... I ended up reading some of Huysmans' pages from a couple of his novels between February and June and then grabbed Soumission on a Sunday in July and read it in one day, it is THAT good!

I also read, (in French too), a couple of really tender and funny (YES!) books by an Icelandic female writer, Audur Ava Olafsdottir. I highly recommend: Rosa Candida and also L'Embellie. One feels much better after reading these two books + you get to discover Iceland! Might prove useful when stopping there on the way back to Paris from DC on Iceland Air or Wow Air. I love the design of the cover of the English version of L'Embellie... translated into Butterflies in November by the brilliant Pushkin Press. A good pun on "butterflies in my stomach". A chance acquisition at a Used Book Sale put this author in my hands. My advice: always browse Used Book Carts. You never know what treasure you are about to find!

I read Elena Ferrante's Troubling Love last week. Ferrante is an Italian female writer, from Naples. Talk about a tormented writer!  Highly recommend her though, terrific style. Plus the translators at Europa Editions are the best in the world...Oh, and BTW, seems like people are whispering that Ferrante and Knausgaard are the current Titans of World Literature! Not surprised really. With sentences such: "I anchored myself to the paving stones of the piazza with the sole of my shoes."  or "I had sat for a while tasting my name like an echo of memory, an abstraction that sounds without sound in one's head." or also: "Amalia had the unpredictability of a splinter, I couldn't impose on her the prison of a single adjective.", her sentences are the strongest and the most beautiful I have read by far (apart from Knausgaard) this year.

In June I mentioned  Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem to a few French friends. 

Tom Friedman is a journalist...

at The New York Times, probably one of the most brilliant ones there is. He was the NYT Correspondent in Lebanon in the 1980s and then in Jerusalem. If you get the book, make sure you get the second edition (2012)... I hope he will release another edition in the next coupe of years, in light of the Arab Spring and its surprising consequences, the rise of ISIS, the destruction of the cradle of humanity (Syria... My heart cries when I think of Aleppo, of Palmyra...) and the likes... But at least I keep up with him as he writes in the NYT. His most recent article two days ago on why people who are against the Iran Deal have probably slept through 9/11 and forgotten that the US's worst BFF is Saudi Arabia is the BEST Editorial on the subject ever. 

My advice: Follow Tom Friedman on Twitter and in the NYT for the best analysis on the Middle East!

I invite everyone to read (for those who have not.. yet!) and re-read (for fans of the books and of the TV show like me, but the books first...) GoT (Game of Thrones, for the uninitiated). 

There are 5 volumes so far. I concede volume 3 is the least entertaining but is necessary to understand what went on, is going on and might happen. I am still feverishly awaiting the release of volumes 6, 7 and 8. I just hope the author does not die before he's finished writing (Valar Morghulis, I know... I know...). If you wonder why I write this, check his picture out! George R.R. Martin is his name. I salute his fertile imagination, this guy is a true story-teller. I hang onto his every page!

A former Washingtonian and a friend, Maryline Gauthier has just published her first book. Well, Maryline and I and a couple of others have been in the same writing group (a virtual group now... we send each other our writings since we all live in different places/continents) and Maryline is the first one to get published!  She released her novel, Kidnapping in May 2015 with Editions de la Difference, the same editor that published.... none other than Houellebecq's first books. So I am sure she is on the road to become a successful author! It is a tremendous treat to read the final product of a book one has read in multiple stages of writing and re-writing. Maryline is a prolific, intense, dark, writer. I have read four manuscripts by her and hope that all of them will be published. Kidnapping is more than just an ordinary kidnapping, it is a multi-dimensional kidnapping, a vicious circle of destruction within one's family which does bear some hope at least for one character. Maryline's strength at landscape descriptions matches the themes and the claustrophobic inferno in which some of her characters are stuck. Her 2nd book should be released in Spring 2016. I hope she comes to the Alliance Francaise de Washington DC for a signature!

THRILLER ALERT!

For those of you who like thrillers, Fred Vargas is still at her best with her most recent book, Temps Glaciaires. I also discovered Olivier Truc and read both his books, Le dernier Lapon and Le detroit du Loup. (In English: Forty Days without Shadow and Wolf Strait) What can I say? Apparently I am not the only one fascinated by the Vikings, Scandinavia and all the Northern countries. Fred Vargas's book goes to...Iceland eventually and Olivier Truc has been living in Sweden since 1994. His books take place in Lapland. You'll learn all about "la police des rennes" but also about the greed behind the petroleum and mineral companies in Norway and Sweden that slowly kills off the environment, the reindeer shepherds and the Sami lifestyle and traditions. 

Onto  Muriel Barbery's second book, La vie des elfes. She had not published anything since 2006 L'elegance du herisson, whichto this day  remains one of my favorite books of all times. Her second one is not as memorable. Still great writing, with an attention to style that matches the landscapes and the characters (very well done and exquisite as always) but I must say that I am not much into elves, I hate The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, never went over page 50 and after 1.5 hours of the first Lord of the Rings movie, I was ready to commit hara-kiri (so never went to see films 2 and 3). As much as I LOVED Harry Potter (Read the 7 volumes in 10 days in one go... I had waited for them to be all released before reading them, my idea was that if I loved them then I would not be able to wait the publication of the next one and would suffer some form of withdrawal syndrome... which of course is what is happening with GoT...)

So as much as I am a total GoT-maniac (I root for the Starks... Winter is Coming, The North  Remembers; You Know Nothing, Jon Snow!... ), I cannot, absolutely cannot stand Lord of the Rings and anything elfish... But I'd be interested to know if you like it. I'd say it is worth reading for the style and 50% of the story (the parts in Bourgogne, and in the Italian village). Everything else can go.

Avoid Kamel Daoud's Meursault Contre-Enquete (In English, The Meursault Investigation) No joke, I have been at it since it was released... It is a very slim, thin book, barely 120 pages probably... I cannot get into it. Most boring book ever (more boring than Lord of the Rings). I guess I am too much of a Camus' fan to allow any imaginary sequel with a different point of view on L'Etranger. I guess Daoud's only redeeming quality is that it helps with my insomnia. 

I also read Le Consul by Salim Bachi. Great story (true), great style but too many content and stylistic redundancies kill the broth for me. Still, if you have nothing else, it is worth reading. I much prefer Bachi than Daoud.

And I also re-read two books: Foenkinos' La delicatesse (Good news: I still like it) and Barbery's Une gourmandise (I needed it after La vie des Elfes). I did not re-read L'elegance du Herisson, not because I have already read it 6 times in French and 2 in English, but because I did not want to cry again at the end (I did every single time I read it before...). 

The reason for reading La delicatesse a second time was because Foenkinos is such an amazingly unpredictable writer.  How can someone write La delicatesse and Charlotte? Not so many authors can write in totally different styles. Charlotte should have had the Goncourt last year...

Quadrature du Cercle au Moyen-Orient

Edito du quotidien Le Monde ce matin sur la fragilité de la monarchie jordanienne qui rejoint un edito du New York Times que j'ai lu hier soir sur ce traître de Nasrallah et les obstacles que met le Hezbollah à une enquête approfondie sur la mort d'Hariri:

http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2010/11/16/inquietudes-sur-la-stabilite-de-la-monarchie-jordanienne_1440766_3232.html#xtor=EPR-32280229-%5BNL_Titresdujour%5D-20101116-%5Bopinions%5D

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/opinion/16tue2.html?src=ISMR_AP_LI_LST_FB


Liban, Jordanie et, bien qu'on ait du mal à accepter sa position, Syrie: ces 3 pays sont sous la menace grandissante de l'islamisme fondamentaliste, en partie financé par l'Iran, mais, bien plus gravement, financé par les Frères Musulmans, le wahabisme - donc l'Arabie Saoudite- et potentiellement (mais non officiellement) par Al-Qaida. Des pays modérés (Liban, Jordanie), qu'il faut absolument protéger de cette tentation religieuse radicalisante. La Syrie, avec Assad Junior,  maintient un équilibre précaire en semblant faire le jeu des Shiites et de l'Iran, mais est tentée depuis 1946 au moins plus par une invasion définitive du Liban que par la radicalisation religieuse.

Et Israel dans tout cela? Netanyahou ne semble pas comprendre que l'intérêt d'Eretz-Zion n'est pas non plus dans la radicalisation religieuse et/ou nationalistique, mais dans le renforcement de la démocratie en Israel et chez ses voisins immédiats. Une paix même fragile comme ce fut le cas au départ avec l'Egypte du temps de Begin et Sadat serait le premier pas vers un pied de nez commun (Liban, Jordanie, Syrie et Israel) à la menace fondamentaliste en Islam. 

Mais qui a vraiment l'intérêt de son pays et de ses citoyens à coeur et non son propre intérêt? Hariri, Sadat, Rabin, trois hommes morts martyrs de la cause de la paix... Un autre point commun: tous trois furent tués par des "insiders", c-a-d, des terroristes issus de leur nation respective.

Comme dit le proverbe: "Ce sont toujours les meilleurs qui partent en premier"  et j'ajouterai, pour plagier de Gaulle, "la chienlit" demeure....

No Salvation for Humanity

It may seem trivial to blog about the current Middle East situation. What? More words? Hasn't everyone and anyone already written, blogged, videotaped, posted, analyzed, spoken on TV and radio? Isn't it a permanent ongoing race to the latest dead bodies's and injured's count? Doesn't it feel as if we were hyenas eating up the corpses of what the media have already chewed up? Aren't we replaying this ugly war in the comfort of our houses, hypnotized by the 24 hour news and the nightscope images on our big screen TVs, as if it were a mere video game? As if it were a game... It seems so far away.

Are we the ultimate voyeurs? You would have thought that after all the decades since World War 2 and the increasing communication means we would have had enough pictures of genocide, violence, war, enough to demonstrate and call for peace instead of conjuring up new blood. Nor the picture of the little Vietnamese girl burnt by napalm, nor the Killing Fields of Cambodia, nor the photography of the famished little African boy barely alive and about to eaten by the fuzzy vulture in the distance, nor the American soldier lynched in Somalia, nor the thousands dead in a couple of hours on 9/11, nor the discovery of mass graves, rapes and murders in the name of "ethnic cleansing" or political ideology on all the continents, nothing will be of use to humanity.

No images are strong enough to make nations stop and think that children's lives are too precious to be sacrificed on the altar of God, State or citizenship. Where is the new John Lennon who would be singing "Imagine...no religion, no country, nothing to kill or die for"?
Is History deemed to repeat itself senselessly?

We are all Cains, vindinctive and jealous, envious and murderous. Are we even worthy of some form of redemption?

These last weeks have borne a toll on my sanity. All the explanations provided right and left: the pro-Israeli prejudice in the main stream American press, the pro-Palestinian prejudice in the main stream European press, the omissions of both media with regards to pro-peace demonstrators (Israeli against what is happening in Gaza and Palestinians against another war with Israel), the blogs putting oil on this information fire, the comments on the blogs exuding hatred, calling to murder of one or the other, the one mountain of now fallacious religious, racist, historical, and political grounds on which one side bases its claims and the other mountain of the reversely qualified grounds of the other side.... The synagogue attacked in my hometown in France, the shouts of "Death to the Jews" in the streets of Paris, sung by Muslims and Christians alike, or should I say by Muslims and secular French alike? The calls for eradication of the State of Israel by some and of the Palestinians by others, the anger, the hatred...

There is NO salvation for humanity!

The hypocritical or fearful silence of those, in the Middle East, from Egypt, to Saoudi Arabia, to Lebanon, and the PA themselves, who wish for Hamas to be gone, to disappear, but who would never say it aloud, who wish for peace with Israel and look back with nostalgia at the year 2000 before the Second Intifada as a "golden age" of Israeli-Palestinian relationships, who wish that the unilateral negotiations between Syria and Israel had borne fruit in order to isolate Iran, their enemy within Islam, who lip-condemn the attacks for fear of enraging their own population, for fear of losing their own power...

Obama's election and a potential change in the American Foreign Policy as the possible reason for this attack on Gaza? Would the Israeli have measured the risk of "change" in the White House and decided to go ahead while Bush was still in power? Do they think that Rahm Emanuel is not hawkish enough, will not lobbby enough in their favor?

The stubborn attitude of the Israeli government who puts at risk not only the existence of the Hebrew State, but of all the Jewish populations scattered around the world, who may now fall victims of terrorist's attacks, of antisemitic acts, who puts the world at risk of a World War if Iran decides that it is time to enter the game.

Both sides playing at being more democratic than the other, more deserving than the other, when none is one or the other...

Indeed, there is NO salvation for humanity!

And Now The CIA

Two days ago, I was angry at the Pope. Now it is the turn of the CIA...

It has been revealed that the CIA has been using other methods than "just torture" to gain intelligence information in Afghanistan. So far so good: if torture is "let go" in favor of more humane means of obtaining information in the fight against terrorism, I am all for it... However, should I really be all for it when I learn that the new "will-make-them-talk" weapon/method is the little blue pill? That is to say, Viagra!

The CIA has been distributing the miracle "virility" pill to elderly Afghan tribe leaders whose manhood (and therefore authority) was at stake, in an effort to win them to their side. The effects of the blue pill have been thoroughly described and the side effects (heart attack amongst others) explained. It is said that the elders' health was even examined before the pill was actually prescribed (Prescribed by who? The CIA has doctors on call in Kabul?). The elders came back a few days later, happy and smiling, asked for more pills and gave information in exchange.
Now obviously they will not give inaccurate information because there could happen a sudden "shortage" of the miraculous pill...

So why am I appalled?

As a woman, I feel that once again the true victims are other women. Women were victims of the Taliban, deprived of the right to an education, to work for those who were educated at the time the Taliban took over Afghanistan. Under the Taliban, women truly became invisible. They were forced to wear the burqa from head to toe. It even had a threaded "barbed wire" in front of their face. Women were reduced to being the sexual slaves of one man, 4 to a man to be precise. Some were "sold out" by their parents, especially the young ones to the older men. They were exposed to the ire of jealous older women in the harem and to constant "legal rape" -at best if they were of age and not consenting- or "legal pedophilia" -at worst if they were under the age of 18... Notwithstanding that the Taliban's definition of "legal age" was probably 12: if you have seen the movie "Osama" (no relation to the terrorist), you know what I mean. If you have not, then it's time to rent it and do not forget the box of Kleenex.

The current "new" Afghan constitution defines the legal age to marry (and have sex) as 18. But is the new constitution retroactive? Are all the little girls sacrificed to the Taliban's dogmas now free to go back to their parental abode or to live on their own if they so desire? Or are they still metaphorically and in truth jailed, forever married to Viagra-sex crazed old Afghan tribe leaders?

As a woman, my heart weeps for all these other women who have endured enough wars (since 1979 with the Soviet invasioon, remember?), enough wounds, enough losses and who now have to endure endless nights of erectile fixation by aging, loveless, and imposed upon husbands?

Of course the CIA does not seem to care that women will be, -once again, once more-, the first victims of the eternal fight against terrorism... Must be a "male" thing!

Le Figaro

I am not the only one concerned by Rahm Emanuel 's position as Obama's Chief of Staff. This article forwarded to me by a friend, was published in the Figaro today and goes along the lines of my blog.

Rahm Emanuel apologized for the very anti-Arab comments made by his dad (who remains an Israeli citizen). The paternal comments were made on November 6: hopefully his apology is sincere and Rahm Emanuel will be able to cut the "symbolic umbilical cord" linking him to his dad. Lacan would say that he needs to get rid of the "Nom du père".

http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2008/11/14/01011-20081114FILWWW00520-rahm-emanuel-s-excuse-pour-son-pere.php

Happy But Concerned

Of course I am happy that Barack Obama is our new President. Of course I am proud too. But I am also concerned.

Of course choosing Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff is a smart move in as much as he is a dedicated Democrat and has a long resume to prove it. If Sarah Palin is a pitbull with lipstick, Rahm Emanuel can be as much a bully, and angry, and ferocious, a true warrior.

And that is where I am concerned.

To the risk of offending many, I cannot help asking myself whether he will truly and genuinely serve his country, -the United States-, to the best of his ability and God knows he is able!. What if he lets his extreme positions against the Arab countries, Irak, Iran and the Middle East in general take over his loyalty? Should he let himself be dominated by his family's connections to Israel and therefore oppose and influence negatively Barack Obama? Should not one so close to the Presidency have one's heart only set towards one goal?

The question can be asked differently: did Eisenhower let his feelings for his German family rule his heart over World War 2?

The question therefore becomes a philosophical one: can one share one's loyalty between two countries?

I guess that only John Lennon had the answer. Listen to 'Imagine No country, nothing to die for"