Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg. #1961Club
Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg. (1961) French title : Les voix du soir. Translated by Nathalie Bauer.
The book blogging community pointed Natalia Ginzburg to me. She’s an Italian writer I’d never heard of but is actually published in France by the indie publishing house Liana Levi.
Voices in the Evening is set in a village in the Turino region in the 1940s. The life of the village revolves around the fabric factory founded by the De Francisci. Twenty-seven-year-old Elsa is our narrator. She’s unmarried, lives with her parents and is under the scrutiny of her mother who sounds like an Italian Mrs Bennett.
We follow the story of the De Francisci family, what becomes of the patriarch’s children, their marriages and personal tastes and distastes. We see the life in the village, the weight of social expectations, the way every one knows every one else’s business. The atmosphere is heavy and stultifying.
We get glimpses of what happened during WWII, one character was a fascist, another was a maquis fighter. Elsa’s family had to move away become the factory was a target for bombs.
To be honest, I didn’t care much about the interactions between the family members, their doomed love lives, their poor choice of partners. The best part of the book is the last third when Elsa’s personal life comes up. Her love affair becomes her prison when it is known, becomes an official engagement and turns fragile feelings into grim domestic prospects.
I don’t even know what to write about this novella as it sounded rather bland to me. We shift from one character to the other after a few pages and we discover the subtle and oppressing politics of a small village.
I read this for the #1961Club hosted by Karen and Simon. Jacqui wrote a full review of the book. She enjoyed it more than me and gives it better justice.
Here are other books published in 1961 that I already reviewed on the blog.
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark – Muriel & me : sparks but no blazing fire.
- Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin – A must read
- Betty by Georges Simenon – the victim is not always who you think it is.
- Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook – What happens in the Yabba must stay in the Yabba
If I had to choose a book among the 1961 books I read, I would definitely pick Black Like Me, the true story of a white journalist who goes undercover as a black man in the South of the USA in the 1950s. Enlightening.
Mehs and DNFs #2 : Mona Awad, Ali Rebeihi and Didier van Cauweleart
- 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad (2016) Not available in French.
- They look like us by Didier Van Cauwelert (2016) Not available in English. Original French title : On dirait nous.
- Auntie Alice Investigates: Happiness Is in Crime by Ali Rebeihi (2023) Not available in English. Original French title: Tante Alice enquête: le bonheur est dans le crime.
As often, I’m behind with billets and last year I started this new series of “Mehs and DNFs” where I bundle short billets about books I didn’t really like or didn’t finish.
The first one is 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a Canadian book by Mona Awad. It’s been sitting in my e-reader for a while, I think I picked it after reading a review on another blog, but I don’t remember who wrote it. I decided to finally read it as part of my Tame the TBR challenge and the Great Canadian Challenge.
The fat girl is Lizzie whom we follow from her teenage years to her adult years. The book is composed of thirteen vignettes and each represents a pivotal moment in Lizzie’s life. Most of them are described from Lizzie’s point of view, only two are from a man’s point of view.
Lizzie is at war with her body and with her appearance. Her self-esteem is in shred because everyone around her seems focused on her weight. She thinks her father loves her less since she’s gained weight and her mother insists on dressing her in clothes that don’t quite fit with her figure. She connects with troubled men online and has a unhealthy relationship with food. A string of clichés.
The way I describe this novella isn’t fair to Mona Awad, I suppose. It’s well-written, with a kaleidoscopic vision of Lizzie, all these disjointed pictures of her at various points of her life end up giving a global picture of her and her life. This book is like a Picasso of his cubic period. Awad is bold, has a good sense of humor and all her characters have their own neurosis. A postcard for creative writing programs.
There’s no real message in the book, it’s no Midnight Library, Mona Awad doesn’t want to help overweight people to better deal with the pressure of social expectations. It’s the unique story of Lizzie, with her ups and downs and the author never aims at making of her some sort of militant character. That alone is a feast. So why didn’t I like it better?
I was ill-at-ease with the tone of the book, the creepy online connections with men or the weird way her mother wants to dress her like a tramp. It didn’t sit well with me. Stripped of its literary wrapping paper, i.e. the vignettes and the bold style, Lizzie does tick all the boxes of books about big girls. Poor self-esteem, eating disorder, unhealthy relationships with men, poor academic results…Her story is sordid as if it couldn’t be anything else and every vignette puts her down. That didn’t sit well with me.
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl won several literary prizes when it went out. If you’ve read it, let me know what you thought about it.
Next Meh book belongs to a totally different genre. Tante Alice enquête: le bonheur est dans le crime by Ali Rebeihi is a French cozy crime, not available in English and it’s not a Translation Tragedy. You’re not missing out on anything.
I was looking for a light book and had heard of this one last year at Quais du Polar. Ali Rebeihi was there for the second volume of his Auntie Alice series. He’s a journalist at France Inter, with a daily shows about everyday life, with a women magazine vibe.
His character, Alice Bonneville is a retired teacher of criminal law who lives in a cozy village of Seine-et-Marne near Paris. She’s a widow and shares her home with her nephew Arthur. She has a beau, the owner of the local café and she meddles in the death of a local celebrity, Paul Faye. *zzzz*
Ali Rebeihi tries too hard, his style is leaded with unnecessary metaphors or references. The characters are too fabricated and I’ve never seen the kind of village he depicts except in cozy crime by Joanne Fluke. I finished it because it was short but it’s not worth reading. It’s published by the famous crime fiction collection Le Masque, I expected better from them.
At least, I finished this Auntie Alice. I couldn’t read On dirait nous by Didier van Cauweleart, also not available in English and not a Translation Tragedy either.
Soline is a violinist and she had to give back the excellent violin she had on loan. She mourns her violin. She lives with the narrator, Illan who is head-over-heels in love with her and has no stable job. He works on and off for a realtor and Soline and he live illegally in an empty apartment in Montmartre that he’s supposed to sell.
They meet Georges and Yoa on a bench. They are in their eighties and want to befriend them to sort of live further through Soline and Illan. That’s what I understood, I don’t know more since I stopped reading.
I stopped reading this one because the characters were so unrealistic that it got on my nerve. The Montmartre cliché, the unusual characters that sounded really fabricated made me sigh with irritation. I know you can’t judge a book by its cover but in this case it was a give away.
I wanted to like this short novel as it was a Kube delivery and usually, the libraires pick good books. It was supposed to be “filled with good feelings, benevolence, kindness, humor and whimsy” which sounded perfect for all the train hours I had to endure in the last weeks. You know, a perfect Beach & Public Transport book. But no. These characters didn’t sound real at all and I couldn’t bear to read another page. I’d rather watch a Hallmark movie, at least it doesn’t take itself seriously and you know what to expect.
Next time I’m on a train, I’ll pick gritty crime fiction or a book published by Gallmeister, it’ll pass the time. 🙂
Quais du Polar 2026 – vignettes
An appetizer before the festival.
In my previous billet, I mostly talked about the panels I attended but my Quais du Polar started on March 26th when I went to the cinema and saw Seule la Terre est éternelle, the film made by François Busnel about Jim Harrison. My billet about the book is here.
Busnel was present to introduce the movie as it was the tenth anniversary of Harrison’s death. To the date. The film is really moving as Harrison would die a few months after it was shot. We see he’s at the end of his rope and he knows it. The landscapes are beautiful as Busnel takes us to Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Arizona. A wonderful evening.
Publisher Anniversaries
Years “in six” (2016, 2006 et and 1986) seem to be good for crime fiction publishing houses and the festival celebrated three anniversaries:
Editions Agullo –10 years of European voices. Nadège Agullo founded her publishing house and she publishes 10 books per year, 40% from France and 60% from Eastern Europe.
Looking back, I think I remember their first visit to Quais du Polar. Marina Sofia and I were wandering in the Chamber of Commerce hall when we stumbled upon Bogdan Teodorescu and got a copy of his novel Spada, published by Agullo. A few years later, Marina Sofia translated this Romanian novel into English and published it through Corylus book.
Agullo aims at publishing social and political crime fiction. Spada is exactly that but it’s also highly entertaining, not preachy but enlightening. This independent publishing house wants us to be have fun and be smarter through their books.
Actes Noirs – 20 years of crime without borders.
Actes Sud started their noir collection in 2006 and hit the jackpot with Millenium by Stieg Larsson. Needless to say it was a huge success and it must have brought in decent money to finance future crime fiction projects.
They now have 200 authors in their catalogue and 300 foreign books translated from 20 different languages. They are the French publisher of Camilla Lackberg, Keigo Higashino, Victor del Arbol, Louise Penny and Lars Kepler among others. I have read a few books from Actes Noir and they only pick books with excellent literary style, which is part of their editorial line.
They celebrate their anniversary with a special edition of ten of their most famous Actes Noir books. Here they are:
I’ve read four of them, what about you?
Rivages Noir – 40 years of crime fiction legend.
This is an iconic French crime fiction publisher, along with Le Masque and Série Noire.
They always pick excellent contemporary writers like Thomas Mullen or Duane Swiercynski but they are also the publisher of classic noir, like Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler or Vera Caspary and of modern classic noir like James Ellroy or James Lee Burke. You can buy any of their books, you might not like it but it will be a good piece of noir literature.
For their anniversary, Miles Hyman exposed several covers he has made for classic books of the Rivage Noir Collection. They are gorgeous.
Gallmeister – 20 years in 2025
Their catalogue Totem has 300 books, and I counted, I’ve read 87 of them, some are crime fiction, a lot of them are Nature Writing. Most of them are American and a few are European. I have discovered so many new-to-me writers through Gallmeister, including my beloved Pete Fromm, Craig Johnson or Keith McCafferty.
I snatched the catalogue of their Totem collection at the festival and it’s like a candy catalogue for a sugar addict. So many books I want to read in there. Look at the cover of the catalogue, isn’t it gorgeous?
They publish contemporary writers in excellent translations and republish older writers in their original translation or in a new one. Oliver Gallmeister is a fan of Ross McDonald, he has started to republish the whole series, be it profitable or not.
My Quais du Polar notebook is full.
A few years back, my son gave me a funny notebook for Christmas, I’m not even sure he remembers about this gift now.
It must have been 2017 since the first notes I took at Quais du Polar date back to 2018. This notebook has been my Quais du Polar notebook since then and I used the last pages this year.
It holds 9 years of festival attendance, of stolen notes during panels, half in French, half in English. Browsing through the pages I see a Jazz & Literature time with Michael Connelly and James Sallis, talks with David Joy, David Vann, Colin Niel, Piergiorgio Pulixi and many others.
I’ll start a new notebook next year.
Authors let loose in the Lyon streets.
The fun thing at Quais du Polar is that events are split between different venues, all within 10 minute walks. Writers walk from one place to the other and you can see them wandering into the city. I once stumbled upon Michael Connelly sitting around a corner, eating a sandwich from a nearby Paul boulangerie.
This time, Thomas R. Weaver was waiting for someone at the city hall plaza, he was idling there with his red badge from the festival and people thought he was a volunteer and went to him to ask for directions.
Jay King, Bluesky and real life.
Quais du Polar is also a place to meet lots of book lovers. I mentioned earlier that Marina Sofia and I spent some time together at the festival. This year, Jay King shot a message to Bluesky asking who knew about this festival she was going to for the first time. I gave her pointers and we ended up having an animated chat in a café in the center of Lyon.
She’s English and a translator from the Greek into English. Her translation of Deepfake by Makis Malafekas is going out on April 16th, published by Foundry Editions. It’s also available in French, published by Asphalte. Check it out!
Despite all the vile things that circulate on social networks, I could never wish they don’t exist because I would have missed out on such lovely moments. It always surprises me how fast we connect with other readers we’ve never met before.
That’s all folks! After a rocky month of March, a brilliant festival, I hope to resume normal writing on the blog and hopefully read other book blogs as well. I have several books on the TBW pile and I’ll probably bundle a few in one billet to catch up with all the writing. My book load from the festival was modest this year. 🙂
Quais du Polar 2026 : panels and books
This weekend was the twenty-second episode of the Quais du Polar crime fiction show. For newcomers to my blog, it’s a crime fiction festival set in Lyon, France. And it’s huge and spread through many venues in the city center: the Chamber of Commerce, the City Hall, the Comédie-Odéon theatre or the Chapelle de la Trinité. There are also events hosted at the Court House, the police academy, in several museums or in libraries. This year, 130 authors were invited and 250 events were organized for a public of avid crime fiction readers.
Our Saturday started with a panel about Memory as a playing field for suspense. The authors were Niko Tackian, Pétronille Rostagnat, Matthew Blake and Eva Björg Ægisdóttir around the use of memories in their books. I’ve never read any of these authors but Blake’s novel, A Murder In Paris, sounded intriguing. If you’ve read it, let me know what you thought about it.
We had tickets for a panel at the Comédie Odéon theatre entitled AI, Darknet and tech industry: new powers, new stories with Elena Sender, Bernard Minier, Ingrid Astier and Frédéric Andréi.
Elena Sender was the most interesting person of the panel because she had an epiphany about the use of the personal data by tech companies, started investigating the issue and wrote a novel about it. She was the most nuanced of the four, the less prone to think “we were better off before social networks” and the most inclined to invest into educating people on how to use these new tools than ban them. She’s a science journalist and her book L’ADN du chaos explores the issue of DNA tests and the manipulation of people through social media. I understood that part of it is set in Lyon, I’m tempted to read it.
We moved back to the Chamber of Commerce for a talk with authors published by Agullo Editions, Damien Igor Delhomme (France), Petra Klabouchová (Czech Republic) and Oto Oltvanji (Serbia).
They all wrote novels with political and social commentary. Delhomme wrote a book about a scientific experiment in Siberia under Brejnev. Klabouchová’s book is based on the true story of houses for women and mass graves in Prague during the communist regime. She said that they are only starting to talk about state crimes committed during these times.
Oltvanji addresses the issues of his country through a journalist who investigates two disappearances. I bought his book, I have a good feeling about it.
Then I attended a Jazz & Books event with Andrée A. Michaud and Jean-Marc Souvira. They discussed their love of jazz music, the way they embed music in their books and how it influences their work. After this lovely talk, two students from the Lyon College of Music majoring in jazz came in and played several jazz standards mentioned in Michaud’s and Soubira’s books. A great time.
Still at City Hall, we attended a panel about the use of vengeance in a crime fiction book. The authors were Céline Denjean, Victor Guilbert, Max Monnehay and Clarence Pitz. I have never read any of their books, so, let me know if you have. It was a good conversation about vengeance as a plot device and about their working habits in general.
The next day, we got lucky and got in the Grand Salon at the City Hall for a talk about writing against racism with Abir Mukherjee, S.A. Cosby and Henry Wise. It was a fantastic time with these authors as they were at ease and articulate. They bounced on each other’s arguments, explained their books and shared personal experience. It was fascinating.
And last but not least, I went to the Chapelle de la Trinité where Andrey Kurkov, Arttu Tuominen and Oto Oltvanji were gathered to discuss Europe under pressure, stories from today and stories from the past. It was more a political than a literary talk as they either live in a country with a border with Russia or live in countries part of a so-called “buffer zone” between Russia and Western Europe.
It was quite interesting to hear about Finland through Tuominen. Given their history with Russia, the country is on edge. He mentioned Norek’s book about the war between Russia and Finland, a very successful novel in Finland. I really need to get to it, it’s sitting in my e-reader. Kurkov is always interesting, with a broad vision of the situation in Ukraine. His crime fiction series which starts with The Silver Bone sounds like a good combo of entertainment and education. Have you read it?
These were the panels I attended this year and there were so many more that sounded interesting that it’s always hard to make a choice. I would have liked to have the choice to attend a panel or a talk with Don Winslow.
Don Winslow is against The Agent Orange who has invaded the White House. He’s vocal about it and he’s under repeated threats from the far-right and pro-Agent Orange movements in America. These death threats are serious enough for him to cancel his coming to France and to Quais du Polar.
I have never read his books, I’m not really interested in crime fiction about drug trafficking and mafia. I’m sure he’s an excellent writer but I never thought his books were for me. –If you have a recommendation, let me know.
Let’s buy and read a book by Don Winslow as an act of defiance and resistance, because if books didn’t quietly change the world, dictators wouldn’t ban them and dictatorships or undemocratic movements wouldn’t try to silence writers.
This edition of Quais du Polar is another statement about the place of crime fiction in literature. Its authors say it’s the genre that best allows social and political commentary without preaching anything. Under the guise of crime investigations, they are at liberty to explore the weaknesses of our worlds and give a voice to voiceless people.
In another billet, I’ll share a few vignettes about this edition of Quais du Polar this year.
Third Crime is the Charm # 19 : a Bison Crusade, the Reindeer Police and a man hunt
- Buffalo Jump Blues by Keith McCafferty (2016) French title : Buffalo Blues. Translated by Marc Boulet.
- Forty Days Without Shadow by Olivier Truc (2012) Translated by Louise Rogers Lalaurie Original French title: Le dernier Lapon.
- The Tormented by Lucas Belvaux (2022) Original French title: Les tourmentés.
February has been a bit of a reading slump, as far as non-fiction and literary fiction are concerned.
I turned to crime fiction for a distraction and was happy to reunite with the crew of characters created by Keith McCafferty and discover their new adventures in Buffalo Jump Blues. I read the series in order and this is the most political one yet.
Today, I grant myself the right to be lazy, so this is the blurb of the book as it’s accurate and without spoilers:
In the wake of Fourth of July fireworks in Montana’s Madison Valley, Deputy Sheriff Harold Little Feather and Hyalite County sheriff Martha Ettinger investigate a horrific scene at the Palisades cliffs, where a herd of bison have fallen to their deaths. Victims of blind panic caused by the pyrotechnics, or a ritualistic hunting practice dating back thousands of years? The person who would know is beyond asking, an Indian man found dead among the bison, his leg pierced by an arrow.
Farther up the valley, fly fisherman, painter, and sometime private detective Sean Stranahan has been hired by the beautiful Ida Evening Star, a Chippewa Cree woman who moonlights as a mermaid at the Trout Tails Bar & Grill, to find her old flame, John Running Boy. The cases seem unrelated—until Sean’s search leads him right to the brink of the buffalo jump. With unforgettable characters and written with his signature grace and wry humor, Buffalo Jump Blues weaves a gripping tale of murder, wildlife politics, and lost love.
Besides the gripping murder plot with its twists and turns and the underlying romance threads, Buffalo Jump Blues is recommended for its political content. The whole series is set in a county near the Madison river. This is fly-fishing heaven, the town of Ennis mentioned in the book has a giant trout sculpture in its center and a fly-fishing film festival. But this county is also very close to the northern entry of Yellowstone National Park.
Buffalo Jump Blues mentions the conflict between the Department Of Live Stock who represents the cattle industry in Montana and a group of activists named the American Bison Crusade. They would like to let buffaloes roam outside of Yellowstone National Park while the cattlemen want them far away from their stock. I suppose they have the same kind of issue in South Dakota near Custer State Park. And we do have the same here about wolves in the Alps or the Pyrenees.
The American Bison Crusade, with the help of two students in Native American studies and two Blackfeet young men in search for their roots, helped reenacting the ancient Indian hunting technique named “Buffalo Jump” Here’s the Wikipedia entry about First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park. Basically, young Indian runners dress into baby buffaloes, start running towards a cliff, the herd follows them, the buffaloes fall off the cliff where another part of the tribe is waiting for them while the young hunters slip to boulders off the cliff. Quite a dangerous technique.
Part of the book takes place in the Blackfeet reservation and it reminded me of Craig Johnson and the Cheyenne in Wyoming. Then I had a light-bulb moment! The sheriff is a woman named Martha and her second in command is named Walt. In the Longmire series, Walt is the sheriff’s first name and Martha is his dead wife’s. How did this never occur to me before? It took me 5 books and a character reading C.J. Box to reflect on McCafferty’s propensity to celebrate fellow Montana & Wyoming crime fiction authors.
Keith McCafferty lives in Bozeman, he’s an angler, used to write about fishing for various magazines and he loves Montana. It’s everywhere in the descriptions of the landscapes, the fondness for his characters and the fly-fishing parties Sean Stranahan goes to.
This episode of Sean & Martha’s investigations pictures local political issues and the author is clearly in favor of more freedom for the buffaloes and a better way for humans and animals to cohabit on the land.
After the bison issue in Montana, I moved to reindeer issues in Lapland.
Olivier Truc is a French author who moved to Sweden more than 30 years ago. He was correspondant for several French media like Le Monde or RTL for the Scandinavian countries. He also did documentaries and he wrote five crime fiction books set in the Great North and Forty Days Without Shadow is the first volume of the series.
A new bout of laziness results in this blurb copy-pasting:
Winter is savage and cold in Lapland. When a priceless local relic is stolen from Kautokeino, a village in the middle of the isolated snowy tundra, detectives Klemet Nango – a familiar face in the rural community – and Nina Nansen, fresh out of the local police academy, are called to investigate.
There are just a few days until the locals will host a UN World Heritage conference, and Klemet and Nina are under pressure to retrieve the artefact, due to be presented to a world-renowned French scientist as part of the celebrations. When a local reindeer herder is found brutally murdered, Klemet and Nina immediately suspect that the two events are linked. But the villagers don’t take too kindly to having their secret histories stirred up and the duo is forced to cross the icy landscapes alone in search of the answers that will lead them to a killer.
The Reindeer Police is a local and transnational police force between Norway, Sweden and Finland. It deals with issues around reindeer herding. It’s open range pastures in Norway and Sweden while Finland opted for raising reindeer in farms. They’re like the game warden Joe Pickett in C.J. Box’s series. They have to work with the local police when their investigations intersect.
The explanations about their work, about the workings of reindeer herding in Lapland was fascinating. (At least to me!) I’ve heard Olivier Truc talk about his books several times at Quais du Polar. He spends time with reindeer cattlemen during the summer and they put him to work too. So, he’s done more than internet researches to write about this part of the Scandinavian countries.
Like C.J. Box in Trophy Hunt or Keith McCafferty in Buffalo Jump Blues, Olivier Truc describes the local political issues. Here in Lapland, we have the combination of the greed for mining rights we have in Trophy Hunt and the respect for the First People’s traditions and way-of-life we have in Buffalo Jump Blues. The Sami too had to go to state schools in order to erase their culture.
Truc is an outsider and a journalist, he feels free to write about the brutal colonization of Lapland, the violent evangelization of the Sami and the greedy Western people who prey on the Sami subsoil. Through some characters, he also shows the rise of far right ideas in Norway and we’re only in 2012.
The book is a little weak in its writing but it’s the first volume where the author installs the setting and the recurring characters. He’s finding his footing with his characters and his writing. It’s fascinating because it’s so far away from our quotidian and yet, it’s part of the EU. I’m a sucker for crime fiction set in exotic places, so I enjoyed following the work of these two reindeer police officers.
And the plot eerily echoes with the Greenland issue we have now as a foreign power considers their mineral-rich subsoil is up for grabs.
The last book I wanted to write about is a DNF. The Tormented by Lucas Belvaux is not available in English and tells the story of two former legionnaires. Max now works for a tormented rich lady who loves to hunt. She wants to do a manhunt and Max hires Skender who is now homeless and willing to risk his life for money as long as it goes to his children.
I didn’t like the characters, they were living clichés and I thoroughly disliked the idea of this literal manhunt and I didn’t want to read about it. So I just stopped reading!
The Rise of the Green Hawk by Amid Lartane – political Noir in Algeria
The Rise of the Green Hawk by Amid Lartane (2007) Not available in English. Original French title: L’envol du faucon vert.
According to Babelio, we don’t know much about Algerian writer Amid Lartane. We only know it’s a penname, that he used to be a high level executive in the Algerian administration, that he now lives in Montreal and works for an international organization. I say he, but Amid Lartane may be a she, after all.
After reading his debut novel, The Rise of the Green Hawk, I really understand why he needs to be discreet. Since this novel isn’t available in English but only in French, I’ll use its French title from now on. L’envol du faucon vert it will be.
The book opens in Algier in 1998, at the end of civil war between the Islamic Salvation Army and the Algerian government, also known at the Black Decade.
Oulmène Makadem dreams of starting a new airline company. He doesn’t have the funds and well-intended people suggest him to start a bank which will enable him to finance his airline company. The Green Hawk Bank project is born.
Several powerful men who have their hands in many pies have a secret meeting to promote their next project: they want to support the founding of a new private bank, the Green Hawk Bank. They represent several areas of the corrupted power that manages Algeria. Lamine Boutramine, a retired general who pulls all the strings and runs or owns a group of men with key positions in the system: chief of the secret police, minister of Finance, VP of the state pension administration or shady business men.
Boutramine wants to promote young Oulmène to turn the page of the 1990s, show a new face of the country but most of all profit from all the money the business could bring him. Greed is the energy behind all this, for power and for money.
The main issue is to convince the director of Omnium, the state run pension fund, to invest the pension money into the new bank. He’s quite reluctant to do so.
Lartane shows how a web of relations, power play, threats and manipulations results in a green light to incorporate the Green Hawk Bank and fund it with the money of the state pensions of the people in Algeria.
Through flashbacks, Lartane describes the past of the protagonists and how, through compromissions, ambition, disillusions or naïveté, they ended in the cul-de-sac they are in. Former Islamist terrorists are owned by the power and do all their dirty business.
He demonstrates how a few men in power infiltrated all the areas of public services and private businesses. They bought obedience in all circles with bribes, money, positions but also through kidnappings and torture. Once a man has been tortured, he’ll cave to anything to avoid a repeat.
The story is based upon the Khalifa affair. Here’s a summary from Wikipedia in French. (There’s no entry in English, sorry) I didn’t remember it all, but it happened in 2003 during my “Nappy Years”, the years with babies and toddlers when I lived in a baby bubble.
L’envol du faucon vert is really close to what happened with Khalifa and is like a behind-the-scene footage of the events that led to the rise of Oulmène, a new but unfit businessman. Now you understand why the author has a penname.
L’envol du faucon vert is not crime fiction in the murder-solving kind of way but it’s Noir anyway, the worst kind because it’s based on true events. It’s published by the independent publisher Métailier, in their Noir collection. Although I’m late for ReadIndies, I still want to put this forward because I’m not sure any publisher would have published this book.
Honestly, after reading this, I wonder if Algeria or any country would ever get out of such a corrupted system since its roots are so widespread that it would mean replacing or changing the ways of many people in charge of key positions. All these people might not want to lose their power, their well-paid positions or the privileges that corruption brings them. Or maybe we can hope that the ones who silently disagree or who, like Sadek Bounab in the novel, are tired of living with a constant ball of fear in their stomach will change their ways.
If you can read in French, I highly recommend L’envol du faucon vert by Amid Lartane.
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier – two characters in the turbulences of the Civil War.
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (1997) French title: Retour à Cold Mountain. Translated by Marie Dumas.
Séverine and I picked picked Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier for our first buddy read of the year. It’s been made into a film by Anthony Minghella that I haven’t seen but heard it’s good. I’m late with the billet, as usual.
Cold Mountain is historical fiction, set in North Carolina in the last years of the Civil War. Inman, a soldier in the Confederate Army, has been seriously wounded and now that he feels better, he decided to desert and go back to his beloved Ada, back home in Cold Mountain, in the south west of North Carolina.
We follow Inman and Ada in their own journey to the new reality of North Carolina during the Civil War and the chapters alternate between them.
Inman travels through the Appalachians and though I haven’t read The Odysseus, his journey reminded me of Ulysses who encounters various people and hurdles along the way. Inman is haunted by what he saw on the battlefield and his sanity holds by two fragile threads, a book about his home county and the thought of Ada. We follow him in the woods, walking, hiding, trying to stay away from the militia who searches for deserters. In pain, exhausted and famished.
Meanwhile, Ada is trying to survive after her father passed away. He was a pastor, he had moved them from Charleston a few years before and he was not a farmer. At all. They were city people, his mission was with his church and he had people handling the property. Ada’s education was more literary than practical and she realizes, much to her dismay, that it amounts to nothing when you have to fend for yourself.
Ada’s neighbors know she never learnt how to cook, sew, clean or take care of animals and fields. She’s clueless. They send Ruby her way. Ruby knows the practical things and needs a home. A verbal pact is sealed between the two women. Ada accepts to treat Ruby as an equal, something that would have been impossible pre-war and Ruby helps her with the farm.
Ruby’s ambition is to turn Ada’s property into a self-supporting farm. She puts Ada to work and teaches her how to grow crops, vegetables and have enough animals for milk and meat. She makes her look around, see the nature around them, watch how it works and how plants and creatures work as what we now call ecosystems. Ada teaches Ruby how to read and introduces her to books and reading.
In the woods, Inman is in survival mode, Ada as a beacon to keep walking and fighting for his life. With Inman and Ada, we see all the damages of the war on a human scale. Inman will never be the same, physically but also mentally after he witnessed how men have to behave to survive on the battlefield. His time as a soldier makes him question human nature but also his own values. It brings him closer to nature.
Ada works hard with Ruby and sheds her former lady skin. Her body changes to accommodate her new way-of-life. She renounces to pretty hands, fair skin, fine clothes, flawless hair and her piano. All attributes of lady ways that have no currency any longer in her new reality.
Inman’s travels might look like The Odysseus but Ada is no Penelope. She’s not waiting for Inman, she’s taking charge and that makes her a lot more interesting to me. Her journey is as life-altering as Inman’s. Up to the war and her father’s death, she had kept her city ways while living on a farm in a remote part of the Appalachians. It proved unsustainable and I enjoyed her grit. She decided to stay in Cold Mountain because she wanted to keep her independence.
She had the intelligence to welcome Ruby as a companion and a teacher and to acknowledge the two of them had different sets of skills and that in these troubled times, Ruby’s might be more important than hers. Ada changed her way-of-life, understanding it was a necessity. She never complained but embraced her new life. Her personal journey was more interesting than Inman’s because she was growing towards something and he was focused on coming back home.
Frazier shows how the war bulldozed into social classes as a true friendship develops between Ada and Ruby and as Inman and Ada’s relationship sounds a lot more possible now that the usual social shackles are rattled or broken. Lots of previous social rules get blurry, like social classes, the place of women and of course, in this specific war, of black people.
Like David Joy, Frazier writes about his home county and it’s palpable in the descriptions of the mountains and the nature. He loves this place and it seeps through the pages. Inman is based upon the actual stories of Cold Mountain soldiers. Frazier knew of them through his grandfather but also did some researches.
Frazier never really dwells upon the reasons of the war or the issue of slavery, only upon war’s damages on a human scale. He does show how local militias tracked down deserters to send them back to the battlefield or killed them on the spot. Lance Weller also describes it in his novels.
All in all, I liked Cold Mountain but I didn’t love it. I thought the passages with Inman in the woods were too long sometimes. I saw the Ulysses pattern when I wasn’t even looking for it, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing for a writer when the reader sees through their tricks. I also thought the ending was a bit trite. It’s worth reading though, for Ada and the beautiful descriptions of the Appalachians.
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude by Etienne de La Boétie – highly recommended.
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude by Etienne de la Boétie (1546 or 1548) Original French title : Discours de la Servitude volontaire.
I have a project regarding 18th century literature this year and I thought I ought to read Discourse on Voluntary Servitude by Etienne de La Boétie as a preamble. I had the intuition – or I had read it somewhere before and retained the information – that it would be a good introduction. I was right.
When I hear “Etienne de La Boétie”, my first thought is that he was best friend with Montaigne. Indeed, we owe Montaigne for the Discourse as he had a copy of La Boétie’s essay and ensured it wouldn’t get lost after his friend’s untimely death. It used to be published as an appendix to Montaigne’s Essais. Both Montaigne and La Boétie studied law in an excellent university and practiced law in official positions.
My edition of the Discourse is aimed at students of “classes préparatoires littéraires”, ie students who study literature, philosophy, Latin and Greek to enter into prestigious schools dedicated to “humanities”. It comes with an educational introduction by Simone Goyard-Fabre, with a bio of La Boétie, the history of the publication of the Discourse and its analysis in modern language.
This is what La Boétie wants to study in his essay (don’t forget he was 18 when he wrote it!)
| Pour ce coup, je ne voudrais sinon entendre comme il se peut faire que tant d’hommes, tant de bourgs, tant de villes, tant de nations endurent quelquefois un tyran seul, qui n’a puissance que celle qu’ils lui donnent ; qui n’a pouvoir de leur nuire, sinon qu’ils ont pouvoir de l’endurer ; qui ne saurait leur faire mal aucun, sinon lorsqu’ils aiment mieux le souffrir que lui contredire. | For the present I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. |
There is a lot of material in a thirty pages essay. La Boétie is a humanist. He believes that human nature prefers liberty but that the people is under the yoke of a servitude they do not shake because they are used to it. The way to dispel this misfortune is to develop critical thinking and through education.
Another cause of the servitude of the people is the deviance of the monarch. (La Boétie doesn’t want to replace monarchy by a republic.) A king should consider he’s in office because his people has given him the power to rule the country. He ought to remember it and act accordingly. In La Boétie’s vision, the people has the right to give power to a government but also to take it back. The king shall act as depository of this power and not as a master. Tyrants run countries as masters. They use force instead of legal paths. They also use religious props to justify their power.
Two centuries before the philosophers of the Enlightenment, La Boétie has the intuition of the social contract that is the basis of modern democracies. He urges the people to remember that they have the power to make a tyrant fall:
| Soyez résolus de ne servir plus, et vous voilà libres. Je ne veux pas que vous le poussiez ou l’ébranliez, mais seulement ne le soutenez plus, et vous le verrez, comme un grand colosse à qui on a dérobé sa base, de son poids même fondre en bas et se rompre. | Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces. |
He also describes the tyrant’s ways and how he stays in power. First, ensure you have a grip on the greedy ones and let them become your valets, for…
| Ce ne sont pas les bandes des gens à cheval, ce ne sont pas les compagnies des gens de pied, ce ne sont pas les armes qui défendent le tyran. On ne le croira pas du premier coup, mais certes il est vrai : ce sont toujours quatre ou cinq qui maintiennent le tyran, quatre ou cinq qui tiennent tout le pays en servage. Toujours il a été que cinq ou six ont eu l’oreille du tyran, et s’y sont approchés d’eux-mêmes, ou bien ont été appelés par lui, pour être les complices de ses cruautés, les compagnons de ses plaisirs, les maquereaux de ses voluptés, et communs aux biens de ses pilleries. | It is not the troops on horseback, it is not the companies afoot, it is not arms that defend the tyrant. This does not seem credible on first thought, but it is nevertheless true that there are only four or five who maintain the dictator, four or five who keep the country in bondage to him. Five or six have always had access to his ear, and have either gone to him of their own accord, or else have been summoned by him, to be accomplices in his cruelties, companions in his pleasures, panders to his lusts, and sharers in his plunders. |
No, it only takes a few billionaires to fund far-right parties to shake up a democracy or help a tyrant.
Second, do as Roman emperors used to do and entertain the people. Make sure they’re so entertained that their free will is MIA and they’ll support you. Willingly. Against their best interests.
| Les théâtres, les jeux, les farces, les spectacles, les gladiateurs, les bêtes étranges, les médailles, les tableaux et autres telles drogueries, c’étaient aux peuples anciens les appâts de la servitude, le prix de leur liberté, les outils de la tyrannie. Ce moyen, cette pratique, ces alléchements avaient les anciens tyrans pour endormir leurs sujets sous le joug. Ainsi les peuples, assotis, trouvent beaux ces passe-temps, amusés d’un vain plaisir, qui leur passait devant les yeux, s’accoutumaient à servir aussi niaisement, mais plus mal, que les petits enfants qui, pour voir les luisantes images des livres enluminés, apprennent à lire. | Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books. |
Let’s mull over the fascination of current tech moguls for Roman emperors and fear.
The history of publication of the Discourse in France shows that it was often used as a political prop. It was used as a justification to fight against the established power. The first ones were the Huguenots in the 1570s as they challenged the power of the King of France after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Then some revolutionaries like Marat used it to back up their wish for a Republic. The same happened in the 19th century are monarchist political currents were still strong. But La Boétie doesn’t condone violence and says :
| Il ne faut pas abuser du saint nom de liberté pour faire mauvaise entreprise. | The sacred name of Liberty must never be used to cover a false enterprise. |
I shall say the same about the sacred name of Freedom of Speech.
For La Boétie, political systems must be challenged in peace and from within, always in ways that are respectful of the law. It echoes with my previous billet about Dangerous Roads and the opposition between the Martin Luther King way and the Black Panthers way.
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is a masterpiece. La Boétie analyses the roots of tyranny and, based on his humanist vision of the human condition, explains that the people only lends the power to their ruler, that any government is accountable for their action and that the people are their worst enemy when they forget they are free beings and allow themselves to be under the yoke of a clique. Resistance is in the people’s power but must remain peaceful and legal to be effective.
It’s very modern. It was written almost 500 years ago and it’s still relevant. I don’t know yet if I find it comforting or disheartening. Each time I think “Have we learnt nothing from the past?”, I also remind myself that the human nature never changes and if it means we have a steady history of hurting each other, it also allows me to understand and find beauty in Ovid’s or Ronsard’s poetry. You can’t have one without the other.
For further reading in English, click here. I found a translation by Harry Kurz and an online version with an introduction and historical commentary. It’s only 26 pages long.
Third crime is the charm #18 : Québec, England, Japan, Tennessee and France
- The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny. (2009) French title: Révélations brutales.
- The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman (2021) French title: Le jeudi suivant.
- Guilt by Keigo Higashino (2021) French title: Le cygne et la chauve-souris. Translated by Sophie Refle
- Dangerous Road by Kris Nelscott (2000) French title: La route de tous les dangers. Translated by Luc Béranger.
- The mystery of the Code noir by Laurent Joffrain (2022) French title: L’énigme du Code noir.
I know that this series of crime fiction billets usually deal with three books but I have a growing backlog of billets, so I’m doing a five in one this time.
At Christmas I received a book by Louise Penny and it reminded me that it’d been a long time since my last Chief Inspector Gamache investigation. The next one in the series for me was The Brutal Telling, the fifth volume.
We’re in Three Pines again, a village in the part of Québec near Sherbrooke, near the Maine border. A body is found in Olivier and Gabri’s bistro in Three Pines. Nobody knows who he is but the police soon understands that he was killed somewhere else. But why drop him at the bistro? And what was Olivier doing in the woods?
The victim a hermit who lived in a cabin in the woods near Three Pines. The police still has no clue about his identity and doesn’t understand why he has so many antiques in his cabin. Chief Inspector Gamache and his team are on the case and know how to think out of the box to solve the case.
Penny goes beyond the mechanics of the investigation and dives into the psyche of her characters. The villagers are a mini-society with their qualities and flaws, the gossip and the help.
The Brutal Telling is an excellent crime fiction book. The plot is well tied and the author digs into greed as a driving force in humans. Louise Penny also leaves plenty of breathing room to think about art and its importance in our lives, what it brings us, what artists mean to us. There are several subplots that involve secondary characters, all interesting and sometimes thought-provoking.
This is high quality crime fiction with good psychological sides as Penny investigates the workings of the human soul besides writing suspenseful mysteries.
I suggested our Book Club that we read The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman in January. I thought it would be a candy read, pure pleasure and it didn’t disappoint.
I saw the film The Thursday Murder Club and read The Bullet That Missed. It reminded me of the Famous Five. The Man Who Died Twice was more about retired James Bonds than children solving crimes.
The blurb says “Elizabeth has received a letter from an old colleague, a man with whom she has a long history. He’s made a big mistake, and he needs her help. His story involves stolen diamonds, a violent mobster, and a very real threat to his life.” Elizabeth is a former MI5 agent and she enrolls her friends from the retirement home to find the diamonds.
I had so much fun reading this. Osman cooks the best sweet and sour cozy crimes. The mystery moves forward at a steady pace, the pages are filled with a good natured sense of humor and while this elderly crew of amateur sleuths do wonders at solving cases, Osman never lets us forget their age. They are old people with old people’s fears and vulnerabilities. It’s a lovely and entertaining read.
I’m too late for January in Japan hosted by Tony but I’m still on time for Japanese Literature Challenge #19 hosted by Dolce Bellezza. (Can you believe it’s the 19th edition?) I got Guilt by Keigo Higashino at Christmas, along with my subscription to Quais du Polar 2026. I’ve already read two books by him, The House Where I Once Died and Salvation of a Saint Guilt is the first book of a new series with detective Godai.
Shirashi Kensuké, a lawyer, is found dead in his car, murdered. Karuki Tatsurō confesses the crime along with another murder he committed in 1984. His son Kazuma has a hard time believing that his sweet dad murdered two people. Mirei, the victim’s daughter thinks that what Karuki reports about his interactions with her father sounds unlike the father she knew.
Godai and his partner Nakamachi are embarrassed too: they have an admission of guilt by a man who knows details about the murder that the police didn’t disclose. Only the murderer knew them and yet they have a hard time comforting his confession with material evidences.
Something doesn’t add up. Here again the plot is a little gem as the author leads us from an obvious case to a more complex story with roots in a crime that occurred 30 years ago. This, coupled with a neat style, was already enough to make of Guilt a good crime fiction book.
It becomes even more fascinating because we see glimpses of the criminal justice system of Japan. Mirei, the victim’s daughter, has to hire a lawyer to assist her and her mother as plaintiffs. I understand from the novel that the law changed rather recently but before that, the trial was only between the defendant and the State prosecutor. The victims were not part of the trial and had no access to the documentation of the case. They had no contact with the defendant, no opportunity to hear what they had to say to the jury. Seen from my French window, it’s weird.
Higashino also describes the impact of a father’s crime on their family. Kazumi’s employer doesn’t fire him after his father’s confession but they demote him. He knows he’ll have to live with this stain his whole life. Families of criminals become social pariahs.
Guilt combines an excellent crime plot with social commentary about the workings of the criminal justice and with musings about guilt, innocence, repentance and the side effects of crimes on the perpetrator’s family. Highly recommended.
Dangerous Road by Kris Nelscott is set from February to mid-April 1968 in Memphis, during the black sanitation workers strike up to the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Smokey Dalton is an unlicensed private investigator. He barely makes ends meet with his job. He’s known in the black community as a cool head and a free agent. He’s friends with the Reverend Henry Davis and gives a hand to no-violent civil right activists. But he’s not an activist himself.
He’s a good member of the community and at the moment, he worries about ten years old Jimmy who skips school, whose coat is too small and who doesn’t eat enough. His mother checked out, his brother Joe has let me down. So Smokey takes him to restaurants, picks him up at school and even gets him a new coat.
Smokey’s life change at the end of February 1968 when Laura Hathaway enters his office and tells him her mother left him 10000 dollars in her will. Laura Hathaway wants to know why her mother left him money, not to retain it but because she wants to understand.
Problem: Laura is a white young woman from Chicago, Smokey doesn’t know her or of her. And in 1960, he had already received the same amount from an undisclosed legacy. The two legacies are linked, he’s sure of it. He tells Laura they will probably unearth dirty secrets she might regret knowing. She decides to go on with the investigation.
At the same time, black associations organize marches and protests in Memphis in relation to the strike. Black Panthers militant want to go further than peaceful protests. Crowds are under manipulation. The town is a powder keg waiting to explode.
This is a wonderful book that mixes a search for two people’s identity, the resolution of the mystery of their pasts and information about the days leading to Martin Luther King’s assassination.
I didn’t read it on purpose for Black History Month or Read Indies, it just happened. I’m very tempted to read the next volume of the series right away and see what becomes of Smokey and Jimmy after the dramatic events and revelations of this month of April 1968.
This one is highly recommended, contrary to the next one, The mystery of the Code noir by Laurent Joffrin.
This is a new episode in the series created by Jean-François Parot featuring Nicolas Le Floch as a police investigator. This time, we’re in 1791, Louis XVI is in Paris and has not fled to Ravenne. Yet. So he’s still alive and the city is buzzing with revolutionary meetings and the implementation of new ways to run the country.
Among this chaos, the Comte de Fleuriau and the marquis de Fossais are killed and their bodies are mutilated. Le Floch investigates and discovers that they both own plantations in the Ile aux Vents (now Guadeloupe) and that the way they were killed is similar to some punishments of slaves according to the Code noir. The Code noir is decree defining the rules regarding slaves and plantations, written under Colbert during the reign of Louis XIV.
What did these two men do? Who wanted them dead in such a way?
Honestly, the plot idea is great but the execution is sluggish. Laurent Joffrin is a journalist, he knows how to write articles but not novels and certainly not historical crime fiction novels. I thought his style was poor and that Le Floch’s character grated on my nerves with his womanizing ways and his love of food and wine, like the caricature of a French Dom Juan.
Five books, all excellent except the last one. These five books show how diverse the genre can be and how rewarding it is to dive into a good crime fiction book. They are entertaining but also deal with societal, political and psychological issues. None of the five books mentioned is about serial killers, violence against women or feature graphic violence.
All the books above are a participation to the following project or challenges:
Hungarian Lit month at Winston’s Dad – some book recommandations
Somehow I missed the announcement that Stu at Winstonsdad is hosting Hungarian Lit Month in February. We’re already the 7th of the month, there’s not much time to read and write about Hungarian lit before the end of the month, at least for me, considering how little time I have for this blog.
I’m in though, I’m currently reading Relations by Zsigmond Móricz (1932), a book I bought a decade earlier while visiting Budapest. Check out my Literary Escapade in Budapest here. I also wrote a billet about my Hungarian bookshelf. Lucky me, Hungarian Lit Month also covers my Tame the TBR project since the book has been sitting on my shelf for so long.
I have a fondness for pre-WWII Hungarian Lit and here are suggestions for you to discover this country’s literature:
- A Child of Our Time by Ödön von Horváth. (1938) – chilling
- Oliver VII by Antal Szerb (1942) – a timely and timeless tale
- The Traveling Companion by Gyula Krúdy (1918) – translation tragedy
- The Charmed Life of Kázmér Rezeda by Gyula Krúdy (1933) – Budapest in 1913
- They Were Counted by Miklós Bánffy (1934)
- Colours and Years by Margit Kaffka. (1912)
- Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb (1937)
- The Adventures of Sindbad by Gyula Krúdy
- N.N. by Gyula Krúdy (1922) – translation tragedy
- Embers by Sándor Márai (1942)
- I denounce humanity by Frigyes Karinthy (1912-1929) – Translation Tragedy
- The Rebellious Wife by Zsigmond Móricz (1934) – Translation Tragedy.
- Anna Edes by Dezső Kosztolányi (1926) – Masters and servants
- The Confessions of a Bourgeois by Sándor Márai (1934) – Happy who like Ulysses has explored
- The Confessions of a Bourgeois by Sándor Márai. (1934) – about literature and writing
- The Golden Kite by Dezsö Kosztolányi (1925)
- Skylark by by Dezső Kosztolányi (1924) – Eleanor Rigby is Hungarian and lives in Normandy. Or in Vancouver ? – Very highly recommended
- The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb (1933) – I, János Bátky, Hungarian citizen, come face to face with Englishness, Welshness and Irishness – Very highly recommended
I have read a few post-WWII Hungarian books too:
- Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy. (1970)
- Fatelessness or Fateless by Imre Kertész (1975) – Very highly recommended
- Catsplay: A tragi-comedy in two acts by Istvan Örkény (1974)
- A Story of Loneliness by Milán Füst (1956)
There are a lot of Hungarian writers out there but also a lot of them aren’t available in translation. This is only a tiny list of books but I hope it’ll prompt you to read one of them.
Happy reading!
Theatre : War Does Not Have a Woman’s Face, a stage version of The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich – what an evening!
Last night at the theatre, we saw a stage version of Svetlana Alexievich’s book, The Unwomanly Face of War (1983). Here’s the blurb of the book:
This book is a confession, a document and a record of people’s memory. More than 200 women speak in it, describing how young girls, who dreamed of becoming brides, became soldiers in 1941. More than 500,000 Soviet women participated on a par with men in the Second World War, the most terrible war of the 20th century. Women not only rescued and bandaged the wounded but also fired a sniper’s rifle, blew up bridges, went reconnoitering and killed… They killed the enemy who, with unprecedented cruelty, had attacked their land, their homes and their children. Soviet writer of Belarussia, Svetlana Alexiyevich spent four years working on the book, visiting over 100 cities and towns, settlements and villages and recording the stories and reminiscences of women war veterans. The Soviet press called the book”a vivid reporting of events long past, which affected the destiny of the nation as a whole.” The most important thing about the book is not so much the front-line episodes as women’s heart-rending experiences in the war.
I haven’t read it but I knew this stage version would be good. It was made from book to play by Julie Deliquet, Julie André and Florence Seyvos and directed by Julie Deliquet. She had already directed Welfare, based on a documentary, a play we’d seen and loved.
When the public enters the theatre, as often the stage is already open – when did the curtain lift disappeared and why? – and this is the décor we see:
It’s a messy communal apartment somewhere in the Soviet Union. Then one by one, the actresses arrive on stage until the nine witnesses who will discuss their experience in the Soviet army during WWII are sitting on chairs. Then the actress playing Svetlana Alexievich arrives and explains to the public what kind of book she wants to write and why she’s been hunting the country high and low to find women who want to share their past and how she now receives spontaneous testimonies.
Then, she starts asking the first question: How did you feel when the war started and your life was uprooted? And from then on, the women talk, their stories bounce off each other, they bring their piece to the puzzle and draw a horrible picture of war and women at war.
They show the horrible conditions on the front, in an army who needed them but was not ready to have women as soldiers. No women uniforms. No sanitary pads. No protection against rapes. They talk about their harsh return at home, not seen as heroes but as bad mothers, abnormal women, war women. Not women men want to marry or ones mothers want as daughters-in-law. They explain why they remained silent and never told their story.
They talk about all the horrors they saw and had to live with, the difficult reconnection with their children when they came home, the guilt, the shame and also the indignation of being left aside in the grand celebration of the Soviet victory.
They came from various parts of the Soviet Union and experienced the war differently. The Ukrainian woman’s testimony was even more poignant because of the current Russian invasion of her country. They also had different positions in the army: stretcher-bearer, pilots, resistant fighters in occupied parts of the country like Belorussia, snipers or soldiers. They describe the humiliations that awaited them at home, private or public since Stalin didn’t trust them.
On stage, Julie André was Svetlana Alexievich. She co-wrote the text for the play and she was asking difficult questions, explaining her intent with collecting even the smallest details of their experience at war. She didn’t want to write a book about the war. She wanted to show the war at a woman’s level, as a person and also give a voice to all these forgotten heroines and leave a trace of their lives before they disappeared and their stories was wiped out of history for good.
This play was a masterpiece. I don’t say that really often but it left us speechless and the whole public did a standing ovation to the incredible actresses who embodied the voices of these women, who are probably dead by now but will live forever in Alexievich’s pages.
Their acting was perfect, interacting with each other very naturally and we didn’t have the impression they were telling a written text but truly discussing with each other, reminiscing, reliving their past in front of us. It felt like this session of discussion between these women was happening before our eyes. It felt spontaneous. I hope someone recorded this play for future broadcasting. It deserves a TV showing.
And it comes from the way this play was created. Julie Deliquet explains it in this interview. She built the group of actresses around her project and they worked together on the text and its stage adaptation. They absorbed the material of the book but also discussed their lives as women. Julie Deliquet says that the cast of who would play which character came late in the process, that they were all able to play any role.
This group is composed of Julie André, Astrid Bayiha, Evelyne Didi, Marina Keltchewsky, Odja Llorca, Marie Payen, Amandine Pudlo, Agnès Ramy, Blanche Ripoche and Hélène Viviès. They were all amazing and I bet they didn’t come out of this experience unscathed.
The making of this play, the implication of the actresses and the way the text is adapted to the stage is extremely powerful. It rights the wrong of the invisibility of the women’s participation in WWII in the Soviet army but it also reaches universality.
What they say about women during wars, how rapes become a war weapon and how cruelty towards women and children is seen as an act of war to intimidate the enemy is still valid today. It happens in wars around the globe, it happens in Ukraine now.
I haven’t read Alexievich’s book mostly because I shied away from its bleak content but now I want to, I even feel like I owe it to all these women and to the ones who are under the bombs now.
Something else: The French title of the book is La guerre n’a pas un visage de femme, which means, War does not have a woman’s face. It’s different from the Unwomanly Face of War, no? I checked out on google translate: the French title is the exact translation of the original title in Russian. I wonder why the English translation has such a title.
Two very different British novellas by David Lodge and Agnes Owens
- Home Truths by David Lodge (1999) French title : Les quatre vérités. Translated by Suzanne V. Mayoux.
- Bad Attitude by Agnes Owens (2003) Not available in French.
I have read several David Lodge who was very popular in France. The Campus Trilogy, The British Museum Is Falling Down, How Far Can You Go? and Deaf Sentence. All pre-blog, which means that the last one was more than fifteen years ago.
Home Truths was first a theatre play and David Lodge converted it into a novella. The protagonists are Adrian Ludlow, his wife Eleanor, their friend Sam Sharp and a tabloid journalist, Fanny Tarrant.
When the book opens, Sam is visiting his friends in Sussex where they live after years in London. Sam had agreed to an interview with Fanny Tarrant and she wrote a disparaging portrait of Sam as an ageing and untalented screen writer. He’s hurt, miffed and wants to get back to her.
Adrian wrote a promising debut novel and all his subsequent ones weren’t as good as the first. So he went into semi-retirement and now writes non-fiction little books. Fanny had also contacted him for an interview. He and Sam decide Adrian should do it and try to seek revenge for both of them.
Of course the plan backfires and the subtitle of the novella could be ‘karma is a bitch’.
To be honest, I was a little bored by another writer-character with a fragile ego and the underlying discussion about the comparative merits of literature, screenplays and trash journalism. Literature being the higher moral grounds and then things go down hill to newspapers articles. But since Lodge isn’t Houellebecq, the novella moves forward nicely, thanks to the author’s sense of humor and gift for a perfect ending.
The most interesting part was the afterword by the Lodge where he explained a bit of the writing process from play to novella. I’d say that Home Truths is a pleasant read and nothing more.
Pleasant isn’t a good adjective to describe Bad Attitudes by Agnes Owens. The novella is set in Glasgow among the working class. The Dawson family used to live at the Terrasse, a working class neighborhood that will be soon demolished. They have been relocated in a council flat and their teenage son Peter has a hard time with the move.
One of their former neighbor, Shanky Devine refuses to leave his house and blocks the demolition of the Terrasse tenement, at least until all legal paths against this project have led to a dead-end. Nearby Shanky are The Tinkers who are squatting an empty house promised to demolition.
Peter struggles with the new flat, his dog is not welcome, the downstairs neighbor, Mrs Webb complains about him all the time and the issues at home have not disappeared. He acts out.
The bad attitudes mentioned in the title apply to almost all the characters of this grim but well-written novella. Mrs Webb, the neighbor is vindictive and petty. Harry, Peter’s father, drinks his salary and is a mean drunk. Peter’s mother, Rita, intends her best but acts her worst. Councillot Healy trades his influence on flat attribution against sexual favors. Shanky and the Tinkers are quite violent and Peter keeps spending time with them instead of going to school. He learns the law of violent instead of English and mathematics.
The whole story is grim and violence is peaking out at every corner. This novella is also a social commentary. It shows how disruptive it is for people to leave their home and their neighbors to live somewhere else. By destroying the Terrace, however run down this housing could be, the council destroys memories and communities.
The book Bad Attitudes also includes another novella, Jen’s Party. Jen is thirteen, unpopular in school and turns fourteen soon. She lives with her timid and dull mother Maude and her flamboyant Aunt Belle. Her father is in prison.
Aunt Belle brings joy and chaos in to their home and makes promises she forgets to keep. She’s a shoplifter and a bit of a con artist. Belle declares that Jen need a birthday party. Much to Jen’s dismay, she bulldozes herself into the role of party planner and Jen starts worrying and hoping at the same time. She wants and doesn’t want this party and she’s wary of her aunt’s flimsy attitude.
Belle is not reliable and until the end, the reader wonders whether this party will take place, at which cost and who will take pleasure in it. Not sure Jen can survive the attention and the roller-coaster of emotions her aunt brings into her life. And Maude feels the same. But is Belle really a bad influence in their quotidian?
Jen’s Party isn’t as good as Bad Attitudes but it still centers around a working class family who struggles to make ends meet and keep their heads above water. Agnes Owens shows people who try to survive as best they can. For a better review about Bad Attitudes, check out Guy’s post here. Thanks Guy for sending this novella my way and I agree with you, readers who enjoy Beryl Bainbridge will probably like Agnes Owens too.
Reading plans for 2026: fun, knowledge and book buddies
Reading Plans !
January, brand new year, brand new reading plans. I’m always like a kid in a candy store when I’m in front of bookshelves. I want to read all the books at once but I can’t. So I’m making plans to read books from the TBR, to share books with friends and family, to focus on my own wishes and mix my reading plans with blogging events as much as I can. There’s still room for spontaneity, escapism and new books.
Reading With Séverine 2026
Great news for me, 2026 sees another year of Reading With Séverine, my sister-in-law. We’re having another year of reading books together and we picked books from various genres and different countries. Our logo is a picture of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Appalachians and it goes with our first book of the year, Cold Mountain. Here are the books we picked for our literary adventures:
Book Club
Our Book Club was in a slump in 2025 but the three founding members decided to revive it this year as we missed picking books, discussing them and most of us going out together at least once a month. Half of the books overlap my Reading with Séverine project, so, here are the additional books we chose:
I think that Charlotte Mandel is currently translating Proust, roman familial by Laure Murat. And I still don’t understand why Erri De Luca isn’t translated into English.
18th Century Mini-Project
I want to read books published in or related to the 18th century.
I have Autobiographical Stories by Voltaire, Persian Letters and An Anthology of The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu. I also have The River Guillotine, a historical novel by Antoine de Meaux set in Paris and Lyon during the French Revolution. That’s on the TBR today.
I hope I’m not too ambitious with this project, I’m not sure I’ll finish The Spirit of the Laws but I’ll try. It feels like a “back-to-basics” read much needed in 2026. Maybe I’ll get to Enlightenment Era fiction too. I’ve read some French ones like Candide, Manon Lescaut or The Dangerous Liaisons, seen and read several plays by Marivaux, but I’ve never read British novels from the time. Which one is the easiest to start with, btw?
Tame the TBR 2026
Last year, I read 61 books out of the TBR but since I bought new ones, it only decreased by 15 books. Project Tame the TBR is still on! It spurs me on reading books that have been lying around for a long time. I still want to read all the books I have, culling the TBR isn’t a way to decrease it. I just need a nudge to read these books. Sometimes blogging events help too.
These are the Tame the TBR 2026 books that do not overlap with aforementioned reading projects.
Great Canadian Reading Challenge
Jody at That Happy Reader hosts the Great Canadian Reading Challenge. The aim is to read at least 12 Canadian books. I already have 9 out of 12 on the TBR and I’ll finally read a book by Margaret Atwood.
It’ll be an excuse to read another Tremblay and maybe read new English-speaking Canadian authors. I know a lot more authors from Québec than from the other provinces. What can I say? I’m French. For us, Canada means Québec. So any idea besides the obvious (Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood) is welcome in the comments section.
Cloak & Dagger Reading Challenge
With all the crime fiction books I read every year, I thought it would be fun to join Carol and her Cloak and Dagger Reading Challenge.
I picked the Detective Level, which means 16-25 crime fiction books in 2026. Last year I read 27 of them, I think I can make it without trying too hard. After all, I’ve already read two.
Other blogging events.
I’ve already two books lined up for Karen & Simon’s Club 1961 in April: Heaven Has No Favorites by Erich Maria Remarque and Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginsburg. I received Guilt by Keigo Higsahino with my Quais du Polar subscription. I might have time to read it for Japanese Lit Challenge and January in Japan.
I know there will be other blogging events during the year and I love to participate. So, if you’re hosting an event, leave a comment with information about it. I’ll look it up and see if I’m interested in it.
The most important in all this: I’m going to have a lot of fun, I’ll explore new countries and learn about the world. All the while connecting with other book lovers and sharing about books online and in real life.
One Minus One by Ruth Doan Macdougall – an excellent novella set in New Hampshire.
One Minus One by Ruth Doan Macdougall. (1971) Not available in French.
I discovered One Minus One by Ruth Doan Macdougall via Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust and her rediscoveries. That’s how I also read The Girls From the Five Great Valleys by Elizabeth Savage and The Last Night at the Ritz also by Elizabeth Savage. (both recommended)
One Minus One is a novella told from the point of view of Emily, recently divorced from David. We’re in 1969 in New Hampshire. Emily and David were high school sweethearts, went to college together and got married very young. She’s now 32 and David left her for another woman, a fellow teacher at his school. Quite a banal story after all.
We follow Emily as she navigates her new life. She’s refused any kind of alimony from David and they have no children. They have no reason to see each other anymore. She was a stay-at-home wife, a would-be writer and she has now started her first year as an English teacher at a middle school. She doesn’t like it but it pays the bills.
Emily is lost and has a hard time living alone. She misses David very much and she has to face all kinds of material issues he used to take care of.
The novella has three parts, each corresponding to a step in her new life. She dates Warren for a while, moves in with Grace and KayKay, two other teachers from her school and later dates Cliff. While she befriends Grace and KayKay, Warren and Cliff are just buffers against crippling loneliness.
Each time she goes with the flow to avoid solitude. She’s grieving her marriage, her relationship with David, their good times and their complicity. She was blindsided by the divorce more because she put her head in the sand than anything else. The signs were there, she refused to see them. She’s still in love with David.
One Minus One equals zero. That’s how Emily feels now. She and David started dating when she was fifteen. She grew up with him, had all her firsts with him and she’s never been an adult without him. She was merged into him and she felt one with him. And now that he’s gone, she feels like a non-entity.
But she’s not helpless. After all, she has a job, she made new friends, she has an active social life and she goes out with other men. But she’s detached, as if all this was happening to someone else. Her soul seems bruised beyond repair, she’s the epitome of “emotionally unavailable”. She has possibilities to grow as a single woman but still feels a bit like a failure.
Emily is 32, we’re in 1969. She’s from the first generation of women who had access to oral contraception. A decade earlier and she’d have had children to take care of. She belongs to a transition generation, the one who moved from mandatory traditional roles to new possibilities, thanks to education and contraception. She is a bit torn between being a traditional wife and an independent woman. It’s also a time when couples settled down young, I chuckled when Cliff, 34, wonders if he’s not too old to be a dad now.
Macdougall wrote the beautiful portrait of a woman who needs to move on, to find out who she is, to stand on her own two feet without a male crutch and acknowledge that she’s stronger than she thinks she is. Emily’s sadness is so deep it oozes from the pages. I wanted her to get better.
This is an excellent novella, a good one to add to your TBR for the next blogging event about reading novellas. 😊I think it would appeal to readers who love Anne Tyler.
PS : ***spoiler alert*** After writing my billet, I read the discussion guide for this book (I kind of loathe them, tbh.) and I realized that readers are expected to feel less empathy than I did for Emily. I guess it’s because she refuses Cliff’s perfectly sound proposal and readers expect her to get back on the marriage wagon and learn to love Cliff since she likes him well enough. How is that fair to him? How will she not become a new “One” with Cliff instead of a “Two” in a well-adjusted partnership if she never becomes an adult of her own? It seems to me that she needs a room of her own for a while.
Most memorable reads of 2025 : my awards
It’s that time of year again! Time to look back on my 2025 reading adventures.
I had set personal goals, with projects like Tame the TBR, Reading with Séverine or the Gallmeister Challenge. They went well until the last quarter of the year where I couldn’t focus on the books from the list and let go. Tame the TBR and Reading With Séverine will resume in 2026.
I signed up for several book blogging events like Paris in July, WIT Month, Hundred Years Hence, German Lit Month, Non-fiction November, Novellas in November, the Club 1925 and 20 Books of Summer. I love these blogging events, digging into the TBR, interacting with others and seeing what others pick. Many thanks to the bloggers who spend time organizing them, they make our blogosphere brighter.
Without further ado, my rewards of the year.
Best Least Commented Billet
Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden is one of the least commented billets of the year. Please, reconsider. Not that my prose is that worth reading but Boyden’s definitely is.
His story celebrates friendship, sheds some light on two Cree young men in the madness of the WWI battlefields and tells the end of their traditional way-of-living and healing. Beautiful.
The author is Canadian, this book is a great pick for the Great Canadian Reading Challenge organized by Jodie at The Happy Reader.
Best Gallmeister Book
For once, it won’t be a book set in Montana or Wyoming but Two Old Women by Velma Wallis. It’s set among the Gwich’in Athabascan Indian tribe in Alaska. It’s a story of resilience and fight for a proper place in the tribe. And the bonus was great illustrations.
Best Novella
I read fourteen novellas, a genre I really enjoy and I admire the writers who embrace it.
My favorite one is One Minus One by Ruth Doan MacDougall, the poignant story of a freshly divorced Emily who tries to rebuild her life after her husband left her. Upcoming review.
Best Weird and Creepy
The competition for this prize is rather fierce between Body by Harry Crews, Coyote Song by Gabino Iglesias and Cobrastar by Thomas Bois. Yes I like crazy books.
In the end, Body is the weirdest and creepiest with its closed setting at a bodybuilding competition in Florida. Really, what could go wrong among a crowd of highly competitive bodybuilders locked up in a luxury hotel for a major championship when a family of hillbillies invades their space?
Best Non-Book post
Posts about reading, lists of books and challenges usually get a lot of response, at least according to my blog’s standards. I published fifteen billets that weren’t book reviews and your favorite one was Fifteen years of blogging : fifteen years of fun Thanks for reading these billets too.
Best Translation Tragedy
I read 26 books in French that are not translated into English and 9 books in English that aren’t available in French. Anglophone readers are definitely missing out because alas, Piergiorgio Pulixi has no publisher in the English speaking world. And sadly, French book lovers can’t read The English Teacher by R.K. Narayan.
Best Book-I-Want-To-Buy-To-All-My-Friends
My gift would be a bundle of Dalva by Jim Harrison and Seule la Terre est éternelle by François Busnel, his book about Jim Harrison. The two books belong together.
The problem is that most of my friends here have already read Dalva. That’s how famous Harrison is in France. So…if you haven’t read Dalva, just go for it.
Best Book in a Series
It’s hard to decide between Craig Johnson, C.J. Box and Jørn Lier Horst.
I think that Trophy Hunt by C.J. Box was the best one because it blended seamlessly Joe Pickett’s personal life, his professional struggles, an efficient plot and enlightening bits about the oil industry in Wyoming.
Best French Book
I tend to think that I don’t read a lot of French literature but guess what, I read twenty-eight French books, six of them being comics or graphic novels.
Of Mice and Men illustrated by Rebecca Dautremer is stunning, a piece of art that enhances Steinbeck’s beautiful tale. Graphic novel at its finest and no AI will ever be able to do what she does, no matter what the tech gurus want us to believe.
Best Book set in Montana and Wyoming
I’ve only read seven books set in Montana and Wyoming this year. My favorite one is As Cool As I Am by Pete Fromm. What can I say, I’m a fan of Pete Fromm.
To be honest, even if one third of the books I read were from the USA, I’m reluctant to pick one from the shelves, now. That’s how bad politics influence my reading these days. I know it’s not fair to the authors but the impulse to read books from other countries is strong. It’s irrational but powerful.
Best Norwegian Book
We had planned a trip to Norway and naturally, I read Norwegian books. Eleven. I really liked Berlin Poplars by Anne B. Ragde but the William Wisting crime fiction series by Jørn Lier Horst stands out. I read five during the year and I seldom read as many books by the same author within a few months like this. My husband got the Wisting bug too and I still have three on the shelf.
It was a Nordic year, since I also read four books from Denmark, Finland and Sweden.
Best Feminist Book
It wasn’t a goal I set out for the year but I read several books I consider feminist. The most obvious one is Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie but Benigna Machiavelli by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was excellent and is highly recommended. I loved Benigna’s energy, her reasoning and all the strength she puts into improving her life and helping her mother and sister.
Please don’t judge the book by its cover, I don’t understand where it comes from.
Most Overrated Book
I know that Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea won the Prix Goncourt and that a lot of readers loved it. I wasn’t blown over but at least this Goncourt was readable and it had its literary merits.
I didn’t love it but I understand why it was successful. I can’t say the same about The Midnight Library, its ratings baffle me.
Most painful to read.
As I Lay, Dying by William Faulkner. There’s no debate. It was terrible. Thank God, I had a bilingual edition. Everything was a struggle in this book: the style was literary and creative but difficult, the characters were awful and sad and the story was ugly. *shudders*
It was agonizing.
Best Non-fiction Book.
I read twelve non-fiction books, which is a lot for me. Some I abandoned, some were luminous and wise, some were stressful. I urge you to read Umberto Eco’s short essay, How to Spot a Fascist and maybe turn to Alain on Happiness by Alain to alleviate the tension you’ll feel after the Eco. .
This was my last award and as you can see, my reading was eclectic, in genres and in countries. I read books from twenty-one different countries, not something I planned but it’s where my love for books and stories took me.
This billet is also the opportunity to thank you all for reading my blog this last year. Many thanks to faithful readers and a renewed warm welcome to new subscribers.
I still love blogging, even if the years go by and I still don’t have as much time as I’d want to read, write, interact with other bloggers and participate to blogging events. I love reading your comments on my billets, so please, keep writing them even if I don’t answer right away. I always read them and respond to them at some point. Thanks for your patience.
I’m looking into my 2026 reading plans and I’ll tell you about them in another billet. Until then, happy reading!
Book Around the Corner 