Hergé – findingtimetowrite

#6Degrees of Separation: From Long Island to…

It’s time for the monthly #6Degrees of Separation meme hosted by Kate: we start with the same book and then link it with whatever quirky association comes to mind, all ending up in different places. This month we start with Long Island by Colm Toibin, a sequel to his novel about a young Irish immigrant woman, Brooklyn, which I read when it first came out but which didn’t leave me with a very deep impression, so I don’t think I’ll be reading this one.

However, my first choice is the most famous novel set on Long Island, namely The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It remains one of my favourite novels, saying so much in a relatively small number of pages. It also features one of the most recognisable and poignant final paragraphs in English-language literature, so my next link is to one of my favourite openings in English literature, which I may have mentioned before on this blog (I do apologise if that is the case). Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means not only has the most pithy first sentence, but in just one paragraph manages to perfectly describe the post-war London setting with all of its atmosphere, ending with a sarcastic twist.

From the devastation of post-war London to the ruins of post-war Japan and a book that I read quite recently perfectly fits the bill: Laughing Wolf by Tsushima Yuko. A book that has a bit of a fantasy and YA feel and yet is also quite sinister and certainly historically accurate.

I’ll stick to the post-war period and move to Germany now with The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers – well, strictly speaking, it is set just on the cusp of Germany losing the war, but still unsafe for seven men who break out of a concentration camp and are then systematically hunted down by the Gestapo and their collaborators.

This is not a book cover, but a poster for a theatrical adaptation of the book, but it just looks so lovely, I had to include it.

After such grim subject matter, let me move to something more cheerful, and the link is a number in the title. I could have gone with several books by Jules Verne, but one of my all-time favourites was Around the World in 80 Days (which I guess just shows how much I dreamt of travelling and encountering other cultures even as a child).

For similar ‘travelling around the world’ reason, I was very fond of the Tintin series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. I can’t remember which one of them was my favourite as a child (probably Destination Moon or Tintin in Tibet) but after living in Geneva and seeing first-hand the places where Tintin and Milou chase villains, I now claim that L’Affair Tournesol (aka The Calculus Affair in English) has a special place in my heart.

So I’ve travelled from Long Island to London, to Japan, to Germany, and ended up in Geneva after a hasty trip around the world. Where will your six degrees of literary separation take you?

#1929Club: Here Are Some I Read Earlier

I won’t have time to read or reread another book from 1929 for the wonderful #1929Club, but when I looked at the year in literature, I realised just how many of the books published that year I have read in the past… and how many of them are by favourite authors! I really think the 1920s and 30s might be my favourite time in literature and there is quite a bit of variety in this particular year. By no means a cosy time, still recovering from one war and starting to prepare for another, a struggle for social and economic stability, a major financial crash, countries starting to militate for freedom from the shackles of empire. A time of great poverty but also shameless display of wealth, with socialist and labour union movements clashing with capitalist owners and the police. It must have felt like the end of the world at times, which meant unchained hedonism and a devil-may-care attitude too.

I can’t help feeling we are living through similar times now – but will today’s cultural output be equally creative, extraordinary and have a long-lasting impact? Just think of the effervescence of Paris, Berlin, Vienna, London and Bucharest/Iasi in 1929 in terms of literary, philosophical and artistic circles! Anyway, here are some of the most memorable books from that year.

Books about the war, looking towards the future but also nostalgic about vanished worlds:

E. M. Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front – probably one of my favourite books about WW1, it was not popular at the time of publication in Germany because of its ‘defeatist’ attitude, but it gives us a great insight into ‘the other side’ (i.e. usually history is written only by the victors)

Richard Aldington: Death of a Hero – equally as excoriating about the stupidity and futility of war, just as critical of the mistakes and monstrous egos on the English side as Remarque was about the German side. I don’t know why this one seems to have slipped into oblivion.

Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms – I have to admit I am not a huge Hemingway fan (I tend to prefer his short stories to his novels, but overall he describes a man’s world which makes me as a woman feel somewhat superfluous and weak), but this is an apt description of the disillusionment and alienation felt by soldiers sent to war, impacting even on their ability to love and be loved.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery: Courrier Sud – not strictly speaking a war novel, although our knowledge of the author’s fate may colour our perception of his books about flying. A homage to the pioneers of early aviation, as he describes the life of the postal pilots.

Tanizaki Junichiro: Some Prefer Nettles – this story is not only about the death of a marriage, but also mourns the death of the traditional Japanese society (and culture), as it succumbs more and more to Western influences

Elizabeth Bowen: The Last September – as if WW1 was not enough, this book describes its aftermath – the Irish War of Independence, as it is perceived in one of the grandiose country mansions in Ireland, and its subsequent destruction

Children’s books:

Although all of the below are classed as children’s books, it has occurred to me that they are quite dramatic and unsentimental, a real contrast to many of the more saccharine children’s books deemed suitable for younger readers.

Richard Hughes: A High Wind in Jamaica – sort of an adventure story, but actually the story of a kidnapping, living with pirates and violence and near-sexual abuse. I don’t remember being terrified reading it as a child – maybe I was too innocent to grasp all of its horrors? We read it in class, believe it or not.

Erich Kastner: Emil and the Detectives – the innocent sent to the big bad city, who ends up chasing the bad guys together with a gang of street kids – I loved this book so much as a child, it was the start of a lifelong love affair with urban noir. I particularly like the close relationship between Emil and his mother, very sweet.

Herge: Tintin in the Land of the Soviets – the first of the Tintin BD, this has a problematic history, as Herge had never set foot in the Soviet Union but was forced to write this almost as a piece of anti-communist propaganda by his boss, conservative newspaper owner and Catholic priest Norbert Wallez. As it turned out, many of the negative depictions of the Bolsheviks and of Stalin’s secret services were quite true…

Franklin W. Dixon: The Secret of the Caves (The Hardy Boys) – of course nowadays I know that there was no author of that name, but that it was a syndicate of writers who produced at least two Hardy Boys titles per year. The Secret of the Caves is the seventh in the original series, written by one of the best of the original authors, Leslie McFarlane. I loved all the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and Trixie Belden books, although the ones I read were probably the ‘revised’ and modernised ones published from the 1950s onwards. They certainly seemed to epitomise the glamour of American teens to me.

As a treat, I have included three different covers of The Hardy Boys book, the original, plus one from the 1950s and one from the 1970s. The story got modernised too along the way – I wonder if anyone bothered to bring it into the 21st century? Oh, there we go, I found a cover dating from 2017, which looks much more childish.

#1954Club: Tintin goes to the moon

I had no idea that 1954 was such a good year for literature, particularly children’s literature. So many old favourites were published that year: The Horse and His Boy from the Narnia series, the first in the Children of Green Knowe series, the first two volumnes in the Lord of the Ring trilogy, The Eagle of the Ninth, The Lord of the Flies and Moominsummer Madness. Oh, and Good Work, Secret Seven by Enid Blyton, which I have to admit I devoured when I was a child but my children never quite relished.

However, I haven’t had the time to reread any of these or to explore any other books for grown-ups published in 1954 this week, so I will participate with the shortest book I could find, namely Hergé’s 17th album in the Tintin series: On a Marché Sur La Lune (Explorers on the Moon), the second in a two-volume mini-series about lunar exploration. In this book, Tintin, Captain Haddock , the Professor Tournesol/Calculus, engineer Wolff and the Dupont-Dupond /Thompson twins, together with the only sensible creature on board the indomitable dog Milou/Snowy, all set off on the rocket to the moon. But the evil machinations that were afoot in the first volume continue, and there are betrayals and dangers aplenty, as well as impressive speculation of what one might find on the surface of the moon – considering this was written well before the first moon landing.

‘I’ve taken a few steps and for the first time in the history of humanity, one can say: “We have walked on the moon.” ‘ says Tintin long before Neil Armstrong.

This is such an iconic album that I don’t even remember when I first read it, but I remember rereading it with my boys while we were living in France and that they had a moneybox in the shape of Tintin’s rocket.

There are some running gags in the book which faithful Tintin readers will remember from other volumes: the sudden spurt in hair growth and change in hair colour of the twins, the Captain’s drinking habits, going round in circles. But there is also a lot of innovation and research, science fiction which later proved to be incredibly accurate – and the discovery of ice caves on the moon!

My favourite thing, however, is Milou’s adorable little astronaut costume.

I seem to remember in my childhood there was a French song about Milou and I wanted to link to it, but cannot find it anymore nor remember anything much about it other than that there was a Milou in the chorus and it wasn’t a children’s song. My favourite album used to be this one with the moon landing, but after living in Geneva for a few years, L’Affaire Tournesol overtook it, because so many of the landmarks were very familiar to me.

The British were latecomers to Tintin – the first translations by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner did not appear until 1958. They worked closely with the author to try and capture his humour, but the whole idea was to translate quite freely and anglicise things to make life easier for English-speaking readers, hence Milou becoming Snowy, Chateau Moulinsart became Marlinspike Hall etc. Some of the translations were very clever (like the Thomson/Thompson twins) or the Captain’s imaginative curses ‘blistering barnacles’ (Mille sabords! in the original).

So please excuse my very brief participation in the #1954Club, but do go and check out the links of everyone else taking part this week.