Tag: Paris

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London

Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse is more than the book I was expecting it to be. I thought it was going to be an examination of city streets and public spaces and how they welcome or exclude women, of a similar ilk to Leslie Kern’s Feminist City. It turned out to be more like Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City. Which is fortunate, because I loved Laing’s book and hated Kern’s. Elkin blends personal memoir with the stories of other women who have worked things out through walking and sought anonymity in city streets across the world. It gave me a lot to think about. This one’s going to be a long one – make yourself a brew.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 3

What You Could Have Won

Henry and Astrid: a psychiatrist and a singer, drawn together at one of her gigs into an unequal relationship. Told in alternating chapters, Henry’s relayed in the first person, Astrid’s in the second, What You Could Have Won tells us about these two flawed individuals in a story that moves between New York City and a small Greek island via Paris. This is a knowing novel, sending out nods and winks, self-referential to author Rachel Genn’s interests in her other areas of work. It struck me as being less clever than it thought it was, though.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 5

The Prague Cemetery

Umberto Eco’s literary novel The Prague Cemetery begins in March 1897, in a room in Paris down a blind alley where we encounter a man writing a manuscript. Over the stretch of the novel, we read what he writes and find out what else he has written in his strange and twisted career. Eco threads together 19th century literature that contains elements of conspiracy, from Augustin Barruel to Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Sue. It’s not necessary to have read the works. Eco has done that for us, and has his central character lay out the gist of them. This central character is a complex and odious man who seeks to create a document that can act as evidence of a Universal Conspiracy.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 5

Saving Lucia

When I plucked Saving Lucia from my To Read pile, I wasn’t expecting another time travelling novel that takes imagination and rethinks reality. I also wasn’t expecting such a slim book to be so dense with ideas and feelings.

The Lucia of the title of Anna Vaught’s book is the daughter of James Joyce, incarcerated in St Andrew’s Hospital for Mental Diseases in Northampton in 1953. One of her fellow residents is the Honourable Violet Gibson, daughter of a Lord Chancellor of Ireland and famous for her attempted assassination attempt on Benito Mussolini. Violet makes it the work of her last few years to save Lucia from the pain of life in a psychiatric institution.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

Jolts

Jolts is a short story collection from the Argentine writer Fernando Sdrigotti. It’s a punchy collection that looks at being an émigré from somewhere and an immigrant to somewhere. Across the nine stories there is anger, frustration, a sense of being lost in spaces in between, broken up by leaving bits of yourself in the places you inhabit and move on from.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 3

The Invisible Bridge

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Read 08/12/2021-27/12/2021

Rating 4 stars

An unplanned side trip to Hungary with my next book. On Margaret’s Six Degrees chain for December 2021, I spied a title that interested me. The Invisible Bridge is a novel about the experiences of Hungarian Jews following Hitler’s rise to power and during the Second World War.

Author Julie Orringer is American, so the book doesn’t fit my loose rule for my European literary tour of reading books by authors from the countries I virtually visit. A large amount of the book is set in Paris, too, with a brief period in Ukraine. Continue reading →

Posted on by Jan Hicks 6

Blood Wedding

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Read 16/05/2021-25/05/2021

Rating 3 stars

Blood Wedding is a psychological crime novel by French writer Pierre Lemaitre. It concerns Sophie, a woman with severe memory loss who, at the start of the book, is looking after a young boy on the days and nights that his busy parents can’t be there. When we meet Sophie, disaster has struck. Continue reading →

Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

Wayward Girls and Wicked Women

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Read 17/07/2019-02/08/2019

Rating 3 stars

Read as part of the 20 Books of Summer readathon.

I accidentally started Women in Translation month early with this collection of short stories. I should have known that Angela Carter would include a few women whose first language isn’t English. After all, being a woman who doesn’t conform to the artificial notion of femininity isn’t an exclusively Anglophone thing.

Carter introduces her selections as being about women who aren’t really wicked or wayward, at least not all of them. Continue reading →

Posted on by Jan Hicks 7