french literature – Mysterium Coniunctionis

I’ve not been pushing myself to read French lately, and it is absolutely vital that I continue to work on the language so that I sound less like an adolescent speaking when I interact with locals here in the Correze and particularly with business clients who arrive from cities like Toulouse, Bourdeaux, and Lyon. When Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in 2022 I picked up a couple of her books, one of which was La Place.

Surprisingly the French is quite clear and simple-stylistically I’d compare Ernaux’s writing to Hemingway, with crisp, short declarative sentences. Technically La Place is a novel, but it is also a memoir or autobiographical novel, and her style is very objective and is comparable to Joan Didion’s dispassionate journalism. I was pleased to only need a dictionary a couple dozen times throughout, and mostly for colloquial phrases.

The idea for the novel arose when Ernaux was processing the death of her father, and focuses on him and her family in a small town in Normandy through WW2 and into the 1970s. Her father was raised working on a farm with a quite limited education and his parents were not literate. Through his hard work and survival of the war to working in a factory and rising through the ranks and eventually buying and running a small cafe/epicerie with his wife we can see how the family pulled itself up from poverty to a comfortable middle-class existence. Ernaux’s descriptions of her family’s sensitivity to class and how they tried to hide their rural hick upbringing in front of clients by changing their speech and feigning a more sophisticated vernacular were quite touching. Reflecting on the difficulties her parents faced and her father’s challenges in particular was obviously difficult for Ernaux but she never wavers from her stylistic choices to keep her emotions out of the prose. Sometimes what she describes or recounts make her involvement and her feelings evident, however–there are photographs she finds and events she narrates which are dense with the weight of emotional memory.

Ernaux’s father is never called by his name, only by “him” or “he.” He is adamant that Ernaux continue her education but at the same time he can’t resist pointing out that her life in books is not the real life he lives with his hands in the dirt of the garden or in the till of his business. He is however enormously proud of her accomplishments when she becomes a professor and moves away to start a family of her own. Ernaux winning the Nobel Prize is even more remarkable given the family history recounted here. I look forward to reading more of her work.

Pere Goriot took a while. I started reading it over a year ago as we prepared to move from Panama to France. I felt I needed to brush up my language skills, and had never read a Balzac novel.

The French was challenging at first, and I took it slow, reading a few pages a day. Lots of detailed descriptions, often quite flowery, with unfamiliar adjectives and colloquial expressions. Also, the use of the literary past tense which is not typical in spoken French was a bit difficult at first–I’d forgotten some of those forms.

But the last 20% of the novel I blew through quickly. I think my confidence in French reached a level I’d not had in 20 years, and suddenly I could breeze through pages instead of struggling and looking up multiple words.

It’s strange that when I got my degree in French Lit we did not read Balzac. Pere Goriot is a true masterpiece, a document of Parisian culture, a portrait of class divisions and the morals and ethical complications individuals faced when trying to break into the life of the glittering upper crust, or trying desperately to remain there. It’s difficult to say much without spoiling it–but Rastignac certainly learns a great deal about himself and the woman he ‘loves’ (or at least needs in order to ascend in society).

I would like to continue reading the Comedie Humaine, but must be selective. Perhaps Illusions Perdus and a couple others? I’m at the stage of life where I have to decide carefully what reading I want to accomplish, and what I would like to reread. I likely have a couple decades left and I already have 30 years of books I would like to read or re-read, LOL. And trying to complete reading lists in French and English, while hopefully adding some Spanish into the mix–makes me wonder where I’ll find the time.

And speaking of searching for time, I’d like to tackle Proust in French, and fear that might take up more than I have left!