Alice Brière-Haquet's PHAILANA (Tr Emma Ramadan)

What if the Mothman (of prophecy fame) were a little girl named Manon, lost in Jack the Ripper's London? Being relentlessly pursued by a would-be mad scientist and protected by a weird old lady and a pack of Very Good Dogs?

I mean, shut up and take my money, amirite?

In Alice Brière-Haquet's Phalaina (Greek for "moth") the Goodest of the Good Dogs, Giulio, even becomes a point of view character, as he is an agent of the secret Mothman People (I know it's basically the Secret Commonwealth aka Faerie, but they hang out with moths, have very moth-like habits and glowing red eyes; they are the Mothman People) via his friendship, not only with Molly, the woman who becomes Manon's human protector after Manon escapes from a convent, but with a strange and gangly man with weird abilities who is seeking to reunite Manon with her people. Her people who live in a special harmony with nature and can communicate telepathically with each other and with all animals. Manon can't yet because she's still a larva, basically.

Giulio doesn't entirely steal the show, but he does emerge as Phalaina's most dynamic and dependable hero even when he's not the point of view character, so I think perhaps this novel should actually have been named for him, but then someone would have to explain the cover art (though I like how, in the American edition, the upper wings of the moth depicted look almost like dog's heads in profile and the lower wings, combined with the tree's trunk and a hollow at its base, form yet another dog's face! I wonder if that was intentional? The cover artist for the English language publisher, Levine Querido, is not listed on the copyright or title page, dammit!). 

Ah, but the Mothman People are not her only people; Manon had a human father, a famous and wealthy professor, Dr. Humphrey, who corresponded with Charles Darwin and started an important scientific foundation before dying in a mysterious carriage crash out in the boonies, which some sinister types know Manon was in but survived...

Among the sinister types are the hilariously Cruella DeVil-ish Harriet Humphrey, the dead professor's sister and sole heir -- unless proof surfaces that he had a child, say -- and her icky boyfriend, John, who was the Secretary of the good doctor's foundation and is helping Miss Humphrey to locate Manon, but maybe not in service to Miss Humphreys' or Manon's interests!

The resulting tale is a chase narrative reminiscent of, say, The Quincunx (but written for a middle grade audience) tinged with all of the coolest cryptid stories, Charles Paliser meets Coast to Coast AM minus the mRNA vaccine hysteria.

Translator Emma Ramadan kept this book's intended audience very much in mind and kept the prose clear and direct, though for some reason decided that the very modern (I think?) "heave" was a good usage to convey nausea and vomiting in a historical fantasy set in the 19th century, which usage tripped me up every time. I doubt the intended readership will even notice that, though; they'll just be having a good time while absorbing the book's very timely message about living in harmony with, versus dominating, nature. What a different world we might have now if that message had gained more traction back then. 

I hear Alice Brière-Haquet has written a few other books. Perhaps the next time I'm in the mood for some weird fantasy from the French, I'll grab one and spend some time with her again. She is delightful!

Colette's CHÉRI & THE END OF CHÉRI (Tr Rachel Careau, Narr Gabrielle de Cuir)

A sort of anti-love love story in two phases, Colette's Chéri and the End of Chéri takes very seriously an affair of the heart that was never allowed actually to reach those hearts involved. 

It would be easy to dislike young Fred "Chéri" Peloux, a "beauty who has everything and is only the more wretched for it, " raised in cold opulence by the servants of his courtesan mother, spoiled, impatient and demanding -- but Colette is too incisive a dissector of character to let us off that easily. As his lover, the much older "ghoul who only wants fresh flesh" (as she'll rather exultantly describe herself later in the book), Lea, falls in love with him despite herself but would never admit it, we wind up kind of admiring his monstrous qualities, or at least forgiving them; Lea is herself a courtesan, a life-long colleague and frenemy of Chéri's mother, and watched him grow up and never took him seriously as a possible love interest until she found herself kissing him. She has known all his flaws from the start, may be a little bit at fault for some of them, and so intimately understands why he is the way he is, and shares that understanding with us. 

We first encounter this pair five or six years into their relationship, with Chéri all but demanding a long pearl necklace that is something of a trademark of hers. He argues somewhat successfully that it looks better on him but grudgingly leaves it with her when she finally chases him out to go see his mother, Madame Peloux, whom they call the Harpy. Lea, left in peace, models the necklace for herself in a mirror and sees all the ravages time is taking on her beauty and finds that the necklace that used to set off her best features now makes them look shabby. Much later her now-married-but-not-to-her lover will encounter a woman his own age wearing a similar necklace of imitation pearls and finally realize that Lea has meant more to him than an Oedipal-ish crush but it's already far too late. 

But now that he's worn the real thing, fake pearls will never do. 

Lea is highly marginalized for all that she's had a celebrated career, because unlike her rival/friends, Madame Peloux and Marie Laure, she never had children. While she enjoyed wealth and comfort in relative solitude, her the other two made plans to marry their children to one another and settle them with a considerable fortune. Thus Chéri has always been destined to marry Marie Laure's lovely daughter, Edmée, only 19 to his 25 (and Lea's 49). It is thus implied, but never explicitly stated, that Madame Peloux drafted Lea simply to break the boy in and teach him how to be a decent lover for Edmée. Very much a frenemy move, if I've ever seen one.

At any rate, for all that both Chéri and Edmée are born out of wedlock children of courtesans, they and their futures count in a way that Lea does not; they are above her in the estimation of their little wannabe-bourgeois society's values. At least as expressed and embodied by her erstwhile colleagues in a community that is exceptionally interdependent because envied and despised by the greater world; if you have no solidarity, you have neither security nor hope. And the years when Lea wielded enough personal power (via her lovers) to provide her own security and hope are fast leaving her behind; Lea has to go along with her colleagues' treatment of her, whether she even realizes it or not.

But meanwhile, oops, no one ever bothered to let the kids get to know each other or in any way facilitate a relationship between them once their mothers have decided. And like I said, no one ever spelled out what Lea's expected role was supposed to be, to her or to Chéri. 

So anyway, before long Lea, six months or so later, receives belated gossip that Chéri left his wife and is living in a Paris hotel, prompting Lea's maid Rose to observe that "the divorce will be happier than the marriage" and that everyone was "so gloomy" at the wedding. Before Lea can even agree, Chéri is, in fact, at her door once again and it looks like they might resume their prior idyll. But will they?

I mean, would a story like this be famous if it had a happy ending?

All of this takes place in the first novel, Chéri, set in France's Belle Epoque right before World War I. Six years after its publication, Colette took up these characters again for The End of Chéri and allowed an identical span of time to elapse. When we meet Chéri again, he is a war veteran, now returned to civilian life and, while unscathed compared to most Great War veterans of literature, still very much at odds with that life. He is still well off thanks to his mother's machinations but that just frees him of the need to earn a living; it doesn't tell him what to do with his life.

Meanwhile his wife and his mother have discovered charity work and between them seem to be running every aspect of a hospital from Chéri's well-appointed home; Edmée is even under consideration for high civic honors for her work. She and Madame Peloux are sure Chéri will eventually come around and start playing the role they've cast him in as the gracious host at their events and the masculine figurehead for their efforts, but he'd rather hide out in his bedroom when Edmée has committee members over for a working luncheon.

What's a still-beautiful boy to do but go look up old girlfriends, since his marriage, which Colette encapsulates in an early scene with him strutting around in front of his wife in just his underwear "more as a rival than as a lover" because he considers himself the more beautiful of the pair,  is still a wreck?

Ah, but six years has merely taken him deeper into his prime at age 31; Lea is now in her mid-50s in 1926 Paris, when Bright Young Things are running amuck and beauty is more important than ever. Those pearls become her even less well than they did in the first book. She has not only committed the sin of aging, but she has also gained weight -- and won't let him deny, in front of one of her friends when he shows up again uninvited at her home, that they were lovers once. She forces him to look at her as she is now, dumpy and grey haired in her "sexless dignity" and think "I used to hit that."

And worse, Lea finds this funny. And calls him out over the vanity and self-centeredness this exposes even as he still, in his head, is making it all about him; she must have come to this from grief over losing him. When she reveals that she's all but reading these thoughts and laughs aloud, it is, as they say, *chef's kiss.* Oh no, she's had a life of her own all along! It is here and now that he decides how the novel will end, if not on the details.

Was anything in his life real? Bitterly he wanders Paris, watches his wife and mother succeed, passes time with old friends whom he still considers beneath him; at novel's end we discover we were right to dislike him, but he has one last claim on our compassion because Colette was a damned genius. Ah, me.

Now I guess I'm going to have to take a look at the 2009 Stephen Frears film with Michelle Pfeiffer as Lea and Kathy Bates as Madame Peloux. I mean, the casting alone...!

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès' ISLAND OF POINT NEMO (Tr Hannah Chute)

Was Hagbard Celine your bad literary boyfriend long before Hubertus Bigend burst on the spec fic scene? Is "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" your problematic fave? Was your favorite bit of Jodorovsky's The Holy Mountain the roll call of evil tycoons? Were Jules Verne's books not quite as Jules Verne as you were expecting? Do you care about mustaches? How about ebook readers?

Or, to be more succinct, do you like having fun when you read? And what is French for "fnord?"

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès (who, are all Algerian-born authors simply amazing, or what? Admittedly, my sample size is a bit small, but still...) decided the answers to all of these questions was yes and decided to go them all one better and throw in a pigeon with a hilarious name here and there for good measure. 

Speaking of names, get a load of these: Martial Cantarel (dandified man of adventure), his pal Shylock Holmes (who solves crimes with the aid of a genius African butler with a big secret,  Grimod, in the mode of his famous grandfather, Sherlock), Inspector Scummington (of Scotland Yard, of course), French tobacco farmer Arnaud Méneste (whose personal bankruptcy -- after making cigars every bit as good as Cuban ones but since they're grown and rolled in France they have no exotic appeal to French smokers -- enables a Chinese syndicate to buy up his ancestral farm to set up an ebook reader factory), and Wang-li Wong, aka Monsieur Wang (the scopophiliac overseer of the ebook reader factory that arises from the unburnt ashes of the tobacco farm and the fancier of the pigeon with the hilarious name)... And there are more.

The action kicks off with an apparent murder mystery that may be connected to the theft from a Scottish castle of the world's largest diamond. While that thievery might be enough of a mystery to get things going, there is also the matter of three severed and saponified human feet,  each still encased in elaborate sneakers of a make and brand that do not exist, that have washed up on European beaches. No sooner are Cantarel, Holmes, Grimod engaged by the diamond's former owner (and Cantarel's baby mama) than one of the probable former owners of one of the severed feet turns up spectacularly and publicly dead and the gang is following an ingenious clue to Siberia! To which they travel in mind-bending luxury!

Meanwhile, a wife desperate to please and be pleased by her impotent husband resorts to desperate measures that result in improbable sentences like "His penis looks like a butcher's joke, a microphone made of bratwurst, ending in a big ball of calf liver." So, uh, content warning for bawdy humor though it's no worse than what you'd find in, say, The llluminatus! Trilogy.

I did not evoke Hagbard Celine in jest.

But this isn't much of a conspiratorial romp, nor is it merely a detective story, for all its trappings of both. Roblès has more on his mind than that, and he's been reading his Baudrillard, or at least his Umberto Eco, as we see when the action brings us to Tianducheng, China and an idealized,  hyperreal, scaled down version of Paris located there, with all of the City of Lights' famous sights and views perfectly reproduced but more conveniently situated, closer to one another "as if some genie had fulfilled a weary tourist's wish to shrink the city." It's carefully filled with all the expected cliches to populate the architecture, too:

Hundreds of white-skinned extras thus contributed to the authenticity of this immense garden of acclimatization, the designers having spared no expense. Among all these exhibitions of outdated and lost scenes, one display invariably provoked contemptuous chuckles -- that of a bookstore* reconstructed according to the best sources, in the image of those that existed before the digital divide that had finally stamped them out. Inside were fake readers around fake spindly booksellers who sorted piles of fake books.

If this doesn't make you think of Jim Munroe's bitterly awesome Ghosts With Shit Jobs, you really haven't been paying attention, have you? I, for one, can absolutely read the characters from this film as those less fortunate and left behind in North America while their more attractive or better connected relatives made for the bright lights and hyperreal sights of China.

Our trio of detectives and the diamond's owner, the lovely Clawdia MacRae, who happens to have had a daughter out of wedlock by Cantarel and has brought her along for the adventure despite said daughter being comatose (!), wind up traveling the world in grand Edwardian style, which is an odd thing to be doing in a novel that also explicitly contains things like ebooks and the internet and other modern technologies, encountering an array of perversions that would make Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson gush with glee as they follow the trail of the three right feet and the diamond. I had a theory about the anachronisms that kept characterizing their story -- the other plotlines in Island of Point Nemo are deeply concerned with storytelling, particularly with oral storytelling in the form, chiefly, of workers designated to read newspapers, essays and novels to their co-workers on the work floors of cigar factories and, later, the ebook factory, to keep them entertained through their drudgery and also to enlighten them (and thus make their overlords a bit less conscience-stricken at how their comfort and enrichment is paid for by that drudgery). I turned out to be right, at least in more ways than I did wrong, which was satisfying.

Where they end up is as incredible and unexpected as any reader could wish, among circus performers, zoo animals, and renegade scientists who have a firm belief that any small repair a person makes to the world is worth doing, even if it's just replacing a bulb in a street light.

A word, as always, about the translation: Hannah Chute had better have been well paid for the effort this must have taken; the English text is so rife with unusual locutions and near-neologisms that one would think Gene Wolfe had had a hand in it. I am a person of a certain age and fairly widely read, but some of the vocabulary (favorite example: "apocolocyntosis") appearing in Island of Point Nemo had me very glad to have an ebook version of the text and thus the ability to immediately look up the dizzying array of references and the unfamiliar words that kept cropping up. I felt like a naughty teenager again, leafing madly through the scandalous pages of the Illuminatus! Trilogy and other RAWiana with a real-life encounter with Robert Anton Wilson still in my future. I wonder if Roblès has a similar anecdote lurking in his back-story. Wouldn't that be delightful?

What is less delightful is pretty much the whole Monsieur Wang storyline. I labeled him a scopophiliac earlier, but he is also a gross sexual harasser of his employees, some somewhat consensually, some decidedly not. If you haven't been scared off by the wilder sex scenes in the other storylines you might take this in your stride, but as someone who rolls her eyes and taps her foot through this sort of thing, well, I guess we're supposed to hate Monsieur Wang anyway? Silly name notwithstanding?

Regardless, I am fairly certain this is going to end up being one of the weirdest, if not the weirdest, books I'll read this year, but then again, it's only February. From the French. What's yet in store? Stay tuned... I'm about to read some French young adult fantasy.

*This has to be a reproduction of Shakespeare & Company, right?

Yiyun Li's THE BOOK OF GOOSE

It's sheer coincidence that I got my turn with my public library's copy of Yiyun Li's latest, The Book of Goose, a novel set partially in postwar France, right near the beginning of my second focus month on literature in translation, February from the French. It's not quite an appropriate choice for this theme in that it was originally written in the same language in which I normally read which is not French, but let's call it French-adjacent in honor of its setting, shall we?

Anyway, The Book of Goose. A book that was never going to be possible for an extremely online doofus like me to read without at least occasionally thinking of the magnificent Untitled Goose Game even though the text establishes a somber tone right away as our narrator, Agnès, announces the death in childbirth of the person she tells us is the most important character in what is to follow. A death of which she learned in a vaguely passive-aggressive letter from her mother in far-off St Rémy, France that is mostly about the birth of that mother's latest great-granchild (it is left ambiguous until much later whether or not said great-grandchild's birth is what killed Fabienne, or if that was some other baby). 

Whether the news is meant as another nudge about Agnès' own duty to provide more grandchildren is left mostly unexamined for a while; more importantly, we learn that Agnès now lives in Pennsylvania and married a nice man, Earl, who cannot father children but who makes Agnès happy anyway. As she observes, "People often forget that it is always a gamble to be a mother; I am not a gambler."

But long before that range of decisions confronts her is her childhood in France with her bestie, who she maintains, kept her from being ordinary:

All the girls, other than me, wanted the same things: to own a pair of stockings so their legs would not look bare and childish in their humiliating ankle socks; to have the best notebooks to record song lyrics, those sickeningly sweet words of dreams and loves and hearts; to be praised by the teachers, but more importantly, to be admired and envied by one another; to catch the attention of the right boys. I would have been one of them had Fabienne not been in my life. What a tragedy that would have been, living an interchangeable life, looking for interchangeable excitements.

Agnés, by their 13th year, is still going to school but Fabienne has dropped out long ago, after Fabienne's mother died in childbirth, yet another victim of rural France's post-World-War-II deprivation and poverty. While Agnès continues her education, Fabienne works her father's meager land and tends goats and geese and other livestock. They mostly hang out in the evenings, in the local cemetery, where it's easier to look at the stars and where they never stop hoping to encounter ghosts.

Soon Fabienne gets it in her head that the two of them are going to write a book, and the very recently widowed postman, M. Devaux, is going to help them. He is crotchety and ugly and still very much bereaved but the kids pretty much bully him into being their editor and, eventually, helping them get it published. The stories, Agnès tells us, are all made up by Fabienne; Agnès is merely the amanuensis, frantically taking Fabienne's dictation until they have a collection of short stories they title Les Enfants Heureux (The Happy Children) with M. Devaux's bitter irony: all the children in Fabienne's fables die in them.

At Fabienne's insistence, only Agnès' name will appear on the cover, so when it comes time to bring the little peasant author to meet prospective publishers in Paris with M. Devaux, only Agnès is to go. Bidding good-bye to her parents and older brother, Jean (a survivor of a German POW camp, still stick-thin and bedridden since coming home), she boards a train for her big adventure but not without reminding us that Jean once took the same train away from their countryside and almost didn't come home. 

Happiness is very fleeting in The Book of Goose.

It was impossible not to think of Gloria from Bye Bye Blondie's own train rides into the capital. A generation later than Agnès, Gloria wound up seeing her artistic efforts taken away from her and exploited. Would the same be Agnès' fate?

Eh, not quite.

Before we know it, Les Enfants Heureux is a publishing sensation, Agnès a bright new star, and her book is translated into other languages, including English. Meanwhile, Fabienne has concocted their second book, a romance about a young woman and a postman, and has contrived to get the real postman, M. Devaux, banished from their lives. And in faraway England, our half-invented peasant prodigy has attracted the notice of a formidable woman who wants Agnès for her finishing school and I finally realize what all this has been reminding me of.

Agnès is every inch a Margaret Atwood heroine, attractive and capable in her own right but weak of personality, easily enthralled to a stronger will. Her life to this point has been lived almost entirely in subjection to Fabienne, whom she repeatedly refers to as her other self. Fabienne condescends to do all her thinking for her and patronizes her as someone who doesn't know how to make things happen. This dynamic is at the very core of most of Atwood's fiction and is a big part of why I have lost my taste for her. But this is not an Atwood novel, so I kept on going, wanting to see how far Fabienne could reach with a chunk of France and all of the English Channel between her and Agnès. Would she maintain control, or would she have to yield to Mrs. Townsend and Her School?

The last 20% or so of the novel, in which all of this should be wrapped up at least somewhat, does so, but does so in what feels like a rush. While we've lingered long on Agnès' year as a literary celebrity and finishing school student, her life between this year and the time of her "once again writing another book with Fabienne's (posthumous) help" is barely worth a mention as far as our narrator is concerned. She meets and marries Earl in a paragraph or two, for instance; her relationships with three other men (one imaginary and very interesting, admittedly) are drawn out across numerous chapters and allowed to complicate her situation, but Earl is simply her off-page Prince Charming and they are happily ever after I guess? Just Agnès and Earl and her flock of geese?

So if that sort of thing bothers you, this might not be your book. But if you're interested in a look at post-war life in rural France? Eh. What this book is mostly concerned with is Agnès and Fabienne and How They Made Themselves Real, which isn't going to be everybody's cup of re-used teabag-made tea. I still don't know how much I liked it, to be honest. I know I didn't hate it, but, again, eh.

Yasmina Khadra's DOUBLE BLANK (tr by Aubrey Botsford)

February from the French now takes me back to Algeria, back to crime fiction, back to Yasmina Khadra and his incredible detective-cum-novelist (not unlike Khadra himself), Inspector Brahmin Llob.

The murder that gets the plot going in this second Inspector Llob novel, Double Blank, the sequel to the amazing Morituri, is an arresting and perfect encapsulation of the relationship between the elite criminals of Algeria and the police who have to at least pretend are trying to keep those criminals in check. Not even a full day before he told Llob that "Our country needs neither prophets nor a president. It needs an exorcist," and implied that Llob should be that exorcist, former cop, diplomat and author Ben Ouda is found beheaded in his luxurious home. Ouda's headless corpse stands near a painting that belongs to the nation but has hung in his private residence for who-knows-how-long. His head has been stuffed in the bidet in the bathroom -- concealing a bomb meant to blow up whoever shows up to investigate the murder. 

Oh boy.

This time around, the good inspector is accompanied not only by his accustomed sidekick, the shell-shocked officer Lino, but by a shooting range instructor who has decided to return to fieldwork after realizing that too many of his former students have turned up dead. This new character, Ewegh Seddig, is a Touareg so massive that everybody calls him a dinosaur upon first meeting him (and I can only imagine him as played by Dave Bautista). They only get to do that once, however; if they do it again, they find out that his reflexes belie his size and his reflex is always to lash out with a face-re-arranging punch. If you're thinking that Ewegh is my new favorite character, gold star to you.

A second body, that of a well-known professor, is barely cold before Llob, Lino and Ewegh have a list of suspects to track down; there were eyewitnesses, and the murderers made zero effort to conceal their identities. Their incredible beards proclaim them as vicious fundamentalists; their lack of concealment proclaims as surely as did the head-bomb-in-the-bidet that they really and truly DGAF if the cops come after them, unless it is in that very special "come at me, bro" way in which a certain type of male seeks to solve any and all problems. Not too different from how Ewegh handles insults, I suppose? But I never claimed to be a morally consistent reader. And there's a bit of a difference between attempting to blow some functionaries into Jahannam and punching a smart-ass in the nose. Swing away, Ewegh.

Interestingly, this is the first instance that I can recall in which the translator of a sequel is not the same as the translator of the first book. David Herman did the honors for Morituri, where from here on out it's Aubrey Botsford translating Khadra's work from the French. With this in mind I kept an eye out for differences in prose style, etc, but never noticed any except for one thing that I don't really know is a translation issue or just a surprising turn of phrase in the original. It comes fairly early in Double Blank, when Llob, Lino and Ewegh are interviewing the owner of the getaway car and he looks disdainfully upon them and tells them "I'm so allergic to pigs that even the sight of bacon makes me throw up." Which just sent me off on a tangent that looks like it's going to take me a while to sort out but, isn't calling a cop a "pig" an even worse insult in an Islamic country than in more omnivorous parts of the world? Or is that slang just universal now? So far I'm turning up a doughnut hole on this but I'm probably going to keep digging.

While on the subject of translation, there is one annoying tendency I don't quite recall in the prior volume, and that's some weird ambiguities in compound sentences that left me having to read them several times to sort out who was doing what. For example, I had to ponder a moment over "I ask my colleague to let me take the wheel and then get lost." At first I thought the narrator, Llob, had simply had his companion, in this case Lino, move over to let Llob drive, and then Llob took some wrong turns or something, but no; later context revealed that in fact Llob was kicking Lino out of the car, and furthermore telling Lino to go away or "get lost." As I said, there are several bits like this, and I don't know if they are Khadra's fault or Botsford's.

Regardless, as rendered by both translators, Yasmina Khadra is one quotable motherfolklore, each paragraph more searingly awesome than the last. Like, here's one of his many passages describing the psychic atmosphere of the city of Algiers and its casbah:

Here in this tangled web, resignation rises ceaseless and unconvinced, like a noxious dough. People don't expect anything anymore. With their feet in purgatory and their heads in limbo, their prayers are transformed into curses. The graffiti on the walls has the feel of epitaphs. Cobblestones raise bruises on the surface of the disgraced road. Doorways inject their shadows deep into men's minds. 

But lest you think this an entirely bleak read, I must hasten to assure you that he can be damned funny, too, in that deadpan way of all good gumshoes.

Meanwhile, the part about the crimes. Oh, the crimes. Because it's not just a string of brutal murders getting longer and more brutal all the time; Ben "Body #1" Ouda had recently lost a whole lot of money and was plotting some kind of baroque revenge against all the hotshot tycoons that watched from the sidelines as he did so.  Ouda's revenge was to be in the form of, what else, this is an Inspector Llob story, a book he was threatening to publish. Surely it was to be full of compromising information.

And a mysterious diskette was missing from his fancy safe.

The plot that is eventually uncovered is gigantic and audacious and certainly could never happen here, in the good old US of A, or now, in the 21st century. 

Except, oh, wait, it is. Or at least it's trying to. And, of course, has tried to before. Google the Business Plot sometime. Except, well, don't use Goog anymore. It'll waste your time. Just go straight to Wikipedia, or better, a good public library. 

Meanwhile, I find I am still in shock at how good this book was. And only 127 pages long. What are you doing? Go find you an Inspector Llob novel and let Yasmina Khadra scramble your brains without using a whisk. You'll be glad you did. Mostly.

Where will February from the French take me next? Watch this space, true believers. It will be somewhere they speak French, I'm pretty sure...

Virginie Despentes' BYE BYE BLONDIE (Tr Siân Reynolds)

"Every time I find a guy I really like, I drive him nuts and he chucks me out... You know the effect I have on guys: at first they love it that I'm in such a bad place, they always want to help. But if you overdo it, it's bad for the furniture."

Is there a Virginie Despentes Cinematic Universe out there in the ether? Or is it just a thing that happens in realistic literary fiction that a reader can 100% imagine an author's other characters showing up in the backgrounds of that author's other books. 

I can totally imagine Gloria*, the boozy, angry, messed up heroine of Bye Bye Blondie, who named herself for a song Patti Smith made ubiquitous, turning up at one of Vernon Subutex' al fresco Convergences, is what I'm saying.

She'd probably be the only one Bleach's Beats didn't work on, and thus constantly getting yelled at for slam dancing, though. 

Bye Bye Blondie is, of course, an earlier work than the trilogy that captured my crusty old heart a while back, but its heroine would fit right in with the huge cast of characters that populate the Vernon Subutex novels. She's the right age, for a start, and has the right sensibilities and the right proximity to, but inability to share in, success.** She's tough but loves deeply, abrasive but sentimental, drunk out of her mind a lot of the time and really kind of violent; when she first encounters her old boyfriend, Eric, she leaves the encounter wondering why she didn't punch him in the jaw. And it goes without saying that she has fantastic taste in music. She is, in short, exactly as the great Molly Crabapple drew her on simulated notebook paper for the American cover art, here. "Her life has few good points, except that she's used to it."

I really shouldn't like her, but I sure do. Though I wouldn't want her in my actual life, of course. I've got my own shit to deal with. And my medical bills are already insane. 

Anyway, Gloria is also, as the action gets going, in exactly the same situation as Vernon is at the beginning of his odyssey, though for different reasons. Vernon was long-term sponging off a friend who'd just died; Gloria made herself homeless one angry fit at a time, until she and her boyfriend, Lucas had their final fight and she, well, she kicked herself out more than Lucas kicking her out, but either way it is her violent craziness and her refusal to address it that have left her couch surfing in Nancy.

Enter Eric, who broke her heart years and years ago, now a big time TV presenter with TV looks and TV clothes and a TV chauffer stopping his car in the rain when he arrives on location in Nancy -- and spots Gloria stumbling down the street, not long after she finally stormed out of her latest ex-boyfriend Lucas' apartment for good. Eric is unaccountably delighted to see her and urges her to meet up with him for a drink later that night, when he's done with work. Mostly just to get rid of him, she kind of half-assedly agrees and even tells him about her preferred dive bar where everybody knows her nom de guerre (as in "Gloria" [G-L-O-R-I-A] is not the name her parents gave her), towards which he was preventing her from heading by keeping her standing with him in the rain. I might wish I'd punched him, too.

Auspicious beginning for a grand romance, no?

In different ways, both of them would eventually realize what a very poor preparation punk rock had been for later life. Too much fun, too much utopianism. Getting back into reality wouldn't be a pleasant experience. 

Of course, this isn't the beginning, exactly. No. Gloria and Eric originally met when Gloria was just 15 years old (and he was around that age, too, presumably) when they were both involuntarily committed, she by her parents, he by the authorities who picked him up as a vagrant while his parents were off on unspecified exotic travels, to a mental institution, there to be locked up against their will for many weeks with a motley assortment of ugly, gross old people (aged 30 - 50. You know, ancient, decrepit, how are they still alive?) with real problems except they seem mostly to boil down to refusals to grow up, according to Gloria? Gazing askance at them all at the mature age of 15? Anyway, Erik is young like her, and while kind of camp and effeminate, good looking enough to sleep with, except she doesn't get around to that until later in life. No, his parents come for him a good month and change before Gloria's come for her, and they exchanged letters! On paper with envelopes and stamps! Remember those? Plus he sent his "Blondie" cassettes to listen to on the walkman he left her after hers got confiscated (she was listening to Motörhead too loudly, according to another inmate) in which he smuggled small amounts of marijuana, because of course he did, this was young love in the 1980s, baby!

My mom is probably reading this and raising her eyebrows right now, but dude, we lived in the middle of nowhere and the cops actually did their jobs back then. Nobody was going to go to all the effort it took to get drugs into the Upper North Platte River Valley of Wyoming and then share them with someone as uncool as the book nerd speech kid cop's daughter. They just called me Narc and shoved me back into my locker. I was perfectly safe. As long as the janitor was still around to let me out, but that wasn't anybody's worry but mine was it? Ptoo!

But oh, didn't I wish I could hang out with people like Gloria back then. I would have been her pen pal while she was in the hospital and everything. I would have sent her all the Cure tapes I could find. Sigh.

Adult Gloria is a rather less appealing friendship prospect, though, as she let her heartbreak over Eric stop her from developing much beyond her angry little punkette phase. At 35 or so she is on public assistance, a confirmed day drinker, not quite as pretty as she was as a teen and lets her most violent impulses run unchecked. If she's not a danger to others, she's a danger to herself if there's no one around to beat up. She's had a string of terrible love affairs that always end badly and violently, and her best friend is an older heroin junkie named Michel who just laughs at her when she loses her temper. 

Into this paradisical existence comes Eric, who does indeed show up at her bar and, even though she left it hours before, sticks around in the hopes that she'll come back, meanwhile charming the socks off of all her crummy bummy drinking buddies who are falling all over themselves at the chance to be in the same room as a real live TV star. Their opinion of Gloria is changed forever when they learn that Eric considers her the One That Got Away and also the Love Of His Life!

Eventually, of course, the two reunite and whether it's true love or just neither of them has the strength of will to avoid making the same mistake twice, they get a kind of second chance. But this time, if things go wrong, they can't blame parents or prejudice or anything but their own deeply flawed characters. A kind of romance does indeed develop, but Gloria is still Gloria. If it succeeds, it will be in spite of rather than because of this fact, looks like.

Me, I think if I ran into 35 year old Gloria, I'd squeak and run. But I'd probably still love her from afar. Very afar. So afar. Just like I know I'd never be cool enough to hang with her author, who, also a filmmaker, made a film of Bye Bye Blondie recast as a lesbian love story that I'm gonna have to hunt down sometime. But I know there's no way I'd survive an encounter with Blondie. Bye!

*Who is almost exactly my age, and I'll probably never get used to that, having been raised, first,  on the classic literary Dead White Male canon and second, on the 20th century Boomer Narcissist canon. It's like I barely have room in my head for a woman who's anything like me. I have to shove Rabbit and Garp and David Copperfield and Jean Valjean aside to make room for a literary figure who, while both way cooler and way more fucked up than I am, has shared my actual progress through the world so closely. And I'm still a privileged American white woman! It must be so much weirder, but also even more refreshing, for actual demographic minorities to encounter their own Glorias.

**She even has dealings with an unnamed producer type who could very well be a younger Larry Dope from Vernon Subutex, and at one point she and Eric wash up outside a record store in Paris that could easily be Revolver before Vernon was old enough to buy it and run it into the ground.

Marie Ndiaye's THE CHEFFE: A COOK'S NOVEL (Tr Jordan Stump, Narr Edoardo Ballerini)

Cuisine is an art form that still resists duplication. A painting can be made into prints, as can a film; a book can be re-printed in a variety of formats but still with that original text. A recorded performance can outlive its performer(s). But a culinary artist's specialty? That can barely be approximated, a recipe published, yes, but is it the same when someone else, following mere written instructions that only poorly communicate the scents, sounds and colors occurring in the process, attempts to make it? Or if the chef/cheffe has to make it AGAIN long after he or she has grown tired of doing so, for, in order for a new person to experience this art, the artist has to create it all over again from scratch. Imagine Leonardo da Vinci having to paint that famous smile anew every time someone wanted to see it!

Then, too, there is a huge chasm between the appreciators, fans, of great or even just good, cooking, and those of any other art form. Only perhaps aficionados of pornography feel the same tinge of shame that lovers of food for its own sake either actually feel or know they are expected to feel; gluttony and lust are both among the seven deadly sins, after all. And making a meal for someone is perhaps as intimate as titillating them sexually, for in the realm of the art of cooking it's pleasure and not mere consumption of calories to sustain life, that is the object of the preparation and consumption of food. 

Which is all to say that the life of the woman known only as The Cheffe* in Marie Ndiaye's novel is more fraught with ethical and moral issues than it is with the kind of cutthroat competition and tests of skill and endurance that we more usually associate with the restaurant business, with the professional kitchen. Anthony Bourdain: The Novel this ain't. Though it has glimpses, perhaps, of Michael Pollan: The Novel. If Pollan had a creepy stalker trying to stage-manage his life from behind the scenes.

We learn of the Cheffe's childhood poverty and unpleasant early education, all the steps of her rise to prominence as that rare thing, a female chef in France, through the unctuous narration of one of her assistants, a man who would gladly have been her lover had she any interest in such a thing,  and whose feverish idolization seeks a kind of possession of her anyway. He claims to be the only person who ever really understood her at all, to have known her better than anyone else ever did, but of course it's the Cheffe emulation that lives in his head that he tells us about, even as he expresses complaints on her behalf about how misunderstood she was. Voiced by actor Edoardo Ballerini doing his best Jeffrey Coombs impersonation, his every word is fawning, admiring, exacting but also more than a little creepy. He's younger than his idol by quite a bit but there's still something Humbert Humbert-ish abouut him, though it's a Humbert who genuinely is, instead of just wants to believe so, the submissive in the relationship, as he constantly revels in her moral superiority to him, and of course her greater culinary gifts and her status as his employer. 

A bit comically, the narrator, who refuses to see a single flaw in the Cheffe, sees nothing but flaws in the one person who may know the Cheffe even better than he does: her daughter, who is almost exactly his age. 

The venom Ballerini imparts to descriptions, even casual mentions, of this daughter reaches levels of absurdity that perfectly complement the poetic adoration of his perfect goddess of a boss, only barely letting escape here and there any hint that maybe the daughter, whose greatest sin in his eyes is disloyalty to her divine mother, might have a story of her own to tell of the Cheffe that isn't quite so flattering.

Hilariously, he constantly accuses the Cheffe of speaking of her daughter with the exact same refusal to find fault that he uses to speak of her, never once noticing the blatant projection and hoping that we don't, either, always perfunctory apologizing for mentioning it and rushing to return to the subject of, not so much cooking itself as the sublime meditation and the moral universe in which good cooking can take place. He has no sooner stuck another knife into the idea of the daughter than he's off again expounding on the Cheffe's commitment never to waste ingredients or to disrespect either the animal a kitchen worker is dismemberment or the kitchen workers themselves.

The result is a bit of a stifling read, this account of an obsessed man obsessing about the object of his obsession, anxiously micro-managing our every impression or idea about what's going on, but it's still also such a glorious story of life and art and food that you keep reading, or listening, anyway. Truly, this is a book that will make you hungry, will tempt you to blow that diet you started in January while I was indulging in tamago sandos in Japan.

But we never get to enjoy the literary food porn for long before our narrator is yanking our attention away from the food like a stern host who is saving those dishes for more important visitors, even as he makes us doubt their existence; the Assistant goes down in my books with some of the all-time great unreliable narrators. By about a third of the way through the novel, his status as an unreliable narrator really starts to sink in; I found myself speculating that this whole story is a bit of slight-of-hand, meant to distract us (again I think of Humbert Humbert) from, perhaps, an actual crime or two,  and not just crimes of the heart on the part of our boy. Neither of the women of whom he so passionately speaks ever makes an actual appearance on stage, as it were. Both are just figures he manipulates as he tells the story, the one serenely engaging in various acts of creation and kindness in his memory, the other maligned and despicable in his present account. Is this really "a novel of cooking" or a heavily disguised confession? 

Have I just been reading too much crime fiction lately?

It would be interesting to someday read a counterpart to this novel that is more truly a character study of the Cheffe as she struggles for and wins her place in the still deeply sexist world of fine cuisine, with the tremendous pressure and discomfort of fame and being misunderstood through that fame, with the values of her dignified but bohemian parents who raised her in simple and, our narrator insists, strangely happy poverty but have no wish to benefit from her success. She overcomes these obstacles and more, but in this book we only see her indirectly, an elegant insect trapped in the amber of a dude's imagination. Which is maybe the whole point of this book. I bet Ndiaye herself has had a few guys like this narrator in her life. I think most of us have. 

Meanwhile, parts of the Assistant's strange post-Cheffe life have crept in. He seems to be sort of hiding out in a very posh retirement village he is technically too young to live in, spending wonderful days on various terraces in the kinds of endless parties that cannot but remind me of those in J.G. Ballard's High-Rise, a novel I did not expect to be thinking of in reading this book. A sub-plot involving an approaching visit to him by a suddenly announced daughter there becomes so prominent in the last quarter or so of the book that it starts all but breaking up paragraphs about the Cheffe without really seeming like it's ever going to have anything to do with the title character. Many reviewers have complained about all of this as an annoying distraction, a diminishment of quality on the part of critical darling Ndiaye, but if one understands that this is the story, not of the Cheffe but of another's hijacking of her legacy, all of this material snaps into place. The Assistant confides to us that he's never told his new friends and neighbors that he had a modest culinary career in the shadow of greatness and gloats over the pleasure he takes in being always given their own inferior efforts in that direction to try and how their condescending assumptions about his uneducated palate (more projection on his part, of course) amuse him. It all leads us further into the labyrinth of his telling of the Cheffe and her life as we wonder not only what became of her beyond those quiet late nights with him in the kitchen of her famous restaurant (a fait accompli from The Cheffe's earliest pages so this is not a spoiler), but how he came to retire so early and in such splendor. 

This is my second Marie Ndiaye novel, and my first read for my follow up to January in Japan, February from the French (I'm focusing not merely on novels from the nation of France, but from throughout the French-speaking world, so I couldn't call it February in France). If my public library were quicker about buying stuff I request, or I were more in funds, I would be in great danger of just letting this turn into Marie Ndiaye Month. It's a bummer that I can't. But I console myself that I've got some Virginie Despentes and Yasmina Khadra and Balzac and Collette and more on the pile. It should be a pretty great month here at Kate of Mind!