The French Journal

This month's literary scandal: Houellebecq versus mama

Michel Houellebecq is one of the best-known, more notorious writers on the French scene, responsible for cynical, sex-filled novels like The Possibility of an Island andThe Elementary Particles. This latter book has a character which Houellebecq based on his mother, and he portrays her as an irresponsible flower child. Now Houellebecq's mother, Lucie Ceccaldi, 83, has "fired back," claiming that she was a hard-working woman (who nonetheless gave up the upbringing of her son to her mother-in-law). (TTC/AFP). Like most who follow this route, she says that going public to dispute her son's characterization is a way to reach out to him. Somehow, I don't think the tactic of telling the world that your son is a "liar" and a "parasite" will be the most effective way to bring about a reconciliation.

NYT Day #2: Bordeaux eats, Paris after midnight, lots of opera, Marie-Thérèse

Other items from the NYT:

• For the two people who read this blog and who have unlimited budgets and who will be spending time in Bordeaux in the near future, be sure to read Christine Muhlke's recap of high-end dining in the city. The rest of us without expense accounts may not find the article edifying. Featured are Restaurant Jean-Maire Amat, La Cape, La Grand'Vigne, Cordeillan-Bages, and Hostellerie de Plaisance. (Got to get myself one of these gigs.)
• If I'm reading Elaine Sciolino's article about Paris by Night correctly, after 1:00 AM your best options in the city are some elaborate noshing and a game of pool.
• A more-or-less forgotten survivor of the French Revolution is the subject of Susan Nagel's Marie-Thérèse, Child of Terror, subtitled "The Fate of Marie Antoinette's Daughter." (Apparently, Louis XVI is less of a draw and doesn't merit any up-front mention. Ah, the indignities continue!) The NYT review says that "while a biographer's impulse to empathize with her subject is commendable, Nagel's desire to humanize Marie-Thérèse leads her to make some unconvincing assumptions."
• To scope out the future of New York City Opera, music critic Anthony Tommasini has hied himself to Paree to check out productions overseen by Gerald Mortier, who will take over the NYCO next year. Reading between the lines, New Yorkers and opera aficionados should prepare themselves for non-traditional experiences after Mortier hits the town.

Book: Mistress of the Revolution

In New England, it's still too cold for beach reading, but maybe it's not too warm to curl up in front of the fire with a good, long read. A candidate for that activity is a new novel by first-timer Catherine Delors, Mistress of the Revolution. It tells of a young woman, first unhappily married and then the mistress of a nobleman, against the turbulence of the French Revolution. Early reviews indicate that the book is enriched by the wealth of historical detail that Delors, a Frenchwoman writing in English, provides, and there are special guest appearances by Thomas Jefferson and Robespierre, among other actual famous personages. The book's feature page on its publisher's site has a brief interview with Delors, a excerpt, and a reader's guide.

Old news from the IHT (and me): Heritage food, Saint-Exupéry, Poussin

The stories have been kickin' around for awhile, but these articles from The International Herald Tribune are fresh, and I haven't mentioned two of the subjects here, so for you enlightenment:

• Fossilizing French cuisine. Sarko has kicked off an effort to have French cuisine recognized a UNESCO World ...er...monument? Actually, it would be classified as an "intangible cultural heritage." Opponents suggest that the designation would officially indicate that French cuisine is ossified and irrelevant.
• Who killed the Little Prince? The circumstance behind the disappearance of writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on a flight during World War II is one of aviation's great mysteries. Recent discoveries, however, have helped to pinpoint the site where Saint-Exupéry's plane crash, and a German man and former pilot has proclaimed, with great sorrow, that he was the one who shot down the writer.
• Poussin, continued. I wrote my modest appreciation last month about an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York of works by Nicolas Poussin. An expert's review of the "gripping" paintings is now available.

Books: Madame de Staël

My thirst for reading some French history led me to Maria Fairweather's recent (2005) biography of Madame de Staël. What a woman! What a life! Alive during the time of the French Revolution and Napoleon's reign, de Staël was like the Susan Sontag of her time, composing intellectually challenging treatises, novels, and plays, but she was also more than that. The daughter of Jacques Necker, perhaps the most important governmental finance expert of the times, de Staël had access to wealth, a fascination with politics, and an expansive personality that drew the most important people in Europe to her salons. She wasn't a beautiful woman, and her arranged marriage was loveless, but she carried on a series of passionate affairs, sometimes several at once; her conquests included Benjamin Constant and a devoted boy-toy lover near the end of her life. Her influence was so consequential that Napoleon, who hated powerful women, banned her from Paris, an injunction that she nonetheless repeatedly appealed and challenged; she was not one to take "no" for an answer, even if it came from the emperor. It is no small praise to say that Fairweather's book does justice to de Staël's life.

Linguality and me: First impressions

One of my favorite Christmas gifts last year was a membership in Linguality, a book club which features recent works in French annotated with vocabulary lists to assist with translating. Here are some first impressions.

I'm a finicky reader, and in a normal year I read between 30 and 40 books, not nearly enough. I usually discourage friends from buying books for me -- unless I've mentioned a title -- because my reading time is so precious that I want to spend it on items that interest me. I'm fond of nineteenth century fiction, books about France, good modern fiction like Anne Enright's The Gathering, a few mystery writers, books about movies, and an occasional wild card. I enjoy long reads.

I offer this background because anyone who joins Linguality puts his or her trust in the tastes of the editors, unlike, let's say, The Book of the Month Club, where there's a main selection but other options are possible. Perhaps, as Linguality's catalog grows, older titles will be offered as alternatives, but for now you must take what you are given.

Petite Anglaise x 5

One of the most successful of ex-pat bloggers is Catherine Sanderson, a.k.a. Petite Anglaise -- "success" in this case being defined as over 2-million hits and a book contract. British and in her thirties, Sanderson fell for Paris after her first visit, and moved there about a decade ago. She loved, lost, and loved again (with someone who commented on an entry); she also had a child and launched a successful lawsuit against an employer who fired her after finding out about her second career as a blogger. With the publication of her book, entitled -- logically -- Petite Anglaise, Sanderson gets the star treatment from The Guardian (U.K.):

• Rory McLean reviews the book, calling it "light, frank and tremendous fun."
• There's a slideshow narrated by Sanderson as she tours her adopted Belleville neighborhood. (I sighed, remembering my own climb up to the Parc de Belleville.)
• An accompanying article by Sanderson tells of her history and of her joy in Belleville.
• Her book is available for pre-order from Amazon, publication date in June in the US.
• Lastly, of course, there's the blog, which is a little heavy on information about publicity tours for the book these days. (I'd do the same thing.) In the meantime, it's fun to poke around in the archives.

Book: Historic Photos of Paris

It's been almost a year since my last visit to France, and I miss it. Knowing that there's no visit on the horizon accentuates the longing; writing about the darn place nearly every day doesn't help.

I had moments of relief while looking through a new coffee table book, Historic Photos of Paris, by Rebecca Schall. The dozens of pictures here are culled largely from the archives of the Rogers-Viollet Agency, one of the most extensive collections of its kind. Many of the shots, although beautiful, are of historic rather than artistic interest, but of interest nonetheless. Some pictures of major sites like the Place St. Germaine Auxerrois from a hundred years age are eerily pristine; others offer a sense of wonder, like a number of pictures from the Universal Exposition of 1889 which give you a sense of what a grand undertaking the event was. There are frightening shots of France during the Occupation.

Many familiar sites are given their due. Some of these photographs document how well the city has preserved its heritage, but others, such as one of the Rue Mouffetard (a favorite spot of mine) from the 1920's, show how much has changed. Schall is generous with her captions, giving each photograph an extensive explanation and a context, and there's often a note about the current state of a subject as well.

A short slide show of some shots from the book heads this post.

Rerun: My favorite Paris guidebooks

I've been to Paris five or six times in the past several years, but I still pack a small library whenever I travel there. Here are the guidebooks that I usually take with me.

• Walking Paris by Gilles Desmond has thirty walks in different areas of the city, each of which lasts about two hours. By now I've completed most of the walks, and they've added immeasurably to my enjoyment of Paris. I've poked around alleys, passages, little museums, parks, cemeteries, and more. For those of you who want to get away from the heavily traveled tourist routes, this is the one to get (although, to be frank, tourists are everywhere in Paris; it's just a matter of how many).

Walking Paris is overdue for an update; once or twice it may advise you to go someplace that's no longer accessible (there's usually an easy workaround). And it may not be the only guide you'll need for a first trip. Despite these qualifications, it's one that I treasure.

Books: Sempé offers little bits of France and Paris

For your coffee table are two new books by the renown and well-loved illustrator, Jean-Jacques Sempé. In A Little Bit of Paris, "Sempé illustrates the quirky charm of France's capital and it's* residents with his signature style and gentle sense of humor and irony."  In A Little Bit of France, "There are berets and bicycles; women sipping tea, roundish gentlemen at the sacred ritual of lunch, the splendid matriarchy, the humanity at the heart of French cities (Susan Salter Reynolds, Newsday)."

And for your walls, be aware that The New Yorker offers limited edition, signed prints of Sempé covers. (I put in that promotion as a public service: people come to this site looking for these things.)

*Error is reproduced from Rizzoli press material. I make so many mistakes that I should be the last one to throw stones. I should be...but I'm not.