Author Archives: Melissa Beck

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About Melissa Beck

My reading choices are rather eclectic. I enjoy reading a wide range of books especially classics, literature in translation, history, philosophy, travel writing and poetry. I especially like to support small, literary presses.
September 16, 2015 · 12:00 am

Review: The 6:41 to Paris by Jean-Philippe Blondel

Today I welcome France Book Tours back to the blog with an intriguing literary novel from New Vessel Press.  This novel was originally written and published in French and this English translation has been done by Alison Anderson. Scroll down to the end of the review to enter to win your own copy and to look at all of the stops on the book tour.

My Review:
641 to ParisCécile is a stylish and confident forty-seven year old entrepreneur who owns a successful cosmetics company, has been married for twenty years and has a teenage daughter.  When the book opens, she has just visited her elderly parents for the weekend and is about to take the 6:41 a.m. train back to her home in Paris.  As her parents age, her weekend visits to their home are becoming harder for her and more depressing.  The only thing that Cécile wants to do on the train is to relax and have a few hours of peace and quiet.  But when she realizes who sits down next to her on the train, her commute back home is anything but restful.

Philippe Leduc is also forty-seven but time has not been as kind to his physique as it has to Cécile.  Philippe is divorced and his teenage children pretty much want nothing to do with him and he has a monotonous job selling televisions in a big box chain store.  He is also on the 6:41 a.m. train to Paris but for a very different reason than Cécile.  Philippe’s childhood friend is dying of cancer and Philippe is on his way to the hospital in Paris to say his final goodbyes.  Philippe also assumes that his train ride will be quiet, until he realize that the only seat left on the train is the one next to his ex-girlfriend, Cécile.

Philippe and Cécile had a four month relationship when they were in their early twenties.  They were both very different people at the time: Philippe was the most popular boy in school, handsome, and very popular; Cécile was plain looking, shy and did not have many friends.  They immediately recognize one another on the train, but neither one of them has the courage to speak up and acknowledge one other’s presence.  They each sit in silence and contemplate the disaster that was their short-lived romantic relationship that ended more than twenty years ago.

While they were dating, the relationship, for the most part, seemed fine but Cécile always had the feeling that Philippe was better than her and that he would inevitably dump her for someone better.  They go on a trip to London together which ends up being an awful memory for both of them because it is on this very trip that Philippe decides to end the relationship in the worst possible way.  What is interesting about the end of their affair is the effect it has on each of them.  Cécile decides she will never again be made to feel inferior and will not be treated so badly by anyone.  Philippe, on the other hand, knows that he has behaved in a very mean and churlish way towards Cécile and this eats away as his pride and confidence.  He is never able to recover from the guilt of this bad breakup and never has a successful relationship after his time with Cécile.

The ending to this book is very interesting as the author builds up to the conclusion.  We are left wondering if Cécile and Philippe will ever speak with each other; and if they do have a conversation will it be amicable?  New Vessel Press has provided us with another entertaining translation of a charming French book.

About The Author/Translator:

Jean-Philippe Blondel was born in 1964 in Troyes, France where he lives as an author and English teacher.  His novel The 6:41 to Paris has been a bestseller in both France and Germany.

Alison Anderson is a novelist and translator of literature from French. Among the authors she has translated are JMG Le Clézio, Christian Bobin, Muriel Barbery and Amélie Nothomb. She has lived in Northern California and currently lives in a village in Switzerland.

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Giveaway:

You can enter the global giveaway here or on any other book blogs participating in this tour. Be sure to follow each participant on Twitter/Facebook, they are listed in the entry form below. This giveaway is open to US residents only. Five participants will each win an ARC print copy of this book.

Enter here

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September 14, 2015 · 1:20 pm

Review: To Bed with Grand Music by Marghanita Laski

I am so delighted that it is finally fall and the temperatures are getting cooler and the NFL season has begun here in the U.S.  I am a huge New York Giants fan and I am hoping for a stellar year.  Speaking of sports, this is another interesting Persephone title, the plot of which involves a woman using sex as a game while her husband is away at war.

My Review:
To BedI thought that the first scene in this book was quite shocking, but as it turns out the subject matter of the entire book is rather bold.  Deborah is in bed with her husband, Graham, who is about to leave for the middle east where he will be stationed during World War II.  Graham informs her that there is no way he can be expected to be faithful to her for the duration of the war.  Graham also gives Deborah permission to have a dalliance of her own since he will be away for so long.  I couldn’t decide what was more shocking: his declaration of intended unfaithfulness or his suggestion that his wife have an affair as well.

Deborah is the type of woman who needs a man to complete her identity.  When she is left alone with her three-year-old son and her housekeeper she thinks she will go crazy from the boredom and the monotony.  Deborah’s mother suggests that she get a job to help pass the time until the war is over.  Deborah eventually finds a job in London as a clerk and it is also in London that she has her first indiscretion with a man.  The first one night stand disgusts her and she runs off in shame, but she quickly changes her mind and her attitude towards having extramarital affairs.

Deborah eventually comes to the conclusion that it is acceptable to have lovers while her husband is gone so that she isn’t lonely.  The first prolonged affair that she has is with an officer named Joe who lavishes attention on Deborah and even gets along well with her son.  When Joe is sent to the frontlines Deborah takes on yet another lover.

The rest of the novel is an account of Deborah’s string of lovers.  Some of the book is very funny, especially when she finds ridiculous reasons to dump one man and move on to the next.  One of her lovers gets along very well with Deborah’s mother and Deborah is extremely irked by this.  So she casts him off and moves on to the next soldier.  Many of Deborah’s lovers provide her with lavish gifts, jewelry, expense differs and clothes.  Deborah is not a sympathetic characters since she is taking advantage of the situation of war to have a series of affairs which are all to her emotional and material benefit.

One part of the book that I found particularly sad is the fact that Deborah cannot bring herself to move back home and take care of her son.  The little boy craves his mother’s attention and the scenes in which she leaves him to go off to London with one of her many lovers is pathetic.  The boy becomes more and more attached to his nanny and we wonder whether or not his mother’s abandonment will have a lasting effect on his life.

This is a very interesting book to compare to Laski’s other World War II title, Little Boy Lost.  Both books bring up a very different side of the war that are somewhat controversial.  And children do not fair well in the lives of adults in either book.  If I found the subject matter of this book bold then I wonder what the reaction to it was in 1946 when it was originally published.

About The Author:
M LaskiEnglish journalist, radio panelist, and novelist: she also wrote literary biography, plays, and short stories.

Lanksi was to a prominent family of Jewish intellectuals: Neville Laski was her father, Moses Gaster her grandfather, and socialist thinker Harold Laski her uncle. She was educated at Lady Barn House School and St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith. After a stint in fashion, she read English at Oxford, then married publisher John Howard, and worked in journalism. She began writing once her son and daughter were born.

A well-known critic as well as a novelist, she wrote books on Jane Austen and George Eliot. Ecstasy (1962) explored intense experiences, and Everyday Ecstasy (1974) their social effects. Her distinctive voice was often heard on the radio on The Brains Trust and The Critics; and she submitted a large number of illustrative quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary.

An avowed atheist, she was also a keen supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Her play, The Offshore Island, is about nuclear warfare.

 

 

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September 10, 2015 · 2:09 pm

Review: Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman

My Review:
Call me By Your nameThe twenty-four year old university student named Oliver who is one of the two main characters in this intense novel is writing a manuscript about the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.  I took a Pre-Socratic seminar in graduate school and translated some of Heraclitus’ fragments which, to say the least, are mind boggling.  Even in antiquity he was known as Heraclitus “the obscure.”  Heraclitus could not be a more fitting author with which to compare the emotional turmoil, upheaval and even confusion that both Oliver and Elio share in this book.

Elio is a shy seventeen-year-old who is interested in music and literature.  He spends all of his summers at his parents’ villa on the Italian Riviera; and each summer Elio’s father, a university professor, invites a young scholar to come and live with the family for six weeks as a type of mentorship.  There have been a string of writers and house guests for Elio’s entire life, but this particular summer becomes unforgettable and life changing as soon as Oliver steps out of the cab and greets Elio.

The author is a genius at describing, in beautiful and intense prose, the initial resistance between lovers when the first stages of attraction are felt.  Elio finds that he cannot stop thinking about Oliver, he craves Oliver’s attention and wants Oliver’s approval in all he does.  When Oliver is not around the house and when Oliver is not in a talkative mood then Elio feels like he has had a bad day.  We have all had these experiences where our mood and our happiness are dependent on the small scraps of attention we may or may not receive from the one with whom we are in love.

One of the most significant and symbolic scenes in the book is when, after they play a tennis match together,  Oliver puts his arm around Elio and Elio at first leans into his embrace but then feels embarrassed and shrugs Oliver off.  Throughout the first part of the book Elio and Oliver repeat the scenario of this embrace by coming close to having a physical relationship but then resisting and pulling away from each other.

One of my favorite fragments of Heraclitus is one that is attributed to him by Plato (Cratylus 402A): “Heraclitus, you know, says that everything moves on and that nothing is at rest; and, comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says that you could not step into the same river twice.”  As Elio and Oliver finally confess their feelings to one another and fall into a very intense physical relationship they know that the six weeks at the Italian countryside can never be replicated again.  They meet again at Christmas and several years later when they are older but they can never recapture the physical and emotional intensity of their summer on the Riviera.

The mutability of life, identity, and sexuality are all highlighted in this book through Elio and Oliver’s relationship.  This is one of those books that is very difficult to describe fully and to do justice in a short review but I promise that it will bring out a variety of emotions in every reader.

I first discovered this book on my of my favorite blogs, roughghosts.  Joe has a beautiful review of this book (and many others) so please check out his site as well.

About The Author:
Andre AcimanAndré Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays. Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, has taught at Princeton and Bard and is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently chair of the Ph. D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers’ Institute at the Graduate Center.

Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. Aciman has published two other books: False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001), and a novel Call Me By Your Name (2007), which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the Lambda Literary Award for Men’s Fiction (2008). His forthcoming novel Eight White Nights (FSG) will be published on February 14, 2010

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September 8, 2015 · 12:32 pm

Review: The Man in a Hurry by Paul Morand

I received an advanced review copy of this title from Pushkin Press through Edelweiss.  This book was originally written and published in French in 1941 and this English translation has been done by Euan Cameron.

My Review:
The Man In A HurryPierre has been in a hurry for all of his life.  He does multiple tasks at a time in order to speed up his life.  He shaves, gets dressed and brushes his teeth simultaneously; he drives too fast and he takes stairs three and four at a time.  There is no task for which Pierre will slow down.  The parts of the book that describe his lightening fast lifestyle are humorous.  For example, there is an incident in which his car breaks down after an accident and instead of waiting for help, Pierre abandons the car with his friend in it and proceeds to his destination on foot.

But Pierre’s fast life has not allowed him to slow down and forge any true or lasting relationships.  His closest friend and partner, the one whom he abandons with his care, decides he has had enough and severs their business relationship.  His manservant who has worked for Pierre for many years is tired of being yelled at and almost run over by Pierre so he quits.  Pierre is essentially alone in his life until he meets Hedwige.

Hedwige, her two sisters and her mother are the opposite of Pierre.  Their favorite activity is lounging around on their mother’s bed; they are never in a hurry for anyone or anything.  When they meet Pierre they are amused by this quirky man and his swiftness.  Pierre is immediately attracted to Hedwige and proposes marriage.  But can the love of a good woman really slow Pierre down and make him appreciate his life?

When Hedwige marries Pierre, the most beautiful gift that he decides he can give her is to delay the conjugal relations on their wedding night.  Pierre arranges for separate bedrooms in their apartment and decides to wait six weeks to get to know Hedwige before he has sex with her.  What better gift can he possibly give her than his patience, especially when it comes to putting off one of the most basic human drives.

When Hedwige becomes pregnant, the old pull of always being in a hurry starts to draw Pierre back in.  How can he possibly wait for nine months to see his child?  Hedwige begins to find comfort again in her mother’s bedroom with her other sisters and she slowly shuts Pierre out.  The matter comes to an ugly head when Pierre wants Hedwige to induce labor when she is only seven months pregnant.

This book has a humorous side as we read all of the ridiculous things Pierre does to hurry up.  But there is also an important social commentary about appreciating what we have and living in the moment.  If we are always in a hurry and worrying about what is happening next then we don’t appreciate those who are most important to us.

About The Author:
Paul MorandPaul Morand was a French diplomat, novelist, playwright and poet, considered an early Modernist.

He was a graduate of the Paris Institute of Political Studies (better known as Sciences Po). During the pre-war period, he wrote many short books which are noted for their elegance of style, erudition, narrative concision, and for the author’s observation of the countries he visited combined with his middle-class views.

Morand’s reputation has been marred by his stance during the Second World War, when he collaborated with the Vichy regime and was a vocal anti-Semite. When the Second World War ended, Morand served as an ambassador in Bern, but his position was revoked and he lived in exile in Switzerland.

Post-war, he was a patron of the Hussards literary movement, which opposed Existentialism. Morand went on to become a member of the Académie française; his candidature was initially rejected by Charles de Gaulle, the only instance of a President ever exercising his right to veto electees to the academy. Morand was finally elected ten years later, though he still had to forgo the official investiture).

Paul Morand was a friend of Marcel Proust and has left valuable observations about him.

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September 3, 2015 · 12:02 pm

Review: Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski

My Review:
Little Boy LostIt’s about time that I reviewed another title from Persephone Books.  I haven’t found one yet that I didn’t like.  Although, I must admit, that I wasn’t sure if I would make it through this one because the beginning is so incredibly sad.

Hilary Wainwright returns to France after World War II in order to find his lost infant son.  He has only met his son once, on the day he was born, and so he has very little information to go on to track him down.  Hilary’s wife, Lisa, was living in Paris during the war and working for the resistance when the Nazis discovered her secret operations and arrested her.  Just before she is arrested, she passes off her baby to a family friend named Jean whom she hopes will be able to keep him safe.  But Jean is also arrested by the Nazis and she, too, has to relinquish the child before she is caught.  Jean’s fiancé, Pierre, is the only one who can help Hilary track down his son with the few clues that Jean left behind.

Hilary is so devastated by Lisa’s horrible and tragic death; she was the love of his life and his entire world and after the war he is not sure that he even wants to find his son.  To a lot of us this does not seem to make any sense.  Hilary’s son is a part of or an extension of his love with Lisa, but Hilary is afraid of more emotional turmoil if he fails to find his missing boy.  Hilary doesn’t want to open his heart again only to experience disappointment or hurt again.

Hilary’s search for his son leads him to an orphanage in a small town in France.  The scenes of the pathetic and abandoned children in the orphanage are heart wrenching.  When Hilary meets little Jean, the child whom they suspect is his son, Hilary is hesitant to become attached to the child for fear that he will experience another crippling emotional loss.   Hilary notices that Jean does not have any gloves and so he buys him a small pair of red gloves.  This is one of the most emotional scenes in the book because, although the gloves are too small for Jean, he insists on keeping them because he has never had such a nice gift before.

The end of the book deals with Hilary’s decision on whether or not to accept this son as his own.  For a while he even distracts himself from making a decision by entertaining a floozy he meets at his hotel.  The boy resembles Jean in a cursory way and we have to remember that there aren’t any DNA tests in the 1940’s.  Jean seems to want an obvious sign from the heavens pointing to the fact that this is his son.  It was my wish, though, that regardless of whether or not Jean was his biological son, that he would take pity on this small, abandoned boy anyway and decide it was worth opening up his heart again.

About The Author:
M LaskiEnglish journalist, radio panelist, and novelist: she also wrote literary biography, plays, and short stories.

Lanksi was to a prominent family of Jewish intellectuals: Neville Laski was her father, Moses Gaster her grandfather, and socialist thinker Harold Laski her uncle. She was educated at Lady Barn House School and St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith. After a stint in fashion, she read English at Oxford, then married publisher John Howard, and worked in journalism. She began writing once her son and daughter were born.

A well-known critic as well as a novelist, she wrote books on Jane Austen and George Eliot. Ecstasy (1962) explored intense experiences, and Everyday Ecstasy (1974) their social effects. Her distinctive voice was often heard on the radio on The Brains Trust and The Critics; and she submitted a large number of illustrative quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary.

An avowed atheist, she was also a keen supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Her play, The Offshore Island, is about nuclear warfare.

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