Discourse on Voluntary Servitude by Etienne de La Boétie – highly recommended.
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude by Etienne de la Boétie (1546 or 1548) Original French title : Discours de la Servitude volontaire.
I have a project regarding 18th century literature this year and I thought I ought to read Discourse on Voluntary Servitude by Etienne de La Boétie as a preamble. I had the intuition – or I had read it somewhere before and retained the information – that it would be a good introduction. I was right.
When I hear “Etienne de La Boétie”, my first thought is that he was best friend with Montaigne. Indeed, we owe Montaigne for the Discourse as he had a copy of La Boétie’s essay and ensured it wouldn’t get lost after his friend’s untimely death. It used to be published as an appendix to Montaigne’s Essais. Both Montaigne and La Boétie studied law in an excellent university and practiced law in official positions.
My edition of the Discourse is aimed at students of “classes préparatoires littéraires”, ie students who study literature, philosophy, Latin and Greek to enter into prestigious schools dedicated to “humanities”. It comes with an educational introduction by Simone Goyard-Fabre, with a bio of La Boétie, the history of the publication of the Discourse and its analysis in modern language.
This is what La Boétie wants to study in his essay (don’t forget he was 18 when he wrote it!)
| Pour ce coup, je ne voudrais sinon entendre comme il se peut faire que tant d’hommes, tant de bourgs, tant de villes, tant de nations endurent quelquefois un tyran seul, qui n’a puissance que celle qu’ils lui donnent ; qui n’a pouvoir de leur nuire, sinon qu’ils ont pouvoir de l’endurer ; qui ne saurait leur faire mal aucun, sinon lorsqu’ils aiment mieux le souffrir que lui contredire. | For the present I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. |
There is a lot of material in a thirty pages essay. La Boétie is a humanist. He believes that human nature prefers liberty but that the people is under the yoke of a servitude they do not shake because they are used to it. The way to dispel this misfortune is to develop critical thinking and through education.
Another cause of the servitude of the people is the deviance of the monarch. (La Boétie doesn’t want to replace monarchy by a republic.) A king should consider he’s in office because his people has given him the power to rule the country. He ought to remember it and act accordingly. In La Boétie’s vision, the people has the right to give power to a government but also to take it back. The king shall act as depository of this power and not as a master. Tyrants run countries as masters. They use force instead of legal paths. They also use religious props to justify their power.
Two centuries before the philosophers of the Enlightenment, La Boétie has the intuition of the social contract that is the basis of modern democracies. He urges the people to remember that they have the power to make a tyrant fall:
| Soyez résolus de ne servir plus, et vous voilà libres. Je ne veux pas que vous le poussiez ou l’ébranliez, mais seulement ne le soutenez plus, et vous le verrez, comme un grand colosse à qui on a dérobé sa base, de son poids même fondre en bas et se rompre. | Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces. |
He also describes the tyrant’s ways and how he stays in power. First, ensure you have a grip on the greedy ones and let them become your valets, for…
| Ce ne sont pas les bandes des gens à cheval, ce ne sont pas les compagnies des gens de pied, ce ne sont pas les armes qui défendent le tyran. On ne le croira pas du premier coup, mais certes il est vrai : ce sont toujours quatre ou cinq qui maintiennent le tyran, quatre ou cinq qui tiennent tout le pays en servage. Toujours il a été que cinq ou six ont eu l’oreille du tyran, et s’y sont approchés d’eux-mêmes, ou bien ont été appelés par lui, pour être les complices de ses cruautés, les compagnons de ses plaisirs, les maquereaux de ses voluptés, et communs aux biens de ses pilleries. | It is not the troops on horseback, it is not the companies afoot, it is not arms that defend the tyrant. This does not seem credible on first thought, but it is nevertheless true that there are only four or five who maintain the dictator, four or five who keep the country in bondage to him. Five or six have always had access to his ear, and have either gone to him of their own accord, or else have been summoned by him, to be accomplices in his cruelties, companions in his pleasures, panders to his lusts, and sharers in his plunders. |
No, it only takes a few billionaires to fund far-right parties to shake up a democracy or help a tyrant.
Second, do as Roman emperors used to do and entertain the people. Make sure they’re so entertained that their free will is MIA and they’ll support you. Willingly. Against their best interests.
| Les théâtres, les jeux, les farces, les spectacles, les gladiateurs, les bêtes étranges, les médailles, les tableaux et autres telles drogueries, c’étaient aux peuples anciens les appâts de la servitude, le prix de leur liberté, les outils de la tyrannie. Ce moyen, cette pratique, ces alléchements avaient les anciens tyrans pour endormir leurs sujets sous le joug. Ainsi les peuples, assotis, trouvent beaux ces passe-temps, amusés d’un vain plaisir, qui leur passait devant les yeux, s’accoutumaient à servir aussi niaisement, mais plus mal, que les petits enfants qui, pour voir les luisantes images des livres enluminés, apprennent à lire. | Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books. |
Let’s mull over the fascination of current tech moguls for Roman emperors and fear.
The history of publication of the Discourse in France shows that it was often used as a political prop. It was used as a justification to fight against the established power. The first ones were the Huguenots in the 1570s as they challenged the power of the King of France after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Then some revolutionaries like Marat used it to back up their wish for a Republic. The same happened in the 19th century are monarchist political currents were still strong. But La Boétie doesn’t condone violence and says :
| Il ne faut pas abuser du saint nom de liberté pour faire mauvaise entreprise. | The sacred name of Liberty must never be used to cover a false enterprise. |
I shall say the same about the sacred name of Freedom of Speech.
For La Boétie, political systems must be challenged in peace and from within, always in ways that are respectful of the law. It echoes with my previous billet about Dangerous Roads and the opposition between the Martin Luther King way and the Black Panthers way.
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is a masterpiece. La Boétie analyses the roots of tyranny and, based on his humanist vision of the human condition, explains that the people only lends the power to their ruler, that any government is accountable for their action and that the people are their worst enemy when they forget they are free beings and allow themselves to be under the yoke of a clique. Resistance is in the people’s power but must remain peaceful and legal to be effective.
It’s very modern. It was written almost 500 years ago and it’s still relevant. I don’t know yet if I find it comforting or disheartening. Each time I think “Have we learnt nothing from the past?”, I also remind myself that the human nature never changes and if it means we have a steady history of hurting each other, it also allows me to understand and find beauty in Ovid’s or Ronsard’s poetry. You can’t have one without the other.
For further reading in English, click here. I found a translation by Harry Kurz and an online version with an introduction and historical commentary. It’s only 26 pages long.
Third crime is the charm #18 : Québec, England, Japan, Tennessee and France
- The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny. (2009) French title: Révélations brutales.
- The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman (2021) French title: Le jeudi suivant.
- Guilt by Keigo Higashino (2021) French title: Le cygne et la chauve-souris. Translated by Sophie Refle
- Dangerous Road by Kris Nelscott (2000) French title: La route de tous les dangers. Translated by Luc Béranger.
- The mystery of the Code noir by Laurent Joffrain (2022) French title: L’énigme du Code noir.
I know that this series of crime fiction billets usually deal with three books but I have a growing backlog of billets, so I’m doing a five in one this time.
At Christmas I received a book by Louise Penny and it reminded me that it’d been a long time since my last Chief Inspector Gamache investigation. The next one in the series for me was The Brutal Telling, the fifth volume.
We’re in Three Pines again, a village in the part of Québec near Sherbrooke, near the Maine border. A body is found in Olivier and Gabri’s bistro in Three Pines. Nobody knows who he is but the police soon understands that he was killed somewhere else. But why drop him at the bistro? And what was Olivier doing in the woods?
The victim a hermit who lived in a cabin in the woods near Three Pines. The police still has no clue about his identity and doesn’t understand why he has so many antiques in his cabin. Chief Inspector Gamache and his team are on the case and know how to think out of the box to solve the case.
Penny goes beyond the mechanics of the investigation and dives into the psyche of her characters. The villagers are a mini-society with their qualities and flaws, the gossip and the help.
The Brutal Telling is an excellent crime fiction book. The plot is well tied and the author digs into greed as a driving force in humans. Louise Penny also leaves plenty of breathing room to think about art and its importance in our lives, what it brings us, what artists mean to us. There are several subplots that involve secondary characters, all interesting and sometimes thought-provoking.
This is high quality crime fiction with good psychological sides as Penny investigates the workings of the human soul besides writing suspenseful mysteries.
I suggested our Book Club that we read The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman in January. I thought it would be a candy read, pure pleasure and it didn’t disappoint.
I saw the film The Thursday Murder Club and read The Bullet That Missed. It reminded me of the Famous Five. The Man Who Died Twice was more about retired James Bonds than children solving crimes.
The blurb says “Elizabeth has received a letter from an old colleague, a man with whom she has a long history. He’s made a big mistake, and he needs her help. His story involves stolen diamonds, a violent mobster, and a very real threat to his life.” Elizabeth is a former MI5 agent and she enrolls her friends from the retirement home to find the diamonds.
I had so much fun reading this. Osman cooks the best sweet and sour cozy crimes. The mystery moves forward at a steady pace, the pages are filled with a good natured sense of humor and while this elderly crew of amateur sleuths do wonders at solving cases, Osman never lets us forget their age. They are old people with old people’s fears and vulnerabilities. It’s a lovely and entertaining read.
I’m too late for January in Japan hosted by Tony but I’m still on time for Japanese Literature Challenge #19 hosted by Dolce Bellezza. (Can you believe it’s the 19th edition?) I got Guilt by Keigo Higashino at Christmas, along with my subscription to Quais du Polar 2026. I’ve already read two books by him, The House Where I Once Died and Salvation of a Saint Guilt is the first book of a new series with detective Godai.
Shirashi Kensuké, a lawyer, is found dead in his car, murdered. Karuki Tatsurō confesses the crime along with another murder he committed in 1984. His son Kazuma has a hard time believing that his sweet dad murdered two people. Mirei, the victim’s daughter thinks that what Karuki reports about his interactions with her father sounds unlike the father she knew.
Godai and his partner Nakamachi are embarrassed too: they have an admission of guilt by a man who knows details about the murder that the police didn’t disclose. Only the murderer knew them and yet they have a hard time comforting his confession with material evidences.
Something doesn’t add up. Here again the plot is a little gem as the author leads us from an obvious case to a more complex story with roots in a crime that occurred 30 years ago. This, coupled with a neat style, was already enough to make of Guilt a good crime fiction book.
It becomes even more fascinating because we see glimpses of the criminal justice system of Japan. Mirei, the victim’s daughter, has to hire a lawyer to assist her and her mother as plaintiffs. I understand from the novel that the law changed rather recently but before that, the trial was only between the defendant and the State prosecutor. The victims were not part of the trial and had no access to the documentation of the case. They had no contact with the defendant, no opportunity to hear what they had to say to the jury. Seen from my French window, it’s weird.
Higashino also describes the impact of a father’s crime on their family. Kazumi’s employer doesn’t fire him after his father’s confession but they demote him. He knows he’ll have to live with this stain his whole life. Families of criminals become social pariahs.
Guilt combines an excellent crime plot with social commentary about the workings of the criminal justice and with musings about guilt, innocence, repentance and the side effects of crimes on the perpetrator’s family. Highly recommended.
Dangerous Road by Kris Nelscott is set from February to mid-April 1968 in Memphis, during the black sanitation workers strike up to the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Smokey Dalton is an unlicensed private investigator. He barely makes ends meet with his job. He’s known in the black community as a cool head and a free agent. He’s friends with the Reverend Henry Davis and gives a hand to no-violent civil right activists. But he’s not an activist himself.
He’s a good member of the community and at the moment, he worries about ten years old Jimmy who skips school, whose coat is too small and who doesn’t eat enough. His mother checked out, his brother Joe has let me down. So Smokey takes him to restaurants, picks him up at school and even gets him a new coat.
Smokey’s life change at the end of February 1968 when Laura Hathaway enters his office and tells him her mother left him 10000 dollars in her will. Laura Hathaway wants to know why her mother left him money, not to retain it but because she wants to understand.
Problem: Laura is a white young woman from Chicago, Smokey doesn’t know her or of her. And in 1960, he had already received the same amount from an undisclosed legacy. The two legacies are linked, he’s sure of it. He tells Laura they will probably unearth dirty secrets she might regret knowing. She decides to go on with the investigation.
At the same time, black associations organize marches and protests in Memphis in relation to the strike. Black Panthers militant want to go further than peaceful protests. Crowds are under manipulation. The town is a powder keg waiting to explode.
This is a wonderful book that mixes a search for two people’s identity, the resolution of the mystery of their pasts and information about the days leading to Martin Luther King’s assassination.
I didn’t read it on purpose for Black History Month or Read Indies, it just happened. I’m very tempted to read the next volume of the series right away and see what becomes of Smokey and Jimmy after the dramatic events and revelations of this month of April 1968.
This one is highly recommended, contrary to the next one, The mystery of the Code noir by Laurent Joffrin.
This is a new episode in the series created by Jean-François Parot featuring Nicolas Le Floch as a police investigator. This time, we’re in 1791, Louis XVI is in Paris and has not fled to Ravenne. Yet. So he’s still alive and the city is buzzing with revolutionary meetings and the implementation of new ways to run the country.
Among this chaos, the Comte de Fleuriau and the marquis de Fossais are killed and their bodies are mutilated. Le Floch investigates and discovers that they both own plantations in the Ile aux Vents (now Guadeloupe) and that the way they were killed is similar to some punishments of slaves according to the Code noir. The Code noir is decree defining the rules regarding slaves and plantations, written under Colbert during the reign of Louis XIV.
What did these two men do? Who wanted them dead in such a way?
Honestly, the plot idea is great but the execution is sluggish. Laurent Joffrin is a journalist, he knows how to write articles but not novels and certainly not historical crime fiction novels. I thought his style was poor and that Le Floch’s character grated on my nerves with his womanizing ways and his love of food and wine, like the caricature of a French Dom Juan.
Five books, all excellent except the last one. These five books show how diverse the genre can be and how rewarding it is to dive into a good crime fiction book. They are entertaining but also deal with societal, political and psychological issues. None of the five books mentioned is about serial killers, violence against women or feature graphic violence.
All the books above are a participation to the following project or challenges:
Hungarian Lit month at Winston’s Dad – some book recommandations
Somehow I missed the announcement that Stu at Winstonsdad is hosting Hungarian Lit Month in February. We’re already the 7th of the month, there’s not much time to read and write about Hungarian lit before the end of the month, at least for me, considering how little time I have for this blog.
I’m in though, I’m currently reading Relations by Zsigmond Móricz (1932), a book I bought a decade earlier while visiting Budapest. Check out my Literary Escapade in Budapest here. I also wrote a billet about my Hungarian bookshelf. Lucky me, Hungarian Lit Month also covers my Tame the TBR project since the book has been sitting on my shelf for so long.
I have a fondness for pre-WWII Hungarian Lit and here are suggestions for you to discover this country’s literature:
- A Child of Our Time by Ödön von Horváth. (1938) – chilling
- Oliver VII by Antal Szerb (1942) – a timely and timeless tale
- The Traveling Companion by Gyula Krúdy (1918) – translation tragedy
- The Charmed Life of Kázmér Rezeda by Gyula Krúdy (1933) – Budapest in 1913
- They Were Counted by Miklós Bánffy (1934)
- Colours and Years by Margit Kaffka. (1912)
- Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb (1937)
- The Adventures of Sindbad by Gyula Krúdy
- N.N. by Gyula Krúdy (1922) – translation tragedy
- Embers by Sándor Márai (1942)
- I denounce humanity by Frigyes Karinthy (1912-1929) – Translation Tragedy
- The Rebellious Wife by Zsigmond Móricz (1934) – Translation Tragedy.
- Anna Edes by Dezső Kosztolányi (1926) – Masters and servants
- The Confessions of a Bourgeois by Sándor Márai (1934) – Happy who like Ulysses has explored
- The Confessions of a Bourgeois by Sándor Márai. (1934) – about literature and writing
- The Golden Kite by Dezsö Kosztolányi (1925)
- Skylark by by Dezső Kosztolányi (1924) – Eleanor Rigby is Hungarian and lives in Normandy. Or in Vancouver ? – Very highly recommended
- The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb (1933) – I, János Bátky, Hungarian citizen, come face to face with Englishness, Welshness and Irishness – Very highly recommended
I have read a few post-WWII Hungarian books too:
- Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy. (1970)
- Fatelessness or Fateless by Imre Kertész (1975) – Very highly recommended
- Catsplay: A tragi-comedy in two acts by Istvan Örkény (1974)
- A Story of Loneliness by Milán Füst (1956)
There are a lot of Hungarian writers out there but also a lot of them aren’t available in translation. This is only a tiny list of books but I hope it’ll prompt you to read one of them.
Happy reading!
Theatre : War Does Not Have a Woman’s Face, a stage version of The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich – what an evening!
Last night at the theatre, we saw a stage version of Svetlana Alexievich’s book, The Unwomanly Face of War (1983). Here’s the blurb of the book:
This book is a confession, a document and a record of people’s memory. More than 200 women speak in it, describing how young girls, who dreamed of becoming brides, became soldiers in 1941. More than 500,000 Soviet women participated on a par with men in the Second World War, the most terrible war of the 20th century. Women not only rescued and bandaged the wounded but also fired a sniper’s rifle, blew up bridges, went reconnoitering and killed… They killed the enemy who, with unprecedented cruelty, had attacked their land, their homes and their children. Soviet writer of Belarussia, Svetlana Alexiyevich spent four years working on the book, visiting over 100 cities and towns, settlements and villages and recording the stories and reminiscences of women war veterans. The Soviet press called the book”a vivid reporting of events long past, which affected the destiny of the nation as a whole.” The most important thing about the book is not so much the front-line episodes as women’s heart-rending experiences in the war.
I haven’t read it but I knew this stage version would be good. It was made from book to play by Julie Deliquet, Julie André and Florence Seyvos and directed by Julie Deliquet. She had already directed Welfare, based on a documentary, a play we’d seen and loved.
When the public enters the theatre, as often the stage is already open – when did the curtain lift disappeared and why? – and this is the décor we see:
It’s a messy communal apartment somewhere in the Soviet Union. Then one by one, the actresses arrive on stage until the nine witnesses who will discuss their experience in the Soviet army during WWII are sitting on chairs. Then the actress playing Svetlana Alexievich arrives and explains to the public what kind of book she wants to write and why she’s been hunting the country high and low to find women who want to share their past and how she now receives spontaneous testimonies.
Then, she starts asking the first question: How did you feel when the war started and your life was uprooted? And from then on, the women talk, their stories bounce off each other, they bring their piece to the puzzle and draw a horrible picture of war and women at war.
They show the horrible conditions on the front, in an army who needed them but was not ready to have women as soldiers. No women uniforms. No sanitary pads. No protection against rapes. They talk about their harsh return at home, not seen as heroes but as bad mothers, abnormal women, war women. Not women men want to marry or ones mothers want as daughters-in-law. They explain why they remained silent and never told their story.
They talk about all the horrors they saw and had to live with, the difficult reconnection with their children when they came home, the guilt, the shame and also the indignation of being left aside in the grand celebration of the Soviet victory.
They came from various parts of the Soviet Union and experienced the war differently. The Ukrainian woman’s testimony was even more poignant because of the current Russian invasion of her country. They also had different positions in the army: stretcher-bearer, pilots, resistant fighters in occupied parts of the country like Belorussia, snipers or soldiers. They describe the humiliations that awaited them at home, private or public since Stalin didn’t trust them.
On stage, Julie André was Svetlana Alexievich. She co-wrote the text for the play and she was asking difficult questions, explaining her intent with collecting even the smallest details of their experience at war. She didn’t want to write a book about the war. She wanted to show the war at a woman’s level, as a person and also give a voice to all these forgotten heroines and leave a trace of their lives before they disappeared and their stories was wiped out of history for good.
This play was a masterpiece. I don’t say that really often but it left us speechless and the whole public did a standing ovation to the incredible actresses who embodied the voices of these women, who are probably dead by now but will live forever in Alexievich’s pages.
Their acting was perfect, interacting with each other very naturally and we didn’t have the impression they were telling a written text but truly discussing with each other, reminiscing, reliving their past in front of us. It felt like this session of discussion between these women was happening before our eyes. It felt spontaneous. I hope someone recorded this play for future broadcasting. It deserves a TV showing.
And it comes from the way this play was created. Julie Deliquet explains it in this interview. She built the group of actresses around her project and they worked together on the text and its stage adaptation. They absorbed the material of the book but also discussed their lives as women. Julie Deliquet says that the cast of who would play which character came late in the process, that they were all able to play any role.
This group is composed of Julie André, Astrid Bayiha, Evelyne Didi, Marina Keltchewsky, Odja Llorca, Marie Payen, Amandine Pudlo, Agnès Ramy, Blanche Ripoche and Hélène Viviès. They were all amazing and I bet they didn’t come out of this experience unscathed.
The making of this play, the implication of the actresses and the way the text is adapted to the stage is extremely powerful. It rights the wrong of the invisibility of the women’s participation in WWII in the Soviet army but it also reaches universality.
What they say about women during wars, how rapes become a war weapon and how cruelty towards women and children is seen as an act of war to intimidate the enemy is still valid today. It happens in wars around the globe, it happens in Ukraine now.
I haven’t read Alexievich’s book mostly because I shied away from its bleak content but now I want to, I even feel like I owe it to all these women and to the ones who are under the bombs now.
Something else: The French title of the book is La guerre n’a pas un visage de femme, which means, War does not have a woman’s face. It’s different from the Unwomanly Face of War, no? I checked out on google translate: the French title is the exact translation of the original title in Russian. I wonder why the English translation has such a title.
Two very different British novellas by David Lodge and Agnes Owens
- Home Truths by David Lodge (1999) French title : Les quatre vérités. Translated by Suzanne V. Mayoux.
- Bad Attitude by Agnes Owens (2003) Not available in French.
I have read several David Lodge who was very popular in France. The Campus Trilogy, The British Museum Is Falling Down, How Far Can You Go? and Deaf Sentence. All pre-blog, which means that the last one was more than fifteen years ago.
Home Truths was first a theatre play and David Lodge converted it into a novella. The protagonists are Adrian Ludlow, his wife Eleanor, their friend Sam Sharp and a tabloid journalist, Fanny Tarrant.
When the book opens, Sam is visiting his friends in Sussex where they live after years in London. Sam had agreed to an interview with Fanny Tarrant and she wrote a disparaging portrait of Sam as an ageing and untalented screen writer. He’s hurt, miffed and wants to get back to her.
Adrian wrote a promising debut novel and all his subsequent ones weren’t as good as the first. So he went into semi-retirement and now writes non-fiction little books. Fanny had also contacted him for an interview. He and Sam decide Adrian should do it and try to seek revenge for both of them.
Of course the plan backfires and the subtitle of the novella could be ‘karma is a bitch’.
To be honest, I was a little bored by another writer-character with a fragile ego and the underlying discussion about the comparative merits of literature, screenplays and trash journalism. Literature being the higher moral grounds and then things go down hill to newspapers articles. But since Lodge isn’t Houellebecq, the novella moves forward nicely, thanks to the author’s sense of humor and gift for a perfect ending.
The most interesting part was the afterword by the Lodge where he explained a bit of the writing process from play to novella. I’d say that Home Truths is a pleasant read and nothing more.
Pleasant isn’t a good adjective to describe Bad Attitudes by Agnes Owens. The novella is set in Glasgow among the working class. The Dawson family used to live at the Terrasse, a working class neighborhood that will be soon demolished. They have been relocated in a council flat and their teenage son Peter has a hard time with the move.
One of their former neighbor, Shanky Devine refuses to leave his house and blocks the demolition of the Terrasse tenement, at least until all legal paths against this project have led to a dead-end. Nearby Shanky are The Tinkers who are squatting an empty house promised to demolition.
Peter struggles with the new flat, his dog is not welcome, the downstairs neighbor, Mrs Webb complains about him all the time and the issues at home have not disappeared. He acts out.
The bad attitudes mentioned in the title apply to almost all the characters of this grim but well-written novella. Mrs Webb, the neighbor is vindictive and petty. Harry, Peter’s father, drinks his salary and is a mean drunk. Peter’s mother, Rita, intends her best but acts her worst. Councillot Healy trades his influence on flat attribution against sexual favors. Shanky and the Tinkers are quite violent and Peter keeps spending time with them instead of going to school. He learns the law of violent instead of English and mathematics.
The whole story is grim and violence is peaking out at every corner. This novella is also a social commentary. It shows how disruptive it is for people to leave their home and their neighbors to live somewhere else. By destroying the Terrace, however run down this housing could be, the council destroys memories and communities.
The book Bad Attitudes also includes another novella, Jen’s Party. Jen is thirteen, unpopular in school and turns fourteen soon. She lives with her timid and dull mother Maude and her flamboyant Aunt Belle. Her father is in prison.
Aunt Belle brings joy and chaos in to their home and makes promises she forgets to keep. She’s a shoplifter and a bit of a con artist. Belle declares that Jen need a birthday party. Much to Jen’s dismay, she bulldozes herself into the role of party planner and Jen starts worrying and hoping at the same time. She wants and doesn’t want this party and she’s wary of her aunt’s flimsy attitude.
Belle is not reliable and until the end, the reader wonders whether this party will take place, at which cost and who will take pleasure in it. Not sure Jen can survive the attention and the roller-coaster of emotions her aunt brings into her life. And Maude feels the same. But is Belle really a bad influence in their quotidian?
Jen’s Party isn’t as good as Bad Attitudes but it still centers around a working class family who struggles to make ends meet and keep their heads above water. Agnes Owens shows people who try to survive as best they can. For a better review about Bad Attitudes, check out Guy’s post here. Thanks Guy for sending this novella my way and I agree with you, readers who enjoy Beryl Bainbridge will probably like Agnes Owens too.
Reading plans for 2026: fun, knowledge and book buddies
Reading Plans !
January, brand new year, brand new reading plans. I’m always like a kid in a candy store when I’m in front of bookshelves. I want to read all the books at once but I can’t. So I’m making plans to read books from the TBR, to share books with friends and family, to focus on my own wishes and mix my reading plans with blogging events as much as I can. There’s still room for spontaneity, escapism and new books.
Reading With Séverine 2026
Great news for me, 2026 sees another year of Reading With Séverine, my sister-in-law. We’re having another year of reading books together and we picked books from various genres and different countries. Our logo is a picture of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Appalachians and it goes with our first book of the year, Cold Mountain. Here are the books we picked for our literary adventures:
Book Club
Our Book Club was in a slump in 2025 but the three founding members decided to revive it this year as we missed picking books, discussing them and most of us going out together at least once a month. Half of the books overlap my Reading with Séverine project, so, here are the additional books we chose:
I think that Charlotte Mandel is currently translating Proust, roman familial by Laure Murat. And I still don’t understand why Erri De Luca isn’t translated into English.
18th Century Mini-Project
I want to read books published in or related to the 18th century.
I have Autobiographical Stories by Voltaire, Persian Letters and An Anthology of The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu. I also have The River Guillotine, a historical novel by Antoine de Meaux set in Paris and Lyon during the French Revolution. That’s on the TBR today.
I hope I’m not too ambitious with this project, I’m not sure I’ll finish The Spirit of the Laws but I’ll try. It feels like a “back-to-basics” read much needed in 2026. Maybe I’ll get to Enlightenment Era fiction too. I’ve read some French ones like Candide, Manon Lescaut or The Dangerous Liaisons, seen and read several plays by Marivaux, but I’ve never read British novels from the time. Which one is the easiest to start with, btw?
Tame the TBR 2026
Last year, I read 61 books out of the TBR but since I bought new ones, it only decreased by 15 books. Project Tame the TBR is still on! It spurs me on reading books that have been lying around for a long time. I still want to read all the books I have, culling the TBR isn’t a way to decrease it. I just need a nudge to read these books. Sometimes blogging events help too.
These are the Tame the TBR 2026 books that do not overlap with aforementioned reading projects.
Great Canadian Reading Challenge
Jody at That Happy Reader hosts the Great Canadian Reading Challenge. The aim is to read at least 12 Canadian books. I already have 9 out of 12 on the TBR and I’ll finally read a book by Margaret Atwood.
It’ll be an excuse to read another Tremblay and maybe read new English-speaking Canadian authors. I know a lot more authors from Québec than from the other provinces. What can I say? I’m French. For us, Canada means Québec. So any idea besides the obvious (Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood) is welcome in the comments section.
Cloak & Dagger Reading Challenge
With all the crime fiction books I read every year, I thought it would be fun to join Carol and her Cloak and Dagger Reading Challenge.
I picked the Detective Level, which means 16-25 crime fiction books in 2026. Last year I read 27 of them, I think I can make it without trying too hard. After all, I’ve already read two.
Other blogging events.
I’ve already two books lined up for Karen & Simon’s Club 1961 in April: Heaven Has No Favorites by Erich Maria Remarque and Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginsburg. I received Guilt by Keigo Higsahino with my Quais du Polar subscription. I might have time to read it for Japanese Lit Challenge and January in Japan.
I know there will be other blogging events during the year and I love to participate. So, if you’re hosting an event, leave a comment with information about it. I’ll look it up and see if I’m interested in it.
The most important in all this: I’m going to have a lot of fun, I’ll explore new countries and learn about the world. All the while connecting with other book lovers and sharing about books online and in real life.
One Minus One by Ruth Doan Macdougall – an excellent novella set in New Hampshire.
One Minus One by Ruth Doan Macdougall. (1971) Not available in French.
I discovered One Minus One by Ruth Doan Macdougall via Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust and her rediscoveries. That’s how I also read The Girls From the Five Great Valleys by Elizabeth Savage and The Last Night at the Ritz also by Elizabeth Savage. (both recommended)
One Minus One is a novella told from the point of view of Emily, recently divorced from David. We’re in 1969 in New Hampshire. Emily and David were high school sweethearts, went to college together and got married very young. She’s now 32 and David left her for another woman, a fellow teacher at his school. Quite a banal story after all.
We follow Emily as she navigates her new life. She’s refused any kind of alimony from David and they have no children. They have no reason to see each other anymore. She was a stay-at-home wife, a would-be writer and she has now started her first year as an English teacher at a middle school. She doesn’t like it but it pays the bills.
Emily is lost and has a hard time living alone. She misses David very much and she has to face all kinds of material issues he used to take care of.
The novella has three parts, each corresponding to a step in her new life. She dates Warren for a while, moves in with Grace and KayKay, two other teachers from her school and later dates Cliff. While she befriends Grace and KayKay, Warren and Cliff are just buffers against crippling loneliness.
Each time she goes with the flow to avoid solitude. She’s grieving her marriage, her relationship with David, their good times and their complicity. She was blindsided by the divorce more because she put her head in the sand than anything else. The signs were there, she refused to see them. She’s still in love with David.
One Minus One equals zero. That’s how Emily feels now. She and David started dating when she was fifteen. She grew up with him, had all her firsts with him and she’s never been an adult without him. She was merged into him and she felt one with him. And now that he’s gone, she feels like a non-entity.
But she’s not helpless. After all, she has a job, she made new friends, she has an active social life and she goes out with other men. But she’s detached, as if all this was happening to someone else. Her soul seems bruised beyond repair, she’s the epitome of “emotionally unavailable”. She has possibilities to grow as a single woman but still feels a bit like a failure.
Emily is 32, we’re in 1969. She’s from the first generation of women who had access to oral contraception. A decade earlier and she’d have had children to take care of. She belongs to a transition generation, the one who moved from mandatory traditional roles to new possibilities, thanks to education and contraception. She is a bit torn between being a traditional wife and an independent woman. It’s also a time when couples settled down young, I chuckled when Cliff, 34, wonders if he’s not too old to be a dad now.
Macdougall wrote the beautiful portrait of a woman who needs to move on, to find out who she is, to stand on her own two feet without a male crutch and acknowledge that she’s stronger than she thinks she is. Emily’s sadness is so deep it oozes from the pages. I wanted her to get better.
This is an excellent novella, a good one to add to your TBR for the next blogging event about reading novellas. 😊I think it would appeal to readers who love Anne Tyler.
PS : ***spoiler alert*** After writing my billet, I read the discussion guide for this book (I kind of loathe them, tbh.) and I realized that readers are expected to feel less empathy than I did for Emily. I guess it’s because she refuses Cliff’s perfectly sound proposal and readers expect her to get back on the marriage wagon and learn to love Cliff since she likes him well enough. How is that fair to him? How will she not become a new “One” with Cliff instead of a “Two” in a well-adjusted partnership if she never becomes an adult of her own? It seems to me that she needs a room of her own for a while.
Most memorable reads of 2025 : my awards
It’s that time of year again! Time to look back on my 2025 reading adventures.
I had set personal goals, with projects like Tame the TBR, Reading with Séverine or the Gallmeister Challenge. They went well until the last quarter of the year where I couldn’t focus on the books from the list and let go. Tame the TBR and Reading With Séverine will resume in 2026.
I signed up for several book blogging events like Paris in July, WIT Month, Hundred Years Hence, German Lit Month, Non-fiction November, Novellas in November, the Club 1925 and 20 Books of Summer. I love these blogging events, digging into the TBR, interacting with others and seeing what others pick. Many thanks to the bloggers who spend time organizing them, they make our blogosphere brighter.
Without further ado, my rewards of the year.
Best Least Commented Billet
Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden is one of the least commented billets of the year. Please, reconsider. Not that my prose is that worth reading but Boyden’s definitely is.
His story celebrates friendship, sheds some light on two Cree young men in the madness of the WWI battlefields and tells the end of their traditional way-of-living and healing. Beautiful.
The author is Canadian, this book is a great pick for the Great Canadian Reading Challenge organized by Jodie at The Happy Reader.
Best Gallmeister Book
For once, it won’t be a book set in Montana or Wyoming but Two Old Women by Velma Wallis. It’s set among the Gwich’in Athabascan Indian tribe in Alaska. It’s a story of resilience and fight for a proper place in the tribe. And the bonus was great illustrations.
Best Novella
I read fourteen novellas, a genre I really enjoy and I admire the writers who embrace it.
My favorite one is One Minus One by Ruth Doan MacDougall, the poignant story of a freshly divorced Emily who tries to rebuild her life after her husband left her. Upcoming review.
Best Weird and Creepy
The competition for this prize is rather fierce between Body by Harry Crews, Coyote Song by Gabino Iglesias and Cobrastar by Thomas Bois. Yes I like crazy books.
In the end, Body is the weirdest and creepiest with its closed setting at a bodybuilding competition in Florida. Really, what could go wrong among a crowd of highly competitive bodybuilders locked up in a luxury hotel for a major championship when a family of hillbillies invades their space?
Best Non-Book post
Posts about reading, lists of books and challenges usually get a lot of response, at least according to my blog’s standards. I published fifteen billets that weren’t book reviews and your favorite one was Fifteen years of blogging : fifteen years of fun Thanks for reading these billets too.
Best Translation Tragedy
I read 26 books in French that are not translated into English and 9 books in English that aren’t available in French. Anglophone readers are definitely missing out because alas, Piergiorgio Pulixi has no publisher in the English speaking world. And sadly, French book lovers can’t read The English Teacher by R.K. Narayan.
Best Book-I-Want-To-Buy-To-All-My-Friends
My gift would be a bundle of Dalva by Jim Harrison and Seule la Terre est éternelle by François Busnel, his book about Jim Harrison. The two books belong together.
The problem is that most of my friends here have already read Dalva. That’s how famous Harrison is in France. So…if you haven’t read Dalva, just go for it.
Best Book in a Series
It’s hard to decide between Craig Johnson, C.J. Box and Jørn Lier Horst.
I think that Trophy Hunt by C.J. Box was the best one because it blended seamlessly Joe Pickett’s personal life, his professional struggles, an efficient plot and enlightening bits about the oil industry in Wyoming.
Best French Book
I tend to think that I don’t read a lot of French literature but guess what, I read twenty-eight French books, six of them being comics or graphic novels.
Of Mice and Men illustrated by Rebecca Dautremer is stunning, a piece of art that enhances Steinbeck’s beautiful tale. Graphic novel at its finest and no AI will ever be able to do what she does, no matter what the tech gurus want us to believe.
Best Book set in Montana and Wyoming
I’ve only read seven books set in Montana and Wyoming this year. My favorite one is As Cool As I Am by Pete Fromm. What can I say, I’m a fan of Pete Fromm.
To be honest, even if one third of the books I read were from the USA, I’m reluctant to pick one from the shelves, now. That’s how bad politics influence my reading these days. I know it’s not fair to the authors but the impulse to read books from other countries is strong. It’s irrational but powerful.
Best Norwegian Book
We had planned a trip to Norway and naturally, I read Norwegian books. Eleven. I really liked Berlin Poplars by Anne B. Ragde but the William Wisting crime fiction series by Jørn Lier Horst stands out. I read five during the year and I seldom read as many books by the same author within a few months like this. My husband got the Wisting bug too and I still have three on the shelf.
It was a Nordic year, since I also read four books from Denmark, Finland and Sweden.
Best Feminist Book
It wasn’t a goal I set out for the year but I read several books I consider feminist. The most obvious one is Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie but Benigna Machiavelli by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was excellent and is highly recommended. I loved Benigna’s energy, her reasoning and all the strength she puts into improving her life and helping her mother and sister.
Please don’t judge the book by its cover, I don’t understand where it comes from.
Most Overrated Book
I know that Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea won the Prix Goncourt and that a lot of readers loved it. I wasn’t blown over but at least this Goncourt was readable and it had its literary merits.
I didn’t love it but I understand why it was successful. I can’t say the same about The Midnight Library, its ratings baffle me.
Most painful to read.
As I Lay, Dying by William Faulkner. There’s no debate. It was terrible. Thank God, I had a bilingual edition. Everything was a struggle in this book: the style was literary and creative but difficult, the characters were awful and sad and the story was ugly. *shudders*
It was agonizing.
Best Non-fiction Book.
I read twelve non-fiction books, which is a lot for me. Some I abandoned, some were luminous and wise, some were stressful. I urge you to read Umberto Eco’s short essay, How to Spot a Fascist and maybe turn to Alain on Happiness by Alain to alleviate the tension you’ll feel after the Eco. .
This was my last award and as you can see, my reading was eclectic, in genres and in countries. I read books from twenty-one different countries, not something I planned but it’s where my love for books and stories took me.
This billet is also the opportunity to thank you all for reading my blog this last year. Many thanks to faithful readers and a renewed warm welcome to new subscribers.
I still love blogging, even if the years go by and I still don’t have as much time as I’d want to read, write, interact with other bloggers and participate to blogging events. I love reading your comments on my billets, so please, keep writing them even if I don’t answer right away. I always read them and respond to them at some point. Thanks for your patience.
I’m looking into my 2026 reading plans and I’ll tell you about them in another billet. Until then, happy reading!
Bonne année 2026! Happy New Year!
2025 is now over and I hope you had a nice New Year’s Eve, that it was as festive as you wanted it to be.
As you might know, I love going to the theatre and that’s where I spent my New Year’s Eve, watching the iconic French Christmas play, Le Père Noël est une ordure, ie Santa Claus Is a Scumbag. It’s hilarious and quirky.
I hope that, in the grand theatre of life, your 2026 personal play will be a comedy show and not a tragedy.
I wish you all a wonderful reading year and hope that you and your beloved ones will be safe and healthy. And…
Joyeux Noël 2025!
I wish you all a Joyeux Noël.
Nowadays, the way we celebrate Christmas is about family gatherings, good food, Christmas trees and decorations, silly Christmas movies and gifts. It’s a celebration of joy, the joy to be alive and together. Despite its commercial side, it’s still a time where we want peace and simple joys to prevail.
I’m not religious even if I was raised a Catholic but this year I’d like to go back to the basics of Christmas: the birth of Jesus, the beginning of Christianity and of the New Testament.
Let’s forget the religious side and consider Jesus as a civilian and an activist for a change.
We have a man who throws the merchants out of the temple for making money in a place of worship, whose main message is “Love one another”, who shows concern for the poor, the outcast. He promotes peace, inclusion and consideration for all human beings.
Let’s remember one thing: when political parties use religion as a political tool to be in power, what they do is not being religious, it’s co-branding a political agenda with religion to attract the masses and manipulate them as political wolves hidden in religious sheep –cheap?—clothing.
So, these politicians who claim that they are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and whatnot and do not behave in accordance to the principles of their religions are not religious, they’re politicians. And usually, those to claim to be religious only need a religious cover as bathroom freshener to hide the stink coming off their actual political agenda.
We common people must keep this in mind, separate genuine devout wheat who go the church, to the temple or the mosque from political chaff and act accordingly.
But back to the cheerful secular traditions of Christmas. If you speak French, I highly recommend this podcast La bûche de Noël, du rondin magique au dessert crémeux from the radio show Le cours de l’Histoire. It’s about the history of the bûche de Noël, a traditional Christmas dessert in France and it’s fascinating.
Either way enjoy the holiday.
I hope everything is as fine as can be in your corner of this chaotic world.
Third Crime is the Charm #17: Spain, Italy and North Carolina.
- Erased by Bernard Minier (2024) Not available in English . French title Les Effacées
- The Black Cats Bookshop by Piergiorgio Pulixi (2023) Not available in English. French title: La librairie des chats noirs. Translated by Anatole Pons-Reumaux.
- Blanche on the Lam by Barbara Neely (1992) French title: Blanche se fait la malle. Translated by Laure Du Breuil.
This is the seventeenth episode of my Third Crime is the Charm series where I write about three crime fiction books at a time. It suits me as I don’t have time to write a billet per book and I don’t know how to write lengthy billets about crime without spoilers. Way to kill two birds in one stone.
This time we’re going to Spain with the French author Bernard Minier, to Sardinia with Piergiorgio Pulixi and to North Carolina with Barbara Neely.
I received Les Effacées by Bernard Minier with my Quais du Polar subscription in 2025. I had never read him before but had heard he was excellent. I also kept seeing him on the shelves in Norwegian bookstores last summer. I thought it was high time to give him a try. What a disappointment.
It’s the second book of a Lucia Guerrero series, she’s a lieutenant with the Spanish police. When the book opens, she’s in Galice, investigating the murder of working-class young women. She’s pulled from this case and replaced by a colleague when a jet set lady is killed and mutilated in her Madrid mansion. The killer left a message “Kill the rich”. Sounds like a serial killer.
This book almost landed in the Mehs and DNFs series as I thought it was weak. Minier’s style is lazy. I didn’t like the political and social commentary he left in the pages as it wasn’t subtle enough. That’s a general statement.
And on a personal level, I’m sick of thrillers about women who are kidnapped, raped, killed or mutilated and so on by murderers who have psychiatric issues and are serial killers. Wake up, guys, most feminicides are done by spouses or ex-partners. The danger does not come from serial killers.
So, I’m not sure I’ll read another Minier any time soon but I’m sure I’ll sure read another Pulixi.
La librairie des chats noirs by Piergiorgio Publixi is not another episode of the Eva and Mara series. It’s a new series and the main character is a grumpy libraire, Marzio Montecristo. Two cats adopted his store and he named them Poirot and Miss Marple. He also runs a crime fiction book club.
Marzio is 38, a former math teacher who had to leave teaching and bought a bookstore. His business is struggling and he tends to push customers away with his behavior. He’s also in love with sergeant Angela Dimase who friend-zoned him a long time ago.
Now Sergeant Dimase and her partner Lieutenant Flavio Caruso have a murder case on their arms and no clues how to solve it. A killer broke into an apartment, drugged and tied the three members of the family. When the father woke up, the killer asked him to choose if they would kill his wife or his son or the two of them. The father chooses his son and throws himself out the window.
Lorenzo, the surviving kid used to have Marzio as a math teacher. This is how our grumpy libraire gets involved in the investigation.
This is a wonderful cozy crime book that celebrates crime fiction. Lots of references to books and writers, dead or alive. Marzio is a wonderful character and I’m looking forward to reading another one of this series. It would appeal to Richard Osman’s and Peter Swanson’s readers, I think.
What a fun and lovely page-turner. Why is Pulixi not translated into English? It’s a mystery to me. Maybe La librairie des chats noirs will catch an Anglo-Saxon publisher’s eye since its cover has a cat and the word library on it.
The last book of this billet is Blanche on the Lam by Barbara Neely, a book a libraire recommended to me at Quais du Polar. This libraire at the bookstore L’Esprit Livre always recommends me excellent crime fiction novels.
We’re in Farleigh, North Carolina. Blanche White, a black servant, – the irony, I know – has just been condemned to 30 days of prison for bounced checks. There’s a scuffle at the court and she runs away. She decides to hide at her new employer’s place. She has a temp job there as a housemaid for a week and she thinks she’ll keep her head low until she figures out her next step.
The household is composed of Grace and her husband Everett, Mumsfield, their cousin with Down Syndrome and Aunt Emmeline, the family link between the three.
They all move to the summer house and Blanche discovers that Mumsfield isn’t allowed to visit Aunt Emmeline. Grace and Everett don’t want him to know she’s a drunkard. When Blanche and Nate the gardener are summoned in Emmeline’s room as witnesses when a new testament is signed, she knows something fishy is going on.
Blanche starts listening, observing and playing the amateur detective. Her friend Ardell helps her; she turns to the community of local black servants and tunes into their gossip mill to learn more about Blanche’s employers. Mumsfield is also more astute than people think.
Barbara Neely (1941-2020) was a black activist. Blanche is a strong character who knows how to play the rich white and entitled employers’ game. In appearance, she’s submissive, polite, minding her own business and aware of her inferiority as a black maid, in other words, she’s what these rich whites from the South expect her to be. Inside, she’s intelligent, full of sass and rebellious. She puts walls around her to protect her self-worth, doesn’t let herself fall for the idea that her employers might like her and she strengthens herself with small acts of resistance, like using her employers space in the house or spitting at the Confederate statue in town.
She cooks and thinks. She cleans and thinks. She serves meals and observes her employers. She never forgets her place, never trusts white people and come to her own conclusion.
The social commentary about being black housemaid in North Carolina and the USA in general is spot on, it helps the reader understand her. I really liked Blanche and I will read the next three books of this series.
That’s all for this time, folks! December has been a busy month, I didn’t have a lot of bandwidth to read and I’m happy that good and easy crime fiction books exist. They provide easy escapism. The good side of this Lit Fiction reading slump is that I don’t have any billet backlog anymore !
Third Crime Is a Charm # 16 : Wyoming and Norway, again.
- Trophy Hunt by C.J. Box (2004) French title: Sanglants trophées.
- Dry Bones by Craig Johnson (2015) French title: Dry Bones. Translated by Sophie Aslanides
- The Katharina Code by Jørn Lier Horst (2017) French title: Le code de Katharina. Translated by Céline Romand-Monnier
The last few weeks have been a permanent rush with little extra-time to read books that require focused brain cells or read other blogs. Again. So I fell back to easy reads and here we are, three crime fiction books in one billet.
I first read Trophy Hunt by C.J. Box, the fourth book in the Joe Picket series. I was back in Saddlespring, Wyoming, with game warden Joe Pickett, his wife Marybeth and his daughters Sheridan and Lucy.
This time the case opens with cattle and moose mutilations. It escalates to two men killed and mutilated.
Since the case involves humans and game, Pickett is included in the task force set up for the occasion. The local FBI agents, the sheriff’s office and the Fish & Wildlife services have to work together, not they are thrilled about it.
Box based his story on actual cattle mutilations that happened in Montana. He also uses contemporary Wyoming issues in his book. He explains quite a bit about Oil, Gas & Mineral rights (OG&M). The owner of a piece of land can lease them to oil or gas companies, as David Gran explains in Killers of the Flower Moon. In Wyoming, it’s the boom of CBM drilling. People who own ranches on the brink of bankruptcy can become rich, which is something ingrained in the American West.
It’s tempting to shake things up to make the prices of properties drop and be ready for the taking. It looks like a lunatic committed these murders but as usual, greed, hurt and revenge have a lot to do with murders, even if a very troubled man was involved in the actual mutilations.
This is another great volume of the series as it blends nicely Joe’s family life, the tension between him and the sheriff, political and economical issues in Wyoming (and environmental) with well-drawn side characters brought in for the plot.
After this new visit to Wyoming, I decided to stay there and read Dry Bones by Craig Johnson.
This one is the eleventh episode in the Walt Longmire series. I have the excellent hardback edition by Gallmeister, signed by the author and his translator Sophie Aslanides. I remember the lovely evening we had in a bookstore in Lyon when he came to talk about this book.
Like in Trophy Hunt, it’s all about money and money Wyoming people can make with the treasure buried in their land. Only this time we’re not talking about CMB but dinosaurs bones.
Danny Lone Elk is murdered over a fight about the sale of T-Rex bones from his property. Estimated price 8.5 million dollars. Who did it and how is what Longmire and his BFF Henry Standing Bear will try to understand.
We’re also following Walt’s private life and Sad news come from Philadelphia where Cady, Walt’s daughter lives. Their family life is turned upside down again. I wonder what decision she’ll make.
Craig Johnson says in the afterword that the idea of this story came to him as he was visiting the National History Museum in London with his grand-daughter and noticed that the T-Rex came from Wyoming. He started investigating this matter and based his story on the “dinosaur wars” that occurred in the region in the 1980s. (Wyoming but also the Dakotas) Reality always defies fiction.
For the anecdote, I loved that, in the final chapter where the T-Rex is auctioned, Craig Johnson named two of the bidders after his French publisher (Gallmeister) and his French translator (Aslanides).
In the end, Box and Johnson complement each other: Box deals with economic and land issues, with white people lives while Johnson mentions the Native American issue in the area and never says a word about the exploitation of the land by ranchers or oil companies.
I also turned back to the William Wisting series by Jørn Lier Horst and read The Katharina Code. It’s my fifth Wisting this year, I’m hooked. I was happy to be back to Larvik and Stavern, Norway.
This time, we’re looking into a cold case, the disappearance of Katharina Haugen 24 years ago. Wisting keeps in touch with her husband and visits him every year at the anniversary of her disappearance.
She left clues behind, and especially a code for something that nobody managed to decipher. This feels like an open file to Wisting who likes to revisit the case every year. He still hopes he’ll spot a clue or a connection he missed.
But this year, Kripos (some sort of Norwegian FBI) wants to re-open the case because new technologies brought a better analysis of the DNA clues found during the investigation. His agent, Adrian Stiller has unconventional methods that test Wisting’s professionalism. He also involves Wisting’s daughter Line, an investigative reporter.
I devoured this one as fast as the others and had a lovely reading time.
I’m looking forward to my next Joe Pickett, my next Walt Longmire and my next William Wisting. The three authors manage to keep up with an excellent combination of suspenseful plots, news in the personal lives of the heroes and good writing.
All have a great sense of place, incorporate natural landscapes in their stories and relevant topics of their region. It gives the reader a familiarity of the places and the people. We follow families in their private matters but also get a sense of the hot topics that impact their lives.
There are 25 five Joe Picketts, 21 Walt Longmires and 9 William Wistings. This means many great reading time ahead of me. Yay!
Good crime fiction is a real gem.
Mehs and DNFs #1 : Chile, England, Outer space, France and England
- The Cormorants by Edouard Jousselin (2020) Not available in English
- The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (2021) French title: La Bibliothèque de minuit.
- Cobrastar by Thomas Bois (2021) Not available in English
- Critique de l’anxiété pure by Fred Vargas (2003) Not available in English
- The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimarães Rosa (1956) French title: Diadorim. Translated by Maryvonne Lapouge-Pettorelli.
I’m starting a new series of billets, the Mehs and DNFs, dedicated to books I didn’t like much or couldn’t finish. It doesn’t mean they are bad books, just that I didn’t get along with them. Maybe I shouldn’t write anything at all about them but then this reading diary of a blog wouldn’t be complete and that bothers me. I’m all for completeness.
And writing about the Mehs and DNFs helps understanding why I felt that way instead of just closing the book and putting it aside.
Now, without further ado, The Cormorants by Edouard Jousselin.
We’re in 1897, in Chile. Two towns, Agousto and Libertad live off the guano trade. The “guano islands” are near their coasts. Three ruling families are settled on these islands, extracting guano and selling it as fertilizer. They rule the island with iron fists, like barons in the Middle Ages. They own their workers and don’t let them marry whoever they want.
Problem: soon there will be no more guano and the weather has become so bad these last years that only the Capitaine Moustache knows how to convey the guano from the islands to the towns and bring back supplies.
Jousselin imagines a story full of intrigues, betrayals and twists-and-turns as conflicting forces set into motion. Joseph, a guano worker would do anything to marry Catalina who works for another family. The patriarchs of the three families feel their power slipping away from them and start to fight against each other. And the Capitaine Moustache has too much power over the local economy, with his boat and exclusivity on guano shipping. His former comrades in arms, the mayors of Agousto and Libertad would love to get rid of him.
I received this French novel in one of my Kube packages. I finished it but without much enthusiasm. I’m just not the right reader for this book which has true merits. After all, I wasn’t too fond of Treasure Island either. It’s an adventure, a book of the story-telling kind, not the looking-at-my-belly-button kind, which is great. It occurred to me while writing this that the guano is probably a metaphor for oil and this sheds a new light on the book. See! Writing about the mehs has its perks. 😊
Another Meh book is The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, 2.3M ratings on GR, an average 3.98 stars, which only proves that these ratings only show the opinion of the readers and are not objective. After all, if readers who love SF tend to read and rate SF books, an SF book that will have a good rating only means it’s probably a good SF book not that it’s a good book per se or that any reader will like it.
I guess everyone has heard about it. Nora lives in Bedfordshire, she’s estranged from her brother, has lost her parents, she’s now losing her job and her cat just died. She left her fiancé before the wedding and she lives with a lot of regrets.
She swallows sleeping pills to end her misery and finds herself between life and death. This brings her to the midnight library where she can try on different lives and see how things would have been if she’d made other decisions in her life.
God, how bored I was. Nora grated on my nerves and I had zero interest in all the lives she tries on. I never liked Goldilocks or The Princess and the Pea as a child anyway. Midnight Library is full of cheap self-help advice and I’m happy if it helped some readers clear their head and move on. If this paper therapy works, I’m all for it but I’m not the right reader for this book.
If you really want to read a book about suicidal people who change their mind, read Charming Mass Suicide by Arto Paasilinna.
Now let’s move to Cobrastar by Thomas Bois. He’s a French writer from Saint-Etienne and his debut novel is a space opera. If you’re familiar with my blog, you know it’s not a genre I usually read.
The book opens in a Texas diner where a data broker, La Rumeur (Gossip) is trying to sell stolen data to a bounty hunter, BlackFury. There’s also a Galaxy Ranger on location and an emissary from The Syndicate to retrieve the data. On top of that, the pirate Cobrastar is there too. Hell breaks lose in the diner and Cobrastar escapes from it with Eli, the human server of the diner under the protection of the sociopath Plague Snyssken.
Cobrastar flies them back to Tartarus, the pirates’ planet whose capital city is Dead End Point. Follows an intergalactic adventure where people fight over the data.
It’s like a fast-paced action movie with technology, battles against monsters, strategies and family feuds. The characters are unique, fun and completely crazy. It’s like a space Tarantino on steroids. This is a French space opera written by an author whose major literary reference is probably San Antonio. The language! So much fun! And so tiring after a while! It’s very French.
I have mixed feeling about Cobrastar. I acknowledge it’s fun and innovative in its style. It’s different from other books I’ve read and yet I suspect it’s full of familiar references for readers who love this genre. It’s out of my usually beaten paths, I remembered why I don’t choose those paths too often but it was a fun read.
And now the books I couldn’t finish.
Let’s start with Critique de l’anxiété pure by Fred Vargas. She usually writes crime fiction but this one is non-fiction about a way to live with anxiety.
I couldn’t bear the style of the book. It addresses directly to the readers, it’s a kind of vocal stream-of-consciousness bordering on verbal diarrhea.
I was lost in the flow of her words and they were not soothing at all. No way she was doing something about anxiety with this short book. It’s only 127 pages long and I quit at page 29. I couldn’t follow her and didn’t understand where she was going. Stressful, for a book about anxiety.
The best book I’ve read recently to quiet anxious thoughts remains Propos sur le bonheur by Alain.
The other book I didn’t finish is Diadorim by Joao Guimarães Rosa, a masterpiece of Brazilian literature published in 1956. It was part of my Tame the TBR project.
The English title is The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. It’s a 622 pages, written in small caps monologue by a narrator named Riobaldo. On the back cover of my edition Diadorim is compared to The Song of Roland, the Aenid by Virgil and Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann. A tall order. It’s an epic story, a love story and an adventure.
It’s definitely a great piece of literature but I stopped reading at page 67. I could have soldiered on and finished it. But why? I wasn’t really retaining what I was reading and I wondered what part of this book would have stayed with me in the end. Why finish it if it was only to have the satisfaction to think “I read it!”? But so what? I’m reading to have fun, to learn new things, for nourishment, not to tick boxes on a to-do list or win reading trophies. There are too many books out there that are better suited to me, so I quit.
Well, that’s all for this time, folks. I hope I won’t add too many episodes to this Mehs & DNFs series as I’d rather read books I love. 😊
Four novellas for Novellas in November #NovNov25
- The Highwayman by Craig Johnson (2016) Not available in French.
- So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan (2023) French title: Misogynie.
- Wanted by Philippe Claudel. (2025) Not available in English.
- Two Old Women by Velda Wallis (1993) French title: Seules dans le Grand Nord. Translated by Françoise Torchiana. Illustrated by Christophe Chabouté.
It’s the end of the month and I’m still on time to post this billet about four novellas I read this week. This post is another participation to Novellas in November hosted by Cathy and Rebecca.
The first novella is a crime fiction one, The Highwayman by Craig Johnson. It’s volume 11.5 in the Walt Longmire series. It’s not set in Absaroka county but in another county in Wyoming, near Riverton and Thermopolis.
The head of the highway patrol called Walt and his friend Henry Standing Bear because he has an issue with his new patrolwoman, Rosey Wayman. At 12:34 pm she hears a message on the police radio frequency that requests assistance to an officer in danger. Problem? The voice belongs to Bobby Womack, the first Arapaho highwayman and he’s been dead for more than 30 years.
Now Longmire wants to prove that Rosey isn’t a nutcase and that she doesn’t need time off in a psychiatric ward.
He and Henry will unearth old stories and solve the mystery. It’s a quick read and I was glad to spend time with Longmire again. Craig Johnson has a solid literary style. He always describes the landscapes, here, the canyon and its surroundings with striking sentences. The interactions between characters ring true; they are full of nuance, emotion and coated with an excellent sense of humor. A good cocktail for an entertaining read.
After Wyoming, let’s go to Dublin with So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan. It’s a little more than a short story, only 46 pages
We are with Cathal at a pivotal moment of his life. We understand that he’s upset, sad and intends to wallow and lick his wounds at home after work. As the story progresses and he reminisces about his relationship with Sabine we slowly understand how his misery is of his own making.
Claire Keegan brings the reader from one emotion to the other, from compassion to exasperation in less than 50 pages. As with her previous books, I’m impressed by how much she can pack into a few pages. I can’t say much more without spoilers, so, I’ll keep this review short. Check out the cover of my edition of this novella, I love this painting.
Now let’s move to a totally different brand of literature.
Wanted by Philippe Claudel is a contemporary dystopia. I think that the author wrote it as therapy for the current madness in the news, the one that started in November 2024.
See the plot for yourself: since the US politics sound like a Far West revival, Claudel imagines that Elon Musk offers a one billion dollar reward to whomever would kill Vladimir Putin. What would be the outcome?
All the politicians involved in the story keep their real names, Claudel refers to actual events in recent world politics and it feels like a cathartic experience. He puts into words one of the what-ifs anyone staying in touch with the news might entertain. He imagines speeches and interviews by and with Trump and Musk that sound just like them.
It’s not a great book from a literary point of view but just like Flyover by Douglas Kennedy it uses dystopia to describe what could happen and the forces at stake. It’s funny as Musk’s and Trump’s way of speaking are wild and outrageous.
It makes you laugh as an escape from reality because the sheer implications of what he describes are way too horrifying. I read it in one sitting and it felt like an outlet for all the stress and frustration that fall on us each time we switch the radio on.
Then I read Two Old Women by Velma Wallis, a novelist Gwich’in Athabascan Indian descent. Talk about a one hundred eighty after the Claudel.
Wallis was born in 1960 in Fort Yukon Alaska and this novella tells the story of two old women who were left behind by their tribe during a hard winter. They were starving and the chief decided to get rid of them as they were dead weight.
These two women, Ch’idzigyaak and Sa’ were 80 and 75. They decided to fight for their lives and the story tells how they recalled all the skills they learnt when they were younger and how they put them into good use to survive the terrible Alaskan winter.
It’s a beautiful tale that comes from the stories the author learnt from her mother. It dates back to times where Westerners hadn’t claimed Alaska and the Gwich’in Athabascan people lived a full nomadic life.
As you can see, my edition is a gorgeous book published by Gallmeister with illustrations by Christophe Chabouté, who usually does BDs and graphic novels.
I think this billet shows that novellas cover very different genres and that they are a good way to explore new authors and new genres. When they are short enough to be read in one sitting, it’s also a different way to experience literature as I am fully immersed in the book, without interruption. The time I need to reconnect to a story and its imaginary world that I go through with longer works doesn’t exist. Reading novellas in one sitting is like watching a movie and I love it.
Let me know if you’ve read any of these books, I’m always happy to discuss books I read with other readers. Many thanks to Cathy and Rebecca for hosting Novellas in November again as it’s a nudge to make a little dent in my novellas TBR.
Three different brands of feminism accross time : Benigna Machiavelli, Lorelei Lee and Joanna Eberhart – #NovNov25 #HYH #SciFiMonth25
- Benigna Machiavelli by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1914) French title: Benigna Machiavelli. Translated by Pascale Voilley.
- Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925) French title: Les hommes préfèrent les blondes. Audiobook narrated by Patrice O’Neill.
- The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin (1972) French title: Les femmes de Stepford.
I’m virtually patting myself on the back for my mad multitasking skills to participate in as much blogging events as possible as November is rife with them. Novellas in November, Nonfiction November, Sci-Fi month, Margaret Atwood Reading Month, German Lit Month and I’m sure there are others I’m not aware of. Aren’t we busy bees?
I wonder why November is so loaded with blogging events. Is that because it’s autumn, almost past the bright colors of falling leaves and we’re way into a meteorological feast of rain, grey and early sunset that we want to burrow ourselves at home and read? Well, at least in the Northern hemisphere.
Anyway, here I am with three novellas for NovNov hosted by Cathy and Rebecca, one of them for Sci-Fi month co-hosted by Annemieke and another published in 1925 which inserts into the A Hundred Years Hence Reading Challenge hosted by Neeru.
These three novellas have female protagonists and are about feminism, relationships between men and women and explore these topics in very different ways.
Let’s start with Benigna Machiavelli by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It’s straightforward feminism, probably because it dates back to the Suffragettes era. Benigna McAvelly tells her story and how she quickly decided to be a good villain. And this is how she got to the conclusion that the world needed her brand of villainy.
I learned a lot, when I was a child, from novels and stories, even fairy stories have some point to them—the good ones. The thing that impressed me most forcibly was this: that the villains always went to work with their brains and accomplished something. To be sure they were “foiled” in the end, but that was by some special interposition of Providence, not by any equal exertion of intellect on the part of the good people. The heroes and heroines and middle ones were mostly very stupid. If bad things happened, they practised patience, endurance, resignation, and similar virtues; if good things happened they practised modesty and magnanimity and virtues like that, but it never seemed to occur to any of them to make things move their way. Whatever the villains planned for them to do, they did, like sheep. The same old combinations of circumstances would be worked off on them in book after book—and they always tumbled! (…) And it seemed to me, even as a very little child, that what we wanted was good people with brains, not just negative, passive, good people, but positive, active ones, who gave their minds to it. “A good villain! That’s what we need!” said I to myself. “Why don’t they write about them ? Aren’t there any ?” I never found any in all my beloved story books, or in real life. And gradually, I made up my mind to be one!
Benigna is bright, she has out-of-norm insight, she’s cunning and manipulating people for their own good.
She knows how to become popular because she’s industrious, helpful and friendly. She raises the good questions. She’s also meddlesome, doing these good deeds as experiments about human nature. There’s a sense of goodhearted shrewdness that warms the reader even if they know she’s manipulative.
As we follow her plans and actions, we see that Benigna actively works for the well-being of the women around her: a gift for her teacher, manipulating her father into moving out to save her mother from her husband’s harassment, opening her sister’s eyes about the scoundrel she plans on marrying, getting money from her grandfather to fund the boarding house business that will provide for the women of the family.
She thrives on taking action, she wants to be independent and free and she wants to protect a few women from toxic patriarchy. The tone of the book is light, witty, thoughtful and very attractive.
Highly recommended as it’s fun and thought-provoking. (PS: I have no clue how they came up with this cover for this book, really. It doesn’t make any sense to me.)
The second feminist character is Lorelei Lee from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos. I decided to listen to the audiobook after seeing several reviews of it for the Club 1925.
Patrice O’Neill reads it with the voice of an ingenue. Her tone grated on my nerves until I got used to it, mostly because I have very little patience with false ingenues IRL too.
Lorelei Lee is the 1920s version of the Parisian cocotte of the 19thC century. Mr Eisman, the kind of the button, pays for her NYC apartment, comes to see her from Chicago as soon as he can and pays for her “educational” travels in Europe.
She goes on a tour with her friend Dorothy and they trick gentlemen into parties and shopping trips in London, Paris, Vienna.
Lorelei Lee is street smart. She makes appalling grammar mistakes when she speaks but she’s so lovely that men fall at her feet. She sounds pure, helpless and innocent when she’s as cunning as Benigna Machiavelli above. She’s just using her skills towards more futile goals like jewels, champagne, presents, and hotels suites. This quote is her, in all her glory:
“So when I got through telling Dorothy what I thought up. Dorothy looked at me and looked at me and she really thought my brains were a miracle. I mean she said my brains reminded her of a radio because you listen to it for days and days and you get discouraged and just when you are getting ready to smash it, something comes out that is a masterpiece.”
She seems to think that if men are stupid enough to fall for her tricks hook, line and sinker, why shouldn’t she take advantage of them and live a glamorous life? She comes from Little Rock, Arkansas, from a poor family and had a rocky past; she doesn’t have anything to lose and behaves however she wants, never ashamed of anything.
With this novella, Anita Loos pokes fun at the men who fall for brainless beauty because it fuels their feeling of superiority. They fulfill a need to be protective and are condescending doing so. It’s the don’t-bother-your-pretty-head-with-serious-thinking drive. Well, more power to the Loreleis of this world until their marks stop objectifying women.
I did have a good laugh with her candid descriptions of London, where a Lady’s hat is so ugly it explains why her husband bought Lorelei a diamond tiara, of Paris, where she says there is obviously a Louis XVI in the furniture business, Vienna with all these people who only speak German, etc.
It was endearing, really! For a proper review, check out Jacqui’s here.
After this good fun, The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin was horrifying. I knew of the derogatory “Stepford wife” tag and wanted to read the book to understand what it came from.
We’re in 1972, in Stepford, Connecticut. Joanna Eberhart has just moved to this suburban town with her husband Walter and their two children. It’s become the iconic setting: a commuting husband from NYC to CT (or NJ) with a stay-at-home mother with two kids and a station wagon.
At the beginning of the book, Walter and Joanna are all for equal sharing of domestic tasks in the household. She wants to develop her business as a photographer.
She looks for new friends in Stepford and only finds perfect decerebrated barbies who don’t have time for anything but kids, housework and looking good for their husbands. She eventually spots Bobbie and Charmaine who aren’t perfect hausfraus. Until they go to a romantic getaway with their husbands and come back as robotic versions of themselves.
It’s interesting that The Stepford Wives was written by a man, after the 1960s and the feminist movements. His statement is terrible: these husbands prefer to have robotic and docile wives with no other conversation than the merits of various cleaning supplies and the best way to make P&J sandwiches, domestic bimbos with big boobs devoted to serving their male masters. Poor wives and pathetic husbands, that’s what he seems to tell us.
In her review published in 2009, Lisa writes that these gender issues might still resonate in places like the Middle East and Afghanistan, but to those of us in the West it reads like a museum piece. How confident we were that our rights were set in stone. I’m not so sure about that in 2025. In the end, the Stepford’s men retaliation is SciFi in its means but not in its intent. Food for thoughts. Highly recommended too.
These three American books published in different times tackle with feminism in their own way and each resonates with the time it was published. It was interesting to read them within a few weeks and see how they resonate with our time now.
Book Around the Corner 