The splendid wedding I attended last weekend in Normandy provided the
perfect excuse for not writing my column... Well, not so perfect. I
confess. A beautiful weather, delicious food, lots of excellent
champagne and very effective music...
The book I started on my
flight from New York was very disappointing. I bought it at the airport
before boarding, looking forward to an exciting night of reading... It
was the paperback edition of a thriller, the review of which, in the
New York Times, I had a vague, but overall positive, recollection...
Child 44
(Tom Rob Smith, Grand Central Publishing, 2008, 448p) has a crisp
rhythm but lacks depth, especially regarding its main characters, and
by moments credibility... Youthful sin? Tom Rob Smith published a
sequel to
Child 44 last May (
The Secret Speech).
Publishers Weekly commented:
Shifting from Moscow to Siberia and to
a Hungary convulsed by revolution, this fast-paced novel is packed with
too many incidents for Smith to dwell on any in great depth. Though its
drama often lacks emotional resonance, this story paints a memorable
portrait of post-Stalinist Russia at its dawn.
Beside the story, I was intrigued by the scant biographical details
on the back cover, under the picture of a handsome young man: "Tom Rob
Smith graduated from Cambridge in 2001 and lives in London," and the
enigmatic last paragraph of the author's acknowledgments: "Many people
assisted the completion of this book but none more so than Ben
Stephenson. I've never been as happy as I have been during these past
few years." I found more about him in an interview published in March
2008 in Pinknews (
From soaps to Soviet murder mystery).
Since then, back in Paris, I have been catching up with several good books published in the past few months.
La Pléiade has issued a new edition of André Gide's fictions, two volumes coordinated by Pierre Masson (
Romans et récits, Gallimard, 2009 1,584p and 1,456p). A great opportunity to read, together,
Corydon and
Les Faux-monnayeurs.
Champion has published a small volume dedicated to Armance (
Armance, ou la liberté de Stendhal, Jean-Jacques Hamm, Honoré Champion éditeur, 2009, 272p), "an in-depth reading of a novel that his own author considered too
erudito," a fascinating analysis of an enigmatic work.
I very much enjoyed
L'art d'être pauvre,
François Baudot's memoir, promoted by its publisher (Grasset, 2009,
410p) with the slogan "Proust au Palace." With a sharp style, Baudot
remembers his lost youth in Paris where he was born in 1950. He takes
us on a journey, haunted by characters reminiscent of Proust's world,
through a stay in New York in 1968 when Pop Art was at its height and
where he has sex, for the first time, with a man, "a blond angel whose
twin brother was Warhol's lover," to the Paris of the seventies where
gay night life blossoms, leading to the "explosive" Palace years.
Baudot was now thirty and "il n'avait certes pas fait d'étincelles."
The last, nostalgic, pages of the book are dedicated to his 20-years
long love affair with Philippe:
Au cours de ce long pas de deux entamé
par hasard, nous nous serons épargné toi et moi les grands sentiments
et les grands mots. Nous aurons ignoré les souffrances romantiques du
jeune Werther, tout autant que l'honorabilité bourgeoise des ménages de
garçons. Nous n'aurons pas connu les fades couleurs du bonheur qui fane
comme un bouquet sous sa cloche de verre. Chaque matin nous aura
surpris. Tout étonnés de nous trouver ensemble dans le même lit. Et
puis, petit à petit, sans que rien ne soit dit, se sont tissées des
écharpes de soie contre la solitude. Finalement, naturellement,
passionnément, nous avons concrétisé la définition que je préfère de
l'amour: 'Le contact de deux épidermes'.
2009.09.06
