November 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year
The Guardian, January 5, 2019

In October I finished reading Regards from the Dead Princess — the semi-fiction/semi-biography that French journalist Kenizé Mourad wrote about her mother in the 1980s.

Her mother was born into the Sultan's family at the end of the Ottoman Empire, thrown into new lives and places as a princess in India after marriage, and emigrée in Lebanon and Paris, at different periods in her life. She died of an infection during the Second World War when Mourad was a toddler.

Her purpose is, I guess, to paint a picture of her mother and her mother's life in her mind. At the same time she flexes her journalistic scope and personal fascination for 'the Orient' in the historical and geographic details. We hear all about Atatürk and Indian Independence and the German Occupation of Paris, and about what Istanbul and Lucknow and France looked like in those times.

I do think Mourad has the tendency to call a spade — not a spade, but a pearl-handled cake lift. (To re-use a phrase I've read elsewhere.) Her style, or perhaps the style of the translation into English, is reasonably purple.

Her cast of characters also has a tinge of soap opera and to be honest (as a result of her upbringing) I think the heroine tends to depend on or exploit people, or feel victimized by them alternately. Mourad classifies her figures into characters into villains whom the heroine dislikes, villains whom the heroine likes, and heroes who are in the heroine's good graces and heroes who have fallen from their pedestals — for being villainous, or for thwarting the Princess in a more trivial way. Needless to say I find this approach to human nature risky because it can be self-centered and amoral.

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I imagine that the book is an apt reflection of the Princess Diana era:
A fragile-looking, gently-reared, very young aristocratic woman is expected to realize the dreams of at least half her gender.
People believe that these dreams must and will be fulfilled for her,
— precisely because she earns them through her beauty and public benevolence.
But then she reveals herself to be unexpectedly — or expectedly, to any half-skeptical person — unhappy.

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I reread Elizabeth Acevedo's earlier novel for teenagers, The Poet X, in paper form. The poems felt strikingly personal and fresh, and I appreciated that they were not an equal length, tone or subject. They adapted to their scenarios, were wisely brief where brevity was wit, set a brisk narrative pace, and were well-ripened.

With the Fire on High, which I've finished listening to, offers a (relatively) invigoratingly rebellious look at school, gender double standards, and figuring out how to shift to working/college life. It in my view praises an ideal of personal autonomy in aspects besides the freedom from family expectations that Acevedo championed in The Poet X.

I hope that many teenagers have a chance to read these books, because they might 'find themselves' in the pages. While teenage pregnancy, social backlash to pregnancy, or a burning desire to become a chef were not part of my life, for example, I doubt this would have prevented me from feeling understood and encouraged by With the Fire on High.

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The Pages Choisies from Arthur Rimbaud's works that Larousse published in the 1950s, with notes by Etiemble, was a counterbalance to the edition that I'd read by Claude-Edmonde Magny. It is more risqué and adversarial, and it does not airbrush over Rimbaud's faults. I thought it was not a fair approach, however, because Etiemble seemed unfairly prejudiced. As always, I barely grasped Rimbaud's poems themselves, but since Etiemble refused to agree with the widely accepted ways to read and interpret them, I felt like I was no worse off than anyone else in having no interpretation.

After reading Rimbaud, I wavered between reading more Another Country by James Baldwin; or beginning to read an abridged edition of Souvenirs de la jeunesse et de l'enfance by Ernest Renan, or Vol de nuit by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

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"Portrait of Renan in his Study"
via

Wikimedia Commons

I decided on Renan, because his writing and biography were new territory to me. Born into what I think is the middle class in the early 19th century in Brittany, he was intended to become a priest, and worked his way through lesser and greater religious schools and reached Saint-Sulpice in Paris.

But instead of being a priest, he broke off his theological education and became a historian and a society figure, and he contributed articles (like the ones that compose his Souvenirs) to the famous Revue des deux mondes. He broke the heart of priests who educated him by leaving the path of God, publicly. One of these priests apparently only published one book in his lifetime: a refutation of Renan's writings.

But he says that the priests who taught him inculcated a good moral example that left traces anyway. He turned away from the Church due to contradictions within Catholic church dogma (and its pretense that 19th-century rules sprang from the time of Jesus and St. Paul, rather than from hundreds of years of Vatican wheelings and dealings), as well as due to historical and philosophical counter-evidence. It was not due to lurid harassment or abuse, which I'd rather feared.

His tale of schoolmate Noémi 'interested' me from my amateur feminist critic's standpoint. I temporarily agreed with Sherlock Holmes's ideas regarding the heliocentric solar system — there are just things one doesn't need to hear, or hearing them they should be forgotten so as to free up the precious brain cells that are wasted on them. For example: "Très tôt, le goût des jeunes filles fut vif en moi." ('Very soon, I had a lively taste for young girls.') made me reach for the metaphorical brain bleach; it sounds lewd. Hopefully I'm just mistranslating it.

Maybe his priestly training gave Renan a weird concept of female minds. Maybe other reasons did. Whatever the reason, and despite the fact that he was married, I think he might have been better at analyzing the inner lives and talents of Antarctic penguins.

Translated in 1897 by Mynors Bright, here Renan is describing the girls whom he knew before he entered a men-only theological school at the age of 15:

The vague idea which attracted me to the[ girls] was, I think, that men are at liberty to do many things which women cannot, and the latter consequently had, in my eyes, the charm of being weak and beautiful creatures, subject in their daily life to rules of conduct which they did not attempt to override. All those whom I had known were the pattern of modesty. The first feeling which stirred in me was one of pity, so to speak, coupled with the idea of assisting them in their becoming resignation, of liking them for their reserve, and making it easier for them. I quite felt my own intellectual superiority; but even at that early age, I felt that the woman who is very beautiful or very good, solves completely the problem of which we, with all our hard-headedness, make such a hash. We are mere children or pedants compared to her. I as yet understood this only vaguely, though I saw clearly enough that beauty is so great a gift that talent, genius, and even virtue are nothing when weighed in the balance with it; so that the woman who is really beautiful has the right to hold herself superior to everybody and everything, inasmuch as she combines not in a creation outside of herself, but in her very person, as in a Myrrhine vase, all the qualities which genius painfully endeavours to reproduce.

[Bright's translation is here at Wikisource.

The original is here.]

To be fair, there were many weird ideas about women and their role in society at the time. Without searching for it, I came across this in Wikipedia just now:

Camille Saint-Saëns wrote of Holmès in the journal Harmonie et Mélodie: "Like children, women have no idea of obstacles, and their willpower breaks all barriers. Mademoiselle Holmès is a woman, an extremist."

["Augusta Holmès", Wikipedia]

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As for modern books: Carmen Maria Machado, the author, is about to release In the Dream House: A Memoir, a new book that uses elements from other genres like horror to portray her relationship with a psychologically abusive woman.

As for anniversaries, the Guardian has mentioned that French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes will have dreamt his 'night of three dreams' 400 years ago on November 10th. Also, that George Eliot's 200th birthday will fall on the 22nd. Perhaps it's a good time to tackle the Discourse on the Method or Middlemarch...