Category — Literature

One day last month I noticed a poster in the Metro with this intriguing title: Le mec de la tombe d’à cote.  On closer inspection, I saw that it was an advertisement for a play,  so when I returned to my apartment  I searched on TickeTac to find the dates and some details. It was playing at a small theatre in the 3rd. I bought tickets for myself and a friend, and then went in search of the book. My French is not yet quite reliable enough to allow me to follow a play with full comprehension, so I always try to read the text first. I’d just done this with Dis-leurs que la verite est belle, which had given me nearly 95% comprehension when I attended the play, although fabulous acting and crystalline enuncation from the actors had played a role in that too.

But I couldn’t find a copy of the play about the graveyard mec, and was told by my local bookshop L’arbre à lettres that it only existed in the form of a novel, originally Swedish by Katerina Mazetti,  translated into French by Lena Grumbach and Catherine Marcus, and only recently adapted into a stage play. The book (pictured above) looked as intriguing as the poster for the play, so I bought that and tried to read as much as I could in the two days left until the evening of the play.

Although it is a comedy of sorts, it also contains some important truths about relationships, especially when two people are from different worlds–in this case two different occupational worlds. A newly-widowed city librarian meets a farmer from the depths of the country in a city cemetery (the farmer’s mother has recently died). That’s as much of the plot as I’m prepared to give away at the moment. The play telescoped all of the action beautifully, and the half-dozen characters in the novel were pared down to the two protagonists, who were seamlessly converted into French characters complete with French names. The acting was perfect (in fact all of the acting I have seen in the French theatre has been perfect–from Fanny Ardent and Patrick Chesnais in various productions, through to all of the relative unknowns). The only downside for me was that for the sake of verisimilitude the character of the farmer had to speak in a rural and slightly uncouth accent which marred my understanding somewhat (when oh when does one get to the stage of fluency in a foreign language that enables one to understand bad enunciation and thick accents? Maybe never, as I’m not very good at that in English either).

After the play, which my friend A-M and I enjoyed enormously, I put the book aside, and have only just had the time to take it up again. What a delight it is to return to it, to discover the twists and turns of the relationship, but now with the pictures of the two characters in my mind–she so thin and pale and refined, and Jean the farmer so honest and straightforward, with thick black curly hair and stubble, his check shirts and overalls.

The insights I am discovering, about connecting the self with the other, are gently humbling.

The book can be bought from Amazon France for a good deal less than I paid for it, and they ship to Australia for a reasonable rate.

When I was diligently poring over the canonical 17th century French novel La Princesse de Clèves last year during my French literature class in Melbourne, the last thing I would have imagined was La Princesse becoming a symbol of resistance to President Sarkozy.

Sarkozy seems to have borne a grudge against La Princesse for quite some time. The first sign of it, according to Liberation, was in February 2006, in a speech the president made in Lyon. He said that he’d been amusing himself by reading the exam papers for entry into public service administrative positions. According to him, either a sadist or an imbecile had put on the program questions on La Princesse de Clèves. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve often had cause to ask a clerk what they think of La Princesse de Clèves. Imagine what a spectacle that would be!’

Now, I’m no expert in French literature, but I have a hunch that La Princesse occupies in France a position a little like Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) does in English, although a hundred years earlier. Both authors took their respective fictional traditions and made such innovations to the form, and especially to the rendering of human thought and feelings, that these books represented a distinct shift which gave birth to the form of the modern novel.

And that is probably why La Princesse is staple fare in French secondary schools. I wish I could say the same for Sense and Sensibility in the Anglophone world, but alas it is not so, except for students taking specialized literature subjects.

The topic must have continued to weigh heavily on Sarkozy’s mind, though, as he brought it up again in July last year at a teaching seminar, implying what a waste of time it was to have to devote any time to La Princesse, and telling how he himself had ‘suffered under her’. From the video, it appears he got a few laughs, although that may have been due to the stand-up comic quality of his delivery.

You don’t have to be French to know that to make fun of what a public service clerk may or may not think of a French classic is rather at odds with notions of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

In any case, this performance was one too many for the university lecturers who are already opposing Sarkozy’s efforts to ‘reform’ higher education (read: make it more like Anglophone higher education). On February 16th this year, lecturers and others opposed to Sarkozy staged several marathon public reading of La Princesse, one of which was outside the Pantheon. Readers took turns, one of them being the wonderful young actor Louis Garel, who starred in the 2008 remake of the story, titled La Belle Personne, set in a Parisian lycée (the film having been made in protest at Sarkozy’s dismissive comments).

I had to quit my literature class last year before finishing La Princesse unfortunately, but I shall persevere with her, encouraged by feeling I am—if only vicariously—part of the movement that seems to be gathering momentum in France.

There are even multiple Facebook sites in support of the movement, and the book is reportedly sold out in many bookshops. And according to an article in the UK Guardian on March 31, award-winning French writer Régis Jauffret is expressing his protest by encouraging every French citizen to mail Sarkozy a copy of La Princesse.

I’ve just been listening to Yvan Amar’s Danse des Mots program on Radio France (about which I’ve blogged before), in which he interviewed Afghan/French writer and film maker Atiq Rahimi. Rahimi has just won the Prix Goncourt 2009 for his latest book Syngue Sabour (pierre de patience). Syngue Sabour is Persian – his mother tongue – for ‘stone of patience’. Rahimi took the idea of the ‘stone of patience’ from ‘a folk tale about a black stone that absorbs the distress of anyone who confides in it’, according to an article in the International Herald Tribune.

The Prix Goncourt has been running for 105 years and has been awarded to many great French and non-French writers. Among the former group are Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and Marcel Proust.

The most fascinating part of the interview, for me, was when Rahimi talked about writing in French, his second language. He said that writing in French was liberating, but also imposed certain obligations. For example, he has to concentrate on each word, and also on the rhythm and sound of the words. He has to write and re-write, to check each word in the dictionary. In this way, it was like poetry, he said, because in poetry you must work on each word, each phrase, each comma. You have to be both precise and concise with each phrase, each image.

If you’d like to listen to or download the interview yourself, you’ll find it here.