A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds and Other Stories, a collection of more or less gothic short stories, ending with a story about a dysfunctional family who live by the lake ( spoilers )

Also Colette’s Claudine at School, translated by Antonia White. I originally meant to read all four of the Claudine novels, but after barely limping past the finish line of this first one, I decided that life was too short. Claudine is just so mean! She doesn’t have any friends, doesn’t like anyone, sees the ulterior motive in every action that anyone undertakes, and mercilessly bullied a girl who has a crush on her because the girl’s older sister (one of the assistant teachers) threw Claudine over to get with the headmistress. This book was a sensation in fin de siecle Paris and I don’t understand why.

What I’m Reading Now

Sarah Vowell’s Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, a collection of essays. I've long meant to go back and read some of Vowell’s earlier work, and these essays are a delightful peek at that long-vanished world of the 1990s. An essay about the art of the mix tape! What a blast from the past.

The essays have a more controlled and serious tone than some of Vowell’s longer history books, which I love but feel were sometimes marred by Vowell’s pop culture digressions or current-day political screeds.

It looks like Vowell hasn’t published any books since 2015. I wonder what she’s been up to?

What I Plan to Read Next

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but littlerhymes and I are planning to meet up in Paris in mid-June. We thought it would be fun to read a book together in person, but we are not quite sure what to read, so I thought I’d ask for suggestions.

We’re looking for something France or Paris themed; a translation from French would be fun, but we’d also be happy with an English language book set in Paris. Most of our buddy reads are children’s books, and we’re looking for something on the shorter side, since we’ll only be in Paris a week and we want plenty of time to sightsee.

I’ve already vetoed The Little Prince because I’ve read it in two languages and didn’t enjoy it in either.

Extremely busy tomorrow, so posting Wednesday Reading Meme a day early!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

At long last, I’ve completed D. K. Broster’s Sir Isumbras at the Ford! Still no idea where the title came from. Presumably it’s a reference from a poem? I went into this expecting a medieval tale, and it absolutely is not. Like The Wounded Name and The Yellow Poppy, it’s about Royalists trying to oust the Republicans after the Revolution.

( Spoilers )

I also read Charles Finch’s What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year, largely because I’ve read all of Finch’s books hitherto and didn’t mean to break my streak just because his latest book is a diary of 2020. But it turned out to be surprisingly absorbing for a book about such recent events: I devoured it in one afternoon. You’d think it wouldn’t tell you anything new, and in a sense, of course, it doesn’t, but at the same time it was surprising to realize how much I had forgotten from 2020—in particular the absolute misery of having Donald Trump as president, and waking up every morning wondering how the hell that buffoon is going to make everything worse today. (Forgotten may be the wrong word. I may have repressed the memory in self-defense.)

And I’m back in the swing of things with the 1930s Newbery books, this time with Davy Crockett, by Constance Rourke. You may remember Rourke as the one who wrote the Newbery Honor-winning John James Audubon biography positing that Audubon might have been the escaped dauphin of France. Naturally I was agog to learn Rourke’s theories about Davy Crockett.

Sadly, nothing in Davy Crockett is as deliciously nuts as John James Audubon, Escaped Dauphin of France. (Then again, what could?) But the book is highly readable, and Rourke happily relates a great many Crockett legends (Davy Crockett was clearly the Chuck Norris of his time), sorting them generally into “probably true,” “could be true,” “okay these can’t all be true but it sounds like something Crockett might have done,” and “physically impossible for a human being to accomplish, so I must sadly admit that Davy Crockett did not in fact grease a lightning bolt.”

What I’m Reading Now

Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940, which I got because it contains a short story by D. K. Broster. (It’s near the end of the volume, so I haven’t reached it yet.) A few familiar names here (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton – also Edith Nesbit!), but also quite a few I’m not familiar with, so this will be an interesting exploration.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have decided that I am indeed going to dive into all things French! I’ve already read a few of the big ones (Les Mis, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Count of Monte Cristo) - perhaps it is time to read more Zola? To delve, at long last, into Colette? To attempt the first volume of Proust? Recommendations of books and also specific translations greatly appreicated.

Also considering books about French history! troisoiseaux, I know there was that one book you read about the last day of Robespierre. Maybe it’s time for me to give that a try.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Maylis de Kerangal’s The Cook: A Novel (translated from the French by Sam Taylor) is a novella that reads like an unusually in-depth magazine profile: a character study of a young Frenchman who bops around the French food establishment (while also pursuing a degree in economics), starts his own small restaurant, then throws up the restaurant because it has become his entire life, which is what he had hoped to avoid in becoming his own boss. Gorgeous food descriptions.

I also finished Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield! Dickens has been hit or miss with me in the past, but this one I really enjoyed: very pacy, lots of whump. Dickens clearly lives on the tears of his readers and wrings out your heart every fifth chapter, and you know what, I can respect that. (Mostly. It was a little excessive when ( spoilers )

On the whole however I felt that Dickens played fair with the heart-wringing in this one: the tragedies feel like real tragedies that could happen to real people (particularly the Murdstones and the way they squash all the heart and spirit out of David and his mother) and Dickens mostly lets them stand on their own. It’s not like Little Nell’s death in The Old Curiosity Shop where he made me cry but I was angry about being manipulated into it as he wrung every living drop of bathos out of the situation.

What I’m Reading Now

In The Yellow Poppy, the Duc de Trelan and his ragtag band of Chouans stand alone against the forces of Napoleon! All the other Royalist forces have fallen and been treated with leniency, but Napoleon may wish to make an example of this final holdout… Were the Duc and Duchesse reunited only to be torn asunder by the winds of history? If they’re doomed, at least let them die together!

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been on the fence a while about Grady Hendrix’s My Best Friend’s Exorcism (it sounds so good but I’m such a baby about horror), but now my friend Becky has recommended it so I’m going to give it a try.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I liked Siobhan Dowd’s Bog Child so much that I must have put A Swift Pure Cry on my list without reading the summary, because about a third of the way through the book I was getting Vibes, finally looked it up, and glumly learned that yes, indeed! this is a book about an accidental teenage pregnancy.

Accidentally teenage pregnancy is about on the same level as cancer on the list of “items I wish to avoid in my leisure reading,” so as you can imagine I wailed and gnashed my teeth. However, if that’s something you DO like, I actually think Dowd’s writing here is both tighter and more poetic than in Bog Child... and, uh, I’ll definitely be reading the summaries before I venture any more of her books!

I also finished Janet Flanner’s Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939, a collection of her notes to the New Yorker about happenings in Paris. As pleasure reading it left something to be desired - I wanted the notes to be longer, or more detailed, or just more something than most of them were - but it would be a fantastic research resource about Paris life in those years, and also the western European experience of the run-up to World War II.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve read the first chapter of R. A. MacAvoy The Grey Horse, and so far the titular stallion has more or less run away with Anrai, the elderly hostler who found him standing atop a round hillock above the sea. It’s my belief that this horse may be one of the Good Folk, but we shall see.

What I Plan to Read Next

Racing to finish up some books before I head to New York City next Monday! My main goal is to finish Megan Whalen Turner’s Return of the Thief and wrap up my Queen’s Thief review sequence.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Marilyn Nelson’s Carver, A Life in Poems, which indeed tells the story of George Washington Carver’s life in poems. This is one of those Newbery books where I feel that the awards committee (and also the publisher) forgot to consider what actual children might make of lines like

“Another lynching. Madness grips the South.
A black man’s hacked-off penis in his mouth,
His broken body torched…”

On a lighter note, I also finished Elizabeth Peters’ The Curse of the Pharaoh. Still kicking myself for not picking up more of the series - indeed, more of any mystery series - while the library was still open. Perfect brain candy for a stressful time.

And I blasted through the last quarter of Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles. About halfway through the book, Colum completes the adventures of the Argonauts, so the rest of the book is just following up on the heroes’ life stories outside of the Argo: the Twelve Labors of Heracles, Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason throwing over Medea without whom he would have died a loser who never accomplished anything, etc. etc. (Colum goes for a less-savage version of the Medea story, where Medea merely murders Jason’s new prospective bride Glauce; Medea and Jason have no children for Medea to murder.)

What I’m Reading Now

Therese of Lisieux’s The Story of a Soul, which I’ve been enjoying as a memoir of her childhood - although we’ve now left her childhood; I’ve just gotten to the part where all but two of the nuns in the convent fall ill with influenza, and Therese, as one of the well ones, is worked practically off her feet… but it’s fine, because “I was able to have the indescribable consolation of receiving Holy Communion every day… Oh! How sweet that was!”

I really don’t think I quite get nineteenth-century Catholicism.

I’m taking Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster a bit at a time, because it’s a grueling read. One image that keeps recurring: again and again people comment on the contrast between the natural beauty of the Exclusion Zone and its deadliness, the gorgeous cabbages that have to be plowed right back under the earth because they’re saturated with radiation.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve still got ten library books left, and I’ve also been casting a thoughtful eye on my unread bookshelf. It seems to me that this might be the perfect time to read a Mary Stewart or two; I’ve always enjoyed her ability to make you feel like you’re really visiting the places she writes about, and now is the perfect time for a literary holiday. I’ve got Airs above the Ground and The Rough Magic, which take place in Vienna and Corfu, respectively.

La Pointe Courte, Agnes Varda’s first movie, is named after the town where it is set: a small French fishing village. The name is apt, because the movie tells a number of stories which are connected only by their setting: the fishermen’s fight with the health inspectors to continue collecting shellfish in a local lagoon; a local girl’s romance with one of those fishermen; a young Parisian married couple who have are visiting, because this is the husband’s hometown, and they hope to sort out their marital troubles.

Actually, it really feels like two movies knitted together. One is a sort of sociological portrait of this French fishing village in the early fifties. This is Varda’s first film, but this section already feels extremely Varda in its focus on these working class people who are often overlooked by filmmakers, its eye for detail, its interest in the process of gathering things - shellfish, in this case - the interest that eventually developed into The Gleaners and I.

The other half is this story of the bourgeois Parisian couple, who feel like they’ve been parachuted in out of space and possibly out of another directors’ oeuvre. (The one exception is the scene where they crawl into the hulk of an old beached ship, decaying and yet beautiful in its excellent craftsmanship.) They are having an extremely mid-twentieth-century French argument about love (do you love me, or are you in love with love?), often accompanied by close-ups of their overlapping faces.

The first movie is interesting: I particularly enjoyed the scene with the boat jousting, where crews of Viking-type boats row toward each other so the men standing on the prows can try to knock each other off with lances. The second movie fits into it awkwardly, and also feels awkward in itself: a little too theatrical, a little too mannered.

But I suppose you can’t expect even Agnes Varda to burst right out of the gate with her vision fully formed.

Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 covers two hours in the life of Cleo, a singer in Paris who is waiting to hear from her doctor about a potentially fatal diagnosis. (The movie is actually only an hour and a half long; we skip some travel time in there somewhere.) The movie is perhaps as interesting as the things it doesn’t do as the things it does: you might expect meditations on the meaning of life, contemplation about the meaning of death, or at least a life-changing epiphany, but these things happen only in oblique shards.

Instead, Cleo simply wanders, sometimes succumbing to tears as her fears overcome her, sometimes masking her terror in irritation and snapping at the composers who write her songs - and sometimes, briefly, setting aside the sense of impending doom that hangs above her, smiling at herself in the mirror as she tries on new hats.

The movie abounds in these moments of distraction. Not only millinery shops but cafes, mirrors, street performers (including a man who eats live frogs), a silent movie within the movie, all swirl around Cleo as she moves through the streets of Paris. I suspect you could learn quite a bit about Paris in the 1960s just by watching this movie.

I feel that I ought to have something more to say about it, because I did like it, although it didn’t grab at my soul the way Vagabond did; but the film is so dependent on visuals, or rather on the accretion of visual details, many of which seem so small in themselves, that it’s hard to find a way into writing about it. It’s worth seeing, though; I have the feeling that all of Agnes Varda’s films are worth seeing. We’ll see how many I can get my hands on.

In the raw early spring, in the south of France, a vine cutter discovers a young woman frozen to death in a ditch. This is the opening of Agnes Varda’s Vagabond, which then reels backward to tell us the tale of that young woman’s last few weeks as she drifted around the countryside, living in a tent, hitching rides, picking up work or men in order to get money, food, booze, grass.

We learn only a few details about her past. Her name is Mona; she once worked as a secretary, but gave it up. She had the option, then, of a more settled life, but instead took to the road because of... boredom? Laziness? A yearning for freedom? Wanderlust?

She is free do to what she wants, when she wants it, as long as it costs no money: when she went on the road she abandoned not only steady work and soap, but the entire concept of agreeability. Early on, we see her hitch a ride in a truck - which she promptly derides as a piece of junk, when she learns the radio doesn’t work. The truck driver just as promptly drops her off by the side of the road. She’s rude, he complains.

Different people offer different valuations of her character depending on their preconceived notions (all female drifters are grasping and man hungry, charges a garage owner - who we later see crawling out of her tent with his pants undone) or the circumstances under which they meet her. One young girl, disappointed in love herself, catches a glimpse of Mona and her fling-of-the-moment asleep in a gently decaying chateau they’ve broken into, and sees her as a symbol of love. (Soon after, this fling runs out of weed, and then gets beaten up by robbers. Mona ditches him.)

Is her solitude sad or enviable? Her rejection of work, community, obligations of all kinds - is that freedom, or is it living death, as a philosophy student turned goat farmer thinks? (“All my friends who stayed on the road died,” he tells her.) Is she a figure of sexual freedom or sexual vulnerability?

Nothing graphic is ever shown, but it’s clear that sex is one of the ways that Mona provides for herself on the road, along with occasional odd jobs (washing cars, cutting vines) and petty thievery. And her peripatetic life makes her vulnerable: a man attacks her as she camps in the forest, and the camera cuts away as Mona shouts “No!”

(Side note: people sometimes justify graphic rape scenes, for instance on Game of Thrones, on the grounds that it’s necessary for realism, but I’ve become very skeptical of this claim and Vagabond perfectly illustrates why. You don’t have to see the whole damn thing to know what happened.)

Who is the real Mona? I think the genius of the movie lies in the fact that it is, in the end, it commits to no simple interpretation, but shows Mona as a kaleidoscope: her many facets shake together differently at different times. She can be callously dismissive, as with the fling she abandons; or she can be great company, as when she gets roaring drunk with a rich, lonely old woman who no one else has time for.

Now, this doesn’t mean that all interpretations of Mona are equally correct: the garage owner and the romantic girl are clearly seeing what they want to see, for instance. But many seemingly-contradictory interpretations are more or less true. It all depends how the pieces in the kaleidoscope have fallen out that day.

***

I didn’t intentionally watch this movie in conjunction with Tallulah, but it’s been a fruitful pairing, because the contrast in the way that the two movies treat their main characters, both of whom are female drifters.

Tallulah wants you to like the title character, and although I did enjoy the movie, I think ultimately this desire warped it out of true. The movie softens many of Lu’s less appealing aspects (that glove compartment full of credit cards) and twists itself into a pretzel to ensure that you’re basically on Lu’s side when she kidnaps a baby. Showing that the baby’s mother is unfit isn’t enough: after the baby is kidnapped, no less than three characters step up to tell the mother so.

Vagabond doesn’t care if you like Mona. Indeed, in many ways it paints her in a quite unflattering light. She abandons one lover because he’s run out of weed; later on, she ditches another young man because she’s offered a ride as long as she’s traveling alone. She steals from people who try to help her. She uses people.

And yet you do come to like her - not perhaps in the sense that you’d want to sit down and have coffee with her (if for no other reason than that almost all the characters comment on how bad she smells) - but in the sense that you come to care a great deal what happens to her. There’s a plain honesty in her portrayal - both in the sense that she’s brutally honest and in the sense that the movie never flinches from showing us her uglier actions - that makes up for the lack of any more ordinary appeal.

And indeed, there’s something attractive about her very refusal to be appealing - her refusal to do anything that she doesn’t want to do, even if that something is as simple as politely refraining from complaining about the truck’s broken radio. Why does Mona go on the road? Because she wants to. It’s as simple and as baffling as that.

I expected to enjoy Total Eclipse, as it was directed by Agnieszhka Holland (who directed The Secret Garden) and is about the dysfunctional romance between the French poets Verlaine and Rimbaud.

But in fact I didn’t finish it. Leonardo DiCaprio was bizarrely wooden as Rimbaud: what makes this particularly odd is that when he’s playing Rimbaud pretending to be a dog or a goat, he’s actually quite convincing, but when he’s just delivering normal dialogue he’s flat. This may be intentional - although what it’s intending to show, I don’t know - but mostly the effect is “this is Leonardo DiCaprio pretending to be someone and doing a bad job of it.”

Also, I had not realized just how low my tolerance is for men behaving badly because they are GENIUSES. To be fair the movie doesn’t entirely agree with this point, but Verlaine and Rimbaud clearly believe that their GENIUS means that they can do whatever they want, even if that means setting his wife’s hair on fire (Verlaine) or stealing his host’s stuff if he feels like it (Rimbaud) or stabbing his lover’s hand in a weird demonstration of the principle that if you’re going to be brutal, it’s purer to do it while you’re sober and also insulting to apologize (Rimbaud again, chastising Verlaine for maundering on about how he drunkenly set his wife’s hair on fire).

The hand-stabbing really ought to be in my wheelhouse, but in combination with DiCaprio’s flat delivery it’s just kind of dull and unpleasant. There’s no sense of interiority to his character - no sense of why he’s doing any of this. And without that, what’s the point?

It's been a dispiriting week so I'm behind in The Three Musketeers, but I can at least report that the characters have been suffering a week even more dispiriting than mine. D'Artagnan is dispirited because Milady is trying to kill him! Milady is dispirited because her stupid assassins just keep failing! The musketeers themselves are downcast because, as a result of their efforts to help d'Artagnan, they too are now in Milady's crosshairs.

We have not seen Anne d'Autriche or Constance Bonacieux for quite a few chapters, but Queen Anne is still married to Louis XIII and Constance is hidden away in a convent to save her from Milady's vengeance so I think we can take it as read that they are suffering too. They are my favorites and I hope we will get more chapters about them (and by that I mean that I hope we get another scene where Constance flings herself to her knees to swear allegiance to Queen Anne, I HAVE SIMPLE NEEDS), but sadly I think it will be some time before they show up again. WOE.

Also, I've got to say. For the most part I am really into Athos's "strong and silent noble lord who is fleeing from his opulent yet dark past, yet cannot fully conceal his innate superiority, and also has suffered so much that he's just totally zen about death because after everything else that happens to him that's small potatoes" -

But goddamn is he an asshole to his lackey. Let the poor man speak, Athos! And for God's sake don't drag him into a picnic in an abandoned bastion in the middle of a battlefield! (The musketeers are picnicking in this unlikely place so they can discuss their future plans without eavesdroppers.) I guess probably it's beneath a musketeer's dignity to carry his own picnic basket - but dude, try it just this once.