pickNow @Leoslittlebooklife & I are 1/2 through the 20 vol Rougon-Macquart series. This was a marked departure in tone from the previous books. A previous title does it more justice- Restless House. Like in The Assommoir, an apartment building features heavily in the story but this time it‘s a petit bourgeois building vs the squalor of a tenement. While madcapped, lusty and frenetic, the last 4th of the book hammers home the hypocrisy beautifully.
I finally made it to Pere Lachaise today, and Proust was my #1 dead person I had to visit. The map I found online turned out to be wildly unspecific (right quadrant, wrong position for EVERYONE), but I ran into a nice lady who offered me help and steered me right to him.
Alas, I never did find Sarah Bernhardt, but I also said hi to Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. The latter is so rowdy they‘ve got metal event barriers around him.
We are nothing but perpetual animals. What‘s the use of these huge fragile enthusiasms, these dried-out leaps of joy? We know nothing but dead stars; we look at faces; and we sigh with pleasure. Our eyes turn aimlessly, hopelessly. There‘s nothing now but these cafés where we meet to drink these cold beverages, these mixed drinks, and the tables are stickier than these sidewalks where our dead shadows from the day before have fallen.
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
#findingjoy
#14639769
I had to add this to my collection. Many books on French writers don‘t include very many women writers. They usually have Marie de France, Madame de La fayette , sometimes Simone de Beauvoir and George Sand and that‘s it.
so-soI‘ve always been intimidated by Proust and was thrilled to read this one with a few others. Proust has a meandering way of exploring the world around him. He‘s not rushed and his sentences are long and indulgent. That can feel exhausting at times, but then you come across a line so beautiful and achingly relatable that it stops you in your tracks. I‘m not ready to tackle the rest of the series, but maybe one book a year would be the right speed.
Sarah @HardcoverHearts and I are buddy reading Emile Zola‘s Rougon Maquart series in publication order. Starting no. 9 today: Pot Luck.
“It‘s most direct successor in modern French literature may be Baudelaire‘s post-romantic” Fleurs du mal”. It was only a few years after “The Regrets” that the wars of religion between varying factions of Protestants and Catholics (1562-98) profoundly changed French culture and set the stage for the more highly structured and often less personal literature of the 17th century”.
Reading Barzakh, a fantasy/SF novel by Mauritanian author Moussa Ould Ebnou. Doing a bit of research on Aoudaghost/Awdaghost, a city lost to the desert in the Middle-Ages, and on the Sahel region is helping a lot w/ timeline & geography.
Pic by Luca Abbate from https://wildmanlife.com/aoudaghost-economic-hub-of-the-sahara/ This page contains pics & detailed info & matches quite closely the descriptions in the book. Useful.
#Mauritania
