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.
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
