The Last Man Who Knew Everything

This is a biography of a polymath. Thomas Young was a physicist, doctor, and archaeologist who deciphered the Rosetta Stone. It is written by a science writer. I was attracted to this biography because it was about a polymath: polymaths are historically not well received by academics. But I have only reached one conclusion: never read a biography written by a science writer. There are essays on Young's scientific discoveries, as opposed to insights into his life and character. Rats.

Frapie, Nau, Tharaud, Moselly

I read four Goncourt-winning novels since yesterday. Tharaud's Dingley is a satirical novel, unusually written in collaboration, about the British in World War I. I didn't think it was possible to laugh at that, although national caricatures are always easy. It was a quick read, fairly insignificant. But as with the other three, the Goncourt dared to reward novels very different one from the other, and in any event it is a nice change from Zola (although I just started his last three novels, Fecondite being the first). Moselly wrote Terres lorraines, a tragic pastoral about betrayed love ending, you guessed it, in suicide. I saw the tragedy coming from far away, and the betraying feckless young man is an unusually flat character -- I have still no idea why he took up and dropped the same woman twice. He portrays the seas better than this plot-essential person. Nau in Force ennemie (in English, I'd translate it into 'fifth column' wrote an unusual novel about a mental hospital, an unhealthy place in early 20th century France. It reminded me of The Snake Pit and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in terms of content, and the waterboarding scene was used in the terrible movie The Fifth Floor. There are assaults, mistreatments, lies. Finally, Frapie's novel La Maternelle is about a cleaning woman in a early childhood school, complete with sexual harassment, lies, mistreatment of children, etc. These were all quick reads. Frapie and Nau went to the trouble of introducing a first person narrative point of view, which most authors today skip.

Zola, Pot-Bouille and Bonheur des Dames

So I finished reading the two last books in the Rougon-Macquart series, Pot-Bouille, a dismembering of the French bourgeoisie, it's that acerbic, and something about a ladies' shop in Paris, Bonheur des dames. Neither are particularly memorable, but the description of a birth by a woman alone at home in Pot-bouille just leaps right off the page. The true but never-mentioned excrement which accompanies birth pangs was described dryly, but with great naturalism. All in all, there are certain books that are riveting, like the famous Germinal, but otherwise I repeat my complaint that Zola is a polemicist, and not a novelist, and that he fails to bring most characters to life, to make us care about his characters. Ah, and Balzac did that so effortlessly, even when the plot twists weren't remotely believable. I suppose only Tolstoy had it all: plot, character, telling detail.

Zola's La Terre

Zola is at his best describing humanity's lowest moments -- assault, disloyalty, poverty. Otherwise, he is a run of the mill writer, and is particularly uneven. I read the contemporaneous reviews of La Terre, and we are in agreement. And I like a good pastoral -- this one is just a melodrama with long scenes of sunrise and wind on wheat fields. So much for that.

Sade's Crimes de l'amour

I read Sade's Crimes de l'amour, and it is not literarily memorable. This turned out to be a privately printed collection of short stories. I noticed that the distribution was assigned to an individual living who knows where in Europe, and had a circulation restricted to 'bibliophile' aficianados known to the guy who paid for the printing. And I was shortly to find out why: there was a story at the end that qualifies as pornography (i.e. minors coerced into sexual acts) even if it is not explicit by today's standards. The fine binding meant that an individual could bring it into Canada without it being particularly noticed. So I'm going to recycle it rather than donate it and let it circulate again. Who knew? And it was purchased for me as a gift (because it was in French) at the local public library used bookstore. Nobody at the library read it, that is for sure. Mind you, I've read books I thought were pornographic, i.e. describing sexual acts in which women were not willing participants, that were held in our public library, protested, but was ignored. Put it down to experience.

Zola, Eugene Rougon and Argent, other books

I didn't think much of Zola's political novel, Son excellence Eugene Rougon, the best of a bad genre according to some professors of literature. It doesn't hold a candle to Trolloppe's, for example, it fails to come to life. Argent is about financiers in Paris, and has more interest for me, but is still not very lively.

I got as gifts several books in French, all of them translations. So I read La Popessa, about the nun who looked after Pius XII -- I doubt the accuracy of some of it, it's kind of trashy. I also read a translation of Danielle Steele's Loving, which took little engagement on my part to follow the plot. I have as a last book something by the Marquis de Sade. I've read some of his novels and a biography, and don't feel a critical need to know more, but I plan to read it. Finally, a great play by Jean Anouilh, Antigone, which I read in high school. It's wonderful. I guess they're all headed for the donation bin.