de Lacretelle, Le Franc, Robert

I read a bunch of novels yesterday. First I read Roman du malade by Louis de Robert (all my authors had the French particle, as a matter of fact). It was wonderful -- full of truth, keenly observed, a quick easy read, luminously simple prose. That first page would get the novel published today. It's the story of a man sick with tuberculosis, and he tels the story simply of how people behave around him, of how he falls in love with someone who visits him, of the careful watch of every nuance of a doctor's pronouncements on his illness. Le Franc's Grand-Louis l'innocent is a love story between a shell-shocked soldier and a country woman. I found it somewhat cliche. I then read a daring novel about anti-Semitism, Silbermann by de Lacretelle. It's predictable, but the topic was not welcome in bourgeois France in the interwar period. Finally, I read Odyssee d'un transport torpille, which tells the simple story of a ship and its crews' adventures, going from port to port, before and during World War I.

Old Europe, New Security and Feminist Methodologies in International Relations

I read the two books above for professional reasons. Feminist Methodologies falls prey to that most common of flaws in theoretical or methodological works, claiming too much for its accomplishments -- I've done it myself just about as often as I've published. The book on security is actually more believable on the claim of women scholars' work being integrated into the mainstream.

Joue-moi Espana, Jeanne d'Arc, Marie-Claire, Deborah et les anges dissipes

Well, I read a novel about the last days of the ancient Jewish community in Cairo, told not in a tone of grief but in a picaresque novel. I appreciate that from a novelist, and the story is really ridiculous: a generous American donor comes to see the orphanage she funds, and the locals substitute a bordello and its occupants for it. It all ends in a hail of bullets from Israel, ironically enough. The novel about Joan of Arc is a very quick read, and I will remember the detailed description of Joan burning at the stake for quite some time. Finally, both Joue moi Espana and Marie-Claire are bildungsroman, but the latter, written by what passes for a non-professional writer, Marguerite Audoux, sparkles with simplicity and light.

Handelman, Imprecateur, Grand Vizier de la nuit, Le reste est silence... by Jaloux, Juan Maldonne, Georgette Garou

I'm reading a truckload right now because I ordered the rest of my Femina and Goncourt winners from Interlibrary Loan and then found out a bunch of proposals I had made had come through with support. Wow! Do I have work to do!



I liked the start of Imprecateur, and the end, too. It's a first person narrative of mysterious deaths in the French subsidiary of an internal company, and it starts with the narrator in a psych hospital and ends with the narrator being released, and learning afresh about the murder that landed him in Psych in the first place just having occurred. Daring and entertaining, but the middle part bored me. Juan Maldonne is set in post WWI Turkey, with all the plot twists you might expect of a picaresque novel. Grand vizier de la nuit by Catherine Vieille is another skillful novel about the same-sex love of a servant for his master, and all the events that flow from it, with murder, love and betrayal, and at the end the death of the storyteller. It is set in the middle East in about 800 C.E. Le reste est silence, by Jaloux and Georgette Garou have as their themes marital infidelity perpetrated by women. In Jaloux's novel, the young son narrates, and comes to realize the sacrifice his mother made in staying in the family, a bourgeois French family at the turn of the century. In Georgette, it's a woman farm-owner who sleeps with another man to have a child, as her husband is sterile, and eventually leaves, realizing her husband drove her to the adultery. It is skillfully written as well, I suppose my taste for early 20th century literature is showing.



The book by Howard Handelman was about less developed countries, and the chapters corresponded to the problems they face. I was hoping for more public administration that this book actually had, but it was very complete and thorough in its approach. It's a quick easy read. I also read the third volume of Politics of Nonviolent Action -- also a breeze. I suppose after Heidegger, anything is easy.

Gene Sharp, Politics of Nonviolent Action

This is an excellent three-volume description of the use of nonviolent means in a confrontation between a dissident group and a state government, or state organization. I was interested in reading this book because it interests some potential collaborators of mine, and I’m very glad I did. First, it’s the closest thing I’ve read in a long time to the sort of work I do, and the sort of book I write, although frankly, this is much more detailed and comprehensive. Second, it made me think about what my own work is and is not – this is a philosophical read of the book in the manner of Berdiaev, but it is very useful to me. It’s on this last point that I would like to elaborate.

First, Sharp does not distinguish between psychological violence and physical violence, and I do. Mind you, this was written in 1968 or so, when no one was yet thinking about psychological violence except in the most unsubtle terms.

Second, the methods he recommends are limited to uses between a dissident group and a government. My work on strategy applies to the full spectrum of possible interactions between actors: person to phenomenon or event, person to person, person to group, person to international group, person to government, person to group of governments, group to phenomenon or event, group to group, group to international group, group to government, group to group of governments, international group to government, international group to international group, international group to group of governments, international group to phenomenon, government to phenomenon, government to government, government to group of governments, group of governments to group of governments.

Third, the politics of nonviolent action only really apply to a conflict or a confrontation. Strategy is applicable to conflict or confrontation as well as exploiting opportunities or making the best of a situation.

Fourth, to work, the politics of nonviolent action require the confronted government to have an audience about whose opinion it cares – in other words, there has to be the potential for that government to be embarrassed. It doesn’t work in the case of, say Communist China under Mao and Tibet, because Communist China didn’t care what the West thought of it.

Fifth, to work, the politics of nonviolent action requires there to be some value placed on the dissident group. Again, with China and its periodic target of certain types of crimes or criminals, the government places no value and does not care if it executes a hundred of them within a few days of arrest, because its values are on preventing a certain type of crime, as happened with embezzlement a few years ago.

Sixth, my work is about strategy, and Sharp’s work really is about tactics and counter tactics. This means that my work would complement Sharp’s to the extent that it would explore and train in detail how to use those tactics.

Seventh, my work is at a higher level of generality, hence the comments about greater than confrontation, greater than nonviolent means, etc. But strategy can make nonviolence better, in terms of understanding the power that is to be confronted, and underdog strategy can make nonviolent action even better too.

Eighth, strategy does not require success to be an equalization of power. Strategy can help assure survival.

Ninth, underdog strategy assumes a constant state of unequal power throughout the period covered by the strategy.

Tenth, strategy can be used by the powerful as well as the underdog. Fortunately, powerful people, groups or governments usually practice strategy of the strong, and they are usually bad at it.

Eleventh, nonviolent action requires the participation and long-term mobilization of a significant proportion of people. That doesn’t happen very often, it’s a tall order, and if a regime is long-lived enough or brutal enough, it can literally beat the life out of the people it is oppressing.

Twelfth, Sharp will work with liberal democratic countries and authoritarian regimes, but not the totalitarian ones unless they are already weakened for other reasons.

Takashi Nagi by Paul Glynn, Power of Nice by R. Shapiro, Maitre d'heure by Claude Faraggi

Well, Power of Nice was disappointing -- it's a book about negotiating, and I hoped that it was going to be how to have a non-confrontational process, but it seems it's still about winning, but about how winning and leaving hour opponent something, as opposed to nothing, is better. The book about Nagai was very interesting -- this is a physician pacifist who barely survived the Hiroshima nd Nagasaki attacks to become the voice of the conscience of Japan. I learned a lot about Jpaanese culture, and this despite my having worked there and conducted research on its politics. The story is a very sad one, although all Japanese alive in that period pretty much had a terrible time of it. Maitre d'heure is a mystery novel, I think, by Claude Faraggi. I didn't like it. It was hard to read because the paragraphs were not split often enough, and also the style of writing was mysterious as well - hence the uncertainty about it all. I'm now reading a novel called L'imprecateur, and it's a first person narrative of someone in a psychiatric hospital, with a great start. I read about 790 pages of it despite being sleepy... it's been a while since I read something that gripping.

Negotiations, Haumont

I read two books since I last posted -- one is The Power of Nice, written by two sports lawyers who find it pays to not be a complete shark, only mostly a shark, and Le trajet, by Mari Haumont. Le trajet failed to capture my attention. So it's been pretty boring. Power of Nice has a very good listening checklist that I am going to use in future, but that's about it.

Grenier's Cine-Roman

This is the story of a family and a small town in France, built around the ownership and operation of a small movie theatre. I hate it that I can't avoid the cliche, but this novel is cinematic, and in that sense, I suppose, it's a success. I was mildly interested, it was well structured, it was an easy if not a thrilling read. There's a coming of age novel in there too.

Fleutiaux, Bolletto, Lambron, Absire, Sonkin

I have read in recent days Pierrette Fleutiaux's Nous sommes eternels, Bolletto's Enfer, Marc Lambron's L'oeil du silence, L'Egal de Dieu by Alain Absire, and Un Amour de pere, by Francois Sonkin. Well, Fleutiaux was a long, slow read, full of stream-of-consciousness and heavy portents. It was hard to follow and poorly structured. Enfer is a verite low-life story, an easy read but unremarkable. Lambron's novel is about Lee Miller, a photographer and society woman, whose biography I had read. It was an easy read, but not very interesting otherwise. I really like Absire's novel, written by a monk remembering his days as the valet of a minor feudal vassal. I thought it rang very true, except of course that the French was much too contemporary. But if it hadn't, it would have been like reading Gargantua all over again, and who would want to do that? Sonkin's first person novel is mildly intriguing, and starts well with the story of the father caring for his sick son. I also enjoyed the peripatetic marriage negotiations of the bourgeois class in France.

more prize-winning novels in French: Debray, Delay, Biabciotti, Jardin

I read La neige brule, by Regis Debray. It was a novel I found thoughtful, and despite its conventionality (basically a Marxist revolutionary Harlequin -- oh! The author is going to kill me if he reads this!), thought-provoking. The narrator at one point says: "her warmth comforted me and annoyed me, like life itself." Is life always warm and also always annoying? I fear so, and yet I try and avoid concluding so. I also read an insipid novel, Riche et legere (rich and callous), by Florence Delay, whose title turned out to be entirely too apt . Hector Ciabciotti's first novel in French (despite the Italian name, his first language is Spanish) turned out to be meandering and just this side of pointless. It didn't hold my attention. Right now I'm reading Le zebre, by Alexandre Jardin, and I find it mildly intriguing. I also read Sylvie Germain's Jours de colere, which I kept mistaking for a Quebec novel, although it's clearly set in the Morbihan, in Brittany. Possibly the language characteristics survive until today....