New Google Doodle Honors Charles Perrault, the Father of the Fairytale

RISHI IYENGAR
JANUARY 11, 2016 9:47 PM EST

If you’ve ever read a story that begins with “Once upon a time…” then there’s a good chance you’ve come across the work of the man whose 388th birthday Tuesday’s Google Doodle is celebrating.

Charles Perrault, an academic from Paris who spent most of his life in the court of King Louis XV in the 17th century, may not be a household name, but Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty — two of his best-known fairytales — definitely are.

The Doodle created by artist Sophie Diao features scenes from both those stories, as well as two more of his famous fables, Mother Goose and Puss in Boots.

Perrault, who died in 1703, only started writing stories in his sixties after he had retired. He borrowed several elements from stories that were already widely narrated, but provided what were then modern twists to the narrative. Moreover, the act of presenting them in written form was itself an unprecedented move at the time, and made him a true pioneer of storytelling.

TIME

Charles Perrault / French author

Charles Perrault

French author

Charles Perrault, (born January 12, 1628, Paris, France—died May 15/16, 1703, Paris), French poet, prose writer, and storyteller, a leading member of the Académie Française, who played a prominent part in a literary controversy known as the quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. He is best remembered for his collection of fairy stories for children, Contes de ma mère l’oye (1697; Tales of Mother Goose). He was the brother of the physician and amateur architect Claude Perrault.

A lawyer by training, Charles Perrault first worked as an official in charge of royal buildings. He began to win a literary reputation in about 1660 with some light verse and love poetry and spent the rest of his life in promoting the study of literature and the arts. In 1671 he was elected to the Académie Française, which soon was sharply divided by the dispute between the Ancients and the Moderns. Perrault supported the Moderns, who believed that, as civilization progresses, literature evolves with it and that therefore ancient literature is inevitably more coarse and barbarous than modern literature. His poem Le Siècle de Louis le Grand (1687; “The Age of Louis the Great”) set such modern writers as Molière and François de Malherbe above the Classical authors of Greece and Rome. His chief opponent in this controversy was Nicolas Boileau. Perrault’s stand was a landmark in the eventually successful revolt against the confines of the prevailing tradition.

Perrault’s fairy stories in Mother Goose were written to amuse his children. They include “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Bluebeard,” modern versions of half-forgotten folk tales, which Perrault retold in a style that is simple and free from affectation.

ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA

BRITANNICA

Homa Taj / In Conversation with Bettina Rheims

Homa Taj In Conversation with Bettina RHEIMS on Her Return to America

10/13/2010

Bettina Rheims has been creating intensely erotic images of women, for more than three decades. My introduction to Rheims’ work was marked by the purchase of her hugely successful Chamber Closed – a copy of which has graced my tri-continental travelling library since, 1998. Two weeks ago, I spoke with Bettina over the phone, in Paris, about her work …and return to New York City, after many years of absence. Her first major gallery exhibition in the United States, in nearly 20 years, is held at the Edwynn Houk Gallery, until October 30, 2010.

Charlotte Rampling
Photo by Bettina Rheims

Homa Nasab – In what way do think your background as a model has influenced your work?

Bettina Rheims – I don’t know that it did influence me. What it did tell me was that I did not want to stay on that side of the camera. Though, my experiences in front of the camera – even as an actress for a brief period – may unconsciously have given me the feeling that I don’t want to make women uncomfortable… though it’s sometimes necessary for my work.

Jean Giono / The Man Who Plated Trees

Jean Giono

JEAN GIONO: THE MAN WHO PLANTED TREES

March 30, 2018

Jean Giono, the only son of a cobbler and a laundress, was one of France’s greatest writers. His prodigious literary output included stories, essays, poetry, plays, filmscripts, translations and over thirty novels, many of which have been translated into English. Giono was a pacifist, and was twice imprisoned in France at the outset and conclusion of World War II. He remained tied to Provence and Manosque, the little city where he was born in 1895 and, in 1970, died.

“All Quiet on the Western Front” Reflects the Postwar Mind

All Quiet on the Western Front is often praised for the way it faithfully captures not only the physical experi­ence of war, but the psychological bent of the young sol­diers who were caught up in its futile and alienating brutality. Modris Eksteins, professor of history at the University of Toronto, Canada, argues in the following viewpoint that it is more accurate to say that Remarque captured the postwar mind. After all, when Remarque wrote the novel, the war had been over for ten years. Remarque and other writers of his generation were fi­nally able to come to terms with the trauma the war had caused them, and Remarque, like a number of other writers, wrote the novel during this post-trauma time, not during the war. Consequently, it reflects post­war values, including the belief that World War I con­tributed immensely to the rootlessness of many of the people who survived it. Modris Eksteins has written extensively about Germany’s Weimar Republic and on war and its impact on civilization.

by Modris Eksteins
February 7, 2018

The simplicity and power of the theme—war as a demeaning and wholly destructive, indeed nihilistic, force—are made starkly effective by a style that is basic, even brutal. Brief scenes and short crisp sentences, in the first person and in the present tense, create an inescapable and gripping immediacy. There is no delicacy. The language is frequently rough, the images often gruesome. The novel has a consis­tency of style and purpose that Remarque’s earlier work had lacked and that little of his subsequent work would achieve.

Stanislaw Lem / Hospital of the Transfiguration

HOSPITAL OF THE TRANSFIGURATION

by Stanislaw Lem

June 16, 2019

Hospital of the Transfiguration was Stanislaw Lem’s first novel, written in 1948 but only later published in his native Poland. Its English translation, by William Brand, did not appear until 1988. Though Lem is best known as a writer of science fiction, Hospital of the Transfiguration is set in Poland shortly after the German invasion of 1939. Lem signposts this immediately when its central character, Stefan, arrives at Nieczawy for a family funeral to discovers a memorial to Poland’s ‘Sons’, “Faithful to Her Until the Hour of Their Death” with a September 1939 date. He thinks of this again later when the family gather for a meal after the burial:

STANISLAW LEM

Based on a 1971 sci-fi novel by Stanislaw Lem, this movie begins

• By Brian Miller

Tuesday, August 26, 2014 12:28pm

Based on a 1971 sci-fi novel by Stanislaw Lem, this movie begins intriguingly as Hollywood satire. Robin Wright plays Robin Wright, an actress on the wrong side of 40 with two kids to support. The roles aren’t there, so her agent (a very warm, welcome Harvey Keitel) gets her an unusual audition with a studio boss (Danny Huston, ever charming and malevolent). Basically the deal is this, he explains: We get your past and future likeness to manipulate however we want in the computer—but no porn!—now and forever, so as to not compete with yourself. “I need Buttercup,” he says. “I don’t need you.” These are the best, funniest scenes to The Congress, though not the most eye-popping ones, which soon follow.

The Open-Ended Parables of Stanislaw Lem and Solaris

Stanislaw Lem

THE OPEN-ENDED PARABLES OF STANISLAW LEM AND “SOLARIS”

by Darko Suvin

Solaris is the first novel of the distinguished Polish writer Stanislaw Lem to be translated into English. In order to understand its context, which is Lem’s rediscovery of science fiction as a supple and satisfactory form of literary cognition, the English-language reader should be acquainted with Lem’s staggering range of interests and achievement. For Lem is not only the most important SF writer on the continent of Europe, he is a cultural phenomenon unto himself.

Jean Giono / Hill

Jean Giono

HILL

May 25, 2016

When Scott of Seraillon and Dorian of Eiger Monch and Jungfrau, as a result of a discussion surrounding the latter’s dislike of Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life, suggested reading Jean Giono’s Hill, recently published by New York Review of Books in a new translation by Paul Eprile, I felt almost obliged to join in given my own hostility to Seethaler’s novel. Hill was Giono’s first novel, originally published in 1929, set in a small village, the Bastides, in Provence, an area Giono knew well. (This, of course, immediately points to one difference between the novels: Seethaler, born in 1966, is writing about a past he never experienced; Giono, who was thirty-four when Hill was published, is writing about a time and place which he knew intimately).

That the novel begins with a description of the landscape, and that the first consciousness we inhabit is that of a boar, is an indication of the importance of nature in Giono’s work. The landscape is as alive as any other character, with Giono frequently using imagery to suggest this:

“Mount Lure dominates the landscape and blocks out the west with its huge, numb, mountain body.”

Shortly after he describes night “pouring into the valley”:

“It washes over the haunch of the hill. The olive groves raise their song, under the shadow.”

While nature is given human attributes, characters are often described in terms of the nature around them:

“From his beady, chestnut coloured eyes his blank stare flits into the sky like a moth.”

Despite cramming the novel with a wheen of apt and striking similes and metaphors, Giono never strays from the world of the novel in his imagery, enhancing the sense of a closed eco-system, and the limits of his characters’ perspective.

Thirteen characters live in the village, the oldest of which is Janet, now bedridden. A deterioration in his condition has prompted a doctor’s visit, a rare intrusion from the world outside:

“I don’t believe he has much time left… Do what I told you. However, in my opinion it’s like putting a bandage on a wooden leg. If he gets any worse, come and get me if you want, but it’s a long way. It took me three hours to get up here.”

Janet’s approaching death is not the only cloud hanging over the village, both literally and metaphorically. Much of the novel has an ominous feel; the village’s dilapidated state is a reminder of the precariousness of man’s existence, and tension builds towards some sensed but unknown threat. First there is a storm (“The sky is like a swamp where patches of open water gleam between patches of slime”), and then the sighting of a black cat associated with previous misfortunes, which Gondran, Janet’s son-in-law, is happy to list to the other villagers:

“As for the earthquake back in ’07…it was on a Thursday. The Monday before that, when I was stalking partridge, I’d seen the cat.”

Soon after the fountain, the village’s only supply of water, runs dry.

A rural life is one where luck, and therefore superstition, plays a part, but Giono is making a more profound point than that. Gondran has an epiphany where he considers the way man treats nature:

“Is he directly to blame for the suffering of plants and animals?
Can he not even cut down a tree without committing murder?
It’s true, when he cuts down a tree, he does kill.
And when he scythes, he slays.
So that’s the way it is – is he killing all the time? Is he living like a gigantic runaway barrel, levelling everything in his path?”

The novel, as well as being a detailed portrait of rural life in the early part of the twentieth century, is also a meditation of man’s relationship with nature, for which, it suggests, there is a price to pay. (This can be seen, for example, in Gondron’s failure to shoot a boar at the beginning, a kill which he makes at the end). In this it is in some ways a very contemporary novel despite its description of a way of life which has largely disappeared in Europe, exploring ideas about how we should treat animals and land, a debate which is even more urgent today.

Above all, it is a joy to read. It is beautifully written, and therefore I imagine beautifully translated, with too many memorable phrases to mention. Stylistically, its short paragraphs and sections of direct speech perfectly suit both the characters and the building tension. The characters themselves, though often built in a series of brief strokes like an etching, soon come to inhabit the landscape, as does the reader.

1STREADING'S BLOG

Jean Giono / Harvest / Review

Jean Giono

HARVEST

January 23, 2017

One of the most impressive novels I read last year was originally written in 1929. Hill (which I read in a new translation by Paul Eprile) was Jean Giono’s first novel and it left me eager for more, though up against Giono’s rather sporadic and disorganised appearance in English. Hill is the first of three novels said to comprise Giono’s ‘Pan trilogy’, the second being Un de Baumugnes (Lovers are Never Losers) and the third Regain (Second Harvest). Both were translated into English in the 1930s, but Lovers are Never Losers seems not to have been reprinted (and is therefore not the easiest book to get hold of) whereas Second Harvest (translated by Henri Fluchere and Geoffrey Myers) was (in 1999 by Harvill).

Second Harvest, like Hill, is set in a sparsely populated village in the Provence area of France. In fact the village of Aubignane is so sparsely populated that when the novel opens it has only three inhabitants left: Gaubert and Mameche, both elderly, and Panturle, the only one with much life left ahead of him:

“Panturle was a huge man. He looked like a piece of wood walking along. During the heat of the summer, when he had made himself a sort of sun-curtain out of fig leaves and held himself erect with his hands full of grass, he was just like a tree.”

That Panturle appears to be part of nature is not unexpected as Giono uses language in these novels to suggest that the landscape and the creatures (including people) which live there are inextricably linked. The wind, we are told, “waved about a little and beat its tail gently against the hard sky”; flames are “just like colts, prancing around elegantly without thinking of work”; in winter:

“The countryside shivered in silence…Every morning a russet sun rose in silence. With a few indifferent paces it strode across the whole breadth of the sky and day was over. Night heaped up the stars like grain.”

Gaubert has been convinced by his son to leave as winter approaches – “He says he’s anxious about leaving me alone this winter” – and it looks as if the village will soon be empty until Mamech asks Panturle, “If I brought you one, would you take the woman?” She does not ask this question because she has someone in mind but simply out of determination. The promise seems in vain, however, when Mamech herself disappears.

Our focus now moves to the knife-grinder, Gedemus, and the woman he travels with, Arsule. Arsule’s back-story is an indication that Giono is never sentimental about the lives he portrays. A travelling entertainer, she is abandoned by her ‘manager’ and, when found the next day by a group of farm-workers, she is repeatedly raped. Gedemus then takes her in as both servant and mistress. His treatment of her as a useful asset rather than a human being can be seen in the way that, though they set off with him pulling his knife-grinding tools in a cart, she soon takes over.

Through a series of prosaic events which Giono describes in such a way to seem almost mystical, including Gedemus and Arulse pulling Panturle from a river and saving his life, Panturle and Arsule end up living together in Abignane. Panturle’s symbolic rebirth (“He had begun to live again a few moments ago…”) is the beginning of the rebirth of the village, best seen in his decision to plant grain again having lived alone by hunting.

As with Hill, Second Harvest is a simple story told with great subtlety. Giono’s great skill is to display characters and landscape as one and in constant conflict. Even in writing of a way of life which was already dying out, there is an optimism of the will which is difficult to resist.

1STREANDIN'S BLOG

Jean Giono / Melville

Jean Giono

MELVILLE

September 22, 2017

My introduction to Jean Giono last year, when New York Review of Books published Hill, was one of those moments when a half-known name exceeds all expectations, when an old voice sounds fresh and new, and when those first few pages suggest a long-term relationship. Impatiently moving onto another of his early novels, Second Harvest, I was delighted to discover that NYRB have a similarly enduring commitment to Giono, and have now released Paul Eprile’s translation of Melville (which will in turn be followed by his 1951 novel, The Open Road). As Edmund White points put in his introduction, Melville comes at a turning point in Giono’s writing life, as he moved away from his “Pan Cycle…works of an almost folkloric quality that highlighted his native Provençal landscape.” While this change may be related to the failure of Giono’s pacifism, Melville’s origins are particularly unusual as the novel began as an introduction to his own translation (alongside his friend Lucien Jacques) of Moby Dick. Instead it became an imaginative recreation of the author based on his reading of the book.

Melville begins strangely enough with the lines:

“In 1849, when Melville returned to America after a short stay in England, he had a strange item in his baggage. It was an embalmed head…but it was his own.”

It continues, however, with a summary of Meville’s biography, albeit in a style full of conversational interjections and imaginative interpolations – one in which Melville’s restless energy is echoed in the narrative voice. Giono focuses on Melville’s desire to escape to the sea, but where he is (unsurprisingly) particularly good is in his portrayal of Melville as a writer:

“For fifteen months, since he went to sea, he’d been wrestling with an angel. Like Jacob, he’s plunged into darkness and no dawn comes…He hasn’t a moment’s respite from the fight… He, Herman, wrestles with this dreadful angel who, by doing battle, illuminates the impenetrable mystery of the intercourse between humans and the gods. It’s inside of this mystery that his eyes have sight.”

It’s after Melville has dropped off the manuscript of White-Jacket with his publisher in London that the novel leaves his life behind and entirely enters Giono’s fantasy. Giono portrays Melville as a man who cannot live without adventure:

“…as long as there was the possibility of getting in discussion, in argument; as long as it should have been leading into something worthwhile, London was still bearable. But now – dark, soulless, noisy – he can’t stand it. What kind of trap had he fallen into?”

Dismissing his initial instinct to rebel by wearing a white top hat, Melville instead strikes up a conversation with the stable boy, asking him, “Supposing you had ten days of freedom to do whatever you liked, what would you do?” The stable boy’s answer, that he would visit his sweetheart, Jenny, in the village of Woodcut, is all Melville needs to begin an adventure. He acquires the appropriate costume, recreating the appearance of a sailor, a process which sees him feel alive once more:

“His heart was swelling again. Big, ferocious wings were starting to fan him furiously…”

This sense of adventure is inextricably linked to his inspiration:

“The battle with the angel has resumed. He always suspected it was only a truce.”

It seems likely that Giono sees something (or even everything) of himself in Melville, his attachment to the country echoed in Melville’s relationship with the sea. As Melville wrestles with his muse, we see Giono coming to terms with a change in his own writing:

“It’s up to me to devise my own compasses and my own rigging. In this game you set out either to win it all or lose everything… He’s no more a writer ‘of the sea’ than others are writers ‘of the soil’.”

The adventure of his coach trip is, of course, the adventure of a mysterious and beautiful woman, Adelina, as well as a brush with revolutionary politics. Though the plot is hardly complicated, it still feels as if everything moves at a breathless pace (perhaps partly because we spend a lot of time in the carriage). It is this relationship which gives him the inspiration, and motivation, to write Moby Dick.

This makes Melville one of the strangest pieces of literary criticism ever written. Whether it provides much insight into Moby Dick I cannot say (having never read it) but I suspect it is more revealing regarding Giono himself. Giono’s imaginative engagement with his subject is such, however, that it is impossible to resist.

1STREADING'S JOURNAL

Jean Giono / Occupation Journal / Reviews

Jean Giono

OCCUPATION JOURNAL

May 14, 2020

Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal, covering the year between September 1943 and September 1944, (published in French in 1995 and only now translated into English by Jody Gladding) becomes a far more recognisable text under our own current lockdown conditions. “More and more I am immersed in a very great solitude,” Giono tells us, though he also declares, “I have never been so happy as now.”

“I believe I am deeply grateful for everything that forcefully cuts me off from the world.”

In 1943 Giono was forty-eight years old, living, as he did for most of his life, in Manosque in Provence and famous for his portrayal of Provencal peasant life in novels such as Hill and Second Harvest. His writing would begin to change with the publication of Melville in 1941, a novel he continued to have affection for (“I don’t consider anything I’ve done to be valuable,” he says, “Possibly Colline (Hill) and Pour saluer Melville, but just barely if at all”). His pacifism had already brought him into conflict with the state with a brief arrest in 1939, and shortly after the final journal entry he was arrested again, accused of being a Nazi sympathiser, and imprisoned for five months without charge. (Giono’s pacifism originated from his experience in the First World War: at Verdun he was one of eleven survivors in his company. He wrote about his experience in To the Slaughterhouse).

Despite the title, a direct translation, Giono states:

“This is not a journal. It’s simply a tool of the trade. My life is not completely depicted. Nor would I want it to be. As I’ve said here, I practice scales, I break up my sentences, I try to stick as closely as possible to the truth.”

This does not, however, mean that its publication is undeserved. In fact, although by its nature the insights it contains are scattered, it covers a lot of ground. Not only do we get a sense of conditions in France during the year before liberation, but we also have a window into the daily life of a writer, as well as Giono’s musings on art and politics. Less vital, but still interesting, we see the practical problems he faces: illness is common place, and two members of his family, an aunt and uncle who both stay with him, die in the course of the year. Money is another frequently mentioned challenge. “I can’t wait to be less strapped for money,” he tells us, and:

“I work precisely to make a living.”

In June he tells us, “I now have the same money worries as in January,” and, in the course of the year he resorts to selling two of his manuscripts:

“I’m mad at myself for all my generosities that now force me to part with these manuscripts.”

It doesn’t hep that he is widely regarded as rich – “the legend of my ‘immense’ fortune” as he describes it. (I couldn’t help but feel that many writers would sympathise with these problems!).

The journal also contains some thoughts on what he is reading. Of Nicholas Nickleby he says:

“…the story doesn’t escape ‘Punch’: caricature, sentimentality. It’s very engaging, despite some long passages that seem to drag on, but it remains a sketch, witty, exceptionally well constructed, but constructed.”

He is much more complementary when it comes to Stendhal and Balzac, and saves his most scathing remarks for Gone with the Wind:

“The women are cardboard cutouts. How do they have children?… Does Scarlett even have sex organs?”

Throughout, the war forms a background to Giono’s work and thoughts:

“This morning gunfire can be heard very distinctly from the south.”

As the possibility of the Allies freeing France from German occupation increases, different groups compete for power and influence. “The country is all abuzz with conspiracies,” Giono tells us, and “…it’s going to devolve into murder, pure and simple.” This is indeed what happens in May:

“The attack in Voiron a sign of the times. A whole family shot dead from the eighty-year-old grandmother to a child, three years old, killed in its crib by three bullets to the neck and one in the belly. The murderers (what other word to use?) are students and teachers at the vocational school in the town!”

As a pacifist, Giono deplores all violence, but he also feels “War and revolution never killed the right people” and doesn’t trust the Communists not to collaborate with the bourgeoisie they find useful to them. (He also sees them as anti-peasant). When France is finally liberated he is not:

“I’m not leaving the house and not going into town.”

Even before his arrest he is preparing his defence:

“I tell him I wish everyone had done as much as I did for the poor wretches hunted down by the Gestapo.”

Above all, Occupation Journal demonstrates that, in war, it is not good against evil, but, in fact, life becomes even more morally murky than before.

Occupation Journal is not just for Giono completists – it’s a fascinating historical document as well as an interesting insight into the life of a writer. It would probably have benefitted from an introduction and notes, both to provide the historical background, and to clarify the many references Giono makes to his work, particularly what he is writing at the time, but that does not prevent it from being eminently readable, particularly at today:

“The mental vicissitudes that all the contradictory passions of the present moment make us go through destroy any equilibrium.”

2STREADING'S BLOG 

The Snares of Memory by Juan Marsé / Black spots, pink pills

Juan marsé

The Snares of Memory
by Juan Marsé

Black spots, pink pills

Post-Franco Spain is ‘caught between its transition to democracy 

and its Pact of Forgetting’ in The Snares of Memory by Juan Marsé

By Annie Mcdermott

May 15, 2020

It is 1982 in Barcelona, and the unnamed protagonist, a middle-aged novelist who may or may not be Juan Marsé himself, is commissioned to write a film script about the grisly murder of a prostitute. It is to be based on real events: in 1949, during Franco’s dictatorship, a young woman was strangled with a length of celluloid film in the projection booth of a neighbourhood cinema, by a man who remembers having done it but not the reason why. “What we are after is not a plot as such, so don’t waste your time on that”, the director, an acclaimed leftist auteur of the Franco years, explains. Instead, he says, his plan is to “replace plot with naked reality”. He is after “a truthful, non-judgemental and journalistic account”, in which ultimately “the two protagonists, the whore and her murderer, should appear clearly as victims of the political system”.

The murderer, Fermín Sicart, was released from prison twenty-five years ago and is now “a peaceful pensioner who play[s] pétanque on Paseo de Sant Joan”. Our protagonist arranges to carry out a series of interviews with him as research, and so, throughout the sweltering summer, the two men sit under a parasol on the protagonist’s terrace and discuss what happened in the “spectral, starving Barcelona of the post-war years”. Despite having vivid memories of life as a cinema projectionist – of using a soda siphon to put out the flames whenever the film caught fire, for example – Sicart struggles to remember the murder itself. He recalls Carolina, the prostitute, arriving in his projection booth, where they’d had sex several times before. He recalls her draping the film around her own neck and moving towards him, naked but for a raincoat and a pair of stockings. Then the narrative becomes hazy, and “all of a sudden I found myself somewhere else: sitting in the back row of the stalls with no idea of how I had got there or what had happened”.

The novel opens with a newspaper interview with the protagonist in which only the answers to the questions, and not the questions themselves, are printed: responses to things we can no longer see. It is a fitting image of post-Franco Spain, caught between its transition to democracy and its Pact of Forgetting. The Snares of Memory (Esa puta tan distinguida, 2016) is about looking back at the Franco era from 1982 – when the country was, in the words of the protagonist, “torn between memory and forgetting” – and as such it is full of gaps, absences and mysteries. Rolls of film in the projectionist’s booth are snipped up, thrown out of windows, or even catch fire, and Felisa, the protagonist’s cinema-buff maid, has theories about censors cutting out particularly racy sections of films before they were distributed. It’s not only celluloid that is edited by the state, however: Sicart claims his memory lapse is the result of psychiatric therapy he underwent in prison. A renowned military doctor “diagnosed” him as an anarcho-syndicalist and prescribed the erasure of his memory as treatment, as he did with many Republicans after the Civil War. Sicart was given “daily doses of forgetting in the shape of pink pills”, which have left him suffering from a kind of senile dementia.

The Snares of Memory artfully depicts a Spain for which the past is a foreign country, from which it is possible, like Sicart, to be “expelled”. Over the course of his long career, Marsé (who was born in 1933) has developed a reputation for elegant, finely wrought prose, which is fully in evidence here thanks to Nick Caistor’s energetic and well-judged translation. The novel is thoughtful, charming and occasionally very funny, but it is ultimately somewhat unsatisfying. The central image of a strangled prostitute in suspenders, bleeding around her neck, who supposedly represents “the tricks and snares created for us by memory, that high-class whore” (to quote the interview that opens the book), is a rather trite, dated and gratuitous way of exploring a theme that has, what is more, already been much explored.

Annie McDermott is a literary translator based in London

TLS

‘THE SNARES OF MEMORY’ BY JUAN MARSÉ (REVIEW)

October 17, 2019

While a fair bit of the Spanish-language literature I’ve read has been dense, weighty and ‘important’, there has been the occasional book with its tongue a little more in its cheek.  Eduardo Mendoza’s Spanish-Civil-War romp An Englishman in Madrid certainly falls into that category, and today’s choice is another slightly lighter affair, even if the subject matter might not suggest that.  There’s also another connection between the two books.  You see, they were translated by the same person, so it seems that he enjoys playful works, too 

*****

In Juan Marsé’s The Snares of Memory (translated by Nick Caistor, courtesy of MacLehose Press), it’s 1982, shortly after the end of the Franco era, and a well-known writer (an alter-ego of Marsé himself) has been asked to work up a story that will later be made into the script of a movie.  The topic is the 1949 murder of a prostitute, Carolina Bruil Latorre, and the producer and director have commissioned the writer with finding out exactly what happened on the fateful day so that they can make a faithful work of art.  But how is he to get these details?  Why, by asking the murderer of course…

Fermín Sicart Nelo was a young man at the time of the crime, and having spent his time in prison, he’s more than happy to come and talk to the writer, particularly given the 6,000 pesetas a week he’s promised for the daily afternoon conversations.  However, despite his willingness to talk, the task of unveiling the truth won’t be quite as easy as you might expect.  After his arrest, Sicart Nelo was taken away to a facility where doctors experimented on him, leading to his having a rather limited recall of events after the murder.  He remembers full well how and when he killed Bruil Latorre – he just has no idea why.

The book’s premise is perhaps a little gruesome, and some readers may not appreciate the woman’s death being used as the basis of the work.  However, at its core, The Snares of Memory is less the story of a murder than a series of conversations between two men that uncover the secrets of memory, both its reliability and fallibility. Over a number of afternoons, the writer slowly jogs the older man’s memory, trying not to rush, waiting for the moment when everything will click into place, realising all the while that after the passing of so much time, the chances of coming up with what really happened are slim indeed.

The details of the murder itself appear fairly straight-forward.  Fermín worked as a projectionist at a small cinema, and Carolina was making one of her frequent visits to the small room he worked in.  Each conversation adds details to this picture: the rain outside, the issues with the film being shown and Carolina’s strange mood.  As she walks towards the projectionist, semi-naked, with some discarded celluloid film looped around her neck, we see her getting ever closer to her death.

The Snares of Memory isn’t really that kind of book, though, and Marsé works several different layers into his story.  Perhaps the key to the story is the era in which the murder takes place, with the fascists now firmly in control.  Carolina’s tangled personal life sees her in a relationship with the Falangist official Ramón Mir Altamirano, and when we learn that Fermín’s colleague, an older projectionist, is involved in socialist activities, the whole affair becomes more puzzling.  The writer suspects that there’s something very strange about the murder, even if it’s unlikely that we’ll ever find out what it is.

Another aspect of the novel is the author’s concern with the art of writing.  Quite apart from his humourous forty-eight answers (to unwritten questions) that start the book (“There is no psychopath or murderer to uncover or arrest.  The murderer, c’est moi!”), there are constant musings on what he’s actually doing in writing the novel:

I wouldn’t be able to say what the limits of fiction are when it comes to recreating a historical truth; possibly the task is not to throw more light on the real event, but to emphasise the play of light and shade, the ambiguities and doubts, anything that contributes to the liveliest expression of the truth.

p.207 (MacLehose Press, 2019)

Marsé has this interest in common with several other Spanish writers (c.f. Javier Cercas’ The Impostor or Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Like a Fading Shadow) who seem to enjoy delving into the past.  The result is a special blend of fact and fiction, with the writers appearing as characters in their own work, and that manifests itself here in interviews and phone conversations, as well as the intrusion of scenes the writer scribbles down for the film.

Where The Snares of Memory is a little different from the works cited above is in its lighter tone.  Much of the book rests on the amusing interchanges between Fermín, the writer and his housekeeper Felisa, who bosses her employer around and frankly scares his timid visitor.  There are also the farcical developments of the film itself to consider.  With funding issues leading to changes of personnel behind the camera, what was meant to be a solemn documentary ends up turning into a soft-porn melodrama, a movie focusing on another prostitute who wasn’t involved in the murder at all.

It all makes for an enjoyable read that doesn’t outstay its welcome, and Caistor’s work is as impressive and readable as ever (I wonder if he’ll take it as praise or mockery when I say he catches the tone of conversations between a group of ageing people nicely…).  Marsé pokes fun at himself in the form of the irascible writer, doing as he wishes provided his housekeeper agrees, and the bewildered murderer, who’s never quite sure that the whole affair isn’t just a joke someone’s playing on him, is a wonderful creation.

Yet what saves it from being too light is the focus on memory, and how it can (and does) deceive us:

As I listened to him recall those fateful days I discovered that, in a somnambulist memory such as his, reconstructed under such suspicious and dire circumstances, the inconsistencies, lapses and tricks could be just as interesting as the truth. (p.95)

The setting of 1982 is key here, a time when the writer’s country was set the task of looking back into the past and attempting to reevaluate recent history.  As Fermín himself gradually realises, much of what we remember is not what actually happened.  In the end, though, despite our best efforts, it’s unclear what, if anything, we’ve actually found out.  The moral of the story seems to be that detailing the truth of past events is a near impossible task…

TONY'S READING LIST