Saturday, September 12, 2015
There was a time when, if I didn't get enough sleep, I could ignore the fatigue and push on. Now I find that that is not an option.
Also, when I was younger, not getting enough sleep sometimes meant not sleeping enough hours, versus sleeping badly. Now I tend to sleep badly more than sleeping fewer hours.
Which was born out this morning.
I had an ambitious day planned: it is the 10th anniversary of Books et Cie, an independent bookstore around the corner from Saint Vincent, where I go most Saturday evenings. At 10:00 a.m. there would be a reading from Fiances, a novel about a woman in a nursing home who confuses a man in the nursing home with the man she loved, someone she thought killed in French Indochina. The author would also be present to take about the book and dedicate copies. At 4:00 p.m., there is a dialogue between two French translators, one working from Swedish, the other English. In between I hoped to see Youth, the film with Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel made by the director of the Oscar-winning La Grande Belleza, Paolo Sorrentino. And I had a few errands to run at Le Pont Rouge before making it to Carcassonne, parking by Le Canal du Midi, and walking to Books et Cie. After seeing the film I would run to hear the translators speak, then run to Saint Vincent for Mass. Then I could return home to sleep alone. (Beau is en pension with my neighbor, Chantal.)
Well, I got to do everything I had planned for this morning. when I arrived at Books et Cie, the reading had just started --on time. The area around the readers and the writer was full up, but someone brought me a chair placed on the other side of the low wall dividing two sections of the bookstore. I could see everything, but more, I was placed directly in front of rows of books.
In France, all books appear in paperback editions. This is traditional: the books were originally produced this way so that wealthy book collectors could have their volumes bound in leather and embossed with their personal library marks. Although few people in France have the means (or inclination) to create personalized volumes, there has been no transition to hard-cover printing.
France, is of course, book-mad, so a dedicated booksellers can arrange their libraries very finitely around specific topics. In the case of Books et Cie, the emphasis is on the finest in world literature. The shelves immediately in front of me contained contemporary books originally written in Italian and Spanish translated and published in France. The shelves to the left of me were lusophone --literature from the Portuguese-speaking world. To the write of me was a tall bookcase with literary arcana on the top shelf: a collection of all the Nobel-prize speeches of literature laureates from the beginning of the prize's life; a history of Le College de France, the correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin.
On the second shelf were contemporary books inspired by authors: a book written by a Frenchwoman inspired by her lifelong infatuation with Daphne du Maurier, entitled Mandelay Forever; a book of interviews given by Francoise Sagan, who came to fame writing Bonjour Tristesse at eighteen, but never surpassed it. Another book considered the Rimbaldolatres --those fans of Arthur Rimbaud (punk poet Patti Smith is one) who cannot say enough about their idol. There was a book of (brief) interviews with Beckett exploring his love of silence, and a book of Walter Benjamin's last letters, written when he was on the run from the Nazis. On the bottom shelves were literary journals, and behind me contemporary novels from France, with a few Anglophone authors mixed in (James Salter).
I could hear the two women reading and catch most of what they were saying, but I most enjoyed reading the titles on the shelves surrounding me, a pleasure I could not have had had I found a seat earlier. I tried to do this as unobtrusively as possible, as the quiet when I walked into the bookstore and throughout the reading (which was ornamented with music played between chapter fragments) was imposing. The woman managing the portable stereo, a woman in her 70s, hair dyed black, cut in a pageboy, her face framed by big "cats' eye" glass frames, glared at me when, as I took my seat, the keys around my neck jingled: the noise was an outrage against art. When I unzipped my knapsack pocket to put them inside, she glared again, but after that, she let up, and I enjoyed both the words spoken and the titles read.
The reading over, I trawled the bookshelves in the rest of the store: literature from the Arab world, Western philosophy, Eastern philosophy as interpreted by modern French thinkers, critically-acclaimed thrillers from around the world, the latest non-fiction collection from Jean d'Ormesson. I spied a DVD made about Marguerite Yourcenar's life on Mount Desert Island in Maine, focusing on her interest in the environment. The narrator is Michael Lonsdale, one of my favorite actors. (He is most famous in the English-speaking world, for playing the French inspector in Day of the Jackal.)
Jean d'Ormesson is not a writer popular with partisans of the Left, but he is as open-hearted as any one in France who invokes la solidarite. His voice is gentle and wry, and although he is an aristocrat and member of France's elite (his father was ambassador to Germany before the Second World War). His personality endears him to many who do not share his conservative sensibilities, and some refer to him as "France's favorite aristocrat".
Yourcenar, on the other hand, was crustier, and a great snob. (She too, was an aristocrat: Yourcenar is an anagram of her family name, [de] Crayencour.) Yourcenar lectures her listeners from an Olympian height, which can be tiresome; but to hear her speak French is to realize how badly the French speak their language. I cannot wait to watch the film and find out how she and her wealthy lover, Grace Frick, managed their lives on Mount Desert Island.
Exiting the store I had my third coffee of the morning and picked up a sandwich to eat on the way to the movie theatre. It was not yet open, so I could not buy tickets, and it would be two hours before the film: which is when my tiredness hit me.
Suddenly, the idea of returning home and sleeping away the afternoon beckoned. If as we get older we are more accepting of ourselves, I have arrived. I quickly made for the car and drove home, from where I write this now.
Wisely, it turns out: a violent hail storm began as soon as I turned the key in the lock.
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