Dontcha just hate it when you're the protagonist of some poorly realised campus novel, bored to death with your stereotypical colleagues and the beautDontcha just hate it when you're the protagonist of some poorly realised campus novel, bored to death with your stereotypical colleagues and the beautiful implausibly compliant women who keep throwing themselves at you, and then you find you're being alternately written by two people who are having creative differences? Yeah, me too. ...more
People who should know better keep insisting that the novel is dead, but they are making a fundamental mistake. It is the publishing industry, with itPeople who should know better keep insisting that the novel is dead, but they are making a fundamental mistake. It is the publishing industry, with its soulless insistence on chasing profit to the exclusion of everything else, which is dying. The novel is very much alive: you just need to look for it in the right places.
Melancholia is a stunning example. When Not and I first heard about this book, we couldn't help smiling: here's a six hundred page stream-of-consciousness account based on two days in the life of an obscure nineteenth century painter, moreover written, not just in Norwegian, but in the less commonly spoken version of that small language. It sounds like an SBS Woman parody come to life. But I found, to my considerable surprise, that the book works. It isn't just readable, it's compulsively readable, and it says some things about art and the human mind that...
So what's it saying, you want to know? I was wondering how I could try to explain, but on reaching the book's final pages I found that the author had anticipated me. The painter's sister, now a very old woman, is sitting on the toilet looking at the picture her brother had given her many years ago:
Og ein dag kom han Lars springende etter henne og gav henne dette biletet, og ho sa vel ikkje takk eingong, tenkjer ho Oline, og ikkje syntest ho vel at biletet var noko særleg, heller, helst var det vel berre noko rableri, syntest ho nok, men ho tok då imot og så hengde det der på veslehuset og der har det nu hange i alle dei år, tenkjer ho Oline, og ho synest vel og etter kvart at biletet er vakkert, og ho skjøner vel og kva Lars kan ha meint med det biletet, gjer ho vel, men å seie det! få sagt kva han kan ha meint! nei det går vel ikkje, eg ho kan vel omogeleg seie det, heller, for då var det vel ikkje noko vits for han Lars å male biletet, då, kan ein vel tenkje, tenkjer ho Oline, men biletet er fint, det, sjølv om det vel helst er noko rableri, fordi han Lars ha malt det, er biletet fint, det meiner ho nok, ja, om einkvan andre enn han Lars hadde malt det, hade ho ikkje synst at det var noko vakkert, tenkjer ho Oline, men no synest ho at biletet er så vakkert at det nesten er som om ho skal ta til tårene når ho ser på det.
My translation:
And one day Lars came running after her and gave her this picture, and she didn't even say thank you, thinks Oline, and she didn't think the picture was anything special either, really just a scribble, she thought, but she let him give it to her and she hung it in the outhouse and it's been hanging there all these years, thinks Oline, and in the end she thought the picture was beautiful, and she understands what Lars meant with the picture, she does, but how would she say it! say what he meant! no you can't do that, she could never say it, because then why would Lars have painted the picture would he, thinks Oline, but the picture is lovely, even if it's just a scribble, because Lars painted it the picture is lovely, that's what she thinks, yes, even though if someone else had painted it she wouldn't have thought it was anything special, thinks Oline, but now she thinks the picture is so beautiful that tears almost come to her eyes when she looks at it.
Please forgive the infelicities in my translation: this is almost the first thing I've read in nynorsk. But it won't be the last. ________________
If you want some idea of what the passage sounds like in Norwegian, here is a C-LARA version. Word glosses by GPT-4, audio by Google TTS (NO-Wavenet-B voice; unfortunately I can't find a nynorsk TTS voice) and image by DALL-E-3....more
A few years ago, Not and I were having a discussion about whether rape jokes could ever be genuinely funny: there is, needless to say, an influential A few years ago, Not and I were having a discussion about whether rape jokes could ever be genuinely funny: there is, needless to say, an influential school of thought which holds that a funny rape joke is a contradiction in terms. But it only took us an hour of searching to convince ourselves that rape jokes could be hilarious, the winner being Amy Schumer's "Football Town Nights", a sketch about an unsuspecting football coach who tries to implement a no-rape policy for his team. The jocks simply don't understand why rape might be wrong: they keep trying to find loopholes ("Like, suppose we just filmed it on our phones?"), convinced that no one could really be making such absurd demands of them.
And, similarly, Kunsten at græde i kor is a genuinely funny book about child abuse, surely one of the grimmest subjects around. Well-meaning, naïve eleven year old Allan worships his father and simply doesn't understand what's wrong with him regularly sleeping with Allan's big sister. Dad always looks so much happier after one of their little sessions! Surely he can't be doing anything bad, even if Sanne is a bit weird about it? And when that's your moral starting point, things develop with their own logic.
Obviously it's a high-wire act, but Jepsen waves away the safety net and confidently strolls along fifty metres above the sawdust, cracking one hilarious incest joke after another in South Jutland dialect. He reaches the other end without even looking worried, then strolls back again cracking more jokes about murder, mental illness and suicide. The audience, tears running down their cheeks, clap until their hands hurt.
Why have I never even heard of this guy before? Danish authors are ridiculously underrated....more
This ferociously intelligent and compulsively readable novel, written by a disaffected insider who had had ample time to look at the inner workings ofThis ferociously intelligent and compulsively readable novel, written by a disaffected insider who had had ample time to look at the inner workings of the financial services industry, was published in 2002. Anyone who read it would have been able to see, not just that a major financial crash was likely, but exactly why it was likely and what could be done to stop it. In a couple of sentences, the problem was that the people in charge of the big banks were completely irresponsible, because they had been incentivised to prefer risky short-term gains to prudent long-term planning. If they made risky short-term decisions, they were likely to receive huge amounts of money which would set them up for the rest of their lives. If things went sour after that, there would be no consequences for them. And indeed, as the whole world knows, there was a major crash, and none of the people responsible suffered. You get what you incentivise.
The next obvious crisis, already almost upon us, is climate change. Once again, the incentivisation structure is the problem. For example, Rishi Sunak, the near-billionaire Prime Minister of Great Britain, has just decided to backtrack on all his promises about responsible environmental policies because his team's modelling suggests that doing so may give the Conservative Party a better outcome at the next election. If he could miraculously turn things round for them, he knows there will be large, tangible short-term rewards. Humanity as a whole will suffer, but he, personally, risks very little.
The book contains several wistful passages about the 60s far-left terrorist groups: Rote Armee Fraktion, Brigate Rosse. The author distances herself from them, or at least she says she does. But she mentions them all the same. And applying the same cold logic that the fossil fuel industry does, a resurgence of such groups would indeed change the incentivisation structure. If Prime Minister Sunak were obliged to consider the nontrivial probability that a car bomb planted by environmental activists could blow up him and his family, that would alter the payoff matrix. Doing the math, he might find a different solution was optimal.
Just a thought-experiment, of course. My real point: as the book says, you have to study these people and learn to think like they do....more
Well, objectively this is a terrible book. Jason Pettus nails it in his review. But there is a genuine feeling of sadness, as the dying Asimov recountWell, objectively this is a terrible book. Jason Pettus nails it in his review. But there is a genuine feeling of sadness, as the dying Asimov recounts the final years of the dying Hari Seldon, and I loved the early Asimov when I was a teen....more
It's well known that Balzac published a clutch of novels anonymously before he wrote anything he wanted to put his name to, and I've often wondered whIt's well known that Balzac published a clutch of novels anonymously before he wrote anything he wanted to put his name to, and I've often wondered what they were like. Having just finished this book, which came out very early in his career, I'm willing to make a guess: they were like La Femme de trente ans, but even worse. It's a stinker. And the more I read about it in the prefaces and endnotes of my annotated edition, the more reasons I find to dislike it. Balzac originally published the material as five novellas. His editor thought that they were perhaps all about the same woman, but Balzac denied it. Then, a few years later, he reconsidered his decision, added a sixth story to cover the most egregious gap, fixed things up a bit, and republished it in a new form where they officially are about the same woman. This certainly goes some way towards explaining the strange inconsistencies I noticed when reading it, but it doesn't excuse them. And the disjointed plot is far from being the only thing that's wrong here. There's an absurd amount of melodrama; the moral message is all over the place; worst, the writing is way below Balzac's usual standard. If you want the gory details, Lisa's review does a great job of explaining just how ridiculous the book is.
You'll gather that I'm not recommending it. But nonetheless, there is one aspect which I found perfectly fascinating. According to the endnotes, the literary fathers of Victor, the pirate from part 5, are Fenimore Cooper's The Red Rover
[image]
and Eugène Sue's Kernok le Pirate
[image]
two rollicking yarns well known to Balzac: he wrote a stage adaptation of the first and was good friends with the author of the second. Much more surprisingly, the evidence suggests that Captain Nemo in Jules Verne's Vingt Mille Lieues sous les Mers
[image]
is at least in part Victor's son; in particular, Nemo's implausibly sumptuous staterooms on the Nautilus are so similar to Victor's on the Othello that it seems too much to call it a coincidence.
Well. Whoever would have thought that Balzac could be the hidden link between Fenimore Cooper and Jules Verne? Yet another proof that even the trashiest book can have an unexpected redeeming feature....more
Trigger warnings: this play may offend or make uncomfortable people people with sensitivities including rape, Ireland, the US, gory violence, rape, baTrigger warnings: this play may offend or make uncomfortable people people with sensitivities including rape, Ireland, the US, gory violence, rape, bad language, abuse of power, Princess Di, bereavement, Twitter, Brexit, trivialisation of artistic integrity, Margaret Thatcher, and did I mention rape?
But if you're good with all of that, then it's really, really funny. And in a bizarre way, even kind of politically correct....more
I started leafing through this at the bookshop round the corner, and by the time I'd got to the third page of the introduction I was intrigued. Clive I started leafing through this at the bookshop round the corner, and by the time I'd got to the third page of the introduction I was intrigued. Clive James gave an insightful analysis of the Divine Comedy's poetic structure and explained, better than anyone I'd seen try this before, just how ridiculously difficult it is to produce an English-language translation that has some meaningful relationship to the original text. Everything is difficult, needless to say, but the very worst thing is the rhyme scheme.
A prose translation is flat, and large parts of the second and third books turn into boring theology; in the original, they are sublimely beautiful, and the poem gets more and more beautiful as Dante draws closer to God. Also, Dante's poetry is propulsive, carrying the action forward at a rapid pace. But it turns out, unfortunately, that you can't do terza rima in English, the language just doesn't support that verse form. James thought about it for decades, and in the end had an idea: maybe quatrains would do the job? He experimented and decided the answer was yes. I flipped forward to Canto I and found these gorgeous lines:
At the mid-point of my path through life, I found Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound I still make shows how hard it is to say How harsh and bitter that place felt to me - Merely to think of it renews the fear - So bad that death by only a degree Could possibly be worse. As you shall hear It led to good things too, eventually, But then and there I saw no sign of those, And can't say even now how I had come To be there, stunned and following my nose Away from the straight path.
I was sold: James definitely had something. I paid my $20, took it home, and carried on reading.
I had previously only read the tepid Dorothy Sayers translation, some of the Longfellow, and some passages in the original, but my Italian, alas, is still nowhere near good enough to get through the whole thing that way. This was an acceptable substitute, and James was not overselling himself. The language, indeed, was often beautiful. And it really was propulsive: I often read several canti at a stretch, unable to put it down. By the time I reached the third book, where Dante ascends the spheres of heaven in the company of Beatrice, a third aspect became noticeable: it was wonderfully romantic. The adoration Dante feels for his angelic Lady leaps off the page in a way that I totally didn't recall from Sayers. For example (one passage of very many):
And so I am invited and made bold To ask you of another truth less than Clear to me, lady. Let me now be told If ever it can happen that a man May make it up to you by doing good For vows he has not kept." She looked at me With eyes so full of love my powers could Do nothing to withstand the clarity That sparkled there within. My vision shook. I almost fainted, stunned by that one look.
As I progressed, I become more and more certain that the translator was being inspired by his own muse, and I was also sure I could identify her: in the foreword, James was very gracious about the debt he owed to his wife, Prue Shaw, who introduced him to Dante when he was still a student and eventually become an internationally acclaimed Dante scholar. When James described how Dante is dazzled by the radiance of Beatrice's smile, I thought how he was being led on his own journey by his own celestial guide. It was really quite inspiring.
I mentioned some of my theories to Not, who scornfully told me that, as any Australian knew, Prue Shaw had unceremoniously dumped her husband in 2012 when she found he'd been deceiving her for years with a much younger woman. Maybe James had had a heavenly muse, but it was less than clear who she was. It was quite conceivable that he in fact had had two muses.
Damn. Why can't life ever be as beautiful and simple as you'd like it to be? But however it was produced, I still give an unhesitating thumbs up to James's translation. If you can't read five hundred pages of medieval Italian, this is the next best thing. _________________ [And the next day...]
Over lunch, it occurred to me to wonder whether Leanne Edelsten was in fact Clive James's anti-muse, helping him express that sense of pervasive guilt so central to Dante. Not's explanation was simpler: she thought that James, like most male writers, was a total shit.
I said that my interpretation in no way disagreed with hers, it was just more nuanced. But I am unsure whether Not found this convincing....more
Most of the pieces in this collection were composed early in Balzac's career, and they come across as rather slapdash and mass-produced. There is in pMost of the pieces in this collection were composed early in Balzac's career, and they come across as rather slapdash and mass-produced. There is in particular an intriguing paragraph in French Wikipedia about La Grenadière, a revoltingly sentimental short story which Balzac is supposed to have written in one evening between, or perhaps during, games of billiards. (Kids, don't try this at home). But they're strangely compelling, and I read the whole lot in a few days.
It is in particular interesting to learn the continuations of subplots from some other books. I'd last seen Madame de Beauséant at the end of Le Père Goriot, where she'd been heartlessly dumped by her lover, Ajuda-Pinta; I found out in La Femme abandonnée that she spent a while pining alone in the depths of the Norman countryside, but then (view spoiler)[met a much younger man who fell in love with her, after which they were together for nine blissful years before his mother talked him into abandoning her to marry a rich heiress. Gaston realises too late that he's made a terrible mistake, and when Madame de Beauséant refuses to take him back he shoots himself. (hide spoiler)]
Even more surprisingly, in the title story, the noble and selfless d'Arthez from Illusions perdues meets utterly amoral femme fatale Diane de Maufrigneuse from Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes and Le Cabinet des Antiques, who (view spoiler)[manages to convince him that she's really a wonderful person and the victim of malicious gossip, and they live happily every after. (hide spoiler)] Proust's de Charlus refers approvingly to this novella, and you can't help wondering if it isn't one of the sources for (view spoiler)[the relationship between Swann and Odette. (hide spoiler)]
As you can see, a good bad book. If you're another Balzac fan, I definitely recommend putting it on your list!...more
I reread Maupassant's classic short story earlier this week while putting together this LARA version. Looking at the other reviews, I see much about tI reread Maupassant's classic short story earlier this week while putting together this LARA version. Looking at the other reviews, I see much about the moral aspects, the author's literary craftsmanship, the relationship to Madame Bovary, and whether or not diamonds are a girl's best friend. But there is curiously little about a question that surely must have occurred to other people: what happened next? Luckily, I happened to know that Peter Chelsom, undisputed king of tasteful adaptations from the French, was following up his triumph in Hector and the Search for Happiness with another masterpiece. I am proud to present the initial scene from The Necklace II: This Time It's Personal, soon to be released by Amazon Prime:
MME FORESTIER: ... Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste! It was worth at most only five hundred francs!
[A moment of stunned silence]
MME LOISEL: I... I... ah, I guess all's well that ends well. When can I have it?
MME FORESTIER: [who is rapidly reevaluating the situation] Have what?
MME LOISEL: The necklace. The real necklace.
MME FORESTIER: I'm sorry, I don't understand.
MME LOISEL: Oh... Jeanne, please, please, you aren't going to be difficult about this are you? We spent ten years of our lives scrimping and saving to buy this stupid piece of jewelry. It seems the whole thing was a mistake. But at least, now we own something worth forty thousand francs.
MME FORESTIER: I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
MME LOISEL: The necklace! You know it's mine! You just told me it was!
MME FORESTIER: What necklace?
MME LOISEL: The one you lent me back in... I mean, actually...
MME FORESTIER: Oh yes, that extremely valuable diamond necklace I once let you borrow. I must have been insane. When you were late returning it, I wondered if I'd ever see it again. A narrow escape, I've always thought.
MME LOISEL: But... but, Jeanne, please, you can't... I mean, you know perfectly well that legally...
MME FORESTIER: Are you threatening me?
MME LOISEL: No, no, of course not...
MME FORESTIER: If it ever did go to court, the judge would rule there was no case to answer. Though I doubt it would get that far. You probably can't even afford a lawyer.
MME LOISEL: But Jeanne...
MME FORESTIER: Mathilde, I'm worried about you. Have you considered seeking professional help?
[A long pause]
MME LOISEL: You poisonous bitch. I'll get even with you if it's the last thing I ever do.
MME FORESTIER: I think it would be. Better not try, sugar plum.
Given the intense mystique that surrounds Proust, I decided I would try to approach the final volumes with an open mind. It's possible that I went a lGiven the intense mystique that surrounds Proust, I decided I would try to approach the final volumes with an open mind. It's possible that I went a little too far and that my review of Albertine disparue was insufficiently respectful. Sorry Kalliope! But having now reached the end, I am relieved to say that my fears were unfounded. The final chapter, which I discover Proust wrote immediately after completing the first chapter, pulls everything together; nothing was wasted, nothing was gratuitous. Although it was not easy to climb this mountain (a metaphor the author uses himself), when you reach the top the view is absolutely worth it. It is of course very sad that Proust died when he did. The three posthumous books are uneven, with strange plot holes and passages that are stylistically in need of revision, but it doesn't really matter; he seems to have known this would happen, and the text contains several references to his "unfinished cathedral". In a strange way, it is almost appropriate.
Some thoughts that have been going through my head the last couple of days:
- Given the construction of the book, I was very lucky to have ended up reading Combray and Le temps retrouvé in parallel: I'm sure it heightened my appreciation of the last volume. If you're also nearing the end of the series, I strongly recommend doing the same. You won't regret the time you spend on this little detour.
- In general, the problem with reading Proust is that you want to keep the whole thing in your head at once, so that you can appreciate all the interconnections, but in practice it's hard to read it quickly enough. I was however encouraged by my recent experiment with creating a multimedia version of the first volume. I will soon get back to this idea.
- A la recherche du temps perdu is formally a novel and always described as such, but it is at least as much a work of philosophy. It is both theoretical (it says deep and provocative things about the nature of the self) and practical (it embodies a highly idiosyncratic set of precepts for how one should live one's life). I wondered what people there might be who have tried to follow this philosophy and extend it; my top suspects are Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I must look around to see if anyone else has had the same thought, and what they have written about it....more
I've just posted a LARA version of Un amour de Swann, built using the same methods as with Combray out of a public domain audiobook taken from LitteratureAudio and parallel French and English text taken from Gutenberg. This gives a total of about 19 hours of Proust in LARA form. The scripts still need more work, but they're starting to get there: Combray took three weeks and a substantial revision of the code, Un amour de Swann a few days and some minor bug fixing. Coming next, Noms de pays : le nom and then A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. By the time we get to Le temps retrouvé, I hope everything will be quite stable.
There is a good deal of editing and quality control involved. If you're interested in contributing to this project, please leave a comment or PM me! ________________________________
I finished rereading it in the new multimedia format, and, as with Combray, I was astonished to see how much more I appreciated it this way. It becomes clear that, even for people who fancy themselves as connoisseurs of Proust, we tend to underestimate just how complex and subtle a writer he is. It helps a great deal to be able to read the French text while simultaneously getting the viewpoints of a French person who's spent a lot of time thinking about how she should read it aloud, and an English person who's spent a lot of time thinking about how he would say it in his language. Both of them quite frequently made obvious mistakes: as noted, Proust is very challenging. But much more frequently, they showed me things I'd missed on previous readings.
Starting with what the book is about. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but (view spoiler)[I'd somehow acquired the idea that it's about jealousy. It isn't. It's about the nature of the mind. (hide spoiler)]...more
I've been spending a lot of time this year trying to develop ways to build multimodal LARA documents automatically out o[Original review, Sep 13 2022]
I've been spending a lot of time this year trying to develop ways to build multimodal LARA documents automatically out of public domain internet resources. In principle, as Not told me a while ago, it should be easy. For many classic works of literature, everything you need is already there: the original text, a good English translation, and a high-quality audiobook. You just need to pull them apart and then put the pieces back together again so that the text, audio and translations line up. Surely there can't be much to it?
Not's intuition was spot on, though the details have taken a while to work out and still need considerable tidying up. Basically, my recipe goes like this. You start with the audio and cut it into pieces at silences using the ffmpeg tool. You then take the pieces of audio and send them for processing by Google Cloud Speech to Text. This is far from 100% accurate, but it's good enough that you can write a script which aligns the speech recognition results against the text of the book and matches them quite reliably. Next, you take the source text and the translation, and send them for processing at the YouAlign site; this cuts the two texts into roughly sentence-length chunks in a way which matches corresponding passages.
The problem is that the two alignments, source/audio and source/target, are not consistent with each other, since silences and sentence-breaks are not at all the same thing. In general, a sentence contains many silences comparable in length to the ones you get at periods. However, the aligments agree well enough that you can in practice take the places where they do agree and use those to create a consistent alignment. Most often, this means that a sentence found by YouAlign corresponds to several silence-delimited audio segments, though sometimes you need more than one YouAlign segment for it to work. For each combined segment, you stick togther all the relevant audio chunks and all the relevant translation chunks, and you're there. There is slightly more to it than the above, but basically it is indeed quite simple: it works because the core resources, Google Cloud Speech to Text and YouAlign, are very good, and you just have to find a way to exploit that power.
Proust's Combray is my first full-scale test of the idea. The original French text and the Scott Moncrieff translation were both downloaded from Gutenberg; the audio, about 8 hours and beautifully recorded by Monique Vincens, comes from LitteratureAudio. The resulting LARA version is posted here, view in Chrome or Firefox. You can use the audio controls to play audio a page at a time or a sentence at a time. Clicking on a pencil icon shows a translation of the previous sentence on the right; clicking on a word shows a concordance of places where that word occurs in the text.
We are writing a paper about this work, due at the end of the month. If you have any feedback, in particular including suggestions for what texts to do next or ideas about how one might use resources like LARA Combray in practice, it will be much appreciated! _______________________________ [Update, Sep 17 2022]
Picking up on Théodore's recommendation in message #9, I have used the same technique to create a LARA version of Rimbaud's Les poètes de sept ans. It's posted here. What a great poem! I had not seen it before, thank you Théodore. The audio is again from LitteratureAudio, this time by recorded by Alain Degandt. _______________________________ [Update, Oct 11 2022]
We have now submitted our paper. In the course of writing it, I went through four texts I'd created using the alignment method, listening to each piece of audio, checking it against the text and translation that the aligner had matched to it, and correcting where it was wrong. This kind of annotation work is common in language technology projects, and in nearly all cases it's painfully dull. But not here! I was amazed to find how much I enjoyed reading Combray in this new way, and how much more I got out of it as I listened to the French audio while flicking my eyes back and forward between the pieces of French text and English translation, which were neatly lined up for me.
There were two things in particular that stood out. First, it's possible to read a good deal more quickly. Proust is a notoriously demanding author; when reading in normal text form I usually feel I've reached my limit after at most 20-25 pages, and can no longer maintain the concentration needed to disentangle the longer sentences. Here, I was supported by the audio and the English translation, and I could read the whole book in two or three days. This exposed all sorts of connections I hadn't noticed before. Second, listening to Monique Vincens reading aloud made me properly aware of how funny Proust is; his irony is often so subtle that I hadn't noticed it, but she does a wonderful job of conveying the humour.
All in all, I felt I was appreciating the book at a different level. I will soon start putting together a LARA version of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs....more
If you end up simultaneously reading book 6 of A la recherche du temps perdu and watching series 6 of Engrenages, what can you do but write:
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CelIf you end up simultaneously reading book 6 of A la recherche du temps perdu and watching series 6 of Engrenages, what can you do but write:
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Celebrity Death Match Special: Marcel Proust versus Caroline Proust
Le bureau de LAURE BERTHAUD. LAURE, HERVILLE, GILOU, TINTIN. Ils regardent un livre.
LAURE: Putain ! Mais c'est quoi ce bordel ?
HERVILLE: Albertine disparue. Le sixième livre de Marcel Proust.
LAURE: Et en quoi ça nous regarde ?
HERVILLE: Vous ne trouvez pas la mort d'Albertine un peu—
GILOU: Albertine ? Sa gonzesse ?
HERVILLE: Oui. Morte « jetée par son cheval contre un arbre ». Il écrit qu'il ne fait que pleurnicher toute la journée, mais—
LAURE: Mais ?
HERVILLE: Je crois qu'il tourne la page bien vite.
LAURE: Ça veut dire quoi, patron ?
HERVILLE: Bof—
TINTIN: Il baise sa meilleure amie. L'italienne aussi. Cette histoire de détournement de mineur—
LAURE: Alors, bref, c'est possible qu'il a buté sa meuf ?
HERVILLE: Qu'en penses-tu ?
LAURE: Moi je n'en sais rien, j'ai pas lu. C'est comment ce roman ?
TINTIN: Tu veux savoir ce qu'il en écrit lui-même ?
LAURE: Vas-y.
TINTIN: Ces phrases de mon article, lorsque je les écrivis, étaient si pâles auprès de ma pensée, si compliquées et opaques auprès de ma vision harmonieuse et transparente, si pleines de lacunes que je n'étais pas arrivé à remplir, que leur lecture était pour moi une souffrance, elles n'avaient fait qu'accentuer en moi le sentiment de mon impuissance et de mon manque incurable de talent. Mais maintenant, en m'efforçant d'être lecteur, si je me déchargeais sur les autres du devoir douloureux de me juger, je réussissais du moins à faire table rase de ce que j'avais voulu faire en lisant ce que j'avais fait. Je lisais l'article en m'efforçant de me persuader qu'il était d'un autre. Alors toutes mes images, toutes mes réflexions, toutes mes épithètes prises en elles-mêmes et sans le souvenir de l'échec qu'elles représentaient pour mes visées, me charmaient par leur éclat, leur ampleur, leur profondeur. Et quand je sentais une défaillance trop grande, me réfugiant dans l'âme du lecteur quelconque émerveillé, je me disais: «Bah! comment un lecteur peut-il s'apercevoir de cela, il manque quelque chose là, c'est possible. Mais, sapristi, s'ils ne sont pas contents! Il y a assez de jolies choses comme cela, plus qu'ils n'en ont l'habitude.»
LAURE: Tu te fous de ma gueule ?
HERVILLE: Traduit, pour lui c'est de la merde, pour nous autres c'est de l'or pure.
GILOU: A mon avis c'est plutôt l'inverse.
LAURE: Putain !
Winner: the application of Kantian epistemology to romantic relationships...more
Saved from my soon-to-be-closed-down writing section, the unforgettable Goodreads Celebrity Death Match Review Tournament of 2011. Those were the day Saved from my soon-to-be-closed-down writing section, the unforgettable Goodreads Celebrity Death Match Review Tournament of 2011. Those were the days.
The Rules
What is the greatest book of all time?
There are many ways to try and answer this question. Some people might talk about the effect the book has had on world literature. Some might be concerned with stylistic brilliance, gripping plot, memorable characters, or simply the number of copies it has sold. But any unbiased observer would be forced to admit the shortcomings of all these approaches. Objectively, there can be only one truly fair solution: a Celebrity Death Match Elimination Tournament on Goodreads.
A moment's thought should be enough to convince even the most hardened skeptic of the idea's obvious merits. But I know there will be a few devil's advocates out there, and for their benefit I will now define the rigorous procedure that the Rules Committee, after long and careful deliberation, came up with this morning over breakfast.
1. The tournament will pit 32 books against each other. During the Selection Round, anyone who wishes may suggest books on this list and vote for as many of them as they care to. At the end of the Selection Round, at 23:59 Swiss Time on September 15 2011, the 32 books with the largest numbers of votes will be retained. Ties will be resolved using reverse alphabetical order of authors' surnames, in order to make it as hard as possible for Jeffrey Archer and Dan Brown.
2. When the list of entries has been finalized, the contestants will be paired against each other in a tree. Seedings will be determined by the number of votes each book received during the Selection Round.
3. Each round will last two weeks. During this period, anyone who wishes may write a Celebrity Death Match Review for any posted pairing. Links to reviews should be submitted on the comment thread to this page. People are allowed to write reviews for more than one pairing. [Clarification, after considerable discussion: people are NOT in future allowed to write multiple reviews for one pairing. Multiple reviews already posted will stand]
4. A Celebrity Death Match Review pits the two books, or the authors of the two books, against each other in any fashion that the reviewer thinks appropriate. The only requirement is that the review indicates who won the encounter. Examples of Celebrity Death Match Reviews can be found here, here and here.
5. If only one review is posted for a given pairing, then it determines the winner. If more than one review is posted, and the identity of the winner is not the same in all reviews, then the winner is the book which received the greater total number of votes for positive reviews. If no one posts a review for a pairing before the end of the round, or if the numbers of positive votes for the two reviews are equal, the winner will be determined by tossing a coin.
6. All decisions of the Rules Committee will be final.
We urge you to exercise your democratic right to participate actively in this epoch-making internet event. Okay, so we know now that the winner's probably going to be either Twilight or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But hey. Suppose it isn't. Now wouldn't that be exciting?
Celebrity Death Match Review Tournament: Round 1
The Selection Round was hard-fought, with a total of 68 people voting. Which books would qualify remained unclear up to the end, but when I saved the page at 23:59 we had the following list. Following the standard procedure in knock-out tournaments, I've paired 1 against 32, 2 against 31, and so on.
Keep those reviews coming! Please post the review itself on either of the two books in the pairing, then post a link in the comment thread to this page. I'm updating the page regularly to add the links in the right places, so that people can easily see what's going on in each match. The round ends at 23:59 Swiss time on Sep 29.
I am continuing to experiment with the scripts I've developed for cutting up audiobooks and turning them into multimedia LARA texts (more details hereI am continuing to experiment with the scripts I've developed for cutting up audiobooks and turning them into multimedia LARA texts (more details here if you're curious). I've tried French and English, so I thought I'd move to a different language and do something in German. What better place to start than Aschenputtel, the original Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella? You can see the result here. As usual with LARA texts, view in Chrome or Firefox and hover over a pencil icon to get a translation of the preceding sentence; clicking on a word shows you all the places it occurs in the text, and also gives you a link to a German lexicon/grammar page. The audio comes from someone on Librivox called Hans Hafen, who sounds like the kind German grandfather every child ought to have to read Grimms Märchen to them. Vielen dank Herr Hafen!
I did the translation myself, partly because the one I found on Gutenberg was far removed from the German, and partly because it was fun. What a weird story Aschenputtel is compared to the bland Disney film! I started off thinking it was very politically incorrect, which I suppose it must be, but after a while I decided that the proto-feminist component was even stronger. Herr Charming, if you haven't figured it out yet, I must warn you that this is a seriously dangerous princess. You look like you're way out of your depth. _________________ [Update, Oct 1 2022]
This afternoon, we watched the Adelaide Gilbert and Sullivan Society's charming production of Into the Woods, which I'd never seen before. I was amazed to discover how closely the Cinderella segment followed Aschenputtel! If you're a fan, I definitely recommend checking out the original text....more
And so on to La Prisonnière, volume 5 in A la recherche du temps perdu and one of the most depressing books I can remember reading. Knowing full well And so on to La Prisonnière, volume 5 in A la recherche du temps perdu and one of the most depressing books I can remember reading. Knowing full well that it's the last thing he should do, Marcel has invited Albertine to come and live with him in Paris and now spends his time in a hell of jealousy, trying to stop her from meeting her many lesbian lovers and endlessly cross-examining her about her movements. He's aware, both from his own experience and from that of his late friend Swann, that his behaviour is pointless and self-destructive, but he can't control it.
Looking at the introduction and many other places, I see everyone explaining to us that the book is about Proust's brief and tragic relationship with his chauffeur/private secretary/lover Alfred Agostinelli. From the information available, it is indeed easy to see why this theory is popular. On the other hand, I notice this sentence in the book's first paragraph:
Ceux qui apprennent sur la vie d'un autre quelque détail exact en tirent aussitôt des conséquences qui ne le sont pas et voient dans le fait nouvellement découvert l'explication de choses qui précisément n'ont aucun rapport avec lui.
which I might paraphrase as
People who note some striking detail in someone else's life often draw conclusions from it which are entirely incorrect, and see in the fact they have just discovered explanations of things which have absolutely nothing to do with him.
Indeed, on the occasions when I have had an opportunity to check my theories about people's books by asking the authors directly, I've been surprised to see how many times Proust's observation turned out to be accurate. So, maybe not as clear-cut as it seems.
The author of my edition's preface also spends several pages telling us about the book's painstakingly constructed architecture, but refrains from pointing out that it often seems to be a complete mess. There are bizarre plot holes, and sentences are repeated for no obvious reason. Worst, Proust's syntax, always driven to the edge of what's possible for a human being to understand, sometimes goes well past the point of no return. The diligent editor, as conflicted as his author, goes to great lengths in his footnotes to explain that some sentences aren't actually finished and others use pronouns whose reference is almost impossible to deduce from the grammar. In general there are a vast number of obscure words and allusions which complicate the task of understanding what the hell the narrator is talking about.
Why is Proust doing this? He died while he was still correcting the proofs, and some of the inconsistencies must be down to things still being in progress. But I think this is far from being the whole story, and it may not even be an important part of it. It seems to me, rather, that Proust has chosen to convey his narrator's constant pain and confusion by using the grammar to inflect the same sufferings on us, the poor readers. It's a dangerous manoeuvre, and you can only get away with it when you're a brilliant enough writer that you can pull some magical pages out of the hat any time you need them to remind us that you're doing this on purpose; a modern novel which uses the same method with success is Infinite Jest, also a book about obsession.
Although La Prisonnière was often unpleasant to read, when I reached the end I decided I'd been tortured for valid reasons. The narrator spends most of his time in so much pain that his mind isn't functioning properly; indeed he's always telling us he's unable to think. But every now and then, when his attention turns to the redemptive power of art, the mental fog clears, and with it the syntax. The high point of the novel is the musical evening chez Mme Verdurin, which contrasts the sublime beauty of Vinteuil's septet (clearly, and somewhat immodestly, the book itself) with Mme Verdurin's tawdry scheming against Baron de Charlus. We see that the two contrasting themes of the septet correspond to the two themes of the book, the power of art (can art be not just an alternative to life, but actually more real than life?), versus the miseries of romantic relationships.
The opening of Albertine disparue, which I have just started, appears to confirm the above theory: Albertine has left, and the narrator already seems clearer and more coherent. I'm looking forward to following the triumphant development of the artistic theme in the final two volumes. ________________ [And the next day...]
Thirty pages into volume 6, I stand by what I said: at least to my eye, there is a very noticeable difference in the syntax. I'm wondering if I can find some straightforward way to quantify it....more
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