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On Perfume, Paris and Glamour

Monday, February 13th, 2012

Photo: Vincent Thibert

Photo: Vincent Thibert

Denyse Beaulieu is an author and translator based in Paris. She writes a bilingual blog on scent. Her book The Perfume Lover: A Personal History of Scent, will be published on March 15th by Harper Collins. She has learned the principles of perfume composition with the help of some of the profession’s most prestigious noses. Her expertise has been acknowledged by the London College of Fashion where she has taught an intensive “Understanding Fragrance” course. She is a member of the Société Française des Parfumeurs and a juror at the Fragrance Foundation France.

We are thrilled that Denyse will be a part of our Passion Panel on Wednesday 15 February at 19h30. She will join experts Sister Noella Marcellino and  Robert Camuto for this panel on three things we love and associate with France: perfume, cheese, and wine. Today, Denyse explains how she was introduced to perfume and how one of her memories was transformed into an essence. She writes:

“I want more Denyse!”

There was no comma between “more” and “Denyse”. The wonderful Jenny Heller, my editor at HarperCollins, didn’t just want more out of my manuscript. She wanted more about me and my “glamorous Parisian life”. This wasn’t just about perfume, she said: it was a woman’s story.

I was dismayed. Granted, The Perfume Lover: a Personal History of Scent was written in the first person. Wasn’t I living every perfume lover’s dream? I’d inspired a great perfumer to compose a fragrance based on a story I’d told him. I would be chronicling its development throughout our work sessions, and my journal would be the narrative thread stringing together my essays on the art of perfumery. Still, however partial and subjective my “personal history of scent” would be, I hadn’t expected Jenny to ask me to delve into my life and loves. But she had a point: how could I tease my life in Paris apart from my passion for fragrance?

Perfume is to smells what eroticism is to sex: an aesthetic, cultural elaboration of the raw materials provided by nature. And thus, perfumery, like love, requires technical skills and some knowledge of black magic; both can be arts, though neither is recognized as such. And I’ve been studying both in the capital of love and luxury, Paris, where I settled half a lifetime ago. It is in Paris that I learned about l’amour; in Paris that I stepped through the looking glass into the invisible realm of scent. I’ve had good teachers: discussing the delights of the flesh as passionately and learnedly as you would speak about art or literature is one of the favourite pastimes of my adopted countrymen. For the French, pleasure is intensified by delving into its nuances. By putting words to it. La volupté is taken very seriously indeed: a worthy subject for philosophizing in the boudoir.  Is this why fine perfumery, with its delicate balance of artistic creativity, exquisite taste, sensuous pleasure and technical know-how, is such a quintessentially French achievement?

It was, in fact, because of the Philosophie dans le Boudoir that I left Montreal for Paris: I was doing my PhD on the Marquis de Sade. But it was only while writing The Perfume Lover – and adding “more Denyse” – that I realised my first lessons in philosophy had indeed been dispensed to me in a boudoir. Or rather, between the closet, dresser and Vogue collection of a glamorous French neighbour in the suburbs of Montreal. It was thanks to her that the first drops of French perfume ever touched my skin. Perhaps they acted as a magic potion. That day, at age eleven, I decided I’d be French. Not only French, but Parisian. And not only Parisian, but Left Bank Parisian: glamorous, intellectual and bohemian.

The perfume was Yves Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche. Was it by chance that the very first perfumer I met, decades later, was one of its co-creators? My encounter with Jacques Polge, who had since gone on to become Chanel’s in-house perfumer, was my first step into an intensely secret world that would open itself up to me as I learned to translate its coded language into words.  But I never thought that one day my words would be translated back into scent and poured inside a bottle. That Paris, the capital of perfumery, would offer me this gift. That perfume would, at last, make me a Parisian writer. My story in a bottle. My name on a book.

I can’t imagine anything more glamorous than that, but in the ancient sense of the Scottish word, which is derived from “grammar”: occult learning; magic charm; a haze in the air causing things to take on a different appearance. Those are the very words I would use to describe perfume.

the perfume lover

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Fernanda Eberstadt on being an American writer in Europe

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

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Fernanda Eberstadt is the American expatriate author of five acclaimed novels, Isaac and His Devils, Low Tide, When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, The Furies, and her latest – Rat. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Commentary. Her nonfiction book Little Money Street is about the struggle of Gypsies in southwest France, where she lived with her family before returning to London. We look forward to welcoming her to the Library on Wednesday 1 February at 19h30. She writes:

I’m thrilled to be appearing at the American Library and will be talking about the delights and perils of being an American writer in Europe and in particular about my most recent novel, “RAT.”

The novel is named after its heroine, a fifteen-year-old girl growing up in the French countryside, raised by a feckless, charmingly narcissistic single mother. Rat has never met her biological father, who lives in London. The person she loves best in the world is her adopted younger brother—the son of her mother’s best friend, an ex-prostitute who died of AIDs—and when her mother’s boyfriend begins to take a sexual interest in the kid, Rat decides it’s time for her and her brother to leave home in search of her father.

Like all my books, RAT is about family.

For years, I’d been haunted by the subject of a child who grows up obsessed by a father she’s never known, and finally sets off to find him for herself. My heroine Rat’s fantasy is that once she’s reunited with this unknown father, he will somehow give her all the steadiness and sense of belonging she’s always lacked.

But of course the reality turns out to be quite different: Her father was a twenty-something-year-old Englishman on a beach-holiday, who had sex one night with a local girl he met in a nightclub. And felt completely outraged when his one-night pickup not only got pregnant, but insisted on having the baby, without his consent.

He goes on to marry a suitable wife to whom he never mentions this traumatic episode; they have a child. And then fifteen-year-old Rat shows up, like Banquo’s ghost, ruining the domestic feast.

The irony of the book is that in the end, her father comes to love this girl he wished had never been born, and to recognize an affinity with her almost deeper—certainly more involuntary, more agonizing–than what he feels for his “real”, lawful family.

RAT raises a lot of crucial contemporary subjects: what is the nature of biological identity, of genetic inheritance? If women have reproductive rights, do men, too? What happens when children are obliged to parent their own parents? What makes a family? (It’s significant that the only “family” in which Rat and her brother feel completely at home is a bunch of anarchist squatters they meet in an abandoned dynamite factory.)

RAT is set in the French Pyrenees, where I spent six crucial years; my children got most of their education in a village school there. We were living on a vineyard half-a-mile from the Mediterranean. The tourist image of the South of France is of Gold Coast glamor, and yet in fact, for all its natural majesty and blessed climate, this area is poor, down-and-out, blighted by political corruption, a honky-tonk stretch of trailer parks and fast-food stalls that are boarded up nine months a year.

In my last book, LITTLE MONEY STREET, I wrote about Gypsies and Arabs in this area. This time, I wanted to write about the white French families who have drifted down here in search of a cheap place in the sun.

One of my aims in this novel was to create a heroine who is genuinely heroic. Surrounded by dangerously needy adults, Rat is obliged from a young age to become a kind of mother to her younger brother, feeding him, clothing him, protecting him from harm.

I’ve always loved children’s books. One thing I’ve noticed, reading aloud a whole new generation of writers to my own children, is that the world of children’s literature is astonishingly dark. The best children’s writers are tough-minded: they do not shrink from exposing their characters to wrenching ordeals and moral dilemmas. Yet, unlike the heroes of most contemporary “adult” fiction, those of children’s books tend to meet adversity with pluck and resourcefulness. You read Philip Pullman’s Lyra trilogy, and you want to be as brave as she is.

I wanted to do something similar in RAT: to create a heroine who raises a reader’s spirits.

RAT is my own way of grappling a very particular cultural problem. I think of myself as being a New York writer. Yet for most of the last twelve years, I’ve been living in rural France, my children have been going to school in French, and our outside life has been largely conducted in French. In 2009, we moved to London. Closer, but still not Manhattan.

Which means that the daily sights, sounds, smells, opinions, attitudes, pop culture that have been feeding my fiction for the last decade-plus are a European mishmash. The world is indeed becoming Americanized, but the music Rat and her friends listen to, their language and expectations and cultural assumptions are not the same as American kids’. The “New York” of my imagination, the New York in which I grew up, is by now about as archaeological a relic as Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Warsaw.

RAT is written in American English, but it’s my first work of fiction whose characters and setting are a hundred percent European.

cover_rat

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Sophie Hardach on Forced Marriages in France

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

sophie hardach

Sophie Hardach wrote her novel The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages while working as a journalist for Reuters in Paris. Originally inspired by the fragments of stories she was told while out on various reporting assignments, the novel follows the intertwining lives of a Kurdish boy struggling to build a life in Europe and a Registrar working at a Parisian town hall. Today, Sophie writes about the French pamphlet that inspired the novel:

Inspiration comes in many different forms: a thunderbolt, a light bulb, or, in the case of my first novel, a pamphlet printed by the French government.

About three years ago, I was working as a correspondent for Reuters news agency in Paris when the French government launched a campaign against forced marriages. I interviewed some activists in the field – like the victims, many were of North African, Turkish, Kurdish or Senegalese descent – and was struck not just by the fact that the problem persisted, but that it was much more pressing than I had expected. During one interview in a cramped little office in a Parisian suburb, staffed by one lone activist and her assistant, the phone kept ringing with calls from girls seeking help. A rescue mission for a girl whose parents had already booked her ticket to the country where she would be married off against her will was planned for that night. Another organisation had just taken in a girl whose own grandmother tied her to a bed on the wedding night – and this happened not in some remote, deserted location, but in the trendy 10th arrondissement.

So the French government decided it was time to do something, and one of the things it did was print a peppy, pink-and-red little pamphlet titled “Prévention des Mariages Forcés – Guide à l’usage des élu/es“. It was a guide for bureaucrats in town halls all over France who might unwittingly preside over forced marriages. It was also, in a way, a tour through the hopes and dilemmas of modern France, or rather, a France that is figuring out how to be modern. There was great idealism in the way the pamphlet directly addressed the reader: you – yes, you, mayor of Boondocks-Sur-Seine – you too can be a soldier in the fight for good. But just how that fight should be fought wasn’t quite clear. The intention was there, but as soon as it went into detail, the guide sounded curiously helpless. So how do you spot a forced marriage? Well, apparently an age difference of 10 years is a bit suspicious, and so is a “menacing attitude” by the bride’s entourage. Certain communities are singled out as higher-risk, but there’s also a stern warning not to become too wary of foreign and mixed marriages as that would be against the European Convention of Human Rights.

Sitting in a press conference under the high stone arches of an old Parisian town hall, I pictured an anonymous official reading the guide and scratching her head: “Hmmm…they say that ‘Yes’ does not always imply consent…I’m meant to be suspicious if the bride cries…and then alert the prosecutor if I think it’s a forced marriage… but oh dear, if I get it wrong, I’ll have an enraged bride, groom and two families accusing me of ruining their big day!”

It’s not surprising that a real-life French official told me he didn’t know anyone who used the guide.

And one of the seasoned, tough activists I interviewed simply said: “There’s no way the girl would show any opposition once they’re all at the town hall. There’s simply no way she would suddenly confide in the mayor, or cry or something like that. She’d feel like a traitor.”

Incidentally, that activist’s organisation – Elele, which mainly advised Turkish and Kurdish girls – had to close down in 2010 after its government subsidies dried up. Elele was listed in the Mariages Forcés pamphlet, but that did not protect it from the budget cuts. Given this rather depressing development, it would be easy to write off the pink pamphlet as yet another example of political cynicism: print a few thousand brochures with great fanfare and lots of press coverage, then withdraw funds from the very people who are helping the victims.

And yet, something about the pamphlet stuck with me. It seemed to encapsulate so many of the issues we grapple with today, and have grappled with through the ages: whether, and how, a society should interfere with a private issue such as marriage; whether it’s better to stay out of certain conflicts and risk being accused of turning a blind eye, or try to help and perhaps make the situation worse.

The news cycle soon moved on to the burqa ban and the economy, but in my spare time I continued to think about all those questions, and about migration in general, and about my own experiences as a migrant in particular. Eventually I wrote a novel: “The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages”. It’s about a woman who works at a Parisian town hall, about her friendship with Selim, a Kurdish refugee, and about a pact they made in the past that overshadows the present. The manual in the novel is fictional, though it shares some characteristics with the original, such as a fondness for capital letters and exclamation marks. Since the book was published in April 2011, I’ve had lots of interesting comments from readers. Some are especially intrigued by Selim’s story, since the plight of the Kurds is not a common subject in fiction. Others see it as a story about identity, or about the joys and challenges of multi-culturalism. And others again simply read it as a story of two people trying to make their way through this often delightful, often bewildering world.

registrar 2

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Cherie Burns on Fashion Icon Millicent Rogers

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

cherie burns

Cherie Burns is the author of Searching for Beauty–The Life of Millicent Rogers, the first comprehensive biography of the Standard Oil heiress and fashion icon.

Raised in the Gilded Age of New York society, Rogers came of age as a debutante and flapper. She eloped with an impoverished European nobleman and lived with three husbands in high-living pre-war Europe. During WWII she returned to the U.S to pitch into the war effort, and at war’s end she followed American glamour–and Clark Gable–to Hollywood. Her last reincarnation was in Taos, New Mexico where she fell in love with the Pueblo Indians and re-imagined southwestern style for her followers in the New York fashion world.

Rogers was considered the first American woman with real style to merit the admiration of Parisian couturiers and fashion arbiters. Beautiful, rich, spirited and always impeccably dressed, Rogers re-invented herself with every decade of the first half of the Twentieth Century.

In addition to Searching for Beauty, Cherie Burns is author of The Great Hurricane: 1938, of which  Liz Smith  wrote in her column in The Daily News: “A must if you care about brilliant reporting…” and Stepmotherhood—How to Survive Without Feeling Frustrated, Left Out or Wicked.  It  has sold over 40,000 copies in the U.S., England and Germany and remains in print after twenty years. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine,The Wall Street Journal, People, Glamour, New York, and Sports Illustrated. She now lives primarily in Taos, New Mexico.

Cherie Burns writes: People frequently ask me how and why I became interested in writing about Millicent Rogers. I first took note of Rogers when I visited the museum named after her in Taos, New Mexico when I came to Taos with my family to ski in the 1990s.   I didn’t know much about her and the name blurred with Mabel Dodge Luhan, Dorothy Brett, Frieda Lawrence and Georgia O’Keefe, other famous women who found their way to New Mexico and left an impression with their bohemian ways, flair, mischief and artistry. One cannot but wonder at the photos of Frieda Lawrence, D.H.’s wife, with the cigarette dangling from her lip,  O’Keefe, the severe artist with her tight kerchiefs, magisterial Mabel and  eccentric Brett.   It was not until I came to live in Taos in 2005 that I routinely visited the Millicent Rogers Museum, and Millicent Rogers began to come into focus for me. She was an elegant beauty,  mysterious and evocative because less was known publicly about her life. I often took visitors to the adobe museum on the edge of town to show them the regional artistry and New Mexican sensibility on display there. Waiting for them in the lobby, I had time to study the likenesses of Millicent on the walls.

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The more I looked into her legend and realized that of her 51 year-long life, only six of those years were lived in Taos, the more intrigued I became.  Though she is associated in the modern public consciousness with  New Mexico, she lived most of her life in New York and Europe, tripping the light fantastic wherever she went. Researching her life story gave me the opportunity to learn more about Taos, and to fill in my dearth of knowledge about the 1930s and 40s, Millicent’s heydays, in both fashion and political history.

Millicent H Rogers dying her own textiles in the home of Mabel Dodge Luhan. Taos, NM 1948.

Millicent H Rogers dying her own textiles in the home of Mabel Dodge Luhan. Taos, NM 1948.

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Lionel Shriver talks about Kevin

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012

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We look forward to welcoming prize-winning novelist Lionel Shriver on Wednesday 11 January at 19h30. In this essay, Shriver talks about how it feels to have her widely rejected manuscript become a best-selling, prize-winning novel, then a book-club favorite and the toast of the Cannes film festival.

It has now entered the cultural canon that, on completion in 2001, the manuscript of Lionel Shriver’’s seventh novel was widely rejected by publishers and literary agents alike. In retrospect, this incidental fact being widely known is alone a little weird. After all, every day writers numbly receive curt, dismissive rejections of work they’ve slaved over for years. Writers should have some grasp of publishing’s brutality, and this morose process of having your beloved creations stepped on and pissed over comes with the territory. Hence people in my occupation are routinely expected, as Kevin would say, to suck it up.

Sorry, did I say “Kevin”? That’s what’s truly weird: the large number of fiction readers who know exactly who Kevin is, and that number is set to swell once a cinema audience joins the mix. Yet “Kevin Katchadourian” is just a name I picked after combing through the phonebook on an ordinary afternoon.

The premiere of Lynne Ramsay’s film of We Need To Talk About Kevin at the Cannes film festival provides an apt juncture at which to celebrate the miraculous power not of film but of fiction. Lo, I have created a monster.

Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller, Lynne Ramsay, John C Reilly and his wife Alison Dickey on the red carpet at Cannes Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA

Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller, Lynne Ramsay, John C Reilly and his wife Alison Dickey on the red carpet at Cannes Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA

Sorry, did I say “Kevin”? That’s what’s truly weird: the large number of fiction readers who know exactly who Kevin is, and that number is set to swell once a cinema audience joins the mix. Yet “Kevin Katchadourian” is just a name I picked after combing through the phonebook on an ordinary afternoon.

The premiere of Lynne Ramsay’s film of We Need To Talk About Kevin at the Cannes film festival provides an apt juncture at which to celebrate the miraculous power not of film but of fiction. Lo, I have created a monster.

Kevin is a dark book, and many of those initial rejections objected that its narrator, Eva, is “unattractive”: a woman uneasy about pregnancy, who feels alarmingly blank after childbirth, and fails to form the bond with her boy that we like to imagine is as instinctive as closing the epiglottis when we swallow. The novel breaks one of the last taboos (and how amazing that at such a late date I found a taboo still standing): a mother disliking her son. Rife with difficult characters and climaxing in a high-school massacre of the sort Americans are rightly ashamed of, Kevin was a poor commercial bet from the get-go.

More, my timing was mythically crap. I submitted the final draft to my New York literary agent right after 9/11, in that hilarious little window when everyone thought Americans would never read or watch anything violent again. Waiting for her response, I recorded in my journal that my new novel “abruptly seems irrelevant and, more dangerously, dated”. (Indeed, the week the twin towers fell, New York Times columnist Frank Rich listed Columbine among a catalogue of national issues from “before” that suddenly didn’t matter.) Ominously, my usually responsive agent went silent for weeks. Finger-drumming, I wrote presciently to myself: “Should this day, too, pass, with no comment from NY, I have vowed to break my silence and press her for a response. But the responses you have to ask for you don’t want.”

Xan Brooks gives his verdict on We Need to Talk About Kevin, while assorted bloggers, buyers and blaggers share their thoughts Link to this video Quite. Finally I got an email – a long, unparagraphed, associative wail of dismay of which I’ve kept a copy: “For the life of me, I don’t know who is going to fall in love with this novel . . . People in the industry are so thin-skinned right now – I just don’t think anyone is going to want to publish a book about a kid doing such maxed-out, over-the-top, evil things, especially when it’s written from such an unsympathetic point of view.” She worried the plot might invite copycat killings. She suggested a rewrite with “a lot more humour (in that way which ONLY YOU can do) instead of one kid from hell who will make people sick just reading about the things he does. Don’t make him a mass-murderer . . . And have him actually have a soft spot for his sister because she is easily humiliated and poses no threat.” She demanded I pay my photocopying bill.

I paid the bill. I spent the next eight months shopping in vain for a new agent. Finally in desperation I sent the manuscript directly to an editor at a small house who’d published me before. She read it over the weekend, made an offer on the Monday, and that’s where the fairytale starts. Offer in hand, I got a wonderful new agent whom I retain today.

Nevertheless, Kevin was a slow burn. The book went to 30 different British houses before the Little Publisher That Could, Serpent’s Tail, picked up the title with a tiny advance but great compensatory enthusiasm. Meanwhile, three months after its hardback publication in America – publicity budget: near-zero – an article appeared in the New York Observer describing all these women on the Upper East Side biking a little-known novel to each other and convening coffee klatches to discuss it. “Word of mouth” had begun.

Word of mouth, far more than critical acclaim, is what elevated Kevin to the enduring status he appears to enjoy today, for the novel hit the London Times bestseller list before it won the Orange prize in 2005. Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare. This novel has been driven from the off not by advertising and publisher hype, but by individual readers who passed it on to friends. Its success is therefore a populist tribute. Even Lynne Ramsay bid for the film rights well before the novel was a commercial hit. She was simply one more reader who discovered the book for herself.

Book clubs have also powered Kevin as he went viral, and I’ve visited a few, where groups cleave into ferocious camps: one convinced that the boy was evil from day one, the other just as convinced that his mother’s coldness was criminally culpable. A fine spectator sport in which I never participate, since what the book means is no longer up to me.

The novel passed the signal sales mark of 1m copies worldwide some years ago, and I’ve stopped keeping track. It has secured 25 translation deals, including Estonian, Serbian, Arabic and Russian; I collect foreign editions because I enjoy comparing covers. My favourite is the Chinese version: a belligerent, deranged-looking teddy bear. The title has so installed itself in the British cultural lexicon that it’s given rise to books such as We Need To Talk About Kevin Keegan and the wittily christened science primer We Need To Talk About Kevin. And now the movie.

What has it felt like, watching a novel travel from pariah manuscript to Cannes? Obviously, publishing the novel at all was a relief. Finally hitting a bestseller list when six previous novels had lost money was satisfying, though in general my experience of “success” has been surprisingly mild; I couch that word in inverted commas out of superstition, and also from dubiety that ever regarding one’s self as having summarily arrived is good for one’s character. My life is not so different, really, and though I’m less prone to depression I hardly leap out of bed every day bursting with disgusting go-get-’em-girl vim and vigour. (Any writer still wallowing in self-congratulation over the popularity of a novel written a decade ago should be shot.) I’ve travelled from amazement to incredulity to bewilderment, and at last to bemused detachment.

Yet underpinning all these emotions is gratitude. I owe thanks to a thoughtful, sophisticated readership hungry for challenging subject matter, for honest portrayals of parenthood, and for fiction whose meaning is neither obvious nor morally pat. This peculiar, tortured novel was an unlikely bestseller, and has benefited from numerous individual readers with independent tastes who have hand sold it. I’ve met many of these readers, and they’ve confirmed my view that the publishing industry routinely underestimates book buyers, especially women, who don’t all want to read girly pap. I’m sometimes asked if I get bored with talking about Kevin, and of course the short answer is yes. Nevertheless, after a long slog in the literary trenches I never take a single reader for granted, and always remind myself that for new readers the unfolding story is fresh.

Most of all, Kevin as a phenomenon long ago ceased to have anything to do with me. I’ve published two novels since, and I’m stuck into another; fortunately, many Kevin fans have moved on to other novels of mine as well. Meanwhile, Kevin can continue to suck a lychee sadistically in front of his mother after her daughter has lost an eye without any further help from me.

My starkest realisation that this novel has achieved a life of its own was while watching Ramsay’s riveting adaptation of the book. Mind, I’ve been lucky, because Ramsay’s version is excellent: well cast, beautifully shot, and thematically loyal to the novel. Settings such as Eva and Franklin’s slick, ghastly suburban house in fictional Gladstone look almost unsettlingly close to the way I saw them in my mind’s eye.

Before the premiere in France, meeting Ezra Miller, who plays Kevin as an adolescent, was particularly surreal. In social circumstances, he still exudes a seductive eroticism you instinctively want to resist, a beguiling exterior disguising you’re-not-sure-you-want-to-know-what, and a subtle manipulative sleaziness that I recognised instantly from the novel. Talking to Ezra in Cannes was so eerily like having a conversation with Kevin himself that at the premiere’s after-party I turned to him with narrowed eyes. “You little shit,” I said. Rationally I knew better, but something in me truly believed that this kid had killed seven students, a teacher, and a cafeteria worker at his high school, and still thought rather well of himself for pulling the atrocity off.

Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin. Photograph: Nicole Rivelli photography

Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin. Photograph: Nicole Rivelli photography

Allowing herself to look washed-out and haggard, Tilda Swinton is brilliantly cast as Eva, and seems already to have replaced my own flickering image of my narrator. Though the script is sparse, her silences exude an overload of conflicting emotion – a dismay, anguish, loneliness, and fury too dangerously combustible to express. John C Reilly brings to the role of Eva’s husband Franklin a weight, presence and warmth that rescues the father from seeming simply a dupe in the face of his son’s sunny pretence of being a normal, rambunctious boy. And the two child actors who play Kevin when younger both capture the exasperation with the meaningless adult world that I tried to impart to the novel’s character, as well as providing Kevin a seamless physical contiguity as he grows up.

The film’s literal manifestations of impulsive, near arbitrary decisions at my computer I found a riot. I picked the dorky name of Eva’s squalid place of employ out of the air one day, yet the production team had to carefully paint a real sign over a real shop premises reading “Travel R Us”. I snatched the name of the walk-on who runs that shabby travel agency with equal flippancy, yet there she is, in all her three-dimensional glory, with “My name is Wanda” pinned to her dress. Both comical and a little scary, my apparent capacity to conjure the solid from mere caprice suggests a power I’m not sure anyone should enjoy.

The film is an interpretation of the novel, of course, and Ramsay was obliged to edit out multiple scenes, lest the film run to 10 hours. But here’s what’s fab: the book still exists, inviolate. All the dialogue Ramsay eliminated is still in the book. All the scenes she couldn’t dramatise are still in the book. All the literary reflections that have evaporated into a wordless interplay of colour and space are still in the book.

I’ve often marvelled at the ability of visual artists to let things go – to craft unique objects, to which they surely become attached, yet which they sell off and may never see again. By contrast, the medium in which I work allows simultaneously for generosity and piggy hoarding. I’ve given my book away to a director, producers, and cast; to dozens of translators whose skills this unilingual moron has to take on faith; and to countless readers, who have breathed their own life into the story and brought their own analyses to bear on the characters. Yet no matter how many copies my publishers sell, I get to keep mine, filed by chapter on my hard drive.

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Katy Masuga on Henry Miller

Monday, November 21st, 2011

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Katy Masuga received a PhD in 2007 at the University of Washington in Comparative Literature with a joint PhD in Literary Theory and Criticism. Her published works include Henry Miller and How He Got That Way and The Secret Violence of Henry Miller. She has also published on DH Lawrence, Beckett and Wittgenstein and teaches at The American University of Paris and at l’Université de Paris (III): La Sorbonne Nouvelle. Here, Katy writes about how she first discovered Henry Miller and the reasons she decided to study and write about his work.

My first introduction to Henry Miller was when I was 19, spending my final year of college in Germany earning a degree in philosophy. It was there that a fellow exchange student exposed me to the literature you don’t really get in school: William Burroughs, Irvine Welsh, Anthony Burgess, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and so on. I read some of his recommendations, and those that I didn’t were stored in my mind for a later date.

Many years later, after college, after two more years in Germany, after a Master’s degree, after a year in Paris, and after two years of coursework to finish a PhD at the University of Washington, I was at the point of preparing to pass my doctoral qualifying exams. The preparation consists of compiling and reading literally hundreds of books over a very short period of time, in order to write the massive exams. (At one point, the reading amounted to a book a day for one hundred days.) Miller was on that reading list because I had randomly put him on that list along with all of those other writers whose day had finally come. I included everything I could imagine, in addition to the rest of what is expected from a doctoral student of comparative literature. (Hence, very long lists…)

Anais Nin and Henry Miller in 1974

Anais Nin and Henry Miller in 1974

Henry Miller immediately stuck out and made his way directly toward the center of my dissertation proposal. With my undergraduate degree in philosophy, I already had a huge passion for Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and the latter’s influence on French philosophers such as Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille. These guys were writing about the limits of language, passionately destroying meaning, taking apart words, looking in the dark corners of human experience —mythology, parables, the sacred, the unexplainable and unspeakable— that only engaged them more in the paradoxical struggle to always say the impossible.

Suddenly, it seemed only evident and necessary that some one (namely, me) needed to bring to light a couple of things: 1) Henry Miller was writing like these reputable and influential philosophers but in a language all his own; and 2) no one knew it! They were too caught up either in Miller’s obscenity or in his jovial messages about life. But what about his writing? I thought. I found my focus.

Luckily, my committee didn’t tell me that they thought I was completely crazy for choosing such a topic until we were sitting for my dissertation defense. It was at that point that the first committee member, a renowned European scholar in literary theory and criticism, said to me: “When you first chose your subject to be Henry Miller and French philosophy, I thought, ‘There’s no way this could make any sense.’ Now after reading your dissertation, I have only one question: How did you come up with this idea? I am beyond surprised and just have to say, I am completely convinced!”

henry miller and how he got that way

It was then that I knew Henry Miller needed better press, and I was eager to bring that research to the public. The story of how I came to publish two Henry Miller books simultaneously this year, then, is something to share during my talk.

Perhaps, though, the above explanation still doesn’t account for how Henry Miller really drew me in after I had read through those long PhD exam lists. To answer that, I’ll just say the following:

During the tough times over the years of writing my doctoral dissertation, my PhD committee supervisor used to always remind me of the reason I gave him when he first asked me: Why Henry Miller?

My response? “Because he makes me laugh out loud.”

masuga book

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The Wednesday Wars, a review

Friday, November 18th, 2011

warsThe Wednesday Wars by Gary D.  Schmidt

Reviewed by  Children’s Library Volunteer Alex Toutounji

On his first day of seventh grade in 1967 , Holling Hoodhood, otherwise known as the Son Who Is Going to Inherit Hoodhood and Associates, finds out that his teacher, Mrs. Baker hates  him. On top of that, his mother doesn’t believe him, his father doesn’t want to hear anything about it because it would be bad for his business and his sister, well, let’s say she has no interest in her brother whatsoever…  Because he isn’t Catholic or Jewish, he also hast to spend his afternoons with her in the classroom while all of the other kids go to church or temple. But as the days pass, he realizes that she might not be so bad after all…. He learns to like this wacky teacher that keeps pet rats in the classroom instead of fish or guinea pigs and that likes to read Shakespeare. This is a great novel that kids can really relate to, I mean, who hasn’t ever had a vibe from a teacher that says  ” I really don’t like you…. ” ?

The Wednesday Wars is a Newbery honor book and can be found in the Young Adult fiction collection on the teen mezzanine under J SCH  (YA).

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David Downie on the City of Light

Monday, November 14th, 2011

David Downie

We look forward to welcoming David Downie to the Library on Wednesday 16 November at 19h30 as a part of our discussion of Paris on the Page. David is an American author and journalist who divides his time between France and Italy. He has been writing about the City of Light for two decades. His books include Food Wine Burgundy, Quiet Corners of Rome, Paris City of Night, and Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light. Here, he writes about being an accidental Parisian.

People often ask why the second “Paris” in the title of Paris, Paris is italicized. For one thing the italics reflect the French pronunciation of the city’s name, as perceived by an English speaker. They also signal my underlying quest: a voyage of discovery into the other Paris, the Paris of Parisians dead or alive, the Paris of dreams, the Paris of the past, the Paris lying beneath our feet, often unseen and unsung.

“Underfoot” in Paris, Paris might mean not only the subterranean city of catacombs, sewers, and other celebrated sights. It could mean the sidewalks and street-paving we and most Parisians take for granted, and what those trodden pieces of infrastructure contribute to making Paris uniquely Paris.

Paris, italicized again, happens to be the plural of pari, a wager or bet, as in pari-mutuel. Paris, the city of light became my personal pari a quarter century ago.

As to the nuts and bolts of building Paris, Paris the book is the unexpected offspring of two decades’ worth of exploring and reporting.

Rewind to the fall of 1985. That’s when I rented a maid’s room in the 17th arrondissement, determined to write the great Italo-Franco-American novel before returning to Italy, where I’d been living, or San Francisco, my home town.

In spring 1986 I shoe-horned myself into my unheated, un-gentrified garret, giving myself a year to improve my French and finish the job I’d started. Somehow 25 springs have come and gone. I still haven’t finished that novel, in theory a literary work of fiction. But I have written many humble articles and several books, including two crime novels, about this unendingly surprising city.

So, what’s the book about? Each chapter distills something that seemed to me essential about the cityscape, the people and the phenomena associated—by me—with Paris. Each also says something about a given period in the life of the author. More than one reader has remarked that Paris, Paris is a reflected, refracted self-portrait. Paris is in the foreground; I’m there for scale, a figure in the landscape.

Just as I’m an “accidental Parisian” this is an “accidental book.” Try confining a young (at the time) athletic man for days at a time in a cupboard-sized maid’s room with no window, no heat, no shower, no nothing. I was authentically broke back then. My chambre de bonne came equipped with a little skylight called a vas-is-das, way up at the top of a shaft. Raising the vas-is-das and looking out involved moving a 12-foot ladder from the lightless hallway, propping it in the shaft and climbing into the sky. Precariously perched there I would stare at the tin or tile roofs, watch the pigeons and the night-lighting on the Eiffel Tower or Arc de Triomphe, and plot out the path of my next foray. Then I’d go out and walk. And walk. For hours at a time.

Happily my wife of 24 years did not judge me by my digs and was also a walkaholic. Alison Harris and I met in Paris about a year after I’d arrived. She’s the main reason I stayed. Born here to American parents, Alison is a professional photographer; she took the enigmatic, sometimes puzzling black-and-white photos that accompany—they aren’t intended to “illustrate”—each chapter.

The photos entice and challenge readers, evoking unexpected elements of the city, or echoing something in the pages of the book. The image that accompanies “Going Underground,” about underground Paris, shows a rounded object and tool. Read the chapter and take a close look. You’ll probably figure out the tool is for lifting manhole covers; the rounded object is the cover’s edge.

For both of us roaming the city was and still is a necessity. Initially it seemed like a good way of getting to know the Great Unknown—the physical, topographical and practical Paris. Where did the subways take you? Where were the best markets, the leafiest parks, the quietest streets, the most striking views, the thickest, crispest baguette sandwiches? How could I transform a trip to the library—the American Library, for instance—into an adventure?

Later on, walking and exploring Paris developed into a kind of meditation. About 15 years ago I decided to paint a word-portrait of the city, singling out key neighborhoods and places. But that wasn’t going to work without the people who had shaped those places. To staple the pieces of this rough-cut puzzle together I needed to illustrate and fold in the phenomena—the soul of the city—that make Paris unique, as unique as any great city or human being.

Over the years I interviewed hundreds of people as I wrote what eventually came together in book form. It’s not an exaggeration to say I walked a couple of thousand miles visiting most of the churches, monuments, museums and parks in town. I also read: history, literature, travel books, old guide books, whatever I could find about Paris. I spent days at the Paris Historical Library doing archival research. Many of the novels, newspapers and reference works I consulted were written by French authors, some were by Italians (Casanova, for instance) yet others by Americans or Englishmen.

Happily, none of the above was anything like a chore. It seemed like a lark. I hope my delight—and my occasional horror—at what I discovered comes through in the pages of what Mavis Gallant describes as a “quirky” book. One day I might even finish that literary novel, or write the sequel to Paris, Paris. It’s titled Paris, Paris Encore! A few chapters are ready, including one about my early days as “The Accidental Parisian.”

With the publishing industry upside down and the “new paradigm” transforming print media relics into collectibles it’s unclear where my path lies. But I’ve been here before and am less scared than I should be. Maybe I’ll climb back up that rickety old ladder, stare out over the roofs, and head into the unknown again. Paris is infinitely explore-able and ultimately unknowable. Like the people you love most.

paris-paris

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Penelope Rowlands at the Library

Monday, November 7th, 2011

bouquiniste

Penelope Rowlands was raised in London and New York and has lived intermittently in Paris. A journalist and critic, she has contributed to Vogue, the Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, Architectural Digest, and The New York Times. She is the author A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters. She is the editor of Paris Was Ours: 32 Writers Reflect on the City of Light. We look forward to welcoming her to the Library on Wednesday 16 November at 19h30 as a part of our Paris on the Page panel. Here, she writes about the first time she lived in the City of Light.

penelope rowlands bw 2

When I moved to France in my early twenties, it felt like home, not because of its natives, whom I found baffling and cold, but mainly for what it wasn’t – neither my father’s native England nor my mother’s U.S., but a place all my own.

As a student in Paris you’re never alone for long. It only takes a second before you become part of a huge, multinational swarm. You typically find your first friends in language class, drawn together by a conviction that you’ll never, ever speak French. For me, this moment came as I sat in disbelief listening to a teacher expound upon a hateful thing known as the ne explétif, which is – no kidding – a meaningless monosyllable that’s tossed into a sentence as a kind of fillip to improve its rhythm.

I knew the instant I met the ne explétif that I would never, ever master the French language, or even understand a culture that could dream up such a thing. But I was wrong. Mainly this was because of Paris and the youthful, multinational culture that buzzes through it, adding and dropping members as it moves ceaselessly along.

Some join the swarm as I did, in language classes where, since so many of your classmates come from different countries, you can only communicate in French. Which none of you speak. And because you can’t speak it, but need to, you quickly learn.

When you do, Paris becomes yours.

You fan out into cafés and surreal-seeming boîtes de nuit, secure in the knowledge that your new friends are feeling as lost – and excited to be so – as you are. You mangle French to shrieks of laughter, drink beer on the steps of Sacre Coeur, then weave, singing, through Métro corridors before catching the last train home. You share youth and foreign-ness and the gift of a common enemy – the French! – a group you will ceaselessly dissect, pick apart, trade horror stories about and, just possibly, come to admire.

You enter a place from which, in a sense, you never return. For even if you race back to your native land — and whether you want it to or not – the experience of having survived as a foreigner in a place as tough as Paris causes you to see things in a new way.

Twenty years after I first lived in the French capital, I returned, this time with my five-year-old son; we stayed for a couple of years before heading back to the States. Still, I couldn’t quite stay away, and for years returned there each summer to work.

Not long ago, I began to ponder why both my attraction to Paris and the city’s effect on me had been so strong. I canvassed other writers, curious about what their experiences had been, then gathered their stories into a book, Paris Was Ours. These writers come from all over the world; their time as Parisians was distinctly their own. Even so, the intensity of the experience was the same.

One of them, the inimitable American writer Joe Queenan, summed it up recently over lunch in New York. “I was in Paris for a year at 21,” he said, rummaging in his backpack for a small red leather address book, which he held up between us. “You can just pull that time out,” he said, almost mystically, as we gazed at the book. He then riffled through its pages, as if shuffling a deck of cards. “It’s the defining moment.”

The red address book was his time in France, reduced to object size. It was a passport to a place that transformed him entirely.

I was back in Paris for a long stretch last summer and my son, a university student, joined me for part of the stay. He’s 22, just about the age I was when I first lived there, and he has two passports, too (and even a third nationality, but that’s another story). His French is good – he’d attended a bilingual school on the Quai D’Orsay when he was small – but he’s forgotten quite a bit and I suggested that he sign up for a refresher course at the same Left Bank school that I’d attended.

It only took one class for him to join the roving band I remembered, the one comprised of multinational youth, speaking iffy French, clustering in cafés, weaving through Métro corridors. I was delighted: student life in Paris is an experience I wanted him to share. But then he returned to the US, and school, and later in the summer I headed back home, too. And while now and then we speak French to each other, mainly we don’t. Still, I’ve always assumed that one day Paris will be his, too.

So I was startled when he told me recently that he wasn’t much interested in living in Europe, having set his sights further afield – perhaps Turkey, even China. Anyone who’s raised children knows the feeling. That sudden reminder that your son or daughter isn’t you. That their interests and their lives are their own. That the world moves on.

I was surprised, yet also relieved. For even if he opts for Asia over Europe, he’ll still have his own version of Joe Queenan’s red book.

So that’s my message to him, and all of his young, restless cohort. Reject Paris, even Europe itself, if you must. But do, at some point, spend time as an expatriate, somewhere in the world. Join the swarm. Pack that expatrian passport. It’s invaluable. And it will never expire.

paris was ours

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Where in the world do you belong?

Monday, October 31st, 2011

globe 2

Born in the U.S.A.; university in London; first job in Hong Kong; wedding in France; career on the computer. Welcome to the ordinary life of a Global Cosmopolitan, a new breed who find it difficult to answer questions such as ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where is my home?’

Today, Professor Emeritus of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD, clinical psychologist, and author, Linda Brimm writes about how a six-month adventure became a life and a career in France.

When I left Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1973 for a six-month adventure in the South of France, I never imagined where this decision would take me. Nor did I envision how that decision would affect by identity and my life choices. My clinical and academic interest in understanding the impact of living internationally has its roots in my personal journey.

My personal narrative includes many opportunities for confronting the challenges and reaping the benefits of international mobility. The external facts give one story, while my internal journey has been a relatively silent story. It is the subtle, but important differences between the two that I addressed in my book.

Take Eric, a young man I interviewed for Global Cosmpolitans. Here he talks about his two selves:

“There is a deep divide between the young French student who went to the United States and the English-speaking professional I have become. I do have two sets of behaviors, two approaches to life, whether I function in French or in English.

The English-speaking Eric is confident and self-assured not only in what he can do but also among others, in society. He does not fear of what others think of him. He is self-aware and quite hard to destabilize.

The French Eric is less sure of himself. He is more on the defensive, more of an introvert, more aggressive sometimes. He knows what he can do as well and know his strengths, but his attitude is different.”

This generation of Global Cosmopolitans represents a cutting-edge population with a great deal to contribute to the global landscape and our understanding of it. As their professor, clinical psychologist or consultant, I have had the opportunity to listen and learn as people from various corners of the world shared their life stories. While each story was different, they enabled me to tell the larger story of Global Cosmopolitans.

I have been gathering material from life stories over the years; combining their fascinating stories, told in their own voices with a variety of useful concepts for understanding their unique experience. The frameworks and exercises contained in the book are also a useful approach for anyone expiring the excitement and anxieties of change in life conditions and personal identity.

For example, studying the phenomenon of Global Cosmopolitans, I have identified a set of five important characteristics that frequently develop. These characteristics are often overlooked in favour of the more visible signs of global experience, such as cultural mastery and language ability.  Significantly, none of these qualities requires an international context. What’s more, Global Cosmopolitans develop these qualities so subtly and naturally that many don’t even know they have them. These five characteristics combine to yield a Global Cosmopolitan identity.

1) Global Cosmopolitans see change as normal.

2) As outsiders to fixed cultural rules, they rely on creative thinking.

3) They reinvent themselves and experiment with new identities.

4) They are experts at the subtle and emotional aspects of transition.

5) They easily learn and use new ways of thinking.

People growing up in a single culture develop a filter by which to understand the world around them; their life story has a fixed center of shared wisdom and learned responses on which to build their identity. But Global Cosmopolitans develop a prism that yields kaleidoscopic perspectives. Their centre is a multifaceted collection of contradictions, often undefined. Much of their identity is built around their experiences with conflict, alternate belief systems and new ways of behaving around people very different from themselves. Through their stories, I try to provide a window into their complex world.

We look forward to welcoming Linda Brimm to the Library on Wednesday 9 November at 19h30. Her presentation on Global Cosmopolitans is free and open to the public.

global-cosmopolitans

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