Assia Djebar, Les Nuits de Strasbourg

Thelja, a young Algerian researcher living in Paris, agrees to spend “nine nights” in Strasbourg visiting François, some 20 years her senior, whom she has met only a few times but to whom, in her mind, she tells “Ce que je devrais vous dire, ce que je vous dirai, ce que je n’oserai pas, au dernier moment, laisser échapper, ce que vous répondrez, à mes aveux, à mes silences.”

(What I should say to you, what I will say to you, what I won’t dare, at the last moment, to let slip, what you will say in reply, to my confessions, to my silences.)

Assia Djebar's 1997 novel Les Nuits de Strasbourg is full of confessions and silences. The spoken word takes on an immense significance in varying contexts; Thelja and François’ nights are as much about intimate conversation as they are about lovemaking, and the two are frequently inseparable:  “j’aime ce dialogue à la fois de nos corps, et la façon dont je peux délier enfin ma parole”. (I love this dialogue between our bodies, and at the same time the way I can finally release my words.)

Words are the means at once to unite people and to divide them; characters in the novel speak French, German, Alsatian, English, Arabic, and Moroccan and Algerian dialects, and the characters’ choice of language is full of significance. Thelja speaks the language of her country’s oppressors, but she is afraid of her feelings for her French lover, a representative, in some deep-seated sense, of the enemy. Thelja’s friend Eve, an Algerian Jew, has to face similar feelings regarding her German lover Hans. Having refused ever to speak German, she eventually makes Hans exchange ‘Le Serment (vow) de Strasbourg’ with her. This vow was originally exchanged in the 9^th century by two sons of Louis the Pious; the two agreed to support each other, and, symbolically, each took the vow in the language of the other. This is Eve’s reason for appropriating it. Afterwards, she tells herself that “toute guerre, entre nous, est finie” (all war, between us, is over). This is a novel that wears its issues on its sleeve.

This piling up of layer upon layer of language-related imagery and symbolism becomes a little heavy-handed at times, as does Djebar’s style when writing about sex, of which there is certainly a lot in this book. It isn’t gratuitous in itself, as these scenes form a vital part of the novel’s exploration of language, foreignness and physical and psychological barriers; but the breathless phrases and lexical choices feel a little overwrought, at least to an English reader (I counted five different words for penis – one of them was ‘sword’! – which in Britain would consign the novel to a realm well outside that of literary fiction).

However, the inner monologues of Thelja and Eve, addressing each other or their respective lovers, are frequently touching in their portrayal of the characters’ need for contact with another, the search for a home, whether it be found in a place or in another person. Both feel a desire for finality, an end point: Eve the photographer wants to photograph her home town of Tébessa “pour ne plus en rêver” (so as not to dream of it any more); Thelja puzzles François by referring several times to the “nine nights” after which she will leave Strasbourg, for unspecified reasons.

But Thelja knows that endings are not so easily come by. Her country’s history haunts her, along with her historical passions – a 12^th-century abbess from Strasbourg, the 1870 siege of the city, and, later, the 1939 exodus recalled by François and evoked in the novel’s opening pages. Several times, imagining the events of 1870, she says to herself it was “only yesterday!” Past and present are equally real here – only the future remains entirely unglimpsed, with no indication of what will happen when the nine nights draw to a close.

(Betsy Wing’s translation Strasbourg Nights was published in 2003, but it doesn’t seem to be available from any of the usual online suspects. All translations in this article are mine.)

Tomboy

This review dates from a while back and isn't about a book, but this beautiful film deserves a wide audience and I hope this might inspire you to go and look it up..

I missed Celine Sciamma’s film ‘Tomboy’ when it was released, and only got round to seeing it thanks to a later screening at a local cinema. I had high expectations: after watching the trailer a couple of times, as well as an interview with Sciamma, it is no exaggeration to say I longed to see this film. One reason for this is that I often enjoy understated, naturalistic films; but something in the story of Laure, a 10-year-old girl who moves to a new area with her family and introduces herself to the local children as “Mickael”, felt very close to my heart. I dislike the word ‘tomboy’ and would never have used it to describe myself; but I think anyone who knew me as a child will understand why Tomboy resonated with me.

I was not disappointed. Sciamma skilfully avoids any heavy-handedness, both in allowing the children to act very naturally and play in an unscripted way, and in declining to make this a film about an Issue. The film does not deal with or speculate on why Laure (played by newcomer Zoé Heran) decides to pass as a boy, but only how she does it. Her struggles with practical problems, such as how to construct a plausible penis to fill her (also home-made) swimming trunks, are documented unobtrusively and largely in silence. When, finally, reality has to be confronted, and her mother asks in bewilderment “Pourquoi tu as fait ça?”, there is no response.

Tomboy is about games of make-believe, from the games Laure plays with her little sister to the bigger game of pretending to be a boy. There is no reason for us to think that Laure really wants to be a boy – it is simply a game she enters into, and has to see through to its inevitable end. The game is not even begun by Laure but, unwittingly, by her neighbour Lisa, whose initial mistake (“Tu es nouveau?” – an important detail that would be lost in English translation) sets up Laure’s response.

The film is partly a study in how we perceive and copy one another. Laure’s painstaking efforts to walk and spit correctly appear to be rewarded: the children do not find her out. However, we cannot always control how others see us. Lisa sees a boy “pas comme les autres”, and delights in “Mickael’s” ambiguous gender. In a beautiful scene where Laure’s younger sister Jeanne is drawing her, a long close-up of Laure’s striking blue eyes is followed by a decided statement from Jeanne that she will give her brown eyes.

Adults have little presence in the film until the final scenes. The summer-world belongs to children, and its soundtrack is mostly the sounds of their games; but school is looming, and with it reality – and adolescence. Laure is at a point of physical grace and confidence between the child’s lack of coordination and the adolescent girl’s awkwardness. Before daring to remove her T-shirt to play football, she examines her torso in the mirror and decides that it will pass.

Unhurried in its story and cinematography, Tomboy is lent a touch of suspense by our knowledge that the game must end. When it does, Laure’s mother is initially distressed, and immediately forces her daughter to put on a dress. Yet she later tells Laure that she has no problem with her passing for a boy – but that others will. In the closest the film comes to any sort of commentary, this line portrays gender demarcations as arbitrary but somehow necessary – reality cannot be avoided.

One of the most delightful aspects about this film is the tranquillity of Laure’s family environment. The scenes between Laure and Jeanne, and the benign presence of their parents, portray an atmosphere of tenderness and total acceptance, in contrast to the exciting yet dangerous world of freedom that Laure has entered as Mickael, where she must be a little on her guard. It is this tranquil acceptance that makes Laure’s mother’s reaction slightly shocking. It is at this moment of reckoning that the film moves closest to Issue territory, but it resists the temptation and we are allowed the space simply to watch the trees in the woods where Laure throws off her dress for one more moment of freedom.

L'horizon by Patrick Modiano

Bosmans belongs nowhere. Without roots, seemingly without friends, and with the only trace of his family an estranged mother who demands money from him each time they meet, he wanders the labyrinthine ways of Paris and of his mind in an attempt to make sense of the disjointed memories that haunt him.

In L’horizon, Patrick Modiano presents us with a world at once small – Bosmans appears to lead a solitary life, and the repeated appearances of the same characters and references give us the impression that his horizons are very narrow – and somehow infinitely extended, in the long Paris streets where a walk can seem to last years without ever leading to a destination. This impression is created largely by an extensive use of flashback. The Bosmans who is narrating is a relatively old man, and most of the events he recounts took place several decades earlier. A simple encounter can trigger memories of events that themselves occurred over a period of months or years, but which take only a few seconds to recall.

Bosmans is forever attempting to pin things down. The novel begins with him and his notebook, in which he has begun to jot down memories in an attempt to place them: “a date, an exact location, a name whose spelling escaped him”. He is frustrated by the vagueness of his recollections, and yet we sense that really he prefers it that way. Spotting a figure from his past in a café, he contemplates approaching her, telling himself that she “will finally give me all the explanations, from the beginning”; but he does not get up, realising that “I prefer things to remain hazy.” He thinks obsessively of Margaret Le Coz, who vanished giving no explanation many years before; and yet his searches for her since her disappearance seem to have taken place only in his mind.

In L’horizon, the people and the course of events are hazy, while certain details of a building or street from thirty years before are recalled with a peculiar vividness. Characters are reduced to vague figures that appear and disappear, often leaving a sense of unease or menace behind them. Even Margaret is hardly more than a shadow in Bosmans’ memories of her; we know that she is timid and keeps a low-profile, but little else. The few recalled conversations between her and Bosmans are banal, and he demonstrates almost no curiosity despite knowing next to nothing about her. Her past is shrouded in mystery, yet Bosmans does not probe and does not even seem to wonder. The chief factor bringing them together is the sense of being “nothing people”, with no family and no place in the world.

How to create a narrative out of all this vagueness? This is Bosmans’ quest, and is also the difficulty faced by Modiano. L’horizon is not an easy book to begin; the reader is given little to take hold of and, like the narrator, is left swimming in disconnected memories. Without narrative thrust, Modiano has to rely on style, and succeeds beautifully with an elegant lyricism and a perceptive grasp of the elusiveness of human memory. The novel rests on the things imagined but left unsaid and the countless small mysteries of life that are left unresolved. Bosmans likes the new districts of east Paris, which “give you the illusion that you could live a second life there”; but it is unclear what, exactly, he regrets, or what would be different the second time around. The horizon exists, but it remains doubtful that he can move towards it, for life brings the same things back again and again – the same names, the same metro stations – just “when you believe yourself rid of them for good”.

L'horizon is the first Modiano novel I have read, and I'll certainly be coming back for more. He has over forty years of work behind him, including a new novel published earlier this month, so I'm spoilt for choice! It would seem, however, that only a handful of his works have been translated into English - perhaps because his dense, meandering style must prove rather resistant to translation. 

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Welcome to my blog! I plan to use it to post mainly about French literature, as well as other French or book-related things. I will write about books as I discover them, so not necessarily the latest releases, and not in any particular order. My posts will probably mainly be in the form of reviews, but some may have a more analytical slant and some might just be haphazard musings. My intention is to introduce friends and other readers to literature they might not have come across and may not be able to read in the original, so where possible I'll try to include some information about English translations. Please feel free to comment, whether it's to disagree with me, point me in the direction of Interesting Things (not you, spammers), or simply inform me that I'm wonderful.
Right, time for a swim.