ANTOINE LAURAIN'S PAGE: THE PORTRAIT, firstborn fiction by the author; & FRENCH RHAPSODY, meditation on Les Jadis and how much today is the same

FRENCH RHAPSODY
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Emily Boyce & Jane Aitken)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Middle-aged doctor Alain Massoulier has received a life-changing letter—thirty-three years too late.

Lost in the Paris postal system for decades, the letter from Polydor, dated 1983, offers a recording contract to The Holograms, in which Alain played lead guitar. Back then The Holograms had believed in their cutting-edge sound. However, the music industry remained indifferent, and eventually the band split up, each going their own way.

Alain is overcome by nostalgia, and is tempted to track down the members of the group. But in a world where everything and everyone has changed . . . where will his quest take him?

Antoine Laurain's new novel combines his trademark charm with a satirical take on modern France.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Republication of these titles comes after Gallic Books' acquisition by Pushkin Press is picking up steam. I'm all over it, I loved Gallic Books and am (obviously) fond of Pushkin Press (and imprints).

In this rather odd tale, we go down the rabbit hole of missed chances. Every person this accident of fate changed came under Author Laurain's scrutiny in separate chapters, with life stories and so on. It made for nice reading...but what was I supposed to get from these stories? I know them but possess no framework to see what I'm to make of the fates of the post-The Holograms members. Maybe I'm insufficiently au fait with modern French society to get the full import of the meaning.

That said, I really resonated to the right-wing politician's trajectory, he who was the bassist. I've forgotten his name because I despise his politics (and his screed-spouting lectures) and, like Endora from Bewitched, I forget the names of those I dislike. Nonetheless, I thought it was very interesting to read about whatsisname's trajectory. How he got into it, what he does...all very timely. Especially for a book first published in 2015....

The others stuck with me less but were absorbing enough that I kept picking the book up to read more every time I put something else down. A clutter of wacky neighbors and hero's-journey cicerones detract from the central story's momentum, none of whom end up making a real difference. I found the ending...pat.

So I'm rating it only a tad under four stars. I got chuckles, I got angry mutterings, but I never got bored. That, my olds, is worth a lot in a literary month cram-jam full of heaps of nothing interesting.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE PORTRAIT
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Emily Boyce & Jane Aitken)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A Parisian antiques collector finds himself in a case of mistaken identity after buying a portrait which curiously resembles him

While wandering through a Paris auction house, avid collector Pierre-François Chaumont is stunned to discover the eighteenth-century portrait of an unknown man who looks just like him. Much to his delight, Chaumont's bid for the work is successful, but back at home his jaded wife and circle of friends are unable to see the resemblance. Chaumont remains convinced of it, and as he researches into the painting's history, he is presented with the opportunity to abandon his tedious existence and walk into a brand new life.

Chaumont needs a fresh start—he and his wife fell out of love long ago, and the only thing that holds meaning for him anymore is his search for perfect objects. But this portrait is more than just a painting. The first night he owns it, Pierre-François dreams of another life, lived as the Comte de Mandragore, in a rural chateau, with a beautiful young wife. Awaking from the dream he’s determined to find this place—but it will take all his collector’s avidity, ingenuity, and unscrupulousness to make it his own. And when he finally has the chance to do so, will he be willing to pay the price to make it last?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Republication of these titles comes after Gallic Books' acquisition by Pushkin Press is picking up steam. I'm all over it, I loved Gallic Books and am (obviously) fond of Pushkin Press (and imprints).

This is the novella that started it all. Told in first-person, it's as immediate as a récit but takes place outside the narrator's skull, so it's not one. It's a sweetly-smiling stab at modern greed, the lust for Stuff that fills the gaping emotional holes in many modern people.

There's a sharp edge here, a flensing eye that spares no one...the unloved, unloving wife, their circle of "friends", the man himself...no one looks all that good under the pithy judgment of Author Laurain:

Modern eyes? They have no soul; they no longer look up to heaven. Even the most pure are only concerned with the immediate. Vulgar lust, petty self-interest, greed, vanity, prejudice, cowardly appetites and envy. Those are the abominable emotions swarming in today’s eyes. We have the souls of notaries and cooks. That’s why the eyes on the portraits in museums are so spectacular; they reflect prayers and tortures, regrets and remorse.

What a pompous peroration! What a quiet proof that simply being misunderstood and softly maligned does not equal being Right.

It's an afternoon's read. It will keep you involved if, like me, you think Stuff is an addiction that speaks more loudly about what it is...about greedily stuffing yourself...than what it isn't...a fulfilling and worthwhile use of you one wild and precious life (that endlessly apt and beautiful phrase from Mary Oliver).

I think it's evident it's a first work, the sheer improbability of the plot is up there with Thorne Smith that whole school of magical objects that open portals from modern to ancient (ot just other) times. The characters are, as is almost inevitable in novellas, not developed beyond the necessity of moving the plot forward.

It's a pleasant and worthwile read. Maybe don't hunt for it everywhere, but if you have the budget and the device, download it of a dull Sunday afternoon to enjoy its real pleasures.

NOTHING PERSONAL, an overlooked essay by a master of the form

NOTHING PERSONAL
JAMES BALDWIN
Beacon Press
$10.99 ebook editions, available now
Save 30% on everything at their site (linked above) through December 31 using code HOL30!


Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: James Baldwin's critique of American society at the height of the civil rights movement brings his prescient thoughts on social isolation, race, and police brutality to a new generation of readers.

Available for the first time in a stand-alone edition, Nothing Personal is Baldwin's deep probe into the American condition. Considering the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020--which were met with tear gas and rubber bullets the same year white supremacists entered the US Capitol with little resistance, openly toting flags of the Confederacy--Baldwin's documentation of his own troubled times cuts to the core of where we find ourselves today.

Baldwin's thoughts move through an interconnected range of questions, from America's fixation on eternal youth, to its refusal to recognize the past, its addiction to consumerism, and the lovelessness that fuels it in its cities and popular culture. He recounts his own encounter with police in a scene disturbingly similar to those we see today documented with ever increasing immediacy. This edition also includes a new foreword from interdisciplinary scholar Imani Perry and an afterword from noted Baldwin scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Both explore and situate the essay within the broader context of Baldwin's work, the Movement for Black Lives, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the presidency of Donald Trump.

Nothing Personal is both a eulogy and a declaration of will. In bringing this work into the twenty-first century, readers new and old will take away fundamental and recurring truths about life in the US. It is both a call to action, and an appeal to love and to life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: It is hard for me to believe that this essay was, for a long time, relegated to text around Richard Avedon's amazing photos. The fact that Avedon and Baldwin knew each other, and since high school, hadn't made my radar screens either. This is the first time I've ever seen the essay, and how I wish it wasn't.

Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

Author Baldwin was a man whose vision was clearer than most people's sight.

Possibly the best proof you can have that Baldwin, a skinny gay Black kid, was a man out of time is this:

We have all heard the bit about what a pity it was that Plymouth Rock didn't land on the Pilgrims instead of the other way around. I have never found this remark very funny. It seems wistful and vindictive to me, containing, furthermore, a very bitter truth. The inertness of that rock meant death for the Indians, enslavement for the {B}lacks, and spiritual disaster for those homeless Europeans who now call themselves Americans...

He already foresaw the gigantic changes in humor that our generation is undergoing; they were underway even then. The Smothers Brothers on their three-season comedy show sparked a revolution in what could and should be grounds for humor. It makes my eyes water to remember how much guff the "comedy" of my parents' generation desensitized them to. They were both alive before the last vestiges of vaudeville were destroyed by radio. Blackface and minstrel songs were things they heard and saw. Racism was in the air, was utterly pervasive...it was the time of Jim Crow laws, it was the time when lynchings were happening with regularity, and a flag was hung out in front of the NAACP Building in New York:

Baldwin, Harlem native that he was, would've seen that flag time and time again, would've associated it with his own Black body, his own maleness.

The violence was being perpetrated mainly against {B}lack men...the strangers; and so it didn't count. But, if a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, no one in that society is safe.

This is something I understand viscerally. The police do not, as a rule, like faggots; if one is found in any place or at any time being faggoty in pubic, they will harass you and intimidate you to the maximum extent they can get away with; if reported, their defense is "that's a lie" and I promise you your word against their words amounts to less than nothing. This is my lived experience, so arguments are not welcome.

Imani Perry, author of the Foreword to this edition of Nothing Personal, says this of our deeply American inability to believe others' experiences are real:

Then, and now: we have acquired an endless habit of the most superficial forms of self-correction, makeup to make up for our perceived inadequacy as it were, nipping, tucking, coloring, all as a displacement for the possibilities of deeper self-reflection and self-creation.

It is fuctionally impossible to believe, believe in, trust another when you don't believe in your own value to the point that you feel compelled to ask your body to endure surgeries, toxic chemicals, and endless damaging stress in order to feel you're even acceptable to look at.

James Baldwin is a writer of great and unendingly valuable insight and moral authority. He was clear-sighted, his vision of what could be was articulated from a high moral base as a former believer in Christianity, and he never once backed down from his conviction that we could reach the City upon a Hill. He was a realist, however, schooled in the rejections of his gayness and effeminacy and Blackness by even those whose job it was to love him. He didn't believe we would reach that paradisiacal state; he never let go of the unshakeable assurance that we should never, ever cease to strive after it.

Happen I agree. Happy Memorial Day long weekend.

MISS LONELYHEARTS, a biting and supremely outraged novella of alienation and the Problem of Evil

MISS LONELYHEARTS
NATHANAEL WEST
Books on Demand (non-affiliate Amazon link)
99¢ Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Praised by great writers from Flannery O'Conner to Jonathan Lethem, Miss Lonelyhearts is an American classic. A newspaper reporter assigned to write the agony column in the depths of the Great Depression seeks respite from the poor souls who send in their sad letters, only to be further tormented by his viciously cynical editor, Shrike.

This single volume of Miss Lonelyhearts features its original Alvin Lustig jacket design, as well as a new introduction by Harold Bloom, who calls it "my favorite work of modern American fiction."

My Review: Totally with Harold Bloom here, this is one of the USA's cultural treasures. In just under 100pp, anomie and alienation and the Problem of Evil (solved, allegedly anyway, by theodicy, resolving the evidential problem of evil that is the essence of the story West tells here) are examined thoroughly and from several viewpoints. While telling a louche little tale of drinking, fucking, and cheating, West also manages to incorporate an acid bath of gallows humor into the proceedings:

But now let us consider the holes in our own bodies and into what these congenital wounds open. Under the skin of man is a wondrous jungle where veins like lush tropical growths hang along over-ripe organs and weed-like entrails writhe in squirming tangles of red and yellow. In this jungle, flitting from rock-gray lungs to golden intestines, from liver to lights and back to liver again, lives a bird called the soul.

His nudges and winks at the audience are almost post-modern: Shrike, who is the otherwise-unnamed Miss Lonelyhearts' editor, is named for a particularly nasty bird of prey, and the man we call "Miss Lonelyhearts" is both emasculated and depersonalized by his yclepture.

He knew now what this thing was — hysteria, a snake whose scales are tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on a semblance of life. And how dead the world is . . . a world of doorknobs. He wondered if hysteria were really too steep a price to pay for bringing it to life.

It's hard to imagine a more complete telling of the tale of man's bitter fate than this one. Trudge along in your path, you dumb oxen, and this is what will overtake you; lift your heads, look at the sky, and dare to yearn?

Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on eath. Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will percieve the divine mystery in things. Once you percieve it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.

This is what will overtake you. West knew it, felt it, and ultimately lived it by dying early as he drove drunk.

Fitting, isn't it.