Writers in paradise
In the NYTRB, Cristina Nehring presents a routine journalistic caricature of the Parisian book scene and says “the big books of the season are disconcertingly weak, marked by lazy prose, easy narcissism and a peculiar brand of knee-jerk pessimism.”
Not that there’s an easy, lazy, knee-jerk anti-French thing going on here at all. Of course.
She picks out a few examples: “A French Life, by Jean-Paul Dubois, yet another autobiographical novel, [...] interspersing the author’s infidelities and family vicissitudes with political commentary and editorializing about events like Abu Ghraib.”
She observes that “It is striking that the French - so idealistic about pleasure, politics, love and literature - should produce such a strenuously sad crop of new fiction. One would think melancholy were being fetishized. Still, it’s a tradition that can be traced to Proust, Sartre and Nathalie Sarraute.”
Two things: Proust is definitively not melancholic; he writes about happiness like nobody else. And ‘Abu Ghraib’ was not an event. It was a symptom.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Knee-deep in Zizek
- Reader Response Required
- Bellow and the Puritans Just found James Wood’s…
- It’s All French To Me
- You’ve been farmed
