February 2010 - Posts
By J.Tosic
I very rarely consider literature in terms of gender of the writers, but when I do, two names immediately come up to my mind: Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras. To mark International Women’s Day, the Reader’s Nook celebrates the work of these two exceptional writers.
MARGUERITE YOURCENAR (1903-1987)
Marguerite Yourcenar was a French/Belgian novelist, essayist and short story writer, and the first woman elected to the Acedeme Francaise, in 1980. She became famous with her metaphysical historical novels, creating psychologically penetrating characters from the distant past. At the same time, in her novels she addressed issues such as homosexuality, and dealt with universal taboos such as incest.
Yourcenar’s first novel, Alexis, was published in 1929. At the outbreak of the WWII, her intimate companion of that time, a translator named Grace Flick, invited her to the United States, where she lectured in comparative literature.
Oriental Tales was first published in 1938 in France. From China to Greece, from the Balkans to Japan, the Tales take us from a portrait of the painter Wang Fo, “who loves the image of things and not the things themselves”, to legends of a hero betrayed and then rescued by love. “Dream and myth speak here in a language rich in images that imply other, more secret meanings, building a world of reflections upon art…”
Among Yourcenar’s best known works is certainly Memoirs of Hadrian (1951). The emperor, one of the last great Roman rulers, is portrayed on the eve of his death, absorbed in his reflections. Hadrian recounts his 
memories in his testament letter to his chosen successor and adoptive son Marcus Aurelius. The emperor meditates on his triumphs and failures, and on his love for Antonius, a Greek youth. Yourcenar worked on this novel for fifteen years, and Memoirs of Hadrian has become a modern classic, “a standard against fictional re-creations of antique world are measured”.
First published in Paris in 1982, each of the three stories in Two Lives and a Dream is written in a different style and takes place in the world of late Renaissance Europe. Yourcenar’s incredible gift for “bringing a historical epoch to life is here employed with unsurpassed mastery to create fables of timeless universality about the human condition”. An Obscure Man, the first and longest in this collection, contains one of the author’s most moving depictions of human nature. A Lovely Morning is a brief fantasy of a young man who joins a touring company of actors and dreams out the whole of his life to come. The final story, Anna, Sorror, an unforgettable tale of fated love, was composed by the time Yourcenar was 22. Set in the baroque Naples at the close sixteenth century, Anna, Sorror is “an intensely affecting account of illicit and overwhelming passion between a young aristocrat Miguel and his sister Anna, who live and love each other in seclusion from the surrounding world after the death of their mother."
For Marguerite Yourcenar’s books, please check our catalogue.
(Image of M. Yourcenar courtesy of flickr.com)
MARGUERITE DURAS (1914-1996)
"Very early in my life it was too late." (The Lover)
"On Marguerite Duras' tombstone at Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris", wrote Pilar Adon, "there are a small plant, a lot of white pills scattered over her sober gray stone, two flowers and two letters engraved: M. D. Two are also the images that could illustrate the unbridled process of her exsistence: the evocation of a beautiful girl full of eroticism, traveling by ferry along the Mekong River with a felt hat on, her lips in dark red color, and
just, at the other end, a woman with her face and body devastated by alcohol, dressed in a straight skirt and a vest over a turtleneck jumper, who, after four detoxication cures, went into a five month coma. Marguerite Duras leapt in just a moment from the beginning to the end of her life, but in the brief time of that moment, she did what she wanted to do: écrire. To write..."
Marguerite Duras was born in French Indochina (what is today today South Vietnam), where she spent most of her childhood. "I cannot think of my childhood without thinking of water. My home town is a town of water”, whe once said. Her father's sudden death, when she was four, left the family impoverished. Many years later she would say that having money didn't change anything because she would always keep "a damned mentality of being poor".
Reading Marguerite Duras’ books implies looking into her own life. “In a real act of literary vivisection, she extracted her own pain, filtered it through her writing and offered it to the readers… Literature and life – two points hard to separate in the works of Marguerite Duras."
Probably her best known and most celebrated work is The Lover (L’ Amant), a semi-biographical novel about an illicit affair between a teenage French girl and a wealthy Chinese man in 1929 French Indochina. The book won the prix Goncourt, the most prestigious literary award in France, has been translated into 43 languages and in a short time sold 1.5 million copies.
“It is said that old loves can haunt us. The Lover creates this feeling through the atmosphere of shadows, veils, floating memories that came from – was it this boat trip or the last one? From the age of eight, twelve or thirty? In the end, it doesn’t matter, for the experience is now embedded, a distinct yet inseparable part of the personality “, wrote Erica Bauermeister in 500 Great Books by Women. Marguerite Duras digs in her own past to tell The Lover, a story of an adolescent girl who was forced to grow up to fast and was exposed to too much pain, too soon.
The Lover was made into a film in 1992, directed by Jean- Jacques Annaud, who remarked: “Destruction. A key word when it comes to Marguerite Duras, who uses her novels…to study herself in as many mirrors; she identifies herself with her work to the point that she no longer knows what is autobiographical fact and what is fiction…”
Check our catalogue for more books by Marguerite Duras.
Freedom to Read Week
February 21-27
Freedom to read can never be taken for granted. Even in Canada, a free country by world standards, books and magazines are banned at the border. Books are removed from the shelves in Canadian libraries, schools and bookstores every day. Free speech on the Internet is under attack. Few of these stories make headlines, but they affect the right of Canadians to decide for themselves what they choose to read. http://www.freedomtoread.ca/
For more challenged books, check our catalogue or visit your local branch.
Memorial Park Library and Pages on Kensington have the pleasure of presenting
Kate Pullinger
and her novel
The Mistress of Nothing
Winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction
Wednesday, February 24
7:00 P M
Memorial Park Library
1221 2nd Street SW
Call 403-221-2006 for more details
'Absorbing, intimate, Pullinger's story of a loyal English maidservant's awakening during a journey to an 1860s Egypt in turmoil is also a subtle observation of the play of power and love’. (Lisa Appignanesi)
‘A highly sensual evocation of place and time…a journey down the Nile that explores the subtle complexities of power, race, class and love during the Victorian era. The book, narrated by the character of the maid, Sally Naldrett, has one of the most distinctive and memorable voices in recent literature.’ (Governor General’s Award Jury Citation)
ACCIDENTAL ARTISTS
When art mimics life the results are fascinating! And when the life lived takes a unique path, the results are brilliant. It has occurred to me that, although many of the author/artists that I love began their artistic training directly, there are many "greats" who came to comics from very different worlds. Try a few for yourself, and see how each author's life is reflected in his art!
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Robert R. Foster, born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1892 was a hunting-guide and gold prospector (and Hudson Bay staff artist) before getting serious and heading to Chicago to attend art school. He is best known for his Prince Valiant adventure series.
- One of the most diverse personages, William Moulton Marston, was a psychologist, feminist theorist, professor, and inventor (contributing to developments in the polygraph). He is best known for creating the illustriuos Wonder Woman!
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Calgary-born Todd McFarlane had aspirations to become a professional baseball player after an ankle-injury ended that career - he began his work in comics. He is the creator of the enormously famous Spawn series.
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Everyone knows Charles M. Schulz as the author of the beloved Peanuts cartoon strip. But did you know that he was drafted during the 2nd world war? He was a machine gun squad leader and achieved the rank of Staff Sergeant. He later wrote: “The Army taught me all I needed to know about loneliness”. Could these experiences have affected his creation of the lonely Charlie Brown and his flying-ace-dog, Snoopy?
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Osamu Tezuka - though educated as a physician, his life took a turn toward comics. He is revered as the "god-father of manga"! One of his most renowned works, is a medical manga series about a wandering physician named "Black Jack".
Textual Liaisons
“For literature that changed the world, look under erotica.”
Sarah Hedley
In its widest sense, erotic literature includes all writing that deals to a conspicuous degree with sex and love. Under this norm, there is a vast body of literature that treats these themes from an integral human point of view; that is, sex and love are conceived not merely in terms of their physical aspects, but also as manifestations of the spirit. In this type of literature, the physical is generally quite subordinate to the spiritual aspect. Even when physical details are quite frankly portrayed, they are nevertheless caught up in a total atmosphere that provides aesthetic pleasure, and not sensual titillation. Emotionally immature readers may, of course, read merely to satisfy an unhealthy curiosity, but a sound judgment of the work itself, and of the author's intention as far as it is evident in the work, would conclude that the work is not of its nature seductive or sexually stimulating. Often, as a matter of fact, the very realism of the physical details is a necessary element in bringing alive to the reader the deeper spiritual aspects of the story. Romeo's raptures over Juliet's physical beauty are certainly sensuous, but it would be a most insensitive reader who would think that Romeo did not see much more in Juliet than merely her physical attractions. (New Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol 5.2nd ed. Detroit Gale, 2003. p. 326-327).
Ancient and medeival time
Classic erotica from the ancient world includes Solomon's Song of Songs from the Old Testament, and the Roman Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter, much later made into a film by Federico Fellini. Song of Songs suggests a relationship between a man and a woman, from courtship to consummation. Probably the most famous piece of erotic literature from medieval time is Boccaccio's Decameron (1353), a collection of 100 novellas, told within 10 days (hence the name). Decameron spins the tales of love appearing in all its possibilities, from erotic to tragic. Being educated in the tradition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which uses allegory to present connections between literal events of the story and the Christian message, Boccaccio uses Dante’s model not to educate the readers but satirize Dante’s method of learning.
Early modern erotic fiction
The list of classic erotica from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries is long and notable (Faceriae by Bracciolini, Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre, Notorious Modi by Guilio Romano). An early pioneer of this erotica in England was Edmond Curll. Erotic fiction would 
be established as a genre in the 18th century, and one of its most famous repesentatives was John Cleland's Fanny Hill. Across the Canal, French writers of that time also wrote erotica. Some famous examples are Therese Philosophe by Jean-Batiste de Boyer and Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. The Marquis de Sade's work in this field was probably the most influental on later erotica.
From Victorian times onward
In the Victorian period, the quality of erotic fiction declined significantly. It was often written anonymously and featured a curious form of social stratification, where the distinctions between social classes were scrupulously observed, even during the most flagrant interractions. Towards the end of the century, a more sophisticated form of erotica began to appear in the work of A. G. Swinburne, Aubrey Beardslay and Pierre Louys. The twentieth century brought some of the most famous classics of the genre: Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Ada or Ador, Anais Nin's Delta od Venus and Guy Davenport's Bicycle Rider.
Contemporary erotica
Contrary to some previous conceptions, contemporary erotica is not mainly of male interest. As 'mainstream' romance has begun to exhibit flagrant, albeit sometimes poetic, descriptions of the physical aspect of love, erotic fiction found its female audience as well, and a new sub-genre of romance fiction was born.
Explore our catalogue to find more... Happy Valentine's Day!
The Humbling by Philip Roth
THE MILLENNIUM TRILOGY
Six years ago, a Swedish journalist delivered three manuscripts to his publisher in Stockholm. These three supreme thrillers featuring an unlikely pair of sleuths – Mikael Blumkvist, an investigative journalist, and his sidecick Lisberth Salander, an Asperser's Syndrome antisocial hacker.
The journalist was Karl-Stieg Erland Larsson (1954-2004), and his first book went on to sell more than 3 million copies in Sweden alone. The Millennium Trilogy swept through Europe and North America with more than 22 million copies sold in 35 countries. In 2008, Larsson was the second best-selling author in the world, behind Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini (please see Books of the Decade, part IV).
Tragically, a few months before volume 1 was published, Larsson died suddenly and never saw the worldwide phenomenon his work would become. He was 50 years old.
VOLUME ONE: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
People magazine called it "the biggest Swedish phenomenon since ABBA", and Washington Post "an intelligent, ingeniously plotted, utterly engrossing thriller that is variously a serial-killer saga, a search for a missing person and an informed glimpse into the worlds of journalism and business . . . Lisbeth is a punk Watson to Mikael's dapper Holmes, and she's the coolest crime-fighting sidekick to come along in many years.”
The reviews for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, with few exceptions, such as from Bookmarks Magazine ("...This is one for neo-noir fans - but it doesn't seem destined to rule this side of the Atlantic...") were ecstatic. "Larsson's debut thriller succeeds on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin. First off, it's an absolute page-turner. But the characters are so fascinating and the clear, understated writing so graceful, you are going to want to savor it...Electrifying", wrote Portsmouth Herald. Michael Connelly found The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a striking novel: "Just when I was thinking there wasn't anything new on the horizon, along comes Stieg Larsson whit this wonderfully unique story. I was completely absorbed". Lee Child described it "as vivid as bloodstains on snow".
Calgary Public Library owns 65 hard cover copies and 3 book on CDs. Although it's been almost two years since the book has been added to our collection, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo remains very popular, with more than 220 holds.
VOLUME TWO: THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE
This time Bookmarks Magazine got it right: "By most accounts", reads their review, "the follow-up to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is as successful a second installment in a crime series as we're likely to see. In The Girl Who Played with Fire, Larsson explored Lisbeth Salander, a swirl of contradiction and evasions, with a depth that eludes most crime writers. In fact, this is Lisbeth's book (Mikael Blomkvist is still around, of course, though he plays second fiddle here to his erstwhile love interest), and Larsson has readers eating out of his hand with a plot that simmers before coming to a full boil..."
In its starred review, Booklist prized the The Girl Who Played with Fire as "a suspenseful, remarkably moving novel...Salander is one of those characters who comes along only rarely in fiction: a complete original, larger than life yet firmly grounded in realistic details, utterly independent yet at her core a wounded and frightened child...One of the most compelling characters to strut the crime-fiction stage in years." Library Journal noted that the second part of the Trilogy is "a complex and compelling storytelling at its best, propelled by one of the most fascinating characters in the recent crime fiction."
Check our catalogue for The Girl Who Played with Fire. There are 99 hard cover copies with 163 holds and 6 of large print editions with 47 reserves. It's worth waiting, though.
VOLUME THREE: THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST
Current Status at the Library: On Order (spring or summer 2010)
Number of copies ordered: about 70
Number of holds 224 (as of January 17)
In its editorial review, Guardian noted: "Larsson has produced a a novel that is complex, satisfying, clever, moral...This is a gown-up novel for grown-up readers, who want something more than a quick fix and a car chase. And it's why the Millennium Trilogy is rightly a publishing phenomenon all over the world. "There are
two overriding reasons for the hold that this massive trilogy has attained on the public: machine-tooled plotting which juggled the various narrative elements with a master's touch and, above all, the vividly realized character of Lisberth Salander herself, writes Barry Forshaw from Amazon.co.uk. "She is something of a unique creation in the field of crime and thriller fiction: emotionally damaged, vulnerable and sociopathic (all of these concealed behind a forbidding Goth appearance), but she is also an ultimate survivor, somehow managing to stay alive despite the machinations of some deeply unpleasant villains, as well as hostility of often stupid establishment figures, who want her out of the picture quite as passionately as the bad guys. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest brings together all the elements that have made the previous books of the sequence so successful..."
Kite Runner (2003)
It's not that hard to understand why Khaled Hosseini's first novel, The Kite Runner, became such a huge best seller, based largely on word of mouth and its popularity among book clubs and reading groups. The novel reads like a kind of modern-day variation on Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” in which the hero spends his life atoning for an act of cowardice and betrayal committed in his youth. It not only gave readers an intimate look at Afghanistan and the difficulties of life there, but it also showed off its author’s accessible and very old-fashioned storytelling talents: his taste for melodramatic plotlines; sharply drawn, black-and-white characters; and elemental boldfaced emotions.
Source: Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, May 29, 2007
A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007)
A Thousand Splendid Suns takes its title from a poem by the 17th century Persian poet Saib-e-Tabrizi. The story follows two women, Mariam and Laila, both married to the same abusive man. Like its predecessor, A Thousand Splendid Suns became a massive international bestseller, topping the bestseller lists as soon as it was published. The paperback edition spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list.
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