The Book Sill: Defiant Pose

Defiant Pose by Stewart Home

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



A highly commendable book for the Christmas season



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The Book Sill: Uncommon Danger

Uncommon Danger by Eric Ambler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



The plot is not quite as clerverly built as The Mask of Dimitrios. It feels at times as if Ambler rushed the writing: easy dialogues, inconsistencies in character building, laughable plot tricks. If this book was only a spy thriller, it would not be a very good one. But Ambler writes about history and politics. He writes about intelligence between the two world wars. He does so with a depth of sight, a precision in the details and a shrewdness which make the reading of this old spy novel a delight.



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The Book Sill: Le Cocommuniste

Le Cocommuniste by Jacques Jouet

My rating: 5 of 5 stars







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The Book Sill: 14

14 by Jean Echenoz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Echenoz's lightness and wonderful irony lets the terrifying background of World War One dominate this short novel. A joy to read, as always. If only Echenoz could write a new book every month...



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The Book Sill: Le Sens de ma vie

Le Sens de ma vie by Romain Gary

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Highly entertaining series of interviews conducted few months before the writer killed himself, and revealing a whole life shaped by fiction.
From an early age, Romain Gary will try to conform to the life his mother had imagined for him, that in spite of being born Russian he would become a famous French writer and diplomat. He will lie to her, hiding his failure to become an officer in the French air force. She will lie to him, hiding her own death for three whole years ! He will lie to the whole world and to himself, during his years as the French speaker for the United Nations. He will lie to the publishing world by winning the Prix Goncourt under a false name.
Romain Gary reveals these lies all along these short interviews, in the exact opposite attempt of Cendrars's tetralogy: use his talents as a writer to de-mystify his own life.



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The Book Sill: Situations Delicates

Situations Delicates by Serge Joncour

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I was looking for a lazy Sunday book. I found a lazy Sunday book. Situations Delicates shows why, of all the talents to participate in Les Papous Dans la Tete, Serge Joncour is the most entertaining one. Light, ferocious and self deprecating, Joncour made me laugh in 154 pages of everyday situations more than Wodehouse in 600 - and Wodehouse does make me laugh. in other words, this was the perfect little book to see me through 2 days of football world cup finals.



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The Book Sill: La Bible Steampunk

La Bible Steampunk by Jeff VanderMeer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Merci Bragelonne pour ce magnifique livre, superbement edite et qui m'a fourni une nouvelle liste de lectures a venir s'empiler bientot sur ma table de nuit ! Si certains sujets meriteraient d'etre creuses davantage (mais il s'agit d'un dictionnaire, non d'un essai), ceci est amplement compense par les illustrations somptueuses, dont certaines ont -presque- reussi a me reconcilier avec la mode.

The Steampunk Bible - buy it, read it, give it around you and let's organise a fancy-dress night !



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The Book Sill: Paris Avant l'Histoire

Paris Avant l'Histoire by Elie Berthet

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Very interesting reading to more than one respect: as an illustration, for instance, of how ideology constantly messes up with science, but also with history. Particularly interesting is the last story, and the way it was ingested and transformed by Goscinny when he started writing the first Asterix.



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The Book Sill - Chourmo

Chourmo by Jean-Claude Izzo

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Chourmo is one of these novels I had always promised myself to read, because it was held is such high regards by people whose opinion I trust.

Las ! The context might grasp the interest of any reader familiar with or fascinated by this graal of all cities that is Marseille. But as for the novel, I can barely see anything good to say. Political comments ooze from the author in every scene - not that Izzo has his heart in the wrong place ; more that he has his pen in the wrong hand, if not in the wrong limb. The style is full of teenage pathos without ever reaching the beautiful rough poetry that a James Lee Burke, a writer with an equal tendency towards whingeing, achieves. The situations are often predictable and the characters lacking the depth or idiosyncrasy that would make them attaching to me. As a social mirror, Chourmo is far from any of Georges Simenon's novels. As a pure noir novel, it is nowhere near any of Manchette's stories.



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The Book Sill - Aurélia et autres textes autobiographiques

Aurélia et autres textes autobiographiques by Gérard de Nerval

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Four stars only for the confusing succession of notices and notes, sliced and spread out throughout the book. I would have preferred to have them held in one place - but other, less easily distracted readers will not find it an issue. This collection of works is indispensable for whoever is interested in the rising of the subject at the centre of our societies in the XIXth century. It links beautifully Rousseau and Chateaubriand to Proust and Cendrars.



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The Book Sill - Pac de Cro Détective

Pac de Cro Détective by Paul Fournel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Talk about a long drift at sea! This book entered my home in 1997. I came around to reading it some fifteen years later... Why would I delay such a reading for so long? What tragic turn of events kept us apart, myself and Fournel's book, for a decade and a half?
Light and entertaining, always avoiding its promised end, this series of short stories is served by a flawless style. In the French late nineties, only the Echenoz of Lac and Cherokee has achieved this level in the comic novel. Less Houellebecqs more Chevillards please! Less Beigbegers, more Fournels!



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The Book Sill - A Wizard of Earthsea

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Fantasy relies on cliches and Ursula Le Guin does not avoid them. But the language she uses to tell this tale of becoming of age approaches perfection. Her voice has the bluntness, the darkness of the myth and the softness of a fable. Authors like Philip Pullman or Terry Pratchett might have stolen some of her scenes. For all their talent they have not approached the beauty of these pages.



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The Book Sill - Le Magasin des suicides

Le Magasin des suicides by Jean Teulé

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Only when the tone turns tragic does Jean Teule show some talent. Otherwise the style is loose and vulgar without being funny. Why do we French seem unable to write comedy novels, when our theater is so full of comedy plays ? It is a mystery.
Thanks to a handful of charming baroque scenes, Teule's book excapes the zero star.



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Hypnopompicture 12

Yesterday in the night I was
So light
Humming over
The crest of the water
And the roar of my life like a hurried ocean

Today I walk again my walk stroking the Earth
The ghost of the feather of a seed
And my heart so heavy with thought
My body so heavy with blood
Do not touch the ground

The Book Sill: Evolution

Evolution by Stephen Baxter

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Be them laudatory or acerbic, most reviews of Evolution insist on the same two aspects of the novel: the huge importance of the scientific discourse (indispensable textbook for the former, totally inaccurate for the latter) and Baxter’s pessimism as to the nature and future of the human race. These points will seem obvious to the casual reader. However the irrelevance of the first one is easily demonstrated. As for the accusation of pessimism, a closer examination of the novel reveals it as inaccurate, if not erroneous.
Anyone who values Evolution by the accuracy of its scientific contents chooses to ignore Baxter’s warning in his forewords: despite all the efforts he has put into it, his novel is not a textbook. More than any science, paleontology is built on a trickle of fragile clues. Any of its theories is subject to great discussions and debates. A fiction based on it can only reflect the views of part of the scientific community at a given moment in time. More than any other science-fiction sub-genre, pre-historical fiction exposes the nature of the relationship between the novel and its supporting science. Raising the argument of the scientific accuracy of Baxter’s novel is simply missing its point. Evolution is a fiction. It is a story, not a history. It needs a point, not accurate facts. Being fictional, it is biased in essence. It is an artistic proposition based on the state of the paleontological knowledge at the beginning of the twenty-first century. No less, no more.

The second point cannot be as easily dismissed: Baxter’s views on humanity are depressing. Our race is almost always represented under disastrous lights: we exhaust our resources, we exploit anything of benefit to us. We are unable to overcome our animal urge to destroy anything we do not know or understand. The dynamic of Evolution is fueled by these sad truths; selfishness and xenophobia are its mankind’s modus operandi.

However, and this needs to be stressed, all of Evolution life forms behave the same way. In Baxter’s novel humanity might be in the spotlight, but its logic is that of life on Earth itself.

In such novels as Quest for Fire or The Inheritors, the Earth of our first ancestors (the Earth from Before Adam, as Jack London puts it), looks to our modern eyes like some sort of paradise –tough and rough as it may be, more innocent for Rosny than for Golding or London, where the human snake is already creeping)-. In comparison, Evolution’s young Earth is a ferocious battlefield. In none of his stories does Baxter show a central character capable of appreciating the beauty and grandeur of its environment. The descriptions are not entirely deprived of poetry, however this poetry is limited to some of Baxter’s most far-fetched creations: the air whale, the symbiotic tree, the invisible salamander. Out of these three examples only the air whale has been created for its own sake. Apart from it even the craziest flares or Baxter’s imagination stress the same point: any life form is a prey or a predator. Life is a relentless struggle for daily survival. We are far from the Robinson’s dream of the first pre-historical fictions. Earth is not an empty world to conquer. Here the stories goals are terribly down to earth: find food, breed, escape death.

Evolution is structured like a catalogue of scenes depicting the slow and fragile rising of primates on Earth. Each story shows us a species which survival hangs by a thread, to which Nature is a constant menace. More than once, the main character fails. Quite often, death is a relief. But one story makes exception. In A Long Shadow nature initially appears as the pre-Adam paradise we see in Rosny’s novels. Here the technology is at its peak and Earth is almost empty of humans. This story stands alone by many aspects and would deserve a separate examination. Its subtitle, “place and time unknown”, is enough to set it apart. Apart from A Long Shadow, all stories in Evolution start with an indication of place and time.  Here all we know here is that we are on Earth, in the future. More telling even, we are after the fall. Thus having set the premises of a fairy tale, Baxter inverts all its codes The comparison with Robinson Crusoe is fascinating: far from being the new beginning of Defoe’s island, A Long Shadow’s virginal Earth is immediately soiled by human presence. The entire story relies on the necessity to breed and the immediate and unbearable tension arising from its simple and tragic arithmetic: of all five human survivors there is only one female. It is all to Baxter’s credit to have created a situation where sexual tension is a starting element of the story. It does not develop: it is here as a result of the initial set-up.
This leaves us with this paradoxical world: a paradise where mankind has already fallen; a starting point where the weight of the original sin is overpowering. Even though the story starts before the crime, from the opening pages the strongest and sharpest character, Sidewise, understands what for the others is still a vague feeling on a confused horizon: in this green, fresh, empty world where nothing seems to be of any real threat to mankind, mankind is already doomed.
The symbolic implications of this set-up are rich and obvious. It is worth noting that, though the crime is committed inside the fictional time, it is not told - it is merely accounted for shortly after it happens. This crime is consubstantial to the human life form. A Long Shadow starts as the retelling of the desert island tale –to turn almost instantly into a perfect post oedipal story. At the end what emerges (and this is a major blow to the view that the whole of Baxter Evolution is a demolition of mankind) is a humanity whose nature is a devil which can only be partially contained through the development of its civilization and, with it, of its understanding of the world. The price it has to pay for this development proves fatal.

This of course is a very protestant conception. Among all the stories of the novel, A Long Shadow might stand out by its nature, but not by its ideological standpoints. Its fairy tale structure and its reduced cast of characters expose these points better than anywhere else. However the same hypotheses are staged throughout Evolution. In the vast panorama Baxter builds, for all the damages they cause men are redeemed by their ability to share and transfer their knowledge. This point is particularly apparent in the story of the Martian robots. These machines were designed with the ability to learn and programmed to replicate themselves. Too successful, they soon become horrific monsters who, to fulfill their program, consume entire planets in their search for heavy metals. But ultimately these caricatures of ourselves are all that remains of Earth. They are man’s true children, brought to life by his capacity to transfer knowledge. This ability, Baxter explains, relies on what sets primates apart: empathy. With it comes the powerful counterpoint to the novel patent pessimism: what brings success is not the capacity to kill one’s enemies. It is the capacity to share. “Sharing was as old as life itself” Baxter says in his final story (p.727). “The survivors won through by cooperating” (ibid). Survival of the fittest does not define the fittest as the ultimate killer. It defines it as the species which learned to adapt to changing conditions by sharing resources and knowledge. Sharing is easily done when the will to share exists –this will, Baxter says, receives a phenomenal boost with the emergence of empathy. Empathy is what made a specific branch of primates - ours - successful. When empathy disappears, so do these primates and Baxter’s story finds an end.

Empathy is not only at the core of Evolution. It is also the component on which Baxter bases his strategy as a storyteller. Throughout the novel the reader's empathy is put to the test. From the story of Purga to that of Ultimate, empathy is what sustains our interest for characters so foreign to our lives. Nevertheless, we feel for Purga, a tiny, mouse-like mammal from the dinosaur era, as she struggles mercilessly to breed and preserve its cubs from the cataclysmic aftermath of the Mexican comet. Our hearts bleed as we walk along with Ultimate, the last of the descendants of human beings, on her way back to her symbiotic tree, in what Baxter describes as the last human travel on Earth. “This parched, dead beach had been the furthest point of all. The children of humanity had done with exploring.” (p.746).
But what about the Martian robots? After all they are the product of mankind, albeit not through gene transmission. They have not done with exploring. They will survive our planet itself, continuing the story of mankind’s descendants! For Baxter however, these unnatural creatures are beyond the reach of human empathy. They are the point where Baxter resigns himself to letting go of his story. In one of the final scenes a Martian robot lands on New Pangea, sent here by the robots community in a quest for their origin. A survey of the dry, empty continent reveals the absence of any organised intelligence. Finally, “With an equivalent of a sigh, [it] leapt to the stars” (p.743).
The Martian machines might be our children; they might be the future of evolution. In spite of it, and this is Baxter’s way of setting a limit to the unmatched span of his story, they have “nothing to do with mankind”. By doing so Baxter is leaning towards this cliche of most North-American schools of creative writing: that any fiction finds its readership among people who can relate to the main characters. This cliche is too generic to have any real meaning and knows too many exceptions to hold any real truth. Baxter himself has proven it wrong in several of his works.
So now I can only hope that one day, Baxter will allow us to read the story of the Martian Robots.



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The Beach That Is My Sill

From where I sit in my deep sand-coloured armchair
It is but a dusty plank of wood
Muscovado ridge gleaming in the light
Beyond the western wind
Waves and waves through the elders leaves

I come here in the morning dusk
I watch the seagulls as they circle past
The scaffolding of the blue gas lace
Sometimes, when the world is quiet
I walk along the window sill
And I collect the washed up drifts
From the night ebb and flow

This is to the transmutant Orbitor
Come ashore here in October
I had wedged it in two thousand and six
Between Crusoe and The Stranger
Somewhere else in another house

Three months ago in January
Irving's Owen Meany ran aground
A few inches away
Sandwiched between Child Gardens and
Inheritors by W Golding

Just yesterday breathing the night
It was about bed time
I stumbled upon Kafka's Castle
Lost to the sea ten years ago

I picked it up. And here I am
All my best reading plans upset
By a night stroll on
The beach that is my window sill

Of Stories - 1

For anyone who spent some time reflecting about his / her own tastes regarding novels, the stories they tell and the resources they use to tell them, the apparent arbitrariness of these choices is striking. A literary movement like the Oulipo based its own identity on finding ways to escape it, by randomly constraining its authors to using certain forms and certain plots. The best example of it might be Georges Perec's Life, a manual, where every single plot, background, decor and character is determined, not by the needs of the story, but by a random draw from a pool of possible characters, decors, backgrounds and plots.

Far from being a flaw of the genre though, this arbitrariness is deeply rooted in its nature, as Marthe Robert demonstrates in the groundbreaking analysis she published forty years ago. As always, as I read it this morning, a powerful feeling of  reassurance overwhelmed me as if, at last, I had been proven to be merely human. 

This, and the sunshine. 

"Sauf lorsque [le roman] se considère lui-même à distance et, découvrant ses propres illusions, les prend résolument pour sujet. J'ai tenté de montrer ailleurs (l'Ancien et le nouveau, Paris 1963, 1968) que cette méditation active et romancée du genre sur lui-même — ou «donquichottisme » puisque Cervantes en donne le premier et le plus grandiose exemple — est la seule façon de surmonter le paradoxe du « feint » et du « vrai », qui autrement tourne nécessairement à la mauvaise foi ou la naïveté."

"Apart from when [the novel] looks at itself from a distance and, discovering its own illusions, takes them resolutely as its topic. I tried to show elsewhere (L'Ancien et le nouveau, Paris 1963, 1968) that this active and romanticized meditation of the genre onto itself - or "Quixotism" since Cervantes gives it its first and most brilliant example - is the only way to overcome the paradox between the "faked" and the "true", which otherwise turns into bad faith or naivety."

Marthe Robert, Roman des origines et origines du roman, Paris, Gallimard, 1972, p.68 note 1.

The Book Sill - L'Enigme de Givreuse

L'Enigme de Givreuse by J.H. Rosny Aîné

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



An interesting book for anyone who liked La Brigade Chimerique, by Serge Lehman. The build-up is good, gripping, using a language which is efficient and visual at the same time - a balance that Rosny has always struggled to reach. But Rosny loses himself in the love story which was the rule of the genre at the time. The core of the book is weak, predictable, in short, ruined. The hasty scientific justification, falling right at the end, is therefore not developped and of no use for the plot. This is far from his best books, Quest for Fire, The Xipehus, La Mort de la terre or Hareton Ironcastle.



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The Book Sill - Dracula

Dracula by Bram Stoker

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Bar the unending monologues where the characters whine and cry on the terrible ordeal which befalls them and praise each other's godly virtues  Dracula is still a good read. The settings are particularly enjoyable, be them romantic Whitby, dusty and noisy London or the icy lands of the Carpathian mountains. The technological paraphernalia even gives it a charming tinge of steampunk.




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After the Ghetto - E3

I had started sleeping again.

Dreamless nights: I was sleeping much better now. At night I would shove the coffee table against the door frame and put the two huge armchairs face to face. In the past seven years, with Fred and I sharing the tiny caravan, I had to sleep on my single chair, twisted between the worn out arms, with a spring under my arsehole pushing up to get in. With Fred gone, for the first time, I could stretch again. That was almost as good as a proper bed. When I got up the next morning I felt like jumping all over the place. Waking up rested: what a luxury.

A few days after my brother's death I was woken up by someone shaking my shoulder vigorously. I opened my eyes. Bent over me against the daylight, my uncle was filling the whole visual field, his face drowned in its own shade, grey dawn light weakly glowing through his hair. He was dripping wet. He looked like a purposeful Poseidon, his head crowned in shining silver.

Rain was battering the caravan roof.

"I guess you disposed of the body didn't you? I thought I told you to bring it to my place." His voice was low and growling, like something huge moving inside a deep cave.
"You thought well" I said. "You did tell me."
"And? Is there a reason why you didn't follow my instructions?"
I was starving.
"Listen Val, is there a reason why you are here? I need to eat right now and to be frank, I care little for your wounded pride."
I am not afraid of Val. His looks are godly but his eighty-year-old body is human. He straightened up.
"I came to tell you that I know where the phone call was coming from. I also wanted to check on Fred's body. The phone is more recent than I first thought and if I am right, there should be some visible clues on him. Where did you bring him? Not to that horrible place in New Cross?"
"So you know whom he was talking to?"
"No. I said I knew where the call was coming from. Not who was making it."
"I don't get it."
"The phone call that killed you brother was coming from the Ghetto."
"This is ridiculous."
This angered him some more.
"I am a telecommunications specialist. I don't see how you can dispute my conclusions. The origin of the call your brother picked up is Canary Wharf's Ghetto - you can triangulate the signal if you want, I personally have all the evidence I need-. The phone call killed your brother, I also know that, and I know how it did it. It would have killed you exactly the same had you picked it up, even though you don't have any French, unlike the rest of your family."
This is another one of his favorite topics. We come from Wallonia. We should all speak French. It is a question of duty, of honor. I have lived in London my whole life. I care little for honor or duty and, with Fred dead, I do not care for family any more.
"Why are you interested all of a sudden? You've never liked him, you've never been able to exchange two words with him. You kept treating him as if he was some sort of spoiled child. Why try to do something for him now? What's in it for you?"
"You will have to make an effort. You will have to talk to me nicer than that. You will have to listen more carefully to what I am telling you. You don't seem to understand: I am telling you that your brother is dead and that the Ghetto did it. The Ghetto!"
"You always blame the Ghetto for everything."
"They are to blame. In this case I have hard evidence. That phone call..."
"You would blame them anyway, wouldn't you. I don't see why you hate them so much."
"They made their choice. They abandoned us. They abandoned the human race."
"They had an opportunity and they took it. Come on, they are our children!"
"They are not mine. My child is here with me"
"Oh yes, and he's doing so well isn't he? He's a drug addict."
"Well, at least he is trying to cope with his condition. No one said it was easy to be a human being."
"But what's the point? What is the point, Val, of staying a human being when you have another solution? What is the point of going through all this, this ordeal? See where that led my brother? He was so depressed he couldn't even eat properly. If he hadn't died he would have ended up killing himself."
"How dare you make fun of this, how dare you! THIS IS WHAT WE ARE" - Val started shouting - "WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS! THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH IT, THIS IS WHAT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE, THIS IS WHAT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO STAY! HAVE YOU GOT NO PRIDE,  YOU AND YOUR BROTHER? HAVE YOU GOT NO SELF-RESPECT? YOU ARE A HUMAN BEING! DON'T YOU WANT TO FIGHT FOR THAT?"
"I would have done what our children did, had I had the opportunity, and Fred too. But you know like I do that we were too old."

I hate it when days start like this. Straight from bed, an argument. For God's sake, I was famished. I didn't even know if I was really angry or if it was caffeine withdrawal. I was trying to get up to push him outside, but something moved behind Val. When I saw what it was my legs refused to lift me.

At the caravan door, his old depressed body standing well upright, his hair that shiny blond they had lost to age these past twenty years, his jaws and fists clenched, his eyes -both of them!- nailed to a spot two feet above my head, my brother was breathing deeply, heavily. I could not tell whether he was struggling for air or trying to control an inner fury. Rain water was pooling around his feet. He was soaked, but alive! My uncle turned around.
"I thought he... I thought you were... he was... I saw him! You told me! You told me he was dead!" he thundered at me, out of himself with indignation.
"He was dead! You were dead! I brought you to Depford! I threw you on these two hunks! I poured perfume on you! Our flask of Fahrenheit!"
But my brother wouldn't answer.
"Well, he isn't dead now" Val said. "If he isn't now then he wasn't before. Death is not something people recover from, you know."
There was nothing I could say to that, except open my arms to mark my puzzlement. Twenty years of boredom. Twenty years of utter dullness since the rise of the Ghetto. After all this time I had no other desire than to die peacefully in the midst of my beloved books. Then the phone call. And now this: zombies. Good, healthy looking zombies.

Val sat down at my sides. Out of his backpack he picked up our phone and put it on a pile of books.

"Well, that just confirms what I thought" he said.