Les Liaisons Dangereuses

I love Classic literature; I love books in translation; I love controversial novels with scandal and intrigue so when Polly of Novel Insights chose Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) by Pierra Choderlos de Laclos for the Riverside Readers to discuss, I was delighted.

An eighteenth century epistolary novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses concerns two bored aristocrats in pre-Revolutionary France who are in dire need of the guillotine for the evil ways the employ to alleviate their ennui. The Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, ex lovers, each enjoy the arts of deceit and manipulation, each wishing to excel over the other. What begin as acts of revenge and of sexual conquest evolve into intricate Machiavellian plans of diabolical proportions; Valmont and Merteuil embroil others into their salacious machinations and nobody comes off unscathed.

The structure of the novel celebrates what is now the lost art of letter writing; the letters back and forth between all the players serve to look at the deceptions from every available viewpoint and fully appreciate their well-thought-out wickedness. Despite the epistolary form, the characters each had distinct voices and the letters their own style and tone; each writer was easily identifiable and by providing the majority of the correspondence the reader gains an insight into the complex manipulations and behind-the-scenes workings that occur. The multiple ironies of Les Liaisons Dangereuses that the reader is privy to throughout make it compelling reading as did the insight into the other face and persona that each character showed depending on whom they were writing to. Les Liaisons Dangereuses is very witty and intelligent and where some readers find the Chevalier Danceny and Cécile Volanges, the piano teacher and the convent girl respectively, to be annoying, I found them exceptionally amusing in their naïveté and their hyperbolic declarations of love.

Madame de Tourvel, the sexual object of Valmont's whim, is exceptionally virtuous and pious but her letters display great intelligence and passion and Laclos's representation of women is very impressive for its time; the Marquise is a vividly-drawn alpha-female and her verbal sparring with Valmont is every bit as much about sexual politics as it is sexual attraction. A manual in seduction, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is salacious and sordid; sex sells and the novel was very ahead of its time in being very much a part of ours. The scandalous lengths that Valmont and Merteuil go to to gain revenge are quite something; the novel is enthralling (the second volume does admittedly drag in its involved scene-setting) and shocking. At the same time as attempting to seduce Madame de Tourvel -whose conquest will earn him a sexual reward from Merteuil- Valmont is playing older male tutor to Cécile Volanges, at Merteuil's request as she has a score to settle with Cécile's future husband and Valmont consents because he desires revenge on Madame Volanges, Cécile's mother, who is confidante to Madame de Tourvel; further pawns are the impressionable Chevalier Danceny, in love with Cécile and seeking advice and assistance from both Valmont and Merteuil, and Madame de Rosamonde, the matronly aunt of Vamont and friend of de Tourvel, as well as a couple of other by-standers who are caught up in the devilishly dangerous scheming.

I did not find Merteuil or Valmont at all sympathetic; they are thoroughly cruel and loathsome characters in their depravity yet they are fascinating, especially Valmont in his phallocentrism and boundless vanity. Les Liaisons Dangereuses in a study of Sadism and a play-by-play of how people deceive, seduce and manipulate others to their will; it examines the underbelly of human nature. Merteuil loves Valmont and Valmont de Tourvel love each other as much as vain, narcissistic people can love another, but they will not bend to the other and relinquish their power, which is why they can not, ultimately, co-exist; these odious characters will never submit to true feeling at the expense of their reputation and the face that they show to others.

I read the Douglas Parmée translation of the novel, which I found immensely readable; it gives a modern voice to the words, which never jarred for me but it may for some. I didn't lose any of the aristocratic language nor Laclos's deft and clever plays on language and innuendo to depict sexual liaisons. I also watched the Stephen Frear's 1988 adaptation of the novel and thought it wonderfully brought to screen; the editing that is lacking in the novel is brutal in the film but not to the detriment of the story. John Malkovich as Valmont is outstanding although I was disturbed by his sympathetic portrayal as I was vehemently opposed to the deeds he carried out -in relation to Cécile- but could not resist his charm. Frears achieved an impressive visual representation of Laclos's moral ambiguities and complexities that resonates; of the people at book group who had seen the film, none of us could separate the characters from their incarnations on-screen, that and it was far easier to refer to the Marquise de Merteuil as Glenn Close as none of us could pronounce her name.

Some key dialogue -through letters- between Valmont and Merteuil setting out their despicable plan :

Till now my thoughts were all of love; but it was soon replaced by rage. Who do you think is trying to ruin my reputation with the woman I adore? What fiend in woman's shape is evil enough to weave such an abominable plot? You know her, it's your friend and relative, Madame de Volanges. You cannot imagine the tissue of horrors that obnoxious old hag has written about me. It is she and she alone who has been disturbing my angel's peace of mind; it's her views and her pernicious advice that are forcing me to leave; in a word, it is she who has victimized me. Oh, there's no doubt about it, her daughter has got to be seduced; no, that's not enough. That woman must be smashed and since the old trout is too long in the tooth to be attacked directly, she must be made to suffer through someone she loves.

You may be a trifle annoyed at what I'm asking you to do but isn't it a very small return for all the trouble I've been taking over your affairs? Didn't I restore you to the judge's when, through your own stupidity, you'd been forced to leave her? And then wasn't it me who placed into your hands ways and means to settle your score with that mischievous old bigot Madame de Volanges? You're always moaning about the time you waste looking round for exciting things to do. Now you have a couple under your very nose. Love or hatred, take your pick; they're both sleeping under the same roof and you can live a double life, fondling with one hand and stabbing in the back with the other...

Thoughts from other Riverside Readers:

Farmlanebooks

Novel Insights

Reading Matters

Savidge Reads

Nineteen Eighty-Four

I was in a bookshop with Simon T of Stuck in a Book last month and one of us picked up or pointed out the newly reissued, latest dust-jacket art of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. I commented that I read it about a decade ago but that it was fairly fresh in my mind. The following evening, at book group, it was suggested as November's book. I decided to reread it for the less salient details but I found that the majority of it had remained with me.

Tonight is our book group meeting but due to a sudden family event I am unable to attend; instead, I am scheduling this post to publish whilst the others will be discussing the book. I look forward to reading what the others think and how the discussion went from tomorrow onwards. For most of us it was a reread so it will be an interesting dynamic. I didn't think that Nineteen Eighty-Four suffered any reading it second-time-around although I did find the first half of the third section quite dry although Room 101 was just as effective (albeit without the shock-factor).

I love Dystopian literature and the Orwellian model is the father of the Science Fiction sub-genre; I recall it as the first Dystopian novel that I read and it still resonates, especially as it has been immersed into popular culture and contemporary vernacular (which we should just call everydayspeak and have done with it). Orwell's nightmarish vision of the futuristic totalitarian government, the oligarchical inner party of Big Brother with their oxymoronic party slogans, may be outdated in the age of technology but its claustrophobic society of surveillance, where not only Big Brother via the telescreens but everyone else is watching you and waiting to betray you by accusing you of thoughtcrime, is still effective and disturbing.

Winston Smith, protagonist of Nineteen Eighteen-Four, is a member of the outer party who perpetuates party propaganda by altering historical documents so that the past becomes fiction. Meanwhile Winston is in inner turmoil, rebelling against Big Brother without actually doing anything until he meets Julia. Winston is not an orthodox party member, devoted to Big Brother; nor is he an acute threat to Big Brother. His passivity infuriates me but what could he have done? Was Julia right when she asked him if it mattered the evidence that he found -but destroyed- as what could he have done with it anyway? His helplessness is well-evoked and it is that which makes Nineteen Eighty-Four so powerful and terrifying: the inability to act against a totalitarian regime even if you wanted to.

I was struck whilst reading this time by the portrayal of women in the novel, or more strictly their treatment by Big Brother. Women are denied their femininity, they are made to dress asexually and forbidden to wear make-up or fragrance; males and females are sexually repressed with relationships between party members outlawed. Julia regales in her sexuality, she is proud to enjoy sex and embraces the opportunity to be free and wear what she likes beyond the view of the telescreens. Feminism is freedom of choice, not what you wear or how you look.

I enjoyed rereading this classic; it was a welcome revisit and one that reminded me how good a book Nineteen Eighty-Four is. Tomorrow I will have a follow-up post on Orwell.

I Served the King of England

This month's book for Savidge Reads' and Kimbofo's book group was I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal. This Czech book in translation was my choice. I first came across Hrabal six years ago when I took a Slavonic literature course as an elective at University and read his novella Closely Observed Trains; I would like to reread it as all I can remember of the somewhat bizarre book is that Milos, the apprentice signalman, had attempted suicide after the humiliation of his first sexual experience. I Served the King of England had been on my radar at that time but I promptly forgot about it until coming across it whilst working in a bookshop last Christmas and then it featured in the comedy section of The Guardian's 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. The entry for the book, written my Joanna Hines, caught my imagination:

Ditie, the hero of Hrabal's comic masterpiece, learns early in his career to keep his ears open without hearing, keep his eyes open without seeing. From busboy he progresses to become a waiter in a Prague hotel, and then a millionaire with a hotel of his own; but his personal parameters remain those of the small man. Building on the rambling style of Hasek's Svejk, the novel's humour and bathos achieve universal significance in the contrast between Ditie's meagre resources and his eternally grandiose ambition.

I was curious whether the comedy would translate and it did, albeit perhaps not as well as it may have in the original Czech (although credit to the translator Paul Wilson who has translated Hrabal who, the Czechs say, is "untranslatable"). The important thing to take note of from the synopsis above is "his personal parameters remain those of the small man" because Ditie -which means "child"- is a small man, complete with small man issues; an interesting hero in himself but especially with the backdrop of WWII where megalomaniac dictators with their own small man issues wreaked horror on the "sub"-man. Ditie is reminded by his first manager that as a busboy "you don't see anything and you don't hear anything ... But remember too that you've got to see everything and hear everything". Hrabal, via Ditie, then shows us everything in an overly descriptive first part of the novel. Ditie's escapades -because they can only really be called that- are ludicrous and at times hilarious. In his first job Ditie saves his money to visit Paradise's, the local brothel, so he can have his first sexual encounter. The novel becomes quite lewd, surprisingly so, at this point and Ditie lavishes a cast of prostitutes with visits, attention, and a lap-full of flowers (hence the fabulous cover of the newly re-issued edition from Vintage Books).

Described accurately as a "novel of two halves" by Polly of Novel Insights, the first part of I Served the King of England is a lighthearted expose of the hotel industry with some very amusing -and detailed- descriptions of the tricks of the trade; the second half, however, takes on a far more serious subject matter albeit still with an irreverent tone. The juxtaposition of the horrific German occupation of the now Czech Republic and the subsequent Blitzkrieg, the unbelievable coming true, with the comically farcical is superbly done. Hrabal injects black humour into the unimaginably abhorrent and I found myself chuckling uproariously at the most shocking of moments, that in a straight novel would be far from humorous (moments that in The Glass Room by Simon Mawer were uncomfortably haunting). To share Hrabal's achievement and to demonstrate the style of writing, I have shared a scene where Ditie goes for German testing to see if he is fit to mate with an Aryan woman:

And so while execution squads in Prague and Brno and other jurisdictions were carrying out the death sentence, I had to stand naked in front of a doctor who lifted my penis with a cane and then made me turn around while he used the cane to look into my anus, and then he hefted my scrotum and dictated in a loud voice. Next he asked me to masturbate and bring him a little semen so they could examine it scientifically because, as the doctor said in his atrocious Egerlander German--which I couldn't understand, though I got the gist well enough--when some stupid Czech turd wants to marry a German woman his jism had better be at least twice as good as the jism of the lowliest stoker in the lowliest hotel in the city of Cheb.

Ditie is then presented with pornography and when that doesn't arouse him is masturbated by the nurse. Hrabal certainly knows how to create an image and one that doesn't jar but does make an impact in its ridiculousness.

As a group we were mainly ambivalent towards this book and even after discussion most of us could not make up our minds what we felt about it; none of us hated it and Linda even loved it and saw qualities in it that many of us missed but we were not jumping up and down eagerly in our seats or agreeing that it is a novel that everyone must read. I am glad however that I have read it as I had been meaning to and in reading the very informative introduction by Adam Thirwell, I appreciate it the more. I will leave you with one passage of his, where he certainly sees the profound in I Served the King of England:

A sense of humour, in Hrabal, is really a sense of proportion: the ability to diminish the things of the world to their true and miniature size. This, in the end, is the real way to be a hedonist: to be content with how small the world's pleasures are, to be happy with humiliation. But this sense of proportion is so rare.
Ditie's diminutive stature, which leads him to try to impose himself on the world in such grandiose ways, is really metaphysical. It is universal. For everyone it is miniature, but with grandiose ambitions. So everyone is laughable.

Trouble with Lichen

Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham is a Science Fiction novel set in the 1950s but do not let that put you off! It is an entertaining novel that in many ways is both a product of its time, progressive for its time and timeless. It is also a social satire and did I mention entertaining? I have found this and the other Wyndham novel I have read -The Midwich Cuckoos- surprisingly accessible despite their speculative subject matter; I am eager to read his other work, especially The Chrysalids and Day of the Triffids. Although a book group choice, this wasn't so much taking me out of my comfort zone as I have been anxious to read more of Wyndham, but others in the group found it a welcome change and one a definite departure that she didn't enjoy very much. Trouble with Lichen encouraged interesting dialogue but, for the most part, the themes are light and this was a great read. One of our group couldn't get her hands on Trouble with Lichen so read Day of the Triffids instead, which made for a unique discussion, especially as that novel is more famous and post-apocalyptic.

Diana Brackley is a young, beautiful and promising biochemist, who upon leaving Cambridge goes to work at Darr House Developments, a biochemical lab run by the eminent biochemist, Francis Saxover; it is a career move that "was to determine the course of her life." At Darr, Diana and Francis come across a lichen that they accidentally discover has unique properties; experimenting separately, they each discover that the lichen possesses an anti-aging quality. The lichen does not cease aging but significantly slows the process down and both scientists recognise the potential and danger in what they have discovered.

Diana leaves Darr but fourteen years later contacts Francis. Diana has started and sustained a successful and prestigious beauty company in London. The beauty industry cannot preserve youth and beauty but clients seek this and the antigerone -the lichen- can help. However, Diana is facing discovery and melodrama ensues. The novel then becomes both a satire of the Press and one of intrigue and mystery, with plot devices ranging from blackmail to kidnapping, and even to espionage and murder. There are also global ramifications to the public knowledge of what lichen can do and although very much set in an era of the Cold War, this part was the most relevant to today's scientific, nuclear and industrial advances and the the far-reaching trade and political effects they have.

Trouble with Lichen is a very entertaining melodrama that lightly -and very much tongue-in-cheekly- tackles scientific and feminist themes. Diana is one of Wyndham's few fully-fledged female characters and she is intentionally keeping her powerful (through their husbands/male family), female characters young and beautiful to eke out their potential. Part of me found this condescending but I think the viewpoint is a product of its time: women's lives were taken up by being wives and mothers and Diana gives them more time for personal and societal achievement.

My favourite quotes, that highlight the amusing over-blown 1950s melodrama (picture the scenes in black and white cinema):

On closer consideration, then, the implication of the unguarded reply was scarcely to be escaped: the Tertius lichen certainly had a property which looked antibiotic; but if it had turned out not to be antibiotic, then what had it turned out to be...?
And why should Francis wish to conceal it...?

'Nature is unfair to women. We flower with tragic brevity. Hitherto, science which has transformed the world has neglected us, but now comes Miss Brackley like a messenger from Olympus, offering us what every woman desires - a long summer of full bloom. It seems likely that this will lead to a fall in the present rate of divorce.'

All my life I've been watching potentially brilliant women let their brains, and their talents, rot away. I could weep for the waste of it; for what they might have been, and might have done ... But give them two hundred, three hundred years, and they'll either have to employ those talents to keep themselves sane - or commit suicide out of boredom.

Voice Over

They have known each other for a long time. She has never quite been able to recall the moment when they met, the place, the precise day, whether she shook his hand or they kissed on the cheek. Nor has she ever thought to ask him. She does have a first memory, though. As she was was climbing into her coat in the narrow hallway of an unkempt apartment, she had caught his look of distress. The woman he had flirted with all evening was refusing to leave with him. He was trying to persuade her with an insistent barrage of words, which fell to pieces in the face of the majestic creature. She thought the idea of being suddenly deprived of the object of his affections must have been more than he could bear just then. And seeing him this way, in love, had moved her. She had slipped between the two of them and said, I'm off. But he had not replied.

I have quoted the opening passage of Voice Over by Céline Curiol in its entirety to give you a sense of its style. At first I was immersed in the narrative, admiring her approach, but I soon became lost and never found my way in the text, to where it was going. The style is at first novel but it quickly becomes off-putting. The anonymous narrator -a disembodied voice who announces trains at the Gare du Nord- remains faceless and nameless and I never had a sense of who she was. The "he" from the opening paragraph, the man she loves, also remains nameless and I was often confused about who I was reading about, especially as the time narrative moves backwards and forwards, like a train making stops at certain stations along the way. The style is never-changing and the continual stream-of-consciousness throughout the text, with no chapter breaks or even dialogue, made it inaccessible to me. The style though is definitely a talking point.

As mentioned yesterday, this was a book group choice and it certainly generated discussion. For the most part though it was to voice our own incomprehension and wonder at what Curiol was attempting to achieve, at which we drew no definitive conclusions. We deviated into a rich and informative discussion on accomplished, unique, and, at times, alienating narratives (think Coetzee, Self, Amis), which greatly interested and intrigued me. I am attracted to books that play with the boundaries of narrative and I do enjoy feeling confused by an author's intent on occasion but I don't think I was in the right head space for Voice Over. For a start, my head has hurt since last Thursday and prose that I really had to work at made it worse. I thought that a book at just over 200 pages would be a breeze to read in a couple of days but it wasn't; I struggled with its density. I was left with no insight into the narrator -the stream of consciousness doesn't actually allow you into her mind or a sense of who she is- or the authorial message, if there was one; I even questioned whether all of the strange events in the novel existed or were imagined in her head. I found this book a very difficult one to read and I don't think it was limitations of translation in any way but a style that simply didn't suit my reading needs. With a fuzzy head and post-Persephone week exhaustion, followed by immersion into Catching Fire, I have fallen into a bit of a book slump, that isn't helped by a time-sensitive to-be-read pile (Bookers mainly).

I was left feeling underwhelmed and confused by Voice Over but it generated a good discussion. All in all it is a curious book but makes an interesting choice for a book group. Some of us disliked it and others enjoyed its originality but we all agreed that it is bizarre.

Polly of Novel Insights has also posted her thoughts and I enjoy that we took different things away from it and both provide different views of the same picture. I forgot to mention the Esther Greenwood (from The Bell Jar) comparisons to the narrator, which were wonderfully coincidental. eta: Simon has also posted his views from Tel Aviv!

Book Groups

Do you all belong to book groups? I belong to two: this one and another that a friend invited me to at the beginning of the year. Both are very different but each are fun and a great way to meet new people (in a strange city) and discuss books with like-minded individuals face-to-face.

The book group that Simon S and Kim started is only in its third month but already it looks as if we are going to be reading some interesting books that will generate a lot of discussion. This month's meeting takes place this evening (I'll be blogging about the book tomorrow) and we are reading Voice Over by Celine Curiol, which is translated from French and was shortlisted for The Independent's foreign fiction prize. This is the synopsis:

A young woman works in Paris, at the Gare du Nord. She spends every day talking into a microphone, announcing platforms and timetables, invisible to the world. And then she falls in love with a man who, in turn, loves another. To our heroine, her rival is stunningly beautiful, as beautiful ‘as an angel’. So she decides not to pursue the man, rather, she is prepared to wait, alone. That is, until one night a male friend of the ‘angel’ asks her what she does for a living and without thinking she answers, ‘prostitute’. She decides to play her new role to the hilt.

What makes book groups so great is that I wouldn't have come across this book otherwise. Our next book is my choice (we choose in alphabetical name order) and I can't reveal it until after book group but what I will say is that it is also a book in translation and one I have been wanting to read for some time; another plus for book groups is that they allow you the opportunity at times to read "must read" books on your own to-be-read list.

My other book group meets next week and this month we are reading The Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham, which I am very excited to read (this weekend) and discuss. We meet over dinner and our reading choices have somewhat of a feminist slant, with a good mix of fiction and non fiction. The non fiction is a definite positive for me as I am such a lover of literature that it is pleasant to read something anthropological, economical, or historical every so often to force myself out of my comfort zone.

Next month's book is also, coincidentally, my choice but I am flummoxed as to what to suggest. I was tempted by Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood but I have a feeling that it will be too similar in genre and perhaps tone to Trouble with Lichen. I also considered The Color Purple by Alice Walker as I haven't read it yet but I plan on reading it anyway, there's a chance others in the group will have already read it, and I do like to choose books that are a little off the beaten track... I think that instead I will suggest non fiction and I considered Married Love by Marie Stopes until I realised my copy was at home in Glasgow and my library doesn't stock it. Now I am thinking about Round About a Pound a Week by Maud Pember Reeves because, yes it's a Persephone, but it is also topical and relative to a group of females in London supporting themselves and running a household. What do you think or suggest?

The Bell Jar

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York". Such an opening line! It was a queer, sultry summer, ten years ago that I first discovered Sylvia Plath, the summer before I began University. Back then I didn't know who the Rosenbergs were, I didn't know who Sylvia Plath was, but it was enough to know that she had killed herself by putting her head in an oven to court my interest. As an angsty eighteen year old whose own pain made her self-involved, I loved controversy and Sylvia Plath with her tragic suicide and appropriation of the Holocaust to evoke her pain, was right up my street. That summer I read her poetry and then during the year I read The Bell Jar around the same time that I first read The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Melodramatic much?

Re-reading it a decade later for the Savidge Reads Book Group I had more of a perspective. Where the first experience of it spoke to my tortured, intense, and angst-filled self, the revisit allowed me to appreciate the beautiful prose and the humour that pervades the novel that is inaccurately thought of as depressing. The Bell Jar is dark, of course it is: it deals with the themes of depression and attempted suicide (the first of its kind) but amidst some comedic instances. Plath/Esther Greenwood is exceptionally observant and witty; her observations and insight into her thoughts and thought processes are highly amusing; Esther gives voice to bizarre thoughts, the type of which we wouldn't admit to anyone. I appreciated the stripped-back exposure of Esther, naked and wounded. The ones at book group who were re-reading the book agreed that it should be compulsory for adults who had read The Bell Jar in their youth to re-read it again in adulthood. It resonated with me in my angst-ridden days and it resonated with me again -in a different way- as a more mature, less naïve adult; having been in the bell jar -that confined, claustrophobic, introspective place- between now and then, I appreciate it more and am less inclined to think that it "speaks to" my poor, immature, tortured soul. Yes, I am being self-deprecating but I recognised its black humour during this re-read and perceived that it is not all darkness and tragedy. In many ways I identified more with Esther this time around than I ever did, or thought I did.

These are more my thoughts and impressions outwith a normal book review but I have a lot of thoughts and impressions about this book! I suspect that most posts made after book group will be random observations about the book as I ponder it after discussion, rather than a cohesive account.

To lighten what can often be a light book anyway, I would like to share a favourite quote from a favourite show, Gilmore Girls:

"Hey, did anybody ever think maybe Sylvia Plath wasn't crazy, she was just cold?" Lorelai Gilmore

Often, when I feel cold, I love to take a bath.

"There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" (page 18)