Likely Stories: Five Years in the Making

One of the hardest questions for an avid reader is “What’s your favorite book?”  The task is no easier to come up with a list of my favorites over the five years of Likely Stories.  So, I decided to pick two from each reading year.  

2009-10 – Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín.  Tóibín’s prose weaves a serene tale of life in Ireland and Brooklyn, NY.  The main character Eilis matures quickly after her arrival and develops a relationship with a young man she meets at a dance.  Toibin writes lovely prose.  And  Ballistics by Billy Collins.  This collection, by my favorite poet, sparkles with all the wit and humor, which characterizes his poetry.

2010-11 – Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff.  Schiff has written one of the most entertaining biographies I have ever read.  She brings the Queen of the Nile into sharp focus with all her strengths and weaknesses. Also, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery.  Another writer with elegant and beautiful prose, which tells the story of a close bond between a loner and a young girl who share a love of books and reading.

2011-12 – The Radetsky March by Joseph Roth.  The thread which ties this list together has emerged: spectacular, beautiful, enchanting prose.  This novel, set during the Napoleonic Wars might not seem interesting, but that would be a mistake on any reader’s part.  Next, The Golden Droplet by Michel Tournier.  This story of a young girl’s search for a woman who took her photograph excites, saddens, and pleases on every page.

2012-13 -- The Red and the Green by Iris Murdoch.  Iris Murdoch is one of my top three authors.  Her novels have large casts of characters with intricate plots.  Nearly every one of her novels is a masterpiece.  And, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.  This first volume in a trilogy covers the life and loves of the Tudor Court of Henry VIII.  This Booker Prize Winner was followed by the same award for part two, Bring Up the Bodies.  Part three is due out sometime in 2015.  I can’t wait.

2013-14 – Now we come to my 5^th year of sharing my love for fine literature with my dedicated and faithful listeners.  I have declared a dead heat between Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.  Goldfinch is one of the finest novels I have ever read.  Despite its length, it was a fast read – a page turner some might say – about a young man who loses his mother in a terrorist attack, but new friends place him on a much more secure path to adulthood.  This is a must read.  And finally, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is another must read.  Again, I urge readers not to allow the length – 933 pages – to deter from reading this fascinating story of two children, who share a secret bond neither of them fully understands.  Twenty years after their single encounter, they search for each other.

--Chiron, 8/21/14

The Golden Droplet by Michel Tournier

One of the side effects of being a voracious reader involves hunting down earlier works by authors we love and admire. It took some effort to find this 1988 novel, but it proved to be a worthwhile endeavor.

Michel Tournier was born in Paris, and he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and at the University of Tübingen. He wished to teach but failed to pass the French civil service exam. He joined Radio France as a journalist and translator and hosted The French Cultural Hour. In 1954 he began to write for Le Monde and Le Figaro. From 1958 to 1968, he was the chief editor of Plon, a French publishing house. In 1967 he published his first novel, which was awarded the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française. The Ogre, his second novel, was my introduction to Tournier. A friend, who also admires Tournier, told me The Golden Droplet surpassed Ogre for sheer power of the prose, comic touches, and a level of profound insight. The hunt was on. Thanks to on-line book searches, I found a copy.

The Golden Droplet tells the story of Idris, a Berber sheep herder who lives at the Tabelbala Oasis in Algeria. One day, a blond woman stops and asks to take his picture. She promises to send it to him when she gets home to Paris, France. The village only had one photo at the time – that of a hero of the French Army in World War II. Idris saw this photo as an opportunity to raise his status in the remote desert community.

Months passed, but no photo arrived. Faced with marrying a woman he did not love, Idris sets out on a picaresque journey to find the blond woman and retrieve his photo. Idris starts out walking, then after a series of hitchhiking adventures, finds himself in La Goutte D’or [The Golden Droplet], which is the name of the Arab slums inhabited by immigrants from North Africa.

Tournier has embedded subtle humor in his prose. For example, Tournier writes, “Idris remembered the glass-fronted cabinets of the museum in Beni-Abbès; they were shop windows in miniature, But … a shop window worthy of the name is sealed off by a partition. It forms a closed area, at the same time totally exposed to the gaze and inaccessible to the hands, impenetrable and yet without secrets, a world you may only touch with your eyes but which is nevertheless real, in a way illusory like the world of photography or television. A fragile, provocative safe, a shop window is just asking to be broken into” (144).

If the novel has any faults it involves quite a few Berber words without translation. A few could be worked out from context, Google provided the definition of a few more, but the majority eluded me. After about 50 pages of this, I began to mark the words only for later research. After another 50 pages, I stopped even that, as I slid into this story’s absorbing prose, and these mysterious words became ornaments I actually enjoyed.

The Golden Droplet is an interesting and profound story of sight, images, memory, and how an immigrant spreads his culture while adapting to his or her new home. 5 stars

--Chiron, 1/14/12