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

The Stranger by Albert Camus

I read this book years ago, when I first began to explore rationalism, and I liked most of it, except for Camus’ idea that nothing matters and nothing makes any difference. The idea of an afterlife is irrational in my view, but I believe we each create our own meaning and purpose to life. Our lives can be as rich and meaningful as we choose to make them.

For me, the crucial sentence is in the last paragraph on page 122: "For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a “fiance,” why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too."

Powerful stuff. Mersault's mother lived her life. Her last years were happy and comfortable. Why should anyone regret that life with tears? As Camus wrote in his posthumously published note books, A Happy Death, “Your duty is to live and be happy.” Profound and deceptively simple.

This is a new translation by Matthew Ward. What I did not know, was that Camus intended to write this novel in “the American style” -- mostly adjective free and a simple subject-verb-object structure. I enjoyed, and had a much better understanding, this time around, and I am glad I read it again as we come to the end of 2008. Five stars

--Chiron, 12/29/08

Fire in the Blood by Iréne Némirovsky

Iréne Némirovsky was born in Russia, but her family fled to Finland after the Russian Revolution in 1917. From there, they emigrated to France where she lived until she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942. She died at Auschwitz in 1943. She published nine books between 1928 and 1937. She was working on Fire in the Blood when she was arrested. Her notes and manuscripts were scattered among her family members, and this novel has finally been assembled for the first time.

My first experience with Némirovsky was Suite Française -- a great story of rural villagers trying to survive the early days of the German occupation as refugees streamed through their land trying to reach free France. Originally planned for three parts, it was never finished. I was hoping Fire approached, even slightly, the power of that narrative.

I have not been disappointed, and I would even say my expectations have been exceeded.

Fire is a story of an insular French village in the days between the World Wars. Anyone who has ever visited the French countryside will instantly recognize the slow, measured pace of life. “The farmers around here don’t gossip and would rather walk through fire than get involved in other people’s business” (74). When tragedy strikes a newly married young man, it is marked up as fate, an error of judgment, or simply an accident, and the reader only gradually hears the quiet murmurs as the truth is passed from farmhouse to tavern to kitchen.

The story is narrated by Silvio, a retired gentleman farmer who, because he has no wife and no heirs, has gradually sold off his land and now lives alone, except for an occasional visitor and the company of his housekeeper. One night he writes,

“I was desperate for her to leave, as if I were expecting someone. And, in fact, I was: I was expecting my youth. Memories of the past would return to us more often if only we sought them out, sought their intense sweetness. But we let them slumber within us and, worse, we let them die, rot, so much so that the generous impulses that sweep through our souls when we are twenty we later call naive, foolish…Our purest, most passionate loves take on the depraved appearance of sordid pleasure” (105-6).

Prose like that is not nearly common enough. How can anyone not let the mind wander back to days of care-free youth when there was fire in the blood?

The secret visitor that Silvio awaits comes barging in to turn upside down this quiet little place. Although I guessed part of the secret early on, the end is a stunner, and the full story really took the wind out of me.

All the characters are searching for their own form of happiness, some in the past, some in dreams of the future. Practically every page has the word happy, happiness, unhappy, or some other variation on that theme. Silvio says, “I don’t want to get involved in your problems…all I want is a quiet life” (84-5).

Only a few works of Némirovsky’s have been translated, but I am going to keep a weather eye out for any more that come along. She is a hidden treasure waiting to be rediscovered by all fans of serious fiction. Five stars

--Chiron, 7/24/08

The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) by Alain-Fournier

I never heard of this novel nor this author. After completing a survey for a publisher, they offered me a free Penguin Classic edition for my time. Of the six books on the list, I already had five, so I took this one. It was a lucky draw, because this is definitely an interesting novel.

Alain-Fournier (Henri Alban) was born in France in 1886. His parents were teachers, and he received a fine education. Le Grand Meaulnes was published in 1912, and he was killed on the Meuse in 1914. A second novel was published posthumously.

François Seurel is a student at his parents’ school when Augustin Meaulnes, a tall, handsome boy arrives. The two form an instant bond. A few days after his arrival, Augustin tries a practical joke which goes awry, and he is lost far from school. He stumbles onto an estate in the midst of preparations for a wedding. He is welcomed as a guest and given a costume. He glimpses a beautiful young girl and immediately falls in love. At the last minute, the wedding is canceled, and the guests disperse. Augustin’s horse and cart have disappeared, so he accepts a ride back to school and stumbles in late one night -- three days after he left the school. He is reticent about his adventures, but eventually he tells François all the details, including his plan to return to the chateau and find the beautiful maiden and marry her.

At first glance, this seems to be a “Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy reunites with girl” story; however, this is only the beginning of the tale. It also seems to be some sort of dream or hallucination, but it is all too real.

An informative Introduction by the acclaimed New Yorker writer, Adam Gopnik, warns the reader of “roller coaster turns of the narration, at what Dr. Johnson might have called the improbability of the incidents and the extremity of the experiences” (ix). He is right about that, I found myself scratching my head on more than many occasions. But the prose is so detailed and so visual, as Gopnik later writes, “Once read, Le Grand Meaulnes is forever after seen” (x). The twists and turns of plot are a small price to play for 223 pages of magical, lyrical prose.

Meaulnes is a wonderful character, a little bit of Holden Caulfield in his rebelliousness, and a little bit of the dare-devil Phineas from Knowles’ A Separate Peace, while François neatly fills the role of Gene from the same novel.

Lots of other interesting characters populate the story as well. Frantz, brother of Yvonne, the beautiful maiden, suffers from “extravagant fantasies.” François refers to his mother as “Millie,” and a mysterious gypsy arrives to complicate Augustin’s plans to find Yvonne.

The story is more than interesting -- I was so absorbed I read it in a little more than two afternoons. This not to say it was an easy read. There are lots of passages which require savoring. Sometimes I found my mind wandering in the gardens and woods, so I had to stop, retrace the words, and pick up again. I was drawn into this story in an almost magical way -- as though while staring at an impressionist painting, I felt myself bathed in the light amidst the haystacks.

Adults seem to have limited authority in Alain-Fournier’s world, perhaps because he was still a young man when he was killed in World War I. The insanity of war! What might he have written had he lived to full maturity? Four stars because the ending was too sudden, too final. I would rather the story be extended another 200 pages.

--Chiron, 7/21/08