LA CONDITION HUMAINE (MAN’S FATE), by André Malraux

When you read a good book you must simply acknowledge it: not beating about the bush this time, La condition humaine is a great novel. The opening scene is quite well known: it, moreover, embodies the major achievement of this story set in the 1920s China, namely, its ability to turn action into a statement of the uppermost questions that trouble our poor souls. Chen is about to kill someone, a sleeping human form under the bed sheets, a mound, albeit a breathing one. He knows that he must do it, it is an order, a command which he wants to obey, since it serves a noble cause, but the flesh, oh that human flesh, the materiality of it all, the metaphysical implications of a physical action, the abhorrence of violence when one has never killed a human being before.

This magnificent melange of adventures and deep thinking, this intelligent narration populated by profound and well developed characters, takes place in a city, Shanghai, disputed by three political groups: the communists, the Kuomintang and the representatives of the European colonial interests. The first two had done the revolution together against the old rulers of the country, while the third group takes the least disadvantageous side for them. Once the revolution against the old feudal system succeeds, the triumphant leader of the Kuomintang, Chan Kai Shek initiates the extermination of those inopportune communists towards whom Malraux’s sympathies are by no means hidden. The communist leaders are, if not heroes, at least driven by strong convictions and ideals. Chen, Kyo, Katow and the rest of the lot are far from being flawless people. In fact, how could they be? If that was the case, their condition, the forces under which they struggle, would be foreign to us, mortal readers. But the most basic feelings that we all can relate to are narrated through their lives in a magnificent way: fear of death, obsession, ambition, indifference, human affection and love.

Of course, at least one element binds them together, makes them, for all their differences, one of a kind, that is, their courageous determination to sacrifice their lives to revolution, not as a beautiful ideal to die for and by the by leave behind a beautifully maimed corpse to be one day buried in the pantheon of those who died fighting for a better world, but as a duty, ugly at times and of whose outcome is quite uncertain. The dedication of a life that forces you to coexist with the saddening inkling that all human deeds are ultimately absurd. So, this is no political pamphlet my friends. Politics are treated with through the prism of the underlying and ultimate questions from which political action springs; the reason why politics exist.

Surely, not all characters are up to the eyes in revolution and urban guerrilla. Some step back from it all, to turn life into a simple act of observing. Such attitude is represented by Kyo’s father, an old university professor, and opium smoker whose approach to the unavoidable suffering that comes along with life is that of a detached witness, whose arms to escape the blows dealt by such terrible events as the death of a son are intellectual rather than spiritual.

The world created by Malraux is certainly dark. I pictured all the scenes happening at night even though it is clearly stated that a number of situations unfold in daylight. But there is always the lingering image, the description that turns out to be more powerful, and for me that is the foggy narrow streets of Shanghai, the alleys dimly illuminated by the artificial lights of a lamppost or a paper lantern in a shop.

Now, the q
uestion is, does the novel have any flaws? Well, yes of course it does. First of all, a matter that a politically committed reader may readily notice and those oversensitive may bring up as an unpardonable flaw: the female characters of the book are few and, apart from May, rather shallow. And even May, Kyo’s wife (or girlfriend) does not stand out besides her male companions, for being Kyo’s partner is arguably the only social feature of this woman that prompted Malraux to create her, as if, aware that love had to play a role in this profound human drama, a woman had to be brought in (I guess that a gay affaire would have been too much for a book in which Stalin is watching).

It is also true that La condition humaine does not read as a totally realistic account of a revolutionary milieu: even though the scenes of violence are skilfully described, there is a slowness to it, as if the introspective view was dominant over any attempt at conveying the excitement of action: thought is predominant over matter. Obviously this aspect of the novel results in characters that are way too human, in the sense that there is a lot of heart in them, but not enough muscle, as if the characters were sheer feeling. Fear and instinct seem to be absent in them. Yes, the human condition is beautifully exposed in their thoughts and actions, but maybe not the animal component in it. This also accounts for their unlikely “virtuosity”, their unshakable loyalty to their principles. Their condition is that of being subjugated by tragedy, but never this other recurrent condition, that of being subjugated to one’s inner weaknesses and miseries. Maybe Chan, obsessed with killing and dying, is to a certain extent trapped by a force that comes out of him, but even this seems to lead to a very idealistic behaviour.

Overall, La condition humaine is a beautiful literary creation, honest and sincere. I do not see the grandiloquence or the vacuity others have accused the novel of being full of. Perhaps the flaws and the beauty are in the eyes of the reader as much as in the pen of the writer. At any rate, it is my belief that it is not the case. I’ve recently had a conversation with a friend (and my sister, by the way), over whether objectivity is applicable when it comes to judge a work of art: what comes first, beauty or the idea of beauty in the observer? Is there an actually objective standard for literature? Whatever the solution, if any, to this riddle, I state that people must have at least their own personal standards against which our aesthetic experiences must be measured. And I say that, for all its darkness and even pessimism, reading La condition humaine has been a pleasurable experience for me and, thus, is a great novel.

MADAME BOVARY, by Gustave Flaubert

The moment had to come: I had to read Madame Bovary, what sort of literature-lover would I be otherwise? Reading this book was a duty, an obligation, a must. The book is a classic, a masterpiece, a peak in the history of western literature, one of the outmost examples of literary realism, a successful enhancement of Balzac’s works. Its very name means literature, with a capital “L”, the canon incarnate. Reading it is a pleasure: no evil regime in this world would be so cruel so as to deprive its subjects from the joys of a close acquaintance with Flaubert’s opus magnum, the justification of any life devoted to explore even the subtlest emotion ever felt by a human being. And, funnily enough, it all comes down to a woman’s whims.

Mind you, I am not being ironic: Madame Bovary is a great book, notwithstanding which some found it a tiresome and even irritating reading (you know, it takes all sorts). It is obvious that when a book has been read by the millions and bears the halo of being an experience in itself from which you are meant to learn something about the human soul, it is inevitably bound to be made the object of numberless interpretations. Thus, any classic appears as a multidimensional and complex world, whatever the author’s intention, as once the novel is set free, it will lead a life of its own which will escape any attempt at mastering it. Obviously, Madame Bovary is no exception.

The book has been said to be a statement in favour of realism and a reaction against romanticism in literature, which would be incarnated in Emma and her readings, which lead to her incapability to relate to the real world and her tendency to dwell in a universe of romantic fantasies. But if this was the case, criticism may easily arise: ideals and principles are often far from being realistic, but they make up the fabric of the struggle for a better life. From a political stance the book might even be labelled as reactionary. Flaubert’s intention was, however, none of the sort: he just wanted to create a world that would stand on its own, dependant on nothing exterior, written in a natural way and devoid of useless digressions. But, is such aim “realistic”? Do individual universes exist cut off from other realities? Isn’t such goal actually killing life, depriving it of the very substance that fuels existence, by means of stopping the dialectics prompted by the interactions with external references?

But, then again, a life lived under an incessant tension, constantly oscillating between extreme views, going from passion to apathy, from ego-centred selfishness to altruistic religiousness; can’t such a life kill you? Or, maybe, it is your fault because you haven’t been able to find moderation, the balanced virtuosity to be found in the middle between the extremes. It is, isn’t it? Am I going crazy mate?

The book deals with these problems, or maybe it doesn’t but the readers believe it does. At any rate, there lies its grandeur. There are other notions possibly less appealing to the modern reader, such as the underlying criticism of the 19^th century petty-bourgeoisie, which, unless you are into history (as I am), or you really like politics (as I do) kind of seems to carry little weight on the reasons why a 21^st century reader might relate to the book. So, what does really stand out? Yes, exactly, the person whose travails and miseries embody the most profound philosophical reflections (whether those of Flaubert or those of the readers), Her, the lady: Emma Bovary.

Even though Flaubert famously said “I am Madame Bovary”, evidence leads to think that he did not really mean it. It has been pointed out that Flaubert depicts his heroine with a certain degree of scornfulness. If this is the case, then, the book’s correct interpretation would be not so much that an endless feeling of dissatisfaction is connatural to the human being (which is, by the way, an argument held by theology to introduce the idea that we all innately feel God’s absence), which is in turn lived as a drama, but, quite the opposite, to ridicule such feeling and to look down on it as whimsical and selfish. There is certainly enough in the book to support such idea: thus, Emma’s careless handling of her daughter and her very incapacity to appreciate Charles’ honest and sincere love for her. Her longing for romantic love is not admirable; it is, if any, quixotic in the worst way.

If this is the case, the book reads as quite pessimistic, at least nowadays, in the era of new-age beliefs that if you want something really hard you can get it (and, mind you, I have not said that this is not true in a way). But, this would be doing little justice to the book, simply because Emma does get what she wants: her tragedy is in fact not to be able to find happiness once she has reached the place where she thought she would find it. Are we thus to think that happiness is an illusion? Is Emma’s case pathological? Do we all carry a little Emma inside use whispering in our ears from time to time that we are not really happy and that at some point we gave up our dreams? Is suicide an act of cowardice or, on the other hand, the only consistent and truthful choice, the only way out of a humiliating surrender? And, even more, are those people who can’t live without posting on Facebook photographs of their great and adventurous holidays, while one can read the thirst for attention in their eyes, no more than little Emma Bovaries? Would have Facebook, had it existed in the 19^th century, prevented Emma from doing what she did in the end, poor thing?

There are two levels of interpretation: one, whether we can achieve what we desire and, two, whether achieving it does actually arouse in us feelings of fulfilment and realisation. And here is where religion comes in. But Flaubert does not explore this matter beyond Emma going through a phase of religious fervour that, rather than a possible solution to the problem, is shallowly drawn by Flaubert and regarded as an eccentricity more than anything else. I believe that a deeper look into the possibilities open up by this path would have enriched the otherwise book’s eternal value.

But Madame Bovary was surely not intended as a philosophical novel delving into the ultimate needs of the human soul, our longing for a transcendental existence. Maybe my friend Nacho is right when he says that French literature looks for the form and not for the contents and cares for the expression and not for whatever may be expressed. What certainly puzzles me about the book is not so much Flaubert’s treatment of Emma as that of Charles. I must admit that Charles Bovary is simply one of the most ungraspable characters I have ever come across. I don’t know what to make of him: is he aware of the secondary role he plays in his wife’s life? If he is, does he care? He goes on living, putting up with the evident fact that the creature he loves so much does not love him back (and, at times, even manifestly loathes him). He just doesn’t think about it, he doesn’t beat himself up, he doesn’t suffer until pain is simply impossible to ignore, once death and abandonment have come about.

Maybe Charles Bovary is the smartest character in the novel: he is happy so long as life allows it and does not look for trouble, the flipside being that sometimes trouble looks for you and if you live carelessly and don’t foresee it, it will find you. But maybe this is the ultimate teaching: sod it man, I’ll just let go, I won’t worry uselessly about anything, I’ll take whatever life happens to give me, as it comes: maybe Madame Bovary means, in some still to be deciphered language, Carpe Diem.

LA CHUTE (THE FALL), by Albert Camus

I would like to begin this review with an outright statement about Albert Camus: he is an honest bloke. I didn’t meet him, I don’t know if he ever lied, if he cheated on his girlfriends, did something dishonest to make money, or any of those things we normal and still moral beings are bound to do at least once or twice a year. I don’t mean to say that he was a sort of angel come to earth to teach us about existence(ialism), but rather that he is an honest writer in the sense that he gets no pleasure at all from denouncing the ills of modern society or, for that matter, when he deals with that eternal companion of us called suffering. Camus was too sympathetic a person to celebrate human misery or to feel any satisfaction from beign the one opeing our eyes; he was definitely too good a guy to throw the first stone. When I read L’homme révolté I saw the person behind the philosopher, a person sad to admit that the estate born out of the ideology he had embraced so far killed people and honest enough with himself so as to speak out in spite of the enemies he knew he would earn (I am not saying that Camus was totally right here, I am just praising his honesty).

That honest man is still to be found in La chute. Now, honesty doesn’t turn whatever you say into “the truth” or even into something worth hearing. Well, for those who haven’t read the book I will only say it is basically about two men chatting in some dodgy bar in Amsterdam, the word “chatting”  being  in this case quite misleading because it is a monologue, and we know absolutely nothing about the non-speaking man (other than his being a really patient chap). I came across an interesting review in the shape of a dialogue in which this unknown man confesses to his wife that his trip to Amsterdam was a total pain in the neck because some self-important guy kept following him everywhere, talking about his former life in Paris when he was a successful lawyer and a dandy, and about how he had stolen an old painting and got elected as a pope in some concentration camp and a lot of stuff about philosophy and all men being guilty and what have you. I found this review quite funny and, in a way, I sometimes felt like that poor guy whose trip to Amsterdam was spoiled by Camus in disguise.

I wouldn’t say that I didn’t like the book or that I didn’t find anything suggestive or interesting in it, but I certainly struggled to relate to it. I was expecting something dealing with remorse, as I thought that the central episode of the book was the fall of a young woman into the Seine and how the main character failed to help her. This episode is in fact the turning point of our man’s life, but it does acquire an anecdotal dimension as the relation between it and the man’s real fall into the hells of Amsterdam is not as clear as I thought.

Of course, this is not a problem in itself. I guess that the problem is that rather than focusing on one philosophical problem, the book addresses a broad range of different issues that in the end always comes down to one of the most boringly recurrent tags: modern man’s ills. Modern man (and woman, possibly) is selfish, isolated from other beings, hypocritical, indifferent towards violence and injustice, etc… you know, those labels endlessly repeated book after book. That is why I have begun this review by saying that Camus is an honest man, that is, because I believe that he was sincerely concerned with those surely important issues. The difference might be that for millions of human beings those undeniable aspects of modern man (or should I just say “man” and remove the adjective?) are not the only ones that stand out when it comes to “live” within modernity, but also the examples of daily solidarity one sees on a daily basis in big cities, the actions carried out to help others and save them from loneliness and other such examples of caring and compassion. Evilness, indifference and loneliness are still a choice, probably as much as they have always been.

Now, of course, we have to deal with the fact that we do not live in a perfect world and also with that ultimate apparent contradiction, that we experience everything as individuals, but live in a society and a world beyond us and our experience. That makes possible to be hypocritical and selfish, to get angry and to fall into the hells desperation and suffering, because there is a difference between the reality as represented (ideals) and the reality as felt. The book’s only character, who has always prided himself on being on the side of justice, discovers that he was not really honest and that he was not only judgmental as most of his fellow human beings are, but also judged and punished (turned into a penitent).

There is a possible solution which makes me think of that anecdote attributed to Hobbes: he was known to have fathered a social theory in which individualism was the cornerstone. Once, after having given some money to a beggar someone brought to his attention that he was capable of altruism, to which Hobbes apparently replied that the ultimate aim of such act of generosity was not to relief the beggar’s suffering, but to feel better. So, why should we worry whether our generosity is genuine or not, if in the end the beggar gets his alms? Is not a society composed by an army of individuals pursuing their own happiness as good as any other? True, this too much of a mechanistic example of social engineering and the last thing I would like is to be linked to Bentham’s utilitarianism.

La chute is not properly a novel, at least not formally. There are no characters and there is not plot. Certainly, there is a story but that is not enough to make up a novel, for it is rather a confession which, surely, implies a number of events chronologically ordered. Some say that it is Camus’ own confession; I don’t know about that. Whatever the case, and whatever the impression one may get from it, it is certainly one thing: an example of an intellectually and emotionally honest piece of writing.    

LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS, by Alain Robbe-Grillet

I have been lazy as hell these past days; well, lazy and also practising my French, but I must say that unfortunately I refer to the language. I am not sure to what extent this joke relies on a cultural reference to be missed by those who don’t speak Spanish, but, anyway, it is sexual and consequently it is funny even if you don’t get it. This in turn begs the question of whether anyone who speaks Spanish does actually read my blog: if anyone does, I will politely ask him or her to leave a comment rating my joke, which in turn begs the question of whether a joke can be rated by measuring its quality on a numeric scale and, since I am asking so many questions, I can beautifully divert the whole thing, the pretext having been found, towards a domain born to question, namely, the nouvel roman, that is, the French literary movement within which this novel and its perpetrator must be ranked, thus bringing literary and humoristic ranks together for once and for ever.

Even though the irony of it is quite cheap, let me address this matter of questions and literature with a question: why saying “questioning domain” when speaking about the nouvel roman? Because like pretty much all artistic movements in the 20^th century the raison d’être of this new way of approaching the art of writing aimed at questioning the validity of the methods used during the 19^th century in terms of the artistic representation of the world, this being, furthermore, a characteristic of the 20^th century itself, I mean, to question everything, to doubt of everything and, if necessary, to destroy rather than to construct. The sharp, well defined and easily recognisable forms of the 19^th century’s imaginary worlds give way to the blurred, distorted and subjective worlds of the 20^th century; imaginary worlds as well, but much more aware of their fictional condition and for that matter much more fragile and insecure.

Thus, the nouvel roman wants to get rid of the preconceived plot and the ready-made characters that, like a dictator, govern with an iron hand the 19^th century novel. Also, if on the bargain it can at least reshape space and time that would be quite convenient, because the 1950s where simply too complex and at the same time too ephemeral to be contained within those old-fashioned conventions called objective space and linear time. As already pointed out, the great enemy to be defeated was the 19^th century novel: to be more exact, not the novels written in the 19^th century, whose brilliancy and suitability for their times no one would even dare to question, but the tendency of the novel itself, as a cultural artefact, to mimic their methodology.

The consequence of this sort of intellectual approach to the idea of a novel that may verily account for our modern times is a work like La maison de rendez-vous. I am not going to bother you with the plot, for two very simple reasons, the second of which is barely debatable: first of all, because that is never the point of my reviews and, secondly, because there is no such a thing as a plot in this novel. Don’t believe me? Read the book and tell me what the hell it is about. Of course, you can roughly describe things happening and themes and put them together and there you have a sort of plot, but this will be doing little justice to what I suppose were Robbe-Grillet intentions.

The world of this book is not subjugated by the linear constrains that govern the traditional novel; events that had supposedly provoked other events are in turn provoked by the events they initially provoked (yes, it makes sense), the character’s identities are by no means well defined other than by a few constant features, the identity of the narrator is utterly unknown to the extent that if shifts, in the middle of a paragraph, from the apparently omnipresent narrator often mistaken with the writer himself, to the character whose actions have been described until that moment.

In short, it is a fluid world but not one, conversely, driven by chance, because it is the reader the only one who does not seem to be at ease in this game. The characters, on their side, do not detect this particular state of things; it seems that for them everything unfolds in accordance to the most sensible logic. But, then again, they are not the rendering of the common human being, and neither does the time that rules over them behave in the way it does in our ordinary lives: one of the most outstanding aspects of the style of the narrative is that Robbe-Grillet freezes some apparently trivial scenes, which will occur several times and will thus be described again, always in a suggestive manner which manages to imprint some sort of aesthetic beauty in the anecdotal.

But this world works because it is made of words. I mean by this that, in spite of my admiring the book and, above all, having honestly found in it a very genuine form of aesthetic pleasure, the doubt still remains of whether this small and uncanny universe, for all its references to very human themes like sex, drugs, sodomy and murder, is strong enough to stand on its two legs if confronted with the iron certitude and substantiality of an universe designed in the fashion of the traditional novel. To address this matter from a different perspective, I think that it is perfectly admissible to inquire whether the aesthetic alternatives emerged as a clear response to and thus as an opposition to old paradigms are as strong as those defied paradigms.

The nouvel roman may be a very sophisticated product whose aim is, of course, not only and probably not even to defeat the traditional novel, but rather to redo it in order to render it more adjusted to the changing sensibilities and perceptions of reality of a given period. This is definitely worth doing and, I must say again, it can give birth to fine books like La maison de rendez-vous. But the reality is that, whereas so many 20^th century movements have lived intensely but died young, the old 19^th century ways stay alive, which I believe to be even more the case when it comes to literature: Balzac and Zola, the guys against whom Robbe-Grillet stands, keep being read and being imitated by the thousands; the nouvel roman is, I fear, a rarity only appreciated by a few. And, in keeping with a point of view already held in another review, maybe it is not the mass audience that is to be blamed; maybe, the 19^th century novel still appeals to many readers and tells them more about their world than other experiments, however well executed and suggestive they may be.

I know that the “fascist critic”, may his soul rest in peace, would have scorned me for being so feeble and admitting that maybe the average reader is entitled to his or her taste and prefer a contemporary pastiche to a proper intellectual effort. What can I do, I am a socialist. I believe, though, that literature is not an entertainment and that its greatness lies in being an alternative to academic disciplines in the way we approach reality and make sense of it. Literature must be an intellectual activity, an exploration, an enquiry over the nature of the world we leave in and the way we perceive and construct it. Otherwise, its very existence would be meaningless. Of course, one thing is to condemn a moral system and a completely different task is to build a new one from scratch. Anyway, no one is going to look down on Nietzsche for his failure. Likewise, let me pay homage Robbe-Grillet in this my humble blog, I will not raise my voice against you, my friend, because you have also waged your own war and, alas, you may have not come out victorious, but you fought many a beautiful battle.

LA PEAU DE CHAGRIN (THE MAGIC SKIN), by Honoré de Balzac

What I have here to deal with is not peanuts my lovelies. It is not my aim to repeat what has been written and said about the conception and classification of book that counts among the classics of world literature. It will suffice to mention in passing that it is one of the myriad of novels that, together, shape what was realized of that huge project called La comédie humaine, a realistic portrait of the mores and human types of the France of the first half of the 19^th century: its rebels, politicians and fishmongers, the bourgeoisie and workers, men and women of all sorts. Let’s hastily finish this brief introduction by saying that the book enjoys the privilege of having opened one of the three sections under which Balzac structured his novelistic world, that of “philosophic studies”.

By virtue of the labelling the book, I have managed to find my way within the maze of thoughts which assailed me during the reading and which I did not even bother to note down, out of sheer laziness, to prevent their being lost in eternal oblivion. Ah, those lost thoughts: we must grasp them and put them together into a discourse; that is the use of a narrative, to turn those fussy and chaotic ideas into a bunch of ready-made concepts to which we can resort when needed. So if someone, for example, inquires about my opinion on La Peau de chagrin, I know what to say, instead of acknowledging that I have forgotten most of it or, at best, that what survives is a mess of sensations, suggestions, vaguely formed ideas and recreations with no sense whatsoever. Luckily the Almighty invented literary critics and they came to rescue me in spite of my laziness by providing the key words around which, why not, this review will pivot: realism and philosophy.

Realism, that aesthetic alternative to the extremes and immoderations of Romanticism, a movement embodied by Balzac and Stendhal along with that good looking rascal, Gustave Courbet. Its precepts are more or less condensed in the following sentence: “I will paint (or describe) an angel when I see one”. The idea is to be faithful and loyal to reality as we perceive it and to recreate social ambiences and characters avoiding the emotional excesses of Romanticism, so far as possible. The problems being many, I will point at the main objection, namely, that which springs from the unavoidable truth that, whatever reality is, each individual perceives it subjectively and thus differently. Here it must be assumed that to describe reality is in itself a subjective act only limited by the necessity to express oneself using metaphors understandable to the readers; Balzac’s descriptions, at least in this book, are often made up of enumerations and analogies and, in certain passages, the use gives way to the abuse to the extent that all contact with the reality described is lost and the reader feels totally submerged in the writer’s mind, a subjective world at that.

Two other issues are at stake, namely, what’s the role within realism of the unlikely, the spiritual and even the supernatural? And, is a mere description of reality a tacit approval of the statu quo? The first of these issues can perfectly be addressed in La Peau de chagrin because the very name of the book is that of a mysterious piece of leather, or something of the sort, powerful enough to grant the wishes of its possessor. Unfortunately, as the traditional story goes and the monkey’s paw of the Simpsons will teach you (by the way, I know that it is based on a tale by W. W. Jacobs but I wanted to introduce some elements of “pop culture” into the review), as that story will teach you, all granted wishes bring a curse along with them. It doesn’t get more fantastic than that, I might say, but this aspect of the book is dealt with by labelling all that concerns it as oriental: the theme is oriental and the skin is probably that of an onager, an Asian donkey, thus placing the supernatural in the fringes of reality, in the world of the exotic, where either the rules that govern us may occasionally be violated or, perhaps, different rules apply. Certainly, in that episode of the book in which all the inventions of modern technology fail to destroy the skin, Balzac tacitly acknowledges that there is a more powerful reality, under or above that in which we live. But what matters is that the world in which that fictional element is introduced appears to us as recognizable and functional, that is, as realistic. The supernatural is only an excuse to introduce more serious matters.

This brings me to the second issue and tangentially also to the philosophical aspects of the book: are we dealing with a justification of the French society (should I say the Parisian society) of the 1830s. By no means, and this is so to the extent that some critics have gone so far so as to state that La Peau de chagrin may be read as a pre-Marxist criticism of the decadent world that emerged from the failed revolution of 1830, so beautifully depicted in Les misérables. Raphaël de Valentin’s obsession with grandeur and social success may easily be interpreted as a denunciation of the values of the bourgeoisie, although there is no depiction of the impoverished masses to serve as the counterpoint of that much wealth wasted in balls and orgies. Feodora, the embodiment of society and the lady our hero falls irremediably in love with, has been unmistakably portrayed so as to come across as egotistic and somehow hypocritical. At last, Mr. Valentin finds real love in the shape of a young and lovely lady, Paulina, who happens to become absurdly rich but manages to keep an innocent and pure heart. She is, of course, beautiful as hell and everyone thinks her irresistible, as well as Raphaël, whom all the girls love but Feodora. This is, by the way, a cliché that appears often in 19^th century novels. Especially when it comes to beauty, some authors don’t shy away from presenting young lasses and lads as irresistible, thus turning their love into a spectacle to be talked about and envied as everyone turns their eyes towards the happy couple when they show up at the opera.

Although in my opinion there is not clear political stance in the book, Balzac addresses in a modern fashion the old idea that the pleasures of society are not only frivolous but potentially dangerous as they may lead to a poisonous egotism: Raphaël is the victim in spite of his being blessed by the authentic love, which triumphs in the domestic scenes between him and Paulina, contrasting with that public love represented by Feodora, who, moreover, confesses herself incapable of loving anyone. However, in the end, egotism triumphs over all other feelings.

Is La Peau de chagrin a pessimistic book? Insofar as it may deal with social issues like injustice or the uneven distribution of wealth and power, I don’t think those matters are treated extensively enough to be conclusive. Insofar as it deals with the ancient struggle between pleasure and the destruction it brings along, I would not say so. Certainly, Raphaël is damned and driven to destruction. Authentic love does not seem powerful enough to save him because he is a monomaniac and he has found it when already too far into his way to the promised abyss. On the other hand, it is not clear to me that Raphaël is totally responsible of his destiny, since there was no escape from the very moment the skin became his possession. There is room, thus, for a different interpretation: that skin is as mysterious as our own skin, as existence itself, unexplained and miraculous; but it is also a curse, that of death. Whether we know it or not, we are an ass in its way to the slaughterhouse. Raphaël is granted a wish certainly not denied to us neither, the carpe diem of a serene life. Uncontrolled desire and its counterpart, obsessive hatred or for that matter denial, only accelerate our consumption into nothingness.

LES MOTS (THE WORDS), by Jean-Paul Sartre

I must start this review, I do in fact feel obliged to start this review, by mentioning that a certain person whose avatar’s name is Krista, admitted in a review published in Goodreads back in 2008 that, although she did not enjoy Les Mots (The Words in English) as much as a smarter person might have done, the book caused in her a deep impression nonetheless, because she could not help but fearing that her little child, an avid reader like Sartre, will, and I am now quoting her “have an insane interior life like Sartre did. And a wall-eye (sic.).” She says that she is not very smart; well, I think that she is a genius. Bad reviews are always, always, the most amusing to read and often the most revealing. I love them (such a shame that I am a nice guy).

Certainly, my little ones, Sartre (nicknamed the “arch-whiner” by some other hilarious reviewer) was from the most tender years of his infancy, a bookworm. You know what I am talking about, the typical kid who hasn’t got many friends and no one really wants to play with him in the park because he is weak and feeble and even a bit girlish, and of course he grows up being aware that the other kids are stronger and more athletic, which in turn pushes him to seek refuge in other people’s lives, in books that stimulate his imagination and in the comfort of an imaginary world where real life is not so likely to hurt him. You know, in short, the typical infancy of a future literary success, only that those who spent their infancy locked in their rooms, surrounded by books and afraid of facing real life but, unlike Sartre, did not get to see any of their works published and died unknown, had the same infancy but, unlike the myth would have it, did not get anywhere. Sartre, the myth, is one, the other unhappy children, are thousands.

To be honest, the book is not only about Sartre’s unhappy childhood. Actually, although apparently at some point he is supposed to state that he hates his childhood (I don’t remember reading such a thing) the impression you get is that he was happy among his paper friends and that he somehow knew that literature and the world of knowledge and human experience transmitted through the written word was the world in which he had been chosen to dwell for the rest of this life (yes, he seems to believe that he was chosen rather than he chose it). Ten years old Sartre already knew that he was destined to become a writer, that no other interest or event would deviate him from this path to intellectualness. Obviously, he does not depict himself as little prodigy undeniably heading towards literary stardom; doubts assaulted him as they may and often he seems to be making an effort to belittle his incipient intellectual abilities, perhaps following a natural impulse to avoid showing off too much. He even admits that in a couple of occasions he played the smart kid before his relatives and teachers only to get in return for his pretended cleverness a reprimand with a humbling message: literature is superfluous when it is not honest.

The fears that would supposedly breed Sartre’s thinking (and I say supposedly because he does not openly link his infancy with his future intellectual tribulations), are there already, harassing the poor boy and not letting him sleep well but also shaping him and preparing him to embrace future ideas and ideologies (Marxism, maybe). Death and God are two of the most annoying fellows he had to deal with in those days; Love, the third member of this trilogy of well-known bullies, doesn’t seem to have bothered him much in those days (we all know, however, that he was meant to become an open-minded lover). God and Sartre were playmates (and here, please, don’t heed your nasty minds, even though the very idea is quite comical). Sartre would listen to God and they got on well, but then he started to grow up and could not bear His demands of admiration, and it got to a point where he could simply not care about Him anymore. Yes, Sartre still wants to be friends with God and would like to go for a drink together and chat about the old good times, but often He is nowhere to be seen and he ends up forgetting Him.

Death is altogether a different matter. She is always there, she is persistent, and her presence is very physical. Let’s not forget anyway that Death is the one that will take us away but also the one under whose power is to decide at what point the narrative we are will come to an end and the final judgement on our deeds will begin. And I am not talking about our moral behaviour, but about the character, the idea about us that is left behind when the real human being, less superfluous than an idea or a character, does not exist anymore. Little Sartre was mostly concerned about this second aspect of Death’s undertakings. Knowing as he knew that he was bound to spend his life writing, he brooded about the idea of dead-Sartre-the-literate when he was still living-Sartre-the-bookworm-kid. He acknowledges daydreaming about being the author of an unpublished book, which is all of a sudden discovered by some publisher and becomes an object of praise and admiration, while the whereabouts of that mysterious Sartre who wrote it remain unknown. In a sort of funny episode of that fantasy he overhears in some café a woman confessing to her friends that she would love to marry that Sartre who has written such a marvellous book. He gives her a sad smile and goes away, exactly what Death in the most romantic of her moods would have suggested.

Apart from intellectual amusements, there is the real stuff behind: nostalgia. Sartre is not so full of himself so as to forget completely that he is supposed to be writing about a boy and not about a fifty something years old philosopher remembering how words made him what he is, even though this is the purpose of the book. Not that Sartre acknowledges nostalgia as an element to take into account, but it sneaks in through the choppy portraits Sartre makes of his grandparents and his mother, as well as in the excitement he recalls feeling when mum would take him to the banks of the Seine to buy books, or to the cinema, or to the Luxemburg Gardens. Nostalgia is present in the accounts he makes of the books of adventures he loved so much, in the memories of evenings spent in his room entranced by the charm of a story, in the dim light of the library, in the smells, the habits and the small games he used to plays with those adults that the reader may take for granted that died long ago.

I guess that there is something of that little Sartre in all of us who discovered, still in our infancy, that reading could be exciting and fun; all of us had also our “philosophical concerns”, and possibly all can recall staring at a shelve full of books at home or at a book shop, trying to have a glimpse of the worlds hidden in those books by reading the title and looking at the pictures in the cover. That feeling of “amazement”, to put it  somehow, is at its purest when the World is still new and fresh and living has not turn it into a fractal, a repetition of experiences and feeling that wears out somehow its appeal and enchantment. Possibly all of us can recall discovering aspects of about life that we did not like, that frightened or saddened us, and some of us have ever since been looking for a solution to those unhappy discoveries. I am pretty sure that the memory that will linger in my mind of Les Mots is that feeling revisited of the first approach to the mysteries concealed by literature, only to be revealed to those patient enough, or maybe curious enough, to submerge themselves into the pages of a book. This feeling cannot be detached from the sensations that render it real. All this said, I don’t want to forget one last thing: unlike what I expected, only two photos of Sartre came up when I entered “ugly philosphers” in Google Images, and none of Habermas… strange, isn’t it?

METROLAND, by Julian Barnes

It seems to me that Julian Barnes is one of those writers who manage to please all sort of readers, from those who regard themselves as demanding connoisseurs to those who get easily bored if they don’t get hooked by the plot, or the characters are too bland or too hateful. Maybe the key of such success is that Barnes gives you a bit of everything but never excessively (this being said under the assumption that nowadays readers are probably less patient than they were thirty or forty years ago, let alone in the nineteenth century). As far as I know most of his books are short, the characters are like many people you encounter in normal life, neither too evil nor too good, only normal human beings whose concerns, anxieties and hopes most people can understand; the plots flow smoothly enough so as to make you feel like if you were being carried by the waters of a river while at the same time enjoying the landscape, and all the while being fed spoon fools of “philosophy” but a bit watered down to get rid of any bitterness and not so often to avoid spoiling your enjoyment.

I must say that, having read three of his books, I don’t quite count myself among his most ardent fans. The formula doesn’t work with me, or at least not completely: I see what is lacking; there is too much mildness; the “philosophy” is a snack rather than a proper meal, a number of witticisms, remarks and observations that, however suggestive, do not make up a whole discourse. It may be that, as often happens to me, I have missed the discourse altogether.

For such a short book, it took me a while to finish Metroland. Although, like the two protagonists of the book, I also believed myself a sort of intellectual when a teenager and rejoiced in aesthetical (rather than political) demonstrations against the establishment or the bourgeoisie or the people who took life too seriously or whatever, I didn’t really saw myself mirrored in those two kiddos whose knowledge and appreciation of French sixteenth century theatre and nineteen century poetry is, I must admit, admirable. Their little intellectual games and diversions are fun and quite clever and, if they have been invented by Barnes, I must say in all honesty that his imagination is quite impressive. This is probably what stunned me the most of this two lads and the world they built around them: their powerful imagination, their capacity to make the inherited culture products of the past their own and to use them in different ways, to shock, if not to destroy, the universe of self-deception which adulthood forces you to inhabit, often in spite of yourself.

But that is also the problem I observed in the book: after living the bohemian life in Paris (although really not doing much beyond losing his virginity), one of those two teenagers, the narrator and thus the one whose perspective the reader will logically tend to take for that of the writer (and this is again a problem with novels: who speaks on behalf of who?), enters placidly into that universe of grown-ups, settles down, gets married and finds a job intellectualish enough so as not to betray his principles altogether. He allows the gap that had already begun to separate him from his childhood’s best friend to widen until it gets to a point where they don’t speak the same language: our protagonist struggles but manages to dismiss those unwelcome thoughts that he might have done something grander with his life, whereas his friend, still keen on becoming a true poet, seems to be losing an imaginary war on behalf of the no less imaginary values that art is supposed to embody. He has published a book of poems but no one reads him; no one really heeds him.

So what is Barnes trying to tell us, if anything? I am not sure, really. Maybe that an ordinary life is not necessarily devoid of the pleasures of intellectual activity and, even more, that when such dedication to intellectual pursuits becomes a pose it loses its raison d’être; or maybe that it is precisely in ordinary life that the facts and events and realities and materials that make up genuine philosophy are to be found. This may strike more than one reader as a bit too complacent, and it may be argued that to think out of the box you must leave its confortable insides and get wet under the rain. Barnes is an observer of the facts of life, and he’s got a sharp eye, which is good, but he is too careful not to touch the object under the microscope. The pattern is very similar, as far as I remember, in A Sense of an Ending (apart from the ending itself, quite open to interpretation in my opinion) and in Staring at the Sun: people living normal lives and making certainly interesting discoveries about the complexities of normal lives. Maybe that is the reason why most readers (in the end subject to “normal” lives most of them) seem to enjoy his books. But we also need abnormal lives, we need writers more willing to stir the object under analysis and to trigger a reaction, to explore beyond what happens and open a door into what may happen. Maybe I need them because my life is way too normal.