Category: BookBlast® France

BookBlast® connecting cultures, bridging worlds

Review | Magritte for our time | Selected Writings | Alma Books

“Style is not an end in itself: it is a result,” René Magritte.

 A thinker, Magritte was in permanent revolution against banality and crass assumptions. He communicated his ideas through paintings, which he called “visible thoughts,” upending society’s conventions. He united the familiar in unexpected ways to create what is unfamiliar and often disturbing. Famous for playing with words and image, millions of people know his iconic painting of a pipe with the words beneath it, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“this is not a pipe“) — point being the image may be of a pipe, but the pipe is not representative of the image.

 In this brave new world of twenty-first century “post-truth politics” in which image matters to an alarming degree, and words no longer need bear any relation to reality, how everyday language disguises thought; the vagueness and ambiguity of words; and the gap between words and seeing, are hot topics. Déjà vu? Magritte captured the essence of the relationship between words and image over half a century ago. The first-ever publication of his Selected Writings in English by Alma Books is long overdue, and timely.

Continue reading Review | Magritte for our time | Selected Writings | Alma Books

Media Release | The Bohemian Life of Lesley Blanch | Waterstones, Piccadilly, London W1

Join us for an evening celebrating Trailblazing Women of the 20th Century @WaterstonesPicc on publication of the Virago paperback of Lesley Blanch’s posthumous memoirs, On The Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life.

Georgia de Chamberet & Anne Sebba will discuss the bohemian life of Lesley Blanch at Waterstones, Piccadilly, London W1, Thursday 12 January, 7pm.

This event is free, but please reserve your place by email:  piccadilly@waterstones.com

Editor, translator and literary consultant, Georgia de Chamberet founded BookBlast™ writing agency in 1997. She is Lesley Blanch’s god-daughter.

Daily Telegraph: This volume, edited with affection and grace by de Chamberet, is a deliciously readable monument to a writer who combined a steely resilience and capacity for hard work with an elegant frivolity and a voracious appetite for love, beauty and adventure.

Continue reading Media Release | The Bohemian Life of Lesley Blanch | Waterstones, Piccadilly, London W1

Interview | Jane Aitken, publisher, Gallic & Aardvark

Ebury Street in London’s Belgravia: a quiet, residential, affluent area. The perfect place for a bookshop where readers can enjoy peaceful browsing away from the madding crowd, and dip into some of the best French writing available in English translation. However the Belgravia Books Collective is not just a shop, but also the home of independent publishing success story, Gallic Books. It has been very much on my radar and, at last, I am going to talk to one of the founders.

Jane Aitken and Pilar Webb met when they were both working at Random House children’s, and they went on to co-found Gallic Books in 2006. Headliners Muriel Barbery (trs. Alison Anderson), Antoine Laurain (trs. Emily Boyce & Jane Aitken), Michel Déon (trs. Julian Evans) and Yasmina Khadra (trs. Howard Curtis), have an enthusiastic following among discerning British readers who relish a good, well-written read from foreign shores. 

Continue reading Interview | Jane Aitken, publisher, Gallic & Aardvark

Review | Lucien d’Azay: A French Man of Letters

Lucien d’Azay is a novelist, essayist and translator whose work has been published by Éditions Climats, Éditions Les Belles Lettres, Éditions Sortilèges and La Table Ronde. He divides his time between Paris and Venice.

Once upon a time in the West, marriage was a strategic alliance between families, and it was often between first and second cousins. Polygamy was common until the Church prevailed and monogamy became the status quo, although men enjoyed extramarital affairs. Only in the 19th century did love get a look in; and in the 20th the idea of marriage being a partnership of equals took hold.

Divorce rates around the world have rocketed over the last few decades and in the UK more than a third of people are single, or have never married. Yet the happily married couple is still  idealised. It is the domestic holy grail; the stuff of fantasy. ‘Brangelina’, ‘Kimye’, and ‘Billary’ are regular red-top fodder on to which we can transfer our dreams and desires, envy and  self-righteous outrage, all depending . . . Image, image, image – but what really lies behind?

A happy marriage is a mirage, a miracle, or, according to Lucien d’Azay, a masterpiece. Two very different perspectives of marriage, desire and fantasy are offered to us, in his beautifully-written narratives, Sonia Stock and Ashley & Gilda. I just hope a canny British publisher picks them up and translates them into English, so that they can be savoured by readers on this side of the Channel.

Continue reading Review | Lucien d’Azay: A French Man of Letters

BookBlast® Archive | What Makes a European? Jane McLoughlin | The Observer, 1971

Dunstan Curtis – DSC, VC, CdeG, CBE – fought during the War to destroy Fascism and preserve freedom, and has spent 25 years working for the unity of Europe. English in manner, European in experience, he is perpetually interested in learning “what makes each nationality tick.”

When a strictly traditional British fly fisherman puts grasshoppers on a pin to catch trout à la française, there is more at stake than a compromise over warring conceptions of sport. Here is evidence of a development in homo sapiens – the new European.

If any one man has the right to be called a progenitor of the British European, it is Dunstan Curtis. Not only for his adaptability as a fisherman, but because he has put in more time as a European civil servant since the war than any other Englishman. When he was awarded the CBE on his resignation as deputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, a national newspaper described him then as “one man who has kept a toehold for Britain in Europe”.
 Continue reading BookBlast® Archive | What Makes a European? Jane McLoughlin | The Observer, 1971

Review | Manuel D’Exil, Velibor Čolić | Editions Gallimard

Manuel D’Exil − comment réussir son exil en trente cinq leçons (A Survivor’s Guide to Exile in 35 Chapters) by Velibor Čolić

Both World War I and World War II originated in the Balkans. Central-Eastern Europe is a region that is terra incognita to most Brits. Prime Minister Chamberlain famously remarked about the Czechoslovak crisis in 1938: “How terrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” Dictator Marshal Tito held Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and others in a state of uneasy alliance until his death on 4 May, 1980. Ethnic tensions grew in Yugoslavia and war broke out in 1990. 

The Balkans are once again the crucible of crisis – this time as the main refugee route to northern Europe. Thousands have become trapped in Greece after Macedonia, Croatia and Slovenia closed their frontiers. Continue reading Review | Manuel D’Exil, Velibor Čolić | Editions Gallimard

Review | Arab Jazz, Karim Miské | MacLehose Press

As subdivisions or departments of bigger publishers, imprints break up monolithic companies, give space to individual editors to stamp their list with a defining character and originality, and reassure authors that they are not disappearing into the corporate ether. The MacLehose Press is an independently-minded imprint of Quercus Books, founded by Christopher MacLehose and publishing the very best, often prize-winning, literature from around the world; mainly in translation but with a few outstanding exceptions as English language originals.

“La vie est belle, le destin s’en écarte
Personne ne joue avec les mêmes cartes
Le berceau lève le voile, multiples sont les routes qu’il dévoile
Tant pis, on n’est pas nés sous la même étoile.”
IAM – Nés sous la même étoile [Born Under the Same Star]

Although a thriller, Arab Jazz is really about muddled identities, lives destroyed by religious extremism, and dysfunctional families coexisting in fragile racial harmony in impoverished neighbourhoods. The narrative travels between the ungentrified 19ième arrondissement of  north-east Paris, home of the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket killers, and Brooklyn, with its Sephardic and Hasidic synagogues and kosher diners. Karim Miské’s debut novel excellently translated by Sam Gordon is a good, very ‘real’ read. 

Continue reading Review | Arab Jazz, Karim Miské | MacLehose Press

Interview | François von Hurter, Bitter Lemon Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
With a Greek mother and a Swiss/Austrian father, the bookshelves at home were the reflection of a mad continent. Goethe, Mann, Holderlin rubbing shoulders with Leigh Fermor, Kavafy and Seferis. And many biographies of T.E. Lawrence.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
Loved reading ‘from the start’ but publishing is a second career, begun at age 57.

Has your vision from when you started Bitter Lemon Press 13 years ago changed?
We entered the water gingerly, with a narrow focus on translated crime fiction. We have since diversified into novels written in English, both literary crime and general literary fiction, and also added a non-fiction imprint called Wilmington Square Books. WSB publishes thoughtful and engaging books about culture and society. Continue reading Interview | François von Hurter, Bitter Lemon Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Spotlight | Sex in the nineteenth-century city | Paris, London and the demi-monde

In his planning notes for Nana, the character of which was based on four notorious, pampered prostitutes, Zola describes his novel as being about “a whole society chasing after sex. A pack of hounds following a bitch . . .  The poem of male desire.*”  Nana rises from being a streetwalker to high-class cocotte; her golden tresses and “deadly smile of the man-eater” holding Le Tout Paris in thrall. Zola’s descriptions of her delirious expenditure, rising debts and magnificent, glitzy Hotel Particulier, “which seemed to have been built over an abyss that swallowed up men — along with their worldly possessions, their fortunes, their very names — without leaving even a handful of dust behind them,” foreshadow her vile death rotting in a state of stinking pustulence from smallpox during the last years of the French Second Empire. When it was published the novel was an instant hit, selling nearly 55,000 copies.

In his study of prostitution in Paris published in 1842 — Streetwalkers, Lorettes and Courtesans (Filles, Lorettes et Courtisanes) — Alexandre Dumas shows how going to work on the streets near La Bourse or rue Saint Honoré; on the Grands Boulevards; or in a brothel was more profitable for a lower-class girl than factory work, or shoplifting. Many sold themselves to support their families. Others were servants sacked by their employers, or arrived in the big city from the country having fallen pregnant.
 Continue reading Spotlight | Sex in the nineteenth-century city | Paris, London and the demi-monde

Review | Zola vs. The Victorians, Eileen Horne | MacLehose Press

As subdivisions or departments of bigger publishers, imprints break up monolithic companies, give space to individual editors to stamp their list with a defining character and originality, and reassure authors that they are not disappearing into the corporate ether. The MacLehose Press is an independently-minded imprint of Quercus Books, founded by Christopher MacLehose and publishing the very best, often prize-winning, literature from around the world; mainly in translation but with a few outstanding exceptions as English language originals.

“Morality is not offended by human truth. It needs to know the real world and to make vice itself a source of wisdom. A novel by Sir Walter Scott may well push a highly strung young girl into the arms of a lover; a sincere study of the passions will no doubt horrify a young girl, but at the same time it will teach her about life and give her moral strength.” So wrote Emile Zola in La Tribune on 9 August, 1868.

Zola the Publisher

When Zola was a young employee at the Parisian publisher Hachette, he came across La Cause du Beau Guillaume (1862) by the novelist and art critic Louis Edmond Duranty, an advocate of the Realist, subsequently renamed Naturalist, cause. In the preface to the 1900 edition, Jean Vaudal  writes: “In the gallery of ancestors which Zola gave to Naturalism, he placed the bust of Duranty on the second shelf, just beneath those of Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert. If but one of them were to be granted the Naturalist label, it would be the author of La Cause du Beau Guillaume.”

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt formulated the doctrine of Naturalism, in 1864: “The novel of today is composed from documents, received by word of mouth or taken direct from nature, just as history is composed from written documents. Historians write narratives of the past, novelists narratives of the present.” Continue reading Review | Zola vs. The Victorians, Eileen Horne | MacLehose Press