Belles Lettres & Beaux Rêves

At some point in the recent past, I was able to catch a few minutes of the Diane Rehm show while driving (a rare occurrence since Henry hates NPR in the car and usually starts screaming for me to turn it off after about ten seconds). She had a few ladies on the program talking about a new French novel called The Elegance of the Hedgehog recently published in translation over here. I decided to see if I could get a copy in version originale. It’s been a while since I’ve read a novel in French. I think I read something by Zola on the train during my commuting days (when I worked in DC before Henry was born) so that would have been 2005 or so. I used to edit a newsletter in French, and reading is still pretty easy for me. It does, however, require just a little more mental energy than reading a similar text in my native language, and mental energy is in very short supply these days. But I don’t think I could bring myself to read any kind of French literature in translation. I’d always be wondering what they were really saying…This is why I’ve never read Proust, by the way. I gave it a shot in my twenties but was too distracted to read it in French and unwilling to read it in translation. Maybe I’ll get around too it when the kids go to college.

Anyway, I went to my darling little Lovetown library (where there is, of course, no foreign language section) and asked them to try to get Hedgehog for me through interlibrary loan. They totally (and promptly) came through for me (God I love that place). And its exotic appeal is even greater since it came from Vegas of all places. Now I just have to stay awake to read it.

It’s an interesting story written by a 40 year-old French chick. Written from the perspective of a philosophical concierge in a snooty 16th arrondissement apartment building and the suicidal teenage daughter of some yuppies in one of the flats upstairs. Highly enjoyable, thought provoking etc. and yet I can usually only manage a few pages a night before dozing off. This is pretty much the way of things with any reading material I take to bed these days. Oh well, I suppose the most I can hope for is to get in a few belles-lettres before dropping off into oblivion.