Reading French Novels With Maman

I just wrote my friend in Marseille an email. He could be elsewhere by now, but he always gets his email at the same address, and replies in due course.

I told him how I had been reading some French novels later, in translation and the original, and wanted to share my thoughts with him.

I told him I'd gotten ahold of a copy of The Camp of the Saints (translation from the French), by Jean Raspail, written in 1973. It was forbidden novel during last winter, that everyone was talking about it. But it was out of print, and used copies on Amazon going for several hundred bucks. Then someone put out a new cheap trade paperback edition for fifteen bucks and I scooped it up. I gave it a try. Très lourd, I told my friend in my email. Very heavy.

I decided I needed some lighter fare, something to pick my spirits up, but also something in the same line of artistic inquiry, namely science fiction, so I ordered a copy of Les Planètes des singes by Pierre Boulle, written ten years earlier in 1963. Amazing that within five years this earlier book had already become a famous Hollywood sci-fi movie with one of the most iconic scenes of all time.

My late father probably didn't even hear of Raspail, but no doubt he read Boulle's novel in translation. Certainly he scooped up all the classic science fiction back then. He was a voracious reader to the end of his life, and he was one of those men of that generation who could provide a deep background to science fiction literature as it evolved over that time period.

Boulle turned out to be a much easier read. It's short, and the French is easy for me to read, with use of a dictionary maybe once a paragraph so far. It differs substantially from the movie adaptation in the early chapters, which are in the form of a framing story that doesn't exist in the movie, that of two oisifs (loafers), Jinn and Phyllis who are travelers in a bubble-like spaceship and who push their journeys to the ends of the traveled realms of space, hoisted on the solar winds. In other words they are the far distant versions of the trendy travelers of today who seek out the most obscure experiences, always outrunning the ennui, with a sense of joy in the momentum of pushing the envelope of travel.

Then they find something floating in space...

Like I said, a fun read so far. I got the chance to read parts of it with mom when I was back in Colorado a couple weeks back. I just started reading from the beginning outloud in her living room. She was able to understand most of it, with the help of my interruptions of my own narration to explain certain words, many of which were the ones I had had to look up myself.

We got all the way up to Chapter 2, which begins the inner story, of Ulysse Mérou...