This surreslistic novel is one of the most famous works of French author Boris Vian, of those that he first published under his real name. It also made it on many school reading lists and it actually seems to be quite popular in its country of origin – I definitely understand why.

Writing Mood Indigo Boris Vian took a tragic, though altogether rather banal story of love and friendship and shaped it with great skill into a surrealistic masterpiece. Unlike other authors who tried the same he succeeded in producing a novel that doesn't need lots of explanations to be accessible even to a less practiced reader. I loved the bizarre images echoing the basic action and creating an amazingly vivid atmosphere. The word play in the French original is a particular treat too. And then there are the constant references to music, especially Duke Ellington’s Jazz standard Mood Indigo that accounts for the most often used title of the English edition.

To know more about this wonderful novel, be invited to click here to read my long review on my main book blog Edith's Miscellany!

This charming French novel first published in 2006 happens to be one of my favourites of all time. It's imbued with philosophy from beginning to end and everything revolves around the meaning of life from the point of view of a well-read French concierge who hides behind the façade of a typical speciman of her profession and a twelve-year-old bourgeois who feels disgusted by the empty life to which she seems doomed by birth. It's only thanks to the influence of a Japanese business man who moves into the house that the concierge gradually learns to live her true self and makes friends. A happy end announces itself page by page, but it isn't to be.

If you'd like to learn more about this novel, I invite you to read a long review here on my main book blog Edith's Miscellany.

For Europeans the desert is an intriguing place – very much like the High Seas, the Polar Regions and Outer Space. The Nobel laureate in literature of 2008, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, dedicated one of his novels to the magic of the desert.

The impressive scenes of Desert are Morocco or Western Sahara and Marseille, France, alternately in 1909/10 and in modern times. The two plot lines are interlaced and linked in various ways. One such connection is the desert itself and the deep love for it which share the Tuareg teenager Nour and the poor orphan girl Lalla Hawa although about sixty years separate their stories. Another common point is the Blue Man, a wonder-working man of the Tuareg people and maternal ancestor of Lalla Hawa.

The stories of Nour and Lalla breathe the spirit of the Desert. They move about in a world of beauty and frugality, of secret and magic, of life and death which J.-M. G. Le Clézio describes in countless poetic pictures. The protagonists are fully aware of their surroundings and see things that nobody else, above all no European, might notice or even appreciate.

For the full review please click here to go to my blog Edith’s Miscellany.

Certain book titles attract some people, while they chase away others – The Cat by Colette is such a one. It’s set in Paris in the 1930s and although a cat, more precisely a three-year-old Chartreux cat called Saha, plays a central role in it, the short classical novel couldn’t be less close to a fable or a fairy tale than it is.

The main protagonists of The Cat are Alain and Camille, a young couple about to get married. Alain is an introverted twenty-four-year-old bourgeois who loves his carefree life at his mother’s house, his habits and his cat Saha. Camille, on the other hand, is a bold and energetic young woman of nineteen who wants her husband to completely belong to her alone and to share her desires. Between them stands Saha, the purring link to Alain’s solitary past and the furry obstacle to the common future.

For the full review please click here to go directly to my post on Edith’s Miscellany.

Gigi & The Cat - Colette 

Abridged version of my review posted on Edith’s Miscellany on 19 September 2013

Russia is a huge country with a rich history. Lamentably, it has also been a history of recurring violence. Outside Russia little is known today of the forerunners of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and the victims on either side. The Courilof Affair by Irène Némirovsky is a fictitious novel based on real events of Russian history.

In 1931 the first-person narrator León M. feels the urge to write down the true account of a fatal bomb attack in St. Petersburg in which he was involved in 1903. When he is twenty-two, the revolutionary committee to which his mother belonged until her death charges him with the liquidation of Valerian Alexandrovitch Courilof, the Minister of Education under the last Russian Tsar Nikolai II. In St. Petersburg León M. lives under the name of Marcel Legrand, a doctor of medicine from Geneva, and goes into service with Courilof for the summer. The more he knows about the real Courilof the more he perceives him as a human being. He instructed assassin is plunged into an inner conflict about his task, but there are still a few months left to sort things out.

Irène Némirovsky managed to write the invented autobiography of a political assassin in tsarist Russia without demonizing or canonizing anybody along the way. The first-person narrator unfolds the whole story in the matter-of-fact language of someone who has long done with the past. The depicted characters are human beings with strengths and weaknesses like people in the real world around us. They have hopes and fears, they have desires and aversions, they have a conscience and they have a past which moulded them. The atmosphere of tsarist St. Petersburg just after 1900 feels very authentic and the plot which is modelled after history seems very realistic.

All things considered, The Courilof Affair by Irène Némirovsky has been an interesting and rewarding read. She was a great author. How many more wonderful novels could she have finished, hadn’t she been deported to Auschwitz by the blind followers of fanatics and hadn’t she died a senseless death in the concentration camp like too many others.

For the full review please click here to go to my blog Edith’s Miscellany.