Book Review: Ca ne va pas, Charlie Brown

"Reruns, always reruns," I seem to hear someone grumble. "Aren't you reading any new books lately?"

The answer is that when I agreed to read and review a copy of a manuscript called Lost Books of the Bible I got a little more than I bargained for. I was able to skip some of the full-length books that are printed in "study" and Catholic Bibles, among the Apocrypha. Some other early Christian books that were circulated and admired, 1500 to 2000 years ago, but regretfully deemed not to belong in the New Testament because they conflicted with the canonical books of the Bible...are even longer. I have been reading a full-length book manuscript a day, and they're all going to be bound together and available in bookstores next week, and I want to read and fairly review all of them. The book, originally hand-printed on five scrolls, that I'm reading now, has almost 200 chapters. In the other collection of early Christian literature I own, the "books" were actually letters, printed in between a lot of historical commentary from the editor...I was expecting this forthcoming book to be like that, too, and it's not. Very little contemporary chitchat. Lots of nineteenth century translations from Greek, Hebrew, and Old Slavonic. I'm out of my depth but I've always found that an enjoyable way to learn.

Book Title: Ca ne va pas, Charlie Brown

Author: Charles M. Schultz

Date: 1970

Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston

ISBN: none

Length: pages not numbered; a thin paperback

Quote: "Quand je serai grand, je serai un grand docteur...le Willie Mays de la medecine!"

In 1970, Holt Rinehart & Winston offered three collections of "Peanuts" cartoons with the words translated into French or Spanish. One of these collectors' items was Ca ne va pas, Charlie Brown, translated from You Need Help, Charlie Brown.

What more do you need to know? This book includes such classic "Peanuts" moments as Linus telling Lucy, the would-be psychiatrist, "When your kind have disappeared, thumbs and blankets will last forever" (Quand ton espece aura disparu, les pouces et les couvertures seront toujours la).

Or Linus telling Snoopy, "You can't be happy all the time! There are always ups and downs! That's human...if you know what I mean." (On ne peut pas etre heureux tout le temps. On a toujours des hauts et des bas. C'est humain! Si l'on peut dire.)

Or Charlie Brown scolding Snoopy, "Other dogs jump for joy when their master comes home," and, when Snoopy goes into a ballet routine only a cartoon dog can do, observing, "I missed another good chance to keep my mouth shut" (J'ai encore perdu une occasion de me taire).

The French vocabulary in these cartoons is dead easy; even first-year students should be able to guess any unfamiliar words before looking them up. Classic cartoons are a painless way of learning vocabulary words.

So, this book is recommended to first-year students of French and to "Peanuts" collectors. Because it was a limited edition, it's neither easy to find nor cheap.

Book Review: Une Semaine Agitee

(Reclaimed from Blogjob.)

Title: Une Semaine Agitée

Author: Georges Kolebka

Date: 1983

Publisher: Bayard Presse

ISBN: 2-7009-0081-2

Length: 34 pages

Illustrations: color drawings

Quote: “J’ai cueilli pour vous / des bouquets d’images…”

During “one agitated week,” Carapate the cartoon turtle decides to see the world and make new friends. Her adventures are a whimsical mix of things real turtles don’t do (like housekeeping) and things real turtles can do (like turning over on her back and being unable to get up again without help). Along the way, the book is also padded out with little rhymes and quizzes.

This book is easy enough for high school students taking first-year French, but may be too juvenile to entertain them. It’s really aimed at French-speaking five-year-olds.

Carapate is presumably not a close relative of our box turtles (http://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2015/07/phenology-box-turtles.html), but a European Pond Terrapin (Emys orbicularis, scientific name; tortue boueuse, common name).

This Ukrainian specimen, photographed by George Chernilevsky, might be a distant relative of Carapate. Very distant. Pond terrapins are not great travellers. Adventurous individuals like Carapate might get as far as a kilometer from their home ponds, but females lay their eggs at home. Males are smaller and lighter, can travel further, and have occasionally been found four kilometers from home. Nevertheless, scientists believe pond terrapins can be traced to their home neighborhood by DNA tests. Individuals usually live about fifty years; a few have lived eighty or a hundred years.

More about pond terrapins at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_pond_turtle

If you go to Provence, in France, you can meet pond terrapins and other European chelonian species at a zoo that specializes in chelonians:

http://www.beyond.fr/sites/turtlevillage.html

There’s more to say about my physical copy of the book than there is to say about its contents. I never intended to buy this book. It belonged to a library. I checked it out once, then lost it. Since it’s such a thin paperback that it could easily be lost between or inside bigger picture books, I didn’t even try to find it, in the library or at home, but just paid for it. A few years later it slipped out of a big coffee-table book that belonged to me. Well, so now did Une Semaine Agitee belong to me. Nobody particularly wanted to keep it, so out to the market it went. It’s a thin, flimsy picture book, well worn. I think I let a child take it free of charge.

Then I checked Amazon and realized that this little book for little people might be considered valuable. Note the Amazon information above…there’s a page for Kolebka, but this book isn’t on it. Am I the only bookseller in the United States who’s willing to resell Une Semaine Agitee? Amazon-France and Amazon-Canada list the title, but don’t show a current price. The other U.S. online booksellers don’t list the title.

Does anyone really want a copy of this book? Kolebka is a well respected author who has other novels and picture books in print. I’ve not seen any of them. If you want to encourage a writer by buying Une Semaine Agitee as a Fair Trade Book, let me know, and I’ll look up the current price and availability information.

Posted on October 7, 2015 Categories A Fair Trade Book, French Tags European pond terrapin, terrapin

Book Review: Tu N'en Reviendras Pas Charlie Brown

Happy New Year, Gentle Readers! For those who've resolved to learn more French, here's a book to encourage you.

Title: Tu N'en Reviendras Pas Charlie Brown

Original English: You'll Flip Charlie Brown

Author: Charles M. Schulz

Translator: anonymous

Date: 1965-67 (English), 1972 (French)

Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston

ISBN: 0-03-086658-8

Length: pages not numbered

Illustrations: cartoons on every page

Quote: "Mon probleme est que je ne me...je ne me sens pas sur...Je ne suis pas capable de..."

In the early 1970s, the "Peanuts" comic strip was so popular, and reprints were selling so well in English, that vintage "Peanuts" cartoons were translated into French and Spanish--half a dozen paperback books in each language. All I need to say to U.S. baby-boomer readers about this book is that it exists. For those who don't already know the "Peanuts" cartoon, here are some extra words.

In this collection, Charlie Brown's perfectly normal insecurity and wishy-washiness begin with his approach to the Kite-Eating Tree (l'arbre mangeur de cerfs-volants) and bid for fashionable psychological reassurance from neighbor kid Lucy Van Pelt (Psychiatre 5 sous), who has a "psychiatric help" stand instead of a lemonade stand...

Lucy confused my generation, but then practicing psychiatrists and psychologists were a bit confused, themselves, about the difference between psychiatric and psychological help. Psychiatrists are doctors who are licensed to prescribe treatments. Psychologists are scientists who study the workings of the human mind. In practice competent psychiatrists, like Sigmund Freud, used to spend a lot of time listening to normal people's talk about their lives, dreams, feelings, decision-making processes or indecisive ditherings, etc., before considering any treatments--which was as it should be, and cardiologists, podiatrists, otolaryngologists, etc., should only take a lot of time to find out what's actually going on before they prescribe treatments too. However, when people like Charlie Brown--a very normal middle school boy with whom millions of people identified--benefit from help talking and thinking through things they don't feel sure about, most of us don't need to pay for a psychiatrist's time. Most of us, as Charlie Brown demonstrated to the world, could be paying a neighbor five cents for the same kind of insights we'd get from paying a psychiatrist hundreds of dollars. In the 1960s and 1970s psychiatrists were raking in money for telling people, "That's normal."

"But what should I do?"

"You'll have to make your own decision."

"Oh, doctor, I'm in such a bind, it's giving me headaches, I..."

"So take aspirin and make another appointment for next week. Oh, and if you need help over the weekend, call Dr. Smith...I'll be in Bermuda."

Those pre-HMO days were palmy days indeed for psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists...and any teenager who had successfully talked a half-dozen friends through "crises" could hope to cash in on a career in psychological counselling. (She says, not without a tinge of regret, having joined Psi Chi just as this stream of potential revenue was starting to dry up in a nationwide backlash Against Therapy.) Little Lucy, obviously having more trouble growing up than Charlie Brown but willing to rent out her attention, could reasonably look forward to a long lucrative career.

The rest of the children and animals Charlie Brown knew were as literate, as sensitive, and as confused by contemporary problems, as Charlie Brown was. Even his dog escaped into a fantasy of being a World War I flying ace (l'as de 14-18).

The concept of a demographic "generation gap," designed to explain why the huge "baby-boom generation" group supposedly had more conflict with our parents than previous generations had in their teens, reached the point of absurdity in families where one sibling was born between 1945 and 1965 and another was older or younger. Many people born during the actual baby-boom years had siblings who belonged to the "silent generation" demographic, and by 1967 little Sally Brown was only slightly ahead of a trend (if Sally was five or six years old in 1967 she was a late baby-boomer) when, dissatisfied with Charlie Brown's help, she wailed "I hate your generation" (Je hais ta generation!").

"Identity crises,"which some people always thought were better described as role confusion, was a fashionable topic. Part of the humor of "Peanuts" was that children and dogs weren't supposed to be as much troubled with "identity questions" as teenagers and young adults, and Schulz convinced us that children did suffer from role confusion--and who knew about dogs? Snoopy, the good-natured beagle who sometimes seemed like a Christ figure, not only had a fantasy past life as a military hero, but worried about the doggy behavior problems he didn't have: "Il y a long­temps que je n'ai pas mordu quelqu'un..." (It's a long time since I've bitten anybody) and, just after he'd shown a lack of interest in chasing rabbits, "Je suis heureux...Je ne comprends pas...Qu'est-ce que je fais de bien?" (I'm happy...I don't understand...What good am I doing?"

Anyone who's lived with a dog or cat has probably noticed that our pets like us to smell like them, at least strongly enough for other dogs and cats to know at a sniff whom we belong to. If your pet is allowed in the bathroom, whether or not it's been trained to take its own little bath in its own little basin, you hardly have a chance to dry off before the animal wants to rub its fur against you. Schulz drew it as a joke, but it's probably true that Snoopy feels insulted by the idea that the children wash their hands after touching the dog. "Touched the dog?!" Snoopy chases Sally through the house. "I'm covered in fleas! Yellow fever! I've got leprosy! I'm covered in germs! I'm poison, I'm death! Beware! I'm sick! I'm contaaagious!" When someone comes to rescue Sally from the back of a chair, Snoopy slinks away thinking, "Touched the dog! Good grief!" I've never doubted, from observing their behavior, that all Listening Pets and some ordinary animals feel that way, which is why I've tried to be more specific in explaining to animals, petting them as I shut them out of the kitchen, "I do love your pretty fur...but I don't want fur in my food." Fur on clothing is a lost cause. Deep down, your dog or cat knows that trying to get out of the house without traces of its scent on your clothes is a way of denying your relationship with it. 

Then there's Lucy, for whom women's liberation has nothing to do with paying her own future bills. Her agenda for little Schroeder, practicing on his toy piano, includes "un wagon, une voiture de ville et une de sport..Notre maison coutera $100,000...J'aurai besoin de six manteaux de fourrure, des robes du soir et des tenues pour le ski, beaucoup de bijoux, les parfums rares et une centaine de paires de chaussures. Il nous faudra une piscine olympique, chauffee, des chevaux, un court de tennis, un immense jardin...Au travail, mon gars!" (We'll need a station wagon, a town car, and a sports car...Our house will cost $100,000...I'll need six fur coats, evening gowns, ski outfits, lots of jewelry, rare perfumes and a hundred pairs of shoes. We'll need an Olympic-sized swimming pool, heated, and horses, a tennis court, an immense garden...Get to work, boy!) No wonder Schroeder, age eight or ten or thereabouts, thinks he doesn't want to marry Lucy at all. When she tells him the celebration of Beethoven's birthday involves kissing a friend on the nose, it's almost enough to change his musical loyalty..."provoquer une ruee vers Brahms!"

Lucy's little brother Linus was originally two or three years old when Sally was born, although in the 1970s they'd become primary school classmates. Linus is, however, bright for his age. One strip reprinted in this book shows him pondering which book to read as he eats a bowl of cereal, with choices including Moby Dick, Bleak House, Joseph Andrews, and The Interpreter's Bible (in twelve volumes), at such length that his cereal gets soggy. For Christmas he gets "une nouvelle bicyclette, un tournedisque, un train electrique, de l'argent, des mitaines, un canife, une veste de ski, un jeu "mystere", des jeux de patience, des chemises de sport et un auto de course...Et tu sais ce que j'ai d'autre? Je me sens affreusement COUPABLE!!"  (A new bicycle, a record player, an electric train, money, mittens, a knife, a ski vest, games, shirts, and a (model) racing car...And you know what else? GUILT!")

The Little Red-Haired Girl, to whom Charlie Brown didn't dare to speak because he had such a crush on her, was talked about not drawn in the cartoons. "Elle est jolie et les jolies filles me rendent toujours tres nerveux" (She's pretty, and pretty girls always make me nervous), he confides to Lucy. Lucy shouts, "Je suis jolie! Pourquoi peux-tu me parler?" (I'm pretty! Why can you talk to me?) Charlie Brown is not able to explain, "Because you're more familiar than my own sister"; he just stumbles away feeling mortified.

Schulz published at least one "Peanuts" cartoon paperback each year for several years. All sold well, and several were translated into languages other than English. Some titles are rarer than others. Current price ranges vary widely. At the time of writing I can offer this one for our usual minimum price of $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment; you could fit six of the thin, but bigger than pocket-sized, French translations into one package and have room for three or four of the pocket-sized English paperbacks.

Book Review: Joachim Quelque Chose

Title: Joachim Quelque Chose

(This is quite a rare book. Amazon lists it but shows no price, picture, or record of having ever sold it. In order to show you the picture I'm going to have to use a link to E-Bay which may, of course, be broken by the time this review goes live.)

Price shown in euros, approximately US$28, on E-Bay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Livre-pour-enfant-vintage-Francois-Regis-Bastide-JOACHIM-QUELQUE-CHOSE-1959-/262632529558

Author: Francois Regis Bastide

Date: 1959

Publisher: Hatier

ISBN: none

Length: pages not numbered; I count 68

Illustrations: original artwork by Monica Bastide, some color, some black and white

Quote: “Voici un drole de petit garcon, habille comme un coureur cycliste, coiffe d'un grand chapeau rouge de napoleon-arlequin, tout embobine dans les quatre-vingt six ficelles d'un parachute.”

I might have known this book had collector value. It's not an especially great book; it's a whimsical picture book that was published because it happened to be written by an influential French diplomat of his day. It was not published in large quantities, did not become a bestseller, and has all but vanished. 

Joachim is a humanoid space alien who left his home on the Moon because it was boring. He finds a job on Earth (in a circus) on condition that he can produce some documentation that he's a Moon Prince. He decides he wants a Moon Princess, as well, although his people are apparently asexual and Joachim has to explain to them what girls are...

This picture book may be too silly for children, who want to know either what the world really is like or what it would be like if people were nicer. For adults it's a cute, wacky fantasy. You don't even have to read the story (in French) to appreciate the goofball charm of the pictures.

This story looks as if it were made up to go with a marionette show, and is recommended to anyone who enjoys making marionettes or other dolls or puppets. Several of the characters are classic puppet-show types that could dance through dozens of sequels.

Since Bastide's first book has become so obscure, here's an Amazon image of a more substantial book that bears his name, a re-edition of the founding French Socialist's work.

In the absence of an Amazon price, I'm not sure I can offer Joachim Quelque Chose online (no, it no longer qualifies as a Fair Trade Book). Local readers deserve to know what makes this quirky little book so special. Online readers may or may not be able to buy copies here.

Book Review: Six Chevaux Bleus

Title: Six Chevaux Bleus

Author: Yvonne Escoula

Date: 1954, 1967

Publisher: Gallimard

ISBN: none

Length: 188 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Tibor Csernus

Quote: “L'art chinois est le plus fin, le plus delicat du monde. L'artisan chinois n'a pas son pareil...je fais le commerce des oeuvres d'art chinoises.”

Yves and Jean-Pierre, twelve-year-old identical twins, lost their father long ago. So did Margot, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the superintendent of their Paris apartment building. Both of their mothers seem a bit, well, troubled—the twins' mother is grim and nervous, Margot's mother may be “medicated,” the two dislike each other--and although other children in the building aren't always friendly, these three have parent-pity in common.

The twins at least have an Aunt Martha, the antique dealer who specializes in Chinese pieces, although she handles other Asian art as well. They spend Thursdays with her. (An old antisemitic tradition in some parts of Europe was that classes met on Saturday, and students' “day off” fell on a weekday.) At least they do until their mother starts to worry that they're doing so much Chinese history with Aunt Martha that they'll forget their French history, and sends Yves, alone, to tell Martha that he and Jean-Pierre can't visit her again until they've passed their final exams.

Whereupon Yves gets into enough trouble that the twins, and also Margot, spend the rest of the week solving a mystery for Aunt Martha, school forgotten...

There are other parts of this story that don't hang together as a good mystery novel should. Yves sees a Chinese-looking gentleman sneak into Martha's store, break a porcelain horse, and sneak out again. Martha blames Yves, who is then goaded to enlist Jean-Pierre and Margot to help track down the old man. On Thursday, when Yves sees the old man and the three children start checking other antique stores to see whether anyone else has seen him, he speaks French with a heavy accent. The next time they see him, he's apparently lost the accent...in less than one week.

Meanwhile they learn that some French people are also looking for blue porcelain horses, although the horses aren't especially old or valuable, and those people are quite nasty. One of them knocks an old man with a cane down on the pavement; another threatens to ruin Margot's excellent reputation as a good, law-abiding, high-achieving student who can hope to go all the way through law school on merit scholarships.

According to the rules of Detective Stories For Children, nobody's life is in immediate danger (although we can guess what happened to the missing fathers the children can hardly remember and we're told of similar dangers in China). The children, who are routinely verbally abused by adults in a  way many baby-boomers vividly remember, will finally hear encouraging words from adults. The nasty young Frenchman who caused some of that verbal abuse will be shown up as the stupid dupe he's been. The children will meet the Chinese gentleman and get to hear an exciting adventure story from contemporary China. It's a nice cozy mystery, suitable for middle school students if they read French.

Six Chevaux Bleus also has some historical appeal: according to Jane Badger, it was the basis for a TV series. Prices are entering the collector range, possibly for this reason. Currently this web site can still offer copies for $5 per book plus $5 per package (four books of this size would fit into one package) plus $1 per online payment.

Sets of china horses like the ones described are available online:

Buy them at https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/510540739/vintage-horses-blanc-de-chine-set-of

Buy them at https://www.etsy.com/listing/500477056/set-of-3-vintage-chinese-bluepurple?

Book Review: Memoirs of a Nun

Title: Memoirs of a Nun (La Religieuse)

Author: Denis Diderot

Translator: Francis Birrell

Date: 1796 (my copy was reprinted in 1992)

Publisher: Buisson (1796), Knopf (1992)

ISBN: 0-679-41324-3 (1992)

Length: 249 pages

Quote: “A charming young man paid his addresses to my eldest sister but I quickly perceived that it was for me that he really cared…I warned my mother…a few days later I was told that a place in a convent had been decided upon for me, and the very next day I was taken there.”

In the eighteenth century parents were supposed to determine their children’s future careers; they had the legal right to decide when, where, and how teenagers would be educated, trained for jobs, or married. Monastic life was, then as now, supposed to be chosen only by people who felt a real vocation to celibacy and prayer, but since the choice could be made by parents, it could also be a way to get inconvenient children out from under their elders’ feet.

In the 1750s, a forty-something nun, Marguerite Delamarre, petitioned to the French Parlement for release from a convent, claiming that her abusive parents “had forced her to choose between entering a convent or…a house of correction.” Delamarre’s petition was denied; she remained in the convent until the Revolution.

The kindly old Marquis of Croismare had supported Delamarre’s cause, to no avail. He had then gone to his country estate and dropped hints that he intended to stay there rather than return to Paris. Diderot and a friend, Melchior Grimm, missed Croismare’s company enough to plot to write a fictitious story about another reluctant nun who, having heard of Croismare’s support for Delamarre, wanted Croismare to help her with a similar petition. Grimm later published a confession that their prank had deceived Croismare; the younger men had reported that their fictional nun had sneaked out of the convent and was looking for a job, and Croismare wanted to help her get one, so Grimm and Diderot “had to” report that the fictional nun had died rather than confess their deception…

It’s possible that La Religieuse, which was banned long enough and often enough that it might have died if Diderot had been less famous, was the “scrofulous French novel On grey paper with blunt type” at which a glance, according to Browning’s character, made “you grovel Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe.” Diderot was an atheist partly because one of his sisters, who had been a nun, had died from the effects of religious mania. (Self-starvation, self-flogging, and other forms of torture were popular ways of showing penitence in some convents.) He was also, his story makes clear, a thoroughgoing sexist who believed that celibacy caused insanity. He could imagine nuns who were both sane and sincere, but couldn’t imagine them being those things for very long. The characters in La Religieuse are repulsive, some in the ordinary sense of bullying and tattling and generally being hard to live with, and some in the sense of becoming lesbians.

In Diderot’s mind, of course, there were no “true” lesbians, or even sincerely gender-confused “women.” There was only the horrid possibility that an “unnatural,” celibate life would cause nuns to start having sexual reactions to one another. One of the “Superior” nuns in this novel has spontaneous orgasms while studying and counselling with younger nuns. For Diderot there was no need to argue about the morality of such reactions. They were “unnatural,” “insane” in et per se.

Not all audiences shared this opinion. During the Revolution a reviewer raved that Diderot’s portrayal of the lesbian nun was “worthy of Racine…it is Sappho; it is Phèdre…the most ardent, the most irresistible love.” Sappho, the ancient Greek poetess, may or may not have touched or wanted to touch her young female students, whose beauty and sex appeal she celebrated in poems; many poets have chosen “compliments to a rich person who may reward the flattering poet” as a theme. Phèdre, or Phaedra or Faidra, seems to me more like Mephistopheles, an evil character portrayed so well by a gifted writer as to seem tragic and romantic if you forget the real point of her or his story; she became infatuated with her stepson and had him killed for the crime he refused to commit--not what I'd call love.

Diderot’s teen nun, vaguely suspecting that an older woman appreciates her kisses as more than shows of affection, doesn’t have the vocabulary to say “She liked kissing us, not only in a motherly way. One day, during a long session of ‘motherly counselling’ with her arms around me, she had a spontaneous orgasm.” She has to express these ideas in details calculated to interest the male reader. Diderot wasn’t writing for commercial publication, so he could afford to be frankly voyeuristic about the repressed sexuality of nuns, both (by our standards) relatively healthy reactions to things generally considered sex-free, like sisterly hugs and kisses, and also “sick,” sadomasochistic reactions to things considered “holy” and acts of contrition. He didn’t need to try to show any particular sympathy or insight into the female point of view; he didn’t intend for this story to be read by females. His nun was invented strictly for the entertainment of a small select group of male readers. If her intended audience had included women, Croismare might not have been deceived by the prank.  

Diderot’s images of perverted sexuality among the ostensibly celibate offended his contemporaries not by their explicitness but by their irreverence. Monastic people were supposed to suppress their sexuality in the name of religion. Undoubtedly there were, and there still are, people who chose a celibate life because they didn’t want whatever they imagined the homosexual lifestyle to be, or because they had kinky erotic feelings about religious images. It was considered obscenely disrespectful to sincere monks and nuns to talk about the less sincere kind. Even in a private joke among friends Diderot took care, if only for the sake of credibility, to keep his nun’s reports of perverted sexuality in the convent both mild and censorious. Something was wrong with the positively lesbian nun, and the ones who enjoyed torturing themselves or others were insane.

Feminists, lesbians, anti-Catholics, and men who share Diderot’s muddled male view of female sexuality, have kept Memoirs of a Nun alive for enough years that it’s been added to the Everyman’s Library. I don’t think it’s worthy of that brand. The Everyman’s brand used to appear on some books that are no longer considered real classics, but it used to guarantee a good read. For many, probably a majority, Memoirs of a Nun is unlikely to be a good read. It is not a classic; it tells us more about Diderot than about nuns, and doesn’t even pretend to tell us about anyone but nuns.

I don’t like censorship and don’t think this novel deserves censorship, either. What it deserves are warnings. It’s not pornographic; it’s an incident in the life of a writer who had already become famous, and probably deserves to remain available for that reason. It is a true monument to the credulity of the kind of men who flattered themselves that they were “devoted to Reason.” I don’t believe that reading it (as a middle-aged lady) has done me any harm, nor do I expect that reading it will do you any harm. I bought it, because it was cheap and because I’ve never read any of Diderot’s other now-obscure books. I’m willing to sell it to someone who’s old enough to recognize that even if it were true it would have been a story about some confused individual nuns, not a study of nuns or of monastic life. But only if you’re especially interested in Diderot, or in the history of pranks, is Memoirs of a Nun likely to do you any positive good.

If you do read it, you might get some French translation practice out of it by reading it along with the original text of La Religieuse (which some Kindle users can get for free).

To buy it here, send $5 per book + $5 per package to either address at the bottom of the screen, and please consider adding a book by a living author to the package.

Book Review: La Dame au Long Nez

A Fair Trade Book (?)



Title: La Dame au long nez 

Author: Patrick Hetier

Date: 2001

Publisher: PEMF

ISBN: 9782845261372 (according to Bing)

Length: 39 pages

Illustrations: color pictures by Nancy Ribard (as on the cover)

Quote: "Tijean s'est perdu dans le bois, et bien perdu."

Billed as a "mean story to produce fear" for picture book readers, this novel strikes the only people who seem to have discussed it in cyberspace as funny. It's a fairy tale, related in spirit to the Grimms' tale where the characters use their three wishes sticking and unsticking the sausage on each other's noses; Tijean meets a wicked enchanter who plays a mean trick on him, and then finds a way to turn the trick back against its source.

It's hard to say much more than that about the contents of a book as short as this one. It's all in French, but very basic French, suitable for primary school children or first year students. Never officially published in the United States, this book is available from Amazon.com at collector prices, but mislabelled as "La dame au grand nez," an "album." From the page it's hard to tell whether this refers to an audio album or to the book, which is square like an album cover, but smaller.

It's old enough that I can resell it online--for the collector price of $505 per copy + $5 per package, of which $51 will go to the author, or to a charity of his choice, if and when I can locate him. (There are two Google + accounts for +Patrick Hetier (or +Patrick Hetier ); so far I don't know whether either of those people is our author.) In real life, the book I physically own is not in collectible condition and will cost much less, even if I dress a doll, or dolls, to match the pictures.

Book Review: Thomas Face-de-Rat et Amelie Melasse

(Reclaimed from Blogjob, where it was tagged: books for first year French class, books in French, children’s books, early work by author of Kinra Girls, friendship between primary school children, Kinra Girls, picture books.)

A Fair Trade Book (? ???)

Title: Thomas Face-de-Rat et Amelie Melasse

Author: Moka

Date: 1993

Publisher: L’Ecole des Loisirs

ISBN: none

Length: 54 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Mette Ivers

Quote: “Mais le pire, c’etait qu’il y avait aussi une petite fille dans la voiture.”

This is primarily a picture book for French-speaking children up to about age eight. It’s simply told, with plenty of illustrations, so it an be understood by students during their first or second year of French classes.

Readers over age eight will guess where the plot’s going. Thomas didn’t want his ninety-year-old neighbor to die; he didn’t want other people to move into her house; worst of all, the new neighbors included a girl his age. Naturally, the children will tease and annoy each other. Naturally, they will become friends.

For the benefit of older readers, however, there is a discreetly narrated adult romance in the background. In case any older readers want to be entertained with a tiny hint of suspense, I won’t describe this element of the plot further.

Moka offers students a few new words that may not be found in first-year French glossaries: bisous-bisous, teckel, sans-gene, pivoines, cadenas. Students can follow the text while guessing these words, but if they’ve not done so already they should probably let this book motivate them to buy a good French dictionary.

Top students in first-year French classes, and average students in second-year French classes, are likely to find this a fun read.

However, I'm in a peculiar situation with this book. Picture books sometimes have short lives, French books aren't always marketed in the U.S., and it's beginning to look as if the copy of Thomas Face-de-Rat et Amelie Melasse that I had (and have sold) may have been the only one sold in this country. (This happens, because U.S. State Department employees organize annual bazaars where they often sell unique copies of things not published in the U.S.) So I've traced and e-mailed the author, but as of today I can't say whether I can actually sell Thomas Face-de-Rat or not! Ridiculous situation for a bookseller to get into. Actually there are other online sources besides Amazon, if anyone out there wants this book; having to go to them merely means higher prices.

Here, meanwhile, is an Amazon link you can use to buy one of the author's newer, more widely distributed books.

(Moka promptly and courteously replied to my e-mail, explaining that Thomas Face-de-Rat et Amelie Melasse has been out of print for years. Some writers don't mind if their early books go out of print, especially if they're doing well with more recent books...anyway, I've found a certified Nice Writer and added the Kinra Girls series, which I've not yet seen in real life, to my Amazon Wish List.)

Book Review: The Story of Edward

(Reclaimed from Blogjob, where it was "tagged" as burro, drawings of donkeys, horse stories,nonsense stories, picture books, Spanish Riding School of Vienna. If Blogjob ever finds itself able to pay for these posts, they'll migrate back there; I liked Blogjob but I do not like the way advertisers are coasting on posts for which I've not been paid.)

A Fair Trade Book

Title: The Story of Edward

Author: Philippe Dumas

Date: 1976 (French), 1977 (English)

Publisher: Flammarion (French), Dent (U.K.), Parents Magazine (U.S.)

ISBN: 0-8193-0869-2

Length: 48 pages

Illustrations: drawings by the author, some water-colored

Quote: “There is nothing like dancing to create family spirit—a fact worth noting before closing this book.”

Edward is a donkey who enjoys dressing up like a human. He can even fool humans, as long as they preserve a polite conversational distance. He can’t fool a woman whom he tries to impress, but he can fool men long enough to buy a female donkey, his mate. By the end of the book he’s taught her and all the little donkeys to dress up and dance like humans too.

I find the drawings more amusing than the bare story of this book, which sounds a bit like an Elephant Joke, but evidently many people have liked The Story of Edward; my library-discard copy shows a respectable amount of wear and tear. This book is recommended to anyone who likes the jacket drawing. Dumas is a well-known illustrator, and there's more of that kind of thing on every page.

Something about the quaint atmosphere of this book made me wonder...yes, this is A Fair Trade Book. Dumas is only seventy-five years old, so if you buy this collector's item here, by sending payment to either address in the lower left-hand corner of the screen (in the "sidebar," above the colorful ad), I'll send 10% of the total cost to Dumas or a charity of his choice. That would be $5 per paperback or $10 per hardcover copy + $5 per package for shipping. This is a small book so I recommend buying other things from this site to fill up the package. Amazon recommends Lucie, a Tale of a Donkey and The Lipizzaners and the Spanish Riding School of Vienna as other books by Philippe Dumas with similar illustrations. He's written several others, not all about equines and not all available in English.

Book Review: Le Roman de la Rose

Title: Le Roman de la Rose

Author: Guillaume de Lorris and Geoffrey Chaucer

Editor: Stephen G. Nichols (Jr.)

Publisher: Meredith

Date: 1967

ISBN: none; click here to see this edition on Amazon, here for the more recent edition of the same texts, or here for an edition of the more common text

Length: 197 pages

Quote: “Une autre image i ot assise / Coste a coste de Covoitise, / Avarice estoit apelee./ Laide estoit e sale e folee...”

"Review" is not the most applicable word here, although this web site uses "review" for posts about books and, for Google purposes, we'll stick to it. Actually what one writes about a book of this vintage is more in the way of an announcement.

Le Roman de la Rose is one of the classics of French literature. It is especially popular at colleges in the English-speaking countries because an early translation by Geoffrey Chaucer, The Romaunt of the Rose, is sometimes ranked among the classics of English literature. The copy I have contains both poems but does not include the later effort by Jean de Meung to “finish” Guillaume de Lorris's story. Some scholars accept Jean de Meung's contribution as part of Le Roman de la Rose; Chaucer didn't, and Nichols doesn't.

It's “Romance” in its classical form, a very philosophical and scholarly study of Romantic Love, allegorized as a young man's adventures in a castle garden. Images of unlovable qualities surround the garden like gargoyles on a cathedral. In the quoted passage, Avarice is placed beside Covetousness and described as ugly, dirty, and foolish. After a long study of these images, the young man is admitted to the garden by a lady called Oiseuse (Chaucer: Ydelnesse). A party is in full swing, with beautiful people who personify lovable qualities dancing and mingling. Our hero falls in love with an especially beautiful (symbolic) rose and wants to pick it. In order to do so he has to swear fealty to Love...and so on. This is no longer a story anybody reads for the plot. If it ever was.

Most people who read Le Roman de la Rose do so for college credit; if taking a course that requires you to read Guillaume de Lorris's unfinished poem and Chaucer's loose translation, but not Jean de Meung's sequel or “completion,” this is the edition to get.

English speakers who read French with a dictionary in hand may not enjoy a poem in which the archaic words and spellings are “translated” with their modern French equivalents only. Those who are comfortable with all the “translations” and notes being in modern French will enjoy this edition of Le Roman de la Rose.

Why am I offering this book for sale? I didn't even take a class that required it, back in the day; these days there are college professors in the U.S. who are more likely to be intimidated, thus unfavorably impressed, rather than favorably impressed if you try to discuss it with them. (A few of those professors were in my classes; they bored me, and I bored them, even at nineteen.) I read it for the sheer fun of figuring out the archaic French words and how they related to their modern French and English equivalents. It's like a puzzle, only (if you have my kind of brain) more fun. Not many people think this kind of thing is fun. But some do, so here's a book for them.

Obviously Guillaume de Lorris does not need a dollar, nor does Geoffrey Chaucer, and although Amazon lists the book I own under Nichols' name it's not his book. So this is not a Fair Trade Book. It has, nonetheless, reached collector prices. For the Nichols edition we'll have to charge $30 per clean used copy + $5 shipping. For a newer edition of de Lorris's and Chaucer's texts but not de Meung's, or for an edition of de Lorris's and de Meung's, we could go down to $25 per clean used copy + $5 shipping. Shipping prices can be consolidated on multiple items shipped in the same package, though, so at least if you buy this along with one or more Fair Trade Books you can consider the shipping free of charge. Paypal or postal money orders are accepted at the addresses at the very bottom of the screen.

Book Review: Merde and Merde Encore

A Fair Trade Book

Book Review: Merde and Merde Encore

       
Author: Geneviève [Edis]

Author's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/genevieve.edis

       
Date: 1984, 1986, 1987

       
Publisher: Atheneum / Macmillan

       
ISBN: 0-689-11649-7 (first volume, first edition; click here for the omnibus edition)

       
Length: 102 pages (Merde), 104 pages (Merde Encore)

       
Illustrations: cartoons

       
Quote: “French argot (slang) is not just the dirty words (though, have no fear, you will  find them here); it is an immensely rich language with its own words.”

       
The trouble with slang is that it constantly changes. The colorful words and inventive extended meanings that were in use in 1984 are not necessarily in use now. This should not be too much of a problem if you use a slang dictionary for its intended purpose—to figure out why someone else has said something that makes no literal sense, and figure out what it meant, before you try using the word. This is a good rule even for new slang invented in your native language.

       
With this in mind, I offer the world Geneviève Edis's guide to French slang, as she learned it at the British Embassy in Algeria.

       
Rudeness ratings are offered. So are cartoons showing situations in which the slang phrases discussed in these books might be used. However, just as a bit of English slang like “honey” may mean something like “dear, sweet grandchild” in some situations and mean “body effluvia” in other contexts, the meanings and rudeness ratings of slang words is subject to change without notice.

       
Special note to teenagers: I don’t know whether either French or English has a word for the peculiar naïveté of adults who believe that teenagers are going to use books like these just to look up words they hear on the streets while visiting French-speaking countries, rather than to call the home of a French exchange student and giggle, “Please can you translate this [extremely rude word or phrase].” I’m not all that naïve. Just remember that I’m not recommending rudeness. You want to be rude, that’s your problem. You get into trouble that way, je m’en fiche.

       
You can, of course, ignore the really disgusting words and stick to using the ones that belong to the same register of French as things like “The guys blew off gym class and hit the flicks” in English. (After getting your attention with a rude title, this is what Merde actually recommends.) Most of the slang words Geneviève explains are merely slang, not terribly offensive, and can safely be used in conversation with people who use the same slang words...just beware of using the current French equivalent of “the guys blew off class and hit the flicks” to refer to a mixed group of teenagers who would have downloaded movies onto their cell phones to view during class.

Special note to French-speaking readers: Je vous prie pardon mais avec les barbarismes les élèves aprendront aussi les mots propres, n’est-ce pas?

Genevieve Edis is still alive, according to Google, so I can offer her books online through our Fair Trade Books system. Each book ordered will cost $5, plus $5 for shipping as many books as we can ship in one package, and for each book the author or a charity of her choice will receive $1.