Tag-Archive for ◊ librarian ◊

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• Saturday, May 27th, 2023

Antoine Laurain was born in Paris in 1972. After finishing high school, he took film studies at university, followed by making short films and attempting screenplay writing. Being a great lover of art, he became the assistant to a Parisian antique dealer.

Immersed in the collectors’ world, Laurain was incentivised to write “The Portrait”, a novella about a fervent art collector. The novella received the Drouot Prize in 2007, encouraging Laurain to pursue his writing and earning him prizes for his subsequent books. Laurain is also a journalist for PalaceScope, a deluxe Paris magazine about lifestyle, fashion, art and creation.

The Red Notebook, published in 2014, is Antoine Laurain’s fifth novel. It starts with the middle-aged widow, Laure Valadier, who works as a gilder. She is about to enter her apartment building late in the evening when she is intercepted by a mugger who snatches her handbag. Laure clings to the handbag and strongly resists the attacker. Nevertheless, to overcome her resistance, the mugger puts the palm of his hand on her face and throws her head against the metal of the building’s door. He then grabs her handbag and runs. A few hours later, Laure is transported to hospital in a coma with a subdural hematoma and remains there for most of the story.

Laurent Lettelier, a middle-aged divorced man and father of a fifteen-year-old daughter, Chloé, is the proprietor of a Parisian bookstore called “Le cahier rouge”. While on the way to his bookshop the day following Laure’s mugging, Lettelier stops for a coffee at a nearby café before going on to work, and while heading for it, he discovers a lady’s purple leather handbag in perfect condition on the lid of a garbage bin.

Intrigued, Lettelier decides to pick up the handbag and hand it in to the nearest police station. However, the long wait and lack of cooperation from the police officers dissuade Lettelier, who then chooses to return the following day. Meanwhile, on further thought, he sorts through all the items in the handbag, hoping to discover the name or address to reunite the bag with its rightful owner, but fails because the wallet and portable telephone are missing.

Even the Moleskine red notebook contains nothing to help guide him to the rightful owner. It is a notebook containing dozens of inspirational thoughts, random opinions and observations, fears and dreams, some absurd and some sensual, arousing the finder’s curiosity. It makes him feel he has opened a door leading to the spiritual sphere of the unknown owner of the red notebook. It incites him to seek out this mysterious woman whose intimate secrets he has happened upon.

The story immerses the reader in everyday Parisian life, and the main character, as a librarian, takes us to the French literary world with French books and French authors, some of them classic writers like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Proust, Stendhal, Prévert, Eluard and some contemporary ones like the famous Amélie Nothomb, the equally famous Marc Lévy, and the well-known French novelist and Nobel Prize recipient, Patrick Modiano.

The author includes two titles of Modiano’s novels, “Paris Nocturne”, published in 2003 and “Missing Person”, published in 1978. The French writer, photographer, and conceptual artist Sophie Calle, also gets a mention.

In addition, the author refers to some well-known classical novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like “Les liaisons dangereuses” by Choderlos de Laclos, published in 1782 and “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1857.

We also come across some classic French culinary dishes like the hachis parmentier, the pot-au-feu and even the famous French perfume, Habanita by Molinard, launched in 1921.

The Red Notebook is an original, pleasant, serene, engaging, easy-read short novel with a simple plot, short chapters and two protagonists with sympathetic characters and similar personalities. It is a suspenseful detective story full of accidental discoveries and an unconventional, exciting romance.

It is a pursuit of an enigma, an unusual hunt toward the unknown that slowly shifts into a love affair between two strangers who happen to come across each other fortuitously by fate. Two lives intersect at this critical point in their existence; two passionate strangers seek and discover something in one another.

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Category: Book Reviews  | One Comment
Author:
• Saturday, March 03rd, 2007

Audrey Niffenegger was born in June 1963 in south Haven Michigan. She grew up in Evanston, Illinois, which is the first suburb north of Chicago. She is a spinster with a permanent boy friend, a writer and an artist.

She obtained a BFA in 1985 from the school of The Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA in 1991 from Northwestern University.

She is a full time professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, where she teaches writing, letterpress printing, and fine edition book production.

Audrey Niffenegger loved writing books and illustrating them since she was a young girl, as a part-time.

Her first book was about an imaginary road trip that she went on with The Beatles (the pop group). She was eleven years old when she wrote and illustrated this book.

But Niffenegger’s first real book is The Time Traveler’s Wife published in 2003. It was a bestseller when it came out.

She says: “The title came to me out of the blue, and from the title sprang the characters, and from the characters came the story… I got the title first, and played around with it for quite a long time, slowly evolving the characters in my head. I wrote the end before anything else, and then began to write scenes as they occurred to me.
The Time Traveler’s Wife was written in a completely different order than the one it finally took. I understood early on that it would be organized in three sections, and that the basic unit was the scene, not the chapter. It has a rather chaotic feel to it, especially at the beginning, and that is deliberate-there is a slow piecing together, a gradual accumulation of story, that mimics the experience of the characters. I made a lot of notes about the characters. I had two timelines to help me stay organized, but no outline of the plot.”

The Time Traveler’s Wife is a love story in a science fiction setting.

Clare and Henry love each other very dearly. Clare knows that she is destined to marry Henry, which creates an element of fatalism in the story.

They have to live with each other, go through the every day tasks, Clare being a free- lance artist, and Henry De Tumble a librarian in the famous Newberry Library in Chicago, while overcoming Henry’s genetic disorder called Chrono-Displacement Order. Which whisks him around in time. He disappears against his own will, to find himself transiting somewhere in a different year at any time or season.

For Clare to have Henry appearing and disappearing without any notice, spontaneously, and unpredictably, when he is needed, is quite a challenge for her love. She fears the consequences of Henry’s disappearance since she doesn’t know each time he comes back how that is going to affect her life in real time, according to whether he is returning from the past or the future.

Periodically, Henry finds himself travelling in time, faced with very emotional and sometimes dangerous situations in his existence. He is struggling to keep his sanity and is coping with his disease quite well.

Like Tamino and Pamina in Mozart’s Magic Flute, Clare and Henry had to undergo the Love Test in order to come out of it worthy of each other.

Niffenegger says:” I wanted to write about a perfect marriage that is tested by something outside the control of the couple.”

But then, The Time Traveler’s Wife is not only about love, it’s also about the notion of time, about the endless waiting, which is one of the themes in the novel we discover in the prologue.

” I wanted people to think about the intimacy of time, how ineffable it is, how it shapes us. I wanted to write about waiting, but since waiting is essentially a negative (time spent in the absence of something) I wrote about all the things that happen around the waiting.”

Clare is six years old when she meets Henry for the first time, while Henry has travelled back thirty-six years to meet Clare. But then, when they get married Clare is twenty-three and Henry thirty- one.
They both have to be patient in order to fulfil their destiny, and to prove that no matter how long it takes nothing alter their passion for each other.

Henry summarizes his love for Clare in the letter she is meant to read after his death: “ Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust.”

Clare on the other hand, carries on living patiently waiting for the right time when Henry will come to her, when she is in her eighties, and takes her with him. Henry had seen that day and told her about it.

Niffenegger likes to go into the minute details in order to bring some life and plenty of essence to her story. We learn about different places in Chicago, about the pop groups of the time, about the taste of various characters. Even the couple’s sex life is described in details.

The author says in one of her interviews: “I am interested in mutants, love, death, amputation, sex, and time (the themes of my novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife)

She has also written two other books. The Three Incestuous Sisters, a 176- page graphic novel or “novel in pictures” as she calls it. And The Adventuress published 1st September 2006.

The actors Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston bought the rights to the film, which is going to be released in 2008.

In an interview, Audrey Niffenegger was asked: “How much of Clare or Henry is you?
The answer was: “Contrary to popular belief, not much. I died my hair red as a way of saying goodbye to Clare, as I was finishing the book. She makes very different art from mine, and she’s much quieter and more patient. Henry and I share a quirky sense of humour and a taste for punk, but not much else. First novels are often said to be thinly disguised autobiography. This one uses my places and things I know something about (libraries, paper making) but alas, this is not my life, and these characters are not me.