En dålig flicka

En bok, som i flera veckor legat på den franska topplistan över mest
sålda böcker är Justine Lévy’s bok ”Mauvaise fille”, ung. översatt
”En dålig flicka”.

Justine Lévy föddes 1974 i Paris och är dotter till den berömde
filosofen socialisten Bernard Henry-Lévy och Isabelle Doutreluigne, en känd
fotomodell och feminist. Justine Lévy har skrivit två böcker
tidigare; ”Rendez-vous” och ”Rien de grave.”

I ”Rendez-vous” beskriver hon, hur hon förgäves väntar på sin mamma
på ett kafé, mamman har helt enkelt glömt bort henne och i ”Rien de
grave” (såld i 200 000 exemplar) berättar hon om, hur hon som ung
hustru förlorar sin man till den elaka Paula, i verkligheteten Carla
Bruni…(numera gift med Frankrikes president Nicolas Sarkozy).
Justine och hennes man, Raphaël Enthoven, tillbringar sommaren i
Marrakech hos Justines pappa, då Carla Bruni dyker upp och blir kär i
Raphael, som hon senare får en son med. Carla Bruni har också skrivit
en sång om Raphaël och hans sammetsblick…


”Mauvaise fille” handlar om, hur huvudpersonen, som är gift och
väntar sitt första barn försöker ta till sig det faktum att hennes
mor har drabbats av cancer, samtidigt som hon själv upplever sin
graviditet.
Hennes liv, som dotter till en självupptagen, vacker och berömd
kvinna, har varit väldigt splittrat och hon har ofta blivit övergiven.
Hon älskar sin mor, som gång på gång ”glömmer bort” henne, men
beundrar henne över allt annat. Föräldrarna är skilda och hon lever
med sin mamma, men det är pappan, som räddar henne, då hon inte får någon mat, eller blir bort glömd utanför skolan.
Eller då hon vaknar på morgonen och får gå till skolan utan frukost, för att det ligger en främmande man i mammans säng.

Justine beskriver frustrerat hur den kände cancerläkaren, som ska
behandla hennes mamma inte ens orkar anstränga sig, att uttala hennes mors namn rätt.
”Mamma heter Madame Doutreluigne, inte Doutrelinge eller Doutrebine”!
Detta trots att hennes kände far skrivit en roman och där berömmer
den kände läkaren, allt för att mamman ska få en korrekt behandling.
Alltmedan mamman sakta tynar bort, gör sig Justines graviditet
alltmer påmind. Hon vill så gärna berätta för mamman om allt, som
händer i hennes kropp, men samtidigt vill hon skona sin mor, som sakta inser att hon är döende.

Inte förrän under de sista timmarna viskar hon fram orden, att hon
väntar barn, men hon kommer aldrig att få veta om hennes mamma har
uppfattat dem.
Justine känner sig avig som mamma, hon har ju inte själv upplevt hur
det är att ha en närvarande mamma, men på något sätt lyckas hon
försona sig med tanken, att det nu är hon själv som är ansvarig för sitt barn.

Hennes pappa, däremot är ytterst närvarande, och hjälper och stöder
Justine allt han kan.
Man får en helt annan bild av BHL, som han kallas, Justines pappa. I
franska debattprogram, framställs han gärna som filosofen med ett
knivskarpt intellekt, i boken är han mycket mänsklig.


I ”Mauvaise fille”, är det snarare pappan som får en sympatisk framtoning, jag tycker att bilden av Justines mamma är mycket mer undanglidande.
Boken, som visserligen har ett mycket enkelt språk, flyter fram i en
fascinerande rytm, som gör att man blir mycket engagerad.

Skrivet avGunnela Edelstam
St Gemme dec 09
Foton: Justine Lévy, observer.com
Raphael Enthoven och Justine Lévy, millef.blogspot.com
Bernard Henri Lévy, guernicamag.com

"Suite Française" - the novel that came 62 years too late.

One of the most original and moving stories in the literary world has been the resurging of Irène Némirovsky, a well known writer in France during the thirties with 13 books behind her. She was, however, arrested by the Nazis the 16th of July 1942, as being a Jewess, and perished of typhus in Auschwitz on August 17. During the two years between the invasion and her arrest she wrote an epic novel about life during the occupation. In 2004 one of her daughters found a manuscript in an old suitcase and started to transcribe it with a magnifying glass. Read the amazing story of how Irène Némorovsky became a best-selling writer 62 years after her tragic death.

Irène Némirovsky vas 16 years old when she fled from the Soviet Union in 1919. Her father, Leon, was a wealthy banker and managed to remake his fortune in Paris, France. She married an exiled Russian, learnt excellent French and started to write. Her first novel, “David Golder”, became a success when it came out 1929 and she was considered as a rising star in the French literary circles. Twelve other novels followed suit and as the war began, she was a hailed and established writer.

Immediately she evacuated her two small daughters to Issy-l’Eveque in Central France, which was the home of the nanny of the children. When the Hitler invaded France in June 1942 and the German army advanced to take Paris, she fled to her children, where her husband, Michael Epstein, later joined. They had a hard time during the occupation, since they were Jews and surrounded by humiliating restrictions, among them wearing the yellow star on their clothes.
She started to write an epic novel that should be like Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. The plan was that it should consist of several parts, “Storm in June”, “Dolce”, “Captivity”, “Battle” and “Peace”. When she was arrested the 16th of July 1942, she had completed two of the first parts and had written notes for the third.
Her eldest daughter Dénise Epstein, at the time 13 years old, remember how the parents in some way knew that they sooner or later would be arrested and deported. They tried to shield themselves from the fear by discussing different topics far away from their troubling reality. The parents were very serious about their situation and did not speak much. When the French Gendarmes finally came, Irène was very calm, did not cry and told her to look after Papa and the sister Elizabeth. She said quietly that she was going away for a trip. She surely knew what was waiting for her. Three months later the father was arrested and died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz the 6th of November 1942. The girls managed to get away thanks to a teacher who hid them and later a nanny who under great risks hid them in different locations until the war was over. The whole time they carried a battered suitcase, filled with Irene’s papers and manuscripts. They, however, sensed that it was something important.

After the war, the children went around to different places in Paris, where former prisoners of war and deportees were assembled, among those the Hotel Lutetia and Gare de l’Est. But the parents had vanished. It was only years later they got to know the exact circumstances of their parents death.
The suitcase was still there, the only link to the past. The daughters thought the papers were a kind of a diary and could not bear to read the last thoughts of their mother. Due to the shortage of paper they were written on small scraps of paper, with tiny scripture. Denise Epstein, now 75, said in an interview that in order to survive and get life going, you had to put such a powerful thing in a drawer and forget about it. In 1975 she made an attempt to read something but could not make it. She had no idea that there were two novels among the pieces of paper. When her sister Elizabeth started to write a biography of her mother she used letters and notes from the suitcase It was published 1992 with the title “Le Mirador”. At the same time Denise started to look through they pages that she had not read before. She discovered that it was, in fact, a novel. But it was a painstaking work with magnifying glass. Some pages consisted of three entire chapters.

The novel, that consists of the two parts, “Storm in June” and “Dolce” is not an ordinary World War II book, it is an intimate picture of the occupied France, with its every day pettiness, jealousy, cooperation and resistance. Which is narrated with sympathy and severity.
In the first part, “Storm in June”, Irène follows families and individuals who join the masses of fugitives leaving Paris. She paints a picture of the chaos and panic, when the limousines of the rich families, which she knew so well, pressed through the crowds on foot, dragging their meagre belongings on different kind of carts. Also the fear of attacking German planes and the hopelessness of what the future might bring.
In “Dolce”, most of the fugitives had returned to Paris and life during occupation takes form. Irène depicts life in a small town she calls Bussy, with its aristocratic family, wealthy landowners, shop keepers, peasants and the German soldiers and officers. It is a story of our human qualities during a difficult time, how people show the worst and the best of themselves, a picture of wartime rural France, that many, even now, would not acknowledge. But she tells the story with passion and humour and sometimes even a German officer can be sympathetic.
When Denise Epstein had finished her transcription of her mothers novel, she put one copy in her drawer and sent another to the archives of The Information Institute of Contemporary Publishing. In April last year she met the writer Myriam Anissimov, who just had published a biography of Romain Gary, a French novelist who had known Irène personally. Anissimov persuaded Denise to get the novel of her mother published by Editions Denoël.
The book, “Suite Française”, was an immediate success and got in top of the bestseller lists in France with more than 150 000 copies sold last fall. It got the prestigious Renaudot prize in November that year and has been lauded by the critics. The rights have been sold to 20 countries during the Frankfurt Book Fair and with the American rights to Alfred A. Knopf, which plan to publish it in 2006.
Denise Epstein, (her sister Elizabeth died 1996) is of course delighted that her mother has come to focus again. Especially since the mother was very disappointed that the French literary establishment, had abandoned her when the Nazis came and the Vichy government took power.
Irène wrote: “ Never forget that the war will pass and that the whole historical part will pale. Try to do as many things as possible to interest people in 52 and 2052…” – She has surely got her point 62 years later.
Written by Erik Edelstam
Sources: International Herald Tribune and Newsweek

The first time - with oysters!

Either you love oysters or either you detest them. No one can be indifferent to oysters. I must admit that they don’t look very appetizing when you look at them, like slimy little monsters. Once in the mouth they slide around and overwhelm you with the intense sensations in taste.
Read more about the first, orgasmic experience of the fine art of oysters.

One has to be daring to try an oyster the first time. I was quite old, around 20 years when I had my first one. It was a fantastic experience, nearly like when I got my first, really deep kiss. Like the oysters – an intense mouth experience.
I think I was thirteen or fourteen years old, hopelessly stuttering and shy, nearly disintegrating. A very cute girl, Cecilia Cassmer, much younger than me, obviously liked me, and gave me a fantastic kiss in the back yard of the apartment house, where she lived with her parents. I will never forget that first kiss. - Cecilia was, last time when I met her, a very attractive, much feared and tough criminal prosecutor.

Back to the oysters. - I was on summer vacations with my brothers in Istanbul, where my father was the Swedish Consul General. The summers were very hot, so my father always rented summerhouses near the coast on the Asian side. We had many friends, mostly came from rich, Turkish families. This time we were invited on a yacht by one of our friends. Cruising from the Prince Island of Buykada in the Marmara Sea, we came quite close to a rocky beach at the Asian side. We anchored up and the captain told us that we could dive down in the shallow water and find oysters and so we did. There were a lot of oysters on the seabed and they were easy to pick up. When I came up to the surface with my first oyster, I swam to the side of the yacht, where a crewmember was ready with a knife and opened it swiftly. He pressed a little juice from a lemon over it and handed the oyster back to me.
Still in the trepid water with one hand on the rail, the silhouette of the Prince Islands in the blue distance, our Turkish girlfriends in bikinis, dangling with their legs and carelessly chatting, the heat of the sun and the seawater dripping down my face, - the oyster was a sensation and tasting like a fresh, cool, kissing dream. Though I’ve been eating many different oysters all my life since then, no one has been that delicious, that the first one in the Marmara Sea. - Like my first kiss.

The other day I found a fantastic book on my way to France, at the bookstore, at the Arlanda Airport, in Stockholm. It is written by the American Chef Anthony Bourdain. He tells in a very witty, fast way, nearly like Tom Wolfe, how he became a cook and his life in restaurant kitchens. In one of the best passages he writes about the first time he ate an oyster. At the time he was much younger than me, thirteen years old, but he experienced the same sensation as I did.

Anthony Bourdains book (Kitchen Confidential, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2000) is very good and funny. I warmly recommend it. Read this little excerpt from the book:

“… Monsiuer Saint Jour (the oyster fisher), on hearing this – as if challenging his American passengers – inquired in his thick Girondais accent, if any of us would care to try an oyster.
My parents hesitated. I doubt they’d realized they might actually have to eat one of the raw, slimy things we were currently floating over. My little brother recoiled in horror.
But I, in the proudest moment of my young life, stood up smartly, grinning with defiance, and volunteered to be the first.
And in that unforgettably sweet moment of my personal history, that moment still more alive for me than so many of the other ‘firsts’ which followed – first pussy, first joint, first day in high school, first published book, or any other thing – I attained glory. Monsieur Saint-Jour beckoned me over to the gunwale, where he leaned over, reached down until his head nearly disappeared underwater, and emerged holding a single silt-encrusted oyster, huge and irregularly shaped, in his rough, claw like fist. With a snubby, rust covered oyster knife, he popped the thing open and handed it to me, everyone watching now, my little brother shrinking away from this glistening, vaguely sexual-looking object, still dripping and nearly alive.
I took it in my hand, tilted the shell back into my mouth as instructed by the by now beaming Monsieur Saint-Jour, and with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. It tasted seawater… of brine and flesh… and somehow… of the future.
I’d not only survived – I’d enjoyed.
This, I knew, was the magic I had until now only dimly and spitefully aware of. I was hooked. My parents’ shudders, my little brother’s expression of unrestrained revulsion and amazement only reinforced the sense that I had, somehow, become a man. I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life – the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation – would all stem from this moment.
I’d learned something. Viscerally, instinctively, spiritually – even in some precursive way, sexually – and there was no turning back. The genie was out of the bottle. My life as a cook, and as a chef, had begun.
Food had power…”.

I wonder which kind of oyster Anthony Bourdain ate. – Personally, when in France, I like the middle-sized Claires best. But the best oysters in world are the Swedish round ones. They grow wild at the west coast of Sweden and since the water is cold, they grow very slow and get an extraordinary fine taste. The legends in the business are the Karlsson brothers in Grebbestad, north of Gothenburg.
Go there and try them out. For the true oyster lover it’s worth the trip. Don’t forget to drink the classical oyster drink, a mixture of Porter Beer and Champagne. – Good Luck!
Written by Erik Edelstam