I'm not long back from holiday, in which time I produced a villanelle (I was in France, after all!) and a melting snowball (it was hot, after all!). Here I am, sitting beneath a chestnut tree next to an old castle, wearing a kaftan (ever the pro) and knocking out a little watercolour of a nearby garden, which prompted an old fella to pop down from his very high-up balcony to find out what I was up to. I showed him the picture and explained that I'm really bad at painting, but that it's good for my <<bien-être>>, pointing to my noggin.
I also read a ton of poetry and some quite strange prose, maybe autofiction, maybe memoir, maybe a little of both or indeed neither. I bought some French books, including Michel Butor's Collation, which I've yet to start as it's quite the hefty tome, so I left it à Paris while I trained and bussed it to relax en Provence. I also bought (for the second time, accidentally) Nathalie Sarraute's L'usage de la parole (1986), a collection of short texts à la Tropismes, her first book from 1939. Not to worry, it made me read some more and brought to mind Roland Barthes' Mythologies, of which I'm a fan. On my perusal of Parisian secondhand bookshops (the first was Oxfam and the next one near Odéon with a picture of a cat on the door, this third – just down the road from a lovely little square now infested with Emily in Paris fans, sacre bleu! – was manned by a very intense young bloke, who made absolutely no comment on a blatantly English person buying a blatantly fairly difficult French text), I also picked up an illustrated copy of Françoise Sagan's Toxique (2009). This is the account of the writer's three-month stay in rehab after getting addicted to morphine following a car crash in 1957, three years after she found fame with Bonjour Tristesse, aged just 19. It's fascinating, nothing at all like her slightly romcom-y novels (which I do like, don't get me wrong – partly because they're so lovely and short), and quite an eye-opener. Perhaps I should watch the biopic, after all.
I interspersed the two French women with – all four on rotation – some English language poetry: Denise Riley's Lurex (2022), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and The Mirror Trade (2004), the first full-length poetry collection by Zoë Skoulding. I also read Sphinx by Anne Garréta, the first novel by a female member of the Oulipo to be translated and published in English. I've tried and failed to get the original French version in a real bricks-and-mortar independent bookstore, so the internet might have to be called upon – now I've read the English, I can see that it's going to be actually a very different read again, due to a very specific constraint. I'm currently reading Lisa Robertson's The Baudelaire Fractal, to keep my head in France for as long as possible. Once that is done, I will return to her Boat, which I'd left moored at the side of my bed as it was quite cumbersome for travelling. But the to-read pile is still blocking the view from my desk to the street, so...
