Tagged: 246 Different Kinds of Cheese

Most lives don’t have a specific story. People do things, they live and die, and it doesn’t form any particular shape. Famous people are more likely to have stronger story elements – there’s at least a rise, possibly a fall, probably phases or eras – but that only means better raw materials for a biographer.

So if I say that George Sand: True Genius, True Woman  tells an “and then this happened” version of the famous 19th century novelist’s life, I’m mostly just saying that George Sand had a normal kind of life. Things happened, she did her work, she was involved in causes and had love affairs, and then she died. That’s the story writer Séverine Vidal and artist Kim Consigny tell here: one woman’s life, from fairly early childhood to the moment of her death, in some detail. Vidal focuses somewhat on Sand’s writing, but more so on her relationships – with her mother and grandmother in youth, with other family members and the men she was involved with later in life.

And I appreciate that. Some biographies, especially in graphic-novel form, find a story in their subject’s lives by focusing on a moment or a period on the person’s life. That’s certainly valid, but, especially in a case where I don’t know the person’s life all that well – as here – I’d really prefer to get the full sweep of the story. And George Sand does just that.

She was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, daughter of what seems to be a minor noble in the very early 19th century, and the Napoleonic Wars somewhat impinged on that childhood – spent primarily at the family estate in Nohant in central France – but the drama of her early life was more centered on the conflict between her aristocratic paternal grandmother and her Parisian mother after the death of Aurore’s father at a young age.

Vidal and Consigny show young Aurore as strong-willed, rebellious, prone to visions, and often unhappy with her role as a young aristocratic woman. (As seen later in life, she was against both the roles of “woman” and “aristocrat” as they existed in France at the time.)

She grew up, she started to write, she had affairs – but, before most of that, she did what women in her time had to do: she got married, at the age of eighteen. It was not a success, and maybe that lack of success led to some of the rest.

This is a fairly long graphic novel, over three hundred pages, and it’s packed with details from all of Sand’s life – again, more skewed to her personal life than to details of the themes and reactions to her works, though we do see her talk about and work on her major books here.

There’s a lot of text, particularly dialogue. I assume a lot of it is taken from Sand’s own extensive memoirs, or third-party accounts – I don’t know if we can entirely trust any detailed account of a conversation before sound recording, but Sand’s life was well-documented. Consigny brings a lose, breezy, amiable, energetic line to the proceedings, giving a lot of life to a story of people mostly in rooms talking to each other.

I’ve never read Sand, and knew very little about her life or work before this book. So I’ll say it’s a fine introduction, and a strong portrait of an interesting, influential figure who lived through tumultuous times and was close to a lot of other cultural figures of her day.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Most books like this have a subtitle, but not this one. It is just Sartre . Take him as he is, or walk away – those are your options with the book, as it is with all things Sartrean.

This is a French graphic novel, written by Mathilde Ramadier and drawn by Anais Depommier. And I immediately have to take back what I just said – maybe it’s a subtle difference between how English-speakers view Sartre and how his countrymen do – because the 2015 Dargaud edition had the longer, more descriptive title Sartre, Une existence, des libertés. This 2017 US edition was translated by Peter Russella and published by NBM.

It is a biography in comics form of the writer and philosopher – straightforward and chronological, starting with his youth and ending the main story in 1964 when he refused the Nobel Prize. (Sartre consistently refused all prizes and awards in his life as part of his philosophy: he thought that a person could always change at any point, so judging anyone before they were dead was impossible. I am probably mangling his argument here.)

Actually, it nearly becomes a twinned biography – Simone de Beauvoir is almost as important to the book as Sartre is himself, as she was in his life. We even get her words in captions, as we do Sartre’s, a few times throughout this book. (One minor production note: their captions are tinted to distinguish them from the white-background captions, which are the books’ narrative. I found, reading this digitally, that those captions were scattered enough that the color difference wasn’t clear – though they tend to be used for scenes of either Sartre or de Beauvoir away from the other, so they’re always clear in context.)

For a man who lived through WWII in Paris and was at least nominally part of the Resistance to German occupation, Sartre led a quiet, sedentary, bookish life. The thrills of this graphic novel are primarily intellectual, the conflicts inter-personal and brought out in long complex conversations in drawing rooms over fine food and between cigarettes. It’s a very wordy book, as I suppose it had to be – Sartre was a man of words, more so than even most writers.

Ramadier and Depommier don’t focus on the many sexual adventures of Sartre and de Beauvoir, though they do have a few moments to indicate they are happening (continuously, all the time, in the background of the intellectual activity) and also show the beginning of their relationship with a frank in-bed conversation in which Sartre says (this is my blunt translation out of Sartre-speak) “I want to fuck a lot of people, and I think you do, too – but let’s always come back to each other and tell each other about it, to stay the most important people to each other.”

This is a book full of words, and I have to credit both Ramadier for making it all work in the first place and Russella for turning it into clear English that fits into the panels and tells (what I have to assume is) the same story. It is not an exciting book, and it will be deeper and more interesting the more a reader is familiar with Sartre’s life, thought, and major works, but it’s a solid introduction even to people who only vaguely know who Sartre was or why he matters. 

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The obvious thing to start out with would be a joke about how only the French would make a 250-page graphic novel about cooking.

But I don’t want to be dismissive: this is a both heavily-researched and user-friendly overview of something that’s hugely important for everybody – we all gotta eat, and the vast majority of us enjoy it and want to maximize that enjoyment. It may be too much for some readers, true. But there have been books like this in prose for decades – centuries, actually – and there’s no reason the graphic format should be less useful.

The opposite, in fact – in a prose book, you have to add pictures on individual pages or a photo insert to show what food looks like – in a graphic novel, that’s built in on every page automatically. You have to deliberately avoid showing what things look like in a graphic novel.

So I’m happy to see more books like The Incredible Story of Cooking : serious non-fiction in comics form, for people who want the details and also want to see what it all looks like, or maybe don’t want to read walls of text, or just like the organization of a comics page. (I’m all three of those things, myself, at least intermittently.)

Cooking was written by Benoist Simmat, a journalist and comics writer – he previously did a big book on wine , which has also been translated into English – and drawn by Stéphane Douay, who’s been drawing comics for twenty years but doesn’t seem to have been translated into English before. (Well, he draws the pictures, so his part of it doesn’t need to be “translated,” but you know what I mean.) It was originally published in Paris by Les Arénes in 2021; the US English-language edition (translated by Montana Kane) is from NBM and officially publishes today.

It stakes out a lot of ground: the subtitle starts with prehistory and claims to cover half a million years. The book delivers on that: the first page lists a number of hominids active in Africa between four and one million years ago, and the first chapter tells us as much as modern science knows about what those early humans ate and how they found, prepared, and kept food. I’m not sure that counts as cooking, but I don’t have a solid mental definition of what’s required to “count” as cooking, either. The book only claims 500,000 years of history, anyway, so these additional millions up front are purely lagniappe, to set the stage.

Eight more chapters bring the story, in successive stages, up to the modern world. We start with the great civilizations of antiquity – Sumer and Egypt and China and India – then Greece and Rome, trade routes and the Far East, medieval Europe, the Columbian exchange and food in the New World in general, the rise of first restaurants and gastronomy in the 19th century and then (soon afterward) the industrialization of the food business, before ending with a look at the world today, anchored by the Slow Food movement and related localization trends. Each chapter is dense with detail – there are lots of footnotes, which can send the reader back to an extensive bibliography in the back – livened up by Douay’s crisp and occasionally amusing art.

In the back, besides that long bibliography, Simmat also provides nearly two dozen recipes from representative cultures around the world – the US gets a Chicago Hot Dog, for example – which can probably be cooked from with only a small effort. (Measurements are all in metric, which may confuse some American cooks.) In case the foregoing wasn’t French enough, Simmat also gives a complexity/difficulty level for each recipe in graphic form: one soufflé for simple, up to three for difficult.

I doubt I will cook from this book, but the recipes are a nice addition. And the bulk of the book is the main comics narrative, which is detailed, backed up by all those footnotes, and includes all sorts of quirky details – starting with all of those pre-sapiens hominids up front – that I wasn’t expecting at all. It’s a book that’s both entertaining and informative: what more could you ask for?

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The book is not nearly as puckish as the cover suggests. Anyone looking for a Little Nemo-inspired imaginative adventure should look elsewhere; this is a memoir by a French visiting nurse about one particular patient of hers, an old woman with an unspecified dementia-related condition.

And this is all true, as far as I can see. This all happened, to the real Valérie Villieu, and she’s telling that story to us, with the aid of artist Raphaël Sarfati. It was a little while ago – Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces  covers a few years in the mid-Aughts, with the 2007 French presidential election somewhere in the middle – and the French edition came out in 2012, to be eventually translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2020 English-language edition from Humanoids.

Josephine was a woman in her mid-eighties, living alone in a small Paris apartment, as she had for nearly sixty years. She’d recently been found wandering disoriented in the street, and, after a brief hospitalization, was back in her apartment with daily visits from caregivers and an official legal conservatorship to manage her affairs. Villieu was working as a visiting nurse, with a roster of patients like Josephine, who she would see several times a week, to evaluate and support, administering medications and keeping track of their conditions. Villieu seems to have been part of a nursing team; she uses “we” somewhat regularly to talk about the work done, and occasionally shows what I think is a colleague also visiting Josephine.

But it’s mostly Villieu’s personal experience: how she met this woman, how they interacted, what happened over those years, how Josephine affected Valérie.

A lot of the book is the day-to-day: complaining about the often-lackadaisical work of the caregivers, battling to get the conservator to actually do something and not just complain about how many cases he was handling, and slowly gaining Josephine’s trust. Villieu writes at length about the work she does, and how she interacted with Josephine, and what Josephine was like as a person – this is a graphic novel with extensive captions, a very narrated story.

Villieu cared for Josephine for years – and I mean “cared” in both the professional and the personal sense. And she makes their relationship real here, without sugarcoating it. Josephine had a serious, unreversable, progressive mental illness, that confused her and made her forget thousands of things, that changed her moods and made her combative at times. Dementia is one of those horrible diseases we don’t like to think about – for ourselves or for ones we care for – since it turns the sufferer into a different person, bit by bit stripping away important pieces of who they were and replacing those with a pseudo-childish shell, smaller and diminished and occasionally realizing that.

(I may be biased: a very close family member is going through something similar right now, so this is more real to me than another health problem would be.)

Josephine was still a quirky, interesting person: dementia had stolen a lot from her, but a lot of her was still there, the woman who had lived in that Paris apartment for decades and still had stories of the ’50s and ’60s to tell when she could remember them.

That’s who Villieu wants to celebrate: the woman she met, behind the disease, the woman she supported and helped for a few years, giving her some more happy life at a point when she could easily have been shoved into an institution and left to decline quickly. Little Josephine is a more serious, deeper book than the cover would make a reader expect, but it’s well worth the journey.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.