When You Say The Year, Now You Start With 'Twenty'

I'm back in Paris for deux mille dix. (I said I would incorporate French eventually.)

Almost everyone here is mad for the soldes, every shop is offering 10%, 20%, 40% off, and I am assured they will get even more extreme before it's all over. In my experience January sales involve crushing around in busy hot shops taking your coat on and off to try on optimistically a) the top with the great floral pattern that turns out to be four sizes too big and b) the perfect versatile pencil skirt that ends up being four sizes too small. Still, sales are all about optimism, so I went to Printemps, the huge department store, on Thursday to check them out. I was just like Dougal in the lingerie department. Burberry swimsuits swam in front of my eyes and blaring music assaulted me from every direction. Heavily-made up fifty-year-old ladies in killer heels verbally abused the concession staff in Spanish, Russian and Japanese, and the staff then took their frustrations out on the queue for the changing rooms by verbally abusing them in French.

I eventually found the loos and had to hand over €1 to an air hostess holding a spray can, who escorted me to my cubicle. The waiting males outside were slapping each others' shoulders and squeezing out tears of mirth at the six different colours of toilet paper on display, and the various potions and lotions available in this highly superior urination station. I have never seen men outside a toilet less bored. I left.

Reading List:

Favourite Christmas book goes to 'Faces of Humph: Cariacatures and Memories' by Humphrey Lyttelton, which got me through that interminable stretch of Christmas Day between the Queen's Speech and the trifle and salmon sandwiches.

Score: Take Five stars (it's a jazz book. Sorry.)

'The Cleft' by Doris Lessing

This great woman (born 1919) is still alive and writing, despite having written a perfect novel ('The Golden Notebook') in 1962. I can say that of no other author. She won a Nobel in 2007 for 'The Cleft,' clearly because it was too late to give her one in 1962. Anyway, it's a fable about the origin of the sexes, in which a tribe of women who live by an enormous vagina-shaped rock slowly discover and are discovered by a new male gender. I know what you're thinking, so I'd like to quote her on feminism:

"What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, 'Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.' Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion."

– Doris Lessing, The New York Times, 25 July 1982

She's one of the good guys.
Score: Three Nobel Prizes (probably more if by anyone else, but I'm comparing it to a perfect novel)

'Runaway' by Alice Munro

A lot of people make a big fat fuss about Alice Munro. This collection of short stories could be titled by short story cliché: "Is She Or Isn't She Adopted," "Is She Or Isn't She Psychic," "She Married The Wrong Brother," "He Had A Twin All Along," "She Went Funny-Religious," "Who Knew He Was Going To Jump In Front Of That Ole Train," etc. I did enjoy reading this. There was some great writing in it. But I couldn't escape the nagging feeling that all the characters were either Alice Munro or unfair caricatures of people who didn't like Alice Munro. Also, I'm sick of reading about generic wild environments e.g. coastline, islands, forests, etc.

Score: Three stars

'Oracle Night' by Paul Auster

Paul Auster is the one married to Siri Hustvedt, you know, the one I said wrote about "intellectuals in New York coping with the past, having dinner parties with each other" well, guess what, this is about a novelist in New York, I'm sure there is a dinner party involved, or at least some picking up of supper from a specialist deli. It's one of those books where the title of the book is also the title of the protagonist's book, which we are allowed to glimpse extracts of. (Like 'The Golden Notebook,' in fact.) Actually, beh, er, in this case it's the title of a book within the protagonist's work-in-progress. It's three-deep, clever, but Paul knows it, and Siri does too, and I bet they're in their New York loft right now eating very expensive delicatessen supper and talking about how clever they are.

Score: Four stars, it was damn good really, despite my resentment.

'Everyman' by Philip Roth

I can't believe I've never read any Auster or Roth. One would be understandable, neither is inexcusable. I loved this. This is about 'The Life and Death of a Male Body,' as the protagonist would call it, as he says from inside the book, if he'd ever been a writer. The most similar thing I've read recently was DeLillo's 'The Body Artist,' because they don't just address Death in an expansive, philosophical sense: I felt they both really try hard to understand the physical nature of a human body, its potential, its limitations, and how these fit with who we are inside it. I finished this feeling like I'd made friends with an author. You know. Next time you see them on a shelf you'll give an affectionate smile, they'll take precedence over other shiny books you haven't read. You give them a room and a key, then they start to put out tendrils in your mind and link with other experiences you've had, people you've known, books or films or pictures you're drawn to.

Score: Five stars, I'm feeling generous.

I'm having a New World literature phase, because at first, after reading so much classic old English waffle, Margaret Atwood sounds like Don DeLillo sounds like Alice Munro, but the more I read, the more these voices disassociate from each other and speak out separately. It's like when you read 'Trainspotting' and at first you think, 'oh, balls, it's all in Scottish,' then by the end you know the accents so well they have personalities of their own; characters, almost.

I'm being slightly facetious to make up for my shocking ignorance in having done a literature degree yet read virtually no modern American literature.