Fiction and Truth Reading as a Reader, Reading as a Writer

I would point out that in the Iconic reading group teased me that I read these books as a writer, not purely as a reader.  This is evident here, I think... I did protest to them that this was what I was: a writer!

Fiction and Truth

Suite Francaise  - really a suite of two novels which might have grown been three -  was famously written by Irene Nemirovsky during the German occupation of France  before her removal in 1942 to Auschwitz and ultimate death. The rediscovery and  publication  of the work sixty five years later is a story in itself.

Irene - already a well known writer - embarked on the novel in the rural  village of Issy-l'Eveque where she and her husband and two small daughters lived, having fled occupied Paris.

I have just finished writing my latest novel - to be called The Art of Retreating - partly set in Occupied France and partly in the present day, so had read dozens of scholarly histories,  factual anecdotal memoirs and factual personal stories to get inside the particular experience of one of the six  main characters -  the aged writer Francine Costington.

I  kept Suite Francaise - at the far side of my table -  to read after I had finished writing my own novel.  This was because,  being fiction, this novel is essentially a secondary source; secondary sources are normally weak and can lead to thin storytelling and unconscious imitation..

It turns out though that t Suite Francaise relates intensely ... Read on.

Raffish Courtesans, Balzac and Elvis Presley

As readers here will know I have been flooded for a week or so with all things Dickens, the life, the novels, the biographies. I am still relishing the insights in Peter Ackroyd’s beautifully written, brilliant Dickens . Ackroyd is not just a great biographer but also a great novelist (se his Hawksmoor – an imaginative tour de force.

And I am now dipping my toes in the flood which is demi-monde Paris in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. As I say today on my writing blog reading the novels of a time are one wonderful way of accessing the feeling and spirit of a time – important if you want to writer authentically about that time.


There is no doubt that Paris at that time had a very raffish element of actors, artists, courtesans, fallen or rising women and exotic if shady people. There is no doubt that the great novelist Honore de Balzac observed this world at the time as part of hos encyclopaedic series of novels known as La Comedie Humaine . So, onto my Kindle, I download twelve of these novels (free!) as start to the research.

Having argued with my learned friend Sharon about what she sees as the dubious virtues of Dickens she is more sanguine about Honore de Balzac, my new passion, my denizen of the raffish Parisian Demi-monde, my spy, my informant for this planned novel. I remember reading three of his novels in French Pere Goriot Eugenie Grandet and La peau de chagrin,when I was seventeen but my Kindle versions are in English for speed, for research, to leave time to write….

I have also ordered (not free) a book called Writing with a Vengeance: The Countess de Chabrillan's Rise from Prostitution - a critical and scholarly consideration of the writer - a fascinating and scandalous woman who was a professional writer (extra scandalous!) writing in and of my heroine’s day. This book's more expensive than the Balzacs but great as a research resource flexing out my understanding of the Paris of my future novel.


Both Sharon and I are intrigued by the notion of raffishness She thinks that ‘… in an odd way, it was a sort of raffishness that existed even in this country up until the 1950s and possibly still does in a more limited way.’


Well, I was there in the 1950s and nothing raffish was going on around me. But then there was Elvis Presley. Would he count as raffish?

Now! I have to get down to that reading.

Later Post-script from the learned Sharon:

'Think back to the 1960s for instance - Christine Keeler, Lord Lambton, Profumo, were all part of that sort of set, that included photographers, gamblers, artists ,actresses and tarts. Even Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret

 

There always has been, still is now I guess, a sort of demi-monde where all sorts mix.  Now it would include people like  multi national busienss men - Philip Green, perhaps, politicans, writers, artists and celebs.  The sort of A list and B list people that will always form a world within a world that we know nothing about until scandal surfaces.'

 

Me: But it has evolved. Now because of internet, Utube and fast media any world within a world is exposed the next day, the next week. So the possibility of a world within a world, tacitly acknowledged in certain secion of society, existing and maintaining it own ambience is almost nil. Perhaps I should exclude the criminal/espionage/security complex from that notion.