Slow release of comic effect: Echenoz's list of Queens of France

Reading Jean Echenoz again. (I'd like to read everything he's written.) This time: Queen's Caprice, a  collection of seven short stories. (Caprice de la Reine, Editions de Minuit, 2014).

One of the stories had a delayed effect on me, like a time-bomb. I read it attentively and at first it made me smile. As time went by, it must have gone to my head, because the more I thought about it, the funnier I found the world. I laughed a lot about everything. People thought that maybe I 'd had too much to drink - but no, only orange juice.

It isn't a story. It's a list of twenty items:  the title says it all - Twenty women in the Jardin du Luxembourg, clockwise. It starts like this, without preamble:

"Saint Bathilde, Queen of France, holding a manuscript in her left hand, and the left side of her coat in her right hand. Hairstyle: two plaits, tied back. Jewels: necklace with cross. Expression: determined."

Next paragraph, next Queen: you read about her carefully, her posture, her arms and hands, what she's holding, hairstyle, jewels, expression. It rises in crescendo: you're waiting for that last word, you hope for a surprise - but no - this one is 'volontaire' (I was reading it in French - it means 'wilful'.) I reckon there's not much difference between wilful and determined; the third queen is described as 'decidee', which my Petit Larousse confirms also means determined. They're Queens of France, used to power.

Further down the list, some variation does occur:  Marie de Medicis is 'not very friendly'. (I'd say.) Someone else is 'patient', and the final one, Sainte Clotilde, is 'distant'. In two cases, a further qualifier is added at the very end of the paragraph: 'Presence of big breasts'. If you do need to know, they were Jeanne d'Albret ('inspired' - she was a poet) and Anne of Austria: ('pleasant, but dazed' - probably too many children.)

The breast thing tells you that the observer is a man. OK then, maybe not a man, maybe a 13 year-old boy.

It made me laugh.

*** 

The next day, I attended a party in a lovely modern house, art on the walls and canapes served. On one side, windows from floor to ceiling, overlooking the countryside, the lawn outside sloping to bushes, trees beyond and then hills and far away the sea and a glowing pale sky, long whisps of  cloud across it. In the middle of the lawn stood a stick with a narrow container attached, the contraption no higher than my knee. I asked the friend in whose house we were what it was: "B's rain gauge. I did ask him if it needed to be there today." she said. I laughed.

It doesn't matter where you put a rain gauge, as long as it is in the open. This one was in the middle of the view, bearing witness to my friend's ability to compromise and her husband's single-mindedness. I laughed so much I cried.After that, I carried on laughing about everything. I had a good time.

Names in novels - a view according to Echenoz

I enjoy the names Echenoz gives his charactes in Big Blondes (1997, translation with occasional clumsiness by Mark Polizzotti, The New Press) (Les Grandes Blondes, 1995, Editions de Minuit) and while checking whether one in particular was a total fiction or existed in reality (Personnettaz - so weird, and yes, it is a real name), came across a review in Liberation entirely dedicated to this topic, which you'll find here (in French). Echenoz compiles lists of names he likes as he comes across them, before he may need them. They may not always be the names of actual people: he finds them anywhere - in the train or on the entrance to a factory.

He says: "Reading Henry James' Notebooks, I was struck by the list of names he kept in reserve."
He likes names that work in several languages and over several periods, that have belonged to a variety of people - Arbogast (the heroine's family name in Big Blondes) was the name of a bishop in the 5th century, a general under Theodosius [Roman emperor, 347-395], a French mathematician in the 18th century and the name of the detective in Psycho. First names matter too - they add something, though he says that he is incapable of explaining why the sexy active girl in Big Blondes is called Donatienne, an uncommon name - the name came to him and that is who she was - no question.

Each name is different from all the others and conjures up a specific personality: the reader has no difficulty in remembering who they are.

In Echenoz's following book, Piano (also translated by Polizzotti) one finds that he has been unable to let go of two of the names so carefully chosen and that they reappear, one of them with a wink to his previous incarnation. That book was reviewed in the Independent.

I shall write more when I've finished reading Big Blondes - about the use and practice of irony, which ties in with Vila-Matas' book about Never any end to Paris...