The French Tour Fall 2007, Stop#4: Montélimar

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The regional express train TER that transports passengers from Lyon to the towns of the Drôme and Provence speeds past vast vineyards angled over hillocks. On the way to Montélimar I spot the Hermitage and Paul Jaboulet Ainé estates.
The Cafés Littéraires de Montélimar is organized by a small association of volunteers. A committee of readers reads books all through the year and decides on the authors to invite each year to the festival. This year for the first time the small village of La Garde Adhémar is hosting a café littéraire during the festival; it has taken some work and some convincing, I am told. One of the members of the association Christine drives us from the hotel to the medieval village some twenty kilometers from Montélimar which is perched on the top of a hill. She conjectures that La Garde (literally the guard or the army) was a lookout for the Adhémar (the local noble family) since the village is located high on the hills with a great view all the way to the Rhône river. The Rhône separates the Drôme from the Ardèche.

Night has already fallen but from the foothills one can spot the small ruin that is part of the village. In the main square a group of very serious men is playing pétanque. The referee is in a suit. The village dates back to the middle ages and has its own post office and a population of under 1500. On the hills just below the bell tower is a botanical garden that has all the species of the Rhône-Alpes. The café littéraire is moderated by Franck Daumas and held at the restaurant L'Absinthe. I’m absolutely touched by the incredible turnout. The committee of readers and other members of the association have worked hard with librarians and booksellers of the region to ensure that people attend events. Someone from the staff hunts for a microphone so that those seated outside the restaurant can also follow the proceedings.

The audience is hesitant to ask questions when Franck turns over the floor to them but they soon warm up. There are questions about India, about Babyji and about writing. Everyone now and then I get a question that betrays the as a writer. We finish up an hour later and when I’m asked to sign books I have my turn quizzing some of the audience. Many of them have traveled to India and others are, indeed, writers. The restaurant has a special menu for the evening and one of the choices is an Indian plate. This is how it comes about that I end up eating one of the best south Indian vegetable biryanis of my life in a tiny village in the south of France. L'Absinthe's owners have traveled several times to India and have obviously picked up a few recipes and some kadipatta.

The next morning we are taken to a nearby nougaterie which doubles as a museum. The Nougaterie Arnaud Soubeyran still makes nougat by hand and conducts a guided tour through the premises. Though we’ve had breakfast we take up the offer of a cake au nougat and some tea before being shown around. The nougaterie is fabricating calissons today. Originally a specialty of Provence somehow the delicacy made its way to Montélimar and now many provençal businesses order these from Montélimar. Nougat gets its whiteness from egg white. The nougaterie uses honey harvested from lavender fields (which it owns) and also grows its own almonds. A while back a local apiarist arrived with some bees and the nougaterie decided to display them in a glass case, the bees have been given an exit through a pipe out into the open but they come back to their hive in the evenings. The queen has a spectacular blue dot Franck Thilliez spots right away and is easy to identify through the glass, several worker bees are moving to and fro doing things for her. At the end of the tour we are offered some more types of nougats and calissons to taste. At the afternoon lunch served at the hotel dining room for the authors I’m too full to eat.

I’ve a rendezvous at three with students at the local lycée Alain Borne. A few minutes from the hotel, the lycée is having its break when Chantal the association president and I walk over. Some of the other writers invited to the festival are also addressing classes here and in another nearby lycée. My event is with students in the première, the seconde and the terminale. From what I understand of the scholastic system that means the students are high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors and a few students who’ve opted for a technical education. They are between fourteen and seventeen, a mixed group. The event is held in the library. The students have put up several displays about India, pictures, texts, studies and a collection of books. I take a look at them before sitting down. All the students have read extracts from Babyji and many have read the whole book, they have been asked to write about India and two texts have been selected for me. Marie-Charlotte reads her text first, it is poetic and rhythmic. The next text is written by Cassandre but is read by her and two of her classmates. After this the floor is opened to the students. They are shy to ask the first few questions but after that they don’t stop. For an hour and a half they quiz me about the book, about myself, about schools in India, about writing, about why the main character is a girl, about getting published, about the process of writing various drafts. It is intense, it is exhausting. It is, above all, profoundly satisfying. Their energy is contagious and their enthusiasm on a Friday afternoon at four pm is immensely flattering. I realize that with them I’ve let myself get carried away. The usual distance that I try to maintain as a writer is broken. When the teachers suggest we move to the réfectoire for a goûter littéraire and continue the discussion there I take a picture of them all saying I want it for my blog. Within hours one of them will comment on my French blog.

Saturday is the moment for readers to meet with authors. At the Village des Cafés Littéraires set up not far from the hotel the writers seat themselves at tables. Those browsing our books at the bookseller can drop by and ask us to sign. Two young teenagers Juliette and Charlotte who are journalists for a real-time gazette during the café drop by and interview me for their afternoon edition. The cartoonist Eric Vaxman draws us. Lunch is served in our hotel Le Relais d'Empereur (it has boasted the passage of Napoléan, Winston Churchill and Brigitte Bardot) which is located at the Place Marx Dormoy. One of the writers Eric Holder tells the rest of us that Max Dormoy a minister for the Popular Front who refused to sign over the granting of full powers to Pétain was assassinated in Montélimar with bombs that had been placed under his bed. His assassins fled to Franco’s Spain and were never persecuted. In the afternoon after lunch there is enough time to take a quick walk to the Château des Adhémar in Montélimar. Located on a small hillock it provides a nice outlook over town. It was constructed in the twelfth century.

My café littéraire in the evening is held at 9pm at a local teahouse La Caverne d’Ali Baba. The treasurer of the association Jean-François walks me over. I see faces I recognize from earlier meetings and many new ones. Harold David the moderator has come from Paris and works for La maison des écrivains. After the session I get a chance to speak one on one with many in the audience. Pia Petersen and Nathacha Appanah come to my event and we end up sitting and talking long after it is over. Pia is a philosopher by training who left her native Denmark to study in France and now writes novels in French. She’s bursting with political ideas of all sorts and regales us with stories about passports, civil status and run-ins with the bureaucracy that border on the Kafkaesque. Nathacha and I ask simultaneously if she’s written about it threatening that we will if she doesn’t! Nathacha’s café littéraire is the next morning and I’m going to miss it since I am leaving early. But we’ve bought each other’s books now—another way of being in touch. Earlier in the day leafing through her novels trying to decide which one to begin with I finally settled on Blue Bay Palace because the character Maya shares her name with my character in That Summer in Paris. I wonder for a moment if I would have written that book if I had known so many other writers at that time and if the novel would have been anything like it is if I had. I felt the isolation of the writing life and the absence of friends in the field so sorely then. The beauty of the festivals this month is that one gets to meet one’s readers and also ones confreres.

Christine Carraz who is the only employ of the festival (the others are all volunteers of the association) has handled all our logistics and our last minute issues with train reservations and transfers like a solid rock. Since the festival began on Thursday she has barely slept, whether one is getting back to the hotel past midnight or taking breakfast early in the morning she is always there with a smile. She drives us to the station in the morning, Eric Faye and Dominique Fabre are on the same train. Dominique will be in New York next year, his book La serveuse était nouvelle is being published in English by Archipelago Books under the title The Waitress was new. Only after I leave the train and head to the taxi stand do I realize I’ve not left my email with Dominique so I’m hoping he’ll come across this blog and contact me before his US book tour.

The French Tour Fall 2007, Stop#3: Manosque

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Just before the high speed train from Paris comes to a stop in Aix-en-Provence it passes by several exposed limestone cliffs and one feels as if one is actually pulling up into a Cézanne painting. The authors invited for Les Correspondances de Manosque are received at the station by a smiling Valérie who puts us all into a small mini van. The ride from Aix to Manosque is an hour in low traffic. Despite the dark grey skies the ochre-colored cliffs bring cheer to the day.

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Even though it is only September the temperatures are not much higher than those in Paris and the weather conditions not a lot sunnier. We pass the L’Occitane factory along the auto route and I try to imagine the countryside in the height of the lavender season.

The festival at Manosque is a leisurely affair with time to digest what is happening and the possibility of doing things at one’s own rhythm. I’m staying with several of the other writers at a hotel just five minutes from the small center of the old city which has several large gates and a crisscross network of some fifteen or twenty narrow streets. I walk around and make it to the Place de l’Hôtel-de-ville only after 5pm when François Salvaing is most of the way through his débat. The session is animated by Pascal Jourdana who is also responsible for my being present as well. The Place de l’Hôtel-de-ville is a small square surrounded by cafés. A podium has been set up with a large bookshelf full of books. Salvaing holds forth on his new novel Jourdain. After Salvaing two novelists Gilles Leroy and Maurice Audebert are on for a session. Gilles Leroy is on the shortlist for four awards-the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina-for Alabama Song, an imaginative fictionalized biography of sorts about Zelda while Maurice Audebert is a philosopher who has just written a novel (his second) about Greta Garbo. They talk about the real personalities behind their books and also the fictionalized aspects of their novels. Someone in the audience is bothered by the fictionalizing of others’ lives but when the writers probe deeper it seems her discomfort comes from the fact that the people in question are famous.

By the end of the afternoon’s sessions everyone is a little frozen and happy to stand around the table set up in the square by the local bookseller La librarie du Poivre d’âne. While poivre means pepper and âne is a donkey I still haven’t cracked the idiomatic mystery behind the bookstore name. The conversation turns around the unseasonably low temperatures and those who were here last year say that it was incredibly hot during the festival, but I’m guessing that in 1901 the fall was as cold as it is today. There is a statue at one of the main gates showing a couple huddled together called La froid. Not the kind of thing you’re expecting when you head down to Provence.

Manosque, despite its modest population of some twenty thousand, has been hosting this festival for nine years inviting major authors and actors. The 9pm evening special each night is the reading of a text in the local theater by an actor of national repute. Tonight it is Julie Depardieu—yes the daughter of Gérard—and an actress in her own right. She does a staged reading, props and all, from the letters of Violette Leduc. One of the people I have just met is Achmy Halley the new director of the Villa Mont Noir where I will be spending some time next year. Violette Leduc, Achmy tells me, she was a close friend of Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre. In her letters to Nelson Algren, Simone de Beauvoir referred to Leduc as the “ugly one” but she also thought Leduc was the most brilliant woman she ever knew. Leduc’s letters to her lovers Alain, Georges and Robert would be funny if they weren’t tinged with sadness. Intense and obsessive the letters follow a repetitive pattern of declaring dramatic love, suffering from rejection and repeating the pattern.

Friday morning is a day of discovery. I make the most of the sun in the morning to climb the small hill Mont d’Or (530m) to the north-east of Manosque. The climb is short but steep and I pass by many beautiful provencal homes along the way. Though in the south of France Manosque is actually located at approximately the same latitude as Portland, Maine. The vegetation as one climbs up gets more interesting. There are several plants that have been entirely populated by snails, at first sight I mistook these for flowers. There is another tree I’m unable to identify with very weird fruit. Mont d’Or provides a nice view of Manosque and the surrounding lands.

One of the special things at the Manosque festival which is centered around correspondence and letters is the omnipresence of écritoires. A word that can be translated as a writing desk but does no justice to the concept. Ecritoires have been set up in all sorts of venues including shoe stores, chocolateries, pâtisseries, boulangeries, cafés and boutiques. There is even an écritoire in the shape of a camera lens that can be used to write in the dark or with little light and one shaped like a kaleidoscope with mirrors. The population at large is encouraged to write letters (pen, paper, envelope and stamps provided for free by the post) and indeed people can be seen writing away furiously. I stop by a lovely art gallery run by the painter Anje Delaunay and write. Delaunay borrows from some of the ideas of Buddhist thangka art and appropriates it with his own style and indeed some of his works achieve the mysterious and the spiritual. I then wander into Empreinte a workshop for etchers, lithographers and print-makers. The workshop is run as an association with each of the artists paying a small membership fee in exchange for a key and materials. The artists “correspond” in images with artists from all over the world, sending there prints and receiving one that enters into a dialog with the work they sent. The idea is magnificent and in many of the “letters” that are on display (during the annual festival they exhibit the year’s correspondence) there is a visible and evident dialog between Japanese and Danish artists and Manosquins.

Today, Gloria one of the etchers from the association is volunteering. Visitors are encouraged to try this art form for themselves. While the artists at the workshop etch on a regular basis on wood, metal and linoleum, she proposes something very simple: a small square of thin plastic. I get to work with the tools. Once I’ve got my engraving I cover it with printer’s ink and we run it through the one ton press that is over a century old. I’m so enchanted I do another. I also meet Claudine Rovis a painter from Nice who is going to bring out a hand-made book L'Incendie précaire at another book festival next week. Her book is a collection of her paintings along with the text of a poet who has written specially for the occasion. We hit it off. Bernadette another of the members of the association drops by and I take a photo of the three ladies. If I can find a low-cost workshop like this in NY or Delhi I will participate in this other aspect of the literary festival for next year, corresponding in image with one of the ladies I’ve met. There are other options too, like engraving at home and substituting the one ton press for a rolling pin in the kitchen. The images are less beautiful but apparently it works! So in case you are interested you can too.

Muriel Barbery speaks in the afternoon about her novel L’élégance du hérisson. She has found herself on the bestseller list for over 53 weeks and the Place d’Hôtel-de-ville is spilling with people. I read her book in the spring and stayed up late into the nights to finish it before I left Paris (it was a borrowed copy). I find out she’s got a background in philosophy. She’s in and out of Manosque in a jiffy since she’s invited to Korea so I don’t get a chance to talk to her in person. In the evening I dine with Hubert Artus a journalist who is covering the festival for rue89 an online news site set up by journalists who worked for Libération. We head over to catch Edouard Baer for the 9pm show which is entirely sold out. The auditorium packed. My translator Isabelle Reinharez and her husband Georges call out to me; they have a free seat next to them. I’m in luck! Baer reads from Patrick Modiano’s Un pedigree: searing autobiographical pages about a horrific relationship between the young Modiano and his parents. After the 9pm reading there is a concert scheduled in another room of the same premises. I had missed Mathias Malzieu on Thursday but I catch Babx tonight. He begins by reading an extract from Novecento Pianiste (a novella I’ve read before) and then moves on to texts he’s set to music (Kerouac, Rimbaud, Baudelaire) and other’s he’s written himself.

The next morning is so gray I go right back to Empreinte and set to work on a few more etchings, try new things. At lunchtime it starts to pour and when I bump into Hubert again we take cover in an Italian restaurant offering a simple fare of bruschetta and pizza. The dessert however is totally unexpected, a duo of melting chocolate-caramel-à-la-fleur-de-sel cake. Exotic and delicious it is worthy of getting into more gastronomic menus. In the afternoon I catch snippets of Yannick Haenel who speaking of his book Cercle (also shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis) says he wanted to compose this book much like a musician composes—a comment that immediately made me want to read the novel. I also catch bytes of Marie Darrieussecq (her novel Tom est mort is shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Femina) and Natacha Appanah (her novel Le dernier frére is shortlisted for the Prix Médicis). In the evening the dinner table is bigger than ever, we are 13 and I find myself across one of the only other non-francophone writers invited to the festival: Jamal Mahjoub. With an œuvre comprising some seven novels in English, Jamal is of Sudanese-British descent and currently lives in Barcelona. Needless to say he is a polyglot who speaks fluent Arabic, Spanish, and French in addition to his native English.

The 9 pm reading at the theater tonight is by Jacques Gamblin who has chosen to read from Romain Gary’s La nuit sera calme. A piece in which it turns out Gary has interviewed himself (clandestinely of course, much as he wrote his second Goncourt winning novel under the name of Emile Ajar). Gary holds forth on international politics and his time in the United Nations in the piece and some of his comments are clairvoyant. I skip the evening concert since I have my own débat the next morning.

Sunday is a sunny day. My translator Isabelle Reinharez (click on 25th september to watch her on tv) and I are on together for a Jeu double. Pascal Jourdana our moderator finds a balance between posing us both questions about language, about the book and about writing and translating. The hour flies quickly. We chat for a while after the event and then I head back to the hotel. A bus is taking the authors who are returning on the same train as me to Aix. On the bus Natacha Appanah and I chat through the crack between our seats. We haven't talked before and I'm heartened to hear our conversation can continue next week in Montélimar where we are both invited for the Cafés littéraires de Montélimar.