500 Page BenchmarkIf we're on track (and if my math is right) we should have actually reached 10 books / 500 pages last week, but I didn't have time to post. Today we should be at 575 pages and 11.5 movies for a single challenge, 1150 pages and 23 movies for a double. So: how are you all doing?
Double Challenge: Romance Family17 book, 20 films
deficit: 325 pages, 3 films
This is the first of a quartet about the lives of two women from a poor and often violent neighborhood outside Naples. The girls are super bright, but one will marry and stay in the neighborhood and one will move out and seek higher education. It starts off as a normal coming-of-age story, but picks up power as the friend's lives diverge. I highly recommend it. And, surprisingly, the whole series is available in Italian on the kindle in the US.
In this passage a group of five friends, many who have never left the poor
rione, visit an upper class neighborhood for the first time.
Fu come passare un confine. Mi ricordo un fitto passeggio e una sorta di umiliante diversità. Non guardavo i ragazzi, ma le ragazze, le signore: erano assolutamente diverse da noi. Sembravano aver respirato un’altra aria, aver mangiato altri cibi, essersi vestite su qualche altro pianeta, aver imparato a camminare su fili di vento. Ero a bocca aperta. Tanto più che mentre io mi sarei fermata per guardare con agio abiti, scarpe, il tipo di occhiali che portavano se portavano occhiali, loro passavano e sembrava che non mi vedessero. Non vedevano nessuno di noi cinque. Eravamo non percepibili. O ininteressanti. E anzi, se a volte lo sguardo cadeva su di noi, si giravano subito da un’altra parte come infastidite. Si guardavano solo tra di loro.[It was like passing a barrier. I remember a packed passage and a sort of humiliating diversity. I don't look at the boys, but the girls, the women: they were absolutely different than us. They seem to have breathed an other air, to have eaten other food, to have been clothed on another planet, to have learned to follow another road on the strings of the wind. I was open-mouthed. The more that I would stop to look a the ease with which they dressed, their shoes, the types of glasses they wore if they wore glasses, they would pass and seem to not see me. They didn't see any of the five of us. We weren't perceptible. Or interesting. And even if, at times, their glance fell on us, they would turn immediately as if annoyed. They only looked among themselves. ]
I'm about half way through the book, which means I'm half way through the whole series. This book starts of with a nice scandal, as the narrator discovers that some of the aristocrats have been leading secret gay lives. And then it slows, and their are seemingly hundreds of pages set in the various Paris salons. The salon passages are interesting for a bit, but in the end I get impatient with them. I want more sodomizing and gomorrhizing like the titles promises!
And then the narrator visits Balbec, and is haunted by the memories of his grandmother. It's one of the most beautiful extended passages I've read in any language. It's why I stick with Proust.
In this passage the narrator is in his hotel room, and remembers how he and his grandmother, in the next room, would communicate at night through taps on the wall:
Et je ne demandais rien de plus à Dieu, s’il existe un paradis, que d’y pouvoir frapper contre cette cloison les trois petits coups que ma grand’mère reconnaîtrait entre mille, et auxquels elle répondrait par ces autres coups qui voulaient dire : « Ne t’agite pas, petite souris, je comprends que tu es impatient, mais je vais venir », et qu’il me laissât rester avec elle toute l’éternité, qui ne serait pas trop longue pour nous deux.[And I would demand nothing more of God, if a paradise exists, but to be able to knock against this partition three little taps, which my grand-mother would recognize out of thousands, and she would respond by others taps which would say:
Be calm, little mouse, I understand that you are impatient, but I am going to come, and that he will let me rest with her for all of eternity, that this would not be two long for the two of us.]
And later in the same passage:
Et si elle faisait allusion à ce qu’elle avait souffert, je lui fermais la bouche avec mes baisers et je l’assurais qu’elle était maintenant guérie pour toujours. J’aurais voulu faire constater aux sceptiques que la mort est vraiment une maladie dont on revient. Seulement je ne trouvais plus chez ma grand’mère la riche spontanéité d’autrefois. Ses paroles n’étaient qu’une réponse affaiblie, docile, presque un simple écho de mes paroles ; elle n’était plus que le reflet de ma propre pensée.[And if she made allusion to that which she has suffered, I would close her mouth with my kisses and assure her that now she would be cared for forever. I would have told the skeptics that death really is only a sickness from which we return. Only, I didn't find anymore in my grandmother the rich spontaneity like before. Her words where nothing but affable responses, docile, almost a simple echo of my words; she was nothing but the reflection of my own thoughts.]
And then the narrator locks himself in his hotel room and mopes around for the rest of the month. Ugh.
And then he discovers that his girlfriend has a secret lesbian lover. Yeay!
I thought a swashbuckler would be a good first novel for Spanish. Sadly, this book wasn't the right choice for me. There wasn't enough action, the characters were all a bit dull, and most of the book was page after page of exposition. Maybe if my Spanish were better I could appreciate the actual language, but I'm still at the point where I'm learning to follow a basic story. Since I wasn't invested in the story I found that I was going through chapters without really focusing on them, or even understanding it, and eventually put the book aside at the 70% mark. I switched to
Harry Potter y las reliquias de la morte, which is written at the perfect level for me.