Hunting and Gathering: Revisited

On 11 December (gosh, is it really that ling ago?) I posted a blog about Anna Gavalda's book, Hunting and Gathering.  I have since watched the film with Audrey Tautou as Camille.  This caused me to re-visit the book.  As an aside the film, though enjoyable enough, is startlingly superficial when compared to the book.  I suppose that's an inevitability given the complexities and detail of the characters within the simplicity of the story.

In my original comments I had wondered whether the book was simply a holiday read or a more serious work.  If I were writing that posting now I would have absolutely no hesitation in saying that it is a work of considerable depth in its exploration of the characters who inhabit its covers. Nor would I have any hesitation in suggesting that it should be read.   

I Wish Someone Were Waiting For Me Somewhere

With the exception of those by Somerset Maugham I am not a lover of short stories. However I can now add Anna Gavalda to Maugham. This book comprises a dozen short stories and a novelette (if there is such a thing) entitled Someone I Loved. When, a few weeks ago, I commented on her novel Hunting and Gathering I said that it was, apparently, a departure from her previous two books in that it was not a dark story of love denied nor lost nor roads not taken. As I had not read this book I relied on a reviewer for that information. Yes, this is a book of 'what if' and love denied and lost (and found and rejected for that matter) but I'm not sure that I would describe it as dark.

 

I have the feeling that many, many people if they were to read this book would feel distinctly uncomfortable. I spent a lot of time during the reading of Someone I Loved denying that I had ever acted like that. I had always been honest. Or had I? Whatever else this book achieved it made me feel uncomfortable.

 

Anna's style (I'm living in New Zealand at the moment and we don't do surnames here - OK I did for Maugham but that's different!) is controversial. It's staccato and leaves the reader to fill in a lot of the foliage. This would be totally alien to anyone who likes Anthony Trollope or admires descriptive writing for its own sake but for people like me who, generally speaking, cannot be arsed with the fluff and description and just want the story (because I'm a very slow reader who reads a novel as if it were a law book) her style of writing is ideal. I actually find it very pleasing as well.

 

Anyway I thought this book was quite thought provoking in a fairly light way and I enjoyed it very much. Would I recommend it? You know, I'm having great difficulty with that question. CJ recommends without hesitation books which I would never dream of reading. Not because they are not good books (I'm not sufficiently well-read to pass an opinion on that) but because they are subjects which don't interest me. Anna writes of people, situations and emotions. You will learn from her books nothing of history, nor science, nor, perhaps, very much for that matter. But they will stir you. And if they don't then you and I are very different people. There is only one way to find out.

 

Ah, yes, we are are we not?

 

Quotes:

A bottle of Côte de Nuits, Gevrey-Chambertain 1986. Baby Jesus in velvet britches. [Possibly the most extraordinary descriptive phrase I've read, but I think I understood what was meant.]

 

One of the few things I remember from school is a theory by one of those ancient philosophers , who said the important thing isn't where you are it's the state of mind you're in. He wrote that to one of his friends who had the hump and wanted to travel. He basically told him that it wasn't worth the trouble since he was bound to lug his load of problems around wherever he went. The day the teacher told us that, my life changed.

 

I guess that your face is a place that touched my life.

 

The trap lies in thinking that we have the right to be happy.

 

"You like squash and I like swingball, and that explains everything..." . . . . ". . People who are rigid inside are always bumping into life and hurting themselves in the process, but people who are soft - no, not soft, supple is the word - yes, that's it, supple on the inside, well, when they take a hit they suffer less...I think you should take up swingball, it's much more fun. You hit the ball and you don't know where it's going to come back, but you know that it will come back because of the string, and it makes for a wonderful moment of suspense. . . . . "

 

"You, you're like my father, you have nostalgia for the mountains."

"Which mountains, Mouschka?" I would ask.

"Why, the ones you've never seen, of course!"

Hunting and Gathering

Translated from the French, Hunting and Gathering, Anna Gavalda's latest book is, apparently, a departure from her previous two books in that it is not a dark story of love denied nor lost nor roads not taken.  It is a story driven by its characters rather than a plot.

The characters are Camille, who works as a 'cleaning operative' and lives alone in a tiny, unheated, delapidated garret with a Turkish toilet on the landing and doesn't eat; Philibert, an aristocrat 'minding' an enormous flat which is the subject of a family inheritance feud and which is in the building in which Camille lives; Franck who lives in Philibert's flat and is a talented chef with severe boorish tendencies and Franck's Grandmother, Paulette, who is too old to look after herself but who is terrified of being placed in a nursing home.

All these characters are damaged in some way but come together as a group of individuals who, through each other, manage to mend that damage.  It is a story of many emotions: despair, kindness, sadness and happiness.  To my mind they were crafted with considerable skill and feeling.  One suspects the whole time of reading that this is a book which will have a happy ending.  Surely it will...............  What one can say is that the ending is wrapped up with not a single thread left unsewn.

I seem to wonder about the intentions of the authors of books that I have been reading recently.  I can't decide, for example, whether this book is simply a 'holiday read' or a more serious work.  Whichever, it is very pleasing prose.  I would suggest, too, that it is one of the most beautiful books that I have read recently.

It was recommended to me by a friend who knows me well and was a welcome recommendation. Would I recommend it to others? Absolutely but, and it's a big but, only to selected people.  'Cos if you're not one of those people you may well just not take to it.

Quotes:

It's a hypothesis.  History won't take us far enough to confirm it.  And our certainties never really hold water.  One day you feel like dying and the next you realise all you had to do was go down a few stairs to find the light switch so you could see things a bit more clearly.

In mid-November, when the cold weather began its dirty work of undermining everyone's morale...  [So appropriate on Lewis this year!]

The thing that prevents people from living together is their stupidity, not their difference.  [Ouch, that hurt.]

Why does there always have to be a notion of profitability? [in knowledge] I don't give a fuck if its useful or not, what I like is knowing that it exists.

...everything you regret comes back to haunt you, torment you.  Day, and night...all the time.  [My Godfather, Uncle JPD, drilled into me that one must never regret anything in life because, you've guessed it, it would come back constantly to haunt one.  The one thing I've regretted haunts me constantly.  Oh dear.]

Mathilde had the kindness, arrogance and offhand manner of those who are born in finely woven sheets.