It was strange coming back through Ben Guerdane, but this time just en route. I waited to recognize that dusty curve of main road, the central town mosque, the little pizzeria. But our driver must have bypassed the centre of town because I didn't recognize anything, and soon we were on that long stretch of highway leading up to the border. On the ( Read more... )

I'm in Bruges. I am hungover.

Last night ended a few hours ago with some kind of magnolia-coloured vanilla spirit which according to two girls I was out with had the ‘look and consistency but sadly not the taste’ of semen (whether that means semen should taste more vanilla-y or spirits should taste more seminal I'm not quite sure, well no, I am), ( Read more... )

I have been making a concerted effort to finish off some of the books I was reading, before starting any new ones. It's working! I've finished four books in the last five days - pretty impressive, I think you'll agree. Even more so considering that one of them was Le Morte Darthur, which I have been reading on and off for about 18 months. ( Read more... )

Went down south yesterday into the outskirts of the desert, tracing the Libyan border down towards the dunes and through a lot of small ochre towns nestled in among the low rocky hills. One of them was Tataouine (the two Ts are different - تطاوين), and it was just outside town here that much of Star Wars was shot, the Tunisian landscape being ( Read more... )

 
Yesterday a chance came up to cross the border, but the circumstances were a bit unpropitious. The situation at the crossing is quite difficult - there are several different gates between Tunisia proper and Libya proper, for various passport or administrative checks, and men with guns at all of them. So what happens is that me and Elodie, my ( Read more... )

So I'm here on the Libyan border. Tiny Tunisian town called Ben Guerdane, dusty roads, donkeys pulling carts, beat-up old pickups and men in djellabas, bronzed foreign correspondents posing at terrace cafes, photographers scanning through pictures by their satellite transmitters. Beautiful musical call to prayer round these parts, quite different ( Read more... )

So have a look at this catchy sentence, which Proust uses to open the second volume of his novel sequence.

My mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard was away from home and that she herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of ( Read more... )

So far, my resolution to read one French book for every two English ones this year is going according to plan, more or less, although it does mean the number of books I'll get through has dropped alarmingly. I just finished Adam Roberts's brilliant, brilliant Yellow Blue Tibia, which if it hadn't been brought out by a science fiction author would ( Read more... )

Les traductions sont comme les femmes: lorsqu'elles sont belles, elles ne sont pas fidèles et lorsqu'elles sont fidèles, elles ne sont pas belles.
-EDMOND JALOUX

2010 was an amazing year for books for me. I read several brilliant authors for the first time, including DH Lawrence, Hilary Mantel, Laurence Durrell, and Maupassant, and also got some in from favourites like Pynchon. Weirdly and uncharacteristically, I also found myself reading several ‘celebrity memoirs’ last year - about four in a row, mostly ( Read more... )