Book Club Session 3
This article was originally submitted in French. Due to Covid, only a machine translation is available below for this week’s Bulletin.
Third session of the Book Club, Wednesday, 9th November 2022
Aliénor presented Voyage au bout de la nuit, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. This work proposes a refutation of war, which is reminiscent of Owen Wilfred’s poem “Dolce et decorum est”. Céline’s style, strongly marked by orality, is familiar without being vulgar. It is perhaps a reflection of the questioning imposed on the narrator by war, colonization, Taylorization, and death, the most striking subjects of the novel.
The discussion also turned to the particular status of its author, whose work is partly doomed to opprobrium because of anti-Semitism. Le Voyage au bout de la nuit, an impressive work of richness and verbal inventiveness, is one of the only ones that remain readable.
As for Elise, she read Ken Follett’s Fall of the Giants. A vast historical saga covering the period from the First World War to the Cuban missile crisis, the novel allows us to follow four families and see how their destinies are tied up and untied.
Ms. Guidevay discussed her reading of Yaa Gyasi’s No Home (Home going, in English, in the original version). It follows the story of two families, starting with two sisters who will never meet. Both originating from Ghana, they will experience opposite paths, for one the horrors of slavery, and for the other the dubious privilege of being married to a white slave owner. One will be deported to the United States, the other will remain in Ghana and live among the privileged of her country of origin. Each chapter presents the story of one generation from each of these two sisters. In the background, the book questions the conditioning by the environment, by the family history, and the possible resistance to this heredity.
Mr. Loggia presented Hong Kong Noir by Chan Ho-kei. The novel informs us about the communities, spaces and mythologies that characterize Hong Kong and its literary representations. The chapters are almost independent short stories, whose main thread is the investigator Kwan Chun-dok. Presented as dying and in a coma, in the first chapter, he is nevertheless used by his assistant Lok Siu-ming to solve an investigation, by making people believe in a new method allowing to read the brain waves. The following chapters go back in time and present the same character at different stages of his career. A detective story, the book is also a sociological and historical reflection that takes us through the history of the city since 1967. It highlights the most emblematic but also the most fantasized communities of Hong Kong, the police and the triads.
On the occasion of the presentation of Chan Ho-kei’s novel, the Book Club also mentioned the publication of a special issue of the magazine Jentayu dedicated to Hong Kong literature. Some of the authors published in the magazine will be present at the Parenthèses bookstore on Friday, 11th November.
See you in two weeks for the next Book Club session!