"La montagne de l'âme" utterly engrossing

50 pages into Gao Xingjian's "La montagne de l'âme" that I began reading yesterday.

beautiful, lyrical, vivid, nostalgic prose--I am absolutely in love with this book.

The book is 700 pages long. It will take me a year to finish--since I am reading the French translation instead of the English one--but I am sure it will be entirely worth it.

Here's Gao Xingjian on nostalgia, in an old courtyard of his childhood...

Sur le toit, les herbes sèches ou vivantes, blanches ou vertes, se balancent doucement au vent. Cela fait combien d'années que tu n'as pas revu ces herbes sur les toits? Pieds nus, tu fais claquer tes pas sur les dalles de pierre profondément marquées par les traces des roues des brouettes et tu émerges de ton enfance, tu émerges dans le présent."

Isn't that beautiful?

The book is written in normal tenses, not in passé simple, and uses first and second person pronouns instead of names, making it amazingly engrossing, grabbing your attention and not letting go. (That the book is not written in passé simple also has a side effect of making it much easier to read with my mediocre French.) I am hooked.

I may not be able to blog at all until I am done! Sorry folks.

Comments

[daniel]

heya pim
i purchased my own copy while in paris at a local fnac, at around 10 euros, this is a pricey paperback, will let u know how i like it

[Pim]

heh.

True. My mistake. Didn't I say my French was mediocre. Conditionnel indeed.

Pim

[Johnny]

My intervention is pretty much useless but..

"Could you help me?" cannot be subjonctif in french. It would be something like "Pourrais-tu m'aider?" which is conditionnel.

There, I said it. :)

[anthony]

How very odd. Languages, three parts fascinating two parts frustrating. Keep at it, I'd be thrilled just to be able to pronounce French.

[Pim]

Anthony,

No that's not the non-temporal past tense. Something like "Could you help me?" would be in the Subjonctif.

Passé Simple is the form of past tense used in Literature, basically.

French is such a complicated language I shall never be able to lift my skill up from mediocrity, I'm afraid.

Pim

[anthony]

Pim, I tried unsuccessfully to research this for myself but as I don't speak French I'm going to to have to drag you away from your book with a possibly very dumb language geek question.

Is the passe simple a polite(non-temporal)way of using the past as in "Could you help me?" or is it a separate system for polite/formal "verbs" as in Japanese? If it is, you have my every sympathy.

[Pim]

Daniel,

I'm trying to improve my French, that's partly why. Reading is a very good way to do that I think. Well, perhaps less good than, say, finding a boyfriend who speaks the language. ;-) But good nonetheless.

Also, Gao Xingjian is a political refugee who's now living in France. His book was first translated into French before English. So, since I couldn't read it in the original Chinese, I am doing it in French as I feel that it's a bit closer to the source than the English version.

Well, that, and I am obviously a pedant. :-)

Pim

[daniel]

hey pim, why are you reading this in french rather than english?