Nice: a writer's muse
Festival of Flowers, Nice (Fête des fleurs), 1923. Henri Matisse
The Book Office would like to pay a tribute to Nice in its own way, by talking about what it knows best: books. Those who've had the opportunity to spend their holidays in that wonderful city won't be surprised by how many famous people are associated with it: Nietzsche, Matisse, Chagall... Writers are no exception, and so we've chosen to present a few of them and how Nice made its mark on their work.
Edmond Baudoin:
Born in Nice in 1942, Baudoin returned to his childhood passion of drawing in his thirties after a career as an accountant. The graphic novels he has produced since then have been well received, as he has been awarded prizes at the prestigious Angouleme Festival on three separate occasions: for best French comic book, and for best scenario twice. Baudoin has written his own scenarios or worked with other famous Francophone writers (Le Clezio, Ben Jelloun, Vargas…), has performed with live musicians, and has also helped stage contemporary dance shows. Dalí, his graphic biography of the maverick painter will be published in the UK in October by SelfMadeHero; Baudoin will on this occasion be in conversation with Craig Thompson and Paul Gravett at the Lakes International Comic Arts Festival.
In the critically-acclaimed Couma acò (“like this”, in Nicois), Baudoin shows the depth of his Nice roots, as he tells us the story of his childhood. Throughout the graphic novel, the young Baudoin follows his grandfather, a vagrant who disdained the conventional modern lifestyle, and a true Nicois who speaks in the local dialect. The man takes the grandchild and the reader through the Nicois hinterland, providing the opportunity for reflection about what roots mean to us. An anecdote from this man’s life allows us to reflect on art and what we choose to recognise as being “works of art”: the grandfather used to build small walls in which he would always embed an empty can of food – effectively adding his signature to his work, like a painter or illustrator (“true artists”) would. It is a graphic novel that reaches back to the roots of Baudoin’s life and work.
Unfortunately, Baudoin’s works are translated in many European languages, but not so much in English: here a few of his works anyway!
Couma acò (Futuropolis, 1991; re-published by L’Association in 2005)
Le voyage (L'Association, 1996)
Les quatre fleuves (written by Fred Vargas; Viviane Hamy, 2000)
Peau d'âne (Gallimard, 2010)
Dalí (Dupuis, 2012); to be published in English by SelfMadeHero in October 2016
Patrick Modiano:
Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano was born in a suburb of Paris, and throughout the years has built a remarkably consistent corpus of novels. His work shows an obsession with the themes of memory and identity; it recurrently features tensions between attempts at retrieving a sense of the self through exploration of the past and ghost-like characters who seem to fade back into the mist. The reverberations of the Occupation (during which his father dealt in the black market and may have gotten involved with the Gestapo) and the Holocaust echo through all of his novels. The streets of cities, and especially Paris, figure prominently: through thorough and exact descriptions, they are the few landmarks available to the reader, offering some sort of stability.
Despite the centrality of the City of Light to Modiano, his novels don’t always reflect his feeling of being “a prisoner of his memories of Paris”. The writer has spent quite a lot of time throughout his life on the French Riviera, and several Mediterranean cities are given central roles: Tunis, Alexandria, and Nice. He once described the latter as “the last setting of a murky theatre play”, and as somewhere where “you live your retirement days like you choose to live in exile”: a character in Missing Person talks of “a very beautiful city”, albeit a city “of spooks and spectres, though I hope I’m not a part of it yet”. Of course we shouldn’t expect of Modiano that he’d provide larger-than-life characters like Joann Sfar (more on him later), or that he'd display the same kind of personal engagement. Yet it is interesting to note that the Nice in Modiano’s novels, especially in Dimanches d’Août, is also a deeply cosmopolitan one. However, it is cosmopolitan in a shady and alien manner: rife with Russian emigres, characters from the Occupation, and other exiles.
Livret de Famille, (Gallimard, 1977)
Missing Person, translated by Daniel Weissbort (Jonathan Cape, 1980)
Dimanches d'août (Gallimard, 1986)
The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l’Etoile, The Night Watch, Ring Roads, translated by Frank Wynne (Bloomsbury, 2015)
Pedigree, translated by Mark Poizzotti (Quercus, 2015)
So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood, translated by Euan Cameorn (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015)
J-M G Le Clezio:
The highly cosmopolitan Le Clezio is a man who engages with many different worlds and cultures. Born in Nice, of Mauritian parents who hold the British nationality but are descended of eighteenth-century French settlers, he claims Mauritius’ culture and the French language as his own. He was awarded the Nobel literature prize in 2008, as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”. He is an active traveller, and his novels often feature explorations of other countries, commonly weaving stories that link together humans of different origins and cultures.
One of the tensions in Le Clezio’s life that finds its way into his work is the difficulty of conciliating the admirable achievements of Europe and its civilization with the appalling crimes it has committed throughout history. There is also the problem of understanding the self: “To understand the hidden secret of the modern industrial world in which I find myself, I have to return to another world. That world is at once wartime Nice and the plantation – the sugar isles on which Europe's prosperity was built”. As one would expect of him, he was only mildly interested in the usual attractions of Nice as a summertime tourist magnet. Instead the place where he would daydream was the harbour, where he liked to watch the boats come into port. Recently, he wrote a poignant tribute to Nice in the news magazine Le Point.
The Prospector, translated by Carol Marks (David R. Godine, Publisher, 1994)
Desert, translated by C. Dickson (Atlantic Books, 2008)
The Interrogation (republished by Penguin, 2008)
Wandering Star, translated by C. Dickson (Curbstone Books, 2009)
The African, translated by C. Dickson (David R. Godine, Publisher, 2013)
Joann Sfar:
The celebrated French illustrator, filmmaker, and novelist, was also born and raised in Nice. For a man only in his mid-forties, he has already quite the bibliography to his name! His interests are varied, if not eclectic: they span children’s books (Little Vampire, Sardine in Outer Space), biographies (Gainsbourg Vie Heroique, a biographical movie which he directed; Chagall en Russie), explorations of philosophy and religion (The Rabbi’s Cat, whose adaption into a film he directed) … He is often lauded as one of the leading members of a wave of exciting Franco-Belgian comics artist. The Dungeon series, created with Lewis Trondheim, was a long-running project, and a beloved satire of the Dungeons and Dragons game.
Now that he spends plenty of time in Paris, Sfar has expressed some longing for his hometown. He says of Nice that it is a truly cosmopolitan city, across all social classes; his parents are of Jewish Algerian (Sephardi) and Ukrainian (Ashkenazi) origins. In Sfar’s eyes this is a side of the town which is often overshadowed by stereotypes of the French Riviera as a stronghold of corruption, racism, and provincialism. He has made Nice the setting of his most recent novel, Le Nicois, in which he imagines the return of the dazzling yet deeply controversial 70’s mayor Jacques Medecin to the city’s politics, after decades of exile in Latin America. Finally, Sfar has also illustrated a re-edition of fellow Nicois Romain Gary's Promise at Dawn.
Sardine in Outer Space, 6 volumes, with Emmanuel Guibert (First Second Books, 2006-2008)
Dungeon, collection of 36 volumes in different mini-series, (NBM Graphic Novels, since 1994)
The Rabbi’s Cat, 2 volumes, (Pantheon, 2006-8)
Little Vampire (First Second Books, 2008)
Le Nicois (Michel Lafon, 2016)
Romain Gary:
Romain Gary was born Roman Kacew in Vilnius, Lithuania; although he gave sometimes contradictory accounts of his childhood, what is certain is that his mother and him moved to Nice when he was fourteen years old, in 1928. Like all the other Nicois teenagers, he went to the Lycee Andre Massena and then studied law in Aix-en-Provence, then Paris. After the capitulation of France in 1940, he joined De Gaulle’s Free France as a pilot in the air force: over the course of war, he was was commended several times for his bravery. After 1945, Gary became a prolific writer of novels and essays. He was also a diplomat, serving notably as a member of the Permanent Mission of France to the United Nations and as consul-general in Los Angeles. Mirroring his own life, a recurrent theme of the characters in his books is that they are often “marginal”, unwedded to conventional society because it brings out the most mediocre side of humans. Instead they fight with all the rage and conviction in the world for human dignity and for hope.
One of Gary’s most famous works is Promise at Dawn, an autobiographical novel. Through it Gary tells his story, that of a Lithuanian Jew raised by his mother alone. His childhood with her sees them fail to stay rooted in one place for too long, until she decides to move to France, a country she idealises. Opting for Nice, Gary over the course of the years grows into a man and pursues writing seriously, while his mother despite setbacks achieves a stable life. Promise at Dawn has plenty to say and celebrate about maternal love and Gary’s mother. It also reflects Gary’s own difficulties with his identity, especially his Jewishness. He initially went unnoticed as he published several novels under the alias Emile Ajar, one of which won the Goncourt prize, which he had already won for The Roots of Heaven – Goncourts are normally only awared once to an author! Joann Sfar, who drew the illustrations of a re-edition of Promise at Dawn, says Gary “made him love France”. He identifies Gainsboug and himself with that Jewish son of immigrants who had to make himself at home in a country which adored, but which sometimes rejected him.
The Roots of Heaven (Simon & Schuster, 1957; republished by White Lion Publishers, 1973)
Lady L., self-translated (Simon & Schuster, 1963)
White Dog, self-translated (New American Library, 1970; republished by University of Chicago Press, 2004)
The Life Before Us, translated by Ralph Manheim (New Directions, 1986)
Promise at Dawn, translated by John M. Beach (New Directions, 1987)