That crow again. I photograph him whenever the opportunity arises. Stories reside in small and unimportant things. Round the denuded bollard where unofficial grass had begun to sprout, a few blades have reappeared only a few days after it was scrapped away (see a recent post) by council workers. Nature always fights back.
Albert Camus' posthumously published, unfinished novel Le Premier Homme draws to a large extent on the author's impoverished childhood in Algeria. His grandmother, strong willed, dominating, every vestige of sentimentality driven from her character by loss and hardship is unforgetable. "Quand on disait de quelqu'un, devant la grand-mère, qu'il est mort. "Bon, disait-elle, il ne pétera plus." When it was said of someone in front of his grandmother that he had died, "Good," she would say, "he won't fart any more."
2 comments:
Grandmere sounds a treat.
Makes me want to read more about her....
One of the features of the O'Brien series of novels is a hopeless Chevalier des Grieux/Manon Lescaut yearning by Stephen Maturin for Diana Villiers. As I re-read the series for the fourth or fifth time (unable to summon the mental effort to read anything more demanding) Stephen is observing Diana back from her latest fling with a wealthy American: she has taken to drinking bourbon, he notes, and to smoking cigars. Soon, he thinks sadly, she'll be saying "fart" publically. A useful word that.
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