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A. O. Barnabooth. Son Journal Intime
Rayon : Roman Editeur : Gallimard Date de parution : 1982 Description : In-12, 232 pages, broché, occasion, très bon état. Envois quotidiens du mardi au samedi. Les commandes sont adressées sous enveloppes bulles. Photos supplémentaires de l'ouvrage sur simple demande. Réponses aux questions dans les 12h00. Librairie Le Piano-Livre. Merci. Référence catalogue 28674. Please let us know if you have any questions. Thanks
238 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1913
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About the author
Valery Larbaud
148 books21 followersHe was born in Vichy, Allier, the only child of a pharmacist. His father died when he was 8, and he was brought up by his mother and aunt. His father had been owner of the Vichy Saint-Yorre mineral water springs, and the family fortune assured him an easy life. He travelled Europe in style. On luxury liners and the Orient Express he carried off the dandy role, with spa visits to nurse fragile health.
Poèmes par un riche amateur, published in 1908, received Octave Mirbeau's vote for Prix Goncourt. Three years later, his novel Fermina Márquez, inspired by his days as a boarder at Sainte-Barbe-des-Champs at Fontenay-aux-Roses, had some Prix Goncourt votes in 1911.
He spoke six languages including English, Italian and Spanish. In France he helped translate and popularise Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman, Samuel Butler, and James Joyce, whose Ulysses was translated by Auguste Morel (1924-1929) under Larbaud's supervision.
At home in Vichy, he saw as friends Charles-Louis Philippe, André Gide, Léon-Paul Fargue and Jean Aubry, his future biographer. An attack of hemiplegia and aphasia in 1935 left him paralysed. Having spent his fortune, he had to sell his property and 15,000 book library. Despite his illness, he continued to receive many honorary titles, and in 1952 he was awarded the Prix National des Lettres.
The Prix Littéraire Valery Larbaud was created in 1957 by L'Association Internationale des Amis de Valery Larbaud, a group created to promote the author's work. Past winners of this yearly award include J.M.G. Le Clézio, Jacques Réda, Emmanuel Carrère, and Jean Rolin.
Georges Perec's character Bartlebooth is a cross between Melville's Bartleby and Larbaud's Barnabooth.
Poèmes par un riche amateur, published in 1908, received Octave Mirbeau's vote for Prix Goncourt. Three years later, his novel Fermina Márquez, inspired by his days as a boarder at Sainte-Barbe-des-Champs at Fontenay-aux-Roses, had some Prix Goncourt votes in 1911.
He spoke six languages including English, Italian and Spanish. In France he helped translate and popularise Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman, Samuel Butler, and James Joyce, whose Ulysses was translated by Auguste Morel (1924-1929) under Larbaud's supervision.
At home in Vichy, he saw as friends Charles-Louis Philippe, André Gide, Léon-Paul Fargue and Jean Aubry, his future biographer. An attack of hemiplegia and aphasia in 1935 left him paralysed. Having spent his fortune, he had to sell his property and 15,000 book library. Despite his illness, he continued to receive many honorary titles, and in 1952 he was awarded the Prix National des Lettres.
The Prix Littéraire Valery Larbaud was created in 1957 by L'Association Internationale des Amis de Valery Larbaud, a group created to promote the author's work. Past winners of this yearly award include J.M.G. Le Clézio, Jacques Réda, Emmanuel Carrère, and Jean Rolin.
Georges Perec's character Bartlebooth is a cross between Melville's Bartleby and Larbaud's Barnabooth.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 18, 2021
The ponderous travails of Archibald O. Barnabooth, one of the alter egos of Valery Larbaud take place mainly in Florence, eventually migrating to Russia and Denmark as the titular diarist laments the life of endless luxury and riches with which he has been burdened. His naïve affairs with prostitutes and run-ins with other lesser females are chronicled, along with his friend P.’s equally semi-interesting peripatetic romps. The writing is peppered with formidable wit, hefty observational ruminations, and exquisite travelogue of early 20th century Europe, before the onsigh of bombtime. The thoughts and movements of very wealthy people, whose attitudes to the poor verge on aristocratic contempt, is seriously unappealing . . . somehow the sterling prose and bristling colloquies keep the reader from sneering their noses off. This musty translation from Gilbert Canaan circa 1924 is the only available, long in need of an update.
February 12, 2015
Valery Larbaud belongs to this lineage of writers who tackle reflexively the process experience of writing not only by exploring the marches surrounding the work of fiction itself: Larbaud deployed a dizzying array of interrelated heteronyms, commenting often acerbically on the work of one through the writings of the other. In this “colonization of the metatext” I suspect him to be one of the pioneers, and the reader interested in this period will find for example Jules Romains writing fictional correspondence between one of his own heteronyms and one of Larbaud’s, while André Gide will coin the literary term “mise en abyme” specifically with Larbaud in mind. TThe term heteronym will be coined only later by Pessoa.
The titular Barnabooth, certainly the most famous of Larbaud’s persona, is a complex, changing, sometimes touching but often burlesque character: the diary form allows the author what I find his most compelling achievement in this novel, which is the depiction of a young man’s acute sense of his shortcomings, his inability to live up to the standards his background and education point out to him:
Barnabooth sits somewhere between Musil’s Arnheim, Papini’s Gog and Gatsby: he is immensely rich, so rich, in fact, that he seems to be the richest man in the world. What caught my attention at first in the book is the peculiar role of wealth in the narration, which serves in a sense to “re-enchant” the world and remove realism: I remember Fitzgerald writing somewhere he wrote A Diamond as big as the Ritz as a treat to himself, because he fancied some unhinged luxury and eccentric comfort. That’s pretty much what I thought of Larbaud at first, who complement the refined writing style of his character with lavish lists of luxury goods, fine clothes and expensive hotels, taking the reader on a life-long tour of Europe’s capitals.
But whereas the “enchantment” pursued by Fitzgerald was straightforward enough, very quickly in Larbaud there arises a problematic dissonance in that fantasied jet-setting among the rich and the beautiful: Barnabooth takes at heart to critique the philistine haute-bourgeoisie his status would have him mingle with, and he aspire to intellectual achievements his pairs regard as the puerile eccentricities of a spoiled child.
Here is the crux of the narrative: Barnabooth is too rich to be a poet because he must always suspect that compliments or accolades for his arts, hide some ulterior motives. But he is also too cultured to satisfy himself with the antics of the jet-set, and too modern to turn comply with the rigidity of European nobility. But Larbaud does not stop at this late-romantic posturing: Barnabooth is also quite young, 23, and sometimes quite puerile (as he himself acknowledge regularly) and this leads him down all sorts of awkward roads, oscillating between the burlesque and the tragic, as when he proposes, chaste and idealistic as ever, to this chorus girl he later discovers to be spying on.
The story somewhat repeats itself, with different characters first fascinating the narrator, with their self-assurance, their wholesome confidence in who they are and what they must do, but turning out at closer inspection to be fragile and conflicted, holding together somewhat miraculously, and at the close of the book, revealing themselves to be changing, as inconsistent and insecure as anyone else. If there is a leading thread in the book it seems to be Barnabooth’s angsty searching for a model, for an opening outside of his condition and his wealth, which at first seemed to “enchant” the narrative, but soon enough turns out to be more ambivalent to the character’s aspiration, holding him back and refusing him the achievements he would claim.
On the whole I think it is very difficult to summarize the book, precisely because of its “essayistic” form and rather oblique wit, playing I suspect with the readers ambivalent relationship to wealth (fascination and disgust) ; It is wonderfully well written, and it always surprises me to find Larbaud is not better known outside France: he used to be recognized as one of the greatest stylists of the French language, and although I do not like so much his poetry, I think the diary have a lot of this refined and biting brio we love in Gide and others of the time. It resonated with my mindset at the time of reading, but it also prompted a number of interrogations as to the role of wealth in narration, or that of class identity in modernism.
The titular Barnabooth, certainly the most famous of Larbaud’s persona, is a complex, changing, sometimes touching but often burlesque character: the diary form allows the author what I find his most compelling achievement in this novel, which is the depiction of a young man’s acute sense of his shortcomings, his inability to live up to the standards his background and education point out to him:
Barnabooth sits somewhere between Musil’s Arnheim, Papini’s Gog and Gatsby: he is immensely rich, so rich, in fact, that he seems to be the richest man in the world. What caught my attention at first in the book is the peculiar role of wealth in the narration, which serves in a sense to “re-enchant” the world and remove realism: I remember Fitzgerald writing somewhere he wrote A Diamond as big as the Ritz as a treat to himself, because he fancied some unhinged luxury and eccentric comfort. That’s pretty much what I thought of Larbaud at first, who complement the refined writing style of his character with lavish lists of luxury goods, fine clothes and expensive hotels, taking the reader on a life-long tour of Europe’s capitals.
But whereas the “enchantment” pursued by Fitzgerald was straightforward enough, very quickly in Larbaud there arises a problematic dissonance in that fantasied jet-setting among the rich and the beautiful: Barnabooth takes at heart to critique the philistine haute-bourgeoisie his status would have him mingle with, and he aspire to intellectual achievements his pairs regard as the puerile eccentricities of a spoiled child.
Here is the crux of the narrative: Barnabooth is too rich to be a poet because he must always suspect that compliments or accolades for his arts, hide some ulterior motives. But he is also too cultured to satisfy himself with the antics of the jet-set, and too modern to turn comply with the rigidity of European nobility. But Larbaud does not stop at this late-romantic posturing: Barnabooth is also quite young, 23, and sometimes quite puerile (as he himself acknowledge regularly) and this leads him down all sorts of awkward roads, oscillating between the burlesque and the tragic, as when he proposes, chaste and idealistic as ever, to this chorus girl he later discovers to be spying on.
The story somewhat repeats itself, with different characters first fascinating the narrator, with their self-assurance, their wholesome confidence in who they are and what they must do, but turning out at closer inspection to be fragile and conflicted, holding together somewhat miraculously, and at the close of the book, revealing themselves to be changing, as inconsistent and insecure as anyone else. If there is a leading thread in the book it seems to be Barnabooth’s angsty searching for a model, for an opening outside of his condition and his wealth, which at first seemed to “enchant” the narrative, but soon enough turns out to be more ambivalent to the character’s aspiration, holding him back and refusing him the achievements he would claim.
On the whole I think it is very difficult to summarize the book, precisely because of its “essayistic” form and rather oblique wit, playing I suspect with the readers ambivalent relationship to wealth (fascination and disgust) ; It is wonderfully well written, and it always surprises me to find Larbaud is not better known outside France: he used to be recognized as one of the greatest stylists of the French language, and although I do not like so much his poetry, I think the diary have a lot of this refined and biting brio we love in Gide and others of the time. It resonated with my mindset at the time of reading, but it also prompted a number of interrogations as to the role of wealth in narration, or that of class identity in modernism.
November 29, 2018
What elevated this book for me was the beautiful, vivid compression of place after place into words, as into suitcases. And the narrator himself, the rich self-provocateur whom no one expected to exist as anything more than a sketch, got a very enjoyable Proust-lite arc as the diary progressed.
September 15, 2020
Inspiratiebron voor Modiano...
November 4, 2022
A very sweet, albeit critical “journal” of Larbaud’s Barnabooth (which went to inspire Perec’s Bartlebooth in Vie Mode d’Emploi), where a careless rich single traveller finds himself in a series of adventures and misadventures in his travels to Italy. It has a certain flavour of critique, but notwithstanding treats the character of Barnabooth with some justice and one cannot sometimes just identify oneself with him and wish to be someone as careless as him, without talent (yes), but with a certain joie de vivre. It is, together with Fermina Marquez, Larbaud’s masterpiece, and probably the most carefully crafted. A real treat.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews