JamesF's 2017 Challenge

[James]

Dec. 31

109-110. Honoré de Balzac, Le Curé de Tours. Pierrette 364 pages [in French]

These two short novels are also re-reads; I read them decades ago for my French survey course in college. Together with the next novel I am reading by Balzac, La Rabouilleuse, they make up a subgroup of the Scènes de la Vie de province, Les Célibataires, which deals unsympathetically with unmarried people. Both appeared under various earlier titles before being published under their present titles in the complete collection of La Comédie humaine. They are among the best known of his shorter books, perhaps because they are better constructed than many of his novels are. Although I'm counting them separately I read them bound together in the Classiques Garnier edition with notes and variants, etc.

Pierette [1839] is dedicated to Anna de Hanska, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Balzac's mistress Mme. de Hanska (whom he later married), and he describes it essentially as (to use the modern phrase) his first Young Adult novel. I doubt very much that anyone today would consider it as written (or even suitable) for young readers. The main plot is very simple; Pierrette Lorraine, a poor Breton girl, eleven years old and an orphan, is taken in by her rich cousins, the Rogons. Retired merchants from Paris who have returned to their native city of Provins, M. Rogon (Jérome-Denis, but the name is only mentioned once) is an incurably stupid old bachelor, and his sister, Sylvie, is an ugly old maid with a bitter, spiteful personality. Pierette is mistreated and used as a domestic servant, and becomes very ill. Her boyfriend, Joseph Brigaut, an apprentice joiner (the first actual working-class character I've met with in Balzac) follows her from Brittany and attempts to rescue her (the novel begins with him singing under her window, and is told mainly as one long flashback until it reaches this point again near the end.) Two chapters give the family history of the Lorraines and the Rogons -- as often in Balzac, there has been chicanery with regard to inheritances -- and then most of the book deals with the mounting mental and physical abuse of Pierrette. This is combined with a satire of the liberal opposition in Provins, in the persons of the lawyer Vinet and the retired Colonel Gouraud, who manipulate the vanity of the Rogons to establish a liberal "power base" in the city. Balzac attacks them from the wrong side as usual, but the portrait is probably not much exaggerated -- the liberals of the time were not even republicans, but constitutional monarchists, the people who came to power in 1830 (the novel is set in 1827) under the "bourgeois-king" Louis Philippe and whose corruption led to the Revolution of 1848. The book ends with a lawsuit and a cynical description of the successful later careers of all the villains of the novel.

Le Curé de Tours [1832] is one of Balzac's most cynical works; it makes a good complement to Pierrette, since that novel shows the corruption of the more or less anticlerical liberals, and this novel shows the corruption of the church and aristocratic party. The basic situation is trivial; a priest (l'abbé Troubert) intrigues with his landlady (Mlle. Gamard) to evict another priest (l'abbé Birotteau) from his appartment and steal his furniture. As in Pierrette, there is a lawsuit and the book ends with the villains triumphant.

[James]

Dec. 31

111. The Gleaner, Geography and History of Jamaica: For use in Primary and Secondary Schools [Twenty-first edition, revised in 1973] 98 pages

I've been reading Jamaican literature this year for a Goodreads group, and many of the books talk about how education in Jamaica ignored Jamaican history for British history, so when I found this little book while unpacking boxes in my garage I thought it would be interesting to read. Despite "exercises" at the end of each chapter, there is no way this could actually be a high school (let alone grade school) textbook; the first half, the "geography", is basically an almanac of statistics about economics and a list of cities and their principle products, the second half is a chronological list of events with dates and one or two sentences about each one. The print is tiny, and there are full page advertisements ("Jamaican children prefer Lannaman's sweets"). What struck me most in the first part was learning that Jamaica went from a primarily agricultural country in 1950 to an economy based on strip mining (bauxite, first exported in 1952, by 1970 made up 67% of the country's total exports) and tourism, with the traditional products such as sugar, coffee, coconuts and bananas a distant third. The second part was a random mixture of important and trivial events, with slave rebellions and major city-destroying earthquakes and hurricanes alternating with the dedication of statues and the weddings of government officials -- and there was a good deal about the kings, queen, princes and princesses of England after all.

One thing that I found very unexpected in a book written more than a decade after Independence was the treatment of slavery -- apparently the slaves were well treated but occasionally decided to rise up for no other reason than to "murder every white inhabitant they could get their hands on." These "outrages" were frequent but fortunately they were suppressed and the "ringleaders" firmly dealt with. Later on, every labor or pro-democracy demonstration was taken over by "hooligan elements". Yet later in the event-list, without missing a beat, these same "ringleaders" are treated as National Heroes of Jamaica and we hear about their statues being erected and places named for them. ("Daddy" Sharpe however is not mentioned although I think one of the rebellions listed is the one he lead.)

One of the funniest sections is called "How Jamaica is Governed". I will quote: "Jamaica, as an independent country . . . is governed entirely by Jamaicans, without interference from anyone outside . . . The system of government is called "democratic" because the government is elected by the people themselves every five years. . ." Then the details: the Queen [of England] appoints the Governor-General, who appoints the Senate, which chooses the President; the Governor-General also appoints a Prime Minister and a Cabinet which is "the principal instrument of policy-making." This isn't called "democratic", it's called "neocolonialism".

And this went through twenty-one editions (up to 1973)!