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Diario 1887-1910 (1960)

by Jules Renard(Favorite Author)

4.12 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

DeBolsillo

review 1: This selection from Jules Renard’s journals is beautiful in itself, but also an invitation to read the full journals and some of his other works as well. He was a man whose whole life, to judge from these pages, was lived in reaction to his harridan of a mother. One of his best known works is Poil de Carotte, a ‘fiction’ about his life as a boy in the small town where they lived. His father, the mayor, solved the harridan problem by ceasing to speak to his wife--literally and absolutely- early in the marriage; their son had no such tool at his disposal. Yet what did Renard do as a man? Buy a small house in the same small town (or nearby?) and take his family there to live every summer under the constant watch of his mother. Very strange.In part his return to the... more country is due to a profound love of nature. His Nature Stories are snippets of life that give various animals and insects a moment of close attention--their quotidian actions become poetic as he gives the animals full worth in creation. Equally fascinating is his attitude toward peasants and servants. Nowhere else have I read such an honest and inclusive portrayal of actually living with servants in one’s house, their moving in and out of the rooms and commenting on one’s life and their lives. Hiring them, disciplining, firing, watching their slow decline and death. For Renard, some are comical adolescents, others pathetic declining dependents. He may describe living in close proximity with them, but for him they are also a different species; he speaks about peasants as a species somewhere between the animals in Nature Stories and the educated humans he sees as equals.But Renard was also un homme de lettres complet in Paris. He was fully engaged in the theater, turning his novels into plays and writing other plays as original works. Many of the entries are about the perils of getting a play into shape on paper and on stage. Sarah Bernhardt and many others pepper the entries: Rostand, Mallarme, Daudet, Goncourt. Finally there are the epigrams. This is a book to open again and again for a thought to carry about for the day, or to plunder for quotes.For my Goodreads companions:‘You have read everything, but they have read a book you ought to read, that makes them superior, and annuls all you have read.’[early in his career] ‘The friendship of a talented man of letters would be a great benefaction. It is a pity that those whose good graces we long for are always dead.’‘A little premontory shiver that comes when a beautiful sentence is about to take shape.’‘My style, full of tours de force that no one notices.'
review 2: "Sa pictezi pe pinze de paianjen.""Nu sintem fericiti: fericirea noastra este doar tacerea nefericirii.""Reveria este clarul de luna al gindirii.""Luna, medalion la gitul noptii.""Ploaia aseza pe jos oglinzi pentru stele.""Cind ma gindesc la toate cartile pe care mai trebuie sa le citesc, am certitudinea ca mai sint inca fericit.""Felinarul: o luminare in inchisoare.""Dupa o reverie pe banca, sa adormi cu ochii plini de stele.""O ploaie amestecata cu picuri de pian." less

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