Babylon

Something very strange happened to me the other day. I realised some part of me missed the dense and stressful Oxford routine of reading (or at least pretending to read) dozens of books every week. So I was ecstatic to find this book by the writer of 99F, almost my favoritest film ever, and one which I’m praying will someday be released in the UK with English subtitles.

So now I’m enjoying ‘Windows on the World’ by Frederic Beigbeder, scavenged for $8 from a bookshelf in a Philip Island fish and chip shop. Nobody does brooding self-interest like the French, and this is one of those books that’s so intense you have to give each sentence a good few minutes to develop before you can keep reading.

Like Houellebecq, I find his books fascinating, engaging, surreal, morbid and grim; in fact I’m still not sure if I actually like him, but what he writes makes me think in a way that few mainstream authors can.

Pictures from Words

tm 57, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

I’m so struck by how different France is from Spain. Why? Obviously they’re made up of different people, different histories and different cultures. But for me, what’s fundamental to all that – what embodies the difference – is language. People don’t seem to have much in common these days, and aside from being humans and being alive, I’d say that language is pretty much the only common denominator left.

Perhaps it’s just because I’m a non-native speaker of French and Spanish that the sounds of each language conjure up such vivid images in my mind.  The aspirate ‘j’ of dejar and hijo evoke sandy plains and sun-parched terracotta roofs; the ‘ía’ of parecía is a trickle of water over dusty ground, the splash of water on a forehead hot from walking. The fiery accents of the imperative are so raven-haired that any child would fear to disobey them. The ‘z’s of trozo and Zaragoza sweep like a broom over dry stone. The static finality of levantar, jugar, querer, decir. The lazy lean of mañana and cariño. The drilling syllables bitter and loving like 50 years of housework and heated rollers.

The softening of ‘l’s to ‘r’s in Galician gives it a friendly green glint; praza, branco and praia rest attenuated like hedgeless fields. There’s the lilting smile of ribeira and escaleira, cirrus clouds in the sky that lift the flattened sempre and corpo, lying horizontal like a hazy sunrise over the sea. Then come the rich swishes of lonxe, chamar, xaneiro, chegar… those self indulgent, wholesome sounds crunch like crushed ice under fresh fish; an autumn wind whipping over cliffs clothed in dense heather.

French sings like champagne over flesh, so clean, clear, crystallised. Words flow together as if they could never exist on their own, knowing exactly how to compliment each other. ‘Ou’ like the bright straight channels of the metro, ‘u’ pointing to the stars, ‘r’, hardly even a letter, skipped over like a trampette. En, quarante, longtemps, gazing downwards but so happy to be alive. Je: softly independent, assertive and there, unlike in Spanish. Qualité, conséquence, défait, open vowels glinting like lights across a city at night. Châtain, châtaine, premier, première, perdu, perdus. Sometimes you can’t even hear it, but you know. It’s like wearing matching lingerie.

Paris takes its make up off before it goes to bed. Spain tumbles into bed and wakes up the next morning in the same clothes.