1.
Discussions of The Lover by Marguerite Duras.

First, a roundtable of writers, convened by Alice Blackhurst in 2024, 40 years after the book's publication. And yes, I know I should strive to make my posts more timely...

But I've been thinking about Viet Nam quite a bit lately, last month having seen the 50th anniversary of "the fall of Saigon" or "the Liberation of the South and National Reunification Day", depending on how you view it (contemporary pictures here); and Colm Toibin having told us that Eilis's big bust-up with her Italian-American father-in-law was caused by their differing view on the Viet Nam conflict; and Lyndsey Stonebridge having noted Hannah Arendt's views on Viet Nam (which she saw as America's "big lie").

So... Blackhurst wanted to know why we're still drawn to The Lover, "when its premise of a scandalous affair between a 15-year-old white girl and an older wealthy Chinese man in 1920s colonized Saigon might today appear insensitive or even outright crude". She herself concludes that a big part of its appeal is the way it "shows that we can never fully grasp the outline of a life's unfolding. We're always in the middle of it. Our perspective is, by definition, piecemeal and fragmented".

Other roundtable contributors appreciate what The Lover says about memory, the family, the image, and the need to revisit stories (Lauren Elkin says Duras "essentially wrote the same novel three times, three different ways...; she just digs in again and again to what is clearly, in some form, the primal scene, the urtext of her life: a young girl on a ferry across the Mekong, meeting the eye of a wealthy man in a limousine").

Second, Anthony Macris calls The Lover "one of those great literary acts of looking back", but adds that it's also "a looking inwards, a looking through, a looking askance".

Third, in a podcast tracing the elements of French culture that are still left over in Viet Nam from the period of colonization (think: architecture; alphabet; vocabulary; dishes; cafe culture...), Ingrid Falquy recommends The Lover as background reading...


The Perfume Pagoda, My Duc, 2006

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2.
An interesting dissection of Viet Nam's anticolonialism by Kevin D. Pham.

Viet Nam's wars against its various colonizers have featured in works as diverse as The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai; The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen; On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong; and Wherever You May Be by Khue Pham.

Pham suggests that the commonly presented heroic narrative of resistance is a little more complex than it would seem at first sight: "What makes Vietnamese anticolonialism especially unique," he argues, "is its use of national shame for productive, anticolonial, nation-building purposes."



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3.
A brilliant interview with Evelyne Heyer, an expert on genetic evolution, on skin colour and migration (two topics that feature frequently, one way or another, on The Velvet Cushion).

Humans evolved on the African continent. So our skin colour was dark. People turned white much later: Europeans, if you look back 40,000, or 30,000, or even 10,000 years, had dark skin. The people who painted the caves of Lascaux had dark skin. It's only about 10,000 years ago that we start to see a lightening of skin colour. This is when a) agriculturalists from West Asia (who had lighter skin) began to mix with the dark-skinned populations of Europe, who b) also then began to change their diet (because if you eat more cereals, you get less Vitamin D, and your skin has to adapt to compensate). This change came about quite quickly, evolutionarily speaking. If you think that the developmental line that subsequently became humans and the one that became chimpanzees separated about 7 million years ago, genome selection on the basis of skin colour -- which took place over a period of 5,000 to 6,000 years -- is very rapid (about 200 generations). We've only been white for a few minutes, relatively speaking. And look at all the trouble we've caused...

Initially, human migration was slow. It took us between 10,000 and 20,000 years to get from Africa to Australia, which is because people normally wouldn't go too far at a time. They would move about 10 kms, install themselves, get a population together -- and then a little group from that population would move on again. And why did they move? Not really, says Heyer, for ecological or conflict-related reasons. There weren't that many humans around at the time. No, we moved because we were curious... We moved because we wanted to see what was on the other side of the hill. And THAT'S what distinguishes us from our closest cousins. The chimpanzees just stayed in Africa, where they emerged... Migration is part of being human.



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4.
More awesome things about books!

According to Peter Leyland, books help our minds to heal.

And Silvia Hurtado Gonzalez gives us some great words to describe people's attitudes to them.

"Bibliophilia" and "bibliomania", for example (Charles Nodier, in 1831, said that the two categories are separated only by a crisis, and Antonio Castronuovo, in a book that came out just last year, distinguishes them like this: "The bibliophile possesses books, while the bibliomaniac is possessed by them"). Castronuovo also gives us various categories of bibliomania, none of which lend themselves to one-word English equivalents. "Biblioprestocleptomania" (book-borrowing kleptomania), for example, characterizes people who never return the books they have borrowed, while "biblioprestosinverguenceria" (book-borrowing shamelessness) describes the person who does return borrowed books, but full of notes and underlinings...

A dictionary of Spanish, the article continues, proposes "bibliorexia" (literally, an appetite for books) as an equivalent for the Japanese "tsundoko" (the tendency to not stopping buying books even though they are piling up more quickly than you can read them). I'm not sure whether this applies to e-books, but I fear it does...

Finally, a university in Valladolid offers us "amarabunta", a word created by two of its staff. There are various shades of meaning, but the primary definition is "an uncontrollable urge to accumulate books, even when the shelves can no longer contain them, accompanied by a restless tingling in the hands and chest when imagining all the reading in the pending pile". Oh, yes...


The Temple of Literature, Ha Noi, 2006