French Giggles

Reading Nathalie Quintane's Saint-Tropez (P.O.L.) one comes upon such funny passages.

The eye of the prose is strange, and allured by strange details.

Ancient tabloidia, contemporary brochures, and other diverse documents are pitted against the actuality of the town.

Brigitte Bardot is a recurrent obsession. Orson Welles and others appear doing irksome things.

She obsesses over the sorts of odd details you do.

The ones most writers ignore when they are in the mainframe of plot, character and conflict.

But the author will have little use for these last three---this is a P.O.L. book, after all.

Here's a scene where she's sort of doing the Letterman schtick with the watermelons.

Only funnier.

Both of the books contained in this volume have that Burning Deck sensibility (I'm sure there is author overlap between these two presses) and I'm surprised the second piece in this two book volume didn't come out through Burning Deck. Une Americaine is pure Waldrop. More Rosmarie than Keith, I think.

This second book could just as easily have been titled Christopher Columbus (or I guess it would have been Christophe Colomb as a P.O.L. book). It looks at America's creepy origins. Again, the author obsesses over details, diagrams, maps. It's a curious deconstruction of the birth of a scary nation.

This funny passage with tennis socks turned deadly is from Saint-Tropez.


Pour une raison oubliee, P.Botton jette, d'un helicoptere, des langoustes dans la piscine of d'Y.Mourousi. Ces langoustes sont autant de tomettes volant en hauteur, ce qui compte, c'est leur eruption rouge dans le ciel au-dessus du bassin - ou les figures des eclaboussures qu'elles projetteront sur le bas-bord, pense P.Botton.

Un autre jour, il compte faire une partie de ping-pong chez E. Barclay, mais il est sans chaussettes de tennis. On lui en prete une paire. Il voit que tout joueur n'etant pas tennisman, et meme tout homme n'etant pas jouer, peut a sa guise en porter, que ces objets se rencontrent presque partout ailleurs que sur un court de tennis, qu'on peut y glisser sa monnaie, les nouer en balle, s'en servir comme filtre a cafe ou bonnet lorsqu'elles son bien detendues. Il en achete cinc cents paires et les lance, d'helicoptere, sur la maison d'E. Barclay. Elles brisent les tuiles du toit, penetrent par les fenetres, cassent des vases et des assiettes:

"Un carnage," dit C.Barclay.




Or maybe it reminds me of the episode of Malcolm in the Middle where the father's secret "affair" is actually with a steamroller, which he is using to fetishistically crush things all day instead of going to work.

(Later, his son Dewey discovers this "torrid" affair, and blackmails him to get crushing rights.)

And the French do love Malcolm in the Middle. (Maybe the highbrows and middlebrows as much as the lowbrows.)



I was just checking to see if this was translated (and wasn't surprised to see a Waldrop as her translator for other books--makes perfect sense to me).

I found this in English, translated by someone else..."How Stephane Berard Did Invent Penis Fragrance for Condoms," to give you more of an idea of her delightfully wiggy sense of humor. This appeared in the mag Trouble back in 2005.

Coriander, yes please. Cumin, no.