What am I reading? Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

I just finished reading Catch-22 for what must be the fifth or sixth time. I actually downloaded the e-book, a special 50th anniversary edition (with, funnily enough, a foreword by Howard Jacobson, author of the recently-reviewed Finkler Question), some time last year, and read about half of it before getting distracted by other books and setting it aside until this weekend, when I finished the book I was reading but didn't want to leave the park yet.

I don't think I have anything particularly intelligent to say about Catch-22, except that it is brilliant. A true masterpiece. I worry sometimes that I've lost the ability to appreciate great literature, along with the rest of my youthful promise, but re-reading Catch-22 has somewhat restored my faith in myself, and in literature. I want to go back at once and refresh my memory of the first half of the book.

I first read Catch-22 at some point during my teenage years, probably about 15 or 16, around Christmas or the summer holidays (same time in New Zealand, of course), I believe after my mum gave up on it. I do remember that it took me a while to get in to the book as well, but once you get past those first few confusing chapters, with their slippery treatment of time, the book is a treasure. I'm usually a bit skeptical at blurbs which tell you you'll "laugh out loud", because how often is that true? - but in the case of Catch-22, it really is; it is a comedy of the absurd of the highest order. Much - perhaps most - of the pleasure comes from the language. There is the occasional dated slang or joke that falls a bit flat, but on the whole it is a joy to read. Unfortunately e-books are less flickable than real books, so I went to the internet to nick some quotes (and then got depressed at the websites offering quotes by theme for those determined to crib their way through a school essay or test instead of actually coming to grips with the work themselves). Luckily I found an apropos Catch-22 quote for this sensation:

“He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it”

and then subsequently abandoned the idea of selecting some of my favourite quotes because they just look sad and denuded, shrunk to the status of mere bons mots when no longer cocooned within the sheer magnificence which is Catch-22. You should just go read it at once.

As well as absurdist comedy and the sheer exuberance that comes from playing with language, Catch-22 does have a serious side. In particular, the dark shift in mood around Chapter 39, when Yossarian wanders through the streets of a chaotic and licentious Rome, is all the more powerful by contrast with the prevailing vein of humour, and is still as exquisitely written.

If I had one criticism, it would probably be the casual sexism that crops up repeatedly. I wouldn't go so far as to call it misogyny, but it's the sort of off-hand stuff you might expect from a WWII novel written in the 1950s. Unsurprisingly, it's very much a "man's" novel. Almost all the female characters are sex objects, and most of them are prostitutes. However, I don't think that seriously detracts from the whole, and while I imagine it would speak especially to those with first-hand experience of the army or war, with much of the humour coming from the observation of army life, it's really about the human condition (albeit very grounded in the context) rather than a work that goes into the minutiae of guns and tanks and planes.

It's a book I would whole-heartedly recommend to anyone. My day is certainly the richer for having spent time reading it, and I think it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that my life is as well. Thanks, Joseph Heller!

What am I reading? Fatherland, The Finkler Question and One Day

I need to find my camera cord, upload my photos and blog about my sister's trip, but first I'll catch up on some of the books I've read recently, although I'll probably end up forgetting some.

I think first of the recent batch was Fatherland by Robert Harris, which I downloaded after finding it on a Guardian list of best "alternative historical fiction" books or something like that. First published in 1992, it depicts an alternative history in which the Nazis won the war and continue to rule a Greater Reich, with much of Western Europe under the thumb in a sort of Nazi version of the EU. I must say, I expected it to be very heavy-handed, filled with lots of exposition and extempore hand-wringing about how naughty the Nazis were, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book was primarily focused on telling a story, in which a German criminal detective (and therefore, member of the SS) discovers a body which turns out to be a high-ranking Nazi official, and thus gets sucked in to a world of danger and intrigue, in which he discovers chilling truths about the regime. So, it does get there in the end with the "Nazis are bad" bit, but I really appreciated that this felt like an organic part of an interesting story, rather than some sort of exercise in prognosticating on what might have been for its own sake.

I've been cat-sitting for Liz while she's been in Japan for the last few weeks, and once Fatherland was out of the way, I raided her bookshelves for something to occupy me while I was round at her place (I've managed to sit out in the sun in her garden two or three times in the last few weeks, when it hasn't been raining, and on other occasions I try to spend half an hour or so sitting with the cat so he doesn't get too lonely). First up was The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, winner of the 2010 Man Booker. When I first picked it up, I thought it was going to be another meditation on life from the perspective of middle-aged-to-elderly white men, in the vein of the recently-read The Sense of an Ending, and I prepared to be quite bored. (Not that I didn't enjoy The Sense of an Ending, but I found it hard to relate to the protagonist.) Again, I was pleasantly surprised. The book is essentially an extended meditation on Jewish identity, centred around three men with very different takes on the idea - a Gentile who, after possibly being mistaken for a Jew while being mugged, decides to adopt a Jewish identity; a philosopher who leads a movement of 'ashamed Jews' against Zionism, and an elderly Czech-Jewish widower who starts out defending Israel's actions before becoming increasingly disillusioned. It is certainly an interesting insight into the specificities of the Jewish experience in Britain today, but beyond this, it is wonderfully-written, and its themes of identity, love, friendship and loss go far beyond its specific context. Oh, and it mentions both the Motueka Gorge and Kamyanets-Podilsky, thus making me feel like a global sophisticate for knowing where those two places are...

The second book I read at Liz's was One Day by David Nicholls. It starts with a great concept - showing the lives of two characters by revisiting their stories on one day a year for twenty years, from the night they met to... I couldn't possibly say. On a technical level, Nicholls deals with the idea expertly, with each "yearly" excerpt managing to give you a sense of the characters' lives and developments without ever feeling like it's hammering a year's worth of exposition into the events of one day, before inevitably breaking off at a point that leaves you eager to read the next chapter and find out where the next year has taken the characters. In a way, it's the typical "boy meets girl, but the course of true love never did run smooth" romantic comedy plot writ large, but the writing is good enough and the characters interesting enough that it never seems to fall into cliché. The (lightly present) background of 20 years of recent history also adds an extra element of interest to the story. Apparently it's now been made into a fairly bad film, so you should read the book instead.

What am I reading? The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

I absolutely loved Eugenides' Middlesex (seriously – go and read it if you haven't), whereas I put The Virgin Suicides aside after just a few pages (I can't remember why exactly any more, but it irritated me in some way). So it was with some trepidation that I shelled out the not-insignficant (in Kindle terms) sum of c. £8 to read The Marriage Plot. I'm a little more than halfway through, and while I'm not loving it the way I did Middlesex, it's not irritating me the way Suicides did either, so that's all to the good. I suppose naming a book The Marriage Plot is like a Chekhovian gun – I'm still waiting for the marriage. It's sort of your typical American (post)college novel – following three characters: Madeleine, aimless English Lit major (aren't they all?) who turns out to be a bit of a doormat for love; Leonard, her scientist boyfriend with issues which I won't go into here; and Mitchell, a theology student in love with Madeleine (who does that annoying girly thing of leading him on while claiming she's just seeking a Platonic ideal of a relationship*. Not that that's restricted to girls.) If anything, so far it has made me wistful for the epoch (early 80s) as depicted – a time where working on gender issues in literature was fresh and exciting (to drive the point home, Madeleine glimpses the infamous Gilbert and Gubar at a conference) and you could go travelling around the world with the romance of not planning everything ahead on the internet and encountering a seemingly endless stream of people who speak perfect English. Other than that, it's an interesting read, but I'll reserve full judgement until I've made it to the end.

*Mixing of Platonic references deliberate albeit probably clumsy

I've read quite a few other books recently as well, which I'll just sum up briefly.

• Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, which I read in one sitting, was certainly a good read and quite compelling. I didn't personally feel that there was a great deal of depth in it, but maybe that's from not being a middle-aged man looking back over the events of my life.
  
• The Devil and Sherlock Holmes by David Grann. This was a good choice for my Barcelona holiday, as it was easy to dip in and out of this collection of journalistic pieces, without needing to pay close attention. The interest level, for me, was very varied. The title story, which tries to unpick the mysterious death of a prominent Conan Doyle scholar, for example, was quite absorbing, but I could have done without other pieces such as on a one-time big-shot baseballer trying to make a comeback while marooned in the minor leagues, or a tale of political corruption in an American city which just went on too damn long.
  
• The Women of the Cousins' War by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin and Michael Jones. Philippa Gregory's historical fiction (of which The Other Boleyn Girl is the most famous) is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me and makes for the ideal aeroplane reading. In this book, Gregory (who actually has a PhD so she knows her stuff) and two historians tell the true stories of three women involved in the Wars of the Roses - Queen Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret Beaufort (mother of Henry VII) and Jacquetta, Lady Rivers (Woodville's mother). I've never got much beyond a vague idea of most of the players and events in the Wars of the Roses (go Lancaster!) and I'll probably forget it all again shortly, but this book did a good job of telling the stories of three women who are overlooked to various degrees by mainstream history, in a very accessible and readable way.
• She-Wolves: The Women who Ruled England before Elizabeth, by Helen Castor. Sort of continuing the theme of the previous book, in that it's dealing with powerful women of England, this book focuses on Matilda, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Margaret of Anjou, and Mary Tudor. Again, an interesting and readable introduction to a subject I knew only smatterings about. I read this on my Kindle pretty much exclusively at the gym, so it took a long time and perhaps wasn't the ideal way to take it in, reading a handful of pages at a time on the treadmill, but it was nonetheless enjoyable. One interesting thing is how often parts of France I know and love pop up in passing, particularly with Eleanor of Aquitaine and Margaret of Anjou, but also with others. For example, Eleanor is buried not far from here (which I knew, I want to visit but it's fairly impossible without a car from what I gather) and Margaret of Anjou's marriage to Henry VI was arranged via the Treaty of Tours. Always fun to realise a bit more of the historical connections places in Europe have!
  

What am I reading? The Butcher's Tale by Helmut Walser Smith

The Butcher's Tale: Murder and anti-Semitism in a German town by Helmut Walser Smith

I've been doing quite a bit of reading over the Christmas break and since I've been making an effort to get back to the gym more regularly (if I'm torturing myself on the bike, I'm doing it while reading and listening to my ipod, thank you very much), so this isn't 'what I'm reading' so much as 'what I read before Christmas'. I would love to bring you more details from the book, but sadly when I went away for Christmas I forgot Bob's Golden Rule (heh) which is "If on the floor it be, then on it I shall pee" (Bob's words, not mine). So yeah, I foolishly left this book on the floor next to my bed, and when I came back a week later, Bob had peed all over it. Charming. Luckily enough, I had at least finished reading it.

Anyway, this book focuses on a murder that took place in Konitz, a small German (now I think Polish) town in 1900. The town's suspicions quickly turned on its Jewish inhabitants, and Walser Smith uses this incident to trace the history of the "blood libel" – the myth that Jews need the blood of Christians in order to carry out religious rituals. So yeah, it's "What Sarah Palin SHOULD have been reading". It goes back and forth between recounting what happened in Konitz – who accused the Jews and why, how anti-Semites came into the town from far afield in order to stoke the fires, theories on who the murderer might have been, etc. - and telling the broader history of blood libel accusations and anti-Semitism in Europe.

While I love a good murder mystery, I probably found the sections on the book which retraced the transmission of the blood libel idea most interesting. Walser Smith retraces how the blood libel story was formulated and passed down through time and space, flaring up at moments of tension despite having been consistently debunked (including by the Catholic Church) long before the dawn of the twentieth century. I often found myself wondering how people could still believe these things in 1900, before of course "remembering" that these sorts of beliefs and incidents are just part of the tapestry leading to the Holocaust.

Walser Smith doesn't really labour this point, but it is an interesting insight into the historical background of Nazism and a reminder that it wasn't just an isolated phenomenon based on an ideology totally foreign to contemporary Europe. It was also a reminder of how "history" (and religion) can be made into propaganda - the book recounts incidents of the cults of various saints, supposedly murdered by the Jews in the Middle Ages, being revived or plaques commemorating similar incidents being refurbished at moments when people, for whatever reason, wanted to stir up anti-Semitic feelings. History as politics. Of course, the act of remembering can also be a positive one, as with this book.

If you're interested in history in general, or any of these specific themes, I would definitely recommend this book. As a 'true crime' story, it is perhaps a little weaker, but then that's not really the point. It is popular history, but history nonetheless.

What am I reading? Land of Eagles

Fortuitously, I finished 1Q84 and the very next day 2 books that I'd ordered from Amazon turned up in my letter box. I am now the proud owner of an ex-library book from Illinois. The internet eh? Crazy.

A few weeks ago I happened to see a comment on a travel blog. Someone had written in asking for ideas for their honeymoon, and someone had commented and suggested Albania. The comment was only a couple of lines long, but this is just exactly the sort of place I'm always raring to go to, and it caught my imagination. I, probably like many of you, think of Albania - if I think of it at all - as a bleak, communist hole. But I hopped on to Google and was confronted first with the (obvious) fact that it's right there on the Med above Greece and across from Italy, which screams sea, sand and sunshine. Then I looked a bit further and liked what I saw - not too touristy yet, apparently some nice beaches exist amongst others that are skyscraper-ridden communist disasters, there are some great archaeological sites etc. etc.

So anyway, before committing myself any further, I headed to Amazon and ordered the first travel narrative book I saw - Land of Eagles: Riding through Europe's Forgotten Country by Robin Hanbury-Tenison. It got some good reviews, and apparently Hanbury-Tenison is something of a doyen of English travel writers, so I overlooked the fact that they were doing it on horseback. I've never been a horsey type (perhaps surprisingly, logistics aside - I was a very Lisa Simpson-ish kid in every other way), but that didn't seem an important factor when selecting a travel book.

However, as soon as I opened it up and saw their route map, I realised it wasn't quite what I was looking for. The vague idea I have in my head (after about an hour's internet search) is to fly in and out of the capital, Tirana, and to visit a few spots on the coast and the big archaeological site down south. They are taking their horses trekking through the mountains in the interior, with a stated goal of not setting foot in a city the whole trip. Not very me.

Well, that would still be okay if it was an evocative guide to the history, people, culture and landscape. It started out promisingly enough, with some brief but interesting background on the history of the country, the horrors of Enver Hoxha's regime and subsequent Balkan Wars, but for the most part I've gotta say it's just dull. He goes into great detail a lot of the time, but about stupid stuff like how his "much younger" wife divided all their stuff into four distinct boxes, and how that made it easy to find stuff and quick to pack up in the morning. Tons of stuff about the difficulties they have following whatever bridle trail it is they're on, getting lost in the scrub, horses balking at crossing rivers and so forth, none of which is really of any interest to anyone not planning the exact same horse trek.

Here's a sample from the page I happen to be up to:

I had photocopied in colour all the maps, so that I could give our driver an identical map to the one I was navigating by. In theory that would mean that we would always be able to find each other. But it didn't work out that way. We arranged to meet them where the clearly marked side road to Surroj peeled off. There we planned to enjoy the packed lunches with which the hotel in Kukes had provided us and which, to save them from being jiggled about and pulped on the horses, we had put in the Landcruiser. We reached the junction but there was no one there. They had either driven past or, knowing that we would be taking it, decided to go down the side track and continue until it ran out and became suitable only for horses. There was no signal on the mobile. It turned out they had driven past, and so we missed out on lunch.

Bored yet? It's certainly not inspiring me to visit. Where's the local colour? The crazy old man who, I dunno, drags you in to his house, tries to make you marry his daughter and tells you tales of fighting the Italians in World War I - or something. Where's the glorious descriptions of majestic mountains and soaring eagles? Where's something your average traveller, who's not going to start off on their voyage with champagne provided by the Acting British Ambassador (I kid you not) can use? It's a bit like reading someone's journal in which they've written down every single thing that ever happened to them. Well, I am 72 pages in since picking it up this evening, so I can say one thing for it, that it's a relatively quick read (over 100 pages to go though). Might have to invest in a guidebook or something to help me decide whether Albania 2012 is really a winner.

What am I reading? 1Q84

Inspired by The Guardian's list of the best books of 2011 (the first of many such round-ups, I expect) I thought I'd kick off an occasional series of posts on (surprise, surprise) what I'm reading.

I briefly had a blog back in the day in which I decided I would read one book by everyone who's ever won a Nobel Prize, after realising I had read hardly any of the laureates. Looking at the blog now, I see I managed to get through 16 books, which is more than I thought. I actually have no memory at all of most of them (this is a general problem for me, that I forget books I've read, and even some I've studied, quite easily). If you'd asked me, I would have said I'd never read any Anatole France, despite him being a favourite of the French board of street names. But apparently I read him, and I didn't like him - "Pointless, that's the best summary of The Amethyst Ring by Anatole France, pointless from start to finish". I think the only book of the lot that really stayed with me was The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, which is a masterpiece. But I see that I read that just before starting the 'project' anyway!

But anyway, while the constraints of reading a whole bunch of obscure Swedish writers and people chosen as much for their political beliefs as their writing wore me down (actually, I come across of a bit of a philistine in the blog - apparently I wanted to punch Jose Echegaray, 1904's winner, in the face ha ha), I thought it would be quite fun to blog about books that I had chosen to read of my own volition. So after that lengthy introduction, here goes.

I'm still ploughing through the 900+ page epic that is Haruki Murakami's latest, 1Q84. It's been quite a while since I read any Murakami, but I am definitely a fan. As I said to my mum a while back, it's now seemingly become obligatory to like Murakami. He's the perfect "I have pretensions to literariness, yet I like to think I'm a bit alternative" go-to guy. Not that I'm trying to say I was on the bleeding edge of Murakami appreciation and now I'm too cool for school.

I think I first read Murakami - Kafka on the Shore - when I was in Moscow in 2006, so I think I hardly "discovered" him. I have vivid memories of picking up that first book, with its white cover with a picture of a cat on it. I used to buy a lot of books at the big Dom Knigi (House of Books) on Novy Arbat, but I think I might have bought this one at the English book shop in Kitai Gorod. I ended up with a whole shelf of them in my bedroom, all of them abandoned when I left Moscow precipitously shortly afterwards. I used to read a lot - and spend a fortune on books I was later to discard - when I was in Prague and Moscow. The joys of having (some) time on my hands and no TV (or Russian/Czech only) and no computer.

In Prague I used to go to Shakespeare & Synove (Shakespeare and Sons) a lot. (I imagine it's probably something of an homage to Paris's famous Shakespeare & Co.) Shakespeare & Synove was a wonderful place to hang out - used and new books in the back (and they'd buy your old ones back too) and a coffee shop where you could install yourself by the fire with a hot chocolate and read for hours without being bothered. A rarity indeed in Prague, where generally a waiter will swoop within two seconds of you finishing your drink and ask if you want something else. At the time, I was unemployed, waiting to go to Moscow, and spent a month living in a hostel dorm room before spending a couple of weeks sleeping on the concrete floor of my friends' basement apartment (in one of their bedrooms, in fact), with only a folded blanket between me and the floor, and another thin blanket to sleep under. I used to wake up aching all over when my friend's alarm went off at about 6 am. The good part was that I was authorised to climb into her bed for a few more hours' sleep once she left! There was no spare key, so once I decided to leave the apartment for the day, I was out on my own until whatever time they made it back from long days teaching. I saw a lot of Prague, but it was getting cold by that stage (beginning of November, I think), and I'd been in Prague for a couple of months already, and so I spent a lot of time trying to drink hot chocolates as slowly as I possibly could in cafes or even sitting on the floor outside their apartment waiting for them to get back.

Very different to how I've been reading 1Q84 - on my Kindle, with no real sense of the weightiness of such a book, the pages left unread diminishing with every day; on the bus, in my lunchbreaks, or perched on the stationary bike at the gym. I found that Vol. 1 and 2 (sold separately from Vol. 3 in the UK, where my Kindle is registered) zipped by quite quickly. Even though I'd read some spoilers in articles and interviews before it came out, it did a good job of drawing you into its world and allowing some of the connections between characters to only gradually dawn upon you. There are definitely parts where it's genuinely gripping and you can't wait to see what happens next. But it's quite unevenly paced. Vol. 3, in particular, seems to be dragging somewhat in comparison, although there still is a desire to know how it all turns out. Somehow the surreal elements of the book seem a bit lacking in purpose. One feels that exactly the same essential plot could have been achieved without any of the Little People and air chrysalises etc. They don't really seem to be *doing* much in the book, and yet they're not so out there that you really go "wow, what the hell?" Or maybe that's just because we're all used to this sort of magical realism guff by now?

There is a good story there though, and I'm still looking forward to see what happens at the end (which I have heard is disappointing...) If anything, though, it's made me want to go back and re-read some of those books I read back in Moscow and see if I can recapture the magic.

PS Next time I will try to get down to business a bit faster...

Gluck, another awful French book

"Paris was ours", a collection of 32 essays from people who have spent a bit of time in Paris, apparently in the pursuit of cliché. http://www.amazon.com/Paris-Was-Ours-Penelope-Rowlands/dp/1565129539/ref=sr_1_79?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1297163360&sr=1-79
I should note that I have not actually read this book, but the Amazon review suffices, I think.

The first (or perhaps not the first, but hey) thing one notices is that it is produced in a paperback 'Deckle Edge' edition. How exciting, what could that be? Turns out 'Deckle Edge' is 'A book with uneven page edges cut to resemble handmade papers.' Well, that may be your first clue that this book has been produced for morons.

But of course it's in the essays that the book really shines. We learn that 'Stacy Schiff finds that picking up the dry cleaning was less of a chore when done on ground Ben Franklin and John Adams trod before her'. If only I could sustain myself while accomplishing mundane tasks with thoughts of which famous Americans might have been hanging around my drycleaners'too. Then we have Janine di Giovanni, who 'saw French mothers hit their children to enforce good manners' - is this supposed to be a particularly French trait? French chic tip - beat your children! Perhaps the French don't mind hitting kids because of their Nazi-loving past : 'Alicia Drake muses on the disconcerting ability of the French to accept human faults as she visits sites from which the Nazis, aided by French police, deported Jews to their deaths'. I'm not quite sure if Alicia Drake is calling the Holocaust 'a human fault' there, if so, she almost makes the Nazis seem merely careless. But my favourite is Diane Johnson's esssay, who in the process of 'evaluating French stereotypes', 'was surprised that French hostesses serve store-bought entrees'. Sacré bleu, someone call les flics!

The discovery of France

I've been trying of late to improve my knowledge of French history, because although I took a paper on the French Revolution at uni and several general ones on European history, I've always felt a bit fuzzy on some of the particulars of French history, especially the whole Napoleon-Louis Napoleon-Revolution-Republic-another Revolution-Monarchy bit of it (unfortunately I still am majorly confused on all that, so if anyone knows a good book or something to brush up on it, let me know!)

So first I listened to an excellent Open Yale podcast course on the History of France Since 1871, taught by John Merriman - more info here. Unfortunately, this started after the whole confusing mess mentioned above, but it was still really interesting on the recent history of France. Good to learn who all those 'hommes politiques' every bloody street in France is named after are! Jean Jaurès, for example, who has a major square where the two main axis routes of Tours named after him, was the guy who united the French socialist parties back in c. 1905. He was assassinated on the eve of WWI due to his unpopular pacifist stance.

Anyway, I am currently reading The Discovery of France by Graham Robb (best 1p I ever spent, thanks Amazon! FYI for those reading from France - I always compare prices on amazon.fr and amazon.co.uk - English books on amazon.fr are almost always shipped from England anyway, and althoug the cost of shipping from England is a bit more, often the prices of the books will be much lower and thus offset the shipping & currency conversion differences) and I'm enjoying and learning so much that I thought I should share with any other francophiles who may be reading.

Essentially it's an exploration of France before France i.e. teasing out the 'real' France that existed before everything got centralised and homogenised. I think most people know that France used to be a patchwork of different languages and cultures, but the amount of differences and how long they endured were a real surprise to me. It's billed as a sort of travelogue - one guy exploring France on a bicycle - but it's actually not at all. While the author, a former Fellow at Oxford, really did go around France on a bike, there's very few mentions of this in the book and no sort of 'wacky encounters' or anything like that, just a historic account of what "pre-modern" (i.e. up to the 20th century and sometimes even beyond) France was like.

The first section, which basically describes life in some of the regions and maps out the cultural and linguistic differences, is especially interesting. Did you know, for example, that there used to be a hated minority group in many parts of France called the cagots (or a variant thereof)? They weren't a linguistic, religious, or ethnic subset, just a sort of caste that was shunned and restricted to living in certain areas and working in certain trades, for reasons unknown to even those who were persecuting them. I found it particularly poignant that, when the Revolution came, the cagots tried to take advantage of the situation by burning the records that identified them as outsiders, but this initiative failed because their names were memorised and passed down in the rhymes of the village children. The Wikipedia article on cagots is largely sourced from Robb's book.

After the many fascinating 'did you know' moments in the first third, I found the middle third dipped a little bit, with an over-emphasis on tracing the development of transportation in France and how it opened up the provinces to change and 'discovery', but it's still interesting. I'm currently on the last third (these are my divisions rather than the actual structure of the book) which is describing the impressions of tourists from the Ile-de-France in the regions. One interesting point that is made is that many of the hallmarks of regional identity - cuisine, costume etc. are actually either quite recent - whatever fashions etc. these tourists found at the exact moment they arrived in a region in the 19th century became the 'traditional' costume of the region, even if it had actually been at one a wide-spread fashion throughout France that had just hung on in the slower-changing provinces, or not really representative of traditional life in the province at all e.g. the sorts of rich, meat-filled regional cuisines we know today, which may be native to an area but would have been far out of reach of most of its subsistence-level inhabitants before the modern era.

To sum up, I found (am finding) this a fascinating alternative to the typical Paris-centric, great man sort of history that you normally read about France or anywhere else, full of interesting tidbits and insights into a bygone world. Highly recommended!