Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Top Ten Books of 2013 10. Magritte at the MoMA, The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938 9. From the open-air market in Nice, fresh figs, goat cheese, baguette 8. The young astrophysicist in the hotel shower 7. The Seven Samurai 6. Splash Bar closing. Any reference to dancing in my writing is in part a reference to the dance floor at Splash. 5. Your excitement inside Cité radieuse in Marseilles 4. After reading One Hundred Years of Solitude , I saw an old man walk by with his grandson 3. The Talipot Palm flowering for the first and last time before it dies 2. Massage oil  1. The garage mechanic in Tara Bergin’s This Is Yarrow  and his black hands—“everywhere they touch will be evidence of him.”

The train ride from Paris to Nice took more than the promised four-and-a-half hours. The country views were brilliant--open blue skies, ochre rolling fields--and seeing the Mediterranean for the first time as the train hugged the coastline was very special, but next time we will take a plane instead. We left the crowded train station, picked up our apartment keys from a hotel nearby, and walked through the city, rolling our bags behind us. We were struck by how Italian the city looked. The first settlement was founded by the Greeks of Marseilles around 360 BCE. It came under the dominion of Savoy, then France, then Piedmont-Sardinia, and then back to France in 1860. After we had settled into the apartment on Rue de Suede, we took a walk along the famous Bay of Angels, by the Mediterranean. Nice, Bay of Angels The next day, the plan was to hit Coco Beach, some way out of the city, but we found an outdoors market when we walked about Vieille Ville, or Old Town. The Sunday market ...

TB suggested watching this move last night, and I am glad we made the trek to the Angelika. School drama in a French suburb, with imperfect teacher and trying charges. What does it mean to be French? The movie is based on an autobiographical novel, Entre les murs , by François Bégaudeau, who plays himself in the movie filmed with three HD video cameras. The junior high students and the school staff all come from the same school. Their acting is so natural that they make Sean Penn look artsy in Milk . The talk has the unpredictability and indirection of real speech. Manhola Dargis has a good review of the movie.

I finish reading this novel feeling exalted and cowed by what a man may accomplish in a work of fiction. Human relationships, so various, so changing, so beautiful, are so variously, changeably and beautifully conceived here that they constitute a cause for moral uplift and terror. Flying from an apparent bedrock of ethical certainties, fine discriminations flutter in the air, and cannot find a sure place to land. All (a word that punctuates the novel like an orgasmic cry) is guesswork: who is the "wicked" Frenchwoman holding Chad Newsome back from returning to Woollet, Massachusetts, to take up his responsibility as heir to a great manufacturing concern? how is Lambert Strether, himself a fiance and supplicant to Chad's formidable mother, to convince the prodigal son of his duty? what, really, is one's duty to life? The third person narrative, told entirely through the perspective of Strether, dramatizes the changes in his consciousness wrought by the atmosphere of t...