the first gulp of beer …
Posted by Gordon on October 30, 2008
Le Tour de France, c’est l’été (The Tour de France is summer) is one of 40 odd miniatures in Philippe Delerm’s collection La Première Gorgée de Bière et autres plaisirs miniscules*. In two pages Delerm brings together several ideas, feelings and moods around enervatingly warm and never ending summer afternoons in any household in any part of France. In the a background the television broadcasts monotonous scenes of cyclists in colourful lycra displaying the countryside, shot low down through buzzing wheels across fields of wheat stubble or from a helicopter as the peleton careens over village cobblestones between red-brown roofs. The buzz of the cicada outside the house, the ignored murmer of the commentators, the imagined rhonrohn of the bicycles’ tyres; all are in desultory harmony.
You may know, dear reader, that David Bowie’s Pin Ups album (on which you will find the hit ‘Sorrow’ with its shimmering tremolo guitar-based production – not my favourite at the time but it stands up well in memory) is made up entirely of cover versions of a selection of songs from the sixties. The trick was to go somewhere away from London (rural France perhaps) and develop the arrangements without access to the originals, to give the recordings a chance to find their own new forms. (Marc Collin’s Nouvelle Vague travels a similar road – he makes sure that the singers of his bossa nova versions of 80s new wave songs have never heard the originals.)
It seems people have different abilities to remember things in books they read, different parts attract different people – some remember specific scenes, others quotes or aphorisms, some try to hang on to a mood from a story or book, some the storyline, others the intricacies of the argument, yet others the connections they saw then – and perhaps no longer can explain – with remote events, moods or phrases.
And so when seated last Tuesday on a stone fence in a tiny urban park on a balmy Sydney evening telling my friend about Delerm’s plasirs miniscules, the question is whether I was able communicate the mood by telling parts of the story, by describing the shape, by noting a phrase. In this varying attraction to pieces of the whole – better still when combined with partial memory of a work read long ago - perhaps the reviewers’ originality can be found.
But that originality encounters and often succumbs to a stronger force: Taleb of The Black Swan makes a case that success in creative endeavours is pretty much chance, that the regard for a book, even the way in which it is understood and hence the audience it will likely find, can be set by the first few reviewers; later reviewers have trouble not to influenced by the original take – even if their point is to oppose the first approach.
And so the virtue in the Bowie/Collin remake approach; and the virtue in distance. But for some things the first mouthful is truly the most refreshing. Which is which?
* for a less idiosyncratic appreciation see eg http://alwaysthewit.blogspot.com/2007/05/la-premire-gorge-de-bire.html; or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Delerm.
