
No escaping mother: Lili is Crying, bv Hélène Bessette, reviewed
Charlotte and her daughter Lili live in Provence, and the novel jumps between the 1930s and 1940s, from Lili's 'ribbons and Sunday dresses' to her first freighted dalliances with boys. Charlotte runs a boarding house from which Lili longs to escape – and nearly manages to, with the same young man who tries to convince her not to destroy her life for her mother. His honesty is his mistake, and Lili fails to leave for him – eventually 'going off' not with 'the man I do love' but instead 'with the man I don't'. Her flight ends in failure – there are disappointments and a backstreet abortion – and it isn't long before she is back with Charlotte. The two stay together while Lili's husband, a Slav, is interned in Dachau for the duration of the war.
Bessette's prose is prickly and snappy, with short lines and speech introduced by dashes. On the page it looks more like verse than prose, an effect which matches Bessette's take on the 'poetic novel'. Yet the style is even less defined than this suggests. The action is narrated by everyone and no one. Even the house in Provence has a voice, resentful, complaining: 'Naturally, they slam my doors. What do they care if my doors are damaged?' There is also a mysterious, ever-present shepherd. The effect is one of a verse drama, with a mocking chorus in the wings. People's ages change and remain the same, defying chronology. This is a novel with no regard for anything as stuffy as the traditional passing of time.
In 1953, Bessette – a 35-year-old divorcée and teacher at an école maternelle – was hailed as someone radical. Gallimard signed her up for a ten-book deal; Marguerite Duras called her the very definition of 'living literature'. Yet the early acclaim failed to sustain her career. When she died in 2000, all 13 of her novels were out of print. Perhaps Lili is Crying – a story of unachieved dreams and the pain of continuing to hope – will be the one to revive her reputation.

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The Guardian
a minute ago
- The Guardian
‘City of singles': cosmopolitan prewar Paris's ‘crazy years' brought to life
In 1926, James Joyce was working on his novel Finnegans Wake while living in a spacious apartment in the 7th arrondissement of Paris with his partner, Nora Barnacle, and their two adult children, Giorgio and Lucia. Joyce's neighbours in the elegant stone building at 2 Square de Robiac included a Syrian family whose three children had an English nanny called Jessie, Russian émigrés, an Egyptian industrialist, and the US writers William and Elizabeth Placida Mahl. The details are part of a new exhibition that paints a portrait of the French capital a century ago when it was a hub for artists, intellectuals and young unattached men and women during the decade that became known as les années folles (the crazy years or roaring 20s). Curators at the Musée Carnavalet have drawn on work by researchers from France's National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS) using artificial intelligence to create a database of the 8m individual handwritten entries from the censuses of 1926, 1931 and 1936. The result is an almost comprehensive list of those recorded as living in the 80 districts of Paris's 20 arrondissements at a time when the population of the city reached 2.9 million people. Only the details of those in prisons, hospitals or religious institutions have not been released. 'It's absolutely fascinating. For the first time we can name almost every person who was registered as living in Paris during this period,' said Valérie Guillaume, the director of the Musée Carnavalet. 'From the information, we see Paris was a city of single, young adults and that there were many different nationalities. There were very few children in the city at that time.' As France recovered from the first world war, Paris attracted a cosmopolitan and global crowd of writers, artists, and musicians who mingled with people fleeing revolution, genocide and persecution, workers from France's colonies as well as young people from the countryside seeking jobs. While Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani were busy reshaping the art world, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F Scott Fitzgerald were living it up in the French capital and George Orwell was down and out. Before 1926, population counts had been carried out in Paris, but the census that year was the first to give precise details of city inhabitants including date and place of birth, dependents and profession. Until now, the public has been able to consult the censuses in the Paris archives, but this has required a manual search. 'The artificial intelligence was trained to recognise letters and numbers in the handwritten entries in the census to create a database that can be searched and consulted. Entries that were ambiguous were checked by a human,' Guillaume said. 'It's never been done before because it's an enormous job; too big to manage without digital help.' Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion The Musée Carnavalet, which is dedicated to the history of Paris, said the censuses threw up a 'mosaic of diverse life stories in a whirlwind of memories and emotions'. Aside from the famous, including the US actor and entertainer Josephine Baker, the singers Édith Piaf (born Gassion) and Charles Aznavour (born Shahnour Vaghinag Aznavourian), and the celebrated model Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), the exhibition focuses on ordinary Parisians. The data also reveals interesting comparisons between the 1920s, when the average lifespan of a Paris resident was 50-60 years, and now, when inhabitants live to aabout 80. As well as documents and photographs from the era, many of which have never been previously seen publicly, visitors to the exhibition will be able to consult the census database. 'People will be able to look for details of relatives who were living in Paris at the time or the names of people living in their building a century ago,' Guillaume said of the exhibition, which opens in October. The People of Paris 1926-1936 exhibition will also include newsreels and broadcasts from the era as well as recordings of Parisians recalling life in the city in the 1920s and 1930s made as part of a City Hall project in the 1990s. Joyce lived in Paris for 19 years, frequently moving address until the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, when the family moved to Zurich, where he died the following year. Finnegans Wake was finally published in 1939. As a matter of record, the 1926 census entry for the Joyce family is not entirely correct: the children are wrongly recorded as having been born in Ireland instead of Trieste, Italy, and Giorgio is recorded as Georges. 'This whole project is fascinating and a living thing. For the first time we can put a name to those registered as living in Paris during that decade,' Guillaume said. 'On one hand it is a very large mass of information and on the other it's personal because we are looking at individual people and their stories.'

Leader Live
5 minutes ago
- Leader Live
Emmerdale star shares major career update with ITV show fans
Lisa Riley, who plays the role of Mandy Dingle on the long-running programme, marked the milestone on Facebook, where she told viewers she is "humbled and happy, but mostly giddy to bring more 'Mandy Madness' for many more years to come." The actress went on to praise the fans themselves for their "incredible" support. Taking to Facebook, the ITV star told fans of the show on Facebook: "30 years ago today, I wore a bright lime green body suit, had something camp and spiked in my hair, Double Denim (before Bewitched), Buffalo trainers (before the Spice Girls), ran around the side of the Emmerdale church at the Esholt village, bumped into the character Dave Glover, flirted, smiled that cheeky smile, flickered the eyelashes, and danced to Agadoo expressing true Dingle loyalty to her core, family comes first, second and third." She added that it has been an "absolute joy" to play the character and took some time to thank the "incredible talent" of the crew, writers and producers. The actress said that the character's "famous one-liners" make her laugh personally and told fans that she is "so grateful, so humbled and happy, but mostly giddy to bring more 'Mandy Madness' for many more years to come." She concluded her post by saying: "Always learning, thank you to all the Emmerdale fans, your support is incredible. "P.S. Dom, thank you beyond thank you, for embracing my bonkers... DAILY! Love ya to pieces." According to IMDb, Lisa Riley is an English actress from Bury in Greater Manchester who was born on July 13, 1976. While she is best known for playing the role of Mandy Dingle, something she has done for over 30 years, she has starred in other shows. One of these includes Fat Friends starring James Corden in the year 2000. Emmerdale is available to watch and stream on demand via ITV and ITVX.


South Wales Guardian
31 minutes ago
- South Wales Guardian
Emmerdale star shares major career update with ITV show fans
Lisa Riley, who plays the role of Mandy Dingle on the long-running programme, marked the milestone on Facebook, where she told viewers she is "humbled and happy, but mostly giddy to bring more 'Mandy Madness' for many more years to come." The actress went on to praise the fans themselves for their "incredible" support. Taking to Facebook, the ITV star told fans of the show on Facebook: "30 years ago today, I wore a bright lime green body suit, had something camp and spiked in my hair, Double Denim (before Bewitched), Buffalo trainers (before the Spice Girls), ran around the side of the Emmerdale church at the Esholt village, bumped into the character Dave Glover, flirted, smiled that cheeky smile, flickered the eyelashes, and danced to Agadoo expressing true Dingle loyalty to her core, family comes first, second and third." She added that it has been an "absolute joy" to play the character and took some time to thank the "incredible talent" of the crew, writers and producers. The actress said that the character's "famous one-liners" make her laugh personally and told fans that she is "so grateful, so humbled and happy, but mostly giddy to bring more 'Mandy Madness' for many more years to come." She concluded her post by saying: "Always learning, thank you to all the Emmerdale fans, your support is incredible. "P.S. Dom, thank you beyond thank you, for embracing my bonkers... DAILY! Love ya to pieces." According to IMDb, Lisa Riley is an English actress from Bury in Greater Manchester who was born on July 13, 1976. While she is best known for playing the role of Mandy Dingle, something she has done for over 30 years, she has starred in other shows. One of these includes Fat Friends starring James Corden in the year 2000. Emmerdale is available to watch and stream on demand via ITV and ITVX.