Fleuve

A pick-me-up from somewhere or other, I have had the thing for so long I forget where, but it does appear to have once been in the keep of one Irvine who writes in a poor hand in capitals, it was first published in 1942 during the occupation, and, although it is old enough not to contain a date of printing, I doubt whether my copy is a first edition. Unlikely to be of any real value.

It has been lying around for a long time, it taking a long time to get into. A tale of a young man from a mountain hamlet in the east of France. A tale in which the course of the river, which has its source above said hamlet down towards the sea, is woven into a few years of the life of the young man. As befits a novel from the milieux of between the wars, much talk of life forces, rising sap and such like. The first volume of four.

I was a little lazy about using the dictionary, but what we have is the first three loves of the young man. First, his childhood sweetheart, a decent but dull girl from the hamlet, whom he dumps. Second, the good looking girl whom he marries, who is everything the sweetheart is not, but at heart a nasty, selfish piece of works who divorces him in favour of someone with more money. Third, the wise older woman, who happens to have a bit of money and who makes the hero her estate manager. Then war breaks out and it all comes to an abrupt end and the scene is set for the next book in line. All in all, a bit of a pot boiler, but, I think, taking a more serious interest in relationships than an equivalent English novel from the same time.

Then I get to take a peek in Amazon to see if I can get an English version for BH, it being nice to be talking off the same page from time to time. To find that while the book is alive and well and the author gets translated into mostly German, some Spanish and some Dutch, no English - so that was no go.

Then I take a peek in Wikipedia to be surprised to find that Thyde Monnier is the nom de plume of a woman, very much a contemporary of our own Aldous Huxley, and a sometime fellow resident of the south of France, although there is no entry for her in my biography of him (the Sybille Bedford one). This may well account for the sympathetic account of the love of an older woman (50ish) for a young man (25ish).

But then I find http://thyde.monnier.pagesperso-orange.fr/ where I read in the biography section that she herself had taken a young lover, when she was past 50, some years before she wrote 'Fleuve'. I shall now have to read this latest find more carefully. Someone has taken a lot of trouble to write her up.