It's true. I've spurned typepad for Facebook and now Facebook is depressing so I'm turning back to typepad. (Let's see how long this lasts.) If I'm looking to retain a running record of random thoughts, perhaps this is the better format. And a more permanent cabinet of wonders, the links of stories I read online.
I bought "Le Desert" in 1991...not sure if it was at FNAC or in a bookstore on St. Germain, but the title (I was fascinated with the idea of desert at the time) and the light cover art intrigued me. I never read it but it remains on my bookshelf, the type on the spine going from bottom to top rather than the American/English top to bottom. And then Le Clezio won the Nobel Prize and now "Desert" is published in English. This review is written by Elizabeth Hawes, the author of the recently published "Camus: A Romance". I listened to an interview on NPR with Hawes and was unaware of the controversy of his later-in-life reputation in France.
There is a scene in "Smilla's Sense of Snow" (the book, not the movie) where she thinks about going to jail and the impossibility of her surviving the experience because she needs the vastness of the outdoor snow landscape from her childhood. I thought of that idea a few times in Maine because one spends so much time outdoors there as opposed to one's "real life" spent in boxes, cars, smaller boxes, larger boxes, etc. and it's frustrating and counter to what makes one feel healthy. I think. One gets a feeling of that as well going through Centre Georges Pompidou in those gerbil-cage cylindrical hallways and escalators. Hmmm.
