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ilse's review
3.0
Bluish veins ran across the surface of the great stone slabs, which had formerly served as panelling for the temples. The shadows the merchants cast behind them on the road as they walked toward dusk were larger, slimmer, and not as dark as in the midday sun, tinged with a very pale blue that evoked the rings beneath the eyelids of a sick woman. Blue inscriptions quivered on the white domes of the mosques like tattoos on the delicate breast of a girl, and from time to time a turquoise, pulled down by its own weight, fell with a dull sound onto a carpet of faded, downy blue.
A Blue Tale and Other Stories comprises three stories written between 1927 and 1930 - A Blue Tale (Conte bleu), The First Evening (Le premier soir) and An Evil Spell (Maléfice) - which come across as three exercises in style, miniature finger exercises of the young Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) discovering herself as a writer. Yourcenar didn’t consider these early stories as accomplished works – much of her work she kept rewriting over and over again – and she judged the last story as ‘conventional’.
A Blue tale foreshadows her later work [b:Oriental Tales|124385|Oriental Tales|Marguerite Yourcenar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349121186l/124385._SY75_.jpg|1011201]. It is a symbolist, moral tale literally drenched in blue metaphors, adjectives and images and playing with fairy tale ingredients in an oriental setting. Yourcenar apparently also intended writing a red and a white tale, but unlike the blue tale those weren’t found in her documents - which made me wonder if she, like Krzytof Kieslowski in his Three colours film trilogy, by referring to the Liberté, égalité, fraternité represented by the colours of the French flag, had a similar intractable take on the said principles in mind as well.
Venise - Saya Becuwe
Was it possible that man, having thought about it for so long, had not yet understood that beauty is ineffable and that neither beings nor things can be fathomed?
The First Evening is an introspective vignette on a newlywed couple departing on honeymoon to Montreux which is psychologically and biographically interesting, as this is a reworking by Marguerite Yourcenar of a story her father, Michel Cleenewerck de Crayencour, wrote in 1905, to which she added wry reflections on the relationship between her father and her mother Fernande (who died giving birth to Marguerite) and in which she mercilessly paints the newlywed woman as seen through the eyes of her world-weary, more mature husband – the kind of woman Yourcenar certainly not wanted to be like herself – gullible, fearful, a baby-machine, paltry, a piece of decoration or plaything for a spouse that is already tired of her before even touching her. The story breathes disappointment with life and wistfulness - and resignation in life like it is, feeling ‘neither fear nor desire to be elsewhere, perhaps there was no elsewhere just as there was no exit’.
Zachary Johnson
The last story, An Evil Spell, depicts a exorcist-esque scene among Italian immigrants in the South of France, which in a sense echoes the more contemporary feminist vision on witchhood and ends with a bitter lesson - if you do not fit into the norm and threaten to get ostracised by society, you could as well use the transformative power such gives you as it is better to be feared than loved.
A central theme encompassing the stories is the powerlessness of humankind vis-à-vis nature, love and destiny. These tales aren’t characterized yet by the erudite, sophisticated style of [b:The Abyss|103200|The Abyss|Marguerite Yourcenar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312006753l/103200._SY75_.jpg|1099462] nor imply the multi-layered-ness of [b:Coup de Grâce|103197|Coup de Grâce|Marguerite Yourcenar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312004218l/103197._SY75_.jpg|2078317]. Still they are intriguing, as some of the motifs and images will return in her later work, and because of revealing subliminally the peculiar view of the young Yourcenar on femininity and womanhood. Some of the female characters in the stories seem to illustrate how Marguerite Yourcenar at that age was a person strongly in search of her identity as a woman and a writer, exploring how to become a woman on her own terms. Her struggle with what she considered the weakness of the female body as a darker and inferior part of herself (‘happiness doesn’t lie in the depths of a body’) seems reflected in a perturbing view on women (mouthed by her male characters) which is condescending and almost misogynistic and in her choice to portray female characters as in contrast with her ideal self, presenting women as ridden with a penchant for suffering reminding of Sophie in [b:Coup de Grâce|103197|Coup de Grâce|Marguerite Yourcenar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312004218l/103197._SY75_.jpg|2078317] or exposing them to torture, violence, humiliation and rape - hard not to see a certain self-hate of Yourcenar mirrored in this early work.
I look forward to read her autobiographical trilogy Le labyrinthe du monde within a few months.
A Blue Tale and Other Stories comprises three stories written between 1927 and 1930 - A Blue Tale (Conte bleu), The First Evening (Le premier soir) and An Evil Spell (Maléfice) - which come across as three exercises in style, miniature finger exercises of the young Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) discovering herself as a writer. Yourcenar didn’t consider these early stories as accomplished works – much of her work she kept rewriting over and over again – and she judged the last story as ‘conventional’.
A Blue tale foreshadows her later work [b:Oriental Tales|124385|Oriental Tales|Marguerite Yourcenar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349121186l/124385._SY75_.jpg|1011201]. It is a symbolist, moral tale literally drenched in blue metaphors, adjectives and images and playing with fairy tale ingredients in an oriental setting. Yourcenar apparently also intended writing a red and a white tale, but unlike the blue tale those weren’t found in her documents - which made me wonder if she, like Krzytof Kieslowski in his Three colours film trilogy, by referring to the Liberté, égalité, fraternité represented by the colours of the French flag, had a similar intractable take on the said principles in mind as well.
Venise - Saya Becuwe
Was it possible that man, having thought about it for so long, had not yet understood that beauty is ineffable and that neither beings nor things can be fathomed?
The First Evening is an introspective vignette on a newlywed couple departing on honeymoon to Montreux which is psychologically and biographically interesting, as this is a reworking by Marguerite Yourcenar of a story her father, Michel Cleenewerck de Crayencour, wrote in 1905, to which she added wry reflections on the relationship between her father and her mother Fernande (who died giving birth to Marguerite) and in which she mercilessly paints the newlywed woman as seen through the eyes of her world-weary, more mature husband – the kind of woman Yourcenar certainly not wanted to be like herself – gullible, fearful, a baby-machine, paltry, a piece of decoration or plaything for a spouse that is already tired of her before even touching her. The story breathes disappointment with life and wistfulness - and resignation in life like it is, feeling ‘neither fear nor desire to be elsewhere, perhaps there was no elsewhere just as there was no exit’.
Zachary Johnson
The last story, An Evil Spell, depicts a exorcist-esque scene among Italian immigrants in the South of France, which in a sense echoes the more contemporary feminist vision on witchhood and ends with a bitter lesson - if you do not fit into the norm and threaten to get ostracised by society, you could as well use the transformative power such gives you as it is better to be feared than loved.
A central theme encompassing the stories is the powerlessness of humankind vis-à-vis nature, love and destiny. These tales aren’t characterized yet by the erudite, sophisticated style of [b:The Abyss|103200|The Abyss|Marguerite Yourcenar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312006753l/103200._SY75_.jpg|1099462] nor imply the multi-layered-ness of [b:Coup de Grâce|103197|Coup de Grâce|Marguerite Yourcenar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312004218l/103197._SY75_.jpg|2078317]. Still they are intriguing, as some of the motifs and images will return in her later work, and because of revealing subliminally the peculiar view of the young Yourcenar on femininity and womanhood. Some of the female characters in the stories seem to illustrate how Marguerite Yourcenar at that age was a person strongly in search of her identity as a woman and a writer, exploring how to become a woman on her own terms. Her struggle with what she considered the weakness of the female body as a darker and inferior part of herself (‘happiness doesn’t lie in the depths of a body’) seems reflected in a perturbing view on women (mouthed by her male characters) which is condescending and almost misogynistic and in her choice to portray female characters as in contrast with her ideal self, presenting women as ridden with a penchant for suffering reminding of Sophie in [b:Coup de Grâce|103197|Coup de Grâce|Marguerite Yourcenar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312004218l/103197._SY75_.jpg|2078317] or exposing them to torture, violence, humiliation and rape - hard not to see a certain self-hate of Yourcenar mirrored in this early work.
I look forward to read her autobiographical trilogy Le labyrinthe du monde within a few months.
teodomo's review against another edition
La palabra orientalismo sirve tanto para designar los estudios orientales como, desde 1978 cuando Edward Said publicó Orientalismo, para hablar de la representación estereotipada o mistificada (y muchas veces racista y/o ignorante) de culturas orientales por parte de escritores o artistas occidentales. Hay obras donde el orientalismo (en el sentido saidiano del término) es obvio. Pero el problema de leer textos que exploran más sutilmente la estética o leyendas orientales desde Occidente, sin ser uno (lector) un experto en las culturas orientales particulares de las que versan, es que a veces uno no sabe si la persona que escribe está cayendo en un orientalismo saidiano o no. Como es el caso de este cuento de Marguerite Yourcenar.
En alguna parte de la web leí algo como "Marguerite Yourcenar era demasiado conocedora de Oriente para caer en ese orientalismo". Ni idea de si es así, esperemos que sí. El cuento es fascinante, cargado de mística y símbolos ambiguos. Solo que no me siento capacitado para decir si realmente atina o si es el equivalente de Voltaire hablando de sudamericanos en Cándido.
En alguna parte de la web leí algo como "Marguerite Yourcenar era demasiado conocedora de Oriente para caer en ese orientalismo". Ni idea de si es así, esperemos que sí. El cuento es fascinante, cargado de mística y símbolos ambiguos. Solo que no me siento capacitado para decir si realmente atina o si es el equivalente de Voltaire hablando de sudamericanos en Cándido.
miralarissa's review
dark
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
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