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“Not only are we no longer capable of seeing the tragedies that have befallen us, we are incapable even of registering our own incapacity to do so. What I admire most about The Little Girl and the Cigarette is the clarity with which this novel unmasks the fundamental stupidity of our modern world. Duteurtre sees, and records all that he sees"- Milan Kundera THE LITTLE GIRL AND THE CIGARETTE/ Benoit Duteurtre Duteurtre's first novel to be published in the United States, THE LITTLE GIRL AND THE CIGARETTE, gives us two stories in one. One is about a man waiting to be executed for killing a policeman. His last wish before being put to death, a cigarette, is against jailhouse policy but he must be granted his last wish—this sets off a chain of events that eventually puts his death sentence in doubt. The other story focuses on a midlevel bureaucrat; his cigarette habit leads him to jail after being interrupted by a little girl in a bathroom. Soon he's falsely viewed as someone who commits crimes against children. Hints of Camus dot the landscape of each story, especially during the scenes that take place within the French judicial system; absurd associations between flowers and the condemned man are made by the media, which ring, sadly, as very true to current form; but yet are still extremely hilarious to read. "What a strange juxtaposition! The cigarette, with its toxic tar; the wildflowers, symbol of freshness…", the TV announcer exclaims when the prisoner takes his last smoke; and he goes on to make the typical TV announcer banal psychobabble conclusion: "I imagine that more than one viewer must be wondering about Johnson's behavior." Any notion that this book is farcical in its take on the world should immediately be put to rest. It is a gracefully honest narrative exercise in controlled style and well-earned humor that cogently examines the current western preoccupation for a coddled youthful existence; and the misinterpreted sense of community brought about by repression. This societal affinity for the past is not merely sentimental, but a deluded notion that occurs when people are generally well off but mentally ill-equipped to deal with having a relative pain free existence despite their inherit mediocrity. The context perceptively rendered in this book is new for this condition, of course; but this sentiment was presciently noted in literature almost one hundred years ago in Maugham's OF HUMAN BONDAGE- It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. ...They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life. And emotionally, in every Alain Resnais' movie (over and over…and again and again…) But in his movies it is more of longing that cannot be quenched in vista of one's memories against what is present in the world, politically and socially—while also, thankfully, being contained in the fictional landscape. Instead of the bizarre present day realities that are so wonderfully exhumed to be publicly shamed by Duteurtre. The verdict is in: this is one well-composed piece of fiction that holds more truth than any nonfiction book that I have read this year. And it makes you laugh. Wonderful. Edit/ And it continues: Smoking a Windmill Toy.... http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyE...?

2022-10-29 03:45