Lucky Girl in the Book Garden

When you enter giveaways, do you really expect to win? I didn't, but I won the 500 follower giveaway, graciously offered by Birgit from The Book Garden YAAY!
The next complicated step was to decide on the books to be ordered by Birgit, which was a tough task, since there are around 70 books on my wish list, but it just dawned on me that in February I am going to host my first Reading Challenge together with Bellezza (more details to be posted soon), so all the three books I chose are about or set in Venice (does that give you a clue about the Reading Challenge?:))
And remember, there's only one Venice and probably just one lucky little girl... ME :) Thank you, Birgit!

Happy Birthday, Your Madgesty!

Madonna - Like a Virgin (Addiction 2011 Mashup Mix)

Asculta mai multe audio pop

Aimez - vous Francoise Sagan?

"Love lasts about seven years. That's how long it takes for the cells of the body to totally replace themselves."



After a Murakami marathon, I decided to take a break and read something "light" but still enjoyable. Francoise Sagan seemed the perfect choice.
"Avec mon meilleur souvenir", written in 1984, is a book about what Sagan loved the most: gambling and how she won her only possession - a big house in Normandy; speeding up, jazz and her Favorite BIllie Holliday for whom she travelled all the way to New York; writers, especially Tennessee Williams whom she considers to be amongst the greatest writers; the theatre, which she started as a way to amuse her entourage but which ended up being a passion that she would never give up, just like gambling.



The book ends with a love letter to Jean - Paul Sartre in which she acknowledges him as the most important writer in French literature, the one that delivered what he had promised in his books: to be true to his words and beliefs. The sequel? A blind Sartre wishes to meet Sagan...

Everything that Sagan writes about is what moved her along the years. She reveals herself in a tender way, while sincerely narrating about the years long past and the fascinating people that she encountered. We discover between the lines a writer that fears loneliness, and who spends nights on end in the casinos of Saint-Tropez.
Still, Sagan returns to literature, fearing the fact that she might not write and reminding us of the four books that she considers to be her guiding light in a troubled universe. These books are Gide's "The Fruits of the Earth", Camus' "The Rebel", Rimbaud's "Illuminations" and Proust's "Albertine gone".

Here are a few of her words of wisdom:

“Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.”

“I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.”

"I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love."

More Banana(s)...

"Everything in life has some good in it.And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more – it’s sad, but that’s the truth."

Not long ago I posted a few impressions on N.P., by Banana Yoshimoto. It was my first read by the Japanese writer, but it seems, not my last. At the end of June I was the lucky winner of Bellezza's Giveaway and so, I dipped into my second book. Needless to say, whenever I read a second, third, etc. book by the same writer, I compare them. "The Lake" was a bit different from "N.P.", but still, dealing with the same recurrent themes of feeling alone in the world, the impossibility of communication, the drowning need to commit suicide because there's too much "otherness" and little "you" in the world.



"When things get really bad, you take comfort in the placeness of a place."

"The Lake" is about Chihiro, a graphic artist who finds herself falling in love with Nakajima, a student in biotechnology with whom she previously shared glimpses and smiles from their opposite windows. Her feelings oscillate between "Just being with Nakajima made me feel as if we were detached from history, and had no particular age" and the impulse to remain independent. However, Nakajima's attitude towards sex makes her wonder what had happened in his past that traumatized him so deeply.

"When someone tells you something big, it's like you're taking money from them, and there's no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening."

Do we discover in the end the mystery surrounding him and the ghostly lake, that force that relentlessly calls for both characters? We definitely do. Do we see them having a cup of tea in a small cafe in Paris? We might...

"Here we were, two ridiculously fragile people, sliding along on a very thin layer of ice all the time, each of us ready to slip and take the other down at any moment, the most unsteady of couples – and yet I believed what I had said. It would be all right."

This is not an ordinary love story, but it's definitely a simple one. Not that simple means dull!

"Love isn't only a matter of fussing over each other, hugging, wanting to be together. Some things communicate, inevitably, precisely because you keep them in check."