Do You like book The Most Beautiful Book In The World: Eight Novellas (2009)?
The reviews here are on opposite extremes: from the 1-2 stars (extremely annoying, does absolutely nothing, etc.) to the 4-5 stars (excellently written, highly recommended!, etc.) with a vast international audience who made reviews in English, Polish, French, German, Italian and perhaps a few other languages I don't recognize.This is not a full-length novel but a collection of eight novellas (or maybe eight short stories but longer than the usual, or eight novels much shorter than the usual). So not tied up in a coherent whole, it may easily happen that the disgust one feels after the first of these novellas which I found very close to mediocrity ("Wanda Winnipeg") could dictate the reader's mood in his reading of the remaining. Overall, I could pass judgement on it: simply narrated, straightforward, fast-paced, markedly plot-driven, bereft of any attempt towards sophistication or composition gimmickry. That could very well be a criticism. But it is not. Except for "Wanda Winnipeg" I enjoyed each and every story like I was a small boy tasting one exotic candy after another. I expected stories and was given delightful ones, each with distinct flavor and often with unexpected twists and turns. The last two I found the best, both of them having to do with the book's cover: you see here "Odette Toulemonde" (the 7th novella) happily reading her favorite author's (Balthazar Balsan's) "Silence of the Plain" but of course that's not the title the book carries. The eight was deemed to be more eye-catching, "The Most Beautiful Book in the World."This was originally written in French and it may be that some faults for the book's "imperfections" may have been brought about by poor translation. For a lot can be gained OR lost in translation. To illustrate, take a look at this poem:"This great toil: to go through things undonePlodding as if tied by foot and hand, Recalls the uncouth walking of the swan;Death, the loss of grip upon the shelfWhereon every day we used to stand,Mimes the anxious launching of himselfOn the floods where he is gently caught,Which, as if now blessedly at naught,Float aside beneath him, ring by ring;While he, infinitely sure and calm,Ever more of age and free of qualm,Deigns to fare upon them like a king."Then take a look at this one:"This clumsy living that moves lumberingas if in ropes through what is not donereminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.And to die, which is letting goof the ground we stand on and cling to every day,is like the swan when he nervously lets himself downinto the water, which receives him gailyand which flows joyfully underand after him, wave after wave,while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,is pleased to be carried, each minute more fully grown,more like a king, composed, farther and farther on."You'd think, at a cursory glance, that they are two poems. But no. They are just two different English (from the original German) translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Der Schwan" ("The Swan"), the first one by Walter Arndt and the second one by Robert Bly.Aside from the given possibility of the translation contributing negatively to this book, there is also a hint in one of the stories here which show that it may be indeed the case. I found it in "Odette Toulemonde" itself, the paragraph which reads:"When the Filipino maid found him lying there lifeless, it was not too late. The emergency services managed to revive him and then, after a few days under observation, he was sent to a psychiatric hospital."Now unless Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt really intended to write the next literary resurrection of the dead after Jesus Christ in French, I think this may be attributed to a faulty translation.Yet it is good if the dead can really come back to life. So happy Easter everyone.
—Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly
Wanda Winnipeg is a beautiful, rich, demanding woman who's made a successful career out of marrying rich men and then divorcing them. But what happens when she sees her first lover on the beach, now an old man and a failure of a painter?Hélène likes everything just so, including her men, but has never been satisfied with what she's got - including her man. It is only after she loses something she didn't realise was so important to her, that she learns about the beauty of imperfection. But is it too late for Hélène?Odette is a single mother and widow, working in a shop by day and sewing feathers on costumes at night. Her one passion is the books of Balthazar Basan: they make her float. For Basan, his new book is being panned and his wife is more distant than ever; a letter from a fan called Odette might possibly be the only thing to bring him back to life.A group of women prisoners in the Gulag - all mothers to daughters - work together to secretly create paper and acquire a pencil to write on it with, only to be stumped: what message should they leave their girls, whom they'll probably never see again? The result of their efforts is quite possibly the most beautiful book in the world.These eight stories about wildly different women and the important things in their lives were touching, whimsical and sometimes bitter-sweet, but they all end on a note of hope. Except for Odette, the women tend to all be somewhat cold figures, and seem lost in their own womanhood, as if they woke up one day and couldn't figure out how they had become the women they became. Yet Schmitt has simply and touchingly captured some of the myriad of conflicting emotions and influences of love in the lives of women.Naturally, Odette and her passion for stories spoke to me on a personal level, and it's one of the happiest stories, but I felt moved by all the stories. Some were very sad, like "Every Reason to be Happy" and "The Barefoot Princess" - but they all spoke of how easily love and life can slip through your fingers, either because you're not looking or because you've set up entirely the wrong expectations. They could be tragic stories precisely because they yearned for something lost and gone, something they couldn't have or didn't realise they had but wanted.The prose was deceptively simple, the stories usually told from an omnipresent, future voice - a voice that already knows what happened. One of the standouts was "The Intruder", about an intelligent woman and journalist, Odile, who keeps seeing an old lady in her apartment and calls the police. When her husband Charlie, a journalist, comes back from the Middle East, she breaks down when he calmly tells her he doesn't live there, and hasn't in a long time. What you come to realise is that Odile is the old lady, the man isn't Charlie but their son who lives with his wife and children elsewhere, and that Odile - this woman who has a PhD and a revered career behind her - is losing her marbles. On a first reading, I didn't get as much out of it as I wanted to, possibly because I don't read many short stories and it's not a medium I'm terribly comfortable with. I would need to re-read, knowing what to expect, and really absorb these stories. Because I think they're deceptively simple, and my response is too simplistic for my own satisfaction. It's also been a week since I read it, and it's lost its spark and sharpness and is starting to fade from memory.The story "Odette Toulemonde" is based on the film of the same name, written and directed by Schmitt, which helped inspire this collection of stories.
—Shannon (Giraffe Days)
کتاب "یک روز قشنگ بارانی" پنج داستان کوتاه درباره ی 5 زن مختلفه. زن هایی که یا درون ذهنشون تو دنیای متفاوتی هستن و یا واقعا دنیای اطرافشون ناگهان تغییر می کنه.اگر خواننده ی حرفه ای اشمیت باشید، می دونید که این نویسنده به زندگی امیدواره و حتما جایی از داستان، حقه ی هوشمندانه ای زده تا هرکسی رو که تو داستانشه و هرکسی رو که داستانشو می خونه، به زیبایی های زندگی امیدوار کنه. اگر خواننده ی حرفه ای اشمیت نیستید، تبریک می گم. به شما این فرصت داده شده تا از تزریق این همه امید، شادی و زیبایی به زندگیتون در خلال داستان های اشمیت دوست داشتنی، لذت ببرید
—Yasaman A
