Reviews for La Gloire de Mon Pere (Fortunio Series #1)

The average rating for La Gloire de Mon Pere (Fortunio Series #1) based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-10 00:00:00 Peter Chappelow Recently I discovered what one can do with Google Maps. I used to use it just for looking up places and find my whereabouts. The satellite mode and the homunculus are also fun. But what I love doing now is customise My Maps and keep track of places I have been or want to go. For each recent trip I am now keeping track of the restaurants or shops or less well known places that I visited. I know that no matter how vivid my experience was, with time I will forget the names of the bars, the hotels, the monuments.... Even for the town I live in now, I am keeping My Tapas & Restaurants Google Map, flagging those that have been recommended to me by various people or magazines, so that in improvised outings or in the evenings after the theatre, I can pull out My Map and try out one of those suggested restaurants. For my recent journey to Provence, we were going to visit so many places, small and bigger towns, museums, Roman ruins, restaurants, that to keep track of the busy agenda, and what were we doing each day, I created My Provence Map. So, there I marked Van Gogh's hospital and yellow café, or Picasso's mural of Peace, or Cézanne's studio, or the prehistoric caves, or Matisse Rosary Chapel, the illuminated quarry in Les Baux, and the town where the gypsies celebrate their annual festival. When opening this novel and reading the first pages, I immediately realized the importance of the places where the story takes place, literally. La gloire de mon père is the first volume of a tetralogy in which Marcel Pagnol remembers his childhood and youth. Those memories are entrenched in the Aubagne region as much as in his mind and in the pages he has written, and so I proceeded to signal them in My Provence: Cassis, St Loup, La Ciotat, and The Garlaban mountain, which tops this review, and with which Pagnol begins his tale - even though I would not visit them, with the exception of the Sainte-Victoire mountain. In the pages they became as real as the places on which I was walking, so they also belonged to My Provence. This was not the first time I read the book. As I had tackled it in my youth, during a summer, since Summers were for reading French. During the recent reading then I began to mix Pagnol's childhood memories with my own, and realise that various epochs intermingled - Pagnol's youth happened much before mine, but mine was happening during his adulthood close to the time he wrote the tetralogy. I use to think of this series as early samples of what we now call YA literature, and have given them to the girl of a friend of mine not long ago. But in this second reading I no longer conceive of them as particularly fit for youth. No, they are for adults with a nostalgic past. For this is a glorious read. The sweetness and the humour are balanced and condensed as if in a flask one could bottle the fragrance of fresh lavender plunged into the brightness of a joyful sky. For the recollection of past memories, and filial love, retains the ingeniousness of childhood with the clarity of a clairvoyant adult. My reading continues with the following volumes.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-22 00:00:00 Nelson Michael Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974) In 1957 the playwright, cinéaste and film producer Marcel Pagnol published what he called in the Avant-propos his first piece of prose (aside from quelques modestes essais), La gloire de mon père (The Glory of My Father), which opened a tetralogy of memoirs from his childhood and youth - Souvenirs d'enfance - to a well justified popularity. Though Pagnol had been elected to the Académie française in 1946, this charming text is the opposite of the stuffy and studiously serious memoir one might expect from an Académicien. With loving detail and somewhat exaggerated effect Pagnol recreates life and family in the Provence early in the 20th century - Aubagne, Saint-Loup, Marseille - a life I still saw traces of when I lived in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille in the 80's. I can best give you a sense of this amused, slightly hyperbolic style with a tout petit example in which he describes his little brother, Paul: ...on le voyait tout à coup s'avancer, titubant, les bras écartés, la figure violette. Il était en train de mourir suffoqué. Ma mère affolée frappait dans son dos, enfonçait un doigt dans sa gorge, ou le secouait en le tenant par les talons, comme fit jadis la mère d'Achille. Alors dans un râle affreux, il expulsait une grosse olive noire, un noyau de pêche, ou une longue lanière de lard. Après quoi, il reprenait ses jeux solitaires, accroupi comme un gros crapaud.(*) A trip to a junk shop becomes an elaborate adventure and generator of reader's chuckles, which effects are soon totally eclipsed by those of a féerique removal to a summer vacation villa in the Provençal countryside full of ancient olive, almond and apricot trees, wild herbs and the buzz of countless cicadas. Indeed, the tone of much of the book is that of an accomplished raconteur entertaining friends gathered around a few bottles of wine with tales of people and places all present know well and love, deliberately told in a manner to widen the eyes of the children at hand. I recommend that you pour a glass and edge into the circle of listeners yourself. (*) ...one saw him suddenly advance, staggering, arms outstretched, face violet. He was in the process of choking to death. My panic-stricken mother pounded on his back, stuck a finger down his throat or shook him upside down by his heels as once did Achilles' mother. Then with a horrible groan he expelled a large black olive, a peach pit or a long lanyard of lard. After which he resumed his solitary games squatting like a great toad. Mont Ventoux