Reading Poirot in French speaking English with a French accent

I decided to learn French, so I got some Agatha Christie books in French translations because I figured they'd be more fun to study than lists of imperfect verbs. And, as far as her books go, once you learn the words for "murder", "kill", and "little gray cells", you're basically fluent.

(What stinks is that you still have to look up those imperfect verbs; I was so sure I had outsmarted them.)

It was only after reading two Poirot mysteries in French that I remembered that one of his signature quirks, along with his enormous ego and his flourishing mustache, is his charmingly-phrased Franglish. He's Belgian, of course, and speaks English with a French accent. So I'd been reading his Franglish in French as translated from English.

Way to learn a language, Me!

I read Temoin Muet, then not long after I finished it I stayed in a bed and breakfast that had an old Christie paperback on the bedside table in my room, and lo and behold: it was Dumb Witness. In English! Bon chance! I told my vacation to screw off and sat there and read the book to see what I'd missed. It turns out: not much. If you want to feel a false sense of fluency really quickly, learn French the Christie way.

But I did miss the accents. Agatha is not shy about the Upstairs/Downstairs mental gap -- she's always going on about how dumb the maids are, and in English they speak in broad slang-filled accents. I didn't notice that in French, but I was pretty busy congratulating myself in my head like this: "Tuer -- to kill! That means to kill! I AM SO FRENCH!"

One thing about Dumb Witness made no sense in Temoin Muet (Clue Spoiler!): the victim leaves a pre-tuer clue by mumbling on about a "dessin vaste". Drawing vast? Big drawing? Wide design? Lady, I know you're dying, but that makes no sense. It turns out to be a misunderstood word; vase instead of vaste. She's referring to a design on a vase that sort of proves that she knew that someone was trying to kill her. Wicked clever wordplay, right?

Not in French, it isn't. That was the translator's way of dealing with the English word "ajar". The victim babbles about something being "ajar", so there's all this speculation about her door being ajar while her killer skulked around. But it turns out that she's talking about the fricking vase again in our English alterna-verse, her vase or her urn, or her JAR. So look at the drawing on the jar, dummies! Someone tuer-ed me!

And that's what got lost in translation. That and the fact that everyone says things "dryly" in her books, which sounds a lot dumber as "un ton sec".

If someday you and I have a conversation in French and I sound like a Belgian detective, you'll know why.

F, Marry, Kill: Tom Ripley, Holden Caufield, and Henry James

F, Marry or Kill? You'd have to kill Tom Ripley, obviously, in preemptive self-defense. Marry Holden because he's so sensitive, which leaves Henry, who you wouldn't so much F as spend an awkward evening with unsatisfying results, then never speak to him again and look away when you see him in public.

These guys are three sides of the same three-sided coin, despite the fact that only one was a "real" person, for those of you who are literalists and fictionphobes. (It's so typical of you to hold someone's fiction-ness against them, as if they are second class citizens!) They cannot get into someone else's mind or walk a mile in someone else's shoes because they think other people's shoes smell and will doubtless give them athlete's foot. Other people are inexplicable and annoying and rather gross to these guys. They either hate them or idealize them. They try and fail to make other people better than they are.

Holden believes there are two types of people in the world: idiots and Phoebe. But he knows that he's doomed to be misunderstood or abused by the idiots, and that he's bound to fuck things up with the Phoebies. His saving grace is that Phoebe will forgive him.

Tom believes there are two types of people in the world: Tom Ripley and all the people he despises and/or kills. Thank goodness he has those forgery/murder/identity theft hobbies to keep his spirits up.

Henry believes there are two types of people: Henry alter egos and naive women full of crippling self-doubt or crippling self-confidence. Women are just waiting to be victimized, and all Henry Alter Ego can do is watch and wring his hands and hate them a little for being so dumb.

Thus the core problem for these men is, of course, women, those boorish or beautiful or clingy or coquettish puzzles who insist on being both alluring and repulsive. Women never act right, and they can be terribly pathetic and/or treacherous. Men make no sense to these guys, either, but the great folly of men is when they abuse women or lose their heads over them or both. It's all about the ladies.

So if the game were reversed, Tom would kill you and convince himself it was your fault; Holden would F you and then get way too attached until you had to change your cell phone number just to get away from him; and Henry would marry you just to make you miserable.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

This novel is a miracle of storytelling, dream-like in its ability to mire us in Humbert's fevered brain, and nightmarish in its power to make us give up and say, "Just DO IT already! Get it over with!"

Nabokov doesn't let us sit back and feel superior to Humbert; instead, he has Humbert seduce us in that way that a gross relative at a family reunion can pull you aside and drunkenly divulge all the things you never wanted to know about his drug-filled adventures in the '70s out in Pensacola or canning in Fairbanks or working the shoelace fries w/ vinegar stand at Virginia Beach. You don't want to know, but you have to know, partly because you know the story is about you and the terrible surprises hiding in your DNA.

Lolita inspires us to pity and awe and disgust and that undeniable knob of admiration that comes from watching someone pursue a goal with unshakeable intensity. It's Greek tragedy on such a sad, small scale that it makes you look at your own life and wonder what the hell's wrong with you; something must be, you're human, after all.

And just when you think you've set your mind on Humbert and convinced yourself that maybe young Lolita was so jaded and tough that she'd grow up and out of the skin that he touched, that she'd thrive anyway and you wouldn't have to worry about her after all, you'd be absolved of your voyeur's guilt, just when you're getting comfortable, along comes Clare Quilty. Suddenly you want to protect your pervert from this worse, more dashing, more destructive and attractive and soulless pervert. Suddenly you're on Humbert's side and resenting Lolly's fickleness. And that's life, because you aren't going to figure it out, but you are going to have to face it.

The 1962 Kubrick film is the same but different. It's got the same brain but different limbs. The cast is outstanding, especially Shelley Winters as Lolita's mom, and Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty, the role he was born to play. Sellers wanted to be Chauncy Gardner, but he was Clare Quilty.

Lolita is a work of genius and a great read.

Stephen King's It

Wait, you're only supposed to do the name above the title for tv movies, right, not books? But King's books ARE tv movies, so whatever.

Major, extremely gross SPOILER ahead. If you haven't read this book yet and haven't seen the tv movie and want to remain in suspense, do not read ahead in which I talk about the end of the story. In which the children of the town besieged by the evil spider defeat the Arachnid of Evil by gangbanging the girl in the group.

And here I was foolish enough to think that King had a girl as one of the gang (pun!) because he knew it was more interesting than a group of all-boys, but really he only had her in there because he didn't have the balls to depict boy child circle sodomy and pass that off as some bullshit about love conquering spiders and clowns.

I read this book as a teenager and loved it right up to the child gangbang. You lost me forever with that one, King. So that's really all a girl is good for in a group of friends, huh? Defeating the forces of evil with her VAGINA. I never knew those things were so powerful. And keep in mind it was her PRE-PUBESCENT VAGINA. Yum.

I loved all those actors in the movie, too, especially my beloved Dennis Christopher. Funny how they glossed over the child sex.

I might've just made up the term "circle sodomy"; it's got a real ring to it. Pun!

Tip in The Marvelous Land of Oz, by L Frank Baum

Spoiler Alert!

And it's a doozy. Imagine that you're a young kid, just trying to find your footing in life. Your world is still black and white, right and wrong, and that's how your young mind learns to categorize things and distinguish one thing from another. Like, say, boys from girls.

And then you enter Oz and follow the adventures of Tip, a boy escaping from the witch who has enslaved him since he was a baby. Tip and Jack Pumpkinhead and the Saw-Horse go off on adventures and la la and so forth, and Baum gets to engage in some high-larious sexist comedy about lady soldiers, and it's an Oz-ing good time.

Then you get to the end and find out that Tip is, in fact, Ozma, the lost princess of Oz, magicked into boyness to hide her from some nefarious something or other, I can't remember.

I can't remember because I was shaken to the core by this boy I've known for however many pages suddenly being a girl I've never met before. I'M a girl. I'm not suddenly going to be told I have to be a boy, am I? And everyone won't act like that's the most normal bit of "hey, we forgot to tell you..." they'd ever heard, will they? They won't just sit down to their palace feast while I sit there with my sudden new reproductive organs rustling around under there, will they?

No one seemed to mind that Tip had to be Ozma all of a sudden, but I sure as hell did. Baum, what the hell's the matter with you? At least let him/her be a bit conflicted or go on Maury or something to complain about how I Was a Witch's Transgendered Slave.

But Tip wasn't transgendered. He never thought he was a girl and never wanted to be one. He just had to be.

Maybe I just didn't like being the thought of girlhood being the consolation prize that Duty To Your Country stuck you with.

An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser

This is one of the most boring books I've ever read. It's the only book it's ever taken me literally years to read.

My mom picked it up for me at the supermarket (and no matter how much I ponder the idea of this book on the rack at the A&P, I can't figure it out) the summer before I went to college. It's a brick of a book in extra tiny, elderly-reader-taunting typeface. I started to slog through it, went away to college for a few months, came back for vacation, found it sitting on my bedside table, jeering at me, read some more, and kept this up until I finished it. Seriously, it's dull and takes forever to read.

And yet. I have a terrible memory for plot and couldn't possibly put most books down for more than a few days before I'd have to start over at the beginning to know what's going on. But I was easily able to pick this one up months later. Dreiser is boring for the same reason that he's memorable: he describes things in such sharp, intricate detail that he imprints them on your memory for forever.

I think this is one of the handful of Great American Novels because it's so authentically perceptive about and descriptive of the character of post-Civil War Americans. The hero of the story wants money and respect, and he knows he'll get respect by getting money. He wants to be a big shot. He ends up in the middle of a triangle -- devoted, simple, dull shop girl he impregnates versus glamorous, wealthy boss's daughter he pursues. He accidentally (except in the sense that he planned it) drowns his unsuspecting pregnant girlfriend in order to rid himself of his inconvenient past, but of course, you can't escape your past no matter how far down a river you put it.

Once you know this story, you see it everywhere you look, from Ted Kennedy to O.J. to Iran Contra to Watergate. Just push your dirty little secrets out of the boat and no one will know, will they?

It's the flip side of the American Dream, the true story to the Horatio Alger mythology. It's about our lust for privilege. We in America believe the privileged deserve better than the rest of us, as is evident from our health care system to our first class cabins to our Hummers and our love of casinos. If only we can figure out how to step on each other to claw our way up to the ranks of the privileged; then we'll be happy!

The movie adaptation A Place in the Sun, starring the perfectly cast and excellent Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters (gee, guess which woman played which character), is damned near perfect itself.

But before you see the movie, set aside a few years to read the book. The news, your neighbors, and your own seething ambitions will make more sense when you do.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

It's about talking bunny rabbits who get into gang wars and deal with displacement and migration. No, really. Bunnies. Macho bunnies.

Somehow, despite the giant bunny on the cover, I didn't really think it would be about rabbits.

Great book, but I still haven't gotten over that page 1 surprise of, "Oh, really? It's actually about the rabbits?"