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Novelhistorian

Tag Archives: Jean-Christophe Rufin

This Blog Is One Year Old Today

27 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Andrew W. Taylor, Ann Weisgarber, Colm Toíbín, Geraldine Brooks, Helen Dunmore, historical fiction, Jean-Christophe Rufin, Jerome Charyn, John Spurling, Laila Lalami, Lily King, Mary Morris, Robert Harris

A year ago today, I published my first review as Novelhistorian. My thanks go to all my readers, regular or casual, with a special nod to those who’ve graced their visits with commentary. Without all of you, this blog wouldn’t exist. Thank you again.

When I was growing up in the New York area, a local TV channel broadcast Million Dollar Movie, a program that showed a single film continuously for hours at a stretch. The theme song, as I only found out years later, was from Gone With the Wind; I still think of it as belonging to the TV program. The movies were generally the swash-and-buckle type, like Scaramouche or The Crimson Pirate (Burt Lancaster in a title role he probably preferred to forget). It’s thanks to Million Dollar Movie that I can quote stretches of Duck Soup, without which my education would have been incomplete, or vividly recall James Cagney playing George M. Cohan and Errol Flynn as Robin Hood.

Each showing of a movie closed with the voiceover, “If you missed any part of ________ or would like to see it again, stay tuned after these messages.”

So that’s what I’m offering you today. After reading about a hundred books the past year, the following dozen are the ones that have stayed with me most clearly and probably will for awhile. And if you missed my reviews (or care to read them again), here they are, in recap, with links, following the order in which I published them.

The Lie, by Helen Dunmore, recounts the painful, tragic struggle of an English veteran of the First World War who returns to his village and tries to make a life. The Anatomy of Ghosts, by Andrew W. Taylor, involves an eighteenth-century amateur sleuth who must combat superstition, class prejudice, and political influence to solve a murder–and grows as a person in the process.

The Dream Maker, by Jean-Christophe Rufin, is a gripping tale about Jacques Coeur, the fifteenth-century French merchant who not only helped Charles VII transform his country but conceived of power as stemming from knowledge, a revolutionary idea. I Am Abraham is Jerome Charyn’s stirring portrayal of Lincoln as a man conscious of his physical ugliness and tortured by loneliness and desire as he tries to find his way.

An Officer and a Spy, Robert Harris’s novel about the Dreyfus Affair, is more than an intensely compelling story about the most infamous political scandal in nineteenth-century French history (and there were many). It’s also the gold standard for thrillers. The Ten Thousand Things, John Spurling’s novel about Yuan Dynasty China, explores art, sex, love, justice, and politics–you know, the important stuff. For the record, it won this year’s Walter Scott Prize. Colm Toíbín’s subtle, probing Nora Webster, set in 1960s Ireland, takes a commonplace subject, widowhood, and makes it into literary art of the first order.

Jazz Palace, Mary Morris’s lovely rendition of Chicago jazz during the Twenties, captures the era and two of its walking wounded in a hard-edged, deeply felt romance. In The Promise, Ann Weisgarber spins a keenly observed, taut love story of 1900 Galveston, about two people who can see past surfaces and the jealousies that surround them.

The Moor’s Account, by Laila Lalami, follows the disastrous sixteenth-century Narváez expedition to the Gulf of Mexico, as viewed by its most adept (but socially and culturally invisible) member. Lily King’s Euphoria follows a love triangle among anthropologists in New Guinea in 1931, based on Margaret Mead’s life, in a retelling of exceptional breadth, psychological insight, and power.

Finally, The Secret Chord, Geraldine Brooks’s recent novel, recounts the rise of King David, as told by his prophet and trusted adviser, Natan. Like The Dream Maker, I Am Abraham, and An Officer and a Spy, Brooks manages to infuse edge-of-the-seat tension into a narrative whose events are no surprise.

Here’s to another year of good reading.

The Novel I’d Bring to a Desert Island: The Dream Maker

02 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bourges, commerce, fifteenth century, historical fiction, Hundred Years War, Jacques Coeur, Jean-Christophe Rufin, novel of ideas, power politics

Review: The Dream Maker, by Jean-Christophe Rufin
Translated from the French by Alison Anderson
Europa, 2013. 421 pp. $27

This book is that rare volume whose insight, inspiration, and artistry make me give thanks I know how to read. Rufin’s creation follows the grand tradition of André Malraux or Albert Camus, as a novel of ideas, among other things; The Dream Maker is fine literature, maybe great literature.

Jacques Coeur's palace in Bourges (Courtesy 37-online.net, Loire Valley tourism site)

Coeur’s palace, Bourges (Courtesy 37-online.net, Loire Valley tourism site)

Jacques Coeur was a midfifteenth-century son of a furrier who became the richest man in France. In Rufin’s premise, his genius rests in the way he dreams of what doesn’t exist. From a childhood misadventure that nearly costs him his life, he conceives a startling, revolutionary idea: that power based on intelligent governance is superior to that of brute force. Later, as a merchant traveling to the Levant (which he has yearned to visit ever since a pelt salesman brought a live leopard to his father’s fur shop), he understands the transformative force of commerce. Not only is it more effective than war as a way of life or path to wealth, it changes people by providing what makes life worth living–new ideas, security, pleasures, comfort, beautiful surroundings, art. Of course, commerce also corrupts, through money, and Coeur learns a lot about that, sometimes the hard way.

He plans carefully and waits years to meet his king, Charles VII, but when he does, France’s future takes a dramatic turn. Charles harnesses Coeur’s ideas (and wealth) to expel the English and end the Hundred Years War, while suppressing the squabbling war lords who kept the country divided. But having lived through how Charles abandoned Joan of Arc to her fate after she gave him his throne, Coeur knows that Charles will betray him, too, someday. It’s when and how that someday will arrive, and what happens in between, that forms the core of this novel.

Before I found The Dream Maker, I’d thought to write a novel about Coeur myself. I’m glad I didn’t. Rufin aims higher than I’d have ever imagined and captures the man’s inner life, with which he sustains the tension that, for me, never flags. That’s not to say you don’t get the cat-and-mouse politics with Charles, the voyages overseas, a clandestine romance with the king’s mistress, or other exciting events. You do, in elegant, masterful prose, neatly rendered in smooth translation. But Rufin goes further. Throughout, Coeur explores what these events mean about how humans treat each other and what they portend for a world moving toward what we have called the Renaissance. And as I read Coeur’s take on fifteenth-century power and its uses, how men and women regard each other, what wealth signifies (or doesn’t), and the politics of betrayal, I saw how his story describes what’s happening now, all over the world.

Given that, you won’t be surprised when I tell you that Rufin is a founder of Doctors Without Borders and has visited the killing grounds of Bosnia and the Sudan. He has also served as France’s ambassador to Senegal and in a ministerial capacity in Paris, so he’s well qualified to parse the themes he’s chosen in The Dream Maker. But perhaps most important, he grew up in Bourges, where Coeur came from, in the shadow of his palace that still stands.

Rufin has Coeur remark that this house, however magnificent, is unremarkable for the stones that built it, for stones have no need of man. What matters are the dreams that lie behind it, and Coeur hopes others imitate him by closely following their own. “The only thing that belongs to us,” he says, “is that which does not exist, and which we have the power to bring into the world.” I humbly take that as a lesson.

Disclaimer: I bought my reading copy of this book for the purposes of review.

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