obscurity

Two half-posts in default of a post. . .

*

Richard Warren writes a blog that's, mostly, about British art and literature in the twentieth century, especially its more obscure practitioners. It's been a bit more active than usual recently, and I've relished these posts:

Cameron Cathie, briefly a poet (1938).

https://richardawarren.wordpress.com/2020/11/10/nostalgia-for-no-known-face-the-poems-of-cameron-cathie/

A sub-quotation from Cameron Cathie, meeting up with a lover:

Your eyes trace the slow bewildering trajectory
till I look on the words’ source, moving me, gleaming anew:
stares from your eyes, stares ecstasy back on me,
come between fragments of speech from afar.

Roger Pryor Dodge and Mura Dehn, jazz dancers in Greenwich Village in 1937.

https://richardawarren.wordpress.com/2020/10/31/empathetic-embodiment-the-dance-of-roger-pryor-dodge/

The paintings of Mabel Layng (Macclesfield, 1881- London, 1937); her most striking paintings are from c. 1915-1930. 

https://richardawarren.wordpress.com/2020/07/25/out-of-the-ordinary-the-paintings-of-mabel-layng/

Layng studied under Frank Brangwyn, but she soon ougrew his influence, which Warren characterizes as "deft but mannered and insincere, in shades of brown". Layng became a wonderful discoverer of the ordinary. Here's one of her paintings:

The Omnibus, painting by Mabel Layng

*

We've been travelling in Europe for long enough now (eight years?) to see some changes. One is that, at the service stations in France, literary books have completely disappeared; the books for sale are all genre fiction. Hence I'm now reading a Scandinavian noir, by Viveca Sten, in French translation: Les Secrets de l'île. The Swedish title was I natt är du död, and it's also been translated into English as Tonight You're Dead. It's the fourth of ten books (so far) collectively named The Sandhamn Murders.*  In this case the police investigators fail to prevent five murders, always arriving just too late and never seeming to ask the right questions soon enough.  It's as if their function is not to prevent but to narrate in a titillating way, never uncovering too much. Like a media team. And after all, the murders have a strong element of public statement. (The author works alongside the police, sacrificing closure in favour of maintaining attention, leaving false clues unexplained and rapidly abandoning the victims' families to their obscurity.) But we remain firmly on the side of Thomas and Margit and Nora, because they're presented as ordinary, well-meaning people with meetings and coffee and children and their own real-world problems. It could be an image of how our society fails to address its greater challenges. 

My French (at least, modern-day French) is no better than my Swedish. And I found I was unfamiliar with some of the basic phrases that appear again and again in this novel and probably in most other popular fiction. 

Le Vieux se racla la gorge.  (cleared his throat)

Birgit Hagelius hocha la tête.    (nodded)

Thomas secoua la tête.       (shook his head)

Ses réflexions lui arrachèrent une grimace  (made her wince)

Elle raccrocha et se tourna vers lui.   (she hung up)

Elle décrocha.  (She answered the phone)

L'esprit de Thomas se mit à tourner à plein régime.   (his mind began to work furiously)

C'est vrai? dit-il d'une voix rauque.   (hoarse)

C'est exactement comme les empreintes digitales, ricana le Vieux.   (sneered)

Thomas avait décelé une légère inflexion qui ne cadrait pas avec ses propos.     (detected / did not fit)

Il afficha un sourire las.  (he smiled wearily)

Thomas enclencha le haut-parleur  (went on speaker-phone)

L'imprimante s'est coincée  (printer got jammed)

Il se pencha en arrière / en avant  (leaned back / forward)

Je suis réveillé, marmonna-t-il. (he muttered, murmured)  

Thomas opina, las.   (nodded wearily)

Elle avait l'air désemparée.  (seemed distraught)

Il déglutit pour refouler cette impression désagréable. (He swallows, to suppress this unpleasant feeling)

Cronwall s'immobilisa. (froze)

*Sandhamn is a small island on the Stockholm archipelago (strictly, the port on the island Sandön), popular with summer tourists. 

A brief clip, with English subtitles, of the TV series, Morden i Sandhamn (The Sandhamn Murders), with Alexandra Rapaport as Nora and Jakob Cedergren as Thomas. 

Jakob Cedergren has subsequently starred in Den Skyldige (The Guilty) (2018), a celebrated Danish cop movie with just a single on-screen character (the US remake, featuring Jake Gyllenhaal, is apparently due for release).