'Do you know, Monsieur Jean, that when hatred sets in, it takes hold of your entire being? And infests it. And devours it whole. Hatred, Monsieur Jean, has the power of flies. At times father gets nostalgic. So he sings some flamenco. Or rather, he brays it. But no matter what he does, I hate him. Everything he does is base and rank. Hatred, Monsieur Jean, is undiscerning. It enjoys the dull mindlessness of flies.' -- Lydie Salvayre
Bio
Lydie Salvayre‚ the daughter of refugees from the Spanish Civil War‚ was born in France in 1948. Her publications include the novel The Declaration and nine others, such as Everyday Life‚ The Lecture‚ and The Power of Flies. She has received the Prix Hermes for The Declaration and the Prix Novembre for The Company of Ghosts. In her own words, Lydie Salvayre is: "uneasy with conversation but clever with her legs. Won a twist contest in 1967. Studied arts then medicine. Reads philosophy constantly without understanding it. Works as a psychiatrist in a suburban medical center where she sees teenagers who don't write poetry."
Further
About
'Surging up out of the narcissistic 1990s, Lydie Salvayre’s writing is like a breath of fresh air. Two aspects of her work are truly distinctive: her gaze and her voice, that is, the way she sees and the way she speaks. Looking around her at contemporary French society, Salvayre is scandalized and appalled by what she sees. Her glance is a particularly incisive one; she has (to borrow a phrase from P. G. Wodehouse) an eye that would open an oyster at ten paces. Cutting through the official Panglossian discourse that trumpets France’s prosperity and social progress, she sees a culture afflicted by widespread alienation, inequity, and institutional brutality. Putting those phenomena squarely on stage in her novels, she forces her readers to confront aspects of French social organization that they might have preferred to overlook. That is not to say that Salvayre is some knee-jerk, doctrinaire social realist. Quite to the contrary, her work is finely nuanced, comic at times, insistently mordant, and uncompromisingly ironic. It lacks nothing but tact, and it represents a kind of littérature engagée that we have not seen for quite some time because, frankly, our canons of taste have found it unfashionable—and undoubtedly deeply disturbing, too.' -- Warren Motte, Context
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'French novelist Lydie Salvayre's tiny treatise on the dwindling art of conversation hides within it an amusing portrait of a lonely, failed intellectual. The Lecture is written in the form of a monologue given by a pompous, unnamed Frenchman who stands before the citizens of his small town, Cintegabelle, intent on methodically teaching them the withering art of conversation and thus saving French civilization.
'The Lecture leaps nimbly between wisdom and inanity, its narrator's striking voice perfectly rendered in Linda Coverdale's deadpan, crystal-clear translation. Although our orator sees himself as a great thinker, his proposals are often hilarious—like his petition to replace the city's benches with sofas purchased from unemployed psychoanalysts, based on his notion that the derriere must be comfortable for a proper chat to ensue. Of course, buried underneath all these dyspeptic declarations is a backhanded ode to his wife, to whom he never listened while she was alive. The couple lost the hang of conversing, he laments, and spent their marriage "looking high and low for other ways to connect with one another. Despairing of ever finding any that could satisfy us. Like Dante's poor damned souls. Which we were. Without realizing it."' -- Joy Press, The Village Voice
Media
Lydie Salvayre speaks (in French; 8:22)
Lydie Salvayre The LectureTranslator: Linda Coverdale
Dalkey Archive, 2005
'At the City Hall in a small town in the South of France, one man starts his campaign to correct the ills that have overtaken his proud nation by lecturing the town's inhabitants on the art of conversation. In the narrator's opinion, "conversation is a specialty that is most eminently French," an art that should be nurtured and practiced, and can help repair France's reputation. Not to mention, being a good conversationalist is extremely useful for seducing women, which is how the narrator managed to attract Lucienne, his "superbly lumpish" wife who died two months before giving this lecture.
'One of the oddest characters in contemporary fiction, the lecturer in this novel can't help but digress about his sad life in the midst of his speech, giving the reader a view of a man trying to turn one of his greatest faults into a virtue and forcing it on everyone else.' -- D.A.
Excerpt
Take a French dinner party. In Paris. Chez Armand. A chic dinner. The kind I don’t go to. Pearls, crystal, the works.
Observe the guests. Scientifically. They turn to the left and right. Shake their heads. Gesture repeatedly with their arms in a manner known as pronation. Devote themselves to mastication, mouths closed, I should add. And between two tiny mouthfuls, I should add, they move their lips constantly. Like this.
Because for them, ladies and gentlemen, conversation has replaced everything else. They neither laugh nor belch. Belching went out of fashion with regicide. That’s the remark my brother-in-law made just to mortify me. At the table. In front of everyone. The day of the funeral. As I was choking back a hiccup between two sobs.
In the time of the Bourbon Louis, he announced with ludicrous pedantry, there was an official called the hastener who was in charge of the king’s belches. Sometimes the king’s belch was slow in coming, and all the courtiers would wring their hands, quiver with impatience, and turn sorrowful countenances toward the royal valve: But let him hasten, then, let this hastener hasten the sacred belch of the king! The hastener and his king have been done away with. And belchery with them. Those are great losses indeed.
Still, I thought, not so great as Lucienne’s death. Forgive me, but my grief is as fresh, if I may so, as a vegetable. I said vegetable. I really shouldn’t have. That’s the word I often use to evoke her, so calm, so—how shall I put it—so superbly lumpish. But let us stifle our grief. And let us return to that dinner party with which I opened my lecture. We may conclude, from our thorough investigation, that while it is generally admitted that speech is the achievement of all mankind,
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conversation is a specialty that is eminently French.
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We French, I was saying, are champions at conversation. This distinguishing trait, long elevated to the status of a national virtue, made the reputation of France and secured its reign.
Well, that art at which we excel is today in peril. I am sounding the alarm in hopes of alerting the highest authorities. Mediocrity, ladies and gentlemen, is going international. The fear of offending prevails more and more over the taste for talking. A generous spirit is discredited, if not condemned outright. It is taken for weakness of intellect. From one end to the planet to the other, conversations are all the same. Their poverty of ideas is now in fashion. And their insipidness is sickening.
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Conversation is going downhill.
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Conversation is going downhill and the country with it, they go hand in hand. And it is greatly to be feared, if nothing is done, that they will both wind up in the garbage. The vultures will finish the job. You can count them.
So here, dear ladies and gentlemen of Cinteagbelle, is my rescue plan, conceived in the utmost urgency and which I unhesitatingly declare to be of national utility, since by proposing to restore the luster of speech in the eyes of a world that has forgotten how to speak, it aims at nothing less than the civic renewal of our country and the polishing of its image so that, I’m catching my breath, so that, strong in its recovered prestige, the France of tomorrow may assure throughout the world the civilizing mission that has fallen to her from time immemorial. Might I ask you, children, to please stop snickering. And to stop moving your chairs around. It’s irritating.
The subtle art of conversation, however—to which, I venture to say, I have devoted my genius—offers, aside from that patriotic virtue I have just mentioned, other advantages no less excellent albeit less directly civil. And which to my astonishment have not yet been the object of any detailed study.
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