2 star 3 athlon

During the week on Lac d’Annecy, I took most of the day off to run the 3 X trail, a first true run since 01 Jan, then cycle around the lake (with alas some discontinuities in the otherwise fantastic biking lane and an unexpected hill in Talloires) and have a lake swim in the early evening, when the water was at its warmest (15⁰), which makes it a triathlon of sorts.

The reward for the (moderate!) exercise was a take-away dinner, which is rather unusual for us but the more here because it was a two-star Michelin take-away! Namely, the Auberge du père Bise restaurant, with Jean Sulpice as its chef, located in Talloires-Montmin, by the lake, and featuring mostly local products. While eating at the restaurant would have been impossible, esp. wearing biking gear!, and beyond my pricing standards, we were able to enjoy six dishes, from an artichoke and ewe cheese salad, to an asparagus salad with rocket salad pesto, to polenta gnocchis with asparagus and tomato confit, to crayfish raviolis in a rich nutty sauce, to a rhubarb and verbena crumble, and to a lemon, praliné, and nut tart. Fabulous end of a well-occupied day!

a journal of the plague year [lost September reviews]

Read a (red) book I bought in Chamonix last January (sounds like last century, at the very least!) at the Éditions Guérin bookshop, The Bond, by Simon McCartney, translated in French as The Ghosts from Denali. It starts more or less like a traditional mountain climbing story, with a pair of cocky young climbers attacking a new and difficult route and managing the opening despite severe adverse circumstances, which is what Simon McCartney and Jack Roberts did for the north face of Mount Huntington in Alaska, having run out of food and facing the constant threat of collapsing seracs. It however turns into a inner introspection as McCartney gets stranded on the mythical Eiger Nordwand (just like many before him!) after his large group keeps breaking their Charlet Moser icepicks due to the cold (!) and end up being airlifted. He later manages a Winter climb of the Eiger and reunites with Roberts to attempt the south face of Denali, never climbed before. This is when the book takes off, from the sheer difficulty of the route to the amazing unpreparation of the climbers, to Simon’s cerebral embolism building up and bringing him a hair away from death, to the altruism of several other climbers on the mountain to bring him down from the death zone, especially Bo Kandiko, and to a trauma-induced complete break from climbing when McCartney got out of Anchorage hospital. This is gripping and moving and unbelievable. The book received a Banff Mountain Festival award and no wonder. The story told by McCartney is actually seamlessly completed by diary excerpts by Roberts and Kandiko, where they question their own involvement against the very real danger of dying from staying with McCartney, much more than giving up their own attempt against the deadly mountain. A terrific mountaineering book, truly. As a sad coda, Roberts died ice-climbing Bridal Veil Falls a few days before McCartney’s attempt to reunite with him.

Spent several evenings baking fig jam when returning from the Alps as the fig tree was full! And ended up with a total of 35 jars. Resulting into a full “marmalade closet”, as in the past weeks my mom home-made the same amount of peach jelly and my wife’s mom even more rhubarb marmalade jars. Enough to stand a whole year of lockdown, jam-wise. And ate some of the few but tasty peppers that grew in our garden, for the very first time, despite the welcomed tomato and squash invasion! Also ate a terribly greasy risotto in a supposedly highly noted restaurant…

Started watching Dark on Netflix, a German dark time-travel fiction. But while I enjoyed the complex story, the play of the young actors, and the appeal of watching a show (and a Greek play within the show, with Ariádnê and Thêseús of course!) in German, the endless paradoxes of time-travel and the duration of the series made me stop after a few episodes, the town of Winden keeping most of its mystery for me.

a journal of the plague year [grey November reviews]

Read Evil for Evil, K.J. Parker’s second tome in the Engineer trilogy, published in 2009! Surprisingly, I remembered enough of the first volume for the story to make sense and I enjoyed it, for the same reason I liked Sixteen ways to defend &tc., namely for its attention to logistics and medieval industry taking over the muscle-display of standard equivalents, plus the self-demeaning attitude of most characters, again a welcome change from the standards! The pace of the story sometimes get bogged down, though.

Slowly cooked pulled pork with a hellish amount of red peppers, meaning I ended up eating most of it by myself over a few days. Tried cauliflower risotto, and liked it. Took my mom to a nice restaurant in Caen, À Contre Sens, after an oyster breakfast with her on the quays of a nearby Channel harbour, with a surprise lunch based on local (Norman) products. Finding hardly anyone in the restaurant due to COVID regulations made the experience even more enjoyable. And such a difference from the previous Michelin we sampled this summer!

Wasted hours watching the US presidential vote counting slowly unraveling, computing & recomputing from the remaining ballots the required percentage of Biden’s votes towards catching up, and refreshing my NYT & Fivethirtyeight webpages way too often. And remain fazed by an electoral system stuck in a past when less than 50,000 men elected George Washington.

Cleaned up our vegetable patch after collecting the last tomatoes, pumpkins, and peppers. And made a few jars of green tomato jam, albeit not too sweet to be used as chutney!

Watched the TV series The Boys, after reading super-positive reviews in Le Monde and other journals. Which is a welcome satire on the endless sequence of super-heroes movies and series, by simply pushing on the truism that with super-powers does not come super-responsibility. Or even the merest hint of ethics. Plus some embarrassing closeness with the deeds and sayings of the real Agent Orange. Among the weaknesses, a definitive excess of blood and gore, ambiguous moral stands of the [far from] “good” guys who do not mind shooting sprees in the least, and some very slow episodes. Among the top items, the boat-meet-whale incident, “Frenchie” from Marseille almost managing a French accent when speaking some semblance of French, and Karl Urban’s maddening accent that’s a pleasure to listen even when I understand a sentence out of two, at best.

 

a journal of the plague year [latter August reviews]

Read during the first week of our Alpine vacations a Japanese gore novel by Natsuo Kirino, Out, which I found in the book exchange zone at Dauphine earlier in July. The book is more impressive for a social criticism of the condition of working class women the Japanese society than for its psychological thriller nature, even though the later is well-enough conducted to induce a page-turning commitment… The four women at the centre of the story are drawn in fine and convincing details and the practical cynicism of most of them makes the novel avoid the easy and rosy idealisation of a crime sisterhood. The slow unraveling of the past of these women exhibits how they ended up in a food-packaging night-shift job by virtue (!) of a gender inequality inherent to the social structure. The book is not 100% perfect, especially in the final moments, even though the surprising readiness of Masako to turn herself (almost) into a victim is much more subtle than it sounds (spoiler!). Still a major novel, if one can manage to stand the gory details..!

Had another chance great meal in a Michelin-recommended restaurant in Briançon, Au Plaisir Ambré, with a surprising sea-food theme including Granville whelks tartare, lobster samosas and grayling en croûte (except the crust was not salt but brioche!), the later with the distinctive taste of river fish. The more pleasant as an earlier experience at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris was not so exciting, with a risotto smothered by Gruyère!, a culinary lèse-majesty! Also tasted wonderful tartes aux noix made by the housekeeper of one of our vacation rentals. Rich enough for a whole day of hiking.

Read the Raven Tower by Ann Leckie, of which I expected much and which I alas found quite poor (compared with the fabulous Ancillary series). Maybe because I found too many connections with the stunning Ka, which takes the raven’s perspective on human history. Maybe because the Raven is the bad guy/god in this story. Even taking the story as a theatre play (as it builds on Hamlet) did not really work for me. The few characters are not sufficiently deep, the interaction between gods and humans is rather simplistic (although the world-building shows promises) and the conclusion is botched in my opinion. The style is original and the book well-written, however. Plus the book is short and single-volumed! (But I do not get the rave reviews!)

a journal of the plague year [long weekend reviews]

Read Thinblade, ordered by mistake as I confused the author David Wells for another more famous one! An absolute disaster, from the poor quality of the printed-on-order self-published amazon-made copy to the abyssal style of the author (or of his dog). The story has no depth and no originality [a teenager discovers he must save the World against an evil entity released from captivity and gathers a team of un.be.lie.va.ble followers], the characters are uni-dimensional, either unbelievably good or complete evil and a colour comes with them to tell the hero which is which. The style (or lack thereof!) is massively indigest, with numerous repetitions about the feelings and questionings of the central characters, plus an hilarious focus on food, all menus being included in the text!, same endless drones about the incredible beauty of the visited castles a few days of ride from the hero’s farm. The plot is, again, laughably simplistic, making the Shannara books I read a few months ago sounding like an elaborate literary construct, and completely predictable. I cannot imagine myself or anyone else’s dog reading further books in the series…

Watched The Old Guard after an exhausting day, including a (physical) trip to a dreaded DIY store!, after reading a somewhat lukewarm review in The New Yorker… I found out later that the film is based on a comics series with the same title. And it shows from the lack of real plot (need to get quickly to Afghanistan? just drop out from a freight train in the middle of Sudan…) to the predictability of the story (set-up heroes fight bad guys and at the end, guess what, …), to the massive amount of stale gun fights with the addition of archaic weapons (to make sure everyone understands the old guard is really old!). The funniest part is actually taking place in Goussainville, France, in the ghost section of this town located on the path of De Gaulle airport planes (and thus evacuated, but not demolished), and in its Roman church (listed, hence intact!). The lack of moral imperative or of higher being driving such immortal killers, who mostly seem tired of said immortality, and the absence of connection with the locals (as e.g. in the scenes taking place in Morocco) do not make this B movie any better. (And the French character definitely has an English accent!)

Had a chance lunch in a Michelin recommended restaurant, on the road to Chenonceau and a family vacation, as we were looking for an open restaurant. The haddock appetizer was fantastic (and enough!), while the trout was not so great, presumably frozen, even though the vegetables were original (incl. chayotte) and yummy.

Read Konungsbók (The King’s Book) by Arnaldur Indriðason, found on my mother’s bookshelves, which is a stand-alone book more of the “involuntary spy” type found in Eric Ambler‘s stories than the usual social theme detective story favoured by Indriðason. While the two involuntary spies in the story are indeed two archeolinguists blundering their way through implausible situations, against hidding Nazis and East German police, as Ambler’s The Dark Frontier, the appeal of the book is in the quest for the ultimate Icelandic saga that would close the nation’s history, The King’s Book, towards recovering other foundational and historical documents hoarded by Denmark. At some point, Halldór Guðjónsson Laxness gets the Nobel Prize in Literature, which first stuns the characters into stupefied pride and second helps them into making another unlikely escape. What I enjoyed in the novel is the feeling of ultimate importance attached to the sagas and their role in cementing Iceland as a genuine nation (again connecting with Laxness, whose books described the social desagregation produced by the American occupation).