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The Lecture
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Paperback
Price: $12.50 $10.00 Save $2.50 (20%)
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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.
By turns ironic, hilarious, pathetic, and mortifying, Salvayre's The Lecture is an exuberant example of the exciting fiction currently being written in France.
Details
ISBN-10
1-56478-351-0
ISBN-13
9781564783516
Publication Date
May 2005
Nb of pages
120
Dimensions 5 x 8 in.
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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That is our first and most heartening axiom. A specialty, I emphasize this, that is not exportable. Because it is not merchandise. It is even quite the opposite. I shall come back to this essential point. At the proper time. With the methodical turn of mind that is my wont.
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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That will be our second and most distressing axiom. We live, increasingly, without talking to one another. Is no life, then, worth the telling? We live without talking to one another and soon we will live without living, which gives me the shivers.
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.
The first of these advantages is that conversation is very useful seducing women.
The second is that it’s even handier for succeeding in society.
The third and most surprising is that in bringing joy to mankind, it contributes appreciably to reducing the deficit of the National Health Service. A subject of satisfaction for our government.
Reviews
Press Reviews
The Lecture
Village Voice
" The Lecture leaps nimbly between wisdom and inanity, its narrator's striking voice perfectly rendered in Linda Coverdale's deadpan, crystal-clear translation."
The Lecture
Le Matricule des Anges
"The Lecture is first of all hilarious . . . Thanks to her clown-like protagonist, Lydie Salvayre is able to write about things that couldn't have been addressed in a more serious book. The beauty of her language doesn't prevent the protagonist from being insolent about certain topics, especially intellectuals and the publishing world. The jubilation in reading this book is also due to the fact that, like in Rabelais, Salvayre resorts to getting laughs, and plays with the musicality of her prose."
The Lecture
Sitartmag
"In The Lecture, Lydie Salvayre has dared to forget about all the pseudo-obligations of current novels—you find neither a progression in the plot nor pornographic scenes in this book. She has a very unique style that is captivating as we follow with admiration and interest the aphorisms and ramblings of the strange protagonist."
The Lecture
Lire
"Conversation is at the heart of the most exciting book of this literary season . . . Salvayre writes like the child of E. T. A. Hoffman's Mademoiselle de Scudéry and George Bernard Shaw."
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