Philippe Delerm

Second Star: And Other Reasons for Lingering, written by Philippe Delerm and translated by Jody Gladding, is an engaging and at times beautiful collection of life's little moments.

These "literary snapshots" are hard to categorize. Not because they can't, sorta, be put into various genres such as prose poems but because they don't seem to entirely fit into any of them. The first two comparisons that popped into my mind were just as quickly put aside as being similar but also dissimilar. Baudelaire's Paris Spleen because Delerm's observations are much shorter and more focused and Stein's Tender Buttons because, while short entries, just seem colder even while engaging the reader. To say Delerm blends the two does none of the three justice. So I'll leave literary definitions behind and try a different approach. Have you ever been reading something, maybe a novel, maybe even an essay or poem, and a small section reminds you of some small moment or incident in your own life? That small section, which probably touched on minute detail combined with internal feeling (perhaps in the moment, perhaps as reflection, it doesn't matter), is very similar to what these "literary snapshots" are. Not sure that helps, but it works for me.

Not all of these entries will speak to every reader, but if you're serious about appreciating what you read and don't consider "French men" a literary genre, you will likely relate to many of them. Even something as common as that in between position of the hand in front of your face, ready to signal to a server. The ones that touch you the most probably aren't the ones that touched me. My eyes teared up at the last paragraph of one about a woman's movement when opening the door every morning for a cat. Go figure.

I would highly recommend this to readers who enjoy interacting with what they read. These are certainly all self-contained, but it is what each reader brings to them that will make them shine. If you bring nothing more than wanting to see what happens, you may not get as much out of them. If you are looking inward as much as outward, you may find yourself noticing many more things in your own life. If you like having a book you can dip into for a few moments every night, or when you have limited time, this is ideal. Each entry is a short read, but will give you something to ponder for quite some time.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (meer)

Teacher and occasional sports journalist Philippe Delerm seems to be known mainly as an author of little prose-poems, although he's also written novels, lyrics and memoirs, amongst other things. This 2015 collection contains around forty short prose pieces, mostly in the region of 300 words, each focussing as a lyric poem might on a single, quite specific experience. Most are pleasures of one sort or another — belles raisons d'habiter sur Terre like the texture of water-melon, the turbidity of the mojito, the colour of Venetian spritz, the smile it brings to other people's faces to see the narrator's small grandson immersed in a new book on the way home from the bookshop, the early-morning atmosphere of the seaside resort where M Hulot spent his famous holidays, the banquet on the last page of an Astérix story, and so on — but a few are darker, like the sight of the narrator's mother trying to make sense of her place in a care-home for Alzheimer's patients.

I don't know if Delerm's little pieces add to our understanding of sensual experiences at all, but they are very enjoyable to read in themselves: this would be a great book to give someone who doesn't read much but might need a little bit of positive energy from time to time.… (meer)