Read Patrick Dewdney’s La Maison des Veilleurs, the fourth volume in this fantastic fantasy series. Only to realise by the end that this was not the end! The setting is the same as in the previous volumes, which makes this one less exciting and prone to extended lazy episodes. The main character, Syffe, keeps puzzling about his destiny and culpability in past events, and it took me a while to get re-hooked, but this remains a remarkable creation. Hopefully soon to be completed! During my Singaporean trip, I also read Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings which is a short fantasy in the Murakami sense, a disrupting mixture of realism (and nostalgia of childhood days) and of unreal behaviours of the characters. The story revolves around mental and sexual aggressions of the main character as a pre-teen, from a paedophile teacher as well as an abusive mother and a transparent father. The story gradually turns away from any pretence to realism and the end is a wee bit of a disappointment. Still worth reading imho. As well as Graham Greene’s The Man Within, which I had not read before (during an episode of intense exploration of his work, following the discovery of The End of the Affair and Brighton Rock). This is one of the earliest Greene’s, and it does contain many hints and premises of the great books to come, with the themes of pursuit, guilt, salvation already there, but as such, the story is rather awkward and contrived, with unnatural dialogues, inner thoughts revolving in circles, and a complete lack of realism in the scenario. The style itself is definitely Greene’s, with beautiful descriptions of the landscape. (I wonder why the cover features the famous Preikestolen cliff on the Lysefjord rather than the more sedate Shoreham downs, where smuggling French alcohols makes sense!)
Made no cooking for an entire week but enjoyed the almost infinite variety of Singaporean cuisines, with some nice discoveries. If missing the chili crab session on two consecutive nights! (And, coïncidence!, sat next to the same passenger on both flights between Paris and Singapore. If not the same crew as it happened once between Amsterdam and Calgary.) Had a weekend to recover and make most of my “classics”, incl. the weekly whey buckwheat galettes. And missing once again to keep an aquafaba mousse mouss-y enough!
Watched one episode of When Life Gives You Tangerines, which features Jeju women (haenyeo) diving for abalone harvesting (which I tasted in Singapore, if not likely from Jeju). And (at last) Oppenheimer on my flight back, as a way to fight sleep towards resetting my internal clock. Which I mostly enjoyed, despite some awkwardness in the scenario and an old-fashioned way of flipping between different eras, with black and white episodes in case one does not notice. And a very poor treatment of female characters. The ghastly moments when the team celebrates the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima or when officials refuse to drop from the nuclear arm race are quite strong, especially these days. Among the MCMC originators, only Edward Teller is involved in the story, from his obsession with the H bomb to his testimony against Oppenheimer at the high of the McCarthy Red Scare… I also sped through Companion, a lame movie about support robots turning into killers that offers little in either thriller or comic perspectives. Possibly written by ChatGPT?!
Here are some new teas I sampled this summer, when visiting a few tea shops here (Paris) and there (Montréal):
