Misha found SIX MORAL TALES by Eric Rohmer (English translation, 1980) in a pile of booty coming home at night near Millenium Mart. Someone must have been cleaning house, having just acquired a new title and finally decided to clear out the shit they never look at anymore.

The best of the batch is this book, which are the bases of Rohmer’s movies. It is out of print, and worth $15!

So far, I have only read the first story, The Baker’s Girl, which is exellent. Direct prose, set in Paris, about unrequited love.

Here is the opening from the third story, “My Night at Maud’s”

“In this story I’m not going to tell everything. Besides, there isn’t any story, really: just a series of very ordinary events, of chance happenings and coincidences of the kind we have all experienced at one time or another in our lives. The deeper meanings of these events will be whatever I choose to endow them with.

I will keep to a certain line, a certain order of events, a certain way in which one event succeeds another. But my feelings, my own opinions and beliefs, will not intrude upon the line of the story, even though they are very much at the forefront of the events described. I present them here without any desire to share them, or to justify them.”

Misha thinks it sounds brooding.

It sounds like a film, where the narrator’s voice is hidden in the camera’s eye pretending to be objective and straightforward. I would like to write something where I’m not trying to justify the plot, just presenting it.