I knew before moving that the French word ‘excité’ was verboten. It is one of the first ‘false friends’ that a student of the language becomes aware of. Most French learners can recall the day that a classmate first uttered the phrase ‘Je suis excité’ (which literally translates as ‘I am excited’) only to have their teacher hem and haw uncomfortably before explaining that the word excité doesn’t signal emotional but rather physical excitement. A better translation of the phrase Je suis excité into English would be ‘I am aroused’.
French doesn’t have the excited/aroused lexical pair that English does, so one word does both jobs. Excité technically denotes excitement both “objective (a state of stimulation) and subjective (feelings),” according to Olivier Frayssé, professor of American Civilization at Paris-Sorbonne University, but the physical sensation is the one most often implied. “If ‘aroused’ existed, it would be unnecessary to interpret ‘excité’ this way,” he explained.
For the past two years, a group of my friends has been gathering every month to talk about dreams; we do it for fun. Even if we resist, dreams have a way of sneaking into conscious territory and influencing our daytime mood. In three years of reporting on the science behind dreams, I’ve heard strangers describe flying, tooth loss, reunions with the dead — all the classics. I’ve seen that a dream can be a fascinating window into another person’s private life, and I’ve learned that paying attention to dreams can help us understand ourselves.
Because dreams rarely make literal sense, it can be easier to dismiss them than to try to interpret them. But a growing body of scientific work indicates that it’s likely to be worth the effort. Dreams might help us consolidate new memories and prune extraneous pieces of information. They might be a breeding ground for ideas — a time for the brain to experiment in a wider network of associations. Some argue they’re an accident of biology and mean nothing at all.
In three lines at the upper right corner of the first page of my copy of the study score of Anton Webern’s Concerto, Opus 24, the words Mark Wallace / July 12, 1983 / San Francisco are written in the kind of rough blue ballpoint pen that has gone seriously out of fashion in the ensuing 35 years. When I made that inscription, at 16 — done with high school a year early and soon off to college — I did not yet understand the Webern Concerto as a masterpiece of both artistic expression and musical design. Nor did I understand it as the piece of music that would determine the course of my life, though that, for a time, is exactly what it did.
Not much has been written about the history of West African cuisine, and a lot of what is considered historically West African is quite new. My Akan ancestors left Sudan around the 10th century — possibly fleeing forced conversion to Islam — and moved into the forest. Their original diet would have been considerably different from what they would come to find and create there. Their cattle would have suffered in the humidity and constricted spaces of the forest, and many succumbed to death by tsetse fly. My ancestors’ groundnuts and millet and rice seeds would have sprouted mold. To stay alive, I imagine a matriarch — Akan women have always been indomitable — whipping up the young to forage for edibles, which she would throw into a clay pot: snails crawling and mushrooms sprouting from the forest floor.
The dominant theme, though, is the easy falsity of history, a note that will resonate in Northern Ireland, and far beyond. The closest the novel comes to recent headline Irish events is that the recovered remains under the airfield recall the revelation that up to 800 children and babies were found to have died at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, run by nuns, in Tuam, County Galway. A mass grave was found next to the site of the former home. This scandal seems to underpin one of the Morne stories in The Vogue, but McNamee is more widely interested in hidden history, impressively addressing from a fresh perspective a country for which, in various ways, the question of where the bodies are buried is fundamental.
Who writes letters to the president of the United States, and what happens to these letters after they are sent? In her latest book, “To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope,” Jeanne Marie Laskas, the author of eight books, including “Concussion,” follows the path of constituent letters to the White House — and what happens then.
Occasionally, Carey loses faith in the extraordinary potency of his material, making insights that arise of their own accord (the equalising nature of waxworks, for instance) too explicit and neat. Some characters are less complex than they could be. But at its best this is a visceral, vivid and moving novel about finding and honouring one’s talent; about searching out where one belongs and who one loves, however strange and politically fraught the result might be.