Do You Like Brahms
- Author
- Françoise Sagan written by
- Publisher
- Minumsa | Published 2008-05-02
- Category
- Fiction
- Book description
- Drawn by Françoise Sagan, the master of delicate psychological depiction in the French literary world...
As soon as the semester started, Gwang-min saw me beginning to read 'Do You Like Brahms' and made a somewhat disparaging, teasing remark about why Brahms, but having only thought it was a truly wonderful title without actually reading it through, I was left with lingering regret and so came to read it. The French literature I know consists roughly of the 'existential literature' written by Sartre, the 'individualized' modernist literature of Camus, the 'literature written in French' by Milan Kundera, and the 'grand literature' written by Victor Hugo, but this work by Françoise Sagan didn't give off the feel of any work I'd read before, so I couldn't help but feel that, indeed, every author has their own distinct color (trait).
If I were to put it in today's terms, this novel could be explained as a story, like 'I Hear Your Voice,' of an older woman and a younger man meeting, but if there's a difference in this novel, it's that Paule (the older woman) and Simon (the younger man) do not end up together. How heartless. What on earth was the author thinking to give it such an ending? Honestly, I don't really understand it. It's probably because getting inside the head of a twenty-something Françoise Sagan is an impossible thing. But since understanding her 'sensibility' wasn't the purpose of this novel, and since I had simply read it because I'd always known Brahms, from the title 'Do You Like Brahms,' as a musician I'd heard of at least once, that was that.
Brahms—for me, the existence of the musician called Brahms holds no meaning whatsoever. But in 'Simon's' single line asking whether one likes Brahms, there was a feeling as if he were asking me something too. Just as I surely would have found it hard to say anything when Simon asked Paule, 'Do you like Brahms?', I too find Brahms holds no meaning at all. When I know nothing about the other person's interests, I could grasp at once the deeply regrettable feeling that would arise if it were a relationship that could become romantic.
What relationship are Roger and Paule in... this is truly an ambiguous, ambiguous relationship, and I think my characteristic 'distancing' made the relationship between Roger and Paule a bit easier to understand. I often look at people through distancing. (I've also thought it might be a bad habit.) I don't know why, but the reason I try to view others while not letting my subjectivity intervene is to see that person a bit more 'objectively,' and from the 'objective' viewpoint I think of, Roger and Paule are neither this nor that, just an ambiguous relationship. Even so, the fact that the two reunite in the end was too shocking to me. Even in times like these it's not something that could never happen, but I don't think the world is so 'tenacious' as to call it really common. So it was received a little differently. Is the sensibility Françoise Sagan thinks of this kind of sensibility?
This book seems to have tried to talk about 'romance.' I think the author wrote so that readers had no choice but to choose a set of values, placing before them 'Paule,' who has experienced to some extent what love is, 'Simon,' who is still a 'pure-hearted type' about love, and 'Roger,' who seems not to have thought about love at all. Readers like me would have no choice but to say that Paule is, no matter what, a bad woman who strings men along. Even so, that's because the poignancy of mutual kin seeps out, making me want to value Simon's pure heart even a little. Simon appealed to her with his own sensibility, and that sensibility happened to get through to Paule quite a bit. Even so, doesn't Simon end up being abandoned? The expression 'abandoned' might cause a bit of resistance, but I thought Simon was surely the kind of man who could make Paule happy. Roger is nowhere close. Roger, who, knowing the other person will be lonely, doesn't meet her but meets other women, is really not it.
Somehow I've ended up talking about my own view of romance. But today it's fine to write this way. I always make an effort to read countless papers in order to write about a book after reading it, and I did so for this book too, but there were fewer papers about this book than expected, and it's due to my limitation of having no choice but to use the 'stream-of-consciousness technique,' which is the most effective method of purely writing down my own feelings. I don't dislike this, but it's a bit of a shame that it's not an organized piece but a piece driven by flow. That's because the pieces I wrote after reading books like Your Heaven (Dangsindeurui Cheonguk) or Pygmalion were very well-ordered pieces that weren't bad even when I reread them. That said, I won't disparage this piece.
Next week, two presentations, one study session, and exam studying await. I'm doubtful whether I'll be able to do much studying, but I want to live diligently, telling myself I have to do it anyway. If I can drive myself a bit more, I'd like to do so. I still think many opportunities have been given to me. After all, I'm younger than the 'Simon' in this book and in a situation with no 'job' either. I'm not being particularly forced to do anything I don't want to.
I'll end this piece with the intention of writing about Yi Gwang-su's Mujeong (The Heartless).
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