A small fishing village in the south of France, circa 1963: "Once upon a time there was this precocious kid who, having been abandoned by both his mother and father and hastily parked at a young age at his aunt's seasonal hotel, plotted to have himself (and his faithful bulldog, Youki) adopted by Hugo and Nina, an immensely talented and well known opera singers duo: they would spend six weeks at the Hotel des Anges each summer to rest their voices before their various engagements in European opera houses".
The protagonist of this tale, Fanfan Renaud, almost 13, spends the incoming Provencal summer feverishly scheming, daydreaming, dancing with the Gypsies, eating sardines and anointing his plethora of private goddesses:
I thought of Artemis and Aphrodite a great deal too but my favourite
was Perséphone, the green-eyed Queen of the Nether world. My kind of
Goddess and my guiding light, so to speak. I was seven when I’d decided to
immodestly consecrate myself the supreme ruler of my own universe, with a
brief to enshrine women I liked into my own Parthenon. That way, I was sure to possess an endless supply of Goddesses. That very same day I’d appointed Youki to be my Lord Protector. What good was it to be a young ruler without a Lord Protector?
When he's not busy communicating with Olympian gods or traveling to the distant shores of his inner mind, he observes life between the tides, pursues unlucky crabs in the rocky interstices and muses on those around him:
On dogs: dogs are cleverer than we think. Everything in their
world is indexed and catalogued, taking no one and nothing for
granted and giving as good as they get. If I'd come back into
this world, I wouldn't mind coming back as a dog although I
have to confess that once upon a time I thought that it would be
handy to have eyes closer to the ground, the rationale being that
I would be able to look under girls' skirts, but, as common sense
had crept up on me, slowly, like a blanket of London fog, I had
to revise my thinking: if I were a dog, I'd have to behave like all
the other dogs and dogs, as a rule! don’t seem to be too interested
in girls' skirts', they seem to have a soft spot for skirtless dogs.
Dark moods often cloud his mind:
Apart from Mademoiselle Planchet, the only irritating blots in my landscape were a nervously acquired bed-wetting tendency and a dark habit of smashing mirrors whenever I couldn’t bear to see my own reflection. I wasn’t really superstitious, I couldn’t afford to be though I observed some rules and like everyone else, I was drawn to number thirteen and black cats. I even walked under ladders…willfully. Besides, that old Greek guy said that believing in superstition brought really bad luck.
When one is nearly thirteen, the imagination runs wild:
The day before, in the reading room at school, I had looked up a book on memory to find out how many films I could store in my brain and to my amazement, I discovered that I would never be able to fill it, no matter how many productions I’d undertake and how many books I’d read and how many arias I’d learn. Apparently, we have the capacity to absorb everything we see and hear, just like Monsieur Pinard has the capacity to absorb every drop of leftover wine, and still have enough space left to learn Chinese and Swahili, if you so wished, and memorise Pascal’s thoughts and the itineraries of every bus in Provence, and every written cook book and -if you really wanted to fill up you could have a go at telephone books. This extraordinary bit of information had opened up vistas of windows or windows on vistas, whichever: I had brain space and I, Fanfan Renaud, was going to use it!
Fanfan notes wryly the many aspects of hotel life:
The first wave of suppliers filed in and out, laden with crates of fresh
produce: Monsieur Donat, the finest grower of vegetables, a small, taciturn man who would rather be talking to his turnips; Gégé, the cigar-smoking chicken and duck man who was as bald as a hen’s egg and had large ears with plenty of cartilage; Hans the German butcher, a jovial, giant of a man who had been captured during the war and fell in love with his captor’s daughter; Madame Del Rio, whose husband made the creamiest cheese, a large woman who laughed a lot and teased the apprentices, pinching them on their bums; Pastis, the crab man, friend of Poulet, a gangly joker with yellow eyes, named as such for his devotion of that anise-flavoured drink; Monsieur Santoni, the solemn wholesale grocer who wore glasses the thickness of a magnifier, always clad in a speckled grey working-gown; Puff-puff, the lean and intermittently laconic mussels and oyster specialist who was always out of breath due to his 120 cigarettes a day habit; Micheline with the rosy cheeks—Postman Fernand wife- who carried hefty sacks of potatoes on her back as if they were bags of feathers; Doudou the very tall fishmonger whom on account of the quality of his fresh sardines, was my favourite supplier and he could whistle like a canary; Tutu the footballer, who delivered the longest ice blocks every morning, clad in a football outfit, though he wasn’t known to have ever been near a ball; Madame Filou, the mushroom Lady, who had a beetroot nose and was as old as the tower of Pisa, and countless of others.
Of course, there is a bigger story in that novel, part one of a trilogy, and that's for you to find out as I couldn't possibly reveal the ending. The clue in in my sig. If you like food, lunacy and life in Provence as it once was, then it's for you.