Why choose, you might say? Because our choices make us who we are.
In this short scene, I play a girl in a bookstore. The bookstore will be represented by Green Apple Books on Clement Street, a haven of narrow aisles and tall shelves for the lit-addicted and cash-poor. With only $7 in her wallet, my character is torn between two novels by Emile Zola, Nana and Le Ventre de Paris.
Narrator: Nana tells the story of Anna Coupeau's rise from streetwalker to high-class cocotte during the last three years of the French Second Empire. Nana first appears in the end of L'Assommoir (1877), another of Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, in which she is portrayed as the daughter of an abusive drunk; in the end, she is living in the streets and just beginning a life of prostitution. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nana_%28novel%29)
Girl: What's a cocotte? Is it made with squash?
Narrator: Le Ventre de Paris (1873) is the third novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. It is set in and around Les Halles, the enormous, busy central marketplace of 19th Century Paris. The plot is centred around the escaped political prisoner Florent...There are several excellent descriptive passages, the most famous of which, his description of the olfactory sensations experienced upon entering a cheese shop, has become known as the "Cheese Symphony" due to its ingenious orchestral metaphors. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ventre_de_Paris)
Girl: A symphony of cheese! I wonder if there's anything about vegetables in here... [flipping pages] Ah, yes, here we are:
Narrator: Hardly a choice at all.
In this short scene, I play a girl in a bookstore. The bookstore will be represented by Green Apple Books on Clement Street, a haven of narrow aisles and tall shelves for the lit-addicted and cash-poor. With only $7 in her wallet, my character is torn between two novels by Emile Zola, Nana and Le Ventre de Paris.
Narrator: Nana tells the story of Anna Coupeau's rise from streetwalker to high-class cocotte during the last three years of the French Second Empire. Nana first appears in the end of L'Assommoir (1877), another of Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, in which she is portrayed as the daughter of an abusive drunk; in the end, she is living in the streets and just beginning a life of prostitution. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nana_%28novel%29)
Girl: What's a cocotte? Is it made with squash?
Narrator: Le Ventre de Paris (1873) is the third novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. It is set in and around Les Halles, the enormous, busy central marketplace of 19th Century Paris. The plot is centred around the escaped political prisoner Florent...There are several excellent descriptive passages, the most famous of which, his description of the olfactory sensations experienced upon entering a cheese shop, has become known as the "Cheese Symphony" due to its ingenious orchestral metaphors. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ventre_de_Paris)
Girl: A symphony of cheese! I wonder if there's anything about vegetables in here... [flipping pages] Ah, yes, here we are:
Heads of lettuce, escarole, chicory, still slick with earth, lay open to display their glistening hearts; bunches of spinach, bunches of sorrel, bouquets of artichokes, jumbles of string beans and peas, and bales of romaine tied with straw sang every note in the scale of green from their lacquered pods to their richly colored leaves: a scale of intensity that faded as it rose all way to the faint polka-dot pattern of celery bottoms and leeks. But the most piercing notes, the ones that rang out highest, were the vibrant splashes of carrot and the clear splashes of turnip, dispersed in prodigious quantity throughout the length of the market, illuminating the mottled canvas with their two colors. At the intersection of the rue des Halles, cabbages rose in a mountain: enormous white cabbages, hard and firm like balls of pale metal; savoy cabbages with large leaves like bronze basins; red cabbages that bloomed in the dawn light, wine-red, bruised carmine and purple. On the other end, at the intersection of the pointe Saint-Eustache, the entrance to the rue Rambuteau was blocked by a barricade of orange winter squash, splayed in two rows, thrusting out their fat bellies. And while the bronze varnish of the onions, the blood red of the tomatoes, the self-effacing yellow of the cucumbers, and the deep violet of the eggplant gleamed all around him, the black radishes, deep in their mourning cloaks, sunk dark holes in the vibrant joy of the sunrise.[Sigh...]
(p. 44; tr. courtesy of R. Bunny)
Narrator: Hardly a choice at all.
Fin
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