Rebecca Solnit

 I have three Rebecca Solnit in my backpack, it must be love!

So yes, in my bag I have (apart from my notebook, a scarf, two multicoloured pens, one highlighter and probably, right at the bottom of it, a condom which expired some time in the last century...):

Wanderlust, a voyage reminiscing of all the walkers out there who also write 

A Field Guide to Getting Lost a mix of personal memories and philosophical thought and walking of course, is the desert for Solnit the same as the Parisian arcades for Walter Benjamin?

The Faraway Nearby  a series of stories, so far based on her mother (I haven't checked a synopsis as it might spoil my fun)

And yesterday, apart from a quick work meeting online which lasted 5 minutes (joy!), I found the time to search the web for interviews with her. Very pleasant, and pleasant also to discover new people (this guy with an accent as strong as mine, Paul Holdengräber). So here she is speaking with him at the New York Public Library:

Pleasant also to see some familiar faces doing something completely different, an excellent interview done by Emma Watson (yes, she of the Harry Potter fame):

And later on in the day to read her now knowing the sound of her voice... there's something special about that.. the luck we have now to hear literary voices... couldn't happen with Voltaire or madame de Sévigném though we have letters for these two authors so an idea somehow of their true voice.

But I'm lucky, my favourite author, well I can hear her, the one who comes from a village not far from my father's in Burgundy. Colette with her long, rolled r:

Everybody's got a distinctive accent, a mix of their region and their personality... and in Solnit, weirdly enough, I also hear echos from my family... the other side of it, the one that escaped or simply decided to move to America from Russian, Germany, England, Scotland and mainly Ireland... the slow English of the West Coast, the softness of tones... it is said that 'Americans are loud'... well yes, some Americans are loud and so some Germans and Russians and Spaniards... Perhaps, when I noticed that, I was queuing to go into the Louvre or some activities that are best to avoid in tourists high times (summer mostly).

I cannot speak much of my travels to Los Angeles as I mostly speak French there with my aunt, a strange tongue jumping from one language to another when we forget one word in one. But when I went to San Francisco, I was struck by how quiet most people were.

Anyway, it is not only for her accent reminiscent of my American family (or rather the fantasy of my American family) that I enjoy listening to her. I didn't realise how feminist she was. Well of course I knew she was a feminist but she's really outspoken about it. I don't really know how she does it, reading and speaking about abuses and rape and still not losing her California cool. Perhaps we French are different, perhaps we need the screams of a Virginie Despentes to get heard...(for those who do not know her, read Baise-moi and King Kong Théorie)

I do admit I hated the beginning of The Field Guide to Getting Lost I really struggled in the first pages, she sounded too Californian, the type of Californian who went to Venice Beach for the weekend and had too many special cigarettes (the ones sold for $5) all that talk about the blue I really couldn't get itAnd then I read the chapter about her ancestors, fleeing Europe, that got me, I was in tears. What I love in that book is that she goes all over the place, in a good way, a bit like Walter Benjamin in fact (less the minutia about old stuff to buy in a Parisian arcade). 

I love her digressions, and they're everywhere, in every book I've read of her so far.