I asked NH if today’s excursion could be considered a “hot date” and he said no. Whatevs, I’m keeping it.
One of the nice things about having the AG train pass is that it makes day-tripping rather easy. If we get up early, we can go to Zurich or Konstanz for the day (I personally enjoy shopping in Zurich as even now, three years later, I “shop better” there), and if we putz around the house we can still go somewhere in the afternoon. We have gone to Neuchatel, Montreux or Bern after lunch on Saturdays before.
Today it was noontime and we decided to go out. Too late for Zurich or Basel, so we decided on either Neuchatel or Martigny, and when we got to the train station, it was easier to go to Martigny. We had gone to Sion for our Fake Honeymoon but I hadn’t been down to the Valais since, at least not for sightseeing. If you are just going off the cuff to Martigny you probably miss a lot of stuff, like what is evidently a fab museum, so it was really just an excuse to tick off another Swiss city on my list. If we had guests we would have read up and stuff.
However, Martigny was totally worth the trip because we found a used bookstore where NH got a couple of books on gardening and trees, and I got three lovely books by Bernanos (Monsieur Ouine), Modiano (Une Jeunesse) and Aragon (La semaine sainte). My books were a grand total of 27 francs, which is what I would have likely paid for one of them new in paperback. The Bernanos is an old hardcover from the fifties, and the Aragon and the Modiano are those lovely beige with red print covers that new titles often come out in, with the Aragon dated 1958 and the Modiano dated 1981. Very very happy about that.
I am a jack of all trades and a master of none, and one of the few things I can even arguably discuss with some authority is the “oeuvre” of Patrick Modiano, I have read almost every published work of his (Une jeunesse I have read but did not own a copy until today). Some critics say his work is all the same (I remember once there was a college class with an assignment where they all had to write fake essays in the style of an author and the only one that everyone in the class passed was the Modiano) but I personally enjoy the way he’s all about these personal landscapes that on the surface mean nothing to anyone except the narrator. You get kind of sucked in by these details. Old phone books, old addresses where people used to live and so on. Almost like a detective novel but there’s no resolution at the end- the story is in the details. My very favorite book of his remains Du plus loin de l’oubli (which in translation was called Out of the Dark). Good stuff. If you read French -even at a basic level, his books are an easy read- or can get your hands on a translation (five or six have been translated as I recall), I totally suggest it.
