BOOK REVIEW #16: A PIED D'OEUVRE BY FRANK COURTES

A Pied D’Oeuvre is about a former photographer of celebrities Frank Courtes turned divorced writer in his mid 50s who must do strenuous odd jobs via apps and what he calls The Platform to survive.

It’s an honest, startling treatise on the brutal and hypocritical trenches of modern day lowest bid workfare, from construction sites to booked out apartments, and the quest to write in between.

I often admired young writers and their art of hunger, recounting their early days, and their chaotic, lively, impoverished background serving as decors in their first person literary selfies. John Fante, Charles Bukowski, Hunter Thompson or Jack Kerouac come to mind.

This French book is a version of that for a midlife crisis and a late blooming writer, but never as a victim, just as an observer of a world easily so precarious if you take the risk to drop off from the path you’ve been on, without the frenetic recklessness and energy of youth.

The hardest in the case of Courtes is his separation from his kids, now in Quebec, unfathomable, much like his back breaking poorly paid work he does not just occasionally, but on a daily basis, to which he then adds going to and from in Paris, on a bicycle, downpours be damned.

Writing is “a fire in the snow,” in that it’s hard to resist away from, but with very little to show for. Writers have a certain aura, but few have their books bought.

The book ends fittingly with brighter news on the literary front while receiving an order to fix up a toilet. It’s a proven adage, you must go low to go high, the rest too often becomes washed up mediocrity.