Contemporary Authors

• How to Behave in a Crowd ( novel) Tim Duggan Books (New York, NY), 2017

1. How to behave in a crowd LCCN 2016023941 Type of material Book Personal name Bordas, Camille, 1987- author. Main title How to behave in a crowd / Camille Bordas. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Tim Duggan Books, [2017] Projected pub date 1111 Description pages ; cm ISBN 9780451497543 (hardcover) 9780451497550 (softcover) CALL NUMBER PS3602.O678 H69 2017 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• From Publisher -

  Camille Bordas is the author of two previous novels in French, Les treize desserts and Partie commune. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker. Born in France and raised in Mexico City and Paris, she now lives in Chicago.

• Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/How-Behave-Crowd-Camille-Bordas/dp/0451497546

  A Conversation with Camille Bordas, Author of 'How To Behave In A Crowd'
  Q. Tell us about your inspiration for 'How To Behave In A Crowd.'

  How to Behave in a Crowd doesn’t exactly rely on a big idea or concept, but more on its characters. I never have big ideas come to me out of nowhere. Or if I have one, it’s usually a bad sign—I get a little crushed by it and give up fast. For me, the writing of a novel often starts with a little voice I like and want to keep playing with. As far as the notion of 'inspiration' goes, I’m a firm subscriber to Picasso’s idea that inspiration is not really something you can count on, or that eventually will come to you from above or wherever, but that it is something that finds you at work. When I write, I never know in advance what’s going to happen, and you could say that what 'inspires' a sentence is nothing other than the one (or the few) that just preceded it. Sentence after sentence, narrative possibilities are either opening or closing, and part of my job is to be open to and keep track of them so that I can write the best possible version of my book. The problem with saying that the only things that inspire a new sentence are the ones I wrote before, though, is that you’re going to ask me, “Sure, but what about the very first sentence of the book, then? If all the others just stemmed from it, where did the first one come from?” and now I’m cornered. I don’t have a clever answer. It so happens that the very first page I wrote of this book ended up being the first of the finished novel as well, so I guess, in retrospect, that the day I wrote it ended up being pretty defining, but I don’t remember much about it. At the time, that first page was just a little thing I scribbled, an observation about suede that I decided for some reason to write down in the voice of a child. This first page describes something apparently trivial (there’s a stain on the family couch, but nobody knows who’s responsible for it, what it is a stain from, or when exactly it was made) and yet it is extremely important to the narrator, Isidore. It’s a page that introduces six core characters, Isidore and his five older siblings, by showing that the five eldest in question can’t even agree on something as small and meaningless as the author of a stain. It also presents Isidore—who is the only one to not have an idea about it because he was too young at the time the stain was made to remember—as dependent on his siblings for all kinds of information, big and small. The rest of the book covers about three years in Isidore’s life and goes in all sorts of directions, but it came out of Isidore’s character in that particular moment. I liked his obsession with this small thing that nobody around him seemed to care about.

  Q. This is your first novel written in English. How did you come to the decision to write in English, and was the process different from writing in your native French?

  I moved to the United States a few years ago and have barely spoken French to anyone since then. I speak French when I go back to France once a year, or on the phone with my mother, but other than that, English pretty much took over my life. In the end, writing in English wasn’t a big decision I made. It happened quite naturally. Weirdly, I didn’t find the process of writing a novel in English that much different than writing a novel in French. That’s probably because I see the process of writing a novel pretty much exactly as Doctorow describes it, as being similar to driving at night in the fog: you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. It makes the process seem both vertiginous and not at the same time. You never know where you are or where exactly you’re headed, but the way to get there is one sentence at a time, so that’s a manageable unit—and that’s how I wrote this novel, same as I would’ve written it in French, one sentence at a time. Obviously, having not grown up speaking English but having learned it in my late teens, there will always be words or phrases that I won’t only not know, but also not know that I don’t know, so that can be a little paralyzing if I think about it too much. Having a smaller vocabulary and fewer references at my disposal can also be a good thing, I think. I guess it can all be either extremely freeing or frustrating, depending on the kind of day I’m having. I have fewer tools than a native speaker, for sure, but I make do with what I’ve got. I know you don’t necessarily need gigantic means to reach big emotional effects. To riff on the Doctorow image, I feel that not being a native English speaker only means that my headlights are maybe a little dimmer than those of an American writer, but in a way that might be advantageous: it forces me to be even more focused and precise.

  Q. The protagonist of 'How To Behave In A Crowd', Isidore Mazal, is eleven years old. How did writing the adults in the story differ from writing the children? Was one easier than the other?

  Not really. I’m an adult now, so you might think it would require extra effort to put myself in the shoes of a preteen, but I actually remember being Isidore’s age quite vividly. I have learned a lot of things since then of course, but I actually don’t feel that much smarter than I was then.

  Q. What do you hope readers will take away from 'How To Behave In A Crowd?'

  I hope they take away a good memory of reading it, and a desire to maybe read it again down the line. I write books because I love books, and I don’t think the books that I love try to send me a message. I don’t really learn or expect to learn lessons from a novel. A good novel to me is time out from the world. It’s pretty precious.

  Q. You recently published a short story in The New Yorker. How is your process different when writing a short story versus writing a novel?

  I don’t know that I can really talk about it much because I have only written that one story. But what I can say is that, in writing it, there was more of a sense of urgency than in writing my novels. When I write novels, I tend to let myself explore and go to the (sometimes dead-) end of things. I’m always telling myself, We’ll see when the first draft is done whether this stays or not. But with the story, I was watching myself more. If I started writing a description of a room, for instance, I would ask myself right away, Well, does it matter to the story, the colors of the wall? and decide right then and there if it did or didn’t. A story is obviously easier to edit as you go. You can read the whole of it many times in a day of work, keep it in your head... You’re convinced that you could finish it any day, also, which is not the case with a novel. Writing that story was pretty intense, because it felt kind of like the last few weeks of writing a novel. You know you’re close to finishing, so that’s very exciting, but you also try to not get carried away, because any sentence could be the last, so you have to be extra careful.

  Q. Who are some of the writers, or what are some of the books, that have most influenced you?

  I never really understand what people mean by 'influence.' There are many, many, books that I love, but I’ve never necessarily felt that I was writing in the lineage of any of them in particular. That might be because I always read novels for pleasure and not for school or work. I never studied literature or writing; I never thought of dissecting a book I loved to see what made it work; I never deliberately riffed on or copied a writer I loved as an exercise, as I hear some American writers do in the course of their education. It just never crossed my mind. But surely I must have been influenced by writers I love, right? I don’t know which ones, though. I mean, one of my favorite books of all time is Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, but I challenge anyone to see its influence on my work... Same goes for Nabokov’s Ada or Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. Patrick deWitt and George Saunders make me laugh out loud, but I don’t feel at all like I’m in their lineage. I love Harry Crews’s Gypsy’s Curse, but unfortunately I could never come up with such a book. There are authors whose worldview I feel close to, though, like José Emilio Pacheco, Akhil Sharma, J. D. Salinger, Joan Didion, Jeffrey Eugenides, Lydia Davis, Édouard Levé, or Emmanuel Carrère (all of them very different from one another, by the way, but I guess every reader makes his or her own connections between writers, and I can sort of link them all somehow). I also read a lot of sociology, and I tend to believe that every writer (or maybe everyone, actually) should read Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

  Camille Bordas is the author of two previous novels in French, Les treize desserts and Partie commune. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker. Born in France and raised in Mexico City and Paris, she now lives in Chicago.

• Shelf Awareness - http://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers-issue.html?issue=637#m11135

  The Writer's Life
  Camille Bordas: Finding One's Place

  photo: Clayton Hauck
  Camille Bordas is the author of three novels and her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker. Born in France and raised in Mexico City, Bordas now lives in Chicago with her husband. How to Behave in a Crowd (reviewed below), her first novel written in English, is the story of Isidore Mazal and his strange, precocious family.

  How to Behave in a Crowd has been hailed as "a darkly comedic novel about the confusions of adolescence," but there is so much more to it than that one sentence could possibly convey.

  Summarizing the story is always a bit hard, because it covers about three years in the life of this boy, Isidore--the major and the minor things that happen to him in that time span. Also, I don't want to give away any spoilers! But you could say it's about the adventures of a boy who keeps trying (and failing) to run away from home in search of adventure. Isidore keeps wanting to see what's beyond his home life and the silence and the constantly shut doors of his five super-smart academic siblings, but he's always drawn back to them. His brothers and sisters fascinate him, because they seem to know everything and to have life figured out. As the story progresses, though, it ends up looking like the family, which seemed so sturdy at first, might be more of an emotional Ponzi scheme in which everyone thinks the others are doing great and therefore continues with business as usual, until Isidore realizes that his siblings are all just pretending they know what they're doing, and the whole thing collapses.

  This was the first book you wrote in English. Did writing in a different language change your writing process in any way?

  I didn't find the process of writing a novel in English that much different, or harder, than writing a novel in French. That's probably because I see the process of writing a novel pretty much exactly as E.L. Doctorow describes it--similar to driving at night in the fog: you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. It makes the whole endeavor seem both vertiginous and not at the same time. You never know where you are, or where exactly you're headed, but the way to get there is one sentence at a time, so that's a manageable unit--and that's how I wrote this novel, same as I would have in French, one sentence at a time.

  Obviously, having not grown up speaking English but having learned it in my late teens, there will always be words or phrases that I won't only not know, but also not know that I don't know, so that can be a little paralyzing if I think about it too much. I guess it can all be either extremely freeing or frustrating, depending on the kind of workday I'm having. I have fewer tools than a native speaker, for sure, but I make do with what I've got. To riff on the Doctorow image, I feel that not being a native English speaker only means that my headlights are maybe a little dimmer than those of an American writer, but in a way that might be advantageous: it forces me to be even more focused and precise.

  Isidore is such a wonderfully drawn character. He often seems to have no idea what's going on around him, but also has moments of great clarity and wisdom. How did you get into the mind and spirit of an 11-year-old boy?

  By writing the book! My books get written one sentence at a time, and characters emerge that way as well. It took me a while to know who Isidore was. No character has ever come out of my imagination fully formed--as I put them in different situations to which they have to respond one way or another, their voices become clear. The questions are not, "What is it like to be an 11-year-old boy?" but more, "Would Isidore say this or that?" You never can fully be in someone else's head, know what it is to be them, but the more you spend time with them, the closer you get to having a glimpse of that.

  But I guess I've made this question take a weird philosophical turn, when the simple, down-to-earth answer to it is probably that I remember being 11, 12, 13 years old very vividly. The sense memories of it are particularly strong: a constant discomfort, a feeling that things are going too slow, the loneliness of growing up, the impossibility of knowing if you're the first person to think a thing or if it's part of the process for all of us, the impossibility of knowing if everyone else is having a weird time too. In many ways, I feel out of touch with my teenage self and don't really know who that person was, but at the same time, I know that I haven't changed much since then. I've just had experiences pile up. That's why I liked writing a teenage character: Isidore's brain is fully formed, but not yet shaped by experience, so he mostly doesn't know what to do with it. It's like a useless superpower.

  The novel features a 100-year-old woman, Daphne, who has lived so incredibly long--especially in comparison to Isidore's short 11 years. Did you intend for the novel to be an exploration of age and how it shapes our understanding of the world?

  I never see my characters as vessels through which to explore any particular issue. I never intend much more in building them--and in this case, in writing Daphne--than to present full people who have something to say, or sometimes nothing to say, but in a funny way. They don't stand for anything other than themselves.

  Something that I noticed in the United States, since I moved here, is that it is rare to witness much in the way of intergenerational friendships. In France, I have a handful of friends my parents' age and older, 70-somethings. I was friends with my grandparents. What interested me in Daphne was not so much her age itself (though the dissonance between her range of experience and Izzie's relatively clean slate was a great source for dialogue) but more the fact that she lived a normal life that only started becoming abnormal because of its length--a length that people start attributing meaning to when there isn't any. She becomes a receptacle for people's fears and hopes about old age, and that's problematic because she doesn't have any particular wisdom to offer.

  It's clear that the Mazal family loves Isidore in their own ways, and Isidore knows that. And yet he keeps trying to run away from home. Why is that?

  Isidore's case is complicated because it's unclear whether he really wants to run away or not. One minute he says he wants to be his own man, separate from his brothers and sisters, the next he says he only wishes to run away to please his mother, who's always complaining her children are not adventurous enough. I think, at the beginning of the novel at least, that it's more a desire to be noticed and find his own place in the family than to leave it. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

• The New Yorker - https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-this-week-camille-bordas-2017-01-02

  Camille Bordas on What Things Are Worth Worrying About
  By Willing DavidsonDecember 26, 2016

  Camille Bordas, whose story “Most Die Young” appears in the magazine this week.PHOTOGRAPH BY CLAYTON HAUCK
  In “Most Die Young,” your story in this week’s issue, Julie, a young writer for a cultural magazine, stumbles across a topic that intersects with her life. The Pawong, a Malaysian tribe, instead of valuing bravery, celebrate fear and caution. Julie first learns about the tribe when her boyfriend tells her that she’d fit right in with its members. Then he breaks up with her. What leads Julie to turn an insult into a field of inquiry? And what do you think the Pawong would make of her, should she get up the courage to visit them?

  One of the first things Julie says in the story is that she never takes anything personally. You get the feeling that she is probably not that easy to offend, either. There is no explanation as to why or how she ended up being this way: it's just a piece of information she hands out to the reader first thing. Therefore, it's not surprising that she would turn something her boyfriend told her and meant as an insult into not a compliment (she's not delusional) but something she can dissect and analyze. She's a methodical person, and led by curiosity: when she hears about the Pawong, her impulse is to learn everything she can about them, make it a story for her magazine. Although not stated explicitly in the story, we can extrapolate that to acquire as much knowledge as she can is a way for her to exert some control on a world that would otherwise only worry and confuse her. Also, in the Pawong tribe, she finds people who are seemingly even less adjusted to the terrifying potentialities of life than she is. In a way, this is probably reassuring to her.

  But the technical answer to your question is that, from a narrative point of view, there would be no story if Julie hadn't turned her boyfriend's insult into a field of inquiry. Her reaction to the insult also conveys that she might not care about the boyfriend as much as she'd previously thought.

  As for the second part of your question, I would have to write another story to figure out what the Pawong would make of someone like Julie. We can assume that they would treat her similarly to how they treated the anthropologist who lived with them for a while, Professor Croze. They would have a hard time understanding why she would leave the comfort of the familiar to visit a group of strangers. But, honestly, I doubt she'd ever go meet them.

  Throughout the story, mundane anxieties—always being early, tongue fungus—intermingle with larger world events, such as two bombings. This is a source of some of the humor of the story, but it’s also just a very true situation. How do we decide what things are worth worrying about?

  If I knew the answer to this, I would probably have more friends, and more fun in life, in general. But I'm a worried person—not to the extent that Julie is, but I would say more than a balanced person should be. I'm afraid the answer here is that we probably don't get to decide what's worth worrying about. Even though I want to believe that there are some well-adjusted people out there who, at some point in life, successfully implemented a decision to only worry about things they could actually affect, or actively protect themselves against, and to happily ignore everything else, I don't think it's true. I've met worriers and non-worriers, but never someone who'd gone from being one to being the other. You can make adjustments, sure, realize that it's not worth it to worry about how other people choose to live their lives, for instance (it's really not), but then another type of worry, like germs, or terrorism, will likely take the place of the one you've overcome. The worried mind will always fill an empty space. I think it might also be empathy-related (I tend to over-empathize, which I'm pretty sure is not a good thing): the more you're able to empathize, the more you're at risk to over-worry. For instance, when I was a child, I saw “The Lion King” and really felt for Simba when his father died. I don't know that my worry that my own parents would die started after that, but I was definitely way too worried about it growing up. Then, a few years ago, I watched the movie again with my niece, who was about three at the time, and as the music rose during Mufasa's death scene I turned to her and said something stupid like "It's sad, right?," to which she responded, "Well, it's sad for Simba, but not for me. This is a movie, you know?" At first I thought she might be a psychopath for not being moved, but then she turned out to be one of the smartest, more well-adjusted people I know. And she doesn't worry too much. Good for her. Maybe I'll put your question to her next time I see her—I'm sure she'll have a better answer than me.

  You have a novel, “How to Behave in a Crowd,” coming out next year, in English. You’ve also written two novels in French. What made you decide to start writing in English? Did it feel freeing—or just more difficult?

  I don't remember making a clear decision to write in English. I moved to the United States in 2012 to be with my husband, an American writer who didn't (and still doesn't) speak a word of French. He's the one who thought I should give writing in English a try. I wasn't so confident that I could write a novel in English, but then I wrote a paragraph, and then a second, and a third, and, page after page, it started resembling one. I've always loved the English language, the playfulness of compound words, the sounds, the rhythms. I learned English when I was a teen-ager, and through movies (a lot of them), not through school or books, so I had a pretty good sense of how everyday English was spoken, but I didn't necessarily have much perspective on "literary" English, how to create different voices, the history and weight that certain words carry. But I'm a practical person, so I did with what I had, and, in a way, not having too much perspective, not having a whole list of synonyms that might sound better pop into my head every time I wrote down an adjective was, as you say, extremely freeing. It forced me to keep things tight and moving, and I was amazed at how much I could pack in an English sentence while keeping it fast, when saying the same thing in French would have taken me twelve more words and four more commas.

  So it was a new way to write, and very exciting, and the book was moving fast for a while. I kept thinking, Wow, I'm really going somewhere with this!—until I wasn't. But this would have happened had I been writing in French, too. It's the nature of writing a novel. You create problems for yourself and act all surprised to see them surface and smack you in the face. Hitting a narrative wall was not harder in English than it was in French. Not for the most part. The two ways to deal with a wall are available: if it's a narrow wall, you trace back your steps and fix the problems in order to allow yourself to turn before it’s in your way; if it’s a broad wall, though, something you have to push through, you write and delete and write and delete and write and delete until you write the thing that can punch a hole in it. And these were the only moments where I found that writing in English was difficult, at least a different kind of difficult than the writing-in-French difficult. Because in French, I'm always able to just fool around and write nonsense, a ten-page dialogue that my character would have had with his mother when he was five years old, for instance—not something that would end up being in the book, but that would somehow inform, or give me the idea for the next actual scene—whereas I found it difficult to just do this sort of "automatic writing" in a foreign language. So the most difficult part was not actually writing in English but being stuck and not writing in the middle of writing a novel in English.

  Another way in which writing in English could be particularly frustrating at times was when I would think of a French word or phrase and realize that there wasn't an exact equivalent in English, or that it didn't sound as good, or didn't convey the same image/power I'd envisioned. French slang (argot) is very, very rich, and I'm sure American slang is, too, except I can't handle it as easily, because even if certain slang words come to my mind when I write, I can never be sure about usage, history (who would say it? when? what might it signify that I'm not aware of? etc.). I don't, for instance, know who would say "the fuzz" for "police," or in what situations you can say "grub" for "food," whereas I know who would say "crevard" (slang for "stingy," extremely pejorative) or "toubib" (argot for "doctor," not pejorative) in French. Altogether, this is a small issue, obviously; my characters aren't constantly using slang, but it can be a nice way to identify someone, a go-to to give a secondary character a voice. To add some color. But then you can't have it all, the strengths of English and the vividness of certain French words. Maybe I should just buy an American slang dictionary.

  Julie says that "to readers eager to learn something about a different culture, the lack, in said culture, of a concept that they were familiar with was more likely to pique their interest than any other factoid.” Is there a concept that you can think of in English that French, or France, lacks? Or vice versa?

  Of course, all the typically French concepts I can think about right now are food- and/or drinking-related. Trou normand ("the Norman hole"): the concept of drinking Calvados between courses, supposedly to help you digest what you just had and keep your appetite up for what's coming next. Apéritif: the concept of gathering with your friends to eat and drink right before dinner. Some bitter people might say that these are merely sub-concepts of the bigger "thirty-five-hour work week" concept, but the Norman hole and apéritif existed long before socialism. Either way, I am very fond of all of the aforementioned.

  American concepts that have confused me over the years: wintry mix, the Electoral College, standardized tests, letters of recommendation (can you tell that I’ve been searching for a creative-writing job?). The concept of "camp" I still don't fully understand, either. (I was told to read the Susan Sontag article about it, but it only created more confusion.) Probably my favorite American concept (and I realize that this might sound a bit cheesy, but it’s true nonetheless) is that of the contemporary short story as serious fiction, as work that deserves to be undertaken by writers and received by readers with as great an intensity as—if not with a greater intensity than—that which in France is reserved for the novel.

• Signature - http://www.signature-reads.com/2017/08/camille-bordas-writing-characters-family/

  Creating Characters, Writing a Family, and More with Camille Bordas
  By JESSICA MIZZI
  August 17, 2017

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  Camille Bordas/Photo © Clayton Hauck

  Camille Bordas is the author of the witty novel How to Behave in a Crowd, which perfectly captures a family in distress, struggling to cope with a tragedy that strikes down each character with grief. The story unfolds through the keen eyes of eleven-year-old Isidore – a boy who doesn’t quite fit in and lacks a filter, but knows more than others recognize. Readers grasp the true meaning of change with each turn of the page as they watch the Mazal family evolve, and find that growing older doesn’t always mean growing wiser.
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  How to Behave in a Crowd
  by Camille Bordas

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  We got the chance to talk with Camille about the characters in her novel, creating a unique family dynamic, writing about grief, her definition of success, and more. Read on to see what Camille had to say, and be sure to pick up a copy of How to Behave in a Crowd – you won’t regret it.

  SIGNATURE: What inspired your quirky characters and the Mazal family dynamic? And how did you come up with their names?

  CAMILLE BORDAS: It’s hard to remember how they all came about. The plan wasn’t always to write about such a big family, but then I kept adding siblings as I went. From the beginning, I knew I wanted to write about book-smart and emotionally inept characters that a more down-to-earth narrator would try to make sense of. Maybe what brought it all on was a memory of my mother going back to university to get a PhD when I was eight or so. I remember her office in our house being off limits when she worked, every night coming back from her day job, smoking her pipe. The word “dissertation” came into my life very early on, and I didn’t quite understand it, but it seemed really, really important. I wanted to explore, go back to this feeling from childhood of having absolutely no idea what the people I shared a house with were up to.

  I discovered the family dynamic as I wrote the story. The characters determined it little by little. I realized as I went that the whole family was this sort of emotional Ponzi scheme in which everyone thinks the others are doing great and continues with business as usual, until Isidore understands everyone is just pretending they know what they’re doing and the whole structure collapses."All I want from a novel is time out from the world. I hope mine can give that to someone."
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  And coming up with names is like everything else when I write: I “just” have to find one point of entry, and things will sprout from there or arrange themselves around it as I go (veeeery slowly). The point of entry here was Isidore’s name. I wrote a chapter of this book in French before I decided to switch to English, and Isidore’s name was Isidore’s name only because he had to have the stupid nickname of “Zizi,” which became “Dory” in English. Once I had “Isidore,” whenever I added a sibling, I just had to find a name that went well with it, that had the same kind of cultural weight (Isidore is a very literary name, that of Isidore Ducasse, better known as Lautreamont), so that’s how Simone’s, Leonard’s, and Berenice’s names came about. Jeremie and Aurore just made sense with the other names, I thought. It’s all mostly instinctive.

  SIG: How were you able to so successfully capture the essence of an eleven-year-old boy coming-of-age?

  CB: By writing the book! And by staying close to Dory’s worries and obsessions and how he voices them. No character has ever come out of my imagination fully formed: It is as I put them in different situations and let them figure things out that I get to know them, and more importantly, get a sense of how they speak. The questions, as I wrote Isidore, were not so much “What is it like to be an eleven-year-old boy?” but more “Would he say this or that?”

  Also, there’s obviously no one way to come of age – whatever that may mean – so I was never there asking myself, “Does that fit the bill of a male coming-of-age story?” One thing I remember from my own time as an eleven-year-old was that I never gave my being a girl too much thought. I was more concerned with what it meant to be alive than what it meant to be a girl, so I have no problem writing from a boy perspective. I remember being eleven, twelve, thirteen years old very vividly. The sense memories of it are particularly strong: a constant discomfort, a feeling that things are going too slow, the impossibility of knowing if you’re the first person to think a thing or if it’s part of the process for all of us, the impossibility of knowing if everyone else is having a super weird time too. I think they’re pretty universal questions one asks oneself growing up. I just tried to find a character who would voice them in a unique way.

  SIG: Why did you choose to tell this story from Dory’s point of view? If you were to rewrite the story from another perspective, which character would you pick as the protagonist?

  CB: Obviously it wouldn’t be this story anymore if I wrote it from another point of view, but there was a moment when I thought about maybe writing a whole story (or even a short novel) from the point of view of Dory’s mother, and not about her whole life but about the few hours before she has to tell her children about the death of their father. I was quite interested in that – that moment, and that particular character in that moment. Maybe I’ll end up doing it. We know very little about the mother’s character in the end, but I have a feeling she might be a pretty interesting person to write in the voice of.

  SIG: Dory differs from his older siblings in that he places trust in those around him. Do you think that losing this sense of trust is just part of growing up? Is trust synonymous with innocence – with being young?

  CB: Unfortunately, I sort of do, and that’s why I love writing young characters; they’re not corrupted by experience, they can go into things open-heartedly without it meaning that they’re wide-eyed or incurably naive, so that makes for more narrative possibilities – and more potential for heartbreak, also.

  SIG: Is it necessary to incorporate humor into dark novels? Is a balance important?

  CB: I think it is necessary to incorporate humor in all novels. Period. But that’s just my opinion. It doesn’t mean everything should be puns and jokes and slapstick, but it’s rare that I like entirely humorless books. One touch of lightness in 500 pages of horror can be enough. Humor is just a form of distance you put between yourself and a situation, and yes, I do think that in facing a horrible situation, it is essential to know that among all the coping mechanisms – or whatever you want to call them – humor is an available option. In art, I think you don’t get to move people if you don’t have that distance on horrible things. If you only line up horrifying stories without any humor whatsoever, the reader will be nothing but horrified – and if that’s your goal as a writer, that’s great of course, it just doesn’t happen to be mine. Also, though, I don’t want to mislead anyone: How to Behave in a Crowd is not a comedy, it just has these lighter moments, the humor in it is sometimes just there to hide some deep sadness. There’s this quote I heard a lot in France when I was a kid, I don’t know if you have it in America: “Humor is the politeness of despair.” As a child, I didn’t understand what it meant, I didn’t understand the grammar of it, how despair could be polite, etc., but anyway, it ended up making a lot of sense when I grew up.

  SIG: What is your strategy for writing about grief? Do you tap into your own?

  CB: No. For some reason, I don’t like doing that. Although, it did happen in the past that I wrote diary-type things (I could never keep a journal for more than five days, even as a very sad/annoying/misunderstood teenager), long paragraphs of feeling sorry for myself, and suddenly one sentence would come out of it and make sense or seem useful beyond my personal experience, so I’d decide to keep it for fiction. But that seriously happened maybe three times.

  SIG: How do we cope with loss differently as we age?

  CB: I don’t think it’s an age question as much as an experience question, or a combination of the two, or how comfortable you happen to be in your life at the moment you lose someone. I’m not a loss specialist or anything, but I’ve lost people I loved at different ages, and it certainly doesn’t get easier to deal with as I grow older, but I noticed one thing is that I now deal with loss more and more privately. Maybe if you lose someone you loved early on in life, as a teenager, say, there’s this idea or sense that you have to display your grief or something, like Isidore: He feels he has to cry a certain amount after his father dies, otherwise it will mean that he didn’t truly love him. Well as I age I kind of realize that I don’t get anything out of displaying my feelings when it comes to it, because there’s nothing less shareable and more personal than losing someone. By personal, I mean lonely. It’s the epitome of solitude, you’re left alone with memories of a person that absolutely no one else has.

  SIG: Would you label the Mazal family as dysfunctional?

  CB: No. I don’t really know what that means I guess. They do function. As I said earlier, describing their dynamic as this emotional Ponzi scheme (and now saying the words again, I’m thinking it might actually be more of an emotional Jenga), they rely on each other, they take each other’s pulse regularly. Even if they don’t interpet each other’s “symptoms” very well, there’s still a lot of love underneath it all.

  SIG: Which is more valuable: academic excellence or social intelligence?

  CB: Depends on how many friends you want to have! Seriously though, it fortunately doesn’t have to be one or the other, I don’t think. Academics have always sort of fascinated me. What I like about them is how relentless they are at work. I had this professor in grad school who told our class one day: “Why are we all here?” His answer: “Because we never want to work.” And I found it funny of course, because it came from a brilliant man who’d published many books, some of them the size of small ocean liners, someone for whom his work was so obviously at the center of everything that he couldn’t tell the difference anymore between doing it and not working. He had spent half his life working as an anthropologist in Oceania, but he would always tell us that you didn’t need to go to the other end of the world to study humans, that any condo association meeting would do. To him, there was always potential to study, and I liked that idea a lot.

  SIG: How do you measure success?

  CB: Well, it’s probably one of those things everyone uses different tools to measure and the results don’t end up meaning anything. Like happiness. There was this study about what country was the happiest a few years ago, and I think France fared quite poorly, worse or just a little better than Afghanistan. That, to me, means that French people have impossible standards. I mean, France has many problems, but it also has a lot going for it. It’s a pretty nice place I think, as far as countries go. I find life easier there than in the U.S. – it’s a country still mostly meant for people. We sure like to complain though. I joke about this a lot. Once, on the phone with my mother, after she asked how I was doing, I told her: “Well, apart from my marriage, my health, and my career, nothing is well.” Also, success is fleeting, and luck has a lot to do with it, so it seems a little arbitrary to stop and try to measure it at any given time. I never pause and reflect on how good I’m doing. I’m sure it would only make me want something more. You always want something more, be it money, the loss of five pounds, or whatever. Right now I’m doing well, but the thing I know I’ve often wanted more of is drive. Succeeding for me as a writer would be to write something I’m happy with and still want to write something else after that. To not be in constant fear that I’ll never write again. To know that I’ll always want to do it. And that’s an impossible thing to know.

  SIG: What’s one thing you would like readers to take away from this story?

  CB: A good memory of having read it. Ideally, they will remember moments from it, will want to pick it up again later, down the line, read it again, differently. As a reader, I never expect to learn lessons from a novel. I don’t think the novels I love most try to teach me anything. Stanley Elkin wrote: “For conveying ideas, novels are among the least functional and most decorative of the blunt instruments,” and as far as I’m concerned, he’s entirely right. All I want from a novel is time out from the world. I hope mine can give that to someone.

• Chicago Tribune - http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-books-how-to-behave-crowd-camille-bordas-0917-20170912-story.html

  'How to Behave,' according to Camille Bordas
  'How to Behave in a Crowd'
  Chicago Tribune
  Kathleen Rooney
  Chicago Tribune
  Camille Bordas' first two novels, "Les treize desserts" and "Partie commune," came out in France in 2009 and 2011, respectively. She has just released her first book in English, "How to Behave in a Crowd," a sharp, sweet and wry coming-of-age story in which an awkward and empathetic boy named Isidore has to find his niche in his large and idiosyncratic family of extremely smart misanthropes. About pretentious people but never pretentious, the story unfolds with humor and compassion.

  Bordas, 30, who lives in Ukrainian Village with her husband, author Adam Levin, answered these questions by email. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and space.

  Q: You were born in France, raised in Mexico City and Paris, and moved to Chicago in 2012 after you married Adam Levin. Why did your family divide its time between countries during your childhood?

  A: Like the father in the book, mine was an engineer who traveled a lot for work, for two- or three- year "missions," except unlike in the book, he moved his family with him whenever possible. I still consider Paris my home, even after five years in Chicago. I do love Chicago quite a lot, but Paris still feels more human-scale to me. You can walk the length of it in a few hours, the width of it in three, and there are about a million different ways to go from one place to another. Chicago I feel is more meant for drivers than walkers. But Chicago has beaches and amazing Mexican food, two things Paris cruelly lacks. And autumn here is unreal, also. I'd never seen anything like it.

  Q: What made you decide to write this latest novel in English?

  A: I don't remember making a clear decision about it; it just happened. My husband doesn't speak French, and at some point he said he'd like me to try to write something in English, so that he could figure out what kind of person he'd married, I guess. I wrote a couple paragraphs, and he liked them, so I kept going. If you write with no big plan in mind, one sentence or a paragraph at a time, the prospect of writing a novel isn't too daunting. It basically was the same process for me, writing in English as writing in French, except I realized as I went that writing in a foreign language helped me create a sort of distance from myself that was actually very helpful to the work. You're a slightly different person in a foreign language.

  Q: "How to Behave in a Crowd" centers on a young protagonist, Isidore Mazal, a thoughtful and sensitive 11-year-old, the youngest sibling in a family of six precocious kids. How did he emerge as a main character for you?

  A: I knew I wanted him to be the heart of a novel that would concern itself with academia and highly intelligent but emotionally inept people. The plan wasn't always to write about such a big family as his, though. I kept adding siblings as I went, each working on more and more obscure subjects. I think if there's something autobiographical in this book, it's that I, too, am the youngest of many ("only" four in my case), and it was a weird position to navigate. I remember being like Isidore in that I had all these older people around me doing things that I didn't quite understand but that made sense to them. I wanted to go back to this feeling from childhood of having absolutely no idea what the people I shared a house with were up to, who these older people who were raising me were. Because I feel I was raised partly by my siblings, as well as my parents. And I've always felt like it would be a lifelong endeavor to try to get to know them.

  Q: Often, books that focus on young characters end up positioned as young-adult literature. Did it ever occur to you that this book might be Y.A.?

  A: It never occurred to me that it could be Y.A. for the simple reason that I didn't know what Y.A. was until about three months ago. I still don't quite understand what it is. I've been told it's literature for 12- to 18-year-olds, but I don't really see why 12- to 18-year-olds would need targeted literature. Growing up in France, there wasn't any literature marketed to teens specifically, so what kids who liked reading did, when they grew tired of children's books, was they picked up the grown-up books they'd heard of and read them. I remember being 12 or so and reading novels I didn't understand 50 percent of (often more) without being too bothered by it. It was actually what I liked about reading them: It gave me something to grow up for in a way, all these things I didn't get. Maybe we condescend to adolescents a little when we assume that they have to understand every last detail of a book and relate to the story 100 percent to enjoy it. My book is not Y.A., but I don't see any reason why a 12-year-old shouldn't read it.

  Q: Why is the coming-of-age tale — especially in a dysfunctional family, like Dory's — such a popular one to tell through fiction?

  A: Even though there's obviously no one way to come of age, it's still the thing we've all had to do, and it's natural to want to see how other people (even fictional characters) managed it. "Coming of age" makes that time sound like a pleasant picnic, but more often than not, it's horrifying. You're basically smart enough to know that you don't know anything, and that in itself is a scary realization. Then you keep getting hit on the head with new responsibilities, your grades are not just grades anymore but start representing all the jobs you won't be able to get in the future, and someone breaks your heart for the first time, and your grandparents die, and you're lonely, you get sick and you have to go fetch the meds yourself, oh, and your body is changing, by the way, and you don't know if you're the only human who's ever had a hard time adjusting to any of this — you're basically an insane person at that point.

  The coming-of-age story is the opposite of the superhero story in a way: You don't want the protagonist to get beat up by life, but you know it's coming for them, and that they probably won't come out of it undamaged. It may sound like I have nostalgia for my teenage years. I don't. They were horrible, and being an adult is better. But there's this transitional part between the two when you think they're both exactly as horrifying, and these intermediate states are always more interesting to read about than stories of perfectly adjusted, settled characters.

  Q: What is something that you've always wanted an interviewer to ask you about, but they never have?

  A: I pretty much always want to talk about soccer, actually. Or "The Sopranos." But I don't know what the questions should be. I guess it should be, for starters, "Who's your team?" and I would answer the Olympique de Marseille. And about "The Sopranos" I would just talk at length about how great James Gandolfini was. I do think he was one of the best actors of all time.

  Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel "Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk."

  'How to Behave in a Crowd'
  By Camille Bordas, Tim Duggan, 336 pages, $26

• Electric Lit - https://electricliterature.com/camille-bordas-doesnt-understand-why-you-want-to-relate-to-her-characters-2d7990327e0d

  Camille Bordas Doesn’t Understand Why You Want to Relate to Her Characters
  The French author explains why she’s terrified of commercial art, and why identifying with fictional characters is just plain strange

  Author Camille Bordas

  The narrator of Camille Bordas’ new novel, How to Behave in a Crowd—Isidore Mazal, or Dory—is by all measures a normal child on the cusp of adolescence. But among his high achieving siblings, his normalcy seems more like a failure than an emblem. While his siblings skip grades, pursue doctorates in their early twenties, and publish theses on humorism in the golden age, Dory shows no unique academic aptitude and struggles to build relationships in the face of his siblings’ insistence that knowledge is more important than friendship.

  But in the aftermath of a family trauma, intellectual theories fail to help the siblings recover. Dory’s observations of how his siblings react to the incident illuminate the chasm between theoretical knowledge and interpersonal relations.

  Bordas’ narration is intricate and wise, told through the eyes of a boy whose social observations begin to overshadow his siblings’ academic achievements in the notoriously rigorous French school system. In a conversation over email, we discussed how she worked social theories into the novel, the meaning of the word pretentious, and how our relationship to fiction changes as we get older.

  Becca Schuh: I loved the debate that Dory and Simone have over the word “pretentious”— I’ve found myself in similarly absurd discussions. As Simone states, the actual definition of the word is “looking to impress people with knowledge you haven’t really mastered,” versus the idea that it “defines someone who talks about a thing that others don’t understand.” The way I hear it used the most is referring to people who discuss esoteric topics that are perhaps inaccessible to the general population, but I’m sure that’s not by any means the dictionary definition. What does the idea of pretension mean to you, and how do you navigate the gray area between the dictionary definitions of words and how they’re used colloquially?

  Camille Bordas: It depends on the language I’m speaking! In French, I used to be a Simone-type tight-ass when it came to proper word usage — I wouldn’t correct anyone of course, I’m not entirely socially inept, but I would notice misuses, big or small, see word meanings slide slowly, inevitably…and then I moved to the U.S. with a pretty good command of English, but I had a limited range, and I wanted to expand it, so I had to try things out, make mistakes, navigate the gray area you mention between registers…and that was liberating in a way, even though I’m still sort of terrified at the idea of misusing certain words in public and making a fool of myself. It’s weird that I’m so attached to proper definitions, because there’s nothing I love more than people who play with language and bend it in fun ways.

  I guess that’s the answer to your question, though: if you’re going to bend language, you have to be funny about it. Or very smart, I guess. Otherwise yeah, you’re kind of just being pretentious. Or plain wrong.

  BS: It was so interesting to get these miniature lessons on the obscure things the siblings studied. One I found particularly fascinating was Berenice’s thesis on humorism. It made me think about personality tests, the everlasting human fascination with everything from Myers-Briggs to astrology to internet personality quizzes. How did the idea of categorizing humans relate to the narrative of Dory and his siblings for you?

  CB: Categorizing is organizing, is giving you a sense of a grip on reality. And that grip becomes a sort of power, I guess. Dory is more interested in people than his siblings are, but just like them, he seems to have a mind for categorizing. So he sorts through what he sees and goes about it methodically. He notices and interprets people’s awkward silences, the shifts in their facial expressions (in the guy who’s courting his mother, for instance), etc. I don’t think he wants to notice all these things. They become a problem to him in a way. Like, when he says, “My parents didn’t look very much in love to me, and I thought it was my fault,” he’s under the impression that noticing things other people don’t makes him responsible for them.

  The issue with Dory’s “gift” for reading humans is that, unlike his siblings, who deal with abstract or intellectual topics, the struggles that he notices cannot be solved by writing an academic essay, so he ends up accumulating knowledge about human emotions that weighs him down more than anything else. Then he realizes, by catching glimpses of his siblings’ work, that human emotions have always been categorized by intellectuals (doctors, in the case of humorism, sociologists, novelists), and put at a distance, in a way. So he tries to learn how to do that. Not to unsee the things he’s seen, but to numb himself to them.

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  BS: When Simone is talking to Dory about Aristotle’s rules of fiction, she posits that his ideas, motivations, and desires exist because he’s seen them played out in books and films. Do you believe that this is true today? How does the plethora of media the average person consumes affect their choices and lifestyle?

  CB: There are definitely people out there who have a thing for drama, and I wonder what they’d be like had they never seen a TV show. I don’t think it’s very controversial to say that the media seems, more and more, to be trying to push on us all an image of the life we’re supposed to aspire to. Parallel to that, people seem to have become more and more interested in seeing themselves reflected in the stories they’re told. They need to relate, to be able to predict characters’ reactions…and it becomes a big blur between life and fiction. It ends up feeling like you’re supposed to react to adultery the way people react to it on TV, for instance. I’ve seen this happen around me, and it seems both false and sad. Perhaps some people react in a prescribed way to protect themselves from what they really feel. I don’t know. Nor do I know which came first: our desire to be reflected in stories, or the media’s attempts to reflect us.

  Commercial art (the one Simone talks about in the book) teaches us to live in clichés, and some clichés are useful, I guess, but I fear sometimes that they just end up numbing us at our core, if we don’t take them with the grain of salt they require. They make us all lemmings and there’s no emotional connection anymore — life ends up being a simple verification of human clichéd reactions. I guess there’s something reassuring to that to some people, but I find it quite terrifying.

  I do think some people live through fiction, but even though I devote my life to fiction, it’s still a pretty foreign idea to me. Fiction is important to me as a way to bear existence, but not as a way to help conduct my life and make decisions. I think it boils down to identification, in the end, and that’s a concept I’m not sure I can relate to. I don’t get the need to identify with a character to be involved in a book or in a movie. As a reader, I need to care for, or hate, or be entertained by a character in order to get involved in their story, but identification…I’m not even sure I know what that means, or why I would want that. Sounds scary. I’m a pretty empathetic person, however, so I guess one has nothing to do with the other. Maybe I reserve true empathy for real life. I love fiction more than any other man-made thing in life, but I still love life more than fiction, because life is what allows for it. I like this thing Robert Filliou said: art is what makes life more interesting than art.

  “I don’t get the need to identify with a character to be involved in a book or in a movie. As a reader, I need to care for, or hate, or be entertained by a character in order to get involved in their story, but identification…I’m not even sure I know what that means, or why I would want that.”
  BS: Midway through the book, the mother says “The memories you make as you get older, they’re not as bright, you know? They’re more like memos. They have a certain flatness. And a veil.” This reminded me of a Geoff Dyer passage from his book Zona, where he says that all of his “favorites” developed in his youth, because his emotions towards art were so much stronger when they felt unprecedented. As we age, how do you think our emotional reactions to both art and interpersonal relations change?

  CB: I didn’t know the Dyer quote but it rings true, sadly. I mean, maybe it’s not that sad. It’s a double-edged thing. On one hand, having accumulated knowledge and experience, age makes you more able to see through the bullshit, so that’s good. But on the other, you’re just not as open-hearted as you were growing up, as ready to absorb new ideas, as hungry to build yourself as when you thought you were the first to ever feel what you felt. After that, your personality sets and dries in the sun a little. You can’t quite maintain the same intensity.

  But now saying all this, I realize I must not quite be done growing because I’m still pretty hungry to discover new authors and artists, for instance, and when I do stumble upon one that I love and have never heard of before, I’m as excited about it, maybe more, actually, than I would’ve been 10 years ago.

  However, I did hear people in their 50s or 60s say that they had lost all interest in fiction even though they loved it before. That frightens me a little. But anyway, maybe Dyer was in a bad mood when he wrote that. If you’d asked me the same question last year, I might’ve said, “Yeah, you like less and less things as you age, and generally, getting older sucks,” but I’m in a pretty good mood today. It’s like when I moved to the States, I had no friends here other than my husband, and I had no idea to make any. To feel better about my failure at it, I concocted this stupid theory that you couldn’t really make any new close friends past the age of 25. I convinced myself of that. And then last year I met Catherine Lacey, who’s not only an amazing writer but also one of the best human beings around. Very fun to drink with.

  BS: Throughout the novel, you intersperse a lot of “social ideas,” like a few of the ones mentioned above, or the idea of the characters “practicing melancholy.” What fascinates you about putting names and analysis to the ways people look at the world and socialize?

  CB: That’s some sort of occupational hazard…I read a lot of Erving Goffman in grad school (Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Behavior in Public Places — that’s where my title came from, by the way, since in French it was translated as “How To Behave In Public Places”), I became really interested in “micro sociology,” the study of individual social processes as opposed to big, all encompassing ones.

  I also have an uncle who narrates his actions whenever there’s an awkward silence. He’ll help himself to some wine and say “A little more wine perhaps, mister Cordoba?”/”Why yes, thank you very much!,” and I noticed that I tend to narrate other people’s smallest actions in my head as well. It’s not so much that putting names and analysis to our routine behaviors fascinates me as much as it reassures me. When I first read Goffman, and Harold Garfinkel, also, something opened up that was as close as someone like me can get to a religious experience, I think: “I’m not alone! We’re all the same!” — something like that. I felt connected to everyone else. I know it sounds cheesy, but well, I’d never really felt that before, and it was comforting, and still is, because half of the time, I’m not even entirely sure I’m alive, so looking at other people and noting how every little thing they do was in Goffman helps me remind myself that we’re all here and we’re all weird and it’s all fine.

  BS: The “olive of shame” bit was truly hilarious, but I was further fascinated by the line following it: “Something we had only considered vaguely impolite became shameful through the magic of a foreign proverb.” How do the stories and jokes that we share with our loved ones affect our relationships?

  CB: They just make us closer. A private joke, a made-up expression, an adopted and beloved one…any specific group of words that you only share with a small group of people and ends up meaning something unique to you and that group of people is like a magic shortcut to expressing something big and idiosyncratic about your relationship with them. It sends you back to the moment you devised it. I wonder if all families have something like that, their own pantheon of modified sayings, like the Mazals do in the book. I know of a few. When other people do share their homemade sayings with you, it’s very rewarding: you join their very private club. Anyway, my family has a handful of expressions that I never heard used elsewhere. It’s a sort of clanic language at this point.

  BS: In the days following finishing the novel, I found myself bringing up the idea of the funnel in social situations, that as you go through school and life you’re more and more constrained by your choices and have less and less possibility. Have you felt the “force of the funnel” in your life? Do you think that there’s any way to avoid the feeling that as you grow older, you have fewer options?

  CB: I ask myself these questions a lot when it comes to writing. I’ve never been confident in that area. I always wonder if I made the right choice in pursuing this. In France, I started publishing very young, and people liked my first book, so it seemed like I should keep doing it…you know, in a way it’s the only instance in which I feel close to professional athletes: they started doing what they do very early on, and it has defined their whole lives, but how do they feel at the end of their career, when they still have 50 years of life to fill? I kind of feel like that all the time, even though I’ve arguably picked the one career-path where you’re most likely to peak when you’re old. It’s still a choice that I made when I was young, and in many ways I don’t even remember who I was then, yet I’m still living a life that that person decided on.

  It didn’t seem like a decision at the time, and that’s what Simone says in the book: you don’t even realize you’re going down the funnel. What happened in my case is that my father died when I was 19, a few weeks before my last year in college ended. I did finish college, but I was also broken and in a state of “Fuck this/No tomorrow/Might as well write fiction.” And I wrote my first book the following year, didn’t apply to grad school, started working…and now 10 years later, I can’t help but wonder if, were my father still alive, I would’ve just made the same decision, only later, or if I would just be the archeologist I was training to be when he died. It’s a little bit crushing, as far as the questions you can ask yourself go. So yeah, I definitely feel the force of the funnel.

  I did finish college, but I was also broken and in a state of “Fuck this/No tomorrow/Might as well write fiction.”
  And I regularly make attempts at fighting it, at climbing back up. After publishing my first book, I wasn’t sure I could write another, so I went back to grad school, for Anthropology. But then as I was getting my Masters, I wrote my second novel. Somehow I always go back to that. Maybe it’s part of the process of writing for me, to think that I should be doing something else, try it, and realize that I’m better at writing. This reminds me that years ago, I stumbled upon an old article in the archives of the French newspaper Libération. It was some sort of special issue about books, where they asked several writers the same questions. One of the writers was Beckett and one of the questions was “Why do you write?,” and they all went on and on and on about vocation and love of books and the power of literature etc., and Beckett’s answer was a laconic: “Bon qu’à ça,” which translates to: “Only good at that.” That moved me quite a lot.

How to Behave in a Crowd: A novel
Camille Bordas
Library Journal. 142.11 (June 15, 2017): p5a.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
An absorbing, darkly comedic novel that brilliantly evokes the confusions of adolescence and marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

978-0-4514-9754-3 | $26.00/$35.00C | 40,000

Tim Duggan Books | HC | August

* 978-0-4514-9756-7 | * AD: 978-1-5247-7416-5

LITERARY FICTION / COMING OF AGE / DEBUT

RA: For fans of Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, and Salinger's Glass family RI: Author lives in Chicago, IL

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bordas, Camille. "How to Behave in a Crowd: A novel." Library Journal, 15 June 2017, p. 5a. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495668160/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=17dd1b76. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A495668160

How to Behave in a Crowd
Publishers Weekly. 264.24 (June 12, 2017): p36.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
How to Behave in a Crowd

Camille Bordas. Crown/Duggan, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-0-451-49754-3

Bordas 's intriguing first novel in English (after two in French) consists of the personal narrative of Isidore (Dory) Mazal from age 11 to 14 as he struggles to understand his family, his hometown in France, and what little he sees of the world. Dory's quest for understanding is complicated by a tendency to take things literally, as well as by the limitations of his gifted but socially awkward older siblings: Leonard, relentlessly working on his sociology thesis; Jeremie, a talented cellist who refuses to play professionally; Berenice and Aurore, recently minted Ph.D.s adrift outside graduate school; and precocious high schooler Simone, already preparing her own biography. During summer beach vacations, each withdraws into his or her special interest; only Dory and his father go in the water. The father travels so much the rest of the year that his fatal heart attack barely interrupts family routine. To help his widowed mother through each night, Dory talks her to sleep or reads to her. He invites an internet contact to dinner as a possible suitor, but the siblings mock their guest. After multiple attempts to run away from home, Dory finds that the more he gets to know people, the less he understands. His German teacher, Herr Coffin, suggests that intellectual and emotional experience, in art at least, are mutually exclusive. Bordas 's novel, with its humor and sadness, beauty and bluntness, youthful perspective and mature insight, proves otherwise.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"How to Behave in a Crowd." Publishers Weekly, 12 June 2017, p. 36. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495720636/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=78729b45. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A495720636

How to Behave in a Crowd
Michael Cart
Booklist. 113.17 (May 1, 2017): p57.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* How to Behave in a Crowd. By Camille Bordas. Aug. 2017. 336p. CromnlTim Duggan, $26 (9780451497543).

Set in France, Bordas' first novel in English is the story of the coming-of-age of its narrator, 12-year-old Isidore, whose family calls him Dory. One of six brilliant children (his three oldest siblings are on track to receive their PhDs by the age of 24), Dory is something of an odd man out, less gifted, perhaps, than his siblings but with an excellent memory and a talent for noticing things, which--thinking himself phlegmatic--he reports in an often-affectless voice, even when he recounts the unexpected death of his father. But there is more here than meets the eye--or ear. As readers come to know more about Dory, they realize he is, perhaps unwittingly, a central figure in his family, even though he attempts to run away from it half a dozen times with little success. On one of these excursions, he has sex for the first time. Meanwhile, at school, he has a growing friendship with Denise, who is both anorexic and clinically depressed. She will be responsible for a show of violent emotion from Dory, one that surprises and emotionally engages the reader, who has become accustomed to a more distant, intellectual involvement with Dory's life. The fusion brings to a conclusion this deeply satisfying work of literary fiction.--Michael Cart

YA: Older teens will likely be engaged by Dory's sensitively written coming-of-age story and his eccentric family. MC.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cart, Michael. "How to Behave in a Crowd." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 57. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495035062/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ee846bda. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A495035062

Bordas, Camille. "How to Behave in a Crowd: A novel." Library Journal, 15 June 2017, p. 5a. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495668160/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=17dd1b76. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018. "How to Behave in a Crowd." Publishers Weekly, 12 June 2017, p. 36. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495720636/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=78729b45. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018. Cart, Michael. "How to Behave in a Crowd." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 57. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495035062/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ee846bda. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2017/08/16/542469075/an-oddball-family-that-cant-connect-in-how-to-behave-in-a-crowd
  Word count: 902

  An Oddball Family That Can't Connect In 'How To Behave In A Crowd'
  August 16, 20177:00 AM ET
  HELLER MCALPIN

  How to Behave in a Crowd
  How to Behave in a Crowd
  by Camille Bordas

  Hardcover, 336 pages purchase

  Writers are drawn to oddballs and outsiders, in much the way that dogs out for a walk veer toward fellow canines. The endearing pre-adolescent narrator of Camille Bordas' novel, How To Behave in a Crowd, is the youngest of six siblings growing up in a small French village. He's the odd man out because he's the most normal of the lot: All of his older sisters and brothers have skipped multiple grades, and three of them earn PhDs during the course of this book.

  Eleven-year-old Isidore Mazal, whose family calls him Dory — though he prefers Izzy — is the exception in an exceptional family. He's a decent student, but he hasn't skipped a single grade. He's a worrier, and it troubles him that he seems to be "the only one to notice things," from a stain on the couch to his mother's insomnia. His siblings, holed up in their rooms studying, are "oblivious ... lost in their thoughts," which aggravates his sense that it's up to him to do something to alleviate the problems he sees.

  Their mother, a positive force, refuses to be discouraged by the fact that five of her six children are neither happy nor sociable, two qualities she holds supreme. But their father, who travels constantly to far-flung countries on business, is so distant his sudden death barely causes a ripple. Their mother calls him "the father," which Izzy assumes was "to give him extra substance ... We saw him so little." The kids refer to him with the definite article, too.

  Social And Emotional Skills: Everybody Loves Them, But Still Can't Define Them
  NPR ED
  Social And Emotional Skills: Everybody Loves Them, But Still Can't Define Them
  About that definite article: It's a rare instance in which we hear Bordas' native French — le père — behind her smooth English. How to Behave in a Crowd is Bordas' third novel, but it's her first written in English, after she moved to Chicago five years ago and married an American writer. Although nominally set in France, the culture depicted is for the most part vague — no baccalaureates or baguettes, and neither A's and B's nor 20- point grading scales. (A butcher shop is one of the few Gallic details.)

  With three published novels by age 30, Bordas is clearly no stranger to precocity. Her new novel's tight family of book-smart, emotionally-clueless eccentrics evoke both the Royal Tenenbaums and Salinger's Glass family. This is a book about togetherness and alienation. The Mazals are a self-sufficient lot whose idea of fun involves periodic "condescension fests" at the expense of suitors who occasionally try to penetrate their barricades — like the glaringly inappropriate date Izzy arranges online for their widowed mother. "Sometimes I feel like I brought up a batch of little misanthropes," she complains. "You're all so intolerant. You only look up from your books to criticize the rest of the world."

  Izzy is a wonderful narrator, keenly observant, but also inherently caring and inadvertently astute, ironic, touching, or flat-out hilarious.

  Again, Izzy is different. As he navigates the shoals of adolescence in the two years following "the father's" death, he reaches out in multiple ways, forging a genuine friendship with a smart, suicidally bleak girl at school and seeking an unlikely mentor in his disgruntled German teacher. Repeated, ridiculous attempts at running away — in search of adventure and notice — provide an amusing leitmotif. "I hadn't thought about how crossing the Alps on a bicycle might be a challenge," he writes a mile into an aborted attempt to reach Italy. Risible interviews with his sister Simone deliver another clever throughline: Just 18 months older than Izzy but already finishing high school, she is so convinced she's going to be famous that she has him gathering material on her formative years for an eventual biography.

  Izzy is a wonderful narrator, keenly observant, but also inherently caring and inadvertently astute, ironic, touching, or flat-out hilarious. On one of his escapades, he surprises his oldest sister in bed with an older man in her Paris garret. He reports, deadpan: "He said I had to be Berenice's brother, with these cheekbones. 'And you must be her PhD adviser,' I said." Is Izzy being snarky? Nope, he's just hit a nerve, unintentionally. He explains, "I thought it would be polite to at least try to place him, but he stiffened. 'Berenice is not a student anymore,' he said."

  If you're wondering about the odd title, it says little about the book, while the abstruse cover design — perhaps an allusion to the family's inability to connect the dots — omits even the author's name. Bordas keeps things mostly light, though the novel is underpinned by serious concerns about balancing critical thought with feeling, and it earns the moving scenes it builds to. When, after learning about Brecht's theatrical Verfremdungseffekt — alienation or distancing effect — Izzy questions why you can't have art that engages both intellectually and emotionally, we know where Bordas stands on the issue. How to Behave in a Crowd is her smart, charming answer.

• Student Voices
  https://mystudentvoices.com/a-review-of-camille-bordas-how-to-behave-in-a-crowd-fcb21afe9639
  Word count: 1160

  Zachary Houle
  Book critic, Fiction author, Poet, Writer, Editor. Follow me on Twitter @zachary_houle.
  Oct 8, 2017

  Camille Bordas
  A Review of Camille Bordas’ “How to Behave in a Crowd”
  Sex and Death

  “How to Behave in a Crowd” Book Cover
  The French are known for their sophistication and their mordant wit, so it’s no surprise that France’s Camille Bordas has both to spare. In her debut English novel, How to Behave in a Crowd, Bordas weaves a tale that is both darkly humourous and profoundly distressing. The novel centers on 11-year-old Isidore Mazal (his family calls him Dory, but he prefers to be known as Izzie instead). Isidore has a bevy of older brothers and sisters and lives with them and his parents in an unnamed small French town perhaps most famous for having the oldest living inhabitant of France. His father, referred to only as “the father” (it must be a French thing) is largely absent, and, aside from a sister who is 18 months older than him (who has designs on being a successful novelist, forcing Isidore into the role of her authorized biographer), his siblings are largely working towards preparing their Ph.D. dissertations.

  Then tragedy strikes the family. The father dies (and we don’t know why or how) and everyone except Dory retreats into their own worlds of study to deal with their grief (or, in his mother’s case, simply retreats). Meanwhile, Dory has designs on becoming a German teacher, having sex for the first time with one of his sister’s pen pals, and hanging out with a suicidal and depressed female classmate. That’s when he’s not running away from home unsuccessfully.

  How to Behave in a Crowd obviously takes a little while to warm up to, because it’s such an odd and peculiar story — and because many of the characters are unlikable. For instance, Dory’s siblings may strike the reader as being self-absorbed and pretentious, as they chase away outsiders of the family with their intellect and arrogance. However, the story eventually becomes charming and quaint, and rewards the reader with a rich metaphor. I found that the family as portrayed in this book is really about the state of modern-day France. After all, they only watch American TV (eschewing French tradition and culture) and is probably seen by the outside world as being aloof and too smart for their own good.

  In some ways, How to Behave in a Crowd is eerily similar to an earlier 1970s French Canadian film, Mon oncle Antoine. Both stories are about a young man discovering sex and death, though religion doesn’t really play a central role in this book as it does in the film. However, both are darkly comedic and both are bildungsromans, which is appropriate in How to Behave in a Crowd’s case as its protagonist wants to learn German, which may be a point the author is trying to make about how the French culture is being diluted.

  In essence, How to Behave in a Crowd is constructed from various vignettes of small town French life. There isn’t much story, per se, and Dory comes of age as he grows through various events and interactions with people in his family and those who live in his small town (and sometimes beyond). The novel’s theme centers around authenticity — what is a real experience, and what is not? For instance, Dory and his depressed friend find out that a young girl who appeared in a charity video they watched in school is really an actress, though it is unknown if the girl found her acting fame after she appeared in the video making an impassioned plea for money, or if she was always an actress and her role as an impoverished youth was simply a paying job.

  The novel is also about how one achieves real satisfaction in life. For instance, Dory’s siblings who are pursuing their Ph.D.’s find that there are no real jobs waiting for them upon successfully defending their dissertation, other than being a teacher, and they burrow into doing a second Ph.D. to escape from this harsh, unsatisfying reality. In their quest for knowledge, they learn less and less about life and find themselves in a downward spiral as fewer choices (for jobs, lovers or otherwise) become available to them.

  All of this goes to say that there’s a lot to chew on with How to Behave in a Crowd. It is a fascinating and compelling look at French society and also of a family struggling to come to grips with the meaning of life in the absence of others who might help them find a spark. Dory matures as a character throughout the novel, and the real question becomes one of whether or not he is going to become like his bookish brothers or sisters, or if he’s going to forge his own path and experience all the pain and joy that life has to offer. Immensely thoughtful, How to Behave in a Crowd’s success is contingent on watching Dory change.

  That’s not to say that the book isn’t slightly flawed. For instance, it’s hard to really like Dory’s family because, again, they’re just insufferable know-it-alls. Their arrogance is hard to take, and it’s hard to really feel sorry for them as they watch their life prospects slip away. Perhaps, though, that is a point that the author is trying to make — maybe even she’s saying something larger about how modern French society is functioning in the early 21st century by navel-gazing too much.

  In conclusion, How to Behave in a Crowd is a novel that is rich in symbolism and possible meaning beyond the narrative arc of the story. It is, in a way, snidely funny, too. I had no trouble seeing this novel as a foreign film (complete with subtitles!) unspooling in my head. It’s that refined of a read. I’m glad to have had the experience of reading How to Behave in a Crowd, as it took me beyond my usual bookish delights and it allowed me to experience the perspective of another culture in all of its strengths and flaws. How to Behave in a Crowd may not be for everybody, but if given the proper time and meditation on it, it is a pleasant pleasure to embrace, one that heralds the arrival of a dazzling new literary talent.

  Camille Boras’ How to Behave in a Crowd was published by Tim Duggan Books on August 15, 2017.

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• BookPage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/21652-camille-bordas-how-to-behave-crowd#.WqpCn8NuZpg
  Word count: 344

  Web Exclusive – August 15, 2017

  HOW TO BEHAVE IN A CROWD
  The family Mazal
  BookPage review by Carla Jean Whitley

  It isn’t easy being the youngest child. And for Isidore Mazal, being the youngest is further complicated by the five people ahead of him. The elder Mazal kids are smarter than average—perhaps genius-level smart—and while he’s no slouch, Isidore has yet to skip a grade. He doesn’t love to read and thinks it’s weird when his siblings deploy “hopeful borrowing”—taking a book and hoping the owner won’t notice, thereby making the book property of the borrower.

  Sometimes this odd-man-out mentality leaves the 11-year-old ready to run. He’ll pack his things and plot a way to escape from his family. Hopefully they’ll lift their noses from their books long enough to notice he’s gone. But if he isn’t there, who will notice them?

  In her first English-language novel, French writer Camille Bordas examines a lost family from its youngest member’s point of view. Isidore observes his siblings at great length. Simone, only 18 months his elder, assigns him the task of writing her biography. It’s a job that requires him to ask many questions of his sister. Isidore extends his examination to others around him and begins to notice the things that go unsaid. His only friend, Denise, is obviously depressed and anorexic. Isidore turns to his German teacher, Herr Coffin, for insight into the field. It turns out Coffin isn’t so wild about teaching—Isidore’s chosen profession—after all. The Mazal family neighbor Daphne Marlott is poised to become the oldest living woman in the world when the two Indian women older than her die. After she becomes his German conversation partner, Isidore learns a long life may not be everything it seems.

  Bordas draws complex characters who face the challenging and sometimes mundane issues of daily life. In the process, she prompts readers to look within.

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