Reading, Reading...And Watching Television

It's essential to understanding me to know that I'm one of that tribe of ultra-white, snails and pâté de foie gras and quiche-eating, quadrilingual, Mozart-loving, wine and beer and tea and coffee-drinking, Transcendental Americans who have never owned a television set.   So, with YouTube and Hulu and Netflix on my computer, the last several years, I've been catching up on much that escaped my attention during the last couple of decades of the last Millennium and during the first decade of this.  Recently (last week in fact) I discovered the charming TV series Angel, which began airing in the late 90's, and whose first nine episodes featured a brilliantly acted half-demon, "Doyle," portrayed by Glenn Quinn, who had been (yes, I remember) Mark, Becky's boyfriend, in the sometimes shatteringly funny series Roseanne.  So, like the intemperate Netflix addict I am, I watched all nine hour-long episodes within a couple of days.  And, still hungry, looking to see what else young Mr. Quinn had done, I found that he had died of a heroin overdose on the 3rd of December, 2002, at the age of 32.  I feel not a little like one who has just been slapped in the face.  

So, turning to library books at hand, I find that I've read all the dozen or so Maigret detective novels on the shelves at the main library (although I've just thought to check the catalog to see if there might be more in the stacks or at other branches)--and what a pleasure they all have been!--I thought I might enjoy the curiously bourgeois and Protestant young Gide's heterosexual adventures with similarly boring young Frenchwomen (after all, when at university, I did enjoy, or at least appreciate ["Belle analyse dans un style charmant!"] La Symphonie Pastorale); but I found, after a few pages of each, that I was slogging my way joylessly through them and reading them at arm's length (like one whom some nameless stench, that he doesn't want to recognize or acknowledge, is suffocating) both Isabelle and La Porte étroite):  So at last, much disappointed, expecting nothing, ready to drop it at the first glimmer of smug, heterosexual vulgarity, I picked up and started reading my final random selection, Françoise Sagan's  Musique de Scenes [goddamned accent grave is not functioning].  And Lo!--Enchantment:  What delight, nay breath-taking exhilaration, there is in good, clean, French, swift-as-lightning prose!   I would at any rate rank the eleven or twelve pages of 'Le Chat et le Casino' with any dozen or so pages of Voltaire, Mérimée, Flaubert or du Maupassant, as sheer, electric miniature perfection of telling phrase and compression.  Not even the divine Voltaire could have invented so exquisite a detail as "le parfum de l'horrible eau de cologne dont se couvrait Helena" which had given the errant husband "le plus grand mal a faire disparaître."  As one who has once or twice had to stand under a shower for hours to rid myself of the noxious odor of a cheap perfume, I am infinitely grateful to our observant authoress.