Passé continu

Treasures culled from Labro this morning: crapahutage ("tramping about") and garde-chiourme ("slavedriver"). I've finally reached the halfway point after, what, a month or so? We're just now getting into what I thought the whole book would be about: the life of an ordinary combat soldier during the Algerian War. Since the author is a journalist, the first third of the book focuses on his privileged position working for a military publication (more analogous to Yank than Stars and Stripes) in Algiers, but he gets scapegoated following the assassination of a friend and sent back to barracks.

My slow progress in this and The known world was frustrating me, so this week I resolved to devote at least a solid hour each evening to my reading. As a result, I'm now done with the Jones. I'm not sorry I read it, but I much prefer his short stories (something I confirmed by reading another immediately upon completing the novel). As I hoped, his digressions did calm down after a while (otherwise I'd've given up), becoming longer and better integrated. He used them to good effect in delaying the resolution of the storyline of the first character whose fate I really began to care about and then again at the climax when dealing an end to two more. But the tragic arc of his focus character never really engaged me, which blunted the payoff.

I'm now weighing whether to start on another Woodrell novel or Past continuous (a translation of Thời gian của người) by Nguyễn Khải. The latter sounds like it might be one of those tedious works which is read more for what it "says" about a country's recent history than for actually being a good piece of fiction, but it's relatively short. Then again, so is the Woodrell. monshu says I should flip a coin, but I'll probably just read a bit of both and see which one grabs me. Or alternate.