Pronunciation Issues; Characters in Literature

This is a thing that's been in my head a little more often recently...

So, a few years back I was off at an elementary or middle school to get some work done for my then "current gig/adventure", and as I was leaving I noticed there was a book sale going on. It wasn't the school's library selling off the discontinues, rather UCLA had gathered the books from their own bowels and donation centers, and had donated them to be sold in one of these settings.

If you, fair reader, know me or read these blogs regularly enough, you know that I have a problem with books and can't pass up a book sale or indie bookstore or tiny rez-museum shop with at least checking on their offerings.

And, at the time of this specific gig/adventure, money was tight. I knew that the $1.25 in my pocket (left over from bodega coffee) would be all I had to throw down the collection-addiction well.

It didn't take long perusing the paperback shelves for me to find something worthy of fifty valuable cents:

Camus is one of my favorites, for many reasons. Always an outsider, he dabbled in philosophy, politics, wrote plays and novels....The Starnger I realized when rereading it in my mid-20s (as opposed to AP English in high school) is a masterpiece of absurdity and has been appropriated by (us) existentialists as a foundational text (even if Camus would (and did) disagree).

Anyway, The Plague is great: it follows an outbreak of bubonic plague in Oran, one of Algeria's Mediterranean port cities. The main character has a name that I had a hard time pronouncing in my head. I pride myself on pronouncing names from all walks of life with impeccable precision, and it's usually only when I'm with Ryan and we're talking Belgian beers when I'm regularly off.

Seeing the name many times on every page led me to ask my father, who is serviceably fluent in French for a few tips. The name, which is a surname, is "Rieux." I may have even written a post about back then.

As I mentioned, this happens rarely.

Even with my current gig/adventure.

Now I'm reading another great book by one of my short-list authors and again there was name that I had a difficult time reading, or pronouncing it in my head. This is the book:

David Mitchell wrote Cloud Atlas, which I hear was better than the movie, which I haven't seen. The book Cloud Atlas is freaking great, and it makes snse that in order to get a movie of that story done you'd have to force some romance onto pieces that don't have that...

Here, in The Bone Clocks, the name of our heroine's daughter is the one that tripped me up, send me to Google for help. The name: "Aoife."

It must be all those vowels, in both names. "Rieux" is pronounced like a perfectly French 1.5 syllable word, "REE-oonh." (I put the 'n' in the end there to mimic the natural nasalation of French.)

"Aoife" is Irish and means something like "strong beautiful girl" and is one of the woman warriors, or princesses, of old Irish lore. (The mom/protagonist's maternal family is from Cork.)

It's pronounced "EEE-fa."