Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘November, 2011’

a bookish week

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Last week was my birthday, and I had an exceptionally bookish week that resulted in a nice haul of new books and a stack of Jane Austen BBC adaptations – none of which I’d actually seen before.

The first in the haul—and the only book I’ve started to read already—is Charles Dantzig’s Pourquoi Lire? (Why read?) I’d never heard of Dantzig until this lovely little book found its way into my mailbox. A gift from my mother-in-law, who is very good at selecting books I wouldn’t otherwise have come across. Dantzig’s homage to reading is so far really lovely. Funny and clever and sweet. Each chapter begins with another reason to read, like “We read because of love,” about falling in love with characters and stories, or “Read to get past the halfway point of the book” about those interminable books of 1000 pages and how we love them and hate them at the same time. This book promises many little gems.

The rest of my new book stack contains:

  • Chris Bohjalian – The Double Bind
  • Damon Galgut – The Quarry
  • Téa Obreht – The Tiger’s Wife
  • Julia Otsuka – Buddha in the Attic
  • Siri Hustvedt – The Summer Without Men
  • Colm Toibin – The Empty Family
  • Jeannette Winterson – Written on the Body
  • José Saramago – The Elephant’s Journey
  • Michael Cunningham – By Nightfall
  • Orhan Pamuk – The Museum of Innocence
  • Julian Barnes – The Sense of an Ending

I am really looking forward to reading the Otsuka, as I’ve already sampled two chapters in recent issues of Granta. The book is about mail order brides coming to America from Japan, and written in the first person plural. The samples I read simply blew me away, like this passage from “The Children” (Granta 115):

Sometimes we tried cutting off all our hair and offering it to the goddess of fertility if only she wold make us conceive, but still, every month, we continued to bleed. And even though our husband had told us it made no difference to him whether he became a father or not – the only thing that mattered, he had said to us, was that we grew old by his side – we could not stop thinking of the children we’d never had. Every night I can hear them playing in the fields outside my window.

 

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Nina-Marie Gardner – Sherry & Narcotics

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This week at Necessary Fiction, I had the pleasure of reviewing Nina-Marie Gardner’s début novel, Sherry & Narcotics:

It isn’t easy to publish a love story these days—somehow we’ve all decided this is the stuff of cliché. As if the back and forth success and failure of looking for love doesn’t concern most people most of the time. Which is why Nina-Marie Gardner’s Sherry & Narcotics stands out in its genre of contemporary urban fiction. Here is a novel whose central movement is fixedly concerned with a young woman and a young man and whether or not the two will find a way to be together. (…)

There’s an argument to be made for Sherry & Narcotics as a coming-of-age novel for Generation X.  Mary is very much a member of that tribe—financially and geographically independent, at ease in the greater world, with more choices and possible connections than any of the previous generations, and yet, true to the Generation X crisis, slow to negotiate her way to emotional adulthood and at risk to the dangers of her precious independence.

Read the full review here.

 

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finishing Agota Kristof

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It takes a lot of courage to read Agota Kristof before going to bed. Or so I am learning. When I read the first novel in her trilogy, Le Grand Cahier (The Notebook), I read it in two sittings, both during the afternoon and there was enough distance between the dark scenes of the story and my bedtime that nothing overlapped. I am quite susceptible to nightmare. And the same thing happened when I read the second book, La Preuve (The Proof). But yesterday evening I sat down with La Preuve to skim through it quickly again in preparation to start the final book in the trilogy, Le Troisième Mensonge (The Third Lie), and realized that the story was too unsettling for that hour of my day.

Kristof’s world is brutal. I’ve read many a book with difficult subject matter (Pat Barker’s Blow Your House Down comes directly to mind), but Kristof is absolutely unflinching in her indictment of human nature, especially because her writing is so simple, so undemanding. This is what I wrote about Le Grand Cahier:

Such a deceptively simple little novel. An easy story – two boys must leave the city to live in the safer countryside during the war. Yet, the novel quite simply explodes with little horrors. I tried to find another word to describe it, something other than horror, but I can’t. The book is horrifying.

This whole trick about not knowing what the book is about is key. Of course the book is about WWII, about the separation of families, about violence, about neighbors helping neighbors and neighbors hurting neighbors. It’s a classic war story. But it’s also wholly unique.

Part of what makes Le Grand Cahier so unique (and compelling, if I’m allowed this reviewer cliché) is the perspective, the way it pretends to be written by the boys themselves. They are telling their story as one of a series of imposed exercises, recording events in their notebook. They’ve promised the reader to give nothing but the facts, no interpretation, no emotion. It’s an effective way of giving the reader the “story” but their very lack of emotion or explanation creates this effect where the reader begins to see too much in the boys’ silences, begins to understand what Kristof is actually getting at. And it isn’t nice.

The second novel, La Preuve, picks up the story at the moment the twin boys separate (one having crossed over the border, the other staying behind—how they get across is extremely disturbing) and follows Lucas, the one who stayed behind, for the next fifteen years or so, through two very important relationships, until he is forced to leave the town.

What I found so unsettling about this second novel is how cleanly Kristof depicts her psychopath. There isn’t another word for Lucas. To my standards, he’s a monster. As shown in Le Grand Cahier, he spent so many years exorcising his emotion away that nothing remains. Or at least only the primal impulse. The original want or fear or anger, and then he acts on that original feeling without allowing any other emotion or rationale to mediate. When he wants something—a woman, a young child to adopt—he does the simplest, quickest thing to fulfill the desire. Including murder.

On the other hand, Lucas is capable of infinite tenderness toward the small child he adopts. He does everything in his power to give this little boy a happy childhood. It doesn’t work, of course. The child is miserable for a variety of reasons, and as intense and emotionally frightening as Lucas. Their story can only be a tragedy.

Although I have to be careful about when I sit down to do it, meaning not before sleep, I’m quite eager to read the final book. Despite the difficult nature of the events in each story, I’d like to see where Kristof is going with her meditation on psychological trauma. Lucas isn’t normal, that’s easy to see, but the world around him is nearly as horrific and I’m curious whether she is making an argument against a certain kind of emotional abandonment or about a specific system of political oppression. The trilogy begins during WWII but extends thirty to forty years beyond. War is awful, yes, and the cause of significant personal trauma, but Kristof seems to be suggesting that redemption on any level is never possible.

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Virginia Woolf – Diaries, Vol. One: 1915-1919

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Usually, when I read an author from start to finish, I try to avoid biography. It isn’t that I believe biography doesn’t or couldn’t inform my study of their work, but I prefer to take the work on its own terms first. I chose not to do this, however, with my Virginia Woolf read, mainly because her journals are so detailed, and really, they are as significant a contribution to her oeuvre as her fiction writing. (I have not taken on her essays or letters… yet. I’m tempted to integrate them now, especially as she consistently references both her reading and her critical writing.)

I’ve just finished Volume One of her diaries, which covers 1915 to 1919. What strikes me first and foremost about her diary writing is how different it is, on the whole, from her fiction. She has a very sharp and perceptive mind, that is evident in both, but she must have worked extremely hard to maintain her particular style in fiction. All writers have a “style,” of course, but Woolf was experimenting and so she breaks with traditional narrative structures and chronologies, even rhythms of language and thought. And then when you read her diary and see how concise it is, how succinct and detail-oriented her personal narration was—and I can only assume that personal narration is a writer’s most natural and instinctive voice—it only serves to highlight the affect of her fiction style.

The other thing I find interesting is that before reading her diaries, I might have been inclined to put her in the mad-genius category. This is a category of artist I am wary of because I do not believe that genius requires madness. To be fair, it is also a stereotype that is often imposed upon an artist by others and while some might enjoy the label there are those who fight it. I admit that I was curious to see how Woolf negotiated this tension, or whether it was even an issue for her in her lifetime. So it is curious to me that there is very little self-reflection upon her depressive tendencies, at least in these early diaries, even after the long depression she suffered between 1915 and 1917, during which she could not write at all. The first few months of entries written after this illness are markedly different from her usual journaling style, but she does not comment on the lapse herself except obliquely, and only on a few rare occasions.

I don’t know how frequently Woolf lost herself completely to depression—perhaps it began to happen more often or maybe she writes more about it as she grew older. I’ll be curious to see how the subject evolves throughout her diaries. I know about, but haven’t yet read her essay “On Being Ill” and I suspect she concentrates her thoughts here (another reason to order her complete essays!)

Going back to where I started, I’m happy to find that reading her diaries doesn’t interfere in any way with the experience of reading her fiction. It is easy to maintain a line between the two forms, and there is just so much to admire in her diaries – character portraits, anecdotes, thoughts on writing, exquisite descriptions of nature.

I do wonder about one thing, however, and maybe some of you know: do Woolf scholars believe that Woolf wrote her diaries knowing they would be public some day? How personal are they?

 

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giving up the crazy

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When I first started writing about books and reading back in 2006, I fell into a rhythm almost immediately, writing three times a week and keeping up with several reading projects at the same time. Not to mention the hours I spent reading and commenting on other literary blogs and, in general, being engaged in the online literary community. For any of you who visit this space regularly, you might have noticed that things became very quiet late last spring.

The obvious reason for my blogging slowdown has to do with a certain wonderful little girl who has just turned two. Parenthood has put the crunch into timecrunch for me and I’m still adjusting to the shock. I should also mention that Switzerland, for all its lovely scenery, good food and fun people, isn’t as social as many of its neighbors. Many women in Switzerland stop working when they have their children, and most only continue part-time. Child care structures are rare and hard to get into. We waited a year and a half to get 1.3 days at our local daycare and made do with a part-time nanny so that I could work 2.5 days a week. Since August, I’ve had three full days of child care and this has felt like a luxury. (A luxury that won’t last very long – our nanny is moving on in January and our daycare cannot pick up that extra day. Did you all hear that yelp of frustration?)

However, I know I’m not the only parent in the world with this kind of problem, and the details of juggling parenthood and profession isn’t what I wanted to write about, even if it’s related.

I read an article last week over at Salon called “How to say ‘Balls of Gold’ in French?” (I’m not linking to it because they don’t need to see my personal rant here about childcare and literary passions, but if you’re interested in issues of translation, I’d highly recommend it). The article basically reminded me what a futile struggle I’ve been engaged in for the last few years as I pursue both a fiction writing career and literary translation work.

Everyone knows that making it (whether financially or critically) as a writer of literary fiction is extremely hard, maybe even sometimes impossible. OK, I accept that. Fiction writing is for the extra hours. But somehow I missed the memo on realistic literary pursuits and so went ahead and added literary translation to the mix of “extra hours” work, as if this could somehow become the day job to keep my writing afloat. Ha! In the Salon article, translator David Bellos says, “You can’t really live as a literary or book translator in the English-speaking world as a full-time job and also sleep.”

And he’s talking about people who actually get book contracts—not aspiring translators (ahem, that’s me) who have only published a few short story translations and spend half their time querying publishers with samples we’ve completed in our free time, in the hopes of getting a ridiculously low-paid book contract. Before having my daughter, I had enough time to keep up with both paid work and my unpaid literary passions. Being a freelance commercial translator and editor (and teaching the occasional scientific writing class) meant that I could contribute to my household income as well as have two or three hours a day to write fiction and translate any number of writers I hoped to see make their way into the English-speaking world.

But since then – goodness, I’ve been running on a lot of hope and not much reality. I suspect I’m not alone in this tendency, but I’ve spent the first two years of my daughter’s life thinking I could keep up the same level of activity as I had before she was born. I never told my commercial clients that I was working half-time (because they would have found another translator), and so there were many weeks that I crammed 5 days of work into 2.5 days. On the days that I didn’t have childcare, I literally raced to my desk anytime she went down for a nap, and then worked most evenings after she was in bed and every morning before she would wake up. I even took a Dictaphone on walks—I would find a very quiet country road near the farm, let the dog roam, prop my Ramuz or whoever up onto the stroller, and dictate a translation while my daughter watched the trees and listened to the story. This may seem romantic, but it’s also a little crazy.

And amid all of this, I finished a novel and took on more reviewing work than I’ve ever done before. I’m sure you can see where this is headed—somehow all these different candles reached the end of their wicks this summer and I’ve been cutting back on superfluous activities ever since, this blog included.

But the realization I came to after reading the Salon article was that I’ve been engaged in a double impossibility for the last few years—it’s sad for me to admit, but there is simply very very very little chance that I’ll ever make it as both a literary fiction writer AND a literary fiction translator. And all the more so because I’m dividing my increasingly restricted time between the two. And each requires infinite dedication, infinite patience, an extremely thick skin, and a willingness to continue even though very little money will ever get made.

So, obviously, I need to make a choice. And really, when I think about it, there is no choice. When I get to the end of my day, if I haven’t written any fiction, I get a little panicked. Even if it’s only 500 words, even if it gets deleted the next day, writing fiction is the only professional accomplishment that means anything to me. And publishing is notoriously hard; no one is going to go waltzing into my hard drive and pick up the stories and books I’ve got sitting there. The work required to get published is nearly equal to the work involved in actually creating the story and getting the words onto paper.

Now, I’m not even going to start discussing the insecurities involved in sitting on two, soon to be three, novel manuscripts that no one seems interested in publishing. Suffice it to say that I’m perfectly aware of the fact that to give up literary translation in favor of writing fiction means I’m giving up something I love to focus on something that may never work either. This reality has occasioned many a sleepless night.

In a perfect world (or my version of a perfect world), literary translation would be a valued profession and there would be hundreds of publishers around the world jumping at the chance to make literature available in as many languages as possible. Even with the recent noticeable upswing in interest in translated literature in the US, I don’t see it becoming easier to make a living as a full-time literary translator. So I am ducking out—for now. Maybe, hopefully, someday I’ll try again.

Now, before this post devolves entirely into a pity party for me (too late, yes, I know). I will point you toward an essay written over the summer by Alison Anderson, one of the most accomplished French-English translators working today (and a really lovely person to boot). Anderson presents a sound analysis of the problem underlying the difficulty/impossibility of literary translation as stable career. Her essay is both thoughtful and invigorating.

I can only hope that because this issue is getting raised (by Anderson, by Salon, by the report that Anderson references in her essay), thus proving that the literary world is at least paying attention, maybe something will change in the future.

 

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