Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘April, 2009’

Jean-Louis Fournier – Où on va, papa?

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For those of you who read my post from Friday, I did manage to get through Où on va, papa? over the weekend. It turned out to be a relatively smooth read once I could take some personal distance from the book. This was really the only way for me to read it – to take myself and my own intangible, half-defined worries about impending parenthood away from my reading experience. And really, I think Fournier’s story deserves to be treated on its own terms, without putting any of the reader in there. Eventually, as I read deeper into his experience and began to understand how difficult it must have been for him to write the book, there was simply no room left for any consideration about me. As it should be.

As I mentioned before, Où on va, papa? is a memoir about what it was like to raise his two mentally disabled sons. His honesty in terms of his experience is one of the most disarming elements of the book. A combination of anger, disappointment, guilt, frustration and a complicated love. There is humor in the book, but his humor is the uncomfortable kind, a humor of grief. He uses humor a bit like a weapon, a kind of protection. I think as long he says the worst thing first, no one can take him by surprise.

The book is really a collection of tiny little flashes, short reflections or anecdotes that move more or less chronologically from the birth of his first son, Mathieu, followed two years later by the shock of having a second son, Thomas, with essentially the same level of handicap. They eventually have a third child, although they considered terminating the pregnancy until a doctor advised them otherwise. The doctor actually tells them that having a third handicapped child won’t change much for them in the long run, but that the chance to have a normal child would mean they wouldn’t have ended on a failure. Can you imagine? Fournier tells this short story without condemning the doctor, yet I think it’s clear how he felt when you see how acidic his narration becomes and how he ends the anecdote with an uncomfortable joke:

Notre chance s’est appellé Marie, elle était normale et très jolie. C’était normal, on avait fait deux brouillons avant. Les médécins, au courant des antécédents, étaient rassurés. Deux jours après sa naissance, un pédiatre est venu voir notre fille. Il a examiné longuement son pied, puis, tout haut, il a dit, « On dirait qu’elle a un pied-bot… » Après un petit moment il a ajouté, « Non, je me suis trompé. » Il avait certainement dit ça pour rire.

[We named our non-failure Marie. She was normal and very pretty. Which was expected, we’d made two rough drafts first. The doctors, aware of our history, were reassured. Two days after she was born, a pediatrician came to see our daughter. He examined her foot for a long time, and then announced, “It looks like she has a club foot…” After a short moment he added, “No, I must be wrong.” He certainly said this to get a laugh.]

Some of the book is written like a conversation between Fournier and his two sons. It’s clear he harbors a huge amount of guilt for what he imagines their life must have been like. His oldest son, Matthieu, dies at the age of fifteen. His younger son, Thomas, fades away in an institution. Fournier can’t seem to forgive himself, or fate, for that matter, for putting the three of them through this difficult experience.

Où on va, papa doesn’t have little gems of wisdom for anyone in a difficult situation. It is intensely personal, avoids any and all platitudes, and doesn’t come to any satisfying emotional wrap-up. I can’t help approving of the honesty in that. There simply aren’t answers to most of Fournier’s questions.

I often think of memoir as a means to catharsis. I envision the writer sitting down at the end of his or her life, or after some significant experience, and going back over the details of what happened, mining that time period for what it taught them, what it brought to their understanding of their life and purpose. Fournier’s take on this exercise doesn’t come with any real sense of catharsis; it is so much more raw and unprocessed. Less a meditation on his experience and more a testament.

Just a last note to finish up, the rights for Où on va, papa? have been sold to an American publisher, so hopefully in the next year or so an English version will become available.   

 

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William Boyd – Any Human Heart

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William Boyd’s Any Human Heart is a curious project. It is fiction, but fiction which attempts to mimic non-fiction. Written in the form of a journal, the story begins in England of the 1920’s with Logan Mountstuart’s childhood and follows him then until his death in France in 1991. The book is ultimately less about Logan as an individual as it is an exposé of the twentieth century.

In some sense, this journal style is slightly disappointing. Initially, Logan’s boyish narrator reminds us of Stephen Daedulus in many ways, a bit more irreverent perhaps but quite as impressionable. It is easy for the reader to become attached to this narrator and therefore expect the novel to follow a more conventional storyline. There are many books written in diary form that don’t mirror an actual diary, and those tend to make better fiction.

But a real journal often drops the threads of its story as the narrator ages. It isn’t often a coherent narrative – despite the continued familiarity of the subject. People lose interest in friends, stop caring about certain interests, move on, grow out of their preferences. Boyd allows many of the original characters to come back again and again throughout Logan’s life, but ultimately the story revolves more around the events of the twentieth century than it does around Logan’s hopes and expectations.

Although in fairness, this is really Boyd’s project – how to reflect and embody the great changes of the twentieth century in a single individual. Logan could be a stand in for anyone of that generation. His life is both extraordinary and completely mundane. And really, so are the events that come along to shape it – love, success, disappointment, true love, war, adventure, prison, loss, sorrow, renewal, poverty, friendship and finally peace. The ups and down of a century, therefore a lifetime.

So how does this make for a reading experience? The book is meticulous with its details of the changing times, especially in terms of life’s accoutrements – housing, dressing, eating and media. This is a really rich aspect of the novel. Also, Logan is a writer, both of fiction and for newspapers and journals. So his character reflects a preoccupation with minutiae – his own interior emotional life (for the fictional part of his art) as well as exterior events (for his journalistic reporting). That balance creates a nice tension, keeping us interested in Logan and what happens to him, but also ensuring we keep an eye on Boyd’s twentieth century project.

Any Human Heart also includes a fair share of humor, most of it delivered in knowing winks to the reader. Logan continually encounters famous real-life figures of the twentieth century – Picasso, Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, members of the British royal family, Ian Fleming and many others. Aside from the comedic elements of many of these scenes (Logan dismisses Virginia Woolf as a complete shrew, for example, and is kissed by Evelyn Waugh at a party) these moments add a great texture to the book, anchoring it as a pseudo-artifact of the twentieth century. Yet Logan remains a fictional creation, an “everyman”, which places him on the reader’s side of history.

a short story for today

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I read a lovely short story this morning out of Alain Gerber’s collection, Les Jours de Vin et de Roses. Gerber is a French author with an impressive list of novels and essays; his non-fiction work centers on jazz and he works for the French radio. Les Jours de Vin et de Roses (1984) is his only short story collection, it not being a popular genre in most of Europe – something Smithereens was bemoaning the other day and a subject on which I couldn’t agree more. I’m a big fan of the short story for how it can distill a moment into something larger, something representative of an entire lifetime.

 

Gerber’s story Mon fils l’écrivain [My son, the writer] does this exceptionally well. The situation is simple – a son has come out from Paris to visit his father in the small rural village where the older man has retired. The story is narrated by the father. When they sit down to lunch, the son pulls a book (his own, a recent publication) out of his bag and hands it over to his father. He mentions there is a dedication but the father quickly changes the subject of their conversation. The book sits on the edge of the sideboard throughout their entire meal and both men are keenly aware of its presence but unable to bring it up again.

 

Later, they take a walk to collect mushrooms. And again the son tries to bring up his literary career. He mentions he might actually get an award for this new novel. Again, the father changes the subject. The son mentions the book’s dedication, says it’s a nod to something they share between them – a kind of memory. And the father answers:

 

A mon âge, ce ne sont pas les souvenirs qui me manquent!

[At my age, I don’t need any more memories!]

 

It’s a horrible scene. Full of this awkward, broken feeling between the two men. The son is trying very hard to engage with his father and the father recognizes all this but can’t react. He’s literally unable to accept any offering from his son. They return to the father’s house and eat an omelette with the mushrooms they’ve just collected.

 

The dinner scene provides a clue as to what makes the father so reserved. They sit silently at the table, the son searching for a subject of conversation. The father muses that he’s always eaten in silence, that it doesn’t bother him, that he wasn’t allowed to speak at his own father’s table. This reflection takes him one step further to a kind of evaluation of the kind of father he was, but then he quickly rejects the utility of that kind of thinking. And comments to himself that he would never have made a good writer –  he sees no use in opening a can of worms. Of course the son’s book is still lying on the sideboard. At one point the father gets up to get a bottle of brandy.

 

J’ai vu mon fils tressaillir lorsque je me suis approché du buffet pour y prendre la bouteille d’eau-de-vie. Il est possible que je l’aie surveillé dans la glace, mine de rien. Il est même possible que j’aie tout fait pour qu’il croie que j’allais chercher le livre.

[I watched my son start when I went toward the sideboard to get the bottle of brandy. Perhaps I was secretly watching him in the mirror. Maybe I even led him to think I was going to go pick up the book.]

 

The rest of the story just follows these two through to the end of the son’s visit. Their parting is, again, very tense. Very sad. Gerber manages with just a few sentences to reveal how impossible it is for the two men to communicate. The father comes off as very cold and distant, but just after the son leaves the reader is given a glimpse of the father’s real thoughts. His son is finally out of his sight, but the father continues to see him, imagines exactly what he’ll be doing.

 

 

Mon fils monte dans le train en première classe, avec près d’une demi-heure d’avance. Il choisit un compartiment vide et se demande avec angoisse s’il le restera jusqu’à la fin du voyage. Je le connais bien. Je n’ignore rien de lui. Il va tirer de son sac un autre exemplaire de son livre. Il en lire quelques pages au hasard et pensera qu’une fois de plus, il a échoué dans sa tentative. Il pensera cela à cause de moi.

[My son steps into the first class compartment of the train, nearly 30 minutes early. He selects an empty wagon and then wonders, anxiously, whether it will remain that way for the entire trip. I know him well. There is nothing I don’t know about him. He will take another copy of his book out of his bag. He will read a few pages at random and once again, he will think his project failed. He will think this because of me.]

 

The story continues on for a few more paragraphs, giving just a few more subtle clues as to why the father behaves this way toward his son. It’s quite a short story – just over 2500 words – but there is so much here about generational misunderstanding…the father doesn’t even know what the son writes about, but he’s simply too afraid to look. He assumes their experiences are far too disparate to ever meet on common ground. And in fact, because of his fear, he creates differences that don’t even exist.