Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘May, 2009’

Didier Van Cauwelaert – La Maison des Lumières

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Fiction has always struck me as the perfect place to safely explore unusual ideas – the varying levels of distance between the author, narrator and characters somehow create a space for investigating thoughts which might otherwise seem a bit too delicate to touch directly. Without Humbert Humbert, for example, and Humbert’s intricate fictional universe, would Nabokov have felt comfortable delving into pedophilia? This is definitely an extreme case in point, much like Crime and Punishment or African Psycho by Alain Mabanckou. Most good literature does this in some way or another, with varying degrees of intensity.

Over the weekend, I read Didier Van Cauwelaert’s newest novel, La Maison des Lumières, which attempts to do something similar by offering up a look at one person’s reaction to a near-death experience. Jérémie, a twenty-five year-old baker who was once a famous child actor goes to Venice alone after his girlfriend Candice breaks up with him. He visits the Guggenheim Museum to see René Magritte’s L’Empire des Lumières, Candice’s all-time favorite work of art.

Just at the moment he stands looking at the painting, two things occur: from Jérémie’s perspective (which the reader gets first) he enters the painting, literally and physically steps into one of the window’s of the house in the painting and meets a young woman, Marthe, who gives him back a series of idyllic moments with Candice. When he leaves the painting, it’s to discover he has been brought to the hospital after being pronounced “clinically dead” for four minutes, 30 seconds.

As expected, this event pushes Jérémie out of a melancholy apathy and forces him to confront his past with Candice and his mother, as well as his vision of the future, including his passion for the violin, and his professional and emotional opportunities. Through varying methods, Jérémie re-enters the painting two more times, each time encountering a few other people, people he claims to have never seen before in his life but upon research are revealed to really and truly exist.

Van Cauwelaert introduces a series of ideas throughout the course of the novel which include some of the more conventional explanations for a near-death experience (the influence of brain hormones at the moment of death, religion) as well as more experimental rationalizations: the tachyons (particles which travel faster than the speed of light) of Jérémie’s brain enter into contact with the tachyons of the other people he meets inside the painting, as well as a shamanistic view of humanity as linked through organic matter.

Described in this way, it sounds like there was a strong element of fantasy or science fiction in the novel. And yet when reading the book, it felt quite straightforward. The narration keeps this under control, I believe, since Jérémie remains as perplexed with these explanations as the reader. They are given to him by various colorful characters he meets along the way, a very safe method, I think, for Van Cauwelaert to offer a range of explanations for a highly-disputed, and emotionally-charged experience.

So here is where my criticism of the book comes into play. The story, as outlined above, is quite unique. This idea of someone entering a painting (a wonderful fictional re-creation of the emotional experience of art) to learn something about their life is a powerful and interesting idea. And the transformative potential of a near-death experience is obviously huge. At the same time, the increasingly complex interweaving of Jérémie’s experience with the life of Magritte and the woman Marthe from inside the painting is also skillfully executed.

Unfortunately, I felt Jérémie’s actual real-life story lacked substance. It was like Van Cauwelaert got a little too wrapped up in all these different scientific and pseudo-scientific ideas and somehow lost the threads of what to do with the human element of the novel. There was great potential in this book – huge, in fact – for a vivid and creative exploration of how a near-death experience might affect someone’s outward and inward perspective, as well as a real possibility of creating meaningful parallels between art and its impact on reality but in my view this was never fully realized.

La Maison des Lumières is Van Cauwelaert’s nineteenth novel and has done well in France. I won’t be surprised to see it translated in the near future. There was something very appealing about the book and the writing, despite my feeling that it was somehow unfinished. Van Cauwelaert won the Prix Goncourt in 1994 for his novel Un Aller Simple (A One-Way Ticket), and I think I’ll look this up next to broaden my view of his writing.

André Brink – The Rights of Desire

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Before I go back to Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, I’ll pause today to write about the book I finished last night, André Brink’s The Rights of Desire.

I mentioned earlier that I had some trouble with The Rights of Desire and I’d like to write about that, mainly because I’m still working out what exactly bothered me about this beautifully-written book. Certainly the writing was a pure pleasure to read, thoughtful sentences and precise but poetic description. The first-person narrator in The Rights of Desire reminded me of a John Banville narrator except less guarded and much less apologetic for any melodramatic expressions.

The story is simple – a widower living in Cape Town with a full-time but live-out housekeeper is forced by his two sons (who live far away) to take in a boarder as a sort of protection against illness, violence etc. He grudgingly agrees and then settles on a 29-year old woman, Tessa. The situation is made a little more complicated by the fact that the house is haunted by the spirit of a young slave woman, killed some 300 years earlier. The book accepts the presence of this ghost and so the reader must as well – the truth of her existence is never called into question, at least not as one of the book’s essential questions.

The book is about Ruben falling desperately in love with this young woman, and then spends its time in a kind of meditation on the ups and downs of their relationship. Ruben and Tessa are products of their respective generations. So in that sense they are presented as opposites – Tessa is sexually promiscuous, free with drugs, fairly irresponsible and burdened with a fatalistic, if not negative, outlook on the future. She is also full-of-life, unafraid and beautiful. Ruben is quiet, reserved, awkward with people he doesn’t know and represents a way of life no longer relevant to the contemporary situation he finds himself in. But he does appear to have a firmly anchored moral compass.

The situation in The Rights of Desire reminded me of something Nadine Gordimer took up in The House Gun – this idea that contemporary society has lost its purpose in a whirlwind of violence, that violence (both outward and inward) has become a means of expression for individuals of recent generations. And Brink explores this notion carefully and respectfully, without positing any easy answers or trying to solve what reveals to be a complex dilemma.

My fundamental criticism of the novel comes from the fact that I found Tessa unworthy of Ruben’s unconditional love and so as I was reading, a lot of the novel’s tension eroded out from under me. Right from the start, I could not understand what Ruben saw in this young woman and so why should I care so much about how much he cared for her. Everything about her persona was constructed – she lied consistently and manipulated Ruben (whether consciously or not) and Ruben was aware of this but somehow didn’t care. Their conversations seemed utterly one-sided and yet Ruben unequivocally declared that he’d met his soul mate.

I can easily see how a 66-year-old man could fall in love with this kind of 29-year-old woman for his own reasons (not saying there aren’t some exceptional and deserving 29-year olds out there, but this particular one was not) and so I tried to look at the book from this perspective. What was Brink trying to express about Ruben, and about this idea of consuming violence, through this lopsided relationship?

The story of the slave girl runs parallel, I think, to this. She was involved in a dangerously obsessive relationship with her master and now haunts the household as a kind of spy. Which is exactly how Ruben behaves with Tessa. So here are three individuals, exercising their “rights” of desire – Ruben in indulging his complicated lust for a woman who should technically be off limits, Tessa in accommodating her various lovers, and the ghost by reminding the entire household of the perilous undercurrents of passion.

I’ve always believed that rights come with responsibilities, at least from a socio-political perspective, and this is a book very much about South Africa’s socio-political brokenness. Looking at the novel this way, Ruben’s unbalanced relationship with Tessa and Tessa’s compulsive promiscuity are examples of a deeper collective distortion.

So despite my frustration with how Ruben’s attachment to Tessa is represented, I’m willing to believe it served a larger purpose and that it was actually meant to disturb me. Regardless, I’d like to look further into Brink – especially in relation to Gordimer and Coetzee.

the transit of venus – initial thoughts

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Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus is one of those books which asks to be enjoyed as carefully and as slowly as possible. There is no way I could have rushed through this book, instead I took it in small sections, appreciating the strange quality of Hazzard’s writing style and the unconventional way she told her story.

In the simplest terms, this is a novel about all the different ways we fall in love over a lifetime. Ted Tice adopts his love of Caro as a solid fact, something to be borne along with the other realities of his day to day existence. Caro’s loves are more varied, less idealistic but much more sensual. Grace, Caro’s sister, starts out in one seemingly safe direction and then is jolted with an unexpected situation much later in her life.

But the book also has a finger on the zeitgeist of post WWII, on the varying experiences of class, on motherhood, on power relationships between individuals, on the omnipotence of despair, and the significance of hope. These other elements stack up behind the novel’s firmer focus on those love narratives, giving them a deeper texture and structure.

Hazzard’s unique narrative style took me some time to get used to but overall I loved it (and not only because I kept experiencing echoes of Nadine Gordimer). She has a way of describing something in terms I’d never imagined before, or giving a feeling to a scene that would take me by surprise. In that sense, her characters were intriguing. They experienced their lives in ways which asked me to pause and consider whether I understood, or whether I’d ever felt something similar.

There were a few moments I wondered if Hazzard hadn’t gone a bit too far, making things more weighty or obscure than she needed. The book seems to hinge on the idea of the great mysteries of our hearts, the peculiar ways we engage with those around us, and every once in a while I felt she was letting that sentiment get carried too far away. But for the most part, this tone made the book both beautiful and complex.

I have some more to write about The Transit of Venus, and will put my thoughts together for a second post later this week. I’m thrilled to have discovered Hazzard, a writer previously unknown to me but who has three other novels waiting for me to enjoy. I have The Great Fire already and will pick it up in a few months to delve into Hazzard’s curious and lovely writing once again.

Honoré de Balzac – Eugénie Grandet

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I finally finished Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet Friday afternoon. I love how Balzac writes, even when he does narrative summation – something which can overwhelm sometimes in older novels. But Balzac manages to keep the tension alive even when he’s covering several years and lots of events in a single paragraph. Perhaps it’s the power and inflection of his narrative voice. Or the sheer confidence of his storytelling.

Eugénie Grandet is primarily a love story. Although I would argue it has two main characters. First is Eugénie, who falls in love with her cousin. And second is Eugénie’s father, whose love and devotion to his money gives Eugénie’s less-experienced passion some stiff competition. And of course the book isn’t really JUST a love story. It’s about greed and family legacy, about small-town social machinations, religious devotion and martyrdom. This last theme is what I found myself reading for the most. Balzac makes Eugénie into a perfect martyr and her movement toward that decision (because really, it’s her choice) was fascinating.

Eugénie Grandet is filled with all sorts of surprises. The first surprise to me was Eugénie. Balzac describes her in the beginning as an ignorant fool. And she is. But she develops over the novel in such a way that you almost wonder whether he was teasing you to start. For example, the very first time she’s confronted with a difficult choice (between her father’s wishes and her desire to please her cousin), she doesn’t hesitate for a second to find a way around her father. She may be ignorant but she very quickly digs her heels in and decides to do what will make her happiest. That self-will transforms itself into something self-defeating later on as she accepts a series of disappointments.

Something else I find surprising is the way Balzac doesn’t pull his punches. His entire project was to reveal the multi-faceted face of humanity and he doesn’t disappoint. Eugénie’s cousin Charles is a good indication of how well Balzac understood human nature. Charles evolves over the course of the novel and the result is fairly disappointing until you realize how many clues Balzac leaves along the way. Charles’ character develops as a result of circumstances and personality, two aspects of human existence Balzac grasps nearly perfectly.

It’s funny to me how much more often people give themselves Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu as a project. I think Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine might be even better – more entertaining and just as insightful. They are very different projects, if we take the author’s intention as a starting point, but both deal with the fundamentals of existence. A comparison of these two monumental works would be fascinating – I won’t be volunteering for that job anytime soon, just throwing the idea out there for someone else!

Any takers?