Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘August, 2009’

this week's reading notes and some Ramuz

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Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie – Why has it taken me this long to read Rushdie? This is definitely a book to read slowly, however, so I’m taking it a few chapters at a time in the afternoons. I am surprised at how much I’m enjoying the narrator’s tangential way of telling the story. I usually dislike interruptions of this kind, moments which reveal the seams behind the main story, but the voice is really strong and it’s clear that these moments when the narrator draws attention to himself will come to be meaningful later on. I do find myself at a bit of a loss for this particular novel because my knowledge of India’s history is so poor.

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens – Yesterday I read one of the best scenes I think I’ve ever read in any classic novel to date. The scene occurs when a wine cask falls off the back of a cart in a Paris street and breaks and everyone in the shabby, run-down neighborhood jumps on the chance to drink some of the wine. Dickens has people building mud walls to catch the flowing wine, soaking it up in their handkerchiefs and sucking on the cloth, lapping at puddles or even chewing on the wood from the barrel staves. It’s a thoroughly disgusting image, but so vivid.

Nouvelles et Morceaux (Tomes 1-5), C.F. Ramuz – Every day I read a few more Ramuz short stories and select one or two to begin translating. I’ve finished three this summer and am sending them around for publication – although I’m finding it difficult to get contemporary journals interested in short stories written in the early 20th century. There are more and more journals interested in translation these days, something I definitely applaud, but most journals are publishing contemporary fiction from around the world, not classic short stories.

Anyway, this week has me working on a lovely story called Les Deux Vieilles Demoiselles (The Two Old Ladies). Ramuz does atmosphere so well and the story takes place on a summer evening, right at dusk, when the stars first appear and when these two sisters have finished their needlework and are sitting at the window looking out into their neighbor’s garden. I love his description of how the shadows of the impending night creep across the room:

Alors le jour s’en alla lentement depuis le fond de la chambre jusque là où elles étaient. On vit les meubles entrer dans l’ombre, on dirait qu’ils se noient ; d’abord ils entrent par le bas et l’ombre monte comme l’eau, et enfin, ils sont recouverts.

[And so the daylight slowly departed from the back of the room up to where they were sitting. The furniture entered into the shadow, it appeared to be drowning. At first, the base of each piece enters and the shadow rises like water, until eventually, they are submerged.*]

A bit later the ladies see their neighbor’s daughter, a girl of barely sixteen, sneak out to the orchard and meet a young man. One of the sisters jumps up, embarrassed and indignant, while the other begins to stare longingly at the scene. The one sister escapes to the kitchen while the other watches the couple. She tries to hear what they are saying and can’t, but suddenly she discovers she can imagine their conversation. She finds the words deep inside herself that she might have once said to some young man. Except, of course, she never got the chance. The scene ends with the sisters trying to console one another, although Ramuz makes it clear that this is impossible.

*I’m still tweaking this passage and making some decisions about how I want to handle it. Ramuz is notorious for his use of the French subject on, which is tricky to make work in English the way he uses it. A literal translation of that second sentence would be: One saw the furniture enter into the shadow, one would say they were drowning. He consistently brings a larger audience, so to speak, into the scene instead of allowing for a straightforward narrator. And you’ll notice he switches tense in that last sentence…just to make my life easy, of course.

podcasts and Edith Wharton

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No one ever mentioned that reading would become a problem in late pregnancy. I don’t mean reading in and of itself, thankfully, but rather, finding a comfortable position to sit and read for any duration of time. Particularly in the evening. I’m used to settling down on the couch or curling up with a book in bed and reading for at least an hour or two each evening, and much to my surprise, this has become incredibly difficult. Mostly because the most comfortable way for me to relax at the moment is to lie on my left side with about a hundred pillows propping me up from every direction. Unfortunately, it suddenly becomes very awkward to hold a book.

Watching a movie, on the contrary, is very easy. My husband and I don’t own a TV, but we love movies and so watch them on a laptop. And we’ve been going through a bunch of Agatha Christie films and shows. Because of this we’ve been having an ongoing debate about David Suchet vs. Peter Ustinov. I think I’m a confirmed Ustinov fan, although I think Suchet is incredible as well. I might be biased, however, by my real-life appreciation for Ustinov, who was an absolute linguistic genius.

Back to the topic at hand – I have managed to do some reading before bed using my Ipod and I’m enjoying a selection of short stories offered by Librivox as well as The Classic Tales podcast. The other night I listened to an interesting short story by Edith Wharton called The Fulness of Life. As the story opened I was at first surprised by Wharton taking up such a metaphysical subject as a woman going to heaven and dealing with happiness in the afterlife. But as the story continued, I realized this story dealt exactly with Wharton’s overall project of marital bliss and difficult choices.

In the story, an unnamed woman dies and goes to heaven. When she arrives, she’s overwhelmed with the beauty of paradise and the chance to experience what she calls, “what it means to really live.” Her conversation with the guardian spirit reveals that she lived on earth in a ho-hum marriage with a man who, although kind, was not her intellectual equal, and that she never experienced true passion. To this declaration, the spirit says:

“that every soul which seeks in vain on earth for a kindred soul to whom it can lay bare its inmost being shall find that soul here and be united to it for eternity.”

As expected, the woman is overjoyed. And soon a man appears – her kindred spirit. They discuss things for a moment, finishing each other’s sentences and getting more and more excited. Until the woman discovers that when the man who was her husband on earth dies, he’ll be alone in paradise to make his way and find his own happiness. The woman realizes that although she was never fully happy with him while they lived, he believed she was his soul mate. So she knows that by leaving him in the afterlife to pursue her own happiness, she’ll be deserting him.

So she is left with a difficult choice. I won’t give away the ending exactly but if you’re familiar with Wharton at all, I suspect you can guess what this woman decides to do. I can’t help thinking it particularly cruel or cynical of Wharton to bring her view of marriage into the ever after. Her heroines never, ever get a break, do they?

Jeanette Winterson – The Passion

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Thank you to Bibliographing for introducing me to Jeanette Winterson. I’ll be dutifully tracking down every single one of her fourteen or so books, both fiction and non-fiction. Any suggestions on where to begin from those of you that already know her work?

It took me all of two days to read The Passion. Not only because it is a slender little book, but mostly because I was loathe to disrupt the atmosphere the book created. It was both highly realistic and extremely magical, and I love a book that can embody that paradox without becoming awkward. It managed to accomplish this feat by embracing those emotions we continue to consider mysterious – namely, love, but also trauma and how humans cope with a full range of disappointments and disillusions.

I don’t want to give away the details of the story except to say that The Passion is an historical fairytale – set in Napoleon’s France as well as in Venice. It’s about Henri, an earnest young Frenchman, and Villanelle, an unusual Venetian, and their respective passions. Despite the historical nature of the story, reading The Passion felt more like reading contemporary, experimental fiction. Another reason I enjoyed it so much.

Someone else will have to tell me if this is characteristic of Winterson’s style but the prose in the novel had a weighted and lyrical quality. Key phrases were repeated throughout, each time accruing slightly more meaning. This is a risky technique, because often the opposite can occur and the phrases can come off sounding cliché. This didn’t happen with The Passion and I think this is mainly due to Winterson successfully creating a fantastic, fabulous, nearly-carnival ambiance.

On her website, Winterson writes this:

The past is strange. We have never been there and we can never go there. I have never recognised the past as a document, rather I understand it as a kind of lumber room, full of trunks of old clothes and odd mementoes. There are as many narratives as there are guesses.

She writes this in a description of her other novel, Sexing the Cherry, but it strikes me as relevant to The Passion as well. I love this idea of the past as something a writer can re-construct both faithfully and unfaithfully – precisely because we can only guess and invent and imagine. We can never visit the past, we can only be bold enough to try to give it meaning and shape. To attempt to make something out of the remnants which make their way forward into our present as clues.

thursday reading notes

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These warm summer days leading up to my maternity leave see me doing much less than usual. I’ve got a few work projects to wrap up before Sept 1, but I am otherwise taking it very easy. This does mean I am reading quite a bit, but I haven’t been able to drum up much energy for long, lengthy reviews. I feel quite guilty about this because I’ve recently read some excellent books.

I finished Graham Swift’s Waterland and Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations – both wonderful, both intricate and complex narratives. For a change of style, I read Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meat which was quite funny in places, but also serious and one of the best representations of Japanese and Japanese-American culture I’ve read in a long time.

For work I’m enjoying a slim volume of essays by Jacques Chessex called Ecrits sur Ramuz as well as a collection of writings about Ramuz by his friends and colleagues called Ramuz vu par ses amis. Both are excellent and giving me much to think about as I work through my translation. Not to mention I’ve been dipping into Ramuz’s journals a little bit every day and becoming increasingly impressed with his extemporaneous writing style. He began his journals when he was seventeen and right away they show what a conscientious thinker and writer he would soon become.

And finally, today, I’m happily starting Part III of Jeannette Winterson’s The Passion and thoroughly entranced with her writing.

Alexander Trocchi – Young Adam

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Oneworld Classics, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite publishing programs, recently republished (2008) a novel by the Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi. The novel, Young Adam, was originally published in 1954 and features a highly-unreliable narrator named Joe.

Young Adam is divided into three parts and it isn’t until you turn the page to Part 2 that you realize that Joe has just spent eighty pages distracting you from the real story. The novel actually opens with Joe and his employer Leslie finding a dead woman floating in the river next to their barge. They fish her out, call the police, mull over the event a bit and then the novel changes direction completely, detailing Joe’s obsessed attempt to have an affair with Leslie’s wife.

But when Part 2 opens, you realize that Joe and the dead woman are much more intricately connected than he ever let on. And that the novel is actually about this relationship and Joe’s role in her death. You also realize that Joe’s interest in Leslie’s wife Ella dates from almost the exact moment the other woman’s body was removed from the river and that previous to that moment, he hadn’t much considered her worth his time. 

Although quite a short novel, Young Adam packs a bizarrely powerful punch. On the one hand, the writing is often awkward. Joe’s narrative style is as inconsistent as his fact-telling. He moves from a gentle, poetic lyricism to using stilted, clumsy sentences – often in the same paragraph. The introduction tells me that Trocchi did this on purpose, and links it to his proto-postmodern style. I must admit that it created a bumpy reading experience, although I eventually accepted this as part of Joe’s camouflage, a way to deceive or at least confuse the reader. On the other hand, Joe’s attempts to disentangle himself from the responsibility of the woman’s death are psychologically rich and complex and gave a lot of meat to this very slim story.

Joe’s relationship with the different women in the novel is where Trocchi seems to provide most of the analysis for Joe’s character. Joe is profoundly misogynistic. Although this may be oversimplifying things, since he also seems to be just as misanthropic. I couldn’t find an example of Joe enjoying the company of any other single person in the novel. But he uses the women in particular, which makes it easier to examine this aspect of his personality.

Trocchi is considered a member of the Beat generation and Young Adam reflects that tradition, although I found it much darker than other samples of Beat literature I’ve come across. I wonder if this is a cultural difference, since I often find that Europeans allow for a more cynical and somber worldview than Americans. In his literature, Trocchi seems to be experimenting with both form and content, but there is no joy, no heady giddiness in that experimentation.

In fact, it could be argued that his portrayal of sexual freedom results in a heartless, unfeeling situation where both partners are locked inside their own experience, without access to the other. If Trocchi was interested in exploring the Beat themes of rootlessness, non-conformity and free expression, his assessment of the power granted in that freedom seems overwhelmingly pessimistic.

 In total, Trocchi has ten novels, although it seems most of these are dismissed as experimental erotic fiction with little literary merit. His other “serious” novel, Cain’s Book, is a chronicle of heroin addiction and caused quite a sensation when it was first published in 1961. Apparently, critics are still undecided as to whether Young Adam or Cain’s Book should be considered his finest work. I’ll be interested to see what I think when I can get my hands on a copy.

Jane Austen – Emma

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Last week, after snatching it off the shelves of my favorite second-hand book shop, I sat down and read Jane Austen’s Emma in one sitting. I happen to like my Austen this way, in big healthy bites with very few interruptions. And reading Emma was no different, although the experience was heightened a bit since I’d never read it before and kept trying to figure out who Emma would end up with. To say I figured it out fairly early would be both true and a lie. I had my suspicions from the beginning, but all my recent Wharton reading put me on guard and I wondered if Austen wasn’t about to shock me with an unexpected twist of some sort.

Let’s see…what did I like about Emma? First and foremost, it was just plain enjoyable to immerse myself in Austen’s 19th century England. The vista she presents to her readers is so wholly complete, so detailed, that it’s difficult not to wish to have lived at this time period, or at least to be able to experience firsthand the world she describes. And Austen really is an expert storyteller, so just moving from one scene to the next and working through the various ups and downs of the story provides an all-around satisfying reading experience.

I also enjoyed the structure of the novel and the way it keeps the reader from knowing for absolutely certain which gentlemen the author has selected for her heroine. Compared to her other novels, I felt she kept the hints about Emma’s future husband decidedly subtle. With that looming story a bit more subdued than usual, she was free to construct a series of adventures to help Emma do some much-needed growing up.

So here is where I admit I found Emma a bit of an annoying heroine. I realize this is what Austen intended, that we get frustrated with Emma’s well-intentioned but hopelessly irresponsible manipulations. She serves us a good lesson – even clever people, when too-often indulged will lose their objectivity. In short, cleverness isn’t enough. Patience, empathy for others and honest self-reflection is just as important. To some extent I was happy to play along and then feel suitably proud of Emma for recognizing the gravity of her heedless meddling and then earnestly mending her ways.

And there was something about Emma’s perfect independence that worked against her. She is in no real danger, ever, of losing something she really cares about. Compare that to Elizabeth Bennett, Elinor Dashwood, Catherine Morland, Fanny Price or Anne Elliot – all of these women must come face to face with real, life-altering disappointment at some point in their stories. Emma’s realization that she is at risk to be disappointed is so quickly rationalized into existence and then her actual disappointment so wonderfully short-lived, that it was hard for me to work up any real concern about her well-being.

Finally, though it may have been my mood when reading the book, I found Emma to be much less funny than say, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice or Northanger Abbey. Those three books had many moments of laugh-out-loud comedy, provided by a contingent of marvelously eccentric characters with either sharp tongues or oblivious blunderings. Emma’s father and Miss Bates provided some well-needed humor on occasion (both decidedly in the latter category) but that was about it.

All in all, Emma will never be my favorite Austen. But I’m very happy to have read it and I’m sure I’ll re-read it at some point. Perhaps it will grow on me with a second reading. Now that I’ve read them all, Pride and Prejudice remains my favorite with Northanger Abbey and Persuasion tied for second and Sense and Sensibility coming in a very close third. I love the characters and the story, but I believe the narrative gets a bit baggy around the edges in this one. I quite like the intellectual equality Austen gives to Emma and her eventual husband, so I think Emma will come next in line for that reason alone. Unfortunately, I’ve never been completely satisfied with the ending of Mansfield Park so Fanny and Edmund remain my least favorite Austen couple.