Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘October, 2009’

Sarah Orne Jewett – The Country of the Pointed Firs

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Having no experience whatsoever with Sarah Orne Jewett I took her book off the shelf with only mild interest. I have a Dover Thrift edition, which weighs nearly nothing and could be easily mistaken for a bound short story. The evening I took the book down, I needed something I could move easily through from beginning to end and which would hold my interest through a predictably sleep-interrupted night. So it was quite fun to start reading and then find myself swept up in Jewett’s cheerful and loving descriptions of the New England she held close to her heart.

The Country of the Pointed Firs is not so much a novel as it is a series of portraits assembled into a detailed collage of coastal Maine at the dawn of the twentieth century – a rugged landscape, a reliance on fishing and the lobster harvest, the deep quiet of a typical Maine personality. I believe it was Jewett’s goal to record the way of life in this area as well as pay a sort of tribute to it. And she does this well, introducing the reader to a series of eccentric characters and describing the landscape with great precision.

The narrator is a writer who has come out to the area on retreat, spending her days either helping her landlady gather herbs or working diligently in an old school house a bit outside of the town. It is difficult not to imagine Jewett as the narrator, especially since the narrator keeps her own personality and internal thoughts so distant from the actual people she is describing. She reflects on them and interacts with them, although not to create a story between herself and them but, rather, to get at the heart of their own story, whatever that may be.

Each little chapter is a portrait of one of the townspeople or a related event and includes such gems as Captain Littlepage’s story of encountering a sort of limbo town where dead souls wait during one of his sea voyages to the Arctic, or a young woman named Joanna who, thwarted in love, rows out to a tiny island off the main coast to live out the rest of her days alone. Most of the sketches involve the narrator’s landlady or the landlady’s mother – two quaintly bizarre women – in some capacity, either introducing the narrator to another individual or providing a suitable event for description.

The Country of the Pointed Firs has no central event or interlaced plot, but each chapter is linked to the rest through its tone and the consistency of the narrator. There is also a harmony in the collage aspect of the book; each chapter fits to the rest like a separate piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The overall effect is pleasant and the book creates a vivid image of a tiny corner of the United States at a particular time in its history.

 

Maureen Myant – The Search

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I’ve recently read several books dealing with WWII which treat the issue of The Holocaust from an unfamiliar perspective, at least for me the perspective was one I’ve had less experience with. What I mean by this is that these books took up the smaller stories circling around the larger narrative of concentration camp internment and provided a backdrop, just as chilling and difficult, to that more well-known piece of history.

The first book was Arnost Lustig’s Lovely Green Eyes, the second was Philippe Claudel’s Le Rapport de Brodeck and now the third, just recently published by Alma Books, is Maureen Myant’s The Search.

The Search begins in Czechoslovakia in 1942, when nine-year old Jan witnesses the execution of his father, the destruction of his town and the internment of his mother and two sisters. (Although never mentioned by name, this event is a fictional recreation of the destruction of the town of Lidice in 1942).  Jan is also interned, at first with his younger sister Lena. However, after a few months, Lena is sent away to be adopted by a German family near Dresden. Jan decides to escape and track Lena. The novel follows his incredible journey from Germany into Poland and back to Germany in the hopes of being reunited with his sister and eventually his mother and other sister.

Although the novel tackles a very difficult subject and involves a series of traumatic and/or violent events, Myant handles her bleak subject with a great amount of respect and care. I think this is mostly due to the narrative perspective. The reader experiences the brutal world of Nazi Germany through Jan’s eyes, and the way he alternates between confusion and fear, and naiveté and optimism creates an emotional texture that is much less aggressive than, say, an adult point of view might create.

In many ways, The Search is not easy reading, although I found myself moving through it smoothly. Jan’s journey is captivating, as are the various individuals he meets who either help or hinder him. The descriptions of war-torn Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany are worth a passing comment as well, as Myant recreates the cheerlessness of those years without resorting to a monochromatic palette. Much of the countryside and the towns are somber and even lonely, but still vividly depicted.

I was most impressed by the ending, which resisted an easy solution – and was neither negative nor positive. What finally happens to Jan, after nearly two years of searching and wandering, was both good and right…and heartbreaking. This seemed appropriate and I think Myant deserves some extra praise for braving a complex but realistic resolution.

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt – Lorsque j'étais une oeuvre d'art

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For my French book group this month we are reading Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Lorsque j’étais une oeuvre d’art (When I was a work of art). The premise of the book is quite simple. A depressed young man makes a deal with a famous artist – instead of killing himself (which the artist interrupted him from doing) he agrees to sign his life over to the artist who would like to turn him into a work of art. Several extremely painful operations later, the young man is the talk of the world.

Of course, fame and fortune as a living work of art do not turn out to be what the young man expected and he finds himself resenting his new position. He eventually realizes the life he’s accepted is worse than the death he escaped. He is admired and talked about and fawned over but his only value is as an object, not as a person.

Schmitt asks the reader to consider some very interesting questions in the novel – about what defines humanity, about the boundaries of art, about one person having an absolute right over someone else, about the importance of outer beauty vs. inner beauty – and I suspect my book group will have a wonderful discussion in two weeks time. However, I felt that had these questions been handled with a bit more subtlety and a bit less grotesque, the book would have been ten times better.

This is definitely a personal aesthetic preference but I found the story oversized, outlandish and excessive. The characters are mostly caricatural and the emotional tone unrealistic. On the one hand Schmitt creates an incredible, fantastical story, an example of social and artistic excess, which in fairness is highly entertaining and sometimes even provocative, and I suppose you could argue that the book is a satire (although I think if this was Schmitt’s overall objective, he misses the mark, especially in view of the ending), but on the other hand, the seriousness of the questions he asks the reader to consider is undercut by the over-the-top nature of the story. I couldn’t help thinking something more realistic might carry more weight.

Schmitt’s prose is accomplished and a pleasure to read; this helped smooth over my frustrations with the novel’s aesthetic. I’m one-for-one with Schmitt at this point, since I really enjoyed his other novel L’evagile selon Pilate (The Gospel According to Pilate). He has plenty of other work for me to try and I’m not ready to give up on him yet.

Many of Schmitt’s novels have been translated into English and I thought this one had too, but not yet. It’s in a bazillion other languages however so perhaps it will make its way into English soon. Anyone else read his work? Any suggestions about what to try next?

a few words on Vanity Fair

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Although it gets a bit baggy for about 150 pages in the middle (which is not much when you consider the overall length of this novel), Vanity Fair is one of the funniest novels I’ve read in a long time. What I find so remarkable about this is that the characters in and of themselves are not especially funny. In fact, most of them are pathetic or cantankerous or pious or frail. The story isn’t all that funny either, a bit too much of a silly marathon to be truly funny. But the narrator, the wonderful narrator is downright, laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Reading Vanity Fair feels like having a snarky conversation over a delicious glass of wine with a most amusing, most dashing friend with an incredible gift for dramatic representation. The kind of person who has so much fun relating the particulars of a given event that it is impossible not to laugh and snigger at the poor fools who were in this person’s vicinity when he or she chose to pay attention.

The narrator is what makes the book complete. Without this snide voice describing the events and making up detailed portraits of each character’s foibles, the story would actually be quite sad. Nice people get taken advantage of and made into pathetic jokes while clever, naughty people have all the fun. Well, at least until page 631 where I’m wondering if the tide is about to change.

Don’t tell me, any of you who have read this already, but I’m incredibly curious whether the narrator will be able to skewer his beloved Rebecca in the end. Until now, she’s gotten off each and every time for her dastardly behavior and it’s clear he loves her more than any of his other inventions. (I’m now freely taking the narrator for Thackeray himself. And if this is the case, if Thackeray was as wonderfully sarcastic and funny as the narrator of Vanity Fair, I’m very sad not to have had the chance to meet him or hear him speak in person).

I can just picture Thackeray laughing over his manuscript, chuckling proudly at each scene and line of dialogue. Becky Sharpe is a fantastic heroine. Thackeray makes her so quick and witty, such a bald-faced liar and opportunist; it’s hard not to want to see her get away with it all. If only to keep the narrator in such jovial spirits:

It is all vanity to be sure: but who will not own to liking a little of it? I should like to know what well-constituted mind, merely because it is transitory, dislikes roast beef? That is a vanity; but may every man who reads this have a wholesome portion of it through life, I beg: aye, though my readers were five hundred thousand. Sit down, gentlemen, and fall to, with a good hearty appetite; the fat, the lean, the gravy, the horse-radish as you like it – don’t spare it. Another glass of wine, Jones, my boy – a little bit of the Sunday side. Yet, let us eat our fill of the vain thing, and be thankful therefor. And let us make the best of Becky’s aristocratic pleasures likewise – for these too, like all other mortal delights, were but transitory.

Luis Alberto Urrea – Into the Beautiful North

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My Central and South American reading project got off to an excellent start with Luis Alberto Urrea’s novel Into the Beautiful North. I read this lovely book in about two days and closed the last page feeling like I’d met some of the most delightful and interesting characters of all my recent reading.

Into the Beautiful North begins in small town Mexico, a dry and dusty place populated with cranky old women and vivacious teenage girls. The town’s jewel is a young woman named Nayeli, full of energy and confidence and the book focuses on her joys and inner sorrows (her father has vanished to the North with the rest of the men from town). Essentially, the novel belongs to Nayeli and her journey to find her father and save her town.

That serious focus is wrapped and twisted around a horde of outrageously quirky characters – Tacho: gay, owner of the town’s café and Nayeli’s best friend, Atómiko: a slang-speaking garbage dump warrior with a heart of gold, Aunt Irma: the outspoken and rigidly feminist new mayor, Vampi: Nayeli’s gothic girlfriend…the list goes on and on and includes border patrol officers, an ex-missionary, restaurant owners and a sweet, bumbling retired semi-pro bowler.

Tacho, Nayeli, Vampi and another girl named Yolo strike out on a journey to sneak into the United States to bring some men back to their devastated small town. They go about this task with an incredible optimism and an almost blind faith in their future success. Their endearing naiveté is almost too hard to believe, so are the number of near-disasters (instead of real disasters) that beset them. Not to mention Nayeli’s near perfect and extremely useful karate skills.  But I felt this only gave Into the Beautiful North a fairytale quality that suited its delicate balance of comedy and tragedy. The novel flirts with real violence, edges close to utter tragedy but somehow keeps every single one of its charming characters out of any real danger.

Almost everyone in Into the Beautiful North is kind. Genuinely kind and ready to help a stranger in need. Now when was the last time a contemporary novel attempted to assert that wild supposition? Urrea’s characters may be flawed and quirky, have sharp tongues or look extremely dangerous, but deep inside they are devoted to one another and to their fellow human beings. As I mentioned before, this gave the book a touch of fairytale but I didn’t feel it ever became trite. No one in the novel is perfect, and most of the characters are faced with difficult choices, but the story flows along over an undercurrent of ‘goodness’, for lack of a better word, that was refreshing.

So now I’ll be leaving Mexico and heading to Guatemala with The Divine Husband by Francisco Goldman.

Larry McMurtry – Lonesome Dove

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I should admit I was a bit skeptical when my book group decided to read Larry McMurtry’s western novel Lonesome Dove. I’ve never been interested in historical western fiction, although I have some fond memories of looking at the stacks and stacks of Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey paperbacks in my grandfather’s house when I was a teenager. He piled them everywhere – on the radiators, on the armrests of his couches, on the windowsills. He loved this type of fiction. But I never tried it. Whenever I would go and stay with him, I always had my own stack of books and never went further than glancing with amusement at the gaudy covers of his. I wonder now what I might have been missing.

Lonesome Dove is an epic novel. It covers thousands of miles and nearly a year in the life of its characters, along with heavy back story for many of them. Aside from a selection of main characters, there are also dozens of minor characters to keep straight as well as an endless parade of small western towns and landscapes. Despite the breadth of the novel, it has a single, fundamental quest at its heart – one man’s desire to move from Texas and settle as a cattle rancher in Montana.

The book moves quickly from one extraordinary adventure to the next – fights, love stories, death, the trials of cowboy life. There is a healthy dose of violence, but also quite a bit of humor. The book has plenty of action and plot-driven momentum, but I was considerably impressed with McMurtry’s rendering of each character. And in particular Gus and Call, the novel’s main heroes.

Woodrow Call is the man behind the great cattle drive and an inscrutable figure. He lives for work, keeps himself apart from the men he leads and is rigidly honest in his dealings with both friends and enemies. His downfall, which the novel reveals slowly, is an inability to accept weakness in himself. I really enjoyed reading how McMurtry explored this idea.

Gus is the perfect foil for Call, a bon vivant with a sly sense of humor and a heart of gold. He is a tough character, but utterly devoted to the people he loves. His friendship with Call is one of the more interesting parts of the book. The two men are such opposites, yet wonderful complements. Gus pushes Call to admit his failures, with little success, and Call questions Gus’ choices and behaviors.

There isn’t a great, hidden meaning to this book. Nor is there space to get lost in the writing. It is what it is. But it does provide a fascinating portrait of 1800’s America, with its violence and peculiar worldview. McMurtry includes examples of everyone and everything: cowboys, immigrants, whores, settlers, criminals, lawmen and soldiers, poor people, women, ordinary men. Sadly, most of the characters he introduces the reader to eventually die somewhere later in the story. But it’s a testament to his skill as a writer that each time, no matter how minor the character, it was difficult not to truly mourn their loss.