Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘March, 2010’

John Fuller – Flying to Nowhere

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I wish I could remember where I got the recommendation for John Fuller’s tiny little novella, Flying to Nowhere, originally published in 1983. I got the book a few months ago but only grabbed it off the shelf on Monday evening because I wanted to read something completely new, something I had no idea about before opening the cover.

This is what greeted me:

The three novices walked fast down the margin of the hay field. In the great heat the tall grasses stood feathery and still, until the striding sandalled feet parted and crushed them. The hems of the woollen robes caught the seed tips and dragged them. Stems bowed and sprang, sending out tiny clouds of grass fruit.

That last image – tiny clouds of grass fruit – is lovely, don’t you think? The book has barely enough pages (88 in my edition) to earn being called a novella. It’s more like a long short story. But what a story.

In the field with the three novices are the harvest girls, scything grass, and they avoid looking at the novices, but the novices stare at the girls. One of the novices, who collects his observations in a notebook, thinks the following when he looks at the girls:

Their strokes are like the strokes of the knife on used vellum. The erased word serves its turn and is restored like dead grass to the elements. The field is the book of nature to be freshly inscribed by our brother the sun.

I just love that image of erasing a word from old parchment. Now the tone of this novice is a bit self-important, and clearly he’s keeping himself at a contemplative distance from the everyday tasks of the world about him. Later, his detachment will come back to haunt him.

Despite this bucolic, peaceful introduction the story, things turn dark quickly. It was impossible not to think of Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose because Fuller’s story is set at an isolated monastery (on a Welsh island) and involves a creepy mystery. Pilgrims to the island have been disappearing and the Bishop has sent a man, Vane, to discover what’s going on. Which he does, eventually, but at great cost. And what’s actually going on is much more interesting than the little bit that Vane manages to uncover.

The story of Flying to Nowhere was wonderful – unexpected, slightly otherworldly situations and unique characters along a spectrum of innocent to evil. The reader guesses quite early what might be going on but there is no sense of disappointment at this easy understanding. The language Fuller uses to tell his story was so exquisite I didn’t mind if in the end the “mystery” was somewhat obvious. The mystery is completely beside the point.

Fuller is a poet and that influence is really strong. So much so that there are a few moments of confusion. This could have been a source of frustration but with Flying to Nowhere I was more than happy to just get lost in the imagery, even if it meant I wasn’t exactly sure what was being inferred, or even what was happening at certain moments. I would love to read this strange, lovely little book with a book group sometime, because it would be interesting to hear and discuss different interpretations. Especially of the final scenes…

The novice’s story is really only a tiny part of the whole book but I’ll finish with this quote from one of his sections because I really liked it:

The windows of the cells were so small and high that the moon simply cast its ghostly patches on the ceilings without generally illuminating the sleeping shapes and their few possessions. And yet the outlines seemed quite clear in the half-darkness; the scrubbed bowl, the scowling cherubs at the shoulders of an oratory, the metal clasps of a book on a small table.

The novice who was shortly to undergo the night of examination reached out his hand and touched one of the clasps. His book was not finished, and he thought it might never be finished. The reflections in it of things as they really were could be no more, he decided, than insufficient reflections of things only as they seemed to be, reflections of reflections, moonlight patches at a pathetic remove from the sun.

Jacques Chessex – L'Ogre

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This month my French book group is reading Jacques Chessex’s novel L’Ogre (The Ogre), which won the Prix Goncourt in 1973 (I believe he was the first non-French writer to win the prize). With 22 novels, 27 books of poetry, 4 collections of short stories, and a full range of other writings, Chessex is one of Switzerland’s most famous writers, perhaps only second to Ramuz. He just died this past October, after a long and renowned career.

L’Ogre is the third Chessex novel I’ve read, and probably my favorite. He is known for having a thick, erudite style, and the book stayed true to that aesthetic, but it was also infused with tightly-contained, accessible moments of pathos.

I like short, intense narratives where a relatively brief moment of someone’s life is put under a microscope. In L’Ogre this moment begins the day that Jean Calmet’s father dies. The reader learns immediately, in the scenes detailing the death and the funeral, that Dr. Calmet was a perfect tyrant, that after living with his formidable personality for so long, his wife is nothing but an empty husk, that his children don’t know how to relate to one another and that his youngest son, Jean, is deliriously happy at this death. The book then follows Jean for the next few months as he attempts to construct a life in his new fatherless situation.

L’Ogre reminded me of Anne Bragance’s novel Casus Belli, only this time focusing on the father-son relationship. Both books take up this issue of parental tyranny and how destructive it is for the entire family. Jean has suffered his entire life because of his father, but when his father dies, presumably liberating him from that oppression, instead he is lost, bereft of any points of personal reference. Until this moment, he knew he was “useless, stupid, etc.” but without his father to maintain his identity, he suddenly has no idea who he is.

This is not a happy book, and it does not have a happy ending. But it does grant the reader a certain measure of pleasure. I was greatly involved in the details of each scene, which Chessex renders with great skill – the shadows and sounds of the house where Calmet grew up, the broken conversations between Calmet and his mother, the dreary loneliness of a busy café, the bleak sexual exchanges between Calmet and his much younger girlfriend, the memories of a terminally-ill student.

Finally, the book is set in Lausanne and the village of Lutry. Chessex, who was born and raised here and spent his life working as a teacher in the cantonal high school, does a beautiful job of capturing the stern façade of the canton of Vaud, with its strict Calvinist influences and overall Protestant work ethic.

I don’t expect I will ever become a huge fan of Jacques Chessex. I’ll have to think about this idea more, and read more of his work, but if I compare him to Ramuz (which I can’t help doing) he seems less able to depict his characters, especially the despicable ones, with quite as much love.

A quick note for anyone who is interested – several of his books have been translated into English, including L’Ogre which was given the ironic title, A Father’s Love. I can’t help thinking this is a bit of a shame, the image of the Ogre-Father in the book is absolutely wonderful, fairytale-esque and powerful. A shame not to let the original title stand.

digital media and our mental libraries

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Two recent posts on digital media have got me thinking:

First, this post at @craigmod talks about “formless content” and “definite content” and how this relates to printed books vs. e-readers. Mod’s goal is to come up with a way to determine what type of content should be digitalized. It’s an interesting discussion about how our perception of publishing might and/or should change in the digital age, and relates specifically to the ipad.

Biblioklept responds here, with some valid questions of a few of Mod’s ideas.

I have just a little something to add about a notion that Mod only quickly touches on, the experience of holding a book vs. an e-reader and how that might influence our reading and our after-reading experience. I am actually really curious how having mostly all of our stories on one device will change how we approach our “personal libraries”. Right now, the books I keep in my home all have a second-layer of texture (the covers, the paper texture, the smell of the book, the marginalia right on the page as opposed to somewhere else on the device…all of which varies from book to book) on top of the story as I remember it after I’ve read it.

I’ve yet to separate that experience from the imagined landscape of whatever novel or story I’m reading. Added of course to where I put the book upon finishing it. This all matters to me because I do go back and reference the books I’ve read, either in discussions, in reviews, while I’m reading something else. When I begin that mental process of reflecting on a book, I do imagine its form and location, however briefly, before I move further into a consideration of the story.

I’ve now read several works on my Kindle (The Maid by Yasutaka Tsutsui, Nicholas Nickleby…) and the reading experience is fine, comfortable, smooth, but when I want to refer to any of these books, my mind actually visualizes my Kindle, which is a bit stale, and of course identical for each book, before moving on to the layer of the text. And when I think about Nicholas Nickleby, as a whole text, for example, it exists for me as a kind of semi-invisible block of data inside the limbo of my Kindle as well as a vibrant, emotional narrative landscape. It has a very different physicality compared to my other printed books and this will always be a part of my overall reading experience.

Perhaps this is because I have a photographic memory, that I’m a visual learner, so the method I use to absorb the story is an integral part of my experience with a particular text. But it’s an interesting question for me, because maybe, one day, if most of my library is housed on a small number of digital devices, the experience of revisiting favorite works, of mentally cataloguing my library will be vastly different than it is now. I don’t think it will be necessarily bad, but it will be quite different. Flatter, I suppose. Although Mod’s point is that the ipad will allow for new textures, so there is an additional question there. But I do wonder whether any digitally-created texture, displayed on a flat screen will be able to give me a three-dimensional mental texture other than the container that displays the content?

Maile Chapman – Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto

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From page one of Maile Chapman’s Your Presence in Requested at Suvanto, the reader is invited into a somewhat surreal and disturbing landscape. I usually try to avoid using qualifiers like ‘somewhat’ but I feel it’s important in this case. This is realistic fiction, but one that highlights the more bizarre, fantastic elements of its unique situation.

The novel is set in the 1920s and opens with the arrival of Julia at Suvanto, a hospital in rural Finland. The hospital is an ordinary hospital, except for the top floor which serves as a temporary home for women in need of a rest cure. This isn’t a psychiatric ward in the strictest sense, but the women are a bit unhinged, emotionally fragile, unable to take care of themselves. Many of the women are Americans, wives of executives in the flourishing timber industry. Others are Danish, some are Swedish or Finnish. Julia is a troublemaker from the start. She does not want to be at Suvanto and does her best to disrupt its established routines and upset many of the other women. 

Aside from Julia, the novel’s most important character is Sunny, the head nurse on the top floor. Sunny is American and chose to come and work at Suvanto to escape from painful memories of her former life in the United States. Sunny is a tightly controlled individual with impeccable nursing skills, never upset, never flustered. She is the perfect foil for the ‘up-patients’ with their leaking emotions and often childish behaviors.

I’m sure you can guess this balance will necessarily be disturbed, and it is, as soon as a new obstetrician arrives from the United States with grand ideas for furthering his career. He wants to help Finland learn the Caesarian section technique and he’s willing to practice on non-maternity patients, removing the uteruses of older women past child-bearing age. Many of the up-patients, including Julia, fit this profile.

This plotline is the largest part of the novel, insomuch as it feeds the ending (see my post on Suvanto’s relationship to The Bacchae), but there are many smaller stories going on around it, and together they create this wonderfully eerie tension.

The writing is also impeccable – careful, subtle descriptions, an uncommon narrative perspective blending a voice-driven omniscient narrator with the third person plural, and attentive pacing. The voice-driven omniscient narrator is a real treat, smooth and flawless, with wordy insights (often verging on judgments) into the inner lives of each character. I haven’t been this impressed with début fiction in a long while. I can’t wait to see what else Chapman will come out with.

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman, Graywolf Press, April 2010

second teaser about Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto

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Now, this may be because I have literally been swimming in Ramuz since last summer, but Maile Chapman’s Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto reminded me of my favorite Swiss literary fellow.

The similarity comes from the narrative perspective. I’ve mentioned before how Ramuz’s use of the third person pronoun on (one, you – universal, we) can drive a translator to distraction. On isn’t a terribly complicated concept, grammatically speaking, but in the Ramuzian universe it has a special job.

In a Ramuz text, the on is often used to represent the voice of the village, which is just a slightly more intimate form of the narrator. And the narrative shifts back and forth between a straight omniscient and this subtle all-village voice. So it has this collective consciousness aspect to it, adding an invisible “watcher/describer” to whatever story is being told. But it’s very subtle, since it is only rarely a direct “we”. I love this about his work, since he’s so often getting at the psychology of small village life.

Now, Chapman’s novel, which is set at a hospital in rural Finland, uses the first person plural. But it uses this perspective with great subtlety, which is, in my opinion, the only way to really get away with the first person plural unless you want to give your book a gimmicky texture. But what happens is that the narrator is both a member of the cast as well as a watcher of the story. Very much like Ramuz.

I realize I haven’t given any details about what this novel is about yet, and I’ll get there soon, I promise. What I do want to say is that Chapman’s clever use of the first person plural creates a kind of chorus, which chimes in every once in a while throughout the novel. It’s a bit spooky. It is also how she manages to create this fantastic echo of Euripedes’ play The Bacchae, without overtly mimicking that story. One event in Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto does directly reference The Bacchae, but the careful construction of this chorus using the first person plural emphasizes the connection much more subtly, much more powerfully.

Friday reading notes

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My Swiss fellow just passed me The Logic of Life by Tim Harford. Quite an interesting book about rational choice theory. I’m often wary of this kind of easily-accessible ‘popular science’ book, because I just assume everything will be oversimplified and glib, but I like the way the author is trying to get his readers to reconsider a lot of their conventional thinking about why people do the things they do.

He begins with a hot issue – teenage sexuality – and argues that when teenagers change their sexual behavior, it is the result of rational decision making and not necessarily deteriorating morals. The example he uses to illustrate the idea comes from evidence that teenagers nowadays engage in more oral sex than say twenty years ago, a statistic that many people find absolutely horrifying. Well, Harford argues that faced with the greater risks of contracting HIV/AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases, teenagers have collectively changed their sexual behaviors to avoid those greater risks. They’ve worked out that the cost of engaging in regular sex is actually higher, and so they make the trade.

He uses the same theory to look at a myriad of other issues, including drug addiction, crime rates, love and relationships, and workplace behaviors. It’s important to note that Harford defines a ‘rational’ choice as something resulting from a process of cost/benefit analysis…so a seemingly insane decision can be rational. It is an interesting book and he is careful to point out that his theory applies to groups, but when used on an individual basis can break down. Human beings, individually, are more complicated than rational choice theory. I like that. I look forward to reading through the rest of his examples…

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My Blog Stats page tells me that the other day someone made their way to Inc. Logo. by googling “Nancy Huston and Marie Vieux Chauvet”. My curiosity is now so aflame, I can’t stand it. Is Nancy Huston working on something that has to do with my favorite Haitian writer? I know that Huston was near New York City in the seventies (for university) and I know that Vieux Chauvet spent her final few years in New York…did the two ever meet? But Huston moved to Paris in 1973 and Vieux Chauvet died in 1973 so maybe they just missed each other.

Could I be even more geeky?

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My mother-in-law passed my Swiss fellow and me a book last week called Lettre à D, Histoire d’un Amour by the French social philosopher/writer André Gorz (pen name Michel Bosquet). I haven’t finished it yet but plan to this evening. As the title suggests, it’s a love letter, written by Gorz to his wife. In the opening pages he writes that he was shocked to realize one day that of all the writing he’d done over the years, he’d never written the story of their love, which he says was the greatest and most important story of his life. A lot of what he writes is particular to a writer / nonwriter relationship. Gorz and his wife committed suicide together in 2007, after she was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Here is a generous excerpt from the publisher Editions Galilée. There is an English version (Letter to D.) which was published last May, translated by Julie Rose.

 

Haruki Murakami – Norwegian Wood

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I’d be very curious to hear a die-hard Murakami fan’s reaction to Norwegian Wood. This was my first Murakami, and possibly it was a mistake to read it first. I believe it’s quite different from his other work. I tried reading Dance, Dance, Dance once a few years ago but gave up after a few chapters because I was just too confused. I think, however, that confusion is part of the aesthetic Murakami would like his readers to experience and I just wasn’t prepared for that at the time.

Norwegian Wood, however, isn’t confusing in the least. It is a fairly conventional love story about a young student, Toru, and two women, Naoko and Midori. Toru and Naoko have known each other for a long time because of Naoko’s former boyfriend and Toru’s longtime best friend Kizuki, who committed suicide before the novel opens, while Toru and Midori get together after meeting at a class at university.

The story basically follows Toru to school, on walks with Naoko, on dates with Midori, on escapades into Tokyo with his friend Nagasawa. Loosely, it is about the deterioration of his relationship with Naoko and the development of his relationship with Midori. But I think Norwegian Wood is more interesting when broken down into its themes.

First, the book takes place in the late sixties, at the height of the sexual revolution, although I think we could debate whether that sexual revolution included Japan in the same way as the Western world. In any case, the novel is about how Toru conflates sexual experience and emotional growth and then how he ultimately distinguishes and balances the two.

Second, Norwegian Wood takes a frank look at suicide, a troubling aspect of Japanese culture. Murakami’s discussion of suicide is interesting in and of itself, but it also prompts a related discussion on whether a person has obligations to the past, to the people they have left behind. Much of Toru’s growth is bound up in the idea of his being able to step forward into the future or bound to elements of his past.

Yes, I enjoyed and appreciated these aspects of the book.

But I feel pretty underwhelmed about the novel as a whole. This is perhaps a bit nitpicky of me, but I even found the opening introduction awkward…why bother opening the novel with 38 year-old Toru sitting on a plane in Germany if we’re never going to go back there? Or if that frame is never going to inform the rest of the story? I like narrative texture when it’s meaningful…and I suppose you could argue there is a small commentary on the power of memory in those opening paragraphs…but I’m not convinced it was necessary.

I won’t go into a laundry list of the other things that distracted me from fully enjoying this novel. But I would like to know where I should go next…The Wind-up Bird Chronicle? Kafka on the Shore?