Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘September, 2010’

Flannery O'Connor – Wise Blood

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It is very hard not to have a visceral reaction to Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood. This is a messy and bizarre book, but also strangely and deeply funny. I read each chapter often appalled and disgusted, a little frightened and uncomfortable but at several points I burst out laughing. O’Connor’s ability to make me laugh at what was otherwise a gravely serious story is what transformed the reading experience for me, because I found it hard to enjoy reading Wise Blood. It just wasn’t that kind of book.

My experience with Flannery O’Connor is limited to a selection of her short stories, ones which most people have read – A Good Man is Hard to Find, Good Country People, Everything That Rises Must Converge. All very typical of her style and good examples of her ability to mingle a cracking wit with what is otherwise a sad or distressing detail. Who can forget the grandmother in A Good Man is Hard to Find, trying frantically to make something beautiful and religious come out of her family drive while her son and his family are picked off by The Misfit and his partners right in front of her. It is nearly impossible to convey the humor in that story by describing what happens…on the surface it is so awful, but lurking behind every line of dialogue and around each of the characters’ actions is this wonderful absurdity.

In any case, Wise Blood is in the same vein. Although there is something about carrying that mood through 150 pages that makes it more intense. And I’d say the dark bits overwhelm the comic bits so the overall effect is a little hard to take. The story is simple: Hazel Motes has just finished his army tour and has left his empty home in a small town to make his way as a preacher in a nearby “big” city. He preaches The Church Without Christ from the hood of his dilapidated car and becomes obsessed with another street preacher Asa Hawkes (who is not blind, but pretends to be after a failed attempt to blind himself) whose daughter Sabbath becomes obsessed with Hazel.

No one in this novel does what one would expect, and mostly people are mean-spirited and cruel to one another. The story involves a considerable amount of street preaching, a stolen mummy, a man in a gorilla suit and one horrible act of vehicular manslaughter. Lots of symbolism and much of it grotesquely done, which is what O’Connor is famous for. Wise Blood is a gruesome carnival. And as such, a perfect setting for an intensely religious/philosophical meditation.

As usual, I’m less interested in the “meaning” of this novel and how it fits into its tradition (although I am fascinated by Southern Gothic literature in general) and more curious to pick apart the details. I really appreciated the understated quality of O’Connor’s writing. Thinking back on the book, my mind is filled with one spectacular image after another, which is, I think, the effect of the novel’s grotesque, but when I go through the text to pull any of this out, the actual descriptions are simple and straightforward. A lot of her power rests in the dialogue and because her characters are so eccentric, they say eccentric things, which sets the novel’s mood without the narrator having to do much work. The narrator does, however, signal the comic elements to the reader, but with a great deal of subtlety.

I suspect I will always prefer her short stories, but I’m very happy to have read Wise Blood and I plan on reading The Violent Bear it Away, her other novel.

mid-read thoughts on Bragance's "Succulente"

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In 2007, I was introduced to Anne Bragance’s work through her novel Casus Belli about a dysfunctional family. That novel charmed me, both for the depth of its character exploration and because of Bragance’s lovely writing style. Afterward, I hunted out several of her other novels (she has over twenty) and was all geared up to continue getting to know her work but somehow other projects got in the way and I only got around to reading a second novel by her this week.

I am about fifty pages from the end, and curious to see such a huge stylistic difference between this book and Casus Belli. It’s almost like it’s written by another person.

Une succulente au fond de l’impasse, her latest novel, is the story of François and Emma. Forty-something François is going through a divorce when he meets Emma, a prostitute who used to be a champion swimmer. They become friends, nothing more, but very good friends, and then one day Emma disappears…

The book is written in three sections, all in the first person, beginning with François and then about halfway through it switches to Emma. (At the end is a final section in the voice of Emma’s childhood best friend Bénédicte, but I’m not there yet). So far, I find little difference between François and Emma. They each tell a different story, but their language, their emotional register and even their vocabulary is quite similar.

Also, both narratives seem more concerned with the interior reflections of the voice in question than creating a “story” as it were. I don’t always have trouble with an intense interior kind of narration, one which shuns action and the exterior trappings of story, but I suppose it must depend on how the voice works, and most definitely its intellectual and emotional tone. I’m thinking here of André Brink’s first person story The Rights of Desire, or either Eclipse or The Sea by John Banville, even Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – all these novels maintain a strict interior reflective voice, and even a little suffocating at times. And I loved them all. Perhaps I shouldn’t compare to only Anglophone writers, so I’ll mention Nancy Huston’s incredible Instruments des Ténébrès, again partly first-person and intensely interior.

So Une succulent au fond de l’impasse is disappointing so far, perhaps because I get the sense it isn’t trying very hard. Despite their situations, nothing about either François or Emma has managed to reflect on the larger human condition. “Human condition” sounds a bit weighty, but I think that’s what good fiction does – it touches the world beyond itself. Casus Belli dealt with difficult psychological territory, and raised interesting questions about the nature of emotional wounds. The language was also rich and textured and the whole novel was filled with interesting and complicated images.

I certainly won’t give up on Bragance because of this book; she has several others I’d like to try before I decide whether she’s a writer for me. And, who knows, maybe the last fifty pages of Une succulente au fond de l’impasse will reverse all this grumbling…I’ll let you know.

Virginia Woolf – The Mark on the Wall

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The other day I wrote that reading The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf compelled me to chuck all other authors aside and decide, finally, that I would read Woolf for my author project this year. After all my hemming and hawing, choosing Woolf felt so wonderfully, deliciously easy. I’m not under any illusions that reading her nine novels, all her short fiction and many of her essays will be a walk in the park, if anything Woolf provides an exhausting reading experience – her prose is so damn busy – but, I feel the same excitement heading into the project as I have felt in the past for other authors. So I know I’ve made the right decision.

But getting back to what convinced me – The Mark on the Wall. Reading Virginia Woolf gives me the same feeling I get when I step up from the metro in Paris. No matter the neighborhoods and their different flavors, this is Paris. Unmistakably. (Haussmann, Haussmann, Haussmann). I’ve never quite had this feeling anywhere else. And reading Woolf is the same – a few sentences in to The Mark on the Wall and already I knew – the voice, the active, vivid images, those industrious sentences. The skipping and shifting from thought to thought.

Now, as stories go The Mark on the Wall isn’t at all a story. It’s a series of thoughts squeezed between the two tiny actions of a woman looking through her cigarette smoke at a blot on the wall and a man laying his newspaper on the table. There is no conversation, no movement, no “story”.

But as thoughts go, these jumps and meditations and musings are fantastic. Woolf mimics the heady rush of thought, hopping and sliding from one idea to the next. The woman smoking her cigarette (is it Woolf? several clues make me say ‘yes, probably’) contemplates and imagines a messy little war between modernity and nature, men and women, tradition and fancy. At the same time she is engaged with her own intellectual process, aware of her slide of thought and both indulging and checking it as she goes along.

The pace of the story is frenetic. There is nowhere for the reader to settle, except in the tiny moments of exploded detail:

I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, tumbling all night long.

Lastly, although the story has no explicit, outward movement, it contains a tense feeling of expectation. Why isn’t she getting up? It’s a little like she’s trapped inside this moment, but happily so, willing to entertain her imagination, her fierce thoughts. It is clear that the intellectual exercise is one of pure pleasure, and she’s indulging it to the fullest. Until the end, of course, when she is inevitably interrupted.

Nadine Gordimer – The Pickup

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It occurred to me last week that I’ve never posted on The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer. This was my third time reading this excellent book, and the reading experience reminded me of Nabokov’s quote about how we never really read a book, we can only re-read it. A first read is only an introduction, no matter how intense the experience, all subsequent reads push and then settle the acquaintance where it needs to go.

The Pickup is actually my very favorite Gordimer novel, which is saying something because I have high praise for each of her fourteen novels. But The Pickup is somehow a distillation of Gordimer’s style; it is both neat and untidy, both practical and reckless. The storyline repeats this dual tendency by being firmly contemporary yet at the same time a simple, traditional love story.

So let’s start with the story: The Pickup is the story of a relationship forged within the messiness of modern society. Julie meets Abdu when she takes her broken car into a garage in Johannesburg where he is working illegally. They begin an affair which becomes complicated when Abdu receives a deportation notice. Of course Julie wants him to stay, and of course Abdu does not want to return to his home country. They try various methods to keep him legally in South Africa and when everything fails, Julie shows up one evening with two tickets. She will go home with him. Home is an unnamed Muslim nation – the complete opposite from any life Julie has ever experienced.

The novel, as indicated by the title, flirts with the idea that one of these two has been a pickup for the other…Abdu needs residency, Julie needs adventure. Is one-half of this couple taking advantage of the other? Gordimer raises this question, yes, and in some ways, answers it, but this does not remain the central question. The Pickup goes on to explore the cultural and experiential differences between Julie and Abdu, and how they do find a connection. Julie’s integration into Abdu’s family home is a beautiful and respectful investigation of both sides of a huge cultural divide.

Finally, the ending…one of the most surprising endings I’ve ever read. And yet when you turn that last page, it isn’t really a surprise, it’s organic to the story and everything Gordimer has been revealing about Julie and Abdu. A surprise that is ultimately completely satisfying.

Stylistically, The Pickup is also my favorite. Mostly because of the omniscient narrator’s skill at personal and general revelation, but also because of the strange, slightly jarring way the narrator slips so casually in and out of Julie and Abdu’s (and several other characters’) minds. There isn’t a strong delineation between spoken word and thought, which creates an intense, contemplative atmosphere within the world of the novel. Delicately done. An excellent book.

Here is just a sample of the narrative style:

Not for her to speak those words; he heard them as she had heard them. Nothing for her to say; she knows nothing. That is true but he sees, feels, has revealed to him something he does not know: this foreign girl has for him – there are beautiful words for it coming to him in his mother tongue – devotion. How could anyone, man or woman, not want that? Devotion. Is it not natural to be loved? To accept a blessing. She knows something. Even if it comes out of ignorance, innocence of reality.

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Alejandro Zambra – The Private Lives of Trees

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Last January, I bought myself a subscription to the Open Letter Books catalogue. Fantastic decision, this has been a wonderful treat. To date, I have received seven books. I haven’t read all of those seven yet, but the four I’ve managed to read have all been either really good or at least a fascinating reading experience. For anyone who isn’t familiar with Open Letter, they are a small press publishing books in translation, and the books are all quirky and interesting.

Last month I received The Private Lives of Trees by Chilean writer/poet Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell. The title alone promised good things and I sat down with it only minutes after taking it out of the bubble envelope. This is a tiny little book, easy to read in one sitting and perhaps best experienced as a single, contained read.

The story is simple: one evening, Julián is waiting in his apartment for his wife Verónica to come home from her art class. To pass the time and help her sleep, he is telling a story to his step-daughter Daniela called The Private Lives of Trees. He is worried about his wife’s lateness, but trying to keep his focus elsewhere. When Daniela is awake, Julián tells her the story, when she falls asleep, Julián passes his time remembering, worrying, imagining, reflecting…

The book has a brilliant and confident narrator, who resides just outside and above the story. An omniscient with a very subtle personality. This narrator never upstages Julián but provides the story with a light-handed metafictional flavor:

But this night is not an average night, at least not yet. It’s still not completely certain that there will be a next day, since Verónica hasn’t come back from her drawing class. When she returns, the novel will end. But as long as she is not back, the book will continue. The book continues until she returns, or until Julián is sure that she won’t return. For now Verónica is missing from the blue room, where Julián lulls the little girl to sleep with a story about the private lives of trees.

Now I said the story was simple, and that is true, but like all good novellas, The Private Lives of Trees is actually concerned with greater issues and moments than these quiet hours passed between Julián and Daniela. It is a wonderfully modern book, investigating the cracks and confusion of contemporary relationships, contemporary life. Julián considers a variety of reasonable reactions to his situation: jealousy, panic, apathy, anger. Those varying emotions turn this moment of Veronica’s absence into a reflection of his past – his childhood, his mistakes, his successes – as well as a consideration of his possible futures.