Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘April, 2011’

Irène Némirovsky – Le Bal

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On Monday night I sat down and read Irène Némirovsky’s very short novel, Le Bal. I’ve been meaning to read Némirovsky for awhile now and luckily my French book group selected this feisty little story of revenge and mother-daughter disharmony for our April read. As the title suggests this is the story of a party—although it is really the story of a pair of horrible parents and their soon-to-be horrible daughter. And it is also the story of 1920s Paris and the rise of the nouveau riche, of social climbing and being desperate for public recognition. On top of all that, it is the story of a certain moment of adolescence when suddenly the adult world comes into frightening focus.

Némirovsky’s writing is a pleasure to read, all sharp corners and crisp sentences. And the kind of omniscient narrator who swoops in with exactly the right kind of stunning detail and careful framing. The kind of narrator who keeps out of the way, for the most part, and just gets the story out in front of the reader in the most efficient and elegant way possible. I knew that this year with so much contemporary fiction reading on my plate that I would relish any moment I could steal with older, modernist fiction. Such was the case with my hour with Némirovsky. A pure delight.

Such a tragedy that Némirovsky was not given the chance to lead a long, full life. In her very short life she wrote a considerable amount – not all of which has made its way into English. Just imagine what else she might have written if she hadn’t been killed at the age of 39…

I’ll be hunting up copies of her other works, starting of course with her earliest…Le Malentendu, a first novel written first as a short story and then published as a novel when she was only 18 years old.

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thoughts on reviewing translations

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A few weeks ago over at Necessary Fiction, I reviewed Seven Years, a novel by a Swiss novelist writing in German. In that review I tackle the content of the book, and only make a few passing comments about the style. I actually wanted to say more about the writing but couldn’t find my way into that discussion within the review, so I settled for leaving it out. This kind of compromise always leaves me a little unsettled, especially because Seven Years is a translation and I feel strongly about not overlooking that fact when considering a book.

Recently, Words Without Borders has published a series of essays on how to review translations. The latest is by Scott Esposito, the editor of The Quarterly Conversation, and it’s a good one. Esposito provides some thoughtful framework-style guidelines for looking at a translation and finding a way to evaluate it. There are about nine essays now for the whole series, and they are well worth a read for anyone interested in reading or reviewing literature in translation.

Now, where I come to this in relation to my Seven Years review is that I sorely wanted to be able to say something about the translation. And in my idealist little heart I figured that I would find a way…I am a translator, right? I am also a huge fan of literature in translation, right? I live in Switzerland, right?  (Okay, Seven Years is set in Germany, actually, so never mind). But in the end, because I don’t read German, I simply did not feel comfortable approaching that aspect of the text.

The writing in the English version of Seven Years is unadorned and straightforward. The most interesting thing about it is that much of the dialogue comes indirectly, and even when it is direct, it isn’t set off from the rest of the text. So there are moments when you have to read a line twice to make sure who is speaking. Other than that, though, there isn’t much that stood out from Seven Years to raise my translator antennae…but maybe this is only because I don’t read German. Perhaps if I read German, I would have been able to see patterns in the translated English that could only come about because they were being created on top of German scaffolding. I see this with translations from the French and from Japanese, because certain phrasings and structures necessarily occur as the English grapples with the original.

You see my dilemma here. In my heart of hearts, I’d like to believe that someone unfamiliar with the original language can engage with aspects of the translation as suggested by these WWB articles, but I’m skeptical. And I get the sense that this great discussion on reviewing translation isn’t addressing this question head-on. (Except this piece by Jonathan Blitzer.) Is it possible to review fairly and thoroughly, emphasis on thoroughly, without knowledge of the original language? I want to think so, but I don’t think so. Examples? Anyone?

In the end, all I can say about Seven Years is that it is a translation, that an original text exists in German and that what I read was Michael Hofmann’s version of Peter Stamm. How that differs from someone else’s version of Peter Stamm I cannot say. And that frustrates me. I’d like to find a way through this problem.

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final thoughts: Houellebecq on Lovecraft

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So I finished up my post earlier this week on Houellebecq’s H.P. Lovecraft: Contre la Vie, Contre le Monde with Houellebecq asserting that the key to Lovecraft’s genius is that he managed to transform his feelings of disgust (about life and social changes he had no control over) into a form of creative hostility. I think it would be quite easy to use this same sentence and exchange the word Lovecraft for Houellebecq. Simple as that. Not hard to see why one writer admired the other.

But Houellebecq’s disgust is of a different variety than what I understand of Lovecraft’s. Lovecraft couldn’t stand the world he lived in, so he created alien worlds to escape into, taking his anger and frustration and working them out or increasing them, both symbolically and overtly, in those new worlds. (This is more or less Houellebecq’s reading.) Now, for Houellebecq, I get the feeling that he is profoundly, overwhelmingly, devastatingly disappointed in human nature. Like Lovecraft, he is revolted by society, but unlike Lovecraft, he is not quite willing to reject it and escape away. Houellebecq is still interested.

His disgust is palpable, but there is more sorrow than hostility in much of what he writes. Every once in a while something horrible does surge up and out of a text, taking the reader more or less by surprise, but then the tone resettles around Houellebecq’s grief. Yes, grief. I think this might be the best word for it – Houellebecq is in a state of perpetual mourning for what he understands of society.

And grief is something that often turns a person inward, so it isn’t a surprise that Houellebecq cannot get himself out of his stories. As I wrote earlier, I think this inability to remove himself from the literary equations he poses and tries to solve is a tricky issue of his writing but it also contributes to the unique nature of his work.

In all honesty, I can see now that one of the reasons I’ve become so interested in Houellebecq is that I usually prefer my writers to stay out of their stories. I tend to balk at, or, at the very least, disregard biographical details when I’m considering a text. I want to be able to consider the literary landscape and the characters without worrying whether the author is speaking from experience or made it all up. I’ve always felt that it shouldn’t matter.

However, because of his unsettling merge of author and character, Houellebecq forces me to consider him biographically at almost every step of the way. My knee-jerk reaction would usually be, “Grow up, get over yourself, get a therapist, and do something truly creative.” But his honesty is actually engaging. His perspective is even seductive—I think humans can be pretty rotten, too—as well as off-putting and that combination is hard to put down.

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Peter Stamm – Seven Years

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Yesterday at Necessary Fiction I reviewed Peter Stamm’s Seven Years:

Alex’s narrative is, in essence, a comparison of the two women. Ivona, a simple individual whose devotion to Alex borders on mental illness, and Sonia, a kind but distant partner whose passion for her work outstrips her passion for anyone and anything else. Where Ivona is self-less, Sonia is self-full. That essential difference informs Alex’s connection to each woman.

Click here for the full review.

 

Michel Houellebecq – H.P. Lovecraft: Contre le Monde, Contre la Vie

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Now that I am several books into my Houellebecq Project, I feel that I have, by accident, gone about this in exactly the right way. The first Houellebecq I tried was La Carte et le Territoire, his most recent novel, which won him last year’s Prix Goncourt in France, and a novel which is, by Houellebecquian standards, rather tame. I don’t mean that it doesn’t have any shock to it, or any social criticism, but compared to the other works of his that I’ve now read, those elements come in a softer, less wince-inducing package.

There are two issues that seem to bother most Houllebecq readers: his portrayal of sex, and the fact that it is difficult to decipher whether the racist, sexist and other harsh comments in his work come from Houellebecq himself or from his characters—as Litlove points out in a recent comment, this is because his main characters almost always appear to be, at least in part, some incarnation of Houellebecq himself. That lack of separation is problematic.

But La Carte et le Territoire had very little in terms of provocation, in either of those areas. It was definitely a provocative text, but easy to read. I say all of this because it was pure dumb luck that I read that novel first and thus became curious to figure out what all the fuss was about.

Now, my second bit of luck came from my own strange obsession with reading an author in chronological order. I like nothing better than beginning with a writer’s earliest work and moving forward. For Houellebecq, this meant taking up with his long essay, H.P. Lovecraft: Contre le Monde, Contre la vie (H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Eng. trans. Dorna Khazeni). And it was really fascinating. An essay that endeared Houellebecq to me, mostly because of the care he takes in writing about Lovecraft.

Who knows if Lovecraft was the single most important writerly reference point for Houellebecq, but he is clearly a huge influence. The essay is pure homage, but a serious study as well, filled with critical and autobiographical interpretation. However, the essay does more than just tell me about Lovecraft, it tells me about Houellebecq. As I am slowly coming to understand through Houellebecq’s other work, he is not able to remove himself from anything he writes. (I find this both a source of his brilliance and a possible weakness, but I will get to that in another review.) So in nearly every assessment of Lovecraft, Houellebecq is inside the message, leaving little clues to his own writing and his own vision:

Quand on aime la vie, on ne lit pas. On ne va guère au cinéma non plus, d’ailleurs. Quoi qu’on en dise, l’accès à l’univers artistique est plus ou moins réservé à ceux qui en ont un peu marre. [ A person who loves life doesn’t read. And rarely goes to the movies, as well. No matter what people say on the matter, access to the artistic universe is more or less reserved for those who are just a little sick of it all.]

OR

Le style de compte rendu d’observations scientifiques utilisé par HPL dans ses dernières nouvelles répond au principe suivant: plus les événements et les entités décrites seront monstrueuses et inconcevables, plus la description sera précise et clinique. Il faut un scalpel pour décortiquer l’innommable.

Tout impressionnisme est donc à bannir. Il s’agit de construire une littérature vertigineuse : et il n’y a pas de vertige sans une certaine disproportion d’échelle, sans une certaine juxtaposition du minutieux et de l’illimité, du ponctuel et de l’infini.

[The style HPL uses in his later short stories, like a summary of scientific jottings, responds to the following idea: the more monstrous and inconceivable the events and beings described, the more precise and clinical the description. One needs a scalpel to dissect the unnamable.

Thus, impressionism is to be banned. This means creating a vertiginous literature: and there is no vertigo without a certain difference of scale, without a certain juxtaposition of the meticulous with the limitless, of the specific with infinity.]

OR

Si le style de Lovecraft est déplorable, on peut gaiement conclure que le style n’a, en littérature, pas la moindre importance ; et passer à autre chose.

Ce point de vue stupide peut cependant se comprendre. Il faut bien dire que HPL ne participe guère de cette conception élégante, subtile, minimaliste et retenue qui rallie en général tous les suffrages.

[If Lovecraft’s style is deplorable, we can happily conclude that style has not the least importance in literature; and then move on to something else.

This stupid point of view is, however, understandable. One must admit that HPL hardly ever contributes to the elegant, subtle, minimalist and restrained craft which tends to win the most votes.]

The last two quotes I’ve given here end up informing a short discussion suggesting that if your job as a writer is to discuss the horrors of the world, writing them beautifully is a form of hypocrisy. Houellebecq criticizes certain Lovecraft passages, for their obviously bad writing, but at the same time he applauds the fact that Lovecraft’s form mimics his content.

And this is easy to see in Houellebecq’s own writing. He isn’t interested in wasting time writing about something horrific in a carefully-worked style. An ass in an ass. An ugly person is an ugly person. In La Carte et le Territoire, when he describes a vicious murder, he uses a clinical and distant style. Indeed, that book has something of the crime novel to it.

But he can write beautifully, and this is something I’ve discovered as I’ve moved forward in his work. This has gone on long enough for today, so I won’t parade out the examples.

Let me finish, however, with a mention of one other point that I’d like to discuss in my next post. In Contre le Monde, Contre la Vie, Houellebecq reflects on Lovecraft’s racism as the transformative element of his writing. He writes:

Toute grande passion, qu’elle soit amour ou haine, finit par produire une œuvre authentique. On peut le déplorer, mais il faut le reconnaître : Lovecraft est plutôt du côté de la haine ; de la haine et de la peur. [All great passion, whether a question of love or hate, finishes in the production of a genuine work of art. We can lament the fact, but we must acknowledge that Lovecraft is more about hate; hate and fear.]

And then he asserts that the secret of Lovecraft’s genius is that:

…il a réussi à transformer son dégoût de la vie en une hostilité agissante. […he managed to transform his disgust for life into a powerfully efficient hostility.]

This sentence has become the phrase I keep going back to as I read forward in Houellebecq, and I want to consider how it actually describes Houellebecq just as well as Lovecraft.

***

FYI – All translations provided here are mine, and rather quick ones at that.

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From Wood to Saramago to Houellebecq

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I wrote last week how Wood champions literary realism at the end of How Fiction Works. But really, he does this subtly throughout the entire novel. Not by ever contending that experimental fiction doesn’t have as much to say about the relationship between fiction and life, but through a kind of censure, again related to craft, which is detectable in passages like this:

Is there a way in which all of us are fictional characters, parented by life and written by ourselves? This is something like Saramago’s question; but it is worth noting that he reaches his questions by traveling in the opposite direction of those postmodern novelists who like to remind us of the metafictionality of all things. A certain kind of postmodern novelist (like John Barth, say) is always lecturing us: ‘Remember, this character is just a character. I invented him.’ By starting with an invented character, however, Saramago is able to pass through the same skepticism, but in the opposite direction, toward reality, toward the deepest questions.

Wood is talking about José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, a novel I’m now really eager to read. I do really like postmodern fiction, but there are times it can get tiresome. A bit shouty. But based on Wood’s description, it sounds like I would love Saramago’s way of negotiating a postmodern existential crisis.

What I understand Wood to be saying here is that he approves of Saramago’s existential exploration because it doesn’t just stop at revealing the artifice to the reader. Instead, it uses that revelation to ask a further question. His quote is lovely:

Yet the novel suggests that perhaps there is something culpable about being content with the spectacle of the world when the world’s spectacle is horrifying.

Because I am deep into my Houellebecq project at the moment, this makes me consider the metafictional aspect of his work. I am slowly getting the sense that Houellebecq is unable to forget for a moment that he is writing, that he is creating a story for others to read, to be consumed. A certain narrative personality—either Houellebecq himself or an authorial personality he uses when writing—hovers over his work. It isn’t so much like Barth and the constant reminder of the invented character, but more like Houellebecq just can’t get out of the way.

I’m slowly starting to get a feel for Houellebecq’s overall aesthetic, and his project, and the more I read of his work, the more I think that he uses this form of metafiction because he would consider it dishonest to write the kind of fiction that pretends the writer doesn’t exist. I find that notion of dishonesty pretty interesting.

But I’m still working through all of his work and I think I’ll wait to expand on this idea until I’ve finished, or at least, nearly finished. I want to think about it a little more in case I’m misreading him…

*Thank you to careful reader, Guilherme, who kindly reminded me that it is Saramago and not Saramango! This post now corrected.

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About the end of James Wood's How Fiction Works

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I have been meandering my way through James Wood’s How Fiction Works for the last month or so and finally finished it up over the weekend. I think what I love the most about this little book is how easy Wood makes the study of literature appear. He condenses years of study and probably thousands upon thousands of hours of passionate, careful reading into a series of thematically-linked paragraphs. Paragraph 1 begins with narrative perspective and Paragraph 123 ends the book with a succinct appeal to craft:

…for the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable ageing. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.

This last sentence is Wood’s answer to the assertion that literary realism is no longer a viable genre. To get to this statement, he visits several of realism’s loudest denouncers (Roland Barthes, Rick Moody, William Gass…) and disagrees with their conclusions that because fiction suffers from convention it therefore cannot ever express what is real:

…just because artifice and convention are involved in a literary style does not mean that realism (or any other narrative style) is so artificial and conventional that it is incapable of referring to reality.

Wood concedes that literary techniques are constantly becoming conventional. Of course narrative techniques, expressions, metaphors and all the other building blocks of fiction are always and forever ‘at-risk’ of rendering themselves ineffective. What is called into question is their ability to render ‘truth’ in an original and novel way, but never their ability to reflect reality.

I’ve never been particularly fussed about the debate on literary realism. I think both perspectives provide insight into how fiction works as an art form, how it is negotiated by readers. I am definitely more rooted in literary realism, however, so I would never be the kind of reader to chuck it out the window anyway, but I appreciated Wood’s championing of the genre as well as his celebration of the writer who simultaneously embraces realism while writing to escape all that has already been written.

So, I’ve only touched on approximately 20 pages of this excellent 180-page book. I’ll see if I have more to say another day…

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