Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘May, 2012’

Tove Jansson – The True Deceiver

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A few months back, the lovely Helen of Gallimaufry sent me a copy of Tove Jansson’s The True Deciever. She suspected I would like it and was she ever right! Discovering Jansson’s fiction is one of the highlights of my reading year. I loved the book. Loved it.

The True Deceiver is strange and dark and interested in human nature and animal nature and how the two get confused with each other or confront each other. The book is about Katri and her brother Mats and their relationship with Anna Aemelin, a wealthy woman who lives alone in a big house at the edge of the forest.

When the novel opens, Katri and Mats, who have a ten-year age difference, are living above the local shop. Katri is definitely a guardian figure for her brother and both Katri and Mats are outsiders, although for very different reasons. Katri is feared by the villagers because she doesn’t want their friendship, because she trusts no one, because she wields an uncanny authority over a giant but nameless German Shepherd. She is also a math genius. Mats, on the other hand, is considered simple-minded. He loves reading adventure stories. He loves working on boats and members of a family of local boat builders give him odd jobs from time to time.

For her part, Anna is a strange character indeed. A famous children’s book illustrator, she lives alone in the big house her parents left her when they died. She draws eerily intricate paintings of the forest floor which are then superimposed with bizarre, almost cartoon rabbits. Anna lives very much outside the local community, and so in their shared outsider status it is quite fitting that Anna, Katri and Mats are finally connected.

That connection is engineered by Katri for purely financial means. She wants to find a way to give Mats something he desperately wants. It begins with Katri working as a kind of assistant to Anna, and following a break-in (faked by Katri) the two move into the big house. Katri approaches the relationship on purely economical terms – what can be gained? what must be given up? Despite her constant mental calculations, she can’t factor in the other person’s personality quirks. And Anna is unable to think in such mercenary terms. If Katri’s modus operandi is hostile honesty, than Anna’s is overly gracious pretence. The two are worthy opponents and their “battle” will work profound changes on each side.

Just as fascinating as this uncommon story is the way in which Jansson tells it. She wavers between the 3rd person and the 1st person, switching at will and using the 1st to give us snippets of Katri’s thoughts and less often, Anna’s. The 3rd person narrator has a “knowing” tone as well, further complicating the mix of voices and opinions.

The book is set in the deepest darkest winter, when the villagers practically tunnel through the streets to get around town. The weather continues to reflect certain of the book’s events, although this isn’t a heavy handed technique in any way. As the story ramps up and Anna and Katri discover previously unknown parts of their personalities, Jansson’s winter descriptions shift to mirror their inner and outer struggle. It’s wonderfully done.

The True Deceiver was my first experience with Tove Jansson’s fiction for adults, but it certainly won’t be my last. Let me just finish up here with a bit of the writing, taken from a sample in Katri’s 1st person voice:

Every night I hear the snow against the window, the soft whisper of the snow blown in from the sea, and it’s good, I wish the whole village cold be covered and erased and finally be clean… Nothing can be as peaceful and endless as a long winter darkness, going on and on, like living in a tunnel where he dark sometimes deepens into night and sometimes eases to twilight, you’re screened from everything, protected, even more alone than usual. You wait and hide like a tree.

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Jürgen Fauth – Kino

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Atticus Books is a fairly new publisher doing some wonderful things. First off, they published The Bee-Loud Glade, a book by a very good friend of mine, Steve Himmer, and which I’ve talked about several times already (here, for starters). They’ve also put out an e-novella by Himmer called The Second Most Dangerous Job in America, which I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read yet. I plan to correct this mistake very soon.

There are several titles in their catalogue that I’d like to read, namely John Minichillo’s The Snow Whale and Nazareth, North Dakota by Tommy Zurhellen.

However, I had the pleasure of reviewing one of their latest titles for Necessary Fiction recently. Kino, by Jürgen Fauth, is somewhat hard to describe succinctly. The book is about a young woman out to uncover a few family secrets, it’s about the German film industry of the 1930s, it’s also a little bit about contemporary politics and media, and it’s also a little bit about love and marriage.

Here is a little bit of what I had to say in my review:

Much of the joy in reading this kind of novel comes from an admiration of the author’s research and skill in putting that research together into a coherent story. Kino is filled with real historical characters and events—people like German filmmaker Fritz Lang, actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge and many others, and of course Goebbels and several events pertaining to the Third Reich’s negotiation of German art and culture during the 1930s and 40s—but the novel cleverly inserts itself as a fictional footnote to this period of film history, even going so far as to suggest that the discovery of Klaus “Kino” Koblitz’s films will necessitate a re-evaluation of the merit of certain film makers previously credited with the development of revolutionary techniques. Suddenly, deliriously, the “real” and the “possible” begin to merge. Fauth becomes Kino—or is it the other way around?

You can read the entire review here.

Emily St. John Mandel – The Lola Quartet

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Last week over at Necessary Fiction I wrote about Emily St. John Mandel’s most recent novel, The Lola Quartet (Unbridled Books, 2012). This is a carefully scripted story with a large cast and some very interesting commentary on how youthful mistakes can haunt a person’s life. Mandel has a simple but elegant style that suited the novel’s sometimes difficult subject matter. I’ve never read Mandel before and really enjoyed discovering her writing. I’m also curious now if she always writes as she did in The Lola Quartet, or if some of her style came about as a reflection of the way she incorporated elements of literary noir into the novel. On to read her first two novels as soon as I get a chance.

Here is a small excerpt from my review:

Like any good homage to literary noir, The Lola Quartet deals in suspense. From the opening chapter with Anna waiting for help on a playground while that dangerous wad of cash hangs heavy and toxic from the bottom of her infant baby’s stroller, to the final “handoff” with its complicated moral implications, The Lola Quartet cultivates the reader’s sense of dread. These characters, mostly vulnerable to us for their relative youth and precarious lifestyles, move through different levels of danger. They are all at-risk from the dangers of the self as well as from various perpetrators of exterior menace.

Read the full review here.

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Anne Korkeakivi – An Unexpected Guest

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Books that involve politics while keeping sight of the personal issues are a favorite of mine, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I really enjoyed Anne Korkeakivi’s An Unexpected Guest. Here is a book that very elegantly mixes politics and history with a complicated personal story.

Quick story summary: Clare Moorhouse is the American wife of a high-ranking British diplomat. They live in Paris; their two teenage sons are at different boarding schools in Britain. Clare has a big secret in her past, a secret that has formed her exterior personality for the last twenty-five years and a secret that could ruin her husband’s career were it to get out now. The book is concerned with a single day—a neat time limitation that makes for a close and intense reading experience—and a day in which, obviously, the threat of her past looms larger than it ever has before.

The political intrigue of An Unexpected Guest deals primarily with The Troubles between Northern Ireland and England, and especially with the American perspective on that issue during the 1980s. However, while these events work mostly in the novel’s past, Korkeakivi manages to make some provocative parallels to contemporary political struggles – namely the American invasion of Iraq and the current War on Terror. The book involves a very interesting subplot that deals specifically with these contemporary issues, but also, subtly comments on how the War on Terror has fueled a dangerous kind of racism.

The scenes of An Unexpected Guest that work to grease the wheels of this political story are what make it somewhat of a thriller. Korkeakivi creates a very palpable sense of impending danger. It is to her credit that the book doesn’t stop there, as the exploration of Clare’s personality is a fascinating one. Here is a woman that committed a grave mistake in her youth—a mistake that caused her to lose someone she loved, but also required her to relinquish a part of herself. Giving up aspects of one’s personality may be a normal part of the growing up process, but Clare must enact a permanent about-face. After what happens in her youth, she must choose to be someone very different and she must guard herself very carefully.

Early on in the novel, Clare remarks on this process. Her thoughts come about after a comment made by her husband, which he intends as a compliment but which hurts her very much, when he says that she fits so perfectly into the orderly and composed diplomatic residence.

She was pale, smooth, beige, a sea pebble of the kind one picks up along the beach and slips into one’s pocket to run one’s fingers over while pondering the meaning of life—or where to eat dinner. She knew it, she had even cultivated it—as much as she had ever manufactured anything about herself, for her development had been more like an act of erosion, a sanding away of all extraneous or undesirable elements, and this was how she felt more and more, as though each year were a grand wave washing away a little more of her.

Clare is in an interesting position since what drove her toward the life she has now was a solid quest for safety, for predictability, and more than anything else, civility. She admires her husband for his capacity for rational thinking and for his belief that the world’s problems can and must be resolved through clear-headed negotiations. Knee-jerk emotional reactions will never save the day. And yet she still secretly harbors a passionately emotional individual beneath her unruffled exterior and she cherishes the memory, however painful the memory might be, of a man who functioned in a much different manner. In this way, the book goes beyond its bombs and diplomatic maneuvering and conducts a very careful examination of this woman’s psyche.

An Unexpected Guest is a curious hybrid of a book. It has elements of a thriller, it contains several echoes of Mrs. Dalloway, and it is set in a posh world of diplomacy and expatriate families. Even Korkeakivi’s writing is a blend of straightforward storytelling and the gently lyrical. Yet despite these fascinating variations, more than anything it is an intelligent book. Emotionally intelligent and politically astute.

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