Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘October, 2012’

book collecting

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Non-stop bookishness today that began with a trip to my favorite 2nd hand bookstore in Lausanne. I had to engage in a small but mostly polite skirmish with another Anglophone and obvious book-lover as he and I negotiated four slim shelves of English books, eyeing each other to make sure the other wasn’t about to grab a coveted title. I was in a hurry but did get this little stack of paperbacks:

  • The Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories
  • Borges and the Eternal Orangutans by Luis Fernando Verissimo (I read almost a third of this on the train ride back to home and so far it is a light & clever satire, written as a letter to Borges and involving a fiftyish translator and an Edgar Allan Poe conference in Buenos Aires)
  • The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
  • Best American Essays 1987, edited by Gay Talese & Robert Atwan (some great names in this collection)
  • The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitov Ghosh
  • Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction by J.D. Salinger

I also raced through the French section and picked up Alain de Botton’s Petite Philosophie de l’Amour.

Then onto lunch with a good friend of mine who is also a translator and we had a quick book trade – I’m pretty sure I came out the winner here (although I did give her a copy of Robert Pagani’s Mon Roi, Mon Amour, a book I really enjoyed) with these lovelies:

  • Une Forme de Vie by Amélie Nothomb
  • The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys (Apparently the Thames has frozen over exactly forty times between 1142 and 1849, and this is a book of stories that tell of those freezings – it’s small and square and has plenty of illustrations. It looks wonderful).
  • Fireworks by Angela Carter
  • The People’s Act of Love by James Meek
  • The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa
  • Foreign Words by Vassilis Alexakis
  • See Under: Love by David Grossman (this book looks wonderful, but no publisher should ever be allowed to print in type this small)

On the back and forth from my still-moderately-snowy mountain to town, I read Salman Rushdie’s essay in The New Yorker about the beginning of his time in hiding, about how it happened that he needed to invent a new name and life for himself after the publication of The Satanic Verses. It’s a personal history piece and he’s written it, but it’s done in the 3rd person, which tricks you into thinking it’s investigative journalism (and there’s probably much to be discussed about this choice), but it’s clearly an excerpt from his memoir Joseph Anton and I enjoyed it, especially the history he gives on the inspiration for writing The Satanic Verses as well as his telling of how he came up with the pseudonym he would live under for so many years.

And finally, as if all this concentrated bookishness were not enough – I arrived home to a box of books from The Folio Society, including a really beautiful and slim edition of Turgenev’s novella First Love. I think it’s safe to say that if the snow comes back and I’m forced to stay inside, I’ll have plenty to read.

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Christine Schutt – Florida

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Impressionistic, mixed-up timeline kind of novels can be extremely fun to read – especially when the voice and the unusual imagery produces a sustained series of “wow” moments for the reader. I especially love it when I find myself as intrigued with the work of sorting out a linear timeline as unstacking or unraveling the images that flash past as I read along. Christine Schutt’s Florida is exactly this kind of novel—it involves woven layers of memory-style vignettes that manage to tell a huge story, the story of a woman’s entire life really, while seeming to reveal very little.

Briefly, Florida is the story of Alice. Abandoned as a child by the death (possibly a suicide) of her father and then her mother’s illness/instability, Alice grows up shuttled between relatives with only passing contact with her mother, a mother who remains for Alice half glamorous fantasy and half unsightly embarrassment. The book has a loose linear movement in that it begins when Alice is 10 and sent to live with her relatives and then follows along until she’s an adult in contact with her dying mother. But the narrative twists and backflips and repeats itself.

In this type of novel, I think there’s often a fine line between asking the reader to agree to be completely lost within the layers of text and image, and effectively creating a pathway that brings the reader along on a meaningful and expressive journey. Perhaps it’s better said this way – some writers naturally present even apparently unconnected scenes in a way that mimics human memory, so while the information appears to be disjointed and nearly random, it really follows a pattern that feels very comfortable to the reader.

Even when her company promised no pleasure, I went looking for my mother. She was, as often, looking for whichever man was making up her life. My mother made up a tramp’s sack of the silver and shouldered it to carry to a lover as a gift. I saw her leaving, and later, on the lawn, I stood where she might have stood, and I called after her.

“Remember my shoes,” Mother asked me when she had stopped crying and Aunt Frances had left the room on that one and only visit to the San. “My shoes in the yard with the leaves?”

I saw shoes, narrow and balletic and made in a material that stained. Strapped ankles, stubbed toes—from dancing? I wondered. Such shoes as these the terrible Walter caught up in a rake as easily as leaves and burned.

Nothing then, nothing held its shape but blew away.

This particular vignette occurs on page 52, almost exactly a third of the way through the book. Taken on its own, it’s nearly incomprehensible except for its innate references to the book’s mother-daugther theme. However, Schutt has given us several of these memory cues before – the bag of silver, the hospital room, the ballet shoes. The reader gets little glimpses of these same objects again and again so by the time we see them here, they’re nearly familiar, they’ve become part of our memory of the text.

Florida is a short novel but it’s beautifully done, and it’s quite powerful. Schutt is asking questions about memory and how childhood experiences are carried forward into an adult life. The writing is quite unique, but it has no hint of “aren’t I so clever” tucked into its experimental nature. It’s wonderfully honest and there are moments when it feels almost like memoir. I really enjoyed that blend because it enforced the feeling that the structure of the book grew out of the content; it wasn’t something author imposed, which is how some impressionistic writing can feel.

Florida was Schutt’s first novel (it followed two story collections, both look excellent) and was published in 2004 and shortlisted for the National Book Award. Schutt has since published two other novels –the most recent, Prosperous Friends, just came out this year. I’ve added all of her work to my TBR list.

Clarice Lispector – Água Viva

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For this week’s review at Necessary Fiction, I reviewed Clarice Lispector’s seventh novel, Água Viva. This strange and wonderful book was originally published in 1973, first translated into English in 1978 and now re-translated by Stefan Tobler for New Directions and published this year as one of four Lispector novels in re-translation.

Here is some of what I had to say in my review:

Written by an unnamed narrator and written to an unnamed “you”, Água Viva is a meditation on the act of creation using the idea of the written word, as opposed to other creative media, as its vehicle. With this “letter,” Lispector asks what it really means to write to someone, how to transpose thought into missive or message, and what part of an individual is captured or lost in the act of writing:

I want to write to you like someone learning. I photograph each instant. I deepen the words as if I were painting, more than an object, its shadow. I don’t want to ask why, you can always ask why and always get no answer—could I manage to surrender to the expectant silence that follows a question without an answer? Though I sense that some place or time the great answer for me does exist.

It is also a meditation on the individual—how does a narrator portray the self? Is this possible? Is it desirable? Lispector’s stated goal throughout the text is to somehow re-create, through words, the instantaneous instant, the “instant now.” An instant that is constantly changing, constantly being reborn. This rebirth becomes painful for the narrator, and she both embraces it and rejects it repeatedly.

You can read the whole review here.

I’ve had the pleasure of reading two Lispector novels now, and it’s definitely time to read her start to finish. I felt somewhat at a disadvantage reading and reviewing Água Viva without having read all of her earlier works. It is an incredible book—strange in a beautiful way, challenging but also rich with thought and image. I enjoyed it for what it was, and I think anyone interested in this kind of self-reflexive hybrid essay/fiction would find much to savor in this short novel. It is definitely a book to be read and read again, and new meanings will come out of it all the time.

At the same time, it made me want to have all of her writings in my head for constant reference against this strange novel. I’m just greedy that way. From what I understand, Água Viva is different enough from her other works (and it was different enough from The Hour of the Star for me to believe this) that it sits in its own category. Meaning that among her already innovative/experimental body of work, it is an extreme. So I spent much of my time reading her thinking that I wanted to go back and experience all she’d written that had brought her to the moment of writing this particular book, just to see the development.

Also, I think I will get a few copies of Lispector in French, including Água Viva, just to see how she reads in another romance language. So much of the discussion around Lispector focuses on her language and how she plays with grammar and punctuation. Stefan Tobler’s translation was incredibly smooth, easy to read and obviously careful, but not so smooth that I couldn’t experience the strangeness of Lispector’s writing. There are moments when the images don’t make sense or when words come together in unexpected ways. I loved that.

So next on my Lispector list is Near to the Wild Heart – her first. And I can hardly wait to move through her nine novels in the order they were published.

But to wrap up today, I give you some of my favorite lines from Água Viva:

And all of this is me. All is weighted with sleep when I paint a cave or write to you about it—from outside it comes the clatter of dozens of wild horses stamping with dry hoofs the darkness, and from the friction of the hoofs the rejoicing is freed in sparks: here I am, I and the cave, in the very time that will rot us.

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catching up

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Things have been quiet around here lately, but I have been reading some wonderful fiction.

First is Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion. I read this book for the Dead Writers Book Group and we discussed it (a little) on Twitter two Mondays ago. Discovering Stafford is a real find – an American writer I’d never heard of and one with a wonderfully unique voice. There are some great comparisons to be made between Stafford and Carson McCullers, for example, because Stafford has much of that Southern Gothic feel, except she isn’t a Southern writer but a Western writer (who lived in New York for most of her adult life). She is better known for her short stories… and so I’ve just picked up her Collected Stories and will write about them once I’ve started reading.

In a perfect universe, I will come back and write up my thoughts (properly) on The Mountain Lion but for now let me say that this is a book about two children, a brother and a sister, stuck between two vastly different worlds, and how those worlds pull at them and shape them in different ways. The two children are mostly unloved, and so both do things to become unlovable, as children unfortunately will. It is a powerful story, simply told, with a unique structure.

Next is Karen Brown’s Little Sinner & Other Stories – which I reviewed this past week for Necessary Fiction. I say as much in my review, but these were excellent:

Despite the mini-novel feel to each of these stories, when looked at as a collection there are several themes linking throughout—one I especially enjoyed was Brown’s explorations of infidelity, and in particular, the feminine side of what is too-often portrayed to be an exclusively male issue. First presented in the collection’s second piece, “Swimming,”—a dark and delightful recasting of John Cheever’s classic “The Swimmer”—several of the stories in the collection tell of women (of all ages) who cheat on their partners or spouses. One of the best parts of the way Brown handles this theme is that it isn’t ever a story’s main preoccupation but a kind of subtle side-story, a detail of a life turned upside down, and the woman’s infidelity could be the cause or the result of that upset.

You can read the entire review here.

Also, I just finished reading my second Clarice Lispector – Agua Viva. I’ll be reviewing this title in a few days, so will mention it again soon. But let me just say now that my first impression of Lispector holds firm. An incredible writer, a vivid talent. The Lispector revival that is currently underway in the English-speaking world is exciting and I can’t wait to read her start to finish. She’s got nine novels and the two I’ve read are from her later work, so it’s time to go to her first, Near to the Wild Heart, and start reading her properly.

Finally, I’ve had a number of great books make their way into the house recently. Here’s just a sample of what I’m looking at for fall reading:

  • • Going to Meet the Man – James Baldwin
  • • Best European Fiction 2013 – ed. Alexsander Hemon
  • • My Mother was an Upright Piano (stories) – Tania Hershman
  • • The Slow Natives – Thea Astley
  • • The Very Air – Doug Bauer
  • • Athena – John Banville

Looking forward to all of these and more…

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