Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘December, 2017’

there is always more to read

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Thinking back over my reading in 2017, it is inextricably connected to feelings of concern and panic, even despair. Many people have expressed this, so I know I’m not alone. My reading has been both guided by and in reaction to the world’s events and the continued ugliness of politics. Luckily reading is a comfort and a refuge, and luckily, I have discovered excellent comforts and distractions for an unsettled mind.

Something I did this year—at first unintentionally—was read much more in French. Without making this an essay on the angst of an emigrant/immigrant and how much I have struggled to be engaged with the political horrors of contemporary US politics while consciously telling myself to step back and focus on where I live now (Swiss passport in hand since 2016), I found myself wanting to avoid English, wanting the coccoon of my new home in language and books. Doing this I read more Michele Lesbre, whose work I have consistently loved. Her Le Canapé Rouge is stunning (and available in translation from Seagull Books), and I read her Ecoute La Pluie and was just as enchanted. I have her Chemins waiting for me to read this year.

I read Anne Brécart’s La Femme Provisoire which is a delicate and dark little book, and I loved it, reminding me that 15 years ago I loved her Les Années de Verre, so I reread that and my memory of its complicated elegance was confirmed.

Perhaps the best “discovery” of 2017 was Elsa Triolet, whom I add to my bulging basket of undertranslated French modernists. I wrote about her here, so I won’t say more than I have a stack of her books waiting for me to move slowly through this year, and I cannot wait. The other writer I will continue to champion is Clarisse Francillon, an almost exact contemporary to Triolet, and the two must have crossed paths in Paris at some point—which, if I can prove once I spend more time with both of their writing, will make me very happy. Both women writing about war, both women writing about women and power.

I read a short story by Francillon the other day, “L’harmonica” from her collection La Belle Orange, and it just quite blew me away. It’s a dark and horrible story, part of a collection published in 1944, and its content shocked me for its frank dissection of a brief but intense moment between a man and a woman, following the death of the woman’s lover. Each page is a concise study of power dynamics. So much of her writing is like this.

Finally, I did read in English this year but my reading was all over the place. I read Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and was surprised to find I couldn’t put it down. I spent two days devouring Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching. I discovered that Graham Greene is utterly wonderful, even if I imagine everyone else knew this before me. I read two more Ali Smith, Autumn and How to be Both, confirming her as one of my favorite contemporary writers. I had the distinct pleasure of reading Helen McClory’s début novel, Flesh of the Peach, which is a book with sharp edges (I mean this in the best way) and extremely interesting, both in terms of story and style. It’s a book that bleeds. Along the same vein, Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter held me captive for several weeks, and continues to resonate long after I’ve finished. I really like Zambreno’s sideways curating, and this no matter the subject she’s working around.

I read more poetry this year than I have in past years—poetry is the ultimate comfort reading for me as it circles around the logical instead of dealing with it straight on—and I’m so glad that I did, returning again and again to Jan Zwicky’s marvelous collection Chamber Music. I am still reading through her Lyric Philosophy, so it doesn’t yet count for 2017, but it’s an enormous work and I can get lost in it or stuck on one or two of its pages for days. I read Brenda Shaughnessy’s Interior With Sudden Joy, loving so many of the poems I will read them twice or three times a day. I came across a copy of Nzotake Shange’s performance poem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide while visiting my family in the US, and read it over and over. It’s such a beautiful and frightening work of art, and doesn’t feel dated even if it’s now over 40 years old. I received Anne Carson’s Float for my birthday and have been thrilling over its chapbooks, each one like a special gift. I’ve also really enjoyed Antonio Rodriguez’s Big Bang Europa, which is intense and contemporary (and in French).

What has stuck with me the most this year? This year there isn’t just one author. So I suppose it is that I always wish I could read more, that there is always more to read. But also that reading is the best passion (just don’t even try to argue that one with me), and that as readers we’re so lucky to have these marvelous worlds at our fingertips. It’s endless, it’s so incredible.

Happy New Year bookish people, see you in 2018 with more books.

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Kate Zambreno – Book of Mutter

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My review of Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter came out yesterday at Necessary Fiction – it begins like this:

A quarter of a way into Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter the following stand-out line surfaces amidst a collage of anecdotes related to memorializing, burial practices, and grief writing:

What does it mean to write what is not there. To write absence.

The line sits on its own, separated out from a preceding block of text commenting on Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, and it feels, at first, like a standard academic question. A way to frame Zambreno’s thirteen-year project to write about the death of her mother. And it certainly does do this. But its tone and position—that missing question mark, the clarified repetition of the idea of absence, and the white page that engulfs the reader as they finish the weighted word—give these simple sentences all the power of a lament and an entreaty. This isn’t a curious professor posing a rhetorical question to a dispassionate audience, this is the fierce howl of a desire for sense-making.

Grief memoirs are interested in burdened negotiations of this sort because grief is always a plea bargain, an attempt to wring sense from this most senseless of experiences. But here’s the trick: death is senseless in only one definition of that word, meaningless, but it engages the five senses relentlessly. So what does it mean to write what is not there? That missing question mark in Zambreno’s line places her sentence somewhere between a defeated query and a brave gesture to the impossible. And she doesn’t mention writing about what is not there, she is interested in the verb, the act of writing and what that very act might mean. In this way, the question is also about the asker. She could be saying_, what does it mean that I am writing what is not there_. And in this, immediately and cleverly, Zambreno embraces the conflicted dichotomy of absence versus presence.

You can read the entire review here.

closing the distance

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The four books I have been reading leisurely (even lazily) over the last few weeks are talking to each other in marvelous ways. Added to this I have been racing through, and just finished, Madeline Miller’s forthcoming novel CIRCE. A particularly excellent reading week with many interconnections and echoes.

“For our texts interrogate us when we have crossed into the world of the imagination, until we can figure out why we have come, where we have come from, and how we have managed the passage.”

–Grace Dane Mazur, Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination

“Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions—“Will you fade? Will you perish?—scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain.”

–Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“An utterance, a gesture, is clear if it is transparent; if it renders what is on the other side of the glass easier to understand, to accept, respond to, or love; if it facilitates the integrity of our being in the world.

An utterance is clear if it purifies vision.”

–Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy

“Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is. Even a reproduction hung on a wall is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures. This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s own act of looking at it.”

–John Berger, Ways of Seeing