Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

muscling her own weight

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This is from “The Summer After Barbara Claffey,” the second story in Christine Schutt’s 1996 collection, Nightwork:

She is watching from her window the man’s approach across the lawn. “You can wave from here,” Mother says in the voice she uses with the new Jacks, and I do.

I wave and wave, even though she is not looking. I wave at my mother muscling her own weight under this Jack’s arm. I cannot hear what they are saying; it is quiet in this town.

But the neighbors must notice my mother and her Jack. Either side of us and across the street, the Dunphies, the Smiths, Barbara Claffey down the street, must press to windows startled as by birds that swoop and mate so queerly close. I sometimes draw the blinds to them—but not to Mother. I am ready for Mother and her sudden turning to see if I am watching her, to see if I am paying attention to how she stands, tottering in her shoes, ankles gagged and tense and helpless—and Mother is not helpless. My mother is brave, I think, and her upturned face is shining. I see this, and see them both, willful lovers, tilted away from the house, leaning hard into the night.

This collection is extremely hard to put down. The writing! The mood! Interestingly, much about these stories is inscrutable—what exactly is going on? what kind of situation has the narrator found herself in? The stories move forward in impressionistic little flashes and fascinating off-kilter dialogue, but the atmosphere is sharp and dark and well-defined. There is so much menace, and each story seems to function within a borderland space of taboo and transgression. The story I’ve quoted from here actually reminds me a lot of her first novel Florida—this intense mother/daughter relationship and the precariousness of the mother’s dependence on various men.

I’ll write more about the book when I’ve finished…  

Tanizaki Junichiro – Some Prefer Nettles

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A modern coating goes no farther than the large cities that are a country’s arteries, and there are not many such cities anywhere. In an old country with a long tradition, China and Europe as well as Japan—any country, in fact, except a very new one like the United States—the smaller cities, left aside by the flow of civilization, retain the flavour of an earlier day until they are overtaken by catastrophe.

This is Kaname, the young man in Junichiro Tanizaki’s short novel Some Prefer Nettles (1929), and he has this thought as he’s surveying the harbor town of the small island of Awaji, which sits in Osaka Bay. The entire book involves comparisons of this sort—between new cities and old cities, between Tokyo and Osaka, between traditional Japan and the more modern values that have filtered into the country since its opening in the 1850s.

Some Prefer Nettles is a straightforward novel, meaning that the story is quite simple; at the same time, the story is purely symbolic. Kaname and his wife Misako have been married for about ten years but they are both tired of their marriage, Misako has even fallen in love with another man with Kaname’s help and blessing. But divorce is a difficult thing to manage properly and they are waffling about it, very much paralyzed and unsure of how to move forward. A situation which works as a perfect symbol of Japanese society between the two world wars. Here is a country that was absolutely closed to the outside world until 1850, and when it opened up it was quickly inundated with images and media and fashion from other parts of the world. European and Middle Eastern culture especially–two “exotic” cultures with long and rich histories–became extremely interesting, as did American culture with its apparent ease and openness. Obviously, with any great cultural change, there are those who embrace the changes and those who run from them. Much of the book is about whether to look backward and honor traditions, even those that feel stale, or whether it’s best to look forward and embrace a new identity.

What’s most interesting to me about this book is how Tanizaki handles it all so directly – and yet it’s still a good story. Most of Kaname’s conversations are about the old Japan vs. the new Japan, his thoughts are constantly comparing tradition versus modernity, whether in puppetry or another art form, or even with respect to the roles of women, and even some of the narrative exposition directly addresses these ideas. Tanizaki is known for his constant East-West comparisons and his literary soul-searching to define the pure heart of Japan, and this book is an unsubtle expression of those questions. I don’t actually mean that word “unsubtle” as a kind of negative criticism, only that the idea being explored isn’t ever hidden. Everything Kaname thinks about, every person he encounters, every love relationship, every friendship, even every town or puppet play—all of these things stand in to represent one side or the other in this great debate. There’s a terrible risk of the book coming off as pedestrian – and yet Tanizaki has just enough poetry fitted in around the edges of everything that the novel is smooth and engaging.

At one point, Kaname goes on a three-day trip with his father-in-law and that man’s mistress, the very young but traditional O-hisa. She is practically a geisha, although she does not work for a tea-house, she is under the protection of Kaname’s father-in-law and he is “training” her so that when he dies, she will make a suitable match. It’s interesting that O-hisa, the very young woman, is a symbol of traditional Japan, while Misako, who is in her late thirties and already a mother, is the “modern” woman turning away from those traditions. And Kaname is stuck between the two and the stereotypes they represent, trying to decide which kind of woman he would like.

But I was talking about poetry, wasn’t I? On this three-day trip, the purpose of which is to watch some traditional puppet theatre, Tanizaki provides a series of truly stunning images of his traveling companions, the countryside, the theatres, the music, the puppets and the audiences.

From a walk through one of the towns:

The main road through the town stretched on under the blue sky before them, so clear and serene that they could count the people passing back and forth far into the distance. Even the bicycles tinkling their bells as they moved by seemed calm and unhurried.

From the last theatre they visit:

In the pit, where rush mats and rows of cushions were laid out on the bare ground, the children of the village had taken over. Noisy games, oranges, candy—it was lively as the playground of a kindergarten, untroubled as a country shrine festival. No one seemed to notice that a play was going on.

There are too many of these little moments to do them any justice by pulling out only two, but I wanted to show a little sampling of his style. Which, all in all, is very neat and simple, but he uses that simplicity to great effect. I’ve read Tanizaki before – his collection of stories Seven Japanese Tales is wonderful, so is his essay on aesthetics In Praise of Shadows. I read In Praise of Shadows probably once a year, and it’s both complicated and extremely beautiful—it’s also a primer on Japanese nationalism, but we will forgive him this when he writes so eloquently about the beauty of a cracked porcelain teacup. However, this was my first time reading one of his novels, and I’m obviously now really looking forward to reading his best-known work, The Makioka Sisters, as well as hoping to get a copy of another novel, Quicksand, which was written in serial form between 1928 and 1930, but only translated into English in 1994 – it sounds incredibly dark and psychological.

a disorganized post about organizing my reading

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I had my suspicions that it wasn’t a good idea to leave my 2013 reading so open—no defined projects, nothing to focus on—and I was right, because I have spent the month of January jumping somewhat aimlessly between books that weren’t speaking to each other. Luckily most of what I read was quite good: one exceptional novel-manuscript by the talented Steve Himmer and several books I would still like to write about, namely Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, Deborah Levy’s Black Vodka and Steve Edward’s memoir Breaking Into the Backcountry about living alone in a cabin in eastern Oregon for ten months. Still, I like a little more continuity in my reading and so I put an end to my random reading last evening and made a proper plan with matching spreadsheet (oh yes, big nerd).

Before I tell you about the new project, I should give a quick re-cap of a current one. Last year I began reading Virginia Woolf start to finish and I am not curtailing that project, but I am reading her diaries at the same time as her fiction, and trying to keep pace—which means that I am somewhere in 1923 (17 July 1923, to be exact), quite a few months after she published Jacob’s Room (1922) and she’s now begun working on Mrs. Dalloway. I’m really looking forward to rereading Mrs. Dalloway but I have a few diary years to catch up before that. And I find that the diaries are best read slowly, a few pages every evening.

There is a lovely passage I underlined recently, one of the few passages in which Woolf writes about children:

We came back from Rodmell yesterday, & I am in one of my moods, as the nurses used to call it, today. And what is it & why? A desire for children, I suppose; for Nessa’s life; for the sense of flowers breaking all round me involuntarily. Here’s Angelica—here’s Quentin & Julian. Now children don’t make yourself ill on plum pudding tonight. We have people dining. There’s no hot water. The gas is escaping in Quentin’s bedroom—I pluck what I call flowers at random. They make my life seem a little bare sometimes; & then my inveterate romanticism suggests an image of forging ahead, alone, through the night: of suffering inwardly, stoically; of blazing my way through to the end—& so forth. […] Let me have one confessional where I need not boast. Years & years ago, after the Lytton affair, I said to myself, walking up the hill at Beireuth, never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having; good advice I think.

And she goes on at quite some length on the subject – it’s a very interesting moment in her journal, one of her most introspective.

In any case, while I do my catching up with Woolf, I need a new project, something to give some meaning to my reading, and as I’m elbow-deep in revisions of one of my novel manuscripts, and as this book is set in southern Japan, I thought to do some concentrated immersion. It is the perfect excuse to broaden and deepen my experience with modern and contemporary Japanese literature. I’ve put together a very preliminary list – works by well-known authors whom I’ve already read one or two novels, works by some lesser known writers, books by as many women as I can find in translation (and one Yoko Ogawa short story collection in Japanese – as slowly and painfully as I can) and many of the men as well.

This is an aside but I took many of these names from the Akutagawa Prize winners – and while there are actually a lovely number of women on the list, most of them have not been translated. More of the men on the list have been translated into English. So it goes.

Here is the early list – and I welcome any additional suggestions:

  • Yoko Ogawa – Hotel Iris
  • Yoko Ogawa – Amours en Marge (quite a bit of Ogawa is available in French)
  • Yoko Ogawa – Mabuta (in Japanese – wish me luck)
  • Yasunari Kawabata – Thousand Cranes
  • Yasunari Kawabata – The Dancing Girl of Izu (we spent time on the Izu peninsula last year and I’d wished I’d read this before going)
  • Fumiko Enchi – Tale of False Fortunes (I am a big fan of Enchi’s Masks and The Waiting Years)
  • Shusaku Endo – Silence
  • Shusaku Endo – Volcano
  • Shusaku Endo – The Sea and Poison (if it’s been translated)
  • Kobo Abe – The Ark Sakura (Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes is one of my all-time favorite novels, it’s about time I read more from him)
  • Kobo Abe – The Ruined Map
  • Junichiro Tanizaki – The Makioka Sisters
  • Kenji Nakagami – The Cape and Other Stories
  • Kenzaburo Oe – Silent Cry
  • Kenzaburo Oe – Rouse up O Young Men of the New Age
  • Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction
  • Taeko Kono – Toddler Hunting
  • Minako Oba – Of Birds Crying
  • Risa Wataya – Isn’t it a pity? (which is supposed to be translated soon)
  • Yu Nagashima – Yuko’s Shortcut
  • Yoko Tawada – The Bridegroom was a Dog
  • Hiromi Kawakami – The Briefcase

That’s what I’ve got so far – what am I missing?

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stepping into the new year

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This year I am resisting  the idea of writing a wrap-up post to catalogue all that I’ve read and thought about in 2012, and I’m resisting even more the idea of plotting out all that I’d like to read and think about in 2013… of course I’ve got scratched out reading plans sitting around my desk and stacks of books I’ve slowly acquired over the last few months that I am eager to pick up and begin. I love the beginning of the year because there is always so much potential for “newness” and there is always the idea that lurking just inside the next book is an idea or an image that will radically change something about me or how I perceive the world. Reading is such an incredibly powerful activity that way.

So instead of putting together a neat wrap-up of last year and a carefully detailed outline of the year to come, I’d like to just post a quote from something I recently read… the first “new idea” of 2013. This comes from Tim Parks’s essay “The Mind Outside My Head” which, although it  was published this past April, I just read (hat tip to the Twitter world). It is about a conversation Parks had with the Italian philosopher Ricardo Manzotti and Manzotti’s ideas of a spread consciousness versus the traditionally understood internal/subjective conciousness. After his conversation with Manzotti, Parks takes a walk around Milan and writes:

For some time I walk the streets of Milan trying to accept that consciousness is not locked in my head but spread out across the revving traffic, the rustling leaves, the dog shit, the blue sky, the gritty cobbles, the solemn facades, the soft breeze, the unseasonal temperatures, the screaming children, the air, the women. After a while it begins to make sense. There are small shifts of mood passing from street to park, from outside to inside, from red to blue, male to female, night to day, tram to metro, center to suburb. There are varying tensions between focus of vision and field of vision, between conversation and background noise. In general there is more: the intrusion of smells, the slap of a passing truck, a persistent touching of heat and breeze.

I will not pretend to understand everything that Manzotti is talking about, even if I do find the idea fascinating. Also, Parks does a lovely job of translating this idea of Manzotti’s for the layperson and applying it to the realm of novel writing, and, in a more general way, to an individual’s experience of the world. Parks takes Manzotti’s science and makes it a subtle argument for a different way of constructing one’s particular openness toward the world, a way of observing and allowing the outside world inside. So, I think, it isn’t a bad way at all of looking forward to the future as I step through these first few days of the new year.

Bonne Année. Happy New Year. Wishing you all a million pages of fascinating ideas in 2013. 

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Best European Fiction 2013 from Dalkey Archive

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My last review of 2012 over at Necessary Fiction is an appropriate one as I take a look at the most recent edition of Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction project:

One of the defining elements of Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction project is the impossibility of gathering these assorted fictions under a single stylistic or thematic roof. And the most recent offering—the fourth of the series and the last edited by Aleksandar Hemon—is no different; the Best European Fiction 2013 is a mix of aesthetics and styles, a jumble of voices and settings and genres and perspectives, the stories as different from each other as are the 32 different countries and 28 different languages that this lengthy collection includes.

Anyone interested in translated literature, in voices that are almost never represented in traditional American publishing—at least not in such diversity or sheer number—will really enjoy this anthology. It’s a collection to take slowly—a story a week, a story a day. Whatever your pace. But these are unique little fictions and a glimpse at how contemporary literature is evolving on the European end of things.

You can read the entire review here.

Heroines – Kate Zambreno (more thoughts)

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I’ve now had some time to think about Kate Zambreno’s Heroines a bit more and I’d like to add to what I wrote about in my first post. This is definitely the kind of book that stays with you and provokes discussion, from several different angles.

Last week I wrote mostly about my overall response to the book, how it is put together and how its structure affected my reaction to Zambreno’s project. I also summed up what I felt was the main point of the book, and I still believe that this overall point—this idea of women’s literary voices being systematically erased in a very particular way— is really what makes Heroines a fascinating and successful piece of literary history/criticism. Zambreno also writes so compellingly about the women writers and/or spouses of those successful male writers—she gives them histories and bodies, she fleshes out their presence alongside their successful partners, she invites us, as readers, to look backward at the literary canon and start over again, reading forward with a new perspective. We’ve had to do this before and we’ll have to do it again, and it is always an exciting moment.

Today, though, I’d like to write about the more personal reaction I had to Heroines. Obviously, every book elicits a “personal” reaction, so this is a little bit different… and perhaps a little harder to write about. Somehow the nature of Zambreno’s narrative, the way she mixes her own personal memoir into her re-drawing of the “modernist wives” seems, at least to me, to be what is polarizing opinion about the book. And in a way, my reaction to the book—although by the time I turned that last page was almost completely positive—my reaction to the book embodies both extremes.

Zambreno puts a lot of herself into the book, including numerous anecdotes about her private life—her relationship with her partner, her worries as a writer and an academic, interactions she has with other women, and how she felt alienated as a “trailing spouse” as she and her partner moved to different places to follow his work. Most of this information is front-loaded into the book, by around page 100 it drops out significantly and the rest of Heroines focuses almost completely on the women Zambreno is championing.

In those early pages, however, much of her story revolves around a kind of tension between herself and her partner—she puts herself into the role of the erased modernist wife, and so by default her partner must play the role of the oppressive successful man. Zambreno does admit that she makes him into a character, and to some extent she admits that she herself is reveling/wallowing in the role she gives herself. She later calls it a form of “memorializing”—a very interesting idea, but one I’m not quite comfortable with.

While reading those early pages of Heroines, it was hard for me to keep a critical distance as I have lived and continue to live a similar situation. On paper, at least. I’m about her age, I’m a writer, I considered working toward a Phd but decided at the time that it wasn’t right for me. Like Zambreno, who appears ambivalent about her unfinished academic status, this is a decision I still sometimes regret. My husband, however, is an academic (a physicist) and I followed him all the way to Switzerland because his job is more stable, more financially sound. As a writer who happens to be a woman, as a relatively new mom who has found herself without many hours of productive writing/working time, I struggle with many of the issues Zambreno touches on throughout the book.

Despite these similarities, or rather, I think, because of them, I found myself unsettled with the way she puts herself and her partner into the oppressed/oppressor roles. Not because I don’t believe that this can’t happen, but because in Zambreno’s case it felt somehow self-imposed. It felt like she wanted to be in these roles because it brought her closer to the women she so admired and wanted to save. I couldn’t help thinking about how dissimilar her life could have been (or is, I really have no idea), and about how much opportunity she appears to have had. Frankly, I can’t quite think of anything more free, more empowering, than an open schedule and full access to an academic library.

I say this last sentence somewhat flippantly, yet knowing how crippling the self-doubt of a (woman) writer/academic can be, knowing how difficult it is to find your own fictional/critical voice when the models are overwhelmingly male and knowing how enraging the perpetuation of certain gender roles in writing/publishing/academia—I know these things, I don’t want to minimize the issues that must be negotiated.

She addresses this issue of role playing rather quickly and a little obliquely, toward the end of Heroines when she makes a comment about Second Wave feminists and their requirement that women write and be empowered heroines. And there is some idea—which Zambreno mentions in an interview—that I should be reading the book like a novel and not a memoir. So then my quibble is not so much with the “truth” of Zambreno’s story but with the form of the book and this mixture of criticism/biography/memoir. Does her own story inform my understanding and reactions to the stories of the silence modernist wives? I think—and I think this after days of thinking, and rereading—that it does not. Simply because while I found her book incredibly intelligent and her writing and ideas a real pleasure to read, I found myself becoming impatient with the “character” of Kate Zambreno as she was written in Heroines.

But I am still thinking about this… about what my reaction might mean in terms of my own feminism, how I judge other women as they handle the difficulties that all women writers face compared to how I handle them, how I feel about the stereotype of the irrational woman and why I feel that way.

So I am still re-reading, and I am still thinking…

Heroines – Kate Zambreno (first thoughts)

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This may end up being one of my last book/reading posts of the year, so it is a happy coincidence that I’ll finish up by writing about Kate Zambreno’s Heroines – a book I only recently came across (thank you Anthony) but which speaks to so much of what I’ve been thinking about in recent years – namely literature and women and women’s writing and its place in/displacement from the canon. This entire year here at Pieces was dedicated to reviewing women writers and a feminist approach to the whole literary universe.

I think my reaction to Heroines is going to take a few separate posts – I have a lot to discuss. So today is just one initial reaction. I’ll try to get the others written up before the end of the week (although my daughter’s daycare is closed now until the 7th of January – I am not unaware of the irony of this fact keeping me from writing again more quickly about this particular book).

Before I say anything else, I will say that Heroines is a Before/After book, meaning that reading it has broken my literary perspective into a “Before I read Heroines” and an “After I read Heroines.” I will not be able to look at that long line of canonized male writers in the same way ever again, nor will I be able to make the same assumptions about the women who were connected with them and women writers in general – and I want to send a huge heartfelt thank you to Zambreno for doing this. I’ve always been aware of the sad exclusion of so many wonderful and talented female writers from the canon and other generalized literary discussions, but she’s gotten me to think about why this happens in a very particular way.

In brief, Heroines is a hybrid work: part criticism, part literary biography, part personal memoir. Zambreno is interested in the “modernist wives,” women like Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivien(ne) Eliot, Jane Boyles, Elizabeth Hardwick, Sylvia Plath, and, to some extent, Virginia Woolf and a handful of others. Women who were used as muses for their famous spouses but forbidden their own artistic expression, often diagnosed as mentally unstable and eventually silenced and/or institutionalized.

Just a few words on the hybrid form of the book before I write about the content. This kind of fractured nontraditional narrative is beginning to feel more and more comfortable (and Zambreno makes a case for it as a particularly feminine form of writing – an idea which I found quite interesting), and I think that as postmodern readers we have come to enjoy it—I certainly do—and also expect it. The book as a whole feels very accessible, and yet it remains rigorously academic as well.

In her acknowledgments, Zambreno thanks her editor for supporting the idea that we should not be “erasing the self in our criticism.” It’s obviously something she thought a lot about – how to put herself into the book, how to structure the narrative while keeping herself woven through it. This, I think, is where the book will be contested. It is where she minimizes (on purpose, by invoking her own fragility) her writer’s authority, and it puts her in a vulnerable place. I am still working out my own reaction to it.

One thing I can say now, however, is that I think the book’s blog-like structure, with the reader following along as Zambreno makes all these connections and bridges, jumping from subject to subject and exploring the various writings, biographies and other disjointed textual and anecdotal evidence on the lives of her heroines and their connections to her, means that some of her overriding arguments and ultimate conclusions become hidden at the end of the book – and this is a bit of shame, because they’re brilliant.

I’m not arguing for a traditionally structured work of academic criticism, not at all, but an awareness of the risks inherent in this kind of jumping, fractured, and personalized narrative – and then somehow the ability to undercut it, to insure the reader doesn’t get lost in the mix of personal and academic, to get right away to the heart of the argument.

Which is this – and it’s undeniable and brilliant:

That a male writer’s emotional excess/singular artistic focus is glorified and lauded, it becomes his genius, his ability to embody the other, his “transcendence of the self” – while a woman experiencing/attempting the same is diagnosed and institutionalized, it becomes her madness, her inability to live in normal society, her loss of reason.

Zambreno fills the book with examples – Scott Fitzgerald actually using lawyers to keep Zelda from writing (his case is nearly the most egregious, I may never be able to read him again), Virginia Woolf’s carefully allotted writing time (by doctors and Leonard) – no more than an hour a day, Flaubert lecturing Louise Colet against excess, Robert Lowell idolizing then demonizing his women as he fell in and out of love, and more and more, example after example… the book is composed of interwoven case studies of this kind of violence/oppression and the denial of the worth of a woman’s artistic creation.

 So overall, what Zambreno puts forward is an extremely compelling idea – and a way to re-envision what have been considered “minor” works and place them back on equal footing with similar novels and poems and stories created by male writers all along. This, to me, is the greatest contribution that Heroines makes to the literary discussion.

I’ll have more to say about the book – specifically about the personal part of the narrative and about Zambreno’s romanticism of the silenced woman writer (a romanticism she acknowledges and addresses), and about the different feminist approaches to the problem of the female writer, approaches which fascinate me and provoke a lot of questions – but I’ll have to do it another day. More soon.

 

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Noelle Revaz – With the Animals

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This week at The Rumpus I reviewed With the Animals by Noelle Revaz – this book was published this year as part of Dalkey Archive’s Swiss Literature Series:

Paul, the narrator and subject of Noëlle Revaz’s With the Animals, is a rustic Swiss farmer with strong opinions but a weak intellect; he is a man of formidable emotion but has a rather small heart, metaphorically speaking. The book asks its readers to sustain an intimate encounter with this difficult and often violent man, an intimate encounter because of the way the reader becomes so tightly locked inside Paul’s narrated vision—the story unfolds in his voice and through the representation of his thinking as Revaz has conceived it. Paul’s voice is exceedingly rustic, so much so that at first it seems the book might be set several decades before its initial French-language publication date of 2002. As the story continues, however, it becomes clear that while the story is contemporary, Paul is a living anachronism – out-of-date even by the standards of other neighboring farmers.

Not only is he wary of modern technology—he has trouble using an ordinary landline telephone, for example—and ultra-conservative in his vision of family and society, he is also attached to his farm and to his animals in such a way that he actually sits just outside the usual polarity of city and rural; he is nearly more animal than he is human. And this set-up leads to the central question of With the Animals– can Paul be humanized?

You can read the entire review here.

And, now, just a quick word, a more personal reaction to the book. In W. Donald Wilson’s short Translator’s Note, he comments that With the Animals isn’t written in any particular French dialect, that it was an invention of Revaz’s. Also, Revaz does not name the Swiss canton where Paul has his farm, but it isn’t hard to narrow down the options. First, it’s a French speaking canton: either Valais, Jura, Geneva, Fribourg, or Vaud. We can cross off the Valais as it’s a mountainous region and mostly Catholic, Fribourg is quite Catholic and so is the Jura (and most farming regions of the Jura are up on a high plateau – the beautiful but anarchist Franches Montagnes – that give a very particular farming and community culture). I mention this Catholicism as an excluding factor because I believe that in With the Animals Revaz is really working with a particular Swiss Protestant aesthetic, a bit of Calvinism gone mad, if you will, and so that leaves the cantons of Vaud and Geneva – basically any of the rural communities that dot the hillsides overlooking Lake Geneva.

So I believe, although cannot prove, that the book is set in the canton of Vaud – this is where Revaz currently lives, although I believe she is originally from the Valais. And this is where I live. I live in a small farming community in the canton of Vaud, and I rent a farmhouse from a local farmer. I read the book in French first and then read Wilson’s translation (which is excellent, as I mention in the review at The Rumpus). Much of Revaz’s French felt incredibly familiar to me – the rustic expressions, the cold awkwardness about matters of emotion and physical sensuality, this strange tenderness toward the animals. It’s all worked into the language of the book, and this language is the Swiss French that I’ve come to listen to most often. (Not to mention the one farmer – about Paul’s age – who comes into our local shops still covered in manure, still reeking of spoilt milk and speaks in a patois I cannot understand at all. I see this man at least once every few weeks and now he’s become Paul to me, a pure embodiment of the book.)

So because of all this, I can’t help but disagree with Wilson – Paul’s unique speech is absolutely drenched in this little corner of Switzerland and its rural culture, it’s tension between modernity and traditional Swiss Protestant ethics and aesthetics. And I think it’s a bit of a shame to play that down.

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Tania Hershman – My Mother Was an Upright Piano

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This week at Necessary Fiction I reviewed Tania Hershman’s collection My Mother Was an Upright Piano:

But flash pieces can also work in another direction entirely. They can willfully ignore or resist this idea of “boundaries,” and, in this way, they create a sharp and refined glimmer of a much longer story. But they are more than hints or teasers, they become like a puzzle piece so intricately detailed and formed that it no longer needs the puzzle.

This last example is the kind of fiction that mostly fills Tania Hershman’s My Mother Was an Upright Piano, a collection of 56 short and very short fictions that play across a wide variety of human experience and emotion—loss, irreverence, love relationships, family relationships, grief, anger, curiosity, escape. The diversity of subject on offer in the collection is brilliant, but what really impresses is how Hershman succeeds in establishing longer, more complicated narratives within each short piece. These aren’t incomplete excerpts; the reader doesn’t want or need any of these fictions to go on longer or somehow become another form entirely. But again and again, out of a very short piece, a fuller story blooms.

You can read the full review here.

“Henry James could have been a woman.”

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From the 1979/1980 Paris Review interview with Nadine Gordimer :

 

INTERVIEWER

You say that writers are androgynous. Do you recognize any difference between masculine and feminine writing, such as, say, Woolf’s versus Hemingway’s writing?

GORDIMER

Hemingway is such an extreme example, and his writing is really an instance of machismo, isn’t it? Henry James could have been a woman. E. M. Forster could have been. George Eliot could have been a man. I used to be too insistent on this point that there’s no sex in the brain; I’m less insistent now—perhaps I’m being influenced by the changing attitude of women toward themselves in general? I don’t think there’s anything that women writers don’t know. But it may be that there are certain aspects of life that they can deal with a shade better, just as I wonder whether any woman writer, however great, could have written the marvelous war scenes in War and Peace. By and large, I don’t think it matters a damn what sex a writer is, so long as the work is that of a real writer. I think there is such a thing as “ladies’ writing,” for instance, feminine writing; there are “authoresses” and “poetesses.” And there are men, like Hemingway, whose excessive “manliness” is a concomitant part of their writing. But with so many of the male writers whom I admire, it doesn’t matter too much. There doesn’t seem to be anything they don’t know, either. After all, look at Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. To me, that’s the ultimate proof of the ability of either sex to understand and convey the inner workings of the other. No woman was ever “written” better by a woman writer. How did Joyce know? God knows how, and it doesn’t matter.