Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

two new reviews: Sheldon Lee Compton & Pia Juul

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I have two recent reviews over at Necessary Fiction that I would like to mention here. The first is for Sheldon Lee Compton’s début collection of stories The Same Terrible Storm. Compton is an American writer from Virginia and his stories draw firmly on their Appalachian setting. It is a wonderfully atmospheric collection.

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

… each story, especially the longer ones, suit this notion of storm—of rage, outburst, eruption, hurricane, all of these definitions and more—in one way or another. Each story has, at its center, its own horrible explosion and Compton’s careful, voice-inflected prose circles these tense moments in a way that feels much like a dance.

The wind skirted across the pond and slid beneath the sill. A spirit breeze spiked with pine needles and some circled the bedroom and took hold of her ribbed waist. She would go to the pond and wait, wait for Pete to return with his hound from hell and Van to join her and for Kent to arrive to the place of his redemption or rest where rooftop clouds would collide, where, like always, not a single drop of rain would touch the cracked marble of her skin.

How wonderful is the alliteration in this section of the titular story—all those s’s, plus that “hound from hell” where another writer might have been content to leave off with hound and sadly lose all the rhythm in the triplet phrasing, and then, finally the switch from the s’s to a series of hard k’s (Kent, collide, like, cracked, skin) that foreshadow the movement of this particular piece from one of soft and hazy experience to a sharp and pointed confrontation, an unexpected blowing up.

You can read the whole review here.

The Same Terrible Storm is published by Foxhead Books, an independent publisher with a very small but impressive catalogue.

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The second review was published today and is for Pia Juul’s fantastic Murder of Halland which came out just earlier this year from Peirene Press. I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy Peirene’s publishing program and the novellas–in-translation they select. The Murder of Halland was no exception – it’s a page-turner of the most devious and literary kind.

My review begins like this:

Think of that classical mystery genre set in a small town and which involves the unexpected murder of a prominent citizen. Now think of this genre turned inside out and upside down, where all of your “mystery story” expectations are set up neatly but quickly subverted. This will give you some idea of what to expect from Pia Juul’s The Murder of Halland — a fascinating and fun and thoughtful anti-mystery.

You can read the full review here.

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Doris Lessing – The Fifth Child

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As it happens, I’ve only read two novels by Doris Lessing – The Grass is Singing a few years ago, and The Fifth Child a few months ago. I didn’t write about The Grass is Singing after I read it, and I realize now what a mistake this was because I’ve let some of the book’s power fade from my memory. I have held onto a series of distinct visuals and sense memories from this book: the front porch of the house, the heat created from the tin roof, something about a yellow dress, and this image of a stick-thin woman, not more than a shadow, lurking about her home. What I wish I could remember better is Lessing’s writing style and how it worked to create this atmosphere throughout the novel.

I’m interested in this—and the only solution is to re-read—because I was struck with the efficiency of her writing in The Fifth Child and I’d like to compare. I say efficiency because while the prose isn’t overly spare, there is nothing lavish or wasteful about it either. And she manages to tell a difficult and provocative story in about 150 pages.

The premise of The Fifth Child is simple enough – a young English couple buy a big rambling old house and spend a few years filling it up with more children than they can really afford; despite constant nagging financial concerns they create a happy and enviable family life. Until, of course, they get pregnant with their fifth child, a boy, who is somehow abnormal. Not in any easily understandable or diagnosable way, however. He is simply other—somehow ferocious, superhuman and violent. The mother, Harriet, begins to think of him as a kind of goblin.

At first the family copes with his differences as best they can, but things begin to fall apart and a series of very difficult, very painful decisions must be made. It’s an extraordinary book, I feel, because it manages to discuss a number of difficult social and emotional questions without leaving the strict confines of a simple, albeit disturbing, story. What is to be done about Ben? What are Harriet and David’s responsibilities to this child? How do they manage those responsibilities without shirking the responsibilities toward their other children? But also, and this is where the book has left its mark on me as a reader, how does a parent deal with the reality of not loving, of even fearing, their own child? What a frightening possibility.

The following passage encapsulates the dilemma Lessing has given her characters:

One early morning, something took Harriet quickly out of her bed into the baby’s room, and there she saw Ben balanced on the window-sill. It was high – heaven only knew how he got up there! The window was open. In a moment he would have fallen out of it. Harriet was thinking, What a pity I came in… and refused to be shocked at herself. Heavy bars were put in, and there Ben would stand on the sill, gripping the bars and shaking them, and surveying the outside world, letting out his thick, raucous cries.

Later on, the book hinges on this same idea in a slightly different way… whether Harriet allows Ben to be “taken care of” and what her decision means for the rest of her family. It’s a terrible question, a riveting one. What struck me as fascinating, however, about the book and where Lessing ultimately goes with it, is that right from the beginning Ben’s difference is depicted in extreme terms. He’s so obviously monstrous, so inhuman. And while the story unravels, the reader finds it almost too easy to sympathize with the people willing to do whatever it takes to make things normal again for this family. When Harriet finally does make her decision, it’s almost shocking. Almost. But it effectively recasts all the earlier questions we’ve had to the situation, and what decisions we—as readers, as people, as parents—might have entertained.

There is a sequel to this novel called Ben in the World, which Lessing published twelve years after The Fifth Child. Has anyone read both?

Finally, while I sat here writing this out, I realized that I’ve actually read a third Lessing title, The Grandmothers, which is a collection of four novellas and was the first Lessing I read. It was quite good, especially the title story “The Grandmothers.” I remember enjoying the second piece, “Victoria and the Staveneys,” as well.

So, really, I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by her… I know that I will read The Golden Notebook at some point, along with her other novels—although I admit I’m a bit lost as to where to go next, so suggestions would be very welcome. (I don’t believe I would be interested in any of her science fiction-esque work, but perhaps I’m wrong.)

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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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Louis Armand – Breakfast at Midnight

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This week at Necessary Fiction, I review Louis Armand’s Breakfast at Midnight, a book published by the Prague-based Equus Press in 2012:

Overall, plot does not so much matter in this book—the mood, the style, the imagery and emotion are really at the heart of the work; also, Armand is experimenting with depression and psychosis, how to describe them, how they are experienced—but for the sake of review, here is a bare bones that will suffice: a young man in Prague relives a past relationship when the body of a young redheaded woman surfaces in the river and he goes with his friend (if that’s really the word to describe their connection), Blake, to photograph the body. Blake is a pornographer of women’s bodies, both dead and alive, although he seems to prefer them dead. Our narrator is a fugitive, having exchanged his life (via swapped passport in a South American jungle) for a dying man’s ten years before. The reason for his shadowy existence is slowly and circuitously revealed and has everything to do with the body of a young red headed woman. Not the corpse we meet in chapter two, but that body from his past, a powerful physical presence that hovers throughout the entire book.

You can read the entire review here.

Charlotte Smith – Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle

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It’s been a while since I’ve read anything pre-1950s – and so it was great fun to sit down with Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline, or The Orphan of the Castle this week. The book was published in 1788 and was Smith’s first novel (of ten).

The story centers on a young woman – Emmeline Mowbray – who is raised on her own in a castle belonging to her uncle. The castle was once her father’s, but his death (which shortly followed her mother’s death in childbirth) has left her an orphan and, more importantly, an orphan without claim to her father’s or his family’s name. The uncle provides for her basic needs but is not planning to raise her as a part of his family. When Emmeline is sixteen her caregiver dies, leaving her exposed to the advances of one of the servants. She sends a letter to her uncle, asking for help, and eventually he arrives to sort out Emmeline’s future, but he has brought along his son, Delamere, who instantly falls in love with the young and beautiful and softspoken Emmeline. He decides he must have her at any cost. His obstinate pursuit of her (because his family does not approve of the match, nor does Emmeline love him) sets in motion the next 527 pages of passionate speeches, near escapes, clever subterfuge and so on and so forth.

The book is highly entertaining and I stayed up far too late several nights in a row just wanting to see what would happen and how it would all work out. I’ll put your fears at rest – the book has a fantastic happy ending. Highly satisfactory.

But Emmeline is definitely a novel of its times—extremely sentimental. The endless weeping, sobbing and fainting becomes tiresome about halfway through the book. The slightest emotional upset will send any one of the female characters into a dead faint, or at the very least, a high fever that may last for several days. Luckily, our Emmeline is a plucky woman and in the midst of her near-fainting, she is able to deliver some amazing speeches. She is a model of integrity and it is only through her sound mind and clever thinking (while crying, while sobbing, while falling down with fatigue), that she manages to keep her “honor” intact.

Where I found myself enjoying the book the most was in its social critique. Smith is clearly arguing against the social and family structures of the era that leave women so open to “moral compromise.” Two of Emmeline’s closest friends in the novel have been forced into horrible marriages and their lot in life is not a happy one. They are without any means to correct their situations themselves, and must rely on their male friends (a risky maneuver) or relatives for any assistance. Because Emmeline is the only character without any real family ties, especially male ones, she is at the greatest risk. And of course this is what drives the story—how will she avoid all the traps that surround her, how will she manage to maintain her honor when her social situation makes it so easy for men to take advantage of her? The simple act of crossing town in the company of a man who is not a brother or established “safe” connection, is fraught with danger.

As Emmeline was Smith’s first novel, I’m keen to see how her work developed, in terms of theme but also style, and I look forward to reading her other novels. I’d also really like to read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary: A Fiction, which was published the same year as Emmeline but may be quite different. At least Wollstonecraft was supposed to have been very critical of the sentimental novels and their tradition. So we shall see – I do love it when one book leads to another right away.

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Barbara Comyns – Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

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Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is the fourth Barbara Comyns novel that I’ve read. I started with Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, then went to The Vet’s Daughter and after that read The Juniper Tree. My reading of her has been completely haphazard, dictated mostly by which book I happened to come across in a second hand bookshop (except for Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, which I got from a friend.)

Although I’d like to do a start-to-finish read of her at some point, I’m quite happy to have read these four in the order that I did because Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead was actually somewhat different from the other three. It still felt very much like a Barbara Comyns novel, but it was much starker and more grotesque. I wonder whether it would have unsettled me too much to look for her other work right away, if I had read it first. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths and The Juniper Tree, both unusual novels with elements of this same stark vision and bizarre perspective, seem positively gentle compared to Who Was Changed, and even The Vet’s Daughter doesn’t get as strange and violent.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is about a small village in England and the internal struggles of a particular family (the wealthiest) in the village, but it’s also about a mysterious illness that suddenly affects many of the inhabitants. I’ve lent my copy to a friend so I cannot provide verbatim any of the fantastic descriptions of the villagers becoming ill and going crazy. It’s incredible. Comyns makes it all so horrible and violent. And then once the villagers figure out what’s happening, they burn someone’s house down. That scene is one I will not likely forget soon.

For all of the book’s fantasy, Comyns’s omniscient third-person narrator is straightforward and unemotional, maintaining an almost frighteningly clinical distance from what’s going on. The narrator passes over many of the novel’s gruesome details quite quickly, changing subjects from one sentence to the next. Often the narrator juxtaposes something outrageous with something benign. This narrative technique had a way of making me gasp out loud, like I might be the only one noticing how utterly amiss everything was in this little village. I love that Comyns brought me through the text this way.

Comyns has a way of creating characters with a lurking monstrous side. The father in The Vet’s Daughter and the mother in The Juniper Tree, for example, but in Who Was Changed it is hard to find a character without this monster-within. The grandmother is an absolute caricature (wonderfully done) of an obese tyrant. The father a weakling with a pathologically selfish side. Even Emma, the oldest daughter of the family and the person we are meant to find the most sympathetic, has a way of making unsettling statements and misunderstanding vital situations. The village and the family and the story all end up feeling like a carnival somehow, or a gruesome fairytale, and yet as a reader I was incredibly attached to what was happening. It’s fascinating to me how she manages (and she’s done this in each book) to both reflect and distort reality.

With each book of hers I read, I become more and more impressed with the uniqueness of her style and fictional vision. All of her books are available but several have been re-issued lately (she wrote most of them in the 50s and 60s) and so it feels like the world is going through a little Barbara Comyns revival. I hope this is the case, and I hope it continues.

 

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Short fiction – “Winning”

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The Scottish writer Helen McClory has put together a project on Thresholds that she is publishing on her really lovely blog Schietree. This is how she describes the project:

Boundaries, thresholds, doorways. Space, hybrids, dichotomies, taboos. The girl, the woman. The wilderness, the city. I’ve been interested for a long time in these points of tangent and overlap and crossing which appear in literature.

She has very kindly included an excerpt from my novella-in-progress, which I’m calling Hush (for now). This excerpt comes from a chapter toward the end of the book, which is also toward the end of the protagonist’s life and is called “Winning.” Here is how it begins:

A bright morning in the third week of May. Here is our Lia in the garage below the small condominium where she and Evan now live. She is yelling, her hand in the box she has dragged to the foot of the stairs and opened, certain that although he is pretending not to, Evan can hear her.

“Where is it?” she yells one last time. Silence from the upstairs.

Lia is not to be outdone by a Christmas ornament.

To understand her, we must go back to breakfast and a small dispute. A detail needing clarification.

You can read the full excerpt here.

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