Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

Tuck and Hustvedt

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There is a stack of books on my desk glaring at me. Seven books to be exact. All deserving a much better review than I am about to give them. But in order to move forward – I’ve waited too long – here we go with a first round of bookish thoughts to clear away two books:

I read Siri Hustvedt’s The Summer Without Men almost in tandem with Lily Tuck’s I Married You for Happiness and so the two books are linked in my mind. There are some notable similarities between them. First, the timeline factor – Hustvedt’s book is about one single summer in the narrator’s life while Tuck’s is about a single night. Second, both books offer somewhat controversial endings. And third, both books are concerned with reviewing a marriage. I Married You for Happiness is about the night the narrator’s husband dies unexpectedly. She sits with him for that one night and thinks back over their thirty-some years together. For Hustvedt, narrator Mia’s “Summer Without Men” comes about because of her husband’s infidelity and so they separate for several months as each works out what has happened.

I discussed I Married You for Happiness with my book group last month, and the book improved upon discussion. I enjoyed the book on my own while reading it but I overall a little ambivalent. Much of what Nina, the narrator, remembers is unpleasant—the unhappy moments in her marriage, for example, or moments when she failed him or he failed her—and she paints her husband in a somewhat unfavorable light. Not that this is automatic grounds for my not liking the book. On the contrary, I liked the unexpected nature of what she chooses to remember and discuss and what it says about her and especially “our” expectations of a successful marriage. At the same time, however, Nina’s negativity distorts a little how I perceived and experienced her grieving.

In the book, Nina’s husband was a mathematician and Tuck uses this bit of information to filter the narrator’s memories through certain mathematical constructs and ideas. Albeit a tiny bit gimmicky, this was one of the most interesting parts of the book. I say gimmicky because I feel that certain scientific ideas (i.e. quantum physics) get a lot of play outside the realm of hard science and not always correctly. There is something very romantic about quantum physics and difficult math, but we don’t always understand exactly what we’re transposing into a metaphor used in another discipline. So I was wary of Tuck’s project in that sense, but I should say that she doesn’t ever go too far. Nina isn’t a mathematician or a physicist and she doesn’t understand much of what her husband often talked about. This is perhaps something she regrets; at least she is fixated on his inner life and how she negotiated it or matched it to hers at the moment of his death.

The science idea Tuck uses the most is Schrodinger’s dead/alive cat-in-the-box thought experiment, which is essentially about the nature of observation and reality. She does something interesting with this idea at the end of the book – a “trick” that certainly divided the opinions in my book group.

All in all, I Married You for Happiness is a thoughtful book and one worth revisiting in ten or twenty years time, for example. It will undoubtedly affect readers differently at different stages of their life and I like that. The mark of a good book. Tuck’s writing is also quite lovely—easy but elegant. The book reads quickly and yet contains much to think about.

Writing style seems to be a good enough bridge then to cross over to The Summer Without Men. Hustvedt is a different kind of writer, although she isn’t directly opposite in terms of style. Her prose is not dense, but it is a little thicker than Tuck’s. If I weren’t afraid it would sound too negative, I would call it more academic.

In any case, The Summer Without Men throws quite a challenge at the reader with its premise. Mia’s husband Boris (husband of thirty years) asks for a separation because he has fallen in love with a young woman and wants to explore this new development. This news is so shocking to Mia that she ends up in the hospital with a kind of psychic collapse, where she stays for a week or so before coming around and heading back to her hometown for the summer. The book then details her grieving (how else can you call it?) as well as the relationships she makes while there – with her aging mother and mother’s friends living at an old folks home, with a group of teenage girls to whom she teaches poetry and with her next door neighbor, a young mother with a possibly abusive husband.

As you can see, the book attempts to embrace a woman’s entire timeline. In this, I think, it is incredibly successful. Mia’s discoveries about the lives of the older, widowed women, her negotiations with the teenagers, her support from and to the young mother next door are all really well done. Of course all of this is framed against her own understanding of herself in relationship with Boris and what it means that he has thrown her off. There is a lot of feminist thought in The Summer Without Men and never does she offer any cute or easy answers.

Now, when I say that the premise is a challenge, I say it because of the narrator’s break down and hospitalization and the fact that her husband of forty years, knowing how she suffered, continued with his affair. I knew that the book would ultimately involve the question of reconciliation and I knew that if she went back to him, I would probably hate the book. I will not reveal what happens, nor will I say how I felt about the ending. The book is good enough for all the other reasons mentioned above to withstand what might be controversial about the ending.

 

 

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Nadine Gordimer – No Time Like the Present

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In 2008, I read all of Nadine Gordimer’s fourteen novels from start to finish. From her excellent début, The Lying Days (1953), to her 2005 novel Get A Life. (If you’re interested, here are the two wrap-up posts from that project, Wrap-up #1 and Wrap-up #2 and I think they serve as a good introduction to her work.) Reading someone start to finish is a hobby of mine, but Gordimer’s oeuvre is so big and diverse that it was a wonderfully satisfying project. It also gave me an appreciation for her writing, instead of what tends to get trumpeted more often, her message. Her latest novel, No Time Like the Present, just came out in March and I finally finished this rather grand, sweeping 421-page novel the other day.

I certainly don’t want to think that No Time Like the Present will be her last novel. At 88, she is incredibly sharp and has said that she continues to write. But if circumstances dictate that it is her last novel, a hundred years from now people may suggest that she planned it this way. More than any of her other post-Apartheid novels, this book will serve as a detailed document of the years between say 1991 (just before Apartheid was banned in 1994) and 2012.

The book is about a couple, Jabulile and Steve, who meet and fall in love while fighting against Apartheid. Being a mixed-culture couple, they are married in secret out of the country and live hidden for a few years in the country until 1994. When Apartheid is banned, their relationship becomes legal and their lives in this new independent situation begin. They have two children, Sindiswa and Gary Elias, and they both work jobs that give them power to affect change in the radically transforming South African society. Jabu is a lawyer and Steve a professor.

No Time Like the Present covers a lot of territory – it touches on so many subjects and so many issues of post-Apartheid society: violence, government corruption, poverty, immigration, continued racism. It looks at how Steve and Jabu must re-define their relationship that was once clandestine but is now accepted. It looks at how their children grow up in a society that now legally accepts their mixed-culture status. The second half of the book focuses on one particular issue—the brain drain. Steve begins to look at the possibility of moving to Australia, at the possibility of giving himself and his children a different sort of life.

That discussion is where the book generates a lot of power. (And where, as an expat myself, from a country that has its own set of difficult and frustrating social and political issues, I had my most personal reaction to the story Gordimer tells.) When a person has invested their young adulthood in a movement to better the society they live in, the idea of abandoning that society does not come easily. Both Steve and Jabu are disillusioned with the governmental corruption that ensues once Jacob Zuma becomes president, they are angry at the violence and poverty that explodes all over the nation. They are faced with the fact that no matter the laws, the capitalist system will effectively continue to segregate their society. Gordimer does a really excellent job of revealing the complications behind the desire for escape and the desire to stay behind to continue to fight.

Where No Time Like the Present disappointed me just a little is that I’ve always felt that Gordimer manages to effectively blend politics with personal. Even in Burger’s Daughter, which is not one of my favorites and one of her most overtly political, there are passages of writing, insights into complicated human emotion that rise above the rapid-fire political discussions that Gordimer has no qualms inserting into a book. A Guest of Honour is similar in that despite the diplomatic meetings and political cocktail parties, there are brilliant descriptions of life lived, of landscape, of rare human connection. She has an incredible talent for finding a description that unbalances a reader, that reveals something new.

And yet this was mostly missing in No Time Like the Present. If it’s possible for a book to be both dry and passionate, then this is the best description. The narrative is fast-paced and distanced, and it doesn’t ever, or very rarely, linger on the intangible parts of a story—the physical details of landscape and character, the strange observations of individuals within the story. Because of this, I ended up with the feeling that Steve and Jabu could have been any mixed-culture couple, that their children could have been any set of siblings from the new South Africa. And so their story, although interesting and filled with “event,” did not move me so much. I suppose the way Gordimer tells this story makes the book an important artifact, perhaps even an important literary artifact, but, for me at least, it didn’t make the book an excellent piece of fiction.

At her reading in London a few weeks ago, I was too shy to ask a question and I hadn’t yet finished the book anyway. But if I had the chance now, I would have loved to ask her why she used such a dash-over-everything narrative style and whether she knew she was sacrificing “story” for documentation. This must be something she considers—she is a fine writer, a powerful writer, most of her books have balanced this tricky problem with elegance. I’m thinking of The Conservationist and July’s People, The Pickup and My Son’s Story, for example. All novels that are powerful documents of a troubled society, but more than that, are examples of compelling and effective storytelling.

 

Julianna Spallholz – The State of Kansas

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This week at Necessary Fiction I reviewed Julianna Spallholz, a début writer, for her collection of short and very short fictions, The State of Kansas.

A collection of flash fiction is an interesting body of work to consider as a whole. Unless specifically connected, each piece must stand on its own. Must create that flash of heat and light, that lightning bolt charge between the reader and the piece. In this way, flash fiction is a more difficult form than its longer cousin, simply because it doesn’t have the leisure of multiple scenes or voice-driven explanation or layers of detail to lure a reader into the collusion needed to make a fictional world come alive.

Julianna Spallholz’s collection of short and (mostly) very short fictions, The State of Kansas, is filled with many a lightning bolt, moments when her careful assembly of only a few words quite literally shocks, burns, scratches, and dazzles. There are pieces here—miniature worlds wrought of startling images and unsettling voices —that will echo long after a reader has finished and moved on.

As I mention above, I think that flash fiction is a difficult form in many ways. I have the sense that it either works or it doesn’t – because there isn’t any manoeuvering room with such small word counts, a flash piece has to strike hard, has to surprise the reader. On the whole I think that Spallholz’s collection is a real success. Her stories are clever when they’re funny and quite moving when they’re serious.

Read the entire review here.

New Ramuz translation out – “Phimonette”

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The Spring Issue of Metamorphoses—the journal of the five college faculty seminar on literary translation—includes my translation of Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s short story, “Phimonette.” It took me several tries to find a home for this unique and sad little story. It is essentially the story of a life lived unhappily, and a sudden frenzied rush to do it again, this time happily, even if that happiness is imagined, even delusional. The title character, Phimonette, is an old woman who has suddenly shown up at a semi-secret dance party in a hay loft on the mountain where the young people of the village like to meet. Phimonette has lost her grip on reality and has imagined herself young again, this time with a fiancé, and so the young villagers tease and laugh at her, although they aren’t mean. However, as the day continues and the group descends from the hillside back into the village and we meet Phimonette’s sister, Angèle (also unmarried, also an old-maid and also very unhappy), it becomes clear that Phimonette’s delusion will have quite sad repercussions.

This kind of story involving two sisters – old maids – is one that Ramuz returns to again and again. It’s clear he was interested in solitude and the nature of sorrow created from loneliness. In “Phimonette” he pushes this idea to the extreme and shows that this lifelong unhappiness has finally caused a rupture. Phimonette is incapable of living with her unhappiness any longer and so she exchanges it for something equally dangerous – insanity. (I can’t help finding the French kinder here – “la folie” seems so much softer than “insanity.”)

Editions Slatkine in Geneva have been slowly producing The Complete Works of CF Ramuz, fully annotated and commented; there will be 30 volumes in total when they finish the series in 2013, including five volumes dedicated to his short stories. It is an enormous undertaking, but the result is spectacular. I have three of the short story volumes (Nouvelles et Morceaux) and it’s from these annotated texts that I’ve based my translations. These annotated volumes are also a wonderful source of information about each piece.

For “Phimonette,” for example, we learn that the story was originally titled, “Mariette” but that Ramuz changed the protagonist’s name for his second draft. The story was written in about one week in September of 1907, and there are five different drafts. It was rejected by a literary journal in Lausanne in October 1907 and was not published in Ramuz’s lifetime. Fun to think that it found a home in another country and language just over a hundred years later!

Here is a link to Metamorphoses.

 

 

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Delphine de Vigan – Les Heures Souterraines

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My French book group meets this coming Monday evening, and this month we selected Delphine de Vigan’s 2009 novel – Les Heures Souterraines. De Vigan has six novels to her name, although this is my first experience reading her. Les Heures Souterraines was a Goncourt finalist and translated into English as Underground Time (Bloomsbury).

The book follows two desperately unhappy people—Mathilde and Thibault—for exactly one day. Their unhappiness stems from two very different situations. Mathilde (who is a widowed mother of three boys) is being bullied at her job. The bullying is pretty horrific, so horrific in fact that it starts to undermine the book’s verisimilitude. Mostly because about halfway through, it becomes very hard to understand why Mathilde has even stayed in this office – unless we are to assume that it would be otherwise nearly impossible for her to find another job. This is a detail, perhaps, but one which the author could have easily dispensed with and didn’t, and so it weakened my otherwise intense sympathy for Mathilde.

The bullying, however, was expertly done. And quite frightening. Les Heures Souterraines draws an extremely realistic portrait of a kind of harassment—not at all sexual—that gave me chills. After daring to publicly contradict her boss (at a moment when she was “in favor” with this vain and power-hungry man), Mathilde is subsequently ostracized and then repeatedly set-up to fail or disappoint. The day the novel follows her she is at the breaking point.

Thibault’s unhappiness is less defined. He’s recently realized that the woman he’s been seeing will never love him back, in fact, she finds pathetic, even enraging, the whole idea of his loving her. There is more, namely a drunken argument fifteen years ago that resulted in the loss of two fingers and wrecked his chances at becoming a surgeon. So when we meet him, he’s been working for years as an on-call emergency doctor in Paris, a stressful and unsatisfactory job.

Les Heures Souterraines is a work novel in many ways, and it spends a considerable amount of time exploring how our professional life, separate as we may keep it from our personal life, becomes a strong and unavoidable reflection of a person’s identity. What happens to Mathilde is so unexpected, a completely unforeseen violence and an attack on who she believed she was, that she becomes paralyzed, and by the time she realizes that she must act, do something to change what is happening, it is already too late. For Thibault, the disconnect between the person he wanted to be and the person he finds he has become is so great that he has simply become numb.

De Vigan sets up the expectation that Mathilde and Thibault are destined to meet on the day in question and that this meeting will change the course of their lives. I won’t give anything away, except to say that de Vigan both fulfills this expectation and completely subverts it. That dual result is as frustrating as it is thought-provoking—I suspect my book group will have much to discuss.

Although I read this book in two sittings, and last night I literally could not put it down, I also found myself mostly reading for Mathilde’s story and quite uninterested in Thibault, except as a possible catalyst for Mathilde getting out of her difficult situation. I don’t think this was an inherent problem of the novel’s dual narrative, a technique I usually like, but more because of the contrast between Mathilde and Thibault, which could easily be described as active and passive. Some of the problem comes from Thibault’s psychological state on the day in question—he is so numb that he is difficult to access—but it’s also because de Vigan seems content to leave him more of a sketch compared to the intricately detailed portrait she creates of Mathilde.

After this first experience, I’ll be interested in reading more de Vigan. She is apparently best known for an earlier novel, No et Moi. Her other books include both autobiographical works and true fiction. I’m always quicker to pick up fiction, and her novels seem to favor urban-setting solitude narratives, something I feel (although I’m saying this off-the-cuff and could be wrong) that not many contemporary women writers take as their subject. Loneliness in a domestic setting, yes, loneliness within a couple or because of a broken family setting, yes, but a book that explores the loneliness of the greater urban world seen through a female protagonist strikes me as relatively unique.

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Meeting Nadine Gordimer

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If you have been reading my blog for any amount of time you have probably noticed that one of my favorite writers, if not my all-time favorite writer, is Nadine Gordimer. Back in December I got word (hat tip to NOCA and Guilherme) that she would be giving a reading at Bloomsbury in London in March. After a little debate—okay, not much debate at all really, just some logistical negotiations for childcare and work schedule—I decided to buy a ticket and fly over for what was probably my only chance to attend a Gordimer reading. She turns 89 this year and she doesn’t often travel outside of South Africa.

The reading was Monday night and was held at the lovely Bloomsbury offices at Bedford Square. It was a very small gathering, not more than 50 people. I attended with two wonderful friends, who are also writers. Once inside, with our coats handed over, we were directed into a reception room for a glass of wine. Within seconds one of my friends turned to me and said, “She is sitting right over there. And you must absolutely go up to her right now.”

I hesitated. Because, first and foremost, that is what shy people do when faced with someone they admire very much. But also, it was very informal. It was not quite clear whether she was going to be signing books already before the reading, (of course, why else was she seated in this room with a little table in front of her?) and I’m just the kind of person who doesn’t want to bother anyone, doesn’t want to be that awkward person who speaks too loud or says something ridiculous. I’m sure I sputtered a few half-finished sentences that all started with, “Well, I’m not…” and “Maybe we shouldn’t…”

But thankfully my friends would have none of my silliness and we made our way over to Gordimer, got behind another would-be book signee and waited our turn. I gave her my copy of No Time Like the Present – her latest novel, and that came with tickets to the event – and managed to say a quiet, “Thank you,” once she’d signed, but that was it.

Until my friend stepped up, beaming and a little mischievous, and asked Gordimer whether she minded having her photograph taken with me. I was embarrassed, ridiculously so, but am now forever grateful to my outgoing friend. She also forced me to sit in the first row once we moved into the reading room, and hooray that she did; of course I chose the 2nd or 3rd row – because that is what shy people do. Instead, I got to sit for an hour just two feet away from Nadine Gordimer and watch her think and speak as she read and answered a series of questions.

I have admired, if not loved, each of her novels, and have read several many times. I’m now halfway through her fifteenth novel, No Time Like the Present, and while it will probably not become one of my favorites (like The House Gun, The Pickup, Occasion for Loving and My Son’s Story, for example), it is a very important work of fiction. It details contemporary, post-Apartheid South Africa by following a bi-cultural couple, married in secret just before Apartheid is dismantled. It is the story of their married life, their transformation from freedom fighters to legitimate couple and about their children who grow to maturity without the same constraints placed on the parents. It is a fiercely political novel and an intelligent work of fiction. I’ll be writing more about it when I finish.

On Monday evening, Gordimer introduced the novel, read a few pages and then answered questions. Watching her, I had to remind myself that she is 88 years old. She is incredibly sharp. Elegant and sure-spoken.

The nature of her fiction invites tangential political discussion, and this is something that I do enjoy, but our time with Gordimer was quite short and I would have loved being able to talk more about her fictional style. She has a unique narrative perspective that has developed in her writing over the years – the editor at Bloomsbury who moderated the evening called it “simultaneous narration.” She’s always had an absolutely sparkling first-person or omniscient narrator, but around, say, A Sport of Nature or None to Accompany Me (both published in the 90s), she started using a slightly different technique, a kind of layering of the close 3rd person. The perspective jumps from person to person, even sometimes within the same paragraph. It takes a little getting used to, but it gives her the ability to reveal what each character is thinking at any given moment.

Gordimer is often discussed in terms of the message or the content of her fiction, and understandably so, but I would love to read more (and to have heard more at the reading) discussions of her style. She has said on many occasions, and she repeated this on Monday, that she is not a “political writer” or any other combination of adjective and writer. She is simply a writer. In my (humble) opinion, she is too often overlooked for the way she portrays human feeling in any context, political or otherwise, as well as for the quality of and unique feel to her prose.

I’m still basking in the afterglow of my whirlwind trip to London and this reading. It was a small gathering, it was only an hour and a half, I was too shy to actually say anything to her except variations of “thank you,” but I feel very lucky to have actually met Nadine Gordimer after spending so many years reading, admiring, and thinking about her fiction.

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Leigh Stein – The Fallback Plan

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This week at Necessary Fiction, I reviewed The Fallback Plan, a début novel/la from Leigh Stein. The book was published by Melville House in January; it was their 200th book and was selected to mark their 10th anniversary.

Small excerpt from the review:

Luckily for the reader, Esther’s parents force her to get a job as a nanny with some family friends. But this isn’t just an ordinary family. Amy and Nate have recently lost their second child, a baby girl named Annika. They hire Esther to watch their four-year-old daughter May so that Amy can get her life back on track and start painting again.

This combination of grieving-for-a-lost-child-family and refusing-to-grow-up-Esther is tailor-made for the kind of catharsis that Esther is going to need to get herself out of her parents’ basement and back into the real world. Minor incidents transpire. Esther makes mistakes. Amy and Nate reveal secrets. Esther, thankfully, gets a glimpse of real trauma.

Read the full review here.

Claire Messud – The Hunters

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I may not have mentioned this before, but I’m a huge fan of the novella form. I usually read in the evenings and on a good day, I’ve got about an hour and a half – just enough time to read 100 to 150 pages, depending on the kind of writing. And when I can start a fictional world and finish it in one sitting, it’s like getting to experience the author’s complete vision all at once. No time to forget details in between readings, no interruptions. Just me and the story. It’s an incredibly satisfying way to read.

I wrote in my last post about the first novella (A Simple Tale) in Claire Messud’s The Hunters; the second novella, however, is where the collection takes its title. It’s a funny title, actually, and one that only makes sense about halfway through. The novella isn’t about hunting, but it makes use of the idea of hunter & prey. The novella is about an academic, recently suffering a romantic break-up, who lives in a strange out-of-the-way flat in London for a summer doing research and about a relationship (an odd relationship) that springs up with one of the neighbors.

Now, it took me several tries to write that last sentence without giving away the gender of the narrator. This is something Messud actually withholds from the reader – I want to say completely, but I’d have to re-read the whole book to be sure. I think it is never positively confirmed one way or another, although I have my strong suspicions. While I found the technique a little awkward, I enjoyed what she ultimately did with this ambiguity because the story appears to attempt two things: first, it becomes universal, and second, it dares the reader to ask whether it matters and whether the writer has confirmed the narrator’s gender through diction and voice.

The Hunters is an interesting little book because it’s a character study, and in many ways it feels like an experiment. The writing is a little bit impenetrable with lots of subordinate clauses and hemming and hawing and this makes it feel as though Messud got deep into character to write in this particular first person. I like that kind of textual richness, even if I don’t instinctively love this kind of prose. A quick example from the narrator’s second run-in with the neighbor:

But when I next saw her—in broad daylight, on the Kilburn High Road, emerging from one of those murky junk shops whose merchandise is plastic tat of innumerable types and uncategorizable vileness, each item more useless than the last—there could be no doubt that she was no figment. People clearly saw her—although I imagined that they, like me, could not bring themselves to look at her—and she had, clanking at her side, plastic bags full of purchases that were undoubtedly real—as real as the Kilburn High Road itself.

This professor is not a happy person and much of the disgust turned on Ridley Wandor can be seen as a reflection of the narrator’s sorrow. It is interesting to see how Messud manages the transformation of both characters, mostly the narrator of course. Because of the way that Messud has a perfect stranger make such a profound effect on the narrator, The Hunters is a deeply psychological story. A thought-provoking one-sitting read.

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Claire Messud – A Simple Tale

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In 2001, Claire Messud published two novellas in one book, The Hunters and A Simple Tale. Pairing them together in this way invites comparison between the two, which is partly a shame because they are both strong, stand-alone pieces in their own right and, to my mind, comparison actually weakens one of them. (Perhaps with the recent changes in publishing, there wouldn’t have been such a commercial necessity to publish the two together as there was in 2001… but this is only just speculation.)

The collection opens with A Simple Tale. Set in Toronto, this is the story of Maria Poniatowski, an immigrant to Canada from the Ukraine and survivor of the Nazi work camps. The story begins in the present, with Maria’s job as cleaning woman for several of Toronto’s wealthy families, but it dips backward to tell of Maria’s childhood, her time in the camps, how she met her husband Lev and how the two made their way to North America. It tells of raising their son Radek, who becomes the very Canadian Rod and who has no interest, even no use for, stories from his parents’ immigrant past. The book also focused on Maria losing Lev and her long widowhood.

Just as the title suggests, it is a simple story, but carefully and respectfully told. Compared to the other work of Messud’s that I’ve read it involves a much quieter narration. Straightforward and conventional in a positive sense. Classic. A lot of its power lies in the judicious way that Messud moves from memory to memory – looking back over a life, big events can become less important than smaller events and I like how she handled this complex reality. It is one of those pieces of fiction that isn’t easy to read because it tells of difficult events and deep emotions, but the prose reads easily. I read it in one evening, wanting to move between the opening and closing of the story in one sitting.

Emigrant/immigrant narratives are fascinating to me not only because I’m an expat myself, but because they are what make up the collective American (and by this I mean North American) experience. Both Canada and the US are immigrant nations and with A Simple Tale, Messud has written a really thoughtful consideration of the identity shifts and feelings of disorientation that any immigrant goes through. Her story deals primarily with a particular immigrant experience, one of Canada in the 1940s and 50s, but much of what she brings out is universal.

 

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catching up

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My little family has been hit with a stomach bug for the last two weeks, hence my lack of posting. We’re all better now, thankfully, and I’ve got some catching up to do. If I can manage it this week, I’ll try to write about Claire Messud’s two novellas, The Hunters and A Simple Tale; I enjoyed both very much. Messud is a very confident and intelligent writer and I’m looking forward to her next book, whenever it may come out.

I also read Martha Southgate’s The Taste of Salt. This is the second Southgate novel I’ve read – the first was The Fall of Rome. Southgate is an interesting writer because she very gracefully straddles black and white America in her work. She writes about black Americans who have made their way into academic white America, and she looks very sharply at the issues this migration entails. She manages to do this within a story that could be written from either a white or a black perspective – in other words, her stories are human while the tangential details involve race.

I’ve also made some good progress in Volume Two of Virginia Woolf’s diaries – she is writing Jacob’s Room at the moment and discussing process much more than she did in Volume One with regards to The Voyage Out and Night and Day. In a way, I see her gaining confidence – it’s very interesting.

I also read The Lola Quartet, a forthcoming novel by Emily St. John Mandel. Mandel is well-known in the United States if you pay attention to the independent presses. I consider myself a broad reader, but until I started paying more attention to the indie houses, I had never heard of her; once I did, I felt a little silly for not having read her before. She’s of my generation, she’s writing about contemporary America, she’s a very good writer. The Lola Quartet is her third novel.

It’s interesting to me, this split in the United States between the independent publishers and the bigger traditional houses. Obviously, there are aesthetic differences in terms of what gets published, especially when looking at some of the micro presses with very particular publishing agendas. But on the whole, the more I read from both publishing worlds, the more I find the separation false. Such great books coming from both sides of that divide – and yet many of the books published from the independent houses will get overlooked by the greater readership. I realize this is a situation that has probably always existed, but I do wonder about how it might be becoming exacerbated as those traditional publishers seem to get bigger and bigger. Something to think about, and research further.

Finally, I’m reading Lily Tuck’s I Married You For Happiness. Some years ago I read Tuck’s The News from Paraguay, and despite admiring her writing, I disliked the novel. I wish I could remember why exactly, but all I’ve got left is a vague notion of being dissatisfied, of feeling there was something vulgar about that book. I suspect it may be the fact that I don’t often get on with historical novels. In any case, I Married You For Happiness is worlds apart from The News from Paraguay. It is contemporary, intensely personal and involves math, marriage, infidelity and death – so far it is a lovely read.

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