Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

first thoughts on Laurent Gaudé's Ouragan

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My Internet service has been haywire since last Thursday—the joys of living in the countryside. But it’s on right now and I wanted to write quickly about a book I just finished reading: Ouragan (Hurricane) by Laurent Gaudé. You may have heard of him through his 2007 novel which was translated as The Scortas’ Sun (UK) and The House of Scorta (US). I haven’t read his other work, but will be looking for it directly.

Because Ouragan…Wow. Really wow.

The book is set in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and told in six different voices – an old woman, a prisoner, a priest, a single mother and her former lover. Each individual has a different relationship to the storm. Each individual must suffer through the storm in a particular way. Handling that many voices in a single, tightly-knit narrative can be difficult, but Gaudé pulls it off with great skill. I literally could not put this book down. The story, the writing, the ideas and history behind the story and the writing.

Wish I had time to write more now about the writing. Gaudé’s writing was intense and emotional. He uses a first person narrator for most of the characters, but third person for two of them. That blend was useful, especially for two sections in which all of sudden the voices begin to merge together, telling each other’s stories. Really very well done.

I find it very interesting that such an incredible work of fiction about an intensely American experience should come from a French writer. I’m assuming Gaudé did a lot of research or was already deeply familiar with the culture and history of New Orleans.

I hope the book is currently contracted with translation into English, but I can’t find any confirmation of that on the web yet.

I will have more to say when my Internet issues get worked out…

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Virginia Woolf – The Unwritten Novel

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I’ve now read and reread Virginia Woolf’s short story, “The Unwritten Novel,” several times. Something I love about Woolf is her ability to create a story out of what seems like nothing. No real frame, no elaborate “set-up”. She simply takes an ordinary moment and expands it, pressing it further outward as far as it can go. This particular moment begins on a train, when the narrator allows her eyes to slip upward from her newspaper and something about the face of the woman seated in front of her works like a spark—suddenly, an entire life begins to take shape around the woman’s expression:

Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one’s eyes slide above the paper’s edge to the poor woman’s face—insignificant without that look, almost a symbol of human destiny with it. Life’s what you see in people’s eyes; life’s what they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of—what? That life’s like that.

This is a chatty narrator, who is pondering several big thoughts while she watches and judges and invents the life of the woman seated before her. This is, I believe, Woolf’s best kind of narrator. One which she gives free reign to skip and jump from detail to detail while centering all this rapid reflection on a precise idea—here the idea is how to define or describe life—like a touchstone the narrator cannot keep from grasping at every few minutes.

The woman and the narrator finally exchange a few words, which suffices to give the narrator a fuller picture of the woman’s life and then the narrator leans back into her corner of the train seat and lets a vast story play itself out in her mind. Here is the unwritten novel, the story of this unfortunate woman’s life. I love the idea here that contained within every chance encounter is a full and fascinating work of fiction.

Alongside the narrator’s inventions is a running commentary on how the novelist/narrator is going to put the story together. This is an excellent and subtly-done metafictional thread. Here she is contemplating the other travelers:

But what I cannot thus eliminate, what I must, head down, eyes shut, with the courage of a battalion and the blindness of a bull, charge and disperse are, indubitably, the figures behind the ferns, commercial travellers. There I’ve hidden them all this time in the hope that somehow they’d disappear, or better still emerge, as indeed they must, if the story’s to go on gathering richness and rotundity, destiny and tragedy, as stories should, rolling along with it two, if not three, commercial travelers and a whole grove of aspidistra.

By this time her story has taken on such a life that she’s already got the travelers somewhere in her scene, half hidden between some shrubbery – which of course isn’t on the train – but she’s working out the details and arguing about what’s appropriate for her setting and season. And she gets so deep into her story, is so certain she’s created the real life of this woman seated before her, as well as started in on the details of another man, that she is startled when the train stops and the woman gets down. The narrator has made her an unhappy old maid, off to visit her brother and his hated wife but then suddenly on the platform the woman is fetched by her son. A son! Suddenly the woman transforms into a mother and the narrator is left reeling:

Well, but I’m confounded…Look how he bends as they reach the gateway. She finds her ticket. What’s the joke? Off they go, down the road, side by side…Well, my world’s done for! What do I stand on? What do I know? That’s not Minnie. There never was Moggridge. Who am I? Life’s bare as bone.

But even the transformation of her original characters cannot stop her. The narrator rushes after them, wondering at this new configuration and what story she might be able to create around it. Suddenly everyone walking about her on the street embodies the possibility of a novelistic “life.”

If I fall on my knees, if I go through the ritual, the ancient antics, it’s you, unknown figures, you I adore; if I open my arms, it’s you I embrace, you I draw to me—adorable world!

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Ashley Cowger – Peter Never Came

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Today at Necessary Fiction I reviewed Ashley Cowger’s Peter Never Came:

The stories in Peter Never Came, by Ashley Cowger, are like so many artifacts of our rebellion, and they take as their mascot that most famous Time-rebel, Peter Pan. This is not to say that Cowger’s stories are harmless, playful tracings of the all-too-human desire to somehow avoid growing up. Cowger is interested in how this longing for the simplicity of childhood can disrupt a life, can cripple the adult harboring this desire. She is also quick to point out the falsity in assuming either side of the equation—childhood or adulthood—to be some kind of promised land.

Click here for the full review.

Steve Himmer – The Bee-Loud Glade

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Back in January I mentioned a book called The Bee-Loud Glade*, by Steve Himmer, whom I should say for reasons of full-disclosure is a very good friend of mine. The book comes out on April 4th, so this is now the right time to tell you more about it. I’ve just had the pleasure of re-reading this novel and I realized that the short announcement I gave for it in January only scratches the surface of all that this book contains.

At first glance, this is a novel about a man called Finch who works in the Brand Awareness department of a big corporation selling “hyperefficient plants” (fake plants, fake nature), who loses his job and gets hired by a billionaire named Mr. Crane to live as a hermit. Finch is asked to take a vow of silence, to wear a horrible wool garment that gives him hives, to share his garden with a drugged lion, and lots of other tasks as invented by his whimsical and powerful employer – beekeeping, music, painting, gardening, you name it. If some hermit somewhere in history was asked to do something, Mr. Crane wants his hermit to do the same.   

But there’s more. Beyond the gentle comedic tension and satire created by Mr. Crane’s tasks, the novel has a serious heart. Finch must slowly learn how to be a hermit, dealing with loneliness and fear and boredom along the way. Not to mention with the repeated visits of Mr. Crane’s wife, a beautiful woman with plenty of opinions and questions for Finch about why he remains and “performs” his work as a hermit. She is a difficult temptation for Finch as he settles into a solitary existence but she also forces him to clarify exactly why he continues with his difficult project.

A hermit’s days are quiet, with plenty of time for observation and reflection. And Finch is a confirmed city-dweller, a nice twist on the story, and by that I mean he isn’t someone who already loved nature and so plotted and planned his retreat into the wild for ages. Finch has never had much experience with nature, and his withdrawal from the world has more to do with his dissatisfaction with society and with the kind of person society makes him. When he begins to get settled into his cave and his garden, much of the natural world comes as a revelation to him, giving the reader similar opportunities for reflection.

So I learned a lot about mushrooms and their shy lives. I learned that they’re quick to cower and quick to hide, that they’re willing to keep quiet and small so long as they’re left to grow…

Thinking like a mushroom came quickly to me, and it worked. In the first place I looked, brushing aside a soft curtain of moss and weeds, I found three perfect mushrooms crouched in the shadow of a large rock. They were so close they were practically—but not quite—touching each other, and as soon as I leaned close and disturbed the air around them my nostrils filled with the sweet scent of secrets, of wine cellars and old canning jars and the thrilling surprise of turning a stone to find a bustling community of potato bugs and millipedes thriving beneath. The excitement of life where it wasn’t expected.

This main story, however, actually takes place in the past and is framed by a narrative of Finch as an old man, alone in his wilderness, voluntarily forgotten by the world until one morning, after a violent storm, a pair of hikers trundle their way into his universe. These are the first people Finch has seen in a very long time, and the complexity of their intrusion is compounded by the fact that Finch has become nearly blind. The necessary relationship that develops between the hikers and the now-old Finch is where a part of the novel’s social commentary resides, adding a nuanced response to Himmer’s question about the value of living in complete isolation from other human beings.

There is also a very subtle twist in The Bee-Loud Glade, a question of the modern world intruding on Finch’s haven in an unexpected way. This is not an overwhelming plot turn by any means, but it is quite effective in getting Finch to formulate his ultimate understanding of the meaning of his life.

It should be pretty obvious that this is a novel that looks with much curiosity, censure and concern at the way in which humans live now, and which tries to identify other ways of engaging with the natural world and with one another. Himmer is careful, however, not to draw unbreachable boundaries around the ideas the novel offers. There is a deep criticism in The Bee-Loud Glade, but that criticism isn’t paralyzing or desperate, instead it orients the reader toward reflection, compassion and study. For a novel about a man living alone in the wilderness who hasn’t spoken for thirty or forty years, this book has quite a lot to say.

*The title of the novel, for anyone as curious as I was, comes from a poem by Yeats called The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Here are the first lines: I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree / And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; / Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, / And live alone in the bee-loud glade

 
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Eric G. Wilson – My Business is to Create

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About two weeks ago I finished an interesting non-fiction book written by Eric G. Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest University, and which will come out later this spring from the University of Iowa Press. I wrote a more formal review at Necessary Fiction, but thought I’d mention it here as well.

The book is called My Business is to Create: Blake’s infinite writing and it was an interesting combination of scholarly analysis of William Blake’s poetry and art with a kind of writer’s handbook. Wilson traces a ‘method,’ if you will, inspired by Blake, that he thinks creative types might find useful. I like the thought of combining these two ideas because I can see how close reading and literary analysis can be inspiring and, apparently, as Wilson points out, William Blake has been a source of inspiration for musicians, artists and writers for hundreds of years.

There was also something quite moving about Wilson’s evident admiration for Blake. I get that when you’ve studied someone for a very long time, you kind of can’t help becoming their champion. Not that Blake wouldn’t deserve this anyway, but Wilson’s esteem for Blake’s artistic fervor infused the book with a lot of earnest energy.

I know only a little about William Blake, so the biographical information and excerpts that Wilson provide are fascinating. I can see how across the centuries Blake has become a kind of mythical figure—the perfect stereotype of the struggling artist. A little bit crazy, a little bit eccentric, but touchingly devoted to his life’s work.

And Wilson is really serious about the method part. He traces out a way of conceiving of yourself as an artist and a way of developing a process of intense but ultimately liberating self-criticism. Underneath all of this is the simple truth that all art takes an immense amount of work and personal energy.

My Business is to Create is a slim little book, just under 100 pages, and Wilson’s writing is lively, if, at times, a little overly poetic, sacrificing clarity for exuberance. Ultimately, however, I found it an engaging and thought-provoking read.

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James Baldwin clears the issue for me

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One of my favorite aspects of being a bookworm is the serendipity of book interaction. Since writing down my intense reaction to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom the other day, I’ve been thinking and re-thinking why I got so upset in the first place. I mean, it’s just a book, right?

But then at noon yesterday I went out to the mailbox and got the mail and there waiting for me was a collection of essays published by Graywolf Press in 1988 called Multicultural Literacy, a book I’ve been waiting for from Bookmooch for a couple of weeks.

Being the impatient reader that I am, I opened to the first essay, delighted to see it was by James Baldwin. I was first introduced to Baldwin’s work with his short story, “Sonny’s Blues” which became one of my favorite stories of all time. It is an incredible story—filled with all the subtlety of a difficult sibling relationship and the pain of creative ache. It is also probably one of the most beautiful meditations on how music moves through an individual that I have ever read. To make the excerpt below understandable, you need to know that Sonny is a musician, but also a heroine addict, and the story is told from the perspective of Sonny’s brother, a teacher, who is watching his brother slowly die. The story ends in a nightclub, where Sonny is playing the piano, hitting deep on a blues tune in an attempt to transpose the essence of his entire life into something tangible:

I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now. I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. […] And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

I include this excerpt for the simple reason that it’s beautiful, but also because of that sneaky word, freedom. Baldwin’s freedom here is like a little origami figure, the more you pull on the folds, the more it opens itself up, leaving you to contemplate the intricate creases. He’s talking about Sonny, of course, and Sonny’s feeling of being trapped, but he’s also talking about the greater black American experience and how it has shaped Sonny, himself, and everyone in the room at this club.

I’m working a little backwards here, because I read the Baldwin essay first, which then brought me to reread “Sonny’s Blues” just after. What I realized after I had finished both pieces was that I finally understood exactly why my reaction to Franzen’s Freedom was so sharp, so angry. I will try to explain.

The Baldwin essay was written in 1963 and it addresses the extremely topical issue at the time, and the unfortunately ever-pertinent issue now, of racism in American society. There are several really strong quotes I’d like to pull out, on a number of issues, but for what I’m writing about today, this one should suffice:

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That’s how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life.

So what does this have to do with Freedom? I’m not suggesting that for a book to be worthy, to be considered Serious Literature, it must take up with the very difficult and specific questions of racial identity in American society. No, Baldwin’s overarching lament in his essay is that American society cannot move forward until it recognizes its own inherent fallacies. His particular example is cultural (and still depressingly pertinent) but in the forty-eight years since his essay was published, we’ve added a few more issues into the mix.

This is where I should probably stop and say immediately that none of what I’m saying here is actually a criticism of Freedom the book, the story or the writing. It’s a well-written book, an engaging story, it asks interesting questions about a limited section of American society, it’s even funny at times and it attempts to make some statements about contemporary America.

But it does NOT move America forward by addressing any of those inherent fallacies. If anything it perpetuates them. If the self-indulgent, middle-class notion of ‘freedom’ as examined in Freedom is all that America has to agonize about, then we should consider ourselves pretty damn lucky.

So ultimately my frustration is with the conversation around Freedom, the intense desire to make this the defining book of the century, make it the greatest commentary on American society of the last fifty years. What a load of nonsense.

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a few words on Franzen's Freedom

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I have more to say about Michel Houellebecq’s La Carte et le Territoire, but I’m switching gears today because I finished Franzen’s Freedom last night. It isn’t really my style to trash a novel completely, and Freedom doesn’t actually deserve that, for various reasons that would be a little boring to go into in detail, but I do feel like spending too much time writing about Freedom might actually be a little more than it deserves.

I’ll try to be succinct.

And fair.

Essentially, my frustration with Freedom is two-fold. First, I am strongly averse to novels which attempt – however clever the writing, however clear and thorough the character analysis – to base an entire fictional universe on what is essentially facile psychology. Not a single person in Freedom did anything unexpected, or behaved in any way which wasn’t already signaled by Franzen in the first few paragraphs of their fictional existence and which was then explained away by Franzen through pop psychology drivel, or, excuse me, ideas.

And second, well, frankly, the book made me feel like I was watching a witty reality TV show. Here are the Berglunds airing their difficult marriage for the entire world to see and comment on. And don’t we all feel so much more superior for not behaving like them? Aren’t they all such sad little creatures? And we can feel sympathetic; we can, but not too much, because really it is all their fault, and the fault of that superficial beast of American culture. I mean, come on, can’t we write incisively, meaningfully, about America without mimicking such a problematic form?

I suppose if I had to, I could come up with something nice to say about this book. But those two reactions trump any praise I might have. Franzen is a good writer, and Freedom is nearly an enjoyable read. But I didn’t find anything really clever in Franzen’s project.

In fairness, I think reading Freedom after finishing Houellebecq might have contributed to the violence of my reaction. The two writers are doing something very similar in their novels. Both are a little manic in their attempt to document contemporary culture, both are cynical toward that society (although their cynicism takes vastly different forms), and both are interested in explaining contemporary neuroses. But where Houellebecq’s metafictional experiment plays with form and content, and therefore implicating the reader which brings his social critique full circle in an ingenuous way, Franzen just seemed to recycle pop culture and superficial psychology.

Did I just go ahead and trash the novel? Okay, yeah, pretty much. Well, maybe in a few days I’ll come back with something more balanced…

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first thoughts on Houellebecq – La Carte et le Territoire

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Well, reading my first Michel Houellebecq novel was not exactly what I expected. I imagined I would have to put up with some gritty and depressing sex scenes (there were none) and I thought I would be impressed nevertheless with his writing (yes, and no). As I mentioned before, I came to his latest novel, which won the 2010 Prix Goncourt, with the preconceived notion that he was a good writer, but probably not to my taste.

This is all just to say that hype is ridiculous, and try as I may to avoid it, there is always some amount of hype that filters its way into my reading brain, thus coloring my reading experience. So okay. Despite all that, what did I think?

La Carte et le Territoire (Eng: The Map and the Territory, which will probably come out later this year) is a strange novel – on one hand it’s extremely clever, on the other I couldn’t help finding it a little dull.

I want to say quickly why I found some of the book dull. First, I think I was simply expecting Houellebecq’s writing to be more intense or more daring. The book is well-written. But the prose is straightforward. Not very lyrical or descriptive. Most of the descriptive work is spent on labeling things. Objects are given their brand names, for example, and people are presented as static images, much like a photograph. The animation of each person comes through the 3rd person omniscient narrator who dips into the thoughts of the characters—fluidly, but again, almost always through exposition.

There is definitely a cynicism in Houellebecq’s writing, a cynicism toward human beings. I was expecting this aspect of his work, and I even agree with some of his vision, and yet there were moments that startled me. Moments in which Houellebecq expounds on some thought or notion of one of the characters and I just found myself thinking—how sad, how untrue.

Despite all that, I think what I’m really resisting about this book is its purposeful unwillingness to engage me in a seamless story. Time and time again, the novel does something to remind me of its fictional status. Where I got frustrated with this is that La Carte et le Territoire doesn’t necessarily do anything unusual with that pointed revelation. It just becomes a clever twist layered on top of a conventionally-told conventional story.

Briefly – the story:

Jed Martin is an artist. The novel recounts his entire life, with particular emphasis on his 30s and 40s, his relationship with a Russian woman named Olga, his friendship with the writer Michel Houellebecq and his feelings about his father.

Martin and Houellebecq meet because Houellebecq gets asked to write the catalog for Martin’s biggest exhibit. The men develop a strange friendship, which is cut short when Houellebecq is savagely murdered.

There are several layers of admirable cleverness to the metafictional trick of Houellebecq putting a writer named Michel Houellebecq into the novel:

First, Michel Houellebecq appears as a character for the first time when Jed and his father are having their annual Christmas dinner together. Jed mentions the fact that a write named Houellebecq was asked to write the catalog. The father says, “Michel Houellebecq?” and Jed says, “Do you know him?” The father answers:

“He’s a good writer, I think. An enjoyable read, and he has a pretty accurate vision of society.”

This is funny, obviously – Houellebecq having a character tell the reader that Houellebecq knows what he’s talking about when he portrays the world.  

Second, the catalog. In the novel, Houellebecq writes the catalog of Jed Martin’s art exhibit and this catalog takes the form of an overview of Martin’s artistic development and vision. But of course, the novel is exactly the same thing. Houellebecq writing about the life and art of Jed Martin.

Third, on page 151-153 of my edition, Jed Martin falls asleep at a café in the Shannon airport (after meeting Houellebecq to discuss the catalog project) and dreams that he is in a book, a book that recounts his life. He walks around a moment in this book, looking at the black letters against a white surface, at the names that appear and then disappear. And then he wakes up. As soon as he arrives in Paris, he calls Houellebecq to say that instead of giving him any old painting as a thank you for the catalog, Martin will paint Houellebecq’s portrait. Thus the two men are creating each other.

I haven’t even gotten to the murder part yet, or what I think Houellebecq might be doing with his Jed Martin character…but I’ll save that for another day.

It’s probably fairly clear that I’m a bit undecided about this work. I could discuss it for hours, for that reason alone it’s a fascinating piece of literature. I wish I’d read Houellebecq’s other novels first, so I’d know where to place this latest work. I have the sense this is a departure in many ways for Houellebecq, but I need to start reading if I want to see how…

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Fiction: short story

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My short story, “Heartbeat,” was published today at Necessary Fiction:

I am not a man to quibble with such a firmly-delivered directive, even if I did not quite understand. I started dialing a phone number at random. I held the cell phone to my ear while Frida began to take the furnace computer apart with a screwdriver she had pulled out of her purse.

Click here to read the full story.

Fiction: short story

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My short story, “Translating Christina,” was published today at Necessary Fiction:

He wanted to smile at them, to give them permission for such thoughts, but he could not speak. Someday they would understand, would know what it meant to wake in the night and for a moment, in the blur of waking, be certain that beloved person was in the room. And then the blur would sharpen and that not-so-recent death would wound as deeply as the first day.

Click here for the full story.