Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

mid-read thoughts on Franzen and Houellebecq

By

The two books I am trying to finish this week are big name books – Michel Houellebecq’s Goncourt-winning La Carte et le Territoire and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. This is my first experience with both authors, actually, and I definitely dragged my feet getting started on either book.

Until now, Houellebecq has intimidated me as a reader, mainly because I’m aware that the labels used to describe his work set me up to disapprove of his project before turning that first page. I hear from certain Francophone friends that he’s doing something very profound, from others that he’s a phony, or that he’s overrated. Interestingly, Swiss Francophone readers tend to be wary of what they consider French literary snobbism, where writers get away with being inconsistent or opaque and if you don’t get them you’re just not philosophical (or smart) enough; this perspective is useful for me because it annihilates the awe factor I might have as an unabashed Francophile and helps me evaluate a book with the same critical mind I use on Anglophone fiction. Also, I admit that I don’t usually enjoy literature which even hints at vulgarity and this is one of the most common labels applied to Houellebecq. Nevertheless, I have remained interested in his work since first hearing about him and I opened his latest novel with more curiousity than pre-conceived notion.

Interestingly, La Carte et le Territoire has done nothing but surprise me with its ordinariness. He is clearly an accomplished writer, but so far his prose is conventional and I’ve found nothing shocking about his descriptions or even the story. The book is about a painter named Jed Martin, but even he strikes me as a very dull creature for the moment and I’m 100 pages into this 400 page book. Houellebecq has written in a character named Michel Houellebecq, and included his real-life buddy Frédéric Beigbeder among other high-profile literati, a “trick” which, admittedly, doesn’t impress me much as I can’t yet see the point. Although apparently Houellebecq in the novel gets murdered – so we’ll see. I’m prepared to reserve final judgment until I’ve finished the book…

Now, for Franzen. I have some vague memory of trying to read The Corrections about seven, eight years ago. But I gave up on the book. This is unusual for me, because really Franzen should be exactly the kind of writer I would enjoy. His writing tends to be detailed, careful and subtly sarcastic, and he holds a magnifying lens over parts of the American psyche. I’ve read several of his New Yorker non-fiction essays and enjoyed them. So I’m not sure why I put off reading The Corrections and why I’ve resisted reading Freedom. In any case, I’ve got both books in hand now.

Like La Carte et le Territoire, I was expecting fireworks or something flashy or showoff-y from the first page of Freedom and this isn’t there. That isn’t to say it’s bad. Again, this is just a novel. So far a well-written novel, with a nice percentage of quotable moments and insightful narrative. But it isn’t mind-boggling, nor will, I’m pretty sure, it alter my perception of America in some profound way. The real question for me is not whether the book deserved all the hype it received, but why do we feel the need to generate such hype for a single book in the first place. There are dozens of books published every year that are just as good and even better than Freedom, so I take issue with the publishing and marketing model more than with the book. Franzen is a good writer and he should be esteemed and criticized appropriately.

Now, hopefully, I won’t be back to contradict all this first-reaction downplaying when I’ve finished both books…

Fiction: short story

By

 

My short story “Knots” was published this month at Necessary Fiction:

Upstairs, in the bed Sam had carried in four pieces by himself up the steep hill, she sat awake, mind no longer numb, frantically retying the threads of their struggle into perfect little knots. She would not give up. She would work harder to get him to eat. She would call another specialist. She would say yes to experimental therapies. Only when her string of knots was sufficiently long enough could she lean back and close her eyes, secure for now with the thought of each problem properly tied and fastened.

Click here for the full story.

Jean Louis Fournier – Where We Going, Daddy

By

Today at Necessary Fiction I reviewed Where We Going, Daddy by Jean Louis Fournier and translated by Adriana Hunter:

Where We Going, Daddy is not a memoir in the traditional sense. This is not Fournier’s attempt to work his way to some form of catharsis through well-structured essays, poetic descriptions of his suffering and a philosophical attitude toward Thomas and Mathieu’s handicap. This slim book, written in part as a letter to his sons and in part a collection of vignettes of remembered moments, is appropriately stark.

Click here for the full review.

Virginia Woolf – Night and Day

By

This may be completely off the mark, but I’d like to hazard that Virginia Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day, published in 1919, was written not because the story came to her as an idea, but because Woolf had a question she wanted to take apart and examine and so created a story to suit it. I suppose one of the characters may have come to her first – if that’s the case, I’d guess it was Katherine Hilbery – but again, most likely even the most basic details of character were formed within the context of her question.

I say this because although Night and Day follows a relatively simple, domestic storyline, it is clearly more concerned with getting to the very heart of its question than it is with containing all the threads of its story. So on one level, this is a book about several people meeting, falling in love and getting engaged. To do this, they walk in the city, have dinner together, visit each other’s homes, have conversations, and spend time at various points in London. All rather mundane. On another level, however, this is a book that wants to investigate what ‘love’ means, whether it is even possible for a person to truly love another, and whether marriage has any meaning at all. That question then brought out some truly incredible passages of writing.

Now, in my experience, Woolf is a writer who wanted to understand and represent how thinking works, on both an emotional and a practical level. Again and again, she goes inside the minds of her characters, parceling out their thoughts in an orderly, detailed fashion, showing how thoughts shift from moment to moment, how emotions influence thoughts, how conversation effects and inspires a person’s thinking. This kind of writing can take a single instant in someone’s life and stretch it out to the length of that person’s interior reflection about said instant. Now imagine an entire book constructed around this kind of stop-time expansion. This is what reading Night and Day felt like.

What I find so curious about this is that I usually describe Woolf’s writing style with words like lively, frenetic, animated, energetic, even sometimes, exhausting. And on a sentence per sentence level, Night and Day certainly made use of Woolf’s prose energy. But the combination of the novel’s relatively fixed and flat storyline with that constant ballooning of thought, forced me to read slowly. I could not have raced through this novel if I wanted to, in fact, it would have made for a frustrating reading experience. Instead, I took up with the book chapter by chapter, curious to see how Woolf would approach this question of love and marriage in whatever scene or character would greet me.

Taken that way, Night and Day makes for a fascinating read. Here are all these young people trying to figure out whether attaching themselves to another being for the rest of their lives is a good idea, whether doing this will change them – possibly for the better, or unthinkably, for the worse. Woolf’s main character, Katharine Hilbery, internalizes this debate so fiercely she practically explodes (while remaining outwardly composed, of course) before the end of the novel. Because the book involves several different characters, Woolf offers several solutions to this difficult problem, something which, arguably, dilutes the story a bit, but I couldn’t help approving of the honesty of that response.

I’m still thinking about this book, and will undoubtedly go back to it, and her first novel, The Voyage Out, as I continue to read all of Woolf’s work.

Quim Monzo – Gasoline

By

This week I reviewed Gasoline over at Necessary Fiction:

Satire is best when it doesn’t pull its punches, and Humbert is thoroughly skewered in Part Two. But Monzo takes this a step further by casting a shadow backward on Heribert, the very standard used to set Humbert up in the first place. Suddenly, he is no longer a foil, an example of true artistic integrity to be held against Humbert’s absurdity. We begin to suspect that Heribert, in the heyday of his own artistic success, was equally ridiculous. This cannibalizes Monzo’s questions and broadens the scope of the novel’s irony.

Click here for the full review.

 

Joanna Ruocco – The Mothering Coven

By

I recently reviewed this book at Necessary Fiction :

But this is not a book to read with blithe inattention, as much of what happens and what is said could be perceived as nonsensical whimsy. A slower, more careful read detects the fragile threads of what makes this a novel and not a playful and poetic montage.

If you are interested in discovering a charmingly eccentric universe created out of a string of elegant and bizarre little scenes featuring eight formidable women and other unconventional characters, please look for this book.

I wanted to add a few words here about the experience of reading Ruocco’s style of experimental fiction. Experimental fiction can ask a lot of a reader – either in concentration or complicity – and not all readers are willing to enter into that exchange. Including myself. I think a person either falls willingly, happily, dizzyingly, into the experimental universe or is kept, for whatever reason, at too far a distance to engage with the text.

As I began to turn the pages of The Mothering Coven, I was at first curious, then amused, then agreeably puzzled. I found myself both delighted at and concerned about the strange world and characters Ruocco had created. Eventually, I fell into the rhythm of the book’s intriguing vocabulary and shifting perspective. I am a sucker for a carefully-placed first-person plural, unusual description and poetic imagery. Especially if all of that comes packaged within enough “story” to keep me invested in remaining along for the rest of the journey.

Also, I appreciated Ruocco’s ability to combine whimsy with real feeling. So much of what happens in The Mothering Coven is, for lack of a better world, silly. But somehow, inexplicably, none of it is really silly at all. This is a novel about people feeling unsteady in their world and about missing loved ones. It is both comical and ridiculous, making it a lighthearted read, and yet wholly serious, making it difficult to forget.

Finally, to end, here is one of my favorite passages from the book:

The action has moved to the kitchen. It must be time for lunch. For Agnes, it is a working lunch. She is researching vermilions, the tiny lions crushed by the thousand to color the crimson velvets of Versailles. Her heart isn’t in it. Vermilions had many hearts. Of course, they have been crushed to extinction.

 

Pastoral by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz

By

 

My translation of “Pastoral,” a short story by C.F. Ramuz was published in the Winter issue of The Kenyon Review. This is a lovely little story about a young shepherd girl and teenage boy. Ramuz’s particular eye for village life is so clever, so sharp. Here is a short excerpt:

The magpies are carried away like pieces of half-burned paper in a fireplace. They are standing a little below the forest. A pine tree forest. The forest cracks, the forest leans. They watch it tip backward all of a sudden, showing the red of its trunks, and then it leans forward again. It disappears beneath its foliage. The forest is red, the forest is black; it takes turns shifting from red to black. There is an explosion, a crack, and then they stop watching because they’ve thrown their two hands forward against the ground (turning their backs to the forest). The goats stop grazing, astonished at this grass that keeps moving, which seems to escape them like water running up an incline.

Click here to buy the issue.

read, write, translate

By

I read. I read because I’m curious. Because I crave alternate realities. Because I want a book to show me how to unravel experience, unravel life. I read because books exist. Because storytelling and metaphor, symbolism and dialogue are all innately connected to who we are as human beings. And who we want to be as human beings.

I read carefully. I read carefully because I love language. I love that language has the power to transform us, alter our relationships, amend our opinions and change the world. I love the awe-inspiring genius of the very existence of language. I read carefully because I am afraid to miss something. Anything. Everything. The truth. The point. The truth beyond the point. I read carefully because I am willing to forget who I am and experience a book’s reality as my own and this vulnerability is worth respecting.

I read critically. I am demanding. I am severe. I loathe a book that gives up on me, that fails to ask questions, that chooses the easy way out, that forgets its vocation. I read critically because I want literature to work its hardest. To achieve something. To affect change and improve society. I want books to have an impact. To make us, readers and non-readers alike, pay attention.

I write. I write because I’m ambitious. Because I want to find new ways of expressing old ideas. Because I want to see if I can say something different out of what’s been said a thousand times before. And maybe, just maybe, say something entirely new. I write because words in combination are mysteriously powerful. Because words are so much more than just words.

I write because words can create a scaffolding of ideas, structures of vision, entire universes of thought. Because fiction is a way to mirror the world and re-cast it at the same time. Because fiction is alive but also contained. Because fiction waits for us on the page and yet once read becomes a gift to the mind that cannot ever be given back. I want to give gifts.

I write as a way of considering the unanswerable questions. Because each piece written offers a possible solution that can then change a thousand times over again. It just needs to be re-written. I write for those endless reconsiderations of the world. For their grace, their ability to forgive us our mistakes, to celebrate our successes in perpetuum. For the possibilities infinite in a fictional landscape.

I translate. I translate because I’m not satisfied with a single set of words to shape my world. Because I want to make other readers unsatisfied along with me. Make them curious about other places, other voices, other ways of thinking. I translate because I believe translation creates permanent pathways between someone here and someone else over there.

I translate because the act of translation makes me into a bridge between the reader and the writer in me, as well as a bridge between the cultures I’ve embraced. Because it allows me to inhabit the expat home I’ve chosen and the real home I’ve left behind.

I translate because translation is an impossible venture, a hopeless work. Because I will never create a flawless translation. I can only construct a path or corridor, a stylized explanation, an echo that resounds in a different key. But I translate because the humility in this repeated attempt and failure makes me a better reader, a better writer.

mid-read thoughts on Woolf's Night and Day

By

Officially, I am just about halfway finished with Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day. Despite a slowish start, this is turning into an excellent read. The style is subtly different than her other work, a bit more calm, a bit more serious.

Night and Day (published in 1919) is the story of three, almost four people. I say almost four because three of the characters appear to have taken hold a little deeper in Woolf’s imagination and she gives them more of her time than the fourth. At least in the first half of the novel, I suppose this could change. Essentially, this is the story of four young people, two men and two women, and how they negotiate and cope with their feelings about marriage. The central question seems to be whether love and marriage can and should be associated.

I suppose if I wanted to be overly critical, I might say the novel plods a bit. But this isn’t quite the right expression. It has a leisurely pace in terms of story momentum, and it involves quite a lot of interior deliberation. Yet, one of the things I enjoy most about Woolf is her ability to give a character room to think. She has her characters weigh their actions, justify their thoughts and decisions, explore their possibilities. It takes a great amount of narrative skill to do this without alienating a reader, and I think Woolf succeeds.

Here is one easy example:

Katherine looked at her mother, but did not stir or answer. She had suddenly become very angry, with a rage which their relationship made silent, and therefore doubly powerful and critical. She felt all the unfairness of the claim which her mother tacitly made to her time and sympathy, and what Mrs. Hilbery took, Katharine thought bitterly, she wasted. Then, in a flash, she remembered that she had still to tell her about Cyril’s misbehavior. Her anger immediately dissipated itself: it broke like some wave that has gathered itself high above the rest: the waters were resumed into the sea again, and Katharine felt once more full of peace and solicitude, and anxious only that her mother should be protected from pain.

This is quite a hefty dose of explanation, and another writer might have portrayed these same emotions through action or dialogue. Much of the novel, perhaps a good three quarters, is given this way. It works, however, to my mind, because Woolf’s narrator is terribly eloquent and not afraid to sneak in a bit of imagery (the wave idea) to spice up all that exposition. Also, the middle bit of that second sentence is extremely straightforward, but extremely powerful…with a rage which their relationship made silent.

I am starting to believe that Woolf’s greatest skill may in fact be her narrator…which is a fascinating thing to trace, as she experiments so much with it.

Woolf project catch-up

By

Today, I am thinking about Virginia Woolf. Her diary, her short stories and her second novel Night and Day.

Let’s start with Night and Day. I had never even heard of this book before I put together all the reading lists for my Woolf project. And I suspect that along with The Voyage Out, it isn’t often read unless someone is doing what I’m doing, or maybe for a class. Truth be told, it isn’t remarkable in the way her other novels are. I’m thinking of To The Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway, novels which begin with a full head of steam and sort of charge forward with that recognizable Woolfian prose. (Have I mentioned that I dislike the word Woolfian…how to write about her without using it? Ugh.)

I am only about a third of the way through the book, so obviously my thoughts will shift and change, but for now, Night and Day feels like Woolf restrained. There is something almost too straightforward about the descriptions and the narrative. More so than The Voyage Out, which was her first novel and as I mentioned before, similar to a 19th century society novel and ‘tamer’ than I expected. But even The Voyage Out had more narrative wandering and plenty of those unique narrative insights and descriptions I so love compared with Night and Day.

This is not to say I’m not enjoying the novel. It is just quieter, and has less of that typical Virginia Woolf feeling. It is a novel about class, and a bit about politics also, and most definitely about love. I’ll have more to say, and hopefully with more enthusiasm, as I get further in.

On to the short stories. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf is organized chronologically and begins with five pieces written before 1917. I don’t think any of these were published with her first collection in 192, which makes sense as they all feel a bit like experiment pieces. Different tones, different POVs, different subjects.

I wrote a little about Phyllis and Rosamond earlier, and I’d just like to mention one of the others, The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn. It is a two-part story, beginning with the description of an older woman interested in British history who comes across a manuscript from 1520. The manuscript is the diary of a young woman, who we learn from the manuscript’s keeper, a distant relative, never married and died at the age of thirty.

Knowing about her early death and spinsterhood before we begin to read Joan Martyn’s journal is a neat trick on Woolf’s part, because much of the diary is about her impending marriage to one of her father’s associates. She is a practical young woman although some of her dreams are quite big, and since we know that none of it will come to anything, it is quite a bittersweet little story.

But aside from the story, which is richly imagined and involves a variety of ideas from poverty to literacy, it is mostly just intriguing to see Woolf write in the voice of a young woman from the 1500s. This is what I meant about these early pieces feeling like experiments. It’s clear she is trying to imagine what someone like herself – a reader, a writer, an independent thinker, would have felt under different, more severe restrictions. In that sense it is intensely felt. The ending is lovely and reveals the inner life Woolf gives her fictional Joan, who is standing in their family church, admiring the tombstones, where she will be taken in a shorter time than she realizes:

As a child I know the stark white figures used to frighten me: especially when I could read that they bore my name; but now that I know that they never move from their backs, and keep their hands crossed always, I pity them; and would fain do some small act that would give them pleasure. It must be something secret, and unthought of – a kiss or a stroke, such as you give a living person.

Finally, just a few quick words on her diary. I’m curious about how little Woolf writes in her diary about her writing and I wonder if this is because of the era. Would it have been strange in the early 1900s for her to be obsessing over the details of her writing decisions, her characters and her ideas for fiction in her personal diary? She writes mainly about the people they see, stories about friends, a little bit of news about her and Leonard’s printing work. It’s all very interesting to read, but I am struck with the absence of her literary thoughts. Does she begin to do this later?