Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

more awards

By

The National Book Award Foundation has posted their 5 under 35 list, and all look very interesting. I’m familiar with some of these names, but haven’t read anything by any of these writers (I think!). I also like the mix of large and small presses represented here:

Sarah Braunstein, The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (W.W. Norton & Co., 2011)

Grace Krilanovich, The Orange Eats Creeps (Two Dollar Radio, 2010)

Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife (Random House, 2011)

Tiphanie Yanique, How to Escape from a Leper Colony (Graywolf, 2010)

Paul Yoon, Once the Shore (Sarabande, 2009)

Has anyone read any of these yet? I think I’ll add all five to my list, but I’d love to hear thoughts – good, bad, or otherwise.

The Ghostly Collaborative Project: Chapter 3

By

As some of you already know, Smithereens came up with a very fun collaborative ghost story project for the weeks leading up to Halloween and I volunteered to write a chapter. For the full story, please find Smithereens’ spooky Chapter 1 here and Stefanie’s spine-tingling Chapter 2 here.

And here is Chapter 3

After what seemed like a very long time, the elevator bell dinged. I relaxed a little, finally I could get out of here. The elevator doors slid open…

…and the elevator man took hold of my elbow, pushing me forward. “Last stop, everyone out.”

I was too stunned to react and in any case, he stepped backward without a sound and the elevator doors closed immediately. I looked left and then right. This was certainly not the basement. At least I had once gone down to the basement to deliver a set of keys to the building janitor and, from what I remember, it was an ordinary basement. Nothing like this.

Just in front of me was a long, dimly lit corridor with a line of doors on either side. About halfway down, one of the doors was open and a green light spilled out into the hall. Above the sound of my hammering heartbeat, I could hear the faint sound of music. A high, tinny melody that seemed to go round in circles.

I turned around to call the elevator back and leave, but the elevator doors were now gone. I was staring at a seamless marble wall. When I ran a panicked hand across the stone, it was cold and clammy.

Okay, I told myself, this is not normal, but just march into that room down there and ask for the way out. I started walking, relieved I had decided to wear comfortable flats today. I was nearly silent.

The first door on the right had a strange white sign – Returns. The next door, on the left, had a similar sign, only it read, No Returns. After that the signs became more and more curious: Halfways, Splits, Long Losts, Undecideds. I hurried past the rest of the signs without looking, feeling a little cheered by the prospect of entering the open door in the middle of the hallway, meeting a normal human being and getting myself home.

The hallway was much longer than it had appeared from the elevator. But eventually the open door was just a few steps away. The music had changed while I walked, and it was now a loud, crashing symphony. Only the instruments were all playing off-key. I shivered.

I gathered my courage and peeped into the open door. To my relief, it was an ordinary office, with four clusters of cubicles, much like the office plan on my own floor. No, I realized with a start, not just like the office plan of my own floor, it was my own floor. The entire floor. This was no small room after all. And all of my colleagues were there, heads bent over their desks or staring at their computer screens. Only the light from the computers was a sickly green. And the light was so sharp and thick, it filled the room and turned everyone’s skin the same awful color. The music grew louder and everyone began typing more quickly. That’s when I noticed the thin gold chains around everyone’s necks. The chains were attached to the ceiling.

I backed carefully out of the room and looked at the sign: Repeats.

This would not do.

Across the hall another door opened. Slowly, and a triangle of fresh, white light landed at my feet. A voice called, “Hurry up, get in here!”

I stepped forward…

 The next chapter will be written by Mr. Smithereens!

tuesday reading notes

By

I finished up the last third of Anne Bragance’s Une Succulente au fond de l’impasse and it didn’t radically change my earlier impression of the book. Overall, very disappointing. But I am interested in several other Bragance titles and hope to find something on the same level as Casus Belli among her other books.

In the light of the current upheaval in publishing, I’m curious how this sort of thing continues to happen. I mean, how does a book this blah get published? Who is the lazy editor that doesn’t say, look, this needs some re-thinking, before publication? Bragance is an accomplished writer; I would assume she could handle it. I don’t think this is an issue of my reading in the wrong genre, or missing some deeply interesting or mysterious element of the book. (For what it’s worth, my entire book group agrees the book failed, so it isn’t just me and even if that’s only six people, we rarely come to such easy accord.) The book is touted as serious literary fiction but it reads like a first draft, or three first drafts. If it was meant to be three interconnected novellas, Bragance fails to work both the form and the stories to a satisfying conclusion. The three parts of the novel don’t speak to each other, except on a very superficial level. And as I mentioned before, the three first-person narrators could have all been the exact same person.

*

The following most excellent and eloquent essay has been (s)linking around the web these days. The essay is on translation and written by Harvard University Press Editor Sharmila Sen. This bit will stay with me:

A translation is the original text’s wife. If too pretty, the translation must be cheating on her husband, the text. If faithful, the translation must not be very pretty.

I love that. And it was a timely sentence for me to read as I struggle with getting Ramuz into English. I recently got a disappointing rejection from a journal where an intern wrote, “I liked the French but the translation did not work”. Ouch. In the particular story I submitted, there were three POV shifts, a relatively unheard of use of a pronoun that doesn’t exist in English, unsettling shifts in tense and I won’t even go into Ramuz’s obsessional use of semi-colons. So, yes, she’s completely right, the translation doesn’t “work”. And maybe my translation fell short of resolving those issues so I’m more than willing to get back to the two texts and see what I can do to. But this is the struggle with translation…how to recreate/reflect the eccentricity of Ramuzian French in English to an Anglophone reader? I’ll just keep trying…

*

My Virginia Woolf project is gaining momentum. I tucked into two of her earliest short stories over the weekend – Phyllis and Rosamond and The Mysterious Case of Miss V.  Phyllis and Rosamond is a detailed portrait of two women as well as a discussion of types. The story tosses the idea of freedom around, personal and intellectual freedom, amidst a discussion of marriage expectations. I won’t go into detail about The Mysterious Case of Miss V. because it was more abstract and less easy to describe, but it struck me while reading both stories that Woolf understood what the coming of modernity would mean for women, both the positives and the negatives, and already in her early work, she was trying to sort out the impending muddle.

And also, a small point, but I’m noticing how Woolf has several of her characters conflate hard, solid facts with the idea of comfort. It is a strange pairing. Yet emotions must have been shifting, unreliable things to get a grip on for someone like Woolf while facts were fixed, and dependable.  Comforting.

Woolf Project begins – The Voyage Out

By

The Voyage Out, a fitting title to launch my Virginia Woolf read this year. And I do feel as if I’ve set out on a journey to discover and observe Virginia Woolf’s imagination and way of thinking. As I mentioned last week, her prose is so wonderfully distinctive that stepping into her fictional universe is quite an immersion. This is my first time reading The Voyage Out, and it’s Woolf’s first novel, published in 1915, but it contains many of the elements that would go on to become her signature style.

This is interesting to me – all writers develop and explore new fictional, thematic and stylistic territory but not all writers are so immediately and recognizably distinctive. Of course she had been writing for a long time already by then, and her upbringing was decidedly literary and artistic.

One of the more interesting aspects of this project for me is that I find myself, for almost the first time, wanting to know as much as possible about the writer’s life as I begin to experience the writing. I’m usually mostly interested in the work and what it does, how it affects me as a reader and writer, and ultimately, what the experience of reading it feels like. But with Woolf, there is a feeling that everything she wrote was intimately connected with who she was as a person, what her mind was processing and what happened to her on a day to day basis. Her “work”, as it were, is also “her.” Why I feel this way about Woolf compared to many other authors is something I’m going to have think about further as the project develops.

I am just about halfway through The Voyage Out. If I am allowed to use the term without belittling the work, this is very much a “coming-of-age” novel. And it is also highly reminiscent of a 19th century society novel in structure, except it is exceptionally modern in its preoccupation. What I mean by that is, that although the story of Rachel’s journey to South America and subsequent adventures follows a similar script of say an Austen, an Elliot or a Burney, it is much more intimately concerned with exploring questions about identity and existence and intelligence. One of the novel’s greatest questions seems to be: What are women really thinking? Why are they thinking it? Is it as worthwhile as what men are thinking?

Finally, just a general comment as I settle in to her writing. There is a thickness to her prose that I love, a layering of understanding and insight with respect to each of her characters and the setting in which they find themselves. She draws out her characters’ eccentricities but also the part of each individual that is fragile, and it is usually this fragility that manages to bring them into connection with each other.

I’ll finish here with a quote I think all readers will enjoy, taken from a scene in which Rachel is reading:

At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

Flannery O'Connor – Wise Blood

By

It is very hard not to have a visceral reaction to Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood. This is a messy and bizarre book, but also strangely and deeply funny. I read each chapter often appalled and disgusted, a little frightened and uncomfortable but at several points I burst out laughing. O’Connor’s ability to make me laugh at what was otherwise a gravely serious story is what transformed the reading experience for me, because I found it hard to enjoy reading Wise Blood. It just wasn’t that kind of book.

My experience with Flannery O’Connor is limited to a selection of her short stories, ones which most people have read – A Good Man is Hard to Find, Good Country People, Everything That Rises Must Converge. All very typical of her style and good examples of her ability to mingle a cracking wit with what is otherwise a sad or distressing detail. Who can forget the grandmother in A Good Man is Hard to Find, trying frantically to make something beautiful and religious come out of her family drive while her son and his family are picked off by The Misfit and his partners right in front of her. It is nearly impossible to convey the humor in that story by describing what happens…on the surface it is so awful, but lurking behind every line of dialogue and around each of the characters’ actions is this wonderful absurdity.

In any case, Wise Blood is in the same vein. Although there is something about carrying that mood through 150 pages that makes it more intense. And I’d say the dark bits overwhelm the comic bits so the overall effect is a little hard to take. The story is simple: Hazel Motes has just finished his army tour and has left his empty home in a small town to make his way as a preacher in a nearby “big” city. He preaches The Church Without Christ from the hood of his dilapidated car and becomes obsessed with another street preacher Asa Hawkes (who is not blind, but pretends to be after a failed attempt to blind himself) whose daughter Sabbath becomes obsessed with Hazel.

No one in this novel does what one would expect, and mostly people are mean-spirited and cruel to one another. The story involves a considerable amount of street preaching, a stolen mummy, a man in a gorilla suit and one horrible act of vehicular manslaughter. Lots of symbolism and much of it grotesquely done, which is what O’Connor is famous for. Wise Blood is a gruesome carnival. And as such, a perfect setting for an intensely religious/philosophical meditation.

As usual, I’m less interested in the “meaning” of this novel and how it fits into its tradition (although I am fascinated by Southern Gothic literature in general) and more curious to pick apart the details. I really appreciated the understated quality of O’Connor’s writing. Thinking back on the book, my mind is filled with one spectacular image after another, which is, I think, the effect of the novel’s grotesque, but when I go through the text to pull any of this out, the actual descriptions are simple and straightforward. A lot of her power rests in the dialogue and because her characters are so eccentric, they say eccentric things, which sets the novel’s mood without the narrator having to do much work. The narrator does, however, signal the comic elements to the reader, but with a great deal of subtlety.

I suspect I will always prefer her short stories, but I’m very happy to have read Wise Blood and I plan on reading The Violent Bear it Away, her other novel.

mid-read thoughts on Bragance's "Succulente"

By

In 2007, I was introduced to Anne Bragance’s work through her novel Casus Belli about a dysfunctional family. That novel charmed me, both for the depth of its character exploration and because of Bragance’s lovely writing style. Afterward, I hunted out several of her other novels (she has over twenty) and was all geared up to continue getting to know her work but somehow other projects got in the way and I only got around to reading a second novel by her this week.

I am about fifty pages from the end, and curious to see such a huge stylistic difference between this book and Casus Belli. It’s almost like it’s written by another person.

Une succulente au fond de l’impasse, her latest novel, is the story of François and Emma. Forty-something François is going through a divorce when he meets Emma, a prostitute who used to be a champion swimmer. They become friends, nothing more, but very good friends, and then one day Emma disappears…

The book is written in three sections, all in the first person, beginning with François and then about halfway through it switches to Emma. (At the end is a final section in the voice of Emma’s childhood best friend Bénédicte, but I’m not there yet). So far, I find little difference between François and Emma. They each tell a different story, but their language, their emotional register and even their vocabulary is quite similar.

Also, both narratives seem more concerned with the interior reflections of the voice in question than creating a “story” as it were. I don’t always have trouble with an intense interior kind of narration, one which shuns action and the exterior trappings of story, but I suppose it must depend on how the voice works, and most definitely its intellectual and emotional tone. I’m thinking here of André Brink’s first person story The Rights of Desire, or either Eclipse or The Sea by John Banville, even Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – all these novels maintain a strict interior reflective voice, and even a little suffocating at times. And I loved them all. Perhaps I shouldn’t compare to only Anglophone writers, so I’ll mention Nancy Huston’s incredible Instruments des Ténébrès, again partly first-person and intensely interior.

So Une succulent au fond de l’impasse is disappointing so far, perhaps because I get the sense it isn’t trying very hard. Despite their situations, nothing about either François or Emma has managed to reflect on the larger human condition. “Human condition” sounds a bit weighty, but I think that’s what good fiction does – it touches the world beyond itself. Casus Belli dealt with difficult psychological territory, and raised interesting questions about the nature of emotional wounds. The language was also rich and textured and the whole novel was filled with interesting and complicated images.

I certainly won’t give up on Bragance because of this book; she has several others I’d like to try before I decide whether she’s a writer for me. And, who knows, maybe the last fifty pages of Une succulente au fond de l’impasse will reverse all this grumbling…I’ll let you know.

Virginia Woolf – The Mark on the Wall

By

The other day I wrote that reading The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf compelled me to chuck all other authors aside and decide, finally, that I would read Woolf for my author project this year. After all my hemming and hawing, choosing Woolf felt so wonderfully, deliciously easy. I’m not under any illusions that reading her nine novels, all her short fiction and many of her essays will be a walk in the park, if anything Woolf provides an exhausting reading experience – her prose is so damn busy – but, I feel the same excitement heading into the project as I have felt in the past for other authors. So I know I’ve made the right decision.

But getting back to what convinced me – The Mark on the Wall. Reading Virginia Woolf gives me the same feeling I get when I step up from the metro in Paris. No matter the neighborhoods and their different flavors, this is Paris. Unmistakably. (Haussmann, Haussmann, Haussmann). I’ve never quite had this feeling anywhere else. And reading Woolf is the same – a few sentences in to The Mark on the Wall and already I knew – the voice, the active, vivid images, those industrious sentences. The skipping and shifting from thought to thought.

Now, as stories go The Mark on the Wall isn’t at all a story. It’s a series of thoughts squeezed between the two tiny actions of a woman looking through her cigarette smoke at a blot on the wall and a man laying his newspaper on the table. There is no conversation, no movement, no “story”.

But as thoughts go, these jumps and meditations and musings are fantastic. Woolf mimics the heady rush of thought, hopping and sliding from one idea to the next. The woman smoking her cigarette (is it Woolf? several clues make me say ‘yes, probably’) contemplates and imagines a messy little war between modernity and nature, men and women, tradition and fancy. At the same time she is engaged with her own intellectual process, aware of her slide of thought and both indulging and checking it as she goes along.

The pace of the story is frenetic. There is nowhere for the reader to settle, except in the tiny moments of exploded detail:

I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, tumbling all night long.

Lastly, although the story has no explicit, outward movement, it contains a tense feeling of expectation. Why isn’t she getting up? It’s a little like she’s trapped inside this moment, but happily so, willing to entertain her imagination, her fierce thoughts. It is clear that the intellectual exercise is one of pure pleasure, and she’s indulging it to the fullest. Until the end, of course, when she is inevitably interrupted.

Nadine Gordimer – The Pickup

By

It occurred to me last week that I’ve never posted on The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer. This was my third time reading this excellent book, and the reading experience reminded me of Nabokov’s quote about how we never really read a book, we can only re-read it. A first read is only an introduction, no matter how intense the experience, all subsequent reads push and then settle the acquaintance where it needs to go.

The Pickup is actually my very favorite Gordimer novel, which is saying something because I have high praise for each of her fourteen novels. But The Pickup is somehow a distillation of Gordimer’s style; it is both neat and untidy, both practical and reckless. The storyline repeats this dual tendency by being firmly contemporary yet at the same time a simple, traditional love story.

So let’s start with the story: The Pickup is the story of a relationship forged within the messiness of modern society. Julie meets Abdu when she takes her broken car into a garage in Johannesburg where he is working illegally. They begin an affair which becomes complicated when Abdu receives a deportation notice. Of course Julie wants him to stay, and of course Abdu does not want to return to his home country. They try various methods to keep him legally in South Africa and when everything fails, Julie shows up one evening with two tickets. She will go home with him. Home is an unnamed Muslim nation – the complete opposite from any life Julie has ever experienced.

The novel, as indicated by the title, flirts with the idea that one of these two has been a pickup for the other…Abdu needs residency, Julie needs adventure. Is one-half of this couple taking advantage of the other? Gordimer raises this question, yes, and in some ways, answers it, but this does not remain the central question. The Pickup goes on to explore the cultural and experiential differences between Julie and Abdu, and how they do find a connection. Julie’s integration into Abdu’s family home is a beautiful and respectful investigation of both sides of a huge cultural divide.

Finally, the ending…one of the most surprising endings I’ve ever read. And yet when you turn that last page, it isn’t really a surprise, it’s organic to the story and everything Gordimer has been revealing about Julie and Abdu. A surprise that is ultimately completely satisfying.

Stylistically, The Pickup is also my favorite. Mostly because of the omniscient narrator’s skill at personal and general revelation, but also because of the strange, slightly jarring way the narrator slips so casually in and out of Julie and Abdu’s (and several other characters’) minds. There isn’t a strong delineation between spoken word and thought, which creates an intense, contemplative atmosphere within the world of the novel. Delicately done. An excellent book.

Here is just a sample of the narrative style:

Not for her to speak those words; he heard them as she had heard them. Nothing for her to say; she knows nothing. That is true but he sees, feels, has revealed to him something he does not know: this foreign girl has for him – there are beautiful words for it coming to him in his mother tongue – devotion. How could anyone, man or woman, not want that? Devotion. Is it not natural to be loved? To accept a blessing. She knows something. Even if it comes out of ignorance, innocence of reality.

2 Comments

Alejandro Zambra – The Private Lives of Trees

By

Last January, I bought myself a subscription to the Open Letter Books catalogue. Fantastic decision, this has been a wonderful treat. To date, I have received seven books. I haven’t read all of those seven yet, but the four I’ve managed to read have all been either really good or at least a fascinating reading experience. For anyone who isn’t familiar with Open Letter, they are a small press publishing books in translation, and the books are all quirky and interesting.

Last month I received The Private Lives of Trees by Chilean writer/poet Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell. The title alone promised good things and I sat down with it only minutes after taking it out of the bubble envelope. This is a tiny little book, easy to read in one sitting and perhaps best experienced as a single, contained read.

The story is simple: one evening, Julián is waiting in his apartment for his wife Verónica to come home from her art class. To pass the time and help her sleep, he is telling a story to his step-daughter Daniela called The Private Lives of Trees. He is worried about his wife’s lateness, but trying to keep his focus elsewhere. When Daniela is awake, Julián tells her the story, when she falls asleep, Julián passes his time remembering, worrying, imagining, reflecting…

The book has a brilliant and confident narrator, who resides just outside and above the story. An omniscient with a very subtle personality. This narrator never upstages Julián but provides the story with a light-handed metafictional flavor:

But this night is not an average night, at least not yet. It’s still not completely certain that there will be a next day, since Verónica hasn’t come back from her drawing class. When she returns, the novel will end. But as long as she is not back, the book will continue. The book continues until she returns, or until Julián is sure that she won’t return. For now Verónica is missing from the blue room, where Julián lulls the little girl to sleep with a story about the private lives of trees.

Now I said the story was simple, and that is true, but like all good novellas, The Private Lives of Trees is actually concerned with greater issues and moments than these quiet hours passed between Julián and Daniela. It is a wonderfully modern book, investigating the cracks and confusion of contemporary relationships, contemporary life. Julián considers a variety of reasonable reactions to his situation: jealousy, panic, apathy, anger. Those varying emotions turn this moment of Veronica’s absence into a reflection of his past – his childhood, his mistakes, his successes – as well as a consideration of his possible futures.

Danielle Dufay – Mon Mariage Chinois

By

Well, I thought I’d be able to stay away but it turns out no…However, posting may continue to be sporadic until the second week of September when hopefully the stars will align and solve my childcare issues. In the meantime, some thoughts on an interesting book:

*

My husband is Swiss. I am American. When we got married, these two nationalities became just another part of our shared life. In a year or so, if I want, I can apply for Swiss citizenship. Someday we may decide to move to the United States and if we do, my husband can apply for American citizenship. There is very little chance that either of us will be denied. It wasn’t until I read Danielle Dufay’s epistolary memoir Mon Mariage Chinois (My Chinese Marriage), that I realized the possibility of “sharing” citizenship is something I never should have taken for granted.

In 1913, Dufay’s grandmother Jeanne married a Chinese citizen. Without realizing it, by signing her marriage certificate, Jeanne surrendered her French citizenship. The book opens in 1922, when Jeanne, separated from her husband because of WWI, is finally traveling to China to meet him again. They have not seen one another for seven years and Jeanne has some very justifiable apprehensions about this reunion. One of the reasons she is finally going is that since her wedding, she has been forced to live as a foreigner in her own country.

The book is formed of the letters Jeanne writes home to her sister Laurence in France, filled with descriptions of the long journey to China, detailed portraits of the various people she meets along the way, and of course, news of her marital situation and life in her new home. I think it is safe to say that the cultural differences between China and France in the 1920s were much bigger than they are today. And Jeanne suffers because of this great rift – not only in her relationship with her husband but also in ordinary everyday experiences. As any expatriate will readily admit, simple tasks can become momentous trials when the cultural frame is shifted.

Now Jeanne’s situation is made even more complicated because of her citizen status. If something becomes difficult for her, she has no recourse to the French consulate and very little support from any of her fellow French citizens. When things between her and her husband become difficult, she cannot just pick up and leave. She is considered “Chinese” in the eyes of the state. She is also supported financially by her husband, which in theory could have been a nightmare, but Jeanne’s husband grants her a liberal measure of freedom to travel and socialize as she prefers. She is not allowed to work, however, except for some part-time English teaching, so she has no means of saving money to return to France.

Mon Mariage Chinois gets a little clunky from time to time. The book was fashioned into a series of letters from Jeanne’s actual letters, a few of her essays and her private journals. I understand the reason for forcing these three different genres together but I’m not convinced it was the best idea. Too much exposition in a personal letter reads false. But this effect is heaviest at the beginning of the book, when Jeanne is giving the background to her marriage. Once she gets on the boat and especially when she reaches Hong Kong and China, this issue smoothes itself out a bit.

Also, the book is not a page turner but best savored slowly. Each of Jeanne’s letters is a treasure trove of historic information, filled with rich detail about 1920s Asia and its customs. As an expat she is keenly interested in the expat community, but also in other minority groups versus traditional Chinese culture. Something I found very interesting was that she was not exempt from the racist thinking that infused her generation, even if she was a victim of it herself.

Finally, aside from its cultural preoccupations, Mon Mariage Chinois is also the portrait of a woman trying to negotiate between her traditional upbringing with its blind championing of marital duty, and her fiercely independent, intensely feminist character.