Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

friday reading notes

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The mailbox offered up a wonderful present yesterday…a book I ordered MONTHS ago which finally became available. Nadine Gordimer’s Telling Times, a collection (1954 – 2008) of her non-fiction writing about politics and literature. I absolutely cannot wait to get started. Just need to clear a few projects off of my desk and I’ll be able to focus almost exclusively on this.

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I have narrowed my choices for my author read to three: Iris Murdoch, J. M. Coetzee and John Banville. Murdoch has 26 novels, Coetzee 12 and Banville 17. Coetzee would be the obvious choice, to be able to read one a month for 2011. But I’ve already ordered Murdoch’s first five novels and I have about seven Banville on the shelf waiting for me. I may just attempt the impossible and read all three writers. It means I wouldn’t really be reading anyone else in 2011 and that may drive me batty, but I so loved my complete Gordimer read, not just her books but the experience of reading them one after the other, that I’m inclined to attempt to recreate that reading mood.

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In an attempt to catch up with my 10-year reading project I am immersed in Euripedes at the moment…Medea, Hippolytus, and The Trojan Women. I’ll be posting on these next week but let me just say here that being a woman (or an innocent child) in Ancient Greece was no party.

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Am currently about halfway through Danielle Dufay’s Mon mariage chinois, a book which Smithereens brought to my attention (and then very kindly sent to me!). This is an interesting book, not only because of the style of the writing, which I found to be dense and formal (but in a good way), but also because of Dufay’s subject. The book is a collection of letters sent by Dufay’s grandmother Jeanne between 1922 and 1924 to her sister Laurence. Jeanne married a Chinese man in 1913 (an act which caused her to unknowingly lose her French citizenship), was separated from him by WWI and then went to China in 1922 to meet him again. Her letters begin on the boat from Marseille and are rich with images of the cities along the way to China and character portraits of the people traveling with her. Jeanne is going to China out of a sense of duty but she doesn’t love her husband and she has no idea what kind of life awaits her. Her impressions of the Hong Kong and China of the 1920s are fascinating. I’ll write more when I’ve finished.

Frances Burney – Evelina

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I confess. I loved Evelina (1778). I could not put it down. It struck me about 3 o’clock this afternoon as I was guarding my Kindle from a rather drooly Mademoiselle Petitvore that I probably needed to put the book down and pay a little more attention to my child before she pulled every single book off our shelves or rip up the entire box of stray paper for recycling. I had been, ahem, somewhat engrossed and she was getting a little stir crazy.

We packed up for a long walk and I only read a few pages (okay 20) when we reached the top of the hill. Luckily, both she and the dog were busy contemplating each other and the view.

In my quest for something Austen-esque, I quite succeeded. The similarities were striking: an unlucky heroine of impeccable moral character thrown into a variety of adventures where she must prove herself, an array of fascinating character portraits from all levels of English society, lively dialogue and a critical eye on social customs and behavior.

Yet, at the same time, Evelina has a very different flavor than Austen. It was more daring, more slapstick (yes, I’m talking about that monkey scene). It went further, on many levels, than any of Austen’s books. Her grotesque characters (Madame Duval, Captain Mirval, Mrs. Selwyn) are quite outrageous. I was very partial to Mrs. Selwyn, whose dialogue actually got me to laugh out loud. Her serious characters (Evelina, Lord Orville, Mr. Villars) were a little more drab than Austen’s. I wanted Evelina to be just a bit smarter at moments, and Lord Orville was a teensy bit of a yawn.

And by daring, I also mean that it was just a touch more explicit. Austen readily treats the notion of a “libertine” but always keeps the threat a little bit off of the center stage. Burney introduces her reader to not just one, but to a parade of these scoundrels. It made for lively reading.

Also, the pace of the novel was fantastic. It just hummed along, energetic scene after energetic scene. Evelina’s constant kerfuffles did start to grow a little old toward the end, but they were admittedly varied enough to keep a reader happy.

I’ll be heading to Burney’s letters and diaries next, and then will try some more of her novels. Perfect summer reading.

19th century continues…

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I read Maria Edgeworth’s unique little novel, Castle Rackrent (1800) the other day, when I was in need of something Austen-esque but didn’t want to do any rereading. I’d never heard of Edgeworth (1767 – 1849) but went looking for an Austen contemporary, found her, got her work from Gutenberg and spent an enjoyable day with her style.

In Castle Rackrent, loyal steward Thady Quirk tells the story of four generations a noble Irish family. He is a devoted servant our Thady, and quick to overlook the vices and flaws of each successive Master. The book is really a nod to the working class and how much more efficient and intelligent they are, but it also illustrates how terrible it must have been to be a poor farmer on one of these estates, squeezed to the last drop by the irresponsible, careless or downright greedy nobility. It was a fun read, although the jumping through each generation made me wish for a contained story along the same lines.

Edgeworth has a rich collection of novels, treating various subjects like interracial marriage, absentee landlords, fallen women and so forth.  Gutenberg has a 10-volume collection of her Tales and Novels, which seems to include nearly everything. And they also have her letters; she corresponded with Sir Walter Scott for years. Treasure!

My search for an Austen contemporary gave me a few other names to try, including Fanny Burney (whom Austen liked) and Ann Ward Radcliffe (whom it seems she didn’t, if I am remembering correctly, Austen makes fun of Radcliffe’s novel The Mysteries of Udolpho in at least one of her books). I’ve got Burney’s first novel, Evelina, as well as The Mysteries of Udolpho, which sounds like a bit of fun.

projects projects

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Forget the fact that I am behind on almost all of my reading projects for 2010, I’m ready to start mapping things out for 2011. I never came right out and stated my projects for 2010, probably because I worried I wouldn’t be able to fulfill them, but I was hoping to move forward on two biggish projects: my 10-year reading plan and the Central and South American Reading Project. It’s July and I’ve been moving very slowly.

However, there are still five months left in 2010, so let’s hope I get back on track.

But on to 2011, because planning for a project is half of the fun. Starting in January, I’d like to get back to doing a start to finish contemporary author read. This is one of my favorite types of projects, but I’ve been having a hard time deciding who to do next. I’m favoring Iris Murdoch (over twenty novels to her name, so not sure I could finish in a year) but Coetzee and Julian Barnes (who I have never read) are also on the list. And secretly, secretly, I want to bury myself in Balzac to the exclusion of everything else. But I know I won’t do that. I’ll read more Balzac next year but not in any order and without any expectation of a ‘start to finish’.

tuesday reading notes

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Why is chick lit from 10th century Japan somehow acceptable to me? I am thoroughly enjoying Genji’s romp through the various social classes in Heian Japan. At the moment I prefer Koremitsu, Genji’s confident and manservant, to Genji. He is appropriately annoyed (though he hides it well) with Genji’s rather overexcited libido.

Beyond the chuckle factor, The Tale of Genji is fascinating. I love the intricate social stratification and the coded conversations. Imagine if people still spoke to each other this way, alluding to famous poems and stories in all exchanges. Well, okay, we do this, a little, but in The Tale of Genji, a vast population of courtiers and commoners routinely cite words and half-phrases from an extensive library of classic poetry. I’m impressed at their ability to just whip out a poem to communicate a delicate situation or feeling.

And again, I am in absolute awe of Royall Tyler’s translation work. It took him eight years. Which seems amazingly short for such an incredible undertaking.

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I’m still getting over Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I knew what had to happen, but I wouldn’t have minded Tess and Angel taking off to Australia instead. Those last few scenes were fantastic. In a literal sense – the blood dripping from the ceiling, the lovers’ hideaway, and then Tess’s exhausted nap upon the altar at Stonehenge…I loved it, all the while I imagined Hardy’s contemporary readers must have been absolutely shocked.

Hardy’s bold depiction of the sexual double standard surprised me; I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so explicit.

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On the schedule for this week is the third Agota Kristof but I think I might hold off and finish Le Rouge et le Noir, which I started randomly yesterday. And I am currently eyeing several Balzac. It’s going to be a 19th century kind of week.

Agota Kristof – La Preuve

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I’m about halfway through the second Agota Kristof novel, La Preuve. My reaction to the first novel is here. I read that book in two sittings, and I tore through it. I was insanely curious about where Kristof was taking the story, and continually surprised and shocked and horrified about her decisions. This gave me little time to think much about the details of the writing and Kristof’s style. Now, however, reading the second novel, I have a little more distance. I know, more or less, what to expect in terms of the story (not the details, but the tone) and so I’m finding myself more critical of Kristof’s style.

Essentially, she uses quite short, straightforward descriptive sentences, terse dialogue and simple action. And this is coupled with the fact that the narrator has zero access to the minds’ of the characters, and in particular, to protagonist Lucas’ mind. There isn’t a single “he thought”. Everything is movement and speech. (This isn’t a surprise if you know that Kristof does a lot of work in theatre.) The effect of this brusque style was quite successful in Le Grand Cahier because it kept the reader guessing what was really going on. By the second book, however, it actually makes me consider whether this is the only way Kristof can write. French isn’t her mother tongue, and perhaps she adopted this style in French because it works for her.

I don’t want to downplay its success. It’s an effective style. I feel the same tension and curiosity to figure out what’s happening, to try and understand what kind of a person the main character is, etc. And if she has selected this way of writing on purpose, her story and aesthetic project are an organic fit. (I suspect the English version, which comes as one book of all three novellas, is a better way to read it – all at once, so the style just flows from one book to the next).

Kristof’s choice for the narration is interesting. The distant omniscient gives the book a cinematic texture. The reader watches the characters, looking for clues in their words and gestures alone to explain their behavior. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that doesn’t let the reader in to at least one of the character’s minds.

I am planning to finish the book over the weekend and despite the bleakness of Kristof’s vision, which makes for rather unsettling reading, I’m looking forward to see what happens and where she’ll go with the third book.

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Related quick note: A friend of mine recently remarked on Agota Kristof sounding a lot like Agatha Christie, and she wondered whether it was a pseudonym. As far as I can figure out, it’s not. Funny, though.

Unrelated quick  note: I am two sections away from finishing Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. (Strike this off my Humiliations List!) I had no idea Hardy was so poetic (yes, I hazily knew somehow he was also a poet, I just wasn’t expecting his prose to be so, um, overtly poetic); many of his descriptions (countryside and character) are simply incredible. I fear for Tess, though, is there no chance for a happy ending?

Maryse Condé – Les Belles Ténébreuses

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Just finished the most recent Maryse Condé novel, Les Belles Tenebreuses*. I have admired Condé’s style and work since studying her in graduate school. She’s a masterful, interesting, and thoughtful writer. But something’s gone wrong in Les Belles Tenebreuses. This new novel appears to be navigating many of contemporary society’s uglinesses. So in that sense, it has something to say. But I felt that several of the pieces didn’t seem to fit together and I think she cut some corners in her narrative.

Les Belles Tenebreuses is the story of Kassem, a perfect example of our fractured society. He comes from a Guadeloupean father and a Romanian mother, but he was born in France, in relative poverty, in a violent and dysfunctional family. When the novel opens, Kassem has been working at a kind of tourist wonderland in northern Africa as a chef. The complex where he lives and works is destroyed by a terrorist bombing and he is left without a job, without any money, without a girlfriend (she was killed in the bombing), and without any chance of going home. Kassem, because of his strange cultural background, and undoubtedly his name, is at first suspected in the bombing. This works itself out, but he is left adrift in a culture of which he knows nothing. He ends up going to a local mosque, because it’s the only place that will let him in.

At the mosque he meets a man named Ramzi, who is a famous doctor and political figure. Ramzi hires him and the two begin working together, although it is never quite explained what Ramzi sees in the young, awkward Kassem. At this point, the book begins to read like a grotesque fairytale involving a mass epidemic, embalming techniques, despotism, social and political displacement. I don’t mind grotesque and I think fairytales have much to offer a reader. But. Well. Ramzi and Kassem move from Africa, to France and eventually to America. Where much the same things happen over and over again. Kassem falls in love, people die, Ramzi becomes involved with political insiders, people become suspicious of Ramzi, confide their suspicious to Kassem, who then tells Ramzi (being mysteriously unable to lie to Ramzi) and so on and so forth, more people die.

Kassem is an antihero, with no real character or will of his own. He lets himself be sort of blown from situation to situation, never addressing what it is that he wants, aside from a good screw. That isn’t quite fair. There is some feeling that Kassem is a stand-in for the “youth of today” – adrift in the world, without a sense of heritage or self. But he is a witness to a staggering number of heinous crimes, and each one revolts him or scares him, but he never does anything. I would like to give Condé more credit for what she’s doing, in the sense that she is investigating the difficulties and violence in modern society, perhaps caused by globalization, perhaps caused by our increasing distance from our families and our roots. These are all issues she mentions. But where she could go into detail and carefully work the psychology of her characters, instead she blasts from event to event with little more than cursory narrative.

Take Kassem’s spiritual transformation, for example. Throughout the course of the novel, he becomes a Muslim. And a fairly devout one, Condé tells us. Yet Kassem’s journey to Islam does nothing to change his character, does not affect his fate or the events of the story in any way. It’s just one of the things he does. He meets some people he might not have met otherwise, but they do not alter him.

Essentially, I am criticizing this book because, despite its clear ambitions and worthy subject, the writing felt rushed and patchy – Kassem sobs, he cries, he stands around dumbfounded. Events are larger-than-life with no attempt to persuade the reader of their meaning. Ideas are introduced and then never dealt with again, making the story inconsistent. And the characters are all types. I won’t even go near the ending, which was baffling to say the least.

Whatever the issue, I feel the book wasn’t successful. I will go back and soothe myself with Condé’s other work that I have so loved… Crossing the Mangrove and Segu and Tree of Life.

*The book hasn’t been translated into English but I’m sure it will, and it will be excellent (the translation, I mean). Condé’s husband Richard Philcox has been her translator for just about ever now. And his translations are beautifully, wonderfully done.

friday reading notes

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Last night I met with my favorite book group to discuss John Updike’s 2003 novel Villages. I won’t go into too much detail here, but this was a good book to read in a group, mainly because despite Updike’s writing (which provides for endless study and admiration), the beginning-to-end story of Villages can be summed up like this: man living in suburban PA has a series of affairs.

Obviously there is more going on here. But it’s all densely packed into the characters, who are, strangely, unexpectedly, all types. Owen, whose story Villages is telling, is fairly stereotypical. He doesn’t have an interior life that would seem to merit so much scrutiny. Yet our discussion last night was all over the place – history, feminism, symbolism, marriage, parenthood, suburban life, and many more – so there’s a point to Owen and his careless, almost mechanical hedonism. I’d like to read more Updike because finishing Villages left me with more questions about his work in general. I suppose I will head to the Rabbit books, but I’m also interested in The Coup (1978) and The Scarlet Letter Trilogy (A Month of Sundays, Roger’s Version and S.).

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Several new books arrived this week. All wonderful. All very tempting. First and most exciting is the Royall Tyler translation of The Tale of Genji. I’ll be starting tonight, and hope to catch up with the Summer of Genji group read that began this week. On a recommendation from a friend, I ordered Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections and that arrived today. Looking forward to this. Also in the non-fiction category, I ordered Atul Gawande’s highly lauded Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. Finally, I received the second two books in the Agota Kristof Twins’ Trilogy, La Preuve and Le troisième mensonge. Like the first book, Le Grand Cahier, these are slim little novels. If I can, I’d like to read them both this weekend.

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I’m curious these days about reader reactions to flash fiction. I’d be interested to hear some thoughts on this. Is this a meaningful/valuable literary form? Can it or does it accomplish something that other forms cannot? How is it different, if it is, from poetry?

Sten Nadolny – The Discovery of Slowness

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From The Discovery of Slowness:

It was an evening sky of infinite duration, shadows becoming gigantically long, and when swaths of mist rose, they turned at once into reddish clouds, changing colors up to the northern horizon.

John looked out on the ice, studied its forms, and tried to understand what they meant. It was true, then, that with its own power the sea could surpass itself. Here was the proof. Here he discovered the meaning of his dreams.

I loved this book.

Sir John Franklin was a real person and Nadolny follows his fascinating life with great care from what I can only assume came out of a formidable amount of research. The novel does so much more, however, than recount the facts of Franklin’s life. It investigates an aesthetics of thought.

On the surface the book is about Franklin’s passion for the ocean, for exploring and discovery. But Nadolny only uses this “fact” of Franklin’s life to engage with the more complex notions of intellect, empathy and honor (to oneself and to others). I was most interested in this idea of slow, deliberate thinking and how Franklin was aware of the way his mind worked. His “character” develops along with the movement of the story and the great events he lives through, but more interestingly, his perception and understanding of his capacity for reflection is subject to a more subtle, but ultimately more profound, revelation.

This book was originally published in German in 1983 and translated into English by Ralph Freedman in 1987.

bookish news

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The Quarterly Conversation and Open Letters Monthly have teamed up this summer for a group read of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. The idea is to read about 70-90 pages a week and they have selected the more recent Royall Tyler translation. I’ve decided to join in and ordered my copy of the translation last week. My only experience with Genji is the original and Seidensticker, so this will be a treat. For other language nerds like me, there exists a very cool website in Japanese of the original Genji Monogatari, with the classical Japanese, the modern Japanese and a Romaji transliteration in three interactive panes. So. Much. Fun.

And I just learned (a month late) that Amazon has decided to launch a translation imprint called AmazonCrossing. Using their ever-so-detailed sales and reviews data, they plan to pick up books which are likely to become big sellers and have them translated. On the whole I think this is fantastic news…more books from around the world making their way into English. The first book they’ve picked is from France, The King of Kahel by Tierno Monénembo. I’ll be very curious to see what other books get on to their list.