Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

wednesday reading notes

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Whew, it’s called child care. And I finally have enough to give me time for work and a few hours of reading and writing.

So…books. What are we reading this summer?

A month or so ago I saw an article about Adam Thirwell’s The Delighted States and I got so excited I ordered the book right away. It came two weeks ago and I finally got the chance to sit down with it over the weekend. This is my kind of book. It focuses on literature AND translation AND the wonderful, sublime connection between writers and translators and ordinary people and readers and objects. It’s clever and funny and serious. Thirwell is clearly in love with language and with how writers manifest their own unique obsession with language. The book hops from one classic to the next, from one writer to another, finding similarities and lovely little gems of intertextuality. Reading The Delighted States feels a bit like watching a literary parade while a brilliant and chatty friend at your elbow tells you all you ever wanted to know about each book, each writer, each character.

For my French book club I am reading the newest Maryse Condé, Les Belles Tenebreuses. When we met last week to discuss Ella Maillart’s novel La Voie Cruelle, one of the members told me she’d already read the Condé and hated it. She said it was badly written, something which surprised me so much I started the book that evening. I’ve been a Condé admirer since grad school when I read and enjoyed her Moi, Tituba, Sorcière, where she re-imagines what the Salem witch trials must have been like for a slave woman accused of sorcery. I also read and studied her first novel Heremakhonon which examines cultural displacement through a unique back-to-Africa love story.

I’m only thirty or so pages into Les Belles Tenebreuses and the style is different from what I remember of Condé’s other work. There is an intrusive and authoritative author/narrator who speaks to the reader from time to time. I find it a little jarring, but I’m not far enough into the book to see whether this voice will serve a purpose. Which it may. Otherwise, the story is curious (embalming, terrorism, love story) and I’m eager to see where she is going.

Finally, I’m reading my first John Updike novel, Villages. I’ve read many upon many Updike short stories and I consider him to be one of the great greats, in the sense that his writing is so confident, so worked and detailed; he uses his words effectively and ingeniously, transforming a purportedly exclusive experience into something universal and collective. But I’m also often left with the feeling that his writing is overwritten. He packs so much into the small moments and descriptions, sometimes I want to say, ‘come on, I get it, let’s move on.’ There is a definite Updike style, and I need to be in the mood for it to enjoy it.

What are you all reading to start the summer? Anything good?

Agota Kristof – Le Grand Cahier

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Difficult, difficult. How to write about this book without giving anything away? This is one of those frustrating books that wants to be discussed, but yet I’m glad I knew nothing of the story or the book’s project before turning to page one. It was a slow revelation, and very effective because of that. I want all its new readers to have a similar experience.

Well, alright, I can tell you one thing: this is a story about twin brothers who are brought to live with their grandmother in a small village in Hungary during WWII. That’s it. If I go further than that, I think it will spoil everything.

So let’s talk about the writer. Anyone heard of Agota Kristof? I hadn’t until a week ago when a friend of mine from my French book club emailed me and said she’d just been introduced to this writer, had ordered her books, had started the first and was now unable to put it down. I followed suit and had a similar experience.

Kristof is a Hungarian writer who lives in Switzerland and writes in French. Her most well-known work, a trilogy, is composed of Le grand cahier (The Notebook), La Preuve (The Proof), and Le Troisième Mensonge (The Third Lie). These are all available from Grove Press in English translation.

As I said, I had a similar experience as my friend in that I literally tore through Le Grand Cahier. Such a deceptively simple little novel. An easy story – two boys must leave the city to live in the safer countryside during the war. Yet, the novel quite simply explodes with little horrors. I tried to find another word to describe it, something other than horror, but I can’t. The book is horrifying.

This whole trick about not knowing what the book is about is key. Of course the book is about WWII, about the separation of families, about violence, about neighbors helping neighbors and neighbors hurting neighbors. It’s a classic war story. But it’s also wholly unique.

Part of what makes Le Grand Cahier so unique (and compelling, if I’m allowed this reviewer cliché) is the perspective, the way it pretends to be written by the boys themselves. They are telling their story as one of a series of imposed exercises, recording events in their notebook. They’ve promised the reader to give nothing but the facts, no interpretation, no emotion. It’s an effective way of giving the reader the “story” but their very lack of emotion or explanation creates this effect where the reader begins to see too much in the boys’ silences, begins to understand what Kristof is actually getting at. And it isn’t nice.

In any case, I’ve got the second book on its way and I’m very curious to see if Kristof will maintain the perspective she established with Le Grand Cahier and I’m doubly curious to see what she’s going to do with Klaus and Lucas as they get older…

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current indulgences

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Just heard about Julie Orringer’s first novel The Invisible Bridge which came out this month. Sounds fantastic. I loved her collection of short stories, How to Breathe Underwater.

Just ordered Adam Thirwell’s The Delighted States and Hermione’s Lee’s Body Parts. It seems I’m craving some good literary chit-chat.

Just started Ella Maillart’s La Voie Cruelle about her road trip from Switzerland to Afghanistan in 1939 with her friend Christina (Anne-Marie Schwarzenbach, who was fighting a nasty drug addiction). Two women camping along the side of the road at such a time period and completely unchaperoned…makes for a great read.

Just finished chapter one of Sten Nadolny’s The Discovery of Slowness. Love the texture of the writing, love the perspective.

Christopher Torockio – Floating Holidays

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Finished a good book over the weekend – Christopher Torockio’s Floating Holidays. This book came out in 2007 from Black Lawrence Press, a small publisher with an interesting and diverse catalogue.

Before I begin praising this book, which is ultimately what I would like to do, I have to mention one thing that I found nearly unforgiveable. The handful of typos were annoying but I could ignore them, a minor printing issue I could forgive because I’m sure Black Lawrence were just as dismayed when they got the books back from the printer, but in one scene a doctor gives a line of such bad information I nearly shut the book and called Torockio myself to complain. He has a doctor tell a pregnant woman that some internal bleeding early on in her pregnancy could cause complications….like Down Syndrome. Um, that’s a genetic disorder and nothing but a mutation on a certain chromosome will cause it. Not only did it surprise me beyond belief that someone in this day and age could actually think this, but how come his editor didn’t fix this?

Okay, so this huge flaw occurred inside one teensy tiny little scene and doesn’t affect the book overall, but I had to point it out. Now, let’s move on.

The book blends a number of voices and several story lines, all of which have their genesis in a certain corporate event. On first glance, the book appears to focus on the world of office cubicles and big corporate life, but the stories stretch much further than that and are ultimately more concerned with the domestic narratives of the novel’s various characters.

It is difficult to pull off a book with so many different voices but Torockio does it well, pegging each character quickly with some feature or habit that really defines them but not letting those ‘tags’ (for lack of a better word) overpower each character’s development. In terms of story, the book concerns itself with life’s setbacks, both marital and professional, how the two are often linked, and how his characters navigate such difficult waters. My description isn’t doing the novel much justice, the book has real momentum. And despite the fact that some of the characters aren’t necessarily likeable, Torockio portrays them all with real empathy.

Floating Holidays did what my favorite kind of contemporary fiction does – gets me to see people, their idiosyncrasies, their weaknesses, their frail strengths and tentative optimism. Humans can be so nutty sometimes – for no obvious reason people might suddenly be horribly mean to one another, while across the street a group of strangers band together to stick it to The Man. Why do we do these things? Torockio seems just as curious.

Damon Galgut – The Good Doctor

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Oh, why why why did it take me this long to get introduced to Damon Galgut’s sublime novel The Good Doctor ? My own fault, actually. I mooched the book a while back after reading about it in various locations (namely, Bookeywookey), but didn’t bother to read it until last week. Big mistake. I consider this book one of the best reads of the year.

Over the last few years I’ve developed a real interest in South African literature (although I know I’ve really only skimmed the surface at this point). There is something about the subject matter and the writing style of writers like Gordimer, Coetzee, Brink and now Galgut, that consistently impresses me…a thoughtfulness, a heaviness, a careful and reflective creation of story and character.

The Good Doctor is a tightly contained, intimate story with immense reach. It manages to portray an entire landscape of complex socio-political realities while remaining closely focused on a single man’s thoughts. The narrative action follows a short timeline (less than a year) yet it reflects both an era as well as the main character’s entire life.

The book opens with the arrival of a young, new doctor at a rural hospital in one of the former South African homelands. The hospital is barely functional, with only a few staff members and hardly any equipment. The new doctor is appropriately shocked and dismayed and the current staff expects him to simply pack up and leave. But Dr. Laurence Waters is an idealist and instead of leaving, he begins to see what kind of new life he might be able to bring to the run-down hospital, and in connection, to the empty town and neighboring villages.

The book is narrated by Frank, a doctor who has been living in this forsaken community for several years. Frank is a jaded and troubled man, somewhere in his forties, who experiences Laurence’s arrival, first like an amusing event in an otherwise humdrum existence, but later as a threat. Laurence is going to change their lives and Frank isn’t at all certain this is a good idea.

What struck me about The Good Doctor is the way it hummed along with an eerie, restrained violence. Frank is neither stable, nor is he a “good person”, yet it is his voice leading us through this story. I love this kind of fiction. Frank is my guide to this fictional universe, but the more I get to know him, the more I mistrust his view of things.

So what gets set up is essentially a face-off between Frank and Laurence, but not a face-off in any traditional sense…as Laurence moves his improvement projects further along, Frank spirals deeper into a series of self-defeating behaviors. Alongside this contrast of personality, there is a problem of looting at the hospital, increasing violence in the town, as well as a number of small conflicts between the few staff members at the hospital. The novel’s restrained menace eventually blossoms into a real, tangible tragedy.

And here is where the novel really impressed me. This tragedy in and of itself is an answer to the Frank/Laurence (resignation/idealism) face-off, but it also gets to the heart of Frank’s true brokenness, which is founded in more than just personal history and his own specific disappointments, but involves South African history, lingering prejudices and universal human failures.

reading update

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For the one or two readers I might still have, I promise to get back to regular posting soon…

In the meantime, a quick update:

I finished Jakov Lind’s quirky, funny, strange, incomprehensible, surreal and serious novel Ergo, just out from Open Letter Books. Reading this book was like taking a deep breath and diving underwater. I only came up for air twice and then plunged back into Lind’s bizarre world. I’m not sure I understood much of this book, but the reading was by no means uncomfortable. Think Kafka on LSD…

And then I had the pleasure to consume Damon Galgut’s wonderful The Good Doctor. This was definitely one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. The book is disturbingly quiet, with tiny little bombs that go off left and right. I couldn’t put it down. Loved the narrator and how I slowly began to mistrust him, mistrust his perceptions of the world. Fantastic book.

Now I’m about a third into Christopher Torockio’s Floating Holidays from Black Lawrence Press. The first chapter of the book, or I should say, the first voice, put me off, but as soon as I stepped into the second voice, it picked up steam. This is a novel of modern office life, of mediocre powermongers, of sensitive people choking under the pressure of corporate shenanigans. It’s good. It has a great momentum, despite the myriad of voices. I can’t wait to get further.

Tsutsui Yasutaka – The Maid (家族八景)

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Since I am just home from Japan, let’s talk about some Japanese literature. Before I left on holiday, I read a book just out from Alma Books called The Maid by Tsutsui Yasutaka and translated by Adam Kabat.

The Maid is about a young woman with the power to read minds who jumps from family home to family home. She is a purportedly intelligent young woman who has decided to hide out in this ridiculous job because she doesn’t want the world to know her secret.

Before I talk about my reaction, you need to know that Tsutsui is one of Japan’s most prolific and famous science fiction writers. He has something like 30 novels and 50 short story collections. You also need to know that The Maid (家族八景, or Kazoku Hakkei) was originally written in 1972.

I mention these two things because it helped me put the book into its proper context. I think that because Tsutsui is primarily a science fiction writer, he leaves out some of the more literary elements I might have enjoyed (Nanase’s development as a character, for example, is quite shallow), to focus on the stranger, more fantastic parts of his story (an artist who thinks completely in the abstract – shapes, colors and all). And the book is just a teensy bit dated, so it helps to know it was written in the 70s.

The Maid reads like a collage, with each chapter essentially following the same format only with different characters and slightly different events. Tsutsui has a lot to say about selfish, even dangerous sexual urges and egotism in general. The families Nanase spends time with are all basically an assortment of human monsters and Nanase moves through them with an interesting mix of cynicism and innocence.

The book does a lot for exploding myths about Japanese culture – its tidiness, the inviolable tradition of respect for one’s elders, the beauty of an intricate and strict hierarchy. With the creation of his mind-reading character, Tsutsui literally peels away the veneer of perfection and exposes a dark portrait of human nature – laziness and fear, infidelities, social climbing, incest, violence. You name it, Tsutsui writes about it.

So in terms of story, there is some interesting stuff going on in The Maid. On a prose level, I didn’t find it a satisfying read. Tsutsui’s style is sparse, yes, and the writing is clear, but Nanase’s mind-reading as a vehicle for emotional and narrative escalation begins to fall flat after a few chapters. It boils down to a strange kind of dialogue, with Nanase and the other characters “conversing” on one polite level while Nanase and the reader “listen in” to each person’s actual, horrible thoughts. The story tension gets lost in such direct access. It made me wish Tsutsui had gone a step further, found a way to push Nanase (or the reader) somehow. He comes close in the very last chapter but still doesn’t step out of his template.

John Fuller – Flying to Nowhere

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I wish I could remember where I got the recommendation for John Fuller’s tiny little novella, Flying to Nowhere, originally published in 1983. I got the book a few months ago but only grabbed it off the shelf on Monday evening because I wanted to read something completely new, something I had no idea about before opening the cover.

This is what greeted me:

The three novices walked fast down the margin of the hay field. In the great heat the tall grasses stood feathery and still, until the striding sandalled feet parted and crushed them. The hems of the woollen robes caught the seed tips and dragged them. Stems bowed and sprang, sending out tiny clouds of grass fruit.

That last image – tiny clouds of grass fruit – is lovely, don’t you think? The book has barely enough pages (88 in my edition) to earn being called a novella. It’s more like a long short story. But what a story.

In the field with the three novices are the harvest girls, scything grass, and they avoid looking at the novices, but the novices stare at the girls. One of the novices, who collects his observations in a notebook, thinks the following when he looks at the girls:

Their strokes are like the strokes of the knife on used vellum. The erased word serves its turn and is restored like dead grass to the elements. The field is the book of nature to be freshly inscribed by our brother the sun.

I just love that image of erasing a word from old parchment. Now the tone of this novice is a bit self-important, and clearly he’s keeping himself at a contemplative distance from the everyday tasks of the world about him. Later, his detachment will come back to haunt him.

Despite this bucolic, peaceful introduction the story, things turn dark quickly. It was impossible not to think of Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose because Fuller’s story is set at an isolated monastery (on a Welsh island) and involves a creepy mystery. Pilgrims to the island have been disappearing and the Bishop has sent a man, Vane, to discover what’s going on. Which he does, eventually, but at great cost. And what’s actually going on is much more interesting than the little bit that Vane manages to uncover.

The story of Flying to Nowhere was wonderful – unexpected, slightly otherworldly situations and unique characters along a spectrum of innocent to evil. The reader guesses quite early what might be going on but there is no sense of disappointment at this easy understanding. The language Fuller uses to tell his story was so exquisite I didn’t mind if in the end the “mystery” was somewhat obvious. The mystery is completely beside the point.

Fuller is a poet and that influence is really strong. So much so that there are a few moments of confusion. This could have been a source of frustration but with Flying to Nowhere I was more than happy to just get lost in the imagery, even if it meant I wasn’t exactly sure what was being inferred, or even what was happening at certain moments. I would love to read this strange, lovely little book with a book group sometime, because it would be interesting to hear and discuss different interpretations. Especially of the final scenes…

The novice’s story is really only a tiny part of the whole book but I’ll finish with this quote from one of his sections because I really liked it:

The windows of the cells were so small and high that the moon simply cast its ghostly patches on the ceilings without generally illuminating the sleeping shapes and their few possessions. And yet the outlines seemed quite clear in the half-darkness; the scrubbed bowl, the scowling cherubs at the shoulders of an oratory, the metal clasps of a book on a small table.

The novice who was shortly to undergo the night of examination reached out his hand and touched one of the clasps. His book was not finished, and he thought it might never be finished. The reflections in it of things as they really were could be no more, he decided, than insufficient reflections of things only as they seemed to be, reflections of reflections, moonlight patches at a pathetic remove from the sun.

Jacques Chessex – L'Ogre

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This month my French book group is reading Jacques Chessex’s novel L’Ogre (The Ogre), which won the Prix Goncourt in 1973 (I believe he was the first non-French writer to win the prize). With 22 novels, 27 books of poetry, 4 collections of short stories, and a full range of other writings, Chessex is one of Switzerland’s most famous writers, perhaps only second to Ramuz. He just died this past October, after a long and renowned career.

L’Ogre is the third Chessex novel I’ve read, and probably my favorite. He is known for having a thick, erudite style, and the book stayed true to that aesthetic, but it was also infused with tightly-contained, accessible moments of pathos.

I like short, intense narratives where a relatively brief moment of someone’s life is put under a microscope. In L’Ogre this moment begins the day that Jean Calmet’s father dies. The reader learns immediately, in the scenes detailing the death and the funeral, that Dr. Calmet was a perfect tyrant, that after living with his formidable personality for so long, his wife is nothing but an empty husk, that his children don’t know how to relate to one another and that his youngest son, Jean, is deliriously happy at this death. The book then follows Jean for the next few months as he attempts to construct a life in his new fatherless situation.

L’Ogre reminded me of Anne Bragance’s novel Casus Belli, only this time focusing on the father-son relationship. Both books take up this issue of parental tyranny and how destructive it is for the entire family. Jean has suffered his entire life because of his father, but when his father dies, presumably liberating him from that oppression, instead he is lost, bereft of any points of personal reference. Until this moment, he knew he was “useless, stupid, etc.” but without his father to maintain his identity, he suddenly has no idea who he is.

This is not a happy book, and it does not have a happy ending. But it does grant the reader a certain measure of pleasure. I was greatly involved in the details of each scene, which Chessex renders with great skill – the shadows and sounds of the house where Calmet grew up, the broken conversations between Calmet and his mother, the dreary loneliness of a busy café, the bleak sexual exchanges between Calmet and his much younger girlfriend, the memories of a terminally-ill student.

Finally, the book is set in Lausanne and the village of Lutry. Chessex, who was born and raised here and spent his life working as a teacher in the cantonal high school, does a beautiful job of capturing the stern façade of the canton of Vaud, with its strict Calvinist influences and overall Protestant work ethic.

I don’t expect I will ever become a huge fan of Jacques Chessex. I’ll have to think about this idea more, and read more of his work, but if I compare him to Ramuz (which I can’t help doing) he seems less able to depict his characters, especially the despicable ones, with quite as much love.

A quick note for anyone who is interested – several of his books have been translated into English, including L’Ogre which was given the ironic title, A Father’s Love. I can’t help thinking this is a bit of a shame, the image of the Ogre-Father in the book is absolutely wonderful, fairytale-esque and powerful. A shame not to let the original title stand.

digital media and our mental libraries

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Two recent posts on digital media have got me thinking:

First, this post at @craigmod talks about “formless content” and “definite content” and how this relates to printed books vs. e-readers. Mod’s goal is to come up with a way to determine what type of content should be digitalized. It’s an interesting discussion about how our perception of publishing might and/or should change in the digital age, and relates specifically to the ipad.

Biblioklept responds here, with some valid questions of a few of Mod’s ideas.

I have just a little something to add about a notion that Mod only quickly touches on, the experience of holding a book vs. an e-reader and how that might influence our reading and our after-reading experience. I am actually really curious how having mostly all of our stories on one device will change how we approach our “personal libraries”. Right now, the books I keep in my home all have a second-layer of texture (the covers, the paper texture, the smell of the book, the marginalia right on the page as opposed to somewhere else on the device…all of which varies from book to book) on top of the story as I remember it after I’ve read it.

I’ve yet to separate that experience from the imagined landscape of whatever novel or story I’m reading. Added of course to where I put the book upon finishing it. This all matters to me because I do go back and reference the books I’ve read, either in discussions, in reviews, while I’m reading something else. When I begin that mental process of reflecting on a book, I do imagine its form and location, however briefly, before I move further into a consideration of the story.

I’ve now read several works on my Kindle (The Maid by Yasutaka Tsutsui, Nicholas Nickleby…) and the reading experience is fine, comfortable, smooth, but when I want to refer to any of these books, my mind actually visualizes my Kindle, which is a bit stale, and of course identical for each book, before moving on to the layer of the text. And when I think about Nicholas Nickleby, as a whole text, for example, it exists for me as a kind of semi-invisible block of data inside the limbo of my Kindle as well as a vibrant, emotional narrative landscape. It has a very different physicality compared to my other printed books and this will always be a part of my overall reading experience.

Perhaps this is because I have a photographic memory, that I’m a visual learner, so the method I use to absorb the story is an integral part of my experience with a particular text. But it’s an interesting question for me, because maybe, one day, if most of my library is housed on a small number of digital devices, the experience of revisiting favorite works, of mentally cataloguing my library will be vastly different than it is now. I don’t think it will be necessarily bad, but it will be quite different. Flatter, I suppose. Although Mod’s point is that the ipad will allow for new textures, so there is an additional question there. But I do wonder whether any digitally-created texture, displayed on a flat screen will be able to give me a three-dimensional mental texture other than the container that displays the content?