Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

Maile Chapman – Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto

By

From page one of Maile Chapman’s Your Presence in Requested at Suvanto, the reader is invited into a somewhat surreal and disturbing landscape. I usually try to avoid using qualifiers like ‘somewhat’ but I feel it’s important in this case. This is realistic fiction, but one that highlights the more bizarre, fantastic elements of its unique situation.

The novel is set in the 1920s and opens with the arrival of Julia at Suvanto, a hospital in rural Finland. The hospital is an ordinary hospital, except for the top floor which serves as a temporary home for women in need of a rest cure. This isn’t a psychiatric ward in the strictest sense, but the women are a bit unhinged, emotionally fragile, unable to take care of themselves. Many of the women are Americans, wives of executives in the flourishing timber industry. Others are Danish, some are Swedish or Finnish. Julia is a troublemaker from the start. She does not want to be at Suvanto and does her best to disrupt its established routines and upset many of the other women. 

Aside from Julia, the novel’s most important character is Sunny, the head nurse on the top floor. Sunny is American and chose to come and work at Suvanto to escape from painful memories of her former life in the United States. Sunny is a tightly controlled individual with impeccable nursing skills, never upset, never flustered. She is the perfect foil for the ‘up-patients’ with their leaking emotions and often childish behaviors.

I’m sure you can guess this balance will necessarily be disturbed, and it is, as soon as a new obstetrician arrives from the United States with grand ideas for furthering his career. He wants to help Finland learn the Caesarian section technique and he’s willing to practice on non-maternity patients, removing the uteruses of older women past child-bearing age. Many of the up-patients, including Julia, fit this profile.

This plotline is the largest part of the novel, insomuch as it feeds the ending (see my post on Suvanto’s relationship to The Bacchae), but there are many smaller stories going on around it, and together they create this wonderfully eerie tension.

The writing is also impeccable – careful, subtle descriptions, an uncommon narrative perspective blending a voice-driven omniscient narrator with the third person plural, and attentive pacing. The voice-driven omniscient narrator is a real treat, smooth and flawless, with wordy insights (often verging on judgments) into the inner lives of each character. I haven’t been this impressed with début fiction in a long while. I can’t wait to see what else Chapman will come out with.

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman, Graywolf Press, April 2010

second teaser about Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto

By

Now, this may be because I have literally been swimming in Ramuz since last summer, but Maile Chapman’s Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto reminded me of my favorite Swiss literary fellow.

The similarity comes from the narrative perspective. I’ve mentioned before how Ramuz’s use of the third person pronoun on (one, you – universal, we) can drive a translator to distraction. On isn’t a terribly complicated concept, grammatically speaking, but in the Ramuzian universe it has a special job.

In a Ramuz text, the on is often used to represent the voice of the village, which is just a slightly more intimate form of the narrator. And the narrative shifts back and forth between a straight omniscient and this subtle all-village voice. So it has this collective consciousness aspect to it, adding an invisible “watcher/describer” to whatever story is being told. But it’s very subtle, since it is only rarely a direct “we”. I love this about his work, since he’s so often getting at the psychology of small village life.

Now, Chapman’s novel, which is set at a hospital in rural Finland, uses the first person plural. But it uses this perspective with great subtlety, which is, in my opinion, the only way to really get away with the first person plural unless you want to give your book a gimmicky texture. But what happens is that the narrator is both a member of the cast as well as a watcher of the story. Very much like Ramuz.

I realize I haven’t given any details about what this novel is about yet, and I’ll get there soon, I promise. What I do want to say is that Chapman’s clever use of the first person plural creates a kind of chorus, which chimes in every once in a while throughout the novel. It’s a bit spooky. It is also how she manages to create this fantastic echo of Euripedes’ play The Bacchae, without overtly mimicking that story. One event in Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto does directly reference The Bacchae, but the careful construction of this chorus using the first person plural emphasizes the connection much more subtly, much more powerfully.

Friday reading notes

By

My Swiss fellow just passed me The Logic of Life by Tim Harford. Quite an interesting book about rational choice theory. I’m often wary of this kind of easily-accessible ‘popular science’ book, because I just assume everything will be oversimplified and glib, but I like the way the author is trying to get his readers to reconsider a lot of their conventional thinking about why people do the things they do.

He begins with a hot issue – teenage sexuality – and argues that when teenagers change their sexual behavior, it is the result of rational decision making and not necessarily deteriorating morals. The example he uses to illustrate the idea comes from evidence that teenagers nowadays engage in more oral sex than say twenty years ago, a statistic that many people find absolutely horrifying. Well, Harford argues that faced with the greater risks of contracting HIV/AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases, teenagers have collectively changed their sexual behaviors to avoid those greater risks. They’ve worked out that the cost of engaging in regular sex is actually higher, and so they make the trade.

He uses the same theory to look at a myriad of other issues, including drug addiction, crime rates, love and relationships, and workplace behaviors. It’s important to note that Harford defines a ‘rational’ choice as something resulting from a process of cost/benefit analysis…so a seemingly insane decision can be rational. It is an interesting book and he is careful to point out that his theory applies to groups, but when used on an individual basis can break down. Human beings, individually, are more complicated than rational choice theory. I like that. I look forward to reading through the rest of his examples…

*

My Blog Stats page tells me that the other day someone made their way to Inc. Logo. by googling “Nancy Huston and Marie Vieux Chauvet”. My curiosity is now so aflame, I can’t stand it. Is Nancy Huston working on something that has to do with my favorite Haitian writer? I know that Huston was near New York City in the seventies (for university) and I know that Vieux Chauvet spent her final few years in New York…did the two ever meet? But Huston moved to Paris in 1973 and Vieux Chauvet died in 1973 so maybe they just missed each other.

Could I be even more geeky?

*

My mother-in-law passed my Swiss fellow and me a book last week called Lettre à D, Histoire d’un Amour by the French social philosopher/writer André Gorz (pen name Michel Bosquet). I haven’t finished it yet but plan to this evening. As the title suggests, it’s a love letter, written by Gorz to his wife. In the opening pages he writes that he was shocked to realize one day that of all the writing he’d done over the years, he’d never written the story of their love, which he says was the greatest and most important story of his life. A lot of what he writes is particular to a writer / nonwriter relationship. Gorz and his wife committed suicide together in 2007, after she was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Here is a generous excerpt from the publisher Editions Galilée. There is an English version (Letter to D.) which was published last May, translated by Julie Rose.

 

Haruki Murakami – Norwegian Wood

By

I’d be very curious to hear a die-hard Murakami fan’s reaction to Norwegian Wood. This was my first Murakami, and possibly it was a mistake to read it first. I believe it’s quite different from his other work. I tried reading Dance, Dance, Dance once a few years ago but gave up after a few chapters because I was just too confused. I think, however, that confusion is part of the aesthetic Murakami would like his readers to experience and I just wasn’t prepared for that at the time.

Norwegian Wood, however, isn’t confusing in the least. It is a fairly conventional love story about a young student, Toru, and two women, Naoko and Midori. Toru and Naoko have known each other for a long time because of Naoko’s former boyfriend and Toru’s longtime best friend Kizuki, who committed suicide before the novel opens, while Toru and Midori get together after meeting at a class at university.

The story basically follows Toru to school, on walks with Naoko, on dates with Midori, on escapades into Tokyo with his friend Nagasawa. Loosely, it is about the deterioration of his relationship with Naoko and the development of his relationship with Midori. But I think Norwegian Wood is more interesting when broken down into its themes.

First, the book takes place in the late sixties, at the height of the sexual revolution, although I think we could debate whether that sexual revolution included Japan in the same way as the Western world. In any case, the novel is about how Toru conflates sexual experience and emotional growth and then how he ultimately distinguishes and balances the two.

Second, Norwegian Wood takes a frank look at suicide, a troubling aspect of Japanese culture. Murakami’s discussion of suicide is interesting in and of itself, but it also prompts a related discussion on whether a person has obligations to the past, to the people they have left behind. Much of Toru’s growth is bound up in the idea of his being able to step forward into the future or bound to elements of his past.

Yes, I enjoyed and appreciated these aspects of the book.

But I feel pretty underwhelmed about the novel as a whole. This is perhaps a bit nitpicky of me, but I even found the opening introduction awkward…why bother opening the novel with 38 year-old Toru sitting on a plane in Germany if we’re never going to go back there? Or if that frame is never going to inform the rest of the story? I like narrative texture when it’s meaningful…and I suppose you could argue there is a small commentary on the power of memory in those opening paragraphs…but I’m not convinced it was necessary.

I won’t go into a laundry list of the other things that distracted me from fully enjoying this novel. But I would like to know where I should go next…The Wind-up Bird Chronicle? Kafka on the Shore?

a fantastic début novel

By

Apologies for being so quiet around here. I have had several extremely busy weeks. Getting back to work after my maternity leave is proving to be a little more difficult than I had expected. But I won’t bore you all with the details (assuming there are any of you left…)

Nevertheless, I have been reading. And some very excellent fiction at that.

Before I say more, I invite you all to reread The Bacchae by Euripedes and then order a copy of Maile Chapman’s début novel Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto. Graywolf is publishing this excellent novel in April and I’ve been fortunate enough to read it for a review I’m writing. I’ll write some more thoughts up this week and be sure to publish a link to the formal review when it comes out.

But I mean it…order this book…you will not regret it.

Siri Hustvedt – The Sorrows of an American

By

I have a special admiration for books that take on the emotional complexity of the human psyche, and then successfully and without melodrama, reveal something novel about personal interaction. Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American is a dense and thoughtful little book about a variety of human relationships – siblings, lovers, children to parents, friends, doctor to patient.

The book is about Erik, a divorced psychiatrist in New York, who becomes attached to the woman (and her child) who rent half of his house. The woman has a troubling relationship with the child’s father, an artist, who often pushes the boundaries of sane, rational behavior. Personal boundaries and emotional/mental health are big issues in this novel. The main story focuses on Erik, his work, his loneliness, his memories, but there are several other stories involving his widowed sister Inga (who was married to a famous writer) and his niece (who witnessed the fall of the twin towers).

One of the more subtle but very powerful stories in the novel revolves around Erik’s grief for his recently deceased father. A small mystery arises when Erik and his sister go through their father’s papers. I’m tempted to say that the mystery in and of itself becomes superfluous (and that would be an accurate statement) but it isn’t superfluous to what the novel has to say about grief, about its painful, disorienting perplexity. I appreciated the intricacy of Erik’s grief for a father he loved, but ultimately never understood or was able to be close with.

The dialogue in the book caught my attention. Hustvedt allows her characters to speak, really speak. Saying things to each other with actual substance. I believe this is often difficult to pull off, our reader’s ear finds falseness very quickly in dialogue that tries to sound too profound. Here is an example of what I mean, taken from a conversation in which Erik is speaking with his sister about his work:

“I miss the patients. It’s hard to describe, but when people are in desperate need, something falls away. The posing that’s part of the ordinary world vanishes, that How-are-you?-I’m-fine falseness.” I paused. “The patients might be raving or mute or even violent, but there’s an existential urgency to them that’s invigorating. You feel close to the raw truth of what human beings are.”

 I like the risk Erik takes in saying this. He’s admitting something about his emotional need to be exposed to the rawness of other people. This doesn’t come in the middle of a long, serious conversation. He says this a little out-of-the-blue while he and his sister are discussing something unrelated. I like the authenticity in that. Sometimes people say things like this, meaningful confessions in the midst of common conversation.

There were two elements of the novel, however, that kept me at a distance. The first was the narrative voice. This is such a difficult thing to quibble with…and I suppose Erik convinced me of his maleness by the end, but I couldn’t quite shake my original impression of the voice as distinctly female. Putting the book down and rereading the first pages helped (and I note that we learn Erik’s first name in the third paragraph, but somehow I managed to overlook this) but the shadow of a female narrator hovered over my entire experience with the book.

I dislike when this happens because I hate to think of myself as a prejudiced reader, one that assumes a female writer can only write in a female voice. Some of my favorite authors routinely write from the perspective of the opposite gender and I’ve never had any trouble with it. Now, on the other hand, I loved most of the other elements of the narrative voice.

The only other thing that niggled at me while I was reading was the sizeable amount of psychoanalytic theory or imagery. On the whole, I really enjoyed Erik’s thoughts about the mind and how fragile it is, but there were a lot of dreams in the book, most of which had quite in-your-face symbolism, and I’ve never found this revelatory in literature. Also, some of the “troubling” behaviors from the daughter of Erik’s renter were too facile. I believe that children under stress do exhibit behaviors which can be clarified and understood through a psychoanalytic lens, but in literature it often strikes me as contrived.

Despite these two small criticisms, I was overwhelmingly impressed with Hustvedt – the eloquence of the prose, the nuances of the characters, the dense but artful layering of the different stories.

another small press

By

The small press I’d like to mention today is a new one to me. I discovered this press over the weekend while browsing the 2010 Best Translated Book Award Fiction longlist from Three Percent. First of all, there are some really enticing books on this list. I’m trying to figure out how I can order all or at least most of them…my book-buying budget is getting a little out of control this year (okay, just pretend along with me that it was once under control).

Well, the book that brought me to this new press is Landscape with Dog and Other Stories by Ersi Sotiropoulos (trans. Karen Emmerich).

Here is an excerpt from one of the stories:

Let’s just say that Giacometti was setting out to draw a face. If he started with the chin, he would worry that he might never reach the nose. The longer he sketched the face, the harder he tried to offer a faithful representation of it, the more it resembled a skull. The only thing left was the gaze. So what he ended up drawing was a skull with a gaze.

Looks wonderful, doesn’t it?

The publisher who brings us this tempting bit of prose is called clockroot books. Yes, strange name. The rest of their catalog is equally appealing.

Cathy Marie Buchanan – The Day the Falls Stood Still

By

I have been trying to put my thoughts together for a review of Cathy Marie Buchanan’s novel The Day the Falls Stood Still. I received this book from the publisher and read it last week and enjoyed it. By ‘enjoyed it’ I mean that I was absorbed in the reading of it, and I was engaged in the story and the characters and the writing.

But I’m having trouble finding the words to express my feeling for this book. It is a lovely book, it is well-written, and it taught me something about the history of Niagara Falls. Despite all these commendable qualities, it didn’t manage to astound me.

Before I try and explain why, let me give you the gist of the story. The novel takes place in Niagara, Ontario between 1915 and 1923 and mainly concerns Bess Heath and her fellow, Tom Cole. When Bess and Tom meet, Bess’ family is in the midst of a great crisis – her father has lost his job, her sister is unhappy and unwell, her mother is trying to keep the family together. The novel is, essentially, a love story. Behind that love story are some other themes – environmentalism, classism, the trauma of WWI, even a bit of spiritualism. There are many interesting side discussions running the length of the novel.

All of this, the larger story and the tangents, are handled well and the book is a smooth, pleasant read. In and of itself, it’s a fine piece of writing and a sweet story. Where I think it disappointed me is that it didn’t take any real risks. The book has its share of sorrows and although it deals with them respectfully, it doesn’t go quite far enough in their emotional exploration.

I’ll take an example that won’t ruin the story for anyone – Tom gets sent to fight in WWI and a part of the novel deals with his absence and fortunate return. He is a sensitive young man, with a great attachment and connection to the natural world. It follows that he would be affected by the trauma of fighting, and he is. So much so that when he comes back he is appropriately shell-shocked and Bess must find a way to help him heal. She does so, creatively, and the story continues.

But the highs and lows of that mini-story weren’t quite steep enough for me. I think Buchanan could have pushed her characters a little further, pushed the writing a little further and the reader would have felt more keenly the horror of World War I as well as the redemption Bess offered Tom. This pattern was repeated throughout the novel when each tragedy threatened. Even the book’s greatest sorrow is eventually smoothed away. I’m not arguing that this isn’t possible, but I felt it was done too easily, almost as if Buchanan or the story was unwilling to engage with the darker aspects of raw emotion.

But perhaps I’m arguing against a genre here. The Day the Falls Stood Still rests very comfortably in the tradition of mainstream contemporary fiction. The writing is even and careful, the story is interesting and takes the reader through a series of familiar emotions – disappointment, sorrow, elation, hope, more sorrow, more hope – which all lead the main character to a kind of mature and resilient strength by the end of the book.

Hustvedt thoughts and Hawthorne Books

By

Finished Siri Hustvedt’s beautiful novel, The Sorrows of an American. Loved it. Will write about it properly before the week is up. Here are just some early thoughts.

This is the kind of book I love stumbling upon when I’m knee deep in my own fiction because it just asks for a second and a third and a fourth read…to take a further look at the skeleton of the text, and the layers that cover it. So many things I admire. Namely, the way Hustvedt’s dialogue accepts difficult conversations, enables the characters to say complicated, thoughtful things. Nadine Gordimer does this as well, allows her characters to engage in long-winded, meditative conversations about difficult topics.

Also, I enjoyed the authenticity of the narrative voice. I mean this in a very particular way. What I liked was that the narrator gave us his thoughts without too much framed narration. This can be risky because it can alienate the reader, asking the reader to do a lot more work than he or she might be willing to do. But Hustvedt kept a good balance. There was a definite narrative structure in place, but the narrator allowed his thoughts to wander at times, mixing previous memories and experiences. Something mentioned on page 3 might make an appearance, without any real explanatory triggers, on page 156. Things like that. It gave the novel a nice texture.

Finally, there was a lot, and I mean a whole lot, of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theories in the book. I’m still wading through my reaction to that element of the novel.

 **

 Before I forget…the small press I’d like to highlight today is Hawthorne Books. This wonderful little press is based in Portland, OR and has some fantastic titles. I’m at a loss to choose just one…Seaview by Toby Olson, Leaving Brooklyn by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Little Green by Loretta Stinson…take a look at their catalog and you’ll see what I mean.

Friday reading notes

By

Received my first book from Open Letter Books (I have a subscription to their catalog, which is a fantastic deal, by the way) yesterday – The Golden Calf, a Russian classic by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. This book looks absolutely excellent and downright hilarious. The From the Authors bit at the very beginning of the book is already funny and I can’t wait to read this novel. Hooray for Open Letter Books and the fantastic translated fiction they are bringing to English-speaking readers.

*

Anyone else wondering whether the literary world is about to be flooded with unpublished JD Salinger fiction? Apparently, he never stopped writing…

*

I started reading Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American. First, I was completely shocked to learn on page 6 that the narrator is a man. I hate it when this happens. I think most readers can’t help but assume a 1st person narrator is female when the author is female unless specified to the contrary within the first paragraph. But I went back and diligently reread those first six pages and I still think the voice is feminine…but I put the book down and will pick it back up in a day or so with my expectations in line.

*

Have made two big reading resolutions for 2010…

#1 – read as much as possible from the small presses. I continue to be overwhelmingly impressed with what is coming from the independent houses and less and less impressed with anything coming from the big houses. Especially for new writers. I realize a lot of this is simply because the independent presses appear to be the only ones even taking new writers, and therefore new fiction. In the long run, I see the closed-up-ness of the big houses for the past year and a half as detrimental to their future in a big way.

#2 – read second novels from anyone I’ve read only once. I tried to do this in 2009 but failed rather spectacularly, except for John Banville, Graham Swift and Philip Roth. But really, I need to be getting further into André Brink, Arnost Lustig, Michèle Lesbre, Richard Powers, Shirley Hazzard, David Malouf and a bunch of others. Plus Iris Murdoch, I cannot forget Iris Murdoch.