Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

Luis Alberto Urrea – Into the Beautiful North

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My Central and South American reading project got off to an excellent start with Luis Alberto Urrea’s novel Into the Beautiful North. I read this lovely book in about two days and closed the last page feeling like I’d met some of the most delightful and interesting characters of all my recent reading.

Into the Beautiful North begins in small town Mexico, a dry and dusty place populated with cranky old women and vivacious teenage girls. The town’s jewel is a young woman named Nayeli, full of energy and confidence and the book focuses on her joys and inner sorrows (her father has vanished to the North with the rest of the men from town). Essentially, the novel belongs to Nayeli and her journey to find her father and save her town.

That serious focus is wrapped and twisted around a horde of outrageously quirky characters – Tacho: gay, owner of the town’s café and Nayeli’s best friend, Atómiko: a slang-speaking garbage dump warrior with a heart of gold, Aunt Irma: the outspoken and rigidly feminist new mayor, Vampi: Nayeli’s gothic girlfriend…the list goes on and on and includes border patrol officers, an ex-missionary, restaurant owners and a sweet, bumbling retired semi-pro bowler.

Tacho, Nayeli, Vampi and another girl named Yolo strike out on a journey to sneak into the United States to bring some men back to their devastated small town. They go about this task with an incredible optimism and an almost blind faith in their future success. Their endearing naiveté is almost too hard to believe, so are the number of near-disasters (instead of real disasters) that beset them. Not to mention Nayeli’s near perfect and extremely useful karate skills.  But I felt this only gave Into the Beautiful North a fairytale quality that suited its delicate balance of comedy and tragedy. The novel flirts with real violence, edges close to utter tragedy but somehow keeps every single one of its charming characters out of any real danger.

Almost everyone in Into the Beautiful North is kind. Genuinely kind and ready to help a stranger in need. Now when was the last time a contemporary novel attempted to assert that wild supposition? Urrea’s characters may be flawed and quirky, have sharp tongues or look extremely dangerous, but deep inside they are devoted to one another and to their fellow human beings. As I mentioned before, this gave the book a touch of fairytale but I didn’t feel it ever became trite. No one in the novel is perfect, and most of the characters are faced with difficult choices, but the story flows along over an undercurrent of ‘goodness’, for lack of a better word, that was refreshing.

So now I’ll be leaving Mexico and heading to Guatemala with The Divine Husband by Francisco Goldman.

Larry McMurtry – Lonesome Dove

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I should admit I was a bit skeptical when my book group decided to read Larry McMurtry’s western novel Lonesome Dove. I’ve never been interested in historical western fiction, although I have some fond memories of looking at the stacks and stacks of Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey paperbacks in my grandfather’s house when I was a teenager. He piled them everywhere – on the radiators, on the armrests of his couches, on the windowsills. He loved this type of fiction. But I never tried it. Whenever I would go and stay with him, I always had my own stack of books and never went further than glancing with amusement at the gaudy covers of his. I wonder now what I might have been missing.

Lonesome Dove is an epic novel. It covers thousands of miles and nearly a year in the life of its characters, along with heavy back story for many of them. Aside from a selection of main characters, there are also dozens of minor characters to keep straight as well as an endless parade of small western towns and landscapes. Despite the breadth of the novel, it has a single, fundamental quest at its heart – one man’s desire to move from Texas and settle as a cattle rancher in Montana.

The book moves quickly from one extraordinary adventure to the next – fights, love stories, death, the trials of cowboy life. There is a healthy dose of violence, but also quite a bit of humor. The book has plenty of action and plot-driven momentum, but I was considerably impressed with McMurtry’s rendering of each character. And in particular Gus and Call, the novel’s main heroes.

Woodrow Call is the man behind the great cattle drive and an inscrutable figure. He lives for work, keeps himself apart from the men he leads and is rigidly honest in his dealings with both friends and enemies. His downfall, which the novel reveals slowly, is an inability to accept weakness in himself. I really enjoyed reading how McMurtry explored this idea.

Gus is the perfect foil for Call, a bon vivant with a sly sense of humor and a heart of gold. He is a tough character, but utterly devoted to the people he loves. His friendship with Call is one of the more interesting parts of the book. The two men are such opposites, yet wonderful complements. Gus pushes Call to admit his failures, with little success, and Call questions Gus’ choices and behaviors.

There isn’t a great, hidden meaning to this book. Nor is there space to get lost in the writing. It is what it is. But it does provide a fascinating portrait of 1800’s America, with its violence and peculiar worldview. McMurtry includes examples of everyone and everything: cowboys, immigrants, whores, settlers, criminals, lawmen and soldiers, poor people, women, ordinary men. Sadly, most of the characters he introduces the reader to eventually die somewhere later in the story. But it’s a testament to his skill as a writer that each time, no matter how minor the character, it was difficult not to truly mourn their loss.

mid-read thoughts on Dickens

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I have very little experience with Charles Dickens. I’ve read Oliver Twist, Bleak House and A Christmas Carol and that’s it. I’d love to read him from start to finish one day – but that’s a project for another year.

At the moment I am finishing up A Tale of Two Cities. Perhaps this is because I am not overly familiar with Dickens’ style, but I’ve been continually surprised at the cinematic quality of his description. A few posts back I mentioned the scene with the tipped wine cask from early in the novel and his description of everyone on the streets grubbing around to get a drink of the spilled wine. But since then, I’ve come across multiple scenes with a similar quality. I’m thinking about the longish description of Dr. Manette’s house in Soho, the hilarious and snide sketch of the chocolate bearers for the French king or the scene when Young Jerry spies on his graverobbing father and then runs home, imagining the coffin chasing him.

It isn’t just that these descriptions are vivid and detailed, but that they seem to rely more on visual detail than any of the other senses. I’m not sure why this struck me as a little unusual, perhaps it is not. Perhaps Dickens just had a visual brain or a sharp photographic memory and so his writing reflects that skill. Either way, it makes for a story which presents itself as a progressive layering of wonderfully rich images.

this week's reading notes and some Ramuz

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Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie – Why has it taken me this long to read Rushdie? This is definitely a book to read slowly, however, so I’m taking it a few chapters at a time in the afternoons. I am surprised at how much I’m enjoying the narrator’s tangential way of telling the story. I usually dislike interruptions of this kind, moments which reveal the seams behind the main story, but the voice is really strong and it’s clear that these moments when the narrator draws attention to himself will come to be meaningful later on. I do find myself at a bit of a loss for this particular novel because my knowledge of India’s history is so poor.

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens – Yesterday I read one of the best scenes I think I’ve ever read in any classic novel to date. The scene occurs when a wine cask falls off the back of a cart in a Paris street and breaks and everyone in the shabby, run-down neighborhood jumps on the chance to drink some of the wine. Dickens has people building mud walls to catch the flowing wine, soaking it up in their handkerchiefs and sucking on the cloth, lapping at puddles or even chewing on the wood from the barrel staves. It’s a thoroughly disgusting image, but so vivid.

Nouvelles et Morceaux (Tomes 1-5), C.F. Ramuz – Every day I read a few more Ramuz short stories and select one or two to begin translating. I’ve finished three this summer and am sending them around for publication – although I’m finding it difficult to get contemporary journals interested in short stories written in the early 20th century. There are more and more journals interested in translation these days, something I definitely applaud, but most journals are publishing contemporary fiction from around the world, not classic short stories.

Anyway, this week has me working on a lovely story called Les Deux Vieilles Demoiselles (The Two Old Ladies). Ramuz does atmosphere so well and the story takes place on a summer evening, right at dusk, when the stars first appear and when these two sisters have finished their needlework and are sitting at the window looking out into their neighbor’s garden. I love his description of how the shadows of the impending night creep across the room:

Alors le jour s’en alla lentement depuis le fond de la chambre jusque là où elles étaient. On vit les meubles entrer dans l’ombre, on dirait qu’ils se noient ; d’abord ils entrent par le bas et l’ombre monte comme l’eau, et enfin, ils sont recouverts.

[And so the daylight slowly departed from the back of the room up to where they were sitting. The furniture entered into the shadow, it appeared to be drowning. At first, the base of each piece enters and the shadow rises like water, until eventually, they are submerged.*]

A bit later the ladies see their neighbor’s daughter, a girl of barely sixteen, sneak out to the orchard and meet a young man. One of the sisters jumps up, embarrassed and indignant, while the other begins to stare longingly at the scene. The one sister escapes to the kitchen while the other watches the couple. She tries to hear what they are saying and can’t, but suddenly she discovers she can imagine their conversation. She finds the words deep inside herself that she might have once said to some young man. Except, of course, she never got the chance. The scene ends with the sisters trying to console one another, although Ramuz makes it clear that this is impossible.

*I’m still tweaking this passage and making some decisions about how I want to handle it. Ramuz is notorious for his use of the French subject on, which is tricky to make work in English the way he uses it. A literal translation of that second sentence would be: One saw the furniture enter into the shadow, one would say they were drowning. He consistently brings a larger audience, so to speak, into the scene instead of allowing for a straightforward narrator. And you’ll notice he switches tense in that last sentence…just to make my life easy, of course.

podcasts and Edith Wharton

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No one ever mentioned that reading would become a problem in late pregnancy. I don’t mean reading in and of itself, thankfully, but rather, finding a comfortable position to sit and read for any duration of time. Particularly in the evening. I’m used to settling down on the couch or curling up with a book in bed and reading for at least an hour or two each evening, and much to my surprise, this has become incredibly difficult. Mostly because the most comfortable way for me to relax at the moment is to lie on my left side with about a hundred pillows propping me up from every direction. Unfortunately, it suddenly becomes very awkward to hold a book.

Watching a movie, on the contrary, is very easy. My husband and I don’t own a TV, but we love movies and so watch them on a laptop. And we’ve been going through a bunch of Agatha Christie films and shows. Because of this we’ve been having an ongoing debate about David Suchet vs. Peter Ustinov. I think I’m a confirmed Ustinov fan, although I think Suchet is incredible as well. I might be biased, however, by my real-life appreciation for Ustinov, who was an absolute linguistic genius.

Back to the topic at hand – I have managed to do some reading before bed using my Ipod and I’m enjoying a selection of short stories offered by Librivox as well as The Classic Tales podcast. The other night I listened to an interesting short story by Edith Wharton called The Fulness of Life. As the story opened I was at first surprised by Wharton taking up such a metaphysical subject as a woman going to heaven and dealing with happiness in the afterlife. But as the story continued, I realized this story dealt exactly with Wharton’s overall project of marital bliss and difficult choices.

In the story, an unnamed woman dies and goes to heaven. When she arrives, she’s overwhelmed with the beauty of paradise and the chance to experience what she calls, “what it means to really live.” Her conversation with the guardian spirit reveals that she lived on earth in a ho-hum marriage with a man who, although kind, was not her intellectual equal, and that she never experienced true passion. To this declaration, the spirit says:

“that every soul which seeks in vain on earth for a kindred soul to whom it can lay bare its inmost being shall find that soul here and be united to it for eternity.”

As expected, the woman is overjoyed. And soon a man appears – her kindred spirit. They discuss things for a moment, finishing each other’s sentences and getting more and more excited. Until the woman discovers that when the man who was her husband on earth dies, he’ll be alone in paradise to make his way and find his own happiness. The woman realizes that although she was never fully happy with him while they lived, he believed she was his soul mate. So she knows that by leaving him in the afterlife to pursue her own happiness, she’ll be deserting him.

So she is left with a difficult choice. I won’t give away the ending exactly but if you’re familiar with Wharton at all, I suspect you can guess what this woman decides to do. I can’t help thinking it particularly cruel or cynical of Wharton to bring her view of marriage into the ever after. Her heroines never, ever get a break, do they?

Jeanette Winterson – The Passion

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Thank you to Bibliographing for introducing me to Jeanette Winterson. I’ll be dutifully tracking down every single one of her fourteen or so books, both fiction and non-fiction. Any suggestions on where to begin from those of you that already know her work?

It took me all of two days to read The Passion. Not only because it is a slender little book, but mostly because I was loathe to disrupt the atmosphere the book created. It was both highly realistic and extremely magical, and I love a book that can embody that paradox without becoming awkward. It managed to accomplish this feat by embracing those emotions we continue to consider mysterious – namely, love, but also trauma and how humans cope with a full range of disappointments and disillusions.

I don’t want to give away the details of the story except to say that The Passion is an historical fairytale – set in Napoleon’s France as well as in Venice. It’s about Henri, an earnest young Frenchman, and Villanelle, an unusual Venetian, and their respective passions. Despite the historical nature of the story, reading The Passion felt more like reading contemporary, experimental fiction. Another reason I enjoyed it so much.

Someone else will have to tell me if this is characteristic of Winterson’s style but the prose in the novel had a weighted and lyrical quality. Key phrases were repeated throughout, each time accruing slightly more meaning. This is a risky technique, because often the opposite can occur and the phrases can come off sounding cliché. This didn’t happen with The Passion and I think this is mainly due to Winterson successfully creating a fantastic, fabulous, nearly-carnival ambiance.

On her website, Winterson writes this:

The past is strange. We have never been there and we can never go there. I have never recognised the past as a document, rather I understand it as a kind of lumber room, full of trunks of old clothes and odd mementoes. There are as many narratives as there are guesses.

She writes this in a description of her other novel, Sexing the Cherry, but it strikes me as relevant to The Passion as well. I love this idea of the past as something a writer can re-construct both faithfully and unfaithfully – precisely because we can only guess and invent and imagine. We can never visit the past, we can only be bold enough to try to give it meaning and shape. To attempt to make something out of the remnants which make their way forward into our present as clues.

thursday reading notes

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These warm summer days leading up to my maternity leave see me doing much less than usual. I’ve got a few work projects to wrap up before Sept 1, but I am otherwise taking it very easy. This does mean I am reading quite a bit, but I haven’t been able to drum up much energy for long, lengthy reviews. I feel quite guilty about this because I’ve recently read some excellent books.

I finished Graham Swift’s Waterland and Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations – both wonderful, both intricate and complex narratives. For a change of style, I read Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meat which was quite funny in places, but also serious and one of the best representations of Japanese and Japanese-American culture I’ve read in a long time.

For work I’m enjoying a slim volume of essays by Jacques Chessex called Ecrits sur Ramuz as well as a collection of writings about Ramuz by his friends and colleagues called Ramuz vu par ses amis. Both are excellent and giving me much to think about as I work through my translation. Not to mention I’ve been dipping into Ramuz’s journals a little bit every day and becoming increasingly impressed with his extemporaneous writing style. He began his journals when he was seventeen and right away they show what a conscientious thinker and writer he would soon become.

And finally, today, I’m happily starting Part III of Jeannette Winterson’s The Passion and thoroughly entranced with her writing.

Alexander Trocchi – Young Adam

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Oneworld Classics, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite publishing programs, recently republished (2008) a novel by the Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi. The novel, Young Adam, was originally published in 1954 and features a highly-unreliable narrator named Joe.

Young Adam is divided into three parts and it isn’t until you turn the page to Part 2 that you realize that Joe has just spent eighty pages distracting you from the real story. The novel actually opens with Joe and his employer Leslie finding a dead woman floating in the river next to their barge. They fish her out, call the police, mull over the event a bit and then the novel changes direction completely, detailing Joe’s obsessed attempt to have an affair with Leslie’s wife.

But when Part 2 opens, you realize that Joe and the dead woman are much more intricately connected than he ever let on. And that the novel is actually about this relationship and Joe’s role in her death. You also realize that Joe’s interest in Leslie’s wife Ella dates from almost the exact moment the other woman’s body was removed from the river and that previous to that moment, he hadn’t much considered her worth his time. 

Although quite a short novel, Young Adam packs a bizarrely powerful punch. On the one hand, the writing is often awkward. Joe’s narrative style is as inconsistent as his fact-telling. He moves from a gentle, poetic lyricism to using stilted, clumsy sentences – often in the same paragraph. The introduction tells me that Trocchi did this on purpose, and links it to his proto-postmodern style. I must admit that it created a bumpy reading experience, although I eventually accepted this as part of Joe’s camouflage, a way to deceive or at least confuse the reader. On the other hand, Joe’s attempts to disentangle himself from the responsibility of the woman’s death are psychologically rich and complex and gave a lot of meat to this very slim story.

Joe’s relationship with the different women in the novel is where Trocchi seems to provide most of the analysis for Joe’s character. Joe is profoundly misogynistic. Although this may be oversimplifying things, since he also seems to be just as misanthropic. I couldn’t find an example of Joe enjoying the company of any other single person in the novel. But he uses the women in particular, which makes it easier to examine this aspect of his personality.

Trocchi is considered a member of the Beat generation and Young Adam reflects that tradition, although I found it much darker than other samples of Beat literature I’ve come across. I wonder if this is a cultural difference, since I often find that Europeans allow for a more cynical and somber worldview than Americans. In his literature, Trocchi seems to be experimenting with both form and content, but there is no joy, no heady giddiness in that experimentation.

In fact, it could be argued that his portrayal of sexual freedom results in a heartless, unfeeling situation where both partners are locked inside their own experience, without access to the other. If Trocchi was interested in exploring the Beat themes of rootlessness, non-conformity and free expression, his assessment of the power granted in that freedom seems overwhelmingly pessimistic.

 In total, Trocchi has ten novels, although it seems most of these are dismissed as experimental erotic fiction with little literary merit. His other “serious” novel, Cain’s Book, is a chronicle of heroin addiction and caused quite a sensation when it was first published in 1961. Apparently, critics are still undecided as to whether Young Adam or Cain’s Book should be considered his finest work. I’ll be interested to see what I think when I can get my hands on a copy.

Jane Austen – Emma

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Last week, after snatching it off the shelves of my favorite second-hand book shop, I sat down and read Jane Austen’s Emma in one sitting. I happen to like my Austen this way, in big healthy bites with very few interruptions. And reading Emma was no different, although the experience was heightened a bit since I’d never read it before and kept trying to figure out who Emma would end up with. To say I figured it out fairly early would be both true and a lie. I had my suspicions from the beginning, but all my recent Wharton reading put me on guard and I wondered if Austen wasn’t about to shock me with an unexpected twist of some sort.

Let’s see…what did I like about Emma? First and foremost, it was just plain enjoyable to immerse myself in Austen’s 19th century England. The vista she presents to her readers is so wholly complete, so detailed, that it’s difficult not to wish to have lived at this time period, or at least to be able to experience firsthand the world she describes. And Austen really is an expert storyteller, so just moving from one scene to the next and working through the various ups and downs of the story provides an all-around satisfying reading experience.

I also enjoyed the structure of the novel and the way it keeps the reader from knowing for absolutely certain which gentlemen the author has selected for her heroine. Compared to her other novels, I felt she kept the hints about Emma’s future husband decidedly subtle. With that looming story a bit more subdued than usual, she was free to construct a series of adventures to help Emma do some much-needed growing up.

So here is where I admit I found Emma a bit of an annoying heroine. I realize this is what Austen intended, that we get frustrated with Emma’s well-intentioned but hopelessly irresponsible manipulations. She serves us a good lesson – even clever people, when too-often indulged will lose their objectivity. In short, cleverness isn’t enough. Patience, empathy for others and honest self-reflection is just as important. To some extent I was happy to play along and then feel suitably proud of Emma for recognizing the gravity of her heedless meddling and then earnestly mending her ways.

And there was something about Emma’s perfect independence that worked against her. She is in no real danger, ever, of losing something she really cares about. Compare that to Elizabeth Bennett, Elinor Dashwood, Catherine Morland, Fanny Price or Anne Elliot – all of these women must come face to face with real, life-altering disappointment at some point in their stories. Emma’s realization that she is at risk to be disappointed is so quickly rationalized into existence and then her actual disappointment so wonderfully short-lived, that it was hard for me to work up any real concern about her well-being.

Finally, though it may have been my mood when reading the book, I found Emma to be much less funny than say, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice or Northanger Abbey. Those three books had many moments of laugh-out-loud comedy, provided by a contingent of marvelously eccentric characters with either sharp tongues or oblivious blunderings. Emma’s father and Miss Bates provided some well-needed humor on occasion (both decidedly in the latter category) but that was about it.

All in all, Emma will never be my favorite Austen. But I’m very happy to have read it and I’m sure I’ll re-read it at some point. Perhaps it will grow on me with a second reading. Now that I’ve read them all, Pride and Prejudice remains my favorite with Northanger Abbey and Persuasion tied for second and Sense and Sensibility coming in a very close third. I love the characters and the story, but I believe the narrative gets a bit baggy around the edges in this one. I quite like the intellectual equality Austen gives to Emma and her eventual husband, so I think Emma will come next in line for that reason alone. Unfortunately, I’ve never been completely satisfied with the ending of Mansfield Park so Fanny and Edmund remain my least favorite Austen couple.

Wharton's Ethan Frome and Summer

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Last week when I wrote that I was reading Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, a thoughtful commenter mentioned that it might be interesting to read Ethan Frome and Summer together, since they are both “rural” novels, a bit different from the big city novels we often associate with Wharton.

Although I’ve read several Wharton novels, I did not realize that she wrote so many. There are 22 novels to be exact, and most of the titles are completely unfamiliar to me. I enjoy Wharton’s writing, although I know enough now to prepare myself for a melancholy, if not tragic, ending. Wharton has a particular skill at portraying the right blend of injustice and personal folly in her stories. Her characters suffer at the hand of fate, but have also contributed in some measure to their vulnerability. At least this is true for the five novels I’ve now read.

I would highly recommend reading Ethan Frome and Summer together, not just for their similarities but for their contrast. Both are quite dark, in terms of subject matter, but where the setting and ambience of Ethan Frome mirror the psychological darkness of the story, Summer takes place in a light-filled, nature-inspired and overtly sensual environment that lulls the reader into a false sense of security about the direction of the story. I had to remind myself around Chapter 12 that this was a Wharton novel and not to get my hopes up for a happy ending.  

Ethan Frome is absolutely tragic and it felt nearly like a gothic novel with all the gloom and cold and hints at madness in the female characters. And Ethan is a lurker, someone who keeps to the sidelines and watches and waits. But the novel’s central thread is about a possible infidelity, an infidelity Wharton makes the reader hope will be accomplished. I liked this trick of soliciting the reader’s complicity because then we are really saddened by the novel’s final dénouement.

I’m hard pressed to say whether Summer is more tragic than Ethan Frome. So much of the novel is lighthearted and cheerful. Although there are repeated warnings that this happy façade is crumbling. So in that sense, when the disastrous ending finally comes around, it isn’t so much a revelation as a confirmation.  While the ending of Ethan Frome contains an element of spooky surprise, the ending of Summer does not at all. It is exactly what the reader has been brought to expect.

Essentially Summer tells the story of an ill-fated love affair between a small town girl, Charity, and a city boy, Harley. (Reminded me in many ways of George Eliot’s Adam Bede). There are complications with Charity’s guardian, a situation that creates an interesting love triangle. The story, which was originally published in 1917, is actually quite scandalous and it gave me a real appreciation for Wharton’s daring. She certainly does not shy away from depicting the harsh realities of sexual relationships of the time period. And although Charity does have a hand in her undoing, I felt Wharton was pretty concerned with portraying the double-standard regarding sex as applied to men and women.

So now I am quite curious to delve into the rest of Wharton’s work. Does anyone have any recommendations about some of her lesser known novels? I’ve read The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers and now these two…