Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

a review up at The Quarterly Conversation

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I mentioned a while back that The Modern Library will be coming out in August with a long-awaited translation of one of my favorite novels – Amour, Colère et Folie by Marie Vieux-Chauvet. Well, it’s time to start ordering people! The book is available directly from The Modern Library but can also be found on Amazon.

If you need any encouragement to sample this excellent offering of Haitian literature, check out my review of the book just up at The Quarterly Conversation.

friday reading notes

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It has been lovely taking a « break » from blogging, although I must admit I miss the frenzied bookish conversation of checking all my favorite blogs each day and trying to put together my thoughts on all I’ve been reading.

Last week, my husband and I went on a short trip to visit friends in Normandy and Brittany, camping our way across France to get there and then spending a few quiet days visiting the beaches from Le Crotoy down to Ver-sur-mer. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest of the US means that I love my beaches windy, rocky and perfect for long walks. Normandy suits me wonderfully.

The night before we left I stayed up late and read Ray Robinson’s Electricity in one sitting. The style of this book is particularly suited to a furious, nonstop read. The novel follows Lily, a young woman with a turbulent past and severe epilepsy, as she deals with the aftermath of her mother’s death. The story rests on an interesting combination of hard-edged, tough reality and the promise of redemption. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this book but I have a complicated quibble with the ending which I won’t go into here.

While we camped across France, I read Ali Smith’s The Accidental in the evenings. I started out loving this book and how it was written but something about the style began to wear a bit thin. It’s written in a stream-of-consciousness style, jumping between narrators, but the further I read, the more each narrator began to sound the same. I’m also usually quite willing to let a writer play with language, even if it takes me out and away from the central story, but in The Accidental, this technique began to feel superfluous. I wanted the language play to remain more or less connected to what was going on between the characters, and I’m not sure it did. But I’ll be looking for Smith’s other work…

Since coming home I’ve started Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome as well as Graham Swift’s Waterland. I loved Swift’s Last Orders and have been waiting for the right time to pick up Waterland. I’m quite in love with the book already and look forward to reading this novel over the next few days. Ethan Frome is also quite a good read and feels somewhat different from the other Wharton novel’s I’ve read (The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth and The Buccaneers). I hope to have time to finish it this evening or tomorrow.

Anton Chekhov – The Shooting Party

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Over the weekend I read Chekhov’s only novel, The Shooting Party, which was originally published in 1885. What a strange and delightful combination of early police fiction with Chekhov’s incredible talent for description and emotional representation. The novel is also a piece of clever metafiction, in that it is about a writer reading and commenting on another writer’s manuscript. The story is quite melodramatic, but in an enjoyable way. I couldn’t stop turning the pages.

The basic story begins with a dashing young man barging his way into a literary newspaper, asking that his manuscript be accepted for publication. He specifies that what he’s written is a true story. The editor (who is a wonderfully sarcastic creature with the initials A.C.) tells him he’s very busy and won’t get back to him for three months. Some months later, the editor takes the story out and reads it. He can’t put it down.

The actual crime story is quite familiar – think ruined innocence, general debauchery, class conflict – and centers on a love quadrangle between a young woodcutter’s daughter, an investigating magistrate, an out-of-luck gentleman and a Count. Each of these men fall in love with the young girl, each have their way with her in one way or another, and eventually she ends up ruined and (to add injury to insult) murdered.

Something I enjoyed immensely in The Shooting Party is the narrative layering between the editor A.C., who annotates the manuscript while he reads, and Kamyshev, the author and main protagonist of The Shooting Party. As A.C. comments on Kamyshev’s character and his writing style, the reader gets to chuckle a bit at Chekhov’s pseudo-modesty as well as get an in-depth look at how Chekhov envisions character creation.

The editor’s commentary also gives the story away repeatedly, which didn’t bother me in the least, but I do wonder how his readers in 1885 responded to this technique. Especially because the introduction to my edition of The Shooting Party tells me that Chekhov wrote the novel as a sort of parody of the extravagant, sensational police thrillers which were all the rage at the time. Apparently, Chekhov couldn’t stand how badly these stories were written, and how horrific their characters were. So in that sense, Kamyshev is both a parody of the tasteless writer AND the reprehensible main character.

There aren’t many good, intelligent, kind-hearted people in The Shooting Party, except perhaps the local doctor (another wink from Chekhov, perhaps, since this was his day job) and another unfortunate young woman. The rest are mostly a bunch of alcoholic swindlers and moral reprobates. Which made for many colorful scenes. There were also some purely comic characters. Of these, I particularly liked Kamyshev’s manservant, Polikarp, who is reading The Count of Monte Cristo throughout the story and verbally abuses his employer whenever possible.

As I’ve made pretty clear here, much of the novel is fun or sensational, although I think there were some serious elements. The women, for example, are neither comic nor wicked. They are all mostly tragic. Especially the woodcutter’s daughter, Olga. What happens to her is quite her fault really (not the murder, but her gradual descent into depravity) in the sense that she sells herself readily. She’s beautiful, but horribly vain. And she’s a social climber, although not at all skilled at climbing. So she makes one mistake after another. She’s a pathetic figure with a tragic end.

All in all, a great weekend read!

Anne Fadiman – Ex Libris

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I tried and tried to make Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris last as long as possible, telling myself to read only one of these short essays each night. My plan inevitably backfired and I was unable to stop at just one, moving forward to finish three or four each evening and then yesterday, waiting at the doctor’s office I finished the collection.

I am hard pressed to pick a favorite essay. I loved Marrying Libraries and Fadiman’s humorous description of the ups and downs of merging the treasured books of two bibliophiles into one cohesive, organized collection. I also laughed my way through Nothing New Under the Sun in which Fadiman manages to painstakingly footnote every single word or sentence that might possibly be attributed to someone other than herself. Cleverly, she makes the point that literature is an endlessly renewing and evolving art, and that although plagiarism is serious business, writers are unavoidably and always standing on the shoulders of their predecessors.

Aside from the specific essays, I also enjoyed the way Fadiman shared her family’s bookish idiosyncrasies – how they treat their books, their merciless radar for grammatical mistakes, and their devoted, nearly obsessive search for new words. I was also raised in a book-loving family, although nowhere near as erudite as Fadiman’s.

Books were, and still are, our preferred form of entertainment. My parents’ bedroom, and both my sister’s and my own, overflowed with books for as far back as I can remember. Our living room housed my father’s collection of old Scottish poetry, 17th century novels and newer collectible hardbacks. Their bedroom was wall-to-wall with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and anything and everything my father could find about Winston Churchill, WWII and the American Civil War. My mother collected gardening and nature books.

My sister and I followed their example, amassing shelves and shelves of our favorite authors. As teenagers, we both had phases – mysteries and thrillers, Jane Austen and the Brontës, historical fiction and even romance. By the time we had both finished graduate school and finally packed up our belongings for good, we each had the challenging task of selecting which old favorites would get donated to the library or the local second-hand bookstore, as well as choosing from the hordes of books from our respective fields that we’d collected throughout our schooling. I’m sure neither of us managed to part with many. But I’m forever grateful to my parents for showing me there is really no such thing as too many books.

The very last essay in Ex Libris is called Secondhand Prose and it is a delightful little meditation on the joy of musty, scribbled-in old books rooted out from the creaking shelves of a used bookshop. I found myself wishing to hop on a plane to NYC, take a train to a town called Hastings-on-Hudson and browse through the 300,000 books to be found at the Riverrun Bookshop. Fadiman writes about spending seven hours in this shop on her birthday one year and taking home 19 pounds of books. I’m quite certain I’m not the only one reading this essay who got shivers of delight at the very idea!

What is it about secondhand bookshops? I’ve never met a reader that didn’t love a good hunt through some dusty shelves. I’m completely biased but I think this has much to do with the inexhaustible nature of reading, coupled with that very notion of literature being on a continuum. Not only does literature build upon and renew itself with each generation, but literary experience is effectively infinite, there will always be another book to find, another story to read. Which makes reading a never-ending treasure hunt and secondhand bookshops the way stations of that adventure.

Muriel Barbery – L'élégance du hérisson

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I’ve done quite a bit of thinking about Muriel Barbery’s L’Elégance du Hérisson and although I resist framing it this way – since I do think there are parts of the book which prompt valuable discussion and in general I think Barbery writes well – I found myself more frustrated with the novel than anything else.

Basically the novel follows two individuals – Renée, the concierge in a luxurious Parisian apartment building, and Paloma, one of the building’s residents, a twelve-year-old self-declared genius. Through alternating narratives, which are both bitter and sarcastic, these two detail their anger and loneliness. They are both out to expose the hypocrisy in the average wealthy person’s soul – Paloma by ridiculing the thoughts and behaviors of her family, and Renée by condemning the thoughts and behaviors of everyone else in the building.

From the angry, frustrated and self-styled intellectual perspective of both Paloma and Renée, these critiques really do come off as ridicule. Renée is much more derisive, and presumably her age and experience have made her opinions that much more ingrained. Paloma is more reactive – she is living her disappointment, not just looking back on it. But both characters speak from a place of smug superiority, no matter how tainted that superiority is with their loneliness.

Only a few people are exempt from Paloma and Renée’s scorching diatribes: Olympe, a wealthy young woman whose greatest aspiration is to become a veterinarian and so she practices on the building’s cats; Manuela, the cleaning lady and Renée’s best friend – although Renée makes sure to point out that Manuela is intellectually inferior, but otherwise an elegant, dignified woman; and Mr. Ozu, the Japanese man who moves into the building halfway through the novel and throws this little Parisian microcosm into an uproar.

Usually I like stories that explore class differences because I think we often pretend (at least I feel the subject is taboo with many Americans) that class doesn’t exist. Barbery runs headlong into a very scathing discussion of class, but I can’t help feeling that where she could have done something a bit more serious, a bit more nuanced, instead she went overboard into caricature. And this includes the very heavy philosophical overtones of the entire book. I have no doubt that people like the ones she describes in this book do exist, but I resist the idea that these stereotypes are the norm. The book didn’t need to use such exaggerated stereotypes to prove its point, this just seemed to make things sensational and I couldn’t help feeling disappointed by that.

It seemed to me that in her attempt to balance things out, Barbery inadvertently offends some of the very people she would presumably prefer to champion. Take Renée – a concierge who pretends to be something she is not. Renée is portrayed as a deeply intellectual woman, brimming with curiosity about philosophy and aesthetics and history and social justice, yet she pretends to watch mindless television all day and eat disgusting food, not to mention uses carefully placed grammatical mistakes, all because she believes this is what her wealthy tenants require of her. Not only does this typecast the wealthy people in her building, but it’s fairly demeaning toward other concierges as well. Why is Renée the only intelligent, curious concierge in all of Paris?

Now I realize that I am to understand Renée’s behavior as a result of her loneliness and fear but I had trouble with this dichotomy. If Renée is truly that enlightened and curious and intelligent, why is she also so broken? I suppose one can be intelligent and hard-hearted at the same time, but the way Renée’s sensibility and intellect were portrayed suggested to me that they should also preclude her from engaging in the same petty labeling as the people in the building.

And in all honesty, I had a lot of trouble with the stereotyping of Japanese culture in the novel. Even before Mr. Ozu arrives in the building, both Renée and Paloma make statements idealizing Japanese culture and aesthetics, and its superiority vs. the superficial culture of the West. I find this kind of east-west pigeon-holing quite dangerous. I was born in Japan, I’ve lived and studied in Japan and I appreciate many aspects of Japanese culture, but I get quite prickly when I hear these kinds of sweeping statements. Especially from two characters that have never actually experienced Japanese culture first hand. Elements of both cultures are wonderful; elements of both cultures can be criticized.

It doesn’t help that when Mr. Ozu shows up, he is the perfect embodiment of all Renée and Paloma have imagined. So the stereotype is thus confirmed and perpetuated.

Despite what it may sound like here, I do recommend this book. It seems to me reactions to this novel are highly subjective. Some people have loved it, and found inside a worthwhile philosophical discussion about aesthetics and human nature. I’m afraid that my frustrations with the characters and with Barbery’s attempt to discuss class, kept me from enjoying aspects of the novel’s philosophical project.

Finally, and I hesitate to write this, but I found the ending fairly disappointing. It struck me as arbitrary, instead of a proper, organic finale. It almost felt like Barbery got worried her novel had somehow veered into mass-culture-chick-lit-ish territory (which I could argue that it did) and so terrified with that possibility, she took drastic measures to create a thought-provoking ending. I believe she could have accomplished a similar, if not better, emotional intonation with a more nuanced ending. Which makes me wonder if she was simply following a template, based on her understanding and interpretation of Japanese aesthetics. Read this way, the ending fits, but then I could argue she sacrificed the book’s crafted and hybrid aesthetic for something not much better than a gimmick…

Philippe Claudel – Le Rapport de Brodeck

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Over the last two years I’ve had the pleasure to read three Philippe Claudel novels, all of which I really enjoyed. His style is simple but poetic and the subjects he tackles in each book all hold up under prolonged discussion. I’d say there are two things that each of the three books share – a subtlety in engaging with their thematic project or question and a reliance on the idea of narration as a means to catharsis.

In Les Ames Grises (2003) the narrator is literally bursting with the need to tell his own painful story, yet that very trauma keeps him from tackling the subject head on. Instead he winds around a related story, just as powerful, as a means to find the words he himself needs. I felt this technique was quite successful, mainly because it was subtly done. La Petite Fille de Monsieur Linh (2005) is also about an individual wrestling with trauma, but in this story Claudel looks at how we invent our own external narratives as a way to survive a difficult past.

It goes without saying that I had high hopes for his newest work, Le Rapport de Brodeck*, and I was in no way disappointed. Like the other two books, this novel also examines how an individual with a traumatic past weaves a narrative. And much like Les Ames Grises, there are two narratives at work in Le Rapport de Brodeck. Although I think it is safe to say that this newest work achieves its goal with more elegance and subtlety than the either two. I can’t help seeing it as a culmination of the stylistic and thematic development found in his other books.

But getting to the more important stuff – what is Le Rapport de Brodeck about? In essence, Claudel takes the horror story of the 20th century (the Holocaust) and recreates it on a tiny, nearly anonymous scale. By anonymous I mean that he keeps his setting vague and doesn’t go about shouting the names or labels of his protagonists. Brodeck, for example, is never described as Jewish, the men who come to occupy the village are never called Nazi’s and even the two countries (clearly France and Germany) remain unnamed.

By doing this, Claudel removes the specificity from the event, making it much easier (and frankly, much more frightening) to see how what happened during the Holocaust is actually a timeless and location-less phenomenon. And in fact, the central event of the story occurs a few years after WWII has ended, which I took as a grim reminder that the world has not finished with horror.

So although the book purports to be a story we’ve all heard or read before, it becomes more of a prediction, a warning. This isn’t historical fiction, but a bleak meditation on the mediocrity of the human soul. There is no hero in Le Rapport de Brodeck, no one who completely overcomes their own powerful instinct for self-preservation. And Claudel seems to be asking whether this is reason enough to condemn us all.

I could hardly put this book down, but I found it quite disturbing in the absolute. Claudel takes great pains to portray humanity in shades of gray – even Brodeck doesn’t escape this notion of mediocrity. Which is something I approved of. At the same time, I felt Claudel’s spectrum a little lopsided. While he does provide examples of pure evil, the pendulum never swung to the highest point in the opposite direction. That isn’t an answer I can accept. I don’t believe there are hordes of brave heroes and heroines, but selfless, noble people do exist and will continue to work against the kind of world Claudel describes.

For those of you who do not read French, the rights to Le Rapport de Brodeck have been sold in both the UK and the US, so this book will appear in English at some time, hopefully soon.

*The title can be translated as Brodeck’s Report and the novel centers on a report that narrator Brodeck must write about a horrible event which occurred in his small village.

C.F. Ramuz – Si le soleil ne revenait pas

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Si le soleil ne revenait pas*  is about a tiny village high up in the Alps. The story is set between October and April, a time when the village doesn’t get any sun because of the steep mountain walls. The villagers are used to this and go about their winter activities without too much fuss. They miss the sunshine but know this period of their lives is something that will pass, as it has every year before.

Until one of the village elders, who is also a healer, predicts that this year the sun won’t come back. Something has changed in the movement of the stars and the sun will no longer be on their side of the earth. Not surprisingly, this prediction has a strong effect on the village and as the winter deepens they each begin to react.

Ramuz does a lot with man vs. nature in all of his writing but this novel takes that idea to an absolute extreme by focusing on a group of people who are already used to the idea that the sun will abandon them for a certain amount of time each year and then asking them to accept its eventual extinction. I think had he tried to set the novel down on the lake for example, the psychology of the villagers would have been completely different. Much more opposition to the idea, instead of this consuming fear.

One of the things I enjoy with Ramuz is his character sketches – with just a few lines he’s able to create this crystal clear picture of a variety of different people. The cast of characters in Si le soleil ne revenait pas is very rich. From old Anzévui, seated in front of his hearth with his long, scraggly beard and his book of numbers to young newlywed Isabelle with her yearning for summer and the chance to feel the sun on her skin. And I particularly loved how he rendered Arlettaz, a father literally losing his mind with grief over the loss of his daughter. The book simply overflows with side stories about the villagers and their lives.

And I know I’ve said this before, but Ramuz is a master of description. Here are just two of my favorite lines – taken from a scene when Métrailler goes to visit Anzévui (the healer) after the death of his father:

Les plantes étaient attachées par leurs racines aux poutres et pendaient, la tête en bas, comme des chauves-souris.

[The plants were attached by their roots to the ceiling beams and hung, head down, like bats.]

La flamme du feu était sur sa figure et ensuite n’y était plus; alors il y avait de l’ombre autour de ses yeux comme il y a de l’eau dans les creux d’une pierre.

[The flame from the fire was on his face and then it was gone; shadows appeared around his eyes like water in the cracks of a stone.]

These short descriptions are interspersed between a terse conversation (Métrailler thinks Anzévui had something to do with the death of his father) and I found the mention of bats, fire, shadows and stone just heightened the darkness of the moment. It was very effective.

I’m hoping hoping hoping that I’ll get a chance to translate this novel as well at some point. At the moment I’m concentrating on a few short stories and a different novel. But every time I pick Ramuz up I can’t believe that so little of his work ever really made it into English. So strange how these things turn out.

*The title can be translated literally as If the sun was never coming back but I think this is a bit clunky in English..the words soleil and revenait rhyme in French so it sounds much better, more fluid. Finding an appropriate English title would be tricky.

George Eliot – Silas Marner

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Silas Marner is so different from Adam Bede. I wonder if I had read them blind (not knowing the author, I mean) whether I would have been able to say they were written by the same person. My hunch is no. What’s interesting is that there was only two years between the publication of Adam Bede (1859) and Silas Marner (1861). In between George Eliot published The Mill on the Floss, so her stylistic change is remarkable.

Thematically, Silas Marner does something similar to Adam Bede in that it exposes the hypocrisy and moral weakness of a country squire. Like Arthur Donnithorne, Godfrey Cass is a gutless rich boy with too much free time and not enough real conviction.  Both men are portrayed as inherently good-natured, just spineless. I think this says a lot about Eliot’s view of character. It isn’t really enough to be kindhearted – being a good person requires courage and self-control.

And in both novels, Eliot pits her two male characters against each other (a bit less directly in Silas Marner) to highlight their strengths and failings. In the Adam vs. Arthur comparison, Adam is nearly superhuman – a truly exceptional character (minus his inability to see Hetty for who she really is). This seems fitting for a first novel. Eliot exaggerates a bit with Adam (and Dinah for that matter, can a woman be more angelic?) and I can only assume she was maybe overexcited about her first large-scale literary offering.

But in Silas Marner the two men – Silas and Godfrey – are much more nuanced, a bit fragile and both have significant faults. Silas’ faults, however, are a result of an earlier misfortune, and Godfrey’s because of a weak character. In that sense, Silas is easily forgiven.

But enough about theme, I really wanted to talk about style here, because this is where the two books were markedly dissimilar. Adam Bede, as I mentioned before, has a few too many tangents and what I would call an intrusive narrator. But in Silas Marner, the narrator rarely steps off the page to signal her presence. There is no, “dear reader”, no pointed asides, no overdone explanation. Just a smoothly-told story.

And yet Eliot does manage to fit in plenty of omniscient narrator discourse. What I mean by that are the moments within or following a scene, when the narrator “exposes” something about human nature, or “reveals” the greater significance of a particular moment. In Eliot’s case, this tends toward generally-applicable revelation. A good example is right after Marner is robbed and the narrator explains that his being forced to interact with his neighbors began to work some positive changes on his character, and then she goes on to make this statement:

Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us anymore than without us; there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.

Now that is a subtle, incisive narrator. In Adam Bede this reflection would have gone on just a line too long.

Looking at tangents, I did think the chapter where the old men are sitting around discussing ghosts could qualify as unnecessary, but since it’s the only one in the book (and quite enjoyable) I wouldn’t have even noticed it if I hadn’t just experienced a raft of similar departures in Adam Bede.

Moving forward, The Mill on the Floss should arrive any day now and I’m looking forward to seeing how it sits between these other two.

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Gottfried Keller – A Village Romeo and Juliet

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When a very nice person from Oneworld Classics contacted me and offered me the chance to review one of the titles from their classics publishing program, I jumped at the chance to look at Swiss author Gottfried Keller, with whom I have very little experience.

I selected this title for two reasons. First, because the premise for the book reminded me of a novel that Jacques Chessex, a contemporary Swiss writer, recently published called Un Juif pour l’Exemple, a really devastating novel about a group of men in the 1940s from a small town who kill a Jewish man for no other reason than his being Jewish. Like Chessex’s novel, Keller took inspiration from a real-life event to create a haunting and poetic narrative of tragedy in a small Swiss village. And second, because the title, A Village Romeo and Juliet, was too interesting to pass up.

As I’m sure you can guess, the story concerns the suicide of two young lovers, pushed to the farthest reaches of despair by a long-standing family feud. Where this book differs from Chessex’s novel is that I believe Keller had no real first-hand knowledge of the actual event. He took the fact of their death and invented a story to justify it, tackling at the same time what I consider one of the greatest Swiss literary preoccupations – village psychology.

Switzerland, even today, is a vast countryside, dotted with small villages and towns. There are very few big cities. Zurich is the only agglomeration with over a million people, the next largest has less than 500,000 and there are only five cities in the entire country with more than 100,000 people. Village life is pretty much the norm and there is a particular psychology that goes along with village life, something Swiss writers and artists have been exploring forever.

My favorite Swiss writer, Ramuz, was a genius at getting to the heart of the villager mindset but I was equally curious to see how Keller, writing a generation before Ramuz, would go about the same project…and I certainly wasn’t disappointed.

A Village Romeo and Juliet (first published in 1856 and translated from German in 1966 by Ronald Taylor) is a slim novella that reads very much like a fable – an idyllic opening, a fateful dispute, a slow decline and overall worsening of the situation and then a detailed dénouement. In many ways this is a very simple tale. But where the book truly succeeds is in how Keller positions these necessary elements within his particular vision of village life.

The fathers of the two feuding families begin as friendly neighbors and eventually fall into an argument over a piece of land. What Keller is quick to point out is that each man’s anger and behavior is not only a result of his flawed character but that the dispute becomes irresolvably entrenched, and both men morally bankrupt, because of the way the village reacts to the fight.

Since their entire case was corrupt, they both fell prey to the worse kind of trickster, who inflamed their perverted imaginations and filled their minds with the most despicable thoughts. Most of these enterprising gentry, for whom the whole affair was a gift from the gods, belonged to the town of Seldwyla, and in a short time the two enemies each had their retinue of mediators, scandal-mongers and advisors who knew a hundred ways of relieving a man of his money.

A number of years pass and both families fall into desperate poverty. It is at this point that the son (Sali) and daughter (Vrenchen) from either side of the dispute, who as children had been devoted playmates, meet again and fall in love. The story begins to build a new momentum. And again here, Keller throws the inner character of his protagonists up against the collective character of the village. The following scenes, which include a wonderful and otherworldly mock-wedding celebration, test Sali and Vrenchen’s integrity and their ability to break free of the stifling village atmosphere.

As the title announces, Keller’s answer to Sali and Vrenchen’s ordeal is pessimistic and the book can be read as a detailed critique of 19th century Swiss village psychology.

To wrap up, let me just mention Keller’s lovely writing. Except for much of the dialogue, which was unfortunately often melodramatic, his descriptions were simply beautiful. I marked line after line and passage after passage throughout the entire text, but I think my favorite passage comes from the very beginning of the book:

From a distance they looked identical representatives of the countryside at its most characteristic; to a closer view they appeared distinguishable only in that one had the flap of his white cap at the front, the other at the back. But this changed when they ploughed in the opposite direction, for as they met and passed at the top of the ridge, the strong east wind blew the cap of the one back over his head, while that of the other, who had the wind behind him, was blown forwards over his face. And at each turn there was a moment when the two caps stood erect quivering in the wind like two white tongues of flame.

One last quick note – Oneworld Classics is a lovely publisher with a fantastic catalogue of well-known favorites as well as lesser-known translations. Highly recommended!

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Arnost Lustig – Lovely Green Eyes

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Back in early April I put together a list of books for a culture clash project but I’ve been very slow getting the project off the ground and just read the first of these titles over the weekend. However, my first book was definitely worth the wait – Arnost Lustig’s Lovely Green Eyes (translated from Czech by Ewald Osers).

I don’t think I could have started this project with a more perfect (and unfortunately, by that I mean tragic) example of cultural conflict. Lustig’s novel is set during the last few months of WWII, at a military brothel in Poland, and describes the experiences of a 15-year-old Jewish girl who manages to exchange death at Auschwitz for life as a prostitute.

For a number of very obvious reasons, this was not an easy novel. The task Lustig set himself, if indeed that is how he conceived it, seems to have been to create a stunningly, achingly beautiful narrative out of a subject more suited for nightmare. The physical landscape of the novel is fashioned from a meticulous collection of horrific and specific detail – ash from the gas chambers at Auschwitz floating through a wintery sky, the scrapings and rustlings of rats in the brothel, a constant inventory of eye color and hair color, the visible signs and symptoms of malnutrition and chronic dysentery, the sounds of physical violence.

That landscape is bleak and cold and horrible, as it is meant to be. But Lustig takes great care to integrate an abundance of humanity to his narrative. Skinny, as she is called at the brothel, alternately condemns and forgives herself for choosing to become a prostitute to escape death. She wonders continually at her desire to survive – Is this a sin? Would it have been better to die?

Aside from Skinny, Lustig’s humanity comes from the faces and stories of the other prostitutes, from the Madam, even from the soldiers which arrive by truckload for the girls each day. One of the more fascinating expressions of Lustig’s vision comes from the juxtaposition of two officers who come for Skinny – Wehrmacht Captain Henschel and Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin from the Waffen-SS. Both of these men are her enemies, both would kill her on the spot if they suspected her true ethnicity. They are each a part of the vast and frightening Nazi machine, yet Lustig renders each so carefully, gives each a unique and complicated identity, they become one of the many faces of the war. Sarazin, in particular, presents an intricate portrait of Nazi psychosis.

Through Skinny’s encounters with these two officers, Lovely Green Eyes goes courageously deep into the psychology of what it meant to believe in the war from the German perspective and what it meant to understand that belief and know you were on the wrong side of it.

Of all the books on the Holocaust that I’ve read, this has to be one of the very best, along with George Semprun’s L’Ecriture ou la Vie, which I felt treated the subject in a similar way – how do we live with the memory of a tragedy of this scale, on both a personal and more collective, or national, level?

Lustig has three other novels, all of which have been translated. His first novel, A Prayer For Katerina Horowitzowa, was published in 1974 and nominated for a National Book Award.