Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

Didier Van Cauwelaert – La Maison des Lumières

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Fiction has always struck me as the perfect place to safely explore unusual ideas – the varying levels of distance between the author, narrator and characters somehow create a space for investigating thoughts which might otherwise seem a bit too delicate to touch directly. Without Humbert Humbert, for example, and Humbert’s intricate fictional universe, would Nabokov have felt comfortable delving into pedophilia? This is definitely an extreme case in point, much like Crime and Punishment or African Psycho by Alain Mabanckou. Most good literature does this in some way or another, with varying degrees of intensity.

Over the weekend, I read Didier Van Cauwelaert’s newest novel, La Maison des Lumières, which attempts to do something similar by offering up a look at one person’s reaction to a near-death experience. Jérémie, a twenty-five year-old baker who was once a famous child actor goes to Venice alone after his girlfriend Candice breaks up with him. He visits the Guggenheim Museum to see René Magritte’s L’Empire des Lumières, Candice’s all-time favorite work of art.

Just at the moment he stands looking at the painting, two things occur: from Jérémie’s perspective (which the reader gets first) he enters the painting, literally and physically steps into one of the window’s of the house in the painting and meets a young woman, Marthe, who gives him back a series of idyllic moments with Candice. When he leaves the painting, it’s to discover he has been brought to the hospital after being pronounced “clinically dead” for four minutes, 30 seconds.

As expected, this event pushes Jérémie out of a melancholy apathy and forces him to confront his past with Candice and his mother, as well as his vision of the future, including his passion for the violin, and his professional and emotional opportunities. Through varying methods, Jérémie re-enters the painting two more times, each time encountering a few other people, people he claims to have never seen before in his life but upon research are revealed to really and truly exist.

Van Cauwelaert introduces a series of ideas throughout the course of the novel which include some of the more conventional explanations for a near-death experience (the influence of brain hormones at the moment of death, religion) as well as more experimental rationalizations: the tachyons (particles which travel faster than the speed of light) of Jérémie’s brain enter into contact with the tachyons of the other people he meets inside the painting, as well as a shamanistic view of humanity as linked through organic matter.

Described in this way, it sounds like there was a strong element of fantasy or science fiction in the novel. And yet when reading the book, it felt quite straightforward. The narration keeps this under control, I believe, since Jérémie remains as perplexed with these explanations as the reader. They are given to him by various colorful characters he meets along the way, a very safe method, I think, for Van Cauwelaert to offer a range of explanations for a highly-disputed, and emotionally-charged experience.

So here is where my criticism of the book comes into play. The story, as outlined above, is quite unique. This idea of someone entering a painting (a wonderful fictional re-creation of the emotional experience of art) to learn something about their life is a powerful and interesting idea. And the transformative potential of a near-death experience is obviously huge. At the same time, the increasingly complex interweaving of Jérémie’s experience with the life of Magritte and the woman Marthe from inside the painting is also skillfully executed.

Unfortunately, I felt Jérémie’s actual real-life story lacked substance. It was like Van Cauwelaert got a little too wrapped up in all these different scientific and pseudo-scientific ideas and somehow lost the threads of what to do with the human element of the novel. There was great potential in this book – huge, in fact – for a vivid and creative exploration of how a near-death experience might affect someone’s outward and inward perspective, as well as a real possibility of creating meaningful parallels between art and its impact on reality but in my view this was never fully realized.

La Maison des Lumières is Van Cauwelaert’s nineteenth novel and has done well in France. I won’t be surprised to see it translated in the near future. There was something very appealing about the book and the writing, despite my feeling that it was somehow unfinished. Van Cauwelaert won the Prix Goncourt in 1994 for his novel Un Aller Simple (A One-Way Ticket), and I think I’ll look this up next to broaden my view of his writing.

André Brink – The Rights of Desire

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Before I go back to Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, I’ll pause today to write about the book I finished last night, André Brink’s The Rights of Desire.

I mentioned earlier that I had some trouble with The Rights of Desire and I’d like to write about that, mainly because I’m still working out what exactly bothered me about this beautifully-written book. Certainly the writing was a pure pleasure to read, thoughtful sentences and precise but poetic description. The first-person narrator in The Rights of Desire reminded me of a John Banville narrator except less guarded and much less apologetic for any melodramatic expressions.

The story is simple – a widower living in Cape Town with a full-time but live-out housekeeper is forced by his two sons (who live far away) to take in a boarder as a sort of protection against illness, violence etc. He grudgingly agrees and then settles on a 29-year old woman, Tessa. The situation is made a little more complicated by the fact that the house is haunted by the spirit of a young slave woman, killed some 300 years earlier. The book accepts the presence of this ghost and so the reader must as well – the truth of her existence is never called into question, at least not as one of the book’s essential questions.

The book is about Ruben falling desperately in love with this young woman, and then spends its time in a kind of meditation on the ups and downs of their relationship. Ruben and Tessa are products of their respective generations. So in that sense they are presented as opposites – Tessa is sexually promiscuous, free with drugs, fairly irresponsible and burdened with a fatalistic, if not negative, outlook on the future. She is also full-of-life, unafraid and beautiful. Ruben is quiet, reserved, awkward with people he doesn’t know and represents a way of life no longer relevant to the contemporary situation he finds himself in. But he does appear to have a firmly anchored moral compass.

The situation in The Rights of Desire reminded me of something Nadine Gordimer took up in The House Gun – this idea that contemporary society has lost its purpose in a whirlwind of violence, that violence (both outward and inward) has become a means of expression for individuals of recent generations. And Brink explores this notion carefully and respectfully, without positing any easy answers or trying to solve what reveals to be a complex dilemma.

My fundamental criticism of the novel comes from the fact that I found Tessa unworthy of Ruben’s unconditional love and so as I was reading, a lot of the novel’s tension eroded out from under me. Right from the start, I could not understand what Ruben saw in this young woman and so why should I care so much about how much he cared for her. Everything about her persona was constructed – she lied consistently and manipulated Ruben (whether consciously or not) and Ruben was aware of this but somehow didn’t care. Their conversations seemed utterly one-sided and yet Ruben unequivocally declared that he’d met his soul mate.

I can easily see how a 66-year-old man could fall in love with this kind of 29-year-old woman for his own reasons (not saying there aren’t some exceptional and deserving 29-year olds out there, but this particular one was not) and so I tried to look at the book from this perspective. What was Brink trying to express about Ruben, and about this idea of consuming violence, through this lopsided relationship?

The story of the slave girl runs parallel, I think, to this. She was involved in a dangerously obsessive relationship with her master and now haunts the household as a kind of spy. Which is exactly how Ruben behaves with Tessa. So here are three individuals, exercising their “rights” of desire – Ruben in indulging his complicated lust for a woman who should technically be off limits, Tessa in accommodating her various lovers, and the ghost by reminding the entire household of the perilous undercurrents of passion.

I’ve always believed that rights come with responsibilities, at least from a socio-political perspective, and this is a book very much about South Africa’s socio-political brokenness. Looking at the novel this way, Ruben’s unbalanced relationship with Tessa and Tessa’s compulsive promiscuity are examples of a deeper collective distortion.

So despite my frustration with how Ruben’s attachment to Tessa is represented, I’m willing to believe it served a larger purpose and that it was actually meant to disturb me. Regardless, I’d like to look further into Brink – especially in relation to Gordimer and Coetzee.

the transit of venus – initial thoughts

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Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus is one of those books which asks to be enjoyed as carefully and as slowly as possible. There is no way I could have rushed through this book, instead I took it in small sections, appreciating the strange quality of Hazzard’s writing style and the unconventional way she told her story.

In the simplest terms, this is a novel about all the different ways we fall in love over a lifetime. Ted Tice adopts his love of Caro as a solid fact, something to be borne along with the other realities of his day to day existence. Caro’s loves are more varied, less idealistic but much more sensual. Grace, Caro’s sister, starts out in one seemingly safe direction and then is jolted with an unexpected situation much later in her life.

But the book also has a finger on the zeitgeist of post WWII, on the varying experiences of class, on motherhood, on power relationships between individuals, on the omnipotence of despair, and the significance of hope. These other elements stack up behind the novel’s firmer focus on those love narratives, giving them a deeper texture and structure.

Hazzard’s unique narrative style took me some time to get used to but overall I loved it (and not only because I kept experiencing echoes of Nadine Gordimer). She has a way of describing something in terms I’d never imagined before, or giving a feeling to a scene that would take me by surprise. In that sense, her characters were intriguing. They experienced their lives in ways which asked me to pause and consider whether I understood, or whether I’d ever felt something similar.

There were a few moments I wondered if Hazzard hadn’t gone a bit too far, making things more weighty or obscure than she needed. The book seems to hinge on the idea of the great mysteries of our hearts, the peculiar ways we engage with those around us, and every once in a while I felt she was letting that sentiment get carried too far away. But for the most part, this tone made the book both beautiful and complex.

I have some more to write about The Transit of Venus, and will put my thoughts together for a second post later this week. I’m thrilled to have discovered Hazzard, a writer previously unknown to me but who has three other novels waiting for me to enjoy. I have The Great Fire already and will pick it up in a few months to delve into Hazzard’s curious and lovely writing once again.

Honoré de Balzac – Eugénie Grandet

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I finally finished Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet Friday afternoon. I love how Balzac writes, even when he does narrative summation – something which can overwhelm sometimes in older novels. But Balzac manages to keep the tension alive even when he’s covering several years and lots of events in a single paragraph. Perhaps it’s the power and inflection of his narrative voice. Or the sheer confidence of his storytelling.

Eugénie Grandet is primarily a love story. Although I would argue it has two main characters. First is Eugénie, who falls in love with her cousin. And second is Eugénie’s father, whose love and devotion to his money gives Eugénie’s less-experienced passion some stiff competition. And of course the book isn’t really JUST a love story. It’s about greed and family legacy, about small-town social machinations, religious devotion and martyrdom. This last theme is what I found myself reading for the most. Balzac makes Eugénie into a perfect martyr and her movement toward that decision (because really, it’s her choice) was fascinating.

Eugénie Grandet is filled with all sorts of surprises. The first surprise to me was Eugénie. Balzac describes her in the beginning as an ignorant fool. And she is. But she develops over the novel in such a way that you almost wonder whether he was teasing you to start. For example, the very first time she’s confronted with a difficult choice (between her father’s wishes and her desire to please her cousin), she doesn’t hesitate for a second to find a way around her father. She may be ignorant but she very quickly digs her heels in and decides to do what will make her happiest. That self-will transforms itself into something self-defeating later on as she accepts a series of disappointments.

Something else I find surprising is the way Balzac doesn’t pull his punches. His entire project was to reveal the multi-faceted face of humanity and he doesn’t disappoint. Eugénie’s cousin Charles is a good indication of how well Balzac understood human nature. Charles evolves over the course of the novel and the result is fairly disappointing until you realize how many clues Balzac leaves along the way. Charles’ character develops as a result of circumstances and personality, two aspects of human existence Balzac grasps nearly perfectly.

It’s funny to me how much more often people give themselves Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu as a project. I think Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine might be even better – more entertaining and just as insightful. They are very different projects, if we take the author’s intention as a starting point, but both deal with the fundamentals of existence. A comparison of these two monumental works would be fascinating – I won’t be volunteering for that job anytime soon, just throwing the idea out there for someone else!

Any takers?

Jean-Louis Fournier – Où on va, papa?

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For those of you who read my post from Friday, I did manage to get through Où on va, papa? over the weekend. It turned out to be a relatively smooth read once I could take some personal distance from the book. This was really the only way for me to read it – to take myself and my own intangible, half-defined worries about impending parenthood away from my reading experience. And really, I think Fournier’s story deserves to be treated on its own terms, without putting any of the reader in there. Eventually, as I read deeper into his experience and began to understand how difficult it must have been for him to write the book, there was simply no room left for any consideration about me. As it should be.

As I mentioned before, Où on va, papa? is a memoir about what it was like to raise his two mentally disabled sons. His honesty in terms of his experience is one of the most disarming elements of the book. A combination of anger, disappointment, guilt, frustration and a complicated love. There is humor in the book, but his humor is the uncomfortable kind, a humor of grief. He uses humor a bit like a weapon, a kind of protection. I think as long he says the worst thing first, no one can take him by surprise.

The book is really a collection of tiny little flashes, short reflections or anecdotes that move more or less chronologically from the birth of his first son, Mathieu, followed two years later by the shock of having a second son, Thomas, with essentially the same level of handicap. They eventually have a third child, although they considered terminating the pregnancy until a doctor advised them otherwise. The doctor actually tells them that having a third handicapped child won’t change much for them in the long run, but that the chance to have a normal child would mean they wouldn’t have ended on a failure. Can you imagine? Fournier tells this short story without condemning the doctor, yet I think it’s clear how he felt when you see how acidic his narration becomes and how he ends the anecdote with an uncomfortable joke:

Notre chance s’est appellé Marie, elle était normale et très jolie. C’était normal, on avait fait deux brouillons avant. Les médécins, au courant des antécédents, étaient rassurés. Deux jours après sa naissance, un pédiatre est venu voir notre fille. Il a examiné longuement son pied, puis, tout haut, il a dit, « On dirait qu’elle a un pied-bot… » Après un petit moment il a ajouté, « Non, je me suis trompé. » Il avait certainement dit ça pour rire.

[We named our non-failure Marie. She was normal and very pretty. Which was expected, we’d made two rough drafts first. The doctors, aware of our history, were reassured. Two days after she was born, a pediatrician came to see our daughter. He examined her foot for a long time, and then announced, “It looks like she has a club foot…” After a short moment he added, “No, I must be wrong.” He certainly said this to get a laugh.]

Some of the book is written like a conversation between Fournier and his two sons. It’s clear he harbors a huge amount of guilt for what he imagines their life must have been like. His oldest son, Matthieu, dies at the age of fifteen. His younger son, Thomas, fades away in an institution. Fournier can’t seem to forgive himself, or fate, for that matter, for putting the three of them through this difficult experience.

Où on va, papa doesn’t have little gems of wisdom for anyone in a difficult situation. It is intensely personal, avoids any and all platitudes, and doesn’t come to any satisfying emotional wrap-up. I can’t help approving of the honesty in that. There simply aren’t answers to most of Fournier’s questions.

I often think of memoir as a means to catharsis. I envision the writer sitting down at the end of his or her life, or after some significant experience, and going back over the details of what happened, mining that time period for what it taught them, what it brought to their understanding of their life and purpose. Fournier’s take on this exercise doesn’t come with any real sense of catharsis; it is so much more raw and unprocessed. Less a meditation on his experience and more a testament.

Just a last note to finish up, the rights for Où on va, papa? have been sold to an American publisher, so hopefully in the next year or so an English version will become available.   

 

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William Boyd – Any Human Heart

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William Boyd’s Any Human Heart is a curious project. It is fiction, but fiction which attempts to mimic non-fiction. Written in the form of a journal, the story begins in England of the 1920’s with Logan Mountstuart’s childhood and follows him then until his death in France in 1991. The book is ultimately less about Logan as an individual as it is an exposé of the twentieth century.

In some sense, this journal style is slightly disappointing. Initially, Logan’s boyish narrator reminds us of Stephen Daedulus in many ways, a bit more irreverent perhaps but quite as impressionable. It is easy for the reader to become attached to this narrator and therefore expect the novel to follow a more conventional storyline. There are many books written in diary form that don’t mirror an actual diary, and those tend to make better fiction.

But a real journal often drops the threads of its story as the narrator ages. It isn’t often a coherent narrative – despite the continued familiarity of the subject. People lose interest in friends, stop caring about certain interests, move on, grow out of their preferences. Boyd allows many of the original characters to come back again and again throughout Logan’s life, but ultimately the story revolves more around the events of the twentieth century than it does around Logan’s hopes and expectations.

Although in fairness, this is really Boyd’s project – how to reflect and embody the great changes of the twentieth century in a single individual. Logan could be a stand in for anyone of that generation. His life is both extraordinary and completely mundane. And really, so are the events that come along to shape it – love, success, disappointment, true love, war, adventure, prison, loss, sorrow, renewal, poverty, friendship and finally peace. The ups and down of a century, therefore a lifetime.

So how does this make for a reading experience? The book is meticulous with its details of the changing times, especially in terms of life’s accoutrements – housing, dressing, eating and media. This is a really rich aspect of the novel. Also, Logan is a writer, both of fiction and for newspapers and journals. So his character reflects a preoccupation with minutiae – his own interior emotional life (for the fictional part of his art) as well as exterior events (for his journalistic reporting). That balance creates a nice tension, keeping us interested in Logan and what happens to him, but also ensuring we keep an eye on Boyd’s twentieth century project.

Any Human Heart also includes a fair share of humor, most of it delivered in knowing winks to the reader. Logan continually encounters famous real-life figures of the twentieth century – Picasso, Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, members of the British royal family, Ian Fleming and many others. Aside from the comedic elements of many of these scenes (Logan dismisses Virginia Woolf as a complete shrew, for example, and is kissed by Evelyn Waugh at a party) these moments add a great texture to the book, anchoring it as a pseudo-artifact of the twentieth century. Yet Logan remains a fictional creation, an “everyman”, which places him on the reader’s side of history.

a short story for today

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I read a lovely short story this morning out of Alain Gerber’s collection, Les Jours de Vin et de Roses. Gerber is a French author with an impressive list of novels and essays; his non-fiction work centers on jazz and he works for the French radio. Les Jours de Vin et de Roses (1984) is his only short story collection, it not being a popular genre in most of Europe – something Smithereens was bemoaning the other day and a subject on which I couldn’t agree more. I’m a big fan of the short story for how it can distill a moment into something larger, something representative of an entire lifetime.

 

Gerber’s story Mon fils l’écrivain [My son, the writer] does this exceptionally well. The situation is simple – a son has come out from Paris to visit his father in the small rural village where the older man has retired. The story is narrated by the father. When they sit down to lunch, the son pulls a book (his own, a recent publication) out of his bag and hands it over to his father. He mentions there is a dedication but the father quickly changes the subject of their conversation. The book sits on the edge of the sideboard throughout their entire meal and both men are keenly aware of its presence but unable to bring it up again.

 

Later, they take a walk to collect mushrooms. And again the son tries to bring up his literary career. He mentions he might actually get an award for this new novel. Again, the father changes the subject. The son mentions the book’s dedication, says it’s a nod to something they share between them – a kind of memory. And the father answers:

 

A mon âge, ce ne sont pas les souvenirs qui me manquent!

[At my age, I don’t need any more memories!]

 

It’s a horrible scene. Full of this awkward, broken feeling between the two men. The son is trying very hard to engage with his father and the father recognizes all this but can’t react. He’s literally unable to accept any offering from his son. They return to the father’s house and eat an omelette with the mushrooms they’ve just collected.

 

The dinner scene provides a clue as to what makes the father so reserved. They sit silently at the table, the son searching for a subject of conversation. The father muses that he’s always eaten in silence, that it doesn’t bother him, that he wasn’t allowed to speak at his own father’s table. This reflection takes him one step further to a kind of evaluation of the kind of father he was, but then he quickly rejects the utility of that kind of thinking. And comments to himself that he would never have made a good writer –  he sees no use in opening a can of worms. Of course the son’s book is still lying on the sideboard. At one point the father gets up to get a bottle of brandy.

 

J’ai vu mon fils tressaillir lorsque je me suis approché du buffet pour y prendre la bouteille d’eau-de-vie. Il est possible que je l’aie surveillé dans la glace, mine de rien. Il est même possible que j’aie tout fait pour qu’il croie que j’allais chercher le livre.

[I watched my son start when I went toward the sideboard to get the bottle of brandy. Perhaps I was secretly watching him in the mirror. Maybe I even led him to think I was going to go pick up the book.]

 

The rest of the story just follows these two through to the end of the son’s visit. Their parting is, again, very tense. Very sad. Gerber manages with just a few sentences to reveal how impossible it is for the two men to communicate. The father comes off as very cold and distant, but just after the son leaves the reader is given a glimpse of the father’s real thoughts. His son is finally out of his sight, but the father continues to see him, imagines exactly what he’ll be doing.

 

 

Mon fils monte dans le train en première classe, avec près d’une demi-heure d’avance. Il choisit un compartiment vide et se demande avec angoisse s’il le restera jusqu’à la fin du voyage. Je le connais bien. Je n’ignore rien de lui. Il va tirer de son sac un autre exemplaire de son livre. Il en lire quelques pages au hasard et pensera qu’une fois de plus, il a échoué dans sa tentative. Il pensera cela à cause de moi.

[My son steps into the first class compartment of the train, nearly 30 minutes early. He selects an empty wagon and then wonders, anxiously, whether it will remain that way for the entire trip. I know him well. There is nothing I don’t know about him. He will take another copy of his book out of his bag. He will read a few pages at random and once again, he will think his project failed. He will think this because of me.]

 

The story continues on for a few more paragraphs, giving just a few more subtle clues as to why the father behaves this way toward his son. It’s quite a short story – just over 2500 words – but there is so much here about generational misunderstanding…the father doesn’t even know what the son writes about, but he’s simply too afraid to look. He assumes their experiences are far too disparate to ever meet on common ground. And in fact, because of his fear, he creates differences that don’t even exist.

 

 

 

 

 

Nancy Huston – Instruments des Ténèbres

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Why do we create narratives for ourselves? How do we define who we are through story? Nancy Huston’s Instruments des Ténèbres takes this idea and pushes it about as far as it can go…initially, by giving us a narrator who is actually a writer, whose daily business it is to create a narrative, create a series of characters and give them life. But later, she reworks this same idea into the entire construct of the novel, bringing the novel’s two stories together so they become one complete work.

I use the word ‘work’ here on purpose. Narrator Nadia’s creation – her notes on her own life and the fictional story she creates for the reader in parallel – is a process, un vrai travail, a labor. In essence, Nadia undertakes a painstaking restoration of herself. In the beginning of the novel she admits she is no longer Nadia, but Nada. A nothing, a no one. Through her work, the creation of her Sonate de la Résurrection (a title which alludes to rebirth and transformation), she does the hard work of not only fictional creation, but the re-location/definition/creation of herself.

As I mentioned before, there are two stories – called, respectively, Le Carnet Scordatura and the Sonate de la Résurrection. For the first, she explains that scordatura is a musical term for dissonance but that its root, scordare, means to forget – so, on the one hand this notebook is Nadia’s claim to otherness, her assertion of herself as an element of discord, but at the same time, it’s her method of forgetting, of moving away from the past. The second story, set in France in the 1600’s, is an intensely beautiful story of a set of twins, Barbe and Barnabé.  

One of the aspects of this book that struck me from the beginning is Nadia’s voice. In the first few pages, as she introduces herself to the reader, she is both compelling and repulsive. A dangerously bitter woman:

…la haine est une de mes grandes et belles spécialités intimes, mon coeur renferme toute une université qui n’enseigne que la haine, propose des séminaires en haine avancée, distribue des doctorats en haine.

[…hate is one of my greatest and most beautiful secret talents, my heart houses an entire university which teaches only hate, offers lectures in advanced hate, gives out PhDs in hatred.]

Yet the reader is wise to be wary of her claims – she admits she has a penchant for exaggeration and lying. She claims apathy for all things beautiful and an indifference to love, friends and family. But as soon as she opens her other notebook – the Sonate – and begins her creative work, the story of Barbe and Barnabé, the reader slowly comes to see the cracks in that other voice. This is the same narrator, but she depicts these twins with an incredible gentleness and love. And as she returns to her Carnet, she isn’t able to leave that other narrator’s voice completely behind and suddenly we start to see her who she really is – this is the first clue of how she bridges these two seemingly disparate narratives. Slowly, this mingling of Nadia’s voice intensifies as the novel lengthens and eventually not only Nadia as a narrator can be detected inside the story of Barbe and Barnabé but suddenly, and quite cleverly, Barbe and Barnabé (as symbols, if you will) become the main focus of Nadia’s modern-day narrative.

This is a book which begs to be read and re-read, it contains quite a lot – religion and trauma and loneliness, a reflection on writing process and the catharsis found in writing, in history’s continual influence on the present. I’ve barely scratched the surface.

Lastly, for anyone interested, Instruments des Ténèbres was translated by Huston as Instruments of Darkness.

 

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Jonathan Lethem – The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye

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So, still no big decisions on a project. I’m going to take the weekend to think about it, try some books and see what suits me. Thank you everyone for the wonderful suggestions, I feel so lucky to have such thoughtful readers to discuss these things with. It feels very strange to be floundering in this way with my reading – I suspect it is a combination of things going on in my everyday life and not taking the right amount of time to focus. I’m not reading as much as I would like to these days, but I’m not worried. The right book will come along and everything will fall into place.

So without further ado – some thoughts on one of my recent reads…

My first experience with Jonathan Lethem was through his novel Motherless Brooklyn, a book that has remained one of my favorites. Lethem is an interesting writer because he started out writing mainly science fiction and has since broadened his project into a versatile and fascinating mix of several genres with what I can only consider a traditional literary style. In Motherless Brooklyn, Lethem called upon noir fiction techniques and mystery writing to tell the story of an orphaned young man with Tourrette’s syndrome who tries to understand how his mentor and “father” figure was killed. It is both funny and touching and complicated and really well written.

So when I saw his short story collection The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye in a used book shop in the states over my January holiday, I picked it right up.  These stories have a very different feel than Motherless Brooklyn – mostly because instead of mystery, they dip heavily into science fiction. And they are all quite dark.

Now I don’t mind dark at all, but I don’t usually have a lot of interest in science fiction. However, Lethem does a great job of blending the sci-fi elements into a more “literary” story. (I really hate to make this distinction, because I think what matters is whether a story or a novel is a pleasure to read, but for the purposes of looking at Lethem, I think it’s interesting to call attention to the way he blends these styles so successfully.) I think the story that does this best is Light and the Sufferer, which is at heart a simple story of brotherly love. But it involves an alien – called the Sufferer – who lurks through every scene and functions as a trigger for the story’s more difficult questions. I also love that Lethem does not ever answer the questions he raises about the Sufferer’s purpose or behavior. The focus remains on the narrator and his grief and anger. Extremely well done.

The other stories are extremely varied: there is an ingenious version of Hell (this story actually gave me nightmares), a futuristic landscape where people are divided into those that live in their cars on the interstates and those that live in a “real” city, a bizarre parable about the dangers of co-dependence (the least successful story in the collection, in my opinion) and a story about a bunch of “sleepy people”, militias and roving bands of thugs called dinosaurs. All very bizarre and extremely creative. All of them, however, more concerned with more fundamental questions like suppressed trauma, loneliness, and heartache. The science fiction elements work as scaffolding while the stories keep their focus on human (easily identifiable) narratives.

Lewis Carroll – Alice in Wonderland

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I’ve been familiar with the characters and story of Alice in Wonderland for as long as I can remember. I suspect the book was first read to me, and then later I read it on my own. And I know I watched the 1951 Disney version as a kid and loved it. But it has been twenty years or more since I sat and read the book cover to cover.

Rereading childhood favorites can be a risky business. Mainly because what impressed us as magical and vivid and wonderful when we were children, might not be so vibrant on an adult re-read. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe disappointed me quite a bit last year, so did A Wrinkle in Time (although to a lesser extent because Meg Murray is such a marvelous character). I think they are still wonderful books for children, no question about it, but I didn’t feel they held all that much for an adult reader on their own. But I’m happy to say that Alice in Wonderland is just as bizarre and outrageous and silly as I remembered it.

I think the key to Carroll’s book is that it is wholly nonsensical. Alice’s adventures don’t follow any sort of logical order, she isn’t on any real kind of quest and we’re left to wander through the peculiar world of Wonderland just as bemused and surprised as she is. And maybe it’s also important that there isn’t any sort of BIG FAT MORAL LESSON tied up in the story. Yes, Alice’s patience gets tested and her good manners are routinely called to assert themselves, but on the whole the book is an exercise in unbridled imagination. (Although there are many fun allusions to mathematics, languages and real-life friends of Carroll, not to mention that the story was written for a real person – Alice Liddell, and her two sisters.)

There is also quite a lot of wordplay in the book, so as an adult reader I enjoyed admiring Carroll’s clever use of puns and homonyms to invent some of the more funny scenes in the book. One of my favorites is when Alice takes a break from the croquet game with the Queen to hear the Mock Turtle’s story with the Gryphon. First he goes through all the names of the subjects he learned at school – Reeling and Writhing, Drawling and Fainting and Stretching in Coils. And then they talk about a fish, the whiting:

“I can tell you more than that, if you like,” said the Gryphon, “Do you know why it’s called a whiting?”

“I never thought about it,” said Alice. “Why?”

“It does the boots and shoes,” the Gryphon replied.

Alice was thoroughly puzzled. “Does the boots and shoes!” she repeated in a wondering tone.

“Why, what are your shoes done with?” said the Gryphon. “I mean, what makes them so shiny?”

Alice looked down at them, and considered a little before she gave her answer. “They’re done with blacking, I believe.”

“Boots and shoes under the sea,” the Gryphon went on in a deep voice, “are done with whiting. Now you know.”

“And what are they made of?” Alice asked, in a tone of great curiosity.

“Soles and eels, of course,” the Gryphon replied rather impatiently; “any shrimp could have told you that.”

Isn’t that fun?

But it also strikes me that Alice in Wonderland is a book written to both the adult and the child. Because at the end he makes a quite obvious nod to childhood and appreciating a child’s innocence and imagination. He quickly shifts into Alice’s older sister’s perspective, who is old enough to see how Alice came up with her dream and happy to pretend to fall into Wonderland herself. But she is fully aware that it’s all pretend and knows the day will come soon when Alice will understand that as well.