Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

Enchi Fumiko – The Waiting Years

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Since graduating from college I have moved house five times, hopping from where I grew up on the west coast to Japan, then to the midwest, the east coast and finally setting up what seems to be a semi-permanent life (or at least for a few more years) in Switzerland. All that moving means I’ve carted my possessions across nearly 16,000 miles. As most of you bibliophiles can imagine, those book boxes start to get pretty heavy. So I learned to be very careful about which books I hold on to and which books I don’t mind leaving behind.

 

One of the books I have lugged with me, literally from continent to continent is Enchi Fumiko’s Masks. I first read this book for a Japanese literature class in college and count it as one of my all-time favorites. It’s a dark, gritty book dealing with issues of sexuality, manipulation and the oppression inherent in Japan’s patriarchal culture. The best word I have to describe this novel is intense. Everything about it is intense – structure, theme, intertextuality, social criticism. In short, it can withstand a lot of re-reading.

 

So knowing how I feel about that book, I was not at all surprised to find myself absorbed in another dark, intensely feminist novel by the same author – Enchi’s The Waiting Years. Enchi took over eight years to write The Waiting Years and for it she won Japan‘s highest literary award – no small feat for a novel with such a glaring social critique.

 

The Waiting Years is also a ripping good read. The novel details the life of Tomo, a paragon of wifely submission, and her husband Yukitomo, a paragon of selfish arrogance. Not only does Yukitomo bring a concubine into their household, he has Tomo go to Tokyo to pick the girl out. Later, he seduces (although rape is more likely what happened) one of their servants and makes that woman his second concubine. Eventually, he begins an affair with his daughter-in-law. Tomo must bear each of these insults in silence as well as stamp out any desire for self-assertion or self-fulfillment. Literally, her entire life is lived only to validate her husband’s life. She has nothing, and is nothing, on her own.

 

In exchange for her willing subservience she has what none of the other women in the novel are allowed to have – legitimacy. Enchi dives freely into the minds of the other women, portraying their own stifled unhappiness. As his mistresses, they are assured Yukitomo’s love and consideration but no necessary legal benefits, neither for themselves nor for their children. As his wife, Tomo is guaranteed the outward strappings of happiness (a home, money, the power to do business in her husband’s name, the respect offered to her by strangers in recognition of his status) but Enchi makes it very clear that Tomo remains celibate, and horribly lonely, for almost forty years once Yukitomo has tired of her physically. And she has no right to want anything for herself. None. That the women are offered this choice between two equally miserable fates is, I believe, Enchi’s point. The entire system is inherently flawed.

 

To add to her worries, Tomo has the thankless job of working frantically behind the scenes to ensure the family name (which is only hers through marriage, yet the only name that will ever be associated with her and therefore vitally important) is never blemished by Yukitomo’s indecent behavior.

 

The Waiting Years ends dramatically with Tomo asserting herself for the first and last time. But I won’t say more. Think bittersweet revenge. Think soul-crumbling revelation. Very satisfying.

 

I mentioned in my first post about The Waiting Years that the Japanese title of this novel is 女坂 (Onna zaka) which literally means the woman’s slope. Traditionally, Japanese temples had a men’s path and a women’s path, the second a supposedly gentler, easier walk. Enchi seems to be using this title ironically, because Tomo’s “path” is anything but easy. This title (and the beautiful scene symbolizing it when Tomo struggles up a hill in the snow one evening to get back home) turns the whole concept of 家 (ie – home, household) upside down by suggesting that a woman’s work inside the home is just as dangerous and difficult as a man’s.

 

One of the book’s other ironies is that we rarely see Yukitomo outside the home, unless he’s taken one of his mistresses on some cultural expedition. Tomo on the other hand is often running left and right, arranging financial matters and keeping busy with tradesman to insure the house has all that it needs. Yukitomo’s “life” is focused almost exclusively on his sexual needs and Tomo’s on a denial of that same sexuality. That this might be a hidden meaning behind the concept of 家and one which destroys its other more positive associations, is a fascinating notion.

 

 

Enchi wrote seven novels in total, all of which have been translated I believe.

 

 

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Nadine Gordimer – A Sport of Nature

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I finished Nadine Gordimer’s novel A Sport of Nature last night and believe this will be the most difficult of her novels to write about thus far. It was complicated – but not in a way I was expecting. This is a novel I will have to read at least twice, and slowly, to come to any firm conclusions about what Gordimer was trying to do.

 

In the simplest sense A Sport of Nature is a personality profile, telling the story, from childhood to adulthood, of Hillela, a white South African woman who “becomes” a revolutionary in the struggle against Apartheid. Hillela’s political and psychological trajectory is unusual, mainly because Gordimer reveals her transformation from unconcerned to concerned (about her country’s social injustices) through a distillation of the idea of human contact. It makes sense that falling in love with another human being is one of the best ways to smash up racial boundaries and I think this is often the story that gets told – how better to understand our shared humanity than to really and truly fall in love. But Hillela’s story is more than this familiar one – her character, her self, struck me as Gordimer’s personification of the idea that love is blind.

 

Her early life is marked by a series of transgressions, all of them having to do with sex. She develops a relationship with a man from a township, whom she doesn’t even realize is black (a first allusion to exactly how colorblind her experience of falling in love will become) and is kicked out of her private school, she woos her cousin and is eventually caught in his bed and has to leave home, she follows a lover illegalIy into Ghana, escaping South Africa not for political ideals but romantic ones.

 

Through all this Hillela seems to possess some incredible luck. She is taken in again and again by the right people and kept back from the edge of poverty. She becomes friends with the wife of the French Ambassador to Ghana, moves in with this family as a sort of nanny and eventually has an affair with the Ambassador. It’s during this period that she meets Whaila, the black man who will become her husband.

 

This is the moment when Hillela changes, when she becomes engaged in the fight to overthrow Apartheid. This is Whaila’s passion and Hillela has fallen in love with him so it becomes her fight too. On the one hand, I saw Hillela’s “transformation” as quite shallow – to love this man, she will also love his politics. A subject she had no use for previously. But on the other hand, this is the moment she becomes aware of her disregard for skin color. She isn’t in love with Whaila as an exotic other, but with him – his mind, his person, his whole self. She was raised under Apartheid, and although rationally she rejected it as many of her generation did, she had never confronted its reality emotionally. So then to finally experience, emotionally, the absolute meaninglessness of that system is nothing short of revelation.

 

What happens to Hillela after this is also really interesting but I’ll give the story away if I say any more. So I’ll just say a bit more about Hillela as a character – after this transformation she continues to create a personal, rebellious world where Apartheid has absolutely no power over her. But the power she uses to fight the world beyond her personal circle isn’t physical, it isn’t intellectual, and it isn’t even emotional – her power is purely sexual. Gordimer is exploring a really interesting idea here, even if I found it somewhat uncomfortable. Her portrait of Hillela is intriguing and provocative. She is essentially a nobody who manages to rise to considerable political power…through love but mostly through refusing to choose a specific ideology except her own colorblindness.

 

As I mentioned above, there is definitely more to this novel than can be picked up in one reading. So in the meantime, before I tackle a re-read or any of the critical work about Nadine Gordimer I’ve been delighted to discover over the last 8 months, I have three more of her novels to read by the end of the year. Next up: My Son’s Story, published in 1990.

 

 

Anna Gavalda – Je L'Aimais

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How wonderfully tricky French can be. I wrote on Thursday that I was reading Anna Gavalda’s novel Je L’Aimais and I translated the title as I Loved Him. But this was wrong – or at least it was only partly correct. In French the article gets placed before the verb and when the verb begins with a vowel, like aimer, the “le” or “la” is contracted so we don’t know without more context whether it is “him” or “her”. I assumed “him” because the story seemed to belong to Chloé, the narrator, who has just lost her husband to another woman. But as the novel progresses I realized that the story belongs just as much to Pierre, Chloé’s father-in-law, and his own story of love lost…so the title could just as well be I Loved Her.

 

Well, I did a quick check and the title of the novel has been translated as Someone I Loved – that’s just perfect.

 

This is a novel about adultery. About the worst kind of betrayal most people can imagine and the shock of having to try and understand why the person you love doesn’t love you anymore.

 

Au bout de combien de temps oublie-t-on l’odeur de celui qui vous a aimée ? Et quand cesse-t-on d’aimer à son tour ?

Qu’on me tende un sablier.

 

La dernière fois que nous nous sommes enlacés, c’était moi qui l’embrassais. C’était dans l’ascenseur de la rue de Flandre.

Il s’était laissé faire.

 

Pourquoi ? Pourquoi s’était-il laissé embrasser par une femme qu’il n’aimait plus ? Pourquoi m’avoir donné sa bouche ? Et ses bras ?

 

Ca n’a pas de sens.

 

[How long does it take to forget the scent of the person who loved you? And when do you stop loving them?

Someone hand me an hourglass.

 

The last time we held each other, I was the one who was kissing him. It was in the elevator on the rue de Flandre.

He let me kiss him.

 

Why? Why did he let himself be kissed by a woman he no longer loved? Why did he give me his mouth? And his arms?

 

It makes no sense.]

 

But it’s also a novel about love. How do we know we’ve found love? How do we know it will last? What happens when love arrives at the most inconvenient moment? When you think about it, this whole loving thing is a pretty fragile affair. And I think this is what Gavalda wants to explore in Je L’Aimais. Love is often a tricky experience to negotiate, filled with some wild ups and downs and often a lot of unexpected and potentially dangerous mundanity. Gavalda presents two versions of the experience of love – first through Chloé and her raw, painful astonishment of what has just become of marriage. And then through Pierre, thirty years her senior, and what he reveals about his own passionate discoveries.

 

Stylistically, the novel is interesting because it unfolds almost completely as a long conversation between Pierre and Chloé. I felt Gavalda managed this back and forth really well, dropping well-placed hints to remind us of their surroundings but for the most part she just let their dialogue do all the hard work.

 

And Pierre and Chloé do venture out into some thorny territory, especially in terms of duty vs happiness. Still, the book is an easy read and I might even argue that Gavalda’s attempt at a moral (a very small one, but its still there) might not have been a good idea, because I think, as horrible as it is, there just aren’t any straightforward answers where adultery is concerned. But despite her debatable conclusion, I liked very much how the book mostly focused on negotiating/exploring the very frightening reality that love is not always a permanent experience.

 

 

Reading Writer – Amsterdam and structure

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It has been ages since I put together a Reading Writer post and since I’m still coming off the high that is my weekly Tuesday morning meeting with my writing partner, I thought I might continue the conversation I’ve been having about structure and extend it a bit to what I’ve been reading lately.

 

When we talk about the structure of a novel, what exactly does that mean? For me, structure is the place where the author’s fingerprints are most likely to be visible. It’s what gets me asking questions like: Why was this particular scene placed after the last one instead of that scene on page 42? Why did parts of the story need temporal displacement? Why are we given four different points of view, shuffled to each give us a part of the story? And so on and so forth. Structure is about configuring the fictional elements and I enjoy trying to figure out why writers make the choices they do.

 

Because I read it recently, let’s look at Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. The book is divided into 5 parts, each of which has anywhere from 3 to 6 short chapters. Almost exclusively each chapter encompasses a single scene. I counted and McEwan uses only 22 scenes to structure his entire novel. Of note about these 22 scenes is that they are linear, branching directly forward from the first funeral scene both temporally and thematically. They build on one another, using either an event or a piece of dialogue to propel the story onward. It is an incredibly simple but also nearly airtight structure.

 

I am quite certain that McEwan did not divide his book into 5 parts by chance. So it follows that we can look at each part as an element of a traditional 5-part drama. And when I compare my notes on what happens in each of Amsterdam’s 5 acts, they follow exactly:

 

1 – exposition which ends with the “inciting moment”

2 – rising action involving secondary complications

3 – climax or turning point

4 – falling action

5 – conclusion

 

Amsterdam is a satire and the evilness of its characters quite exaggerated so it makes sense McEwan would have tipped his hat to burlesque theatre. It’s funny, when I first read this book I only liked it, I didn’t love it. But looking at its structure has bumped it up a few notches in my estimation. I love it when that happens.

 

But now for some nitty-gritty details (and maybe a small spoiler) – because otherwise talking about structure just wouldn’t be that much fun. McEwan does something interesting in terms of structure within two of the sections. The first comes in Part 2, when the story is still developing and when we are in Vernon’s perspective. Part 2 has five chapters and without the last three the entire book would fall apart. Sorry for getting so technical, but I’m going to use numeric indicators to make this easier. In Part 2, Chapter 3 (2 – 3), Vernon receives Clive’s suicide proposal, which he rejects as ridiculous along with the reader. But then something huge happens in 2 – 4 which changes everything so that 2 – 5 sees Vernon not only accepting Clive’s suicide proposal but requesting it be a mutual contract. The nesting of the presumably big event in between two smaller, seemingly benign events is a very cool structural trick with implications on how the ending impacts the reader.

 

The next interesting bit of structural work comes in Part 3, which has only three chapters. 3 -1 shows Clive on a “morning after”. We don’t know of what, only that he is upset and happily escaping to the Lake District to finish work on his symphony. 3 – 2 then jumps back in time to the “night before” to explain what got Clive so worked up in the first place. This chapter shows Clive and Vernon having a mammoth argument (related to that something huge in 2 – 4), which nearly ends their friendship on the spot. Then, in 3 -3, McEwan jumps back to Clive, now beginning his hike around the Lake District.

 

This back and forth is the only time the novel breaks with its strictly linear progression and the effect is quite interesting. In 3 – 1, Clive proclaims his friend a villain, in 3 – 2 we see exactly why he might be so but then in 3 – 3, Clive reveals his own spectacular failings. This structural movement is quite balanced, arguably better than a strict linear one which would have whalloped the reader with their fight and then sent Clive off to brood for two chapters. It is an interesting choice for McEwan to have made and it gives those three chapters an undulating emotional texture.

 

Well, I suppose I have rambled on here long enough and hopefully I haven’t bored too many of you who might not give a pickle for technical issues like this. Admittedly, I’ve picked a book with a structure just begging to be mentioned. I’ll try this again sometime later using a book with a more subtle structural pattern. That will be harder.

 

John Banville – Eclipse

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I wish I could quote out long passages from John Banville’s Eclipse, in lieu of a review. I would enjoy typing them, a kind of slow and careful re-read of the pages I’ve so loved reading. I am a fast reader and Eclipse is a short book but I took over a week working my way through it, savoring the lines and the scenes and the narrator’s reflections.

 

Before, what I contained was the blastomere of myself, the coiled hot core of all I was and might be. Now, that essential self has been pushed to the side with savage insoucience, and I am as a house walked up and down in by an irresistibly proprietorial stranger. I am all inwardness, gazing out in ever intensifying perplexity upon a world in which nothing is exactly plausible, nothing is exactly what it is.

 

Narrator Alex has retreated from the world, into his childhood home on the Irish coast to muse over, or, I suppose it would be more accurate to say, to nurse a set of bewildering wounds. Alex is a stage actor who has taken an early retirement, abandoned his family to hide out in a state of hyperaware limbo, conscious of the ghostly presences of his past that have followed him to his retreat. Followed him isn’t quite right; perhaps some of them were already waiting there for him.

 

Everything here is twilight and half-dream, yet the appearance of these phantoms is naggingly insinuative, as if I should, or would, know them. There is something in them of those ancestral resemblances that will spring unnervingly up at one from the cradle or the deathbed.

 

Growing domestic disturbances and a traumatic professional event brought Alex to seek solace in his hideaway to sort out the personal ramifications of his crisis. To hear him describe it, his entire self has become wrapped up in an ability to transform into an “other” which necessarily engendered a slow loss of what was originally “him”. Do all actors experience this tension and fear? It’s a wonderful metaphor for helping a non-thespian understand the emotional and personal investment in stage performance.

 

Eclipse is also about Alex’s relationship with his daughter, a young woman suffering from what must be schizophrenia, although her specific illness is never named. The parallel between these two is stunning – that he needs to create new voices inside himself in order to succeed in his work, that she cannot stop manufacturing similar voices but which threaten to destroy her.

 

Indeed, such was her calm at times that she would seem to be not there at all, to have drifted off, lighter than air. It is a different air in which she moves, a separate medium. For her I think the world is always somewhere other, an unfamiliar place where yet she has always been. This is for me the hardest thing, to think of her out there, standing on some far bleak deserted shore, beyond help, in unmoving light, with an ocean of lostness all before her and the siren voices singing in her head.

 

As you can see from the passages I’ve included, Banville writes with rich, vivid prose, filled with complicated words and sometimes twisty grammar. I loved the complexity of his language and the way it forced me to slow down and really think about his word choices and images. And for all of Alex’s intense interior musing and remembering, the book moves forward through a steady procession of tense scenes and dialogues.

 

Someone with a better background in drama will probably find the novel filled with allusions to the world of the theatre. I found myself looking up a lot of Alex’s references to certain characters, and without that I would have missed some of his emotional orientation. Eclipse was definitely one of the best reads of the entire year so far. Which makes me really look forward to reading Banville’s prize-winning novel, The Sea, already waiting for me on the shelf.

 

Paul Auster – Oracle Night

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Metafiction is fiction about fiction, writing that draws attention to the fact that it is writing, that it is not real, that it is a construct. There are zillions of different varieties of metafiction – novels about fiction writers writing other novels, novels about readers reading other books, stories within a story…that kind of thing. It’s a very old device and it works to add layers of awareness and meaning to an otherwise straightforward story.

 

Metafiction brings the reader into a story in a way that regular fiction does not – it asks you to divide your attention between what’s going on in terms of basic plot and how the story is being constructed or who is constructing it. In this sense, it reveals the narrative blueprint and attempts to show you something you might not otherwise have noticed – something about the power of fiction, about fiction’s relationship to what, I suppose, is its opposite, reality. This kind of fiction works in direct opposition to what John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, calls the vivid, continuous dream:

 

These novels give the reader an experience that assumes the usual experience of fiction as its point of departure, and whatever effect their work may have depends on their conscious violation of the usual fictional effect. What interests us in these novels is that they are not novels but instead, artistic comments on art.

 

It took me two or three tries to read past page 5 of Paul Auster’s Oracle Night, mainly because I generally dislike straightforward novels with writers as the main character. It wasn’t until I hit page 8 that I realized this wasn’t a straightforward novel and that Auster wasn’t writing a novel at all – but an artistic comment on art. So, I waited a few more days and finally sat down with it when I was in the mood to see what he might be doing.

 

Oracle Night begins with Sydner Orr, a writer, who is recovering from some unnamed but very serious illness. For the first time in months, Orr is able to begin work on a new manuscript which he bases on a small episode from Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon. Orr’s novel deals with a set of characters, who are also dealing with a manuscript – about a man who can predict the future. Already we have three stories floating around. Later in the book, Orr gets asked to write a screenplay about time travel. At another point, another character in the book, also a writer, shares some of his own work with Orr. Woven in and out of these other stories remains Orr’s ongoing account of his troubled marriage. The novel is a tangle of story after story after story. Somehow, hopefully, they are all connected. 

 

Unless their being connected is beside the point. Metafiction asks us to get over the idea of coherent story and look at a text’s fictionality. For Oracle Night this brought me to re-examine Orr, our first-person narrator, and to doubt him. I know that a first-person unreliable narrator is common in traditional fiction, but in that situation most often the reader learns early on that their narrator is not to be trusted, which then informs their unfolding understanding of the rest of the novel. In Auster’s world, the smooth surface of Orr’s narrative authority is never punctured. Instead, it was only at the end, looking back at Orr’s uncanny ability to create and maintain multiple stories coupled with his need to fictionalize his own reality that eventually had me wondering – it was like being handed an extreme version of the writer as puppet master. And suddenly I was looking at a whole other book.

 

But for the last week or so, I’ve been debating this interpretation. I realized that holding Oracle Night to my own strict definition of metafiction might have me reading a whole lot more into it than is really there. It’s a seductive idea but I can’t rule out the possibility I may just have it wrong. I see Auster commenting on the use of fiction and storytelling to mediate reality, on fate vs. destiny, on self-fulfilling prophecies…and maybe that’s all, and maybe that’s enough. But if Orr is a legitimate protagonist then a lot of that exploration stays too close to the surface for me.

 

Part of my hesitation may also come from the fact that I found myself disappointed with Auster’s writing style, so I’m unwilling to give him too much credit. I’m planning to read more of his stuff before deciding for sure, but I felt there was too much flat, sometimes clichéd writing in Oracle Night along with a lot of lengthy, unrealistic dialogue. Perhaps I am not forgiving enough of his homage to noir mystery or maybe he uses that style on purpose to make some point that I’m failing to see. Any Auster fans out there? How does Oracle Night compare with his other work?

 

 

Mary Doria Russell – The Sparrow

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Once in awhile a book comes along that sends me into a tailspin and I find myself putting off writing about it – mainly because I worry that anything I write couldn’t possibly do it justice. The easy thing to do would be to say – read this book, come back when you’re finished and then let’s talk. It’s that kind of book. It wants to be discussed.

 

I do not usually read science fiction. It just isn’t my thing. But when Ann from Table Talk, whose impeccable judgment I trust completely, recommended Mary Doria Russell’s novel The Sparrow, I went and got myself a copy right away. I believe Ann said the book was a revelation for her at the time she read it and that was certainly enough to get me interested. I love the idea that a single book can change the way we understand or think about the world. Literature is just that powerful.

 

The Sparrow is about Jesuit priests and space travel. A young scientist discovers radio waves from another planet which turn out to be music. He reveals his discovery to his closest friends, one of whom happens to be a Jesuit priest and linguistics expert named Emilio, and suddenly the Jesuits are funding a research expedition to get to the planet and see if they can make contact.

 

The novel is written in such a way, however, that you know from the very beginning the expedition was a failure. Eight people (four priests, four civilians) were sent, and only one has returned – Emilio. He is close to death when he arrives back on earth. All of the other travelers were killed somehow and Emilio was found by the rescue team working in a brothel. He also seems to have killed a child from the alien planet.

 

The Sparrow takes on a staggering number of philosophical questions – about religious faith and humanity, about definitions of sentient life and forms of social structure. It explores biological determinism, racism and political theory. And yet it is also a clearly-written story about friendship, love and adventure which takes place in a richly-imagined alien world.  

 

Highlights for me included the novel’s discussion about clerical celibacy, questions about assumptions/prejudices we might make with regard to other sentient beings, and the book’s investigation of a different and difficult-to-understand socio-political system. Also, The Sparrow looks at the idea of influence. What happens when a theoretically more-developed culture comes in contact with a theoretically less-developed culture? And who gets to decide what “developed” means?

 

It is hard to pinpoint a central question in The Sparrow but one which became very important for me by the end of the novel was a theological one – if we accept that God is good, how do we accept that He allows horrible things to happen? This paradox, I think, is fundamental to any exploration of faith. If we believe that a higher power has worked to put together or is fundamental to some kind of architecture – biological or moral – then we can’t help but be interested in understanding how that higher power is involved when the architecture breaks down.

 

Perhaps there are tons of science fiction novels with a similar preoccupation and since I don’t read them I’ve missed out until now, but I can’t help feeling this novel was unique. Russell’s prose is straightforward and her ideas complicated – an effective combination for a novel with so much going on.

 

 

 

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re-reading Joyce – chapter three

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It would be a gloomy secret night.

 

This line opens the second paragraph of Part III of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I have always wanted it to be the first line. The actual first line is just fine by itself, but this line seems to more perfectly capture what Part III will be about – sin and sorrow and fear, failure and shame.

 

I live in Switzerland so I’ll use the mountains to illustrate my point. Let’s imagine that Catholicism and its brand of spiritual health are the Alps. Stephen was born somewhere in the pre-Alps, not at the valley floor, mind you, but somewhere halfway up with a clear and breathtaking view of those formidable peaks. The mountains are so strong a presence in these kinds of villages that they define everything about your life – your work, your relationships, and even, sometimes, your health. As a child, Stephen spent a lot of his time wondering what it would be like to experience the world from that high up.

 

Slowly, as he grows olders and begins to learn, he begins to climb. Small forays to lower Alpine meadows with his classmates followed later by longer walks on his own along the more interesting trails. The mountains are still frightening, but beginning to feel a bit more comfortable.

 

I think for anyone born into this kind of landscape, the view up is just as impressive and awe-inspiring as the view down. And as you get higher, as you get closer to the top, the sheer power of the downward slopes starts to take on more significance than the summit.

 

So quite naturally, in Book III, Stephen starts exploring downward. He stops looking up and starts concentrating on the slippery, rocky slopes and the more rickety trails heading toward the valley floor. Stephen is a strong young man and he takes these paths with long strides and his eyes half-closed. Heading this direction changes everything – you hold yourself differently to keep your balance, the wind comes at your from an another angle, the scenery starts to change. The experience is thrilling in its novelty.

 

It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires.

 

Stephens heads down this mountain so fast, there are times he’s nearly in free fall. Things start to feel unfamiliar again and pretty soon, he’s gone further in a direction he didn’t even realize existed. People live quite differently on the valley floor of Stephen’s Catholic mountain and he’s suddenly alone, afraid and ashamed. At this point the mountains rise so high above him they block the sun and clouds have taken away his view of the peak.

 

The rest of Book III is about Stephen finding the courage to start walking up again. In many ways it is a dreary chapter, filled with long sermons and lengthy fire-and-brimstone reflections as Stephen works toward making a confession. One aspect of his thinking that I enjoyed seeing was his emphasis on human absolution before spiritual. He imagines a scene between himself and Emma, a young girl he has been smitten with for quite some time, which involves him asking her to forgive him for seeing her as a sexual object. Only after he’s worked this out in his mind and listened to a horribly graphic lecture on hell does he feel ready to head toward a priest and confess his time spent with several Dublin prostitutes.

 

If you’ll excuse the silliness of this extended metaphor, Stephen’s confession acts a bit like a chair-lift. Instead of walking back up the mountain he’s pulled quickly toward the summit on a theological mechanism.

 

The muddy streets were gay. He strode homeward, conscious of an invisible grace pervading and making light his limbs. In spite of all he had done it. He had confessed and God had pardoned him. His soul was made fair and holy once more, holy and happy.

 

I cannot imagine what turn-of-the century Irish Catholicism must have been like to experience as a creative, sensitive child, except that it must have been terribly frightening. Stephen takes everything a step beyond imagination. His body reacts physically to his thoughts as well as to the images in the sermons. This is something that makes the ending of Chapter III very interesting in that Stephen’s movement away from sin only becomes permanent when he takes communion. This physical act – just as sensual as his sin – is finally what transforms him completely.

 

 

 

Herodotus – Book I

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Slowly but surely I am getting back on track with the 10-year reading plan. I finished Book I of Herodotus The Histories last night and was delighted to get so caught up in many of his stories – my favorite, although it was horrible as well, was the story of a queen named Tomyris and her battle with Cyrus, the Persian king. When he begins to attack her she sends him this message:

 

I advise you to abandon this enterprise, for you cannot know if in the end it will do you any good. Rule your own people and try to bear the sight of me ruling mine. But of course you will refuse my advice, as the last thing you wish for is to live in peace.

 

She was correct and he did attack (using a rather nasty bit of strategy). He then took her son prisoner who ends up killing himself. Tomyris sends Cyrus a second message calling him a glutton for blood and advising him to retreat, advice he disregards and thus ensues a horrible, violent battle. Surprisingly, Cyrus and his Persians lose, and afterward, Tomyris scours the battlefield for Cyrus’s body. Once she has it she puts his head into an animal skin bag filled with human blood and says:

 

Though I have conquered you and live, yet you have ruined me by treacherously taking my son. See now – I fulfil my threat: you have your fill of blood.

 

It’s so gruesome but also vividly depicted. And I like her balanced understanding of the horrors of war. Sure, she won, but she also lost.

 

Herodotus is big on explaining foreign customs. These are some of the most entertaining passages of the text. In Book I, he dedicates several sections to explaining the various customs of the Lydians, the Persians, the Babylonians and the Massagatae. His description of an old Babylonian marriage custom is fairly entertaining:

 

In every village once a year all the girls of marriageable age used to be collected together in one place, while the men stood round them in a circle: an auctioneer then called each one in turn to stand up and offered her for sale, beginning with the best-looking and going on to the second best as soon as the first had been sold for a good price. Marriage was the object of the transaction. The rich men who wanted wives bid against each other for the prettiest girls, while the humbler folk, who had no use for good looks in a wife, were actually paid to take the ugly ones.

 

According to Herodotus, any money made on the sale of a beautiful woman went into the communal pot to help persuade the poor farmers to take an ugly girl.

 

The money came from the sale of the beauties, who in this way provided dowries for their ugly or misshapen sisters.

 

A very interesting system which Herodotus calls admirable and then laments because it has fallen out of practice. Yeah, I’m pretty broken up about that too.

 

There was another great story about a group of women who were enslaved by a conquering Ionian army and forced to become wives to their captors after their fathers, husbands and sons were all killed. In rebellion they decided never to sit at the table with their new husbands or to use their names, and they taught their daughters to do the same. I’d love to know how many generations this kept up.

 

Whoever he was, Herodotus had a knack for telling a good story. The introduction to my edition of The Histories tells me that Herodotus was an exile, first by force and then later because he chose to be. None of this is reliable but we enjoy having some idea of our historians, don’t we? Maybe he was a traveller, which would explain his dual interest in describing foreign customs and recording history as well as the sheer breadth of his project. I was interested to read that people would have been familiar with his work through oral recitals or performances. He himself may have travelled about performing certain passages at festivals and the like. And then people could debate his stories or discuss them. This made me think of Herodotus as the fifth century BC version of Sarah Vowell and then I wondered if he had a cool voice too.

 

Rhian Ellis – After Life

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Rhian Ellis’s novel After Life is a tricky one to write about. Mostly because any discussion of its subject will quickly give away its secrets. In a general sense, this is a novel about death and regret, about losing someone you care about and not knowing how to move on. But this preoccupation comes from a unique perspective since our main character (and narrator), Naomi, is a spiritualist and a medium.

 

Ellis handles this unfamiliar world with incredible restraint. Nowhere does the story derail into some sideshow spectacle of the bizarreness of communing with the dead or spiritualism’s eccentric adherents. These events and people are mostly treated as mundane experience and so the reader is able to appreciate them as such. Which is good because the actual story of After Life is not mundane at all.

 

This is all I can tell you: When the novel opens Naomi is remembering the day, ten years before, when she had to bury her boyfriend. I don’t mean this figuratively. She had to bury him with her own two hands, dig him a hole on the other side of a lake and try to get him in. It is a disturbing scene, made even more difficult by the fact that we don’t know how he died or why Naomi is burying him.

 

Somehow, despite this event, Naomi has managed to continue moving through her day to day. She takes care of someone else’s child. She works at the Spiritualist library/museum in her town. She gives readings and maintains her communion with the spirits who contact her about her clients. But it’s also abundantly clear that Naomi is not okay at all. She is unkempt (sometimes quite dirty), unsociable and easily upset. She struck me as an incredibly depressed individual.

 

Of course the inevitable occurs. Peter’s bones are found and the police begin an investigation to sort out who they belong to. They enlist the help of Naomi’s mother (also a medium) and Naomi gets involved. I can’t say anything else or I really will give something away.

 

More than these plot twists (as engaging as they were) After Life focused more on Naomi’s loneliness and regret. All was not right between Naomi and Peter before Peter died and Naomi is literally coming apart at the seams with remorse. Which is kind of ironic because, as a medium, she should still have access to him. If she wanted she could try to get through to him. And to make matters worse she has to negotiate the reality that in her professional life she is supposed to believe that dead people really haven’t gone away, so why should she be allowed to feel loneliness at all?

 

Naomi questions her powers throughout the book, which is something that made the novel interesting and complex. Many of the scenes that involve channeling spirits are layered with a level of doubt because Naomi admits that maybe she just imagined she saw someone’s grandmother, or maybe she just remembered details from a recent obituary. The novel opens up a thorough discussion about the powers of belief and how far they can be pushed to amend reality.

 

There were a few places where I felt Naomi’s voice got in the way. Where her narration didn’t quite give enough space to her gestures and words – which together tell us more about what she’s thinking and feeling than any explanation she can offer up. But the book itself is good enough that these come across as nothing more than little speed bumps. What was more compelling to me about Naomi as a narrator was that she has a secret she wants very much to keep to herself, yet she’s the one who has decided to tell her story. That paradox was particularly engaging.