Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

Reading Writer – Coetzee's Disgrace

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For a fiction writer looking to consider technique, Disgrace provides plenty to sink our teeth into. Coetzee makes some interesting stylistic choices as well as engages with some difficult subject matter. It is not an easy book, to read or study.

I’m going to start with some ridiculously simple basics, but I think in this case they are important. Disgrace is written in the present tense. That alone is a choice worth examining. The present tense is a powerful, but tricky medium. Obviously, it brings immediacy to the story. What is happening is happening right now, in something close to real time. It may sound contradictory, but being this close to a story can actually slow things down. The narrator can get bogged down in the minutiae of each and every action.

Fortunately, Coetzee imposes some necessary distance on the present tense story by using the third person. In other words, a filter:

For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex very well. (A description of his arrangement with a prostitute named Soraya follows).
Soraya is tall and slim, with long black hair and dark, liquid eyes. Technically, he is old enough to be her father; but then, technically, one can be a father at twelve.

This is a strong opening with a particular narrative voice. It establishes a close third person (allowing us access into the head of our main character, David Lurie) while at the same time making it very clear that a wry, opinionated (even slightly patronizing) narrator is in control of the story. This layering is one of the novel’s most successful elements.

This attentive narrator takes us through a period of Lurie’s life beginning with his regular appointments with a prostitute and ends with him confronting the fact he has lost the ability to seduce any woman he chooses. This story unfolds quickly, 10 pages in total, and weaves together back story, descriptions of Lurie’s thoughts and habits, and the situation leading him to the real story. Chapter One is an introduction of sorts, skillfully handled and economical. It doesn’t start in the thick of the action but brings us to the real story much more quietly. But appropriately. Words aren’t wasted and this is really important.

Chapter Two is an intense, extended scene. Lurie attempts to seduce one of his students. In this chapter the narrator virtually disappears. Between each line of dialogue or action, we get Lurie’s unfiltered thoughts. This is quite hard to pull off without losing the larger picture of what’s going on. But as the scene draws to a close, the narrator steps back in and asserts his more objective view over what’s been going on. An extremely effective method of making sure the reader understands the parallel emotion of the scene – Lurie’s nearly pathetic intensity and the girl’s wavering thrill. She’s flattered but also nervous.

Skip ahead. The next few chapters catalogue the love affair. He pursues, she gives in, she draws back, he fumbles. The affair becomes a scandal and Lurie must quit his position at the university where he teaches. Again, Lurie’s actions and thoughts are both explained and then sometimes criticized by the narrator.

He does not feel nervous. On the contrary, he feels quite sure of himself. His heart beats evenly, he has slept well. Vanity, he thinks, the dangerous vanity of the gambler; vanity and self-righteousness. He is going into this in the wrong spirit. But he does not care.

This distance remains extremely important, the only way for the narrator to help the reader develop his/her own feelings about the situation and more importantly, about Lurie.

A close third person narrator can be difficult to pull of effectively. We want to get inside our character’s head but in doing that can lose perspective beyond that character and, more importantly, about that character – which is the whole reason to use third person instead of first. Coetzee keeps just about as close to David Lurie as possible but he doesn’t merge with him and this is really important. He keeps a thin boundary – with narrative tone and an eye to Lurie’s surroundings. Lurie translates most of the reader’s impressions of each scene but he doesn’t dictate them – that distinction is key.

Carson McCullers – The Ballad of the Sad Café

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Last night I settled in to finish Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café. What a curiously dark and strange novella. So brooding and unusual. And yet, it really only tells the story of an ordinary love triangle. But the language and the visuals, the eccentric characters and the dreary misery of the town turn everything about that commonplace theme into something remarkable. 

The narrator opens by describing a bleak little town and its boarded up buildings, its miserable dullness and desperate surroundings. Then the reader is invited to consider what used to be a café. Here is where the real story begins.  

The back of my Penguin edition summarizes things so nicely, I’ll just quote it here: 

For this is the tale of Miss Amelia, gaunt and lonely owner of a small-town store; and how she squandered her love on Cousin Lymon, the little strutting hunchback who turned the store into a café; and how her rejected husband, Marvin Macy, the meanest man in town, came back and stole the hunchback’s heart; and of the gargantuan fight that followed. 

Sounds a bit grotesque, doesn’t it? A hunchback, a lonely, eccentric woman and an ex-convict. And there was something definitely fantastic about it – Miss Amelia in her swamp boots carrying Cousin Lymon on her back, and Marvin Macy greasing himself up for the fight like a hog. The chocolate and sugar snuff that Cousin Lymon kept packed between his teeth or the outlandish remedies Miss Amelia practiced on her willing patients.

But despite the fantastic quality of the situation, the overall aesthetic was both melancholy and sad. Miss Amelia’s initial hardness wears away, revealing the anxious lover beneath. Cousin Lymon loses his magical aura and becomes pathetic and weak, willing to do anything for the attention of Marvin Macy. And Marvin Macy just wants his revenge. The ending is ugly and desperate, a truly sad ballad.  

McCullers is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers. She has four novels in total, several short stories and a collection of poetry. All of them are purported to exhibit her tragicomic vision of existence. It doesn’t surprise me in the least to learn that she wrote poetry, as all I’ve read of her writing until now is strongly infused with what I would consider a poetic sensibility – a certain rhythm in the sentences and a dependence on unexpected visual imagery. Engaging and thoughtful, with a real sympathy for misfit-type people, she’s a pure delight to read.

Rohinton Mistry – Family Matters

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I am about to finish Rohinton Mistry’s novel, Family Matters, for my March book group meeting next week. This is my first experience with Mistry and I’m still working out how I feel about the book and his particular writing style.  

My initial reaction was pretty negative and if I hadn’t been reading the book for a discussion next week I would have put it down after 80 pages and never looked back. But these are the moments when I have to admit what a picky reader I can be. For the most part, the story is engaging – a wide-ranging exhibit of the frustrations, minor joys and necessary compromises of modern family life in Bombay.  

Family Matters deals specifically with three siblings – Roxana, Coomy and Jal and their shared burden in caring for their step-father/father Nariman who suffers from Parkinson’s. But it’s also about Nariman’s youth and his failed love affair with a woman of a lower caste, a woman he should have married but couldn’t. This doomed relationship ruined Nariman’s marriage with Coomy and Jal’s mother. And if that central story weren’t enough, there is a lot more going on in tangential stories about Roxana’s two children and her husband, about their neighbors and even Bombay politics. 

As you can see, it’s a huge, sweeping novel with great ambition. Unfortunately, I felt the novel just missed the mark somehow. There are lovely, moving scenes scattered throughout the entire book, particularly between Nariman and his grandchildren, but most of the time the narrative cuts too many corners to achieve anything really powerful. There was too much vigorous explaining in the exposition and a lot of awkward dialogue so I could never forget I was reading something and simply lose myself in the story.  

However, I have heard such good things about his first and second novels, Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance and I’d like to give them both a try before I decide Mistry isn’t a writer for me. 

Nadine Gordimer – A World of Strangers

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Have I made it clear how much I respect Nadine Gordimer? In case anyone missed it, let me mention yet again how often I pick up one of her books, read for a while and settle in to the comfortable bliss of admiration. Her talent and insight are immense. I particularly appreciate that she dedicates that talent to the creation of a discussion about the injustice and moral poverty of any situation of apartheid or discrimination.  

However, it isn’t the political agenda of her work that establishes its excellence. It is much more than that. It is her profound understanding of the human creature, with all our whims and contradictions, our emotional complexity and frightened empathy. Somehow, she manages to get right to the essence of a character, an essence which, I think, is quite simply a reflection of the reader. Her characters are not just people she’s invented and sent off to wander the landscape of her imagination. They are us.  

Which is why the title of her second novel, A World of Strangers, is really more of a challenge thrown at the reader. Yes, the book is set in South Africa during the early years of apartheid and many of us don’t have first hand experience with that system. But yet the division she considers, the ignorance and racism she puts on display, is chillingly familiar. 

A World of Strangers is thematically quite similar to her first novel, The Lying Days – the story of an individual coming to grips with South African culture in the initial years after the Nationalist Party came to power and established the legal institution of cultural segregation. However, whereas The Lying Days is about coming to terms with one’s own culture and defining oneself within that culture, A World of Strangers approaches the same questions through the eyes of an outsider looking in.  

Our narrator Toby is a young Englishman sent to South Africa to work for the family business. He comes from the upper middle class but also from a family with open-minded political beliefs. Toby doesn’t negate those beliefs but he doesn’t embrace them in the same eager way as his family. At best, he agrees but is uninterested in wasting his time on the debate. As he gets established in Johannesburg, he begins to move between two worlds – the contented and extremely wealthy white suburbs and the animated but poor black townships. These two worlds are embodied in two of his relationships – a love affair with Cecil, a white divorcée, and a close friendship with Steven, an educated and dashing young black man.  

Toby considers himself immune from the rules of apartheid and travels freely, even carelessly, between his white friends and the townships. He knows enough to keep his worlds separated, not allowing the two to meet. One of the things I found so honest about Toby was his understanding that neither of those two lives was really for him. He disdained many aspects of his wealthy friends’ undemanding and counterfeit lives but at the same time understood he would never have the courage to face the poverty and violence of the townships.  

Toby slides back and forth between the two worlds, and in a way, he becomes a smug voyeur. Sampling the best of both worlds, keeping himself apart when it suits him and never feeling guilty about his own double standard. Of course this kind of social schizophrenia cannot really last. Eventually, a tragedy requires Toby to confront his emotional sightseeing. He’s forced to face up to the disaster of apartheid and what it means to him personally. No longer a system that has nothing to do with him but one that is him, is in him, that he cannot just walk away from. 

A World of Strangers was published in 1958. It was banned in South African for twelve years.     

Tran thi Thuong-Thuong – Letters to a Teacher

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A friend of mind has just published a lovely little book called Letters to a Teacher: Six years in the Vietminh War Zone 4 and I want to write about it in the hopes of generating some interest in her project. The book is a translation of a series of letters written by Tran thi Thuong-Thuong, my friend’s mother, to her former school teacher. The letters were written in 1995 when Tran was finally living in the United States and were sent to her teacher who had also relocated to America and who was at that point bed-ridden, quite elderly and longing to remember the country she had left behind.  

Tran has an incredible story to tell about a short period of her life (1946 to 1952) when she was living and teaching in the Communist-controlled area of North Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The book contains five richly detailed letters just bursting with stories about the necessity of teaching every lesson with a Marxist-Leninist slant, about trying to help students learn while all around them their world grew more and more violent, about having two young children in such a frightening and unstable situation.   

Eventually, Tran and her husband decide they will escape to the South in the hopes of securing a better future for their children and reuniting with Tran’s family (whom she had not seen or heard from in years because of the fighting). They escape separately, Tran going first with her two children – she tells of hiding her three-year-old daughter under a load of bananas to avoid detection and then watching as the bananas get covered in water by soldiers, preparing bamboo arm sheaths to ward off attacks by orangutans in the jungle, and watching her five-year-old son walk hot railroad tracks for miles and miles and never once complaining at the blisters and welts that soon appeared on his feet. 

Quite an incredible memoir. Tran remembers what she calls the death of her youth with honest precision and painstakingly explains what went on for ordinary citizens at a time of such political and social turmoil. Many of the stories are frightening – about torture, brainwashing and poverty, while others describe endless indoctrination meetings and the dwindling trust between former neighbors and friends along with the frustrating necessity of negotiating a complex and often terrifying government system. 

For anyone looking to learn about this period of Vietnamese history, Letters to a Teacher provides an excellent entry. And in a more general way, it is quite simply a moving story of one woman trying to be a teacher and a mother under some extraordinary circumstances.

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Achilles has a dilemma – Book Nine

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I finished Book Nine of The Iliad last evening. What a significant chapter. One that, I think, really gets to the heart of what The Iliad is really about. 

This book is titled The Embassy to Achilles and it covers the moment when Agamemnon sends his most trusted advisors to broker a treaty with Achilles. At this point, the Achaeans have been fighting pretty seriously for quite some time in the renewed battle and they are exhausted. Achilles has been nursing his rage and wounded pride in his tents. The Achaeans really need him. And Agamemnon comes out with an offer that seems pretty fair. He’s not only willing to give back what he unjustly took from Achilles, he’s willing to bestow a myriad of other gifts as well. In essence, he’s agreeing to magnify Achilles’s kleos to a significant degree.  

It was the loss of this kleos that we are meant to believe is the whole reason why Achilles has been abstaining from the war. Except in this chapter he refuses Agamemnon’s offer and admits to a more troubling reason altogether: 

Mother tells me / the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet / that two fates bear me on to the day of death. / If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy, / my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies. / If I voyage back to the fatherland I love, / my pride, my glory dies… / true, but the life that’s left me will be long, / the stroke of death will not come on me quickly. 

What a decision Achilles has to make. Long life and no glory or accept that a glorifying death will come to him soon and he’ll be revered as one of the greatest fighters of all time. I know that Achilles will eventually be impelled to join the fighting when he loses his friend Patrocles, but I find his hesitancy and his fear in these chapters quite touching. Who wouldn’t stop a moment and really think about how to proceed? He hasn’t seen his homeland in nearly ten years, it seems natural to me that he might be more than a little homesick. And that he might kindof prefer the idea of a quiet death surrounded by his loved ones.  

Achilles is a fascinating character because he’s half god and half human. I think The Iliad makes a careful exploration of this idea by rendering him more human as the story gains momentum. Wrath – which removes him from his fellow soldiers, is such a god-like emotion. Fear – which keeps him away, is much more human. And grief – which will eventually drive him right back into the thick of the fighting, is even more so.

Martin Amis – Time's Arrow

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On Saturday I finished Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis. If anyone remembers from last year I read Amis’s House of Meetings and think it might have been the very best book of 2007, so I was very excited when a friend of mine recommended Time’s Arrow to me. She described the novel as unique and unique is exactly right.

Time’s Arrow moves backward. And not like most reverse novels which have forward moving sections that go backward in time, section by section. In Time’s Arrow, everything is in reverse. Letters are ‘born’ out of fire or garbage cans, death is actually an act of creation, doctors do damage to patients who have come in looking healthy and well. The book is genius. And short enough that this distinctive narrative stance doesn’t become too exhausting.  

The point-of-view structure of the book adds wonderful texture. It is narrated in the first person, by Tod or Hamilton or Odilo, depending on the period of his life, but at the same time it is in the third person. The narrator is writing about himself but with a forced disassociation. What results is two layers of consciousness, a spliced version of “my life passed before my eyes”. Our narrator feels that this backward movement is all wrong which helps mediate it for the reader. But he also misinterprets almost everything about the story which makes us feel for him as we read along. 

You want to know what I do? All right. Some guy comes in with a bandage around his head. We don’t mess about. We’ll have that off. He’s got a hole in his head. So what do we do. We stick a nail in it. Get the nail – a good rusty one – from the trash or wherever. And lead him out to the Waiting Room where he’s allowed to linger and holler for a while before we ferry him back to the night.  

Time’s Arrow is the story of one man’s life – in reverse, from the moment of his death to the moment of his birth. He is an extraordinary man who takes on successive identities as we follow him back in time, from Tod Friendly, a reputable doctor near Boston, to Odilo Unverdorben, a Nazi physician at Auschwitz. The peculiar inverse linearity of the novel twists and challenges our understanding of his life’s acts. Especially when we finally arrive at the concentration camp.  

It is a commonplace to say that the triumph of Auschwitz was essentially organizational: we found the sacred fire that hides in the human heart – and built an autobahn that went there. But how to explain the divine synchronies of the ramp? At the very moment that the weak and young and old were brought from the Sprinkleroom to the railway station, as good as new, so their menfolk completed the appointed term of labour service and ventured forth to claim them, on the ramp, a trifle disheveled to be sure, but strong and sleek from their regime of hard work and strict diet. As matchmakers, we didn’t know the meaning of the word failure; on the ramp, stunning successes were as cheap as spit. When the families coalesced, how their hands and eyes would plead for one another, under our indulgent gaze. We toasted them far into the night. 

Amis’s atypical rendering of the timeline emphasizes the actual horror of what happened. And the reversal of Tod’s acts as a physician in Boston (harming people) compared to his work as a Nazi doctor (healing people) presents an uncomfortable reality. The two layers of consciousness run in opposite directions – the Tod being described who spent his entire life moving deliberately away from his past as a Nazi doctor but the Tod telling the story who is racing, unaware of what’s awaiting him, back into that terror. The tension created from these opposing realities is simply overwhelming. 

Definitely a book I will go back to again and again.

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Nadine Gordimer – The Lying Days

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Reading Nadine Gordimer’s first novel The Lying Days (1953) is a bit like being introduced to someone you’ve been wanting to meet for a long time. There’s a huge amount of expectation involved and not just a little preconceived notion. I was uneasy to start that first page, nervous she wouldn’t live up to all I’ve decided she already is. 

Thankfully, I wasn’t at all disappointed. All of her subsequent accomplishments can be easily spotted in the pages of this first sampling of her art. As much as the term can annoy me with its ability to reduce a larger work into some easily pocketable catch-phrase, The Lying Days is a coming-of-age novel. Our narrator Helen will grow up in these pages, discover herself, discover the world and come to contemplate her own substance.  

The novel begins with a vivid evocation of both transgression and trespass. Young Helen, maybe 7 or 8, quarrels with her mother and as a result ventures out of her safe white community into the roiling and colorful atmosphere of a nearby township. This first voyage into a place she should not be is a visceral experience for our narrator, both frightening and exciting, that serves as a template for the rest of the novel – the sensual and intellectual delight of contravention.  

Gordimer is interested in the space where the political and the emotional interact. This is where her characters really come to life. This first novel makes that very clear. However, it doesn’t merge the two as seamlessly as most of her later work. But what The Lying Days does reveal, quite splendidly, is Gordimer’s uncanny perception into those unique moments of human interaction. 

I could nearly pick a page at random and find something similar but this particular passage struck me – these lines come from when Helen has left her family and set up a new life in Johannesburg:

So I, who had inherited no God, made my mystery and my reassurance out of human love; as if the worship of love in some aspect is something without which the human condition is intolerable and terrifying, and humans will fashion it for their protection out of whatever is in their lives as birds will use string and bits of wool to make a nest in the city where there are no reeds.  

Where the first sections of the book remain subtly political, the second half is intensely so. Helen becomes involved with a man who is passionately fighting against the newly elected National Party and their policy of apartheid. These sections do lose some of “Helen’s story” in a larger sense but they are still quite fascinating. And the events she witnesses shape her as much as her love affair and her friendships. By the end of the book, Helen has become a complicated character who comes into her own both powerfully and honestly.  

Beginning Gordimer

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This is my year reading South African writer Nadine Gordimer. My first experience with Gordimer’s writing came about five or six years ago when I read The Pick Up. That novel, with its subtle courage and inimitable prose, made me an instant admirer of a writer I would come to esteem more than any other. Her writing is thick – textured and nuanced, complicated and beautiful. Her subjects are always morally challenging and she extends that challenge beyond her novels through the creation of engaging human/humane characters. 

I am about to finish up her first novel, The Lying Days, published in 1953 when she was thirty years old. To say that I am impressed is a gross underestimation of how awed I actually am at the near perfection of her project, for both its writing and its political preoccupation. This example of her earliest work reveals all the wonderful potential of the writer she will grow to be, making me even more excited to continue my chronological journey through her literature.  

Here is an excerpt from her 1991 Nobel Prize Banquet Speech:

Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations. We writers do not have the encouragement and mateyness I imagine, and even observe, among people whose work is a group activity. We are not orchestrated; poets sing unaccompanied, and prose writers have no cue on which to come in, each with an individual instrument of expression to make the harmony or dissonance complete. We must live fully in order to secrete the substance of our work, but we have to work alone. From this paradoxical inner solitude our writing is what Roland Barthes called ‘the essential gesture’ towards the people among whom we live, and to the world; it is the hand held out with the best we have to give.

Nabokov, Longinus and the tingle

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From Nabokov’s chapter on Bleak House in his Lectures on Literature:  

Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. 

Reading this passage last night reminded me that our reaction to truly great literature is physical rather than cerebral. A fact that writers, philosophers and literary critics have been attempting to dissect and understand for a very long time.  

One of the earliest attempts was by Longinus (first century AD) with his treatise On the Sublime. It has been a few years since I sat down meaningfully with this text so my memory of it needs refreshing. But what I do remember is an eloquent endeavor to appreciate and explain our complicated emotional reaction to words either read or heard.  Longinus discusses writers like Sophocles, Homer, Aeschylus and Euripedes and details their little flashes of genius, those instants when the listener experiences “the tingle”.  

The tingle is the sublime. The moment we lose rational thought and absorb or react to a text with our senses alone. For Longinus the sublime is created by something he calls elevated language. And elevated language is the result of five conditions:  

First and most important is the power of forming great conceptions, as we have elsewhere explained in our remarks on Xenophon. Secondly, there is vehement and inspired passion. These two components of the sublime are for the most part innate. Those which remain are partly the product of art. The due formation of figures deals with two sorts of figures, first those of thought and secondly those of expression. Next there is noble diction, which in turn comprises choice of words, and use of metaphors, and elaboration of language. The fifth cause of elevation–one which is the fitting conclusion of all that have preceded it–is dignified and elevated composition.  

I love how his definition encompasses both innate and learned elements. Which is what makes writing an art form and not simply uncontrolled instinct. To my thinking, literature is too important to be left to such hazard. I want to believe that great writers have worked and reflected and struggled to produce their beautiful objects, but at the same time, they wouldn’t have been able to succeed without some innate gift.

So how does elevated language result in the sublime? Longinus writes: 

The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport.  

Transport. This is exactly what Nabokov is talking about in the introductory essay to his Lectures when he calls a great writer an enchanter. Someone who creates an entirely new world and maintains it without crack or fissure in its enclosure.  

Nabokov echoes Longinus elsewhere in his Bleak House essay when he praises Dickens for his “vivid evocation”, his ability to combine words to extraordinary affect. He cites a moment when Dickens describes an ocean scene through Esther’s eyes – when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea and then just after, she continues to explain the way these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed. Nabokov reminds us that in a few simple words Dickens creates a new image. More than that, he creates a revelation: 

…in comparison to the conventional blue sea of literary tradition these silvery pools in the dark sea offer something that Dickens noted for the very first time with the innocent and sensuous eye of the true artist, saw and immediately put into words. Or more exactly, without the words there would have been no vision; and if one follows the soft, swishing, slightly blurred sound of the sibilants in the description, one will find that the image had to have a voice too in order to live. 

Bleak House contains thousands of similar moments. Tiny word combinations that take us less than a second to read. Our eyes fly across the sentences. But in those perfect instances, the sublime pulls us up short. We stumble, absorb the image or idea with our physical being. We react and the memory of that reaction becomes a physical recollection and therefore that much stronger. It will be hard to let go. 

I want to let Nabokov say this again – Let us worship the spine and its tingle.