Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

January and February reading

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January and February took me by surprise – I have been reading a ton, but nearly all of my reading for the past two months has been for the prize that my novel won last year, The Christopher Doheny Award. This is an award that honors writing about physical illness and these books (both memoir and fiction) have been fascinating, difficult, sad, beautiful—they have given me much to think about.

That reading period is now over and I’m excited about the book that was selected for the prize this year. I will write more about it when I’m able to.

In the midst of all that reading, I’ve been reading/re-reading short books and essays and turning to a lot of comfort reading. I’ve now finished Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart, am about halfway through her The Passion According to G.H. I spent one evening comparing two translations of Agua Viva (1989’s The Stream of Life, tr. Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz, and 2012’s Agua Viva, tr. Stefan Tobler). The differences between these two versions are both very slight and really interesting – and worth a post all on their own. The 1989 version is definitely worth picking up for Hélène Cixous’s marvelous introduction. I’ve also now re-read The Hour of the Star and can’t stop thinking about it. February has been a month of Lispector.

Comfort reading also means Anne Carson, so I’ve been reading and re-reading “The Glass Essay” and Nay Rather as well as selections from Men in the Off Hours. I could just get lost in her work. I have started flipping through red doc > but didn’t have the concentration for it on the afternoon I settled in. So that’s on my list this week.

One work stands out from all this “small” reading as well—Alice Oswald’s Tithonus, 46 minutes in the life of the dawn. I have Anthony to thank for this one. What an absolutely stunning text. I keep reading and re-reading. I am hard-pressed to pick a favorite passage, but this one may just be it (I had to put a hyphen in to preserve the line-breaks, why WordPress can’t do this, I’ll never know):

     she never quite completes her

sentence but is always almost

–

and this is what draws me to the

window this huge fragment broken off

with the mind-spire winding through

it also unfinished

–

she never quite completes her

sentence but is always almost

–

and this is what draws me to the

window too late I notice my head still

balanced on my neck but severed by

light from myself not knowing but

almost

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Shirley Hazzard – The Bay of Noon

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I read Shirley Hazzard’s The Bay of Noon too quickly, admiring it on a superficial level only, and so what she was doing and how the narrative worked eluded me until I sat down to write about it and began re-reading the first few pages. These lines, which come just at the end of the third paragraph forced me to slow down, begin again and read the entire novel a second time:

…chronological prestige is tenacious (NB: Hazzard means here the right to look back upon an event from a far point in the future): once attained, it can’t be shed; it increases moment by moment, day by day, pressing its honours on you until you are lavishly, overly endowed with them. Until you literally sink under them.

What is more curious about this passage is that the narrator – a woman named Jenny – does something unexpected with it. These sentences sound like a kind of regret, a sad meditation upon memory and old age, how remembered experience will whittle away under its increasingly detailed accumulation. But she immediately tells us that she is looking forward to this, that certain memories she would like to get out from under.

This then sets the frame for her story, which begins with two encounters while she is working as a translator at a NATO base in Naples sometime in the 1960s. Her first encounter is presented as a non-encounter; she is sent to do a translation off-base for a visiting marine biologist, a Scotsman. She does the job and leaves. But because of this unexpected change in her usual schedule, she ends up with free time to go into Naples for the first time, and here occurs the second encounter, this one described immediately in terms that illustrate its importance. It’s an extended scene in which Jenny meets Gioconda, a scene that covers nearly four pages. Something I loved about this scene is that it involves Jenny describing Gioconda (a woman who will immediately become a very close friend) but it reveals so much more about Jenny.

The novel then goes about its duty of taking the reader through Gioconda and Jenny’s friendship, Jenny’s relationship with the Scotsman, which is wonderfully peculiar and sad, as well as Jenny’s relationship as a third-wheel with Gioconda and her lover, Gianni, which is somehow more ordinary at first but then becomes a central element of the bigger questions the novel raises.

Jenny’s time in Naples is situated beneath an unusual emotional umbrella. She has gone there to escape an unrequited love story – that doesn’t sound unusual, I know. But the person she was in love with (whom I won’t tell you) is what makes it so unique, and so touching.

And the book is about nothing more than this. Jenny and Gioconda, Gioconda and Gianni, Jenny and the Scotsman, and so on and so forth. But it manages—in very few pages—to reveal these four people in great depth, to look at them through personally historical but also culturally historical lenses, to make subtle (but uncommon) pronouncements on human feeling and behavior. For nearly a third of the book their meetings and conversations and comings and goings proceed without much narrative intervention, until almost the point that we forget that Jenny is telling the story from some point in the future, and that her perspective is more melancholy than anything else.

But then we reach the end and the timeline gets jumbled. This jumbling is purposeful (and was hinted at in those first paragraphs on the distance between memories and how it influences understanding). The last twenty or so pages of the novel require a very slow, a very careful reading. Done this way, the experience of what Hazzard is offering stretches long and lovely. Layers of meaning unfold, references back to earlier statements and questions, new insights into several of the characters, careful reflections on memory and friendship.

This is one of those books that sneaks up on you if you let it. I’ve read Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, and enjoyed it (and it lingers in my memory with a similar tone to The Bay of Noon – a little bit haunting with sharp, incisive passages peppered throughout), but it has been some years now and I feel like I should go back and re-read to see what else it may offer.

Serious and silly

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Am reading a ton at the moment, and loving the feel of a brain alive. On the serious side of things, I started reading Susan Sontag’s collection Against Interpretation. I have only read bits and pieces of Sontag over the last ten years or so, I’ve never concentrated on her work in a systematic way and so begins a nice journey through her brilliant and critical mind.

From her essay “On Style” I’ve been highlighting left and right, but the following phrases/sections have stayed with me now for a few days:

“Art is seduction, not rape.”

“A work of art is a kind of showing or recording or witnessing which gives palpable form to consciousness; its object is to make something singular explicit.” (I love this. I have been repeating this to myself over and over.)

“Usually critics who want to praise a work of art feel compelled to demonstrate that each part is justified, that it could not be other than it is. And every artist, when it comes to his own work, remembering the role of chance, fatigue, external distractions, knows what the critic says to be a lie, know that it could well have been otherwise. The sense of inevitability that a great work of art projects is not made up of the inevitability or necessity of its parts, but of the whole.”

On the sillier side of things, I received a gift in the mail yesterday. Ella Frances Sanders’ Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World.

This book, which is both funny and profound, is the way to a translator’s heart.

Here are some I love:

COMMUOVERE (Italian) – v. To be moved in a heartwarming way, usually relating to a story that moved you to tears.

MÅNGATA (Swedish) – n. The road-like reflection of the moon in the water.

KOMOREBI (Japanese) – n. The sunlight that filters through the leaves of the trees.

MAMIHLAPINATAPAI (Yaghan). n. A silent acknowledgement and understanding between two people, who are both wishing or thinking the same thing (and both unwilling to initiate).

You can see more about this book here.

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A new year

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This past year involved a few wonderful things —I’m speaking strictly of small personal events and a handful of excellent books and not of the series of horrific world events that I find overwhelmingly preoccupying—but, sadly, the last twelve months did not involve nearly enough good reading. I think I actually read less than forty books this past year. This depresses me. I feel the most alive when I am reading and thinking about books and how they work. So I am desperately looking forward to 2015 and a series of reading projects I have planned.

First, however, a short list of the books I read and loved in 2014 (even if they were not published in 2014):

  • To Hell with Cronjé, by Ingrid Winterbach, tr. Elsa Silke
  • Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson, tr. Anne Born
  • August by Christa Wolf, tr. Katy Derbyshire
  • Orkney by Amy Sackville
  • The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, tr. Shaun Whiteside
  • A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Nay, Rather by Anne Carson
  • Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

I’d love to discuss any of these books with you – and recommendations based on them would also be very welcome.

My reading in 2015 is off to a good start, however. I rang in the New Year with a jetlagged midnight re-read of Clarisse Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart. I enjoyed this book when I first read it, but I read it too closely to a read of Agua Viva and The Hour of the Star. This was too much Lispector at once and I did not appreciate it in the way I could have. I was entranced with this re-read a few nights ago – highlighting, taking notes, pausing to re-read paragraphs. Although I find this comparison a little troublesome, Lispector affects me in a similar way to Woolf – she asks me to engage with a complicated and fast-moving interior world, one that feels achingly familiar at times and wholly alien at others. You know that early scene of Joyce’s in A Portrait of the Artist, when he situates Stephen within the vast universe for the first time? That is what Lispector does again and again and again – she situates the mind of her character in relation to the universe, to others, to herself. She is constantly periscoping outward and inward and it can be dizzying but it is always illuminating and provocative.

The second book I’ve started for 2015 is Shirley Hazzard’s 1970 novel The Bay of Noon. This is one of the books that takes some warming up to. But I am about halfway through and looking forward to see how Hazzard pulls it all together. It is a short little book but formal—I mean formal in the way the prose feels, and structurally as well. Here is one of several lines I keep going back to:

That is something one does not foresee in wishing to elude one’s traditions: that the threat, once its fangs are drawn, may become transfigured into intimacy, a frame of reference.

Last but not least, a haphazard (because still in the planning stages) list of the reading projects I plan to move ahead on in 2015:

I have started reading Beckett finally, an author I have been meaning to read for some time. Anthony of Time’s Flow has piqued my curiosity with his many discussions of Beckett’s work and journals. I have begun with Molloy.

In 2014, I discovered Muriel Spark and plan to read as many of her novels as I can find this year. Her humor is very welcome, as is her biting social commentary.

I am about halfway through my start-to-finish Virginia Woolf read. I hope to finish this year.

Several authors I plan to read as much as possible of this year – Anne Carson, Nabokov, Coetzee and Clarisse Francillon. All extremely different writers, much to look forward to.

More poetry! More poetry!

One of the things I’d like to work on this year is non-fiction/philosophy/essay reading. I am still compiling a list of writers and books and will write more about this later.

Finally, some friends of mine and I recently engaged in a recommendations game. We are all serious readers but with quite different tastes. We gave each other a list of our “perfect books” and the reasons why. Based on these lists we then gave each other a single book recommendation. It was a great bit of fun, and I received the following three books to read: Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing.  So those are now added to my list.

And last but not least, I have a rather random pile of fiction waiting for me. I’ve collected these titles from reviews and recommendations from readers I trust:

  • A Life with Mary Shelley – Barbara Johnson
  • The Hum of Concrete – Anna Solding
  • A Town of Empty Rooms – Aimee Bender
  • Project for a Fainting – Brenda Shaughnessy
  • The Fountains of Neptune – Rikki Ducornet
  • My Mother: Demonology – Kathy Acker
  • Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
  • The House of Breath – William Goyen
  • All the Birds Singing – Evie Wyld
  • We are the Birds of the Coming Storm – Lola Lafon

So that’s it – anyone have a burning recommendation for me? The very best book you read in 2014 and would love to pass on to my ever-growing list? Please don’t hesitate!

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Angharad Price-The Life of Rebecca Jones

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Angharad Price’s The Life of Rebecca Jones (tr. Lloyd Jones) was my book group’s selection for this month. It is tiny – just about 150 pages – although it contains a full life history and in many ways could be considered a family saga. As the title suggests, it is the story of a woman named Rebecca Jones, born in 1905 in the small Welsh valley of Maesglasau. Rebecca is our narrator and she tells of each of her six siblings – five boys and another girl. Only five of these seven lived to adulthood, her four brothers and herself. A particularity of this family is that three of her brothers were blind, two from birth and the third losing his sight as a teenager.

The focus of this short novel is on family, on notions of home and duty and long-term relationships to the land and one’s origins. Rebecca takes care of each brother as he is born, of her parents as they age, of her brothers’ families as they grow. Theirs is a rural life and she goes into great detail of the work that must be done on their farm and their connection to the other farmers and the nearby villages. It is a book that lovingly describes what it must have been like to live in rural Wales across the span of the 20th century. I found the discussions of language fascinating, as her blind brothers were schooled in England and had to learn to negotiate their bilingualism and their Welsh-ness.

I will admit right away that while I enjoyed reading this story, it isn’t a book that set off any immediate readerly explosions for me. I often prefer a less straightforward kind of storytelling, and much of the book is composed of exposition detailing the history and daily lives of each of the book’s characters. It doesn’t read – at least not all of the time – like a novel. At the same time, there is quite a bit of poetry mixed throughout, examples of verse from the famous Welsh poet Hugh Jones for one, but also each chapter opens with a lyrical portrait of the region or a kind of prologue in a style much different from the actual storytelling. This was an interesting structure, to put these two starkly different styles in juxtaposition, instead of telling the entire story in a more blended combination of the two.

Something I did find very beautiful came toward the end of the book, when Rebecca writes about the fact that she was never able to leave home and yet she yearned for foreign travel. Instead she travels the world over a series of months by using a local library and its books to see the things she has always wanted to see.

I cannot remember how long I spent travelling. Whether it was days, weeks, months, I cannot say. It was a time of sweet enthralment, and for the first time in my life I felt carefree. I was away for so long I forgot about home.

I think most readers will find a lovely truth in these passages. How books can take you away from yourself but also become an inseparable part of you. How they change and liberate you.

The frame of the book is that Rebecca Jones is at the end of her life and looking back over her experiences, telling us of her “self”. Using this frame, which becomes more pronounced at the very end of the book, she engages in a short discussion on memory:

I sometimes think that the act of remembering life gives more pleasure than living itself. We can select, delete, amplify, recreate, interpret memories. But life itself is unpredictable and unruly. Certain things can be recalled at will; others thrown into the bottomless pit of forgetting. We can choose when to laugh and to cry; when to challenge and to submit. Such is the privilege of remembering.

This particular passage goes on then to mean something else by the time you hit the very last page of the book – in which a large surprise awaits the reader. I have mixed feelings about the surprise (mixed feelings which have more to do with my looking at the book as a writer who is somewhat obsessed with structure and how structure affects meaning), but it adds an interesting layer of metafiction to this very short novel, and does make the book so much more than a family history.

Finally, both the Afterword and the Translator’s Note invited me to look back over The Life of Rebecca Jones and consider it from a few different angles. The translation angle interests me the most, especially because the book was originally published in 2002 and apparently for a long time people thought it might be impossible to translate. That is fascinating to me because of the expository parts of the book and how stark I found the contrast between those sections and the poetic interludes. It made me wonder how easily the Welsh was rendered into English, and if in the original these two sections were more blended.

Overall – and this is the best part of any good book – it has made me very curious to read further into translated Welsh fiction. Any suggestions?

Kazuo Ishiguro – A Pale View of Hills

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I am trying to get back into the habit of taking some notes of my reading and finding time to write up thoughts in this space. I’ve neglected this blog over the last two years and this feels a little unsteadying. I am never quite as happy as when I have time to think (which for me means writing) about a book. But I’ve gotten into the habit of thinking about each book as a potential “review” and this has kept me from writing a bit more freely about the books I’m reading.

A few months ago a good friend passed me Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills. I’ve read him before, and in fact, An Artist of the Floating World as well as Never Let Me Go are both favorites of mine—although for very very very different reasons. But A Pale View of Hills is one of those books that went on the special shelf I reserve for books I end up thinking of as “perfect”.

I found it perfect for a number of reasons—in its prose style mainly (Ishiguro is a quiet writer who writes directly and simply but still achieves an overall lyrical feel) but also its structure and the way the time jumps inform the front story in surprising ways.

The novel is told by Etsuko and she begins by telling us something of her two daughters—Niki, who is younger and half-English, and Keiko, who is Japanese. The novel takes place over the course of Niki’s five-day-visit to Etsuko in her countryside home in England—that is the present framework—but the story is actually one of Etsuko going back into the past, into post WWII Japan and telling the reader something of her life at that time, before she came to England.

It isn’t just Niki’s visit to her mother that inspires these memories, but the recent suicide of the older daughter Keiko. Ishiguro writes this devastating sentence on page two:

The English are fond of their idea that our race has an instinct for suicide, as if further explanations are unnecessary; for that was all they reported, that she was Japanese and that she had hung herself in her room.

That “as if further explanations are unnecessary” is so key here. Not only does it reflect the depth of bitterness and maybe even resignation that Etsuko is dealing with, but it also gives the reader the entire reason for the story she is about to tell.

The book then very quickly jumps into the past and Etsuko begins to tell the story of a woman she once knew, a woman named Sachiko with whom she was not really friends but with whom she spent much of a summer while she was pregnant with Keiko. Etsuko tells us about Sachiko and Sachiko’s daughter Mariko. We learn that Sachiko has fallen on hard times and is living on the fringes of town. Etsuko helps her find a job and begins to look after Mariko from time to time.

Sachiko is one of those marvelous fictional characters who presents the reader with many questions. What kind of woman is she? Are her actions (many of which seem cruel and self-centered) coming from her own innate character or from her difficult situation? Or what measure of each? Mariko, the daughter, is a difficult and mysterious child. She is badly behaved and sullen. And yet I found myself achingly sad as I read her story because Ishiguro reveals her loneliness and fear in disturbing ways.

This story from the past takes up most of the book, but the way the two timeframes speak to each other is really where the book affected me. Generally, I love books that do this (a past story informing a present-tense story) but A Pale View of Hills is one of the best examples. I don’t want to give anything away, so it’s hard to be too detailed, but it wasn’t just that because of Etsuko’s memories of that summer we understand something more of her relationship with her two daughters, it was more that we begin to question Etsuko’s memories and what she is actually trying to say. By the time we get to the end we realize that Ishiguro has been laying out a series of fascinating parallels that change almost everything about what we think we’ve understood all along.

And finally, throughout the past-tense story are hints that this is also a book of the war, of a Japan that is sorting out its future. This idea remains fairly muted but it is very powerful when looked at alongside the more personal stories of Etsuko and Sachiko and what happens to their lives.

I haven’t said nearly half of what I wanted to write about for this book, but it will have to do for today. I have a short stack of books I read over the summer and this fall that I’d like to write about as well, including Ramuz’s first novel Aline (1905), Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse, Justin Torres’s We the Animals, and Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation, which I absolutely loved. I hope to get to these books soon. I am slowly reading Kathryn Davis’s Duplex right now, and it’s such an odd book. It’s strangely beautiful and often a little disturbing, which I think is the intended effect, but I am enjoying it and enjoying the work involved in trying to understand it.

Kamal Ben Hameda – Under the Tripoli Sky

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Kamal Ben Hameda’s novella Under the Tripoli Sky (tr. Adriana Hunter, Peirene 2014) opens with a circumcision. The narrator, a boy called Hadachinou, brings the reader to this event through his own ignorance of what is about to happen. The foreshadowing is exquisite here as Hadachinou watches the local butcher slaughtering a lamb:

Ibrahim’s sharp knife cutting smoothly through the skin as he whistled a well-known pop song.

Rivulets of slow-moving blood, smaller streams coagulating.

The carcass left to the women: removing the offal, the intestines, cutting up the meat,     salting it and hanging it out in the sun on the terrace.

The slow, impatient morning, quivering.

Because the reader very quickly knows what is about to happen, Hadachinou’s sense of bewildered expectation creates an immediate line of tension. And this is something Ben Hameda will continue to do throughout the book—an appropriate use of such a young narrator. What Hadachinou understands here is the impending celebration, the feast, but the cutting then comes as a complete surprise and he must be held down. It’s a powerful moment, a threshold between childhood and adulthood.

Just after this is where the novella sets up its preoccupying question, and it’s both well-timed and well-done. As Hadachinou cries after the procedure, the book uses his conflicting sensations to set up an opposition of two distinct worlds. On one side of him is the laughter of the women in another room, separate from his experience—and despite his anger, there is an instant longing to be with them even if they are not paying attention to or not aware of his ordeal. On the other side of him are the quiet, solemn men who leave him alone to cry, dropping money for him as they leave. The boundary between the men’s world and the women is drawn sharply here, with Hadachinou situated exactly between these two worlds and for the next 80 pages this is where he will remain. A bit like a ghost, flitting between the worlds. Observing, recording, trying to understand.

On the surface this is a book about the lives of women in 1960s Tripoli, and Hadachinou takes us through a colorful parade of them—his mother and her friends and neighbors, women of all levels of society, of all backgrounds—but its more quiet subject is the idea of secret access and hidden spaces, both physical and those of a person’s inner world. In many ways Hadachinou is a lonely child and his most intense focus revolves around ideas of relationships and how a person can be a comfort or a joy to another person, or how a person can ruin another person’s life. There are representations of sexual awakening here as well but more than that Hadachinou is intent on looking at intimacy. And by extension, as a reader we are intent on understanding how intimacy works in the historical and nostalgic setting that Ben Hameda evokes.

It is clear that Hadachinou is enthralled by and also sympathetic toward the subjects of his study. Because it is in this vein that he watches the women—wanting to see them, to know them. He is angry when not allowed into their circle, when his mother sends him outside, when he must stop visiting a certain woman. He wants to understand them , he wants to be loved. He wants to know why sometimes they seem to hate their husbands, and what this means for him. He wants to understand the power that he will later yield as well, and so there is the implication that this is the way he will learn to be a man. That his walking the boundary line between the men and the women serves a vital purpose.

Ultimately, what struck me most about Under the Tripoli Sky is the sorrow that runs through its pages. Most of the women deal with abuse, confinement, depression and sickness. And this is where the book takes an interesting approach to nostalgia. There is a real lushness—even a kind of gilding—to the physical descriptions: of the women, the houses, the streets, rooftops and gardens. It is clear that a lot of nostalgic love went into the writing of this book, into the author’s representation of place. And yet so much of the book deals with the unhappiness of these women and the broken elements of their lives. This creates a kind of provocative tension and generated, at least for me, a lot of interesting questions—how to react to the world that Ben Hameda conjures up, how to think about the women and whether they should be pitied, how to judge this society and Hadachinou’s place in it. Ben Hameda certainly doesn’t offer up any answers, and he shouldn’t. And so in this way, beneath its series of events and encounters, the novel spends most of its time examining the complexity of nostalgia and asking the reader to do the same.

Office lit…. by women?

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This morning I stumbled upon an interesting essay that functions as a kind of history of the “office novel”—starting with Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener and then moving forward to contemporary books by Joshua Ferris, Ed Parks and even Ben Lerner. It’s a solid essay that raises several questions about some of the typical elements of the form, as well as how these novels have evolved over time in line with changes in the American and international corporate landscape. You can read the essay here.

Something occurred to me as I was reading, however, and this was that all the books mentioned and discussed (save one, I think) are by men. I’m not going to pick on the author (Nikil Saval) about this, at least not at first, only because I am having trouble thinking of any by women. And so I can’t help but wonder if there is a body of “office lit” by women or maybe with more of a focus on women. Does this even exist? I assume that it does, and that I just don’t know about it.

I can think of a review we ran at Necessary Fiction for Radio Iris, by Anne-Marie Kinney, and this book would fit that category. (In his review of that title, Steve Himmer mentions two others: Lydie Salvayre’s Everyday Life and Stacey Levine’s Dra—). But what about historically? Was there a female equivalent to Melville’s Bartleby? And I don’t want to make things so simple – I know that the world of the office was almost exclusively male territory for a very long time, but it isn’t anymore, so I’d love to see that evolution as well, and how women writers have dealt with it. Especially when we so often talk about the “meaninglessness” of corporate work, and yet for many women, being able to be educated and work outside the home is a source of incredible meaning.

Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn (1977) would definitely fit into this genre in some way. So would Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps (1942). Delphine di Vegan’s novel, Les Heures Souterraines (2009) as well. Perhaps Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (2000) might be considered a very odd take on “office lit”—that is maybe debatable, but I’ll let it stand for now. Anyway, I’ve gone through my reading lists, and I’d love to see if there are more. Is there an author who takes this subject on again and again? I’ve just read Muriel Spark for the first time (her A Far Cry from Kensington, 1988) and she strikes me as someone who could have done this, but I don’t know if her books ever take this on directly.

Any suggestions?

(Quick update – Anthony of Time’s Flow Stemmed, whose taste in books I trust without question, has just written some thoughts on Alice Furse’s novel Everybody Knows this is NOWHERE. Adding this to the list!)

“This is a most excellent place.”

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I promise not to become a boring person about this, but I’ll just mention quickly that my book, Fog Island Mountains, is going to be published soon. I received the galley copy a week or so ago – an event that made me both burst with pride as well as succumb to a series of small panic attacks. I realized finally that this book, this story, cannot be tinkered with any more, cannot be changed. Reading through the galley and then reading through the final PDF proofs, I found sections I am extremely proud of, and I also found sections that I wished I could work through all over again.

All in all, I am both thrilled and nervous that the book will be published soon. It’s a little scary to think of people I know and people I don’t know who will read it, judge it and judge me. I am also well aware that the publication of this book is just one of thousands of other books. It is nothing. It is a small, a very small thing. I like this idea. I’m proud of the book, I’m nervous about the book, but I’m also happy that it can be a small thing and that I can work forward on other projects.

The book is already available for pre-order. In the lead up to publication, I’ll be doing a bit more writing about it here, instead of here at Pieces, which I will continue to reserve for thoughts on my reading and translating.

To finish up, a little piece of the preface to the book:

霧島Kirishima
“A land where the morning sun shines directly, a land where the rays
of the evening sun are brilliant. This is a most excellent place.”
—Kojiki, Japan’s “Record of Ancient Matters”

霧島Kirishima
A small chain of volcanic mountains that dot the southern half
of Japan’s island of Kyūshū. The chain is named after its secondhighest
peak, Mt. Kirishima.

霧島Kirishima
The Fog Island Mountains

Jeanne Benameur – Profanes

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Profanes (Actes Sud, 2013) by Jeanne Benameur is a story about long-standing grief, and how it transforms a person, transforms a life. The book involves one very important grief situation and then around that is clustered a raft of smaller ones. Wrapped around and mixed in with this are other smaller stories about how desire works within this context. I think it’s fitting to put these two situations side by side, since grief and desire are essentially forms of longing with vastly different modes of expression.

Structurally, the book is multi-voiced and richly-layered—a favorite of mine. The story opens in the first person voice of a 90 year old man, Octave Lassalle, a retired surgeon, and all we learn is that he has assembled four people to “assist” him in an unspecified project. We are then introduced to the four people—three women and one man. Each person is given a room in Lassalle’s house and a portion of the day: Marc will come in the morning and work in the garden, Hélène (painter) will come in the afternoon to complete a painting at Lassalle’s request, Yolande will come in the early evening to prepare supper and sort through the house’s many rooms and attic, and Béatrice (who is a young nursing student) will come to sleep, to be a presence in the house if Lassalle needs someone in the night.

This premise of strangers coming together in quest of an unspecified goal is one that I really enjoyed. There is something slightly unbelievable about it (especially in today’s world, I think) but then it all felt very old-fashioned and natural. It makes sense that an elderly man of his position would need help to maintain his estate and house, and Lassalle is presented with a certain benevolent (and quiet) eccentricity that makes it easy to accept that he would prefer to create the situation on his own terms instead of finding himself in a medicalized and sterile environment.

Lassalle doesn’t really explain what he is really after—mostly because he doesn’t know it himself. He’s selected Marc, Hélène, Yolande and Béatrice quite carefully, this he makes very clear. But the only part of the project that is concrete is the painting that Hélène is meant to create, a portrait of the daughter that Lassalle lost about forty years before. It becomes very clear that the daughter’s death (and all that happened just after) is a situation that Lassalle cannot seem to move away from, despite how many years have passed. He has gone on living and working, but his life has essentially been an empty one. He doesn’t even really have any memories of this time. Forty years is a long time to efface oneself, and this becomes the central question of Profanes—how did this happen, and can it be undone?

That makes it sound like the book is about trying to “live” again when one has lost the verve for life, but that isn’t right at all. Benameur doesn’t work the reader toward any grand epiphany or attempt to “unefface” Lassalle – except in a very gentle, sideways kind of way. There are subtle evolutions as Lassalle’s story evolves and connects with the individual stories of the four, and there is a general (although muted) movement toward a kind of closure. As the situation deepens (with a kind of mystery at its center—although I think some readers will find the mystery a little superflous), Benameur wrestles with questions of grief and desire more than she propels the reader toward any answers. It is carefully done.

The book’s title is an interesting one: Profanes. This word—and what it means in the context of the novel—has a double meaning. As in English, profane describes something that is outside the realm of religion (opposite to sacred). But here it is being used as in a person who is uninitiated to something. You can say in French, un profane en philosophie, meaning that you haven’t studied it, know nothing of the subject, have not yet experienced it. I am fascinated by this title because within the context of the story, it essentially refers to the idea of being un profane de la mort, a person who does not yet know death. And Benameur plays with this idea (while brushing up against its other meaning of religious/nonreligious) again and again—confirming it, rejecting it, subverting it.

Finally, there is a lot of poetry in Profanes. Lassalle is a great admirer of Haiku and he attributes one of his favorite verses to each of the people who come to the house. These verses change sometimes, or become images that Benameur plays with as we learn more about each character. One of my favorite passages about the meaning and importance of poetry is here:

A l’intérieur de lui, une terre arasée. Il a besoin de poésie, c’est tout. Il a besoin à nouveau du calme des haïkus. Tout ce blanc entre les mots, tout ce vide qu’on ne comblera jamais. Et puis un mot, un seul, et le monde qui bat, fragile, éphémère, tenu par un seul mot.

I’ve made two different translations of these lines—one that plays with the rhythm of the words in English and a couple word choices. I can’t decide between the two.

Within him, a flattened terrain. He needs poetry, that’s all. He needs again the calm of a haiku. All that white space between the words, all that emptiness that can never be filled. And then a word, a single word, and the beating, fragile, ephemeral world, held by a single word.

A razed landscape inside of him. What he needs is poetry. What he needs now is the calm of a haiku. All that whitespace between the words, all that emptiness that can never be made full. And then a word, a single word, and the beating, fragile, ephemeral world, held by a single word.

I’m not happy with the word order of that last sentence – putting all the adjectives together isn’t as pretty as the French original, but to keep it more literal (and the world that beats) doesn’t show that the “bat” here is like wingbeats or heartbeats. So I fear I’d have to do something like: …and the beating world—fragile and ephemeral—held by a single word. Maybe that’s the best solution.

Benameur is a new discovery for me (and I can’t see that any of her work has been translated into English) and I’m eager to read more.