Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘Anne Bragance’ category

tuesday reading notes

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I finished up the last third of Anne Bragance’s Une Succulente au fond de l’impasse and it didn’t radically change my earlier impression of the book. Overall, very disappointing. But I am interested in several other Bragance titles and hope to find something on the same level as Casus Belli among her other books.

In the light of the current upheaval in publishing, I’m curious how this sort of thing continues to happen. I mean, how does a book this blah get published? Who is the lazy editor that doesn’t say, look, this needs some re-thinking, before publication? Bragance is an accomplished writer; I would assume she could handle it. I don’t think this is an issue of my reading in the wrong genre, or missing some deeply interesting or mysterious element of the book. (For what it’s worth, my entire book group agrees the book failed, so it isn’t just me and even if that’s only six people, we rarely come to such easy accord.) The book is touted as serious literary fiction but it reads like a first draft, or three first drafts. If it was meant to be three interconnected novellas, Bragance fails to work both the form and the stories to a satisfying conclusion. The three parts of the novel don’t speak to each other, except on a very superficial level. And as I mentioned before, the three first-person narrators could have all been the exact same person.

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The following most excellent and eloquent essay has been (s)linking around the web these days. The essay is on translation and written by Harvard University Press Editor Sharmila Sen. This bit will stay with me:

A translation is the original text’s wife. If too pretty, the translation must be cheating on her husband, the text. If faithful, the translation must not be very pretty.

I love that. And it was a timely sentence for me to read as I struggle with getting Ramuz into English. I recently got a disappointing rejection from a journal where an intern wrote, “I liked the French but the translation did not work”. Ouch. In the particular story I submitted, there were three POV shifts, a relatively unheard of use of a pronoun that doesn’t exist in English, unsettling shifts in tense and I won’t even go into Ramuz’s obsessional use of semi-colons. So, yes, she’s completely right, the translation doesn’t “work”. And maybe my translation fell short of resolving those issues so I’m more than willing to get back to the two texts and see what I can do to. But this is the struggle with translation…how to recreate/reflect the eccentricity of Ramuzian French in English to an Anglophone reader? I’ll just keep trying…

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My Virginia Woolf project is gaining momentum. I tucked into two of her earliest short stories over the weekend – Phyllis and Rosamond and The Mysterious Case of Miss V.  Phyllis and Rosamond is a detailed portrait of two women as well as a discussion of types. The story tosses the idea of freedom around, personal and intellectual freedom, amidst a discussion of marriage expectations. I won’t go into detail about The Mysterious Case of Miss V. because it was more abstract and less easy to describe, but it struck me while reading both stories that Woolf understood what the coming of modernity would mean for women, both the positives and the negatives, and already in her early work, she was trying to sort out the impending muddle.

And also, a small point, but I’m noticing how Woolf has several of her characters conflate hard, solid facts with the idea of comfort. It is a strange pairing. Yet emotions must have been shifting, unreliable things to get a grip on for someone like Woolf while facts were fixed, and dependable.  Comforting.

mid-read thoughts on Bragance's "Succulente"

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In 2007, I was introduced to Anne Bragance’s work through her novel Casus Belli about a dysfunctional family. That novel charmed me, both for the depth of its character exploration and because of Bragance’s lovely writing style. Afterward, I hunted out several of her other novels (she has over twenty) and was all geared up to continue getting to know her work but somehow other projects got in the way and I only got around to reading a second novel by her this week.

I am about fifty pages from the end, and curious to see such a huge stylistic difference between this book and Casus Belli. It’s almost like it’s written by another person.

Une succulente au fond de l’impasse, her latest novel, is the story of François and Emma. Forty-something François is going through a divorce when he meets Emma, a prostitute who used to be a champion swimmer. They become friends, nothing more, but very good friends, and then one day Emma disappears…

The book is written in three sections, all in the first person, beginning with François and then about halfway through it switches to Emma. (At the end is a final section in the voice of Emma’s childhood best friend Bénédicte, but I’m not there yet). So far, I find little difference between François and Emma. They each tell a different story, but their language, their emotional register and even their vocabulary is quite similar.

Also, both narratives seem more concerned with the interior reflections of the voice in question than creating a “story” as it were. I don’t always have trouble with an intense interior kind of narration, one which shuns action and the exterior trappings of story, but I suppose it must depend on how the voice works, and most definitely its intellectual and emotional tone. I’m thinking here of André Brink’s first person story The Rights of Desire, or either Eclipse or The Sea by John Banville, even Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – all these novels maintain a strict interior reflective voice, and even a little suffocating at times. And I loved them all. Perhaps I shouldn’t compare to only Anglophone writers, so I’ll mention Nancy Huston’s incredible Instruments des Ténébrès, again partly first-person and intensely interior.

So Une succulent au fond de l’impasse is disappointing so far, perhaps because I get the sense it isn’t trying very hard. Despite their situations, nothing about either François or Emma has managed to reflect on the larger human condition. “Human condition” sounds a bit weighty, but I think that’s what good fiction does – it touches the world beyond itself. Casus Belli dealt with difficult psychological territory, and raised interesting questions about the nature of emotional wounds. The language was also rich and textured and the whole novel was filled with interesting and complicated images.

I certainly won’t give up on Bragance because of this book; she has several others I’d like to try before I decide whether she’s a writer for me. And, who knows, maybe the last fifty pages of Une succulente au fond de l’impasse will reverse all this grumbling…I’ll let you know.

Anne Bragance – Casus Belli

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Casus Belli – acts of war. A fitting title for a surprisingly dark novel about the psychological damage of conditional love. From the outside, the Douhet family seems normal. Good-looking intellectual father, capable and put-together mother, one lovely daughter and a charming son. But beneath the surface of this attractive family lies some very savage undercurrents.Claire Douhet, the mother, wields the weapons in this war. She is the only character given her own voice and through her self-righteous monologues with God, she reveals an unfeeling and envious interior life. Her daughter Virginie bears the brunt of Claire’s bitterness and she retaliates, first pathetically and after, destructively. The day her younger brother Christophe is born, five year-old Virginie adopts a limp she will keep for the rest of her life. She refuses her real name and selects Camille (a name with the same first letter as both of her parents and her younger brother), a request her mother refuses to honor. Stubbornly, Virginie keeps both, constructing a self-damaging alter-ego. And finally, when her brother is two or three months old, she throws him in the garbage can.

This act remains between Virginie and the mother as a sort of unexploded bomb. Claire does not reprimand her daughter. Instead she refuses to acknowledge what has happened, wrapping the moment up in a form of suffocating horror that alters Virginie’s self-perception forever. Virginie, too young to understand what she has done, is never given the opportunity to apologize and this stunted guilt sets up house in her psyche. Bragance commits a lovely passage to this idea of withheld forgiveness.

Dans les rivières, là-bas, au fond du monde, dans les mines profondes, des hommes cherchent l’or. Ils cherchent sous un soleil qui tue, le corps éreinté, courbé, poisseux d’une sueur chaude qui leur brûle les yeux, des années durant ils cherchent comme des diables fourbus, comme des demi-dieux impécunieux, ils s’acharnent à cette quête. Mais comment trouver l’or où il se trouve?

Dans sa maison, ici, bordée à droite comme à gauche de fusains bien taillés, précédée d’une pelouse bien tondue, Virginie cherche le pardon. S’il le faut, elle y passera sa vie, elle s’acharnera elle aussi, elle se l’est promise. Comme les chercheurs d’or de là-bas, si loin. Mais comment trouver le pardon quand l’offensée s’obstine à nier l’offense ? Comment obtenir le pardon quand la victime, trop innocente, ignore qu’il y a eu crime.

Pourtant, il faut de l’or pour survivre, l’or d’un regard, d’un geste, d’une parole, il faut le pardon, absolument.

[In the far away rivers at the end of the world, in the deepest mines, men hunt for treasure. They hunt beneath a killing sun, with wasted and bent bodies, dripping with a sticky sweat that stings their eyes. For years and years, they hunt like worn out devils, penniless demi-gods, relentless in their quest. But how to find this hidden treasure?

From within her house, just here, with its border of well-trimmed hedges and its perfectly mowed lawn, Virginie is hunting for forgiveness. If necessary, she will keep looking for the rest of her life, she’ll never give up, she’s promised herself. Like those very treasure seekers so far away. But how to find forgiveness when the injured party keeps denying the injury? How to be forgiven when the still too innocent victim doesn’t even know there was a crime?

Yet one needs treasure to survive, the treasure of a look, a gesture, a word, one needs forgiveness, for certain.]

The years pass, all tainted by the destructive ghost of this event. Virginie, unloved and so unable to love, marries, divorces, marries again, divorces again. She refuses to have children, denying herself a certain pleasure in the sheer desire to thwart her mother. Christophe marries but his mother can’t stand the woman he’s selected as she is too similar to his sister. It’s very ugly, the way Claire’s jealousy deforms what should be the most natural of relationships. Like Virginie’s body remains misshapen, so does the Douhet family dynamic. Made all the more tragic by the complicit silence of the father and the nearly blind cheerfulness of Christophe.

Casus Belli is not all doom and gloom, there are moments of redemption within the story even if they come too late to avoid the final disastrous event. This slim little book is literally exploding with thorny questions and uncomfortable propositions – not all of which get answered or fully addressed before its conclusion. A small disappointment in an otherwise rewarding read.