Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘book review’ category

Iris Murdoch – Under the Net

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If you had asked me to describe Iris Murdoch a few months ago, when all I had read of her fiction was The Sandcastle and The Nice and the Good, I would have described her as skilled at sharp, biting domestic fiction. The kind of writer who picks apart personal relationships – friendships, marriages, sibling dynamics – with careful and sometimes frightening acuity. I would have tempered those two statements with a comment on her ability to render her characters with sympathy, with shades of gray, with feeling and with compassion.

But now, after reading Under the Net, I realize she is not so easily categorized. With Under the Net I must add humorist and satirist to her accomplishments. It isn’t every writer who can do both straightforward fiction and satire, and I was very impressed to get into the novel and realize how different it was from the other books of hers I had read.

Under the Net is about Jake Donaghue, a struggling novelist who translates French potboilers on the side. Jake is about as self-absorbed as you can get. But he is also wonderfully clever and likeable. He has a personal philosophy against work, so he does a lot of sponging off of friends and girlfriends.

This personal philosophy is what sets the entire book in motion. His current girlfriend, Madge, has decided to kick him out. So Jake and his friend Finn (most excellent character, by the way, a kind of Jake-shadow, who chimes in from time to time with many of the novel’s best lines) must move. Their options are limited, and Finn suggests Jake go look up an ex-girlfriend named Anna. The suggestion appears to unmoor our poor Jake.

One of the aspects of the book I enjoyed so much is Jake’s constant hyperbole. Suddenly, although we’ve never heard of her before, although he hasn’t mentioned her until now, suddenly Anna is the lost love of Jake’s life. And finding her, getting her to love him back, sends him on a series of wild capers across London and all the way to Paris and back. And many of these capers raise a measure of doubt as to whether Jake really cares for Anna at all. But of course Under the Net isn’t just about Anna and Jake.

If I had to hazard a statement to sum up in one line what the novel is about, I’d say it’s about poking fun at that pervasive myth of the artistic temperament. Jake, who is so committed to his writing that he’s willing to live in relative poverty in order to devote himself to his typewriter, doesn’t write a single word for the entire book. And he considers himself a deep, intellectual and perceptive person but most of the novel’s action results from his misunderstandings.

Now, despite the humor of the book, there is a subtle philosophical discussion running its way through Jake’s antics. About friendship and politics and about the individual. I think this works and never gets heavy because Jake remains so completely likeable. I think if I were to meet someone like Jake in person I’d want to throw him off a bridge, but within the universe of the novel, I followed him with great sympathy and support. As a reader, I wanted Jake to eventually succeed. I leave it to anyone else who reads the book to determine whether they think he does.

John Berger – To the Wedding

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I like a good story and distinctive imagery in the books that I read, but I am always impressed with unique narrative texture. Give me a book that does something different with its narrative perspective and I’m immediately interested in understanding how that unique narrator influences the story as a whole. Books like Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy or That Night with their strangely effaced first person narrators telling a story which belongs to someone else, or Gordimer’s The Conservationist with its acute third person speaking directly to another character are some favorite examples.

When I first read John Berger’s To the Wedding several years ago it was this aspect of the book that first caught my attention. One of the narrators, the one who completes the story in full, is a blind street peddler the main characters cross paths with only once while visiting Greece. The effect is then layered because they encounter him at an advanced point in their story. Although it isn’t presented that way to the reader, of course. We meet this narrator right away, and then he moves us backward with omniscient powers to catch the reader up.

I mentioned before that there is a magical, almost fairytale-like quality to this novel, and this mainly comes from this narrator and his godlike ability to see the past and future actions of the novel’s characters. I wondered a lot when I first read the book why Berger would use such a perspective, mainly because at first glance it seems an almost arbitrary choice. Why involve an outside character as a narrator, especially a character who has one conversation with another character and then remains completely outside the story? In another country even.

To get further into this, it is important to know a bit more about the story. When the novel opens, Jean is at a market stand buying a tamata, a kind of healing charm and prayer offering, from the street peddler in Athens. We learn through their short conversation that Ninon, Jean’s daughter, a woman in her twenties, is very ill. Deathly ill. The scene then shifts, jumping back in time to Ninon’s childhood and moving forward to her young adulthood. Throughout these flashbacks, the reader is given other scenes as Jean and Zdena, Ninon’s mother, who has been separated from Jean since Ninon was a young girl, begin preparations for their daughter’s wedding. The event will take place in Italy and so both parties are traveling across Europe to meet up for the celebration.

Slowly, as the characters travel, as the past comes forward, Ninon’s tragedy is revealed. I won’t give it away here, because it does come as a surprise when it is finally explained. But it is within her tragedy that the Greek peddler’s voice becomes relevant to the story. At least this is how I finally settled it. Despite the fact that his voice is compelling and highly effective, no one else could tell her story with as much empathy as a man who was not always blind but is now condemned to a life of darkness and helplessness.

The novel doesn’t belong exclusively to Ninon and her fiancé Gino. It is also about Jean and Zdena, who are meeting again after ten years to confront their daughter’s tragedy. It is about Gino’s courageous optimism, his father Federico’s painful but practical resignation. And it is about unexpected calamities and how humans navigate such treacherous waters.

Besides the intricate narrative stance and Berger’s simply stunning imagery, I loved how the novel combined hints of the fantastic and ethereal descriptions with down-to-earth characters and dialogue. The mixture of these two moods created something very special. It transformed the novel modern fable, able to discuss a certain horror while maintaining moments of pure elegance.

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more Suvanto and a book giveaway

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A few months ago I had the pleasure of reading Maile Chapman’s début novel Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto. My reactions to the book are here, here and here.

I also reviewed the book recently for the literary journal Cerise Press.

Now, I happen to have two copies of Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto and I would love to give one away to a deserving reader. If you are interested, please leave a note in the comments and I’ll do a random drawing on the 12th of November when I get back home. I will send anywhere in the world, but I prefer the interested party to be a regular reader of this blog.

One more week of holiday…as most good holidays, this one is passing too quickly. But it’s a relaxing holiday, with plenty of reading, so I have some books to write about when I get back.

more on The Voyage Out

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Although I mentioned in my earlier post that The Voyage Out was similar to a typical coming-of-age novel, let me give that idea a bit more nuance by tracing the storyline for a moment. In pure story, my statement is true – young Rachel accompanies her aunt and uncle on a journey to South America and in the course of that journey she falls in love and comes to understand one of the great mysteries of life, namely, what will society and what will one man in particular expect from her as she makes the transition from childhood to adulthood.

On the surface of things, this is timeless literary fare. But this is also Virginia Woolf and I think it is the details, the specific Woolfian twist, that makes all the difference.

First, the characters are all very close to being eccentric, without being exactly so.  They are almost types: Mr. Ambrose the doddering erudite scholar, the young, unfinished Rachel, Mrs. Ambrose the wise older woman, and Hirst, the pompous academic. There are many, many more. But then each is endowed with such particular, distinct, and sometimes bizarre thinking.

And life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing, as in time she would vanish, though the furniture in the room would remain. Her dissolution became so complete that she could not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly still, listening and looking always at the same spot. It became stranger and stranger. She was overcome with awe that things should exist at all…She forgot that she had any fingers to raise…The things that existed were so immense and so desolate.

Why was it that relations between different people were so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an instinct to be examined carefully and probably crushed?

She had now reached one of those eminences, the result of some crisis, from which the world is finally displayed in its true proportions.

Woolf allows her characters to meander and wonder, to question their reality. So much so that their reflections on the state of their world begin to undermine the novel’s seemingly traditional structure. As the story unravels, it starts to become quite clear that this isn’t just Rachel’s story at all. It is everyone’s story, and although each of their stories may not get equal weight, each of their given moments are equally weighty.

And then Woolf upends everything with a final, jarring twist. I think this was the aspect of The Voyage Out that I most enjoyed. Just as I was getting comfortable with Woolf’s wonderfully different version of a young woman’s coming-of-age, she takes that away and offers a radical and almost completely unexpected* alternative. Suddenly, the book is about everything but Rachel. Very clever. All those searching questions become more relevant.

I am coming to realize that this Woolf project will not really ever be complete until I’ve read these novels several times. I’m only just ready to begin Night and Day, and already I want to go back and reread The Voyage Out to catch all that I missed. But all things in their order…I’ll get there, it may just take a few years.

*The foreshadowing about what will eventually happen to Rachel is excellent. It happens about a hundred pages before the end, and it comes from the perspective of Mrs. Ambrose. Although it is pretty high-handed, Mrs. Ambrose is given to extreme thinking so it doesn’t necessarily overwhelm the reader. And it is one of the novel’s most poetic moments.

Initial thoughts on The Voyage Out

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I like reading authors from start to finish, beginning with their early works and moving forward in sequence. There are other ways to get to know a writer, I suppose, and it’s tempting even to work backwards or just go at random, and then let the different works speak to another. I suspect there would be some fascinating bridges and parallels to be found. But I am obstinately compelled to begin at the beginning and turn those pages until I get to the end.

And so my Virginia Woolf project begins with her first novel The Voyage Out, published in 1915. I won’t be able to get through this book in one post, and I think it would be a mistake, an injustice even, to attempt to do that. So I’ll begin here with some scribbling and impressions.

First, it was both lighter and heavier than I expected. By lighter, I mean that it reminded me of many novels written in the late 1800’s, society novels, in which people travel and interact with lots of other people, in which couples are formed and broken, in which small events string together with sometimes haphazard connection but still manage to race toward an ending. And by heavier, I mean that mixed up within all these conversations and events and people was a fascinating, profound, eccentric and insightful contemplation of a wide variety of people. What they think, how they feel, what they want.

The Voyage Out is preoccupied with existential questions – does all of this meeting and chatting and loving really matter? The story attempts to answer some of those questions, others it leaves hanging, and to nice effect.

Second, what a narrator! What incredible narrative control and authority. Perhaps it impressed me so much because contemporary fiction seems to have abandoned this kind of omniscient third person, but the skill with which Woolf explodes a moment into multiple levels of thinking, layering each character’s thoughts on top of another, is a true pleasure to read. Not to mention how well she differentiates between each character by their thinking. Each person is allowed truly exceptional thoughts, but they are tailored to the individual.

And finally, although I think the last statement I wrote is true, I also think that many of Woolf’s characters, perhaps the more important ones to the story, share one quality that I believe comes from Woolf’s own unique approach to the world…a recognition that perception, insight and awareness are double-edged strengths. On the one hand, this kind of sensitivity makes a person more alive to his or her surroundings, more receptive, but on the other, that state of being receptive involves a certain rawness, it makes a perceived sensation/intuition both revolutionary and painful.

I did so much underlining in The Voyage Out, and I’m not quite sure where I want to begin further discussion. I loved the book, for several different reasons, and I want to sort those out before writing again.

Flannery O'Connor – Wise Blood

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It is very hard not to have a visceral reaction to Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood. This is a messy and bizarre book, but also strangely and deeply funny. I read each chapter often appalled and disgusted, a little frightened and uncomfortable but at several points I burst out laughing. O’Connor’s ability to make me laugh at what was otherwise a gravely serious story is what transformed the reading experience for me, because I found it hard to enjoy reading Wise Blood. It just wasn’t that kind of book.

My experience with Flannery O’Connor is limited to a selection of her short stories, ones which most people have read – A Good Man is Hard to Find, Good Country People, Everything That Rises Must Converge. All very typical of her style and good examples of her ability to mingle a cracking wit with what is otherwise a sad or distressing detail. Who can forget the grandmother in A Good Man is Hard to Find, trying frantically to make something beautiful and religious come out of her family drive while her son and his family are picked off by The Misfit and his partners right in front of her. It is nearly impossible to convey the humor in that story by describing what happens…on the surface it is so awful, but lurking behind every line of dialogue and around each of the characters’ actions is this wonderful absurdity.

In any case, Wise Blood is in the same vein. Although there is something about carrying that mood through 150 pages that makes it more intense. And I’d say the dark bits overwhelm the comic bits so the overall effect is a little hard to take. The story is simple: Hazel Motes has just finished his army tour and has left his empty home in a small town to make his way as a preacher in a nearby “big” city. He preaches The Church Without Christ from the hood of his dilapidated car and becomes obsessed with another street preacher Asa Hawkes (who is not blind, but pretends to be after a failed attempt to blind himself) whose daughter Sabbath becomes obsessed with Hazel.

No one in this novel does what one would expect, and mostly people are mean-spirited and cruel to one another. The story involves a considerable amount of street preaching, a stolen mummy, a man in a gorilla suit and one horrible act of vehicular manslaughter. Lots of symbolism and much of it grotesquely done, which is what O’Connor is famous for. Wise Blood is a gruesome carnival. And as such, a perfect setting for an intensely religious/philosophical meditation.

As usual, I’m less interested in the “meaning” of this novel and how it fits into its tradition (although I am fascinated by Southern Gothic literature in general) and more curious to pick apart the details. I really appreciated the understated quality of O’Connor’s writing. Thinking back on the book, my mind is filled with one spectacular image after another, which is, I think, the effect of the novel’s grotesque, but when I go through the text to pull any of this out, the actual descriptions are simple and straightforward. A lot of her power rests in the dialogue and because her characters are so eccentric, they say eccentric things, which sets the novel’s mood without the narrator having to do much work. The narrator does, however, signal the comic elements to the reader, but with a great deal of subtlety.

I suspect I will always prefer her short stories, but I’m very happy to have read Wise Blood and I plan on reading The Violent Bear it Away, her other novel.

Virginia Woolf – The Mark on the Wall

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The other day I wrote that reading The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf compelled me to chuck all other authors aside and decide, finally, that I would read Woolf for my author project this year. After all my hemming and hawing, choosing Woolf felt so wonderfully, deliciously easy. I’m not under any illusions that reading her nine novels, all her short fiction and many of her essays will be a walk in the park, if anything Woolf provides an exhausting reading experience – her prose is so damn busy – but, I feel the same excitement heading into the project as I have felt in the past for other authors. So I know I’ve made the right decision.

But getting back to what convinced me – The Mark on the Wall. Reading Virginia Woolf gives me the same feeling I get when I step up from the metro in Paris. No matter the neighborhoods and their different flavors, this is Paris. Unmistakably. (Haussmann, Haussmann, Haussmann). I’ve never quite had this feeling anywhere else. And reading Woolf is the same – a few sentences in to The Mark on the Wall and already I knew – the voice, the active, vivid images, those industrious sentences. The skipping and shifting from thought to thought.

Now, as stories go The Mark on the Wall isn’t at all a story. It’s a series of thoughts squeezed between the two tiny actions of a woman looking through her cigarette smoke at a blot on the wall and a man laying his newspaper on the table. There is no conversation, no movement, no “story”.

But as thoughts go, these jumps and meditations and musings are fantastic. Woolf mimics the heady rush of thought, hopping and sliding from one idea to the next. The woman smoking her cigarette (is it Woolf? several clues make me say ‘yes, probably’) contemplates and imagines a messy little war between modernity and nature, men and women, tradition and fancy. At the same time she is engaged with her own intellectual process, aware of her slide of thought and both indulging and checking it as she goes along.

The pace of the story is frenetic. There is nowhere for the reader to settle, except in the tiny moments of exploded detail:

I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, tumbling all night long.

Lastly, although the story has no explicit, outward movement, it contains a tense feeling of expectation. Why isn’t she getting up? It’s a little like she’s trapped inside this moment, but happily so, willing to entertain her imagination, her fierce thoughts. It is clear that the intellectual exercise is one of pure pleasure, and she’s indulging it to the fullest. Until the end, of course, when she is inevitably interrupted.

Nadine Gordimer – The Pickup

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It occurred to me last week that I’ve never posted on The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer. This was my third time reading this excellent book, and the reading experience reminded me of Nabokov’s quote about how we never really read a book, we can only re-read it. A first read is only an introduction, no matter how intense the experience, all subsequent reads push and then settle the acquaintance where it needs to go.

The Pickup is actually my very favorite Gordimer novel, which is saying something because I have high praise for each of her fourteen novels. But The Pickup is somehow a distillation of Gordimer’s style; it is both neat and untidy, both practical and reckless. The storyline repeats this dual tendency by being firmly contemporary yet at the same time a simple, traditional love story.

So let’s start with the story: The Pickup is the story of a relationship forged within the messiness of modern society. Julie meets Abdu when she takes her broken car into a garage in Johannesburg where he is working illegally. They begin an affair which becomes complicated when Abdu receives a deportation notice. Of course Julie wants him to stay, and of course Abdu does not want to return to his home country. They try various methods to keep him legally in South Africa and when everything fails, Julie shows up one evening with two tickets. She will go home with him. Home is an unnamed Muslim nation – the complete opposite from any life Julie has ever experienced.

The novel, as indicated by the title, flirts with the idea that one of these two has been a pickup for the other…Abdu needs residency, Julie needs adventure. Is one-half of this couple taking advantage of the other? Gordimer raises this question, yes, and in some ways, answers it, but this does not remain the central question. The Pickup goes on to explore the cultural and experiential differences between Julie and Abdu, and how they do find a connection. Julie’s integration into Abdu’s family home is a beautiful and respectful investigation of both sides of a huge cultural divide.

Finally, the ending…one of the most surprising endings I’ve ever read. And yet when you turn that last page, it isn’t really a surprise, it’s organic to the story and everything Gordimer has been revealing about Julie and Abdu. A surprise that is ultimately completely satisfying.

Stylistically, The Pickup is also my favorite. Mostly because of the omniscient narrator’s skill at personal and general revelation, but also because of the strange, slightly jarring way the narrator slips so casually in and out of Julie and Abdu’s (and several other characters’) minds. There isn’t a strong delineation between spoken word and thought, which creates an intense, contemplative atmosphere within the world of the novel. Delicately done. An excellent book.

Here is just a sample of the narrative style:

Not for her to speak those words; he heard them as she had heard them. Nothing for her to say; she knows nothing. That is true but he sees, feels, has revealed to him something he does not know: this foreign girl has for him – there are beautiful words for it coming to him in his mother tongue – devotion. How could anyone, man or woman, not want that? Devotion. Is it not natural to be loved? To accept a blessing. She knows something. Even if it comes out of ignorance, innocence of reality.

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Alejandro Zambra – The Private Lives of Trees

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Last January, I bought myself a subscription to the Open Letter Books catalogue. Fantastic decision, this has been a wonderful treat. To date, I have received seven books. I haven’t read all of those seven yet, but the four I’ve managed to read have all been either really good or at least a fascinating reading experience. For anyone who isn’t familiar with Open Letter, they are a small press publishing books in translation, and the books are all quirky and interesting.

Last month I received The Private Lives of Trees by Chilean writer/poet Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell. The title alone promised good things and I sat down with it only minutes after taking it out of the bubble envelope. This is a tiny little book, easy to read in one sitting and perhaps best experienced as a single, contained read.

The story is simple: one evening, Julián is waiting in his apartment for his wife Verónica to come home from her art class. To pass the time and help her sleep, he is telling a story to his step-daughter Daniela called The Private Lives of Trees. He is worried about his wife’s lateness, but trying to keep his focus elsewhere. When Daniela is awake, Julián tells her the story, when she falls asleep, Julián passes his time remembering, worrying, imagining, reflecting…

The book has a brilliant and confident narrator, who resides just outside and above the story. An omniscient with a very subtle personality. This narrator never upstages Julián but provides the story with a light-handed metafictional flavor:

But this night is not an average night, at least not yet. It’s still not completely certain that there will be a next day, since Verónica hasn’t come back from her drawing class. When she returns, the novel will end. But as long as she is not back, the book will continue. The book continues until she returns, or until Julián is sure that she won’t return. For now Verónica is missing from the blue room, where Julián lulls the little girl to sleep with a story about the private lives of trees.

Now I said the story was simple, and that is true, but like all good novellas, The Private Lives of Trees is actually concerned with greater issues and moments than these quiet hours passed between Julián and Daniela. It is a wonderfully modern book, investigating the cracks and confusion of contemporary relationships, contemporary life. Julián considers a variety of reasonable reactions to his situation: jealousy, panic, apathy, anger. Those varying emotions turn this moment of Veronica’s absence into a reflection of his past – his childhood, his mistakes, his successes – as well as a consideration of his possible futures.

Danielle Dufay – Mon Mariage Chinois

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Well, I thought I’d be able to stay away but it turns out no…However, posting may continue to be sporadic until the second week of September when hopefully the stars will align and solve my childcare issues. In the meantime, some thoughts on an interesting book:

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My husband is Swiss. I am American. When we got married, these two nationalities became just another part of our shared life. In a year or so, if I want, I can apply for Swiss citizenship. Someday we may decide to move to the United States and if we do, my husband can apply for American citizenship. There is very little chance that either of us will be denied. It wasn’t until I read Danielle Dufay’s epistolary memoir Mon Mariage Chinois (My Chinese Marriage), that I realized the possibility of “sharing” citizenship is something I never should have taken for granted.

In 1913, Dufay’s grandmother Jeanne married a Chinese citizen. Without realizing it, by signing her marriage certificate, Jeanne surrendered her French citizenship. The book opens in 1922, when Jeanne, separated from her husband because of WWI, is finally traveling to China to meet him again. They have not seen one another for seven years and Jeanne has some very justifiable apprehensions about this reunion. One of the reasons she is finally going is that since her wedding, she has been forced to live as a foreigner in her own country.

The book is formed of the letters Jeanne writes home to her sister Laurence in France, filled with descriptions of the long journey to China, detailed portraits of the various people she meets along the way, and of course, news of her marital situation and life in her new home. I think it is safe to say that the cultural differences between China and France in the 1920s were much bigger than they are today. And Jeanne suffers because of this great rift – not only in her relationship with her husband but also in ordinary everyday experiences. As any expatriate will readily admit, simple tasks can become momentous trials when the cultural frame is shifted.

Now Jeanne’s situation is made even more complicated because of her citizen status. If something becomes difficult for her, she has no recourse to the French consulate and very little support from any of her fellow French citizens. When things between her and her husband become difficult, she cannot just pick up and leave. She is considered “Chinese” in the eyes of the state. She is also supported financially by her husband, which in theory could have been a nightmare, but Jeanne’s husband grants her a liberal measure of freedom to travel and socialize as she prefers. She is not allowed to work, however, except for some part-time English teaching, so she has no means of saving money to return to France.

Mon Mariage Chinois gets a little clunky from time to time. The book was fashioned into a series of letters from Jeanne’s actual letters, a few of her essays and her private journals. I understand the reason for forcing these three different genres together but I’m not convinced it was the best idea. Too much exposition in a personal letter reads false. But this effect is heaviest at the beginning of the book, when Jeanne is giving the background to her marriage. Once she gets on the boat and especially when she reaches Hong Kong and China, this issue smoothes itself out a bit.

Also, the book is not a page turner but best savored slowly. Each of Jeanne’s letters is a treasure trove of historic information, filled with rich detail about 1920s Asia and its customs. As an expat she is keenly interested in the expat community, but also in other minority groups versus traditional Chinese culture. Something I found very interesting was that she was not exempt from the racist thinking that infused her generation, even if she was a victim of it herself.

Finally, aside from its cultural preoccupations, Mon Mariage Chinois is also the portrait of a woman trying to negotiate between her traditional upbringing with its blind championing of marital duty, and her fiercely independent, intensely feminist character.