Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘book review’ category

Siri Hustvedt – The Sorrows of an American

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I have a special admiration for books that take on the emotional complexity of the human psyche, and then successfully and without melodrama, reveal something novel about personal interaction. Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American is a dense and thoughtful little book about a variety of human relationships – siblings, lovers, children to parents, friends, doctor to patient.

The book is about Erik, a divorced psychiatrist in New York, who becomes attached to the woman (and her child) who rent half of his house. The woman has a troubling relationship with the child’s father, an artist, who often pushes the boundaries of sane, rational behavior. Personal boundaries and emotional/mental health are big issues in this novel. The main story focuses on Erik, his work, his loneliness, his memories, but there are several other stories involving his widowed sister Inga (who was married to a famous writer) and his niece (who witnessed the fall of the twin towers).

One of the more subtle but very powerful stories in the novel revolves around Erik’s grief for his recently deceased father. A small mystery arises when Erik and his sister go through their father’s papers. I’m tempted to say that the mystery in and of itself becomes superfluous (and that would be an accurate statement) but it isn’t superfluous to what the novel has to say about grief, about its painful, disorienting perplexity. I appreciated the intricacy of Erik’s grief for a father he loved, but ultimately never understood or was able to be close with.

The dialogue in the book caught my attention. Hustvedt allows her characters to speak, really speak. Saying things to each other with actual substance. I believe this is often difficult to pull off, our reader’s ear finds falseness very quickly in dialogue that tries to sound too profound. Here is an example of what I mean, taken from a conversation in which Erik is speaking with his sister about his work:

“I miss the patients. It’s hard to describe, but when people are in desperate need, something falls away. The posing that’s part of the ordinary world vanishes, that How-are-you?-I’m-fine falseness.” I paused. “The patients might be raving or mute or even violent, but there’s an existential urgency to them that’s invigorating. You feel close to the raw truth of what human beings are.”

 I like the risk Erik takes in saying this. He’s admitting something about his emotional need to be exposed to the rawness of other people. This doesn’t come in the middle of a long, serious conversation. He says this a little out-of-the-blue while he and his sister are discussing something unrelated. I like the authenticity in that. Sometimes people say things like this, meaningful confessions in the midst of common conversation.

There were two elements of the novel, however, that kept me at a distance. The first was the narrative voice. This is such a difficult thing to quibble with…and I suppose Erik convinced me of his maleness by the end, but I couldn’t quite shake my original impression of the voice as distinctly female. Putting the book down and rereading the first pages helped (and I note that we learn Erik’s first name in the third paragraph, but somehow I managed to overlook this) but the shadow of a female narrator hovered over my entire experience with the book.

I dislike when this happens because I hate to think of myself as a prejudiced reader, one that assumes a female writer can only write in a female voice. Some of my favorite authors routinely write from the perspective of the opposite gender and I’ve never had any trouble with it. Now, on the other hand, I loved most of the other elements of the narrative voice.

The only other thing that niggled at me while I was reading was the sizeable amount of psychoanalytic theory or imagery. On the whole, I really enjoyed Erik’s thoughts about the mind and how fragile it is, but there were a lot of dreams in the book, most of which had quite in-your-face symbolism, and I’ve never found this revelatory in literature. Also, some of the “troubling” behaviors from the daughter of Erik’s renter were too facile. I believe that children under stress do exhibit behaviors which can be clarified and understood through a psychoanalytic lens, but in literature it often strikes me as contrived.

Despite these two small criticisms, I was overwhelmingly impressed with Hustvedt – the eloquence of the prose, the nuances of the characters, the dense but artful layering of the different stories.

Cathy Marie Buchanan – The Day the Falls Stood Still

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I have been trying to put my thoughts together for a review of Cathy Marie Buchanan’s novel The Day the Falls Stood Still. I received this book from the publisher and read it last week and enjoyed it. By ‘enjoyed it’ I mean that I was absorbed in the reading of it, and I was engaged in the story and the characters and the writing.

But I’m having trouble finding the words to express my feeling for this book. It is a lovely book, it is well-written, and it taught me something about the history of Niagara Falls. Despite all these commendable qualities, it didn’t manage to astound me.

Before I try and explain why, let me give you the gist of the story. The novel takes place in Niagara, Ontario between 1915 and 1923 and mainly concerns Bess Heath and her fellow, Tom Cole. When Bess and Tom meet, Bess’ family is in the midst of a great crisis – her father has lost his job, her sister is unhappy and unwell, her mother is trying to keep the family together. The novel is, essentially, a love story. Behind that love story are some other themes – environmentalism, classism, the trauma of WWI, even a bit of spiritualism. There are many interesting side discussions running the length of the novel.

All of this, the larger story and the tangents, are handled well and the book is a smooth, pleasant read. In and of itself, it’s a fine piece of writing and a sweet story. Where I think it disappointed me is that it didn’t take any real risks. The book has its share of sorrows and although it deals with them respectfully, it doesn’t go quite far enough in their emotional exploration.

I’ll take an example that won’t ruin the story for anyone – Tom gets sent to fight in WWI and a part of the novel deals with his absence and fortunate return. He is a sensitive young man, with a great attachment and connection to the natural world. It follows that he would be affected by the trauma of fighting, and he is. So much so that when he comes back he is appropriately shell-shocked and Bess must find a way to help him heal. She does so, creatively, and the story continues.

But the highs and lows of that mini-story weren’t quite steep enough for me. I think Buchanan could have pushed her characters a little further, pushed the writing a little further and the reader would have felt more keenly the horror of World War I as well as the redemption Bess offered Tom. This pattern was repeated throughout the novel when each tragedy threatened. Even the book’s greatest sorrow is eventually smoothed away. I’m not arguing that this isn’t possible, but I felt it was done too easily, almost as if Buchanan or the story was unwilling to engage with the darker aspects of raw emotion.

But perhaps I’m arguing against a genre here. The Day the Falls Stood Still rests very comfortably in the tradition of mainstream contemporary fiction. The writing is even and careful, the story is interesting and takes the reader through a series of familiar emotions – disappointment, sorrow, elation, hope, more sorrow, more hope – which all lead the main character to a kind of mature and resilient strength by the end of the book.

K. B. Dixon – A Painter's Life

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K. B. Dixon’s novel A Painter’s Life is a portrait of the fictional artist Christopher Freeze created by blending purported journal excerpts, interview snippets and reviews. This collage technique seems a fitting medium to get at an understanding of an artist’s mind – their particular mix of public persona (necessitated by the public nature of their work) and private individual.

The novel has a definite patchwork quality, and yet much of the book’s thematic preoccupation centers on Freeze’s yearning to find some level of satisfaction with his painting, with the ongoing tension between artists and critics, with an artist’s conflict between their public and private persona and about the artistic temperament in general.

I found the most compelling aspects of the book came from the journal entries and especially those moments when Freeze mused on what art meant to him, how art functions and how his work, in particular, was a challenge.

I am working on a guest commentary for Moment, the local art mag. It looks like it’s going to be an argument in favor of beauty. It’s blasphemous. What I’m trying to say is that art doesn’t have to be diverting, but it can be if it wants to – and at no cost to its truthfulness – that we in the arts community should think about being a little more ecumenical I our biases.

He also discusses the problem of knowing too much about the artist and how it might skew a viewer’s interpretation of a particular piece. I find this true with both art and literature, there is a lot to be learned through biography, but sometimes it is also important to separate the artist and their work.

Spent an hour looking at a new Kinsley picture – The Sleeping Dancers. It’s big and beautiful and one of the best things I’ve seen in I don’t know how long. I found myself wishing I didn’t know as much as I did about Kinsley though (for instance, that he is a religious fanatic – a cultist) because it kept getting in the way of my experiencing the thing. I found myself becoming suspicious of its simplicity – wondering if what I took to be a charming allusion to innocence might not be a cynical pandering to the theological base.

I enjoyed A Painter’s Life but it also frustrated me at moments. Mainly, I think, because it wasn’t enough of one thing or another. It heads in the direction of experimental literature, asking the reader to accept a lack of linear progression (the journal entries are not dated, and there are not many clues about their order) or unified narrative (in the sense that the reader is not given any clear picture of Freeze heading toward or away from one thing – he remains a static character for the entire book with the same wants and desires), but at the same time the novel follows a quite conventional structure. Each chapter options with a journalistic style blurb about Freeze and his life, and these move forward linearly, this is then followed by the undated journal excerpts and then each chapter concludes with samples from interviews or critical analysis of Freeze’s work.

I found the aesthetic of the undated journal entries a convincing and interesting method of creating this portrait, and I was willing to accept and even welcome their meandering until the opening and closing of each chapter made me wonder if I shouldn’t be looking for more connection between the three. Much of what was mentioned in the journalistic blurbs, for example, was never addressed by the journal entries. These blurbs tell the reader that Freeze struggled with excessive drinking, with psychological breakdown…but neither of those topics was ever explored within the journal entries except for some off-hand references Freeze makes about his therapist. I found that inconsistency weakened the novel’s overall project.

Dixon has several other novels. I’m particularly interested in his Andrew A – Z which looks like it pushes the experimental envelope as far as I wish A Painter’s Life had. This novel is again a character portrait but assembled from alphabetic entries on various words that Andrew himself comments on. I’ve ordered this one and look forward to reading it.

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David Benioff – City of Thieves

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David Benioff’s novel City of Thieves is set in Russia during WWII and centers on Lev (the narrator) and his friendship with Kolya, whom he meets when he’s caught looting the body of a German paratrooper and taken to jail. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are asked to find a dozen eggs for the wedding of Colonel’s daughter. They try finding these in blockaded Leningrad, but when that proves impossible they head out into the countryside, into German-occupied territory where a series of scrapes and adventures await them. Not the least of which involve Lev falling in love with a young woman who is also a sharpshooting assassin.

The book is entertaining and a quick read. I enjoyed it so don’t let what I’m about to say stop you from trying it. But I have some reservations, mostly because I can’t help thinking the book should really be a movie. And I don’t mean that something about the book makes it perfect for a screen adaptation. I actually think it should have been a film, rather than a book. The whole time I was reading it, I couldn’t help thinking that its aesthetic was simply more suited to film. By that I mean that although the story moves through a series of grave and difficult situations (it’s set during the siege of Leningrad, for goodness sake, when the Russians were eating paper and glue to stay alive), it has a frustrating lightness about it. I say frustrating because I got the sense the book wanted to be more serious and just didn’t manage it.

Lev and Kolya are the perfect comedic (and cinematic) duo – one dark and brooding, one light and handsome – and they spend the book navigating their dangerous quest with plenty laddish humor. I believe that the human soul can seek humor in the darkest of situations, but Kolya’s continual joking and teasing and bravado wore a little thin by the end of the book.

Take Benini’s Life is Beautiful for example, a film that gets criticized for trying to be funny about Nazi Germany. But the whole point of that film, as I see it, is that it’s actually a tragedy. What could be more tragic than a father trying to keep the magic of childhood alive for his son in a situation that is completely devoid of any sort of magic or goodness. That’s not funny, it’s enough to make you weep.

City of Thieves didn’t seem willing to ever let you weep, and yet all the ingredients were there. Even a prologue which leads the reader (falsely) to believe that the book is based on Benioff’s own grandfather.

All in all, I would consider City of Thieves a few hours of entertainment…with a lot of interesting history, some wonderful landscapes and just enough seriousness to make you enjoy the clever but somewhat corny ending. Somehow, I feel a little guilty for sounding so negative about this book because I did enjoy it,  it’s well-written, it’s compelling, it’s full of vivid scenes…but it just didn’t ever convince me to take it seriously enough. But if you want a glowing review, check out the New York Times.

Kamila Shamsie – Burnt Shadows

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It is rare to encounter a novel that is both historical as well as acutely contemporary. Kamila Shamsie’s novel Burnt Shadows begins in Nagasaki in 1945, moves forward to India on the eve of British departure in 1947, then to Pakistan in 1982 and eventually to New York in 2001. The element linking these four geographic locations is Hiroko, a spirited and courageous Japanese woman with an incredible gift for languages and a sorrowful past.

The book has all the elements of a family saga but none of the tedious details which usually plague that genre. It is essentially the story of two families and how their lives intersect across fifty years of experience. Embedded inside that domestic narrative is a meditation on political violence and its effect on the individual and daily life. For many people political violence, or war, its most explicit form, is an abstract concept – something that occurs elsewhere. Burnt Shadows brings war and its hundreds of thousands of contingent ripples into a closer, personal focus.

Shamsie’s writing is also excellent. It has a strongly lyrical element – it’s clear Shamsie enjoys playing with language and rhythms – but it never goes too far, never trades a straightforward depiction of events for an impressionistic approach. And thankfully, because the book makes a lot of geographic jumps as well as shifts in point-of-view, the entire story is contained in a neat, airtight structure.

Aside from the writing, I think the reason I’m tempted to consider this book one of the best, if not the best read of 2009 is the way Shamsie builds toward her ending. There are several tragedies at work in this novel, the greatest of which is the ending, and when I finally realized a few pages from the end where Shamsie was heading, I was quite impressed. Part of me was screaming for her to change things, to make it work out differently, to wave her magic writer’s wand and make things better, but the rest of me was silently applauding her for forcing me to consider the truth contained in the book’s conclusion.

 

Iris Murdoch – The Sandcastle

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The Sandcastle begins with a fractious dialogue between Mor (the main character) and his wife Nan. It becomes clear within only a few pages that this kind of antagonistic exchange is common between them. In the middle of the discussion, Mor makes a reference to their dead dog, seemingly out of the blue. And then Murdoch delivers two lines which put their entire relationship into perspective:

This animal had formed the bond between Mor and Nan which their children had been unable to form. Half unconsciously, whenever Mor wanted to placate his wife he said something about Liffey.

I really like this kind of specific insight into a character, especially when, as I suspected correctly, it also serves to highlight the book’s central focus. In the case of The Sandcastle, a book about an unraveling marriage, these two sentences illustrate the longstanding tension between Mor and Nan (and ultimately the complete failure of their marriage) as well as reveal a fundamental issue of Mor’s personality – his need to mollify Nan.

As the book progresses and certain important events transpire (Mor meets an engaging young painter and begins a chaste affair with her), his absolute inability to really cross Nan becomes fundamental to the rest of the story. So what looks on the surface like an exploration of the bonds of marriage and whether they are really sacred is actually a careful and detailed criticism of Mor’s particular weakness.

I mentioned earlier that Murdoch was recommended to me as a writer I would like because of my deep admiration for Nadine Gordimer. Interestingly, I think I actually put off reading Murdoch for a long time because I was afraid to make the comparison and find either writer lacking. Now that I’ve read Murdoch, I realize how silly this was. They are similar, so I can see where the recommendation came from, but of course they each carry certain distinct stylistic traits.

Without reading more Murdoch I can’t make a real comparison, but I do think it is interesting to note some of the echoes of Gordimer I found while reading The Sandcastle. First, the flawlessness of the male narrator. Not all female authors even try, let alone succeed, in writing from the male perspective. This is something Gordimer does with about half of her novels and each time I felt it was a seamless performance. The voice of the male narrator in The Sandcastle was equally convincing.

Second, I’ve written before about how much I enjoy Gordimer’s moments of insight, where, in just a few lines, she manages to explicate or illuminate a certain feeling or thought. She takes a singular experience and renders it universally understandable for the reader. Murdoch did exactly this in The Sandcastle, allowing her characters to reflect on the world with bold statements and keen observations and by giving them a voice to their precise, individual thoughts in such a way that the reader says, yes, that is exactly what that feels like.

And finally, both writers are courageous in their use of dialogue, allowing their characters to engage in complicated, weighty conversations at the risk of moving too far away from the cadence and rhythm of natural dialogue. I think Gordimer almost always gets away with this risky endeavor, and I think Murdoch succeeds perfectly in The Sandcastle.

Murdoch has an even larger oeuvre than Gordimer and although I don’t think I’ll be able to tackle it this year, I’d very much like to read her from start to finish in the way I read Gordimer in 2008. If anything I will get a copy of The Sea, The Sea and read that before the end of the year. Any other suggestions?

 

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Sarah Orne Jewett – The Country of the Pointed Firs

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Having no experience whatsoever with Sarah Orne Jewett I took her book off the shelf with only mild interest. I have a Dover Thrift edition, which weighs nearly nothing and could be easily mistaken for a bound short story. The evening I took the book down, I needed something I could move easily through from beginning to end and which would hold my interest through a predictably sleep-interrupted night. So it was quite fun to start reading and then find myself swept up in Jewett’s cheerful and loving descriptions of the New England she held close to her heart.

The Country of the Pointed Firs is not so much a novel as it is a series of portraits assembled into a detailed collage of coastal Maine at the dawn of the twentieth century – a rugged landscape, a reliance on fishing and the lobster harvest, the deep quiet of a typical Maine personality. I believe it was Jewett’s goal to record the way of life in this area as well as pay a sort of tribute to it. And she does this well, introducing the reader to a series of eccentric characters and describing the landscape with great precision.

The narrator is a writer who has come out to the area on retreat, spending her days either helping her landlady gather herbs or working diligently in an old school house a bit outside of the town. It is difficult not to imagine Jewett as the narrator, especially since the narrator keeps her own personality and internal thoughts so distant from the actual people she is describing. She reflects on them and interacts with them, although not to create a story between herself and them but, rather, to get at the heart of their own story, whatever that may be.

Each little chapter is a portrait of one of the townspeople or a related event and includes such gems as Captain Littlepage’s story of encountering a sort of limbo town where dead souls wait during one of his sea voyages to the Arctic, or a young woman named Joanna who, thwarted in love, rows out to a tiny island off the main coast to live out the rest of her days alone. Most of the sketches involve the narrator’s landlady or the landlady’s mother – two quaintly bizarre women – in some capacity, either introducing the narrator to another individual or providing a suitable event for description.

The Country of the Pointed Firs has no central event or interlaced plot, but each chapter is linked to the rest through its tone and the consistency of the narrator. There is also a harmony in the collage aspect of the book; each chapter fits to the rest like a separate piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The overall effect is pleasant and the book creates a vivid image of a tiny corner of the United States at a particular time in its history.

 

Maureen Myant – The Search

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I’ve recently read several books dealing with WWII which treat the issue of The Holocaust from an unfamiliar perspective, at least for me the perspective was one I’ve had less experience with. What I mean by this is that these books took up the smaller stories circling around the larger narrative of concentration camp internment and provided a backdrop, just as chilling and difficult, to that more well-known piece of history.

The first book was Arnost Lustig’s Lovely Green Eyes, the second was Philippe Claudel’s Le Rapport de Brodeck and now the third, just recently published by Alma Books, is Maureen Myant’s The Search.

The Search begins in Czechoslovakia in 1942, when nine-year old Jan witnesses the execution of his father, the destruction of his town and the internment of his mother and two sisters. (Although never mentioned by name, this event is a fictional recreation of the destruction of the town of Lidice in 1942).  Jan is also interned, at first with his younger sister Lena. However, after a few months, Lena is sent away to be adopted by a German family near Dresden. Jan decides to escape and track Lena. The novel follows his incredible journey from Germany into Poland and back to Germany in the hopes of being reunited with his sister and eventually his mother and other sister.

Although the novel tackles a very difficult subject and involves a series of traumatic and/or violent events, Myant handles her bleak subject with a great amount of respect and care. I think this is mostly due to the narrative perspective. The reader experiences the brutal world of Nazi Germany through Jan’s eyes, and the way he alternates between confusion and fear, and naiveté and optimism creates an emotional texture that is much less aggressive than, say, an adult point of view might create.

In many ways, The Search is not easy reading, although I found myself moving through it smoothly. Jan’s journey is captivating, as are the various individuals he meets who either help or hinder him. The descriptions of war-torn Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany are worth a passing comment as well, as Myant recreates the cheerlessness of those years without resorting to a monochromatic palette. Much of the countryside and the towns are somber and even lonely, but still vividly depicted.

I was most impressed by the ending, which resisted an easy solution – and was neither negative nor positive. What finally happens to Jan, after nearly two years of searching and wandering, was both good and right…and heartbreaking. This seemed appropriate and I think Myant deserves some extra praise for braving a complex but realistic resolution.

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt – Lorsque j'étais une oeuvre d'art

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For my French book group this month we are reading Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Lorsque j’étais une oeuvre d’art (When I was a work of art). The premise of the book is quite simple. A depressed young man makes a deal with a famous artist – instead of killing himself (which the artist interrupted him from doing) he agrees to sign his life over to the artist who would like to turn him into a work of art. Several extremely painful operations later, the young man is the talk of the world.

Of course, fame and fortune as a living work of art do not turn out to be what the young man expected and he finds himself resenting his new position. He eventually realizes the life he’s accepted is worse than the death he escaped. He is admired and talked about and fawned over but his only value is as an object, not as a person.

Schmitt asks the reader to consider some very interesting questions in the novel – about what defines humanity, about the boundaries of art, about one person having an absolute right over someone else, about the importance of outer beauty vs. inner beauty – and I suspect my book group will have a wonderful discussion in two weeks time. However, I felt that had these questions been handled with a bit more subtlety and a bit less grotesque, the book would have been ten times better.

This is definitely a personal aesthetic preference but I found the story oversized, outlandish and excessive. The characters are mostly caricatural and the emotional tone unrealistic. On the one hand Schmitt creates an incredible, fantastical story, an example of social and artistic excess, which in fairness is highly entertaining and sometimes even provocative, and I suppose you could argue that the book is a satire (although I think if this was Schmitt’s overall objective, he misses the mark, especially in view of the ending), but on the other hand, the seriousness of the questions he asks the reader to consider is undercut by the over-the-top nature of the story. I couldn’t help thinking something more realistic might carry more weight.

Schmitt’s prose is accomplished and a pleasure to read; this helped smooth over my frustrations with the novel’s aesthetic. I’m one-for-one with Schmitt at this point, since I really enjoyed his other novel L’evagile selon Pilate (The Gospel According to Pilate). He has plenty of other work for me to try and I’m not ready to give up on him yet.

Many of Schmitt’s novels have been translated into English and I thought this one had too, but not yet. It’s in a bazillion other languages however so perhaps it will make its way into English soon. Anyone else read his work? Any suggestions about what to try next?

Luis Alberto Urrea – Into the Beautiful North

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My Central and South American reading project got off to an excellent start with Luis Alberto Urrea’s novel Into the Beautiful North. I read this lovely book in about two days and closed the last page feeling like I’d met some of the most delightful and interesting characters of all my recent reading.

Into the Beautiful North begins in small town Mexico, a dry and dusty place populated with cranky old women and vivacious teenage girls. The town’s jewel is a young woman named Nayeli, full of energy and confidence and the book focuses on her joys and inner sorrows (her father has vanished to the North with the rest of the men from town). Essentially, the novel belongs to Nayeli and her journey to find her father and save her town.

That serious focus is wrapped and twisted around a horde of outrageously quirky characters – Tacho: gay, owner of the town’s café and Nayeli’s best friend, Atómiko: a slang-speaking garbage dump warrior with a heart of gold, Aunt Irma: the outspoken and rigidly feminist new mayor, Vampi: Nayeli’s gothic girlfriend…the list goes on and on and includes border patrol officers, an ex-missionary, restaurant owners and a sweet, bumbling retired semi-pro bowler.

Tacho, Nayeli, Vampi and another girl named Yolo strike out on a journey to sneak into the United States to bring some men back to their devastated small town. They go about this task with an incredible optimism and an almost blind faith in their future success. Their endearing naiveté is almost too hard to believe, so are the number of near-disasters (instead of real disasters) that beset them. Not to mention Nayeli’s near perfect and extremely useful karate skills.  But I felt this only gave Into the Beautiful North a fairytale quality that suited its delicate balance of comedy and tragedy. The novel flirts with real violence, edges close to utter tragedy but somehow keeps every single one of its charming characters out of any real danger.

Almost everyone in Into the Beautiful North is kind. Genuinely kind and ready to help a stranger in need. Now when was the last time a contemporary novel attempted to assert that wild supposition? Urrea’s characters may be flawed and quirky, have sharp tongues or look extremely dangerous, but deep inside they are devoted to one another and to their fellow human beings. As I mentioned before, this gave the book a touch of fairytale but I didn’t feel it ever became trite. No one in the novel is perfect, and most of the characters are faced with difficult choices, but the story flows along over an undercurrent of ‘goodness’, for lack of a better word, that was refreshing.

So now I’ll be leaving Mexico and heading to Guatemala with The Divine Husband by Francisco Goldman.