Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘book review’ category

Larry McMurtry – Lonesome Dove

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I should admit I was a bit skeptical when my book group decided to read Larry McMurtry’s western novel Lonesome Dove. I’ve never been interested in historical western fiction, although I have some fond memories of looking at the stacks and stacks of Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey paperbacks in my grandfather’s house when I was a teenager. He piled them everywhere – on the radiators, on the armrests of his couches, on the windowsills. He loved this type of fiction. But I never tried it. Whenever I would go and stay with him, I always had my own stack of books and never went further than glancing with amusement at the gaudy covers of his. I wonder now what I might have been missing.

Lonesome Dove is an epic novel. It covers thousands of miles and nearly a year in the life of its characters, along with heavy back story for many of them. Aside from a selection of main characters, there are also dozens of minor characters to keep straight as well as an endless parade of small western towns and landscapes. Despite the breadth of the novel, it has a single, fundamental quest at its heart – one man’s desire to move from Texas and settle as a cattle rancher in Montana.

The book moves quickly from one extraordinary adventure to the next – fights, love stories, death, the trials of cowboy life. There is a healthy dose of violence, but also quite a bit of humor. The book has plenty of action and plot-driven momentum, but I was considerably impressed with McMurtry’s rendering of each character. And in particular Gus and Call, the novel’s main heroes.

Woodrow Call is the man behind the great cattle drive and an inscrutable figure. He lives for work, keeps himself apart from the men he leads and is rigidly honest in his dealings with both friends and enemies. His downfall, which the novel reveals slowly, is an inability to accept weakness in himself. I really enjoyed reading how McMurtry explored this idea.

Gus is the perfect foil for Call, a bon vivant with a sly sense of humor and a heart of gold. He is a tough character, but utterly devoted to the people he loves. His friendship with Call is one of the more interesting parts of the book. The two men are such opposites, yet wonderful complements. Gus pushes Call to admit his failures, with little success, and Call questions Gus’ choices and behaviors.

There isn’t a great, hidden meaning to this book. Nor is there space to get lost in the writing. It is what it is. But it does provide a fascinating portrait of 1800’s America, with its violence and peculiar worldview. McMurtry includes examples of everyone and everything: cowboys, immigrants, whores, settlers, criminals, lawmen and soldiers, poor people, women, ordinary men. Sadly, most of the characters he introduces the reader to eventually die somewhere later in the story. But it’s a testament to his skill as a writer that each time, no matter how minor the character, it was difficult not to truly mourn their loss.

Jeanette Winterson – The Passion

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Thank you to Bibliographing for introducing me to Jeanette Winterson. I’ll be dutifully tracking down every single one of her fourteen or so books, both fiction and non-fiction. Any suggestions on where to begin from those of you that already know her work?

It took me all of two days to read The Passion. Not only because it is a slender little book, but mostly because I was loathe to disrupt the atmosphere the book created. It was both highly realistic and extremely magical, and I love a book that can embody that paradox without becoming awkward. It managed to accomplish this feat by embracing those emotions we continue to consider mysterious – namely, love, but also trauma and how humans cope with a full range of disappointments and disillusions.

I don’t want to give away the details of the story except to say that The Passion is an historical fairytale – set in Napoleon’s France as well as in Venice. It’s about Henri, an earnest young Frenchman, and Villanelle, an unusual Venetian, and their respective passions. Despite the historical nature of the story, reading The Passion felt more like reading contemporary, experimental fiction. Another reason I enjoyed it so much.

Someone else will have to tell me if this is characteristic of Winterson’s style but the prose in the novel had a weighted and lyrical quality. Key phrases were repeated throughout, each time accruing slightly more meaning. This is a risky technique, because often the opposite can occur and the phrases can come off sounding cliché. This didn’t happen with The Passion and I think this is mainly due to Winterson successfully creating a fantastic, fabulous, nearly-carnival ambiance.

On her website, Winterson writes this:

The past is strange. We have never been there and we can never go there. I have never recognised the past as a document, rather I understand it as a kind of lumber room, full of trunks of old clothes and odd mementoes. There are as many narratives as there are guesses.

She writes this in a description of her other novel, Sexing the Cherry, but it strikes me as relevant to The Passion as well. I love this idea of the past as something a writer can re-construct both faithfully and unfaithfully – precisely because we can only guess and invent and imagine. We can never visit the past, we can only be bold enough to try to give it meaning and shape. To attempt to make something out of the remnants which make their way forward into our present as clues.

Alexander Trocchi – Young Adam

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Oneworld Classics, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite publishing programs, recently republished (2008) a novel by the Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi. The novel, Young Adam, was originally published in 1954 and features a highly-unreliable narrator named Joe.

Young Adam is divided into three parts and it isn’t until you turn the page to Part 2 that you realize that Joe has just spent eighty pages distracting you from the real story. The novel actually opens with Joe and his employer Leslie finding a dead woman floating in the river next to their barge. They fish her out, call the police, mull over the event a bit and then the novel changes direction completely, detailing Joe’s obsessed attempt to have an affair with Leslie’s wife.

But when Part 2 opens, you realize that Joe and the dead woman are much more intricately connected than he ever let on. And that the novel is actually about this relationship and Joe’s role in her death. You also realize that Joe’s interest in Leslie’s wife Ella dates from almost the exact moment the other woman’s body was removed from the river and that previous to that moment, he hadn’t much considered her worth his time. 

Although quite a short novel, Young Adam packs a bizarrely powerful punch. On the one hand, the writing is often awkward. Joe’s narrative style is as inconsistent as his fact-telling. He moves from a gentle, poetic lyricism to using stilted, clumsy sentences – often in the same paragraph. The introduction tells me that Trocchi did this on purpose, and links it to his proto-postmodern style. I must admit that it created a bumpy reading experience, although I eventually accepted this as part of Joe’s camouflage, a way to deceive or at least confuse the reader. On the other hand, Joe’s attempts to disentangle himself from the responsibility of the woman’s death are psychologically rich and complex and gave a lot of meat to this very slim story.

Joe’s relationship with the different women in the novel is where Trocchi seems to provide most of the analysis for Joe’s character. Joe is profoundly misogynistic. Although this may be oversimplifying things, since he also seems to be just as misanthropic. I couldn’t find an example of Joe enjoying the company of any other single person in the novel. But he uses the women in particular, which makes it easier to examine this aspect of his personality.

Trocchi is considered a member of the Beat generation and Young Adam reflects that tradition, although I found it much darker than other samples of Beat literature I’ve come across. I wonder if this is a cultural difference, since I often find that Europeans allow for a more cynical and somber worldview than Americans. In his literature, Trocchi seems to be experimenting with both form and content, but there is no joy, no heady giddiness in that experimentation.

In fact, it could be argued that his portrayal of sexual freedom results in a heartless, unfeeling situation where both partners are locked inside their own experience, without access to the other. If Trocchi was interested in exploring the Beat themes of rootlessness, non-conformity and free expression, his assessment of the power granted in that freedom seems overwhelmingly pessimistic.

 In total, Trocchi has ten novels, although it seems most of these are dismissed as experimental erotic fiction with little literary merit. His other “serious” novel, Cain’s Book, is a chronicle of heroin addiction and caused quite a sensation when it was first published in 1961. Apparently, critics are still undecided as to whether Young Adam or Cain’s Book should be considered his finest work. I’ll be interested to see what I think when I can get my hands on a copy.

Jane Austen – Emma

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Last week, after snatching it off the shelves of my favorite second-hand book shop, I sat down and read Jane Austen’s Emma in one sitting. I happen to like my Austen this way, in big healthy bites with very few interruptions. And reading Emma was no different, although the experience was heightened a bit since I’d never read it before and kept trying to figure out who Emma would end up with. To say I figured it out fairly early would be both true and a lie. I had my suspicions from the beginning, but all my recent Wharton reading put me on guard and I wondered if Austen wasn’t about to shock me with an unexpected twist of some sort.

Let’s see…what did I like about Emma? First and foremost, it was just plain enjoyable to immerse myself in Austen’s 19th century England. The vista she presents to her readers is so wholly complete, so detailed, that it’s difficult not to wish to have lived at this time period, or at least to be able to experience firsthand the world she describes. And Austen really is an expert storyteller, so just moving from one scene to the next and working through the various ups and downs of the story provides an all-around satisfying reading experience.

I also enjoyed the structure of the novel and the way it keeps the reader from knowing for absolutely certain which gentlemen the author has selected for her heroine. Compared to her other novels, I felt she kept the hints about Emma’s future husband decidedly subtle. With that looming story a bit more subdued than usual, she was free to construct a series of adventures to help Emma do some much-needed growing up.

So here is where I admit I found Emma a bit of an annoying heroine. I realize this is what Austen intended, that we get frustrated with Emma’s well-intentioned but hopelessly irresponsible manipulations. She serves us a good lesson – even clever people, when too-often indulged will lose their objectivity. In short, cleverness isn’t enough. Patience, empathy for others and honest self-reflection is just as important. To some extent I was happy to play along and then feel suitably proud of Emma for recognizing the gravity of her heedless meddling and then earnestly mending her ways.

And there was something about Emma’s perfect independence that worked against her. She is in no real danger, ever, of losing something she really cares about. Compare that to Elizabeth Bennett, Elinor Dashwood, Catherine Morland, Fanny Price or Anne Elliot – all of these women must come face to face with real, life-altering disappointment at some point in their stories. Emma’s realization that she is at risk to be disappointed is so quickly rationalized into existence and then her actual disappointment so wonderfully short-lived, that it was hard for me to work up any real concern about her well-being.

Finally, though it may have been my mood when reading the book, I found Emma to be much less funny than say, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice or Northanger Abbey. Those three books had many moments of laugh-out-loud comedy, provided by a contingent of marvelously eccentric characters with either sharp tongues or oblivious blunderings. Emma’s father and Miss Bates provided some well-needed humor on occasion (both decidedly in the latter category) but that was about it.

All in all, Emma will never be my favorite Austen. But I’m very happy to have read it and I’m sure I’ll re-read it at some point. Perhaps it will grow on me with a second reading. Now that I’ve read them all, Pride and Prejudice remains my favorite with Northanger Abbey and Persuasion tied for second and Sense and Sensibility coming in a very close third. I love the characters and the story, but I believe the narrative gets a bit baggy around the edges in this one. I quite like the intellectual equality Austen gives to Emma and her eventual husband, so I think Emma will come next in line for that reason alone. Unfortunately, I’ve never been completely satisfied with the ending of Mansfield Park so Fanny and Edmund remain my least favorite Austen couple.

Anton Chekhov – The Shooting Party

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Over the weekend I read Chekhov’s only novel, The Shooting Party, which was originally published in 1885. What a strange and delightful combination of early police fiction with Chekhov’s incredible talent for description and emotional representation. The novel is also a piece of clever metafiction, in that it is about a writer reading and commenting on another writer’s manuscript. The story is quite melodramatic, but in an enjoyable way. I couldn’t stop turning the pages.

The basic story begins with a dashing young man barging his way into a literary newspaper, asking that his manuscript be accepted for publication. He specifies that what he’s written is a true story. The editor (who is a wonderfully sarcastic creature with the initials A.C.) tells him he’s very busy and won’t get back to him for three months. Some months later, the editor takes the story out and reads it. He can’t put it down.

The actual crime story is quite familiar – think ruined innocence, general debauchery, class conflict – and centers on a love quadrangle between a young woodcutter’s daughter, an investigating magistrate, an out-of-luck gentleman and a Count. Each of these men fall in love with the young girl, each have their way with her in one way or another, and eventually she ends up ruined and (to add injury to insult) murdered.

Something I enjoyed immensely in The Shooting Party is the narrative layering between the editor A.C., who annotates the manuscript while he reads, and Kamyshev, the author and main protagonist of The Shooting Party. As A.C. comments on Kamyshev’s character and his writing style, the reader gets to chuckle a bit at Chekhov’s pseudo-modesty as well as get an in-depth look at how Chekhov envisions character creation.

The editor’s commentary also gives the story away repeatedly, which didn’t bother me in the least, but I do wonder how his readers in 1885 responded to this technique. Especially because the introduction to my edition of The Shooting Party tells me that Chekhov wrote the novel as a sort of parody of the extravagant, sensational police thrillers which were all the rage at the time. Apparently, Chekhov couldn’t stand how badly these stories were written, and how horrific their characters were. So in that sense, Kamyshev is both a parody of the tasteless writer AND the reprehensible main character.

There aren’t many good, intelligent, kind-hearted people in The Shooting Party, except perhaps the local doctor (another wink from Chekhov, perhaps, since this was his day job) and another unfortunate young woman. The rest are mostly a bunch of alcoholic swindlers and moral reprobates. Which made for many colorful scenes. There were also some purely comic characters. Of these, I particularly liked Kamyshev’s manservant, Polikarp, who is reading The Count of Monte Cristo throughout the story and verbally abuses his employer whenever possible.

As I’ve made pretty clear here, much of the novel is fun or sensational, although I think there were some serious elements. The women, for example, are neither comic nor wicked. They are all mostly tragic. Especially the woodcutter’s daughter, Olga. What happens to her is quite her fault really (not the murder, but her gradual descent into depravity) in the sense that she sells herself readily. She’s beautiful, but horribly vain. And she’s a social climber, although not at all skilled at climbing. So she makes one mistake after another. She’s a pathetic figure with a tragic end.

All in all, a great weekend read!

Anne Fadiman – Ex Libris

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I tried and tried to make Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris last as long as possible, telling myself to read only one of these short essays each night. My plan inevitably backfired and I was unable to stop at just one, moving forward to finish three or four each evening and then yesterday, waiting at the doctor’s office I finished the collection.

I am hard pressed to pick a favorite essay. I loved Marrying Libraries and Fadiman’s humorous description of the ups and downs of merging the treasured books of two bibliophiles into one cohesive, organized collection. I also laughed my way through Nothing New Under the Sun in which Fadiman manages to painstakingly footnote every single word or sentence that might possibly be attributed to someone other than herself. Cleverly, she makes the point that literature is an endlessly renewing and evolving art, and that although plagiarism is serious business, writers are unavoidably and always standing on the shoulders of their predecessors.

Aside from the specific essays, I also enjoyed the way Fadiman shared her family’s bookish idiosyncrasies – how they treat their books, their merciless radar for grammatical mistakes, and their devoted, nearly obsessive search for new words. I was also raised in a book-loving family, although nowhere near as erudite as Fadiman’s.

Books were, and still are, our preferred form of entertainment. My parents’ bedroom, and both my sister’s and my own, overflowed with books for as far back as I can remember. Our living room housed my father’s collection of old Scottish poetry, 17th century novels and newer collectible hardbacks. Their bedroom was wall-to-wall with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and anything and everything my father could find about Winston Churchill, WWII and the American Civil War. My mother collected gardening and nature books.

My sister and I followed their example, amassing shelves and shelves of our favorite authors. As teenagers, we both had phases – mysteries and thrillers, Jane Austen and the Brontës, historical fiction and even romance. By the time we had both finished graduate school and finally packed up our belongings for good, we each had the challenging task of selecting which old favorites would get donated to the library or the local second-hand bookstore, as well as choosing from the hordes of books from our respective fields that we’d collected throughout our schooling. I’m sure neither of us managed to part with many. But I’m forever grateful to my parents for showing me there is really no such thing as too many books.

The very last essay in Ex Libris is called Secondhand Prose and it is a delightful little meditation on the joy of musty, scribbled-in old books rooted out from the creaking shelves of a used bookshop. I found myself wishing to hop on a plane to NYC, take a train to a town called Hastings-on-Hudson and browse through the 300,000 books to be found at the Riverrun Bookshop. Fadiman writes about spending seven hours in this shop on her birthday one year and taking home 19 pounds of books. I’m quite certain I’m not the only one reading this essay who got shivers of delight at the very idea!

What is it about secondhand bookshops? I’ve never met a reader that didn’t love a good hunt through some dusty shelves. I’m completely biased but I think this has much to do with the inexhaustible nature of reading, coupled with that very notion of literature being on a continuum. Not only does literature build upon and renew itself with each generation, but literary experience is effectively infinite, there will always be another book to find, another story to read. Which makes reading a never-ending treasure hunt and secondhand bookshops the way stations of that adventure.

Muriel Barbery – L'élégance du hérisson

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I’ve done quite a bit of thinking about Muriel Barbery’s L’Elégance du Hérisson and although I resist framing it this way – since I do think there are parts of the book which prompt valuable discussion and in general I think Barbery writes well – I found myself more frustrated with the novel than anything else.

Basically the novel follows two individuals – Renée, the concierge in a luxurious Parisian apartment building, and Paloma, one of the building’s residents, a twelve-year-old self-declared genius. Through alternating narratives, which are both bitter and sarcastic, these two detail their anger and loneliness. They are both out to expose the hypocrisy in the average wealthy person’s soul – Paloma by ridiculing the thoughts and behaviors of her family, and Renée by condemning the thoughts and behaviors of everyone else in the building.

From the angry, frustrated and self-styled intellectual perspective of both Paloma and Renée, these critiques really do come off as ridicule. Renée is much more derisive, and presumably her age and experience have made her opinions that much more ingrained. Paloma is more reactive – she is living her disappointment, not just looking back on it. But both characters speak from a place of smug superiority, no matter how tainted that superiority is with their loneliness.

Only a few people are exempt from Paloma and Renée’s scorching diatribes: Olympe, a wealthy young woman whose greatest aspiration is to become a veterinarian and so she practices on the building’s cats; Manuela, the cleaning lady and Renée’s best friend – although Renée makes sure to point out that Manuela is intellectually inferior, but otherwise an elegant, dignified woman; and Mr. Ozu, the Japanese man who moves into the building halfway through the novel and throws this little Parisian microcosm into an uproar.

Usually I like stories that explore class differences because I think we often pretend (at least I feel the subject is taboo with many Americans) that class doesn’t exist. Barbery runs headlong into a very scathing discussion of class, but I can’t help feeling that where she could have done something a bit more serious, a bit more nuanced, instead she went overboard into caricature. And this includes the very heavy philosophical overtones of the entire book. I have no doubt that people like the ones she describes in this book do exist, but I resist the idea that these stereotypes are the norm. The book didn’t need to use such exaggerated stereotypes to prove its point, this just seemed to make things sensational and I couldn’t help feeling disappointed by that.

It seemed to me that in her attempt to balance things out, Barbery inadvertently offends some of the very people she would presumably prefer to champion. Take Renée – a concierge who pretends to be something she is not. Renée is portrayed as a deeply intellectual woman, brimming with curiosity about philosophy and aesthetics and history and social justice, yet she pretends to watch mindless television all day and eat disgusting food, not to mention uses carefully placed grammatical mistakes, all because she believes this is what her wealthy tenants require of her. Not only does this typecast the wealthy people in her building, but it’s fairly demeaning toward other concierges as well. Why is Renée the only intelligent, curious concierge in all of Paris?

Now I realize that I am to understand Renée’s behavior as a result of her loneliness and fear but I had trouble with this dichotomy. If Renée is truly that enlightened and curious and intelligent, why is she also so broken? I suppose one can be intelligent and hard-hearted at the same time, but the way Renée’s sensibility and intellect were portrayed suggested to me that they should also preclude her from engaging in the same petty labeling as the people in the building.

And in all honesty, I had a lot of trouble with the stereotyping of Japanese culture in the novel. Even before Mr. Ozu arrives in the building, both Renée and Paloma make statements idealizing Japanese culture and aesthetics, and its superiority vs. the superficial culture of the West. I find this kind of east-west pigeon-holing quite dangerous. I was born in Japan, I’ve lived and studied in Japan and I appreciate many aspects of Japanese culture, but I get quite prickly when I hear these kinds of sweeping statements. Especially from two characters that have never actually experienced Japanese culture first hand. Elements of both cultures are wonderful; elements of both cultures can be criticized.

It doesn’t help that when Mr. Ozu shows up, he is the perfect embodiment of all Renée and Paloma have imagined. So the stereotype is thus confirmed and perpetuated.

Despite what it may sound like here, I do recommend this book. It seems to me reactions to this novel are highly subjective. Some people have loved it, and found inside a worthwhile philosophical discussion about aesthetics and human nature. I’m afraid that my frustrations with the characters and with Barbery’s attempt to discuss class, kept me from enjoying aspects of the novel’s philosophical project.

Finally, and I hesitate to write this, but I found the ending fairly disappointing. It struck me as arbitrary, instead of a proper, organic finale. It almost felt like Barbery got worried her novel had somehow veered into mass-culture-chick-lit-ish territory (which I could argue that it did) and so terrified with that possibility, she took drastic measures to create a thought-provoking ending. I believe she could have accomplished a similar, if not better, emotional intonation with a more nuanced ending. Which makes me wonder if she was simply following a template, based on her understanding and interpretation of Japanese aesthetics. Read this way, the ending fits, but then I could argue she sacrificed the book’s crafted and hybrid aesthetic for something not much better than a gimmick…

Philippe Claudel – Le Rapport de Brodeck

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Over the last two years I’ve had the pleasure to read three Philippe Claudel novels, all of which I really enjoyed. His style is simple but poetic and the subjects he tackles in each book all hold up under prolonged discussion. I’d say there are two things that each of the three books share – a subtlety in engaging with their thematic project or question and a reliance on the idea of narration as a means to catharsis.

In Les Ames Grises (2003) the narrator is literally bursting with the need to tell his own painful story, yet that very trauma keeps him from tackling the subject head on. Instead he winds around a related story, just as powerful, as a means to find the words he himself needs. I felt this technique was quite successful, mainly because it was subtly done. La Petite Fille de Monsieur Linh (2005) is also about an individual wrestling with trauma, but in this story Claudel looks at how we invent our own external narratives as a way to survive a difficult past.

It goes without saying that I had high hopes for his newest work, Le Rapport de Brodeck*, and I was in no way disappointed. Like the other two books, this novel also examines how an individual with a traumatic past weaves a narrative. And much like Les Ames Grises, there are two narratives at work in Le Rapport de Brodeck. Although I think it is safe to say that this newest work achieves its goal with more elegance and subtlety than the either two. I can’t help seeing it as a culmination of the stylistic and thematic development found in his other books.

But getting to the more important stuff – what is Le Rapport de Brodeck about? In essence, Claudel takes the horror story of the 20th century (the Holocaust) and recreates it on a tiny, nearly anonymous scale. By anonymous I mean that he keeps his setting vague and doesn’t go about shouting the names or labels of his protagonists. Brodeck, for example, is never described as Jewish, the men who come to occupy the village are never called Nazi’s and even the two countries (clearly France and Germany) remain unnamed.

By doing this, Claudel removes the specificity from the event, making it much easier (and frankly, much more frightening) to see how what happened during the Holocaust is actually a timeless and location-less phenomenon. And in fact, the central event of the story occurs a few years after WWII has ended, which I took as a grim reminder that the world has not finished with horror.

So although the book purports to be a story we’ve all heard or read before, it becomes more of a prediction, a warning. This isn’t historical fiction, but a bleak meditation on the mediocrity of the human soul. There is no hero in Le Rapport de Brodeck, no one who completely overcomes their own powerful instinct for self-preservation. And Claudel seems to be asking whether this is reason enough to condemn us all.

I could hardly put this book down, but I found it quite disturbing in the absolute. Claudel takes great pains to portray humanity in shades of gray – even Brodeck doesn’t escape this notion of mediocrity. Which is something I approved of. At the same time, I felt Claudel’s spectrum a little lopsided. While he does provide examples of pure evil, the pendulum never swung to the highest point in the opposite direction. That isn’t an answer I can accept. I don’t believe there are hordes of brave heroes and heroines, but selfless, noble people do exist and will continue to work against the kind of world Claudel describes.

For those of you who do not read French, the rights to Le Rapport de Brodeck have been sold in both the UK and the US, so this book will appear in English at some time, hopefully soon.

*The title can be translated as Brodeck’s Report and the novel centers on a report that narrator Brodeck must write about a horrible event which occurred in his small village.

C.F. Ramuz – Si le soleil ne revenait pas

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Si le soleil ne revenait pas*  is about a tiny village high up in the Alps. The story is set between October and April, a time when the village doesn’t get any sun because of the steep mountain walls. The villagers are used to this and go about their winter activities without too much fuss. They miss the sunshine but know this period of their lives is something that will pass, as it has every year before.

Until one of the village elders, who is also a healer, predicts that this year the sun won’t come back. Something has changed in the movement of the stars and the sun will no longer be on their side of the earth. Not surprisingly, this prediction has a strong effect on the village and as the winter deepens they each begin to react.

Ramuz does a lot with man vs. nature in all of his writing but this novel takes that idea to an absolute extreme by focusing on a group of people who are already used to the idea that the sun will abandon them for a certain amount of time each year and then asking them to accept its eventual extinction. I think had he tried to set the novel down on the lake for example, the psychology of the villagers would have been completely different. Much more opposition to the idea, instead of this consuming fear.

One of the things I enjoy with Ramuz is his character sketches – with just a few lines he’s able to create this crystal clear picture of a variety of different people. The cast of characters in Si le soleil ne revenait pas is very rich. From old Anzévui, seated in front of his hearth with his long, scraggly beard and his book of numbers to young newlywed Isabelle with her yearning for summer and the chance to feel the sun on her skin. And I particularly loved how he rendered Arlettaz, a father literally losing his mind with grief over the loss of his daughter. The book simply overflows with side stories about the villagers and their lives.

And I know I’ve said this before, but Ramuz is a master of description. Here are just two of my favorite lines – taken from a scene when Métrailler goes to visit Anzévui (the healer) after the death of his father:

Les plantes étaient attachées par leurs racines aux poutres et pendaient, la tête en bas, comme des chauves-souris.

[The plants were attached by their roots to the ceiling beams and hung, head down, like bats.]

La flamme du feu était sur sa figure et ensuite n’y était plus; alors il y avait de l’ombre autour de ses yeux comme il y a de l’eau dans les creux d’une pierre.

[The flame from the fire was on his face and then it was gone; shadows appeared around his eyes like water in the cracks of a stone.]

These short descriptions are interspersed between a terse conversation (Métrailler thinks Anzévui had something to do with the death of his father) and I found the mention of bats, fire, shadows and stone just heightened the darkness of the moment. It was very effective.

I’m hoping hoping hoping that I’ll get a chance to translate this novel as well at some point. At the moment I’m concentrating on a few short stories and a different novel. But every time I pick Ramuz up I can’t believe that so little of his work ever really made it into English. So strange how these things turn out.

*The title can be translated literally as If the sun was never coming back but I think this is a bit clunky in English..the words soleil and revenait rhyme in French so it sounds much better, more fluid. Finding an appropriate English title would be tricky.

George Eliot – Silas Marner

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Silas Marner is so different from Adam Bede. I wonder if I had read them blind (not knowing the author, I mean) whether I would have been able to say they were written by the same person. My hunch is no. What’s interesting is that there was only two years between the publication of Adam Bede (1859) and Silas Marner (1861). In between George Eliot published The Mill on the Floss, so her stylistic change is remarkable.

Thematically, Silas Marner does something similar to Adam Bede in that it exposes the hypocrisy and moral weakness of a country squire. Like Arthur Donnithorne, Godfrey Cass is a gutless rich boy with too much free time and not enough real conviction.  Both men are portrayed as inherently good-natured, just spineless. I think this says a lot about Eliot’s view of character. It isn’t really enough to be kindhearted – being a good person requires courage and self-control.

And in both novels, Eliot pits her two male characters against each other (a bit less directly in Silas Marner) to highlight their strengths and failings. In the Adam vs. Arthur comparison, Adam is nearly superhuman – a truly exceptional character (minus his inability to see Hetty for who she really is). This seems fitting for a first novel. Eliot exaggerates a bit with Adam (and Dinah for that matter, can a woman be more angelic?) and I can only assume she was maybe overexcited about her first large-scale literary offering.

But in Silas Marner the two men – Silas and Godfrey – are much more nuanced, a bit fragile and both have significant faults. Silas’ faults, however, are a result of an earlier misfortune, and Godfrey’s because of a weak character. In that sense, Silas is easily forgiven.

But enough about theme, I really wanted to talk about style here, because this is where the two books were markedly dissimilar. Adam Bede, as I mentioned before, has a few too many tangents and what I would call an intrusive narrator. But in Silas Marner, the narrator rarely steps off the page to signal her presence. There is no, “dear reader”, no pointed asides, no overdone explanation. Just a smoothly-told story.

And yet Eliot does manage to fit in plenty of omniscient narrator discourse. What I mean by that are the moments within or following a scene, when the narrator “exposes” something about human nature, or “reveals” the greater significance of a particular moment. In Eliot’s case, this tends toward generally-applicable revelation. A good example is right after Marner is robbed and the narrator explains that his being forced to interact with his neighbors began to work some positive changes on his character, and then she goes on to make this statement:

Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us anymore than without us; there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.

Now that is a subtle, incisive narrator. In Adam Bede this reflection would have gone on just a line too long.

Looking at tangents, I did think the chapter where the old men are sitting around discussing ghosts could qualify as unnecessary, but since it’s the only one in the book (and quite enjoyable) I wouldn’t have even noticed it if I hadn’t just experienced a raft of similar departures in Adam Bede.

Moving forward, The Mill on the Floss should arrive any day now and I’m looking forward to seeing how it sits between these other two.

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