Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘book review’ category

Mary Doria Russell – The Sparrow

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Once in awhile a book comes along that sends me into a tailspin and I find myself putting off writing about it – mainly because I worry that anything I write couldn’t possibly do it justice. The easy thing to do would be to say – read this book, come back when you’re finished and then let’s talk. It’s that kind of book. It wants to be discussed.

 

I do not usually read science fiction. It just isn’t my thing. But when Ann from Table Talk, whose impeccable judgment I trust completely, recommended Mary Doria Russell’s novel The Sparrow, I went and got myself a copy right away. I believe Ann said the book was a revelation for her at the time she read it and that was certainly enough to get me interested. I love the idea that a single book can change the way we understand or think about the world. Literature is just that powerful.

 

The Sparrow is about Jesuit priests and space travel. A young scientist discovers radio waves from another planet which turn out to be music. He reveals his discovery to his closest friends, one of whom happens to be a Jesuit priest and linguistics expert named Emilio, and suddenly the Jesuits are funding a research expedition to get to the planet and see if they can make contact.

 

The novel is written in such a way, however, that you know from the very beginning the expedition was a failure. Eight people (four priests, four civilians) were sent, and only one has returned – Emilio. He is close to death when he arrives back on earth. All of the other travelers were killed somehow and Emilio was found by the rescue team working in a brothel. He also seems to have killed a child from the alien planet.

 

The Sparrow takes on a staggering number of philosophical questions – about religious faith and humanity, about definitions of sentient life and forms of social structure. It explores biological determinism, racism and political theory. And yet it is also a clearly-written story about friendship, love and adventure which takes place in a richly-imagined alien world.  

 

Highlights for me included the novel’s discussion about clerical celibacy, questions about assumptions/prejudices we might make with regard to other sentient beings, and the book’s investigation of a different and difficult-to-understand socio-political system. Also, The Sparrow looks at the idea of influence. What happens when a theoretically more-developed culture comes in contact with a theoretically less-developed culture? And who gets to decide what “developed” means?

 

It is hard to pinpoint a central question in The Sparrow but one which became very important for me by the end of the novel was a theological one – if we accept that God is good, how do we accept that He allows horrible things to happen? This paradox, I think, is fundamental to any exploration of faith. If we believe that a higher power has worked to put together or is fundamental to some kind of architecture – biological or moral – then we can’t help but be interested in understanding how that higher power is involved when the architecture breaks down.

 

Perhaps there are tons of science fiction novels with a similar preoccupation and since I don’t read them I’ve missed out until now, but I can’t help feeling this novel was unique. Russell’s prose is straightforward and her ideas complicated – an effective combination for a novel with so much going on.

 

 

 

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Rhian Ellis – After Life

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Rhian Ellis’s novel After Life is a tricky one to write about. Mostly because any discussion of its subject will quickly give away its secrets. In a general sense, this is a novel about death and regret, about losing someone you care about and not knowing how to move on. But this preoccupation comes from a unique perspective since our main character (and narrator), Naomi, is a spiritualist and a medium.

 

Ellis handles this unfamiliar world with incredible restraint. Nowhere does the story derail into some sideshow spectacle of the bizarreness of communing with the dead or spiritualism’s eccentric adherents. These events and people are mostly treated as mundane experience and so the reader is able to appreciate them as such. Which is good because the actual story of After Life is not mundane at all.

 

This is all I can tell you: When the novel opens Naomi is remembering the day, ten years before, when she had to bury her boyfriend. I don’t mean this figuratively. She had to bury him with her own two hands, dig him a hole on the other side of a lake and try to get him in. It is a disturbing scene, made even more difficult by the fact that we don’t know how he died or why Naomi is burying him.

 

Somehow, despite this event, Naomi has managed to continue moving through her day to day. She takes care of someone else’s child. She works at the Spiritualist library/museum in her town. She gives readings and maintains her communion with the spirits who contact her about her clients. But it’s also abundantly clear that Naomi is not okay at all. She is unkempt (sometimes quite dirty), unsociable and easily upset. She struck me as an incredibly depressed individual.

 

Of course the inevitable occurs. Peter’s bones are found and the police begin an investigation to sort out who they belong to. They enlist the help of Naomi’s mother (also a medium) and Naomi gets involved. I can’t say anything else or I really will give something away.

 

More than these plot twists (as engaging as they were) After Life focused more on Naomi’s loneliness and regret. All was not right between Naomi and Peter before Peter died and Naomi is literally coming apart at the seams with remorse. Which is kind of ironic because, as a medium, she should still have access to him. If she wanted she could try to get through to him. And to make matters worse she has to negotiate the reality that in her professional life she is supposed to believe that dead people really haven’t gone away, so why should she be allowed to feel loneliness at all?

 

Naomi questions her powers throughout the book, which is something that made the novel interesting and complex. Many of the scenes that involve channeling spirits are layered with a level of doubt because Naomi admits that maybe she just imagined she saw someone’s grandmother, or maybe she just remembered details from a recent obituary. The novel opens up a thorough discussion about the powers of belief and how far they can be pushed to amend reality.

 

There were a few places where I felt Naomi’s voice got in the way. Where her narration didn’t quite give enough space to her gestures and words – which together tell us more about what she’s thinking and feeling than any explanation she can offer up. But the book itself is good enough that these come across as nothing more than little speed bumps. What was more compelling to me about Naomi as a narrator was that she has a secret she wants very much to keep to herself, yet she’s the one who has decided to tell her story. That paradox was particularly engaging.

 

 

 

 

Ethan Canin – Blue River

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On Friday afternoon I took a short reading break to get some distance from a translation I was working on and picked a random, unread book from the shelf. I spent twenty minutes with Ethan Canin’s first novel, Blue River, and knew I would go back to it later that evening and read until I had finished.

 

Which I did, turning that last page sometime after midnight and just sitting quietly with my thoughts and impressions of these new characters and images. I haven’t enjoyed a book so thoroughly in months, perhaps since sitting in the garden with Kirsty Gunn’s Rain and getting as equally enthralled in the writing and the voice. In many respects the books are similar – first person narratives about a traumatic past. Where Blue River differs is that its past is a much more distinct and separate location, far removed (and purposely so) from its present.

 

The novel begins in the present – a morning in June when narrator Edward’s brother appears on Edward’s front porch. The two have not seen each other (save once) in fifteen years. Their interaction is understandably strained but it becomes quickly evident that for all the empty space and time between them (an easy explanation for their awkwardness), there is something much more substantial in the way. But Edward does no explaining. The visit continues – they go to the zoo with Edward’s family, they eat dinner…it’s an extended and bewildering scene, infused with Edward’s elegant and weighty tangents about his life and work. But the most remarkable element of this first section is Edward’s conspicuous fear. He is terrified from the moment he finds Lawrence on his porch to the moment he puts him on a bus back to where he came from.

 

And then Canin has Edward take the story into the past. Slowly, carefully Edward redraws his relationship with his older brother. Here is where the novel’s unique structure comes into play but also its risky decision to switch into the second person – Edward has gone into the past in order to retell the stories of their childhood to Lawrence. He stops addressing the reader completely. What’s also interesting is that this retelling isn’t just an attempt to excuse or absolve himself from their eventual estrangement, it’s more a desire to understand how he became the kind of person he is now and why Lawrence didn’t.

 

I’m a sucker for realism, I know, but this is the kind of fiction I enjoy the most – no madcap characters, no outsized events except the intimate, family ones which feel huge when they upset what we believed were firmer foundations, no writerly pyrotechnics. Just unique framing, careful scripting and breathtaking detail. There are a few moments when Canin might have eased off the confessional or let the reader make the connections without forcing them upon us with one or two excess lines of explanation. But in general the novel is a smooth and graceful movement through one man’s memories and self-reflection.

 

Other than several of his short stories from the collection The Palace Thief, this is my first time reading Canin. I’ve already ordered his second novel, For Kings and Planets, from bookmooch and am going to see if I can find his newest, America, America in the shop in Lausanne. I’ve become an instant admirer.

 

 

re-reading Joyce – chapter two

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It’s the small details that make Portrait of an Artist such a joy to read. Like this scene where Stephen sits watching into someone else’s home. You can see the delicious pleasure he takes in being the voyeur (made twice as interesting when the reader realizes she is looking in on Stephen in the same way):

 

Whenever the car drew up before a house he waited to cach a glimpse of a wellscrubbed kitchen or of a softlylighted hall and to see how the servant would hold the jug and how she would close the door.

 

I love his emphasis on the movements and gestures of the servant. He doesn’t even have to give us his interpretation of what he sees, it’s enough to know that those small actions are what he’s looking for. Tells us so much about Stephen.

 

In Part II, Stephen has his first experience with love. It’s unfulfilled (like all first love experiences should be) and Joyce moves us through Stephen’s expectation, disappointment and angry despair in a tumble of rapid lines. He dashes away from the event and off into the night with classic adolescent angst. Racing from the site of his failure, an unthinking, purely physical force. But then he stops, and transforms his physical into poetic:

 

He stood still and gazed up at the sombre porch of the morgue and from that to the dark cobbled laneway at its side. He saw the word Lotts on the wall of the lane and breathed slowly the rank heavy air.

That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.

 

This is Stephen’s trick. This pushing of the moment until it breaks apart into its sensory components. This is his artist’s perspective at work. How he will convert the unpleasant to suit his sensibilities.

 

Part II is also about Stephen as a sexual being, about a natural adolescent longing and then Stephen’s particular fear of sin. Joyce writes quite eloquently about how tortured Stephen feels in relation to his body and its desires. And the chapter ends, rightly, with Stephen visiting a prostitute. Joyce describes their kiss:

 

(Her lips) pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressue, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.

 

Darker than the swoon of sin…doesn’t that just perfectly capture the joy and terror of transgression?

 

 

Angela Young – Speaking of Love

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I stayed up late on Sunday night finishing Angela Young’s Speaking of Love – a thoughtful novel about schizophrenia and about courage and about love. It was not an easy read in many ways because Young does not shy away from depicting some of the more devastating aspects of schizophrenia. But Speaking of Love is also very much about storytelling. And how the telling of stories, of crafting and listening to them, of reveling in them, can help bring people together and mend some of the loneliness that is so often experienced by the families and loved ones affected by mental illness.

 

The novel also deals with the idea of the past controlling our present and what a vicious cycle this perspective can turn out to be. One of the novel’s main characters, Vivie, is a frightening example of how trauma can become your only filter of expression and how each and every one of your personal relationships can become dictated by the needs and demands of feeding that traumatic persona.

 

In many ways each of the novel’s narrators (there are three – Iris, Vivie and Matthew) is trapped or bound inside the memory of a shared painful experience. Except, I suppose, for one important distinction – these three have not shared that experience at all. They endured it side by side, temporally and physically, but came out at the other end with vastly different reactions and no ability to communicate with one another.

 

Something I really appreciated in this novel is Young’s offer of an honest, simple, and realistic solution. Kindness, patience, understanding, learning how to say the difficult words. Sounds easy, of course, but we all know it’s not. Matthew is the most prepared to learn this lesson and his voice is one of the more delightful elements of the novel – introspective and quiet, fearful but affectionate. He takes us through the hushed moments, the times he stood watching and waiting, hoping.

 

I remember the smells most: the wet earth when we dug the potatoes up, the sweet carrots in their cool sand box in Dad’s shed, the mellow honeyed scent the apples gave out from their slatted wooden shelves and the musky smell of the beans on their poles.

 

The novel’s intricate structure, with its three distinct voices and several tenses, adds to the story’s natural tension. Each chapter is short and as the three stories begin to grow more complex, more entwined, they begin to play off one another and deepen our appreciation of the other. The novel also includes four of Iris’s stories – strange, darkly beautiful fairytales – which conclude each of the four parts and add a tangible feeling of storytelling to the entire book. Very unique and quite elegantly done.

 

Speaking of Love is Angela Young’s first novel. I know she is working on a second and I for one am very excited to see it when it comes out. She also runs a delightful blog about her writing and reading at Writing, Life and the Universe.

 

 

Nadine Gordimer – Burger's Daughter

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Well, I didn’t think it could happen but it finally did. I shouldn’t feel so disappointed about this but I do. I was prepared to love all of Nadine Gordimer’s work wholeheartedly. And its not that Burger’s Daughter is bad – on the contrary, it’s a rich story with a lot of very interesting questions. And there are those moments of pure Gordimer – exquisite writing with just the right reflection or description. But as a whole, in its movement through and from each scene to scene, it just kind of got lost in itself along the way.

 

The novel has three distinct parts and if I explain what they are to any extent, I will give the story away. I wanted very much for these three parts to work together – and I suppose that on the surface they do. They represent three distinct phases of Rosa Burger’s self-actualization. But instead of leading one to the other, they felt more like images taped together a bit awkwardly at the seams. There was a moment in the middle of Part II that I thought Gordimer had changed course for an entirely different story and I was ready to feel cheated or at the very least confused. An act of almost-believable coincidence puts the story back on track and eventually it traipses forward to an ending which felt…well, I suppose it felt okay.

 

It must be difficult when writing fiction with a political purpose to keep your eye fixed firmly on storytelling. There were moments when certain characters got far too involved in making speeches and I admit I started reading diagonally. If Gordimer is anything, she is thorough. I don’t doubt that when politically engaged people get together their meetings are everything she portrays them to be – intricate, involved, passionate. But to read through their every detail is frustrating for me – the reader – because I want to stay focused on a character I have come to appreciate or worry about. I don’t want Marxist or any other theory explained to me or examined ad nauseum by characters who will leave the story as quickly as they came in.

 

I mentioned in my review of her sixth novel, The Conservationist, that Gordimer uses a particular technique of having the main character speak to another character (or characters) in their mind. A kind of imaginary conversation which gives the main character the right to explain himself, complain, or defend himself. In The Conservationist this device was a source of some of the most moving passages of the entire book. In Burger’s Daughter she uses the very same stylistic device, but at first I found it horribly distracting. The person to whom Rosa addresses her thoughts is an ex-lover – someone the reader never meets on the page. It was frustrating never having that person in the flesh – just a construct of Rosa’s mind. In Part II, she switches to “thinking at” her father’s first wife, the woman she is staying with in France. I don’t think it works particularly well in that section either, but not for the same reasons. More because all of Part II seems disjointed and apathetic until we reach the coincidence I mention above. But then all of a sudden, in Part III, I saw why Gordimer continued to use the device. Suddenly Rosa is addressing her dead father. And I think this was the whole point. Her transformation is complete and she can safely begin a conversation she has been longing to have but never felt confident enough to do.

 

I won’t put Burger’s Daughter on my list of favorites but as always I’m glad to have read it. Her eighth novel, July’s People, is one I have already read and enjoyed. It’s short so I think I will re-read it before moving on.

Richard Ford, Wildfire

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At some point last year or the year before I read several short stories by Richard Ford – Rock Springs, Communist and Under the Radar, and knew immediately I would like to read more of his work. I recently mooched his fourth novel, Wildfire, and within a few pages had this strange feeling I had read it before. I hadn’t in fact but the voice and the situation in Wildfire is nearly identical to the story Communist. I actually love it when something like this happens because it lets me see how Ford was playing with an idea, a situation, a certain voice and a type of character. Communist was published in his collection titled Rock Springs in 1987; Wildfire was published as a novel in 1990.

 

The bulk of the story of Wildfire occurs over a few short days in the fall of 1960 and is told by sixteen-year-old Joe. Joe, the only child of golf-pro Jerry and homemaker Jeanette, gives us a first person account of essentially three days. The three days which culminate in a two-year separation between his parents.

 

The novel begins like this:

 

In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.

 

It wasn’t until we meet Mr. Miller thirty pages later that I thought about the technique of opening the novel with this line and how it functioned against the novel as a whole. It’s a big statement. In fact, it’s a complete summary of what the next 163 pages are going to be about. The advantage of opening with a line like this is that I know when I first see Warren Miller on the page that he is someone I need to pay attention to, someone who will affect the story in a significant way. The risk is that it prohibits tension from building on its own.

 

Do I think Ford pulls it off? Yes, but that’s maybe not the real question. What I find more interesting is that Ford creates a certain mood around Warren Miller when we do meet him for the first time that this first hint about him is entirely unnecessary. Without it, I would still have “met” him and thought – pay attention, something interesting is going on here. The line works only as an introduction to the overall story and the information it gives is less important than the first person voice it establishes. Which is, I think, more to the point.

 

First person narration of this kind is a delicate and often difficult technique. The narrator, from some distant point in the future, is going over the events of a significant moment in his life. In some instances, a life-changing moment. But presumably the narrator is now beyond that moment, so how does he go about recreating the intensity of that instance for the reader? There is a certain amount of hindsight and analysis involved in the narrator’s recreation (elements which help represent the story on multiple levels and add deeper meaning), but at the same time, the narrator needs to reproduce the events in a way that will captivate the reader. The trick is to find a balance between self-awareness and disconnect so as to avoid melodrama and using a heavy-hand with revelation.

 

 

 

In Wildfire, Ford handles his narrator with a lot of understatement and subtlety. Sometimes too much, however, because there were moments I started to wonder whether this kid was going to react to anything. But I think this is probably the better side to err on, because if he’d been throwing things left and right and getting in people’s faces, he would have taken over what was happening between his parents and the novel would have become his story. Instead, he functioned as a watcher, a listener, a timid evaluator. And although he did venture contemplative reactions to what was going on around him, he did not ever “act” or put anything into motion on his own.

 

This is an interesting choice for Ford to have made. I should re-word one of my phrases above, in the sense that this novel maybe isn’t supposed to be “life-changing” for the narrator, but instead, eye-opening. It is essentially a sequence of events from his adolescence which teach him a valuable lesson – about adults, about love and about his family ­– and that he tells slowly and carefully over 160 or so pages. It’s a clever way to side-step the structure of a traditional coming-of-age novel.

 

Another aspect of the novel which was fun to chart was the dialogue. It very skillfully mirrors the increasing disjointedness between Joe and his parents. As their lives grow more haphazard and out of control, so does the dialogue grow more awkward and uncomfortable. Joe was a particular catalyst for this. He rarely offers anything more than variations of “I agree” or poses simple, fairly naïve questions. This reticence allows the adults around him to say too much. I can’t think of anything more conducive to awkward honesty than someone who doesn’t dare offer the slightest contradiction or opinion.

 

I think it is difficult to create a narrator who doesn’t “act” – and perhaps frustrating for a reader who might be more accustomed to the “I” being the novel’s mover and shaker, the one who will undergo some kind of overt transformation or affect change. In Wildfire, Joe doesn’t seem to change much at all. But as a witness to the transformation of those around him, a transformation which renders his world particularly unstable, he’s powerfully sympathetic.

 

The writing in Wildfire is quite exquisite so I’ll finish up with this passage:

 

I watched a tall spruce tree catch fire high in the dark. A spark had found it, and it exploded in a bright, steepling yellow flame that leaped and shot out bits of fire into the night toward other trees, and swirled its own white smoke, flaming and then dying quickly as the wind on the hillside- a wind that did not blow where we were – changed and died. It all happened in an instant, and I knew it was dangerous though in a beautiful way. And I understood, just as I sat there en the car with my mother, what I thought dangerous was: it was the thing that did not seem able to hurt you, but quickly and deceivingly would.

 

 

Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary

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I sat down with Aristotle’s Poetics last night and had a good laugh when I got to his section on the best kind of tragic plots. Aristotle points out that in order for the audience to experience pity and fear (his criteria for excellence) the hero or heroine must not be of outstanding moral character, nor depraved. Both these extremes would be too difficult for the audience to identify with. We’re left with the ordinary individual. The kind of person who experiences just enough undeserved suffering for us to pity them but who creates just enough of the same kind of mischief we might feel inclined to dabble in ourselves to make us nervous about our own life.

 

The reason I laughed is because I just finished Madame Bovary. And I think Aristotle would have taken Flaubert out and bought him champagne. Both Emma and Charles (and Rodolphe and Leon, for that matter) are so perfectly mediocre. Just earnest enough for us to sympathize with but just selfish, just cowardly enough for us to want to keep a weary distance.

 

I first read Madame Bovary in college. I remember enjoying it. I remember feeling sorry for Emma. I remember disliking lunky Charles and thinking it was so unfair she couldn’t just run off with the men she loved. To put it bluntly, I think I kind of missed the entire point.

 

Reading the novel again was fun. I still feel sorry for Emma, for her silly selfishness and desperate scheming, but I think Flaubert did something much more than write a scandalous account of adultery and feminine ruin. He characterized the maudlin yearnings of a mediocre bourgeoisie while criticizing the superficial sentimentality of mass culture. Two very scathing social assessments, both still relevant to a contemporary discussion.

 

It’s hard to decide who is the more pathetic of the two – Charles or Emma. Charles seems unbelievably clueless for a long time, which is far less interesting, until just after Emma kills herself when there is an affecting scene between Charles and Rodolphe (Emma’s first lover) and it becomes quite apparent that he knew all along. I looked at Charles differently after that and it made me reconsider why Flaubert begins and ends the book with Charles.

 

Madame Bovary isn’t really a tragedy (Aristotle would have figured this one out much more quickly than I did) – it’s a satire. Charles is an anti-hero, Emma a false heroine. It’s sad when she dies but not unexpected – and Charles mourns her, but it seems fairly dismal to mourn the woman who never really loved you. Like Revolutionary Road (a modern meditation on a similar theme) the real tragedy befalls Berthe – their daughter. Unloved, unwanted, and uncared for, she ends up an impoverished worker at a cotton mill.

 

I deliberately avoided reading the Nabokov essay until I’d written up my thoughts but I’m eager to get started and see what he has to say. There are also several film versions of Madame Bovary but two I am particularly interested in finding – a 1949 Minnelli with Jennifer Jones playing Emma and the most recent, from 1991 with the lovely Isabelle Huppert and an apparently outstanding performance by Jean-Francois Balmer as Charles. 

Nadine Gordimer – The Conservationist

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I find reading Gordimer a combination of pure pleasure and hard work. Her images are captivating and unique, her narration unusual, her subject matter courageous. Her novels are so thorough in their project (political, psychological, literary) that reading them is often painstakingly intense – these are novels I want to savor slowly, with necessary appreciative pauses and time spent considering the labor which went into their creation.

 

The Conservationist (1972), her sixth novel, is a character portrait. A detailed rendering of a dying man – not dying in a physical sense, but a metaphysical one. Mehring is a wealthy white South African businessman who commutes between town with its glittering, oblivious socialite world and his small farm in the countryside. He is a perfect cog in the Apartheid wheel, making his money on the near slave labor of his black farm workers or his mining investments (which amounts to essentially the same thing) and accepting the separation of South Africa’s cultures as right and natural. He is everything Nadine Gordimer disapproves of. And yet her representation of him doesn’t once make him the reader’s enemy. Except in an abstract, ideological way. My sympathy for Mehring lies in his full awareness of his own demise. He recognizes the futility (and in his more lucid moments, the injustice) of the system which enables his privilege.  

 

Mehring is also a womanizer. A natural character trait for a man who has always had everything he’s wanted by simply taking it. But that part of him is dying a painful death as well. His last mistress, who was working to fight against the Apartheid system, eventually had to flee the country. He has trouble admitting it but he is in mourning for her. Most of the novel unfolds as an imaginary conversation between her and him – he wants very clearly to understand why she would choose to support a philosophy which would eventually alter the comfortable life they’ve enjoyed until now. He’s enraged and frustrated and confused. And he misses her.

 

I found the structure of that imaginary back and forth (which includes similar imagined conversations with his hippie son) both fascinating and touching. Mehring is a wounded creature, and he’s desperately trying to understand what’s wrong with his life. According to the morals of the culture he was raised in, he hasn’t done anything wrong. Yet in the eyes of the people closest to him (his ex-wife, his son, his former mistress), he’s an abuser of the highest degree. Mehring’s baffled attempt to reconcile these two views created a space where he and I could co-exist.  Where I wanted to get to know and understand him.

In The Conservationist, Gordimer endeavors for the first time to take on the perspective of a black African, exploring the thoughts and experiences of some of the workers on the farm, and especially Mehring’s foreman Jacobus, as well as the Indian shopkeepers just off the property. With this careful work, I was able to experience South African society of the early 1970s when the rigid distinctions between each culture are beginning to fray. Both from within and as the next generation courageously crosses the line. It’s a tense scenario and risky for everyone involved. Gordimer’s pinpointing and depiction of these both dangerous and hopeful moments increase the novel’s consequence.

 

As the story progresses, the narration becomes more jarring and disconnected. Mehring, more and more emotionally marooned, rejects the overtures of his former friends and settles further into his imagined conversations and daydreams. He hides out at his farm, trying to establish some sort of connection with the land he wants desperately to believe is rightfully his. His sorrow, indignation and uncertainty are palpable, and he keeps denying the fact that he’s nothing but an interloper while at the same time coming to the unsettling realization that the people who originally belonged to the land now work for him.

 

 

As usual, Gordimer’s writing accomplishes this impressive project with grace, power and matchless coherence.

 

 

 

 

 

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Jean Rhys – Good Morning, Midnight

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Like many others, I “met” the novelist Jean Rhys when I read Wide Sargasso Sea, her most well-known work and a prequel to Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The novel turned out to be an unsettling but fascinating read. Both psychologically dark and stylistically complex, it tells the story of Rochester’s first wife – from her childhood to her complicated romance with Rochester all the way to her descent into madness. The novel also attempts (with a greater degree of courage, I might add) to offer an exploration of Rochester’s side of the story and his enchantment with the young Dominican woman, his fear of the untamed Caribbean countryside and his ultimate rejection of this first woman. When I finished Wide Sargasso Sea, I was eager to find more of Rhys’s work.

 

From what I understand, Wide Sargasso Sea, along with the rest of Rhys’s novels, all represent her own life and experience in some way or another. I had wondered about this while reading Good Morning, Midnight because something about the emotional structure of the novel led me to believe it was her story in more ways than one. I don’t usually ever assume a first person narrative equals a form of autobiography but in this case it did. And it didn’t detract from the novel at all; in fact, that rawness lent an edge to the story that a more conventional narrative might not have been able to achieve.

 

Good Morning, Midnight is like a swan song – desperate and beautiful and bleak and disturbing. The narrator Sasha is just fumbling along toward the end of herself, groping for some shred of experience or memory that might offer a little comfort. She isn’t trying to buy time, she’s biding her time. Until “midnight”. She’s starkly realistic about her situation – poor, ageing, charmless. Mostly, she’s defeated. By men, the loss of her child, her youthful optimism, by her addictions to attention and alcohol.

 

There is a telling scene where Sasha walks around town trying to buy a hat. First, she encounters another woman on the same errand:

 

I look at the window of the first shop. There is a customer inside. Her hair, half-dyed, half-grey, is very disheveled. As I watch she puts on a hat, makes a face at herself in the glass, and take it off very quickly. She tries another – then another. Her expression is terrible – hungry, despairing, hopeful, quite crazy. At any moment you expect her to start laughing the laugh of the mad.

 

But just after, Sasha enters another shop and begins the same feverish ritual. At one point she recognizes that other woman’s demented expression on her own face in the mirror. It terrifies her and she almost charges out but instead, she manipulates the moment into a relationship and dependence on the shop girl which was both frightening and touching. She’s actually gone beyond reacting to the horror of her situation, she’s willing to embrace it.

 

The present tense action of Sasha’s account focuses on a man she meets – a gigolo. He wants to seduce her. She wants very much to be seduced. They wine and dine each other around Paris, both arguing and consoling each other for unmentioned past hurts. Within every conversation is an element of misunderstanding and discord. Sasha is petrified. The man seems false. They are both pathetic and unlikeable.

 

In the last few pages of the book the somewhat disorganized story line converges into an intense scene between Sasha and the gigolo. It’s a detailed and unforgiving portrait of Sasha’s battered psyche and the scene results in a resolution which is difficult to interpret. 

 

Rhys has four other novels, all of them purportedly autobiographical in nature. I think it would be interesting to read them all. I found Wide Sargasso Sea and Good Morning, Midnight to be stylistically quite different and I love an author who can pull that off.

 

In my searching around this morning about Rhys, I also found a reference to this book: Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three: Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, Germaine Greer. It’s written by the American novelist David Plante, who spent years cultivating friendships with all three women.

 

The New York Times reviewed Plante’s book in 1983 and here is a small excerpt of that article citing a portion of the memoir dedicated to Jean Rhys:

 

Rhys is sitting drunk in her chair with Mr. Plante beside her: ”She seemed suddenly to rouse herself internally, and she shouted ‘Oh David, I’m unhappy. You be happy. I’m so unhappy, all my life I’ve been so unhappy. It’s unfair. I’m dying. I want to die. It’s unfair. I’m dying, my body’s dying, and inside I think: it’s unfair, I’ve never lived, I’ve never lived.’ ”

 

Within a few minutes of this dismaying outburst Rhys says: ”Listen to me. I want to tell you something very important. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake. It is very important. Nothing else is important.”

 

Despite yesterday’s promise not to buy any new books, I ordered this memoir straight away.