Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘book review’ category

Kobo Abe – The Woman in the Dunes

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Sooner or later most humans come to grips with their relative insignificance. Maybe for people born in the second half of the twentieth century this is a given – we know we’re just one tiny speck on a bustling, diverse planet. We know we could slip easily through the cracks of our baggy social systems. We know how easy it would be to get lost in one of the world’s towering, complicated cities. And we know we’ve lost most of the threads that tied us once upon a time to previous generations. 

But for some, this realization comes as an appalling shock. For Niki Junpei, the hero of Kobo Abe’s splendid 1962 novel The Woman in the Dunes, the reality of his insignificance smacks him quite mercilessly into the bottom of a deep sand pit with no opportunity of crawling his way out. 

Niki is a teacher and amateur entomologist. One afternoon he strikes out for three days vacation near the ocean. He hopes to discover a new beetle or an otherwise unknown insect. He arrives at a strange village just barely holding its own against the massive shifting tide of the sand dunes. After missing the last bus, he asks the villagers for shelter for the night. They agree and he is lowered deep inside the dune into one of the homes whose only other occupant is a young woman, a widow. What he doesn’t know is that the village has no intention of ever letting him out again. 

Niki comes to understand not only that he is a hostage but also, and this part is much worse, that no one will ever come looking for him. He will vanish and his disappearance, for the most part, will leave the surface of the life he leaves behind undisturbed. His colleagues will joke and invent a sordid affair; his girlfriend will accept her abandonment as the natural result of their fading relationship. His attempts to fight, overcome, understand or transform this reality supply the novel with urgency and a distinct emotional momentum. 

Alongside Abe’s existential meditation, his prose is also a real delight (seamlessly translated, in my opinion, by E. Dale Saunders). Abe exploits the image of the sand and its weight, its beauty, and its near-magical quality: 

High in the night sky there was a continuous, discordant sound of wind blowing at a different velocity. And on the ground the wind was a knife continually shaving off thin layers of sand. He wiped away the perspiration, blew his nose with his fingers, and brushed the sand from his head. The ripples of sand at his feet suddenly looked like motionless crests of waves. 

The relationship between Niki and the woman is complicated. She needs him to survive in the hostile environment of the dunes. That is his only functional purpose. That he work alongside her clearing the sand each night. But in such close quarters the two can’t seem to stop themselves from embarking on an awkward affair. Their relationship seems to mirror another of Abe’s questions – why have things gotten so confusing, why have men and women become so aggressive with one another, why have people forgotten how to really connect? 

The Woman in the Dunes is an imaginative representation of our struggle to assert our own consequence, an honest depiction of the hidden despotic tendencies of the average human and a bleakly beautiful rendering of nature’s ultimate authority. 

To wrap up, I want to mention that Abe adapted the novel for film in 1964 (dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara) and it remains a stunning example of Japanese black and white cinematography. 

Also, let me just send a huge thanks to Dolce Bellezza for hosting the Japanese Literature Challenge. What a wonderful idea!

Yann Martel – Life of Pi

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Life of Pi is a piscatory novel of sorts. How fun is that word? Piscatory – a literary work portraying the lives of fishermen or anglers. And since the main character is named Piscine, which comes from the same root, my first sentence is nearly a pun.  

Today’s reverence for fish-related words comes from one of my favorite blogs – wordmall, which posted today on a bunch of English words coming from the Greek ichthus and the Latin piscis, both meaning fish. 

Some examples:

ichthyomancy: divination by means of the heads or entrails of fishes (I would like to know if this kind of divining only relates to oceanic issues, or if some fish guts could tell me things about political and social events as well)

ichthyolatry: fish-worship, the worship of a fish-god

piscicle: A small fish (but not a frozen one, as I would have preferred)

piscose: Of a taste: fishy (I would love, just once, to use this word in a wine-tasting context, just to see if anyone would call me on it) 

But back to Life of Pi. (If you haven’t read this novel, you might not want to read on. I don’t give up any huge spoilers, but I do discuss some things that might ruin a fresh reading of it.) 

Life of Pi is one of the most imaginative novels I have read in a long time. I knew before opening the book that the story centered on a boy trapped at sea in a small lifeboat with a 430-pound Bengal tiger. However, I also knew there was going to be some kind of trick or twist. Anyone who has ever mentioned the book around me would get a kind of funny look on their face and ask, “wait, you’ve read that right?” and I would say no and then they would get all hush hush. Which is why my criticism of the book might not be truly fair – I spent my time expiscating*, instead of simply focusing on the story. 

Still, I have some concerns. In general, I prefer books that reveal the essence of a character through their actions or through situations where I can hear them speak and watch them interact with other characters. This seems so much more immediate to me as a reader – that whole “uninterrupted dream” thing is really what I consider the most delightful reading experience. I grow quickly wary of a character that spends most of his time explaining himself to me or explaining the world to me and what he thinks. Although a truly compelling voice can get away with this for a while, I find a story grows stale, no matter how extraordinary the material, when the “telling” takes precedence over the acts and events. Which is what I felt happened in Life of Pi. 

Life of Pi is also interrupted by a series of italicized interludes, semi-scientific observations which read somewhat like a case study. The tone of these interludes runs quite perpendicular to the tone established by Piscine’s adolescent and angst-filled narrative style and so they struck me as, at worst, affected, and at best, unnecessary. It is a heavy-handed tactic, but only one of several Martel employs throughout the book. (For those of you who have read it, the ending interview with its flat out refusal to let the reader make up their own mind, was the crowning blow of this heavy-handedness). 

Still, the story gathers a huge amount of momentum near page 90 (in my copy) once Pi is aboard the lifeboat with the animals. The next 190 pages almost attain that vivid dream I was hoping for. Almost. Pi still continues to over explain and to tell me exactly what I am supposed to make of any possible symbolism hinted at by the active parts of the novel. The story of a teenager spending seven months at sea on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger is absolutely absurd. But because of what this absurdity comes to mean, it isn’t really absurd at all. Because of the twist, this absurdity demands the reader be treated with respect. From the beginning. 

I will give an example. Chapter 56 consists entirely of three paragraphs philosophizing about fear. These three paragraphs are well written, they are intuitive, they are discerning and insightful. But to me, they are also a cop-out. Reading these three paragraphs doesn’t make me feel anything. They are only words on a page. They lack the ability to construct a fictional reality that could shove some real fear down my throat. This would be far more instructional, far more experiential and ultimately more rewarding.  

Pushing the limits of fantasy brought on by trauma is incredibly engaging, as well as touching. Human memory is a fragile thing and I love that Martel explores the idea of redemption through storytelling. But at the same time, he doesn’t really attempt to share the story with me, the reader. He doesn’t invite me to participate in Pi’s trauma, to experience my own hunger or thirst, to get my hands dirty, to get covered in fish slime or scales. I’m only allowed to watch all this from a distance safely mediated by Pi and his constant analysis of what’s going on.  

*expiscating – “fishing out”, discovering something through investigation    

Yasunari Kawabata – Snow Country

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We had snow last week and the low mountains surrounding the village were a lovely white. Across the lake, the Alps are now boasting their beautiful winter plumage. The temperature has been hovering around zero for the past few weeks and it seemed like the perfect time to settle down with Yasunari Kawabata’s 1950s classic, Snow Country.  

Snow Country is set in a mountainous region of Japan, a place of long winters and deep snows, of cold and dark living. A place of tunnels and buried buildings. This setting works to underline the novel’s emotional preoccupation – the bewildering coldness of the human heart, the inevitable decay of beauty and purity. 

The novel takes place at an onsen (hot springs) resort and tells the story of an affair between a wealthy Tokyo man, Shimamura, and a geisha, Komako. Shimamura is incapable of love but drawn again and again to leave his family and visit Komako in the mountains. His rare visits and the life she must lead during his absences drain Komako of her innocence and ultimately her beauty.   

Kawabata’s feel for the lonely aesthetic of the snow country is just tremendous: 

The color of evening had already fallen on the mountain valley, early buried in shadows. Out of the dusk the distant mountains, still reflecting the light of the evening sun, seemed to have come much nearer. 

Presently, as the mountain chasms were far and near, high and low, the shadows in them began to deepen, and the sky was red over the snowy mountains, bathed now in but a wan light. 

Cedar groves stood out darkly by the river bank, at the ski ground, around the shrine. 

Like a warm light, Komako poured in on the empty wretchedness that had assailed Shimamura. 

I have written before about Tanizaki Junichiro’s essay, In Praise of Shadows. In it, Tanizaki lays out some of the principles of Japanese aesthetics – mainly, this idea of beauty in shadows. That art is rendered more beautiful through the darkness created at the borders of light.

Kawabata echoes this theory in Snow Country. The ultimate and inevitable failure of Shimamura and Komako’s affair is that unsettling but beautiful darkness hovering at the edge of what Kawabata chooses to illuminate: the warmth and steam from the hot springs, the crimson stain of hand-made Chijimi linen laid out on the snow and bleaching in the sun, the shimmery radiance of the Milky Way over the buried town.

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Ryunosuke Akutagawa – Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories

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Every time I sit down to read a book by a Japanese author, I curse myself for forgetting all the Kanji I learned when I was still living in Japan. I can still converse in Japanese without too much trouble (although my vocabulary has been slowly dying a pathetic, tortured death) but I can no longer read much of anything. This is so frustrating. Especially when I come across a text that seems like it might actually be somewhat accessible in the original. 

I finished Jay Rubin’s translation of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories last night with mixed feelings. The book is extremely well researched and well presented. It was a delight to spend a few weeks inside these powerful and vivid stories. But I’m a little ambivalent about the translation. Rubin is a terribly experienced translator so I really shouldn’t start ranting about work that I probably couldn’t even attempt to accomplish myself. Still, there were moments when I couldn’t help scolding myself that I hadn’t just gone ahead and ordered a copy of some of these stories in Japanese so I could at least take on a few of the sentences myself. 

Most of what troubled me occurred in the last half of the collection, the stories gathered under Rubin’s titles, Modern Tragicomedies and Akutagawa’s Own Story. These were written during the latter period of Akutagawa’s very short life (he committed suicide at the age of 35) when he finally succumbed to peer/social/literary pressure and started writing about his own life. At that time (cir. 1920), most Japanese novelists wrote fairly undiluted autobiographies and that was it. Akutagawa would have preferred to write fiction, but no one would have understood. This frustration definitely contributed to the decline of his mental health. 

Most of these later stories are like volatile portraits. One of my favorites from this section is titled The Life of a Stupid Man and it works as a mosaic of Akutagawa’s life presented in 51 very short impressionistic flashes. To me they read very much like unregulated haiku. Regardless of length or syllables, many of them had two flat beats and a long mournful downbeat.  

18. Moon

He happened to pass her on the stairway of a certain hotel. Her face seemed to be bathed in moonglow even now, in daylight. As he watched her walk on (they had never met), he felt a loneliness he had not known before. 

26. Antiquity

He was nearly overwhelmed by peeling Buddhas, heavenly beings, horses and lotus blossoms. Looking up at them, he forgot everything – even his good fortune at having escaped the clutches of the crazy girl. 

37. “Woman of Hokuriku”

He met a woman he could grapple with intellectually. He barely extricated himself from the crisis by writing a number of lyric poems, some under the title “Woman of Hokuriku”. These conveyed a sense of heartbreak as when one knocks away a brilliant coating of snow frozen onto a tree trunk.  

Am I the only one that thinks some of these read a little stilted? Maybe it was the time period, the cold, narrative distance that young Japanese writers adopted to be able to write about their own lives so intimately. Maybe it was simply because Akutagawa didn’t feel comfortable in that form. Maybe I am just being overly censorious. 

In any event, this Akutagawa reading is the first for Dolce Bellezza’s Japanese Literature challenge. If you are interested, please join in. She has some wonderful prizes lined up and I am eager to read thoughts and reviews of what the other participants have chosen. 

Logophile’s newsflash – I just found all of Akutagawa’s works in Japanese here. AND, I have found what I’ll be using to finish out Dolce Bellezza’s challenge. The Tale of Genji. This site gives you the classical Japanese, the modern Japanese and the Romaji version, in three interactive panes. Plus I have my English translation to follow along. This will be great.        

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Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway

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I realized after reading Mrs. Dalloway that I knew nothing about Virginia Woolf’s life except the bare facts of her marriage to Leonard Woolf and her suicide in 1941. Did everyone else know that she was raised in a fairly Brady Bunch style household? That both her parents were previously married, had children and then divorced, married each other, had more children and then raised eight children altogether in the same house? For some reason I had wrongly envisioned Woolf as having a lonely childhood. I figured she may have been the child of older or inattentive parents who was left to create her own colorful world, thus learning her skills for story and fiction at a young age. Of course then I realized that having seven siblings is not necessarily an immunization for loneliness. Nor does a bustling, people-filled world keep you from developing a passion for imaginative creation.  

Bustling is one of the first adjectives that comes to mind when I think of Mrs. Dalloway. Every one of the characters seems to be somehow speeding along in perpetual motion. They are all so physically and mentally busy – crashing from one thought to the next, hurrying headlong into the next action or event. The novel just steams forward, halfway out of breath but never once apologizing for its exhausting momentum. I realize this is all a function of Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style but she just accomplishes it all so immaculately.  

Reading the book felt a bit like listening to a boisterous symphony, with all those instruments playing madly in the background while one violin (Peter Walsh, for example) or an alto flute (Clarissa might just have to be the flute) plays a theme in his or her particular voice just a bit louder than the rest. The music behind never quite vanishes and sometimes the soloists fight a bit for space. I quite like the idea of Peter as a violin, with a disturbing octaval range and the ability to play a few notes that are just a bit too high to be comfortable. The overall effect of this rambunctious orchestra is hectic and eventful but everything seems to blend perfectly in the end. 

The story itself is so wonderfully simple. A woman gets herself and home ready for a party, a man stops in to say hello to an old friend, some men eat lunch with a wealthy older woman, another man and his wife visit a doctor, a young girl and her tutor run to the shops, and so on and so forth from the morning all the way through the early evening of this significant day. Then everyone (minus one) comes together for a party. That’s pretty much it. But within all those little errands and conversations Woolf creates a series of fascinatingly full portraits combined with a healthy serving of social commentary. Each story and character explodes with their own past, with regrets and worries, with all those eccentric bits of real personality. 

Mrs. Dalloway is the kind of book that leaves me with the impression that I haven’t even scratched the surface of all that lies beneath its clever prose and brisk story. It isn’t difficult, that’s not what I mean. I just have the feeling that I could read this book once a year and find something new to admire or think about each and every time.   

Alice McDermott – Child of My Heart

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Child of My Heart (2002) is the most sensual of the five McDermott books I have read in the past few months for the Reading the Author Challenge as well as a fairly straightforward coming-of-age story. That doesn’t make it disappointing, or in any way, ordinary. The story captures well those illusory moments of enchanting limbo between childhood and adulthood. 

Our narrator is Teresa – the daughter of middle class working parents, thrown into the high society world of wealthy Long Island as a child minder and pet sitter. The story is set during her fifteenth summer, a summer she spends looking after the young daughter of an older painter along with her own eight year old cousin. One of the trademarks of Teresa’s character is a nearly magical expertise with both children and animals. She is also beautiful. And conscious of both these qualities. The awareness of her gifts comes wrapped in the unshakeable confidence of a young girl eagerly looking to take her first steps in an adult world. 

The heart of the story centers on Teresa’s relationship with the artist father of her youngest charge, Flora, and the mysterious bruises that she discovers blooming across the body of her cousin, Daisy. In response to these two situations, Teresa’s behavior is sometimes surprising and her decisions curious. And as necessary for most coming-of-age stories, McDermott has not created an ordinary teenager but an overly mature one, an old soul. Something that at times does push the boundaries of verisimilitude. Yet, Teresa contains a healthy dose of everygirl and everywoman. And it is this mix of her exceptional qualities with her typical side that make her a character worth getting to know. 

One of the more poignant elements of the story is Daisy’s self-conscious decline. She is a sick little girl and gradually wakening to that possibility despite Teresa’s machinations to fairytale her into perfect happiness. This feature of the novel perfectly mirrors Teresa’s ambivalence about her movement away from childhood and its games. 

I wanted them banished, the stories, the songs, the foolish tales of children’s tragic premonitions. I wanted them scribbled over, torn up. Start over again. Draw a world where it simply doesn’t happen, a world of only color, no form. Out of my head and more to my liking: a kingdom by the sea, eternal summer, a brush of fairy wings and all dark things banished, age, cruelty, pain, poor dogs, dead cats, harried parents, lonely children, all the coming griefs, all the sentimental, maudlin tales fashioned out of the deaths of children. 

McDermott really is a master of finding the smaller moments, the minutiae of life, and mining their more complicated emotions. Child of My Heart spans only a few short weeks in Teresa’s life but it unearths what those weeks are to become to her entire life. 

Nabokov and Mansfield Park

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I read Nabokov’s chapter on Mansfield Park last night (from his Lectures on Literature) and it was interesting. If I hadn’t read the book I nearly would not have needed to as he goes into so much detail about the different sections and characters. But I am glad I did and I still intend to read each book he discusses – next up will be Bleak House, which, not having a huge background in Dickens, I am really looking forward to. 

Early in the chapter on Mansfield Park, Nabokov writes: 

Miss Austen’s is not a violently vivid masterpiece as some other novels in this series are. Novels like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina are delightful explosions admirably controlled. Mansfield Park, on the other hand, is the work of a lady and the game of a child. But from that workbasket comes exquisite needlework art, and there is a streak of marvelous genius in that child. 

Two things: First, I love the idea of “delightful explosions admirably controlled”. What a wonderful way to describe those books and other examples of incredible literature. But second, his comment on Austen surprised me and in a way, disappointed me. I immediately wanted to stand up for her and say – back off Nobbie, and don’t be so patronizing!

But at the same time (sigh), I see his point. They are exquisitely crafted books with a touch of genius – her wit, her ability to render a character grotesque, her perfect timing. Reading Jane Austen is delightful and consistently so. I can read and re-read her novels again and again. Each visit brings me the same enjoyment. Nonetheless, they are comfortable stories and I know that happiness and an orderly finish await me in the final pages. So in that sense, he’s right, they aren’t explosions at all. 

Interestingly enough, halfway through my read of Mansfield Park, I started to get really anxious about who Fanny was going to end up with. And I felt for a while that Mansfield Park might turn out to be my favorite Austen because of all the suspense. But, well, the ending kind of changed all that. She ends up with Edward like expected and although Austen points out that this isn’t a second choice on his part, it did kind of feel like it. Also, I would have loved to get the ending in scene, instead of exposition. Nabokov points this out as well, and even critiques the epistolary structure that comes barging in toward the end as a bit of authorial laziness. Fair? A bit. But also quite normal for her time period. The story just seemed to lose a bit of momentum at the end – especially after Fanny goes back to Mansfield from Porstmouth. Pride and Prejudice will remain my favorite and I would love to read Nabokov’s views on that particular Austen – I wonder whether he would have had just a bit more praise for her. Hard to say.  

So, as I said, next up is Bleak House but I am awaiting a copy from Bookmooch so in the meantime I am finishing up Alice McDermott’s Child of My Heart and still working through the Rashomon tales as well as enjoying my lunches with Schopenhauer.    

 

Alice McDermott – Charming Billy

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Finished up my 4th Reading the Author Challenge book last night – Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy. McDermott came away with the National Book Award in 1998 for this quiet novel and it is considered one of her finest.  

My notes from the first time I read Charming Billy, sometime back in 2004, mention that I found the perspective jarring because while it was first person it was also omniscient. Having had more experience with her work now, I have come to appreciate McDermott’s ability to meld the two perspectives and think that it brings a richness, or maybe a better word for it is layering, to her stories. The narrator sweeps in and out of several story threads at once, reserving different levels of authority for each one. In many ways, the combination of threads work to reveal a larger narrative about who the narrator actually is – but this is done so slyly, so covertly, that it is only at the end you realize what all the storytelling has really been about. 

The novel begins with Billy Lynch’s death (the horrible and messy death of an alcoholic) and the necessary assembling of friends and family to grieve and remember him. They recreate the stories of Billy’s life, focusing on a part of his history that made him famous, the story of his falling in love with an Irish girl visiting in New York, of his asking her to marry him, then sending her the money so she could come back to him and finally, of his getting the news that she has died. This tragedy becomes the epicenter of the earthquake that Billy’s life will turn out to be – nights of drunken grieving, a childless marriage to a woman that everyone suspects knew she was second best, strained friendships and endless health problems.  

But the trick of the story is that the girl, Eva, never died. I am not giving anything away with this information – the narrator and her father Dennis (Billy’s cousin, but more like a best friend) have known the truth of Eva’s disappearance all along. In fact, the lie of her death was created by Dennis himself, a moment of panic when he realized he couldn’t tell love-struck Billy that Eva had taken his money and married another man in Ireland. 

What comes out of this scenario is a frank examination of the idea of fated experience, a look at how our memories are constructed around significant events that, if we have the courage to consider it, might not be that significant in the end. Dennis’ lie is wrapped up in his own desire for fairytale, Billy’s alcoholism is given a convenient excuse, our longing for ideal love is provided safe shelter. She writes: 

In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion.  

And just a few lines later: 

Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar’s courage: there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable, or irreplaceable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many million with just one more. 

Charming Billy is about so much more than Billy’s story. It is about the complexity and complicity of family life and marriage, a subject that McDermott brings to all of her work with a great deal of finesse. It is also about all the ways you can lose a loved one and how that loss may dissolve any previously firm foundations on which to base belief or hope. And in a subtle way, it is very much about understanding the balance of acceptance and resignation versus cherishing necessary ideals.  

I have two more McDermotts to go to finish up the challenge but I will take a small break and not start the next one until later in November. The next two are completely new to me and I’d like to let these last four fade a bit more before I start again.  

Jane Urquhart – The Underpainter

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For the past year I have belonged to a book group here in Switzerland. This is by far the best book group I have ever had the luck to join. We’re an international group of women who meet once a month in one of the region’s wine caveaus – a beautiful smoky cellar filled with wine casks and gnarled old vines in a village that dates to Roman times. We do a tasting and talk literature for a few hours – it is an evening I look forward to all month and I am never disappointed. Last month we discussed Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and this month David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is on the schedule – I cannot wait.

Sometime last year we read Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass which was my introduction to this Canadian writer. On the whole we were a divided group. Some of us loved the book and others a bit less. I was in the second camp. Something about the novel put me off. It is a beautifully written story and deals with emotional distance and artistic expression in an intriguing way – which might have been the problem. Like my more recent experience with Don Delillo’s Falling Man, when a character keeps his or her distance from me, I tend to respond a lot less as well. While reading it, I kept telling myself that I should love it but something held me back. However, Urquhart’s stunning and skillful writing told me that I had found an author I might like to try again.

When I saw another Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter, on one of the awards lists for the Book Awards Reading Challenge I added her to my list and I am so glad that I did. What was even more interesting about this read was that although the story is extremely different, the themes in The Underpainter are very similar to those in A Map of Glass – emotional distance and the artistic mediation of that same distance.

The story is narrated by an elderly painter named Austin and covers a large span of his life, from his childhood into his forties. I mentioned yesterday that this book reminds me of Les Ames Grises and this is mostly because the tone of the narrator is so similar – such sorrow and regret, and such a need to account for his life. Austin circles in and out of his own story and the story of one of his friends – George. The two stories are, of course, linked far more deeply than is initially expected. And the way Urquhart moves us through these men’s lives is so adept, each new experience echoing another.

Writing a novel about a completely unlikable character who needs the reader’s sympathy for the story to work is difficult and Austin was one of the most difficult characters to get on with I have ever read. He made me angry before I managed to feel sorry for him and it took me a long time to forgive him but this serves the story’s purpose in a clever way. So all I can do now is admire how Urquhart pulled it off.

The Underpainter is essentially a love story. But that completely reduces all that is actually contained in its pages – yes, it is about Austin and Sara, his artistic muse, it is also about George and Vivian and later Augusta (one of the book’s most interesting characters), but it is also about the trauma of WWI, about choosing whether to observe life or experience it, and it is most definitely about artistic passion and how different individuals manifest and serve that passion.

Alice McDermott – At Weddings and Wakes

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Alice McDermott’s At Wedding and Wakes is subtle, very subtle. And quiet. With a healthy dose of nostalgia and a certain reverence for the bewildering emotions of childhood. The story belongs to almost every member of the Irish-Catholic Dailey Family – a grandmother, four sisters (Agnes, Veronica, May and Lucy), May’s fiancé, Lucy’s husband and their three children. Most of the story comes filtered through the collective eyes of these three children, although McDermott jumps point of view all the time, a way to give life to each and every character, no matter how small.

Veronica, for example, begins as a missing element, the sister living in the shadows when the children visit their grandmother. At first it seems that McDermott is content to let her stay that way – separate, faceless, silent. Until suddenly in the middle of the book her own story stands up and says, Pay Attention. It is a beautiful moment and resonates through the rest of the book every time Veronica silently steps across the page.

There isn’t anything resembling a plot in this novel, no real forward action, no single story to latch onto – but this isn’t a drawback. This book is for careful, quiet reading. Paying attention to the prose is reward enough. In many ways At Weddings and Wakes reads like a series of vignettes. Although series isn’t the right word because the different stories don’t move in a straight line, instead they loosely circle the death of May – an event that is never realized in the book but whose repercussions are hinted at and projected through glimpses of May’s final days.

One of the more interesting things that McDermott does in this novel is take liberties with the timeline in ways that should be unsettling but which never actually disturb the surface of the story. She has a way of jumping quickly forward from a particular moment and creating a memory out of something actually happening. It’s like she explodes that very moment in time, filling it with longer-term emotions and transforming it into something more complex and complicated than it could ever be on its own. That she does this so seamlessly is a fantastic testament to her skill as our narrator.

So what is At Weddings and Wakes about? On one level it’s about the mysteries of family dynamic – how we work against each other, hurt each other and yet still manage to cultivate love and duty in that difficult environment. On another, it’s about falling in love – a boy with a vocation, an older couple with the idea of happiness, a young girl with the tragic story of her aunt’s late marriage and early death. And on even another, it’s about collective story telling – the narratives and threads of existence that we pull and weave together to create who we are and how we want to remember our life.

At Weddings and Wakes was published in 1992. It is Alice McDermott’s third novel.

Next in line for my Reading the Author Challenge is McDermott’s Charming Billy which won the National Book Award in 1998.