Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘book review’ category

John Irving – A Prayer for Owen Meany

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I wish I could remember when A Prayer for Owen Meany first appeared on my book radar. It was years ago now, and I immediately got an old mass-market paperback copy and then forgot it on my shelves somewhere. But I kept hold of the idea that I should read it, and that it was considered a “good book” by those in the know – whoever they are.

Having read it for myself now, I’m not certain I would call it a “good book.” I would call it: a long book, a book of ideas, an American book, and an ambitious book. These four descriptions don’t mean that it couldn’t also be a good book, but I found myself repeatedly disappointed with A Prayer for Owen Meany, mainly in the writing but also in the depth of Irving’s ideas.

The novel is told by John Wheelright, an American bachelor living in Canada in the late 1980s, but the bulk of the story occurs between about 1952 and 1969 and is about his best friend growing up in New Hampshire, Owen Meany. It is about their childhood, about the death of John’s mother, their search for John’s real father, their prep school lives and the onset of the Vietnam War. It is both a comic novel and a real tragedy—a mixture I usually like—and it’s also an example of a very typical kind of American realism: the details of small town life, boyhood trials, American sexual culture, and religion (lots of religion).

I must say right off that Owen Meany himself is an incredible character. I can only imagine how much fun Irving must have had writing this young man. He is a freak—a tiny kid with a horrific voice, zappingly clever, courageous, eccentric, loyal and hungry for love, starving even. Narrator John is so bland in comparison, as I’m sure he’s meant to be. But he is too bland, finally. I couldn’t even really figure out who John was until pages 421 – 424 when suddenly, he comes thrillingly to life. That’s a long time to wait.

John isn’t ultimately the point of the novel. The point is Owen—what becomes of him, what he brings to John and other characters. It isn’t really giving anything away to quote what’s written on the back cover of my edition:

Owen Meany, the only child of a New Hampshire granite quarrier, believes he is God’s instrument. He is.

This religious aspect of the novel is, perhaps, its most interesting. I am not an ideal reader for a book with a deep religious focus because I don’t have a lot of patience where religion is concerned. (Marilynne Robinson’s exquisite Gilead would be the great exception to that statement.) Having said that, I believe that Irving handles the theme with great detail and a lot of care. The novel reveals Religion in all its destructive, powerful glory and explores the intricacies and limits of personal faith. Irving also focuses a sharp eye on the gray zone where religion and superstition share uncomfortable territory.

A quick word on the book’s political preoccupation. I’m curious whether the book was at all controversial when it came out in 1989. It is fiercely anti-Vietnam war, and fiercely anti-Reagan (the two narrative time periods). My only complaint with the politics in the book is the heavy-handed and clumsy way they are delivered. No, that isn’t quite fair. Because the heart of the novel takes place during the Vietnam war, the political critique in those chapters is quite meaningful and feels more or less natural, but the 1980s political analysis is clumsily delivered in series of boring monologues.

Ultimately, my frustration with A Prayer for Owen Meany is similar to the feeling I get when I find myself in discussion with someone who is very bright but who doesn’t know when to stop talking and who takes me, or anyone else listening, for an idiot. The book engages with some fascinating ideas, involves one of the most interesting fictional characters I’ve ever come across and centers on events—both fictional and historical—of great import. Unfortunately, a lot of that “goodness” gets drowned out by too much “unnecessary.” Irving has his characters explain, many times over, all of the book’s symbolism. He also repeats himself. And worst of all, the book overprepares the reader for the impending tragedy. I got so sick of Irving’s allusions to what was going to happen to Owen Meany that when it actually happened I was too numb to appreciate what should have been an extremely powerful scene.

Anyone else read Irving? Are any of his earlier novels worth trying out? Thoughts?

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Houellebecq Project Completed

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Despite the fact that I did, on some level, really really really like his work, reading nine books by Michel Houellebecq in a relatively short amount of time was not a pleasant experience. A few weeks ago I mentioned to a friend of mine what I’d done and he looked at me with something like terror on his face and said, “T’es maso ou quoi?!” (“Are you masochistic or what?”). The answer to that question would be a definite no, but I understand his concern. Anyone who has read Houellebecq will know that he isn’t someone to read for the pleasure of it. His work is tricky, frustrating, infuriating (especially for women readers) and depressing. But it is also provocative, thoughtful, at moments exceptionally beautiful, and very often daring. On the whole I’m very glad I took the time to read him carefully and to consider his work in the way that I did.

Having said that, I’m quite happy to wait a few more years before reading anything by him again. After a nice long break from his work I will be curious to see what he does next, mainly because I found myself following one particular development of his writing technique—the way he handles himself in relation to each text—throughout his novels. I’ve discussed here before how Houellebecq can’t seem to get himself out of his own novels, even when they are meant to be completely fictional. I think that his latest novel, La Carte et le Territoire (The Map and the Territory), actually resolves that problem, and in a clever and ingenious way. So I’m curious to see whether going forward, he’ll actually be free to do something completely fictional or whether he will relapse into the same problem.

But without further ado – he’s the recap:

Contrary to what I usually do, I read his latest novel first because my French book group selected it. My reaction to that initial reading of La Carte et le Territoire is here.

Something about that first read invited me to go back and consider all of his work, poetry and essays included, in the order they were written.

I was quite struck by his collection of essays, La Poésie du Mouvement Arrêté, especially the title piece and how it asks the reader to re-consider our relationship with technology. His most provocative statement in this piece is to “refuse knowing.” Backing away from the constant stream of media is about refusing to “know” what’s going on, “know” what people are talking about. It’s scary to agree to “not know” anymore, but there is a beauty and a peacefulness in that idea that I find very compelling.

And I would recommend to anyone interested in Houellebecq they they take a look at the very first work he ever published – a biography of H.P. Lovecraft, Contre le Monde, Contre la Vie. I wrote my thoughts on this book here, and here. This long essay really endeared Houellebecq to me (good thing I read it before I tackled his novels as I think it upped my consideration for his work in general). He is so thorough, so admiring, and yet also appropriately critical. And the essay actually gives the reader a lot of information about Houellebecq the writer; it provides a series of helpful clues on how to read Houellebecq’s fiction.

I went on to consider his collection of essays and short fiction, Rester Vivant. The title essay of that collection will stay with me, not only for its impassioned consideration of what it means for someone to want to write, but also because it’s subtly quite funny. That mix made this particular essay really powerful. Houellebecq is very serious about this writing thing, but he also seems to realize that his seriousness is somewhat ridiculous.

I started to write about his individual novels on the blog but I stopped because I was working on a retrospective piece on Houellebecq for The Quarterly Conversation and it became difficult to consider them separately. That overview piece was just published last week. It’s long, but I hope it gives a solid introduction to Houellebecq. Here is an excerpt, from the introduction:

Houellebecq is the author of five novels and eight other books of poetry, stories, and essays. His work is ambitious—interested in philosophical questions of existence and perception as well as controversial scientific ideas about genetic engineering and cloning. Despite having a highly recognizable style, he is not a great stylist; his novels are compelling because they involve much uncomfortable honesty about human nature and are packed with challenging ideas. He has made depression and social pessimism a subject of literary meditation. He is also an obsessive cataloguer of contemporary cultural artifacts and trends, something which gives a documentary feel to much of his work.

In direct contrast to this broad scope, his work is also intensely personal: in some way, each of his novels oblige the reader to consider Michel Houellebecq the person alongside the story or the characters. Whether this is done deliberately or is an unconscious product of his writing style, whether this improves or detracts from the experience of reading his work, it is an unavoidable element of the Houellebecquian textual landscape.

You can read the entire essay here.

The essay spends a little bit of time on each of his five novels but finishes with more detail on his latest work. It was very interesting for me to see how my consideration of La Carte et le Territoire changed after reading everything else. Tied with La Possibilité d’une Ile, it remains my favorite of his novels. It successfully does what his others novels all try to do, but the accomplishment isn’t just a raw success, it’s elegant and meaningful.

 

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Agota Kristof – Le Troisième Mensonge

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Eventually, I did not have to restrict my reading of Agota Kristof’s Le Troisième Mensonge, the third book of her trilogy, to daylight hours only. Compared to the first two books, this one was quite tame.

Quick recap:

The first book, Le Grand Cahier, is about two young boys, twins named Claus and Lucas, who are sent to live with their grandmother during World War II. A lot of what happens to the twins is quite horrifying, as is their development and behavior. They are dealing with trauma and with abandonment, and they work very hard to rid themselves of the emotions that make their abandonment painful. A process which turns them, quite simply, into monsters. The book ends with one twin escaping across the border, leaving the other behind.

The second book, La Preuve, is about Lucas, the twin left behind. The novel follows what happens to Lucas living separate from his brother, but it also begins to raise certain questions about the “truth” of the first story. No one in the town remembers Lucas as a twin. Kristof introduces this idea quite ingeniously, quite subtly, but it becomes suddenly clear that the book, which I already knew was taking a sharp look at psychological trauma, is going to go much farther than I expected. This actually makes the ugliness of much of what happens in the story easier to stomach. By the end of La Preuve, Claus, the one who escaped, returns to his hometown to find his twin brother, only to discover that Lucas has vanished upon suspicion of murder.

Now, when Le Troisième Mensonge opens, the real question of the book is no longer what has happened to Claus and Lucas, but whether or not Claus and/or Lucas ever existed and whether or not the stories we’ve been reading about them actually occurred. In terms of story, I will leave it at that. This is one of the more difficult books I’ve ever had the pleasure of writing about, because I don’t want to give anything way.

What Kristof does with this trilogy is fascinating. Not only from a thematic perspective—everything about the books suggest she is dealing with the trauma of war, with oppressive government and the like, but by the end she’s gone very domestic, which is ultimately much more frightening—but also in the details of her writing: the POV shifts, the structure of each book and the simple, no-frills aspect of her prose. The power of her narrative and the ideas behind it kind of sneak up on you, because there is nothing showy about the project.

The trilogy is available in English as one book (Grove Press, 1997) and I’d be curious to hear if anyone has read it, and if so, how her writing worked in translation. For two reasons – because it was done by three different translators, and also because it seems to me her work would translate easily. Her sentences are very simple and spare. Each book gets progressively more complex, but even Le Troisième Mensonge is quite straightforward.

Aside from the trilogy, she has five other books. One is l’Inalphabète, a memoir, which I read over the summer, but the others are novels as far as I can tell. I’m very curious to see her other work and whether it is all as dark and psychologically complex as Le Grand Cahier, La Preuve and Le Troisième Mensonge.

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Nina-Marie Gardner – Sherry & Narcotics

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This week at Necessary Fiction, I had the pleasure of reviewing Nina-Marie Gardner’s début novel, Sherry & Narcotics:

It isn’t easy to publish a love story these days—somehow we’ve all decided this is the stuff of cliché. As if the back and forth success and failure of looking for love doesn’t concern most people most of the time. Which is why Nina-Marie Gardner’s Sherry & Narcotics stands out in its genre of contemporary urban fiction. Here is a novel whose central movement is fixedly concerned with a young woman and a young man and whether or not the two will find a way to be together. (…)

There’s an argument to be made for Sherry & Narcotics as a coming-of-age novel for Generation X.  Mary is very much a member of that tribe—financially and geographically independent, at ease in the greater world, with more choices and possible connections than any of the previous generations, and yet, true to the Generation X crisis, slow to negotiate her way to emotional adulthood and at risk to the dangers of her precious independence.

Read the full review here.

 

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finishing Agota Kristof

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It takes a lot of courage to read Agota Kristof before going to bed. Or so I am learning. When I read the first novel in her trilogy, Le Grand Cahier (The Notebook), I read it in two sittings, both during the afternoon and there was enough distance between the dark scenes of the story and my bedtime that nothing overlapped. I am quite susceptible to nightmare. And the same thing happened when I read the second book, La Preuve (The Proof). But yesterday evening I sat down with La Preuve to skim through it quickly again in preparation to start the final book in the trilogy, Le Troisième Mensonge (The Third Lie), and realized that the story was too unsettling for that hour of my day.

Kristof’s world is brutal. I’ve read many a book with difficult subject matter (Pat Barker’s Blow Your House Down comes directly to mind), but Kristof is absolutely unflinching in her indictment of human nature, especially because her writing is so simple, so undemanding. This is what I wrote about Le Grand Cahier:

Such a deceptively simple little novel. An easy story – two boys must leave the city to live in the safer countryside during the war. Yet, the novel quite simply explodes with little horrors. I tried to find another word to describe it, something other than horror, but I can’t. The book is horrifying.

This whole trick about not knowing what the book is about is key. Of course the book is about WWII, about the separation of families, about violence, about neighbors helping neighbors and neighbors hurting neighbors. It’s a classic war story. But it’s also wholly unique.

Part of what makes Le Grand Cahier so unique (and compelling, if I’m allowed this reviewer cliché) is the perspective, the way it pretends to be written by the boys themselves. They are telling their story as one of a series of imposed exercises, recording events in their notebook. They’ve promised the reader to give nothing but the facts, no interpretation, no emotion. It’s an effective way of giving the reader the “story” but their very lack of emotion or explanation creates this effect where the reader begins to see too much in the boys’ silences, begins to understand what Kristof is actually getting at. And it isn’t nice.

The second novel, La Preuve, picks up the story at the moment the twin boys separate (one having crossed over the border, the other staying behind—how they get across is extremely disturbing) and follows Lucas, the one who stayed behind, for the next fifteen years or so, through two very important relationships, until he is forced to leave the town.

What I found so unsettling about this second novel is how cleanly Kristof depicts her psychopath. There isn’t another word for Lucas. To my standards, he’s a monster. As shown in Le Grand Cahier, he spent so many years exorcising his emotion away that nothing remains. Or at least only the primal impulse. The original want or fear or anger, and then he acts on that original feeling without allowing any other emotion or rationale to mediate. When he wants something—a woman, a young child to adopt—he does the simplest, quickest thing to fulfill the desire. Including murder.

On the other hand, Lucas is capable of infinite tenderness toward the small child he adopts. He does everything in his power to give this little boy a happy childhood. It doesn’t work, of course. The child is miserable for a variety of reasons, and as intense and emotionally frightening as Lucas. Their story can only be a tragedy.

Although I have to be careful about when I sit down to do it, meaning not before sleep, I’m quite eager to read the final book. Despite the difficult nature of the events in each story, I’d like to see where Kristof is going with her meditation on psychological trauma. Lucas isn’t normal, that’s easy to see, but the world around him is nearly as horrific and I’m curious whether she is making an argument against a certain kind of emotional abandonment or about a specific system of political oppression. The trilogy begins during WWII but extends thirty to forty years beyond. War is awful, yes, and the cause of significant personal trauma, but Kristof seems to be suggesting that redemption on any level is never possible.

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Virginia Woolf – Diaries, Vol. One: 1915-1919

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Usually, when I read an author from start to finish, I try to avoid biography. It isn’t that I believe biography doesn’t or couldn’t inform my study of their work, but I prefer to take the work on its own terms first. I chose not to do this, however, with my Virginia Woolf read, mainly because her journals are so detailed, and really, they are as significant a contribution to her oeuvre as her fiction writing. (I have not taken on her essays or letters… yet. I’m tempted to integrate them now, especially as she consistently references both her reading and her critical writing.)

I’ve just finished Volume One of her diaries, which covers 1915 to 1919. What strikes me first and foremost about her diary writing is how different it is, on the whole, from her fiction. She has a very sharp and perceptive mind, that is evident in both, but she must have worked extremely hard to maintain her particular style in fiction. All writers have a “style,” of course, but Woolf was experimenting and so she breaks with traditional narrative structures and chronologies, even rhythms of language and thought. And then when you read her diary and see how concise it is, how succinct and detail-oriented her personal narration was—and I can only assume that personal narration is a writer’s most natural and instinctive voice—it only serves to highlight the affect of her fiction style.

The other thing I find interesting is that before reading her diaries, I might have been inclined to put her in the mad-genius category. This is a category of artist I am wary of because I do not believe that genius requires madness. To be fair, it is also a stereotype that is often imposed upon an artist by others and while some might enjoy the label there are those who fight it. I admit that I was curious to see how Woolf negotiated this tension, or whether it was even an issue for her in her lifetime. So it is curious to me that there is very little self-reflection upon her depressive tendencies, at least in these early diaries, even after the long depression she suffered between 1915 and 1917, during which she could not write at all. The first few months of entries written after this illness are markedly different from her usual journaling style, but she does not comment on the lapse herself except obliquely, and only on a few rare occasions.

I don’t know how frequently Woolf lost herself completely to depression—perhaps it began to happen more often or maybe she writes more about it as she grew older. I’ll be curious to see how the subject evolves throughout her diaries. I know about, but haven’t yet read her essay “On Being Ill” and I suspect she concentrates her thoughts here (another reason to order her complete essays!)

Going back to where I started, I’m happy to find that reading her diaries doesn’t interfere in any way with the experience of reading her fiction. It is easy to maintain a line between the two forms, and there is just so much to admire in her diaries – character portraits, anecdotes, thoughts on writing, exquisite descriptions of nature.

I do wonder about one thing, however, and maybe some of you know: do Woolf scholars believe that Woolf wrote her diaries knowing they would be public some day? How personal are they?

 

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Melinda Moustakis – Bear Down, Bear North

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This week at Necessary Fiction I write about Melinda Moustakis’s début collection of short stories, Bear Down, Bear North:

Make no mistake, nature is no friend to the people in these stories, but their most savage confrontations are with each other and with themselves. The natural world is only an accessory, and very often a witness, to their conflicts. In this way, Bear Down, Bear North is much more than a book about Alaska, or about people living in Alaska. It is a book about people, period. These are stories that dig deep into the fragile and difficult spaces of human experience.

You can find the whole review here.

 

 

Robert Pagani – The Princess, the King and the Anarchist

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Also while I was away, The Quarterly Conversation published my review of Swiss writer Robert Pagani’s The Princess, the King and the Anarchist:

Which is better? An imagined literature which takes a true historical event as its beating heart? Or a richly-detailed but otherwise straightforward account of that same occasion?

Robert Pagani’s The Princess, the King and the Anarchist raises this question in the subtlest and sneakiest of ways, offering itself up as a piece of evidence for the truth of the former. Its claim is based on the idea that every history has an unrecorded element, the part of the moment that can never be precisely known. That element remains hidden in the minds of the witnesses and participants. Historical fiction, by daring to go inside the minds of its characters, can work to uncover this truth, to present certain possibilities, to offer a possible consciousness to what are otherwise facts and chronologies.

This beautiful gem of a book, translated and published by the late Helen Marx in 2009, did not get much attention when it came out and will probably fade away in relative obscurity. That would be very sad. So here is my attempt to give it a little more of the press it deserves.

Click here to read the full review.

Patrick Michael Finn – From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet

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Before leaving on holiday, I reviewed (at Necessary Fiction) Patrick Michael Finn’s excellent collection of short stories, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet:

The eight stories in Patrick Michael Finn’s collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, are so thematically and stylistically cohesive they create a story collection that reads very much like a novel. These are not linked stories, not in the traditional sense; they do not share characters or even strict time periods. But they do share Finn’s rigorously consistent narrative style, his delight in intense sensory description and a firm geographic anchor in the city of Joliet, Illinois.

Together, these miniature novels create an unsettling fictional world of mid-western America, a detailed and vivid narrative rendering of the outcome of the area’s immigrant, industrial and social history.

I make it very clear in the review how much I enjoyed this collection. Finn’s writing is wonderfully consistent and although his narrative voice transforms itself for each story to create a unique perspective or voice, it also maintains a really satisfying stylistic harmony. Also, these are long stories. Stories that take time to get through, that draw you inside a detailed and complicated world. Each piece felt like it could easily be expanded into a full-length novel and I loved that about each one.

Find the full review here.

 

Norma Kassirer – Katzenjammered

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I recently reviewed (at Necessary Fiction) a really wonderful little novel from BlazeVox Books called Katzenjammered:

And so Katzenjammered pretends, successfully and engagingly, to be about many other subjects: her mother’s difficult personality, her best friend across the street and a long parade of eccentric and marvelously described family members. It pretends to be about growing up at the tail end of Prohibition America, about walking those first few steps on the road to adolescence and what parts of that path will remain to haunt one’s adult understanding.

I can say without a doubt this was one of my favorite books read this year. Click here for the full review.