Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘book review’ category

Christopher Boucher – How to Keep Your Volkswagon Alive

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Today at Necessary Fiction I reviewed How to Keep Your Volkswagon Alive by Christopher Boucher:

Boucher’s narrative is self-consciously metatextual and, well, storyful; the narrator wants you, the reader, to remain aware that you are reading something that is being written both for the narrator and the narrator’s son, but also for you, and that what’s being written is a collection of experiences now crafted into “stories.” By transforming what has occurred into stories, he gives each of these moments a different kind of life. The transformative process is as important as the narrator’s ability to perform the conversion, and this works both within the storyworld of Volkswagen, because it comes to be a matter of life and death for both the narrator’s father and son, but it also reflects outward in the way the reader then experiences Boucher’s playfulness with language, imagery and metaphor.

Click here for the full review.

Vyacheslav Pyetsukh – The New Moscow Philosophy

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Today at Necessary Fiction I reviewed The New Moscow Philosophy by Vyacheslav Pyetsukh and translated by Krystyna Anna Steiger:

There is a wonderful layering of thematic project in this novel, deftly smoothed together by the chatty omniscient narrator. Beyond the meaning of the actual events which transpire in the apartment and Chinarikov and Belotsvetov’s philosophical examinations, the novel spends many a word on an intertextual reckoning of the complicated bond between life and literature…

This (preoccupation) proclaims with unabashed joy that literature and life have become equal sources of human memory, of human thought. To a convinced reader, this is nothing extraordinary except for the thrill of the thought being written down and thus sanctioned. That a fictional conversation between Raskolnikov and Sonia might carry as much truth, or better yet, a greater, more perfect truth, than one between a real-live Russian student and his impoverished prostitute sweetheart is something all committed bibliophiles believe with something as powerful as religious faith. In literature, life is refined, perfected, distilled.

Click here for the full review.

 

A.S. Penne – Reckoning

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Today at Cerise Press I reviewed Reckoning, a collection of short stories by A.S. Penne from Canadian publisher Turnstone Press:

The emotional ground in A.S. Penne’s collection Reckoning is unstable:
shifting sands, rugged terrain. Her characters search, again and again, for a
firm foothold, a space to feel safe, a secure shelter in which to debate and
assemble their difficult decisions. Penne does not grant them this refuge, is
not interested in what it feels like to make it successfully to the other side
of heartache. Instead, the seventeen stories in this well-balanced collection
are about walking the rickety bridge forward from a difficult moment, about the
dread and confusion, the indecision, the regret, the panic and anger in those
careful steps. They are about the swirl and tumult of modern heartbreak.

Click here to read the full review.

 

xTx – Normally Special

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Today at Necessary Fiction I reviewed Normally Special by xTx:

The narrators of these short pieces are worth commenting on because there is very little differentiation between them—all first person, all with a similar emotional tone, and all concerned with the pain, aches and losses from a related set of categories. This harmony gives the collection a real sense of unity as well as gives the reader a feeling that these are all the fictionalized abstractions of one person’s experience. In this way, the reader becomes an authorized voyeur of the narrator’s confessions and revelations. This intimacy is both unnerving and a source of the collection’s appeal.

The longer stories, however, because of their ability to involve more detail and real narrative complexity, do not create the same narrator-confessor/reader-voyeur impression. Despite also working from a first-person narrator, these stories each create a separate and distinct narrator negotiating a unique fictional landscape, alive with its own set of difficult questions.

Click here for the full review.

 

Filippo Bologna – How I Lost the War

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Today at Necessary Fiction I reviewed How I Lost the War by Filippo Bologna:

One of the more interesting aspects of How I Lost the War is the way the narrative meanders through and around its primary preoccupations. Despite his claim to the contrary, Federico isn’t really telling the reader about one event that happened to him—the war against Aquatrade and Ottone Gattai—but about a series of experiences that began before he was born and that have culminated in him. In that sense, the end of the book is not the end that really matters. Federico—his self, his simple existence—is the end and his understanding of that truth is the lament that connects all the other stories, both historical and contemporary.

Click here for the full review.

 

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Reading: Houellebecq / Extension du Domaine de la Lutte

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In 1994, Houellebecq published his first novel, Extension du Domain de la Lutte. (Trans. as Whatever by Paul Hammond). The book begins as a subtly comic office novel—and of course by comic, I mean that it’s tragic— and then becomes an earnest meditation on the narrator’s experience of depression.

Several things about this book piqued my attention right away. The first thing, which I’ll talk about today, is the narrator himself, who begins his story at a party. He isn’t enjoying the party. He drank too many vodkas and is lying down on some cushions behind a sofa and eavesdropping on two women from his office who are sitting on the sofa. Very quickly, Houellebecq sketches out this amazingly miserable specimen of a man, completely disconnected from anyone else at the party. Someone who is watching and judging and wholeheartedly disappointed with what he sees.

The 30 year-old narrator works as a computer programmer but in his spare time he writes strange little existential pieces on the life and soul of animals. So yes, the guy is weird. I’m pretty sure the reader is meant to feel sorry for him immediately, while at the same time remaining aware that he isn’t a terribly likable person.

That dichotomy is interesting to me. The narrator describes a number of people in the first thirty pages or so, before the actual story gets really going, and each one is depicted in highly unflattering terms. His perspective is so bleak, so harsh. To him, people are either pathetic or ridiculous or simply jerks. That this might be a reflection of how the narrator thinks of himself is, of course, an underlying question.

At the same time, there is a kind of sweetness to him. Again in the early pages of the novel, he describes an evening out with an old friend, someone who trained as an engineer as well but who then became a priest. Their conversation is quite touching. They discuss some of the problems of contemporary society, disagree a little and then find common ground. And then at one point the priest expresses concern that the narrator needs help. He is too much alone, and this isn’t normal.

So the book is curious about this word ‘normal’ and what it means. Who is normal? What is normal behavior?

All these meetings and conversations are all introduction, so to speak. The bulk of Extension du Domaine de la Lutte takes place as the narrator and a colleague named Raphael travel around to train a number of clients in a new computer program. As they travel, that idea of ‘normal’ will become even more important.

Also, the narrator will begin to lose control. Slowly, subtly, gently…he will separate even further from the people around him. He eventually has an alarming psychic break, with serious repercussions…

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Michel Houellebecq – Rester Vivant

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It’s time for me to get back to some Houellebecq discussions… I took a little breather from him for a few days; he is, if anything, an intense reading experience. The last piece I wrote about was his essay on Lovecraft, so moving forward from that, let me write today about a collection he published in 1991 entitled Rester Vivant. It doesn’t appear to have been translated into English yet, but perhaps now that he’s won the Goncourt, all of his work will slowly find a home in the Anglophone world.

This collection includes eight pieces – I am only going to talk about the first piece here, which is where the collection takes its title. It is an essay, with a little subtitle: Méthode. So let’s say the title could be translated as Stay alive: a method or How to Stay Alive. One little note on this title: he could have written survivre (survive) but he uses the word vivant (alive) instead. For Houellebecq, I think we can read that as an optimistic choice.

The essay is very serious, in an “it-wholeheartedly-sucks-to-be-a-writer-with-a-vision” way, and this does make it a teeny bit melodramatic. But there is a thin and underhanded vein of satire running through the whole thing, and this, of course, is what saves it. Rester Vivant is serious, wholeheartedly serious—I don’t want to deny or argue against that, but the bleakness of his message becomes a kind of exasperated comedy at one point. And this makes it palatable. I wasn’t expecting humor in Houellebecq, but I see now how it fits him. His is a macabre humor, though, a dark and helpless irony.

A small aside: when I discussed La Carte et Le Territoire with my book group a few months ago, I was the only one who suspected that Houellebecq had a sense of humor. There is a scene in that book, where Houellebecq the character, who has been brutally murdered, is finally interred. When the coffin comes out of the hearse and gets carried to the plot, the onlookers can see that it’s a child-size coffin. Because of the way Houellebecq was murdered, there wasn’t much left of him to put in the ground, and the funeral home appears to have selected an economical, if not ecological way of burying him.

Now, I laughed out loud when I read this scene. It has a certain pathos, yes, but I found it more tongue-in-cheek. Also, planting this sly joke in the midst of an otherwise serious book knocked Houellebecq up a few notches for me.

Now back to Rester Vivant.

The essay addresses the reader directly, and that reader is meant to be a fledgling writer, someone who has figured out that this writing business is going to be pretty tough, but also that this life business may in fact be worse. Houellebecq begins with an assertion that life involves inescapable suffering. Then he tells his reader to revel in that suffering. There is no way around it, so embrace it. Love your suffering; cultivate and explore it, and eventually:

Lorsque vous susciterez chez les autres un mélange de pitié effrayée et de mépris, vous saurez que vous êtes sur la bonne voie. Vous pourrez commencer à écrire. [As soon as you provoke a mixture of frightened pity and contempt from other people, you are on the right path. You may now start to write.]

Then you must learn to express your suffering. If you cannot do this, you will die. He urges his reader to write at all costs, finding solace in already existing forms and not losing heart when your suffering takes over, preventing you from writing.

Au paroxysme de la souffrance, vous ne pourrez plus écrire. Si vous vous en sentez la force, essayez tout de même. Le résultat sera probablement mauvais ; probablement, mais pas certainement. [At the height of your suffering, you will not be able to write. If you feel strong enough, try anyway. The result will most likely be bad; most likely, but not certainly.]

Both excerpts have a little tremor of humor, feeble and self-deprecating, but humor none the less.

One of the key phrases of the essay is: Un poète mort n’écrit plus. D’où l’importance de rester vivant. [A dead poet no longer writes. This is why it is important to stay alive.]

Followed soon after by this:

Vous ne connaîtrez jamais exactement cette part de vous-même qui vous pousse à écrire. Vous ne la connaîtrez que sous des formes approchées, et contradictoires. Égoïsme ou dévouement ? Cruauté ou compassion ? Tout pourrait se soutenir. Preuve que, finalement, vous ne savez rien ; alors ne vous comportez pas comme si vous saviez. Devant votre ignorance, devant cette part mystérieuse de vous-même, restez honnête et humble. [You will never know exactly what part of you pushes you to write. You will only know it through approximations and contradictions. Egotism or devotion? Cruelty or compassion? All are possibilities. This is proof that, ultimately, you know nothing; so do not behave as if you knew. Before your ignorance, before this mysterious part of yourself, remain honest and humble.]

The essay ends with the claim that a writer’s calling is to fight back at the society whose single goal is to destroy him*/her. Hit where it hurts, do not spare anyone, not even yourself. This final section has a number of interesting points, which I think I’ll have to get to in a second post.

But I want to spend a second on his tortured artist perspective. At first read, I love this kind of emotional appeal. I’m a sucker for an impassioned soul. And I also can’t help but agree with the thought that if you open yourself up completely to the injustices and horrors of the world we live in, you will eventually get trapped beneath the great mountain of them and probably suffocate. Most people build barriers or pick their battles or find a way to cope; writers and artists tend to get locked in a continual struggle to negotiate how much barrier is needed for self-protection and how little is needed to work in an atmosphere of emotional honesty.

On the other hand, the tortured artist perspective has always irked me just a little bit. I have always felt a little uncomfortable with the idea of the mad genius, that insanely talented or intelligent individual that is completely beyond the rest of society. Many highly intelligent and creative individuals are healthy, functioning people as well.

This is where Houellebecq’s minuscule touch of irony saves the essay for me. Without it, I think I would get stuck at suspicious and annoyed. Instead, I can see that although he is deathly serious about a writer’s position vis-à-vis society, he is also quite conscious of the melodrama it perpetuates. So the only solution for the writer is to camp up that tragic gravity, as subtly or as provocatively as need be. That’s a solution I can get along with just fine.

*The fledgling writer addressed in the essay is a man, no doubt about it, and most likely a man named Michel Houellebecq. He is always somehow writing about himself.

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Irène Némirovsky – Le Bal

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On Monday night I sat down and read Irène Némirovsky’s very short novel, Le Bal. I’ve been meaning to read Némirovsky for awhile now and luckily my French book group selected this feisty little story of revenge and mother-daughter disharmony for our April read. As the title suggests this is the story of a party—although it is really the story of a pair of horrible parents and their soon-to-be horrible daughter. And it is also the story of 1920s Paris and the rise of the nouveau riche, of social climbing and being desperate for public recognition. On top of all that, it is the story of a certain moment of adolescence when suddenly the adult world comes into frightening focus.

Némirovsky’s writing is a pleasure to read, all sharp corners and crisp sentences. And the kind of omniscient narrator who swoops in with exactly the right kind of stunning detail and careful framing. The kind of narrator who keeps out of the way, for the most part, and just gets the story out in front of the reader in the most efficient and elegant way possible. I knew that this year with so much contemporary fiction reading on my plate that I would relish any moment I could steal with older, modernist fiction. Such was the case with my hour with Némirovsky. A pure delight.

Such a tragedy that Némirovsky was not given the chance to lead a long, full life. In her very short life she wrote a considerable amount – not all of which has made its way into English. Just imagine what else she might have written if she hadn’t been killed at the age of 39…

I’ll be hunting up copies of her other works, starting of course with her earliest…Le Malentendu, a first novel written first as a short story and then published as a novel when she was only 18 years old.

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Peter Stamm – Seven Years

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Yesterday at Necessary Fiction I reviewed Peter Stamm’s Seven Years:

Alex’s narrative is, in essence, a comparison of the two women. Ivona, a simple individual whose devotion to Alex borders on mental illness, and Sonia, a kind but distant partner whose passion for her work outstrips her passion for anyone and anything else. Where Ivona is self-less, Sonia is self-full. That essential difference informs Alex’s connection to each woman.

Click here for the full review.

 

Michel Houellebecq – H.P. Lovecraft: Contre le Monde, Contre la Vie

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Now that I am several books into my Houellebecq Project, I feel that I have, by accident, gone about this in exactly the right way. The first Houellebecq I tried was La Carte et le Territoire, his most recent novel, which won him last year’s Prix Goncourt in France, and a novel which is, by Houellebecquian standards, rather tame. I don’t mean that it doesn’t have any shock to it, or any social criticism, but compared to the other works of his that I’ve now read, those elements come in a softer, less wince-inducing package.

There are two issues that seem to bother most Houllebecq readers: his portrayal of sex, and the fact that it is difficult to decipher whether the racist, sexist and other harsh comments in his work come from Houellebecq himself or from his characters—as Litlove points out in a recent comment, this is because his main characters almost always appear to be, at least in part, some incarnation of Houellebecq himself. That lack of separation is problematic.

But La Carte et le Territoire had very little in terms of provocation, in either of those areas. It was definitely a provocative text, but easy to read. I say all of this because it was pure dumb luck that I read that novel first and thus became curious to figure out what all the fuss was about.

Now, my second bit of luck came from my own strange obsession with reading an author in chronological order. I like nothing better than beginning with a writer’s earliest work and moving forward. For Houellebecq, this meant taking up with his long essay, H.P. Lovecraft: Contre le Monde, Contre la vie (H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Eng. trans. Dorna Khazeni). And it was really fascinating. An essay that endeared Houellebecq to me, mostly because of the care he takes in writing about Lovecraft.

Who knows if Lovecraft was the single most important writerly reference point for Houellebecq, but he is clearly a huge influence. The essay is pure homage, but a serious study as well, filled with critical and autobiographical interpretation. However, the essay does more than just tell me about Lovecraft, it tells me about Houellebecq. As I am slowly coming to understand through Houellebecq’s other work, he is not able to remove himself from anything he writes. (I find this both a source of his brilliance and a possible weakness, but I will get to that in another review.) So in nearly every assessment of Lovecraft, Houellebecq is inside the message, leaving little clues to his own writing and his own vision:

Quand on aime la vie, on ne lit pas. On ne va guère au cinéma non plus, d’ailleurs. Quoi qu’on en dise, l’accès à l’univers artistique est plus ou moins réservé à ceux qui en ont un peu marre. [ A person who loves life doesn’t read. And rarely goes to the movies, as well. No matter what people say on the matter, access to the artistic universe is more or less reserved for those who are just a little sick of it all.]

OR

Le style de compte rendu d’observations scientifiques utilisé par HPL dans ses dernières nouvelles répond au principe suivant: plus les événements et les entités décrites seront monstrueuses et inconcevables, plus la description sera précise et clinique. Il faut un scalpel pour décortiquer l’innommable.

Tout impressionnisme est donc à bannir. Il s’agit de construire une littérature vertigineuse : et il n’y a pas de vertige sans une certaine disproportion d’échelle, sans une certaine juxtaposition du minutieux et de l’illimité, du ponctuel et de l’infini.

[The style HPL uses in his later short stories, like a summary of scientific jottings, responds to the following idea: the more monstrous and inconceivable the events and beings described, the more precise and clinical the description. One needs a scalpel to dissect the unnamable.

Thus, impressionism is to be banned. This means creating a vertiginous literature: and there is no vertigo without a certain difference of scale, without a certain juxtaposition of the meticulous with the limitless, of the specific with infinity.]

OR

Si le style de Lovecraft est déplorable, on peut gaiement conclure que le style n’a, en littérature, pas la moindre importance ; et passer à autre chose.

Ce point de vue stupide peut cependant se comprendre. Il faut bien dire que HPL ne participe guère de cette conception élégante, subtile, minimaliste et retenue qui rallie en général tous les suffrages.

[If Lovecraft’s style is deplorable, we can happily conclude that style has not the least importance in literature; and then move on to something else.

This stupid point of view is, however, understandable. One must admit that HPL hardly ever contributes to the elegant, subtle, minimalist and restrained craft which tends to win the most votes.]

The last two quotes I’ve given here end up informing a short discussion suggesting that if your job as a writer is to discuss the horrors of the world, writing them beautifully is a form of hypocrisy. Houellebecq criticizes certain Lovecraft passages, for their obviously bad writing, but at the same time he applauds the fact that Lovecraft’s form mimics his content.

And this is easy to see in Houellebecq’s own writing. He isn’t interested in wasting time writing about something horrific in a carefully-worked style. An ass in an ass. An ugly person is an ugly person. In La Carte et le Territoire, when he describes a vicious murder, he uses a clinical and distant style. Indeed, that book has something of the crime novel to it.

But he can write beautifully, and this is something I’ve discovered as I’ve moved forward in his work. This has gone on long enough for today, so I won’t parade out the examples.

Let me finish, however, with a mention of one other point that I’d like to discuss in my next post. In Contre le Monde, Contre la Vie, Houellebecq reflects on Lovecraft’s racism as the transformative element of his writing. He writes:

Toute grande passion, qu’elle soit amour ou haine, finit par produire une œuvre authentique. On peut le déplorer, mais il faut le reconnaître : Lovecraft est plutôt du côté de la haine ; de la haine et de la peur. [All great passion, whether a question of love or hate, finishes in the production of a genuine work of art. We can lament the fact, but we must acknowledge that Lovecraft is more about hate; hate and fear.]

And then he asserts that the secret of Lovecraft’s genius is that:

…il a réussi à transformer son dégoût de la vie en une hostilité agissante. […he managed to transform his disgust for life into a powerfully efficient hostility.]

This sentence has become the phrase I keep going back to as I read forward in Houellebecq, and I want to consider how it actually describes Houellebecq just as well as Lovecraft.

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FYI – All translations provided here are mine, and rather quick ones at that.

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