Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘Muriel Barbery’ category

15 books for Women in Translation month

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This month I gave myself a small challenge to send 31 women-in-translation book recommendations to my family and friends. I wanted to do this in a casual way, especially as many who are getting these recommendations are not avid readers nor familiar with much foreign fiction. But I’d like to compile the list here, along with my off-the-cuff introductions to each book. I have now finished half of the recommendations and so here they are:

August 1: THE SUMMER BOOK, translated from Swedish by Thomas Teal.

What I love about this book is how the simple story of the summer companionship between a granddaughter/grandmother on an island in the Gulf of Finland is sad, funny, dark, and uplifting all at the same time. This is a book that I’ve read several times and I love it more with each re-read.

Aug 2: HER NOT ALL HER by Elfriede Jelinek, translated from the German by Damion Searls.

This tiny little chapbook-style book is extraordinary. It is essentially Jelinek having a stream-of-consciousness “conversation” with Robert Walser’s entire oeuvre. (That sold you, right? I know it did.)  It is stunning and unusual and complicated, and there is no story (who needs story all the time? Sometimes you just need poetry and voice…) and it’s a part of the equally stunning Cahiers Series. As proof I give you the first line:

“Wait, don’t sit down! Your soul is peeping out of your body as though a work lay there inside you like a slumbering goddess, wanting to get out, even in her sleep.”

August 3: THE WALL by Marlen Haushofer (Austria), translated from German by Shaun Whiteside

Being alone in a forest is lovely, but I wouldn’t want to wake up alone in a friend’s chalet in the woods and discover that I was presumably the last woman alive on the planet. Which is exactly what happens in this very psychological novel from 1963. She has a dog – which would save me too – and she has a cow, but she must learn to survive, on her own, and it slowly dawns on her that this is for forever. It’s really dark, but it’s so incredibly good.

August 4: THE VEGETARIAN by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith

Set in South Korea, The Vegetarian is a novella about a woman who decides to become a vegetarian. But it’s also about spousal abuse, family obligations, about gender roles, about mental illness, about art and so much more. This book prompted one of the best book group discussions I’ve ever had in my lovely book group. I’m still thinking about how to understand it and it’s challenging and dark and weird – all excellent things.

August 5: SWORN VIRGIN by Elvira Dones (Albania/US), translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford.

This is a book set in Albania and the US, and it’s about Hana, and how she became Mark upon her father’s death. As ‘Mark’, she is one of Albania’s “sworn virgins” — women who vow to live their lives as chaste men in exchange for an independence that most women cannot have — but who gets the chance, by moving to America, to become Hana again. By the time she gets to the US she’s been a man for 15 years. The book is: psychological, sociological, contemporary, poetic, pretty gripping, and ultimately, very moving.

August 6: BUILDING WAVES by Taeko Tomioka, translated by Louise Heal Kawai. I’m linking to my full review, but here’s a small taste:

“Building Waves is the kind of book that comes out of a fault line, an unstable geography of changing mores and shifting cultural practices. It is a feminist book—in the way that Tomioka so baldly addresses issues of female sexuality, marriage and child-rearing—but it’s also deeply interested in what it means to be alive, what does living mean to an individual, to an entire population, and to each careful and interested reader.”

August 7: NIHILIST GIRL by Sofya Kovalevskaya, translated from the Russian by Natasha Kolchevska with Mary Zirim

A coming-of-age story set in mid-19th century Russia, about a young aristocratic woman who finds she wants to completely transform her society – politically and socially. Love! Social upheaval! Injustice! Many famous Russian male writers (*cough* Tolstoy, *cough* Chekov) have written about the same time period. Kovalevskaya’s is the first I’ve ever read from the female perspective. Also, she was a kick-ass mathematician.

August 8: THE LOOKING-GLASS SISTERS by Gøhril Gabrielsen (Norway), translated by John Irons.

This is a novel of two sisters, one who is ill and the other who cares for her. The sisters are bound by this difficult relationship, but also their loneliness in a house far out in the country. When the healthy sister falls in love and marries, bringing her husband home to live with them, the other sister (who is narrating) begins to suspect the two of plotting against her. This is an intensely psychological novel—very dark, very fascinating.

August 9: THE RED SOFA by Michèle Lesbre, translated from French by Nicole and David Ball.

A tiny book with two interweaving stories. The first is of Anne’s train journey across Siberia to find her lover Gyl, and the other is about Anne’s friendship with an older woman named Clémence. As Anne travels, she remembers her conversations with Clémence, how they talked of the young man Clémence once loved, who died when they were nineteen, but also of the famous women artists they discussed. It sounds very quiet but the book does something really interesting with the two stories and how they connect… which I won’t give away!

August 10:  BABA DUNJA’S LAST LOVE by Alina Bronsky, translated from German by Tim Mohr.

Following the Chernobyl nuclear accident, Baby Dunja has returned to her small evacuated and radioactive town to live out the rest of her days. An eccentric cast of people are there alongside her, snubbing their noses at the government and living how they please. Until a small child – who is not terminally ill – is brought to the village by a strange man. I leave you to discover the rest. Despite the dark subject matter, the book is quite light and often very funny.

August 11: THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG by Muriel Barbery, translated from French by Alison Anderson.

Hedgehog is a book about Paris, about concierges, about precocious 12 year olds. It’s about life and love, about class and intellect. It looks at philosophy and art and aesthetics, and it nods to Japanese culture, too. It’s also an excellent example of how a book can distill voice, and the two narrators – Renée (concierge) and Paloma (precious 12 year old) are fascinating. I reread my 2009 review of Hedgehog and found I was rather severe – which is curious to me now, because it’s a book I’ve continued thinking about, and I remember that everyone in my book group loved it. So I leave it for you all to decide!

August 12: ADIOS, COWBOY by Olga Savičević, translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth.

Adios, Cowboy is about Dada, a character of contradictions—tough and sensual, clever and lost, romantic and resigned—who returns from the big city to her small seaside hometown several years after the death of her younger brother. She finds her mother addicted to medication and her sister embittered. And Dada has a question—she wants to resolve the questions surrounding Daniel’s death.

August 13: LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS by Marie Vieux-Chauvet, translated from French by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur.

I reviewed the book years ago, writing: “Often called a trilogy, Love, Anger, and Madness is actually a triptych of three thematically connected novellas. The overarching preoccupation of all three stories centers on the idea of fear as a force of social destruction. Vieux-Chauvet’s characters live in fear of their political and community leaders and, ultimately, of their neighbors and friends. Even the tightest family unit warps and deforms under the influence of this pervasive fear. The novel’s stories create a three-paneled portrait of what Haitian society had become by the mid 1960s—impoverished, environmentally ravaged, chaotic and violent.”

There is extra room for celebration because another novel by Vieux-Chauvet, DANCE ON THE VOLCANO was published in English in 2016.

August 14: ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING WRITTEN BY CLARISSE LISPECTOR.

I started with HOUR OF THE STAR and absolutely fell in love with her unique, poetic vision. These books are hard to describe. They’re breathless and odd and philosophical and challenging. She is an incredibly innovative writer, but there is also something classic in her vision. I have also read and loved AGUA VIVA, THE PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H., and THE BREATH OF LIFE. I am slowly working through her complete short stories.

August 15: I, TITUBA, BLACK WITCH OF SALEM by the Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé (translated from the French by Richard Philcox)

TITUBA is loosely based on an actual person, a black slave woman who was tried for witchcraft in Salem in 1692. Condé does a magnificent re-imagining of this dark period of American history and the novel feels both historical and fairytale-esque. It’s provocative and gripping, and there is even a cameo appearance by none other than Hester Prynne!

 

 

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Muriel Barbery – L'élégance du hérisson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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