Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘reading notes’ category

two Davids

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I have a ton of books to review but am just not finding the time this week…how about two mini reviews of some men named David:

David Malouf – The Conversations at Curlow Creek

Two men sit talking in the middle of the night in a lonely area of the Australian Outback. One is an officer, the other a criminal. In the morning, the officer must hang the outlaw. As they talk, the officer ponders the justice of what he is about to do, what it will feel like to take a man’s life. At the same time, the moment brings him to reflect on his past and what brought him to Australia (a search for a long-lost brother) and what he left behind (the woman he loves.). It took me some time to get used to Malouf’s writing style, which I can only describe as tangential and discursive, but it was definitely worth the effort. The overall effect is lovely.

David Guterson – East of the Mountains

The hero of this meditative novel is Dr. Ben Givens, a seventy-year-old retired physician. He has been recently diagnosed with incurable colon cancer and on the morning the novel opens has decided to commit suicide by faking his death on a hunting trip. There are a series of memorable scenes in this book, the best of which, although violent, involves a pack of Irish Wolfhounds and a coyote. Guterson is also really good at evoking the rugged beauty of Washington State. This is ultimately a sad book, although that sadness is interrupted by moments of generosity, hope and happiness.

 

monday reading notes

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Nothing like a list of unconnected reading notes to start off the week…

My Central and South American reading project is in full swing. I moved from Mexico down to Guatemala and finished Francisco Goldman’s extraordinary novel The Divine Husband. I am uncharacteristically speechless about this book. I strongly suspect that a thorough working knowledge of Don Quixote would have helped render this novel less unwieldy for me. Well, unwieldy is maybe the wrong word. The experience of reading The Divine Husband was wonderful; the book is quirky and outlandish and has a sly narrator and eccentric, memorable characters, but it is an oversized book. And I mean oversized in many ways…it is very long, with numerous tangential stories and lots of seemingly irrelevant detail (all of which is either funny or mysterious or engaging). There is so much going on this novel, within the story itself, but it also includes heaps of intertextual references to other great works of literature. Definitely a book to read a few times in order to break it down and work out its many themes and allusions.

And then I went to Belize with a collection of short stories called Pataki Full by Colville Young. It may have been because I read these simple stories right after finishing The Divine Husband but I wasn’t able to drum up any real affection for the writing or the subject. They did give me a straightforward picture of some of the issues of life in Belize, but without drawing me in, without casting a spell.

Next up is a book from El Salvador called Luisa in Realityland by Claribel Alegria and I cannot wait.

For my French book club I am reading Romain Gary’s memoir La Promesse de l’Aube. For those of you who might not know Gary, he is the only person to have won the Prix Goncourt twice. He won it twice because after winning it the first time in 1956 he began publishing under an alias (while still publishing as Romain Gary) and was awarded the prize a second time in 1975. It was only discovered upon his death in 1980 that he was actually Emile Ajar as well.

La Promesse de l’Aube (published in English as Promise at Dawn) is a beautiful book about Gary’s childhood, and mostly about his relationship with his mother. Gary was raised by a formidable woman who loved him fiercely. He writes how incredibly suffocating her love was but also how inspiring. She would not have accepted anything but fame and glory from her son and it’s clear that Gary suffered, especially as a young child, from her excess of maternal affection. At the same time Gary openly admires her resourcefulness and her unwavering devotion in the face of his common failures. The book is written with more humor than frustration and ranks as one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. (I feel so bold saying that about a second novel in less than a week!)

Also, I’m reading another Iris Murdoch novel – The Nice and the Good. I made some stylistic comparisons between Murdoch and Nadine Gordimer the other day, which I find hold up in this second Murdoch novel, but I did want to say that despite their similarities, there is always the political or social dimension in Gordimer’s work and of course Murdoch doesn’t have this. I don’t say this as a criticism of Murdoch but only as a statement about where their work has very little common ground. I get the sense that Murdoch was intensely preoccupied with relationships and ethical questions as they relate to love and sexuality.

Finally, and this is very silly, but I read Johanna Spyri’s Heidi for the first time last week and it made me wonder where on earth we get this image of a blonde Heidi? In the book, Heidi has short, dark, curly hair. I was so surprised by this I actually had to run downstairs to my refrigerator and take out the bottle of Heidi brand milk to look at the picture, which in my mind had a little blonde girl drinking from a bowl of milk. But no! She has short dark hair. Which is when I realized that it must be the Swiss Miss hot cocoa label from my childhood that did all the damage…

 

a few words on Vanity Fair

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Although it gets a bit baggy for about 150 pages in the middle (which is not much when you consider the overall length of this novel), Vanity Fair is one of the funniest novels I’ve read in a long time. What I find so remarkable about this is that the characters in and of themselves are not especially funny. In fact, most of them are pathetic or cantankerous or pious or frail. The story isn’t all that funny either, a bit too much of a silly marathon to be truly funny. But the narrator, the wonderful narrator is downright, laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Reading Vanity Fair feels like having a snarky conversation over a delicious glass of wine with a most amusing, most dashing friend with an incredible gift for dramatic representation. The kind of person who has so much fun relating the particulars of a given event that it is impossible not to laugh and snigger at the poor fools who were in this person’s vicinity when he or she chose to pay attention.

The narrator is what makes the book complete. Without this snide voice describing the events and making up detailed portraits of each character’s foibles, the story would actually be quite sad. Nice people get taken advantage of and made into pathetic jokes while clever, naughty people have all the fun. Well, at least until page 631 where I’m wondering if the tide is about to change.

Don’t tell me, any of you who have read this already, but I’m incredibly curious whether the narrator will be able to skewer his beloved Rebecca in the end. Until now, she’s gotten off each and every time for her dastardly behavior and it’s clear he loves her more than any of his other inventions. (I’m now freely taking the narrator for Thackeray himself. And if this is the case, if Thackeray was as wonderfully sarcastic and funny as the narrator of Vanity Fair, I’m very sad not to have had the chance to meet him or hear him speak in person).

I can just picture Thackeray laughing over his manuscript, chuckling proudly at each scene and line of dialogue. Becky Sharpe is a fantastic heroine. Thackeray makes her so quick and witty, such a bald-faced liar and opportunist; it’s hard not to want to see her get away with it all. If only to keep the narrator in such jovial spirits:

It is all vanity to be sure: but who will not own to liking a little of it? I should like to know what well-constituted mind, merely because it is transitory, dislikes roast beef? That is a vanity; but may every man who reads this have a wholesome portion of it through life, I beg: aye, though my readers were five hundred thousand. Sit down, gentlemen, and fall to, with a good hearty appetite; the fat, the lean, the gravy, the horse-radish as you like it – don’t spare it. Another glass of wine, Jones, my boy – a little bit of the Sunday side. Yet, let us eat our fill of the vain thing, and be thankful therefor. And let us make the best of Becky’s aristocratic pleasures likewise – for these too, like all other mortal delights, were but transitory.

mid-read thoughts on Dickens

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I have very little experience with Charles Dickens. I’ve read Oliver Twist, Bleak House and A Christmas Carol and that’s it. I’d love to read him from start to finish one day – but that’s a project for another year.

At the moment I am finishing up A Tale of Two Cities. Perhaps this is because I am not overly familiar with Dickens’ style, but I’ve been continually surprised at the cinematic quality of his description. A few posts back I mentioned the scene with the tipped wine cask from early in the novel and his description of everyone on the streets grubbing around to get a drink of the spilled wine. But since then, I’ve come across multiple scenes with a similar quality. I’m thinking about the longish description of Dr. Manette’s house in Soho, the hilarious and snide sketch of the chocolate bearers for the French king or the scene when Young Jerry spies on his graverobbing father and then runs home, imagining the coffin chasing him.

It isn’t just that these descriptions are vivid and detailed, but that they seem to rely more on visual detail than any of the other senses. I’m not sure why this struck me as a little unusual, perhaps it is not. Perhaps Dickens just had a visual brain or a sharp photographic memory and so his writing reflects that skill. Either way, it makes for a story which presents itself as a progressive layering of wonderfully rich images.

this week's reading notes and some Ramuz

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Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie – Why has it taken me this long to read Rushdie? This is definitely a book to read slowly, however, so I’m taking it a few chapters at a time in the afternoons. I am surprised at how much I’m enjoying the narrator’s tangential way of telling the story. I usually dislike interruptions of this kind, moments which reveal the seams behind the main story, but the voice is really strong and it’s clear that these moments when the narrator draws attention to himself will come to be meaningful later on. I do find myself at a bit of a loss for this particular novel because my knowledge of India’s history is so poor.

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens – Yesterday I read one of the best scenes I think I’ve ever read in any classic novel to date. The scene occurs when a wine cask falls off the back of a cart in a Paris street and breaks and everyone in the shabby, run-down neighborhood jumps on the chance to drink some of the wine. Dickens has people building mud walls to catch the flowing wine, soaking it up in their handkerchiefs and sucking on the cloth, lapping at puddles or even chewing on the wood from the barrel staves. It’s a thoroughly disgusting image, but so vivid.

Nouvelles et Morceaux (Tomes 1-5), C.F. Ramuz – Every day I read a few more Ramuz short stories and select one or two to begin translating. I’ve finished three this summer and am sending them around for publication – although I’m finding it difficult to get contemporary journals interested in short stories written in the early 20th century. There are more and more journals interested in translation these days, something I definitely applaud, but most journals are publishing contemporary fiction from around the world, not classic short stories.

Anyway, this week has me working on a lovely story called Les Deux Vieilles Demoiselles (The Two Old Ladies). Ramuz does atmosphere so well and the story takes place on a summer evening, right at dusk, when the stars first appear and when these two sisters have finished their needlework and are sitting at the window looking out into their neighbor’s garden. I love his description of how the shadows of the impending night creep across the room:

Alors le jour s’en alla lentement depuis le fond de la chambre jusque là où elles étaient. On vit les meubles entrer dans l’ombre, on dirait qu’ils se noient ; d’abord ils entrent par le bas et l’ombre monte comme l’eau, et enfin, ils sont recouverts.

[And so the daylight slowly departed from the back of the room up to where they were sitting. The furniture entered into the shadow, it appeared to be drowning. At first, the base of each piece enters and the shadow rises like water, until eventually, they are submerged.*]

A bit later the ladies see their neighbor’s daughter, a girl of barely sixteen, sneak out to the orchard and meet a young man. One of the sisters jumps up, embarrassed and indignant, while the other begins to stare longingly at the scene. The one sister escapes to the kitchen while the other watches the couple. She tries to hear what they are saying and can’t, but suddenly she discovers she can imagine their conversation. She finds the words deep inside herself that she might have once said to some young man. Except, of course, she never got the chance. The scene ends with the sisters trying to console one another, although Ramuz makes it clear that this is impossible.

*I’m still tweaking this passage and making some decisions about how I want to handle it. Ramuz is notorious for his use of the French subject on, which is tricky to make work in English the way he uses it. A literal translation of that second sentence would be: One saw the furniture enter into the shadow, one would say they were drowning. He consistently brings a larger audience, so to speak, into the scene instead of allowing for a straightforward narrator. And you’ll notice he switches tense in that last sentence…just to make my life easy, of course.

podcasts and Edith Wharton

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No one ever mentioned that reading would become a problem in late pregnancy. I don’t mean reading in and of itself, thankfully, but rather, finding a comfortable position to sit and read for any duration of time. Particularly in the evening. I’m used to settling down on the couch or curling up with a book in bed and reading for at least an hour or two each evening, and much to my surprise, this has become incredibly difficult. Mostly because the most comfortable way for me to relax at the moment is to lie on my left side with about a hundred pillows propping me up from every direction. Unfortunately, it suddenly becomes very awkward to hold a book.

Watching a movie, on the contrary, is very easy. My husband and I don’t own a TV, but we love movies and so watch them on a laptop. And we’ve been going through a bunch of Agatha Christie films and shows. Because of this we’ve been having an ongoing debate about David Suchet vs. Peter Ustinov. I think I’m a confirmed Ustinov fan, although I think Suchet is incredible as well. I might be biased, however, by my real-life appreciation for Ustinov, who was an absolute linguistic genius.

Back to the topic at hand – I have managed to do some reading before bed using my Ipod and I’m enjoying a selection of short stories offered by Librivox as well as The Classic Tales podcast. The other night I listened to an interesting short story by Edith Wharton called The Fulness of Life. As the story opened I was at first surprised by Wharton taking up such a metaphysical subject as a woman going to heaven and dealing with happiness in the afterlife. But as the story continued, I realized this story dealt exactly with Wharton’s overall project of marital bliss and difficult choices.

In the story, an unnamed woman dies and goes to heaven. When she arrives, she’s overwhelmed with the beauty of paradise and the chance to experience what she calls, “what it means to really live.” Her conversation with the guardian spirit reveals that she lived on earth in a ho-hum marriage with a man who, although kind, was not her intellectual equal, and that she never experienced true passion. To this declaration, the spirit says:

“that every soul which seeks in vain on earth for a kindred soul to whom it can lay bare its inmost being shall find that soul here and be united to it for eternity.”

As expected, the woman is overjoyed. And soon a man appears – her kindred spirit. They discuss things for a moment, finishing each other’s sentences and getting more and more excited. Until the woman discovers that when the man who was her husband on earth dies, he’ll be alone in paradise to make his way and find his own happiness. The woman realizes that although she was never fully happy with him while they lived, he believed she was his soul mate. So she knows that by leaving him in the afterlife to pursue her own happiness, she’ll be deserting him.

So she is left with a difficult choice. I won’t give away the ending exactly but if you’re familiar with Wharton at all, I suspect you can guess what this woman decides to do. I can’t help thinking it particularly cruel or cynical of Wharton to bring her view of marriage into the ever after. Her heroines never, ever get a break, do they?

thursday reading notes

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These warm summer days leading up to my maternity leave see me doing much less than usual. I’ve got a few work projects to wrap up before Sept 1, but I am otherwise taking it very easy. This does mean I am reading quite a bit, but I haven’t been able to drum up much energy for long, lengthy reviews. I feel quite guilty about this because I’ve recently read some excellent books.

I finished Graham Swift’s Waterland and Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations – both wonderful, both intricate and complex narratives. For a change of style, I read Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meat which was quite funny in places, but also serious and one of the best representations of Japanese and Japanese-American culture I’ve read in a long time.

For work I’m enjoying a slim volume of essays by Jacques Chessex called Ecrits sur Ramuz as well as a collection of writings about Ramuz by his friends and colleagues called Ramuz vu par ses amis. Both are excellent and giving me much to think about as I work through my translation. Not to mention I’ve been dipping into Ramuz’s journals a little bit every day and becoming increasingly impressed with his extemporaneous writing style. He began his journals when he was seventeen and right away they show what a conscientious thinker and writer he would soon become.

And finally, today, I’m happily starting Part III of Jeannette Winterson’s The Passion and thoroughly entranced with her writing.

friday reading notes

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It has been lovely taking a « break » from blogging, although I must admit I miss the frenzied bookish conversation of checking all my favorite blogs each day and trying to put together my thoughts on all I’ve been reading.

Last week, my husband and I went on a short trip to visit friends in Normandy and Brittany, camping our way across France to get there and then spending a few quiet days visiting the beaches from Le Crotoy down to Ver-sur-mer. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest of the US means that I love my beaches windy, rocky and perfect for long walks. Normandy suits me wonderfully.

The night before we left I stayed up late and read Ray Robinson’s Electricity in one sitting. The style of this book is particularly suited to a furious, nonstop read. The novel follows Lily, a young woman with a turbulent past and severe epilepsy, as she deals with the aftermath of her mother’s death. The story rests on an interesting combination of hard-edged, tough reality and the promise of redemption. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this book but I have a complicated quibble with the ending which I won’t go into here.

While we camped across France, I read Ali Smith’s The Accidental in the evenings. I started out loving this book and how it was written but something about the style began to wear a bit thin. It’s written in a stream-of-consciousness style, jumping between narrators, but the further I read, the more each narrator began to sound the same. I’m also usually quite willing to let a writer play with language, even if it takes me out and away from the central story, but in The Accidental, this technique began to feel superfluous. I wanted the language play to remain more or less connected to what was going on between the characters, and I’m not sure it did. But I’ll be looking for Smith’s other work…

Since coming home I’ve started Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome as well as Graham Swift’s Waterland. I loved Swift’s Last Orders and have been waiting for the right time to pick up Waterland. I’m quite in love with the book already and look forward to reading this novel over the next few days. Ethan Frome is also quite a good read and feels somewhat different from the other Wharton novel’s I’ve read (The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth and The Buccaneers). I hope to have time to finish it this evening or tomorrow.

Lewis Carroll – Alice in Wonderland

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I’ve been familiar with the characters and story of Alice in Wonderland for as long as I can remember. I suspect the book was first read to me, and then later I read it on my own. And I know I watched the 1951 Disney version as a kid and loved it. But it has been twenty years or more since I sat and read the book cover to cover.

Rereading childhood favorites can be a risky business. Mainly because what impressed us as magical and vivid and wonderful when we were children, might not be so vibrant on an adult re-read. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe disappointed me quite a bit last year, so did A Wrinkle in Time (although to a lesser extent because Meg Murray is such a marvelous character). I think they are still wonderful books for children, no question about it, but I didn’t feel they held all that much for an adult reader on their own. But I’m happy to say that Alice in Wonderland is just as bizarre and outrageous and silly as I remembered it.

I think the key to Carroll’s book is that it is wholly nonsensical. Alice’s adventures don’t follow any sort of logical order, she isn’t on any real kind of quest and we’re left to wander through the peculiar world of Wonderland just as bemused and surprised as she is. And maybe it’s also important that there isn’t any sort of BIG FAT MORAL LESSON tied up in the story. Yes, Alice’s patience gets tested and her good manners are routinely called to assert themselves, but on the whole the book is an exercise in unbridled imagination. (Although there are many fun allusions to mathematics, languages and real-life friends of Carroll, not to mention that the story was written for a real person – Alice Liddell, and her two sisters.)

There is also quite a lot of wordplay in the book, so as an adult reader I enjoyed admiring Carroll’s clever use of puns and homonyms to invent some of the more funny scenes in the book. One of my favorites is when Alice takes a break from the croquet game with the Queen to hear the Mock Turtle’s story with the Gryphon. First he goes through all the names of the subjects he learned at school – Reeling and Writhing, Drawling and Fainting and Stretching in Coils. And then they talk about a fish, the whiting:

“I can tell you more than that, if you like,” said the Gryphon, “Do you know why it’s called a whiting?”

“I never thought about it,” said Alice. “Why?”

“It does the boots and shoes,” the Gryphon replied.

Alice was thoroughly puzzled. “Does the boots and shoes!” she repeated in a wondering tone.

“Why, what are your shoes done with?” said the Gryphon. “I mean, what makes them so shiny?”

Alice looked down at them, and considered a little before she gave her answer. “They’re done with blacking, I believe.”

“Boots and shoes under the sea,” the Gryphon went on in a deep voice, “are done with whiting. Now you know.”

“And what are they made of?” Alice asked, in a tone of great curiosity.

“Soles and eels, of course,” the Gryphon replied rather impatiently; “any shrimp could have told you that.”

Isn’t that fun?

But it also strikes me that Alice in Wonderland is a book written to both the adult and the child. Because at the end he makes a quite obvious nod to childhood and appreciating a child’s innocence and imagination. He quickly shifts into Alice’s older sister’s perspective, who is old enough to see how Alice came up with her dream and happy to pretend to fall into Wonderland herself. But she is fully aware that it’s all pretend and knows the day will come soon when Alice will understand that as well.

To Kill a Mockingbird

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For a few days now, I’ve been reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird before going to sleep. I read this book once, a long, long time ago, so although most of the details of the story remain vaguely imprinted somewhere in my mind, the writing is a pure discovery. Scout’s voice is particularly engaging, the voice of a grown-up casting back to a beloved but tumultuous childhood.

Last night I read the scene when Atticus is sitting outside the town jail, reading calmly under a light on an extension cord, but actually waiting for a gang of men to show up and attempt to lynch his client. Of course, Jem, Scout and Dill arrive shortly after. Jem is terrified for his father and spurred by that particular combination of anger and fear starts an altercation with his father. Which only boosts the tension between the men and Atticus, until Scout, still an innocent child, jumps in. She recognizes one of the men as the father of one of her classmates and begins a nervous speech to him about his son. It’s a wonderfully tense moment. Scout starts to believe she’s making a fool of herself, not at all tuned in to what is actually happening. Because her innocence and nervousness manage to erase the dividing line between Atticus and the gang of men just long enough to remind them of their shared community. They slink away. Unknowingly, she’s saved a man’s life. And possibly her father’s too.

Also, I have always loved characters in novels like Boo Radley. Children are so gifted at making their world extraordinary, at creating irresistible monsters from eccentrics or the misunderstood. How many people had a similar character in their childhood? A frightening old neighbor you just had to keep tabs on or a house a few streets away you embroidered with your own extravagant details? My friends, sister and I did this all this time. We were deliciously terrified of a number of enigmatic characters or ramshackle houses. And we created stories to keep us involved and afraid.

What I like the best about Boo Radley is that he fulfills that deep-down secret desire many children have. He is just as interested in you as you are in him. What we would have given to find a mysterious present tucked into the knot of a tree, or under a loose brick. What incredible validation of our outrageous stories. And not to mention the particularly childish optimism which thinks all recluses are secretly shy, wounded people just waiting and watching to help those that deserve it. Scout, of course, deserves it, which is why she is such a delightful character.