Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘reading notes’ category

Gordimer wrap-up #2

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Nadine Gordimer published her first novel, The Lying Days, in 1953. This book traces a young woman’s complicated journey from the ignorant bliss of her sheltered childhood to an adult’s understanding of her particular South African world and her place in it. I can’t help seeing The Lying Days as the most biographical of Gordimer’s novels – it isn’t about a writer, thankfully, but it does detail a psychological journey which strikes me as basic for someone destined to become a transformative political figure. So many different tensions to navigate: the struggle between wanting to fulfill the self but knowing that serving the greater community is more important, a relentless and exacting self-scrutiny, and the ability to turn that same scrutiny on society and not be blinded or deluded into ineffective or condescending action.

These same tensions then figure in her other novels and take on new depth depending on the context. The Lying Days is a strictly personal coming-of-age, both sexual and political, while her next novel takes up that same idea from an altered perspective. In The Lying Days, Helen is South African and finds her way to her self within a familiar landscape she must learn to see objectively, while Toby in A World of Strangers is a foreigner coming into South Africa who undergoes a similar realization from a different angle. This second novel goes further than the first by delving into the intracacies of a bi-cultural friendship.

This same theme then becomes even more powerful in her third novel, Occasion for Loving, which is about a bi-cultural love affair. It is in this novel that one of Gordimer’s fundamental ideas gets phrased for the first time.

Every contact with whites was touched with intimacy; for even the most casual belonged by definition to the conspiracy against keeping apart.

Here is something which will come back again and again in her work, in the relationships she creates which reflect South African society and later, in a more general way, which explore any ingrained system of cultural, political or gender-based separation.

The Late Bourgeois World goes further into the psychology of revolution, how a cause becomes both motivating and devastating for an individual, how that individual must fight to maintain a sense of self while accepting an equally powerful need to self-efface for the greater good. It is a short novella and very intense. For ninety pages, Gordimer holds a magnifying glass over one woman’s thoughts and experience, using those suddenly clear details to reveal a much larger story.

Her next novel, A Guest of Honour, takes up this same question of the individual within a larger system, although the magnifying glass is inverted to provide a vast, sweeping portrait of an entire country and its politics. Here, I think, Gordimer puts all her questions and attempted responses into a single, far-reaching framework – bicultural relationships, revolutionary psychology, objective political action, love (or lust) in a context of political turmoil, and social/political reconstruction.

At this point in her bibliography, history is already happening. The political system of apartheid is beginning to crumble. Her next two novels (The Conservationist and July’s People) capture that period of uncertainty and transition and distill it into a single emotion – fear. The upheaval of a political system can be seen in much the same way as a generational change and role reversal, both frightening experiences, and I think Gordimer integrates that feeling of heightened anxiety into her exploration of cultural differences.

So I’ve traced this link between her first six novels, and I could go on to include the next eight (but I won’t – no time), because I was curious to see how her thematic project moved from one book to the next. The six novels I’ve just outlined are quite different, both technically and in terms of story, but they are part of an ongoing discussion which Gordimer invites the reader to participate in each time he or she sits down and opens one of her books. Following that discussion has been one of the more rewarding aspects of reading her from start to finish this year. I have loved seeing how she opens a question in one book and then goes back to it in another, or then looks at it from another angle in a third. This is where fiction really shows its power, I think, in its ability to accommodate sustained discussion.

 

 

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Gordimer wrap-up #1

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I know, I know, I have assailed you with Nadine Gordimer for an entire year. But if you have the patience to stick with me for just one more week, I promise to mention her only when absolutely necessary for the next few years.

Sometime in 2007, I decided Gordimer was one of the writers I wanted to read from start to finish and I duly looked up all of her novels and ordered them or mooched them, setting aside a section of my overflowing shelves for her fourteen novels, and then last January, I plucked number one from the shelf and began what became an extremely rewarding journey through a succession of fictional worlds.

There are a number of doors I could open to begin with, points of entry for a Gordimer-centered discussion, but I think today I would like to talk about the intricacies of her writing style. More than anything, I read for the little stuff – the way a writer puts words together, the transitions and word choices, how the narrative threads and directs the story, how descriptions get built and then placed appropriately, how the writer animates a character.

I have mentioned before one of the more arresting aspects of Gordimer’s writing is her ability to capture, distill and convey an emotion or an observation. Across her fourteen novels, I was continually pulled up short by a line here or a paragraph there that managed to reflect some minute truth I wasn’t aware of until the way she expressed it made it all too clear.  Very often these moments were superfluous to the actual story in progress, and functioned like a kind of supportive netting cast delicately across the larger structure of the novel. This is something I find lacking in some contemporary fiction, as though writers are afraid nowadays to stray too far from the point.

Her earlier novels have a traditional narrative structure, but later she began making some interesting choices in narration. The Conservationist (1972), in particular, is one of the first to try something different. In that novel the narrator, Mehring, is not just telling his story, but he’s speaking to another character in the book. A character Gordimer never brings onto the page, so that our only experience with that person is through Mehring’s frustrated interior discourse. It’s an interesting technique which creates a kind of narrative layering, multiple voices within a singular narrative focus. She does this a second time in Burger’s Daughter (1979).

In The House Gun (1998) and The Pickup (2001), she writes simultaneously from the perspective of both halves of a married couple.  Exploring the two opposing/complementing sides of a couple is something she started doing as early as her third novel, Occasion for Loving (1963), but in her later novels the technique becomes much more refined, more subtle. And in many ways, more intimately reflective of the “unit” she’s describing. There are very few seams or spaces between each character’s thoughts, and Gordimer moves back and forth between Harald and Claudia or Julie and Ibrahim without any heavy guiding structure to “tell” us who is thinking what. The separation comes naturally, from their differing characters and voices.

I’ll finish today with some thoughts on how Gordimer handles description. She is skilled with corporeal presence in her writing, and knows how to give substance to her characters without resorting to unnecessary superficial tags. Instead, she gives them weight, shape, and movement. I think My Son’s Story (1990) showcases this particularly well, as so much of the book is wrapped up in exploring the physical differences of Sonny, William, and Hannah, as well as Sonny’s wife’s physical transformation. But even the smallest, most insignificant character in any Gordimer novel is unique and real and perfectly visible. It is almost infuriating how simple she makes it, a line detailing a nervous habit, a few words on the shape of a forearm, the exact description of someone’s laugh.

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rereading Ramuz

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Next week I’m meeting up with my French book group for the second time. Our first meeting went relatively well, although I was a little worried about the number of people who insisted we should be reading police thrillers. Call me biased (or well, okay, a snob) but I would rather we stick to contemporary or classic literature. I don’t mind police thrillers and mystery books, I will even read one on occasion, but I’m not sure they provide the kind of substance for a truly extensive book group discussion. I feel kindof guilty admitting this but there you go.

Anyway, our book for this next meeting (a choice I fanagled like a happy little bookish dictator) is one of my favorites from the Swiss author C.F. Ramuz, La Beauté Sur la Terre (Beauty on Earth), and I am contentedly re-reading it this week in preparation. The novel was written in 1927 but is stylistically quite modern with an unusual narrative approach. The narrator implicates the reader in the telling of the story as though the reader, alongside the narrator, was actually standing inside the frame of many scenes, looking in on the action like an invisible presence. When I first read the book, I remember feeling kind of strange and unsteady, it was such a direct request for me to join in, but the more I’ve read the book, and the fact that the story takes place in a village just down the hill from where I now live, makes me enjoy the level of participation Ramuz demands.

Rereading is such a different experience compared to the first time you get your hands on a book. I’m not preoccupied with what will happen within the story, or trying to figure out the characters; I can spend all my energy just picking the sentences apart and noting details I’ve already forgotten or maybe didn’t catch on earlier reads. Like this next passage:

Les nuages avaient été longtemps sur le ciel comme une couche de glace sale; tout à coup ils s’étaient crevassés en tout sens. Le ciel, apparu dans les fentes, faisait là-haut des espèces de rigoles, comme dans un pré irrigué.

I’ll translate that in a second, but I want to describe the region where I live first because I think it helps explain why I love these two sentences so much. Lake Geneva sits in a lopsided bowl at about 300m altitude. My side (in Switzerland) and in particular, the region where I live, was first settled by the Romans and they built terraced vineyards that slope steeply down to the lake edge.  A series of small villages dot the vineyards and are connected by windy roads. The upper end of the lake opens up to a sharp valley, with steep mountains on both sides. Those mountains extend back along the French side so if you’re standing in the vineyards looking out across the lake, the mountains form a formidable wall. When the weather is bright, the space appears vast – a wide stretch of lake, green forests climbing up toward the mountain peaks and then a wide blue sky beyond, but when there are clouds and the mountains and sky vanish, the space retracts to what seems like a few feet of gray water. It’s an incredible trick of perspective.

And now for a translation:

The clouds had been hanging in the sky for ages like a layer of muddy snow; suddenly they broke up into crevices in all directions. The sky, which showed through the cracks, created what looked like gullies in an irrigated field.

That isn’t perfect but it will do for now. Two things about this: first, he manages to express the extraordinary texture of the moment the weather changes over the mountains and opens up toward the vineyards, and second, he very subtly gives the moment its due joy. In the French version you’ll see he uses the word “rigoles” which I’ve translated as “gullies” but there is another, unrelated word in French, “rigoler”, which means “to laugh or joke about”. So not only is the sky opening up but that movement contains laughter and teasing.

Isn’t that wonderful? And how sad the nuance gets lost in the translation.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on Inequality

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About a third of the way through Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality*, I nearly threw my pages across the room. Not only because I disagree with his romanticized version of the “savage man” but because I happened to read this:

 

Now it is easy to perceive that the moral part of love is a factitious sentiment, engendered by society, and cried up by the women with great care and address in order to establish their empire, and secure command to that sex which ought to obey.

 

It’s very difficult to take someone seriously when he gives so little credit to his own gender and then so little respect to the other. But I kept reading.

 

The discourse on inequality was Rousseau’s attempt to explain why civil society contains such huge gaps between the wealthy and the poor, the strong and the weak, the powerful and the enslaved, and whether this unfortunate situation is naturally occurring. His answer is yes. And he thinks the whole big mess is a direct result of humans leaving their “state of nature” and coming into contact with one another.

 

Rousseau’s assumption is that humans are perfect when they live separately, in nature, when their life revolves around an “amour de soi”, instead of what this becomes when they group together in civil society, “amour-propre”. He juxtaposes these two terms, which literally mean “love of self” and “self-love”, creating two opposing visions of the human soul. Rousseau argues that Love of Self is good because it promotes self-preservation. Self-love, on the other hand, makes us vain, competitive and proud. I like the distinction he makes between the two, but with almost 250 years of research in the natural sciences behind us, his theory of the noble savage just doesn’t hold any currency anymore, which of course weakens everything else he has to say.

 

He is correct in assessing that civil society is potentially fraught with disaster, that humans are horrible to one another more often than not, that most of our poverty (both intellectual and material) is of our own making. His argument against private property is quite compelling, so is his point about the corrupting capacity of power. He also rightly points out that once inequality is present in a society, it becomes a self-perpetuating problem.

 

However, as Rousseau builds his argument, he spends a short moment explaining how humans transitioned away from the state of nature and moved toward civil society. He argues that this change comes about through several inherent human qualities, notably, self-awareness and freedom.

 

Nature speaks to all animals, and beasts obey her voice. Man feels the same impression, but then at the same time perceives that he is free to resist or to acquiesce.

 

Humans are unique in that we have the ability to choose the life we lead. As well as become aware or conscious of our instincts. This consciousness is the key, I think, but unfortunately Rousseau very quickly throws it away. He explains how this very difference is what sparks our evolution toward civil society but then he spends the rest of his time explaining the negatives of the society we end up creating. And he makes it sound very much like once we’re living inside that complex social construct, we’re no longer capable of self-examination or free will. He depicts a society completely out of control, which spirals toward its own destruction.

 

There are days when it is difficult to remain optimistic about the way the world is heading. There is so much violence and poverty out there. Too much. But as far as I can tell, we are still paying attention. We are actively assessing our actions and examining our motives. We are painfully aware of our failings. Our system may be flawed, as Rousseau points out, but we’re not mindless slaves to any system. I think we prove this day after day. So I remain hopeful.

 

 

 

 

*A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind

 

 

Eudora Welty – no place for you, my love

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Has everyone read Eudora Welty’s famous short story, No Place for you, my love? Something made me take it out this afternoon for a reread. I love Welty’s sly, subtle humor and bizarre, sometimes even fantastic detail. I also love the way she shifts back and forth between the unnamed man and woman in the story as they take their drive south from New Orleans; she leaves so much for the reader to puzzle over while at the same time creates an unmistakable emotional canvas of each character.

 

Right in the beginning, the man is watching the woman (they’re at an improvised lunch party, both out-of-town guests in New Orleans) and he assumes he has discovered something about her inner-life:

 

The shadow lay between her fingers, between her little square hand and her cheek, like something always best carried about the person. Then suddenly, as she took her hand down; the secret fact was still there – it lighted her.

 

Just after this moment, they speak for the first time and discover an instant kinship in their both being strangers and in what I can only describe as a kind of exasperated ennui. They aren’t attracted to one another. But they move quickly and smoothly toward an afternoon with all the outward trappings of adventure and the possibility of an affair.

 

The drive south is hauntingly beautiful:

 

More and more crayfish and other shell creatures littered their path, scuttling or dragging. These little samples, little jokes of creation, persisted and sometimes perished, the more of them the deeper down the road went. Terrapins and turtles came up steadily over the horizons of the ditches. Back there in the margins were worse – crawling hides you could not penetrate with bullets or quite believe, grins that had come down from the primeval mud.

 

I love the desperation in this image. The man and woman are speeding south, not speaking, just holding themselves limply upright in the dazzling heat and all around them these “little jokes of creation” are committing inadvertant suicide left and right under their wheels.

 

What’s even better, faced with this incredible display, the man is falling asleep at the wheel. The woman has to jar his arm to keep him driving straight on the road.

 

They get on a ferry and the man and woman don’t even make the crossing together. He stays down with the car, and she steps up to the deck to have this thought:

 

She held the hot rail before her. It was like riding a stove. Her shoulders dropping, her hair flying, her skirt buffeted by the sudden strong wind, she stood there, thinking they all must see that with her entire self all she did was wait.

 

I will try not to give everything away. But just next is a scene with an alligator some of the ferry help has captured. Welty juxtaposes the man’s and woman’s thoughts about this creature so delicately, so subtly, it becomes an occasion for mutual misunderstanding. And then she delivers this line – which I leave without context to force you all to find a copy of the story and read it for yourselves:

 

Deliver us all from the naked in heart.

 

They make it to their destination, have some food, dance together. All without really speaking or engaging directly with one another. And behind their few words and gestures is this feeling that both of them are reacting to the complications in the lives they’ve left behind for this short escapade. Lurking over the entire story is a kind of violence or danger.

 

In a very limited sense, their adventure is confirmed. Their affair realized. And then they drive back. Welty’s image of this drive is so bizarre and beautiful:

 

Later, crossing a large open distance, he saw at the same time two fires. He had the feeling that they had been riding for a long time across a face – great, wide and upturned. In its eyes and open mouth were those fires they had had glimpses of, where the cattle had drawn together: a face, a head, far down here in the South – south of South, below it. A whole giant body sprawled downward then, on and on, always, constant as a constellation or an angel. Flaming and perhaps falling, he thought.

 

Isn’t that stunning? I love the image of this dark, hollow face, burning from within. A mirror of the nameless man and woman of the story. Both similarly empty but dark, their emotions smoldering, their fiery insides only visible in their tense gestures and careful words.

 

 

mid-read thoughts – The Rachel Papers

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I love reading first novels, especially of writers I already know and respect. But I’ve been having a love/hate relationship with Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers. Here is an author who can really write, who is wonderfully clever and wordy and funny. But I suspect he knows it and that smugness runs right across nearly every page. Also, the idea behind The Rachel Papers is much what I imagine a story passed between sex-obsessed twentysomething men might be like. All about who gets what, when, how and for how long. And will there be any swapping.

 

The book reminds me a bit too much of Edward Docx’s The Calligrapher, which I read in 2007 and which I grudgingly admired but which secretly annoyed me to no end. I realize now The Calligrapher was probably a nod to Amis, at least the main characters of the two books and their ridiculously contrived research and preparation for each seduction seem to be cut lovingly from the same cloth. So does their snarky humor and irreverence for anything not having a direct effect on their sex life.

 

This is neither my kind of book nor my kind of story but Amis is undoubtedly a most excellent writer and for that alone, I’m enjoying The Rachel Papers. Also, Amis’s hero (an unabashed Martin Amis stand-in) reminds me of a friend of mine, an inveterate womanizer who happens to believe his miniscule poetic side somehow makes up for most of his horrible behavior. Men like this are infuriating, and so is Amis’s Charles Highway. He also happens to be literate and just self-deprecating enough I’m willing to read on and see what will happen to him.

 

If I get through the entire book without slamming the covers shut at least once it will be a miracle.

 

Happy weekend reading everyone!

re-reading Joyce – chapter three

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It would be a gloomy secret night.

 

This line opens the second paragraph of Part III of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I have always wanted it to be the first line. The actual first line is just fine by itself, but this line seems to more perfectly capture what Part III will be about – sin and sorrow and fear, failure and shame.

 

I live in Switzerland so I’ll use the mountains to illustrate my point. Let’s imagine that Catholicism and its brand of spiritual health are the Alps. Stephen was born somewhere in the pre-Alps, not at the valley floor, mind you, but somewhere halfway up with a clear and breathtaking view of those formidable peaks. The mountains are so strong a presence in these kinds of villages that they define everything about your life – your work, your relationships, and even, sometimes, your health. As a child, Stephen spent a lot of his time wondering what it would be like to experience the world from that high up.

 

Slowly, as he grows olders and begins to learn, he begins to climb. Small forays to lower Alpine meadows with his classmates followed later by longer walks on his own along the more interesting trails. The mountains are still frightening, but beginning to feel a bit more comfortable.

 

I think for anyone born into this kind of landscape, the view up is just as impressive and awe-inspiring as the view down. And as you get higher, as you get closer to the top, the sheer power of the downward slopes starts to take on more significance than the summit.

 

So quite naturally, in Book III, Stephen starts exploring downward. He stops looking up and starts concentrating on the slippery, rocky slopes and the more rickety trails heading toward the valley floor. Stephen is a strong young man and he takes these paths with long strides and his eyes half-closed. Heading this direction changes everything – you hold yourself differently to keep your balance, the wind comes at your from an another angle, the scenery starts to change. The experience is thrilling in its novelty.

 

It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires.

 

Stephens heads down this mountain so fast, there are times he’s nearly in free fall. Things start to feel unfamiliar again and pretty soon, he’s gone further in a direction he didn’t even realize existed. People live quite differently on the valley floor of Stephen’s Catholic mountain and he’s suddenly alone, afraid and ashamed. At this point the mountains rise so high above him they block the sun and clouds have taken away his view of the peak.

 

The rest of Book III is about Stephen finding the courage to start walking up again. In many ways it is a dreary chapter, filled with long sermons and lengthy fire-and-brimstone reflections as Stephen works toward making a confession. One aspect of his thinking that I enjoyed seeing was his emphasis on human absolution before spiritual. He imagines a scene between himself and Emma, a young girl he has been smitten with for quite some time, which involves him asking her to forgive him for seeing her as a sexual object. Only after he’s worked this out in his mind and listened to a horribly graphic lecture on hell does he feel ready to head toward a priest and confess his time spent with several Dublin prostitutes.

 

If you’ll excuse the silliness of this extended metaphor, Stephen’s confession acts a bit like a chair-lift. Instead of walking back up the mountain he’s pulled quickly toward the summit on a theological mechanism.

 

The muddy streets were gay. He strode homeward, conscious of an invisible grace pervading and making light his limbs. In spite of all he had done it. He had confessed and God had pardoned him. His soul was made fair and holy once more, holy and happy.

 

I cannot imagine what turn-of-the century Irish Catholicism must have been like to experience as a creative, sensitive child, except that it must have been terribly frightening. Stephen takes everything a step beyond imagination. His body reacts physically to his thoughts as well as to the images in the sermons. This is something that makes the ending of Chapter III very interesting in that Stephen’s movement away from sin only becomes permanent when he takes communion. This physical act – just as sensual as his sin – is finally what transforms him completely.

 

 

 

Herodotus – Book I

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Slowly but surely I am getting back on track with the 10-year reading plan. I finished Book I of Herodotus The Histories last night and was delighted to get so caught up in many of his stories – my favorite, although it was horrible as well, was the story of a queen named Tomyris and her battle with Cyrus, the Persian king. When he begins to attack her she sends him this message:

 

I advise you to abandon this enterprise, for you cannot know if in the end it will do you any good. Rule your own people and try to bear the sight of me ruling mine. But of course you will refuse my advice, as the last thing you wish for is to live in peace.

 

She was correct and he did attack (using a rather nasty bit of strategy). He then took her son prisoner who ends up killing himself. Tomyris sends Cyrus a second message calling him a glutton for blood and advising him to retreat, advice he disregards and thus ensues a horrible, violent battle. Surprisingly, Cyrus and his Persians lose, and afterward, Tomyris scours the battlefield for Cyrus’s body. Once she has it she puts his head into an animal skin bag filled with human blood and says:

 

Though I have conquered you and live, yet you have ruined me by treacherously taking my son. See now – I fulfil my threat: you have your fill of blood.

 

It’s so gruesome but also vividly depicted. And I like her balanced understanding of the horrors of war. Sure, she won, but she also lost.

 

Herodotus is big on explaining foreign customs. These are some of the most entertaining passages of the text. In Book I, he dedicates several sections to explaining the various customs of the Lydians, the Persians, the Babylonians and the Massagatae. His description of an old Babylonian marriage custom is fairly entertaining:

 

In every village once a year all the girls of marriageable age used to be collected together in one place, while the men stood round them in a circle: an auctioneer then called each one in turn to stand up and offered her for sale, beginning with the best-looking and going on to the second best as soon as the first had been sold for a good price. Marriage was the object of the transaction. The rich men who wanted wives bid against each other for the prettiest girls, while the humbler folk, who had no use for good looks in a wife, were actually paid to take the ugly ones.

 

According to Herodotus, any money made on the sale of a beautiful woman went into the communal pot to help persuade the poor farmers to take an ugly girl.

 

The money came from the sale of the beauties, who in this way provided dowries for their ugly or misshapen sisters.

 

A very interesting system which Herodotus calls admirable and then laments because it has fallen out of practice. Yeah, I’m pretty broken up about that too.

 

There was another great story about a group of women who were enslaved by a conquering Ionian army and forced to become wives to their captors after their fathers, husbands and sons were all killed. In rebellion they decided never to sit at the table with their new husbands or to use their names, and they taught their daughters to do the same. I’d love to know how many generations this kept up.

 

Whoever he was, Herodotus had a knack for telling a good story. The introduction to my edition of The Histories tells me that Herodotus was an exile, first by force and then later because he chose to be. None of this is reliable but we enjoy having some idea of our historians, don’t we? Maybe he was a traveller, which would explain his dual interest in describing foreign customs and recording history as well as the sheer breadth of his project. I was interested to read that people would have been familiar with his work through oral recitals or performances. He himself may have travelled about performing certain passages at festivals and the like. And then people could debate his stories or discuss them. This made me think of Herodotus as the fifth century BC version of Sarah Vowell and then I wondered if he had a cool voice too.

 

re-reading Joyce, chapter 1

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There is a particular moment in the beginning of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which I have always loved. Stephen is in class, studying geography and looks inside his textbook to see a list he’d written some point before:

 

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe

 

Next to this is a joke written by a friend, which turns this list into a snappy, silly rhyme.

 

Stephen Dedalus is my name,

Ireland is my nation.

Clongowes is my dwellingplace,

And heaven my expectation

 

 Stephen, still sitting in class, reads these lines backwards and makes the observation that altered in this way, they lose their poetry. And then right after, this:

 

Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be but he only could think of God.

 

Portrait is very much about Joyce, a narrative reconstruction of his memories which translate into his version of how he became a writer. Which is why I love that first part and that he sees how the lines, once changed, lose their poetry. A simple enough reflection but one which shows he was already thinking about the importance of arrangement with respect to language. More importantly, this thought leads him to immediately consider his place in the universe, the size and shape of things beyond and outside him. These two observations, stacked the way they are, seem such huge clues to the kind of artist Stephen will become. The questioning of one’s place, of the size of the world beyond the self, all underwritten by a focus on a kind of aesthetic harmony.

 

And then Stephen hits the God wall. He knows his thoughts are huge and that it’s pretty exciting, even extraordinary, to have these kinds of big thoughts. But he can’t get past the idea that only God has the right to such thinking. So he stops his big thoughts and the passage ends with his amused considerations of what God is called in other languages. This entire passage takes up less than half the page and yet so much of the novel’s theme is laid out. It’s wonderfully done.

 

 

 

 

 

world book day

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Today is World Book Day and I just learned that in Lausanne they have a 1932 trolleybus rolling around the city all day with book readings – how fun! I am heading into the library this afternoon so hopefully will come across some of the events they’ve planned all over Switzerland to celebrate.

 

Check out Unesco’s site to see if your country/city has planned anything to celebrate.

 

Like this:

 

In the city of Romans, in France, La Boucherie Chevaline (a cultural center) has organized a 24-hour non-stop reading session this weekend of Les Misérables including light food, drinks and surprises. I mapquested it and was delighted to find I could get there in about three hours as its just south of Grenoble but the Swiss man and I are running in a race on Saturday so no game. What a bummer! Sounds like a lot of fun.

 

But I’m promising myself to celebrate today by finishing up my translating work early and heading into town for a visit to the library, a quick stop at my favorite secondhand book shop and some quality reading time this evening after we’ve finished our training run. I reserved five books online the other night and can’t wait to pick them up:

 

  • The Secret River – Kate Grenville
  • Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates
  • Excusez les fautes du copiste – Grégoire Polet
  • A ton image – Louise Lambrichs
  • Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes

 

Otherwise, I’m almost finished with Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. Last night while I was reading it occurred to me that despite the stylistic similarities between The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway, one thing Cunningham isn’t really able to mimic is the heady breathlessness of Woolf’s book. And I’m glad. Where Mrs. Dalloway charges forward with this incredible velocity, The Hours is a slower take on the same thematic. This seems fitting for an homage, a kind of respectful self-consciousness so we don’t ever forget who’s the master and who’s doing the admiring.

 

As silly as this next statement may sound, I kind of miss reading The Iliad. But I don’t want to jump right into The Odyssey without a small break so luckily I’ve got Herodotus to tackle this month. From Stefanie’s posts (like this one) I think I will thoroughly enjoy my encounter with the father of history and hopefully he’ll fill the Homer void I’m experiencing.

 

Finally, I’m on the lookout for some truly amazing contemporary fiction by a writer I’ve never read. I want to be wowed the way I was wowed with Robinson’s Gilead, Powers’s The Echo Maker, McCarthy’s The Road, Gordimer’s The House Gun or Amis’s House of Meetings. I realize I’ve just cited five vastly different books. Still, anyone have any suggestions? What’s the best contemporary novel you’ve read recently and what was it that struck you?