Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘reading notes’ category

Walser and Ramuz

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I am not sure why this has only occurred to me, perhaps because there is a new Robert Walser translation just out (A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories, NYRB Classics). This is excellent news, of course. I love Walser’s work, and I think Jacob von Gunten one of the most fascinating pieces of literature I have ever read. But this new translation reminds me that so many people think of Walser when they think of Swiss literature. This is interesting to me simply because of my work with Ramuz —whom most people have never heard of.

Walser was born in 1878 and died in 1956. Ramuz was born in 1878 and died in 1947. These men were perfect contemporaries, writing incredibly avant-garde literature (although both in their own unique way) at exactly the same time. They both started publishing their work around the same time, and had similar professional trajectories in that they lived both inside and outside of Switzerland, were befriended by various “high-up” literary people, lived both reclusively and in the company of others. The biggest divergence between them would be Walser’s continuing mental troubles.

What is so curious for me when comparing these two men is how one came to be “exported” and not the other. You could even argue that at the time they were publishing, Ramuz was the more famous and had much more of an international audience. Ramuz was translated into German and a few other languages during his lifetime, including a handful of English translations that were done in the 20s (three, I think, not more). But Walser, with only one book translated into English in his lifetime, has become the canonized writer (in an international way) and Ramuz not. Although Ramuz is on Switzerland’s 200 franc bill, so symbolically he is a “national treasure.” I am genuinely curious about the how and the why of this, and can only explain it to myself with the idea of an accident of history.

I’ve been reading Ramuz’s journals again – slowly, and loving them – and yesterday, in the middle of an antique book shop where I’d gone to hunt down some Julia Daudet and Clarisse Francillon (but found neither), I got stuck inside two volumes of Ramuz’s letters. I have found no mention of Walser in the letters or the journal. Did Ramuz know of Walser? Did he read him? I have no idea if Walser was translated into French in his lifetime. But Ramuz made it into German. So did Walser read Ramuz? These things are fun to think about. They were, in a way, both writing about similar ideas, both obsessed with individual solitude and nature’s effect on that individual. Walser much more interested in bureaucracy and institutional questions, Ramuz much more focused on nature and village life.

I assume that somewhere out there – in Switzerland or beyond – there are academics looking at these two men in parallel. I think it would make for a fascinating comparison – from a critical perspective as well as biographical.

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a kind of list

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Because it is finally very warm on this little mountain and this makes me lazy, because listening to the crickets pulse and whirr out in the yard is much easier when I am not typing, because there are several books waiting for me just a few feet away… I am simply going to write a kind of list:

 Books I recently finished (all of which were excellent, absolutely excellent):

  • The Longings of Wayward Girls, Karen Brown: desire & memory & being lost, losing oneself, missing people, missing pieces of one’s life (full review forthcoming)
  • In the Heart of the Country, J.M. Coetzee: denial & self-denial & repression/oppression & Coetzee’s impeccably flawless narrative control
  • An Elegy for Mathematics, Anne Valente: physical manifestations of emotion, longing, impossible hopes, mixing of science and feeling (full review forthcoming)
  • Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life, Lyndall Gordon: enacting desire within rigorously guarded (or self-guarded) confines (blog review forthcoming)

Books I am currently reading:

  • Mr. Darwin’s Gardener, Kristina Carlson

“We are not bad people. We are not perfect either.”

  • Love Dog, Masha Tupitsyn

“She’s embarrassed. Embarrassed because she is excited, so she can’t look at him. I like people, no love people, who take looking and being looked at this seriously.”

  • To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

“There it was before her—life. Life, she thought—but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them,  in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.”

A few selections from the ridiculously tall stack of books I am currently piling on my desk (I am gathering books to read for the next three weeks, when I am on holiday, both at home and away):

  • Orlando, Virginia Woolf
  • Vanishing Points, Thea Astley
  • The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner
  • New Finish Grammar, Diego Marani
  • All Dogs are Blue, Rodrigo de Souza Leao
  • Bear Season, Bernie Hafeli
  • Under the Jaguar Sun, Italo Calvino
  • Sorrow, Catherine Gammon
  • Grey Cats, Adam Biles
  • How Animals Grieve, Barbara J. King
  • A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride

And finally, books I lingered over this evening while passing an eye across my shelves because I wished (really wished) I had not yet read them since reading them for the first time was so incredibly wonderful (this may be only interesting to myself, but all of the books that made it onto this list are somehow about both movement and solitude)

  • The Summer Book, Tove Jansson
  • The Discovery of Slowness, Sten Nadolny
  • To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  • To the Wedding, John Berger
  • Flying to Nowhere, John Fuller
  • The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers
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“I’m always disappointed that I’m just the same”

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Guernica has an issue devoted to race* in America this month with some really great essays and fiction**, including an interview with Jamaica Kincaid that I’ve now read several times. I’ve read Kincaid’s fiction (I love her novels Lucy and A Small Place) but had no idea of her personal/individual voice; she comes across in the interview with an honest and glittering intelligence and a large measure of humor. She moves through a lot of excellent topics in the interview (especially related to race in literature and women’s writing, and history and politics) so it’s worth reading the entire thing, but this particular question and answer has remained with me:

Guernica: You’ve often said you write because you have to. But I wonder if you’re able to articulate more specifically what it is you’re trying to accomplish when you write? What it is you’re trying to achieve.

Jamaica Kincaid: When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself. And while I’m doing it, I really have the feeling that this time, at the end of it, I will be other than myself. Of course, every time I end a book, I look down at myself and I’m just the same. I’m always disappointed that I’m just the same, but not enough to never do it again! I get right back up and I start something else, and I think this time–this time—I really will be transformed into something other than this tawdry, ordinary thing, sitting on the bed and drinking cold coffee. When I write a book, I hope to be beyond mortal by the time I’m finished.

Read the entire interview here.

*I dislike using the word race when talking about people, but Guernica uses it so I follow suit. And I realize it is difficult to find a substitute, especially in titles. “Ethnicity in America” doesn’t necessarily have the same impact, does it?

**And do not miss Rae Paris’s The Forgetting Tree. It is incredible.

 

“a dose of cooling admonition”

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On 29 December (1836), Charlotte sent some of her poems to the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey. They were accompanied by a letter which has not survived, but the playback in Southey’s famous reply shows that Charlotte had confided to him that she lived in a visionary world, assuming Southey did likewise and would stoop to speak to her ‘from a throne of light & glory’. She also confided an explicit ambition ‘to be forever known’ as a poet.

[…]

It was three months before Southey’s reply came. He was replying to a ‘flighty’ girl in need of a ‘dose of cooling admonition’:

Madam,

… Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity…

This is taken from Lyndall Gordon’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, and it includes Brontë’s reply to Southey, which is superficially apologetic and uses all the right language to placate the receiver, but filled with veiled humor and even a little mocking. Lyndall uses this exchange as just one of her examples of how Brontë maintained two quite distinct personas – the private ambitious and passionate woman vs. the demure, duty-bound public woman. Lyndall demonstrates that these personas were not just “faces” that Brontë switched easily between, but were elements of herself that battled against each other. It was not socially or morally acceptable for Brontë to strive for a literary career or to enjoy the passionate fictional landscape that lived inside of her – and she suffered greatly for this.

I’ll be taking this excellent biography with me on a short trip to the US this week and next.

 

Clarice Lispector – Near to the Wild Heart

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In all truth, reading Near to the Wild Heart was a frustrating reading experience. Not that this is necessarily a horrible thing, but I’m shocked to find how much trouble I had getting through this—Lispector’s first novel—compared to the other novels I’ve read (and very much enjoyed).

I think that I don’t necessarily have all the right “tools” at my disposal for a truly thoughtful approach to this book but I want to think about it within a few different contexts. First, it was first published in 1943, so she was 23. I’m going to assume she’d been working on it for several years, and it is – despite the incredible maturity of the style – a coming of age novel. It is intensely concerned with transitions from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to understanding, from ignorance to knowledge.

What matters then: to live or to know you are living?

This book is all about the intensities of unknown inner lives – how people truly think and feel, it is all unfiltered and raw, the curious power of a deeply strange interior life:

She had awoken full of daylight, invaded. Still in bed, she had thought about sand, sea, drinking seawater at her dead aunt’s house, about feeling, above all feeling.

Or here again:

Otavio made her into something that wasn’t her but himself and which Joana received out of pity for both, because both were incapable of freeing themselves through love, because she had meekly accepted her own fear of suffering, her inability to move beyond the frontier of revolt.

It is also her first novel, and the rest of her books would go on to experiment with this exact form. I don’t believe that any writer manages to get their form/style/project “perfect” on a first go around, and perhaps it is useful to think of this book as the first of her experiments. Maybe this is why it was so hard to get a hold onto. Something about it feeling less “fixed” than her later works – missing certain narrative handholds for the reader to grip onto amidst the free-flowing interior monologue and curious imagery.

It is an intensely feminine/feminist book – much of Joana’s questioning has to do with how to negotiate her interior individual life and thinking with respect to other people, both men and women, but the overall feeling or question remains focused on this idea of how men and women circle around each other. But these questions are transmitted through an existentialist discussion:

In my interior I find the silence I seek. But in it I become so lost from any memory of a human being and of myself, that I make this impression into the certainty of physical solitude.

There’s more to wonder at – looking at it compared to other books published the same year, or perhaps within the context of who she had been reading (do we know? did she keep a journal? I still haven’t read her biography), looking at the book as a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and how it embraces this idea while subverting it all the time.

Otherwise – a few smaller, text-based observations:

She wasn’t worn out from crying. She understood that her father had ended. That was all. And her sadness was a big, heavy tiredness, without anger.

Interesting to me that her lyrically-mediated thoughts make it extremely hard for the reader to access her—and yet the point is to expose her as much as possible. Feel we are kept at a distance from her grief. Or perhaps she is the one kept at a distance because her state is so tenuous and so a reader (who cannot help have some form of sympathy from the main character) is also kept at a distance.

The bathroom is indecisive, almost dead. Objects and walls have given way, softening and diluting themselves in tendrils of steam. The water cools slightly on her skin and she shivers in fear and discomfort.

In this scene, she enters a bathtub in one location and then, when she comes out of the tub she has changed location, changed time period, gone from being a child at home to being a teenager away at school. It’s a wonderful and imaginative and symbolic moment.

One of the biggest questions that kept gnawing at me was how are we supposed to feel about Joana? How are we supposed to understand her? It becomes an impossible task, because she remains in a constant state of self-evaluation and self-actualization. That impossibility became extremely frustrating – and is probably, at the heart, the point of the book. Because self-understanding is a never-ending process. We remain “unformed” for all of our lives, or “forming,” we are constantly evolving.

And the last lines of the novel – which I won’t quote in order to leave the mystery and the beauty to other readers—about immortality and the acceptance of death. They are incredible. They are revealing.

So these thoughts on Near to the Wild Heart are all half-formed and written haphazardly – the book is affecting, curious, frustrating, beautiful, both luminous and incisive, but also incomprehensible and inscrutable. It forces you to read slowly, to think, to ponder. It also asks you put it down and take a breath—it is not a book to absorb in one sitting (Hour of the Star, on the contrary, lends itself to a continuous, one-sitting read). This is a book perhaps best taken as part of a life’s work. It’s a piece of artwork, a narrative collage, something to study, not something to devour or even to enjoy, although there is enjoyment in the reading of it.

(I read this book for the Dead Writer’s Book Club – we’re having a Google Docs discussion as well as on Twitter, and I may come back with other thoughts after the discussion. Wanted to record these here now before talking about the book with anyone else – and really looking forward to others’ thoughts.)

           

 

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“She would tell him all this.”

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From “Pink” in Michelle Latiolais’s Widow:

She liked cathedrals better this way, liked churches better this way—as an entering into herself, into a circuitry of reproduction, not a system of birth or production, but of reproduction, the seeds in the dark ovarian caves, dropping one here, one there, a constancy of possibility happening and happening and happening—like ocean tide, that hydrolic loyalty grinding cowrie shells, all those little vulvae, until they were sand, were clay, were taken up newly plastic and made into porcelain shapes and fired, become teacups, becomes the intimacy of lips, of his lips upon her own. She would tell him all this.

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Some writing, some reading

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Some Writing

Between January and March this year, I had the very real pleasure (and subsequent immediate self-doubting anxiety) of seeing several short fiction pieces, and one translation, published around this beautiful lit-loving internet:

In January the exciting and new Sundog Lit published the first of my Elemental stories, “miner’s daughter.” These are very short pieces that I’ve been playing with as I work on a longer cycle; they are also auxiliary pieces to the novel I’m slowly writing about a woman who discovers a naturally-occurring nuclear fission reactor (and abandoned mine).

PANK just recently published a second one, called “Mining.”

In March then, Two Serious Ladies, which is an online journal that has published some of my favorite contemporary writers, included a short piece I first wrote over 10 years ago and have been re-writing ever since.  “Gongneung subway, 1.am”

Also, the always-beautiful Cerise Press included my translation of Ramuz’s “The Two Old Maids” in their spring issue. This journal does such wonderful work and this issue hosts a number of really beautiful translations as well as essays. Two of my favorites from this issue are Mary P. Noonan’s essay on Beckett and Jacqueline White’s on Mata Hari.

The Ann Arbor Review published a very tiny poem called “For September.” This poem is the perfect example of something I wish I could re-write now that it’s been published – an ongoing war with my inner poet.

Finally, at Necessary Fiction, I was very happy to be involved in a Round Table Discussion on Kate Zambreno’s Heroines with fellow writers/readers Helen McClory, Joanna Walsh and Christine Cody. This book has continued to stimulate some very interesting discussions around the web, and I highly recommend it.

Some Reading

My reading has been very much all over the place for the last few months—a mixture of contemporary titles, classic and contemporary Japanese novels, and back to Virginia Woolf’s Diaries. I’m also about halfway through Lyndall Gordon’s biography of Woolf and thoroughly immersed—Gordon filters all auto/biographical information about Woolf and her family and peers with lengthy discussions of Woolf’s fiction and other writings. It’s all extremely compelling.

I have discovered a handful of writers this winter worth looking further into. The first is Michelle Latiolais, whose story collection Widow was published by Bellevue Literary Press. She has a novel as well, which I will read soon. And I’m going to write a full post on Widow, but will say quickly here that it was an exceptional collection—the combination of emotional and cerebral that I absolutely love, with narratives just a bit inscrutable but which attain a high emotional resonance. She reminded me of Christine Schutt in many ways (and indeed, Schutt blurbed the book). The second is Mariko Nagai, whose collection Georgic I wrote about here.

I’ve also read two quite different francophone women writers, neither of whom has been translated into English but who were both incredibly well-published in their lifetimes and who walked along the periphery of the “nouveau roman.” The first is Hélène Bessette who was French, and the second is Clarisse Francillon, from Switzerland although she lived for most of her life in Paris. Imagine my delight at finding at small back room at the public library in Vevey that houses the Francillon collection—all of her own work plus the library she donated to the city when she died in 1976. Imagine my further delight when I learned I could check anything out and that it wasn’t restricted to use on site. I toddled home with a tall stack of her novels and am getting acquainted. Her novel Le Carnet à Lucarnes (The Skylight Notebook) is described in the Dictionnaire Littéraire des Femmes de Langue Française in this way:

L’héroine y incarne au féminin trois archétypes de l’imaginaire occidental: Hamlet, le tourmenté, Don Juan, l’insatisfait et Faust, l’orgueilleux.

[In this book, the heroine represents a feminine personification of three western archetypes : Hamlet, the tormented, Don Juan, the unfulfilled and Faust, the proud.]

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“the wide life of silence”

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This morning I am thinking about these two quotes from The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector.

The first:

From sculpture, I suppose, I got my knack for only thinking when it was time to think, since I had learned to think only with my hands and when it was time to use them. From my intermitten sculpting I’d also acquired the habit of pleasure, toward which I was naturally inclined: my eyes had handled the form of things so many times that I had increasingly learned the pleasure of it, and taking root within it. I could, with must less than I was, I could already use everything: just as yesterday, at the breakfast table, all I needed, to form round forms from the center of the loaf, was the surface of my fingers and the surface of the bread. In order to have what I had I never needed either pain or talent. What I had wasn’t an achievement, it was a gift.

The second:

Opening in me, with the slowness of stone doors, opening in me was the wide life of silence…

muscling her own weight

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This is from “The Summer After Barbara Claffey,” the second story in Christine Schutt’s 1996 collection, Nightwork:

She is watching from her window the man’s approach across the lawn. “You can wave from here,” Mother says in the voice she uses with the new Jacks, and I do.

I wave and wave, even though she is not looking. I wave at my mother muscling her own weight under this Jack’s arm. I cannot hear what they are saying; it is quiet in this town.

But the neighbors must notice my mother and her Jack. Either side of us and across the street, the Dunphies, the Smiths, Barbara Claffey down the street, must press to windows startled as by birds that swoop and mate so queerly close. I sometimes draw the blinds to them—but not to Mother. I am ready for Mother and her sudden turning to see if I am watching her, to see if I am paying attention to how she stands, tottering in her shoes, ankles gagged and tense and helpless—and Mother is not helpless. My mother is brave, I think, and her upturned face is shining. I see this, and see them both, willful lovers, tilted away from the house, leaning hard into the night.

This collection is extremely hard to put down. The writing! The mood! Interestingly, much about these stories is inscrutable—what exactly is going on? what kind of situation has the narrator found herself in? The stories move forward in impressionistic little flashes and fascinating off-kilter dialogue, but the atmosphere is sharp and dark and well-defined. There is so much menace, and each story seems to function within a borderland space of taboo and transgression. The story I’ve quoted from here actually reminds me a lot of her first novel Florida—this intense mother/daughter relationship and the precariousness of the mother’s dependence on various men.

I’ll write more about the book when I’ve finished…  

a disorganized post about organizing my reading

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I had my suspicions that it wasn’t a good idea to leave my 2013 reading so open—no defined projects, nothing to focus on—and I was right, because I have spent the month of January jumping somewhat aimlessly between books that weren’t speaking to each other. Luckily most of what I read was quite good: one exceptional novel-manuscript by the talented Steve Himmer and several books I would still like to write about, namely Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, Deborah Levy’s Black Vodka and Steve Edward’s memoir Breaking Into the Backcountry about living alone in a cabin in eastern Oregon for ten months. Still, I like a little more continuity in my reading and so I put an end to my random reading last evening and made a proper plan with matching spreadsheet (oh yes, big nerd).

Before I tell you about the new project, I should give a quick re-cap of a current one. Last year I began reading Virginia Woolf start to finish and I am not curtailing that project, but I am reading her diaries at the same time as her fiction, and trying to keep pace—which means that I am somewhere in 1923 (17 July 1923, to be exact), quite a few months after she published Jacob’s Room (1922) and she’s now begun working on Mrs. Dalloway. I’m really looking forward to rereading Mrs. Dalloway but I have a few diary years to catch up before that. And I find that the diaries are best read slowly, a few pages every evening.

There is a lovely passage I underlined recently, one of the few passages in which Woolf writes about children:

We came back from Rodmell yesterday, & I am in one of my moods, as the nurses used to call it, today. And what is it & why? A desire for children, I suppose; for Nessa’s life; for the sense of flowers breaking all round me involuntarily. Here’s Angelica—here’s Quentin & Julian. Now children don’t make yourself ill on plum pudding tonight. We have people dining. There’s no hot water. The gas is escaping in Quentin’s bedroom—I pluck what I call flowers at random. They make my life seem a little bare sometimes; & then my inveterate romanticism suggests an image of forging ahead, alone, through the night: of suffering inwardly, stoically; of blazing my way through to the end—& so forth. […] Let me have one confessional where I need not boast. Years & years ago, after the Lytton affair, I said to myself, walking up the hill at Beireuth, never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having; good advice I think.

And she goes on at quite some length on the subject – it’s a very interesting moment in her journal, one of her most introspective.

In any case, while I do my catching up with Woolf, I need a new project, something to give some meaning to my reading, and as I’m elbow-deep in revisions of one of my novel manuscripts, and as this book is set in southern Japan, I thought to do some concentrated immersion. It is the perfect excuse to broaden and deepen my experience with modern and contemporary Japanese literature. I’ve put together a very preliminary list – works by well-known authors whom I’ve already read one or two novels, works by some lesser known writers, books by as many women as I can find in translation (and one Yoko Ogawa short story collection in Japanese – as slowly and painfully as I can) and many of the men as well.

This is an aside but I took many of these names from the Akutagawa Prize winners – and while there are actually a lovely number of women on the list, most of them have not been translated. More of the men on the list have been translated into English. So it goes.

Here is the early list – and I welcome any additional suggestions:

  • Yoko Ogawa – Hotel Iris
  • Yoko Ogawa – Amours en Marge (quite a bit of Ogawa is available in French)
  • Yoko Ogawa – Mabuta (in Japanese – wish me luck)
  • Yasunari Kawabata – Thousand Cranes
  • Yasunari Kawabata – The Dancing Girl of Izu (we spent time on the Izu peninsula last year and I’d wished I’d read this before going)
  • Fumiko Enchi – Tale of False Fortunes (I am a big fan of Enchi’s Masks and The Waiting Years)
  • Shusaku Endo – Silence
  • Shusaku Endo – Volcano
  • Shusaku Endo – The Sea and Poison (if it’s been translated)
  • Kobo Abe – The Ark Sakura (Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes is one of my all-time favorite novels, it’s about time I read more from him)
  • Kobo Abe – The Ruined Map
  • Junichiro Tanizaki – The Makioka Sisters
  • Kenji Nakagami – The Cape and Other Stories
  • Kenzaburo Oe – Silent Cry
  • Kenzaburo Oe – Rouse up O Young Men of the New Age
  • Japanese Women Writers: Twentieth Century Short Fiction
  • Taeko Kono – Toddler Hunting
  • Minako Oba – Of Birds Crying
  • Risa Wataya – Isn’t it a pity? (which is supposed to be translated soon)
  • Yu Nagashima – Yuko’s Shortcut
  • Yoko Tawada – The Bridegroom was a Dog
  • Hiromi Kawakami – The Briefcase

That’s what I’ve got so far – what am I missing?

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