Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘reading notes’ category

stepping into the new year

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This year I am resisting  the idea of writing a wrap-up post to catalogue all that I’ve read and thought about in 2012, and I’m resisting even more the idea of plotting out all that I’d like to read and think about in 2013… of course I’ve got scratched out reading plans sitting around my desk and stacks of books I’ve slowly acquired over the last few months that I am eager to pick up and begin. I love the beginning of the year because there is always so much potential for “newness” and there is always the idea that lurking just inside the next book is an idea or an image that will radically change something about me or how I perceive the world. Reading is such an incredibly powerful activity that way.

So instead of putting together a neat wrap-up of last year and a carefully detailed outline of the year to come, I’d like to just post a quote from something I recently read… the first “new idea” of 2013. This comes from Tim Parks’s essay “The Mind Outside My Head” which, although it  was published this past April, I just read (hat tip to the Twitter world). It is about a conversation Parks had with the Italian philosopher Ricardo Manzotti and Manzotti’s ideas of a spread consciousness versus the traditionally understood internal/subjective conciousness. After his conversation with Manzotti, Parks takes a walk around Milan and writes:

For some time I walk the streets of Milan trying to accept that consciousness is not locked in my head but spread out across the revving traffic, the rustling leaves, the dog shit, the blue sky, the gritty cobbles, the solemn facades, the soft breeze, the unseasonal temperatures, the screaming children, the air, the women. After a while it begins to make sense. There are small shifts of mood passing from street to park, from outside to inside, from red to blue, male to female, night to day, tram to metro, center to suburb. There are varying tensions between focus of vision and field of vision, between conversation and background noise. In general there is more: the intrusion of smells, the slap of a passing truck, a persistent touching of heat and breeze.

I will not pretend to understand everything that Manzotti is talking about, even if I do find the idea fascinating. Also, Parks does a lovely job of translating this idea of Manzotti’s for the layperson and applying it to the realm of novel writing, and, in a more general way, to an individual’s experience of the world. Parks takes Manzotti’s science and makes it a subtle argument for a different way of constructing one’s particular openness toward the world, a way of observing and allowing the outside world inside. So, I think, it isn’t a bad way at all of looking forward to the future as I step through these first few days of the new year.

Bonne Année. Happy New Year. Wishing you all a million pages of fascinating ideas in 2013. 

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“Henry James could have been a woman.”

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From the 1979/1980 Paris Review interview with Nadine Gordimer :

 

INTERVIEWER

You say that writers are androgynous. Do you recognize any difference between masculine and feminine writing, such as, say, Woolf’s versus Hemingway’s writing?

GORDIMER

Hemingway is such an extreme example, and his writing is really an instance of machismo, isn’t it? Henry James could have been a woman. E. M. Forster could have been. George Eliot could have been a man. I used to be too insistent on this point that there’s no sex in the brain; I’m less insistent now—perhaps I’m being influenced by the changing attitude of women toward themselves in general? I don’t think there’s anything that women writers don’t know. But it may be that there are certain aspects of life that they can deal with a shade better, just as I wonder whether any woman writer, however great, could have written the marvelous war scenes in War and Peace. By and large, I don’t think it matters a damn what sex a writer is, so long as the work is that of a real writer. I think there is such a thing as “ladies’ writing,” for instance, feminine writing; there are “authoresses” and “poetesses.” And there are men, like Hemingway, whose excessive “manliness” is a concomitant part of their writing. But with so many of the male writers whom I admire, it doesn’t matter too much. There doesn’t seem to be anything they don’t know, either. After all, look at Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. To me, that’s the ultimate proof of the ability of either sex to understand and convey the inner workings of the other. No woman was ever “written” better by a woman writer. How did Joyce know? God knows how, and it doesn’t matter.

book collecting

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Non-stop bookishness today that began with a trip to my favorite 2nd hand bookstore in Lausanne. I had to engage in a small but mostly polite skirmish with another Anglophone and obvious book-lover as he and I negotiated four slim shelves of English books, eyeing each other to make sure the other wasn’t about to grab a coveted title. I was in a hurry but did get this little stack of paperbacks:

  • The Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories
  • Borges and the Eternal Orangutans by Luis Fernando Verissimo (I read almost a third of this on the train ride back to home and so far it is a light & clever satire, written as a letter to Borges and involving a fiftyish translator and an Edgar Allan Poe conference in Buenos Aires)
  • The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
  • Best American Essays 1987, edited by Gay Talese & Robert Atwan (some great names in this collection)
  • The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitov Ghosh
  • Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction by J.D. Salinger

I also raced through the French section and picked up Alain de Botton’s Petite Philosophie de l’Amour.

Then onto lunch with a good friend of mine who is also a translator and we had a quick book trade – I’m pretty sure I came out the winner here (although I did give her a copy of Robert Pagani’s Mon Roi, Mon Amour, a book I really enjoyed) with these lovelies:

  • Une Forme de Vie by Amélie Nothomb
  • The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys (Apparently the Thames has frozen over exactly forty times between 1142 and 1849, and this is a book of stories that tell of those freezings – it’s small and square and has plenty of illustrations. It looks wonderful).
  • Fireworks by Angela Carter
  • The People’s Act of Love by James Meek
  • The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa
  • Foreign Words by Vassilis Alexakis
  • See Under: Love by David Grossman (this book looks wonderful, but no publisher should ever be allowed to print in type this small)

On the back and forth from my still-moderately-snowy mountain to town, I read Salman Rushdie’s essay in The New Yorker about the beginning of his time in hiding, about how it happened that he needed to invent a new name and life for himself after the publication of The Satanic Verses. It’s a personal history piece and he’s written it, but it’s done in the 3rd person, which tricks you into thinking it’s investigative journalism (and there’s probably much to be discussed about this choice), but it’s clearly an excerpt from his memoir Joseph Anton and I enjoyed it, especially the history he gives on the inspiration for writing The Satanic Verses as well as his telling of how he came up with the pseudonym he would live under for so many years.

And finally, as if all this concentrated bookishness were not enough – I arrived home to a box of books from The Folio Society, including a really beautiful and slim edition of Turgenev’s novella First Love. I think it’s safe to say that if the snow comes back and I’m forced to stay inside, I’ll have plenty to read.

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catching up

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Things have been quiet around here lately, but I have been reading some wonderful fiction.

First is Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion. I read this book for the Dead Writers Book Group and we discussed it (a little) on Twitter two Mondays ago. Discovering Stafford is a real find – an American writer I’d never heard of and one with a wonderfully unique voice. There are some great comparisons to be made between Stafford and Carson McCullers, for example, because Stafford has much of that Southern Gothic feel, except she isn’t a Southern writer but a Western writer (who lived in New York for most of her adult life). She is better known for her short stories… and so I’ve just picked up her Collected Stories and will write about them once I’ve started reading.

In a perfect universe, I will come back and write up my thoughts (properly) on The Mountain Lion but for now let me say that this is a book about two children, a brother and a sister, stuck between two vastly different worlds, and how those worlds pull at them and shape them in different ways. The two children are mostly unloved, and so both do things to become unlovable, as children unfortunately will. It is a powerful story, simply told, with a unique structure.

Next is Karen Brown’s Little Sinner & Other Stories – which I reviewed this past week for Necessary Fiction. I say as much in my review, but these were excellent:

Despite the mini-novel feel to each of these stories, when looked at as a collection there are several themes linking throughout—one I especially enjoyed was Brown’s explorations of infidelity, and in particular, the feminine side of what is too-often portrayed to be an exclusively male issue. First presented in the collection’s second piece, “Swimming,”—a dark and delightful recasting of John Cheever’s classic “The Swimmer”—several of the stories in the collection tell of women (of all ages) who cheat on their partners or spouses. One of the best parts of the way Brown handles this theme is that it isn’t ever a story’s main preoccupation but a kind of subtle side-story, a detail of a life turned upside down, and the woman’s infidelity could be the cause or the result of that upset.

You can read the entire review here.

Also, I just finished reading my second Clarice Lispector – Agua Viva. I’ll be reviewing this title in a few days, so will mention it again soon. But let me just say now that my first impression of Lispector holds firm. An incredible writer, a vivid talent. The Lispector revival that is currently underway in the English-speaking world is exciting and I can’t wait to read her start to finish. She’s got nine novels and the two I’ve read are from her later work, so it’s time to go to her first, Near to the Wild Heart, and start reading her properly.

Finally, I’ve had a number of great books make their way into the house recently. Here’s just a sample of what I’m looking at for fall reading:

  • • Going to Meet the Man – James Baldwin
  • • Best European Fiction 2013 – ed. Alexsander Hemon
  • • My Mother was an Upright Piano (stories) – Tania Hershman
  • • The Slow Natives – Thea Astley
  • • The Very Air – Doug Bauer
  • • Athena – John Banville

Looking forward to all of these and more…

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holiday reading & new books

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Was away on a short holiday last week and spent a lovely seven days in Liguria, in the small town of Monéglia, near Cinque Terre. Ate really well and spent a lot of time sitting at the beach or at the pool. Traveling with an almost-three-year-old means there are not a lot of hours in the day for reading, but I did manage to read Tove Jannson’s excellent excellent excellent The Summer Book and then re-read Alison Anderson’s wonderful Hidden Latitudes, which I read years ago before I started this blog. I really loved both books and will write about them soon because they both deserve proper discussion.

Coming home from holiday, I was greeted by a very full mailbox (thank you Bookmooch and The Book Depository) and cannot wait to begin reading through this stack of recently acquired books:

  • Jess Stoner – I Have Blinded Myself Writing This (am so excited to read Jess’s book – she’s a friend of mine and frequent reviewer at Necessary Fiction, and I just know that this unique book is going to be real treasure)
  • Barbara Comyns – Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (another Comyns and I’ve heard it is excellent. Hooray to Dorothy, A Publishing Project for re-issuing this)
  • Mary Costello – The China Factory (I gave away the two copies I already had, so had to order a new one. I loved this book that much.)
  • Christine Schutt – Florida (cannot remember now who mentioned this book to me but it looks so lovely, cannot wait to get started)
  • Marianne Wiggins – Herself in love (short stories!)
  • Bernard Malamud – The Natural (getting ready for the September edition of The Dead Writer’s Book Club – won’t you join in?)
  • Helen DeWitt – The Last Samurai (any book that involves an endless looping of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is probably going to be fantastic)
  • Michael Ondaatje – The English Patient (have never read it, nor have I seen the film. Figure I should start with the book)
  • John Cheever – The Wapshot Scandal (why not?)
  • Tessa Hadley – The London Train (I’ve read several Hadley short stories in the New Yorker lately, so went to look for one of her books)

As I’m sure you can guess, books are always coming into this house in alarming numbers, but this stack gathering in one week impressed the entire household… it’s very hard to decide where to start.

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“Joseph Amigne, by God!”

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Over the weekend I had one of those real-life/literature cross-over moments that had to do with wine and Ramuz. I was visiting my mother-in-law and on Saturday noon we went to some of her friends for an easy lunch. They served us a wine from the canton of Valais; the wine was an Amigne, which I haven’t had in ages, but it’s a lovely and quite sweet white. There are several grape varieties grown only in Switzerland and this is one of them. Another is Humagne. Both are quite nice.

I cannot drink either an Amigne or an Humagne without thinking of Ramuz. In his short story, “Phimonette,” which I translated for the American journal Metamorphoses this past spring, there is a mention of this wine, but it’s done in quite a funny way. I wrote about the story here, but I can say briefly that it is the story of an old woman who believes she’s young again. She’s gone to meet the youth of the Alpine village where they are dancing in an abandoned hayloft and she’s pretending to be waiting for her fiancé who has gone down into the valley to save money for their wedding. The young people tease her because the way she’s lost her grip on reality is somehow funny, but it’s also very sad and the story is, at heart, really heartbreaking.

In any case, there is a moment in the story when the young people are teasing her and it goes like this:

And everyone was beside her asking questions, and among them Justin said, “So you’ve had news then?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Good news, not like the rest. He’s coming back. Just when, I’m not exactly sure. He told me, ‘Just a bit longer, you know, you’re a brave girl… when I’ll have the money, you know, a full handkerchief or two, for the bed, and a chest of drawers.’ He told me, ‘in eight days, eight and a half days.’”

But Justin had an idea. And as she was still talking, and the others were asking her, “What’s your fiancé’s name?” and she said, “His name is Joseph” and they asked her, “What’s his full name?” and then she hesitated a bit, so Justin suddenly said, “Joseph Amigne, by God! From Umagne.”

It’s such a great line, and although he is teasing Phimonette, it’s more to show off to the group of his peers than really be cruel. She agrees immediately, delighted to have a name for her fiancé and Justin even gives her “news” from Joseph, whom he pretends to have seen the week before. It’s a powerful scene, both lighthearted and deeply serious. I cannot see a bottle of Amigne or Humagne without hearing that last line in my head.

So I sat there with my company on Saturday, and when our host placed that lovely bottle of Amigne on the table, I thought of Ramuz and smiled and had to keep myself from whispering, “Joseph Amigne, by God! From Umagne.”

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friday reading notes

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Without meaning to, I’ve taken a little blogging break again. Mainly because I’ve been reading some male authors (Dany Laferrière, Ramuz and Cormac McCarthy) and therefore won’t be blogging about them, but also because I’ve been really busy with work and didn’t have much time. Things have calmed down a bit and summer is finally in full swing in Switzerland, so I’m catching up on my reading.

But I thought I would write up some casual reading notes to get back into the habit.

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I just finished Barbara Pym’s first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, published in 1950. Very interesting to read her first. Mainly because I didn’t realize it was her first until I was halfway through. It’s an incredibly accomplished book, extremely funny and wonderfully ironic. It introduces all that Pym would continue to explore in her later books – spinsterhood and bachelorhood, small communities centered around the church, the decision to marry late in life.

Some Tame Gazelle also looks at sisters. Harriet and Belinda, both unmarried, live together and spend their time involved in the local church, where Belinda is friends with the archdeacon. She was in love with him in her youth, but he married someone else. This sorrow rides its way through the entire book. Belinda has never quite gotten over what happened to her, although she is, in most ways, completely resigned to her fate. Pym is relentless in her exploration of people who find moments of contentment in lives that are inherently unhappy and very lonely. That she does this through comedy is remarkable to me. Her books are funny, and then they are horribly sad at the same time.

The last thing I wanted to mention about Pym is that it only just occured to me, after reading several of her books, that although they are always centered around a tightly-knit church community, there is no religion. There is ritual and clerical life, but there is no God. That’s a very interesting choice, I think.

***

I also started reading Dana Johnson’s Elsewhere, California. This book comes out this month from Counterpoint Press. It’s the story of Avery, an African American woman struggling with her identity. Johnson alternates between the story of Avery’s youth (written in African American Vernacular English) and her adult life, married to an Italian immigrant (written in non-vernacular). Language is exceedingly important to the cultural questions Johnson poses. I love books that look hard at America’s cultural identity, at its unspoken and spoken boundaries, at the way people negotiate these issues. Johnson also writes beautifully.

I’ll be reviewing this book for Necessary Fiction soon, so I’ll have more to say then.

***

I’ve also just started reading Janet Frame’s first novel, Owls Do Cry. This is my first time reading Frame, who is one of New Zealand’s most accomplished writers. The book was first published in 1957. I’m about halfway through and was trying to figure out what other book it reminded me of—it has a very particular rhythm and syntax that felt very familiar to me. It finally struck me today that it has a lot in common, language-wise, with Jack Kerouac’s Tristessa. Which really means that perhaps Owls Do Cry simply has a lot in common with other Beat-style literature of the late 1950s. This is not a decade I’m familiar enough with to make any other comparisons – I’d love some input.

More importantly, however, is the difference I do notice between Frame and other writers of the same era that I do know a little better – like Iris Murdoch and Nadine Gordimer, for example. Frame uses a stream-of-consciousness style with a lot of poetic language and not many passing-of-time markers for the reader to follow. But the book is beautiful and different and I can’t wait to finish it. Am hoping to finish it up tonight, so I can write about it before Monday, when we’ll be discussing it with the Dead Writer’s Book Club.

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And finally, new books! Over the last few weeks, I’ve received, bought, and picked up a number of books at my favorite second hand book shop. My shelves are always overflowing, but I’ve added the following to those towering stacks:

  • W. Somerset Maugham – The Moon and Sixpence
  • Deborah Levy – Swimming Home
  • James Agee – A Death in the Family
  • Irène Nemirovsky – All Our Worldly Goods
  • May Sarton – Kinds of Love
  • Daphne Du Maurier – Jamaica Inn
  • Melanie McDonald – Eromenos
  • Alexandra Fuller – Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
  • John Walsh – Border Lines
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Dead Writer’s Book Group

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Wanted to announce a new project coming up called The Dead Writer’s Book Group. This idea came up last week between myself, Myfanwy Collins (of Echolocation, I book I loved and wrote about at Necessary Fiction but also here) and Anne Korkeakivi (of An Unexpected Guest – this book is just out and I am reading right now and will write about soon!).

The idea is quite simple: each month we will host a group discussion of a work by an author who has (unfortunately!) passed on. Our first pick is Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers. Discussions can take place in two places – either on the blog The Dead Writer’s Book Club or on Twitter, and will run for the entire day on the first Monday of every month. We aren’t starting in May but in June, so we will be discussing McCullers on Monday June 4th.

I will for sure be posting about the book on the DWBG blog just before the first “meet-up” on Twitter, so whether you prefer a blog discussion or tweeting, anyone and everyone is welcome to join in. And I hope you will!

For the Twitter discussion look for: #ddwritersbkgp .

I’ve read all three of McCullers’s best known works: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café, which is probably my favorite. This will be a chance to read one of her lesser known works and discuss it. I can’t wait.

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Meeting Nadine Gordimer

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If you have been reading my blog for any amount of time you have probably noticed that one of my favorite writers, if not my all-time favorite writer, is Nadine Gordimer. Back in December I got word (hat tip to NOCA and Guilherme) that she would be giving a reading at Bloomsbury in London in March. After a little debate—okay, not much debate at all really, just some logistical negotiations for childcare and work schedule—I decided to buy a ticket and fly over for what was probably my only chance to attend a Gordimer reading. She turns 89 this year and she doesn’t often travel outside of South Africa.

The reading was Monday night and was held at the lovely Bloomsbury offices at Bedford Square. It was a very small gathering, not more than 50 people. I attended with two wonderful friends, who are also writers. Once inside, with our coats handed over, we were directed into a reception room for a glass of wine. Within seconds one of my friends turned to me and said, “She is sitting right over there. And you must absolutely go up to her right now.”

I hesitated. Because, first and foremost, that is what shy people do when faced with someone they admire very much. But also, it was very informal. It was not quite clear whether she was going to be signing books already before the reading, (of course, why else was she seated in this room with a little table in front of her?) and I’m just the kind of person who doesn’t want to bother anyone, doesn’t want to be that awkward person who speaks too loud or says something ridiculous. I’m sure I sputtered a few half-finished sentences that all started with, “Well, I’m not…” and “Maybe we shouldn’t…”

But thankfully my friends would have none of my silliness and we made our way over to Gordimer, got behind another would-be book signee and waited our turn. I gave her my copy of No Time Like the Present – her latest novel, and that came with tickets to the event – and managed to say a quiet, “Thank you,” once she’d signed, but that was it.

Until my friend stepped up, beaming and a little mischievous, and asked Gordimer whether she minded having her photograph taken with me. I was embarrassed, ridiculously so, but am now forever grateful to my outgoing friend. She also forced me to sit in the first row once we moved into the reading room, and hooray that she did; of course I chose the 2nd or 3rd row – because that is what shy people do. Instead, I got to sit for an hour just two feet away from Nadine Gordimer and watch her think and speak as she read and answered a series of questions.

I have admired, if not loved, each of her novels, and have read several many times. I’m now halfway through her fifteenth novel, No Time Like the Present, and while it will probably not become one of my favorites (like The House Gun, The Pickup, Occasion for Loving and My Son’s Story, for example), it is a very important work of fiction. It details contemporary, post-Apartheid South Africa by following a bi-cultural couple, married in secret just before Apartheid is dismantled. It is the story of their married life, their transformation from freedom fighters to legitimate couple and about their children who grow to maturity without the same constraints placed on the parents. It is a fiercely political novel and an intelligent work of fiction. I’ll be writing more about it when I finish.

On Monday evening, Gordimer introduced the novel, read a few pages and then answered questions. Watching her, I had to remind myself that she is 88 years old. She is incredibly sharp. Elegant and sure-spoken.

The nature of her fiction invites tangential political discussion, and this is something that I do enjoy, but our time with Gordimer was quite short and I would have loved being able to talk more about her fictional style. She has a unique narrative perspective that has developed in her writing over the years – the editor at Bloomsbury who moderated the evening called it “simultaneous narration.” She’s always had an absolutely sparkling first-person or omniscient narrator, but around, say, A Sport of Nature or None to Accompany Me (both published in the 90s), she started using a slightly different technique, a kind of layering of the close 3rd person. The perspective jumps from person to person, even sometimes within the same paragraph. It takes a little getting used to, but it gives her the ability to reveal what each character is thinking at any given moment.

Gordimer is often discussed in terms of the message or the content of her fiction, and understandably so, but I would love to read more (and to have heard more at the reading) discussions of her style. She has said on many occasions, and she repeated this on Monday, that she is not a “political writer” or any other combination of adjective and writer. She is simply a writer. In my (humble) opinion, she is too often overlooked for the way she portrays human feeling in any context, political or otherwise, as well as for the quality of and unique feel to her prose.

I’m still basking in the afterglow of my whirlwind trip to London and this reading. It was a small gathering, it was only an hour and a half, I was too shy to actually say anything to her except variations of “thank you,” but I feel very lucky to have actually met Nadine Gordimer after spending so many years reading, admiring, and thinking about her fiction.

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catching up

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My little family has been hit with a stomach bug for the last two weeks, hence my lack of posting. We’re all better now, thankfully, and I’ve got some catching up to do. If I can manage it this week, I’ll try to write about Claire Messud’s two novellas, The Hunters and A Simple Tale; I enjoyed both very much. Messud is a very confident and intelligent writer and I’m looking forward to her next book, whenever it may come out.

I also read Martha Southgate’s The Taste of Salt. This is the second Southgate novel I’ve read – the first was The Fall of Rome. Southgate is an interesting writer because she very gracefully straddles black and white America in her work. She writes about black Americans who have made their way into academic white America, and she looks very sharply at the issues this migration entails. She manages to do this within a story that could be written from either a white or a black perspective – in other words, her stories are human while the tangential details involve race.

I’ve also made some good progress in Volume Two of Virginia Woolf’s diaries – she is writing Jacob’s Room at the moment and discussing process much more than she did in Volume One with regards to The Voyage Out and Night and Day. In a way, I see her gaining confidence – it’s very interesting.

I also read The Lola Quartet, a forthcoming novel by Emily St. John Mandel. Mandel is well-known in the United States if you pay attention to the independent presses. I consider myself a broad reader, but until I started paying more attention to the indie houses, I had never heard of her; once I did, I felt a little silly for not having read her before. She’s of my generation, she’s writing about contemporary America, she’s a very good writer. The Lola Quartet is her third novel.

It’s interesting to me, this split in the United States between the independent publishers and the bigger traditional houses. Obviously, there are aesthetic differences in terms of what gets published, especially when looking at some of the micro presses with very particular publishing agendas. But on the whole, the more I read from both publishing worlds, the more I find the separation false. Such great books coming from both sides of that divide – and yet many of the books published from the independent houses will get overlooked by the greater readership. I realize this is a situation that has probably always existed, but I do wonder about how it might be becoming exacerbated as those traditional publishers seem to get bigger and bigger. Something to think about, and research further.

Finally, I’m reading Lily Tuck’s I Married You For Happiness. Some years ago I read Tuck’s The News from Paraguay, and despite admiring her writing, I disliked the novel. I wish I could remember why exactly, but all I’ve got left is a vague notion of being dissatisfied, of feeling there was something vulgar about that book. I suspect it may be the fact that I don’t often get on with historical novels. In any case, I Married You For Happiness is worlds apart from The News from Paraguay. It is contemporary, intensely personal and involves math, marriage, infidelity and death – so far it is a lovely read.

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