Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘reading notes’ category

So many books

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Yesterday was one of those days that reminded me why being a booklover is so much fun. I took the train to a nearby city to have lunch with another translator/writer friend of mine. When we’d finished with lunch, we both had a little time to kill before heading back to our respective trains and she, by chance, knew of a little out of the way second-hand book shop. It was snowing, the streets were a gray, sloppy mess and I was loaded down with a backpack filled with several issues of The Paris Review she no longer wanted (now that is an excellent gift!) as well as her most recent manuscript (which I cannot wait to read). I was also carrying Zeppi, my 4 month-old puppy, who was extremely happy to be snuggled into a sling bag over my shoulder and not shoulder high in all that mucky snow. Despite these extra encumbrances, we trudged over to the bookshop.

And what a treat it was to discover this little basement bookshop. From the outside it looked like just one tiny book-filled room, but it stretched like a long, narrow cave beneath the building above. It had an extensive collection of books in both French and German, and, to my delight, an entire wall of English books. Finding second-hand English books is not easy in Switzerland and I’m so happy to add this little shop to my list of treasure-hunting spots.

Of all things, one of the first books I saw was Barbara Comyns’s The Juniper Tree. It seems that the universe is conspiring for me to begin a start-to-finish Barbara Comyns read sooner than later. I also took home Nathan Englander’s collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and a book of Emerson’s essays. And I’m sure I would have loaded my backpack up even further but I had to race back to catch my train.

Interestingly, this week has been an extraordinary one for adding books to my to-be-read lists. Most weeks bring one or two new or new-to-me books to my attention, all duly noted and eventually put into the spreadsheet (total nerd that I am) that I keep for tracking books I’d like to read. But something about this week has brought before me a great number of books I’ve never read, all books I want to have read yesterday. This is unusual enough I thought I should mention them all, just to pass on the love and panic of my overwhelming to-be-read book pile.

Yesterday, I read an interview at 3:AM Magazine of a philosopher named Hilde Lindemann. Lindemann works in feminist bioethics and the article is called, “No Ethics Without Feminism.” It’s a very interesting read and I’ve added Lindemann’s books (and books she’s edited) to my list: Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair and Feminism and Families.

I discovered a new web journal for women’s writing called Literary Mama and one of the first fiction pieces I read on that site was by a writer named Stephanie Freele. I loved her story, “Keeping Track of Insects” so much that I’d really like to read her short story collection, Feeding Strays.

A friend of mine read my most recent novel manuscript a few months ago and he very kindly gave me a list of three books that he felt my book echoed. One of those was Thea Astley’s Coda, which I also saw mentioned earlier this week at Whispering Gums, reminding me that I should hop to it and read this one. (The other two were Lars Gustafsson’s Death of a Beekeeper and Norman Lock’s A Long Rowing Until Morning.)

A recent Twitter exchange reminded me that I’d really like to read David Shields’s Reality Hunger.

I’ve now read a handful of reviews for a book called Quiet by Susan Cain. It’s about introverts and the power of solitude on thinking. How can I resist?

I can’t find it anymore, but at some point this week I saw an image of four Time magazine covers for the same week. The international versions all had a cover related to the crisis in the Euro Zone. The United States cover was about pets. The image was linked to a book called The Information Diet by Clay Johnson. I have to admit I am a little put off by the cover of the book, and by much of the marketing around it, but I’m very interested in discussions on media and information consumption.

Somewhere, someone (I’m sorry for not remembering who or where) posted a long excerpt from Orham Pamuk’s The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist and I was hooked.

And, finally, the last thing I wrote down on a little notepad by my computer was Jean Stafford. This is from Zhiv who recently wrote about her book, The Mountain Lion. I’d never heard of Stafford. I love this about being a reader – there is always someone new to read, someone who’s apparently written beautiful things that I would like to read.

And now I really miss (certainly not for the first time and certainly not for the last time) having easy access to an English-language library…

 

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starting the new year

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A slightly belated Happy New Year! My entire family has been visiting from the US since the 21st of December and they just left today, so I haven’t had much time for sharing bookish news. We had a lovely holiday, spending both Christmas and New Year’s in the small town of Colmar in Alsace. Colmar has quite a big Christmas market every year so we spent our days eating pretzels and beignets and drinking mulled wine. Not a bad way at all to spend a week – despite the slushy weather and the somewhat eccentric apartment we rented.

The only reading I did over the holiday was to start a long overdue reread of Little Women. It has probably been twenty to twenty-five years since I first read Little Women and it is quite fun to revisit the story, especially now that I know a little bit more about that period of American history and about the Alcott family (mostly thanks to Susan Cheever’s American Bloomsbury). But this reread is also interesting because I read and enjoyed Geraldine Brooks’s March a few years ago. I find myself reading for the parts of the novel Brooks would have used to help imagine the untold story of Mr. March at war and of Marmee and March’s relationship. Finally, I’m not there yet, but I’m pretty sure I will be just as upset as I was at thirteen to read the part when Jo turns Laurie down. I’m curious whether most readers disapprove of Alcott’s decision on this point, or is it only pre-teen girls?

I didn’t choose Little Women completely by accident – this book is also kicking off my year of reading and reviewing women writers. I spent a few days before the holidays putting together a list of about 100 books that I’d like to read this year. Many of the writers on the list I’ve heard of and even read before, but many are new to me. I’ll be covering about three centuries and jumping continents as often as I can – although the list is definitely weighted toward American writers. I’m very excited about this project!

And finally, I started reading Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women yesterday. What a fun book! I love the way Pym has written Miss Lathbury—she’s such an excellent combination of pitiful and snarky. It’s funny to think of this book coming out right about the same time as Under the Net by Iris Murdoch, they feel very different. I am slowly working my way through Murdoch from start to finish and already have a great admiration for the depth of her writing, but I like the way Pym satirizes her characters. It seems harmless at first but cuts sharply.

So that’s how my reading year has begun – how about everyone else?

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Houellebecq Project Completed

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Despite the fact that I did, on some level, really really really like his work, reading nine books by Michel Houellebecq in a relatively short amount of time was not a pleasant experience. A few weeks ago I mentioned to a friend of mine what I’d done and he looked at me with something like terror on his face and said, “T’es maso ou quoi?!” (“Are you masochistic or what?”). The answer to that question would be a definite no, but I understand his concern. Anyone who has read Houellebecq will know that he isn’t someone to read for the pleasure of it. His work is tricky, frustrating, infuriating (especially for women readers) and depressing. But it is also provocative, thoughtful, at moments exceptionally beautiful, and very often daring. On the whole I’m very glad I took the time to read him carefully and to consider his work in the way that I did.

Having said that, I’m quite happy to wait a few more years before reading anything by him again. After a nice long break from his work I will be curious to see what he does next, mainly because I found myself following one particular development of his writing technique—the way he handles himself in relation to each text—throughout his novels. I’ve discussed here before how Houellebecq can’t seem to get himself out of his own novels, even when they are meant to be completely fictional. I think that his latest novel, La Carte et le Territoire (The Map and the Territory), actually resolves that problem, and in a clever and ingenious way. So I’m curious to see whether going forward, he’ll actually be free to do something completely fictional or whether he will relapse into the same problem.

But without further ado – he’s the recap:

Contrary to what I usually do, I read his latest novel first because my French book group selected it. My reaction to that initial reading of La Carte et le Territoire is here.

Something about that first read invited me to go back and consider all of his work, poetry and essays included, in the order they were written.

I was quite struck by his collection of essays, La Poésie du Mouvement Arrêté, especially the title piece and how it asks the reader to re-consider our relationship with technology. His most provocative statement in this piece is to “refuse knowing.” Backing away from the constant stream of media is about refusing to “know” what’s going on, “know” what people are talking about. It’s scary to agree to “not know” anymore, but there is a beauty and a peacefulness in that idea that I find very compelling.

And I would recommend to anyone interested in Houellebecq they they take a look at the very first work he ever published – a biography of H.P. Lovecraft, Contre le Monde, Contre la Vie. I wrote my thoughts on this book here, and here. This long essay really endeared Houellebecq to me (good thing I read it before I tackled his novels as I think it upped my consideration for his work in general). He is so thorough, so admiring, and yet also appropriately critical. And the essay actually gives the reader a lot of information about Houellebecq the writer; it provides a series of helpful clues on how to read Houellebecq’s fiction.

I went on to consider his collection of essays and short fiction, Rester Vivant. The title essay of that collection will stay with me, not only for its impassioned consideration of what it means for someone to want to write, but also because it’s subtly quite funny. That mix made this particular essay really powerful. Houellebecq is very serious about this writing thing, but he also seems to realize that his seriousness is somewhat ridiculous.

I started to write about his individual novels on the blog but I stopped because I was working on a retrospective piece on Houellebecq for The Quarterly Conversation and it became difficult to consider them separately. That overview piece was just published last week. It’s long, but I hope it gives a solid introduction to Houellebecq. Here is an excerpt, from the introduction:

Houellebecq is the author of five novels and eight other books of poetry, stories, and essays. His work is ambitious—interested in philosophical questions of existence and perception as well as controversial scientific ideas about genetic engineering and cloning. Despite having a highly recognizable style, he is not a great stylist; his novels are compelling because they involve much uncomfortable honesty about human nature and are packed with challenging ideas. He has made depression and social pessimism a subject of literary meditation. He is also an obsessive cataloguer of contemporary cultural artifacts and trends, something which gives a documentary feel to much of his work.

In direct contrast to this broad scope, his work is also intensely personal: in some way, each of his novels oblige the reader to consider Michel Houellebecq the person alongside the story or the characters. Whether this is done deliberately or is an unconscious product of his writing style, whether this improves or detracts from the experience of reading his work, it is an unavoidable element of the Houellebecquian textual landscape.

You can read the entire essay here.

The essay spends a little bit of time on each of his five novels but finishes with more detail on his latest work. It was very interesting for me to see how my consideration of La Carte et le Territoire changed after reading everything else. Tied with La Possibilité d’une Ile, it remains my favorite of his novels. It successfully does what his others novels all try to do, but the accomplishment isn’t just a raw success, it’s elegant and meaningful.

 

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my new life as a flashlight

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Yes, it is old news that every year the Best-of-the-Books lists make people angry and divide opinion. These lists are never going to satisfy the varied tastes of the reading public. And thankfully so. It would be kind of scary if everyone held fast to the very same yardstick for measuring excellence. That doesn’t mean I think we should continue allowing some of these lists to get away with their appalling blindness to the mountains of excellent literature coming from outside-the-mainstream publishing spotlight. I’m not going to detail my thoughts on this particular subject, mainly because Roxane Gay has already done this so well. Her essay, “Toward a More Complete Measure of Excellence” at The Rumpus is thoughtful, measured, and realistic, and yet contains enough subtle anger and dismay to satisfy my own oversized sense of literary injustice.

The thought that I’d like to work through here is about women writers and men writers and who is getting credit for big ideas, for the “best” writing, for “defining and critiquing society.” This issue, always at the back of my mind, has been hovering around me quite intensely for most of the past year. I can pinpoint a moment of renewed interest when I read a thoughtful response by Michael Nye, the managing editor of The Missouri Review, to VIDA’s The Count on the male bias in publishing. Nye was troubled to see that the male bias was true for The Missouri Review, but he found it was mostly because women submitted less and he wondered how to fix this problem. I would be interested to see a study on this—I suspect it is true that women submit less, but I’d be curious to see someone attempt to figure out why and whether there is a way to fix this without radical upheaval of multiple unrelated systems.

In my work as reviews editor at Necessary Fiction, I have also found this to be true. Significantly more than half of the books submitted to me for review are written by male writers. Obviously, the submission statistics for reviews at NF are further biased because we’re interested in the already published, and there seems to be more men being published. In any case, around April of this year I did a quick tally of our reviews and saw that we’d reviewed 10 male writers, only 4 women and 1 multi-author collection. I was quite surprised and since then I’ve worked to even out those numbers.

In a conversation about this issue with my husband, he mentioned that what I was doing might not be considered fair. He wondered whether our reviews should reflect the publishing situation. I’ve been searching, and I can’t yet find what the publishing situation is. The most easily available statistics are from Vida and they are about books reviewed, not books written. Because so few books by women are reviewed, I can only conclude that men are publishing more. So if there are 65% (I’m throwing this number out off the top of my head) books by men being published, than reviews should reflect that number. Perhaps there is some logic to that, but I’ve decided I’m not interested in being fair to a situation that is intrinsically abnormal. As far as I know, there is nothing “normal” about the male bias in publishing except that it has become “the norm.” We have the chance to publish 52 reviews each year at Necessary Fiction; you can bet I will try very hard to find 26 excellent books written by men and 26 excellent books written by women.

I’m quite happy to say that when we finish 2011, Necessary Fiction will have reviewed 23 male authors, 21 female authors and 6 multi-author collections. I’m proud of those statistics because I helped create them (along with Steve Himmer who consistently came to me, unasked, with a review of a woman’s novel, and with Jess Stoner who realized that she’d been reviewing a lot of men’s fiction and wanted to make sure she included some women. Jess and I actually spent hours combined, combing the Indie houses for a frustratingly short list of women’s books available. Several otherwise excellent houses have no women authors at all. Many have less than 15% on their lists.)

But here is where my literary heart starts to get a little antsy. I love reading. Period. I don’t actually give a rat’s ass who has written the book as long as it changes me somehow, as long as it gets up into my brain and moves ideas and emotions around. Reading is a frightfully powerful activity and I’m reluctant about the decision I’m about to announce because it feels somehow false to me. The list of male writers that I love (worship even) is long and diverse and makes up a significant part of my reading and writing background. So why purposefully exclude these wonderful and talented writers from my book discussions? Yet on second thought, aside from Nadine Gordimer and a handful of books by various women, that list of male authors makes up the major part of my literary education. So yes, this is a problem. Until just as many male writers can say the same thing about a long and diverse list of female writers, until men wake up and find that women are getting the majority of all publishing contracts, then I’m not going to feel at all guilty for kicking some male writers out of my discussion room. I’m pretty sure they will still get talked about. The same cannot be said for many women writers.

If you haven’t guessed it already, here’s my announcement—in 2012 I’m going to read women writers exclusively for this blog. This is, however, more than a quibble with statistics; I have a thematic exploration in mind. Litlove recently reviewed Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, and in her essay she writes,

The early parts of this novel are just so much fun. Eugenides enjoys himself enormously with college students, pretentious theory and interfering parents; he conveys so well the way that desire, in the early twenties, is almost always covertly aspirational, no matter what form it takes. His characters want this person, this class credit, this discourse of knowledge in the hope that something shiny and powerful will rub off on them. So far, so good, but I did feel I could easily be reading an Alison Lurie novel, or at a pinch, one by Anne Tyler. Not that this is bad! I count both those women among my favourite writers, but it was not what I was expecting from a male author hailed as the new great hope of American letters.

Now, those last three sentences are fascinating to me (and I apologize to Litlove for “picking” on her this way, I hope she doesn’t mind) because I know exactly what she means, and yet it’s such a terrible statement actually. One I have probably made on any number of occasions. On some subconscious level we don’t expect a male author to be meddling so much in the domestic. Especially not when the book is being upheld as one of the “big books.” So what do we expect? Stern politics? Tantrums of philosophy? Social meditations? Historical explorations? Nature vs Humanity?

Now, I do not believe for one second that men write bigger books than women. I’m quite certain we can find examples of books from both men and women that fulfill all literary subject categories, big and small. But I do believe that men’s books are more often credited with being “big” compared to women’s books of equal profundity. I do believe that many excellent, “big” books written by women get overlooked in book reviews and End-of-the-year Book Lists. I do believe that for every woman’s book that gets discussed thoughtfully and energetically, there are three or four men’s books that get the same treatment. So I’m going to spend a year reading women’s books and writing about women’s books exclusively on this blog. I’m going to inundate you with a flood of excellent literature written by women. I’m going to discuss these books, I’m going to complain about these books if I need to, I’m going to praise these books when they deserve it. I’m going to give these women writers just a tiny bit more time in the spotlight.

Well, I don’t have a spotlight, I realize—my little blog here is probably better described as a flashlight. But even the feeblest of flashlights in a dark room has gotten many a reader through some very exciting pages.

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a bookish week

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Last week was my birthday, and I had an exceptionally bookish week that resulted in a nice haul of new books and a stack of Jane Austen BBC adaptations – none of which I’d actually seen before.

The first in the haul—and the only book I’ve started to read already—is Charles Dantzig’s Pourquoi Lire? (Why read?) I’d never heard of Dantzig until this lovely little book found its way into my mailbox. A gift from my mother-in-law, who is very good at selecting books I wouldn’t otherwise have come across. Dantzig’s homage to reading is so far really lovely. Funny and clever and sweet. Each chapter begins with another reason to read, like “We read because of love,” about falling in love with characters and stories, or “Read to get past the halfway point of the book” about those interminable books of 1000 pages and how we love them and hate them at the same time. This book promises many little gems.

The rest of my new book stack contains:

  • Chris Bohjalian – The Double Bind
  • Damon Galgut – The Quarry
  • Téa Obreht – The Tiger’s Wife
  • Julia Otsuka – Buddha in the Attic
  • Siri Hustvedt – The Summer Without Men
  • Colm Toibin – The Empty Family
  • Jeannette Winterson – Written on the Body
  • José Saramago – The Elephant’s Journey
  • Michael Cunningham – By Nightfall
  • Orhan Pamuk – The Museum of Innocence
  • Julian Barnes – The Sense of an Ending

I am really looking forward to reading the Otsuka, as I’ve already sampled two chapters in recent issues of Granta. The book is about mail order brides coming to America from Japan, and written in the first person plural. The samples I read simply blew me away, like this passage from “The Children” (Granta 115):

Sometimes we tried cutting off all our hair and offering it to the goddess of fertility if only she wold make us conceive, but still, every month, we continued to bleed. And even though our husband had told us it made no difference to him whether he became a father or not – the only thing that mattered, he had said to us, was that we grew old by his side – we could not stop thinking of the children we’d never had. Every night I can hear them playing in the fields outside my window.

 

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Virginia Woolf – Diaries, Vol. One: 1915-1919

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Usually, when I read an author from start to finish, I try to avoid biography. It isn’t that I believe biography doesn’t or couldn’t inform my study of their work, but I prefer to take the work on its own terms first. I chose not to do this, however, with my Virginia Woolf read, mainly because her journals are so detailed, and really, they are as significant a contribution to her oeuvre as her fiction writing. (I have not taken on her essays or letters… yet. I’m tempted to integrate them now, especially as she consistently references both her reading and her critical writing.)

I’ve just finished Volume One of her diaries, which covers 1915 to 1919. What strikes me first and foremost about her diary writing is how different it is, on the whole, from her fiction. She has a very sharp and perceptive mind, that is evident in both, but she must have worked extremely hard to maintain her particular style in fiction. All writers have a “style,” of course, but Woolf was experimenting and so she breaks with traditional narrative structures and chronologies, even rhythms of language and thought. And then when you read her diary and see how concise it is, how succinct and detail-oriented her personal narration was—and I can only assume that personal narration is a writer’s most natural and instinctive voice—it only serves to highlight the affect of her fiction style.

The other thing I find interesting is that before reading her diaries, I might have been inclined to put her in the mad-genius category. This is a category of artist I am wary of because I do not believe that genius requires madness. To be fair, it is also a stereotype that is often imposed upon an artist by others and while some might enjoy the label there are those who fight it. I admit that I was curious to see how Woolf negotiated this tension, or whether it was even an issue for her in her lifetime. So it is curious to me that there is very little self-reflection upon her depressive tendencies, at least in these early diaries, even after the long depression she suffered between 1915 and 1917, during which she could not write at all. The first few months of entries written after this illness are markedly different from her usual journaling style, but she does not comment on the lapse herself except obliquely, and only on a few rare occasions.

I don’t know how frequently Woolf lost herself completely to depression—perhaps it began to happen more often or maybe she writes more about it as she grew older. I’ll be curious to see how the subject evolves throughout her diaries. I know about, but haven’t yet read her essay “On Being Ill” and I suspect she concentrates her thoughts here (another reason to order her complete essays!)

Going back to where I started, I’m happy to find that reading her diaries doesn’t interfere in any way with the experience of reading her fiction. It is easy to maintain a line between the two forms, and there is just so much to admire in her diaries – character portraits, anecdotes, thoughts on writing, exquisite descriptions of nature.

I do wonder about one thing, however, and maybe some of you know: do Woolf scholars believe that Woolf wrote her diaries knowing they would be public some day? How personal are they?

 

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Woolf project: quick thoughts on Jacob’s Room

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While on holiday in September, I made some progress on my Virginia Woolf project and finished up Jacob’s Room. This is a title that isn’t spoken of much and although I really enjoyed it, I can easily see why. It isn’t the kind of book that makes anything easy for you—not that ease of reading or ease of understanding is a measure of a book’s worth—but I find it difficult to know exactly how to file this particular novel away onto my mental bookshelf. It fits on the Woolf shelf, but resists most other comparisons or associations.

Jacob’s Room is about Jacob Flanders: his family, his schooling, his friendships and romances, his movement into adulthood. The book moves forward more or less chronologically, but it isn’t at all concerned with fixing the reader into any real time line. We watch Jacob watching the world, and at the same time watch the world watching Jacob. The intensity of the reader’s focus gets caught up in the tension between these two perspectives.

Compared to both The Voyage Out and Night and Day, Woolf pushes her literary experiment much further with Jacob’s Room. Looking at the short stories she published around the same time, it is much of a piece with “The Mark on the Wall,” “Kew Gardens” and my favorite, “The Unwritten Novel”. All very impressionistic with an unspecified narrator shifting in and out within a scene. I quite like it when Woolf puts her energy into representing the movement of the mind and its perceptions instead of focusing on actual story. She does both just fine, but she is so skilled at exploding a character’s thinking into that lovely/strange mixture of feeling and thought.

The book feels light in many ways, on the one hand because Woolf’s writing is so lively and quick but also because it skims through conversations and holidays and dances, all the while hinting at being a coming-of-age novel, but there is too much darkness in Jacob for this passage from young man to adult to work out so easily. Woolf wrote Jacob’s Room during the First World War, although the book is set in pre-war London and Europe. But this impending war hovers over much of the novel, this idea that humanity has taken a wrong turn.

This is a novel to be read several times—I suspect that much would come from a second and third read. There is so much going on in each scene, each jump of thought. Like all of her fiction, when I’ve finished something, I usually want to start right over again at the beginning.

So the project is moving slowly— if I continue reading chronologically, then I need to catch up to 1922 in her diaries (I am currently in April of 1919) and then read the next set of short stories published between 1922 and 1925. And then I’ll happily pick up Mrs. Dalloway for a re-read.

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Reviewed: the stinging fly issue 18

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On Monday I reviewed Issue 18 of the Irish journal the stinging fly over at Necessary Fiction. Until a lovely reviewer copy landed in my mailbox (along with Fighting Tuesdays, a collection of short stories I requested for another reviewer), I had never heard of this journal. There are so many literary journals out there it sometimes feels hard to keep up, let alone subscribe to the many I would like to, but I’m very excited to have discovered this one. I thoroughly enjoyed each of the eight pieces of fiction – they were all really different – in tone or voice – but the quality of the writing and the storytelling was excellent. Here is my summary of the stories collected in Issue 18:

Whether slow-burning or urgent, these are all stories of personal emergency. Not disaster or tragedy, but the panic that follows a startling emergence. The unexpected appearance of an emotion, understanding or action. This is fiction that takes up with specific personal reactions to the unforeseen.

One of the issue’s best stories was a ‘spin-off’ from Jane Eyre that gave life to Grace Poole – the nurse who takes care of the first Mrs. Rochester up in the attic. Reading a story like this made me think of Brontë and then Jean Rhys and how good fiction lives on forever. And I can’t think of Jean Rhys without thinking of her quote about literature being this big vast ocean fed by great rivers and small rivers and that it doesn’t matter the size of the tributary because the important part is for the ocean to be fed.

Living for reading is pretty much the best hobby.

Read the full review here.

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an unexpected disagreement

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Something very interesting happened last night at my French book club. We are accustomed to small differences in opinion; this is probably what makes us all come back month after month, the idea that we will discuss and debate a work of fiction, not simply admire it. But last night went far beyond a small difference in opinion. I was especially looking forward to our discussion yesterday evening because I had suggested the book – Robert Pagani’s Mon roi, mon amour (The Princess, the King and the Anarchist, tr. Helen Marx) and was eagerly waiting to hear how much everyone loved it. But last night we got settled in to our seats at the carnotzet at one of our local wine bars, pulled the book out of either a purse or other bag, placed it on the table, and before I could say, “Wasn’t it fantastic?” four other women had torn it to pieces. They didn’t just not like it: they called it worthless, they said it was badly written, there was eye rolling and a symbolic tossing of the book away in disgust.

I was speechless, which is rare for me. And we hadn’t even yet received our wine so there was nothing for me to do but take an imaginary gulp and then charge forward to defend what I considered a lovely, unique work of fiction. I suggested it was not supposed to be read as historical fiction, I brought up theories of monarchy/anti-monarchy conflict and mythology, I said Pagani wasn’t writing stereotypes but ironic caricatures, I argued that it was laugh-out-loud funny. I even tried to read passages aloud in a meaningful voice. Nothing uprooted their disdain.

Now these are intelligent women – clever, articulate, worldly, multi-lingual, fantastically well-read. In short, absolutely entitled to their opinion, however greatly it varied from my own.

So why this huge difference in judgment? I was particularly unsettled by the charge of “badly-written” and so started to think back over my experience reading the book. Which reminded me that by a very strange twist of fate,* I had actually read the English translation of Pagani’s book and not the French original.

My memory of the English text is its delightful simplicity. It reads much like a fable. On the surface there is a lot to laugh at – the narrator very gently mocks each of the characters. But is it possible the English version was better written than the French? Is it possible that Helen Marx, an extremely accomplished translator, might have smoothed any awkwardness out of Pagani’s prose? I cannot say until I’ve read the French. I started last night and in all honesty, I do not find his writing flawed at all. Like the English, it is playful and simple.

But there is another difference between the French version and the English version – a thoughtful introduction opens the English version. And contrary to what I usually do, I actually read the introduction before reading the book. So before I even started, I had some notion of Pagani having deeper but subtly portrayed intentions. I firmly believe the book has a lot to it, as I wrote in my review at The Quarterly Conversation, but I can’t help wondering how influenced I may have been by the introduction. And also by the fact that I had just finished reading Vyacheslav Pyetsukh’s The New Moscow Philosophy, which brought me to this idea of literature being a more useful and beautiful copy of life’s first rough draft, an idea which applied so wonderfully to Pagani’s novel as he takes an historical event and then creates a vibrant fictional tale around it.

On the whole I’m amused by our disagreement last night and sometimes this just happens, so there may be no reason behind it, but as a translator I am now very curious how the French version and the English version might be wholly compared, not just in terms of the faithfulness of the English version, but in their aesthetic and textual presentation.

Recently, at Necessary Fiction, in a review of Lily Hoang’s unique story collection Unfinished, one of our regular reviewers, Jess Stoner, wrote about the importance of the paratexts that surround a piece of literature and how this information influences our reception of the text. Just a quick comparison of Mon roi, mon amour with The Princess, the King and the Anarchist brings an easy list of possibly significant differences: title, cover art, font choice, introduction, back cover text. All of this peripheral data sets the reader up for a certain aesthetic experience of the book. I could argue that the English version book with its black and white fairytale wedding photo gave me a sense of romance (like an independent arthouse film) that the French version with its stark white background and tiny wedding carriage (almost cartoonish) did not.

But this is just guessing, with a tiny measure of self-justification. Unfortunately, I cannot go backward and experience Mon roi, mon amour with fresh eyes so I’ll never really be able to resolve this question. But it will continue to fascinate me.

*I had requested the translation from the American publisher for a reviewer who was interested in reviewing it for Necessary Fiction, but once I had it in my possession I just couldn’t resist reading it quickly before passing it along. I fully intended to read the original before meeting with my book group but, as it happens, sadly never found the time.

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