Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘reading notes’ category

Jacob’s Room & second hand book treasure

By

I had grand illusions of sitting down and writing about Jacob’s Room today, which I finished while on holiday, but jetlag has turned my brain to mush so it will have to wait for another day. Suffice it to say that Woolf’s third novel was both bewildering and clunky but overall an extremely beautiful work of fiction. Part of me wonders if this book, instead of To The Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway better accomplishes what Woolf was trying to do in terms of fictionalizing pure consciousness… but I’ll save that thought for a longer post.

In other news, I had a disappointing rejection of my novel manuscript come through while I was on holiday. And so to cheer myself up I have been hitting 2nd hand bookshops with a vengeance. This morning I stopped in to one of my favorites and found some excellent books:

  • The Selected Poems of Robert Frost
  • The Penguin Book of English Short Stories (It starts with Dickens in 1812 and moves forward with about one story per decade—Hardy, Conrad, Kipling, Wells, etc.—finishing up with “Raspberry Jam” by Angus Wilson (whom I’ve never heard of) in 1912.
  • Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death
  • Czeslaw Milosz’s Enfant d’Europe
  • Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
  • Ramuz, Notre Parrain (A biography by Hélène Cingria)

But the crowning jewel of this morning’s book hunt was a facsimile copy of a manuscript page from Ramuz’s La Beauty Sur la Terre. It was just sitting there on top of a pile of dusty Ramuz novels, just waiting to make my day.

1 Comment

summer reading

By

Goodness, let’s see if I still know how to do this. Three months is a long time to keep most of my bookish thoughts to myself…

After a very hectic year, I needed a break from book blogging and I’m very glad I stepped away from the feverish book talk that is the book blogging world. I definitely missed reading reviews and engaging with all my favorite literary-minded types, but wow, I needed to just relax and take some distance for a few months.

Which I did. Hooray.

Now, let’s see, what did I do all summer? For starters, I finished my Houellebecq project. Part of me suspects that reading Houellebecq so intensely may have contributed to my need for a blogging break. He is a difficult writer to read from A – Z. Having done this, I wouldn’t recommend reading him this way. I think he is better taken one book at a time, with a few years pause between each book. Mainly because he is thematically redundant – in a big way. But also because his pessimism quickly becomes claustrophobic. I finished Plateforme and had a really hard time working up the energy to read La Possibilité d’une Ile. Both interesting books with a lot to discuss, but I was just really tired of Houellebecq at that point.

I have a lot to write about him, although I may not get around to writing about each book here. I’m finishing a long essay on Houellebecq, which I hope The Quarterly Conversation will accept, so for anyone interested in his work and the strange/unsettling/interesting experience of reading him, we’ll have a chance
to discuss when/if the essay comes out.

Other than Houellebecq, I managed to read some wonderful novels this summer. My favorites are The New Moscow Philosophy by Vyacheslav Petsukh, Hunger by Elise Blackwell and Katzenjammered by Norma Kassirer. The Petsukh and Kassirer I reviewed over at Necessary Fiction. Blackwell’s Hunger
I would still like to write about here. It is a neat little book, almost a novella, about the Siege of Leningrad and obviously about starvation, but also about desire and want. I really enjoyed how Blackwell mingled those two ideas.

Finally, I read a tiny little book by Agota Kristof. I’ve mentioned her here before but for anyone who doesn’t remember, she is a Hungarian/Swiss writer most known for her trilogy Le Cahier, La Preuve and Le Troisième Mensonge (The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie) about a set of rather disturbing twins during World War II. The little book I read this summer is her memoir, called l’Inalphabète. As far as I know it hasn’t been translated but Kristof, sadly, just passed away this summer and I suspect (hope) it will find a home at a small publisher in the US.

I won’t say anything else about it right now, because I’d like to write a proper post on it. Suffice it to say that l’Inalphabète, at just over 50 pages, was one of the most moving and beautiful récits autobiographiques I’ve ever read.

4 Comments

a little afraid of experimental lit: Giraffes in Hiding by Carol Novack

By

I’ve been thinking about experimental narratives lately, for a number of reasons, but mainly because I was working on a review of an extremely unique book called Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack. I read this book all the way back in January, and then re-read it and then jumped around inside it for awhile, re-reading certain pieces and basically just trying to figure out how to write about it. I almost didn’t write about it because I didn’t feel like I was up to the task.

I wrote the review eventually (and happily, and honestly) because it bothered me too much that I couldn’t seem to find a way to write about it. Not knowing what else to do, I forced myself to come up with a metaphor that helped me envision the text as a whole. (Hopefully that metaphor will help potential new readers, too, but that isn’t for me to decide). Envisioning the text as a whole is, I think, where some people, maybe even many people, get stumped when they’re confronted with experimental writing. This mass and tumble of words and ideas just sort of spills off the page toward you, attacks you maybe, or just slides on by indifferently; either way, you’re not sure what to do with it, because:

  • it doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever read before
  • it’s maybe a little confusing, even purposefully confusing
  • you worry that you’re not smart enough or not well-read enough (in this tradition of non-traditional literature) to understand what’s going on
  • you’re not sure you like it, or, maybe you love it – but in either case you can’t say why exactly
  • you can’t “see” it the way you can “see” the shape and structure and filler of other narratives—it’s all globby or too spikey or too empty

Something that helped me find the courage to write this review is the series of articles and interviews “What is experimental lit?” by Christopher Higgs at HTML giant. His third essay is about reading strategies. He suggests:

For the former, what may prove to be invaluable might be a close attention to patterns of repetition, rhythm, connectivity and gaps between words and phrases, the moments of caesura, the sites of tension, the magnitudes of intensities, or the ways in which the text unsettles the limitations of genre and convention, subverts familiarity, articulates emotional states for which there are no nouns, or enacts the reader’s sublime.

So, okay, details. And I think most readers who are even open to considering experimental literature do this almost instinctively, because it is the first and only access into the text. Since the whole is denied upfront (not indefinitely, but often at first) the parts become really important. The sound of the words, the play of the language and how that engages with the ideas behind the work.

This was definitely the case for my reading of Giraffes in Hiding. I had to throw out my deep-seated and learned notions of how to experience a text and get as intimate as I could with the details. The details finally led me toward a conception of the whole. I found the experience interesting. I won’t say pleasant, because I am far too emotionally connected to my usual reading experience, and by that I mean I love being submersed into a continuous and coherent narrative. I am unapologetically Aristotelian.

But I’m open to experimental literature because I like the questions that it asks. I like being nudged to find new ways inside a piece of fiction, even if it proves difficult or frustrating. I may never gravitate toward this type of fiction instinctively, but I’m very glad there are other readers and writers who do—they enrich my reading world.

Here are links (series overview, Q&A overview) to the rest of Higgs’ series, for anyone interested.

7 Comments

thoughts on reviewing translations

By

A few weeks ago over at Necessary Fiction, I reviewed Seven Years, a novel by a Swiss novelist writing in German. In that review I tackle the content of the book, and only make a few passing comments about the style. I actually wanted to say more about the writing but couldn’t find my way into that discussion within the review, so I settled for leaving it out. This kind of compromise always leaves me a little unsettled, especially because Seven Years is a translation and I feel strongly about not overlooking that fact when considering a book.

Recently, Words Without Borders has published a series of essays on how to review translations. The latest is by Scott Esposito, the editor of The Quarterly Conversation, and it’s a good one. Esposito provides some thoughtful framework-style guidelines for looking at a translation and finding a way to evaluate it. There are about nine essays now for the whole series, and they are well worth a read for anyone interested in reading or reviewing literature in translation.

Now, where I come to this in relation to my Seven Years review is that I sorely wanted to be able to say something about the translation. And in my idealist little heart I figured that I would find a way…I am a translator, right? I am also a huge fan of literature in translation, right? I live in Switzerland, right?  (Okay, Seven Years is set in Germany, actually, so never mind). But in the end, because I don’t read German, I simply did not feel comfortable approaching that aspect of the text.

The writing in the English version of Seven Years is unadorned and straightforward. The most interesting thing about it is that much of the dialogue comes indirectly, and even when it is direct, it isn’t set off from the rest of the text. So there are moments when you have to read a line twice to make sure who is speaking. Other than that, though, there isn’t much that stood out from Seven Years to raise my translator antennae…but maybe this is only because I don’t read German. Perhaps if I read German, I would have been able to see patterns in the translated English that could only come about because they were being created on top of German scaffolding. I see this with translations from the French and from Japanese, because certain phrasings and structures necessarily occur as the English grapples with the original.

You see my dilemma here. In my heart of hearts, I’d like to believe that someone unfamiliar with the original language can engage with aspects of the translation as suggested by these WWB articles, but I’m skeptical. And I get the sense that this great discussion on reviewing translation isn’t addressing this question head-on. (Except this piece by Jonathan Blitzer.) Is it possible to review fairly and thoroughly, emphasis on thoroughly, without knowledge of the original language? I want to think so, but I don’t think so. Examples? Anyone?

In the end, all I can say about Seven Years is that it is a translation, that an original text exists in German and that what I read was Michael Hofmann’s version of Peter Stamm. How that differs from someone else’s version of Peter Stamm I cannot say. And that frustrates me. I’d like to find a way through this problem.

11 Comments

final thoughts: Houellebecq on Lovecraft

By

So I finished up my post earlier this week on Houellebecq’s H.P. Lovecraft: Contre la Vie, Contre le Monde with Houellebecq asserting that the key to Lovecraft’s genius is that he managed to transform his feelings of disgust (about life and social changes he had no control over) into a form of creative hostility. I think it would be quite easy to use this same sentence and exchange the word Lovecraft for Houellebecq. Simple as that. Not hard to see why one writer admired the other.

But Houellebecq’s disgust is of a different variety than what I understand of Lovecraft’s. Lovecraft couldn’t stand the world he lived in, so he created alien worlds to escape into, taking his anger and frustration and working them out or increasing them, both symbolically and overtly, in those new worlds. (This is more or less Houellebecq’s reading.) Now, for Houellebecq, I get the feeling that he is profoundly, overwhelmingly, devastatingly disappointed in human nature. Like Lovecraft, he is revolted by society, but unlike Lovecraft, he is not quite willing to reject it and escape away. Houellebecq is still interested.

His disgust is palpable, but there is more sorrow than hostility in much of what he writes. Every once in a while something horrible does surge up and out of a text, taking the reader more or less by surprise, but then the tone resettles around Houellebecq’s grief. Yes, grief. I think this might be the best word for it – Houellebecq is in a state of perpetual mourning for what he understands of society.

And grief is something that often turns a person inward, so it isn’t a surprise that Houellebecq cannot get himself out of his stories. As I wrote earlier, I think this inability to remove himself from the literary equations he poses and tries to solve is a tricky issue of his writing but it also contributes to the unique nature of his work.

In all honesty, I can see now that one of the reasons I’ve become so interested in Houellebecq is that I usually prefer my writers to stay out of their stories. I tend to balk at, or, at the very least, disregard biographical details when I’m considering a text. I want to be able to consider the literary landscape and the characters without worrying whether the author is speaking from experience or made it all up. I’ve always felt that it shouldn’t matter.

However, because of his unsettling merge of author and character, Houellebecq forces me to consider him biographically at almost every step of the way. My knee-jerk reaction would usually be, “Grow up, get over yourself, get a therapist, and do something truly creative.” But his honesty is actually engaging. His perspective is even seductive—I think humans can be pretty rotten, too—as well as off-putting and that combination is hard to put down.

8 Comments

About the end of James Wood's How Fiction Works

By

I have been meandering my way through James Wood’s How Fiction Works for the last month or so and finally finished it up over the weekend. I think what I love the most about this little book is how easy Wood makes the study of literature appear. He condenses years of study and probably thousands upon thousands of hours of passionate, careful reading into a series of thematically-linked paragraphs. Paragraph 1 begins with narrative perspective and Paragraph 123 ends the book with a succinct appeal to craft:

…for the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable ageing. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.

This last sentence is Wood’s answer to the assertion that literary realism is no longer a viable genre. To get to this statement, he visits several of realism’s loudest denouncers (Roland Barthes, Rick Moody, William Gass…) and disagrees with their conclusions that because fiction suffers from convention it therefore cannot ever express what is real:

…just because artifice and convention are involved in a literary style does not mean that realism (or any other narrative style) is so artificial and conventional that it is incapable of referring to reality.

Wood concedes that literary techniques are constantly becoming conventional. Of course narrative techniques, expressions, metaphors and all the other building blocks of fiction are always and forever ‘at-risk’ of rendering themselves ineffective. What is called into question is their ability to render ‘truth’ in an original and novel way, but never their ability to reflect reality.

I’ve never been particularly fussed about the debate on literary realism. I think both perspectives provide insight into how fiction works as an art form, how it is negotiated by readers. I am definitely more rooted in literary realism, however, so I would never be the kind of reader to chuck it out the window anyway, but I appreciated Wood’s championing of the genre as well as his celebration of the writer who simultaneously embraces realism while writing to escape all that has already been written.

So, I’ve only touched on approximately 20 pages of this excellent 180-page book. I’ll see if I have more to say another day…

10 Comments

Houellebecq's poésie du mouvement arrêté

By

My Internet access seems to be stable again. Besides the fact that I tend to panic when I lose access to email (something I should probably work on), as a freelancer, my entire professional life hinges on a rapid, reliable connection to the web. When my connection went down last week, I ended up having to scramble to find a way to deliver two translations to a client as well as get my most recent review up at Necessary Fiction. I can live quite happily without that kind of stress, by the way.

Luckily, it’s over…for now. This is an old farmhouse with some old school (for Switzerland anyway) phone lines. One of the lines got moved last week, and reattached in a different way to the farm’s telephone line “hub”. This was enough to knock out our Internet service for nearly a week. Now that I see how fragile the system is, I’m pretty sure a cow will sneeze in the upper pasture next week and I’ll have the same problem.

In any case, this whole incident made me consider my relationship with technology. I’m obviously very bound to my computer and the internet. Which is kind of funny since my favorite pastimes are pretty darn low-tech. Reading, hiking, reading… And yet I spend most of my day answering and sending emails, connecting with people in several countries for work or just because friends live pretty much anywhere and everywhere, or using the Internet for research. The world is small. Very small. At least it seems that way through the “window” of my laptop.

This is all just to say that not only does technology make it possible for me to work from home as a translator and a writer while living in a very small village in Switzerland, it also gives me access to indulge my biggest passion – reading. I’d be one miserable reader if my book buying were limited to the few physical bookstores in the nearest cities. So really, the Internet makes possible much of my happiness and all of my professional life. And yet, I worry sometimes whether I might actually be more productive without the distractions that come as part and parcel of spending so much time online. I’m pretty out of the loop where social media are concerned but I am on Facebook and I write this blog and I spend time reading other blogs and online journals. It is very hard to say “no” to the endless stream of information available on the web.

There is an essay in Michel Houellebecq’s collection Rester Vivant (Stay Alive/Survive) which speaks about the human relationship to technology. He begins with architecture, moves to economics and markets, explores computer science and then ends, briefly, with literature. It is mostly a lament, at least the tone is more overtly sorrowful than critical. It is hard not to agree with his notion of La poésie du mouvement arrêté, which is the title of the final subsection of the essay. The Poetry of Stopped Time or The Poetry of Suspended Movement. Houellebecq argues for a pause – turn off the TV, buy nothing, renounce your desire to buy something, refuse to participate, refuse “knowing” (I find this last idea subtly provocative), simply switch off all thought. Just for a moment, he asks you to stand still.

This obvious solution to the information overload of contemporary society is harder to accomplish than one might think. I suppose I get the closest on dog walks or while reading. Dog walks now involve a chatty, gregarious toddler, an excited dog and a nervous kitten who refuses to be left at the farm, so while my twice-a-day walks are still lovely in their own right, they are not always exactly relaxing. Especially because they are now crammed between work and getting Mlle. Petitvore to daycare on the days she goes and more work and running errands and cleaning house and all the rest. But there are moments of true pause—stopping in the forest to listen to birds, for example, and suddenly, unexpectedly, my little circus all stills at the same time. It’s wonderful what a few seconds of stillness can do for the rest of your day.

And reading isn’t really a pause either, no matter how much I enjoy it. It will always involve thinking, learning, judging. My hours with books are active and intense. I wouldn’t really want it any other way.

It is still nice to be reminded, however, that it’s good sometimes to enter a full stop. Houellebecq is arguing for something both political and social, a rebellion of sorts against the vast whirring machines. I don’t criticize him for that at all; I think he’s right. But I’m also taking his comments in a deeply personal way. I’m a part of those vast whirring machines. I contribute (so does he, so does everyone). So my full stop can never be a real rebellion against the “machine,” it is first a rebellion against myself. I think this is what he’s really getting at in his essay and I like how that turns the critique on its head.

9 Comments

first thoughts on Laurent Gaudé's Ouragan

By

My Internet service has been haywire since last Thursday—the joys of living in the countryside. But it’s on right now and I wanted to write quickly about a book I just finished reading: Ouragan (Hurricane) by Laurent Gaudé. You may have heard of him through his 2007 novel which was translated as The Scortas’ Sun (UK) and The House of Scorta (US). I haven’t read his other work, but will be looking for it directly.

Because Ouragan…Wow. Really wow.

The book is set in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and told in six different voices – an old woman, a prisoner, a priest, a single mother and her former lover. Each individual has a different relationship to the storm. Each individual must suffer through the storm in a particular way. Handling that many voices in a single, tightly-knit narrative can be difficult, but Gaudé pulls it off with great skill. I literally could not put this book down. The story, the writing, the ideas and history behind the story and the writing.

Wish I had time to write more now about the writing. Gaudé’s writing was intense and emotional. He uses a first person narrator for most of the characters, but third person for two of them. That blend was useful, especially for two sections in which all of sudden the voices begin to merge together, telling each other’s stories. Really very well done.

I find it very interesting that such an incredible work of fiction about an intensely American experience should come from a French writer. I’m assuming Gaudé did a lot of research or was already deeply familiar with the culture and history of New Orleans.

I hope the book is currently contracted with translation into English, but I can’t find any confirmation of that on the web yet.

I will have more to say when my Internet issues get worked out…

9 Comments

Virginia Woolf – The Unwritten Novel

By

I’ve now read and reread Virginia Woolf’s short story, “The Unwritten Novel,” several times. Something I love about Woolf is her ability to create a story out of what seems like nothing. No real frame, no elaborate “set-up”. She simply takes an ordinary moment and expands it, pressing it further outward as far as it can go. This particular moment begins on a train, when the narrator allows her eyes to slip upward from her newspaper and something about the face of the woman seated in front of her works like a spark—suddenly, an entire life begins to take shape around the woman’s expression:

Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one’s eyes slide above the paper’s edge to the poor woman’s face—insignificant without that look, almost a symbol of human destiny with it. Life’s what you see in people’s eyes; life’s what they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of—what? That life’s like that.

This is a chatty narrator, who is pondering several big thoughts while she watches and judges and invents the life of the woman seated before her. This is, I believe, Woolf’s best kind of narrator. One which she gives free reign to skip and jump from detail to detail while centering all this rapid reflection on a precise idea—here the idea is how to define or describe life—like a touchstone the narrator cannot keep from grasping at every few minutes.

The woman and the narrator finally exchange a few words, which suffices to give the narrator a fuller picture of the woman’s life and then the narrator leans back into her corner of the train seat and lets a vast story play itself out in her mind. Here is the unwritten novel, the story of this unfortunate woman’s life. I love the idea here that contained within every chance encounter is a full and fascinating work of fiction.

Alongside the narrator’s inventions is a running commentary on how the novelist/narrator is going to put the story together. This is an excellent and subtly-done metafictional thread. Here she is contemplating the other travelers:

But what I cannot thus eliminate, what I must, head down, eyes shut, with the courage of a battalion and the blindness of a bull, charge and disperse are, indubitably, the figures behind the ferns, commercial travellers. There I’ve hidden them all this time in the hope that somehow they’d disappear, or better still emerge, as indeed they must, if the story’s to go on gathering richness and rotundity, destiny and tragedy, as stories should, rolling along with it two, if not three, commercial travelers and a whole grove of aspidistra.

By this time her story has taken on such a life that she’s already got the travelers somewhere in her scene, half hidden between some shrubbery – which of course isn’t on the train – but she’s working out the details and arguing about what’s appropriate for her setting and season. And she gets so deep into her story, is so certain she’s created the real life of this woman seated before her, as well as started in on the details of another man, that she is startled when the train stops and the woman gets down. The narrator has made her an unhappy old maid, off to visit her brother and his hated wife but then suddenly on the platform the woman is fetched by her son. A son! Suddenly the woman transforms into a mother and the narrator is left reeling:

Well, but I’m confounded…Look how he bends as they reach the gateway. She finds her ticket. What’s the joke? Off they go, down the road, side by side…Well, my world’s done for! What do I stand on? What do I know? That’s not Minnie. There never was Moggridge. Who am I? Life’s bare as bone.

But even the transformation of her original characters cannot stop her. The narrator rushes after them, wondering at this new configuration and what story she might be able to create around it. Suddenly everyone walking about her on the street embodies the possibility of a novelistic “life.”

If I fall on my knees, if I go through the ritual, the ancient antics, it’s you, unknown figures, you I adore; if I open my arms, it’s you I embrace, you I draw to me—adorable world!

4 Comments

a few words on Franzen's Freedom

By

I have more to say about Michel Houellebecq’s La Carte et le Territoire, but I’m switching gears today because I finished Franzen’s Freedom last night. It isn’t really my style to trash a novel completely, and Freedom doesn’t actually deserve that, for various reasons that would be a little boring to go into in detail, but I do feel like spending too much time writing about Freedom might actually be a little more than it deserves.

I’ll try to be succinct.

And fair.

Essentially, my frustration with Freedom is two-fold. First, I am strongly averse to novels which attempt – however clever the writing, however clear and thorough the character analysis – to base an entire fictional universe on what is essentially facile psychology. Not a single person in Freedom did anything unexpected, or behaved in any way which wasn’t already signaled by Franzen in the first few paragraphs of their fictional existence and which was then explained away by Franzen through pop psychology drivel, or, excuse me, ideas.

And second, well, frankly, the book made me feel like I was watching a witty reality TV show. Here are the Berglunds airing their difficult marriage for the entire world to see and comment on. And don’t we all feel so much more superior for not behaving like them? Aren’t they all such sad little creatures? And we can feel sympathetic; we can, but not too much, because really it is all their fault, and the fault of that superficial beast of American culture. I mean, come on, can’t we write incisively, meaningfully, about America without mimicking such a problematic form?

I suppose if I had to, I could come up with something nice to say about this book. But those two reactions trump any praise I might have. Franzen is a good writer, and Freedom is nearly an enjoyable read. But I didn’t find anything really clever in Franzen’s project.

In fairness, I think reading Freedom after finishing Houellebecq might have contributed to the violence of my reaction. The two writers are doing something very similar in their novels. Both are a little manic in their attempt to document contemporary culture, both are cynical toward that society (although their cynicism takes vastly different forms), and both are interested in explaining contemporary neuroses. But where Houellebecq’s metafictional experiment plays with form and content, and therefore implicating the reader which brings his social critique full circle in an ingenuous way, Franzen just seemed to recycle pop culture and superficial psychology.

Did I just go ahead and trash the novel? Okay, yeah, pretty much. Well, maybe in a few days I’ll come back with something more balanced…

13 Comments