Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘reading notes’ category

mid-read thoughts on Franzen and Houellebecq

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The two books I am trying to finish this week are big name books – Michel Houellebecq’s Goncourt-winning La Carte et le Territoire and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. This is my first experience with both authors, actually, and I definitely dragged my feet getting started on either book.

Until now, Houellebecq has intimidated me as a reader, mainly because I’m aware that the labels used to describe his work set me up to disapprove of his project before turning that first page. I hear from certain Francophone friends that he’s doing something very profound, from others that he’s a phony, or that he’s overrated. Interestingly, Swiss Francophone readers tend to be wary of what they consider French literary snobbism, where writers get away with being inconsistent or opaque and if you don’t get them you’re just not philosophical (or smart) enough; this perspective is useful for me because it annihilates the awe factor I might have as an unabashed Francophile and helps me evaluate a book with the same critical mind I use on Anglophone fiction. Also, I admit that I don’t usually enjoy literature which even hints at vulgarity and this is one of the most common labels applied to Houellebecq. Nevertheless, I have remained interested in his work since first hearing about him and I opened his latest novel with more curiousity than pre-conceived notion.

Interestingly, La Carte et le Territoire has done nothing but surprise me with its ordinariness. He is clearly an accomplished writer, but so far his prose is conventional and I’ve found nothing shocking about his descriptions or even the story. The book is about a painter named Jed Martin, but even he strikes me as a very dull creature for the moment and I’m 100 pages into this 400 page book. Houellebecq has written in a character named Michel Houellebecq, and included his real-life buddy Frédéric Beigbeder among other high-profile literati, a “trick” which, admittedly, doesn’t impress me much as I can’t yet see the point. Although apparently Houellebecq in the novel gets murdered – so we’ll see. I’m prepared to reserve final judgment until I’ve finished the book…

Now, for Franzen. I have some vague memory of trying to read The Corrections about seven, eight years ago. But I gave up on the book. This is unusual for me, because really Franzen should be exactly the kind of writer I would enjoy. His writing tends to be detailed, careful and subtly sarcastic, and he holds a magnifying lens over parts of the American psyche. I’ve read several of his New Yorker non-fiction essays and enjoyed them. So I’m not sure why I put off reading The Corrections and why I’ve resisted reading Freedom. In any case, I’ve got both books in hand now.

Like La Carte et le Territoire, I was expecting fireworks or something flashy or showoff-y from the first page of Freedom and this isn’t there. That isn’t to say it’s bad. Again, this is just a novel. So far a well-written novel, with a nice percentage of quotable moments and insightful narrative. But it isn’t mind-boggling, nor will, I’m pretty sure, it alter my perception of America in some profound way. The real question for me is not whether the book deserved all the hype it received, but why do we feel the need to generate such hype for a single book in the first place. There are dozens of books published every year that are just as good and even better than Freedom, so I take issue with the publishing and marketing model more than with the book. Franzen is a good writer and he should be esteemed and criticized appropriately.

Now, hopefully, I won’t be back to contradict all this first-reaction downplaying when I’ve finished both books…

mid-read thoughts on Woolf's Night and Day

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Officially, I am just about halfway finished with Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day. Despite a slowish start, this is turning into an excellent read. The style is subtly different than her other work, a bit more calm, a bit more serious.

Night and Day (published in 1919) is the story of three, almost four people. I say almost four because three of the characters appear to have taken hold a little deeper in Woolf’s imagination and she gives them more of her time than the fourth. At least in the first half of the novel, I suppose this could change. Essentially, this is the story of four young people, two men and two women, and how they negotiate and cope with their feelings about marriage. The central question seems to be whether love and marriage can and should be associated.

I suppose if I wanted to be overly critical, I might say the novel plods a bit. But this isn’t quite the right expression. It has a leisurely pace in terms of story momentum, and it involves quite a lot of interior deliberation. Yet, one of the things I enjoy most about Woolf is her ability to give a character room to think. She has her characters weigh their actions, justify their thoughts and decisions, explore their possibilities. It takes a great amount of narrative skill to do this without alienating a reader, and I think Woolf succeeds.

Here is one easy example:

Katherine looked at her mother, but did not stir or answer. She had suddenly become very angry, with a rage which their relationship made silent, and therefore doubly powerful and critical. She felt all the unfairness of the claim which her mother tacitly made to her time and sympathy, and what Mrs. Hilbery took, Katharine thought bitterly, she wasted. Then, in a flash, she remembered that she had still to tell her about Cyril’s misbehavior. Her anger immediately dissipated itself: it broke like some wave that has gathered itself high above the rest: the waters were resumed into the sea again, and Katharine felt once more full of peace and solicitude, and anxious only that her mother should be protected from pain.

This is quite a hefty dose of explanation, and another writer might have portrayed these same emotions through action or dialogue. Much of the novel, perhaps a good three quarters, is given this way. It works, however, to my mind, because Woolf’s narrator is terribly eloquent and not afraid to sneak in a bit of imagery (the wave idea) to spice up all that exposition. Also, the middle bit of that second sentence is extremely straightforward, but extremely powerful…with a rage which their relationship made silent.

I am starting to believe that Woolf’s greatest skill may in fact be her narrator…which is a fascinating thing to trace, as she experiments so much with it.

Woolf project catch-up

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Today, I am thinking about Virginia Woolf. Her diary, her short stories and her second novel Night and Day.

Let’s start with Night and Day. I had never even heard of this book before I put together all the reading lists for my Woolf project. And I suspect that along with The Voyage Out, it isn’t often read unless someone is doing what I’m doing, or maybe for a class. Truth be told, it isn’t remarkable in the way her other novels are. I’m thinking of To The Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway, novels which begin with a full head of steam and sort of charge forward with that recognizable Woolfian prose. (Have I mentioned that I dislike the word Woolfian…how to write about her without using it? Ugh.)

I am only about a third of the way through the book, so obviously my thoughts will shift and change, but for now, Night and Day feels like Woolf restrained. There is something almost too straightforward about the descriptions and the narrative. More so than The Voyage Out, which was her first novel and as I mentioned before, similar to a 19th century society novel and ‘tamer’ than I expected. But even The Voyage Out had more narrative wandering and plenty of those unique narrative insights and descriptions I so love compared with Night and Day.

This is not to say I’m not enjoying the novel. It is just quieter, and has less of that typical Virginia Woolf feeling. It is a novel about class, and a bit about politics also, and most definitely about love. I’ll have more to say, and hopefully with more enthusiasm, as I get further in.

On to the short stories. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf is organized chronologically and begins with five pieces written before 1917. I don’t think any of these were published with her first collection in 192, which makes sense as they all feel a bit like experiment pieces. Different tones, different POVs, different subjects.

I wrote a little about Phyllis and Rosamond earlier, and I’d just like to mention one of the others, The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn. It is a two-part story, beginning with the description of an older woman interested in British history who comes across a manuscript from 1520. The manuscript is the diary of a young woman, who we learn from the manuscript’s keeper, a distant relative, never married and died at the age of thirty.

Knowing about her early death and spinsterhood before we begin to read Joan Martyn’s journal is a neat trick on Woolf’s part, because much of the diary is about her impending marriage to one of her father’s associates. She is a practical young woman although some of her dreams are quite big, and since we know that none of it will come to anything, it is quite a bittersweet little story.

But aside from the story, which is richly imagined and involves a variety of ideas from poverty to literacy, it is mostly just intriguing to see Woolf write in the voice of a young woman from the 1500s. This is what I meant about these early pieces feeling like experiments. It’s clear she is trying to imagine what someone like herself – a reader, a writer, an independent thinker, would have felt under different, more severe restrictions. In that sense it is intensely felt. The ending is lovely and reveals the inner life Woolf gives her fictional Joan, who is standing in their family church, admiring the tombstones, where she will be taken in a shorter time than she realizes:

As a child I know the stark white figures used to frighten me: especially when I could read that they bore my name; but now that I know that they never move from their backs, and keep their hands crossed always, I pity them; and would fain do some small act that would give them pleasure. It must be something secret, and unthought of – a kiss or a stroke, such as you give a living person.

Finally, just a few quick words on her diary. I’m curious about how little Woolf writes in her diary about her writing and I wonder if this is because of the era. Would it have been strange in the early 1900s for her to be obsessing over the details of her writing decisions, her characters and her ideas for fiction in her personal diary? She writes mainly about the people they see, stories about friends, a little bit of news about her and Leonard’s printing work. It’s all very interesting to read, but I am struck with the absence of her literary thoughts. Does she begin to do this later?

another quick word on Gordimer

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On Saturday I said there were two other articles I wanted to mention besides the wonderful Barnes piece from The London Review of Books. The first of these is a short, (nearly infuriatingly so) piece on Nadine Gordimer from The Guardian. The occasion of the article was a lecture she gave in England a few weeks ago, after which the journalist was able to ask her a few questions, and the subject was her life and her newest book, the complete collection of her non-fiction writings, Telling Times, Writing and Living, 1954 – 2008.

The article is worth a skim, especially if you are a fan of Gordimer like me, but it served more to remind me to start reading Telling Times. Which I did right away, and which is about as delightful as going through her fiction again. I like that I’ve read all of her fiction before now experiencing her non-fiction essays. I feel I have a sense of what she tried to accomplish through her literature, and I have judged and admired that on its merits, and so now I can go back and discover her personal voice.

I believe, although I could be wrong, that most people think of Gordimer as a strictly political writer. And so, in some sense, despite her Nobel Prize, despite her other awards and general prestige, her work actually gets overlooked by many readers who might be intimidated, or simply not interested, or putting it off for the right time. But I think that keeping her in such a strict classification is a gross mischaracterization of her work. Yes, all of her novels have some social-political element to them, that fact cannot be pushed aside, but they are all novels of people more than anything else.

In an essay from 1963 on how she came to writing, she says:

I was looking for what people meant but didn’t say, not only about sex, but also about politics and their relationship with the black people among whom we lived as people live in a forest among trees. So it was that I didn’t wake up to Africans and the shameful enormity of the colour bar through a youthful spell in the Communist Party, as did some of my contemporaries with whom I share the rejection of white supremacy, but through the apparently esoteric speleology of doubt, led by Kafka rather than Marx. And the ‘problems’ of my country did not set me writing; on the contrary, it was learning to write that sent me falling, falling through the surface of ‘the South African way of life’.

I loved reading these lines, especially the first and last sentence, because they confirm to me how Gordimer approaches writing. It is simply the essential fact of her existence, the first fact. Other facts have layered themselves around this first one, perhaps the greatest is having been born and raised in South Africa. But Gordimer would have written, and written superbly, had she come from anywhere else.

book group enlightenment and a project

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Hello Friday. Very happy to see you. I had my favorite book group last night in our lovely wine caveau. As we enjoyed one of the local wines and nibbled on some gruyère, we discussed John Berger’s To the Wedding. Not only was this a lively, thoughtful and somewhat emotional discussion, it brought me to realize something about the book that I (stupidly) hadn’t understood before. I can’t say what it is here because it might ruin the book for someone who hasn’t read it, but suffice it to say that it changes everything. In a good way. It elevated the novel from what was already a delicate, beautiful story into something more intimately connected to human compassion. To our desire to correct the wrongs of the world. I love how a book can become something else entirely through discussion with other involved readers.

Changing gears a little bit, I would like to put out a small request to my readers. Now, some of you, I believe, are non-Anglophone and some of you, I also believe, are writers as well as readers. I have a fun project coming up with a literary journal later this winter. I’m going to be their writer-in-residence for a month and I will be focusing on literature in translation. To do this properly, I’m looking for some French or Japanese writers who would be interested in submitting their short fiction to me for translation. If you, or someone you know, would like to submit a story, please let me know and I’ll give you more details. And for those of you who are not writers, but avid readers and enjoy my posts on translation, I’ll let you know when the month begins and where to follow along. I hope it will be interesting for everyone.

And with that, have a good weekend. I’ve just started Coetzee’s first novel Dusklands, set in America of all places, and Woolf’s second novel Night and Day. Looking forward to finishing both over the next two days.

more on The Voyage Out

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Although I mentioned in my earlier post that The Voyage Out was similar to a typical coming-of-age novel, let me give that idea a bit more nuance by tracing the storyline for a moment. In pure story, my statement is true – young Rachel accompanies her aunt and uncle on a journey to South America and in the course of that journey she falls in love and comes to understand one of the great mysteries of life, namely, what will society and what will one man in particular expect from her as she makes the transition from childhood to adulthood.

On the surface of things, this is timeless literary fare. But this is also Virginia Woolf and I think it is the details, the specific Woolfian twist, that makes all the difference.

First, the characters are all very close to being eccentric, without being exactly so.  They are almost types: Mr. Ambrose the doddering erudite scholar, the young, unfinished Rachel, Mrs. Ambrose the wise older woman, and Hirst, the pompous academic. There are many, many more. But then each is endowed with such particular, distinct, and sometimes bizarre thinking.

And life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing, as in time she would vanish, though the furniture in the room would remain. Her dissolution became so complete that she could not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly still, listening and looking always at the same spot. It became stranger and stranger. She was overcome with awe that things should exist at all…She forgot that she had any fingers to raise…The things that existed were so immense and so desolate.

Why was it that relations between different people were so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an instinct to be examined carefully and probably crushed?

She had now reached one of those eminences, the result of some crisis, from which the world is finally displayed in its true proportions.

Woolf allows her characters to meander and wonder, to question their reality. So much so that their reflections on the state of their world begin to undermine the novel’s seemingly traditional structure. As the story unravels, it starts to become quite clear that this isn’t just Rachel’s story at all. It is everyone’s story, and although each of their stories may not get equal weight, each of their given moments are equally weighty.

And then Woolf upends everything with a final, jarring twist. I think this was the aspect of The Voyage Out that I most enjoyed. Just as I was getting comfortable with Woolf’s wonderfully different version of a young woman’s coming-of-age, she takes that away and offers a radical and almost completely unexpected* alternative. Suddenly, the book is about everything but Rachel. Very clever. All those searching questions become more relevant.

I am coming to realize that this Woolf project will not really ever be complete until I’ve read these novels several times. I’m only just ready to begin Night and Day, and already I want to go back and reread The Voyage Out to catch all that I missed. But all things in their order…I’ll get there, it may just take a few years.

*The foreshadowing about what will eventually happen to Rachel is excellent. It happens about a hundred pages before the end, and it comes from the perspective of Mrs. Ambrose. Although it is pretty high-handed, Mrs. Ambrose is given to extreme thinking so it doesn’t necessarily overwhelm the reader. And it is one of the novel’s most poetic moments.

Jean Giono and other thoughts

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My mother-in-law passed me a Jean Giono novel a few weeks ago, and I realized it’s probably the fourth she’s brought to my attention. For various reasons, and much to my embarrassment, I’ve never actually read any of them. But yesterday, I finished some work and was waiting for Mlle. Petitvore to wake up, so I started the first few pages. Giono has a lovely style, full of sounds to parallel his images, and careful, rolling sentences. This particular novel, Le Grand Troupeau (To the Slaughterhouse) from 1931, is a war novel, and it describes how war involves everyone, not only the men at the front. Giono was a fervent pacifist, and his disgust of war is a palpable element of the book.

I’m curious if any of you have read Jean Giono…I’d love some recommendations. He has a large oeuvre, over thirty novels and novellas. And I learned (thank you Wikipedia) that he was inspired by Balzac to write a series of ten novels similar to La Comédie Humaine. Unfortunately, he never finished the project, but there are four, maybe five novels that fall into the category. Could be interesting companion reads as I start digging deeper in Balzac.

And of all things, I have glimmerings of a war-novel project in mind. Not to start this year, of course, but it would be fascinating (perhaps a bit grim, however) to put together a number of “war” writers and begin a tour through that aspect of literature…Pat Barker, Jean Giono, Hemingway. Something to think about.

Woolf's 1915 Diary

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I’ve started reading Virginia Woolf’s Diary. I am struck by and thankful for her ordinary-ness. She records all the necessary boring bits about life. That is rather refreshing. Of course, she does wind her way to lovely reflections like this:

I know that with the first chink of light in the hall and chatter of voices I should become intoxicated and determine that life held nothing comparable to a party. I should see beautiful people and get a sensation of being on the highest crest of the biggest wave – right in the centre and swim of things.

Or this:

There is a foreign look about a town which stands up against the sunset, and is approached by a much trodden footpath across a field.

The first quote reminds me of her writing, the energy of it. And I suspect as she wrote the sentence, she was no longer writing in her diary. It just has a different feel than her other jottings. And the second is simple, but it strikes me as a fine example of her skill for unique observation.

I tried to read Sylvia Plath’s diary once, (at least I think it was Sylvia Plath…I may be wrong, but this was over ten years ago) and was instantly put off because it read like a novel. It was so perfectly shaped and “written”, with long passages of dialogue and actual scenes. It didn’t feel like a diary at all.

But Woolf’s diary is exactly that. A record for each day of what she did, who she saw, her thoughts and little snippets of conversations. It isn’t at all intimidating. It’s wonderful such a record of her life exists.

I’ve just come across the only mention (in her 1915 diary) of her first novel The Voyage Out. She writes:

We talked about my novel (which everyone, so I predict, will assure me is the most brilliant thing they’ve ever read, and privately condemn, as indeed it deserves to be condemned.

I am very curious if she ever mentions this novel again in any of her later diaries. Why so severe on herself? A considerable amount of time had passed since the novel was accepted for publication and then actually saw publication…is that what made her think it was bad? Or was she always this severe with all of her writing? And did she really mean it?

more awards

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The National Book Award Foundation has posted their 5 under 35 list, and all look very interesting. I’m familiar with some of these names, but haven’t read anything by any of these writers (I think!). I also like the mix of large and small presses represented here:

Sarah Braunstein, The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (W.W. Norton & Co., 2011)

Grace Krilanovich, The Orange Eats Creeps (Two Dollar Radio, 2010)

Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife (Random House, 2011)

Tiphanie Yanique, How to Escape from a Leper Colony (Graywolf, 2010)

Paul Yoon, Once the Shore (Sarabande, 2009)

Has anyone read any of these yet? I think I’ll add all five to my list, but I’d love to hear thoughts – good, bad, or otherwise.

The Ghostly Collaborative Project: Chapter 3

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As some of you already know, Smithereens came up with a very fun collaborative ghost story project for the weeks leading up to Halloween and I volunteered to write a chapter. For the full story, please find Smithereens’ spooky Chapter 1 here and Stefanie’s spine-tingling Chapter 2 here.

And here is Chapter 3

After what seemed like a very long time, the elevator bell dinged. I relaxed a little, finally I could get out of here. The elevator doors slid open…

…and the elevator man took hold of my elbow, pushing me forward. “Last stop, everyone out.”

I was too stunned to react and in any case, he stepped backward without a sound and the elevator doors closed immediately. I looked left and then right. This was certainly not the basement. At least I had once gone down to the basement to deliver a set of keys to the building janitor and, from what I remember, it was an ordinary basement. Nothing like this.

Just in front of me was a long, dimly lit corridor with a line of doors on either side. About halfway down, one of the doors was open and a green light spilled out into the hall. Above the sound of my hammering heartbeat, I could hear the faint sound of music. A high, tinny melody that seemed to go round in circles.

I turned around to call the elevator back and leave, but the elevator doors were now gone. I was staring at a seamless marble wall. When I ran a panicked hand across the stone, it was cold and clammy.

Okay, I told myself, this is not normal, but just march into that room down there and ask for the way out. I started walking, relieved I had decided to wear comfortable flats today. I was nearly silent.

The first door on the right had a strange white sign – Returns. The next door, on the left, had a similar sign, only it read, No Returns. After that the signs became more and more curious: Halfways, Splits, Long Losts, Undecideds. I hurried past the rest of the signs without looking, feeling a little cheered by the prospect of entering the open door in the middle of the hallway, meeting a normal human being and getting myself home.

The hallway was much longer than it had appeared from the elevator. But eventually the open door was just a few steps away. The music had changed while I walked, and it was now a loud, crashing symphony. Only the instruments were all playing off-key. I shivered.

I gathered my courage and peeped into the open door. To my relief, it was an ordinary office, with four clusters of cubicles, much like the office plan on my own floor. No, I realized with a start, not just like the office plan of my own floor, it was my own floor. The entire floor. This was no small room after all. And all of my colleagues were there, heads bent over their desks or staring at their computer screens. Only the light from the computers was a sickly green. And the light was so sharp and thick, it filled the room and turned everyone’s skin the same awful color. The music grew louder and everyone began typing more quickly. That’s when I noticed the thin gold chains around everyone’s necks. The chains were attached to the ceiling.

I backed carefully out of the room and looked at the sign: Repeats.

This would not do.

Across the hall another door opened. Slowly, and a triangle of fresh, white light landed at my feet. A voice called, “Hurry up, get in here!”

I stepped forward…

 The next chapter will be written by Mr. Smithereens!