Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘reading notes’ category

wednesday reading notes

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Whew, it’s called child care. And I finally have enough to give me time for work and a few hours of reading and writing.

So…books. What are we reading this summer?

A month or so ago I saw an article about Adam Thirwell’s The Delighted States and I got so excited I ordered the book right away. It came two weeks ago and I finally got the chance to sit down with it over the weekend. This is my kind of book. It focuses on literature AND translation AND the wonderful, sublime connection between writers and translators and ordinary people and readers and objects. It’s clever and funny and serious. Thirwell is clearly in love with language and with how writers manifest their own unique obsession with language. The book hops from one classic to the next, from one writer to another, finding similarities and lovely little gems of intertextuality. Reading The Delighted States feels a bit like watching a literary parade while a brilliant and chatty friend at your elbow tells you all you ever wanted to know about each book, each writer, each character.

For my French book club I am reading the newest Maryse Condé, Les Belles Tenebreuses. When we met last week to discuss Ella Maillart’s novel La Voie Cruelle, one of the members told me she’d already read the Condé and hated it. She said it was badly written, something which surprised me so much I started the book that evening. I’ve been a Condé admirer since grad school when I read and enjoyed her Moi, Tituba, Sorcière, where she re-imagines what the Salem witch trials must have been like for a slave woman accused of sorcery. I also read and studied her first novel Heremakhonon which examines cultural displacement through a unique back-to-Africa love story.

I’m only thirty or so pages into Les Belles Tenebreuses and the style is different from what I remember of Condé’s other work. There is an intrusive and authoritative author/narrator who speaks to the reader from time to time. I find it a little jarring, but I’m not far enough into the book to see whether this voice will serve a purpose. Which it may. Otherwise, the story is curious (embalming, terrorism, love story) and I’m eager to see where she is going.

Finally, I’m reading my first John Updike novel, Villages. I’ve read many upon many Updike short stories and I consider him to be one of the great greats, in the sense that his writing is so confident, so worked and detailed; he uses his words effectively and ingeniously, transforming a purportedly exclusive experience into something universal and collective. But I’m also often left with the feeling that his writing is overwritten. He packs so much into the small moments and descriptions, sometimes I want to say, ‘come on, I get it, let’s move on.’ There is a definite Updike style, and I need to be in the mood for it to enjoy it.

What are you all reading to start the summer? Anything good?

current indulgences

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Just heard about Julie Orringer’s first novel The Invisible Bridge which came out this month. Sounds fantastic. I loved her collection of short stories, How to Breathe Underwater.

Just ordered Adam Thirwell’s The Delighted States and Hermione’s Lee’s Body Parts. It seems I’m craving some good literary chit-chat.

Just started Ella Maillart’s La Voie Cruelle about her road trip from Switzerland to Afghanistan in 1939 with her friend Christina (Anne-Marie Schwarzenbach, who was fighting a nasty drug addiction). Two women camping along the side of the road at such a time period and completely unchaperoned…makes for a great read.

Just finished chapter one of Sten Nadolny’s The Discovery of Slowness. Love the texture of the writing, love the perspective.

Damon Galgut – The Good Doctor

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Oh, why why why did it take me this long to get introduced to Damon Galgut’s sublime novel The Good Doctor ? My own fault, actually. I mooched the book a while back after reading about it in various locations (namely, Bookeywookey), but didn’t bother to read it until last week. Big mistake. I consider this book one of the best reads of the year.

Over the last few years I’ve developed a real interest in South African literature (although I know I’ve really only skimmed the surface at this point). There is something about the subject matter and the writing style of writers like Gordimer, Coetzee, Brink and now Galgut, that consistently impresses me…a thoughtfulness, a heaviness, a careful and reflective creation of story and character.

The Good Doctor is a tightly contained, intimate story with immense reach. It manages to portray an entire landscape of complex socio-political realities while remaining closely focused on a single man’s thoughts. The narrative action follows a short timeline (less than a year) yet it reflects both an era as well as the main character’s entire life.

The book opens with the arrival of a young, new doctor at a rural hospital in one of the former South African homelands. The hospital is barely functional, with only a few staff members and hardly any equipment. The new doctor is appropriately shocked and dismayed and the current staff expects him to simply pack up and leave. But Dr. Laurence Waters is an idealist and instead of leaving, he begins to see what kind of new life he might be able to bring to the run-down hospital, and in connection, to the empty town and neighboring villages.

The book is narrated by Frank, a doctor who has been living in this forsaken community for several years. Frank is a jaded and troubled man, somewhere in his forties, who experiences Laurence’s arrival, first like an amusing event in an otherwise humdrum existence, but later as a threat. Laurence is going to change their lives and Frank isn’t at all certain this is a good idea.

What struck me about The Good Doctor is the way it hummed along with an eerie, restrained violence. Frank is neither stable, nor is he a “good person”, yet it is his voice leading us through this story. I love this kind of fiction. Frank is my guide to this fictional universe, but the more I get to know him, the more I mistrust his view of things.

So what gets set up is essentially a face-off between Frank and Laurence, but not a face-off in any traditional sense…as Laurence moves his improvement projects further along, Frank spirals deeper into a series of self-defeating behaviors. Alongside this contrast of personality, there is a problem of looting at the hospital, increasing violence in the town, as well as a number of small conflicts between the few staff members at the hospital. The novel’s restrained menace eventually blossoms into a real, tangible tragedy.

And here is where the novel really impressed me. This tragedy in and of itself is an answer to the Frank/Laurence (resignation/idealism) face-off, but it also gets to the heart of Frank’s true brokenness, which is founded in more than just personal history and his own specific disappointments, but involves South African history, lingering prejudices and universal human failures.

reading update

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For the one or two readers I might still have, I promise to get back to regular posting soon…

In the meantime, a quick update:

I finished Jakov Lind’s quirky, funny, strange, incomprehensible, surreal and serious novel Ergo, just out from Open Letter Books. Reading this book was like taking a deep breath and diving underwater. I only came up for air twice and then plunged back into Lind’s bizarre world. I’m not sure I understood much of this book, but the reading was by no means uncomfortable. Think Kafka on LSD…

And then I had the pleasure to consume Damon Galgut’s wonderful The Good Doctor. This was definitely one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. The book is disturbingly quiet, with tiny little bombs that go off left and right. I couldn’t put it down. Loved the narrator and how I slowly began to mistrust him, mistrust his perceptions of the world. Fantastic book.

Now I’m about a third into Christopher Torockio’s Floating Holidays from Black Lawrence Press. The first chapter of the book, or I should say, the first voice, put me off, but as soon as I stepped into the second voice, it picked up steam. This is a novel of modern office life, of mediocre powermongers, of sensitive people choking under the pressure of corporate shenanigans. It’s good. It has a great momentum, despite the myriad of voices. I can’t wait to get further.

Jacques Chessex – L'Ogre

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This month my French book group is reading Jacques Chessex’s novel L’Ogre (The Ogre), which won the Prix Goncourt in 1973 (I believe he was the first non-French writer to win the prize). With 22 novels, 27 books of poetry, 4 collections of short stories, and a full range of other writings, Chessex is one of Switzerland’s most famous writers, perhaps only second to Ramuz. He just died this past October, after a long and renowned career.

L’Ogre is the third Chessex novel I’ve read, and probably my favorite. He is known for having a thick, erudite style, and the book stayed true to that aesthetic, but it was also infused with tightly-contained, accessible moments of pathos.

I like short, intense narratives where a relatively brief moment of someone’s life is put under a microscope. In L’Ogre this moment begins the day that Jean Calmet’s father dies. The reader learns immediately, in the scenes detailing the death and the funeral, that Dr. Calmet was a perfect tyrant, that after living with his formidable personality for so long, his wife is nothing but an empty husk, that his children don’t know how to relate to one another and that his youngest son, Jean, is deliriously happy at this death. The book then follows Jean for the next few months as he attempts to construct a life in his new fatherless situation.

L’Ogre reminded me of Anne Bragance’s novel Casus Belli, only this time focusing on the father-son relationship. Both books take up this issue of parental tyranny and how destructive it is for the entire family. Jean has suffered his entire life because of his father, but when his father dies, presumably liberating him from that oppression, instead he is lost, bereft of any points of personal reference. Until this moment, he knew he was “useless, stupid, etc.” but without his father to maintain his identity, he suddenly has no idea who he is.

This is not a happy book, and it does not have a happy ending. But it does grant the reader a certain measure of pleasure. I was greatly involved in the details of each scene, which Chessex renders with great skill – the shadows and sounds of the house where Calmet grew up, the broken conversations between Calmet and his mother, the dreary loneliness of a busy café, the bleak sexual exchanges between Calmet and his much younger girlfriend, the memories of a terminally-ill student.

Finally, the book is set in Lausanne and the village of Lutry. Chessex, who was born and raised here and spent his life working as a teacher in the cantonal high school, does a beautiful job of capturing the stern façade of the canton of Vaud, with its strict Calvinist influences and overall Protestant work ethic.

I don’t expect I will ever become a huge fan of Jacques Chessex. I’ll have to think about this idea more, and read more of his work, but if I compare him to Ramuz (which I can’t help doing) he seems less able to depict his characters, especially the despicable ones, with quite as much love.

A quick note for anyone who is interested – several of his books have been translated into English, including L’Ogre which was given the ironic title, A Father’s Love. I can’t help thinking this is a bit of a shame, the image of the Ogre-Father in the book is absolutely wonderful, fairytale-esque and powerful. A shame not to let the original title stand.

digital media and our mental libraries

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Two recent posts on digital media have got me thinking:

First, this post at @craigmod talks about “formless content” and “definite content” and how this relates to printed books vs. e-readers. Mod’s goal is to come up with a way to determine what type of content should be digitalized. It’s an interesting discussion about how our perception of publishing might and/or should change in the digital age, and relates specifically to the ipad.

Biblioklept responds here, with some valid questions of a few of Mod’s ideas.

I have just a little something to add about a notion that Mod only quickly touches on, the experience of holding a book vs. an e-reader and how that might influence our reading and our after-reading experience. I am actually really curious how having mostly all of our stories on one device will change how we approach our “personal libraries”. Right now, the books I keep in my home all have a second-layer of texture (the covers, the paper texture, the smell of the book, the marginalia right on the page as opposed to somewhere else on the device…all of which varies from book to book) on top of the story as I remember it after I’ve read it.

I’ve yet to separate that experience from the imagined landscape of whatever novel or story I’m reading. Added of course to where I put the book upon finishing it. This all matters to me because I do go back and reference the books I’ve read, either in discussions, in reviews, while I’m reading something else. When I begin that mental process of reflecting on a book, I do imagine its form and location, however briefly, before I move further into a consideration of the story.

I’ve now read several works on my Kindle (The Maid by Yasutaka Tsutsui, Nicholas Nickleby…) and the reading experience is fine, comfortable, smooth, but when I want to refer to any of these books, my mind actually visualizes my Kindle, which is a bit stale, and of course identical for each book, before moving on to the layer of the text. And when I think about Nicholas Nickleby, as a whole text, for example, it exists for me as a kind of semi-invisible block of data inside the limbo of my Kindle as well as a vibrant, emotional narrative landscape. It has a very different physicality compared to my other printed books and this will always be a part of my overall reading experience.

Perhaps this is because I have a photographic memory, that I’m a visual learner, so the method I use to absorb the story is an integral part of my experience with a particular text. But it’s an interesting question for me, because maybe, one day, if most of my library is housed on a small number of digital devices, the experience of revisiting favorite works, of mentally cataloguing my library will be vastly different than it is now. I don’t think it will be necessarily bad, but it will be quite different. Flatter, I suppose. Although Mod’s point is that the ipad will allow for new textures, so there is an additional question there. But I do wonder whether any digitally-created texture, displayed on a flat screen will be able to give me a three-dimensional mental texture other than the container that displays the content?

second teaser about Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto

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Now, this may be because I have literally been swimming in Ramuz since last summer, but Maile Chapman’s Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto reminded me of my favorite Swiss literary fellow.

The similarity comes from the narrative perspective. I’ve mentioned before how Ramuz’s use of the third person pronoun on (one, you – universal, we) can drive a translator to distraction. On isn’t a terribly complicated concept, grammatically speaking, but in the Ramuzian universe it has a special job.

In a Ramuz text, the on is often used to represent the voice of the village, which is just a slightly more intimate form of the narrator. And the narrative shifts back and forth between a straight omniscient and this subtle all-village voice. So it has this collective consciousness aspect to it, adding an invisible “watcher/describer” to whatever story is being told. But it’s very subtle, since it is only rarely a direct “we”. I love this about his work, since he’s so often getting at the psychology of small village life.

Now, Chapman’s novel, which is set at a hospital in rural Finland, uses the first person plural. But it uses this perspective with great subtlety, which is, in my opinion, the only way to really get away with the first person plural unless you want to give your book a gimmicky texture. But what happens is that the narrator is both a member of the cast as well as a watcher of the story. Very much like Ramuz.

I realize I haven’t given any details about what this novel is about yet, and I’ll get there soon, I promise. What I do want to say is that Chapman’s clever use of the first person plural creates a kind of chorus, which chimes in every once in a while throughout the novel. It’s a bit spooky. It is also how she manages to create this fantastic echo of Euripedes’ play The Bacchae, without overtly mimicking that story. One event in Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto does directly reference The Bacchae, but the careful construction of this chorus using the first person plural emphasizes the connection much more subtly, much more powerfully.

Friday reading notes

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My Swiss fellow just passed me The Logic of Life by Tim Harford. Quite an interesting book about rational choice theory. I’m often wary of this kind of easily-accessible ‘popular science’ book, because I just assume everything will be oversimplified and glib, but I like the way the author is trying to get his readers to reconsider a lot of their conventional thinking about why people do the things they do.

He begins with a hot issue – teenage sexuality – and argues that when teenagers change their sexual behavior, it is the result of rational decision making and not necessarily deteriorating morals. The example he uses to illustrate the idea comes from evidence that teenagers nowadays engage in more oral sex than say twenty years ago, a statistic that many people find absolutely horrifying. Well, Harford argues that faced with the greater risks of contracting HIV/AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases, teenagers have collectively changed their sexual behaviors to avoid those greater risks. They’ve worked out that the cost of engaging in regular sex is actually higher, and so they make the trade.

He uses the same theory to look at a myriad of other issues, including drug addiction, crime rates, love and relationships, and workplace behaviors. It’s important to note that Harford defines a ‘rational’ choice as something resulting from a process of cost/benefit analysis…so a seemingly insane decision can be rational. It is an interesting book and he is careful to point out that his theory applies to groups, but when used on an individual basis can break down. Human beings, individually, are more complicated than rational choice theory. I like that. I look forward to reading through the rest of his examples…

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My Blog Stats page tells me that the other day someone made their way to Inc. Logo. by googling “Nancy Huston and Marie Vieux Chauvet”. My curiosity is now so aflame, I can’t stand it. Is Nancy Huston working on something that has to do with my favorite Haitian writer? I know that Huston was near New York City in the seventies (for university) and I know that Vieux Chauvet spent her final few years in New York…did the two ever meet? But Huston moved to Paris in 1973 and Vieux Chauvet died in 1973 so maybe they just missed each other.

Could I be even more geeky?

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My mother-in-law passed my Swiss fellow and me a book last week called Lettre à D, Histoire d’un Amour by the French social philosopher/writer André Gorz (pen name Michel Bosquet). I haven’t finished it yet but plan to this evening. As the title suggests, it’s a love letter, written by Gorz to his wife. In the opening pages he writes that he was shocked to realize one day that of all the writing he’d done over the years, he’d never written the story of their love, which he says was the greatest and most important story of his life. A lot of what he writes is particular to a writer / nonwriter relationship. Gorz and his wife committed suicide together in 2007, after she was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Here is a generous excerpt from the publisher Editions Galilée. There is an English version (Letter to D.) which was published last May, translated by Julie Rose.

 

a fantastic début novel

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Apologies for being so quiet around here. I have had several extremely busy weeks. Getting back to work after my maternity leave is proving to be a little more difficult than I had expected. But I won’t bore you all with the details (assuming there are any of you left…)

Nevertheless, I have been reading. And some very excellent fiction at that.

Before I say more, I invite you all to reread The Bacchae by Euripedes and then order a copy of Maile Chapman’s début novel Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto. Graywolf is publishing this excellent novel in April and I’ve been fortunate enough to read it for a review I’m writing. I’ll write some more thoughts up this week and be sure to publish a link to the formal review when it comes out.

But I mean it…order this book…you will not regret it.

another small press

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The small press I’d like to mention today is a new one to me. I discovered this press over the weekend while browsing the 2010 Best Translated Book Award Fiction longlist from Three Percent. First of all, there are some really enticing books on this list. I’m trying to figure out how I can order all or at least most of them…my book-buying budget is getting a little out of control this year (okay, just pretend along with me that it was once under control).

Well, the book that brought me to this new press is Landscape with Dog and Other Stories by Ersi Sotiropoulos (trans. Karen Emmerich).

Here is an excerpt from one of the stories:

Let’s just say that Giacometti was setting out to draw a face. If he started with the chin, he would worry that he might never reach the nose. The longer he sketched the face, the harder he tried to offer a faithful representation of it, the more it resembled a skull. The only thing left was the gaze. So what he ended up drawing was a skull with a gaze.

Looks wonderful, doesn’t it?

The publisher who brings us this tempting bit of prose is called clockroot books. Yes, strange name. The rest of their catalog is equally appealing.