Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

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Davis and Cusk

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Two of the books I’m reading (or rather, one I just finished and one I’ve almost finished) have suddenly started speaking to each other. I so love when this happens.

I read Rachel Cusk’s Outline last week, and am just about to finish Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story. On the surface they could not be more different—in both style and approach, but I realized today that they are circling in their different ways around the same question of the subjectivity of narrative. Cusk does this by removing the self entirely from her project.

The book has a nearly completely effaced narrator who absorbs the stories of everyone else around her. One after another, the reader experiences the narrator’s disappearance beneath someone else’s narrative, only to surface briefly and then do the same thing again. But in its strange way the book keeps opening up, again and again, this question of how we narrate the self, how the self adjusts and transforms memory.

And in The End of the Story Davis does this from the opposite direction, by sticking extremely close to the narrator, allowing her to tell and re-tell events from all possible angles. This narrator doesn’t ever disappear, and she’s so interested in the impossibility of her own disappearance within the framework of the narrated self that she arrives around to the same set of questions.

Both books give a sense of vertigo—the endless dizzy spiraling of subjectivity— but with such very different prose styles. They make for a wonderful comparison and I’d like to read the two books all over again.

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dérocher

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Here is something that happens (often) when I’m checking and re-checking a full draft Ramuz translation. Today it goes like this:

On page 77, Ramuz uses a word I’ve never seen before (other times it’s a word I’ve seen, but he uses it in an odd way). In this case the scene shows two men walking down from a high alpine village to a lower alpine village (the relationship between these two men is one of the funniest and saddest of the whole novel) and one of them stops and points toward the steeply descending valley. He says,

“There, beside the pine tree, do you see it? It’s square, it’s gray, it looks like a large stone. You know what it is? It’s the doctor’s car, celui qui s’est déroché l’année dernière.”

There’s two things about this. First, I’m immediately stopped on that verb dérocher. I’ve never seen it before but it doesn’t look difficult. Rocher is rock. But the second thing is that when I first read this little phrase, I missed something. It would seem – following that comma – that the clause refers to THE CAR. And I nearly translated it like that. But then looking at the whole phrase:

En bien, tu sais ce que c’est? la voiture du docteur, celui qui s’est déroché l’année dernière.

That’s a celui which is masculine, and la voiture is feminine, so they are not connected. That celui is referring to the doctor, which makes dérocher a little more tricky.

It’s the doctor’s car, the one who [s’est déroché] last year.

Dérocher seems simple enough, doesn’t it? When reading the sentence, I just assumed it was a way of saying the car had slipped from the road and fallen down into the ravine. And my first thought was that it might be a Swiss particularity – mountainous country, with a specific verb to explain this kind of accident. But I looked it up to be sure. It wasn’t in my Larousse and it wasn’t in my beloved Robert Historique (if you enjoy reading dictionaries – not saying I might enjoy this, ha ha – this one is wonderful, with detailed etymology and first literary references), so I had to look it up online and ask some mountaineering/rock climbing friends. But in any case, it appears to be a mountaineering term that can be translated either as “falling from rocks” or “to let go” or “lose your grip.”

So now I’m hesitant to make it a common word for a kind of snowy, mountainous car accident (which it could still be), or to give it some notion of the doctor driving his car off the road on purpose. And it’s just one sentence, and the doctor doesn’t exist in the story. It’s a tiny side story… except it isn’t. Because one of the men in this conversation is trying to convince the other man (who is depressed) to give him something. The one man wants the other to wallow in his depression and give up – because it will lead to a financial gain for the first man. What he points out to this man while they walk down the mountain is now very interesting.

And so now, how I translate this single verb (se dérocher… reflexive even!) is suddenly quite important…

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Claude Cahun – Prison Notes

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The most recent issue of Spolia Magazine includes my translation of Claude Cahun’s “Prison Notes.” This has been one of my most interesting projects to-date and I’m so happy to see it finally published. This was the second of two publications – the first came out in February 2015, her “Prison Letters”, which were letters exchanged between Claude Cahun and her lover/partner/sister Marcel Moore while they were imprisoned on Jersey Island at the end of WWII.

For a quick explanation of this new piece, here is my Translator’s Note for Spolia:

In 1944, the German occupying forces on Jersey Island arrested the French artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore (a.k.a. Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe) for their work in the Resistance and sentenced them to death. Although their sentence was never carried out, the two women spent nearly ten months in jail until they were finally freed upon the liberation of Jersey in May 1945. The following translation comes from 35 handwritten papers stored at the Jersey Archives. Parts of these pages are published in François Leperlier’s Claude Cahun – Écrits (Editions Jean-Michel Place, 2002), and he attributes them to a long letter Cahun wrote sometime in 1946 to the writer Jean Legrand. According to Leperlier, Cahun intended to write a complete narrative of the occupation of Jersey and their time in prison, and she was gathering her notes and letters and papers together with this purpose. What follows is not a complete transcription and translation of the 35 pages, nor is it a strictly a linear narrative; the archived papers begin on page 32 and there are pages missing and abrupt changes of subject. Transitions around those missing pages as well as a few less relevant paragraphs have been redacted.

In these pages she writes about what it was like to be in prison, describing some of the German guards and the other prisoners and her connections to them and feelings about them. What strikes in these descriptions is the depth of her feeling for others—no one is ever a caricature, but a complicated human (why is this so often a synonym for flawed? here I use it this way) individual in the midst of his or her historical moment. She writes of how to find distractions while stuck inside the horrors of war, and she also writes directly of some of those horrors. She also writes about what it felt like the day they got out and where they went to live—the feeling on the island, how the inhabitants re-situated themselves after the occupation.

I hope it inspires a larger project somewhere; her work deserves a broad audience.

The issue of Spolia Magazine can be purchased here. If you don’t know Spolia already, spend some time with the site and sample the back issues. They are all well worth the small price. I hope these included Cahun pieces might inspire a larger project somewhere; her work deserves a broad audience.

And thank you to Scott for mentioning that Cahun’s Heroines can be found in English translation in Shelley Rice’s Inverted Odysseys. (Which looks wonderful.)

p.s. Earlier this year, I also wrote a tiny blog post about part of this translation and the story of an undelivered letter between a German soldier and his Jersey lover. You can read that here.

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“The rain, like a quarrel, was over.”

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“She opened the window and hung out. The rain, like a quarrel, was over. The earth breathed warm and damp in its sleep. Clumsy drops fell from the old trees. Suddenly she saw her life as a bird let into a series of cages, each one larger than the last; and each one, because of its comparative freedom, seeming, for a while, to be without limit, without bars. It’s time to get out again; she knew, but told no one. She stared down at the dark and forgot herself. Under the plastered, hammered earth there was a fecund stirring in the old garden. Under stones, out of decay, sticky wings, moving jaws, feeble millipede wavings—they were all coming back to hunger and reproduction, to crawl and swarm and eat their way through the feast.”

from Occasion for Loving, Nadine Gordimer, 1963

In the bustle of the holiday season, my brain has only seemed able to enjoy re-reading. I have a handful of wonderful new books (including Clarice Lispector’s Collected Short Stories) that I am eager to get lost inside, but I have found myself gravitating to old favorites instead. Comfort reading.

It has been some time since I have reread any Gordimer, and this is one of her “overlooked” novels—that is a bit of a lie, since I think she is rightfully famous for her entire body of work. But this particular novel, Occasion for Loving, which has a fiercely important story for its time and political context, is also alive with Gordimer’s bright and complicated writing. Somehow her writing feels a little old-fashioned to me right now, perhaps because of the things I’ve been reading over the last few years. But it’s so lovely to sink into and admire. By old-fashioned I do not mean slow or tedious or outdated, I mean more that she was writing in a literary moment that invited her to write “richly” in a very particular way, to linger on details and thought movements in a way that I feel contemporary fiction does differently.

 

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“…are many things of silence and dignity…”

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Over the last two months I’ve read a series of really wonderful books – but seem unable to put my thoughts into any sort of order about any of them except to express a deep admiration. Perhaps I am feeling them all too personally, or maybe it’s just the arrival of good weather and more time to sit and read in the garden, to just sit and think about this reading instead of wanting to write deeply about any of them. All of them have prompted plenty of notetaking, and underlining—they are all books that deserve long and thoughtful discussions. I just don’t seem able to write about them individually.

But it seems a shame not to mention them here and see if any of you have anything to add.

The first book I read was Julio Cortazár’s Hopscotch. This is my first Cortazár and I can say that the first short chapter just swept me away. The writing is stunning (lively and difficult and imaginative) and the story so odd and delightful and sometimes disturbing that it is hard not to want to spend days reading and re-reading the book just to try to figure out what he’s doing. The book is actually two books, and you read one first and then go back and read the second (which includes the first) after that. It’s bizarre, but there are exquisite scenes and intense dialogue and plenty to think about. The book creates a certain atmosphere that is hard to step away from.

The next book I read was Russell Hoban’s Amaryllis Night and Day which is hilarious and dark and sexy all at the same time. I loved it. I loved the oddity of the conversations and I loved the way that Hoban doesn’t explain everything or ease his reader into the strangeness of the book’s premise—which is basically a love story but an outlandish one that is really about two very lonely people and how they manage to ease each other’s loneliness. But it’s also about art and literature and impossible connections. I read it in two sittings and wanted to go back and read it all again right away. This was also my first Hoban, so any suggestions on where to go next would be very welcome.

After this I read William Goyen’s The House of Breath. This book quite literally stopped me still. I am going to put here the entire first page in the hopes that anyone reading this will go right out to a local bookshop and ask for a copy:

 …and then I walked and walked in the rain that turned half into snow and I was   drenched and frozen; and walked upon a park that seemed like the very pasture of Hell where there were couples whispering in the shadows, all in some plot to warm the   world tonight, and I went into a public place and saw annunciations drawn and written on the walls. I came out and felt alone and lost in the world with no home to go home to and felt robbed of everything I never had but dreamt of and hoped to have; and mocked by others’ midnight victory and my own eternal failure, un-named by nameless agony and stripped of all my history, I was betrayed again.

Yet on the walls of my brain, frescoes: the kneeling balletic Angel holding a wand of vineleaves, announcing; the agony in the garden; two naked lovers turned out; and over the dome of my brain Creations and Damnations, Judgments, Hells and Paradises (we are carriers of lives and legends—who knows the unseen frescoes on the private walls of the skull?)

So, yes, that first paragraph is a bit too intense, and there are some heavy biblical references (which usually annoy me, but for some reason here were okay) but isn’t that “all in some plot to warm the world tonight” just lovely? And then that very last sentence about “unseen frescoes on the private walls of the skull”? Stunning. And the book is extremely unique. It begins by addressing a place, using the 2nd person to create a picture of an old town, and create what is essentially an ode to this lost place—the narrator’s early home, a place that no longer exists. And then each chapter tells of a different member of the family, telling their lonely stories with a breathless kind of devotion, and how they affected and were affected by their lives in this small Texas town.

Goyen’s writing is thick and heavily descriptive, and his narrator embodies other characters and drifts—precisely, if that is possible, there is an incredible precision in how the narrator moves from person to person. What struck me the most about this book was how sad and yet how bravely ecstatic it was at the same time. It is a book I will probably read several times, and then often again in years to come. It’s all about nostalgia and love and displacement and place. Obviously things I am interested in.

I discovered this book by stumbling across Goyen’s interview in The Paris Review.

I’ve forgotten to mention Denton Welch – because I started reading him as well, finishing Maiden Voyage and starting A Voice Through a Cloud along with his journals. Welch is a fantastic discovery and I cannot wait to read him from start to finish. I’ll save any discussion of his work until then, except to say now that he is one of those writers who approach the world with a vulnerability and a rawness that makes his work really interesting. There is a preciousness about him, but he’s so aware of this, and so painfully honest about how exposed he lets himself be that it becomes endearing. His writing is simply lovely.

Finally, I finally read John Williams’ Stoner yesterday and today. It was not quite what I was expecting but I really enjoyed it. After this series of more experimental books, it took me a moment to get comfortable with the straightforward realism of Stoner, but the subject won me over easily. And Stoner is obviously a character that most devoted readers will feel an affinity for, if not a profound sympathy. As I finished the book up this morning, I realized that I found it quite depressing, actually, and wondered if most people felt this way. There are moments—especially at the end—when the book reaches for and achieves a kind of transcendence (of Stoner’s disappointments and difficulties) and this helped. I’m glad I’ve finally read it.

I also couldn’t help thinking that Stoner would be an interesting book to see written from Edith’s or Grace’s perspective. Edith is such a difficult character to have any sympathy for whatsoever – but I’m thinking of Wide Sargasso Sea and how Rhys achieves something so unusual by upending such a familiar tale. I suspect Grace would be the better choice for this kind of re-telling, but it would be very curious to see Edith’s perspective explored. I admit to being a little fascinated with Edith, whom William’s treats with great respect despite how awful she is.

Reading Stoner also made me think of Carol Shield’s The Stone Diaries, even if it’s been ages since I read this, so maybe they are not as similar as I remember. The Stone Diaries is also a fictional autobiography kind of novel, but of a woman, and it is marked by the same types of loss and longing over a lifetime of fairly unextraordinary events.

I’m now reading Rikki Ducornet’s The Fountains of Venus and finishing Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat as well as continuing on with Welch. What are you reading?

p.s. title of this post from The House of Breath

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A new year

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This past year involved a few wonderful things —I’m speaking strictly of small personal events and a handful of excellent books and not of the series of horrific world events that I find overwhelmingly preoccupying—but, sadly, the last twelve months did not involve nearly enough good reading. I think I actually read less than forty books this past year. This depresses me. I feel the most alive when I am reading and thinking about books and how they work. So I am desperately looking forward to 2015 and a series of reading projects I have planned.

First, however, a short list of the books I read and loved in 2014 (even if they were not published in 2014):

  • To Hell with Cronjé, by Ingrid Winterbach, tr. Elsa Silke
  • Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson, tr. Anne Born
  • August by Christa Wolf, tr. Katy Derbyshire
  • Orkney by Amy Sackville
  • The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, tr. Shaun Whiteside
  • A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Nay, Rather by Anne Carson
  • Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

I’d love to discuss any of these books with you – and recommendations based on them would also be very welcome.

My reading in 2015 is off to a good start, however. I rang in the New Year with a jetlagged midnight re-read of Clarisse Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart. I enjoyed this book when I first read it, but I read it too closely to a read of Agua Viva and The Hour of the Star. This was too much Lispector at once and I did not appreciate it in the way I could have. I was entranced with this re-read a few nights ago – highlighting, taking notes, pausing to re-read paragraphs. Although I find this comparison a little troublesome, Lispector affects me in a similar way to Woolf – she asks me to engage with a complicated and fast-moving interior world, one that feels achingly familiar at times and wholly alien at others. You know that early scene of Joyce’s in A Portrait of the Artist, when he situates Stephen within the vast universe for the first time? That is what Lispector does again and again and again – she situates the mind of her character in relation to the universe, to others, to herself. She is constantly periscoping outward and inward and it can be dizzying but it is always illuminating and provocative.

The second book I’ve started for 2015 is Shirley Hazzard’s 1970 novel The Bay of Noon. This is one of the books that takes some warming up to. But I am about halfway through and looking forward to see how Hazzard pulls it all together. It is a short little book but formal—I mean formal in the way the prose feels, and structurally as well. Here is one of several lines I keep going back to:

That is something one does not foresee in wishing to elude one’s traditions: that the threat, once its fangs are drawn, may become transfigured into intimacy, a frame of reference.

Last but not least, a haphazard (because still in the planning stages) list of the reading projects I plan to move ahead on in 2015:

I have started reading Beckett finally, an author I have been meaning to read for some time. Anthony of Time’s Flow has piqued my curiosity with his many discussions of Beckett’s work and journals. I have begun with Molloy.

In 2014, I discovered Muriel Spark and plan to read as many of her novels as I can find this year. Her humor is very welcome, as is her biting social commentary.

I am about halfway through my start-to-finish Virginia Woolf read. I hope to finish this year.

Several authors I plan to read as much as possible of this year – Anne Carson, Nabokov, Coetzee and Clarisse Francillon. All extremely different writers, much to look forward to.

More poetry! More poetry!

One of the things I’d like to work on this year is non-fiction/philosophy/essay reading. I am still compiling a list of writers and books and will write more about this later.

Finally, some friends of mine and I recently engaged in a recommendations game. We are all serious readers but with quite different tastes. We gave each other a list of our “perfect books” and the reasons why. Based on these lists we then gave each other a single book recommendation. It was a great bit of fun, and I received the following three books to read: Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing.  So those are now added to my list.

And last but not least, I have a rather random pile of fiction waiting for me. I’ve collected these titles from reviews and recommendations from readers I trust:

  • A Life with Mary Shelley – Barbara Johnson
  • The Hum of Concrete – Anna Solding
  • A Town of Empty Rooms – Aimee Bender
  • Project for a Fainting – Brenda Shaughnessy
  • The Fountains of Neptune – Rikki Ducornet
  • My Mother: Demonology – Kathy Acker
  • Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
  • The House of Breath – William Goyen
  • All the Birds Singing – Evie Wyld
  • We are the Birds of the Coming Storm – Lola Lafon

So that’s it – anyone have a burning recommendation for me? The very best book you read in 2014 and would love to pass on to my ever-growing list? Please don’t hesitate!

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Kamal Ben Hameda – Under the Tripoli Sky

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Kamal Ben Hameda’s novella Under the Tripoli Sky (tr. Adriana Hunter, Peirene 2014) opens with a circumcision. The narrator, a boy called Hadachinou, brings the reader to this event through his own ignorance of what is about to happen. The foreshadowing is exquisite here as Hadachinou watches the local butcher slaughtering a lamb:

Ibrahim’s sharp knife cutting smoothly through the skin as he whistled a well-known pop song.

Rivulets of slow-moving blood, smaller streams coagulating.

The carcass left to the women: removing the offal, the intestines, cutting up the meat,     salting it and hanging it out in the sun on the terrace.

The slow, impatient morning, quivering.

Because the reader very quickly knows what is about to happen, Hadachinou’s sense of bewildered expectation creates an immediate line of tension. And this is something Ben Hameda will continue to do throughout the book—an appropriate use of such a young narrator. What Hadachinou understands here is the impending celebration, the feast, but the cutting then comes as a complete surprise and he must be held down. It’s a powerful moment, a threshold between childhood and adulthood.

Just after this is where the novella sets up its preoccupying question, and it’s both well-timed and well-done. As Hadachinou cries after the procedure, the book uses his conflicting sensations to set up an opposition of two distinct worlds. On one side of him is the laughter of the women in another room, separate from his experience—and despite his anger, there is an instant longing to be with them even if they are not paying attention to or not aware of his ordeal. On the other side of him are the quiet, solemn men who leave him alone to cry, dropping money for him as they leave. The boundary between the men’s world and the women is drawn sharply here, with Hadachinou situated exactly between these two worlds and for the next 80 pages this is where he will remain. A bit like a ghost, flitting between the worlds. Observing, recording, trying to understand.

On the surface this is a book about the lives of women in 1960s Tripoli, and Hadachinou takes us through a colorful parade of them—his mother and her friends and neighbors, women of all levels of society, of all backgrounds—but its more quiet subject is the idea of secret access and hidden spaces, both physical and those of a person’s inner world. In many ways Hadachinou is a lonely child and his most intense focus revolves around ideas of relationships and how a person can be a comfort or a joy to another person, or how a person can ruin another person’s life. There are representations of sexual awakening here as well but more than that Hadachinou is intent on looking at intimacy. And by extension, as a reader we are intent on understanding how intimacy works in the historical and nostalgic setting that Ben Hameda evokes.

It is clear that Hadachinou is enthralled by and also sympathetic toward the subjects of his study. Because it is in this vein that he watches the women—wanting to see them, to know them. He is angry when not allowed into their circle, when his mother sends him outside, when he must stop visiting a certain woman. He wants to understand them , he wants to be loved. He wants to know why sometimes they seem to hate their husbands, and what this means for him. He wants to understand the power that he will later yield as well, and so there is the implication that this is the way he will learn to be a man. That his walking the boundary line between the men and the women serves a vital purpose.

Ultimately, what struck me most about Under the Tripoli Sky is the sorrow that runs through its pages. Most of the women deal with abuse, confinement, depression and sickness. And this is where the book takes an interesting approach to nostalgia. There is a real lushness—even a kind of gilding—to the physical descriptions: of the women, the houses, the streets, rooftops and gardens. It is clear that a lot of nostalgic love went into the writing of this book, into the author’s representation of place. And yet so much of the book deals with the unhappiness of these women and the broken elements of their lives. This creates a kind of provocative tension and generated, at least for me, a lot of interesting questions—how to react to the world that Ben Hameda conjures up, how to think about the women and whether they should be pitied, how to judge this society and Hadachinou’s place in it. Ben Hameda certainly doesn’t offer up any answers, and he shouldn’t. And so in this way, beneath its series of events and encounters, the novel spends most of its time examining the complexity of nostalgia and asking the reader to do the same.

Office lit…. by women?

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This morning I stumbled upon an interesting essay that functions as a kind of history of the “office novel”—starting with Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener and then moving forward to contemporary books by Joshua Ferris, Ed Parks and even Ben Lerner. It’s a solid essay that raises several questions about some of the typical elements of the form, as well as how these novels have evolved over time in line with changes in the American and international corporate landscape. You can read the essay here.

Something occurred to me as I was reading, however, and this was that all the books mentioned and discussed (save one, I think) are by men. I’m not going to pick on the author (Nikil Saval) about this, at least not at first, only because I am having trouble thinking of any by women. And so I can’t help but wonder if there is a body of “office lit” by women or maybe with more of a focus on women. Does this even exist? I assume that it does, and that I just don’t know about it.

I can think of a review we ran at Necessary Fiction for Radio Iris, by Anne-Marie Kinney, and this book would fit that category. (In his review of that title, Steve Himmer mentions two others: Lydie Salvayre’s Everyday Life and Stacey Levine’s Dra—). But what about historically? Was there a female equivalent to Melville’s Bartleby? And I don’t want to make things so simple – I know that the world of the office was almost exclusively male territory for a very long time, but it isn’t anymore, so I’d love to see that evolution as well, and how women writers have dealt with it. Especially when we so often talk about the “meaninglessness” of corporate work, and yet for many women, being able to be educated and work outside the home is a source of incredible meaning.

Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn (1977) would definitely fit into this genre in some way. So would Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps (1942). Delphine di Vegan’s novel, Les Heures Souterraines (2009) as well. Perhaps Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (2000) might be considered a very odd take on “office lit”—that is maybe debatable, but I’ll let it stand for now. Anyway, I’ve gone through my reading lists, and I’d love to see if there are more. Is there an author who takes this subject on again and again? I’ve just read Muriel Spark for the first time (her A Far Cry from Kensington, 1988) and she strikes me as someone who could have done this, but I don’t know if her books ever take this on directly.

Any suggestions?

(Quick update – Anthony of Time’s Flow Stemmed, whose taste in books I trust without question, has just written some thoughts on Alice Furse’s novel Everybody Knows this is NOWHERE. Adding this to the list!)

“This is a most excellent place.”

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I promise not to become a boring person about this, but I’ll just mention quickly that my book, Fog Island Mountains, is going to be published soon. I received the galley copy a week or so ago – an event that made me both burst with pride as well as succumb to a series of small panic attacks. I realized finally that this book, this story, cannot be tinkered with any more, cannot be changed. Reading through the galley and then reading through the final PDF proofs, I found sections I am extremely proud of, and I also found sections that I wished I could work through all over again.

All in all, I am both thrilled and nervous that the book will be published soon. It’s a little scary to think of people I know and people I don’t know who will read it, judge it and judge me. I am also well aware that the publication of this book is just one of thousands of other books. It is nothing. It is a small, a very small thing. I like this idea. I’m proud of the book, I’m nervous about the book, but I’m also happy that it can be a small thing and that I can work forward on other projects.

The book is already available for pre-order. In the lead up to publication, I’ll be doing a bit more writing about it here, instead of here at Pieces, which I will continue to reserve for thoughts on my reading and translating.

To finish up, a little piece of the preface to the book:

霧島Kirishima
“A land where the morning sun shines directly, a land where the rays
of the evening sun are brilliant. This is a most excellent place.”
—Kojiki, Japan’s “Record of Ancient Matters”

霧島Kirishima
A small chain of volcanic mountains that dot the southern half
of Japan’s island of Kyūshū. The chain is named after its secondhighest
peak, Mt. Kirishima.

霧島Kirishima
The Fog Island Mountains

Clarice Lispector – Near to the Wild Heart

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In all truth, reading Near to the Wild Heart was a frustrating reading experience. Not that this is necessarily a horrible thing, but I’m shocked to find how much trouble I had getting through this—Lispector’s first novel—compared to the other novels I’ve read (and very much enjoyed).

I think that I don’t necessarily have all the right “tools” at my disposal for a truly thoughtful approach to this book but I want to think about it within a few different contexts. First, it was first published in 1943, so she was 23. I’m going to assume she’d been working on it for several years, and it is – despite the incredible maturity of the style – a coming of age novel. It is intensely concerned with transitions from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to understanding, from ignorance to knowledge.

What matters then: to live or to know you are living?

This book is all about the intensities of unknown inner lives – how people truly think and feel, it is all unfiltered and raw, the curious power of a deeply strange interior life:

She had awoken full of daylight, invaded. Still in bed, she had thought about sand, sea, drinking seawater at her dead aunt’s house, about feeling, above all feeling.

Or here again:

Otavio made her into something that wasn’t her but himself and which Joana received out of pity for both, because both were incapable of freeing themselves through love, because she had meekly accepted her own fear of suffering, her inability to move beyond the frontier of revolt.

It is also her first novel, and the rest of her books would go on to experiment with this exact form. I don’t believe that any writer manages to get their form/style/project “perfect” on a first go around, and perhaps it is useful to think of this book as the first of her experiments. Maybe this is why it was so hard to get a hold onto. Something about it feeling less “fixed” than her later works – missing certain narrative handholds for the reader to grip onto amidst the free-flowing interior monologue and curious imagery.

It is an intensely feminine/feminist book – much of Joana’s questioning has to do with how to negotiate her interior individual life and thinking with respect to other people, both men and women, but the overall feeling or question remains focused on this idea of how men and women circle around each other. But these questions are transmitted through an existentialist discussion:

In my interior I find the silence I seek. But in it I become so lost from any memory of a human being and of myself, that I make this impression into the certainty of physical solitude.

There’s more to wonder at – looking at it compared to other books published the same year, or perhaps within the context of who she had been reading (do we know? did she keep a journal? I still haven’t read her biography), looking at the book as a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and how it embraces this idea while subverting it all the time.

Otherwise – a few smaller, text-based observations:

She wasn’t worn out from crying. She understood that her father had ended. That was all. And her sadness was a big, heavy tiredness, without anger.

Interesting to me that her lyrically-mediated thoughts make it extremely hard for the reader to access her—and yet the point is to expose her as much as possible. Feel we are kept at a distance from her grief. Or perhaps she is the one kept at a distance because her state is so tenuous and so a reader (who cannot help have some form of sympathy from the main character) is also kept at a distance.

The bathroom is indecisive, almost dead. Objects and walls have given way, softening and diluting themselves in tendrils of steam. The water cools slightly on her skin and she shivers in fear and discomfort.

In this scene, she enters a bathtub in one location and then, when she comes out of the tub she has changed location, changed time period, gone from being a child at home to being a teenager away at school. It’s a wonderful and imaginative and symbolic moment.

One of the biggest questions that kept gnawing at me was how are we supposed to feel about Joana? How are we supposed to understand her? It becomes an impossible task, because she remains in a constant state of self-evaluation and self-actualization. That impossibility became extremely frustrating – and is probably, at the heart, the point of the book. Because self-understanding is a never-ending process. We remain “unformed” for all of our lives, or “forming,” we are constantly evolving.

And the last lines of the novel – which I won’t quote in order to leave the mystery and the beauty to other readers—about immortality and the acceptance of death. They are incredible. They are revealing.

So these thoughts on Near to the Wild Heart are all half-formed and written haphazardly – the book is affecting, curious, frustrating, beautiful, both luminous and incisive, but also incomprehensible and inscrutable. It forces you to read slowly, to think, to ponder. It also asks you put it down and take a breath—it is not a book to absorb in one sitting (Hour of the Star, on the contrary, lends itself to a continuous, one-sitting read). This is a book perhaps best taken as part of a life’s work. It’s a piece of artwork, a narrative collage, something to study, not something to devour or even to enjoy, although there is enjoyment in the reading of it.

(I read this book for the Dead Writer’s Book Club – we’re having a Google Docs discussion as well as on Twitter, and I may come back with other thoughts after the discussion. Wanted to record these here now before talking about the book with anyone else – and really looking forward to others’ thoughts.)

           

 

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