Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘writing’ category

“How much better it would be if human beings could be more like starfish.”

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Of the three writers I interviewed for BIBLIOTOPIA, Xiaolu Guo has the largest body of work – and she is a filmmaker as well. I was not able to read all of her books in time for the weekend, but I managed four of them and am so glad that I did. Her work is a complex mix of biography and fiction, and she’s interested in issues of displacement (both within a culture and between different cultures) as well as sexual expression and feminism. She was also generous and engaging in person, a real delight to meet and discuss books with.

Village of Stone is the story of Coral, a young woman living in Beijing with her lover, a man named Red. One way to describe Coral would be to say that she is frozen, or stuck, and it’s only when a mysterious package arrives from her far away hometown that she begins to tell the reader the story of her childhood, giving us a chance to understand what has made her the way she is now. The book flips between the past and the present, revealing the tension that holds the two together. Coral was raised in the “village of stone” by her grandparents – two people who hated each other and lived on separate floors of their home – and she essentially lived as an orphan in a village of families, all of them at the mercy of a wild and merciless sea. The book is very much about loneliness and escape, about surviving trauma, and it plays endlessly with ideas of language and silence. (p.s. The title of this post is a line from Village of Stone.)

Once Upon a Time in the East is Guo’s most recent book, written in English, and published last year. This is her memoir, and many of its stories were achingly familiar after reading Village of Stone (which draws heavily from Guo’s own experiences). Here they are given more concrete detail and Guo’s own interpretations. The book also goes further, showing us when Guo meets her parents for the first time at the age of 7, the very fraught relationship she had with her mother, her family’s story during the Cultural Revolution and its lingering effects, as well as what happens when she leaves for Beijing to attend film school, and then when she travels to England and eventually stays. This book has a marvelous focus on what it means to create art, to write, from within a culture of censorship (which creates an equally strong self-censorship), and she talks a lot about how she was able to define herself outside of China, using English because for her it represented a switch from the patriarchal Chinese system and gave her a chance at equality. There is a lot about families here, too.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is the first book that Guo wrote in English, and it accomplishes a very neat trick. She was learning English at the time, and so she used her unsteadiness in the language as the very basis of the book. It is written in broken English, a broken English that would be spoken by a Chinese immigrant. It’s a love story, as the title suggests, but it’s also a kind of travel narrative, and a book of self-discovery. There is nothing cheesy or simplistic about the novel but the directness of the language almost masks what is a lovely, careful story about losing one’s culture and oneself and trying to find a sense of wholeness again in a new place and a new language. That last sentence is the kind of sentence that gets so overused from a marketing standpoint, that I almost regret writing it, but the book very seriously and thoughtfully asks questions about what it is to love someone – physically, emotionally – and how loving someone else teaches you what loving yourself feels like. It is a deceptively light-seeming book with a much more serious heart.

20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth is the first novel Guo ever wrote. She wrote it when she was still in China, and she wrote it in Chinese but according to Western novelistic narrative conventions, a style that was newish in China at the time. She writes in her memoir that a first-person story with a continuous narrative arc felt modern and strange. 20 Fragments is about Fenfang, a young woman who travels from the countryside to Beijing hoping to become an artist. She dates all the wrong men and has a lot of rotten luck. Again, there is a certain false lightness to the book that belies the seriousness of Guo’s subject: the real struggle of a young woman to make it on her own in a big city without family connections or support, and in a professional setting that is mostly hostile to women. An interesting footnote to this book is that the English version is probably very different from the original Chinese version. Guo writes in her acknowledgements that the ten-year gap between the publication of the original and the translation brought her to make some changes to the text, mostly because her vision of that young woman had changed, but also because, “The translation needed to capture the speech of a young Chinese girl who lives a chaotic life and speaks in slangy, raw Chinese.” I’m also curious if the English version is more overtly critical of elements of the Chinese system and culture than the original – something she may not have been able to do when the novel was first published.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time you will already know that one of my favorite things to do is read an author from start to finish. My experience with Guo over the past few weeks was like a compressed version of that, and it was interesting to read and study the way the margins blurred between her biography and her fictional project. Village of Stone fictionalized her childhood, 20 Fragments fictionalized her early experiences in Beijing, and A Concise Dictionary fictionalized her own immigrant experience in the UK and Europe. The actual memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, added a ton of interesting nuance to those other stories.

I was not able to read UFO in her Eyes, I am China, or Lovers in the Age of Indifference (a collection of stories). I will eventually read those three as well, and I am particularly keen to read I am China because one of its characters is a translator who pieces together a love story based on letters, and also because it deals with modern issues of asylum. It’s also maybe the only novel of Guo’s that is written in the 3rd person and I’m curious how she’s made that shift.

I’ve gone on and one here, and I feel like I could still say a lot more. I’m delighted to have been introduced to Guo’s writing and films, and I look forward to follow what she does in the future.

Language & Identity

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This past weekend was the first ever BIBLIOTOPIA festival at the Fondation Jan Michalski here in Switzerland. I was asked to moderate one of the sessions – a focus on Language and Identity – and in preparation had the pleasure of reading the following books from three very interesting writers:

  • Katja Petrowskaja – Maybe Esther (tr. Shelley Frisch), 2018
  • Gazmend Kapllani – A Short Border Handbook (tr. Anne-Marie Stanton Ife), 2009
  • Gazmend Kapllani – Je m’appelle Europe (tr. Françoise Bienfait et Jérôme Giovendo), 2013
  • Gazmend Kapllani – Le Dernier Page (tr. Françoise Bienfait et Jérôme Giovendo), 2015
  • Xiaolu Guo – A Village of Stone (tr. Cindy Carter), 2005
  • Xiaolu Guo – Once Upon a Time in the East, 2017
  • Xiaolu Guo – A Concise Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers, 2007
  • Xiaolu Guo – 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth (tr. Rebecca Morris, rev. by Pamela Casey), 2009

Several things connect these writers – the first being that none of them are writing in their native language. Petrowskaja is Russophone but chose to write her book in German, Kapllani is originally from Albania but has written his three novels in Greek (which I then read in English or French translation), and Guo began her writing career in Mandarin (which was her 3rd language) before switching to English after she had moved to the UK. All of them are also writing about immigration, displacement, and/or escape, about the intricacies of family narratives – this often meaning silent or hidden stories – and all of them are writing about censorship in one form or another. There was so much linking the writers that I was excited to speak with them as a group. The actual panel conversation I got to have with them was far too short, but I enjoyed hearing their thoughts on how they located themselves—personally, politically, artistically—within their new language and culture.

Something I took away from the discussion and that I am still thinking about is the idea that it isn’t really that big of a deal to be writing in one’s 2nd or 3rd language. We talked about the idea of “betraying” one’s mother tongue, and how they each negotiated that tension in their work and over time, but eventually all three of them insisted on the normality/necessity of writing outside of one’s native language, and even expressed a sense of exasperation that Anglophones are continually astonished, as if this were an impossible task when, in fact, it is not. It was a gentle scolding of the idea that languages are impenetrable from outside their attached culture, in other words language can become another border that doesn’t need policing. We didn’t have time to go into the nuances of stylistic compromises, emotional engagements, etc – things about which I am still very curious. As a translator I know what it feels like to undress and dress a language, and although I consider myself almost bilingual, I very rarely write extensively in French. I found it both perplexing and liberating to think that I could just switch one language for another if I wanted to or needed to.

In any case, I’d like to write a bit about their books now that I’ve spent so much time with them, and I’ll start a new post to do so, beginning with Xiaolu Guo.

Book news – Unfurled, Ig Publishing, 2018

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I am absolutely delighted to be able to share some book news. My second novel, Unfurled, will be published this fall with Ig Publishing. I’m incredibly incredibly incredibly excited.

Ig does wonderful work and I’m thrilled to join their catalog. Check them out if you don’t already know them.

And for a little bit about the book…

Book blurbs and cover text are an impossible art – everything sounds like the description for a daytime TV drama. If you don’t believe me, test my theory: I just went and checked the back covers of three of my favorite understated, quiet novels and all of them sound like 19th century advertisements for miracle remedies. So I won’t give you that text here – it will come in its own unavoidable time.

But I will tell you a little about the book…

I live in Switzerland now, but I grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and (my heart is often still there and) Unfurled is set in a neighborhood that runs alongside and overlooks the Puget Sound, a beautiful place of mountains and ocean. The book is about a difficult woman – because I love writing them and because they are true. The book is about grief – because I cannot get away from this subject. It’s a mother-daughter book in a sneaky way because it’s pretending to be a father-daughter book. It’s a book about mental illness, about abandonment, about fear. It’s a book about the fine line between imagination and the more dangerous form of that gift, delusion. Finally, it’s a book about the daughter of a ferry pilot, about the ocean, about sailing and deep waters.

I look forward to sharing the book when it’s ready.

Unfurled by Michelle Bailat-Jones, Ig Publishing, Fall 2018.

 

 

 

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Research rabbit holes

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This month I have the pleasure of translating an art book about Rodin’s erotic drawings, and so I’m enjoying a glimpse into the art world of Paris in the early 1900s.

Research (mostly checking quotations from art critics and famous people about Rodin’s work) has thrown me into many a delightful rabbit hole, looking at the originals and any existing translations of a number of art books as well as The Goncourt Journal, which is mentioned several times in what I’m translating.

While looking for several quotes, I came across a few interesting anecdotes. One of Jules Goncourt happening upon Sarah Bernhardt wandering around in an art warehouse. It’s pouring down rain and she’s bundled up, musing over different art objects. And then she passes him and he describes her:

It is curious how this Sarah Bernhardt reminded me on this gray and rainy day of one of those elegant and emaciated convalescents who pass you in a hospital at about five o’clock, in the twilight, to attend prayers at the end of the hall.

There are also many mentions of evenings out or evenings in with Alphonse and Julia Daudet, as Edmond de Goncourt was great friends with Alphonse. The section I came across was one of Edmond spying a moment between the couple when Alphonse shows Julia the dedication of one of his newly printed editions.

We go down to the publishers; Daudet shows his wife the dedication, of which only a few copies have been printed, and which she has not yet seen. And Mme Daudet, reading it, denies her husband’s acknowledgments of her talent in words which have almost the emotional sputtering of a disappointed woman in love: “No, no, it’s too much. … I don’t want it … no, I don’t want it!”

(Both quotes are from an English (translator uncredited) edition published sometime in the first half of the 20th century.)

I’m so curious about this. Julia wrote and wrote, and I translated one of her beautiful short stories “The Unknown Woman” a few years ago for Spolia Mag, but she refused credit for all the editing and perhaps even writing she did of her husband’s manuscripts. It makes me think about Meg Wolitzer’s novel The Wife, and wonder how much “editing” Julia may have actually done.

I spent a good portion of yesterday looking for an article on a exhibition that Rodin did in Holland in 1899, of some drawings that were inspired, in part or in whole, by Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden. I found myself, quite at random, stuck reading through all April editions of La Presse (Parisian newspaper) and found myself reading the listings of duels – who was hurt, why they fought, whether it was swords or pistols. It was hard not to laugh, and yet how sad this is. We disagree, we fight to the death (or near death). Albeit, no one listed in these April 1899 duels actually died! Many of the fights were about literary disputes – that made me smile.

This book I’m translating also talks about how Rodin (like so many other artists) was heavily influenced by Japanese woodblock prints – and while checking for the correct spelling of one of the artists who influenced him, I fell into a lovely hour of browsing Hokusai, Utamaro, Hiroshige and many others.

I love woodblock prints of Kyushu, a place that is lesser known for anyone traveling to Japan – even today — and Mt. Sakurajima in Kagoshima was a big inspiration for many artists.

This one is Kawase Hasui:

Kawase Hasui

This is another Hasui that I have always loved….

Kawase Hasui 2

And probably my favorite artist was one who came a bit later – Kiyoshi Saito. If you do an image search for him, you’ll see that his work was darker, more gray scale, and more modern than many of the woodblock artists of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Kiyoshi Saito

And finally, to finish, here is Hiroshi Yoshida’s Matterhorn. He was born on Kyushu but travelled extensively, so here we have Japan and Switzerland from 1925.

Yoshida Matterhorn

 

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“…the raw wind and weather of her lack…”

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Sometime last year I read and loved Jenny Diski’s Stranger on a Train, about Diski’s trip through America on Amtrak, and I’ve read many of her essays over the years, but I had never read her fiction. At the end of last year, I ordered several of her novels, and the first one I took up was her Apology for the Woman Writing, a historical novel about Marie de Gournay and Michel de Montaigne.

I read over half of the novel without bothering to check if Marie de Gournay actually existed (she did), and whether any of the story of her relationship with Montaigne was true or not (it was, it wasn’t), because Diski’s questions, as posed through her story, were infinitely more interesting to me. Later, the fact/fiction question does become relevant, and this adds another layer onto my appreciation for what Diski does in the novel.

Apology for the Woman Writing is a novel of ambition. And more to the point, of a woman’s ambition. It is the story of Marie, who falls in love with books and learning at a young age, but who is never able—because her nobleman father dies and the family subsequently loses most of their money—to enjoy or develop herself within that love of learning. Books, intelligence, and writing become a secret place for her, but, and this is very important for what happens to her, this intellectual space begins as and is constantly reinforced as a place of antagonism against the rest of the world. She loves these things against the wishes or understanding of her family, and later, of society.

Plot wise, the book is about how Marie falls especially in love with the recently published Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Her reaction to his work can only be described as cataclysmic. It is so violent that her family believes she has lost her mind. Her mother’s reaction is excellent:

It was quite clear to Jeanne that those wretched, godless books had finally worked their evil on Marie, and that her solitary life in the library with nothing but words as companions had driven her to melancholy madness.

And a few lines later, finally Marie speaks – a line which made me laugh out loud:

“I am not ill, Maman,” she whispered, still breathing fast, her face changed from dead white and vivid pink to the yellowish pale of parchment. “It’s Monsieur de Montaigne. He has ravished me.”

I love how over-the-top Diski is here – a nod, I think, to the melodrama of romances of the era, but also, for a reader, an undeniably true statement. What genuine reader has not felt ravished at some point by a book? By something utterly new and wonderful that comes through from the written word, directly to you. Reading is so incredibly intimate. It is a communion between the book and the reader. And in this case, because Montaigne was writing in this radical new form, taking himself as the subject and writing so freely about his musing thoughts, Marie becomes in a sense imprinted on him. And from this, only tragedy can ensue.

And it does, again and again. What I’ve written above about Marie makes her appear a sympathetic character. She is not, however, and for this Diski repeatedly impressed me. Marie is awful. She is proud and self-important, and she’s consistently delusional. She uses emotional blackmail to avoid censure, she continues to connive and strive to become what she wants to be: une femme de lettres. Diski’s fictional discussion around all of this is nuanced—how much is Marie simply a horrible person? How much is our perspective of her colored through the eyes of the men who are her inevitable gatekeepers? Could she have been different if born a man, or born into wealth? There are no easy answers.

As a piece of fiction, Apology for the Woman Writing has some odd bumps and rough edges, but as a book of ideas, it’s a delight. I love the liberties that Diski takes with Montaigne and de Gournay, I love the moments of insight into human nature that crop up in so many scenes, and I love the way she plays with the idea of a great writer (Montaigne) adopting a would-be writer (Marie) and the parallel this has to Diski’s own life.

I’ll finish with one of my favorite passages – written from the point of view of Marie’s maid (a fascinating character I didn’t go into) as she thinks about the difference between Marie and Michel de Montaigne, and it sums up one of the book’s salient questions:

It was not the differences in their wealth, or not that alone. Nor in their education. It was not even simply that he was a man and she was a woman, though that difference was implacable. It was that he possessed — and had been freely given — the mind, the talent, the originality: everything that was needed to make, and to seem not to try hard to make, what he wanted of himself. She was so exposed, no padding, just the near-transparent skin and bone of her desire chafing constantly against the raw wind and weather of her lack of what she needed in order to be what she knew was her true self.

Any suggestions of where I should go next with Diski’s fiction?

 

 

The Grasmere Journal

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I started reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere Journal the day after Christmas and have been dipping in each day. It’s a lovely, quiet book and it’s beautifully presented with illustrations and an elegant overwrap cover, all done by The Folio Society.

Wordsworth began the journal in May 1800, and it follows just over two years of time while she and her brother William (and others) were staying at Dove Cottage in the village of Grasmere.

I’m only about a quarter of the way into the journal, but already its entries revolve regularly around four different things: the natural world, the comings and goings of her brothers, short listings of cottage tasks, and descriptions of visitors or the people she passes while out on her many walks. For the first category, she has a wonderfully sensitive eye for nature. There is not a journal entry without some mention of the weather, of the look of a lake, the condition of the winds or any animals she might see – birds especially.

May 16th. The woods extremely beautiful with all autumnal variety and softness. I carried a basket for mosses, and gathered some wild plants. Oh! That we had a book of botany. […] I was much amused with the business of a pair of stone-chats; their restless voices as they skimmed along the water following each other, their shadows under them, and their returning back to the stones on the shore, chirping with the same unwearied voices.

I quite enjoy her listing of cottage tasks, even if this is as simple as mentions of baking a pie or putting out the laundry. They do so much work in their little garden over the summer, and eat in season and happily with what they harvest. The simplicity of it is appealing. And the walks each day to retrieve and send letters. The days as Wordsworth presents them are busy, but somehow that busyness includes what seems like leisure: walking, discussing poetry, garden work, etc. I’m trying not to overly romanticize what their life might have been like (Wordsworth mentions illnesses and I can only imagine how frightening these would actually be) but parts of it viewed from 200 years in the future seems quite idyllic. I’m sure it is the quiet I find mostly so appealing.

She writes often of the many beggars who come to their door or pass them on their many walks. I am often struck by these entries, in which she describes the situation of the women, children, or old men who come knocking at their door with such detail. Quite matter-of-fact, but in listing the details of their lives, it’s easy to read her interest and empathy.

Will finish with one of the small instances of humor I’ve come across so far, written after a friend walks her home one evening when the lake is particularly beautiful.

This was very kind, but God be thanked, I want not society by a moonlight lake.

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“I am what is missing.”

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For two years now, I’ve helped organize a small writers’ retreat in France with two other women. I’m immensely lucky to know the writers Laura McCune-Poplin and Sara Johnson Allen, whom I met when we were all three studying for our MFA in Boston over ten years ago. They are both talented, passionate writers and teachers – not to mention being quite a lot of fun to spend time with.

When Fog Island Mountains came out, the three of us had a mini-celebration over pizza in Mystic, CT of all places and got to talking about lives, schedules, writing, and teaching. We are all busy juggling work and writing and families and… none of this is surprising, this is how everyone in (most of) the world now seems to live. Sigh. Constant juggling, constant striving for balance. In any case, we threw ourselves a challenge that day—to manage a week away, once a year, no kids, no spouses, no cooking, just writing, just book talk, just walks in the country. And we wanted to provide this space for other writers, too, especially those in the same kinds of situations.

We founded L’atelier writers’ retreat and workshop within weeks, found a location and set a date.

IMG_20160612_090905.jpg

A word on the location because we could not have been more lucky—this is a small, rural bed and breakfast in France run by teachers and booklovers. The staff members have pooled their personal libraries to fill the place with books. And when we arrived last year for the first retreat, we were all delighted with the atmosphere—a mixture of elegantly eccentric and charmingly rustic. Think architectural salvage put to very good use mixed somehow with summer camp and the whole thing works. The sheer number of books in all the buildings and rooms that make up this unique hotel create the best ambiance.

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In any case, I’ve just returned from our second annual retreat and am still feeling inspired. It’s a rare indulgence to take a step back from the all-too-often-horrible, always-busy world and just focus on the things I love the most—reading, writing, talking with other readers and writers. It’s also an immense pleasure to hear how other writers approach their work and see their projects develop through conversations with other writers/readers. I’m not a natural teacher because I can be very nervous speaking in front of large groups, but I absolutely LOVE thinking about and discussing how people work through internal questions (both emotional and aesthetic) through poetry and writing and story. This fascinates me.

Last year we were five, this year we were ten. We brought our books, short stories, and poetry to this rural hideaway, we brought our internal libraries (a source of immense pleasure in discussion), we brought our critical minds and our humor. And we worked really hard.

I’ve come to associate the first stanza of Mark Strand’s poem, “Keeping Things Whole” with l’Atelier and I’ll put it here below. There’s a long story why I associate this stanza with this retreat, which I won’t go into… but here it is, because it’s lovely, because it recreates the feeling I have when I indulge this need of mine to take a step out of the world and be quiet and singularly focused for an entire week:

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
I am what is missing.

Reading, Writing & more Reading

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Reading:

I was away this weekend in Burgundy spending a few days doing (a much-needed) nothing, just walking about with my family and visiting small villages, some wine tasting, and plenty of good food. While on this small trip, I read Anne Carson’s short essay “Nay Rather.” Then I read it again. And this morning, I’ve read it a third time. Such a beautiful essay (and the accompanying poems are a treat as well). It’s about translation and so speaks to much of what I love to think about—untranslatability, how language works to create pause (in thought, in communication, in understanding), how language attempts (and/or fails) to replicate experience. Carson uses several examples to talk around these ideas—the trial transcripts of Joan of Arc, Francis Bacon’s artwork and how he rejected narrative, and Friedrich Hölderlin’s extremely literal translations of Antigone.

I read parts of “Nay Rather” to my daughter on Saturday when none of us could sleep while a very bad musician played LOUDLY on the street corner outside of our hotel, and she loved hearing about Joan of Arc because last year we stayed with friends in a place where Joan was supposed to have spent a night once (and my daughter first heard a version of Joan‘s story from a friend who is an inveterate storyteller). My daughter absolutely loved this line, “The light comes in the name of the voice,” as well as many of the lines from Carson’s poem “By Chance the Cycladic People”—her favorite being, “Clouds every one of them smell different, so do ocean currents.” It is such a joy that children do not mind this kind of language. None of it struck her as odd, she just loved how it all sounded.

So today I am happily focused on this idea of Carson’s of writing/language that “stops itself.” I think that Clarice Lispector does a lot of this, which is why some people may find her difficult to read. And I think that Hélène Bessette does this in her 1954 novel maternA (which hasn’t yet been translated, alas). Poetic language does this more than non-lyrical writing—it is so often about disrupting thought or creating heavy silences—but one of Carson’s examples is as non-lyrical as you can get. I’m quite certain there are thousands of examples, and I’d love to hear from anyone else. What other writers and works do this?

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A quick aside: In our meandering visits, we passed very close to the small village near Yonne where Colette was born. There is a small museum in her former childhood home, but we didn’t get there. I was thinking about Colette recently, reminding myself to read more of her work, but also because she is one of the writers on my list of “women who have yet to be (completely) translated.” Much of her work, thankfully, is available in English, but not all of it.

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Writing:

I’ve had a few pieces come out lately that I haven’t point to here. The first two are reviews, of Jonas T. Bengtsson’s A Fairy Tale (tr. Charlotte Barslund) and Ethel Rohan’s short memoir Out of Dublin. I really enjoyed both books, although they are very different from each other—both are unique love stories, both play with language (in very different ways), and both are about the effects of childhood on an adult.

And while I was away this weekend, Issue 9 – “The Disappearance Issue” – of Spolia came out, which includes one section of a forthcoming chapbook of mine called “Elemental: Variations.” There are many wonderful pieces in this issue, plenty of reasons besides my little contribution to download and support Spolia.

While I’m reporting on publications, I have a small poem—“nightjars”—in the latest issue of The Ann Arbor Review.

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More reading:

I have the immense pleasure of reading through the Readux catalogue at the moment, and getting ready to write about these charming little books. If you don’t know Readux, take a moment to see what they’re about.

Here are some of the other books floating about my life at the moment: three different Anne Carson are supposed to grace my postbox today or tomorrow: Glass, Irony & God; Men in the Off Hours; and Red Doc>. I cannot wait for these. And then a friend has pointed me in the direction of Monique Roffey’s Archipelago and The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng. So that’s me, what are you reading?

Fog Island Mountains – coming Fall 2014

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In February something very very very exciting happened – which I haven’t yet written about here. All the details have finally been worked out, so I can now make my small announcement.

My novel Fog Island Mountains won the Center for Fiction’s Christopher Doheny Award, sponsored by Audible. The book will be published this coming fall with Tantor Publishing. Here is what the book is about:

Huddled beneath the volcanoes of the Kirishima (Fog Island) mountain range in southern Japan, the inhabitants of small town Komachi are waiting for the biggest of the summer’s typhoons. South African expatriate Alec Chester has lived in Komachi for nearly forty years. Alec considers himself an ordinary man, with common troubles and mundane achievements—until his doctor gives him a terminal cancer diagnosis and his wife disappears into the gathering storm. Kanae Chester flees from Alec’s diagnosis, even going so far as to tell a recently renewed childhood friendship that she is already a widow. Her willful avoidance of the truth leads her to commit a grave infidelity and only when Alec is suspected of checking himself out of the hospital to commit a quiet suicide does Kanae come home to face what it will mean to lose her husband.

Narrating this story is Azami, one of Komachi’s oldest and most peculiar inhabitants, the daughter of a famous storyteller with a mysterious story of her own. Azami is interested in the kitsune folktales, stories of foxes that transform into women to trick and then marry the men they have selected, but once discovered were forced to abandon their families. Azami knows the foxes as a healer, but she learned of them first as a child, from her Grandfather’s stories and from her Grandmother’s deep-rooted superstitions.

As Azami writes (and invents and rewrites) Alec and Kanae’s story, also telling tangential stories about the couple’s three children and other Komachi townspeople, Fog Island Mountains becomes the story of an entire town and how it submits to this typhoon, how it watches a beloved English teacher get ready to die, and how it wonders at the unexpected disappearance of his faithful wife. In this Azami is re-inventing the kitsune folktale, revealing herself and cannibalizing her own difficult history.

The book is about illness and grief, about mixed culture families and relationships, and ultimately about storytelling. And (I tell you this because no one might ever notice) it is also a contemporary re-working of the longest of the classical Japanese poetry forms, the chōka (長歌).

I’m obviously really excited about this. (And obviously a little terrified, too). Once the book has a cover, I’ll post a link. And I will probably post a few excerpts over the summer.

here and there

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Just wanted to mention some of the writing and reading projects I’ve had the pleasure of seeing out in the world lately:

In August I had two reviews go up over at Necessary Fiction. The first was for the new webjournal Spolia. This is a sister publication of Bookslut and it promises really good things. Here’s just a bit of what I had to say about the first two issues:

These first two issues of Spolia establish that it is an extremely exciting new literary journal. Its dual engagement with the past and the present, its emphasis on translation, its unpretentious intellectual nature and its obvious but unstated conviction that women’s writing (as contributor or subject) is to be taken as seriously as men’s, and its sly embrace of often marginalized topics all mean that Spolia promises to become a worthy and worthwhile contributor to our 21st century literary discussions.

I make it very clear that I was really impressed with the first two issues and I’m really looking forward to see what else they come out with. You can read my full review here.

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The second review was for Anne Valente’s tiny little gem of a story collection – An Elegy for Mathematics. This was a lovely read. Intense and beautiful and thoughtful. A few months have passed since I read through these stories and I am still thinking about them.

This is how I begin that review:

The fourth line of “The Water Cycle,” the ninth story in Anne Valente’s slender collection, An Elegy for Mathematics, reads:

But sometimes it made me feel strange, for reasons I can’t explain, to think that maybe you knew we had separate lives in some way, and that sometimes we did things that weren’t always the same.

The narrator and the “you” of this beautiful little story are a mother and daughter, and the question the story ultimately asks is about what the tie between them is made of, how is it formed, but this single twisting sentence works to open up a discussion about the kind of questions Valente is posing throughout the collection. How exactly are two people connected? What does that connection feel like – physically, mentally, metaphorically? And how are we different despite that fundamental association, what does our difference do to affect and alter the bonds between us?

You can read the full review here:

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At the end of the summer I had a small fiction piece published over at District Lit called “the mercy and the movement.”  I’m working on a series of these, putting them together into a longer work. It was fun to see this part of the puzzle published separately. A few more pieces are forthcoming, so I’ll mention those when they are out in the world.

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I had the very good luck of placing a translation with Spolia (in their 3rd issue, The Wife) – this comes from my project to excavate never-before-translated women writers. Julia Allard Daudet is the first of the women I’m working on. If you are interested in French literature, you may have heard of her husband, Alphonse Daudet. Most of his work has been translated into English.

The piece itself is called “L’Inconnue” or “The Unknown Woman” and is about a woman who suddenly appears in a small Swiss alpine village and everyone speculates about who she is and why she’s there. It’s a tragedy – as all good romantic stories published in 1905 should be. Daudet was French so her setting in Switzerland was a special surprise. And the story is very much a retelling of the famous “Inconnue de la Seine” legend.

Spolia asked me a few questions about Julia Daudet and Swiss literature, and you can read the discussion here.

***

Last but not least, over at Necessary Fiction I recently reviewed Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall (translated by Philip Boehm). I am an unabashed fan of the publishing program at Peirene Press – foreign language translations in novella form. Chasing the King of Hearts is about a married couple (polish Jews during WWII) and what happens to them once circumstances separate them:

Here’s just a bit of the review:

This premise—that something as intangible and fragile as the connection and love between Shayek and Izolda should trump all impossible distances and insane governmental decrees and genocidal rules—is where the novella hinges. It is not so much that Izolda believes that within the context of the war she still deserves the success of her life and love, but rather despite it. On a purely psychological level, Izolda operates as if the war simply does not touch her. While her actions and movements are all prescribed and countered by what is happening in the Polish ghetto, in various prison camps, in Vienna, even in the Guben labor camp, her mindset remains firmly beyond these prescriptions. And this is this novella’s most remarkable offering.

You can read the rest of the review here.

Aside from all that I wrote about this book in my review, this is one of those books that really connects with a historical moment. That it does this through a character who literally rejects that moment is simply brilliant. And it also, though in a much quieter and subtle way, connects with the contemporary legacy of that moment. All of Krall’s work has been translated (from Polish) into German – if I’m not mistaken this is her only work now in English translation. Here’s hoping it all makes its way at some point.

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