Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘writing’ category

Pastoral by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz

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My translation of “Pastoral,” a short story by C.F. Ramuz was published in the Winter issue of The Kenyon Review. This is a lovely little story about a young shepherd girl and teenage boy. Ramuz’s particular eye for village life is so clever, so sharp. Here is a short excerpt:

The magpies are carried away like pieces of half-burned paper in a fireplace. They are standing a little below the forest. A pine tree forest. The forest cracks, the forest leans. They watch it tip backward all of a sudden, showing the red of its trunks, and then it leans forward again. It disappears beneath its foliage. The forest is red, the forest is black; it takes turns shifting from red to black. There is an explosion, a crack, and then they stop watching because they’ve thrown their two hands forward against the ground (turning their backs to the forest). The goats stop grazing, astonished at this grass that keeps moving, which seems to escape them like water running up an incline.

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read, write, translate

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I read. I read because I’m curious. Because I crave alternate realities. Because I want a book to show me how to unravel experience, unravel life. I read because books exist. Because storytelling and metaphor, symbolism and dialogue are all innately connected to who we are as human beings. And who we want to be as human beings.

I read carefully. I read carefully because I love language. I love that language has the power to transform us, alter our relationships, amend our opinions and change the world. I love the awe-inspiring genius of the very existence of language. I read carefully because I am afraid to miss something. Anything. Everything. The truth. The point. The truth beyond the point. I read carefully because I am willing to forget who I am and experience a book’s reality as my own and this vulnerability is worth respecting.

I read critically. I am demanding. I am severe. I loathe a book that gives up on me, that fails to ask questions, that chooses the easy way out, that forgets its vocation. I read critically because I want literature to work its hardest. To achieve something. To affect change and improve society. I want books to have an impact. To make us, readers and non-readers alike, pay attention.

I write. I write because I’m ambitious. Because I want to find new ways of expressing old ideas. Because I want to see if I can say something different out of what’s been said a thousand times before. And maybe, just maybe, say something entirely new. I write because words in combination are mysteriously powerful. Because words are so much more than just words.

I write because words can create a scaffolding of ideas, structures of vision, entire universes of thought. Because fiction is a way to mirror the world and re-cast it at the same time. Because fiction is alive but also contained. Because fiction waits for us on the page and yet once read becomes a gift to the mind that cannot ever be given back. I want to give gifts.

I write as a way of considering the unanswerable questions. Because each piece written offers a possible solution that can then change a thousand times over again. It just needs to be re-written. I write for those endless reconsiderations of the world. For their grace, their ability to forgive us our mistakes, to celebrate our successes in perpetuum. For the possibilities infinite in a fictional landscape.

I translate. I translate because I’m not satisfied with a single set of words to shape my world. Because I want to make other readers unsatisfied along with me. Make them curious about other places, other voices, other ways of thinking. I translate because I believe translation creates permanent pathways between someone here and someone else over there.

I translate because the act of translation makes me into a bridge between the reader and the writer in me, as well as a bridge between the cultures I’ve embraced. Because it allows me to inhabit the expat home I’ve chosen and the real home I’ve left behind.

I translate because translation is an impossible venture, a hopeless work. Because I will never create a flawless translation. I can only construct a path or corridor, a stylized explanation, an echo that resounds in a different key. But I translate because the humility in this repeated attempt and failure makes me a better reader, a better writer.

Reading Writer – Swift's Last Orders

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Let’s go back to Graham Swift. I’ve been thinking some more about Last Orders. I talked about the story when I wrote up my first post, but I want to spend some time looking at the jumble of voice and structure and detail that transformed this particular story into such a wonderfully-written book.

 

What strikes me only a few lines into the very first paragraph is the particular emotional structure of Ray’s voice. His edgy melancholy and gruff sadness. He is a sappy stoic. Ray is set up right away as our guide to the novel. He opens THE story and signals that this story will also be HIS story. There are a lot of characters introduced across the next few pages and sly allusions to almost every single subplot which means the novel threatens to become confusing. But it stays firmly in Ray’s perspective for 18 pages, long enough for the reader to feel steadied again, before switching to Amy.

 

Amy’s voice is the “chin-up, old girl” variety – a perfect blend of bitter self-pity and desperate pluckiness. She is so angry but she’s trying not to let that anger win. One of the novel’s strengths is its willingness to keep us in suspense as to why. And we’re also meant to wonder about June, the person to whom Amy is talking.

 

Eventually, although Ray remains the most frequent POV, each of the men gets a turn leading the narrative – Vince, Lenny, Vic. And Amy shows up a few more times. The effect created is very much like a gathering in a noisy neighborhood pub. Someone starts reminiscing and everyone adds the detail most important to them. The stories intersect but also swiftly diverge. Details start to get cluttered or vague. The voices of the novel’s seven narrators are similar because they all come from the same place and have lived similar lives, a feature of the novel that frustrated me at first, but as I read further, I think Swift manages to differentiate them where it matters – their judgments of others, their interior decisions.

 

Besides Ray, I found myself really drawn to Vic. He speaks directly to the reader only seven times and each time with this kind of fierce pride and solemnity about him. He is the only man in the group who seems to be at peace with himself and his life. Although he’s just a little pompous too. He can’t help feeling the power his job gives him, although he tries to be respectful of it for the most part. I suppose I liked the contradiction in that. A character that recognizes the authority he has over people at their weakest moments and who tries to honor that but who can’t help feeling just a bit superior. That seems very human to me.

 

Part and parcel of the constantly shifting point-of-view in the novel is the way each man describes the others, and his friendship in relation to each and then to all. It was interesting to compare how Vic thought others saw him with the glimpses Swift gives the reader of how they actually did. Same for Ray and Vince and Lenny. Human relationships are so complicated, with so much room for misunderstanding and false impression. The men in Last Orders have known each other for something like forty years and Swift does an excellent job of using a particular blend of their voices to bring all that baggage, both good and bad, into the present moment of their car ride to Margate.

 

This is a novel I could write pages and pages about. And after my first post, so many of you mentioned his other novel Waterlands, which I now have waiting for me on the shelf, along with Shuttlecock, so I’m really looking forward to both.

 

 

Reading Writer – Amsterdam and structure

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It has been ages since I put together a Reading Writer post and since I’m still coming off the high that is my weekly Tuesday morning meeting with my writing partner, I thought I might continue the conversation I’ve been having about structure and extend it a bit to what I’ve been reading lately.

 

When we talk about the structure of a novel, what exactly does that mean? For me, structure is the place where the author’s fingerprints are most likely to be visible. It’s what gets me asking questions like: Why was this particular scene placed after the last one instead of that scene on page 42? Why did parts of the story need temporal displacement? Why are we given four different points of view, shuffled to each give us a part of the story? And so on and so forth. Structure is about configuring the fictional elements and I enjoy trying to figure out why writers make the choices they do.

 

Because I read it recently, let’s look at Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. The book is divided into 5 parts, each of which has anywhere from 3 to 6 short chapters. Almost exclusively each chapter encompasses a single scene. I counted and McEwan uses only 22 scenes to structure his entire novel. Of note about these 22 scenes is that they are linear, branching directly forward from the first funeral scene both temporally and thematically. They build on one another, using either an event or a piece of dialogue to propel the story onward. It is an incredibly simple but also nearly airtight structure.

 

I am quite certain that McEwan did not divide his book into 5 parts by chance. So it follows that we can look at each part as an element of a traditional 5-part drama. And when I compare my notes on what happens in each of Amsterdam’s 5 acts, they follow exactly:

 

1 – exposition which ends with the “inciting moment”

2 – rising action involving secondary complications

3 – climax or turning point

4 – falling action

5 – conclusion

 

Amsterdam is a satire and the evilness of its characters quite exaggerated so it makes sense McEwan would have tipped his hat to burlesque theatre. It’s funny, when I first read this book I only liked it, I didn’t love it. But looking at its structure has bumped it up a few notches in my estimation. I love it when that happens.

 

But now for some nitty-gritty details (and maybe a small spoiler) – because otherwise talking about structure just wouldn’t be that much fun. McEwan does something interesting in terms of structure within two of the sections. The first comes in Part 2, when the story is still developing and when we are in Vernon’s perspective. Part 2 has five chapters and without the last three the entire book would fall apart. Sorry for getting so technical, but I’m going to use numeric indicators to make this easier. In Part 2, Chapter 3 (2 – 3), Vernon receives Clive’s suicide proposal, which he rejects as ridiculous along with the reader. But then something huge happens in 2 – 4 which changes everything so that 2 – 5 sees Vernon not only accepting Clive’s suicide proposal but requesting it be a mutual contract. The nesting of the presumably big event in between two smaller, seemingly benign events is a very cool structural trick with implications on how the ending impacts the reader.

 

The next interesting bit of structural work comes in Part 3, which has only three chapters. 3 -1 shows Clive on a “morning after”. We don’t know of what, only that he is upset and happily escaping to the Lake District to finish work on his symphony. 3 – 2 then jumps back in time to the “night before” to explain what got Clive so worked up in the first place. This chapter shows Clive and Vernon having a mammoth argument (related to that something huge in 2 – 4), which nearly ends their friendship on the spot. Then, in 3 -3, McEwan jumps back to Clive, now beginning his hike around the Lake District.

 

This back and forth is the only time the novel breaks with its strictly linear progression and the effect is quite interesting. In 3 – 1, Clive proclaims his friend a villain, in 3 – 2 we see exactly why he might be so but then in 3 – 3, Clive reveals his own spectacular failings. This structural movement is quite balanced, arguably better than a strict linear one which would have whalloped the reader with their fight and then sent Clive off to brood for two chapters. It is an interesting choice for McEwan to have made and it gives those three chapters an undulating emotional texture.

 

Well, I suppose I have rambled on here long enough and hopefully I haven’t bored too many of you who might not give a pickle for technical issues like this. Admittedly, I’ve picked a book with a structure just begging to be mentioned. I’ll try this again sometime later using a book with a more subtle structural pattern. That will be harder.

 

Paul Auster – Oracle Night

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Metafiction is fiction about fiction, writing that draws attention to the fact that it is writing, that it is not real, that it is a construct. There are zillions of different varieties of metafiction – novels about fiction writers writing other novels, novels about readers reading other books, stories within a story…that kind of thing. It’s a very old device and it works to add layers of awareness and meaning to an otherwise straightforward story.

 

Metafiction brings the reader into a story in a way that regular fiction does not – it asks you to divide your attention between what’s going on in terms of basic plot and how the story is being constructed or who is constructing it. In this sense, it reveals the narrative blueprint and attempts to show you something you might not otherwise have noticed – something about the power of fiction, about fiction’s relationship to what, I suppose, is its opposite, reality. This kind of fiction works in direct opposition to what John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, calls the vivid, continuous dream:

 

These novels give the reader an experience that assumes the usual experience of fiction as its point of departure, and whatever effect their work may have depends on their conscious violation of the usual fictional effect. What interests us in these novels is that they are not novels but instead, artistic comments on art.

 

It took me two or three tries to read past page 5 of Paul Auster’s Oracle Night, mainly because I generally dislike straightforward novels with writers as the main character. It wasn’t until I hit page 8 that I realized this wasn’t a straightforward novel and that Auster wasn’t writing a novel at all – but an artistic comment on art. So, I waited a few more days and finally sat down with it when I was in the mood to see what he might be doing.

 

Oracle Night begins with Sydner Orr, a writer, who is recovering from some unnamed but very serious illness. For the first time in months, Orr is able to begin work on a new manuscript which he bases on a small episode from Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon. Orr’s novel deals with a set of characters, who are also dealing with a manuscript – about a man who can predict the future. Already we have three stories floating around. Later in the book, Orr gets asked to write a screenplay about time travel. At another point, another character in the book, also a writer, shares some of his own work with Orr. Woven in and out of these other stories remains Orr’s ongoing account of his troubled marriage. The novel is a tangle of story after story after story. Somehow, hopefully, they are all connected. 

 

Unless their being connected is beside the point. Metafiction asks us to get over the idea of coherent story and look at a text’s fictionality. For Oracle Night this brought me to re-examine Orr, our first-person narrator, and to doubt him. I know that a first-person unreliable narrator is common in traditional fiction, but in that situation most often the reader learns early on that their narrator is not to be trusted, which then informs their unfolding understanding of the rest of the novel. In Auster’s world, the smooth surface of Orr’s narrative authority is never punctured. Instead, it was only at the end, looking back at Orr’s uncanny ability to create and maintain multiple stories coupled with his need to fictionalize his own reality that eventually had me wondering – it was like being handed an extreme version of the writer as puppet master. And suddenly I was looking at a whole other book.

 

But for the last week or so, I’ve been debating this interpretation. I realized that holding Oracle Night to my own strict definition of metafiction might have me reading a whole lot more into it than is really there. It’s a seductive idea but I can’t rule out the possibility I may just have it wrong. I see Auster commenting on the use of fiction and storytelling to mediate reality, on fate vs. destiny, on self-fulfilling prophecies…and maybe that’s all, and maybe that’s enough. But if Orr is a legitimate protagonist then a lot of that exploration stays too close to the surface for me.

 

Part of my hesitation may also come from the fact that I found myself disappointed with Auster’s writing style, so I’m unwilling to give him too much credit. I’m planning to read more of his stuff before deciding for sure, but I felt there was too much flat, sometimes clichéd writing in Oracle Night along with a lot of lengthy, unrealistic dialogue. Perhaps I am not forgiving enough of his homage to noir mystery or maybe he uses that style on purpose to make some point that I’m failing to see. Any Auster fans out there? How does Oracle Night compare with his other work?

 

 

Ethan Canin – Blue River

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On Friday afternoon I took a short reading break to get some distance from a translation I was working on and picked a random, unread book from the shelf. I spent twenty minutes with Ethan Canin’s first novel, Blue River, and knew I would go back to it later that evening and read until I had finished.

 

Which I did, turning that last page sometime after midnight and just sitting quietly with my thoughts and impressions of these new characters and images. I haven’t enjoyed a book so thoroughly in months, perhaps since sitting in the garden with Kirsty Gunn’s Rain and getting as equally enthralled in the writing and the voice. In many respects the books are similar – first person narratives about a traumatic past. Where Blue River differs is that its past is a much more distinct and separate location, far removed (and purposely so) from its present.

 

The novel begins in the present – a morning in June when narrator Edward’s brother appears on Edward’s front porch. The two have not seen each other (save once) in fifteen years. Their interaction is understandably strained but it becomes quickly evident that for all the empty space and time between them (an easy explanation for their awkwardness), there is something much more substantial in the way. But Edward does no explaining. The visit continues – they go to the zoo with Edward’s family, they eat dinner…it’s an extended and bewildering scene, infused with Edward’s elegant and weighty tangents about his life and work. But the most remarkable element of this first section is Edward’s conspicuous fear. He is terrified from the moment he finds Lawrence on his porch to the moment he puts him on a bus back to where he came from.

 

And then Canin has Edward take the story into the past. Slowly, carefully Edward redraws his relationship with his older brother. Here is where the novel’s unique structure comes into play but also its risky decision to switch into the second person – Edward has gone into the past in order to retell the stories of their childhood to Lawrence. He stops addressing the reader completely. What’s also interesting is that this retelling isn’t just an attempt to excuse or absolve himself from their eventual estrangement, it’s more a desire to understand how he became the kind of person he is now and why Lawrence didn’t.

 

I’m a sucker for realism, I know, but this is the kind of fiction I enjoy the most – no madcap characters, no outsized events except the intimate, family ones which feel huge when they upset what we believed were firmer foundations, no writerly pyrotechnics. Just unique framing, careful scripting and breathtaking detail. There are a few moments when Canin might have eased off the confessional or let the reader make the connections without forcing them upon us with one or two excess lines of explanation. But in general the novel is a smooth and graceful movement through one man’s memories and self-reflection.

 

Other than several of his short stories from the collection The Palace Thief, this is my first time reading Canin. I’ve already ordered his second novel, For Kings and Planets, from bookmooch and am going to see if I can find his newest, America, America in the shop in Lausanne. I’ve become an instant admirer.

 

 

Richard Ford, Wildfire

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At some point last year or the year before I read several short stories by Richard Ford – Rock Springs, Communist and Under the Radar, and knew immediately I would like to read more of his work. I recently mooched his fourth novel, Wildfire, and within a few pages had this strange feeling I had read it before. I hadn’t in fact but the voice and the situation in Wildfire is nearly identical to the story Communist. I actually love it when something like this happens because it lets me see how Ford was playing with an idea, a situation, a certain voice and a type of character. Communist was published in his collection titled Rock Springs in 1987; Wildfire was published as a novel in 1990.

 

The bulk of the story of Wildfire occurs over a few short days in the fall of 1960 and is told by sixteen-year-old Joe. Joe, the only child of golf-pro Jerry and homemaker Jeanette, gives us a first person account of essentially three days. The three days which culminate in a two-year separation between his parents.

 

The novel begins like this:

 

In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.

 

It wasn’t until we meet Mr. Miller thirty pages later that I thought about the technique of opening the novel with this line and how it functioned against the novel as a whole. It’s a big statement. In fact, it’s a complete summary of what the next 163 pages are going to be about. The advantage of opening with a line like this is that I know when I first see Warren Miller on the page that he is someone I need to pay attention to, someone who will affect the story in a significant way. The risk is that it prohibits tension from building on its own.

 

Do I think Ford pulls it off? Yes, but that’s maybe not the real question. What I find more interesting is that Ford creates a certain mood around Warren Miller when we do meet him for the first time that this first hint about him is entirely unnecessary. Without it, I would still have “met” him and thought – pay attention, something interesting is going on here. The line works only as an introduction to the overall story and the information it gives is less important than the first person voice it establishes. Which is, I think, more to the point.

 

First person narration of this kind is a delicate and often difficult technique. The narrator, from some distant point in the future, is going over the events of a significant moment in his life. In some instances, a life-changing moment. But presumably the narrator is now beyond that moment, so how does he go about recreating the intensity of that instance for the reader? There is a certain amount of hindsight and analysis involved in the narrator’s recreation (elements which help represent the story on multiple levels and add deeper meaning), but at the same time, the narrator needs to reproduce the events in a way that will captivate the reader. The trick is to find a balance between self-awareness and disconnect so as to avoid melodrama and using a heavy-hand with revelation.

 

 

 

In Wildfire, Ford handles his narrator with a lot of understatement and subtlety. Sometimes too much, however, because there were moments I started to wonder whether this kid was going to react to anything. But I think this is probably the better side to err on, because if he’d been throwing things left and right and getting in people’s faces, he would have taken over what was happening between his parents and the novel would have become his story. Instead, he functioned as a watcher, a listener, a timid evaluator. And although he did venture contemplative reactions to what was going on around him, he did not ever “act” or put anything into motion on his own.

 

This is an interesting choice for Ford to have made. I should re-word one of my phrases above, in the sense that this novel maybe isn’t supposed to be “life-changing” for the narrator, but instead, eye-opening. It is essentially a sequence of events from his adolescence which teach him a valuable lesson – about adults, about love and about his family ­– and that he tells slowly and carefully over 160 or so pages. It’s a clever way to side-step the structure of a traditional coming-of-age novel.

 

Another aspect of the novel which was fun to chart was the dialogue. It very skillfully mirrors the increasing disjointedness between Joe and his parents. As their lives grow more haphazard and out of control, so does the dialogue grow more awkward and uncomfortable. Joe was a particular catalyst for this. He rarely offers anything more than variations of “I agree” or poses simple, fairly naïve questions. This reticence allows the adults around him to say too much. I can’t think of anything more conducive to awkward honesty than someone who doesn’t dare offer the slightest contradiction or opinion.

 

I think it is difficult to create a narrator who doesn’t “act” – and perhaps frustrating for a reader who might be more accustomed to the “I” being the novel’s mover and shaker, the one who will undergo some kind of overt transformation or affect change. In Wildfire, Joe doesn’t seem to change much at all. But as a witness to the transformation of those around him, a transformation which renders his world particularly unstable, he’s powerfully sympathetic.

 

The writing in Wildfire is quite exquisite so I’ll finish up with this passage:

 

I watched a tall spruce tree catch fire high in the dark. A spark had found it, and it exploded in a bright, steepling yellow flame that leaped and shot out bits of fire into the night toward other trees, and swirled its own white smoke, flaming and then dying quickly as the wind on the hillside- a wind that did not blow where we were – changed and died. It all happened in an instant, and I knew it was dangerous though in a beautiful way. And I understood, just as I sat there en the car with my mother, what I thought dangerous was: it was the thing that did not seem able to hurt you, but quickly and deceivingly would.

 

 

Nabokov on Madame Bovary

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Of the essays I’ve read so far in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, the one on Madame Bovary was the most complex. Not only did I learn a lot about the novel, but I also got to peek in a window at Nabokov’s study style and passion for writing, translating and reading. His in-depth knowledge of the text reminds me that he believed we could never really read a text but only re-read it. It’s clear he knew the book practically by heart and had spent hours and hours analyzing scenes and conversations, diagramming character relationships and significant details. There are a few books I have read again and again, ones I believe I have nearly memorized, but Nabokov’s intimate knowledge of Madame Bovary made me want to go back to those books and look at them all over again, because surely there is more to see.

 

I also suspect he had a special appreciation for Flaubert because of Flaubert’s boldness in taking on an extremely taboo subject:

 

Indeed, the novel was actually tried in a court of justice for obscenity. Just imagine that. As if the work of an artist could ever be obscene. I am glad to say that Flaubert won his case. That was exactly a hundred years ago. In our days, our times…But let me keep to my subject.

 

Not that Nabokov would know anything about morality-based criticisms of a novel, oh no.

 

For this particular lecture, Nabokov doesn’t only focus on the actual text of Madame Bovary but he brings in a discussion of Flaubert’s letters to his then lover, Louise Colet, written while Flaubert was holed away in Normandy writing the novel. That added input adds a whole new dimension to understanding Flaubert’s intent. We often wonder whether great writers do things on purpose in their books, or if critics see things or find connections/allusions/hidden meanings the writer created by accident or maybe wasn’t fully aware of. The excerpts of these letters show that Flaubert knew exactly what he was doing at all times. And also that he worked very hard to construct his novel in a particular way according to a set of particular intentions.

 

Nabokov taught Madame Bovary to his students at Wellesley and Cornell using a translation by Eleanor Marx Aveling (the daughter of Karl Marx) which is available at Gutenberg. I don’t know how many other translations were around at the same time, but Nabokov has nothing but angry criticism for “the translators”. He went so far as to re-translate huge sections for his classes and made lists of mistranslated words.

 

One of his more interesting criticisms is when he says that the translator incorrectly translates Flaubert’s use of the French imparfait (the imperfect form of the past tense), a device which allows Flaubert to express the notion of uninterrupted time, things a person “used to do”, and any ruptures in that flow (all intentional constructs in his writing).

 

 

In Tostes Emma walks out with her whippet: “She would begin (not “began”) by looking around her to see if nothing had changed since the last she had been there. She would find (not “found”) again in the same places the foxgloves and wallflowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and the patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts, aimless at first, would wander (not “wandered”) at random…”

 

 According to Nabokov, Flaubert used the imparfait to fill the entire book with a sense of suspended animation, giving weight to Emma’s feeling of dreary monotony. That a translator would so casually overlook this aesthetic decision must have driven Nabokov insane.

 

Something Nabokov and I do not agree on is whether Charles knew about Emma’s infidelities. I mentioned this in my last post and after reading Nabokov’s essay I had to go back to the text to make sure I didn’t misunderstand something. But some time after Emma dies, Charles runs into Rodolphe (Emma’s first lover) in town and the two men go and drink a cider together. They’re talking but both men are looking at the other, just thinking of Emma. Suddenly Charles looks right at him and says, Je ne vous en veux pas, which means, I don’t hate you, or I don’t blame you. Flaubert, of course, turns the moment inside out by quickly switching to Rodolphe’s perspective and painting Charles in an awful, pathetic light – the same way Rodolphe treated him when he was secretly meeting with Emma.

 

I’m toying with the idea of picking up Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale, another I read in college but have nearly forgotten by now. It might be worth it after learning so much about Flaubert’s writing technique from Nabokov.

 

Otherwise, I’ve got to read Longinus this week. And I started Richard Ford’s Wildfire, which is quite short and I think I’ll finish up this afternoon. I am relatively unfamiliar with Ford’s writing style except for one or two of his short stories. In this novel, he’s using the first person and writes these kind of serpentine sentences with lots of commas and movement to them. I like the technique and how it informs my understanding of the narrator. But more on that later!

 

 

 

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Reading Writer – Gordimer's #5

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I’ve finally reached the half-way point in Nadine Gordimer’s fifth novel, A Guest of Honour. As I mentioned before, this novel takes a broader scope than her previous four. It isn’t so much about the individual perspective and experience of apartheid but more about the legacy of that system on an entire culture – both sides, those who had power and those who were never allowed the same responsibility or privilege.

 

The novel isn’t set in South Africa, but in a fictional neighboring state which has just gained its independence. A Guest of Honour asks two preoccupying questions – first, what are the elements of colonialism most difficult for the no-longer-colonized nation to move beyond and second, what role can (or, more importantly, should) the liberal white individual play in the dismantling and subsequent reconstruction of a culture he/she participated in along the way. For a novel written in 1970, Gordimer is exceptionally prescient as well as compassionate and I’m eager to work my way through to the end and experience either the solution she might offer or a deeper investigation of these important questions.

 

But what I really wanted to talk about today was style. In terms of writing technique, I get a lot from Gordimer. She’s a fantastic study and I just wanted to point out some of the things I’ve been noting throughout this book.

 

First, and I’ve mentioned this before when talking about Gordimer, is her remarkable facility with description. Her use of symbolic language is never heavy or extended – just a word or two, but she somehow manages to pick just the right word or image. A few examples:

 

The road to the village would be blocked, the dog ran over the soft fields breathing like a dragon…the kernel of the house was warm with oil-fired heating…

 

The spiders came out from behind the pictures and flattened like starfish against the walls.

 

Every now and then the trumpet blurted like a shout of obese laughter.

 

There were bats at the fruit, the most silent and unobtrusive of creatures, torn-off rags of darkness itself.

 

Second, she has unapologetic transitions. Simply effortless. In the example here, she moves her character from one side of town (his house) to another (his friend Hjalmar’s), to a completely different scene, as well as brings in another character, with a semi-colon and the word “yes”. It’s brilliant:

 

The trousers were a little short. He looked at himself in the damp-spotted mirror on the door of the wardrobe in his room. He had forgotten to buy a dress tie, after all; but Hjalmar would have one. Yes; and it was a beautiful tie, finely made of the best ribbed silk, with a Berlin label still on it. Emmanuelle laughed. “Nobody wears those butterflies anymore. Ras will lend you one of his.”

 

In her other novels, Gordimer already captures the flow of what I would call “party” conversation. Streams of sentences that don’t always connect, batted back and forth across whatever scene she’s got set up. In A Guest of Honour, which is heavily peppered with these kinds of busy scenes, she refines the technique. This novel features state dinners and policy discussions, dinner parties and after-hours political brainstorming. She gets the mood of these either heated or weary dialogues just perfect. I won’t quote them because they can go on for a long time but suffice it to say Gordimer can be useful to look at if you want to work on the musicality, the nonsensical nature, and the flow of written dialogue.

 

Finally, the third person omniscient narrative style she favors lends itself well to this kind of socially/morally investigative novel because she can telescope between her characters’ observations and more general insights. Here is one such example, taken from a scene when the main character Bray meets another white woman at a state dinner:

 

She did not know who he was; the curious fact was that people like him and her would not have met in colonial times, irrevocably separated by his view of the Africans as the owners of their own country and her view of them as a race of servants with good masters. They were brought together now by the blacks themselves, the very source of the contention, his presence the natural result of long friendship, hers the equally natural result of that accommodating will to survive – economic survival, of course; her flesh and blood had never been endangered – that made her accept an African government as she had had to accept the presence of ants in the sugar and the obligation to take malaria prophylactics.

 

This particular example is a bit longer than most, but I still think she carries it off because she’s able to sculpt our understanding of both characters with this kind of confident narrator. It’s such a smooth omniscient.

 

A Guest of Honour is a heavy book, rich with political maneuvering, complicated social philosophy and historical information. It’s a slow read. But at the same time, the sheer delight of turning the page to come across yet another of Gordimer’s stunning images or insightful descriptions significantly lightens the experience. Definitely one of those books I’m eager to keep reading but that I don’t really want to finish.

 

 

Reading Writer – Animal Dreams

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Writing negative criticism about books is something I dislike. Instead, I tend to avoid writing about the books I don’t wholeheartedly admire. This isn’t because I think I’m not entitled to my opinion. People have vastly different reactions to fiction and writing styles and everyone has their own personal aesthetic preferences so sometimes this is all it boils down to. But I still tend to omit a lot of my negative criticism unless I can find very specific reasons why I didn’t like something. I love picking fiction apart, discovering why I reacted positively to something, why something else put me off, where the tension comes from, how the dialogue works and on and on and on. In that vein, I’ve spent the last few days thinking about why I didn’t love my most recent re-read of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams.

 

Animal Dreams (1990) was Kingsolver’s second novel and there is a lot to admire, in particular the sections in third person narration about Homer. The writing in these shorter sections is really powerful and the emotional structure intricate – Homer’s shifts in lucidity give the narrator the opportunity for both honesty and denial and those two moods generate a lot of tension in relation to the main story. He also muddles the past and the present in such a way that scenes spill into one another; that fluid movement provides the basis for a large chunk of the story’s revelation.

 

The main story is a first person narration by Codi, Homer’s daughter, who has recently returned to her childhood hometown, for several reasons – her father is suffering from Alzheimer’s, her sister has recently gone south to work in war-torn Nicaragua and Codi is newly separated from her longtime lover. She is unmoored. She also harbors an immense distrust for the city she feels somewhat forced to return to.

 

There are moments in Codi’s story that get it just right, where her voice and the images she chooses to illuminate her thoughts or feelings strike all the right notes:

 

Hallie had never left me before. It was always the other way around, since I’m three years older and have had to do things first. She would just be catching up when I’d go again, swimming farther out into life because I still hadn’t found a rock to stand on.

 

or

 

Carlo was a rolling stone: an emergency room doctor, which gave him a kind of freedom almost unknown to the profession. You can always find work if you’re willing to take up with the human body as soon as possible after one of life’s traumas has left off with it.

 

But there are other moments when I wished she’d let the reader do more of their own thinking. There was very often a sentence too much or a line of dialogue that could have been left unsaid. I’m being super nitpicky but when you’re writing I think it’s important to pay attention to this sort of thing. Below is one of the passages I’m talking about:

 

We hadn’t been together since the Holiday Inn lounge, two years ago, but from Doc Homer you didn’t expect hugs and kisses. (He was legendary in this regard.) Hallie and I used to play a game we called “orphans” when we were with him in a crowd. “Who in this room is our true father or mother? Which is the one grownup here that loves us?” We’d watch for a sign – a solicitous glance, a compliment, someone who might even kneel down and straighten Hallie’s hair ribbon, which we’d tugged out of alignment as bait. That person would never be Doc Homer. (Proving to us, of course, that he wasn’t the one grownup there that loved us. )

 

I put parantheses around the sentences I think we could remove. They end up taking power away from what is ultimately a very compelling paragraph. This happens again and again in Animal Dreams. It’s something I see often in first person narration. Like the author wants to make their point over and over again, just in case the reader missed it. This certainly doesn’t destroy a book, but it can really slow it down.

 

Toward the end of the novel this excess writing happens a lot and this is where I think I started getting really frustrated. If you’ve decided to give your novel a happy ending I still think it’s important to resist the urge to tie everything up in a neat little package. The reunion scene between Codi and Loyd (her love interest in the novel) is just screaming daytime drama. But it didn’t have to be that way.

 

Shortly the train began to move again, very slowly, the speed of a living creature. You could still run and catch it. Loyd and Roger kept walking toward me without seeing me. (Standing there watching him, knowing what he didn’t, I had so much power and none at all.) I was on the outside, in a different dimension. I’d lived there always.

Then he stopped dead, just for a second. I’ll remember that. (The train moved and Roger moved but Loyd stood still.

He caught up to me in an instant, with a twinkle in his eye and his bag slung over his shoulder like a ready traveler.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.

He put one arm around my neck and gave me the kind of kiss no fool would walk away from twice. )

 

 

 

This is the end of a chapter and I think where I’ve suggested ending the scene infers everything about the rest, without giving us the cheesy line of dialogue and that awful twinkle in Loyd’s eye. Her lines about the train and the hint about running and catching it are just wonderful, they show us Codi’s ambivalence about her decision to stay without hitting us over the head with the idea. Those lines are subtle. Those other last lines are not.

 

I’m sure some people might disagree with me, since, as I’ve said, we are talking about aesthetic preferences. I think Kingsolver is an accomplished writer and I’m eager to read her most recent novels like Prodigal Summer and The Poisonwood Bible (which I read maybe eight years ago but without such an intense look at the writing) to see if this is characteristic of her style in general or was it something she did in the beginning. I can’t help thinking of it as a beginning writer thing – something we all do when we’re still learning how to trust our instincts and the story itself. Any thoughts?