Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘books’

Julie Otsuka – The Buddha in the Attic

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Those of you who’ve been following this blog might remember that I was born in Japan and that I lived there again for several years after finishing university. I tend to think of Japan as my second home—home in the sense of one’s origins, the place that helped create you. The US and Japan tend to flip-flop with Switzerland at the top of my list of countries that I think the most about – politics, history, literature. I’ll never have a Japanese passport and my Japanese has become woefully rusty in recent years, but the fact of my being born there means that I read books about Japan with more than just my usual curiosity.

This is the context that I couldn’t help carrying with me into my reading of Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic. I read an excerpt of this very slim novel back in the Spring 2011 issue of Granta; it was called “The Children” and it absolutely stunned me. I’ve studied a considerable bit of Japanese history, especially the Pacific War and the issue of The Comfort Women, but I’ve never done much looking at the Japanese immigrant experience, which is the central question of Otsuka’s book. It begins with a boat full of young Japanese brides, clutching photographs of the men they’ve married but never met. Each chapter then moves forward through what happens to this collective body of women: meeting their husbands, working in American fields or as servants or running laundries, having children, raising first-generation Japanese-American children, and relationships with “white” people. Eventually Otsuka makes her way to World War II and the internment of the Japanese-Americans.

Perhaps the most unique characteristic of the book is that Otsuka writes this novel in the first-person plural with the occasional bit of italicized dialogue to conjure up an individual voice. When I encountered this in the Granta excerpt, it is part of what gripped me, perhaps because it ends up reading like a long prose poem and creates a sustained emotional involvement in the narrative:

We laid them down gently, in ditches and furrows and wicker baskets beneath the trees. We left them lying naked, atop blankets, on woven straw mats at the edges of the fields. We placed them in wooden apple boxes and nursed them every time we finished hoeing a row of beans. When they were older, and more rambunctious, we sometimes tied them to chairs. (…) But when they tired and began to cry out for us we kept on working because if we didn’t we knew we would never pay off the debt on our lease. Mama can’t come. And after a while their voices grew fainter and their crying came to a stop. And at the end of the day when there was no more light in the sky we woke them up from wherever it was they lay sleeping and brushed the dirt from their hair. It’s time to go home.

Before starting the entire book, however, I worried that this particular narrative perspective would start to wear after fifty pages or so, but that isn’t the case, at least it wasn’t for me. I admit that my interest in Japanese history might make me less objective than others. In any case, the book reads really quickly (it’s only 129 pages) and is quite beautiful. Otsuka presents the diversity of the immigrant experience through a first-person plural narrator that manages, quite cleverly, to be both many women and one woman all at the same time. At the very end she affects a subtle shift in perspective that closes the story in a meaningful way; I thought this was really well done.

Apparently her earlier novel, When the Emperor was Divine, is more specifically about the internment experience. It is fitting then that The Buddha in the Attic doesn’t go further than the packing and the leaving and the subsequent emptiness. The disappearance of the Japanese from their homes.

My final comment about the book is that it was curiously uninterested in anger. Otsuka is writing about the treatment of “foreigners” in American society but she does this without laying blame at anyone’s feet. It’s quite fascinating how she manages to do this. It’s all very gentle, really. And yet still provocative.

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Dead Writer’s Book Group

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Wanted to announce a new project coming up called The Dead Writer’s Book Group. This idea came up last week between myself, Myfanwy Collins (of Echolocation, I book I loved and wrote about at Necessary Fiction but also here) and Anne Korkeakivi (of An Unexpected Guest – this book is just out and I am reading right now and will write about soon!).

The idea is quite simple: each month we will host a group discussion of a work by an author who has (unfortunately!) passed on. Our first pick is Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers. Discussions can take place in two places – either on the blog The Dead Writer’s Book Club or on Twitter, and will run for the entire day on the first Monday of every month. We aren’t starting in May but in June, so we will be discussing McCullers on Monday June 4th.

I will for sure be posting about the book on the DWBG blog just before the first “meet-up” on Twitter, so whether you prefer a blog discussion or tweeting, anyone and everyone is welcome to join in. And I hope you will!

For the Twitter discussion look for: #ddwritersbkgp .

I’ve read all three of McCullers’s best known works: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café, which is probably my favorite. This will be a chance to read one of her lesser known works and discuss it. I can’t wait.

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J.A. Tyler – Variations of a Brother War

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This week’s review at Necessary Fiction is by me, of a lovely novella written by J.A. Tyler. Variations of a Brother War is actually a novella-in-verse, each page containing a triptych of 100-word stanzas bound together by a common theme. The book has about fifty* different themed triptychs, and together they tell of two brothers, Miller and Gideon, and their love for the same woman, Eliza. The book is set during the American Civil War and so it is also about fighting between “brothers” in that symbolic sense.

Here’s a small excerpt from my review:

As the title suggests, there are many stories here in Variations of a Brother War, and of course there is only one story told in myriad ways. Gideon and Miller will die several deaths, Eliza will love both men and reject both men. She will love many times. She will be happy. She will be alone. Mothers die and fathers leave, both become ghosts who then return again and again to Tyler’s valley of cabins and rage and love-gone-wrong. Despite the strictness of the structure, the book offers a freedom of story and meaning, a chance to be read again and again in the joy of new discovery.

Variations of a Brother War is the first book to be published by a small press out of Portland, OR called Small Doggies Press and based on this first selection, I’m really excited to see what they’ll come out with next. This was a fun, thoughtful and beautiful book to read; it took me only a few hours and so I had the chance to read it again twice over the next couple of days.

Read the full review here.

*I’d have to check for the exact number and maybe there are only 34 or 36 different triptychs, which would be a neat connection to the Civil War since this is how many states there were at the beginning and then at the end of the Civil War – but my memory of the book tells me there are more…

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Barbara Pym – Quartet in Autumn

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After discovering Barbara Pym earlier this year, I went on a mini Pym binge and read several of her books in quick succession – Excellent Women, No Fond Return of Love and Jane and Prudence. Then I jumped ahead and read her “come-back” novel, Quartet in Autumn, which is markedly different from those earlier books. In those earlier works, Pym is often laugh-out-loud funny. Although many of her characters are lonely, they are almost always able to take an ironic stance toward that loneliness, which lightens it – at least for the reader.

However, Quartet in Autumn, although it has some traces of humor, is a thoroughly serious book. I’d even go so far as to consider this short novel a quiet tragedy. Much of Pym’s usual preoccupations are present, including unmarried men and women and clerical life, but she isn’t teasing anyone with these ideas. The focus of her revelatory concern goes beyond these smaller social issues; she exposes the very nature of loneliness.

Quartet in Autumn is about four office colleagues – Marcia, Letty, Edwin and Norman – and their respective solitary lives. Much of what Pym describes is heartbreaking. Marcia storing up empty milk bottles and canned food, Letty listening to the radio alone in her room in the evening, an angry Norman watching young people play in a park at lunch, and Edwin’s cultivated obliviousness. These four individuals are horribly, horribly lonely, but so stuck in their mode of living that they are unwilling to do anything that might rumple the surface of that loneliness. Each time an offer comes about (and there are several throughout the book) that might somehow decrease someone’s isolation, it is always immediately rejected.

Pym has an incredible eye for character differentiation. With a less careful writer, these four people could all start to resemble one another because, at least on the surface, they really do all have a lot in common. But no, Marcia and Letty are so different they can hardly speak to one another and Edwin and Norman also sit on different ends of the “old bachelor” spectrum. Watching these four interact, first at the office and then later after Marcia and Letty have retired, is somewhat funny at its lightest, but quite painful at its worst.

I must say that one of the things I find curious about Pym is her complete and utter lack of sensuality. These four people are lonely, yes, but she doesn’t really push their loneliness outside of an intellectual representation. How do I put this? There is never much concern for the physical reality of being lonely. The issue of never being touched for a person who lives alone is mentioned once, via another character, a social worker who checks on Marcia actually, but Pym never allows her actual characters to express themselves through this filter. What is remarkable to me is that Pym is so effective at conveying the loneliness of her characters without really resorting to an investigation of their physical loneliness.

Although, having said that, one of the characters in this novel, Marcia, manifests her loneliness through anorexia, which could be considered a physical representation. Yet this is also about control, about denying the physical. So it’s almost an extreme version of what I just said above.

Quartet in Autumn has a typically Pym-like ambiguous and perhaps frustrating ending. A possible reprieve from loneliness is again on offer, but Pym doesn’t tell the reader whether it will come to anything.

I am not usually very interested in the life of a writer – I prefer to take the whole of their work and let that sit with me – but the trajectory of Pym’s writing career intrigues me, especially the forced 13 year hiatus she took because no one was interested in publishing her after she’d finished her sixth novel. She was resurrected apparently because two prominent male writers championed her work. I’m curious how she managed those 13 years – I know that she continued to write because what she wrote was eventually published. Her diaries are published as A Very Private Eye and there is a biography of her by Hazel Holt called A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym.

Has anyone read either? Thoughts?

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Tuck and Hustvedt

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There is a stack of books on my desk glaring at me. Seven books to be exact. All deserving a much better review than I am about to give them. But in order to move forward – I’ve waited too long – here we go with a first round of bookish thoughts to clear away two books:

I read Siri Hustvedt’s The Summer Without Men almost in tandem with Lily Tuck’s I Married You for Happiness and so the two books are linked in my mind. There are some notable similarities between them. First, the timeline factor – Hustvedt’s book is about one single summer in the narrator’s life while Tuck’s is about a single night. Second, both books offer somewhat controversial endings. And third, both books are concerned with reviewing a marriage. I Married You for Happiness is about the night the narrator’s husband dies unexpectedly. She sits with him for that one night and thinks back over their thirty-some years together. For Hustvedt, narrator Mia’s “Summer Without Men” comes about because of her husband’s infidelity and so they separate for several months as each works out what has happened.

I discussed I Married You for Happiness with my book group last month, and the book improved upon discussion. I enjoyed the book on my own while reading it but I overall a little ambivalent. Much of what Nina, the narrator, remembers is unpleasant—the unhappy moments in her marriage, for example, or moments when she failed him or he failed her—and she paints her husband in a somewhat unfavorable light. Not that this is automatic grounds for my not liking the book. On the contrary, I liked the unexpected nature of what she chooses to remember and discuss and what it says about her and especially “our” expectations of a successful marriage. At the same time, however, Nina’s negativity distorts a little how I perceived and experienced her grieving.

In the book, Nina’s husband was a mathematician and Tuck uses this bit of information to filter the narrator’s memories through certain mathematical constructs and ideas. Albeit a tiny bit gimmicky, this was one of the most interesting parts of the book. I say gimmicky because I feel that certain scientific ideas (i.e. quantum physics) get a lot of play outside the realm of hard science and not always correctly. There is something very romantic about quantum physics and difficult math, but we don’t always understand exactly what we’re transposing into a metaphor used in another discipline. So I was wary of Tuck’s project in that sense, but I should say that she doesn’t ever go too far. Nina isn’t a mathematician or a physicist and she doesn’t understand much of what her husband often talked about. This is perhaps something she regrets; at least she is fixated on his inner life and how she negotiated it or matched it to hers at the moment of his death.

The science idea Tuck uses the most is Schrodinger’s dead/alive cat-in-the-box thought experiment, which is essentially about the nature of observation and reality. She does something interesting with this idea at the end of the book – a “trick” that certainly divided the opinions in my book group.

All in all, I Married You for Happiness is a thoughtful book and one worth revisiting in ten or twenty years time, for example. It will undoubtedly affect readers differently at different stages of their life and I like that. The mark of a good book. Tuck’s writing is also quite lovely—easy but elegant. The book reads quickly and yet contains much to think about.

Writing style seems to be a good enough bridge then to cross over to The Summer Without Men. Hustvedt is a different kind of writer, although she isn’t directly opposite in terms of style. Her prose is not dense, but it is a little thicker than Tuck’s. If I weren’t afraid it would sound too negative, I would call it more academic.

In any case, The Summer Without Men throws quite a challenge at the reader with its premise. Mia’s husband Boris (husband of thirty years) asks for a separation because he has fallen in love with a young woman and wants to explore this new development. This news is so shocking to Mia that she ends up in the hospital with a kind of psychic collapse, where she stays for a week or so before coming around and heading back to her hometown for the summer. The book then details her grieving (how else can you call it?) as well as the relationships she makes while there – with her aging mother and mother’s friends living at an old folks home, with a group of teenage girls to whom she teaches poetry and with her next door neighbor, a young mother with a possibly abusive husband.

As you can see, the book attempts to embrace a woman’s entire timeline. In this, I think, it is incredibly successful. Mia’s discoveries about the lives of the older, widowed women, her negotiations with the teenagers, her support from and to the young mother next door are all really well done. Of course all of this is framed against her own understanding of herself in relationship with Boris and what it means that he has thrown her off. There is a lot of feminist thought in The Summer Without Men and never does she offer any cute or easy answers.

Now, when I say that the premise is a challenge, I say it because of the narrator’s break down and hospitalization and the fact that her husband of forty years, knowing how she suffered, continued with his affair. I knew that the book would ultimately involve the question of reconciliation and I knew that if she went back to him, I would probably hate the book. I will not reveal what happens, nor will I say how I felt about the ending. The book is good enough for all the other reasons mentioned above to withstand what might be controversial about the ending.

 

 

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Nadine Gordimer – No Time Like the Present

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In 2008, I read all of Nadine Gordimer’s fourteen novels from start to finish. From her excellent début, The Lying Days (1953), to her 2005 novel Get A Life. (If you’re interested, here are the two wrap-up posts from that project, Wrap-up #1 and Wrap-up #2 and I think they serve as a good introduction to her work.) Reading someone start to finish is a hobby of mine, but Gordimer’s oeuvre is so big and diverse that it was a wonderfully satisfying project. It also gave me an appreciation for her writing, instead of what tends to get trumpeted more often, her message. Her latest novel, No Time Like the Present, just came out in March and I finally finished this rather grand, sweeping 421-page novel the other day.

I certainly don’t want to think that No Time Like the Present will be her last novel. At 88, she is incredibly sharp and has said that she continues to write. But if circumstances dictate that it is her last novel, a hundred years from now people may suggest that she planned it this way. More than any of her other post-Apartheid novels, this book will serve as a detailed document of the years between say 1991 (just before Apartheid was banned in 1994) and 2012.

The book is about a couple, Jabulile and Steve, who meet and fall in love while fighting against Apartheid. Being a mixed-culture couple, they are married in secret out of the country and live hidden for a few years in the country until 1994. When Apartheid is banned, their relationship becomes legal and their lives in this new independent situation begin. They have two children, Sindiswa and Gary Elias, and they both work jobs that give them power to affect change in the radically transforming South African society. Jabu is a lawyer and Steve a professor.

No Time Like the Present covers a lot of territory – it touches on so many subjects and so many issues of post-Apartheid society: violence, government corruption, poverty, immigration, continued racism. It looks at how Steve and Jabu must re-define their relationship that was once clandestine but is now accepted. It looks at how their children grow up in a society that now legally accepts their mixed-culture status. The second half of the book focuses on one particular issue—the brain drain. Steve begins to look at the possibility of moving to Australia, at the possibility of giving himself and his children a different sort of life.

That discussion is where the book generates a lot of power. (And where, as an expat myself, from a country that has its own set of difficult and frustrating social and political issues, I had my most personal reaction to the story Gordimer tells.) When a person has invested their young adulthood in a movement to better the society they live in, the idea of abandoning that society does not come easily. Both Steve and Jabu are disillusioned with the governmental corruption that ensues once Jacob Zuma becomes president, they are angry at the violence and poverty that explodes all over the nation. They are faced with the fact that no matter the laws, the capitalist system will effectively continue to segregate their society. Gordimer does a really excellent job of revealing the complications behind the desire for escape and the desire to stay behind to continue to fight.

Where No Time Like the Present disappointed me just a little is that I’ve always felt that Gordimer manages to effectively blend politics with personal. Even in Burger’s Daughter, which is not one of my favorites and one of her most overtly political, there are passages of writing, insights into complicated human emotion that rise above the rapid-fire political discussions that Gordimer has no qualms inserting into a book. A Guest of Honour is similar in that despite the diplomatic meetings and political cocktail parties, there are brilliant descriptions of life lived, of landscape, of rare human connection. She has an incredible talent for finding a description that unbalances a reader, that reveals something new.

And yet this was mostly missing in No Time Like the Present. If it’s possible for a book to be both dry and passionate, then this is the best description. The narrative is fast-paced and distanced, and it doesn’t ever, or very rarely, linger on the intangible parts of a story—the physical details of landscape and character, the strange observations of individuals within the story. Because of this, I ended up with the feeling that Steve and Jabu could have been any mixed-culture couple, that their children could have been any set of siblings from the new South Africa. And so their story, although interesting and filled with “event,” did not move me so much. I suppose the way Gordimer tells this story makes the book an important artifact, perhaps even an important literary artifact, but, for me at least, it didn’t make the book an excellent piece of fiction.

At her reading in London a few weeks ago, I was too shy to ask a question and I hadn’t yet finished the book anyway. But if I had the chance now, I would have loved to ask her why she used such a dash-over-everything narrative style and whether she knew she was sacrificing “story” for documentation. This must be something she considers—she is a fine writer, a powerful writer, most of her books have balanced this tricky problem with elegance. I’m thinking of The Conservationist and July’s People, The Pickup and My Son’s Story, for example. All novels that are powerful documents of a troubled society, but more than that, are examples of compelling and effective storytelling.

 

Delphine de Vigan – Les Heures Souterraines

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My French book group meets this coming Monday evening, and this month we selected Delphine de Vigan’s 2009 novel – Les Heures Souterraines. De Vigan has six novels to her name, although this is my first experience reading her. Les Heures Souterraines was a Goncourt finalist and translated into English as Underground Time (Bloomsbury).

The book follows two desperately unhappy people—Mathilde and Thibault—for exactly one day. Their unhappiness stems from two very different situations. Mathilde (who is a widowed mother of three boys) is being bullied at her job. The bullying is pretty horrific, so horrific in fact that it starts to undermine the book’s verisimilitude. Mostly because about halfway through, it becomes very hard to understand why Mathilde has even stayed in this office – unless we are to assume that it would be otherwise nearly impossible for her to find another job. This is a detail, perhaps, but one which the author could have easily dispensed with and didn’t, and so it weakened my otherwise intense sympathy for Mathilde.

The bullying, however, was expertly done. And quite frightening. Les Heures Souterraines draws an extremely realistic portrait of a kind of harassment—not at all sexual—that gave me chills. After daring to publicly contradict her boss (at a moment when she was “in favor” with this vain and power-hungry man), Mathilde is subsequently ostracized and then repeatedly set-up to fail or disappoint. The day the novel follows her she is at the breaking point.

Thibault’s unhappiness is less defined. He’s recently realized that the woman he’s been seeing will never love him back, in fact, she finds pathetic, even enraging, the whole idea of his loving her. There is more, namely a drunken argument fifteen years ago that resulted in the loss of two fingers and wrecked his chances at becoming a surgeon. So when we meet him, he’s been working for years as an on-call emergency doctor in Paris, a stressful and unsatisfactory job.

Les Heures Souterraines is a work novel in many ways, and it spends a considerable amount of time exploring how our professional life, separate as we may keep it from our personal life, becomes a strong and unavoidable reflection of a person’s identity. What happens to Mathilde is so unexpected, a completely unforeseen violence and an attack on who she believed she was, that she becomes paralyzed, and by the time she realizes that she must act, do something to change what is happening, it is already too late. For Thibault, the disconnect between the person he wanted to be and the person he finds he has become is so great that he has simply become numb.

De Vigan sets up the expectation that Mathilde and Thibault are destined to meet on the day in question and that this meeting will change the course of their lives. I won’t give anything away, except to say that de Vigan both fulfills this expectation and completely subverts it. That dual result is as frustrating as it is thought-provoking—I suspect my book group will have much to discuss.

Although I read this book in two sittings, and last night I literally could not put it down, I also found myself mostly reading for Mathilde’s story and quite uninterested in Thibault, except as a possible catalyst for Mathilde getting out of her difficult situation. I don’t think this was an inherent problem of the novel’s dual narrative, a technique I usually like, but more because of the contrast between Mathilde and Thibault, which could easily be described as active and passive. Some of the problem comes from Thibault’s psychological state on the day in question—he is so numb that he is difficult to access—but it’s also because de Vigan seems content to leave him more of a sketch compared to the intricately detailed portrait she creates of Mathilde.

After this first experience, I’ll be interested in reading more de Vigan. She is apparently best known for an earlier novel, No et Moi. Her other books include both autobiographical works and true fiction. I’m always quicker to pick up fiction, and her novels seem to favor urban-setting solitude narratives, something I feel (although I’m saying this off-the-cuff and could be wrong) that not many contemporary women writers take as their subject. Loneliness in a domestic setting, yes, loneliness within a couple or because of a broken family setting, yes, but a book that explores the loneliness of the greater urban world seen through a female protagonist strikes me as relatively unique.

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Meeting Nadine Gordimer

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If you have been reading my blog for any amount of time you have probably noticed that one of my favorite writers, if not my all-time favorite writer, is Nadine Gordimer. Back in December I got word (hat tip to NOCA and Guilherme) that she would be giving a reading at Bloomsbury in London in March. After a little debate—okay, not much debate at all really, just some logistical negotiations for childcare and work schedule—I decided to buy a ticket and fly over for what was probably my only chance to attend a Gordimer reading. She turns 89 this year and she doesn’t often travel outside of South Africa.

The reading was Monday night and was held at the lovely Bloomsbury offices at Bedford Square. It was a very small gathering, not more than 50 people. I attended with two wonderful friends, who are also writers. Once inside, with our coats handed over, we were directed into a reception room for a glass of wine. Within seconds one of my friends turned to me and said, “She is sitting right over there. And you must absolutely go up to her right now.”

I hesitated. Because, first and foremost, that is what shy people do when faced with someone they admire very much. But also, it was very informal. It was not quite clear whether she was going to be signing books already before the reading, (of course, why else was she seated in this room with a little table in front of her?) and I’m just the kind of person who doesn’t want to bother anyone, doesn’t want to be that awkward person who speaks too loud or says something ridiculous. I’m sure I sputtered a few half-finished sentences that all started with, “Well, I’m not…” and “Maybe we shouldn’t…”

But thankfully my friends would have none of my silliness and we made our way over to Gordimer, got behind another would-be book signee and waited our turn. I gave her my copy of No Time Like the Present – her latest novel, and that came with tickets to the event – and managed to say a quiet, “Thank you,” once she’d signed, but that was it.

Until my friend stepped up, beaming and a little mischievous, and asked Gordimer whether she minded having her photograph taken with me. I was embarrassed, ridiculously so, but am now forever grateful to my outgoing friend. She also forced me to sit in the first row once we moved into the reading room, and hooray that she did; of course I chose the 2nd or 3rd row – because that is what shy people do. Instead, I got to sit for an hour just two feet away from Nadine Gordimer and watch her think and speak as she read and answered a series of questions.

I have admired, if not loved, each of her novels, and have read several many times. I’m now halfway through her fifteenth novel, No Time Like the Present, and while it will probably not become one of my favorites (like The House Gun, The Pickup, Occasion for Loving and My Son’s Story, for example), it is a very important work of fiction. It details contemporary, post-Apartheid South Africa by following a bi-cultural couple, married in secret just before Apartheid is dismantled. It is the story of their married life, their transformation from freedom fighters to legitimate couple and about their children who grow to maturity without the same constraints placed on the parents. It is a fiercely political novel and an intelligent work of fiction. I’ll be writing more about it when I finish.

On Monday evening, Gordimer introduced the novel, read a few pages and then answered questions. Watching her, I had to remind myself that she is 88 years old. She is incredibly sharp. Elegant and sure-spoken.

The nature of her fiction invites tangential political discussion, and this is something that I do enjoy, but our time with Gordimer was quite short and I would have loved being able to talk more about her fictional style. She has a unique narrative perspective that has developed in her writing over the years – the editor at Bloomsbury who moderated the evening called it “simultaneous narration.” She’s always had an absolutely sparkling first-person or omniscient narrator, but around, say, A Sport of Nature or None to Accompany Me (both published in the 90s), she started using a slightly different technique, a kind of layering of the close 3rd person. The perspective jumps from person to person, even sometimes within the same paragraph. It takes a little getting used to, but it gives her the ability to reveal what each character is thinking at any given moment.

Gordimer is often discussed in terms of the message or the content of her fiction, and understandably so, but I would love to read more (and to have heard more at the reading) discussions of her style. She has said on many occasions, and she repeated this on Monday, that she is not a “political writer” or any other combination of adjective and writer. She is simply a writer. In my (humble) opinion, she is too often overlooked for the way she portrays human feeling in any context, political or otherwise, as well as for the quality of and unique feel to her prose.

I’m still basking in the afterglow of my whirlwind trip to London and this reading. It was a small gathering, it was only an hour and a half, I was too shy to actually say anything to her except variations of “thank you,” but I feel very lucky to have actually met Nadine Gordimer after spending so many years reading, admiring, and thinking about her fiction.

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Leigh Stein – The Fallback Plan

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This week at Necessary Fiction, I reviewed The Fallback Plan, a début novel/la from Leigh Stein. The book was published by Melville House in January; it was their 200th book and was selected to mark their 10th anniversary.

Small excerpt from the review:

Luckily for the reader, Esther’s parents force her to get a job as a nanny with some family friends. But this isn’t just an ordinary family. Amy and Nate have recently lost their second child, a baby girl named Annika. They hire Esther to watch their four-year-old daughter May so that Amy can get her life back on track and start painting again.

This combination of grieving-for-a-lost-child-family and refusing-to-grow-up-Esther is tailor-made for the kind of catharsis that Esther is going to need to get herself out of her parents’ basement and back into the real world. Minor incidents transpire. Esther makes mistakes. Amy and Nate reveal secrets. Esther, thankfully, gets a glimpse of real trauma.

Read the full review here.

Claire Messud – The Hunters

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I may not have mentioned this before, but I’m a huge fan of the novella form. I usually read in the evenings and on a good day, I’ve got about an hour and a half – just enough time to read 100 to 150 pages, depending on the kind of writing. And when I can start a fictional world and finish it in one sitting, it’s like getting to experience the author’s complete vision all at once. No time to forget details in between readings, no interruptions. Just me and the story. It’s an incredibly satisfying way to read.

I wrote in my last post about the first novella (A Simple Tale) in Claire Messud’s The Hunters; the second novella, however, is where the collection takes its title. It’s a funny title, actually, and one that only makes sense about halfway through. The novella isn’t about hunting, but it makes use of the idea of hunter & prey. The novella is about an academic, recently suffering a romantic break-up, who lives in a strange out-of-the-way flat in London for a summer doing research and about a relationship (an odd relationship) that springs up with one of the neighbors.

Now, it took me several tries to write that last sentence without giving away the gender of the narrator. This is something Messud actually withholds from the reader – I want to say completely, but I’d have to re-read the whole book to be sure. I think it is never positively confirmed one way or another, although I have my strong suspicions. While I found the technique a little awkward, I enjoyed what she ultimately did with this ambiguity because the story appears to attempt two things: first, it becomes universal, and second, it dares the reader to ask whether it matters and whether the writer has confirmed the narrator’s gender through diction and voice.

The Hunters is an interesting little book because it’s a character study, and in many ways it feels like an experiment. The writing is a little bit impenetrable with lots of subordinate clauses and hemming and hawing and this makes it feel as though Messud got deep into character to write in this particular first person. I like that kind of textual richness, even if I don’t instinctively love this kind of prose. A quick example from the narrator’s second run-in with the neighbor:

But when I next saw her—in broad daylight, on the Kilburn High Road, emerging from one of those murky junk shops whose merchandise is plastic tat of innumerable types and uncategorizable vileness, each item more useless than the last—there could be no doubt that she was no figment. People clearly saw her—although I imagined that they, like me, could not bring themselves to look at her—and she had, clanking at her side, plastic bags full of purchases that were undoubtedly real—as real as the Kilburn High Road itself.

This professor is not a happy person and much of the disgust turned on Ridley Wandor can be seen as a reflection of the narrator’s sorrow. It is interesting to see how Messud manages the transformation of both characters, mostly the narrator of course. Because of the way that Messud has a perfect stranger make such a profound effect on the narrator, The Hunters is a deeply psychological story. A thought-provoking one-sitting read.

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