Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘books’

Claire Messud – A Simple Tale

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In 2001, Claire Messud published two novellas in one book, The Hunters and A Simple Tale. Pairing them together in this way invites comparison between the two, which is partly a shame because they are both strong, stand-alone pieces in their own right and, to my mind, comparison actually weakens one of them. (Perhaps with the recent changes in publishing, there wouldn’t have been such a commercial necessity to publish the two together as there was in 2001… but this is only just speculation.)

The collection opens with A Simple Tale. Set in Toronto, this is the story of Maria Poniatowski, an immigrant to Canada from the Ukraine and survivor of the Nazi work camps. The story begins in the present, with Maria’s job as cleaning woman for several of Toronto’s wealthy families, but it dips backward to tell of Maria’s childhood, her time in the camps, how she met her husband Lev and how the two made their way to North America. It tells of raising their son Radek, who becomes the very Canadian Rod and who has no interest, even no use for, stories from his parents’ immigrant past. The book also focused on Maria losing Lev and her long widowhood.

Just as the title suggests, it is a simple story, but carefully and respectfully told. Compared to the other work of Messud’s that I’ve read it involves a much quieter narration. Straightforward and conventional in a positive sense. Classic. A lot of its power lies in the judicious way that Messud moves from memory to memory – looking back over a life, big events can become less important than smaller events and I like how she handled this complex reality. It is one of those pieces of fiction that isn’t easy to read because it tells of difficult events and deep emotions, but the prose reads easily. I read it in one evening, wanting to move between the opening and closing of the story in one sitting.

Emigrant/immigrant narratives are fascinating to me not only because I’m an expat myself, but because they are what make up the collective American (and by this I mean North American) experience. Both Canada and the US are immigrant nations and with A Simple Tale, Messud has written a really thoughtful consideration of the identity shifts and feelings of disorientation that any immigrant goes through. Her story deals primarily with a particular immigrant experience, one of Canada in the 1940s and 50s, but much of what she brings out is universal.

 

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catching up

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My little family has been hit with a stomach bug for the last two weeks, hence my lack of posting. We’re all better now, thankfully, and I’ve got some catching up to do. If I can manage it this week, I’ll try to write about Claire Messud’s two novellas, The Hunters and A Simple Tale; I enjoyed both very much. Messud is a very confident and intelligent writer and I’m looking forward to her next book, whenever it may come out.

I also read Martha Southgate’s The Taste of Salt. This is the second Southgate novel I’ve read – the first was The Fall of Rome. Southgate is an interesting writer because she very gracefully straddles black and white America in her work. She writes about black Americans who have made their way into academic white America, and she looks very sharply at the issues this migration entails. She manages to do this within a story that could be written from either a white or a black perspective – in other words, her stories are human while the tangential details involve race.

I’ve also made some good progress in Volume Two of Virginia Woolf’s diaries – she is writing Jacob’s Room at the moment and discussing process much more than she did in Volume One with regards to The Voyage Out and Night and Day. In a way, I see her gaining confidence – it’s very interesting.

I also read The Lola Quartet, a forthcoming novel by Emily St. John Mandel. Mandel is well-known in the United States if you pay attention to the independent presses. I consider myself a broad reader, but until I started paying more attention to the indie houses, I had never heard of her; once I did, I felt a little silly for not having read her before. She’s of my generation, she’s writing about contemporary America, she’s a very good writer. The Lola Quartet is her third novel.

It’s interesting to me, this split in the United States between the independent publishers and the bigger traditional houses. Obviously, there are aesthetic differences in terms of what gets published, especially when looking at some of the micro presses with very particular publishing agendas. But on the whole, the more I read from both publishing worlds, the more I find the separation false. Such great books coming from both sides of that divide – and yet many of the books published from the independent houses will get overlooked by the greater readership. I realize this is a situation that has probably always existed, but I do wonder about how it might be becoming exacerbated as those traditional publishers seem to get bigger and bigger. Something to think about, and research further.

Finally, I’m reading Lily Tuck’s I Married You For Happiness. Some years ago I read Tuck’s The News from Paraguay, and despite admiring her writing, I disliked the novel. I wish I could remember why exactly, but all I’ve got left is a vague notion of being dissatisfied, of feeling there was something vulgar about that book. I suspect it may be the fact that I don’t often get on with historical novels. In any case, I Married You For Happiness is worlds apart from The News from Paraguay. It is contemporary, intensely personal and involves math, marriage, infidelity and death – so far it is a lovely read.

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Myfanwy Collins – Echolocation

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I have to say that one of my favorite aspects of reviewing for Necessary Fiction is getting to be one of the first people to write about a piece of début fiction, especially a work that comes from an independent press. I know that many of these novels and story collections – and there are so many published each year – will never really get talked about as much as they should. If we want to think of literature as an ocean, then the big publishing houses are like continents and the smaller, independent presses more like islands of all shapes and sizes. All of us readers are just plying around in our boats, looking for a place to moor up for a night, a few days, a lifetime.

One of the little islands out there in that vast ocean of literature is a small press called Engine Books. In March they are publishing a short novel called Echolocation by a woman named Myfanwy Collins. I had the pleasure of reading this book a few weeks ago and reviewed it this week at Necessary Fiction.

Here are the first three paragraphs from my review:

Animals like bats and dolphins echolocate because it is an effective tool for navigation in a low-visibility environment, in darkness or troubled water, for example. In the simplest terms, to echolocate is to shout two simple questions, “Where are you? Where am I?” and then wait for an answer. The answer comes as an altered repetition of the original question. So echolocation can be understood in terms of intensities and transformations of sound. But it is also a process that cannot achieve its completion alone. Echolocation implies a relationship between two objects. It is about wanting to know where things are in relationship to the self. Used as a metaphor, as Myfanwy Collins has cleverly done by choosing this word as the title of her novel, echolocation conjures up an image: a shouting out into the darkness, a careful listening for the transformed return of that first offered sound. This idea contains both action and stillness, both hope and potential failure.

There are three women in Echolocation, women who have found themselves living in a kind of darkness. First is Geneva, who has returned to care for the foster mother who raised her. Geneva’s darkness has taken her by surprise, the result of a series of traumas, of physical and emotional separations. She eventually invites Cheri, her pseudo-sister, to help her, and when their Auntie Marie passes, to share what remains of their childhood home. Cheri’s darkness is of a more psychic variety, self-imposed, self-defeating. Finally, Cheri’s mother, Renee, is heading toward these two after years of absence, carrying the weight of her past as well as a new burden.

The book moves forward as these three women attempt to re-situate themselves, both geographically, in the sense of their return to an earlier home, but also psychologically. The “Where am I? Where are you?” is also a “Who am I? Who are you?” In this sense, Geneva, Cheri and Renee are engaging in a kind of spiritual echolocation—with respect to each other as well as the obstacles in their path.

Read the full review here.

My review makes it clear that I loved this book. It was beautifully written and the story is unique. It was also a book that asked me to think about the nature of violence and how a person can come to believe in a “rational violence.” I’m intrigued by that – it’s a thought that makes me uncomfortable, and yet it seems very human at the same time.

 

 

 

 

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So many books

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Yesterday was one of those days that reminded me why being a booklover is so much fun. I took the train to a nearby city to have lunch with another translator/writer friend of mine. When we’d finished with lunch, we both had a little time to kill before heading back to our respective trains and she, by chance, knew of a little out of the way second-hand book shop. It was snowing, the streets were a gray, sloppy mess and I was loaded down with a backpack filled with several issues of The Paris Review she no longer wanted (now that is an excellent gift!) as well as her most recent manuscript (which I cannot wait to read). I was also carrying Zeppi, my 4 month-old puppy, who was extremely happy to be snuggled into a sling bag over my shoulder and not shoulder high in all that mucky snow. Despite these extra encumbrances, we trudged over to the bookshop.

And what a treat it was to discover this little basement bookshop. From the outside it looked like just one tiny book-filled room, but it stretched like a long, narrow cave beneath the building above. It had an extensive collection of books in both French and German, and, to my delight, an entire wall of English books. Finding second-hand English books is not easy in Switzerland and I’m so happy to add this little shop to my list of treasure-hunting spots.

Of all things, one of the first books I saw was Barbara Comyns’s The Juniper Tree. It seems that the universe is conspiring for me to begin a start-to-finish Barbara Comyns read sooner than later. I also took home Nathan Englander’s collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and a book of Emerson’s essays. And I’m sure I would have loaded my backpack up even further but I had to race back to catch my train.

Interestingly, this week has been an extraordinary one for adding books to my to-be-read lists. Most weeks bring one or two new or new-to-me books to my attention, all duly noted and eventually put into the spreadsheet (total nerd that I am) that I keep for tracking books I’d like to read. But something about this week has brought before me a great number of books I’ve never read, all books I want to have read yesterday. This is unusual enough I thought I should mention them all, just to pass on the love and panic of my overwhelming to-be-read book pile.

Yesterday, I read an interview at 3:AM Magazine of a philosopher named Hilde Lindemann. Lindemann works in feminist bioethics and the article is called, “No Ethics Without Feminism.” It’s a very interesting read and I’ve added Lindemann’s books (and books she’s edited) to my list: Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair and Feminism and Families.

I discovered a new web journal for women’s writing called Literary Mama and one of the first fiction pieces I read on that site was by a writer named Stephanie Freele. I loved her story, “Keeping Track of Insects” so much that I’d really like to read her short story collection, Feeding Strays.

A friend of mine read my most recent novel manuscript a few months ago and he very kindly gave me a list of three books that he felt my book echoed. One of those was Thea Astley’s Coda, which I also saw mentioned earlier this week at Whispering Gums, reminding me that I should hop to it and read this one. (The other two were Lars Gustafsson’s Death of a Beekeeper and Norman Lock’s A Long Rowing Until Morning.)

A recent Twitter exchange reminded me that I’d really like to read David Shields’s Reality Hunger.

I’ve now read a handful of reviews for a book called Quiet by Susan Cain. It’s about introverts and the power of solitude on thinking. How can I resist?

I can’t find it anymore, but at some point this week I saw an image of four Time magazine covers for the same week. The international versions all had a cover related to the crisis in the Euro Zone. The United States cover was about pets. The image was linked to a book called The Information Diet by Clay Johnson. I have to admit I am a little put off by the cover of the book, and by much of the marketing around it, but I’m very interested in discussions on media and information consumption.

Somewhere, someone (I’m sorry for not remembering who or where) posted a long excerpt from Orham Pamuk’s The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist and I was hooked.

And, finally, the last thing I wrote down on a little notepad by my computer was Jean Stafford. This is from Zhiv who recently wrote about her book, The Mountain Lion. I’d never heard of Stafford. I love this about being a reader – there is always someone new to read, someone who’s apparently written beautiful things that I would like to read.

And now I really miss (certainly not for the first time and certainly not for the last time) having easy access to an English-language library…

 

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Barbara Comyns – The Vet’s Daughter

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Almost ten years ago, I happened upon a book in a used bookstore in Urbana-Champaign, IL with a funny title: Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. I took it home out of curiosity and over the next few days delighted in the discovery of a wonderfully distinct literary voice. I’d never read quite anything like it—breathless like Woolf, but more fanciful, and yet extremely sharp and clear. (Some people might describe Woolf as fanciful, but I think Woolf is too intellectual to be fanciful… she’s playful, but it’s always intellectual. Comyns has a dash of fantasy, of magic, yet her writing is never incomprehensible.) At the same time, there was a sadness to the writing that made it all very interesting and mysterious. I have held on to this first impression of Barbara Comyns’s writing, eager to read more, and yet for some inexplicable reason, hadn’t done so.

So I was delighted to stumble across a NYRB volume of her novel The Vet’s Daughter (begun around 1952, published in 1959) at a used bookstore in Lausanne last week. Nothing gives a better sense of her writing than to read the first two paragraphs:

A man with small eyes and a ginger moustache came and spoke to me when I was thinking of something else. Together we walked down a street that was lined with privet hedges. He told me his wife belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, and I said I was sorry because that is what he seemed to need me to say and I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would have most likely worn kneecaps. We came to a great red railway arch that crossed the road like a heavy rainbow; and near this arch there was a vet’s house with a lamp outside. I said, “You must excuse me,” and left this poor man among the privet hedges.

I entered the house. It was my home and it smelt of animals, although there was lino on the floor. In the brown hall my mother was standing; and she looked at me with her sad eyes half-covered by their heavy lids, but did not speak. She just stood there. Her bones were small and her shoulders sloped; her teeth were not straight either; so, if she had been a dog, my father would have destroyed her.

That last line is devastating, isn’t it? And this illustration of her father’s cruelty is just one of many to come. Our narrator Alice is a gentle, and somewhat naïve soul. She isn’t naïve in the sense that she isn’t aware of unpleasant realities or even that she is locked up inside herself, a victim, as it were. Instead, she is observant, thoughtful and emotionally intelligent, yet her upbringing has left her sheltered enough to believe she might stand a chance at happiness. The book follows Alice through the death of her mother, a move away from London to work as a lady’s companion for a colleague of her father, possible love and an eventual return to her father’s home. There is also a very gentle supernatural plot line as Alice discovers she has the ability to levitate, a talent that will determine her future.

That Alice can levitate is not without a symbolic function in the story. For without any other viable option, Alice has found the means to free herself from a “heavy” existence. This shows an incredible courage on Alice’s part. I also can’t help reading this as a very sly and perhaps inadvertant social critique—except for Alice’s levitation, the novel is unfailingly realistic, and we all know that levitation is truly impossible. So it is only in fiction that Alice can escape her fate…and well, you have to read the end of the book to know that this escape is not without a high price.

Now that I’ve read two of her eleven novels, I can’t help comparing her to other writers working at the same time: Lessing (The Grass is Singing, 1950), Gordimer (The Lying Days, 1953), Murdoch (Under the Net, 1954), Pym (Excellent Women, 1952). Accepting Pym as the stylistic outlier here, there is still a strong connection between all these writers, especially along socio-political preoccupations. A connection that Comyns does not share. Comyns seems completely uninterested in engaging with the socio-political except in the way that it organically touches her narrators. Her world appears to be completely and dramatically sealed around the narrator’s consciousness. In this sense, and especially with the light touch of supernatural/magical, she reminds me of the Carson McCullers of The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951).

It goes without saying that I’ll be reading more Comyns. A really lovely small press called Dorothy recently re-issued her 1955 novel Who Was Changed and Who was Dead. And I have it on good authority (Jess Stoner, David Auerbach) that this is one of, if not her best…

 

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Barbara Pym – No Fond Return of Love

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Having just finished my second Barbara Pym novel, No Fond Return of Love, I can safely say she is now a favorite. I will return happily to both No Fond Return of Love and Excellent Women for rereading at some point. They are easily the kind of book a person could grab off the shelf on a rainy afternoon and vanish inside the story for several wonderful hours.

No Fond Return of Love is similar to Excellent women in that it tells the story of a woman (I was going to say a young woman, because she can’t be much over thirty, but alas, she is not quite young enough and that fact lies quite firmly at the root of her troubles) who is recently disengaged from her fiancé and attends an academic conference in an attempt to forget her sorrow. At the conference, she meets two people who will greatly change the next few months of her life.

Now, I quite like books with this sort of premise, because it is exactly the people we meet under the most banal circumstances who can change our lives unexpectedly, in both good and bad ways. And Dulcie Mainwaring is greatly in need of change. Her first encounter is with another woman on the verge of inconsolable spinsterhood, Viola Dace, and then she is subsequently introduced to a very handsome academic named Dr. Aylwin Forbes. These three are thrown together over the course of the novel and Pym uses their various situations to look at her central question about the nature of happiness and how it relates to love and marriage.

On the whole, I would say that No Fond Return of Love is an easy novel. That word easy is so dangerous, I think, because it can also mean (and I have myself used it this way) to imply that the book lacks depth. This is where Pym’s strength lies. Her books appear quite light, really, and are wonderfully readable and funny. But there is an almost harrowing sorrow in all that she brings up. Her characters are laughable, but they are also suffering an acute pain.

Lilian Nattel and Litlove brought up Pym’s endings in the comments on Lilian’s post on Excellent Women. As Litlove put it, “For such a funny writer, though, she often chooses frustrating endings, or at least endings in which few people win or make headway.” This is so spot-on that I had to repeat it here. The ending of No Fond Return of Love leaves her characters at a kind of impasse, in a situation that would certainly not be considered advantageous for anyone, and yet…it feels very real. Pym deals with the notion of compromise quite openly, as if compromise is the only way to move forward in love relationships. This is quite depressing, but gets to the complicated reality that IS a relationship. This is also probably why Pym could never be considered a romantic novelist even when all of her books focus almost exclusively on marriage and love.

One last thing I wanted to mention about this particular book is the way Pym handles the narrative perspective. It is actually quite uncommon how she slips back and forth into each character’s mind, even within the same paragraph. The effect can be a little destabilizing until you get used to it, but after that it creates a really intricate mosaic. Having such direct access into the minds of all the characters makes the reader the only one who really understands all that is going on. This technique, combined with Pym’s incisive satirical voice, actually generates a lot of sympathy. Satire always risks turning a character into a stereotype, or, at the very least, into an object of scorn. But Pym sidesteps this so neatly, by bringing the reader as close as possible inside the character that what remains important is their fragility—in whatever form that takes.

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From the archives: Claire Messud – The Emperor’s Children

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I originally wrote this post on The Emperor’s Children in 2007, just a few months after I’d started blogging. I thought about the book again recently, because it came up in a discussion about how women writers handle satire. I’ve kept it in mind as a reference, because I remember admiring how Messud handled the balance of mocking her characters and subtly criticizing the reader.

Here is what I originally wrote:

Satire makes for uncomfortable reading precisely because of its preoccupation with exposure. Its desire to ridicule the very object of its scrutiny. From the safe distance of the reader’s outside view, satire is always good for a laugh. An easy way to indulge in some effortless criticism of society or an individual. But taken to heart, which is satire’s most difficult lesson, it’s not always easy to swallow. The truly skilled satirist manages to eloquently pass judgment on both the reader and the subject.

In The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud reveals herself to be quite up to satire’s thorny task. She gives us a cast of socialite New Yorkers centered around three friends – Danielle, Julius, and Marina, all literate, all literary, and all too-ready to compromise family, friends and even health for nothing more than a one-night stand, a glamorous job, or a regular mention in the people pages. These characters are all so self-involved they manage to pass from the day before 9/11 to the day after without batting an eyelash. And the enormity of that event gets quickly swept under the carpet of each character’s more petty trials and tribulations. Or, I should say, 9/11 drowns in the backwash of the smaller events that these three, until that moment, have placed upon their personal altars of consequence.

Danielle has an affair with Marina’s father, a powerful literary figure with an unbelievably dedicated and morally sound wife. Marina pretends to literary aspirations when her real passion is focused on gaining the admiration of an up-and-coming magazine editor. Julius proclaims literary and artistic independence (meaning he won’t get a job even though he’s poor) while abusing his body in an endless spiral of sexual promiscuity and drug abuse. Murray, Marina’s father, is the so-called Emperor of this tribe. An apparent success and a man who considers himself resolutely posited against “the establishment”. Each and every one of them gnash their teeth, expound on the virtues of their superior minds, and plead the case for the uniqueness of their sensitive souls.

Messud sets her characters down atop a detailed canvas she calls American New York, replete with Armani suits and summer homes, ample cocaine and easy trysts, then she lets them machinate, whine, harangue, and battle each other and themselves for the purely trivial. And just when we think we’re ready to snigger and laugh out loud at these small-minded humans, Messud gives them just enough humanity to remind us that we are often in the same boat. We are often consumed by the same insignificant crises, aspire to the same shallow notoriety, and affect the same passionate support for worthy causes. So in the end, the reader’s sniggering is measured with a guilty chuckle and our admiration for Messud’s skill countered with a flush of embarrassment.

Now, almost five years later, thinking of Messud with respect to Pym (one of the other examples of satire I’ve read recently), I find that while Pym’s satire strikes me as having sharper teeth in terms of its delivery, its focus is somewhat smaller and more personal. Messud, on the other hand, takes on an entire society, an entire way of thinking. In The Emperor’s Children, she takes on America, as it were, and the myths of American culture. So although the feel of her satire is a bit softer, it brings the reader around to a powerful critique.

Both ways of engaging in satire are fun to experience, yet I think I prefer Pym’s variety while I’m actually reading, because it is so wonderfully clever and sharp. Messud’s gives less of an immediate wicked chuckle, but it bears out interestingly in the long term.

 

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Banana Yoshimoto – Lizard

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Just over ten years ago now, when I was living in a small town in southern Japan, I read my very first book by Banana Yoshimoto. It was called Amrita (1994), and it was about a young woman with amnesia, whose sister has just committed suicide, and who has a strange relationship with a man that leads her (or maybe she just goes on her own) to the island of Saipei. I don’t remember much about the book except for the mood of it, which was dense and dreamlike, and a bit mysterious, and the fact that it introduced me to a different kind of Japanese literature than I’d been used to.

Before moving to Japan, I’d studied a lot of Japanese literature but almost all of it was pre-1950, and most of it was much older. I think that up until then, the most recent Japanese fiction I’d read was A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe (1964). So Yoshimoto’s more contemporary writing was an eye-opening discovery. Since then I’ve gone on to read other contemporary Japanese writers like both Murakamis and Yoko Ogawa, and, interestingly, Yoshimoto actually seems quite tame in comparison.

But it was high time I read another Yoshimoto, and so I picked up a copy of her short story collection, Lizard, published in 1993 and translated by Ann Sherif. There are six stories in Lizard, and while all of them have merit, the first two pieces really stand out. The first tells of a near-magical encounter on a train between a recently married young man and a homeless person, the second is about childhood trauma and how it can shape a person’s future. Both dealt with feelings of alienation and with love relationships.

Yoshimoto has an interesting style, one that in general I would call light, especially when busy with narrative summation and dialogue. This gives the stories an easy feel, almost too easy. But every once in a while, Yoshimoto lets her narrator linger on a description or a deeper observation and the result is quite different. Take this example, from “Newlywed”:

It seemed as if we had toured Tokyo from every possible angle, visiting each building, observing eery person, and every situation. It was the incredible sensation of encountering a life force that enveloped everything, including the station near my house, the slight feeling of alienation I feel toward my marriage and work and life in general, and Atsuko’s lovely profile. This town breathes in all the universes that people in this city have in their heads.

When she does this enough in a story, the story is transformed, becomes more universal, and I think this is what made “Newlywed” and “Lizard” stand out among the six.

Interestingly, every narrator in Lizard, male or female, is a first-person narrator with a somewhat conspiratorial but also colloquial mode of expression. The shared confidences tend to sound like they’re being given directly to the reader, like this:

I won’t deny that I admired some of the residents, those who didn’t pompously claim that they had achieved spiritual enlightenment—you know, satori and all that.

While reading, I couldn’t help thinking how a translator is going to have a lot of impact on how this type of sentence reads. There were moments throughout the collection when the little sentences—the explanatory phrases, the dialogue tags and transitions—felt unnecessarily wordy, and I wonder if it was a translation issue. In the sense that in making certain decisions, the translator had gone a little overboard to make what was implied (happens often in Japanese) into something overly explicit. Or, in the opposite direction, allowing a lot of narrative filtering that might be innocuous to a Japanese reader but that can slow things down for an English reader.

I don’t have a copy of Lizard in Japanese or I would have done some comparing, but I have an example from another book. In Kitchen, Yoshimoto’s most famous novel, the narrator opens with the line: 私がこの世で一番好きな場所は台所だと思う. A strictly literal translation would be: I think that my favorite place in this world is the kitchen. Note the “I think,” which finishes off the sentence in Japanese. In Megan Backus’s translation of Kitchen, the novel begins: The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. It is a tiny difference, but Backus makes a choice to make the sentence more immediate, to get rid of the second layer of narrative filter. We could debate this choice, but I think that for an English reader, the second sentence is much smoother. And a novel made up of sentences requiring this kind of decision-making can be translated in two different directions.

I’ll get through Kitchen and see if I have a similar reaction to the writing as I did while reading certain stories in Lizard, and this time I can read along with the original and do some meaningful comparing.

 

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Stephanie Staal – Reading Women

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Sometime not too long ago, Litlove wrote about a new book called Reading Women: how the great books of feminism changed my life by Stephanie Staal. I was intrigued by the title and the premise, and so ordered a copy and dove right in and am very glad that I did, as this is a book that gave me much to think about (and a nice fat future reading list, as well).

Staal is a journalist, and must be just a few years older than I am. Since much of her book has to do with her (our) generation’s negotiation of historical and modern feminist writings and theories, I felt quite at home within both her personal story (having just had a child myself not too long ago, and still trying to figure out how to juggle career and parenthood) as well as her academic reflections on reading and living feminist principles. The book is a well-combined mix of personal memoir and literary analysis, and Staal is a competent and engaging writer. Despite the intricacy of the subject, the book is a quick and interesting read.

Brief recap of the book’s premise: Staal, an instinctive feminist (I’ll get to that “instinctive” idea in a minute), finds herself adrift after the birth of her child. Unhappy with her negotiation of the equally powerful pulls of motherhood and career, she returns to her undergraduate alma mater to revisit an in-depth list of seminal feminist texts. (a bit off topic, but I think it is kind of funny to write “seminal feminist” …) The book is as much about her daily life as a mom and writer as it is a careful reading of a series of fascinating and provocative voices in debate about a woman’s place in the world.

I consider Staal an instinctive feminist (and it’s a label I’d give myself) for several reasons. The first comes from her background – she was raised by parents who both worked full time, and her mother was a successful scientist. The second is a generational reason – like myself and many other women who came of age in the eighties and nineties, we grew up hearing repeatedly that we could do whatever we wanted. For some reason (and Staal looks into it), the feminist message of my youth was wonderfully simple. It isn’t that we grew up thinking there weren’t still stumbling blocks for women, but I would say that it was implied that the bigger issues had been dealt with by an earlier generation.

In this sense, an instinctive feminist takes it for granted that as long as she works really hard and finds a suitably egalitarian spouse, she’ll be able to live her feminist ideals without compromise. And this is where Staal, and many women of my generation, including myself, find themselves unmoored when all of a sudden our world becomes split between parenthood and career. As Staal passionately explains, she was caught completely by surprise when she found herself struggling with feminist identity issues.

Being a reader myself, I loved Staal’s approach to sorting through this problem. Why not go back and read what other women have said and done when confronted with a similar quandary? She takes us through history, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Virginia Woolf, to more contemporary voices like Katie Roiphe. The journey is sufficiently in-depth, for a book of 259 pages, and she includes much of the discussions she listened in on as she audited her Feminist Texts courses. Her reactions to the texts are honest and intelligent, and she is smart enough to admit when she doesn’t understand or agree with a certain way of thinking.

This is a book of discussion, not a book of answers, and I’m very glad that Staal did not try to find some pat resolution for a problem that will require re-negotiation throughout her entire life:

The intrinsic worth in reading and rereading feminist writings is that, in doing so, we are given the precious chance to compare and contrast other women’s lives with our own, to liberate our imaginations from the predictable, the conventional, and thus gain greater insight into the various scripts assigned to us by our particular generation. Feminism gives us room to tell the unexpected story, and this, perhaps, is its greatest gift.

Staal recognizes that this issue of how to be a parent, a spouse and a feminist is not something to solve after class over a cup of coffee, and this recognition is what made Reading Women a very good book.

Having said that, I think that it is sometimes too easy to get caught up in perpetual self-examination: What is the current situation? How does it compare to history? Who’s got it worse? And instead, I wouldn’t have minded a little brainstorming. What are the useful discussions? What are the changes that would help? What kinds of ideas can our societies entertain, that might move us in the right direction? Staal does a little of this, but only a little, and the effect is to leave the reader feeling just a tidge helpless. One of Staal’s points is that some feminist theories pushed women apart, and she rightfully bemoans this. But her book contains an implicit suggestion that solving the problem is a distinctly personal and individual experience, which, by default, does the same thing. In fairness, I suspect Staal doesn’t intend to do this at all, and compared to what the book does achieve, this is quite a small hiccup.

And one final word – I’d be interested to hear what any men have to say about the book. I’ve seen only women’s responses and it strikes me that men, fathers especially, might be interested in what she brings up.

 

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Three catch-up reviews

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I’ve reviewed a handful of books over at Necessary Fiction recently. Three very different books actually, and I enjoyed them all for very different reasons.

The first is A Friend in the Police by John Givens. I really loved this book, it was so different from much of what I’d read last year, and it had me laughing out loud. Often. The feel of the story will make you think immediately of Kafka, but then it’s set in a small unnamed SE Asian jungle. And the main character, Detective Sergeant Xlong, is one of the funniest (in a pathetic and moving way) literary characters I’ve come across in a long time.

From my review:

If the Detective Sergeant isn’t ruminating on the metaphysics of authority, he is musing on the definition of love. All the while keeping a firm inner eye fixed on himself and his own behavior. Xlong’s incredible self-preoccupation is a matter of extreme comedy, at many turns throughout the novel, but it is also the source of the reader’s sympathy. On the surface, we are meant to be worried about Philip Bates—what kind of mess has he gotten himself into? Is he working for the “rogue” geologist and tin miner upriver? Is he involved in smuggling contraband? Is he running an illegal gambling operation with another foreigner named Sprague?—but each time the story threatens to become more interested in either of the Bates men, Xlong steps forward to claim his due attention.

Read the full review here.

Next, I had the pleasure of reading The Brothers, from the small London-based publisher Peirene Press. Peirene publishes only novellas of works in translation. Their books are elegant, and the stories they select would probably not find their way into English without Peirene’s selection, so Peirene’s work is precious to me.

The Brothers is an incredible novella – set in a wintery Finland at the turn of the century, it is about a small Finnish farm and two men who have somehow found themselves to be enemies.

Despite the historical setting, The Brothers feels extremely contemporary. Not in the sense that the book bears any anachronism, but because of its embrace of such a timeless, even biblical conflict, as well as the spare purity of Sahlberg’s prose. He packs a lot of conflict and interaction and history into this slim book, but all the drama and quarrel is given to the reader so gently, so gravely. This is whispered rage. Devastating and dark. But always quiet.

Read the full review here.

And finally, a collection of short stories with a deceptively Science Fiction-y name—Omicron Ceti III by Thomas P. Balázs. I have always liked a good short story, but I particularly like collections in which the different stories talk to each other. Balázs has structured his collection to reflect the intellectual and emotional movement forward of an original Star Trek episode, “This Side of Paradise.” And it works. It’s very well done.

Now, it should be clear by now that despite the science fiction tease of the title of Omicron Ceti III, these stories are terrestrial, all-too-human and anchored in our contemporary reality. Time and time again, Balázs returns to this notion of “self-made purgatories” and what it means to be the architects of our own sorrow. Thankfully, Balázs isn’t out to condemn anyone. In the same way that glimpsing a potential happiness leaves a trace of real humanity in Spock, so do Balázs’s characters find themselves transformed through their experience. Happiness isn’t easy, and sometimes it is even impossible, but the contemplation of happiness—even, perhaps, the simple chance to imagine it—is certainly part of what makes us human.

Read the full review here.

So there you go, three very different books: hilarious absurdity with a dash of poetry, dark and intense drama, and a shrewdly constructed collection with careful storytelling.

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