Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘books’

Barbara Pym – Excellent Women

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For some unexplainable reason, I had Barbara Pym down as a writer of a different generation altogether. I wasn’t so off as to have catalogued her as an Austen or an Edgeworth, but I did mistakenly think she wrote somewhere around the turn of the century. However, she is much more contemporary. The bulk of her novels were published between 1950 and 1980, although several that were written earlier were published after her death in 1980.

My first experience of Pym’s work comes through her second novel, Excellent Women, published in 1952. Because of this title, I can’t help kicking off my Women Writers Project with this book. Pym uses this label, excellent women, with terrible irony, so I suppose I should be careful how I throw it around, but her ironic use of what should be a compliment reminds me of why I wanted to do this project in the first place. Pym is looking sharply at women’s roles and women’s happiness and so what better book to launch a project whose impetus came out of my frustration that women writers aren’t getting as much air time as their male counterparts.

Excellent Women is not about a woman writer, but it is about how women get noticed and about how women must navigate a male-dominated world. And the heroine of Excellent Women, Mildred Lathbury, is definitely literary. However, despite of (maybe because of!) her knowledge of English poets, she is heading toward confirmed spinsterhood. She lives on her own, spending most of her time in the company of members of her local church, especially Father Malory and his sister. The story begins with new tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Napier, moving into the flat below Mildred’s. The Napiers are a rather bohemian couple, and by that I mean that they seem to be anticipating the impending social and sexual revolution about to sweep the West, while Mildred and many of her friends and acquaintances are comfortable in the quieter times they are about to be forced to leave behind.

Now, just quickly, before I go on, I have to make a tiny complaint about the introduction to my edition of Excellent Women. I have a Folio Society edition, and it is absolutely beautiful, but the introduction actually gives away the entire story. So I knew what was going to happen to Mildred before I even started the book. This was unfortunate, actually, because the question of her future is quite central to story.

Mildred’s future, or more correctly, Mildred’s future happiness, seems to rely on the question of her being married. Isn’t this what she should want? Isn’t this what all women want? Pym frames and re-frames this question of the value of marriage throughout the novel, setting forth both good and bad examples of marriage, and letting Mildred explore her own feelings on the matter. But before this review makes it sound like Excellent Women is a form of 1950s chick lit, let me point out that the tone of Mildred’s constant musing is so wonderfully sharp, so dry and critical (of herself and of others), that the book turns away from its pretend focus on the race for wedded bliss and becomes a keen, sharp-edged analysis of social manners of the period.

The book is amazingly funny and I caught myself laughing out loud on several occasions. Mildred’s explanations for other people’s behaviors are often hilarious. She is critical of others, but also both astonished and admiring. There are moments when a desire to transcend her own fussy, prissy manners takes a hold of her, and she gives the reader a glimpse of a very real fragility, a longing to be someone else, to experience another kind of life. But then she quickly returns to her comfort zone, often with a subtly derisive comment on someone else. This combination of delicate and censorious is especially effective.

I’d like to read more of Pym, and my plan is to try the last of her “comedic” novels, No Fond Return of Love, because I’m curious how her satire evolved throughout the sixties and into the seventies. Did it become even more biting? Following that I’d like to read Quartet in Autumn, as this was the book that brought her back to publishing after a long series of rejections. It was then shortlisted for the Booker. Any other suggestions from the bookish crowd?

 

 

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starting the new year

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A slightly belated Happy New Year! My entire family has been visiting from the US since the 21st of December and they just left today, so I haven’t had much time for sharing bookish news. We had a lovely holiday, spending both Christmas and New Year’s in the small town of Colmar in Alsace. Colmar has quite a big Christmas market every year so we spent our days eating pretzels and beignets and drinking mulled wine. Not a bad way at all to spend a week – despite the slushy weather and the somewhat eccentric apartment we rented.

The only reading I did over the holiday was to start a long overdue reread of Little Women. It has probably been twenty to twenty-five years since I first read Little Women and it is quite fun to revisit the story, especially now that I know a little bit more about that period of American history and about the Alcott family (mostly thanks to Susan Cheever’s American Bloomsbury). But this reread is also interesting because I read and enjoyed Geraldine Brooks’s March a few years ago. I find myself reading for the parts of the novel Brooks would have used to help imagine the untold story of Mr. March at war and of Marmee and March’s relationship. Finally, I’m not there yet, but I’m pretty sure I will be just as upset as I was at thirteen to read the part when Jo turns Laurie down. I’m curious whether most readers disapprove of Alcott’s decision on this point, or is it only pre-teen girls?

I didn’t choose Little Women completely by accident – this book is also kicking off my year of reading and reviewing women writers. I spent a few days before the holidays putting together a list of about 100 books that I’d like to read this year. Many of the writers on the list I’ve heard of and even read before, but many are new to me. I’ll be covering about three centuries and jumping continents as often as I can – although the list is definitely weighted toward American writers. I’m very excited about this project!

And finally, I started reading Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women yesterday. What a fun book! I love the way Pym has written Miss Lathbury—she’s such an excellent combination of pitiful and snarky. It’s funny to think of this book coming out right about the same time as Under the Net by Iris Murdoch, they feel very different. I am slowly working my way through Murdoch from start to finish and already have a great admiration for the depth of her writing, but I like the way Pym satirizes her characters. It seems harmless at first but cuts sharply.

So that’s how my reading year has begun – how about everyone else?

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John Irving – A Prayer for Owen Meany

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I wish I could remember when A Prayer for Owen Meany first appeared on my book radar. It was years ago now, and I immediately got an old mass-market paperback copy and then forgot it on my shelves somewhere. But I kept hold of the idea that I should read it, and that it was considered a “good book” by those in the know – whoever they are.

Having read it for myself now, I’m not certain I would call it a “good book.” I would call it: a long book, a book of ideas, an American book, and an ambitious book. These four descriptions don’t mean that it couldn’t also be a good book, but I found myself repeatedly disappointed with A Prayer for Owen Meany, mainly in the writing but also in the depth of Irving’s ideas.

The novel is told by John Wheelright, an American bachelor living in Canada in the late 1980s, but the bulk of the story occurs between about 1952 and 1969 and is about his best friend growing up in New Hampshire, Owen Meany. It is about their childhood, about the death of John’s mother, their search for John’s real father, their prep school lives and the onset of the Vietnam War. It is both a comic novel and a real tragedy—a mixture I usually like—and it’s also an example of a very typical kind of American realism: the details of small town life, boyhood trials, American sexual culture, and religion (lots of religion).

I must say right off that Owen Meany himself is an incredible character. I can only imagine how much fun Irving must have had writing this young man. He is a freak—a tiny kid with a horrific voice, zappingly clever, courageous, eccentric, loyal and hungry for love, starving even. Narrator John is so bland in comparison, as I’m sure he’s meant to be. But he is too bland, finally. I couldn’t even really figure out who John was until pages 421 – 424 when suddenly, he comes thrillingly to life. That’s a long time to wait.

John isn’t ultimately the point of the novel. The point is Owen—what becomes of him, what he brings to John and other characters. It isn’t really giving anything away to quote what’s written on the back cover of my edition:

Owen Meany, the only child of a New Hampshire granite quarrier, believes he is God’s instrument. He is.

This religious aspect of the novel is, perhaps, its most interesting. I am not an ideal reader for a book with a deep religious focus because I don’t have a lot of patience where religion is concerned. (Marilynne Robinson’s exquisite Gilead would be the great exception to that statement.) Having said that, I believe that Irving handles the theme with great detail and a lot of care. The novel reveals Religion in all its destructive, powerful glory and explores the intricacies and limits of personal faith. Irving also focuses a sharp eye on the gray zone where religion and superstition share uncomfortable territory.

A quick word on the book’s political preoccupation. I’m curious whether the book was at all controversial when it came out in 1989. It is fiercely anti-Vietnam war, and fiercely anti-Reagan (the two narrative time periods). My only complaint with the politics in the book is the heavy-handed and clumsy way they are delivered. No, that isn’t quite fair. Because the heart of the novel takes place during the Vietnam war, the political critique in those chapters is quite meaningful and feels more or less natural, but the 1980s political analysis is clumsily delivered in series of boring monologues.

Ultimately, my frustration with A Prayer for Owen Meany is similar to the feeling I get when I find myself in discussion with someone who is very bright but who doesn’t know when to stop talking and who takes me, or anyone else listening, for an idiot. The book engages with some fascinating ideas, involves one of the most interesting fictional characters I’ve ever come across and centers on events—both fictional and historical—of great import. Unfortunately, a lot of that “goodness” gets drowned out by too much “unnecessary.” Irving has his characters explain, many times over, all of the book’s symbolism. He also repeats himself. And worst of all, the book overprepares the reader for the impending tragedy. I got so sick of Irving’s allusions to what was going to happen to Owen Meany that when it actually happened I was too numb to appreciate what should have been an extremely powerful scene.

Anyone else read Irving? Are any of his earlier novels worth trying out? Thoughts?

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Houellebecq Project Completed

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Despite the fact that I did, on some level, really really really like his work, reading nine books by Michel Houellebecq in a relatively short amount of time was not a pleasant experience. A few weeks ago I mentioned to a friend of mine what I’d done and he looked at me with something like terror on his face and said, “T’es maso ou quoi?!” (“Are you masochistic or what?”). The answer to that question would be a definite no, but I understand his concern. Anyone who has read Houellebecq will know that he isn’t someone to read for the pleasure of it. His work is tricky, frustrating, infuriating (especially for women readers) and depressing. But it is also provocative, thoughtful, at moments exceptionally beautiful, and very often daring. On the whole I’m very glad I took the time to read him carefully and to consider his work in the way that I did.

Having said that, I’m quite happy to wait a few more years before reading anything by him again. After a nice long break from his work I will be curious to see what he does next, mainly because I found myself following one particular development of his writing technique—the way he handles himself in relation to each text—throughout his novels. I’ve discussed here before how Houellebecq can’t seem to get himself out of his own novels, even when they are meant to be completely fictional. I think that his latest novel, La Carte et le Territoire (The Map and the Territory), actually resolves that problem, and in a clever and ingenious way. So I’m curious to see whether going forward, he’ll actually be free to do something completely fictional or whether he will relapse into the same problem.

But without further ado – he’s the recap:

Contrary to what I usually do, I read his latest novel first because my French book group selected it. My reaction to that initial reading of La Carte et le Territoire is here.

Something about that first read invited me to go back and consider all of his work, poetry and essays included, in the order they were written.

I was quite struck by his collection of essays, La Poésie du Mouvement Arrêté, especially the title piece and how it asks the reader to re-consider our relationship with technology. His most provocative statement in this piece is to “refuse knowing.” Backing away from the constant stream of media is about refusing to “know” what’s going on, “know” what people are talking about. It’s scary to agree to “not know” anymore, but there is a beauty and a peacefulness in that idea that I find very compelling.

And I would recommend to anyone interested in Houellebecq they they take a look at the very first work he ever published – a biography of H.P. Lovecraft, Contre le Monde, Contre la Vie. I wrote my thoughts on this book here, and here. This long essay really endeared Houellebecq to me (good thing I read it before I tackled his novels as I think it upped my consideration for his work in general). He is so thorough, so admiring, and yet also appropriately critical. And the essay actually gives the reader a lot of information about Houellebecq the writer; it provides a series of helpful clues on how to read Houellebecq’s fiction.

I went on to consider his collection of essays and short fiction, Rester Vivant. The title essay of that collection will stay with me, not only for its impassioned consideration of what it means for someone to want to write, but also because it’s subtly quite funny. That mix made this particular essay really powerful. Houellebecq is very serious about this writing thing, but he also seems to realize that his seriousness is somewhat ridiculous.

I started to write about his individual novels on the blog but I stopped because I was working on a retrospective piece on Houellebecq for The Quarterly Conversation and it became difficult to consider them separately. That overview piece was just published last week. It’s long, but I hope it gives a solid introduction to Houellebecq. Here is an excerpt, from the introduction:

Houellebecq is the author of five novels and eight other books of poetry, stories, and essays. His work is ambitious—interested in philosophical questions of existence and perception as well as controversial scientific ideas about genetic engineering and cloning. Despite having a highly recognizable style, he is not a great stylist; his novels are compelling because they involve much uncomfortable honesty about human nature and are packed with challenging ideas. He has made depression and social pessimism a subject of literary meditation. He is also an obsessive cataloguer of contemporary cultural artifacts and trends, something which gives a documentary feel to much of his work.

In direct contrast to this broad scope, his work is also intensely personal: in some way, each of his novels oblige the reader to consider Michel Houellebecq the person alongside the story or the characters. Whether this is done deliberately or is an unconscious product of his writing style, whether this improves or detracts from the experience of reading his work, it is an unavoidable element of the Houellebecquian textual landscape.

You can read the entire essay here.

The essay spends a little bit of time on each of his five novels but finishes with more detail on his latest work. It was very interesting for me to see how my consideration of La Carte et le Territoire changed after reading everything else. Tied with La Possibilité d’une Ile, it remains my favorite of his novels. It successfully does what his others novels all try to do, but the accomplishment isn’t just a raw success, it’s elegant and meaningful.

 

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my new life as a flashlight

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Yes, it is old news that every year the Best-of-the-Books lists make people angry and divide opinion. These lists are never going to satisfy the varied tastes of the reading public. And thankfully so. It would be kind of scary if everyone held fast to the very same yardstick for measuring excellence. That doesn’t mean I think we should continue allowing some of these lists to get away with their appalling blindness to the mountains of excellent literature coming from outside-the-mainstream publishing spotlight. I’m not going to detail my thoughts on this particular subject, mainly because Roxane Gay has already done this so well. Her essay, “Toward a More Complete Measure of Excellence” at The Rumpus is thoughtful, measured, and realistic, and yet contains enough subtle anger and dismay to satisfy my own oversized sense of literary injustice.

The thought that I’d like to work through here is about women writers and men writers and who is getting credit for big ideas, for the “best” writing, for “defining and critiquing society.” This issue, always at the back of my mind, has been hovering around me quite intensely for most of the past year. I can pinpoint a moment of renewed interest when I read a thoughtful response by Michael Nye, the managing editor of The Missouri Review, to VIDA’s The Count on the male bias in publishing. Nye was troubled to see that the male bias was true for The Missouri Review, but he found it was mostly because women submitted less and he wondered how to fix this problem. I would be interested to see a study on this—I suspect it is true that women submit less, but I’d be curious to see someone attempt to figure out why and whether there is a way to fix this without radical upheaval of multiple unrelated systems.

In my work as reviews editor at Necessary Fiction, I have also found this to be true. Significantly more than half of the books submitted to me for review are written by male writers. Obviously, the submission statistics for reviews at NF are further biased because we’re interested in the already published, and there seems to be more men being published. In any case, around April of this year I did a quick tally of our reviews and saw that we’d reviewed 10 male writers, only 4 women and 1 multi-author collection. I was quite surprised and since then I’ve worked to even out those numbers.

In a conversation about this issue with my husband, he mentioned that what I was doing might not be considered fair. He wondered whether our reviews should reflect the publishing situation. I’ve been searching, and I can’t yet find what the publishing situation is. The most easily available statistics are from Vida and they are about books reviewed, not books written. Because so few books by women are reviewed, I can only conclude that men are publishing more. So if there are 65% (I’m throwing this number out off the top of my head) books by men being published, than reviews should reflect that number. Perhaps there is some logic to that, but I’ve decided I’m not interested in being fair to a situation that is intrinsically abnormal. As far as I know, there is nothing “normal” about the male bias in publishing except that it has become “the norm.” We have the chance to publish 52 reviews each year at Necessary Fiction; you can bet I will try very hard to find 26 excellent books written by men and 26 excellent books written by women.

I’m quite happy to say that when we finish 2011, Necessary Fiction will have reviewed 23 male authors, 21 female authors and 6 multi-author collections. I’m proud of those statistics because I helped create them (along with Steve Himmer who consistently came to me, unasked, with a review of a woman’s novel, and with Jess Stoner who realized that she’d been reviewing a lot of men’s fiction and wanted to make sure she included some women. Jess and I actually spent hours combined, combing the Indie houses for a frustratingly short list of women’s books available. Several otherwise excellent houses have no women authors at all. Many have less than 15% on their lists.)

But here is where my literary heart starts to get a little antsy. I love reading. Period. I don’t actually give a rat’s ass who has written the book as long as it changes me somehow, as long as it gets up into my brain and moves ideas and emotions around. Reading is a frightfully powerful activity and I’m reluctant about the decision I’m about to announce because it feels somehow false to me. The list of male writers that I love (worship even) is long and diverse and makes up a significant part of my reading and writing background. So why purposefully exclude these wonderful and talented writers from my book discussions? Yet on second thought, aside from Nadine Gordimer and a handful of books by various women, that list of male authors makes up the major part of my literary education. So yes, this is a problem. Until just as many male writers can say the same thing about a long and diverse list of female writers, until men wake up and find that women are getting the majority of all publishing contracts, then I’m not going to feel at all guilty for kicking some male writers out of my discussion room. I’m pretty sure they will still get talked about. The same cannot be said for many women writers.

If you haven’t guessed it already, here’s my announcement—in 2012 I’m going to read women writers exclusively for this blog. This is, however, more than a quibble with statistics; I have a thematic exploration in mind. Litlove recently reviewed Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, and in her essay she writes,

The early parts of this novel are just so much fun. Eugenides enjoys himself enormously with college students, pretentious theory and interfering parents; he conveys so well the way that desire, in the early twenties, is almost always covertly aspirational, no matter what form it takes. His characters want this person, this class credit, this discourse of knowledge in the hope that something shiny and powerful will rub off on them. So far, so good, but I did feel I could easily be reading an Alison Lurie novel, or at a pinch, one by Anne Tyler. Not that this is bad! I count both those women among my favourite writers, but it was not what I was expecting from a male author hailed as the new great hope of American letters.

Now, those last three sentences are fascinating to me (and I apologize to Litlove for “picking” on her this way, I hope she doesn’t mind) because I know exactly what she means, and yet it’s such a terrible statement actually. One I have probably made on any number of occasions. On some subconscious level we don’t expect a male author to be meddling so much in the domestic. Especially not when the book is being upheld as one of the “big books.” So what do we expect? Stern politics? Tantrums of philosophy? Social meditations? Historical explorations? Nature vs Humanity?

Now, I do not believe for one second that men write bigger books than women. I’m quite certain we can find examples of books from both men and women that fulfill all literary subject categories, big and small. But I do believe that men’s books are more often credited with being “big” compared to women’s books of equal profundity. I do believe that many excellent, “big” books written by women get overlooked in book reviews and End-of-the-year Book Lists. I do believe that for every woman’s book that gets discussed thoughtfully and energetically, there are three or four men’s books that get the same treatment. So I’m going to spend a year reading women’s books and writing about women’s books exclusively on this blog. I’m going to inundate you with a flood of excellent literature written by women. I’m going to discuss these books, I’m going to complain about these books if I need to, I’m going to praise these books when they deserve it. I’m going to give these women writers just a tiny bit more time in the spotlight.

Well, I don’t have a spotlight, I realize—my little blog here is probably better described as a flashlight. But even the feeblest of flashlights in a dark room has gotten many a reader through some very exciting pages.

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Agota Kristof – Le Troisième Mensonge

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Eventually, I did not have to restrict my reading of Agota Kristof’s Le Troisième Mensonge, the third book of her trilogy, to daylight hours only. Compared to the first two books, this one was quite tame.

Quick recap:

The first book, Le Grand Cahier, is about two young boys, twins named Claus and Lucas, who are sent to live with their grandmother during World War II. A lot of what happens to the twins is quite horrifying, as is their development and behavior. They are dealing with trauma and with abandonment, and they work very hard to rid themselves of the emotions that make their abandonment painful. A process which turns them, quite simply, into monsters. The book ends with one twin escaping across the border, leaving the other behind.

The second book, La Preuve, is about Lucas, the twin left behind. The novel follows what happens to Lucas living separate from his brother, but it also begins to raise certain questions about the “truth” of the first story. No one in the town remembers Lucas as a twin. Kristof introduces this idea quite ingeniously, quite subtly, but it becomes suddenly clear that the book, which I already knew was taking a sharp look at psychological trauma, is going to go much farther than I expected. This actually makes the ugliness of much of what happens in the story easier to stomach. By the end of La Preuve, Claus, the one who escaped, returns to his hometown to find his twin brother, only to discover that Lucas has vanished upon suspicion of murder.

Now, when Le Troisième Mensonge opens, the real question of the book is no longer what has happened to Claus and Lucas, but whether or not Claus and/or Lucas ever existed and whether or not the stories we’ve been reading about them actually occurred. In terms of story, I will leave it at that. This is one of the more difficult books I’ve ever had the pleasure of writing about, because I don’t want to give anything way.

What Kristof does with this trilogy is fascinating. Not only from a thematic perspective—everything about the books suggest she is dealing with the trauma of war, with oppressive government and the like, but by the end she’s gone very domestic, which is ultimately much more frightening—but also in the details of her writing: the POV shifts, the structure of each book and the simple, no-frills aspect of her prose. The power of her narrative and the ideas behind it kind of sneak up on you, because there is nothing showy about the project.

The trilogy is available in English as one book (Grove Press, 1997) and I’d be curious to hear if anyone has read it, and if so, how her writing worked in translation. For two reasons – because it was done by three different translators, and also because it seems to me her work would translate easily. Her sentences are very simple and spare. Each book gets progressively more complex, but even Le Troisième Mensonge is quite straightforward.

Aside from the trilogy, she has five other books. One is l’Inalphabète, a memoir, which I read over the summer, but the others are novels as far as I can tell. I’m very curious to see her other work and whether it is all as dark and psychologically complex as Le Grand Cahier, La Preuve and Le Troisième Mensonge.

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a bookish week

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Last week was my birthday, and I had an exceptionally bookish week that resulted in a nice haul of new books and a stack of Jane Austen BBC adaptations – none of which I’d actually seen before.

The first in the haul—and the only book I’ve started to read already—is Charles Dantzig’s Pourquoi Lire? (Why read?) I’d never heard of Dantzig until this lovely little book found its way into my mailbox. A gift from my mother-in-law, who is very good at selecting books I wouldn’t otherwise have come across. Dantzig’s homage to reading is so far really lovely. Funny and clever and sweet. Each chapter begins with another reason to read, like “We read because of love,” about falling in love with characters and stories, or “Read to get past the halfway point of the book” about those interminable books of 1000 pages and how we love them and hate them at the same time. This book promises many little gems.

The rest of my new book stack contains:

  • Chris Bohjalian – The Double Bind
  • Damon Galgut – The Quarry
  • Téa Obreht – The Tiger’s Wife
  • Julia Otsuka – Buddha in the Attic
  • Siri Hustvedt – The Summer Without Men
  • Colm Toibin – The Empty Family
  • Jeannette Winterson – Written on the Body
  • José Saramago – The Elephant’s Journey
  • Michael Cunningham – By Nightfall
  • Orhan Pamuk – The Museum of Innocence
  • Julian Barnes – The Sense of an Ending

I am really looking forward to reading the Otsuka, as I’ve already sampled two chapters in recent issues of Granta. The book is about mail order brides coming to America from Japan, and written in the first person plural. The samples I read simply blew me away, like this passage from “The Children” (Granta 115):

Sometimes we tried cutting off all our hair and offering it to the goddess of fertility if only she wold make us conceive, but still, every month, we continued to bleed. And even though our husband had told us it made no difference to him whether he became a father or not – the only thing that mattered, he had said to us, was that we grew old by his side – we could not stop thinking of the children we’d never had. Every night I can hear them playing in the fields outside my window.

 

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Nina-Marie Gardner – Sherry & Narcotics

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This week at Necessary Fiction, I had the pleasure of reviewing Nina-Marie Gardner’s début novel, Sherry & Narcotics:

It isn’t easy to publish a love story these days—somehow we’ve all decided this is the stuff of cliché. As if the back and forth success and failure of looking for love doesn’t concern most people most of the time. Which is why Nina-Marie Gardner’s Sherry & Narcotics stands out in its genre of contemporary urban fiction. Here is a novel whose central movement is fixedly concerned with a young woman and a young man and whether or not the two will find a way to be together. (…)

There’s an argument to be made for Sherry & Narcotics as a coming-of-age novel for Generation X.  Mary is very much a member of that tribe—financially and geographically independent, at ease in the greater world, with more choices and possible connections than any of the previous generations, and yet, true to the Generation X crisis, slow to negotiate her way to emotional adulthood and at risk to the dangers of her precious independence.

Read the full review here.

 

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finishing Agota Kristof

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It takes a lot of courage to read Agota Kristof before going to bed. Or so I am learning. When I read the first novel in her trilogy, Le Grand Cahier (The Notebook), I read it in two sittings, both during the afternoon and there was enough distance between the dark scenes of the story and my bedtime that nothing overlapped. I am quite susceptible to nightmare. And the same thing happened when I read the second book, La Preuve (The Proof). But yesterday evening I sat down with La Preuve to skim through it quickly again in preparation to start the final book in the trilogy, Le Troisième Mensonge (The Third Lie), and realized that the story was too unsettling for that hour of my day.

Kristof’s world is brutal. I’ve read many a book with difficult subject matter (Pat Barker’s Blow Your House Down comes directly to mind), but Kristof is absolutely unflinching in her indictment of human nature, especially because her writing is so simple, so undemanding. This is what I wrote about Le Grand Cahier:

Such a deceptively simple little novel. An easy story – two boys must leave the city to live in the safer countryside during the war. Yet, the novel quite simply explodes with little horrors. I tried to find another word to describe it, something other than horror, but I can’t. The book is horrifying.

This whole trick about not knowing what the book is about is key. Of course the book is about WWII, about the separation of families, about violence, about neighbors helping neighbors and neighbors hurting neighbors. It’s a classic war story. But it’s also wholly unique.

Part of what makes Le Grand Cahier so unique (and compelling, if I’m allowed this reviewer cliché) is the perspective, the way it pretends to be written by the boys themselves. They are telling their story as one of a series of imposed exercises, recording events in their notebook. They’ve promised the reader to give nothing but the facts, no interpretation, no emotion. It’s an effective way of giving the reader the “story” but their very lack of emotion or explanation creates this effect where the reader begins to see too much in the boys’ silences, begins to understand what Kristof is actually getting at. And it isn’t nice.

The second novel, La Preuve, picks up the story at the moment the twin boys separate (one having crossed over the border, the other staying behind—how they get across is extremely disturbing) and follows Lucas, the one who stayed behind, for the next fifteen years or so, through two very important relationships, until he is forced to leave the town.

What I found so unsettling about this second novel is how cleanly Kristof depicts her psychopath. There isn’t another word for Lucas. To my standards, he’s a monster. As shown in Le Grand Cahier, he spent so many years exorcising his emotion away that nothing remains. Or at least only the primal impulse. The original want or fear or anger, and then he acts on that original feeling without allowing any other emotion or rationale to mediate. When he wants something—a woman, a young child to adopt—he does the simplest, quickest thing to fulfill the desire. Including murder.

On the other hand, Lucas is capable of infinite tenderness toward the small child he adopts. He does everything in his power to give this little boy a happy childhood. It doesn’t work, of course. The child is miserable for a variety of reasons, and as intense and emotionally frightening as Lucas. Their story can only be a tragedy.

Although I have to be careful about when I sit down to do it, meaning not before sleep, I’m quite eager to read the final book. Despite the difficult nature of the events in each story, I’d like to see where Kristof is going with her meditation on psychological trauma. Lucas isn’t normal, that’s easy to see, but the world around him is nearly as horrific and I’m curious whether she is making an argument against a certain kind of emotional abandonment or about a specific system of political oppression. The trilogy begins during WWII but extends thirty to forty years beyond. War is awful, yes, and the cause of significant personal trauma, but Kristof seems to be suggesting that redemption on any level is never possible.

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Reading: Houellebecq / Extension du Domaine de la Lutte

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In 1994, Houellebecq published his first novel, Extension du Domain de la Lutte. (Trans. as Whatever by Paul Hammond). The book begins as a subtly comic office novel—and of course by comic, I mean that it’s tragic— and then becomes an earnest meditation on the narrator’s experience of depression.

Several things about this book piqued my attention right away. The first thing, which I’ll talk about today, is the narrator himself, who begins his story at a party. He isn’t enjoying the party. He drank too many vodkas and is lying down on some cushions behind a sofa and eavesdropping on two women from his office who are sitting on the sofa. Very quickly, Houellebecq sketches out this amazingly miserable specimen of a man, completely disconnected from anyone else at the party. Someone who is watching and judging and wholeheartedly disappointed with what he sees.

The 30 year-old narrator works as a computer programmer but in his spare time he writes strange little existential pieces on the life and soul of animals. So yes, the guy is weird. I’m pretty sure the reader is meant to feel sorry for him immediately, while at the same time remaining aware that he isn’t a terribly likable person.

That dichotomy is interesting to me. The narrator describes a number of people in the first thirty pages or so, before the actual story gets really going, and each one is depicted in highly unflattering terms. His perspective is so bleak, so harsh. To him, people are either pathetic or ridiculous or simply jerks. That this might be a reflection of how the narrator thinks of himself is, of course, an underlying question.

At the same time, there is a kind of sweetness to him. Again in the early pages of the novel, he describes an evening out with an old friend, someone who trained as an engineer as well but who then became a priest. Their conversation is quite touching. They discuss some of the problems of contemporary society, disagree a little and then find common ground. And then at one point the priest expresses concern that the narrator needs help. He is too much alone, and this isn’t normal.

So the book is curious about this word ‘normal’ and what it means. Who is normal? What is normal behavior?

All these meetings and conversations are all introduction, so to speak. The bulk of Extension du Domaine de la Lutte takes place as the narrator and a colleague named Raphael travel around to train a number of clients in a new computer program. As they travel, that idea of ‘normal’ will become even more important.

Also, the narrator will begin to lose control. Slowly, subtly, gently…he will separate even further from the people around him. He eventually has an alarming psychic break, with serious repercussions…

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