Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘books’

Maryse Condé – Les Belles Ténébreuses

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Just finished the most recent Maryse Condé novel, Les Belles Tenebreuses*. I have admired Condé’s style and work since studying her in graduate school. She’s a masterful, interesting, and thoughtful writer. But something’s gone wrong in Les Belles Tenebreuses. This new novel appears to be navigating many of contemporary society’s uglinesses. So in that sense, it has something to say. But I felt that several of the pieces didn’t seem to fit together and I think she cut some corners in her narrative.

Les Belles Tenebreuses is the story of Kassem, a perfect example of our fractured society. He comes from a Guadeloupean father and a Romanian mother, but he was born in France, in relative poverty, in a violent and dysfunctional family. When the novel opens, Kassem has been working at a kind of tourist wonderland in northern Africa as a chef. The complex where he lives and works is destroyed by a terrorist bombing and he is left without a job, without any money, without a girlfriend (she was killed in the bombing), and without any chance of going home. Kassem, because of his strange cultural background, and undoubtedly his name, is at first suspected in the bombing. This works itself out, but he is left adrift in a culture of which he knows nothing. He ends up going to a local mosque, because it’s the only place that will let him in.

At the mosque he meets a man named Ramzi, who is a famous doctor and political figure. Ramzi hires him and the two begin working together, although it is never quite explained what Ramzi sees in the young, awkward Kassem. At this point, the book begins to read like a grotesque fairytale involving a mass epidemic, embalming techniques, despotism, social and political displacement. I don’t mind grotesque and I think fairytales have much to offer a reader. But. Well. Ramzi and Kassem move from Africa, to France and eventually to America. Where much the same things happen over and over again. Kassem falls in love, people die, Ramzi becomes involved with political insiders, people become suspicious of Ramzi, confide their suspicious to Kassem, who then tells Ramzi (being mysteriously unable to lie to Ramzi) and so on and so forth, more people die.

Kassem is an antihero, with no real character or will of his own. He lets himself be sort of blown from situation to situation, never addressing what it is that he wants, aside from a good screw. That isn’t quite fair. There is some feeling that Kassem is a stand-in for the “youth of today” – adrift in the world, without a sense of heritage or self. But he is a witness to a staggering number of heinous crimes, and each one revolts him or scares him, but he never does anything. I would like to give Condé more credit for what she’s doing, in the sense that she is investigating the difficulties and violence in modern society, perhaps caused by globalization, perhaps caused by our increasing distance from our families and our roots. These are all issues she mentions. But where she could go into detail and carefully work the psychology of her characters, instead she blasts from event to event with little more than cursory narrative.

Take Kassem’s spiritual transformation, for example. Throughout the course of the novel, he becomes a Muslim. And a fairly devout one, Condé tells us. Yet Kassem’s journey to Islam does nothing to change his character, does not affect his fate or the events of the story in any way. It’s just one of the things he does. He meets some people he might not have met otherwise, but they do not alter him.

Essentially, I am criticizing this book because, despite its clear ambitions and worthy subject, the writing felt rushed and patchy – Kassem sobs, he cries, he stands around dumbfounded. Events are larger-than-life with no attempt to persuade the reader of their meaning. Ideas are introduced and then never dealt with again, making the story inconsistent. And the characters are all types. I won’t even go near the ending, which was baffling to say the least.

Whatever the issue, I feel the book wasn’t successful. I will go back and soothe myself with Condé’s other work that I have so loved… Crossing the Mangrove and Segu and Tree of Life.

*The book hasn’t been translated into English but I’m sure it will, and it will be excellent (the translation, I mean). Condé’s husband Richard Philcox has been her translator for just about ever now. And his translations are beautifully, wonderfully done.

friday reading notes

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Last night I met with my favorite book group to discuss John Updike’s 2003 novel Villages. I won’t go into too much detail here, but this was a good book to read in a group, mainly because despite Updike’s writing (which provides for endless study and admiration), the beginning-to-end story of Villages can be summed up like this: man living in suburban PA has a series of affairs.

Obviously there is more going on here. But it’s all densely packed into the characters, who are, strangely, unexpectedly, all types. Owen, whose story Villages is telling, is fairly stereotypical. He doesn’t have an interior life that would seem to merit so much scrutiny. Yet our discussion last night was all over the place – history, feminism, symbolism, marriage, parenthood, suburban life, and many more – so there’s a point to Owen and his careless, almost mechanical hedonism. I’d like to read more Updike because finishing Villages left me with more questions about his work in general. I suppose I will head to the Rabbit books, but I’m also interested in The Coup (1978) and The Scarlet Letter Trilogy (A Month of Sundays, Roger’s Version and S.).

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Several new books arrived this week. All wonderful. All very tempting. First and most exciting is the Royall Tyler translation of The Tale of Genji. I’ll be starting tonight, and hope to catch up with the Summer of Genji group read that began this week. On a recommendation from a friend, I ordered Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections and that arrived today. Looking forward to this. Also in the non-fiction category, I ordered Atul Gawande’s highly lauded Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. Finally, I received the second two books in the Agota Kristof Twins’ Trilogy, La Preuve and Le troisième mensonge. Like the first book, Le Grand Cahier, these are slim little novels. If I can, I’d like to read them both this weekend.

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I’m curious these days about reader reactions to flash fiction. I’d be interested to hear some thoughts on this. Is this a meaningful/valuable literary form? Can it or does it accomplish something that other forms cannot? How is it different, if it is, from poetry?

Sten Nadolny – The Discovery of Slowness

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From The Discovery of Slowness:

It was an evening sky of infinite duration, shadows becoming gigantically long, and when swaths of mist rose, they turned at once into reddish clouds, changing colors up to the northern horizon.

John looked out on the ice, studied its forms, and tried to understand what they meant. It was true, then, that with its own power the sea could surpass itself. Here was the proof. Here he discovered the meaning of his dreams.

I loved this book.

Sir John Franklin was a real person and Nadolny follows his fascinating life with great care from what I can only assume came out of a formidable amount of research. The novel does so much more, however, than recount the facts of Franklin’s life. It investigates an aesthetics of thought.

On the surface the book is about Franklin’s passion for the ocean, for exploring and discovery. But Nadolny only uses this “fact” of Franklin’s life to engage with the more complex notions of intellect, empathy and honor (to oneself and to others). I was most interested in this idea of slow, deliberate thinking and how Franklin was aware of the way his mind worked. His “character” develops along with the movement of the story and the great events he lives through, but more interestingly, his perception and understanding of his capacity for reflection is subject to a more subtle, but ultimately more profound, revelation.

This book was originally published in German in 1983 and translated into English by Ralph Freedman in 1987.

bookish news

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The Quarterly Conversation and Open Letters Monthly have teamed up this summer for a group read of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. The idea is to read about 70-90 pages a week and they have selected the more recent Royall Tyler translation. I’ve decided to join in and ordered my copy of the translation last week. My only experience with Genji is the original and Seidensticker, so this will be a treat. For other language nerds like me, there exists a very cool website in Japanese of the original Genji Monogatari, with the classical Japanese, the modern Japanese and a Romaji transliteration in three interactive panes. So. Much. Fun.

And I just learned (a month late) that Amazon has decided to launch a translation imprint called AmazonCrossing. Using their ever-so-detailed sales and reviews data, they plan to pick up books which are likely to become big sellers and have them translated. On the whole I think this is fantastic news…more books from around the world making their way into English. The first book they’ve picked is from France, The King of Kahel by Tierno Monénembo. I’ll be very curious to see what other books get on to their list.

Agota Kristof – Le Grand Cahier

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Difficult, difficult. How to write about this book without giving anything away? This is one of those frustrating books that wants to be discussed, but yet I’m glad I knew nothing of the story or the book’s project before turning to page one. It was a slow revelation, and very effective because of that. I want all its new readers to have a similar experience.

Well, alright, I can tell you one thing: this is a story about twin brothers who are brought to live with their grandmother in a small village in Hungary during WWII. That’s it. If I go further than that, I think it will spoil everything.

So let’s talk about the writer. Anyone heard of Agota Kristof? I hadn’t until a week ago when a friend of mine from my French book club emailed me and said she’d just been introduced to this writer, had ordered her books, had started the first and was now unable to put it down. I followed suit and had a similar experience.

Kristof is a Hungarian writer who lives in Switzerland and writes in French. Her most well-known work, a trilogy, is composed of Le grand cahier (The Notebook), La Preuve (The Proof), and Le Troisième Mensonge (The Third Lie). These are all available from Grove Press in English translation.

As I said, I had a similar experience as my friend in that I literally tore through 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.

In any case, I’ve got the second book on its way and I’m very curious to see if Kristof will maintain the perspective she established with Le Grand Cahier and I’m doubly curious to see what she’s going to do with Klaus and Lucas as they get older…

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Christopher Torockio – Floating Holidays

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Finished a good book over the weekend – Christopher Torockio’s Floating Holidays. This book came out in 2007 from Black Lawrence Press, a small publisher with an interesting and diverse catalogue.

Before I begin praising this book, which is ultimately what I would like to do, I have to mention one thing that I found nearly unforgiveable. The handful of typos were annoying but I could ignore them, a minor printing issue I could forgive because I’m sure Black Lawrence were just as dismayed when they got the books back from the printer, but in one scene a doctor gives a line of such bad information I nearly shut the book and called Torockio myself to complain. He has a doctor tell a pregnant woman that some internal bleeding early on in her pregnancy could cause complications….like Down Syndrome. Um, that’s a genetic disorder and nothing but a mutation on a certain chromosome will cause it. Not only did it surprise me beyond belief that someone in this day and age could actually think this, but how come his editor didn’t fix this?

Okay, so this huge flaw occurred inside one teensy tiny little scene and doesn’t affect the book overall, but I had to point it out. Now, let’s move on.

The book blends a number of voices and several story lines, all of which have their genesis in a certain corporate event. On first glance, the book appears to focus on the world of office cubicles and big corporate life, but the stories stretch much further than that and are ultimately more concerned with the domestic narratives of the novel’s various characters.

It is difficult to pull off a book with so many different voices but Torockio does it well, pegging each character quickly with some feature or habit that really defines them but not letting those ‘tags’ (for lack of a better word) overpower each character’s development. In terms of story, the book concerns itself with life’s setbacks, both marital and professional, how the two are often linked, and how his characters navigate such difficult waters. My description isn’t doing the novel much justice, the book has real momentum. And despite the fact that some of the characters aren’t necessarily likeable, Torockio portrays them all with real empathy.

Floating Holidays did what my favorite kind of contemporary fiction does – gets me to see people, their idiosyncrasies, their weaknesses, their frail strengths and tentative optimism. Humans can be so nutty sometimes – for no obvious reason people might suddenly be horribly mean to one another, while across the street a group of strangers band together to stick it to The Man. Why do we do these things? Torockio seems just as curious.

Damon Galgut – The Good Doctor

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Oh, why why why did it take me this long to get introduced to Damon Galgut’s sublime novel The Good Doctor ? My own fault, actually. I mooched the book a while back after reading about it in various locations (namely, Bookeywookey), but didn’t bother to read it until last week. Big mistake. I consider this book one of the best reads of the year.

Over the last few years I’ve developed a real interest in South African literature (although I know I’ve really only skimmed the surface at this point). There is something about the subject matter and the writing style of writers like Gordimer, Coetzee, Brink and now Galgut, that consistently impresses me…a thoughtfulness, a heaviness, a careful and reflective creation of story and character.

The Good Doctor is a tightly contained, intimate story with immense reach. It manages to portray an entire landscape of complex socio-political realities while remaining closely focused on a single man’s thoughts. The narrative action follows a short timeline (less than a year) yet it reflects both an era as well as the main character’s entire life.

The book opens with the arrival of a young, new doctor at a rural hospital in one of the former South African homelands. The hospital is barely functional, with only a few staff members and hardly any equipment. The new doctor is appropriately shocked and dismayed and the current staff expects him to simply pack up and leave. But Dr. Laurence Waters is an idealist and instead of leaving, he begins to see what kind of new life he might be able to bring to the run-down hospital, and in connection, to the empty town and neighboring villages.

The book is narrated by Frank, a doctor who has been living in this forsaken community for several years. Frank is a jaded and troubled man, somewhere in his forties, who experiences Laurence’s arrival, first like an amusing event in an otherwise humdrum existence, but later as a threat. Laurence is going to change their lives and Frank isn’t at all certain this is a good idea.

What struck me about The Good Doctor is the way it hummed along with an eerie, restrained violence. Frank is neither stable, nor is he a “good person”, yet it is his voice leading us through this story. I love this kind of fiction. Frank is my guide to this fictional universe, but the more I get to know him, the more I mistrust his view of things.

So what gets set up is essentially a face-off between Frank and Laurence, but not a face-off in any traditional sense…as Laurence moves his improvement projects further along, Frank spirals deeper into a series of self-defeating behaviors. Alongside this contrast of personality, there is a problem of looting at the hospital, increasing violence in the town, as well as a number of small conflicts between the few staff members at the hospital. The novel’s restrained menace eventually blossoms into a real, tangible tragedy.

And here is where the novel really impressed me. This tragedy in and of itself is an answer to the Frank/Laurence (resignation/idealism) face-off, but it also gets to the heart of Frank’s true brokenness, which is founded in more than just personal history and his own specific disappointments, but involves South African history, lingering prejudices and universal human failures.

reading update

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For the one or two readers I might still have, I promise to get back to regular posting soon…

In the meantime, a quick update:

I finished Jakov Lind’s quirky, funny, strange, incomprehensible, surreal and serious novel Ergo, just out from Open Letter Books. Reading this book was like taking a deep breath and diving underwater. I only came up for air twice and then plunged back into Lind’s bizarre world. I’m not sure I understood much of this book, but the reading was by no means uncomfortable. Think Kafka on LSD…

And then I had the pleasure to consume Damon Galgut’s wonderful The Good Doctor. This was definitely one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. The book is disturbingly quiet, with tiny little bombs that go off left and right. I couldn’t put it down. Loved the narrator and how I slowly began to mistrust him, mistrust his perceptions of the world. Fantastic book.

Now I’m about a third into Christopher Torockio’s Floating Holidays from Black Lawrence Press. The first chapter of the book, or I should say, the first voice, put me off, but as soon as I stepped into the second voice, it picked up steam. This is a novel of modern office life, of mediocre powermongers, of sensitive people choking under the pressure of corporate shenanigans. It’s good. It has a great momentum, despite the myriad of voices. I can’t wait to get further.

Tsutsui Yasutaka – The Maid (家族八景)

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Since I am just home from Japan, let’s talk about some Japanese literature. Before I left on holiday, I read a book just out from Alma Books called The Maid by Tsutsui Yasutaka and translated by Adam Kabat.

The Maid is about a young woman with the power to read minds who jumps from family home to family home. She is a purportedly intelligent young woman who has decided to hide out in this ridiculous job because she doesn’t want the world to know her secret.

Before I talk about my reaction, you need to know that Tsutsui is one of Japan’s most prolific and famous science fiction writers. He has something like 30 novels and 50 short story collections. You also need to know that The Maid (家族八景, or Kazoku Hakkei) was originally written in 1972.

I mention these two things because it helped me put the book into its proper context. I think that because Tsutsui is primarily a science fiction writer, he leaves out some of the more literary elements I might have enjoyed (Nanase’s development as a character, for example, is quite shallow), to focus on the stranger, more fantastic parts of his story (an artist who thinks completely in the abstract – shapes, colors and all). And the book is just a teensy bit dated, so it helps to know it was written in the 70s.

The Maid reads like a collage, with each chapter essentially following the same format only with different characters and slightly different events. Tsutsui has a lot to say about selfish, even dangerous sexual urges and egotism in general. The families Nanase spends time with are all basically an assortment of human monsters and Nanase moves through them with an interesting mix of cynicism and innocence.

The book does a lot for exploding myths about Japanese culture – its tidiness, the inviolable tradition of respect for one’s elders, the beauty of an intricate and strict hierarchy. With the creation of his mind-reading character, Tsutsui literally peels away the veneer of perfection and exposes a dark portrait of human nature – laziness and fear, infidelities, social climbing, incest, violence. You name it, Tsutsui writes about it.

So in terms of story, there is some interesting stuff going on in The Maid. On a prose level, I didn’t find it a satisfying read. Tsutsui’s style is sparse, yes, and the writing is clear, but Nanase’s mind-reading as a vehicle for emotional and narrative escalation begins to fall flat after a few chapters. It boils down to a strange kind of dialogue, with Nanase and the other characters “conversing” on one polite level while Nanase and the reader “listen in” to each person’s actual, horrible thoughts. The story tension gets lost in such direct access. It made me wish Tsutsui had gone a step further, found a way to push Nanase (or the reader) somehow. He comes close in the very last chapter but still doesn’t step out of his template.

John Fuller – Flying to Nowhere

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I wish I could remember where I got the recommendation for John Fuller’s tiny little novella, Flying to Nowhere, originally published in 1983. I got the book a few months ago but only grabbed it off the shelf on Monday evening because I wanted to read something completely new, something I had no idea about before opening the cover.

This is what greeted me:

The three novices walked fast down the margin of the hay field. In the great heat the tall grasses stood feathery and still, until the striding sandalled feet parted and crushed them. The hems of the woollen robes caught the seed tips and dragged them. Stems bowed and sprang, sending out tiny clouds of grass fruit.

That last image – tiny clouds of grass fruit – is lovely, don’t you think? The book has barely enough pages (88 in my edition) to earn being called a novella. It’s more like a long short story. But what a story.

In the field with the three novices are the harvest girls, scything grass, and they avoid looking at the novices, but the novices stare at the girls. One of the novices, who collects his observations in a notebook, thinks the following when he looks at the girls:

Their strokes are like the strokes of the knife on used vellum. The erased word serves its turn and is restored like dead grass to the elements. The field is the book of nature to be freshly inscribed by our brother the sun.

I just love that image of erasing a word from old parchment. Now the tone of this novice is a bit self-important, and clearly he’s keeping himself at a contemplative distance from the everyday tasks of the world about him. Later, his detachment will come back to haunt him.

Despite this bucolic, peaceful introduction the story, things turn dark quickly. It was impossible not to think of Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose because Fuller’s story is set at an isolated monastery (on a Welsh island) and involves a creepy mystery. Pilgrims to the island have been disappearing and the Bishop has sent a man, Vane, to discover what’s going on. Which he does, eventually, but at great cost. And what’s actually going on is much more interesting than the little bit that Vane manages to uncover.

The story of Flying to Nowhere was wonderful – unexpected, slightly otherworldly situations and unique characters along a spectrum of innocent to evil. The reader guesses quite early what might be going on but there is no sense of disappointment at this easy understanding. The language Fuller uses to tell his story was so exquisite I didn’t mind if in the end the “mystery” was somewhat obvious. The mystery is completely beside the point.

Fuller is a poet and that influence is really strong. So much so that there are a few moments of confusion. This could have been a source of frustration but with Flying to Nowhere I was more than happy to just get lost in the imagery, even if it meant I wasn’t exactly sure what was being inferred, or even what was happening at certain moments. I would love to read this strange, lovely little book with a book group sometime, because it would be interesting to hear and discuss different interpretations. Especially of the final scenes…

The novice’s story is really only a tiny part of the whole book but I’ll finish with this quote from one of his sections because I really liked it:

The windows of the cells were so small and high that the moon simply cast its ghostly patches on the ceilings without generally illuminating the sleeping shapes and their few possessions. And yet the outlines seemed quite clear in the half-darkness; the scrubbed bowl, the scowling cherubs at the shoulders of an oratory, the metal clasps of a book on a small table.

The novice who was shortly to undergo the night of examination reached out his hand and touched one of the clasps. His book was not finished, and he thought it might never be finished. The reflections in it of things as they really were could be no more, he decided, than insufficient reflections of things only as they seemed to be, reflections of reflections, moonlight patches at a pathetic remove from the sun.