Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘books’

Maile Chapman – Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto

By

From page one of Maile Chapman’s Your Presence in Requested at Suvanto, the reader is invited into a somewhat surreal and disturbing landscape. I usually try to avoid using qualifiers like ‘somewhat’ but I feel it’s important in this case. This is realistic fiction, but one that highlights the more bizarre, fantastic elements of its unique situation.

The novel is set in the 1920s and opens with the arrival of Julia at Suvanto, a hospital in rural Finland. The hospital is an ordinary hospital, except for the top floor which serves as a temporary home for women in need of a rest cure. This isn’t a psychiatric ward in the strictest sense, but the women are a bit unhinged, emotionally fragile, unable to take care of themselves. Many of the women are Americans, wives of executives in the flourishing timber industry. Others are Danish, some are Swedish or Finnish. Julia is a troublemaker from the start. She does not want to be at Suvanto and does her best to disrupt its established routines and upset many of the other women. 

Aside from Julia, the novel’s most important character is Sunny, the head nurse on the top floor. Sunny is American and chose to come and work at Suvanto to escape from painful memories of her former life in the United States. Sunny is a tightly controlled individual with impeccable nursing skills, never upset, never flustered. She is the perfect foil for the ‘up-patients’ with their leaking emotions and often childish behaviors.

I’m sure you can guess this balance will necessarily be disturbed, and it is, as soon as a new obstetrician arrives from the United States with grand ideas for furthering his career. He wants to help Finland learn the Caesarian section technique and he’s willing to practice on non-maternity patients, removing the uteruses of older women past child-bearing age. Many of the up-patients, including Julia, fit this profile.

This plotline is the largest part of the novel, insomuch as it feeds the ending (see my post on Suvanto’s relationship to The Bacchae), but there are many smaller stories going on around it, and together they create this wonderfully eerie tension.

The writing is also impeccable – careful, subtle descriptions, an uncommon narrative perspective blending a voice-driven omniscient narrator with the third person plural, and attentive pacing. The voice-driven omniscient narrator is a real treat, smooth and flawless, with wordy insights (often verging on judgments) into the inner lives of each character. I haven’t been this impressed with début fiction in a long while. I can’t wait to see what else Chapman will come out with.

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman, Graywolf Press, April 2010

second teaser about Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto

By

Now, this may be because I have literally been swimming in Ramuz since last summer, but Maile Chapman’s Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto reminded me of my favorite Swiss literary fellow.

The similarity comes from the narrative perspective. I’ve mentioned before how Ramuz’s use of the third person pronoun on (one, you – universal, we) can drive a translator to distraction. On isn’t a terribly complicated concept, grammatically speaking, but in the Ramuzian universe it has a special job.

In a Ramuz text, the on is often used to represent the voice of the village, which is just a slightly more intimate form of the narrator. And the narrative shifts back and forth between a straight omniscient and this subtle all-village voice. So it has this collective consciousness aspect to it, adding an invisible “watcher/describer” to whatever story is being told. But it’s very subtle, since it is only rarely a direct “we”. I love this about his work, since he’s so often getting at the psychology of small village life.

Now, Chapman’s novel, which is set at a hospital in rural Finland, uses the first person plural. But it uses this perspective with great subtlety, which is, in my opinion, the only way to really get away with the first person plural unless you want to give your book a gimmicky texture. But what happens is that the narrator is both a member of the cast as well as a watcher of the story. Very much like Ramuz.

I realize I haven’t given any details about what this novel is about yet, and I’ll get there soon, I promise. What I do want to say is that Chapman’s clever use of the first person plural creates a kind of chorus, which chimes in every once in a while throughout the novel. It’s a bit spooky. It is also how she manages to create this fantastic echo of Euripedes’ play The Bacchae, without overtly mimicking that story. One event in Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto does directly reference The Bacchae, but the careful construction of this chorus using the first person plural emphasizes the connection much more subtly, much more powerfully.

a fantastic début novel

By

Apologies for being so quiet around here. I have had several extremely busy weeks. Getting back to work after my maternity leave is proving to be a little more difficult than I had expected. But I won’t bore you all with the details (assuming there are any of you left…)

Nevertheless, I have been reading. And some very excellent fiction at that.

Before I say more, I invite you all to reread The Bacchae by Euripedes and then order a copy of Maile Chapman’s début novel Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto. Graywolf is publishing this excellent novel in April and I’ve been fortunate enough to read it for a review I’m writing. I’ll write some more thoughts up this week and be sure to publish a link to the formal review when it comes out.

But I mean it…order this book…you will not regret it.

Siri Hustvedt – The Sorrows of an American

By

I have a special admiration for books that take on the emotional complexity of the human psyche, and then successfully and without melodrama, reveal something novel about personal interaction. Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American is a dense and thoughtful little book about a variety of human relationships – siblings, lovers, children to parents, friends, doctor to patient.

The book is about Erik, a divorced psychiatrist in New York, who becomes attached to the woman (and her child) who rent half of his house. The woman has a troubling relationship with the child’s father, an artist, who often pushes the boundaries of sane, rational behavior. Personal boundaries and emotional/mental health are big issues in this novel. The main story focuses on Erik, his work, his loneliness, his memories, but there are several other stories involving his widowed sister Inga (who was married to a famous writer) and his niece (who witnessed the fall of the twin towers).

One of the more subtle but very powerful stories in the novel revolves around Erik’s grief for his recently deceased father. A small mystery arises when Erik and his sister go through their father’s papers. I’m tempted to say that the mystery in and of itself becomes superfluous (and that would be an accurate statement) but it isn’t superfluous to what the novel has to say about grief, about its painful, disorienting perplexity. I appreciated the intricacy of Erik’s grief for a father he loved, but ultimately never understood or was able to be close with.

The dialogue in the book caught my attention. Hustvedt allows her characters to speak, really speak. Saying things to each other with actual substance. I believe this is often difficult to pull off, our reader’s ear finds falseness very quickly in dialogue that tries to sound too profound. Here is an example of what I mean, taken from a conversation in which Erik is speaking with his sister about his work:

“I miss the patients. It’s hard to describe, but when people are in desperate need, something falls away. The posing that’s part of the ordinary world vanishes, that How-are-you?-I’m-fine falseness.” I paused. “The patients might be raving or mute or even violent, but there’s an existential urgency to them that’s invigorating. You feel close to the raw truth of what human beings are.”

 I like the risk Erik takes in saying this. He’s admitting something about his emotional need to be exposed to the rawness of other people. This doesn’t come in the middle of a long, serious conversation. He says this a little out-of-the-blue while he and his sister are discussing something unrelated. I like the authenticity in that. Sometimes people say things like this, meaningful confessions in the midst of common conversation.

There were two elements of the novel, however, that kept me at a distance. The first was the narrative voice. This is such a difficult thing to quibble with…and I suppose Erik convinced me of his maleness by the end, but I couldn’t quite shake my original impression of the voice as distinctly female. Putting the book down and rereading the first pages helped (and I note that we learn Erik’s first name in the third paragraph, but somehow I managed to overlook this) but the shadow of a female narrator hovered over my entire experience with the book.

I dislike when this happens because I hate to think of myself as a prejudiced reader, one that assumes a female writer can only write in a female voice. Some of my favorite authors routinely write from the perspective of the opposite gender and I’ve never had any trouble with it. Now, on the other hand, I loved most of the other elements of the narrative voice.

The only other thing that niggled at me while I was reading was the sizeable amount of psychoanalytic theory or imagery. On the whole, I really enjoyed Erik’s thoughts about the mind and how fragile it is, but there were a lot of dreams in the book, most of which had quite in-your-face symbolism, and I’ve never found this revelatory in literature. Also, some of the “troubling” behaviors from the daughter of Erik’s renter were too facile. I believe that children under stress do exhibit behaviors which can be clarified and understood through a psychoanalytic lens, but in literature it often strikes me as contrived.

Despite these two small criticisms, I was overwhelmingly impressed with Hustvedt – the eloquence of the prose, the nuances of the characters, the dense but artful layering of the different stories.

Cathy Marie Buchanan – The Day the Falls Stood Still

By

I have been trying to put my thoughts together for a review of Cathy Marie Buchanan’s novel The Day the Falls Stood Still. I received this book from the publisher and read it last week and enjoyed it. By ‘enjoyed it’ I mean that I was absorbed in the reading of it, and I was engaged in the story and the characters and the writing.

But I’m having trouble finding the words to express my feeling for this book. It is a lovely book, it is well-written, and it taught me something about the history of Niagara Falls. Despite all these commendable qualities, it didn’t manage to astound me.

Before I try and explain why, let me give you the gist of the story. The novel takes place in Niagara, Ontario between 1915 and 1923 and mainly concerns Bess Heath and her fellow, Tom Cole. When Bess and Tom meet, Bess’ family is in the midst of a great crisis – her father has lost his job, her sister is unhappy and unwell, her mother is trying to keep the family together. The novel is, essentially, a love story. Behind that love story are some other themes – environmentalism, classism, the trauma of WWI, even a bit of spiritualism. There are many interesting side discussions running the length of the novel.

All of this, the larger story and the tangents, are handled well and the book is a smooth, pleasant read. In and of itself, it’s a fine piece of writing and a sweet story. Where I think it disappointed me is that it didn’t take any real risks. The book has its share of sorrows and although it deals with them respectfully, it doesn’t go quite far enough in their emotional exploration.

I’ll take an example that won’t ruin the story for anyone – Tom gets sent to fight in WWI and a part of the novel deals with his absence and fortunate return. He is a sensitive young man, with a great attachment and connection to the natural world. It follows that he would be affected by the trauma of fighting, and he is. So much so that when he comes back he is appropriately shell-shocked and Bess must find a way to help him heal. She does so, creatively, and the story continues.

But the highs and lows of that mini-story weren’t quite steep enough for me. I think Buchanan could have pushed her characters a little further, pushed the writing a little further and the reader would have felt more keenly the horror of World War I as well as the redemption Bess offered Tom. This pattern was repeated throughout the novel when each tragedy threatened. Even the book’s greatest sorrow is eventually smoothed away. I’m not arguing that this isn’t possible, but I felt it was done too easily, almost as if Buchanan or the story was unwilling to engage with the darker aspects of raw emotion.

But perhaps I’m arguing against a genre here. The Day the Falls Stood Still rests very comfortably in the tradition of mainstream contemporary fiction. The writing is even and careful, the story is interesting and takes the reader through a series of familiar emotions – disappointment, sorrow, elation, hope, more sorrow, more hope – which all lead the main character to a kind of mature and resilient strength by the end of the book.

continuing the discussion on Roth

By

Let’s continue this discussion on Roth because there have been a number of thoughtful comments made on my last post.

First, Mike raises a really interesting question.

Since an enormity of books written before 1960 (and much later in some instances) were overtly racist, do we stamp them all, fine lit, classic mysteries, humor, all of it, as shameful?

I think we could discuss the word ‘racist’ first, in the same way that I’d like to get down to the nitty gritty of the word ‘misogynist’. These are words that involve the notion of active contempt. Which I think is very important for this discussion.

First, I agree that most American literature written before the civil rights era did nothing but uphold the status quo so in that sense it simply reflected the inferior position of black Americans at that time. But I don’t think the good stuff, the stuff we study now, the big ‘greats’ actively promoted the inferiority of one culture vs. another. I could be wrong here and I’d love some input on this but I think the difference between active and passive is worth discussing. Yes, perhaps many of these writers could be faulted for including a passive acceptance of the racially imbalanced world they lived in, but an active, contemptuous promotion of racist attitudes seems much graver to me. But also much rarer. I am trying to think of an example of this among my repertoire of great American writers – McCullers, Wharton, Steinbeck, Twain….

I want to clarify one last thought on this. I would hope that in today’s world, where we have finally crawled out of our cave and at least pretended we agree that all cultures and all humans are equal, a writer would get called on the carpet for either passive or active racism.

Okay, so let’s go back to the word misogyny, a word I do not throw around lightly. If I’m reading Roth and identify this active, palpable contempt toward women, why does it matter? I do believe that literature is not meant to be Good, so why does it bother me so much? I think Jacob Russell’s excellent comment gets to the heart of this.

When a book goes wrong, what matters is aesthetics. When a good and experienced reader like you finds yourself drawn in, made to feel complicit in a failed moral universe–not because you recognize that you are, complicit in the world outside the fiction, (as can happen)… complicit in some comparable way–but because you cannot fully engage with the book without feeling as though you are being invited to confirm, not merely understand or sympathize with, but confirm what is vile and hateful–then I think the problem is aesthetic, a failure of aesthetic distance.

This is exactly true – Lolita is one of the best examples for comparison (I can assume The Kindly Ones is right up there – but I haven’t had the courage to read it yet), exactly because the reader is never asked to confirm what is vile and hateful. Humbert Humbert tries every trick in the book to get the reader to sympathize and understand, but never once to confirm.

Jacob continues: What is it then about the misogyny in Roth’s novels that breaches the aesthetic borders, that draws the reader in as a kind of enabler of his misogyny? Is there such a fault? Or has the reaction to the narrator’s attitude and behavior perhaps overwhelmed the reading, created a situational blindness to aesthetic elements that might redeem both the novel and the reader’s sensibilities?

I think that the misogyny in Roth’s novels breaches the aesthetic borders simply because it is not a part of the novel’s thematic project (like HH’s obsession for Lolita was the entire project of that novel). Roth’s misogyny is a side element, a part of the decoration, it is entirely beside the point of what else is going on. As far as I can tell, he isn’t exploring the idea of misogyny through his misogynistic characters and/or narrator. So the breach is huge, because it’s unintentional.

So that’s my answer to the first question, but the next bit is going to have me racing back to reread The Human Stain and perhaps take up a few more of Roth’s books because now I am curious whether my gut reaction to the narrator has created a situational blindness to any redeeming aesthetic elements. I’ve stated very boldly that Roth isn’t exploring the idea of misogyny in his writing but am I really sure? I haven’t read all of his stuff. Does anyone think he might be doing this? Exposing and critiquing the inherent misogyny in American culture? This has not been my experience with him, and I’ve never seen anyone claim this as one of his preoccupations. But I’m going back to the texts and I’ll be reading very carefully, very carefully….

And will be back with more thoughts!

thoughts on Philip Roth

By

‘The work of a genius at full throttle’.

Generally, I hate blurbs like this on books and I can usually overlook them. But these lines, printed in eye-catching type on the bottom of my copy of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, keep coming back to me. And they don’t sit well. Despite his publishing success and the sheer breadth of his overall literary project, I am hesitant about granting Roth this label, mainly because I feel his work contains a fatal flaw.

He is a misogynistic writer and I find that this element of his work interferes with my appreciation of anything else he does. There is a difference between exposing social issues (a misogynistic character, for example) and colluding with them (a misogynistic narrator who is often not much more than a stand-in for Roth). Roth is hailed for his dissection of American life, and he does get into the nitty-gritty and often-unpleasant aspects of human behavior, something I usually applaud in literature, but I find that his portraits of male-female relationships are overwhelmingly caricatural. Yes, sex does come into the equation between men and women and their dealings with one another, but it isn’t the entire equation and it isn’t always such an ugly, angry, unbalanced equation.

I read an article about Roth over the weekend from The Guardian and it said this:

This perceived misogyny is seen in some circles as Roth’s Achilles’ heel, the ugly stain on his greatness. Like Bellow and Updike, he belongs to a generation of male authors whose coming of age predates the coming of modern feminism, and who share a tendency to create female characters who are either emasculaters or victims.

‘One must resist the urge to psychoanalyse,’ says Grant, ‘or to conflate Roth with his male creations, but the palpable sense of disgust towards the women characters has certainly intensified in these last great books. He has no problem with intellectual women, it’s their sexuality that he finds difficult. It’s deeply rooted, and almost medieval. But, it’s not a defect. It’s an element of who he is as a writer, and it does not for me diminish his greatness.’

At first, I found this description of Roth’s misogyny as an Achilles’ heel useful. An effective metaphor to remind me that perhaps I could separate the rest of his fictional gifts from this one, important flaw. And yet, I can’t. Imagine if Roth’s flaw ran in the direction of an incredibly powerful and compelling depiction of white supremacy or pedophilia. A writer with an obvious tendency toward inappropriate depictions of relationships between adults and children would not be considered a genius. And no one would say – it’s not a defect. It’s an element of who he is as a writer, and it does not for me diminish his greatness.

It does diminish his work for me. It impels me to dismiss a lot of what might be revelatory, because I become deeply suspicious of his capacity for insight, his ability to engage in objective critical exposure of other aspects of human nature.

K. B. Dixon – A Painter's Life

By

K. B. Dixon’s novel A Painter’s Life is a portrait of the fictional artist Christopher Freeze created by blending purported journal excerpts, interview snippets and reviews. This collage technique seems a fitting medium to get at an understanding of an artist’s mind – their particular mix of public persona (necessitated by the public nature of their work) and private individual.

The novel has a definite patchwork quality, and yet much of the book’s thematic preoccupation centers on Freeze’s yearning to find some level of satisfaction with his painting, with the ongoing tension between artists and critics, with an artist’s conflict between their public and private persona and about the artistic temperament in general.

I found the most compelling aspects of the book came from the journal entries and especially those moments when Freeze mused on what art meant to him, how art functions and how his work, in particular, was a challenge.

I am working on a guest commentary for Moment, the local art mag. It looks like it’s going to be an argument in favor of beauty. It’s blasphemous. What I’m trying to say is that art doesn’t have to be diverting, but it can be if it wants to – and at no cost to its truthfulness – that we in the arts community should think about being a little more ecumenical I our biases.

He also discusses the problem of knowing too much about the artist and how it might skew a viewer’s interpretation of a particular piece. I find this true with both art and literature, there is a lot to be learned through biography, but sometimes it is also important to separate the artist and their work.

Spent an hour looking at a new Kinsley picture – The Sleeping Dancers. It’s big and beautiful and one of the best things I’ve seen in I don’t know how long. I found myself wishing I didn’t know as much as I did about Kinsley though (for instance, that he is a religious fanatic – a cultist) because it kept getting in the way of my experiencing the thing. I found myself becoming suspicious of its simplicity – wondering if what I took to be a charming allusion to innocence might not be a cynical pandering to the theological base.

I enjoyed A Painter’s Life but it also frustrated me at moments. Mainly, I think, because it wasn’t enough of one thing or another. It heads in the direction of experimental literature, asking the reader to accept a lack of linear progression (the journal entries are not dated, and there are not many clues about their order) or unified narrative (in the sense that the reader is not given any clear picture of Freeze heading toward or away from one thing – he remains a static character for the entire book with the same wants and desires), but at the same time the novel follows a quite conventional structure. Each chapter options with a journalistic style blurb about Freeze and his life, and these move forward linearly, this is then followed by the undated journal excerpts and then each chapter concludes with samples from interviews or critical analysis of Freeze’s work.

I found the aesthetic of the undated journal entries a convincing and interesting method of creating this portrait, and I was willing to accept and even welcome their meandering until the opening and closing of each chapter made me wonder if I shouldn’t be looking for more connection between the three. Much of what was mentioned in the journalistic blurbs, for example, was never addressed by the journal entries. These blurbs tell the reader that Freeze struggled with excessive drinking, with psychological breakdown…but neither of those topics was ever explored within the journal entries except for some off-hand references Freeze makes about his therapist. I found that inconsistency weakened the novel’s overall project.

Dixon has several other novels. I’m particularly interested in his Andrew A – Z which looks like it pushes the experimental envelope as far as I wish A Painter’s Life had. This novel is again a character portrait but assembled from alphabetic entries on various words that Andrew himself comments on. I’ve ordered this one and look forward to reading it.

1 Comment

weekly reading notes

By

This week has me reading The Human Stain by Philip Roth. This is my third experience with Roth, and only my second Zuckerman novel, which means I have only scratched the surface of his work. Still, I suspect it will be a while before I’m tempted to try another one. What’s causing my reserve? Two things. First, two old men sitting around talking about sex doesn’t offer me much in terms of seeing the world from a new perspective, especially when the deepest thing either one of them manages to offer is that the ability to talk about sex means they are true friends. And second, I believe I need some more time with Zuckerman before I’ll feel comfortable with his presence as a literary device. I’m hoping his pertinence to the larger story will become clearer, but at the moment he feels superfluous. Why does the story (or any of the Zuckerman novels) need this additional filter?

My South American reading project continues with Augusto Monterroso’s collection of fables The Black Sheep. These are short, eccentric little tales with surprising moral lessons and twists. Easy to pick up and put down, but also fun to take apart to see what larger idea Monterroso was trying to express.

Finally, I decided to try Anthony Trollope for the first time and got all six of the Barsetshire novels. I’ve dug in to The Warden but it is far too early for me to venture an opinion…

David Benioff – City of Thieves

By

David Benioff’s novel City of Thieves is set in Russia during WWII and centers on Lev (the narrator) and his friendship with Kolya, whom he meets when he’s caught looting the body of a German paratrooper and taken to jail. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are asked to find a dozen eggs for the wedding of Colonel’s daughter. They try finding these in blockaded Leningrad, but when that proves impossible they head out into the countryside, into German-occupied territory where a series of scrapes and adventures await them. Not the least of which involve Lev falling in love with a young woman who is also a sharpshooting assassin.

The book is entertaining and a quick read. I enjoyed it so don’t let what I’m about to say stop you from trying it. But I have some reservations, mostly because I can’t help thinking the book should really be a movie. And I don’t mean that something about the book makes it perfect for a screen adaptation. I actually think it should have been a film, rather than a book. The whole time I was reading it, I couldn’t help thinking that its aesthetic was simply more suited to film. By that I mean that although the story moves through a series of grave and difficult situations (it’s set during the siege of Leningrad, for goodness sake, when the Russians were eating paper and glue to stay alive), it has a frustrating lightness about it. I say frustrating because I got the sense the book wanted to be more serious and just didn’t manage it.

Lev and Kolya are the perfect comedic (and cinematic) duo – one dark and brooding, one light and handsome – and they spend the book navigating their dangerous quest with plenty laddish humor. I believe that the human soul can seek humor in the darkest of situations, but Kolya’s continual joking and teasing and bravado wore a little thin by the end of the book.

Take Benini’s Life is Beautiful for example, a film that gets criticized for trying to be funny about Nazi Germany. But the whole point of that film, as I see it, is that it’s actually a tragedy. What could be more tragic than a father trying to keep the magic of childhood alive for his son in a situation that is completely devoid of any sort of magic or goodness. That’s not funny, it’s enough to make you weep.

City of Thieves didn’t seem willing to ever let you weep, and yet all the ingredients were there. Even a prologue which leads the reader (falsely) to believe that the book is based on Benioff’s own grandfather.

All in all, I would consider City of Thieves a few hours of entertainment…with a lot of interesting history, some wonderful landscapes and just enough seriousness to make you enjoy the clever but somewhat corny ending. Somehow, I feel a little guilty for sounding so negative about this book because I did enjoy it,  it’s well-written, it’s compelling, it’s full of vivid scenes…but it just didn’t ever convince me to take it seriously enough. But if you want a glowing review, check out the New York Times.