Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘books’

more Fournier

By

We are snowed in today on my little mountain so instead of visiting the region with my sister and brother-in-law, we’re all snuggled down in various corners of the house with mugs of tea and books. Lovely to have bookworms for visitors.

And I thought I’d take a few moments to spend some time on this somewhat neglected (of late) blog…

Last spring I read a difficult, very emotional book called Ou on va, Papa? by the French writer Jean-Louis Fournier. The book is a memoir, dealing with Fournier’s life with his two disabled sons. My reactions to the book are here and here. As I mentioned when I first discussed the book, it was a controversial piece of literature when it came out (although it was selected to win the Prix Femina) because of the way it dealt with its subject. Fournier is a comedian and his book uses humor (quite dark) to approach his feelings of frustration and rage with respect to his difficult experiences. Despite the challenging nature of the emotional tone, I enjoyed the book and Fournier’s writing. Mainly because it was exceedingly honest about the conflicting emotions a parent must encounter when raising a child who will always be different, about the disappointments and anger which must have been an integral part of his day to day relationship with his sons.

I mention the book again for two reasons. First, it has finally come out in English and is called Where are we going, Daddy? I expect there will be some continued controversy as the book reaches a broader audience. And I am very curious to see the American reaction to the book since it doesn’t ever attempt to locate a positive aspect of Fournier’s experience. It isn’t depressing, at least I didn’t think so, and it was profoundly moving.

The second reason I bring this book up again is that when I originally discussed it, there was some question about what this same story would look like from the perspective of Fournier’s ex-wife, Agnès Brunet, the mother of Matthieu and Thomas. A thoughtful commenter pointed me in the direction of her blog (which is in French) and is very interesting. She has a clearly different perspective than Fournier on the lives of their sons….or perhaps she simply has a very different manner of expressing her emotional response to their shared experience. I am not interested in deciding which version is the truth, or even more compelling – they are both powerful narratives and both undoubtedly true.

What is interesting to me as a reader is how Fournier found the words to express, or attempt to express, what must have been a devastating, heartbreaking, exhausting long-term reality. He expresses his dismay and sorrow with great eloquence; even the parts that made me uncomfortable were compelling in a literary sense. As a reader and a writer, I can’t help admire that literary journey.

Michèle Lesbre – Le Canapé Rouge

By

I’ve recently discovered a French author named Michèle Lesbre through her novel Le Canapé Rouge (The Red Sofa) and am now curious to try some of her other work. This particular book was published in 2007 (and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt) and it’s her tenth novel, which proves she has some literary legs although I believe she’s remained a bit off of the main stage of the French literary scene. (Or perhaps she’s incredibly famous and I’ve just not paid attention…).

Regardless, this tiny novel was impressive for the depth of material it covered in so few pages as well as the way it structured a series of interlacing stories with such apparent simplicity. The structure appears almost messy and haphazard and yet she must have worked very carefully to keep each substory in line with the rest. And then she pulls off a nice narrative sleight-of-hand when, toward the end of the book, the main story suddenly takes second seat to what was originally a substantial tangent.

Le Canapé Rouge is a seemingly simple story of a woman’s train journey across Russia to find a former lover. Anne and Gyl have been friends and lovers for over twenty years, sharing a special “no rules” relationship which trumped the rest of their many affairs. But a few months ago Gyl traveled to Siberia and a few weeks before the novel opens, Anne stopped receiving any letters from him. Worried as well as curious, Anne sets out to see what has happened to him.

Anne is the kind of traveler that purposefully creates significant memories and looks for a deeper meaning inside each experience and with each person she meets. She develops a curious attachment to a fellow traveler, Igor, and despite their inability for real conversation, she weaves a narrative invovling him and herself, invents his life and somehow makes his presence meaningful to her own life.

Eventually, Anne makes it to Irkutsk and Gyl’s new home. Of course, nothing is what she expected and her journey becomes something much more than a few weeks of travel. What ultimately transforms her journey, however, isn’t so much what she finds along the shores of Lake Baikal, but how it ties back to, how it mirrors, the other story in the book.

The second story in Le Canapé Rouge is about Anne’s friendship with an older neighbor woman named Clémence. Clémence’s “story” is that she loved a man named Paul, was meant to marry him and then he was killed when they were nineteen years old. She went on to other lovers, other experiences, another life, but she admits to feeling that she lived her life in a state of perpetual waiting…waiting for her life with Paul.

The two women have spent hours together, hours that Anne remembers throughout her journey across Russia and back home. Most of the time, they discussed the lives of famous women in history (a subject coming from Anne’s job as a writer of these kind of historical portraits), women who dared the extraordinary, who were martyred for their courage, who destroyed themselves for love.

As I mentioned above, eventually Clémence’s story steps forward and gives greater meaning to the story of Gyl and Anne. But in a very subtle way. Very neatly done.

Le Canapé Rouge was a pure pleasure to read, with a surprising number of literary allusions that never felt heavy or pretentious. Lesbre’s descriptions of the Siberian countryside and the people Anne encounters were just lovely, never overdone but almost always tainted with a bit of mystery. In the way that travel makes the world both marvelous and mysterious because of the mindset of the traveler.

The novel opens with just this kind of moment, with Anne looking out the window of the train to see a man standing next to a motorcycle with a sidecar, rolling a cigarette. The description of the man and his gesture is simple but elegantly done and he literally leaps off the page to the reader. But she goes a step further, taking that moment and making it an integral part of Anne and her future life:

Voir un homme se rouler une cigarette, le perdre de vue très vite, me souvenir de lui toujours. Aujourd’hui encore, il m’arrive de penser à la brève apparition de cet inconnu surprise dans son intimité, à d’autres aussi qui de façon mystérieuse se sont installés dans ma mémoire, comme des témoins silencieux de mes errances.

[To see a man roll himself a cigarette, lose sight of him quickly, remember him forever. Still today I find myself thinking of the brief appearance of this unknown person caught in his private moment, and of others who have mysteriously taken up residence in my memory, like so many silent witnesses to my wanderings.]

2 Comments

loving and (although I'm loathe to admit it) hating Ramuz

By

A short break from work today to reveal my conflicted heart to you…

Why I love C.F. Ramuz (as a reader):

He has brought Switzerland into closer focus for me, with his intricate details of traditional village life, his sly view of social failure, and his careful dissection of personal vice and caprice

His language is a pure pleasure to read, filled with extraordinary descriptions and unconventional metaphor

He is as thorough as Balzac in his attempt to catalogue daily life. It is clear to me that he literally lived to observe the world around him and then worked extremely hard to distill what he observed into a kind of perfect, polished artifact

He is as devoted to the natural world as he is to the human world, rendering both with an unusual acuity

Why I hate C.F. Ramuz (as a translator):

Too many semicolons

He loves to switch tenses, using a particular narrative authority (like an invisible storyteller) that moves fluidly from looking back upon an event (a more formal past-tense stance) to bringing the reader inside the event, despite it being in the past (a more informal present-tense stance)

His absolute preference for the French pronoun “on” is distracting at best, most of the time it is a nightmare…the last paragraph I worked on used “on” to mean “everyone in general” at first, then later “a group of young persons” but from their own collective perspective and then later he uses it in reference to one woman’s thoughts which is the most unconventional use of “on” I’ve ever seen and he gets away with it only because he’s melding the telling of her story with an omniscient invisible storyteller who is “sharing” the voice with her

And now back to work!

English in decline and another TQC review

By

It may seem as though I’ve disappeared but I haven’t. I have been reading, a bit less than last month since I am slowly starting to translate and work again, but I’ve got several books I would like to write about. Before I get to that, however, since I don’t have time to sort through my reading notes today, let me point out two things:

First, my review of Philippe Claudel’s novel Brodeck is up at The Quarterly Conversation and second, I came across an interesting article in the most recent issue of The American Scholar – The Decline of the English Department

Crace begins with statistics* showing that majoring in English and other Humanities is in decline, while majoring in Business is up. He outlines some of the pertinent external reasons why this might be so but then focuses on an examination of several factors coming from within English Departments themselves which could explain their failure to grow. I apologize for the long quote, but I feel this gets at the heart of Chace’s argument:

Perhaps the most telling sign of the near bankruptcy of the discipline is the silence from within its ranks. In the face of one skeptical and disenchanted critique after another, no one has come forward in years to assert that the study of English (or comparative literature or similar undertakings in other languages) is coherent, does have self-limiting boundaries, and can be described as this but not that.

Such silence strongly suggests a complicity of understanding, with the practitioners in agreement that to teach English today is to do, intellectually, what one pleases. No sense of duty remains toward works of English or American literature; amateur sociology or anthropology or philosophy or comic books or studies of trauma among soldiers or survivors of the Holocaust will do. You need not even believe that works of literature have intelligible meaning; you can announce that they bear no relationship at all to the world beyond the text. Nor do you need to believe that literary history is helpful in understanding the books you teach; history itself can be shucked aside as misleading, irrelevant, or even unknowable. In short, there are few, if any, fixed rules or operating principles to which those teaching English and American literature are obliged to conform. With everything on the table, and with foundational principles abandoned, everyone is free, in the classroom or in prose, to exercise intellectual laissez-faire in the largest possible way—I won’t interfere with what you do and am happy to see that you will return the favor. Yet all around them a rich literature exists, extraordinary books to be taught to younger minds.

Chace’s frustration seems to lie in the continual off-centering (and he does attempt to locate a traditional center) of English departments, and what he might call a frantic race to embrace the multi-cultural and multi-faceted aspect of “English” as it’s understood today. While that embrace might be admirable, he feels we’ve gone in that direction at the expense of constructing a “coherent” discipline.

I know that many of you are English / Humanities professors or, like me, come out of and are committed to the discipline and I’d love to hear some of your reactions to his argument.

*Crace’s statistics include English, Philosophy, History, Languages and then as a comparison, Business. His article focuses exclusively on English, but the decline in History is just as significant and I am curious what he might suggest to explain this similar failure, since I think of History as a very coherent discipline, with fairly rigid boundaries and so forth. I’m not saying his argument about English doesn’t hold, I’m just wondering about the similar drop in History and if it might be explained in similar terms.

 

two Davids

By

I have a ton of books to review but am just not finding the time this week…how about two mini reviews of some men named David:

David Malouf – The Conversations at Curlow Creek

Two men sit talking in the middle of the night in a lonely area of the Australian Outback. One is an officer, the other a criminal. In the morning, the officer must hang the outlaw. As they talk, the officer ponders the justice of what he is about to do, what it will feel like to take a man’s life. At the same time, the moment brings him to reflect on his past and what brought him to Australia (a search for a long-lost brother) and what he left behind (the woman he loves.). It took me some time to get used to Malouf’s writing style, which I can only describe as tangential and discursive, but it was definitely worth the effort. The overall effect is lovely.

David Guterson – East of the Mountains

The hero of this meditative novel is Dr. Ben Givens, a seventy-year-old retired physician. He has been recently diagnosed with incurable colon cancer and on the morning the novel opens has decided to commit suicide by faking his death on a hunting trip. There are a series of memorable scenes in this book, the best of which, although violent, involves a pack of Irish Wolfhounds and a coyote. Guterson is also really good at evoking the rugged beauty of Washington State. This is ultimately a sad book, although that sadness is interrupted by moments of generosity, hope and happiness.

 

monday reading notes

By

Nothing like a list of unconnected reading notes to start off the week…

My Central and South American reading project is in full swing. I moved from Mexico down to Guatemala and finished Francisco Goldman’s extraordinary novel The Divine Husband. I am uncharacteristically speechless about this book. I strongly suspect that a thorough working knowledge of Don Quixote would have helped render this novel less unwieldy for me. Well, unwieldy is maybe the wrong word. The experience of reading The Divine Husband was wonderful; the book is quirky and outlandish and has a sly narrator and eccentric, memorable characters, but it is an oversized book. And I mean oversized in many ways…it is very long, with numerous tangential stories and lots of seemingly irrelevant detail (all of which is either funny or mysterious or engaging). There is so much going on this novel, within the story itself, but it also includes heaps of intertextual references to other great works of literature. Definitely a book to read a few times in order to break it down and work out its many themes and allusions.

And then I went to Belize with a collection of short stories called Pataki Full by Colville Young. It may have been because I read these simple stories right after finishing The Divine Husband but I wasn’t able to drum up any real affection for the writing or the subject. They did give me a straightforward picture of some of the issues of life in Belize, but without drawing me in, without casting a spell.

Next up is a book from El Salvador called Luisa in Realityland by Claribel Alegria and I cannot wait.

For my French book club I am reading Romain Gary’s memoir La Promesse de l’Aube. For those of you who might not know Gary, he is the only person to have won the Prix Goncourt twice. He won it twice because after winning it the first time in 1956 he began publishing under an alias (while still publishing as Romain Gary) and was awarded the prize a second time in 1975. It was only discovered upon his death in 1980 that he was actually Emile Ajar as well.

La Promesse de l’Aube (published in English as Promise at Dawn) is a beautiful book about Gary’s childhood, and mostly about his relationship with his mother. Gary was raised by a formidable woman who loved him fiercely. He writes how incredibly suffocating her love was but also how inspiring. She would not have accepted anything but fame and glory from her son and it’s clear that Gary suffered, especially as a young child, from her excess of maternal affection. At the same time Gary openly admires her resourcefulness and her unwavering devotion in the face of his common failures. The book is written with more humor than frustration and ranks as one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. (I feel so bold saying that about a second novel in less than a week!)

Also, I’m reading another Iris Murdoch novel – The Nice and the Good. I made some stylistic comparisons between Murdoch and Nadine Gordimer the other day, which I find hold up in this second Murdoch novel, but I did want to say that despite their similarities, there is always the political or social dimension in Gordimer’s work and of course Murdoch doesn’t have this. I don’t say this as a criticism of Murdoch but only as a statement about where their work has very little common ground. I get the sense that Murdoch was intensely preoccupied with relationships and ethical questions as they relate to love and sexuality.

Finally, and this is very silly, but I read Johanna Spyri’s Heidi for the first time last week and it made me wonder where on earth we get this image of a blonde Heidi? In the book, Heidi has short, dark, curly hair. I was so surprised by this I actually had to run downstairs to my refrigerator and take out the bottle of Heidi brand milk to look at the picture, which in my mind had a little blonde girl drinking from a bowl of milk. But no! She has short dark hair. Which is when I realized that it must be the Swiss Miss hot cocoa label from my childhood that did all the damage…

 

Kamila Shamsie – Burnt Shadows

By

It is rare to encounter a novel that is both historical as well as acutely contemporary. Kamila Shamsie’s novel Burnt Shadows begins in Nagasaki in 1945, moves forward to India on the eve of British departure in 1947, then to Pakistan in 1982 and eventually to New York in 2001. The element linking these four geographic locations is Hiroko, a spirited and courageous Japanese woman with an incredible gift for languages and a sorrowful past.

The book has all the elements of a family saga but none of the tedious details which usually plague that genre. It is essentially the story of two families and how their lives intersect across fifty years of experience. Embedded inside that domestic narrative is a meditation on political violence and its effect on the individual and daily life. For many people political violence, or war, its most explicit form, is an abstract concept – something that occurs elsewhere. Burnt Shadows brings war and its hundreds of thousands of contingent ripples into a closer, personal focus.

Shamsie’s writing is also excellent. It has a strongly lyrical element – it’s clear Shamsie enjoys playing with language and rhythms – but it never goes too far, never trades a straightforward depiction of events for an impressionistic approach. And thankfully, because the book makes a lot of geographic jumps as well as shifts in point-of-view, the entire story is contained in a neat, airtight structure.

Aside from the writing, I think the reason I’m tempted to consider this book one of the best, if not the best read of 2009 is the way Shamsie builds toward her ending. There are several tragedies at work in this novel, the greatest of which is the ending, and when I finally realized a few pages from the end where Shamsie was heading, I was quite impressed. Part of me was screaming for her to change things, to make it work out differently, to wave her magic writer’s wand and make things better, but the rest of me was silently applauding her for forcing me to consider the truth contained in the book’s conclusion.

 

Iris Murdoch – The Sandcastle

By

The Sandcastle begins with a fractious dialogue between Mor (the main character) and his wife Nan. It becomes clear within only a few pages that this kind of antagonistic exchange is common between them. In the middle of the discussion, Mor makes a reference to their dead dog, seemingly out of the blue. And then Murdoch delivers two lines which put their entire relationship into perspective:

This animal had formed the bond between Mor and Nan which their children had been unable to form. Half unconsciously, whenever Mor wanted to placate his wife he said something about Liffey.

I really like this kind of specific insight into a character, especially when, as I suspected correctly, it also serves to highlight the book’s central focus. In the case of The Sandcastle, a book about an unraveling marriage, these two sentences illustrate the longstanding tension between Mor and Nan (and ultimately the complete failure of their marriage) as well as reveal a fundamental issue of Mor’s personality – his need to mollify Nan.

As the book progresses and certain important events transpire (Mor meets an engaging young painter and begins a chaste affair with her), his absolute inability to really cross Nan becomes fundamental to the rest of the story. So what looks on the surface like an exploration of the bonds of marriage and whether they are really sacred is actually a careful and detailed criticism of Mor’s particular weakness.

I mentioned earlier that Murdoch was recommended to me as a writer I would like because of my deep admiration for Nadine Gordimer. Interestingly, I think I actually put off reading Murdoch for a long time because I was afraid to make the comparison and find either writer lacking. Now that I’ve read Murdoch, I realize how silly this was. They are similar, so I can see where the recommendation came from, but of course they each carry certain distinct stylistic traits.

Without reading more Murdoch I can’t make a real comparison, but I do think it is interesting to note some of the echoes of Gordimer I found while reading The Sandcastle. First, the flawlessness of the male narrator. Not all female authors even try, let alone succeed, in writing from the male perspective. This is something Gordimer does with about half of her novels and each time I felt it was a seamless performance. The voice of the male narrator in The Sandcastle was equally convincing.

Second, I’ve written before about how much I enjoy Gordimer’s moments of insight, where, in just a few lines, she manages to explicate or illuminate a certain feeling or thought. She takes a singular experience and renders it universally understandable for the reader. Murdoch did exactly this in The Sandcastle, allowing her characters to reflect on the world with bold statements and keen observations and by giving them a voice to their precise, individual thoughts in such a way that the reader says, yes, that is exactly what that feels like.

And finally, both writers are courageous in their use of dialogue, allowing their characters to engage in complicated, weighty conversations at the risk of moving too far away from the cadence and rhythm of natural dialogue. I think Gordimer almost always gets away with this risky endeavor, and I think Murdoch succeeds perfectly in The Sandcastle.

Murdoch has an even larger oeuvre than Gordimer and although I don’t think I’ll be able to tackle it this year, I’d very much like to read her from start to finish in the way I read Gordimer in 2008. If anything I will get a copy of The Sea, The Sea and read that before the end of the year. Any other suggestions?

 

1 Comment

Sarah Orne Jewett – The Country of the Pointed Firs

By

Having no experience whatsoever with Sarah Orne Jewett I took her book off the shelf with only mild interest. I have a Dover Thrift edition, which weighs nearly nothing and could be easily mistaken for a bound short story. The evening I took the book down, I needed something I could move easily through from beginning to end and which would hold my interest through a predictably sleep-interrupted night. So it was quite fun to start reading and then find myself swept up in Jewett’s cheerful and loving descriptions of the New England she held close to her heart.

The Country of the Pointed Firs is not so much a novel as it is a series of portraits assembled into a detailed collage of coastal Maine at the dawn of the twentieth century – a rugged landscape, a reliance on fishing and the lobster harvest, the deep quiet of a typical Maine personality. I believe it was Jewett’s goal to record the way of life in this area as well as pay a sort of tribute to it. And she does this well, introducing the reader to a series of eccentric characters and describing the landscape with great precision.

The narrator is a writer who has come out to the area on retreat, spending her days either helping her landlady gather herbs or working diligently in an old school house a bit outside of the town. It is difficult not to imagine Jewett as the narrator, especially since the narrator keeps her own personality and internal thoughts so distant from the actual people she is describing. She reflects on them and interacts with them, although not to create a story between herself and them but, rather, to get at the heart of their own story, whatever that may be.

Each little chapter is a portrait of one of the townspeople or a related event and includes such gems as Captain Littlepage’s story of encountering a sort of limbo town where dead souls wait during one of his sea voyages to the Arctic, or a young woman named Joanna who, thwarted in love, rows out to a tiny island off the main coast to live out the rest of her days alone. Most of the sketches involve the narrator’s landlady or the landlady’s mother – two quaintly bizarre women – in some capacity, either introducing the narrator to another individual or providing a suitable event for description.

The Country of the Pointed Firs has no central event or interlaced plot, but each chapter is linked to the rest through its tone and the consistency of the narrator. There is also a harmony in the collage aspect of the book; each chapter fits to the rest like a separate piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The overall effect is pleasant and the book creates a vivid image of a tiny corner of the United States at a particular time in its history.

 

a few words on Vanity Fair

By

Although it gets a bit baggy for about 150 pages in the middle (which is not much when you consider the overall length of this novel), Vanity Fair is one of the funniest novels I’ve read in a long time. What I find so remarkable about this is that the characters in and of themselves are not especially funny. In fact, most of them are pathetic or cantankerous or pious or frail. The story isn’t all that funny either, a bit too much of a silly marathon to be truly funny. But the narrator, the wonderful narrator is downright, laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Reading Vanity Fair feels like having a snarky conversation over a delicious glass of wine with a most amusing, most dashing friend with an incredible gift for dramatic representation. The kind of person who has so much fun relating the particulars of a given event that it is impossible not to laugh and snigger at the poor fools who were in this person’s vicinity when he or she chose to pay attention.

The narrator is what makes the book complete. Without this snide voice describing the events and making up detailed portraits of each character’s foibles, the story would actually be quite sad. Nice people get taken advantage of and made into pathetic jokes while clever, naughty people have all the fun. Well, at least until page 631 where I’m wondering if the tide is about to change.

Don’t tell me, any of you who have read this already, but I’m incredibly curious whether the narrator will be able to skewer his beloved Rebecca in the end. Until now, she’s gotten off each and every time for her dastardly behavior and it’s clear he loves her more than any of his other inventions. (I’m now freely taking the narrator for Thackeray himself. And if this is the case, if Thackeray was as wonderfully sarcastic and funny as the narrator of Vanity Fair, I’m very sad not to have had the chance to meet him or hear him speak in person).

I can just picture Thackeray laughing over his manuscript, chuckling proudly at each scene and line of dialogue. Becky Sharpe is a fantastic heroine. Thackeray makes her so quick and witty, such a bald-faced liar and opportunist; it’s hard not to want to see her get away with it all. If only to keep the narrator in such jovial spirits:

It is all vanity to be sure: but who will not own to liking a little of it? I should like to know what well-constituted mind, merely because it is transitory, dislikes roast beef? That is a vanity; but may every man who reads this have a wholesome portion of it through life, I beg: aye, though my readers were five hundred thousand. Sit down, gentlemen, and fall to, with a good hearty appetite; the fat, the lean, the gravy, the horse-radish as you like it – don’t spare it. Another glass of wine, Jones, my boy – a little bit of the Sunday side. Yet, let us eat our fill of the vain thing, and be thankful therefor. And let us make the best of Becky’s aristocratic pleasures likewise – for these too, like all other mortal delights, were but transitory.