Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘books’

Toole – A Confederacy of Dunces

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On Thursday of last week, Jacob Russell published a very thoughtful post about how we access story – what are the ways in which the story opens itself up to us and how does our movement inside and toward that story alter it and alter us…I’ve been thinking about his post since I finished John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, mostly because I’m at a loss as to how I want to engage with this particular novel and how exactly I’m supposed to approach it.

I should take that word back – supposed to. I don’t think there is a correct way to engage with a text. There are a nearly endless variety of tools which can be used to approach literature. I have my favorites, which tend to focus on the way a story takes over my thinking, the way it creates its visuals inside my mind and the way the skeleton of the narrative (at the most basic level, I mean simply the words and how they fit together) is constructed to create its particular effect. That experience is what I try to pick apart and understand when I’m reading.

Beyond that, I am interested in what the story accomplishes. Where does it begin, where does it take me, who does it introduce me to and where does it ultimately end up…in this sense, I’m on a journey with the book, alongside its own journey and standing quietly by to see where we might end up crossing paths.

I don’t mind not crossing paths. Sometimes it’s enough to be a bystander and to try and puzzle through the logic of a particular work. This is where I stand with A Confederacy of Dunces. I watched and listened, spied and kept myself nearby, but I didn’t really step inside Toole’s incredibly bizarre universe.  It was a vivid landscape and interesting, even funny, I suppose, but my overall impression left me baffled and a little disgusted.

A Confederacy of Dunces reminded me of Rabelais more than anything else. Grotesque beyond belief. Exaggerated. Outrageous. Grotesque doesn’t sit well with me, unless it’s funny. I’m still not sure whether this book was meant to be funny. I suspect it wasn’t. I suspect it was meant to be sad. The characters are diminished in every sense of the world – intellectually, emotionally, financially, physically.  Even Ignatius, whom we are meant to believe is academically bright, struck me as the most diminished. He’s a psychopath. In the strictest sense of the word.

So now you might be wondering what this story is about. And instead of answering that question,  I want to go back to something Jacob Russell wrote:

…the ‘is’ in ‘the story is about’ is not an equal sign, but an arrow. An arrow within the story pointing out. Not a one-way arrow, but an operational sign that points in two directions, away from the work (where the interpretation occurs, where the explanation is deciphered, where the reality of the fictional universe encounters and interacts with that of the reader’s experience) and back into the work, where it (the story) receives its meaning though that very interaction.

Okay, so this means I’m a participant in that phrase. I am a factor of the “is”. This is something I have always agreed with. The reader is an essential part of that narrative skeleton I mentioned before.

What this reminds me, though, is that the reason I’m struggling with how to approach this novel is because I’m unsure where I want to let that outward arrow land. Whether I want to accept Toole’s “grotesque” or reject it. If I reject it completely, the novel becomes funny. A total farce. And that outward arrow points at an easily digestible target. However, if I accept the grotesque in A Confederacy of Dunces as something still very human, as a part of our shared experience, then that outward and inward arrow ask a lot more of me.

I realize if you haven’t read A Confederacy of Dunces, this may all sound a little strange. But take any work of fiction which doesn’t soothe and I think you can apply a similar principle. I don’t ask my fiction to be redemptive, I think that’s false. But when its unwavering focus is the ugliness of the world and of people – and I think this is ultimately the project Toole’s novel takes up – without a single, solitary reprieve, it can be hard to find the energy to access the story, to want to move around inside it.

To Kill a Mockingbird

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For a few days now, I’ve been reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird before going to sleep. I read this book once, a long, long time ago, so although most of the details of the story remain vaguely imprinted somewhere in my mind, the writing is a pure discovery. Scout’s voice is particularly engaging, the voice of a grown-up casting back to a beloved but tumultuous childhood.

Last night I read the scene when Atticus is sitting outside the town jail, reading calmly under a light on an extension cord, but actually waiting for a gang of men to show up and attempt to lynch his client. Of course, Jem, Scout and Dill arrive shortly after. Jem is terrified for his father and spurred by that particular combination of anger and fear starts an altercation with his father. Which only boosts the tension between the men and Atticus, until Scout, still an innocent child, jumps in. She recognizes one of the men as the father of one of her classmates and begins a nervous speech to him about his son. It’s a wonderfully tense moment. Scout starts to believe she’s making a fool of herself, not at all tuned in to what is actually happening. Because her innocence and nervousness manage to erase the dividing line between Atticus and the gang of men just long enough to remind them of their shared community. They slink away. Unknowingly, she’s saved a man’s life. And possibly her father’s too.

Also, I have always loved characters in novels like Boo Radley. Children are so gifted at making their world extraordinary, at creating irresistible monsters from eccentrics or the misunderstood. How many people had a similar character in their childhood? A frightening old neighbor you just had to keep tabs on or a house a few streets away you embroidered with your own extravagant details? My friends, sister and I did this all this time. We were deliciously terrified of a number of enigmatic characters or ramshackle houses. And we created stories to keep us involved and afraid.

What I like the best about Boo Radley is that he fulfills that deep-down secret desire many children have. He is just as interested in you as you are in him. What we would have given to find a mysterious present tucked into the knot of a tree, or under a loose brick. What incredible validation of our outrageous stories. And not to mention the particularly childish optimism which thinks all recluses are secretly shy, wounded people just waiting and watching to help those that deserve it. Scout, of course, deserves it, which is why she is such a delightful character.

 

John Banville – The Sea

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Over my holiday I read John Banville’s The Sea very slowly. I think he is a good author to take slowly, and I liked being able to take up with the book a little each day and meander through his careful sentences. The Sea is an interesting novel, with not much resembling any sort of plot. Despite the quietness of the narrator’s account and his sometimes hazy focus, there are two stories vying for attention – narrator Max’s childhood memory and his feelings about a more recent, but significant loss. But even without any overt plot, there is movement. Max uses his memories of the one painful experience to get to the heart of the other, much more powerful one.

I mentioned before that my initial experience with The Sea was slightly disappointing because it reminded me so quickly of the Banville novel I read and loved last year – Eclipse. As I got deeper into The Sea, some of the resemblance wore off, but the more striking similarities remained. Especially the overall narrative tone and how the book features a narrator escaping into the past to deal with a present trauma.

Now I happened to really like the narrator in Eclipse, so finding him in slightly altered form in The Sea wasn’t necessarily a problem for me. I just had to make some small adjustments to my expectations, to try and banish my vision of Alex from Eclipse and let Max come into his own. There were differences, although mostly in detail, not much in tone and emotional structure.

There was something very ominous about The Sea, a moody and threatening subtext which I think created much of the novel’s tension. I felt this mostly when Max went into the past to describe his relationship with the Grace family but it was there in his more recent memories as well and in his current-day conversations with his daughter or the other residents of the hotel where he is staying. I saw this as Banville’s acceptance of the more dangerous aspects of grief. Not the danger of suffering, or the way sadness can surreptitiously and wholly take over, but more a kind of simmering violence. The understanding that things are not right, and that they won’t ever be right.

This is only my second Banville novel and I’m sure I’ll be looking for more, if anything just to enjoy the thick texture of his writing. There were moments when I wished he’d taken a simpler route to convey a thought or two, but on the whole I like his layering and complicated sentences, his obscure word choice and heavy images. This type of writing asks me to slow down and measure out the rhythm of each word.

 

 

Gordimer wrap-up #2

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Nadine Gordimer published her first novel, The Lying Days, in 1953. This book traces a young woman’s complicated journey from the ignorant bliss of her sheltered childhood to an adult’s understanding of her particular South African world and her place in it. I can’t help seeing The Lying Days as the most biographical of Gordimer’s novels – it isn’t about a writer, thankfully, but it does detail a psychological journey which strikes me as basic for someone destined to become a transformative political figure. So many different tensions to navigate: the struggle between wanting to fulfill the self but knowing that serving the greater community is more important, a relentless and exacting self-scrutiny, and the ability to turn that same scrutiny on society and not be blinded or deluded into ineffective or condescending action.

These same tensions then figure in her other novels and take on new depth depending on the context. The Lying Days is a strictly personal coming-of-age, both sexual and political, while her next novel takes up that same idea from an altered perspective. In The Lying Days, Helen is South African and finds her way to her self within a familiar landscape she must learn to see objectively, while Toby in A World of Strangers is a foreigner coming into South Africa who undergoes a similar realization from a different angle. This second novel goes further than the first by delving into the intracacies of a bi-cultural friendship.

This same theme then becomes even more powerful in her third novel, Occasion for Loving, which is about a bi-cultural love affair. It is in this novel that one of Gordimer’s fundamental ideas gets phrased for the first time.

Every contact with whites was touched with intimacy; for even the most casual belonged by definition to the conspiracy against keeping apart.

Here is something which will come back again and again in her work, in the relationships she creates which reflect South African society and later, in a more general way, which explore any ingrained system of cultural, political or gender-based separation.

The Late Bourgeois World goes further into the psychology of revolution, how a cause becomes both motivating and devastating for an individual, how that individual must fight to maintain a sense of self while accepting an equally powerful need to self-efface for the greater good. It is a short novella and very intense. For ninety pages, Gordimer holds a magnifying glass over one woman’s thoughts and experience, using those suddenly clear details to reveal a much larger story.

Her next novel, A Guest of Honour, takes up this same question of the individual within a larger system, although the magnifying glass is inverted to provide a vast, sweeping portrait of an entire country and its politics. Here, I think, Gordimer puts all her questions and attempted responses into a single, far-reaching framework – bicultural relationships, revolutionary psychology, objective political action, love (or lust) in a context of political turmoil, and social/political reconstruction.

At this point in her bibliography, history is already happening. The political system of apartheid is beginning to crumble. Her next two novels (The Conservationist and July’s People) capture that period of uncertainty and transition and distill it into a single emotion – fear. The upheaval of a political system can be seen in much the same way as a generational change and role reversal, both frightening experiences, and I think Gordimer integrates that feeling of heightened anxiety into her exploration of cultural differences.

So I’ve traced this link between her first six novels, and I could go on to include the next eight (but I won’t – no time), because I was curious to see how her thematic project moved from one book to the next. The six novels I’ve just outlined are quite different, both technically and in terms of story, but they are part of an ongoing discussion which Gordimer invites the reader to participate in each time he or she sits down and opens one of her books. Following that discussion has been one of the more rewarding aspects of reading her from start to finish this year. I have loved seeing how she opens a question in one book and then goes back to it in another, or then looks at it from another angle in a third. This is where fiction really shows its power, I think, in its ability to accommodate sustained discussion.

 

 

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Gordimer wrap-up #1

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I know, I know, I have assailed you with Nadine Gordimer for an entire year. But if you have the patience to stick with me for just one more week, I promise to mention her only when absolutely necessary for the next few years.

Sometime in 2007, I decided Gordimer was one of the writers I wanted to read from start to finish and I duly looked up all of her novels and ordered them or mooched them, setting aside a section of my overflowing shelves for her fourteen novels, and then last January, I plucked number one from the shelf and began what became an extremely rewarding journey through a succession of fictional worlds.

There are a number of doors I could open to begin with, points of entry for a Gordimer-centered discussion, but I think today I would like to talk about the intricacies of her writing style. More than anything, I read for the little stuff – the way a writer puts words together, the transitions and word choices, how the narrative threads and directs the story, how descriptions get built and then placed appropriately, how the writer animates a character.

I have mentioned before one of the more arresting aspects of Gordimer’s writing is her ability to capture, distill and convey an emotion or an observation. Across her fourteen novels, I was continually pulled up short by a line here or a paragraph there that managed to reflect some minute truth I wasn’t aware of until the way she expressed it made it all too clear.  Very often these moments were superfluous to the actual story in progress, and functioned like a kind of supportive netting cast delicately across the larger structure of the novel. This is something I find lacking in some contemporary fiction, as though writers are afraid nowadays to stray too far from the point.

Her earlier novels have a traditional narrative structure, but later she began making some interesting choices in narration. The Conservationist (1972), in particular, is one of the first to try something different. In that novel the narrator, Mehring, is not just telling his story, but he’s speaking to another character in the book. A character Gordimer never brings onto the page, so that our only experience with that person is through Mehring’s frustrated interior discourse. It’s an interesting technique which creates a kind of narrative layering, multiple voices within a singular narrative focus. She does this a second time in Burger’s Daughter (1979).

In The House Gun (1998) and The Pickup (2001), she writes simultaneously from the perspective of both halves of a married couple.  Exploring the two opposing/complementing sides of a couple is something she started doing as early as her third novel, Occasion for Loving (1963), but in her later novels the technique becomes much more refined, more subtle. And in many ways, more intimately reflective of the “unit” she’s describing. There are very few seams or spaces between each character’s thoughts, and Gordimer moves back and forth between Harald and Claudia or Julie and Ibrahim without any heavy guiding structure to “tell” us who is thinking what. The separation comes naturally, from their differing characters and voices.

I’ll finish today with some thoughts on how Gordimer handles description. She is skilled with corporeal presence in her writing, and knows how to give substance to her characters without resorting to unnecessary superficial tags. Instead, she gives them weight, shape, and movement. I think My Son’s Story (1990) showcases this particularly well, as so much of the book is wrapped up in exploring the physical differences of Sonny, William, and Hannah, as well as Sonny’s wife’s physical transformation. But even the smallest, most insignificant character in any Gordimer novel is unique and real and perfectly visible. It is almost infuriating how simple she makes it, a line detailing a nervous habit, a few words on the shape of a forearm, the exact description of someone’s laugh.

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rereading Ramuz

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Next week I’m meeting up with my French book group for the second time. Our first meeting went relatively well, although I was a little worried about the number of people who insisted we should be reading police thrillers. Call me biased (or well, okay, a snob) but I would rather we stick to contemporary or classic literature. I don’t mind police thrillers and mystery books, I will even read one on occasion, but I’m not sure they provide the kind of substance for a truly extensive book group discussion. I feel kindof guilty admitting this but there you go.

Anyway, our book for this next meeting (a choice I fanagled like a happy little bookish dictator) is one of my favorites from the Swiss author C.F. Ramuz, La Beauté Sur la Terre (Beauty on Earth), and I am contentedly re-reading it this week in preparation. The novel was written in 1927 but is stylistically quite modern with an unusual narrative approach. The narrator implicates the reader in the telling of the story as though the reader, alongside the narrator, was actually standing inside the frame of many scenes, looking in on the action like an invisible presence. When I first read the book, I remember feeling kind of strange and unsteady, it was such a direct request for me to join in, but the more I’ve read the book, and the fact that the story takes place in a village just down the hill from where I now live, makes me enjoy the level of participation Ramuz demands.

Rereading is such a different experience compared to the first time you get your hands on a book. I’m not preoccupied with what will happen within the story, or trying to figure out the characters; I can spend all my energy just picking the sentences apart and noting details I’ve already forgotten or maybe didn’t catch on earlier reads. Like this next passage:

Les nuages avaient été longtemps sur le ciel comme une couche de glace sale; tout à coup ils s’étaient crevassés en tout sens. Le ciel, apparu dans les fentes, faisait là-haut des espèces de rigoles, comme dans un pré irrigué.

I’ll translate that in a second, but I want to describe the region where I live first because I think it helps explain why I love these two sentences so much. Lake Geneva sits in a lopsided bowl at about 300m altitude. My side (in Switzerland) and in particular, the region where I live, was first settled by the Romans and they built terraced vineyards that slope steeply down to the lake edge.  A series of small villages dot the vineyards and are connected by windy roads. The upper end of the lake opens up to a sharp valley, with steep mountains on both sides. Those mountains extend back along the French side so if you’re standing in the vineyards looking out across the lake, the mountains form a formidable wall. When the weather is bright, the space appears vast – a wide stretch of lake, green forests climbing up toward the mountain peaks and then a wide blue sky beyond, but when there are clouds and the mountains and sky vanish, the space retracts to what seems like a few feet of gray water. It’s an incredible trick of perspective.

And now for a translation:

The clouds had been hanging in the sky for ages like a layer of muddy snow; suddenly they broke up into crevices in all directions. The sky, which showed through the cracks, created what looked like gullies in an irrigated field.

That isn’t perfect but it will do for now. Two things about this: first, he manages to express the extraordinary texture of the moment the weather changes over the mountains and opens up toward the vineyards, and second, he very subtly gives the moment its due joy. In the French version you’ll see he uses the word “rigoles” which I’ve translated as “gullies” but there is another, unrelated word in French, “rigoler”, which means “to laugh or joke about”. So not only is the sky opening up but that movement contains laughter and teasing.

Isn’t that wonderful? And how sad the nuance gets lost in the translation.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on Inequality

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About a third of the way through Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality*, I nearly threw my pages across the room. Not only because I disagree with his romanticized version of the “savage man” but because I happened to read this:

 

Now it is easy to perceive that the moral part of love is a factitious sentiment, engendered by society, and cried up by the women with great care and address in order to establish their empire, and secure command to that sex which ought to obey.

 

It’s very difficult to take someone seriously when he gives so little credit to his own gender and then so little respect to the other. But I kept reading.

 

The discourse on inequality was Rousseau’s attempt to explain why civil society contains such huge gaps between the wealthy and the poor, the strong and the weak, the powerful and the enslaved, and whether this unfortunate situation is naturally occurring. His answer is yes. And he thinks the whole big mess is a direct result of humans leaving their “state of nature” and coming into contact with one another.

 

Rousseau’s assumption is that humans are perfect when they live separately, in nature, when their life revolves around an “amour de soi”, instead of what this becomes when they group together in civil society, “amour-propre”. He juxtaposes these two terms, which literally mean “love of self” and “self-love”, creating two opposing visions of the human soul. Rousseau argues that Love of Self is good because it promotes self-preservation. Self-love, on the other hand, makes us vain, competitive and proud. I like the distinction he makes between the two, but with almost 250 years of research in the natural sciences behind us, his theory of the noble savage just doesn’t hold any currency anymore, which of course weakens everything else he has to say.

 

He is correct in assessing that civil society is potentially fraught with disaster, that humans are horrible to one another more often than not, that most of our poverty (both intellectual and material) is of our own making. His argument against private property is quite compelling, so is his point about the corrupting capacity of power. He also rightly points out that once inequality is present in a society, it becomes a self-perpetuating problem.

 

However, as Rousseau builds his argument, he spends a short moment explaining how humans transitioned away from the state of nature and moved toward civil society. He argues that this change comes about through several inherent human qualities, notably, self-awareness and freedom.

 

Nature speaks to all animals, and beasts obey her voice. Man feels the same impression, but then at the same time perceives that he is free to resist or to acquiesce.

 

Humans are unique in that we have the ability to choose the life we lead. As well as become aware or conscious of our instincts. This consciousness is the key, I think, but unfortunately Rousseau very quickly throws it away. He explains how this very difference is what sparks our evolution toward civil society but then he spends the rest of his time explaining the negatives of the society we end up creating. And he makes it sound very much like once we’re living inside that complex social construct, we’re no longer capable of self-examination or free will. He depicts a society completely out of control, which spirals toward its own destruction.

 

There are days when it is difficult to remain optimistic about the way the world is heading. There is so much violence and poverty out there. Too much. But as far as I can tell, we are still paying attention. We are actively assessing our actions and examining our motives. We are painfully aware of our failings. Our system may be flawed, as Rousseau points out, but we’re not mindless slaves to any system. I think we prove this day after day. So I remain hopeful.

 

 

 

 

*A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind

 

 

Reading Writer – Swift's Last Orders

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Let’s go back to Graham Swift. I’ve been thinking some more about Last Orders. I talked about the story when I wrote up my first post, but I want to spend some time looking at the jumble of voice and structure and detail that transformed this particular story into such a wonderfully-written book.

 

What strikes me only a few lines into the very first paragraph is the particular emotional structure of Ray’s voice. His edgy melancholy and gruff sadness. He is a sappy stoic. Ray is set up right away as our guide to the novel. He opens THE story and signals that this story will also be HIS story. There are a lot of characters introduced across the next few pages and sly allusions to almost every single subplot which means the novel threatens to become confusing. But it stays firmly in Ray’s perspective for 18 pages, long enough for the reader to feel steadied again, before switching to Amy.

 

Amy’s voice is the “chin-up, old girl” variety – a perfect blend of bitter self-pity and desperate pluckiness. She is so angry but she’s trying not to let that anger win. One of the novel’s strengths is its willingness to keep us in suspense as to why. And we’re also meant to wonder about June, the person to whom Amy is talking.

 

Eventually, although Ray remains the most frequent POV, each of the men gets a turn leading the narrative – Vince, Lenny, Vic. And Amy shows up a few more times. The effect created is very much like a gathering in a noisy neighborhood pub. Someone starts reminiscing and everyone adds the detail most important to them. The stories intersect but also swiftly diverge. Details start to get cluttered or vague. The voices of the novel’s seven narrators are similar because they all come from the same place and have lived similar lives, a feature of the novel that frustrated me at first, but as I read further, I think Swift manages to differentiate them where it matters – their judgments of others, their interior decisions.

 

Besides Ray, I found myself really drawn to Vic. He speaks directly to the reader only seven times and each time with this kind of fierce pride and solemnity about him. He is the only man in the group who seems to be at peace with himself and his life. Although he’s just a little pompous too. He can’t help feeling the power his job gives him, although he tries to be respectful of it for the most part. I suppose I liked the contradiction in that. A character that recognizes the authority he has over people at their weakest moments and who tries to honor that but who can’t help feeling just a bit superior. That seems very human to me.

 

Part and parcel of the constantly shifting point-of-view in the novel is the way each man describes the others, and his friendship in relation to each and then to all. It was interesting to compare how Vic thought others saw him with the glimpses Swift gives the reader of how they actually did. Same for Ray and Vince and Lenny. Human relationships are so complicated, with so much room for misunderstanding and false impression. The men in Last Orders have known each other for something like forty years and Swift does an excellent job of using a particular blend of their voices to bring all that baggage, both good and bad, into the present moment of their car ride to Margate.

 

This is a novel I could write pages and pages about. And after my first post, so many of you mentioned his other novel Waterlands, which I now have waiting for me on the shelf, along with Shuttlecock, so I’m really looking forward to both.

 

 

Nadine Gordimer – The House Gun

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Rereading Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun over the weekend confirmed to me that it will remain one of my all-time favorites. I think this was the third Gordimer novel I ever read and I sought it out because I had so enjoyed the first two. It is her twelfth novel and was published in 1998, when she was 75 years old. And yet it is a novel with incredible insight into contemporary problems of violence and sexual concerns.

 

In 2006, I wrote this about the novel:

 

In The House Gun Gordimer literally unstitches the seams holding together the lives of her main characters, Claudia and Harald, as they cope with the reality that their only child, their son, has committed a murder. Part One begins with the coy words, Something terrible happened but this is not yet Harald and Claudia’s “terrible”, it is only the news, the busy hum of everyday violence the couple are watching on TV one evening. But then within a paragraph, that hum infiltrates their living room. A messenger arrives. Their lives will never be the same.

 

This dichotomy between the violence “out there” and the violence “within” soon becomes one of the central sources of the novel’s power. Harald and Claudia have lived relatively quiet and happy lives, not so much oblivious to the violence in their society, but discreetly distant from it. They are quick to point out that they didn’t agree with the apartheid system but neither did they risk their life and security fighting against it. Claudia is a doctor and an atheist, while Harald is the director of an insurance company and a contemplative Christian. They are both politically liberal, in theory supportive of equality but yet admittedly still enmeshed in the mores dictated by an earlier cultural system. The unfathomable act committed by their son soon becomes their only point of reference and each aspect of their life must pass through its prism as they try to understand the unthinkable.

 

I would say The House Gun has two main preoccupations – one is Gordimer’s traditional dissection of the legacy of apartheid on the South African pysche (from both sides of the color barrier) but the other takes up the issue of longstanding violence within a community and how that poison, for lack of a better word, seeps into everything. With an incredible amount of sympathy, Gordimer presents Harald and Claudia’s son Duncan as someone who can’t help having assimilated that violence (which is both sexual and physical) because, in essence, everyone in the entire culture has had to do the same. The title emphasizes this fact – the group of young people living with Duncan has this “house gun”, an object of incredible violence that everyone treats as no big deal.

 

The novel is one of Gordimer’s most compelling narratives, in the traditional sense, in that the story literally keeps you on the edge of your seat. For those of you a bit shy of Gordimer’s sometimes roundabout narrative style, this would be an excellent book to start with. It is simply packed with her discerning prose and vivid descriptions but also with a story that grips you right from the beginning.

 

Nadine Gordimer – None to Accompany Me

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Things have been quiet around here – sorry for the unexpected blogging break but I’m back today with more Nadine Gordimer. I finished her 11th and 12th novels over the weekend – None to Accompany Me and The House Gun. Both excellent – of course you all guessed I would say that right?

 

None to Accompany Me meanders in the way that several of her novels meander. It doesn’t have a precise, focused story. Instead it charts a period of time, following the lives of two women (one black, one white) during South Africa‘s transitional period away from apartheid.

 

One of the things I’ve grown to appreciate with Gordimer is her willingness to put what I can only call “story” onto a smaller stage and let the details and intricacies of the lives of her characters create an effective storyline on their own. On the one hand, both women (and their husbands) are involved in dismantling the apartheid system, on the other, they are concerned with more personal issues – a teen daughter’s pregnancy, the death of a co-worker, a son’s divorce, their own marital commitment, new employment and shifting friendships. And all of this is set against the evolving political landscape into which each of the four must somehow fit or transform their identity.

 

The book made an interesting parallel between apartheid and a certain kind of marriage in which one person holds all the power. The kind of relationship in which one person does all the defining for both halves of the couple. Gordimer makes the point carefully, showing that although it is possible for the parties on opposite sides to connect, even care for one another, until that original imbalance is corrected, the connection remains a false one.

 

I’m finding it difficult here to put together a neat synopsis of the novel because it encompasses such a wide variety of human experience. None to Accompany Me is a fairly complicated and weighty read (with exquisite writing, however, to make things just a little easier). The story is deceptively quiet when in fact it takes on a steady stream of huge issues and treats them each with a particularly painful honesty.