Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘books’

Eudora Welty – no place for you, my love

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Has everyone read Eudora Welty’s famous short story, No Place for you, my love? Something made me take it out this afternoon for a reread. I love Welty’s sly, subtle humor and bizarre, sometimes even fantastic detail. I also love the way she shifts back and forth between the unnamed man and woman in the story as they take their drive south from New Orleans; she leaves so much for the reader to puzzle over while at the same time creates an unmistakable emotional canvas of each character.

 

Right in the beginning, the man is watching the woman (they’re at an improvised lunch party, both out-of-town guests in New Orleans) and he assumes he has discovered something about her inner-life:

 

The shadow lay between her fingers, between her little square hand and her cheek, like something always best carried about the person. Then suddenly, as she took her hand down; the secret fact was still there – it lighted her.

 

Just after this moment, they speak for the first time and discover an instant kinship in their both being strangers and in what I can only describe as a kind of exasperated ennui. They aren’t attracted to one another. But they move quickly and smoothly toward an afternoon with all the outward trappings of adventure and the possibility of an affair.

 

The drive south is hauntingly beautiful:

 

More and more crayfish and other shell creatures littered their path, scuttling or dragging. These little samples, little jokes of creation, persisted and sometimes perished, the more of them the deeper down the road went. Terrapins and turtles came up steadily over the horizons of the ditches. Back there in the margins were worse – crawling hides you could not penetrate with bullets or quite believe, grins that had come down from the primeval mud.

 

I love the desperation in this image. The man and woman are speeding south, not speaking, just holding themselves limply upright in the dazzling heat and all around them these “little jokes of creation” are committing inadvertant suicide left and right under their wheels.

 

What’s even better, faced with this incredible display, the man is falling asleep at the wheel. The woman has to jar his arm to keep him driving straight on the road.

 

They get on a ferry and the man and woman don’t even make the crossing together. He stays down with the car, and she steps up to the deck to have this thought:

 

She held the hot rail before her. It was like riding a stove. Her shoulders dropping, her hair flying, her skirt buffeted by the sudden strong wind, she stood there, thinking they all must see that with her entire self all she did was wait.

 

I will try not to give everything away. But just next is a scene with an alligator some of the ferry help has captured. Welty juxtaposes the man’s and woman’s thoughts about this creature so delicately, so subtly, it becomes an occasion for mutual misunderstanding. And then she delivers this line – which I leave without context to force you all to find a copy of the story and read it for yourselves:

 

Deliver us all from the naked in heart.

 

They make it to their destination, have some food, dance together. All without really speaking or engaging directly with one another. And behind their few words and gestures is this feeling that both of them are reacting to the complications in the lives they’ve left behind for this short escapade. Lurking over the entire story is a kind of violence or danger.

 

In a very limited sense, their adventure is confirmed. Their affair realized. And then they drive back. Welty’s image of this drive is so bizarre and beautiful:

 

Later, crossing a large open distance, he saw at the same time two fires. He had the feeling that they had been riding for a long time across a face – great, wide and upturned. In its eyes and open mouth were those fires they had had glimpses of, where the cattle had drawn together: a face, a head, far down here in the South – south of South, below it. A whole giant body sprawled downward then, on and on, always, constant as a constellation or an angel. Flaming and perhaps falling, he thought.

 

Isn’t that stunning? I love the image of this dark, hollow face, burning from within. A mirror of the nameless man and woman of the story. Both similarly empty but dark, their emotions smoldering, their fiery insides only visible in their tense gestures and careful words.

 

 

Deborah Lawrenson – Songs of Blue and Gold

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Over at Tales from the Reading Room, Litlove has posted an interesting and informative interview with author Deborah Lawrenson. I enjoyed reading the interview yesterday, not just because Lawrenson reveals herself to be a thoughtful and dedicated writer but because in her responses she actually addresses some of the questions I had in reaction to my recent reading of her novel Songs of Blue and Gold.

 

For those of you who haven’t read the novel, Songs of Blue and Gold is a quiet but serious book. It tells two stories, the first following Melissa Quiller as she searches for answers related to her mother’s past while experiencing a difficult passage in her own marriage, while the second tells the story of Melissa’s mother, Elizabeth, and her relationship with a renowned writer, Julian Adie. Melissa moves between Greece and England and France hunting for clues to a past she didn’t know her mother had and hoping to understand, through that process, what decisions she might have to take in her own life. The two stories communicate on several levels – how is trust built between two individuals, how do men and women need and use one another, how do we define ourselves in relation to our parents, what does it mean to be generous in love, how do we manage the shifting details of our parents lives as we grow to understand and appreciate them as people in their own right, separate from our relationship with them as our parents.

 

On the one hand, the book follows closely the mystery of Elizabeth’s past and Melissa’s quest for information and understanding. She investigates, talks to people, searches for clues. In this sense, it has the aesthetic of a more conventional, plotted novel with an equally conventional emotional structure and writing. On the other hand, there is a consistent and compelling element of unique, specific description and careful interior exploration.

 

These two elements of the novel meant that my reaction to Songs of Blue and Gold became a little complicated. Readers read for different things. My particular reading bias means that most often I could honestly care less about plot because I’m looking for sentences and words put together in a new way, for scenes and dialogue that reveal exactly how complicated human beings really are. I certainly won’t accept incoherence or the complete absence of plot but I’m more interested in an emotional or philosophical movement within a story, than a specific or logical series of events.

 

So my experience with Songs of Blue and Gold was that I would get happily lost in a section of brilliant writing, in looking at Melissa or Elizabeth’s particular interior processing and then suddenly be brought up a little short by a reminder that there was a larger story at work that needed to be brought to conclusion. But I struggled with that reaction because it reminded me why I dislike literary criticism that attempts to label fiction as either good or bad. Ignoring extreme examples, fiction must exist outside simple qualifiers like good or bad. If we are to let fiction work its magic, we have to recognize that fiction is experienced one person at a time. A novel creates a one-of-a-kind relationship with an individual reader. And then goes on to create another, different relationship with another reader.

 

This doesn’t mean criticism, even the kind that revels in its definitive judgments, isn’t useful or interesting or worthwhile. Criticism provides a particular critic’s exploded view of the inner mechanics or hidden meaning of a work of fiction, and often to the benefit of the reader. But what it does mean is that my immediate knee-jerk reaction of wanting to dismiss or ignore the more commercial elements in Songs of Blue and Gold is flawed. It’s based on my accepting a bit too easily the rigid categories defined by someone else for me.

 

In Lawrenson’s interview with Litlove, she mentions that it was difficult to place her fourth book, The Art of Falling, with a publisher because it didn’t fit into either of the generally accepted categories of commercial or literary fiction. I haven’t read The Art of Falling but I would say that Songs of Blue and Gold also walks that line – although I felt it leaned decidedly further over the literary side of the fence. But this isn’t what should define the book, even if I was slow to come around to that understanding. A novel shouldn’t have to be one or the other. Readers are much more intelligent and nuanced than this.

 

Lawrenson has written a thoughtful, lovely, well-researched and interesting book that draws on elements of journalism, mystery writing, real-life inspiration and literary fiction. That unique blend meant I engaged with it on a variety of levels. I fell in love with certain passages, I got caught up in the vivid descriptions of the novel’s geography, I experienced a few minor frustrations, I was confronted with a number of questions and I was engaged, as a writer, to study Lawrenson’s technical choices.

 

I look forward to reading The Art of Falling and I will certainly be on the lookout for Lawrenson’s next book.

 

Graham Swift – Last Orders

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I can no longer remember who recommended Graham Swift’s Last Orders. It may have been Stephen…is that right? But in any case, whoever suggested this wonderful book deserves a huge thank you. What a gem. What a treat to read.

 

I love complicated books with multiple points-of-view and an intricate timeline. Books which are hard to put down because of a real risk of losing the thread. The main, forward action of Last Orders takes place in a single day but the story jumps around from person to person, covering a lifetime of short scenes and powerful experiences. A hodge-podge collection of the moments which gave meaning to each character’s life and which led them all to this particular day.

 

The day in question is not an easy one. Jack Dodds has recently passed away and a group of his friends – Ray, Lenny and Vic – along with his son Vince are on a road trip from London to scatter his ashes on the sea. Swift takes a single car journey and transforms it into the ride of a lifetime. Heartbreak, friendship, treachery, sorrow, luck and joy and everything else you can imagine a person’s life can contain all hitchhike along with the four men as they carry out Jack’s last request.

 

Behind Jack’s story is another, more subtle one. The loud, bravado-filled presence of the four men in the car is made conspicuous by the absence of the women who should be with them – Ray’s wife and daughter, Lenny’s daughter, Jack’s wife and daughter, Vince’s daughter. These are men who have suffered heavy losses. Their sorrow at losing Jack is really the tip of the iceberg, an accumulation of losing much more across a lifetime.

 

Ray has a more central role in the novel and his story is one of the more compelling narratives. His life was intertwined with Jack’s to an incredible degree, for both better and worse. Witnessing the arc of his grief as the four men journey toward the seashore is a wonderfully complicated and riveting experience. I think Swift really gets at the heart of what makes grieving such a horrible process – if it were a simple feeling we would know how to deal with it. But grief surges forth out of the messiness of our day to day and the convoluted details of our relationships. It will never be simple or easy.

 

There is so much going on in this novel – differences between the four men, fathers and daughters, love lost and love found, abandonment, and even a look at social class. Not to mention Swift’s structural and narrative choices. I think Last Orders is a great candidate for a Reading Writer post, because from a writing technique perspective there is a lot to look at and examine. I’ll have to save that for another day.

 

This was my first experience reading Graham Swift and it goes without saying that I really enjoyed it. Has anyone else read anything else by him – any suggestions? I just went and bookmooched his second novel Shuttlecock and his third novel Waterland so will be looking forward to those.

 

 

Philip Roth – The Ghost Writer

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Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer is a book working on several levels. On its most surface level, there is humor. On another, a bit deeper, there is a simple tale of ambition and personal journey with predictable ups and downs and tangents and all the trappings of traditional “story”. And on yet another, there is real tragedy and brokenness.

 

It’s a short little book, and not at all straightforward. It starts out innocuous enough, negotiates a few careful twists and turns and then suddenly takes a hard left into an unfamiliar and thrilling metafictional neighborhood. I wasn’t expecting this. It turned the book into something completely different. Something completely interesting.

 

So here are the two stories: Story one – fledging writer Nathan Zuckerman spends the night at the home of his literary idol, a man named E. I. Lonoff. They talk literature, love and writing. Zuckerman meets Lonoff’s wife and his assistant (i.e. his mistress) whom Zuckerman is extremely attracted to. Story two – Lonoff’s assistant, a woman named Amy Bellette, is actually Anne Frank.

 

Story two is Zuckerman’s brilliant invention. In my opinion it is the absolute best part of the entire novel. I actually wish it were the entire novel. Yes, I know, I know, metafiction has another purpose. And in The Ghost Writer I think Roth uses his metafictional element to the benefit of Zuckerman’s Jewish identity crisis – which is quite interesting in its own right. I just think he asks the same questions from a much more fascinating perspective in the Amy Belette/Anne Frank story. Put another way, story one is not much without story two, but story two rewrites history and asks some phenomenal questions in just a few pages and all on its own.

 

I haven’t yet read enough Roth to really understand all that he’s exploring in the whole Nathan Zuckerman-as-Roth-alter-ego thing. I get the sense that his exploration of the writer’s pysche is as important to him as the story he has his writer telling. In The Ghost Writer, the idea that he is a Jewish writer is very important. In fact, his being Jewish is really the central question of his role as a writer. (And I believe this is Roth’s fundamental preoccupation in all his novels).

 

Although I do somewhat wish the Amy Bellette/Anne Frank story could have stood on it’s own without any connection to Nathan Zuckerman, I did love the idea of Zuckerman inventing this fiction while snooping through his hero’s desk in the middle of the night. This is such an exquisite example of how a writer’s imagination can work. He meets a person who intrigues him, someone whom he really knows nothing about and then blithely invents her entire life. Early in the novel, Roth makes it clear that Zuckerman relies heavily on autobiography in his own writing. So everything Zuckerman comes in contact with is a potential narrative. This all winds back around then to the idea of writerly responsibility and what Zuckerman owes his culture and society.

 

For some reason I have always been wary of Roth’s work and I put off reading him for quite some time. I read a lot of male writers so I’m not sure what about Roth made me think he was a MALE writer but this is the impression I had. I read Everyman a few months ago and it didn’t do much to rewrite my initial expectations. And even after finishing this second book, I’m not sure I will ever find an easy port of access into Roth’s particular project, but The Ghost Writer asked some interesting questions, poked a bit of fun at writerly pretensions and at the same time took itself very very seriously. I see more Roth on my horizon – any suggestions? Anyone have a favorite?

 

 

Nadine Gordimer – My Son's Story

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I believe Gordimer probably begins each of her novels with an idea – by that I mean her characters often represent a philosophy instead of an active element of some story. I don’t mean this as a criticism, her characters are never ‘types’ because she eventually fills them with enough inner life to sink a lifeboat, but in essence her work is more about context than it is about story. In some of her novels, however, I think the story does get a bit too pushed aside but in others the balance of idea and story comes out just fine.

 

Her tenth novel, My Son’s Story (1990) takes up several ideas – interracial love, adultery and the ongoing revolution to overthrow apartheid in South Africa, and settles them firmly inside an engaging, well-told story. The novel begins with a teenage boy playing truant who catches his father doing much the same. The two run in to one another at the movie theatre. The son’s minnow of a lie is swallowed up by the enormous shark of his father’s obvious infidelity. But without batting an eyelash, his father introduces him to his white mistress.

 

The book takes place in the political environment which preceeded the final dismantling of the apartheid system. It was no longer strictly illegal for a black man and a white woman to be together, but Gordimer shows it was not accepted either. But this is less the point, really, because Sonny’s affair coincides with his political awakening. His love for Hannah runs parallel to his developing passion for revolution, for justice, and the two experiences are simply inseparable and will remain inseperable. A reality which will cause big problems for Sonny.

 

The story is told in alternating viewpoints – first person Will (the son) and third person Sonny (the father). This technique and the access it grants us to both men’s experience of Sonny’s revolutionary development and his affair is what propels the book forward. Sonny represents a movement toward the future, toward a new kind of society where relationships are based on ideas and sharing and aren’t first and foremost defined through skin color, but his evolution is due mostly to knowledge passed along to him by Hannah. Will, on the other hand, wants to reject that structure. He’s torn between wanting to maintain his quiet life between the lines set for him by someone else and bursting out, but on his own terms, with no help from the oppressive system that made him who he is in the first place.

 

This tension between the two men is already a lot for the story to contain but it goes further, delivering a number of interesting surprises along the way. Mostly to do with Sonny’s wife – Aila, one of the novel’s more intriguing and rich characters.

 

And there are also those moments of pure Gordimer. The reason why I read her novels slowly.

 

Here is the narrator describing how Sonny categorizes the difference between his wife and his mistress:

 

Joy. That was what went with it. The light of joy that illuminates long talk of ideas, not the 60-watt bulbs that shine on family matters.

 

And later, a moment of quiet reflection on Hannah:

 

The face of a woman who uses no makeup has unity with her body. Seeing Hannah’s fair eyelashes catching the morning sun and the shine of the few little cat’s whiskers that were revealed, in this innocent early clarity, at the upper corners of her mouth, he was seeing the whole of her; he understood why, in the reproductions of paintings he had puzzled over in the days of his self-education, Picasso represented frontally all the features of a woman – head, breasts, eyes, vagina, nose, buttocks, mouth – as if all were always present even to the casual glance. What would he have known, without Hannah!

 

 

Sue Miller – The Good Mother

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It strikes me that one of the more fundamental issues explored in Sue Miller’s The Good Mother is how little control we actually have over our own lives. It all starts in our childhood – all that shaping and influencing that our families exert over us, our attempts to define ourselves within, or, in extreme cases, completely outside that framework, and then the relationships we start to build with teachers, friends, partners, children. Most of all with society. Miller really gets at the tension between those ties and the individual. How does an individual continue to be an individual in the constantly evolving development of those ties? How does an individual decide which of those ties are best cultivated, best respected, or, when necessary, best severed?

 

To explore these questions Miller creates a specific situation – she gives us Anna Dunlap, a recent divorcée with a young daughter, who finds herself falling in love, redefining her sense of self, exploring her sexuality for the first time, and learning to cope with the shifting demands of single motherhood and singledom. Anna eventually becomes embroiled in a horrible custody battle which requires she find a way to justify some of her choices to both society as well as to a number of her personal relationships. She is forced to question, nevermind make a public account, of her way of life, her thinking, her sexual experiences and her value as a mother.

 

The Good Mother made me consider how difficult, how dangerous it can be for someone to be a sexual being and a parent at the same time, especially without the sanctioned framework of marriage to help set some of the rules. Sexuality without established guidelines is threatening for many people. As Anna loses her right to privacy about her most personal thoughts and experiences, that reality is really put into glaring perspective. People love roping other people into their moral comfort zones because it is much easier to do this than genuinely step into someone else’s shoes, or engage in earnest conversation about these difficult issues.

 

The book was written in the 1980s, an era which I think concentrated a significant portion of its emotional energy on divorce. Was it always bad? Was it destroying our societies? Miller’s novel is a distinctly feminist look at divorce and it exposes some of the double standards which may, for all I know, still burden any divorce procedure. But it also takes a very serious view of divorce; it reminds the reader that children really suffer when their world suddenly splits into two, distinctly different universes. 

 

The quote on the very-cheesy front cover of my copy of The Good Mother reads:

 

To whom is a woman more deeply bound, the man she loves, or her own child?

 

Well, that doesn’t at all do justice to the question I think this book is really asking. The novel does put that difficult challenge before Anna, but it goes a lot farther in exploring whether Anna should choose between herself and her own child. This seems more universal to me because I don’t think a parent needs something as extreme as a custody battle or a new lover to become confronted with that essential question. How much of ourselves do we sacrifice, voluntarily or otherwise, to our children? Do our desires, or certain essential elements of our personality, necessarily take second seat once we’ve brought a child into the world? Is our happiness less important than our child’s?

 

 

 

mid-read thoughts – The Rachel Papers

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I love reading first novels, especially of writers I already know and respect. But I’ve been having a love/hate relationship with Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers. Here is an author who can really write, who is wonderfully clever and wordy and funny. But I suspect he knows it and that smugness runs right across nearly every page. Also, the idea behind The Rachel Papers is much what I imagine a story passed between sex-obsessed twentysomething men might be like. All about who gets what, when, how and for how long. And will there be any swapping.

 

The book reminds me a bit too much of Edward Docx’s The Calligrapher, which I read in 2007 and which I grudgingly admired but which secretly annoyed me to no end. I realize now The Calligrapher was probably a nod to Amis, at least the main characters of the two books and their ridiculously contrived research and preparation for each seduction seem to be cut lovingly from the same cloth. So does their snarky humor and irreverence for anything not having a direct effect on their sex life.

 

This is neither my kind of book nor my kind of story but Amis is undoubtedly a most excellent writer and for that alone, I’m enjoying The Rachel Papers. Also, Amis’s hero (an unabashed Martin Amis stand-in) reminds me of a friend of mine, an inveterate womanizer who happens to believe his miniscule poetic side somehow makes up for most of his horrible behavior. Men like this are infuriating, and so is Amis’s Charles Highway. He also happens to be literate and just self-deprecating enough I’m willing to read on and see what will happen to him.

 

If I get through the entire book without slamming the covers shut at least once it will be a miracle.

 

Happy weekend reading everyone!

Nancy Horan – Loving Frank

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I’ve got politics on the brain these days and a large translation contract this week so I haven’t had as much time as I would usually have for keeping up with my reading projects. But never fear – I do manage to squeeze in a few hours here and there!

 

Last night my Swiss bookgroup met for a really involved discussion of Nancy Horan’s novel Loving Frank. I suppose I should admit right away that I did not love Loving Frank, but I didn’t dislike it either. What I did love was our discussion – so many questions, so many different opinions. Loving Frank is the retelling of an affair the architect Frank Lloyd Wright had with a woman named Mamah Borthwick at the turn of the century. The story is told from Mamah’s perspective and deals mostly with what happened to her personally, and intellectually, as the result of falling in love with someone other than her husband – and a famous someone to boot.

 

The book deals with the reality and consequences of infidelity and this is what fueled most of our discussion – especially because the story took place at a time when Mamah had little options for getting a divorce without ruining her own life as well as the lives of her children. Although I think most of us in the room enjoyed reading about Mamah’s struggle to assert her own intellectual and emotional identity, we all had a hard time understanding her willingness to abandon her children for a life with Frank Lloyd Wright.

 

Our discussion went round and round but we ended up going back to one fundamental question – does motherhood trump everything else? Even selfhood? (I’d like to pose that question using the word parenthood, but Horan’s book is focused specifically on Mamah, and I think it’s also fair to say that men are unfortunately not held to same standards when it comes to involvement in their children’s lives.) The answer to that question is obviously entirely personal but it’s a hard one for me to sort through. Horan portrays Mamah’s husband as a kind, generous man who loved her. But he wasn’t an intellectual match for her and she was slowly suffocating in the life they lived. She had two children and she loved her children. Along came Frank Lloyd Wright (married with six children of his own) and her entire world turned upside down.

 

So is there a way to correct an error like that? Should Mamah have been punished for the rest of her life for choosing the wrong man? There is an interesting moment in the book when Wright receives a letter from his minister, urging him to return to his wife and children with the implication that it would be all right to keep Mamah as his mistress. And at least in the beginning of their affair, Mamah’s husband is willing to forgive her if she would only decide to come back. Is that the solution? Should she have stayed with her husband, continued some charade of a family unit and kept up her passionate affair with Wright on the side? Would that have been better for her children? Horan creates a Mamah who couldn’t do that – who wanted all or nothing but who ended up with all and nothing.

 

The ending of the book comes as a horrible surprise and if anyone knows the true story of what happened to Mamah Borthwick, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Real life doesn’t ever follow a neatly packaged narrative and so the book is forced to strike out into territory that doesn’t have much to do with its central question. I couldn’t help being somewhat disappointed by that, even if I realize Horan was just trying to stay true to the facts. It’s just the book was written very much like a novel, so that sudden derailing seemed to significantly undermine what I felt was the heart of the story.

 

 

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Enchi Fumiko – The Waiting Years

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Since graduating from college I have moved house five times, hopping from where I grew up on the west coast to Japan, then to the midwest, the east coast and finally setting up what seems to be a semi-permanent life (or at least for a few more years) in Switzerland. All that moving means I’ve carted my possessions across nearly 16,000 miles. As most of you bibliophiles can imagine, those book boxes start to get pretty heavy. So I learned to be very careful about which books I hold on to and which books I don’t mind leaving behind.

 

One of the books I have lugged with me, literally from continent to continent is Enchi Fumiko’s Masks. I first read this book for a Japanese literature class in college and count it as one of my all-time favorites. It’s a dark, gritty book dealing with issues of sexuality, manipulation and the oppression inherent in Japan’s patriarchal culture. The best word I have to describe this novel is intense. Everything about it is intense – structure, theme, intertextuality, social criticism. In short, it can withstand a lot of re-reading.

 

So knowing how I feel about that book, I was not at all surprised to find myself absorbed in another dark, intensely feminist novel by the same author – Enchi’s The Waiting Years. Enchi took over eight years to write The Waiting Years and for it she won Japan‘s highest literary award – no small feat for a novel with such a glaring social critique.

 

The Waiting Years is also a ripping good read. The novel details the life of Tomo, a paragon of wifely submission, and her husband Yukitomo, a paragon of selfish arrogance. Not only does Yukitomo bring a concubine into their household, he has Tomo go to Tokyo to pick the girl out. Later, he seduces (although rape is more likely what happened) one of their servants and makes that woman his second concubine. Eventually, he begins an affair with his daughter-in-law. Tomo must bear each of these insults in silence as well as stamp out any desire for self-assertion or self-fulfillment. Literally, her entire life is lived only to validate her husband’s life. She has nothing, and is nothing, on her own.

 

In exchange for her willing subservience she has what none of the other women in the novel are allowed to have – legitimacy. Enchi dives freely into the minds of the other women, portraying their own stifled unhappiness. As his mistresses, they are assured Yukitomo’s love and consideration but no necessary legal benefits, neither for themselves nor for their children. As his wife, Tomo is guaranteed the outward strappings of happiness (a home, money, the power to do business in her husband’s name, the respect offered to her by strangers in recognition of his status) but Enchi makes it very clear that Tomo remains celibate, and horribly lonely, for almost forty years once Yukitomo has tired of her physically. And she has no right to want anything for herself. None. That the women are offered this choice between two equally miserable fates is, I believe, Enchi’s point. The entire system is inherently flawed.

 

To add to her worries, Tomo has the thankless job of working frantically behind the scenes to ensure the family name (which is only hers through marriage, yet the only name that will ever be associated with her and therefore vitally important) is never blemished by Yukitomo’s indecent behavior.

 

The Waiting Years ends dramatically with Tomo asserting herself for the first and last time. But I won’t say more. Think bittersweet revenge. Think soul-crumbling revelation. Very satisfying.

 

I mentioned in my first post about The Waiting Years that the Japanese title of this novel is 女坂 (Onna zaka) which literally means the woman’s slope. Traditionally, Japanese temples had a men’s path and a women’s path, the second a supposedly gentler, easier walk. Enchi seems to be using this title ironically, because Tomo’s “path” is anything but easy. This title (and the beautiful scene symbolizing it when Tomo struggles up a hill in the snow one evening to get back home) turns the whole concept of 家 (ie – home, household) upside down by suggesting that a woman’s work inside the home is just as dangerous and difficult as a man’s.

 

One of the book’s other ironies is that we rarely see Yukitomo outside the home, unless he’s taken one of his mistresses on some cultural expedition. Tomo on the other hand is often running left and right, arranging financial matters and keeping busy with tradesman to insure the house has all that it needs. Yukitomo’s “life” is focused almost exclusively on his sexual needs and Tomo’s on a denial of that same sexuality. That this might be a hidden meaning behind the concept of 家and one which destroys its other more positive associations, is a fascinating notion.

 

 

Enchi wrote seven novels in total, all of which have been translated I believe.

 

 

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Nadine Gordimer – A Sport of Nature

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I finished Nadine Gordimer’s novel A Sport of Nature last night and believe this will be the most difficult of her novels to write about thus far. It was complicated – but not in a way I was expecting. This is a novel I will have to read at least twice, and slowly, to come to any firm conclusions about what Gordimer was trying to do.

 

In the simplest sense A Sport of Nature is a personality profile, telling the story, from childhood to adulthood, of Hillela, a white South African woman who “becomes” a revolutionary in the struggle against Apartheid. Hillela’s political and psychological trajectory is unusual, mainly because Gordimer reveals her transformation from unconcerned to concerned (about her country’s social injustices) through a distillation of the idea of human contact. It makes sense that falling in love with another human being is one of the best ways to smash up racial boundaries and I think this is often the story that gets told – how better to understand our shared humanity than to really and truly fall in love. But Hillela’s story is more than this familiar one – her character, her self, struck me as Gordimer’s personification of the idea that love is blind.

 

Her early life is marked by a series of transgressions, all of them having to do with sex. She develops a relationship with a man from a township, whom she doesn’t even realize is black (a first allusion to exactly how colorblind her experience of falling in love will become) and is kicked out of her private school, she woos her cousin and is eventually caught in his bed and has to leave home, she follows a lover illegalIy into Ghana, escaping South Africa not for political ideals but romantic ones.

 

Through all this Hillela seems to possess some incredible luck. She is taken in again and again by the right people and kept back from the edge of poverty. She becomes friends with the wife of the French Ambassador to Ghana, moves in with this family as a sort of nanny and eventually has an affair with the Ambassador. It’s during this period that she meets Whaila, the black man who will become her husband.

 

This is the moment when Hillela changes, when she becomes engaged in the fight to overthrow Apartheid. This is Whaila’s passion and Hillela has fallen in love with him so it becomes her fight too. On the one hand, I saw Hillela’s “transformation” as quite shallow – to love this man, she will also love his politics. A subject she had no use for previously. But on the other hand, this is the moment she becomes aware of her disregard for skin color. She isn’t in love with Whaila as an exotic other, but with him – his mind, his person, his whole self. She was raised under Apartheid, and although rationally she rejected it as many of her generation did, she had never confronted its reality emotionally. So then to finally experience, emotionally, the absolute meaninglessness of that system is nothing short of revelation.

 

What happens to Hillela after this is also really interesting but I’ll give the story away if I say any more. So I’ll just say a bit more about Hillela as a character – after this transformation she continues to create a personal, rebellious world where Apartheid has absolutely no power over her. But the power she uses to fight the world beyond her personal circle isn’t physical, it isn’t intellectual, and it isn’t even emotional – her power is purely sexual. Gordimer is exploring a really interesting idea here, even if I found it somewhat uncomfortable. Her portrait of Hillela is intriguing and provocative. She is essentially a nobody who manages to rise to considerable political power…through love but mostly through refusing to choose a specific ideology except her own colorblindness.

 

As I mentioned above, there is definitely more to this novel than can be picked up in one reading. So in the meantime, before I tackle a re-read or any of the critical work about Nadine Gordimer I’ve been delighted to discover over the last 8 months, I have three more of her novels to read by the end of the year. Next up: My Son’s Story, published in 1990.