Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘books’

Anna Gavalda – Je L'Aimais

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How wonderfully tricky French can be. I wrote on Thursday that I was reading Anna Gavalda’s novel Je L’Aimais and I translated the title as I Loved Him. But this was wrong – or at least it was only partly correct. In French the article gets placed before the verb and when the verb begins with a vowel, like aimer, the “le” or “la” is contracted so we don’t know without more context whether it is “him” or “her”. I assumed “him” because the story seemed to belong to Chloé, the narrator, who has just lost her husband to another woman. But as the novel progresses I realized that the story belongs just as much to Pierre, Chloé’s father-in-law, and his own story of love lost…so the title could just as well be I Loved Her.

 

Well, I did a quick check and the title of the novel has been translated as Someone I Loved – that’s just perfect.

 

This is a novel about adultery. About the worst kind of betrayal most people can imagine and the shock of having to try and understand why the person you love doesn’t love you anymore.

 

Au bout de combien de temps oublie-t-on l’odeur de celui qui vous a aimée ? Et quand cesse-t-on d’aimer à son tour ?

Qu’on me tende un sablier.

 

La dernière fois que nous nous sommes enlacés, c’était moi qui l’embrassais. C’était dans l’ascenseur de la rue de Flandre.

Il s’était laissé faire.

 

Pourquoi ? Pourquoi s’était-il laissé embrasser par une femme qu’il n’aimait plus ? Pourquoi m’avoir donné sa bouche ? Et ses bras ?

 

Ca n’a pas de sens.

 

[How long does it take to forget the scent of the person who loved you? And when do you stop loving them?

Someone hand me an hourglass.

 

The last time we held each other, I was the one who was kissing him. It was in the elevator on the rue de Flandre.

He let me kiss him.

 

Why? Why did he let himself be kissed by a woman he no longer loved? Why did he give me his mouth? And his arms?

 

It makes no sense.]

 

But it’s also a novel about love. How do we know we’ve found love? How do we know it will last? What happens when love arrives at the most inconvenient moment? When you think about it, this whole loving thing is a pretty fragile affair. And I think this is what Gavalda wants to explore in Je L’Aimais. Love is often a tricky experience to negotiate, filled with some wild ups and downs and often a lot of unexpected and potentially dangerous mundanity. Gavalda presents two versions of the experience of love – first through Chloé and her raw, painful astonishment of what has just become of marriage. And then through Pierre, thirty years her senior, and what he reveals about his own passionate discoveries.

 

Stylistically, the novel is interesting because it unfolds almost completely as a long conversation between Pierre and Chloé. I felt Gavalda managed this back and forth really well, dropping well-placed hints to remind us of their surroundings but for the most part she just let their dialogue do all the hard work.

 

And Pierre and Chloé do venture out into some thorny territory, especially in terms of duty vs happiness. Still, the book is an easy read and I might even argue that Gavalda’s attempt at a moral (a very small one, but its still there) might not have been a good idea, because I think, as horrible as it is, there just aren’t any straightforward answers where adultery is concerned. But despite her debatable conclusion, I liked very much how the book mostly focused on negotiating/exploring the very frightening reality that love is not always a permanent experience.

 

 

Reading Writer – Amsterdam and structure

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It has been ages since I put together a Reading Writer post and since I’m still coming off the high that is my weekly Tuesday morning meeting with my writing partner, I thought I might continue the conversation I’ve been having about structure and extend it a bit to what I’ve been reading lately.

 

When we talk about the structure of a novel, what exactly does that mean? For me, structure is the place where the author’s fingerprints are most likely to be visible. It’s what gets me asking questions like: Why was this particular scene placed after the last one instead of that scene on page 42? Why did parts of the story need temporal displacement? Why are we given four different points of view, shuffled to each give us a part of the story? And so on and so forth. Structure is about configuring the fictional elements and I enjoy trying to figure out why writers make the choices they do.

 

Because I read it recently, let’s look at Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. The book is divided into 5 parts, each of which has anywhere from 3 to 6 short chapters. Almost exclusively each chapter encompasses a single scene. I counted and McEwan uses only 22 scenes to structure his entire novel. Of note about these 22 scenes is that they are linear, branching directly forward from the first funeral scene both temporally and thematically. They build on one another, using either an event or a piece of dialogue to propel the story onward. It is an incredibly simple but also nearly airtight structure.

 

I am quite certain that McEwan did not divide his book into 5 parts by chance. So it follows that we can look at each part as an element of a traditional 5-part drama. And when I compare my notes on what happens in each of Amsterdam’s 5 acts, they follow exactly:

 

1 – exposition which ends with the “inciting moment”

2 – rising action involving secondary complications

3 – climax or turning point

4 – falling action

5 – conclusion

 

Amsterdam is a satire and the evilness of its characters quite exaggerated so it makes sense McEwan would have tipped his hat to burlesque theatre. It’s funny, when I first read this book I only liked it, I didn’t love it. But looking at its structure has bumped it up a few notches in my estimation. I love it when that happens.

 

But now for some nitty-gritty details (and maybe a small spoiler) – because otherwise talking about structure just wouldn’t be that much fun. McEwan does something interesting in terms of structure within two of the sections. The first comes in Part 2, when the story is still developing and when we are in Vernon’s perspective. Part 2 has five chapters and without the last three the entire book would fall apart. Sorry for getting so technical, but I’m going to use numeric indicators to make this easier. In Part 2, Chapter 3 (2 – 3), Vernon receives Clive’s suicide proposal, which he rejects as ridiculous along with the reader. But then something huge happens in 2 – 4 which changes everything so that 2 – 5 sees Vernon not only accepting Clive’s suicide proposal but requesting it be a mutual contract. The nesting of the presumably big event in between two smaller, seemingly benign events is a very cool structural trick with implications on how the ending impacts the reader.

 

The next interesting bit of structural work comes in Part 3, which has only three chapters. 3 -1 shows Clive on a “morning after”. We don’t know of what, only that he is upset and happily escaping to the Lake District to finish work on his symphony. 3 – 2 then jumps back in time to the “night before” to explain what got Clive so worked up in the first place. This chapter shows Clive and Vernon having a mammoth argument (related to that something huge in 2 – 4), which nearly ends their friendship on the spot. Then, in 3 -3, McEwan jumps back to Clive, now beginning his hike around the Lake District.

 

This back and forth is the only time the novel breaks with its strictly linear progression and the effect is quite interesting. In 3 – 1, Clive proclaims his friend a villain, in 3 – 2 we see exactly why he might be so but then in 3 – 3, Clive reveals his own spectacular failings. This structural movement is quite balanced, arguably better than a strict linear one which would have whalloped the reader with their fight and then sent Clive off to brood for two chapters. It is an interesting choice for McEwan to have made and it gives those three chapters an undulating emotional texture.

 

Well, I suppose I have rambled on here long enough and hopefully I haven’t bored too many of you who might not give a pickle for technical issues like this. Admittedly, I’ve picked a book with a structure just begging to be mentioned. I’ll try this again sometime later using a book with a more subtle structural pattern. That will be harder.

 

John Banville – Eclipse

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I wish I could quote out long passages from John Banville’s Eclipse, in lieu of a review. I would enjoy typing them, a kind of slow and careful re-read of the pages I’ve so loved reading. I am a fast reader and Eclipse is a short book but I took over a week working my way through it, savoring the lines and the scenes and the narrator’s reflections.

 

Before, what I contained was the blastomere of myself, the coiled hot core of all I was and might be. Now, that essential self has been pushed to the side with savage insoucience, and I am as a house walked up and down in by an irresistibly proprietorial stranger. I am all inwardness, gazing out in ever intensifying perplexity upon a world in which nothing is exactly plausible, nothing is exactly what it is.

 

Narrator Alex has retreated from the world, into his childhood home on the Irish coast to muse over, or, I suppose it would be more accurate to say, to nurse a set of bewildering wounds. Alex is a stage actor who has taken an early retirement, abandoned his family to hide out in a state of hyperaware limbo, conscious of the ghostly presences of his past that have followed him to his retreat. Followed him isn’t quite right; perhaps some of them were already waiting there for him.

 

Everything here is twilight and half-dream, yet the appearance of these phantoms is naggingly insinuative, as if I should, or would, know them. There is something in them of those ancestral resemblances that will spring unnervingly up at one from the cradle or the deathbed.

 

Growing domestic disturbances and a traumatic professional event brought Alex to seek solace in his hideaway to sort out the personal ramifications of his crisis. To hear him describe it, his entire self has become wrapped up in an ability to transform into an “other” which necessarily engendered a slow loss of what was originally “him”. Do all actors experience this tension and fear? It’s a wonderful metaphor for helping a non-thespian understand the emotional and personal investment in stage performance.

 

Eclipse is also about Alex’s relationship with his daughter, a young woman suffering from what must be schizophrenia, although her specific illness is never named. The parallel between these two is stunning – that he needs to create new voices inside himself in order to succeed in his work, that she cannot stop manufacturing similar voices but which threaten to destroy her.

 

Indeed, such was her calm at times that she would seem to be not there at all, to have drifted off, lighter than air. It is a different air in which she moves, a separate medium. For her I think the world is always somewhere other, an unfamiliar place where yet she has always been. This is for me the hardest thing, to think of her out there, standing on some far bleak deserted shore, beyond help, in unmoving light, with an ocean of lostness all before her and the siren voices singing in her head.

 

As you can see from the passages I’ve included, Banville writes with rich, vivid prose, filled with complicated words and sometimes twisty grammar. I loved the complexity of his language and the way it forced me to slow down and really think about his word choices and images. And for all of Alex’s intense interior musing and remembering, the book moves forward through a steady procession of tense scenes and dialogues.

 

Someone with a better background in drama will probably find the novel filled with allusions to the world of the theatre. I found myself looking up a lot of Alex’s references to certain characters, and without that I would have missed some of his emotional orientation. Eclipse was definitely one of the best reads of the entire year so far. Which makes me really look forward to reading Banville’s prize-winning novel, The Sea, already waiting for me on the shelf.

 

Paul Auster – Oracle Night

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Metafiction is fiction about fiction, writing that draws attention to the fact that it is writing, that it is not real, that it is a construct. There are zillions of different varieties of metafiction – novels about fiction writers writing other novels, novels about readers reading other books, stories within a story…that kind of thing. It’s a very old device and it works to add layers of awareness and meaning to an otherwise straightforward story.

 

Metafiction brings the reader into a story in a way that regular fiction does not – it asks you to divide your attention between what’s going on in terms of basic plot and how the story is being constructed or who is constructing it. In this sense, it reveals the narrative blueprint and attempts to show you something you might not otherwise have noticed – something about the power of fiction, about fiction’s relationship to what, I suppose, is its opposite, reality. This kind of fiction works in direct opposition to what John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, calls the vivid, continuous dream:

 

These novels give the reader an experience that assumes the usual experience of fiction as its point of departure, and whatever effect their work may have depends on their conscious violation of the usual fictional effect. What interests us in these novels is that they are not novels but instead, artistic comments on art.

 

It took me two or three tries to read past page 5 of Paul Auster’s Oracle Night, mainly because I generally dislike straightforward novels with writers as the main character. It wasn’t until I hit page 8 that I realized this wasn’t a straightforward novel and that Auster wasn’t writing a novel at all – but an artistic comment on art. So, I waited a few more days and finally sat down with it when I was in the mood to see what he might be doing.

 

Oracle Night begins with Sydner Orr, a writer, who is recovering from some unnamed but very serious illness. For the first time in months, Orr is able to begin work on a new manuscript which he bases on a small episode from Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon. Orr’s novel deals with a set of characters, who are also dealing with a manuscript – about a man who can predict the future. Already we have three stories floating around. Later in the book, Orr gets asked to write a screenplay about time travel. At another point, another character in the book, also a writer, shares some of his own work with Orr. Woven in and out of these other stories remains Orr’s ongoing account of his troubled marriage. The novel is a tangle of story after story after story. Somehow, hopefully, they are all connected. 

 

Unless their being connected is beside the point. Metafiction asks us to get over the idea of coherent story and look at a text’s fictionality. For Oracle Night this brought me to re-examine Orr, our first-person narrator, and to doubt him. I know that a first-person unreliable narrator is common in traditional fiction, but in that situation most often the reader learns early on that their narrator is not to be trusted, which then informs their unfolding understanding of the rest of the novel. In Auster’s world, the smooth surface of Orr’s narrative authority is never punctured. Instead, it was only at the end, looking back at Orr’s uncanny ability to create and maintain multiple stories coupled with his need to fictionalize his own reality that eventually had me wondering – it was like being handed an extreme version of the writer as puppet master. And suddenly I was looking at a whole other book.

 

But for the last week or so, I’ve been debating this interpretation. I realized that holding Oracle Night to my own strict definition of metafiction might have me reading a whole lot more into it than is really there. It’s a seductive idea but I can’t rule out the possibility I may just have it wrong. I see Auster commenting on the use of fiction and storytelling to mediate reality, on fate vs. destiny, on self-fulfilling prophecies…and maybe that’s all, and maybe that’s enough. But if Orr is a legitimate protagonist then a lot of that exploration stays too close to the surface for me.

 

Part of my hesitation may also come from the fact that I found myself disappointed with Auster’s writing style, so I’m unwilling to give him too much credit. I’m planning to read more of his stuff before deciding for sure, but I felt there was too much flat, sometimes clichéd writing in Oracle Night along with a lot of lengthy, unrealistic dialogue. Perhaps I am not forgiving enough of his homage to noir mystery or maybe he uses that style on purpose to make some point that I’m failing to see. Any Auster fans out there? How does Oracle Night compare with his other work?

 

 

Mary Doria Russell – The Sparrow

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Once in awhile a book comes along that sends me into a tailspin and I find myself putting off writing about it – mainly because I worry that anything I write couldn’t possibly do it justice. The easy thing to do would be to say – read this book, come back when you’re finished and then let’s talk. It’s that kind of book. It wants to be discussed.

 

I do not usually read science fiction. It just isn’t my thing. But when Ann from Table Talk, whose impeccable judgment I trust completely, recommended Mary Doria Russell’s novel The Sparrow, I went and got myself a copy right away. I believe Ann said the book was a revelation for her at the time she read it and that was certainly enough to get me interested. I love the idea that a single book can change the way we understand or think about the world. Literature is just that powerful.

 

The Sparrow is about Jesuit priests and space travel. A young scientist discovers radio waves from another planet which turn out to be music. He reveals his discovery to his closest friends, one of whom happens to be a Jesuit priest and linguistics expert named Emilio, and suddenly the Jesuits are funding a research expedition to get to the planet and see if they can make contact.

 

The novel is written in such a way, however, that you know from the very beginning the expedition was a failure. Eight people (four priests, four civilians) were sent, and only one has returned – Emilio. He is close to death when he arrives back on earth. All of the other travelers were killed somehow and Emilio was found by the rescue team working in a brothel. He also seems to have killed a child from the alien planet.

 

The Sparrow takes on a staggering number of philosophical questions – about religious faith and humanity, about definitions of sentient life and forms of social structure. It explores biological determinism, racism and political theory. And yet it is also a clearly-written story about friendship, love and adventure which takes place in a richly-imagined alien world.  

 

Highlights for me included the novel’s discussion about clerical celibacy, questions about assumptions/prejudices we might make with regard to other sentient beings, and the book’s investigation of a different and difficult-to-understand socio-political system. Also, The Sparrow looks at the idea of influence. What happens when a theoretically more-developed culture comes in contact with a theoretically less-developed culture? And who gets to decide what “developed” means?

 

It is hard to pinpoint a central question in The Sparrow but one which became very important for me by the end of the novel was a theological one – if we accept that God is good, how do we accept that He allows horrible things to happen? This paradox, I think, is fundamental to any exploration of faith. If we believe that a higher power has worked to put together or is fundamental to some kind of architecture – biological or moral – then we can’t help but be interested in understanding how that higher power is involved when the architecture breaks down.

 

Perhaps there are tons of science fiction novels with a similar preoccupation and since I don’t read them I’ve missed out until now, but I can’t help feeling this novel was unique. Russell’s prose is straightforward and her ideas complicated – an effective combination for a novel with so much going on.

 

 

 

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re-reading Joyce – chapter three

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It would be a gloomy secret night.

 

This line opens the second paragraph of Part III of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I have always wanted it to be the first line. The actual first line is just fine by itself, but this line seems to more perfectly capture what Part III will be about – sin and sorrow and fear, failure and shame.

 

I live in Switzerland so I’ll use the mountains to illustrate my point. Let’s imagine that Catholicism and its brand of spiritual health are the Alps. Stephen was born somewhere in the pre-Alps, not at the valley floor, mind you, but somewhere halfway up with a clear and breathtaking view of those formidable peaks. The mountains are so strong a presence in these kinds of villages that they define everything about your life – your work, your relationships, and even, sometimes, your health. As a child, Stephen spent a lot of his time wondering what it would be like to experience the world from that high up.

 

Slowly, as he grows olders and begins to learn, he begins to climb. Small forays to lower Alpine meadows with his classmates followed later by longer walks on his own along the more interesting trails. The mountains are still frightening, but beginning to feel a bit more comfortable.

 

I think for anyone born into this kind of landscape, the view up is just as impressive and awe-inspiring as the view down. And as you get higher, as you get closer to the top, the sheer power of the downward slopes starts to take on more significance than the summit.

 

So quite naturally, in Book III, Stephen starts exploring downward. He stops looking up and starts concentrating on the slippery, rocky slopes and the more rickety trails heading toward the valley floor. Stephen is a strong young man and he takes these paths with long strides and his eyes half-closed. Heading this direction changes everything – you hold yourself differently to keep your balance, the wind comes at your from an another angle, the scenery starts to change. The experience is thrilling in its novelty.

 

It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires.

 

Stephens heads down this mountain so fast, there are times he’s nearly in free fall. Things start to feel unfamiliar again and pretty soon, he’s gone further in a direction he didn’t even realize existed. People live quite differently on the valley floor of Stephen’s Catholic mountain and he’s suddenly alone, afraid and ashamed. At this point the mountains rise so high above him they block the sun and clouds have taken away his view of the peak.

 

The rest of Book III is about Stephen finding the courage to start walking up again. In many ways it is a dreary chapter, filled with long sermons and lengthy fire-and-brimstone reflections as Stephen works toward making a confession. One aspect of his thinking that I enjoyed seeing was his emphasis on human absolution before spiritual. He imagines a scene between himself and Emma, a young girl he has been smitten with for quite some time, which involves him asking her to forgive him for seeing her as a sexual object. Only after he’s worked this out in his mind and listened to a horribly graphic lecture on hell does he feel ready to head toward a priest and confess his time spent with several Dublin prostitutes.

 

If you’ll excuse the silliness of this extended metaphor, Stephen’s confession acts a bit like a chair-lift. Instead of walking back up the mountain he’s pulled quickly toward the summit on a theological mechanism.

 

The muddy streets were gay. He strode homeward, conscious of an invisible grace pervading and making light his limbs. In spite of all he had done it. He had confessed and God had pardoned him. His soul was made fair and holy once more, holy and happy.

 

I cannot imagine what turn-of-the century Irish Catholicism must have been like to experience as a creative, sensitive child, except that it must have been terribly frightening. Stephen takes everything a step beyond imagination. His body reacts physically to his thoughts as well as to the images in the sermons. This is something that makes the ending of Chapter III very interesting in that Stephen’s movement away from sin only becomes permanent when he takes communion. This physical act – just as sensual as his sin – is finally what transforms him completely.

 

 

 

Ethan Canin – Blue River

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On Friday afternoon I took a short reading break to get some distance from a translation I was working on and picked a random, unread book from the shelf. I spent twenty minutes with Ethan Canin’s first novel, Blue River, and knew I would go back to it later that evening and read until I had finished.

 

Which I did, turning that last page sometime after midnight and just sitting quietly with my thoughts and impressions of these new characters and images. I haven’t enjoyed a book so thoroughly in months, perhaps since sitting in the garden with Kirsty Gunn’s Rain and getting as equally enthralled in the writing and the voice. In many respects the books are similar – first person narratives about a traumatic past. Where Blue River differs is that its past is a much more distinct and separate location, far removed (and purposely so) from its present.

 

The novel begins in the present – a morning in June when narrator Edward’s brother appears on Edward’s front porch. The two have not seen each other (save once) in fifteen years. Their interaction is understandably strained but it becomes quickly evident that for all the empty space and time between them (an easy explanation for their awkwardness), there is something much more substantial in the way. But Edward does no explaining. The visit continues – they go to the zoo with Edward’s family, they eat dinner…it’s an extended and bewildering scene, infused with Edward’s elegant and weighty tangents about his life and work. But the most remarkable element of this first section is Edward’s conspicuous fear. He is terrified from the moment he finds Lawrence on his porch to the moment he puts him on a bus back to where he came from.

 

And then Canin has Edward take the story into the past. Slowly, carefully Edward redraws his relationship with his older brother. Here is where the novel’s unique structure comes into play but also its risky decision to switch into the second person – Edward has gone into the past in order to retell the stories of their childhood to Lawrence. He stops addressing the reader completely. What’s also interesting is that this retelling isn’t just an attempt to excuse or absolve himself from their eventual estrangement, it’s more a desire to understand how he became the kind of person he is now and why Lawrence didn’t.

 

I’m a sucker for realism, I know, but this is the kind of fiction I enjoy the most – no madcap characters, no outsized events except the intimate, family ones which feel huge when they upset what we believed were firmer foundations, no writerly pyrotechnics. Just unique framing, careful scripting and breathtaking detail. There are a few moments when Canin might have eased off the confessional or let the reader make the connections without forcing them upon us with one or two excess lines of explanation. But in general the novel is a smooth and graceful movement through one man’s memories and self-reflection.

 

Other than several of his short stories from the collection The Palace Thief, this is my first time reading Canin. I’ve already ordered his second novel, For Kings and Planets, from bookmooch and am going to see if I can find his newest, America, America in the shop in Lausanne. I’ve become an instant admirer.

 

 

Angela Young – Speaking of Love

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I stayed up late on Sunday night finishing Angela Young’s Speaking of Love – a thoughtful novel about schizophrenia and about courage and about love. It was not an easy read in many ways because Young does not shy away from depicting some of the more devastating aspects of schizophrenia. But Speaking of Love is also very much about storytelling. And how the telling of stories, of crafting and listening to them, of reveling in them, can help bring people together and mend some of the loneliness that is so often experienced by the families and loved ones affected by mental illness.

 

The novel also deals with the idea of the past controlling our present and what a vicious cycle this perspective can turn out to be. One of the novel’s main characters, Vivie, is a frightening example of how trauma can become your only filter of expression and how each and every one of your personal relationships can become dictated by the needs and demands of feeding that traumatic persona.

 

In many ways each of the novel’s narrators (there are three – Iris, Vivie and Matthew) is trapped or bound inside the memory of a shared painful experience. Except, I suppose, for one important distinction – these three have not shared that experience at all. They endured it side by side, temporally and physically, but came out at the other end with vastly different reactions and no ability to communicate with one another.

 

Something I really appreciated in this novel is Young’s offer of an honest, simple, and realistic solution. Kindness, patience, understanding, learning how to say the difficult words. Sounds easy, of course, but we all know it’s not. Matthew is the most prepared to learn this lesson and his voice is one of the more delightful elements of the novel – introspective and quiet, fearful but affectionate. He takes us through the hushed moments, the times he stood watching and waiting, hoping.

 

I remember the smells most: the wet earth when we dug the potatoes up, the sweet carrots in their cool sand box in Dad’s shed, the mellow honeyed scent the apples gave out from their slatted wooden shelves and the musky smell of the beans on their poles.

 

The novel’s intricate structure, with its three distinct voices and several tenses, adds to the story’s natural tension. Each chapter is short and as the three stories begin to grow more complex, more entwined, they begin to play off one another and deepen our appreciation of the other. The novel also includes four of Iris’s stories – strange, darkly beautiful fairytales – which conclude each of the four parts and add a tangible feeling of storytelling to the entire book. Very unique and quite elegantly done.

 

Speaking of Love is Angela Young’s first novel. I know she is working on a second and I for one am very excited to see it when it comes out. She also runs a delightful blog about her writing and reading at Writing, Life and the Universe.

 

 

Nadine Gordimer – Burger's Daughter

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Well, I didn’t think it could happen but it finally did. I shouldn’t feel so disappointed about this but I do. I was prepared to love all of Nadine Gordimer’s work wholeheartedly. And its not that Burger’s Daughter is bad – on the contrary, it’s a rich story with a lot of very interesting questions. And there are those moments of pure Gordimer – exquisite writing with just the right reflection or description. But as a whole, in its movement through and from each scene to scene, it just kind of got lost in itself along the way.

 

The novel has three distinct parts and if I explain what they are to any extent, I will give the story away. I wanted very much for these three parts to work together – and I suppose that on the surface they do. They represent three distinct phases of Rosa Burger’s self-actualization. But instead of leading one to the other, they felt more like images taped together a bit awkwardly at the seams. There was a moment in the middle of Part II that I thought Gordimer had changed course for an entirely different story and I was ready to feel cheated or at the very least confused. An act of almost-believable coincidence puts the story back on track and eventually it traipses forward to an ending which felt…well, I suppose it felt okay.

 

It must be difficult when writing fiction with a political purpose to keep your eye fixed firmly on storytelling. There were moments when certain characters got far too involved in making speeches and I admit I started reading diagonally. If Gordimer is anything, she is thorough. I don’t doubt that when politically engaged people get together their meetings are everything she portrays them to be – intricate, involved, passionate. But to read through their every detail is frustrating for me – the reader – because I want to stay focused on a character I have come to appreciate or worry about. I don’t want Marxist or any other theory explained to me or examined ad nauseum by characters who will leave the story as quickly as they came in.

 

I mentioned in my review of her sixth novel, The Conservationist, that Gordimer uses a particular technique of having the main character speak to another character (or characters) in their mind. A kind of imaginary conversation which gives the main character the right to explain himself, complain, or defend himself. In The Conservationist this device was a source of some of the most moving passages of the entire book. In Burger’s Daughter she uses the very same stylistic device, but at first I found it horribly distracting. The person to whom Rosa addresses her thoughts is an ex-lover – someone the reader never meets on the page. It was frustrating never having that person in the flesh – just a construct of Rosa’s mind. In Part II, she switches to “thinking at” her father’s first wife, the woman she is staying with in France. I don’t think it works particularly well in that section either, but not for the same reasons. More because all of Part II seems disjointed and apathetic until we reach the coincidence I mention above. But then all of a sudden, in Part III, I saw why Gordimer continued to use the device. Suddenly Rosa is addressing her dead father. And I think this was the whole point. Her transformation is complete and she can safely begin a conversation she has been longing to have but never felt confident enough to do.

 

I won’t put Burger’s Daughter on my list of favorites but as always I’m glad to have read it. Her eighth novel, July’s People, is one I have already read and enjoyed. It’s short so I think I will re-read it before moving on.

re-reading Joyce, chapter 1

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There is a particular moment in the beginning of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which I have always loved. Stephen is in class, studying geography and looks inside his textbook to see a list he’d written some point before:

 

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe

 

Next to this is a joke written by a friend, which turns this list into a snappy, silly rhyme.

 

Stephen Dedalus is my name,

Ireland is my nation.

Clongowes is my dwellingplace,

And heaven my expectation

 

 Stephen, still sitting in class, reads these lines backwards and makes the observation that altered in this way, they lose their poetry. And then right after, this:

 

Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be but he only could think of God.

 

Portrait is very much about Joyce, a narrative reconstruction of his memories which translate into his version of how he became a writer. Which is why I love that first part and that he sees how the lines, once changed, lose their poetry. A simple enough reflection but one which shows he was already thinking about the importance of arrangement with respect to language. More importantly, this thought leads him to immediately consider his place in the universe, the size and shape of things beyond and outside him. These two observations, stacked the way they are, seem such huge clues to the kind of artist Stephen will become. The questioning of one’s place, of the size of the world beyond the self, all underwritten by a focus on a kind of aesthetic harmony.

 

And then Stephen hits the God wall. He knows his thoughts are huge and that it’s pretty exciting, even extraordinary, to have these kinds of big thoughts. But he can’t get past the idea that only God has the right to such thinking. So he stops his big thoughts and the passage ends with his amused considerations of what God is called in other languages. This entire passage takes up less than half the page and yet so much of the novel’s theme is laid out. It’s wonderfully done.