Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘books’

Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir – The Greenhouse

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My review of the Icelandic novel The Greenhouse (by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir and translated by Brian FitzGibbon) is published this week at Necessary Fiction. This was an intriguing book – the kind of writing and story that grows on you as you work through its pages and story. By the end, I loved it. Here is a little of what I had to say about it:

As signaled to the reader in the very first pages when Lobbi and his father, in the midst of preparing his farewell dinner, go back and forth about his leaving, about his accidental fatherhood and what it means to be going away from his child and the child’s mother, and with the subtext of Lobbi’s mother’s death between them at every moment, the biggest question in The Greenhouse revolves around the possibility of meaning in coincidence:

Dad doesn’t believe in coincidences, or at least not when it comes to major events in life such as birth and death. A life doesn’t start or end out of pure chance, he says. […] Dad looks on these things differently; the world is a cluster of numbers that hang together, making up the innermost core of creation, and the interpretation of dates can yield profound truths and beauty.

Words like coincidence and accident fill the book, as do the possible examples of each: Lobbi’s mother dies in a car accident, Lobbi’s child is conceived accidentally after a party, and even the least important story, of Lobbi’s damaged twin brother, gently re-phrases this same question of the coincidence or destiny of someone’s birth.

Interestingly, Ólafsdóttir works these questions through the narrative while keeping the reader in the shadow of the monastery. There are no overt religious discussions—no direct wondering at God’s hand in all these accidents—but instead there is place, there is the infrequent glimpse of a monk in his robes, there are moments of wonder inside a church.

You can read the rest of my review of The Greenhouse here.

Ólafsdóttir has a more recent book out in English translation, Butterflies in November, (this time with Pushkin Press), that sounds very good as well.

Thinking about it, she might be the first Icelandic author that I’ve read – is that possible? It seems I should have read something Icelandic somewhere along the way… There were a few things I wanted to write in my review about how the language felt, but without having read more examples of Icelandic in English translation, I didn’t feel confident making any real statements.  Does anyone have any suggestions? I know that I would like to read Sjón, since so many people whose reading tastes I trust have spoken so highly of his work. But who else should I be adding to my list?

“One must hang it with jewels.” Going back to Woolf

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In 2010, I began a Virginia Woolf project, reading her fiction in the order it was published alongside her diaries and her short fiction. Between then and last year, I read her Diary Vol. I (1915 – 1919), the sixteen stories written up until 1921, The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room and her Diary Vol. II (1920 – 1924).

I wrote a few things about my reactions to this body of work, which are perhaps not very interesting but have been interesting for me to look back on after my unexpected break in the project:

And now I am picking up the threads of this reading again. I spent most of last year moving very slowly through the second volume of her diaries, which cover the periods when she is writing Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway. There is a lot of worrying over the reception of her writing; this is always interesting. But also much more confidence in her artistic vision. In both Vol. I and Vol. II she spends a lot of her time talking about the people in her life, her friends and family, as well as domestic concerns – but in Vol. II she expands on her thoughts about writing and literature, and her own fiction as well.

In February 1924, she writes:

I’m working at The Hours, & I think it a very interesting attempt; I may have found my mine this time I think. I may get all my gold out. The great thing is never to feel bored with one’s own writing. That is the signal for a change—never mind what, so long as it brings interest. And my vein of gold lies so deep, in such bent channels. To get it I must forge ahead, stoop & grope. But it is gold of a kind I think.

In terms of catching up, I’ve actually already read Mrs. Dalloway twice, but I think I’ll reread it once more as I get started on Vol. III. And I’m actually behind on the short stories so I got started on those today. I have thirteen to read that were published between 1922 and 1925. The first of these is called “A Woman’s College from Outside” and it is one of those snippets of scene that works as a full story because of the fullness and emotional specificity of Woolf’s prose. It is nothing but a glimpse into a women’s dormitory and a close-up of a single girl. Although at one point she moves wider to touch upon a few other students and gives this wonderful description, which contains a reference point, a kind of clue, for the ending:

Good Bertha, leaning with her head against the chair, sighed profoundly. For she would willingly have slept, but since night is free pasturage, a limitless field, since night is unmoulded richness, one must tunnel into its darkness. One must hang it with jewels. Night was shared in secret, day browsed on by the whole flock.

The story is not much more than a portrait of a very particular emotion – one I would call expectancy, which makes sense for the setting as well. The woman in the story is waiting, observant, awed. It ends like this:

…she lay in this good world, this new world, this world at the end of the tunnel, until a desire to see it or forestall it drove her, tossing her blankets, to guide herself to the window, and there, looking out upon the garden, where the mist lay, all the windows open, one fiery-bluish, something murmuring in the distance, the world of course, and the morning coming, ‘Oh,’ she cried, as if in pain.

This is something I find again and again in Woolf’s prose, the ability to combine movement with emotion with exterior (most often natural) scenery. She does this so incredibly well. She conjures up so clearly, so concisely, the often unexplainable connections between the world and human sentiment.

Am very much looking forward to getting back into this project.

“…as if everyone is confronted with their inner darknesses” – a conversation about Ramuz’s Beauty on Earth

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Outside of Switzerland, Ramuz is not very well-known but in the country he is really and truly considered one of the “fathers” of Swiss literature. This fact explains why the Swiss radio invited me this week to talk about my translation of Beauty on Earth on one of their cultural programs. (I’m a huge fan of this program by the way – every morning from 7 to 9 on Espace 2).

But because this is an English-translation we were talking about (in French) and this book is meant for English-language readers, I thought it might be useful/interesting to write out a transcription & translation of our short conversation.

Two things I learned from writing this out:

  • it is difficult to make a transcription like this read like a normal conversation
  • introverts (like me) do their best thinking in quiet spaces and not on national radio programs (but there are a few things about Ramuz I’m happy to have said)

Here is the link to the interview, which will only be available for a few more weeks.

Florence Grivel: It is 8h21, hello Michelle Bailat-Jones.

Michelle Bailat-Jones: Hello.

FG: You are a Swiss-American writer and you’ve just published a highly-anticipated English translation of CF Ramuz’s Beauty on Earth with Onesuch Press. This is a highly anticipated book because, if what I’ve heard is correct, it has never before been translated except for an unsigned version published just after its French publication, in, I believe, the beginning of the 1930s.

MBJ: 1929

FG: We’re going to come back to this, but first I’d like to ask you something I’m really curious about. You live in Puidoux, in the hills above Lake Geneva, in the very countryside Ramuz speaks so much about. Is this one of the reasons you wanted to translate this author?

MBJ: Yes, exactly. When I first arrived in Switzerland, people gave me a number of Swiss books and Ramuz was obviously one of the first I received (in fact it was my mother-in-law who gave him to me). And I discovered in this book a vision of Switzerland that I didn’t know before, a vision I found extremely beautiful. So I very much wanted to translate Ramuz, to throw myself into his world, to discover his universe.

FG: When you say a beautiful vision of Switzerland, what does that mean more precisely?

MBJ: On the one hand, it’s a pastoral vision – with the lake and the mountains

FG: The background of a painting.

MBJ: Yes, exactly. There is this aspect of his work. And then what I love about Ramuz is how he looks in detail at people, (he has) a very particular way of creating detail… (mumbles about the story taking place in the past and how beautiful the book is – totally lost my train of thought)

FG: The story of Beauty on Earth is the story of Juliette, a young 18 year old orphan who arrives one day in a village in Vaud. She is from Cuba. And she lives at first with her uncle, a café owner, who remains her only family. And her beauty, her difference, will radiate in a way that ends up hurting the village…

MBJ: Yes, her beauty destroys the village,

FG: Exactly, and this novel, published in 1927, remains relevant even today. Maybe this is what fascinates you about this book?

MBJ: Yes, I think that the idea that a foreign person who comes to a new country, someone who is very exotic, who upsets the mores and attitudes of the people (in this new country), this is something that happens even today.

FG: Especially today.

MBJ: Exactly, this is very much a topic that we can still really discuss.

FG: A translation is something anchored in its time period, in the 30s Ramuz was translated into German, for example, and there was a kind of polemic because of its relationship to traditions/customs was something that spoke to the nationalist propaganda of the time. Ramuz translated into English in 2014, what kind of story does that tell?

MBJ: Hmm, that’s a very good question. I think the thing that surprises me a lot with Ramuz is that this is an author who is extremely modern. He deals with “modernist” themes in the sense that he is looking at the difficulties between the two wars, for example, the psychology of people between the two wars, and this is something that is still relevant for us today. So then to put this into English, I think this is still meaningful today. Despite the particularities of his French, I believe this is a text that resonates in English.

FG: Michelle Bailat-Jones, Ramuz’s writing is very particular, as you’ve just said, there is both “plomb and celeste” (NB: a particular way of describing his style, both weight and weightlessness might be one way of translating this) in the way of fashioning the words. What did you discover, as a young woman, when working through this text?

MBJ: For me, what I find in Ramuz’s work is that he has a completely fascinating way of moving the narrative framework between the reader, the narrator, the characters, and even him… because I think that Ramuz himself is also there inside the text. So, there is this frame that is changing all the time, the size of the frame changes between the “we” of the village, and the characters and the people he is describing. I find this to be completely unique. It is only in Ramuz’s texts, in his style, that we find this way of— I don’t know how to say it—this way of maneuvering throughout the story. And this is something I found to be extremely beautiful. While translating this book, and I really wanted to keep this in the English text. It’s destabilizing for (Francophone) readers, and I wanted English readers to be just as…

FG: Immersed in this.

MBJ: Yes.

FG: Something interesting, at least something that interested me about this idea of translating Ramuz into English is that English is an efficient language…it has absolutely nothing to do with Ramuz’s French, how did you render this language, beside this idea of a moving framework?

MBJ: I really tried to remain extremely faithful to Ramuz’s French, by doing this I think that I created an English that is not exactly a normal English, and because of this I’m asking the readers of this English translation to keep their minds open to this. I kept faithful to Ramuz’s movement, to his grammar, which means in turn that the English is also changed… and so it’s actually a much less-efficient English.

FG: And what about the regional expressions, the traditional/local words, how do you work those into the text, how do you make them come alive in English?

MBJ: I tried to find the same kind of pastoral, bucolic words, things like that – for the plants, and the flowers, all that, just being very specific, and sometimes I kept a word or certain small expressions in French.

FG: Like what, for example, do you have something in mind?

MBJ: Sorry, not off the top of my head…

FG: Michelle Bailat-Jones, how does one approach Ramuz, how does a translation begin?

MBJ: In reading, for me it is about a deep reading, reading the text over and over. I have to find a way to get Ramuz’s voice into my head. So now I have this little Ramuz voice in my head—I hope it’s really his although I can’t be sure. I think I read this book at least five or six times before even starting the translation, at that point I began to play a little bit with paragraphs and words. Also in re-writing a lot. I think that I re-wrote the beginning, the first three chapters, two or three times, until I found the right narrator, the narrator that worked alongside Ramuz’s narrator but in English… it was a kind of detail work.

FG: This fairly pessimistic vision that moves throughout the book…

MBJ: Yes, it’s sad…

FG: Sad, isn’t it? But is this also something that interested you?

MBJ: Yes, a lot. I really like… in fact, this is what I mean by Ramuz’s modernism. In the sense that everyone in the book is extremely sad, everyone is angry… they have trouble with their neighbors, with the village, their relationships…

FG: Yes, it’s like the lightness or the beauty of this young woman…hmm, I’m not sure how to say it, it’s as if everyone is confronted with their inner darknesses.

MBJ: Exactly, no one can stand the beauty of this woman… and everyone falls apart, everything destroys itself.

FG: Would you like to translate more Ramuz? I know that before Beauty on Earth, you translated a few of his short stories. Would you like to start another Ramuz project?

MBJ: Yes, absolutely. I am currently working on Si le Soleil ne Revenait Pas which is also an exceptional book… but I still need to find a publisher.

FG: (laughs) Ah, so here’s a call out to publishers!

MGJ: Yes!

FG: Have you had any commentary coming back from the English reading public?

MBJ: Yes, it’s coming slowly. I’ve heard from people who have read him now in English, who are experiencing him for the first time. This is a real pleasure (for me) to hear people express their surprise that they’ve never heard of him before, and especially someone of his level. So I’m hoping this (translation) will start to have an impact, to make some noise.

FG: Thank you (etc etc) and good luck to this translation.

MBJ: Thank you.

“Art must take reality by surprise.”

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From the 1956 Paris Review interview (which is very short) with Françoise Sagan:

INTERVIEWER

Then you think it is a form of cheating to take directly from reality?

 SAGAN

Certainly. Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion. Art should not, it seems to me, pose the “real” as a preoccupation. Nothing is more unreal than certain so-called “realist” novels—they’re nightmares. It is possible to achieve in a novel a certain sensory truth—the true feeling of a character—that is all.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

Read the whole interview here

I am very much thinking about her use of the word “arbitrary” in this reply – it is curious to me and I’m not sure I would agree. But this idea that “art must take reality by surprise” is a beautiful idea, a true idea. She is just about 21 years old in this interview, by the way, and now I’m hunting about for a similar discussion/interview/essay from her when she’s older. It would be interesting to compare her thoughts on art and writing, etc, at the end of her life.

That dreaded word… perfect

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The other day on Twitter, Matthew Jakubowski mentioned a chapter from one of my very favorite books—Tove Jannson’s The Summer Book. I replied back that this book sits comfortably on my list of “perfect” books and just thinking about it makes me want to reread it immediately. Matt kindly asked me which other books were on the list – and I’ve been thinking about this question ever since.

I do not throw the “perfect” word around lightly. I hate rating systems (one of the reasons I quit Goodreads) because they involve a notion of a perfect score and I often cannot bring myself to do this. No book is perfect because books are meaningful and wonderful in so many different ways. But I had an odd reading year and I have been avoiding writing up a list of my favorite books read in 2013, so instead I think it might be interesting to finish 2013 with an attempt to explain what I mean by that ridiculous word “perfect” and why I consider certain books deserve it.

The Summer Book and To the Lighthouse are the books I most often call “perfect” and without any hesitation. But after some thought, here is my list in alphabetical order:

  •          John Berger – To the Wedding
  •          Coetzee – Disgrace
  •          John Fuller – Flying to Nowhere
  •          Laurent Gaudé – Ouragan (Hurricane)
  •          Tove Jansson – The Summer Book
  •          Michèle Lesbre – Le Canapé Rouge (The Red Sofa)
  •          Alice McDermott – That Night
  •          Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping
  •          Toni Morrison – The Bluest Eye
  •          Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse

These are the books I find myself thinking about long after I’ve finished, and books I have reread multiple times. Until Matt asked me to make a list, I hadn’t considered what it was about these books that make them so perfect to me. But I’ll attempt to do that now. And it should go without saying that this is a wholly subjective list, and the criteria have to do with my own reading tastes and personality. It would be silly to claim that these are “perfect” books in any other sense.

Before I go into the list, you’ll note that I deliberately did not include any classic literature. I worry the list will be too long, and somehow the criteria very different. A perfect classic book is so much different than a perfect contemporary book. (But for what it’s worth, I love Vanity Fair as well as Northanger Abbey, I usually prefer George Eliot to Dickens, and I worship Balzac and adore Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale. Also, Michel Montaigne is my main 16th century squeeze).

Back to the list. First off, these are all novels. I can think of several short story collections that get me very excited—Michelle Latiolais’s Widow, Mariko Nagai’s Georgic & Mary Costello’s The China Factory to name the first that immediately come to mind—but story collections must always be broken up into their separate parts and are experienced, at least for me, with pause and distance between each piece. I’m an intense reader and I love the intensity that comes with a sustained read of a longer piece. We could obviously have another conversation about the “perfect” short story.

Despite my preference for novels, these are all relatively short books. I do have a certain kind of admiration for long, complicated, saga-type books and there are several I consider absolutely wonderful examples of this genre—although under the influence of several glasses of wine, I might be willing to admit that so far not many contemporary doorstoppers have yet to come anywhere near my “perfect” books list—Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai comes close). Yet I have found that time and again a book with more than 300 pages is difficult to engage with in exactly the kind of intense and uninterrupted reading that I prefer.

Thinking about it, the single most important element for me that gets most of these books onto my list is that there is something about the structure or the narrative perspective that is actively engaged with the way the story is presented to the reader. I suppose most good novel’s have the right kind of invisible structure that just simply and elegantly supports the story – and this is great. But I actually love it when the structure sticks its neck out a bit and subtly influences or comments on the story itself. In Gaudé’s Ouragan, for example, there are five voices telling the story of Hurricane Katrina. Some 3rd person, some 1st person – and all very distinctive. They are messy, they overlap, they re-tell parts of each other’s story and they effectively resonate as a parallel human storm alongside the natural storm. In Michèle Lesbre’s Le Canapé Rouge there are two stories being told and the trick that gets me with this book is how the story that appears to be working in service to the main story suddenly rises up and becomes the more important story in the end.

In terms of narrative perspective, what I’m talking about usually falls just a bit short of outright/obvious metafiction but again there is a particular way the perspective influences the reader’s understanding of the story. The 3rd person narrator in Disgrace, for example, who is so close to David Lurie that it feels like a 1st person. And yet this absolutely side-blind narrator manages to depict the emotional/political unsteadiness of an entire population. Or the nearly effaced 1st person narrator in Alice McDermott’s That Night who is telling someone else’s story but manages to make it extremely meaningful to her own by the time she is done. It’s beautifully done. Or John Berger’s To the Wedding, whose entire narrative perspective is a trick of re-writing and storytelling magic. And of course Morrison’s The Bluest Eye with its sorrowful yet angry 1st person narrator and her exploration of another person’s life.

Finally, I very much admire books that involve some kind of dark whimsy. John Fuller’s Flying to Nowhere is the best example of this—pure poetry, a bit outlandish or fantastic, extremely sensual but intellectual at the same time. (I found the same aesthetic in Jeannette Winterson’s The Passion and in all that I’ve read of Barbara Comyns, and I nearly put those books on this list as well). Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book does this without ever touching the fantastic—but the whimsy and the darkness is there, as it is in the most excellent The True Deceiver.

And To the Lighthouse seems to fit all of these criteria. The epitome of a perfect book (to me).

I just know that I am overlooking several books I should like to have included, but these will have to do for now. I’m surprised that I have not put any Nadine Gordimer on this list—I adore her work, and the books of hers I’d most like to include are The Pick-Up and The Conservationist (for her peculiar dual narration) but I will trust my initial hesitation and leave them off. And for the curious, here are a few other books I hesitated about including: Pia Juul – The Murder of Halland, Marilynne Robinson – Gilead, Christine Schutt – Florida, Carson McCuller’s – The Ballad of the Sad Café, Per Petterson – Out Stealing Horses, David Malouf – The Conversations at Curlew Creek, Gerbrand Bakker – The Detour, Agota Kristof – Trilogy, Kirsty Gunn – Featherstone, Clarice Lispector – Agua Viva. All excellent.

Now, I’d love to hear your thoughts – and your own lists if you care to share them. In this way you’ll give me some book suggestions for 2014. And I’ll just finish up here with a tiny New Year’s resolution to write more often on this blog – I miss the longer bookish conversations that can be had through blogging. Am hoping to find some of that again in the coming year.

Two new reviews, poetry and Per Petterson

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Have had the pleasure of reviewing two wonderful books lately for Necessary Fiction. The first is Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës—and this title tells you nearly all you need to know, except how absolutely excellent the writing is in this collection. Unthank Books and Editor A.J. Ashworth put together an incredible list of contributors, and each writer seemed to have had their fun with the idea of re-envisioning, re-writing, or working through Brontë inspiration:

Here is a little of what I had to say about the collection:

There are also stories that engage with the melancholy of the Brontës, like David Rose’s beautiful “Brontesaurus” and Carys Davies “Bonnet.” The first is an elegant story of loneliness and academic solace, a piece that worries away at words like grief and drear in first a strictly literal manner and then a more emotional, more metaphorically delicate way. In “Bonnet” we are back to contemplating the real Charlotte Brontë in an imagined scene that quite possibly could have taken place and that gets at the heart of Charlotte’s conflicting personality: the passionate writer, the careful lover.

The range of subject and theme in the other stories is quite impressive: the deceptions of a modern-day governess, the death of a loved one, a contemporary Catherine & Heathcliff romance, a hike on the moors invoking Sherlock Holmes and much Brontë lore, and even fictional letters between Emma Woodhouse and Jane Eyre. As a purely selfish wish, I would have enjoyed a bit of direct engagement with Anne Brontë, she seems so often overlooked and yet her works are as powerful and complex as her two more studied sisters. And it is fun to speculate what a story inspired by Branwell or the Brontë children’s fantasy worlds of Angria or Gondal might have added, but this is not to say that Red Room feels incomplete, only a little Charlotte-heavy. As a whole, Red Room is a provocative, emotionally-engaging and witty anthology. It is clear that the authors featured here took to their task with both application and admiration.

You can read the whole review here.

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Next, I read a début novel by an American writer, Elizabeth Gentry, called Housebound, which was quite simply excellent. If you are a fan of Barbara Comyns (and I know many of you are), you will want to go right out and get this book.

“They” are a peculiar family—nine children, two parents—living in a large house on the outskirts of a small city. In many respects, they are an experiment, a utopia created by the parents according to very specific rules. The greatest of which is their near complete isolation from anyone else excepting a weekly trip to the library. This excludes the father who works every day in the city—and his difference from the rest of the family is an important element of Gentry’s narrative structure. Now, if this house and family is a utopia, it is one without a moving force; it has turned inward and become frozen. And even when the story’s action begins with Maggie, the oldest child, deciding to leave the family and take a job in town, this feeling of being perched and poised continues. As Maggie begins her preparations for leaving and, suddenly relieved of her role as child-minder for the first time, begins to wander about the property and visit the neighbors, there is a sense of the family holding its breath. And this psychological stillness begs the question—what is everyone waiting for? That tension stretches on, and gently but powerfully becomes the novel’s focus.

I have nothing but high praise for this unique story and Gentry’s descriptions and careful storytelling. It is quite dark in some ways, but thoughtful and beautifully written, and more interested in complicated salvation than any kind of long drawn-out portrayal of gorgeous failure. That sentence may need some explaining, but I hope it is clear that I mean this book does not focus on making something horrible seem beautiful nor on ending on some trite feeling of redemption. The book has a wonderful mood to it and I’m really looking forward to anything else that Gentry will write.

You can read the whole review here.

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Also, I’ll sneak two mentions of my own writings in this post. I have a short poem in the Fall issue of the Ann Arbor Review. A tiny thing, some thoughts about the word proof.

Lately, I’ve been working to write fiction from photographs again, and it was nice to think about the very first time I did this and ended up with “St. Tropez.”

*          *

Finally, I started reading Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses (tr. Anne Born) the other day. What a beautiful book—I am sad it has taken me so long to get to his work. (Of course I could say this about so many authors-the panic of someone who would like to read it all.) Reading this book has me also thinking about John Pistelli’s list of books he’d put into a category he is calling Penitential Realism. I am very drawn to this idea, and I would definitely put Out Stealing Horses on this list. His essay on this idea of Penitential Realism (HT: Anthony at Time’s Flow) has been circulating around in my brain for the last week or so.

Something I am really enjoying in Out Stealing Horses are the narrator’s tangents—how odd, or slightly off-topic, but always somehow organic they seem to be. Like this one, which addresses a supposed coincidence in the story, but ends up commenting on life and fiction in general, but also addresses something Pistelli mentions in his essay about the books on his list and their “resistance to the kind of holistic plotting that binds the narrative into a fully meaningful structure of coincidence…”

I have in fact done a lot of reading particularly during the last few years, but earlier too, by all means, and I have thought about what I’ve read, and that kind of coincidence seems far-fetched in fiction, in modern novels anyway, and I find it hard to accept. It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you’re reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again. A consolation, maybe, or a protest against a world gone off the rails, but it is not like that anymore, my world is not like that, and I have never gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate.

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Save Me the Waltz – Zelda Fitzgerald

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Reading Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz was not an ideal reading experience. It was difficult for me to get through this book and consider it on its own—its story is too enmeshed with the history of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, and the ways in which both writers cannibalized their real lives to write their novels. Mostly, it was difficult for me to separate Alabama Knight, the heroine of Save Me the Waltz, from what I know of Zelda Fitzgerald, and this irritates me because I want to think about her as a creation. I assume that even if Zelda had been drawing on her own life for inspiration, Alabama was her creation—not a stand-in or a mouthpiece or even an example, an ideal, an apology.

This is how I always assume that fiction is written, and how the book deserves to be considered. A university professor named Harry T. Moore writes the introduction (in 1966) to my Vintage copy of Save Me the Waltz and he considers the book not much more than a footnote to Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. He spends most of his introduction talking about Scott instead of Zelda, and he dismisses Alabama Knight’s story in the same way he dismisses Zelda as a writer – asserting that her attempts to create art were based on jealousy of her husband. Even with the handful of kind words he does give this novel and its author, I cannot conceive of a more condescending and dishonest introduction to a work of literature.

Matthew Bruccoli’s Note on the Text tells me that Scott acted as an advisor to Zelda’s revisions to the novel but that it does not seem likely that he actually re-wrote the manuscript. So, I think, readers are safe to assume that the novel is mostly her own work. But we can also assume—sadly, frustratingly—that any editing Zelda may have needed or benefitted from (by Maxwell Perkins at Scribner and from Scott Fitzgerald) did not honestly take the book on its own terms, but took it already at that time as an amendment to Scott’s work.

Because of all of this background, before I say anything else about the book, I want to say this: Save Me the Waltz is a novel in its own right. A novel that stands up as a story without the reader knowing anything about its writer or her marriage or her life. It is a novel with an intriguing (if a bit lopsided) structure and form. A novel that suits its time period—with modernist language patterns and a distinctly modernist mood.

Something that struck me right away about Save Me the Waltz is how it reminded me of Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor – that dark southern gothic feel and something about the way the mysterious and brooding interior life of the female character is written. How she reacts-emotionally-to the world around her. And then I had to check dates because, contrary to what I was expecting, Zelda Fitzgerald wrote this novel ten years before Carson McCullers would publish her first novel and twenty years before Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. It is even earlier than Eudora Welty’s first short story publication. So I think we need to be very careful about ever using the word “derivative” when talking about Zelda Fitzgerald.

There are four parts to Save Me the Waltz: Alabama’s late adolescence, her marriage to David Knight and their life in Europe, her ballet obsession, and then her injury and return to extended family. It is extremely interesting that the book opens and closes with Alabama’s family in the United States, with discussions of tradition and inter-generational observations. That mirroring of sections invites a wonderful discussion about how Zelda reflects upon some of the questions raised within the middle parts of the novel’s structure—especially in terms of marriage and how a life is to be lived.

Superficially, this is the story of an American couple who travel to Europe and what happens to them while they are there. But the story is much more interior than it is about “event”; indeed, there are few events in the story. A first significant event would be Alabama’s unexpected infatuation with a Frenchman she meets during one of their first stops in Europe, when the teeth of a dangerous boredom have begun to nip at her already. This “event” creates a fissure in the relationship façade that Alabama and David have created both publically and privately. A first question is raised about personal freedom and exclusivity in love—which the Knights do not address head-on, instead they avoid each other and themselves in constant partying and an empty life of friends and high-living. Anything to keep boredom at bay. Especially for Alabama, who has nothing to do but party. No role for her except wife to her painter husband and mother to a young child. Without a passion of her own, these are her only two choices. Some time later, they have a brief exchange about their tumultuous life and David says, offhand, that he “needs new emotional stimulus.”

Alabama looked at him coldly.

“I see.” She realized that she had sacrificed forever her right to be hurt on the glory of a Provençal summer.

It is a brief moment, but the tone of the novel swings dramatically after this point. Alabama becomes bitter as David looks at other women and eventually begins an affair with a French actress. The way Alabama thinks about herself after this—in comparison to other women or the ways in which she refers to her body or her self—changes, becomes at first fidgety, and then dark. She is interested in David’s infidelity, but also in her own reaction, in her own desires. In the space of a few short pages, the reader witnesses a surprising loss of confidence, which eventually fuels the novel’s greatest “event”—Alabama’s obsession with ballet.

But just before this are a few of Alabama’s more curious & thoughtful reflections:

In response to an offhand comment about the possibility of her learning to dance:

Alabama went secretly over her body. It was rigid, like a lighthouse. “It might do,” she mumbled, the words rising through her elation like a swimmer coming up from a deep dive.

In response to David’s infidelity:

Men, she thought, never seem to become the things they do, like women, but belong to their own philosophic interpretations of their actions.

And finally, in one of the last paragraphs before she makes the decision to become a dancer:

The macabre who lived through the war have a story they love to tell about the soldiers of the Foreign Legion giving a ball in the expanses around Verdun and dancing with the corpses. Alabama’s continued brewing of the poisoned filter for a semiconscious banquet table, her insistence on the magic and glamor of life when she was already feeling its pulse like the throbbing of an amputated leg, had something of the same sinister quality.

The next section of the novel is my favorite. An intense 65 pages in which all of the novel’s difficult questions reside. Alabama becomes a dancer. She abandons her husband and her child—slowly at first, then openly when a position opens in an Italian ballet company—and she experiences something that makes her feel alive in a way that nothing up to this point in her life has ever done. And of course this feeling comes with an equally intense sacrifice. Because to feel this way, she must be alone. She cannot have this feeling and have her family at the same time.

Interestingly, the prose in this section of the novel is dramatically different than the other sections. Smoother, cleaner. Very vivid. The narrator’s sensitivity has turned from emotional to physical, and then, every once in a while, connects the two in a dramatic way:

He exhibited her to his friends as if she were one of his pictures.

“Feel her muscle,” he said. Her body was almost their only point of contact.

Isn’t that rather devastating?

I won’t ruin the ending of this book by saying anything else about it except that the story of Alabama and David comes full circle in an interesting way. The last few pages reconnect with the beginning of the book, but also draw a line straight out from patterns created in the middle. And the mood created by the ending is both curious and frighteningly bleak.

All of this is to say that I think Save Me the Waltz—its structure and especially its creation of a character like Alabama Knight—deserves much more consideration than Mr. Harry T. Moore ever thought to give it. Not to mention those involved in the book’s original publication. I’m guessing the academic world has done this or is starting to, and I hope there will be more discussions of her work on its own terms. Whatever the similarities to Zelda’s real life and despite the small ways the writing may falter from to time (ZF has trouble with metaphors and, a bit less often, with narrative consistency), this is not a book that should be dismissed so quickly. Or lauded only for its contribution to an understanding of Scott Fitzgerald’s work. It has a life of its own, it raises questions absolutely unrelated to anyone’s biography, and the writing is interesting for its fragmentation, unusual descriptions and pacing. It is the kind of book that makes me wish the author had had a chance to write again, to write differently, to finish with this story (which perhaps she needed to tell), and try her hand at another.

Beauty on Earth – Juliette’s first escape

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I thought to do a little microscoping work on Beauty on Earth for a change. Here is one of my favorite scenes, when Juliette first escapes from her uncle’s café:

But the door to the house had closed again. The girl was now on the other side of the door, in other words, on the good side. She had all the music for herself. All she needed to do was swim up it, like she would have swum up a stream. Just past the ninepins game was a kind of passage which opened up between two walls behind some sheds. She entered into the passage. She raises her head, turning it right and left. It was on the right. The wall was taller than her, but now we begin to see who she is. A wagon with a ladder had been pushed against the wall; she grabbed hold of it with two hands, having wrapped her shawl around her belt, and then began to climb up the ladder, in the moonlight, because the moon had just come out from behind the clouds, and so the moon was on her hair, on her shoulders, then on her skirt and around her legs. We saw how flexible she was. She held herself crouched for an instant at the top of the wall, leaning forward on her hands which she held flat before her; she was on the edge of a paved terrace used for hanging out the washing, which we could see by the iron lines fixed between two supports. We saw that she knew what she was doing. We saw that she knew how to take care of herself. She did not stand up, did not straighten herself; that would have made it too easy to see her. That first quarter of the moon shone like a well washed ice cube over the Café Milliquet, shining even farther out on the water like a kind of long road casting back its reflection; she crawled like a cat. She was so quiet that she seemed to add to the silence with her crawling. She made it to the other side of the terrace. All she had to do was stretch along it with her body, with only her eyes peeking out.

There are two lines I absolutely love in this short scene.

The first is, “She had all the music for herself,” and how, with these words, suddenly the village disappears completely, leaving Juliette alone with the accordion music, alone with the reader. She is rarely allowed to be alone in the novel, she is under constant surveillance – and here Ramuz allows the reader to be the only one spying on her. It’s a lovely trick.

The second line that always brings me up short is, “… but now we begin to see who she is.” This is the key, I think, to how much Ramuz stays away from Juliette’s mind. He is telling us here that the story is not going to be about her as much as it will be about the others. He is telling us that she will be fine no matter what else happens. That we aren’t to get caught up in worrying about Juliette. I love the daring in this.

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Chasing the King of Hearts & Magda

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One of the tangential bonuses to having this blog is that I feel fairly free to write up some of my more unfinished thoughts about a book. I recently wrote a review for Necessary Fiction of Hanna Krall’s Chasing the King of Hearts, which is the latest novella published by Peirene Press.

I really enjoyed Chasing the King of Hearts – as I have enjoyed almost everything Peirene has published. But when I started to write my review, I realized that I wanted to be able to talk about the book as an example of Holocaust literature and how it resisted some of what has become stereotypical about that kind of novel. So I started to write something and I came up with this rough bunch of sentences:

There is a moment when reading the first few pages of a Holocaust novel that a kind of uneasy wariness sets in—is this going to be exciting? is it going to start to feel like a film? It’s unfortunate that graphic depictions of human misery in literature can become exciting once they start to feel familiar, like a good thriller, or once it becomes easy to sort out the bad guys from the good guys and just exactly how many characters a reader will accept for random destruction before deciding the narrative has lost all of its beauty. Do not misunderstand me, these narratives—of all genocides, of all our horrific collective failures—must be told and retold and told again, even at the risk of becoming a kind of kitsch industry for both the heroes and the martyrs. Literature reminds, literature explores, literature reveals and unveils.

But this is also why it is such a relief to experience a novel that carefully resists this drive toward a recognizable cinematic cliché and cathartic memorialization.

When I got to the final draft of the review, I realized that I had to cut these sentences out of it. Mostly because I haven’t actually read enough Holocaust literature to make this kind of claim – and those that I have read tend to do exactly what I was claiming for Chasing the King of Hearts.

I’m thinking of books like Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck’s Report or Martin Amis’s Times Arrow, Maureen Myant’s The Search and Arnost Lustig’s Lovely Green Eyes. I have not read Thomas Keannely’s Schindler’s Ark (but I have seen the film) and I’m curious to see how I might consider it – whether it might even be possible to experience it on its own, without Liam Neeson’s face popping in. A book that I might hesitantly put into the other category is Jonathan Saffran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, which struck me when I read it as using more superficial shock than meditative depth. After cutting those lines from my review and thinking about the idea some more, I am curious where I’ve gotten the notion that there are proper ways to handle novelizing the Holocaust (and other books about horrific historical events) as opposed to ways that are inherently cliché.

I’m not sure, but I will leave my half-finished thought up there –in the hopes that it might generate a little discussion and some book suggestions.

The other thing I wanted to mention when writing about Chasing the King of Hearts was how fitting it was that Peirene brought this book into English, especially as Peirene’s publisher, Meike Ziervogel, has herself written a remarkable novella, Magda (Salt Publishing, 2012) that also tells a WWII story from an extremely unique perspective – it is a short but brutal story going over parts of the life of Magda Goebbels. It is both fascinating and horrible (not just the poisoning of the children but the way Ziervogel illuminates the Nazi psychosis) and while I really admire Ziervogel’s work and research and narrative skill, I have found it a little difficult to write about the book. It’s a remarkable book – it is subtle and straightforward and resists cliché in the same way as the books I mentioned above. I found it devastating. From my own perspective as a woman and a mother, I think that Ziervogel was incredibly brave for working within such a story, for getting as close as she does to such a difficult series of events.

Ziervogel recently wrote about the experience of writing Magda and her thoughts add a nice filter through which to look at the book – I found her comment on why she chose to write the book’s most difficult scene from a specific character’s POV very interesting. As I was reading the end of Magda, I wondered whether the scene might actually have been easier to face – as a writer – from the perspective she chooses, but she adds some historical nuance to her choice that is very appropriate.

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Walser and Ramuz

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I am not sure why this has only occurred to me, perhaps because there is a new Robert Walser translation just out (A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories, NYRB Classics). This is excellent news, of course. I love Walser’s work, and I think Jacob von Gunten one of the most fascinating pieces of literature I have ever read. But this new translation reminds me that so many people think of Walser when they think of Swiss literature. This is interesting to me simply because of my work with Ramuz —whom most people have never heard of.

Walser was born in 1878 and died in 1956. Ramuz was born in 1878 and died in 1947. These men were perfect contemporaries, writing incredibly avant-garde literature (although both in their own unique way) at exactly the same time. They both started publishing their work around the same time, and had similar professional trajectories in that they lived both inside and outside of Switzerland, were befriended by various “high-up” literary people, lived both reclusively and in the company of others. The biggest divergence between them would be Walser’s continuing mental troubles.

What is so curious for me when comparing these two men is how one came to be “exported” and not the other. You could even argue that at the time they were publishing, Ramuz was the more famous and had much more of an international audience. Ramuz was translated into German and a few other languages during his lifetime, including a handful of English translations that were done in the 20s (three, I think, not more). But Walser, with only one book translated into English in his lifetime, has become the canonized writer (in an international way) and Ramuz not. Although Ramuz is on Switzerland’s 200 franc bill, so symbolically he is a “national treasure.” I am genuinely curious about the how and the why of this, and can only explain it to myself with the idea of an accident of history.

I’ve been reading Ramuz’s journals again – slowly, and loving them – and yesterday, in the middle of an antique book shop where I’d gone to hunt down some Julia Daudet and Clarisse Francillon (but found neither), I got stuck inside two volumes of Ramuz’s letters. I have found no mention of Walser in the letters or the journal. Did Ramuz know of Walser? Did he read him? I have no idea if Walser was translated into French in his lifetime. But Ramuz made it into German. So did Walser read Ramuz? These things are fun to think about. They were, in a way, both writing about similar ideas, both obsessed with individual solitude and nature’s effect on that individual. Walser much more interested in bureaucracy and institutional questions, Ramuz much more focused on nature and village life.

I assume that somewhere out there – in Switzerland or beyond – there are academics looking at these two men in parallel. I think it would make for a fascinating comparison – from a critical perspective as well as biographical.

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