Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘contemporary fiction’

bookish news

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The Quarterly Conversation and Open Letters Monthly have teamed up this summer for a group read of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. The idea is to read about 70-90 pages a week and they have selected the more recent Royall Tyler translation. I’ve decided to join in and ordered my copy of the translation last week. My only experience with Genji is the original and Seidensticker, so this will be a treat. For other language nerds like me, there exists a very cool website in Japanese of the original Genji Monogatari, with the classical Japanese, the modern Japanese and a Romaji transliteration in three interactive panes. So. Much. Fun.

And I just learned (a month late) that Amazon has decided to launch a translation imprint called AmazonCrossing. Using their ever-so-detailed sales and reviews data, they plan to pick up books which are likely to become big sellers and have them translated. On the whole I think this is fantastic news…more books from around the world making their way into English. The first book they’ve picked is from France, The King of Kahel by Tierno Monénembo. I’ll be very curious to see what other books get on to their list.

reading update

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For the one or two readers I might still have, I promise to get back to regular posting soon…

In the meantime, a quick update:

I finished Jakov Lind’s quirky, funny, strange, incomprehensible, surreal and serious novel Ergo, just out from Open Letter Books. Reading this book was like taking a deep breath and diving underwater. I only came up for air twice and then plunged back into Lind’s bizarre world. I’m not sure I understood much of this book, but the reading was by no means uncomfortable. Think Kafka on LSD…

And then I had the pleasure to consume Damon Galgut’s wonderful The Good Doctor. This was definitely one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. The book is disturbingly quiet, with tiny little bombs that go off left and right. I couldn’t put it down. Loved the narrator and how I slowly began to mistrust him, mistrust his perceptions of the world. Fantastic book.

Now I’m about a third into Christopher Torockio’s Floating Holidays from Black Lawrence Press. The first chapter of the book, or I should say, the first voice, put me off, but as soon as I stepped into the second voice, it picked up steam. This is a novel of modern office life, of mediocre powermongers, of sensitive people choking under the pressure of corporate shenanigans. It’s good. It has a great momentum, despite the myriad of voices. I can’t wait to get further.

Tsutsui Yasutaka – The Maid (家族八景)

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Since I am just home from Japan, let’s talk about some Japanese literature. Before I left on holiday, I read a book just out from Alma Books called The Maid by Tsutsui Yasutaka and translated by Adam Kabat.

The Maid is about a young woman with the power to read minds who jumps from family home to family home. She is a purportedly intelligent young woman who has decided to hide out in this ridiculous job because she doesn’t want the world to know her secret.

Before I talk about my reaction, you need to know that Tsutsui is one of Japan’s most prolific and famous science fiction writers. He has something like 30 novels and 50 short story collections. You also need to know that The Maid (家族八景, or Kazoku Hakkei) was originally written in 1972.

I mention these two things because it helped me put the book into its proper context. I think that because Tsutsui is primarily a science fiction writer, he leaves out some of the more literary elements I might have enjoyed (Nanase’s development as a character, for example, is quite shallow), to focus on the stranger, more fantastic parts of his story (an artist who thinks completely in the abstract – shapes, colors and all). And the book is just a teensy bit dated, so it helps to know it was written in the 70s.

The Maid reads like a collage, with each chapter essentially following the same format only with different characters and slightly different events. Tsutsui has a lot to say about selfish, even dangerous sexual urges and egotism in general. The families Nanase spends time with are all basically an assortment of human monsters and Nanase moves through them with an interesting mix of cynicism and innocence.

The book does a lot for exploding myths about Japanese culture – its tidiness, the inviolable tradition of respect for one’s elders, the beauty of an intricate and strict hierarchy. With the creation of his mind-reading character, Tsutsui literally peels away the veneer of perfection and exposes a dark portrait of human nature – laziness and fear, infidelities, social climbing, incest, violence. You name it, Tsutsui writes about it.

So in terms of story, there is some interesting stuff going on in The Maid. On a prose level, I didn’t find it a satisfying read. Tsutsui’s style is sparse, yes, and the writing is clear, but Nanase’s mind-reading as a vehicle for emotional and narrative escalation begins to fall flat after a few chapters. It boils down to a strange kind of dialogue, with Nanase and the other characters “conversing” on one polite level while Nanase and the reader “listen in” to each person’s actual, horrible thoughts. The story tension gets lost in such direct access. It made me wish Tsutsui had gone a step further, found a way to push Nanase (or the reader) somehow. He comes close in the very last chapter but still doesn’t step out of his template.

John Fuller – Flying to Nowhere

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I wish I could remember where I got the recommendation for John Fuller’s tiny little novella, Flying to Nowhere, originally published in 1983. I got the book a few months ago but only grabbed it off the shelf on Monday evening because I wanted to read something completely new, something I had no idea about before opening the cover.

This is what greeted me:

The three novices walked fast down the margin of the hay field. In the great heat the tall grasses stood feathery and still, until the striding sandalled feet parted and crushed them. The hems of the woollen robes caught the seed tips and dragged them. Stems bowed and sprang, sending out tiny clouds of grass fruit.

That last image – tiny clouds of grass fruit – is lovely, don’t you think? The book has barely enough pages (88 in my edition) to earn being called a novella. It’s more like a long short story. But what a story.

In the field with the three novices are the harvest girls, scything grass, and they avoid looking at the novices, but the novices stare at the girls. One of the novices, who collects his observations in a notebook, thinks the following when he looks at the girls:

Their strokes are like the strokes of the knife on used vellum. The erased word serves its turn and is restored like dead grass to the elements. The field is the book of nature to be freshly inscribed by our brother the sun.

I just love that image of erasing a word from old parchment. Now the tone of this novice is a bit self-important, and clearly he’s keeping himself at a contemplative distance from the everyday tasks of the world about him. Later, his detachment will come back to haunt him.

Despite this bucolic, peaceful introduction the story, things turn dark quickly. It was impossible not to think of Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose because Fuller’s story is set at an isolated monastery (on a Welsh island) and involves a creepy mystery. Pilgrims to the island have been disappearing and the Bishop has sent a man, Vane, to discover what’s going on. Which he does, eventually, but at great cost. And what’s actually going on is much more interesting than the little bit that Vane manages to uncover.

The story of Flying to Nowhere was wonderful – unexpected, slightly otherworldly situations and unique characters along a spectrum of innocent to evil. The reader guesses quite early what might be going on but there is no sense of disappointment at this easy understanding. The language Fuller uses to tell his story was so exquisite I didn’t mind if in the end the “mystery” was somewhat obvious. The mystery is completely beside the point.

Fuller is a poet and that influence is really strong. So much so that there are a few moments of confusion. This could have been a source of frustration but with Flying to Nowhere I was more than happy to just get lost in the imagery, even if it meant I wasn’t exactly sure what was being inferred, or even what was happening at certain moments. I would love to read this strange, lovely little book with a book group sometime, because it would be interesting to hear and discuss different interpretations. Especially of the final scenes…

The novice’s story is really only a tiny part of the whole book but I’ll finish with this quote from one of his sections because I really liked it:

The windows of the cells were so small and high that the moon simply cast its ghostly patches on the ceilings without generally illuminating the sleeping shapes and their few possessions. And yet the outlines seemed quite clear in the half-darkness; the scrubbed bowl, the scowling cherubs at the shoulders of an oratory, the metal clasps of a book on a small table.

The novice who was shortly to undergo the night of examination reached out his hand and touched one of the clasps. His book was not finished, and he thought it might never be finished. The reflections in it of things as they really were could be no more, he decided, than insufficient reflections of things only as they seemed to be, reflections of reflections, moonlight patches at a pathetic remove from the sun.

Maile Chapman – Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto

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From page one of Maile Chapman’s Your Presence in Requested at Suvanto, the reader is invited into a somewhat surreal and disturbing landscape. I usually try to avoid using qualifiers like ‘somewhat’ but I feel it’s important in this case. This is realistic fiction, but one that highlights the more bizarre, fantastic elements of its unique situation.

The novel is set in the 1920s and opens with the arrival of Julia at Suvanto, a hospital in rural Finland. The hospital is an ordinary hospital, except for the top floor which serves as a temporary home for women in need of a rest cure. This isn’t a psychiatric ward in the strictest sense, but the women are a bit unhinged, emotionally fragile, unable to take care of themselves. Many of the women are Americans, wives of executives in the flourishing timber industry. Others are Danish, some are Swedish or Finnish. Julia is a troublemaker from the start. She does not want to be at Suvanto and does her best to disrupt its established routines and upset many of the other women. 

Aside from Julia, the novel’s most important character is Sunny, the head nurse on the top floor. Sunny is American and chose to come and work at Suvanto to escape from painful memories of her former life in the United States. Sunny is a tightly controlled individual with impeccable nursing skills, never upset, never flustered. She is the perfect foil for the ‘up-patients’ with their leaking emotions and often childish behaviors.

I’m sure you can guess this balance will necessarily be disturbed, and it is, as soon as a new obstetrician arrives from the United States with grand ideas for furthering his career. He wants to help Finland learn the Caesarian section technique and he’s willing to practice on non-maternity patients, removing the uteruses of older women past child-bearing age. Many of the up-patients, including Julia, fit this profile.

This plotline is the largest part of the novel, insomuch as it feeds the ending (see my post on Suvanto’s relationship to The Bacchae), but there are many smaller stories going on around it, and together they create this wonderfully eerie tension.

The writing is also impeccable – careful, subtle descriptions, an uncommon narrative perspective blending a voice-driven omniscient narrator with the third person plural, and attentive pacing. The voice-driven omniscient narrator is a real treat, smooth and flawless, with wordy insights (often verging on judgments) into the inner lives of each character. I haven’t been this impressed with début fiction in a long while. I can’t wait to see what else Chapman will come out with.

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman, Graywolf Press, April 2010

Cathy Marie Buchanan – The Day the Falls Stood Still

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I have been trying to put my thoughts together for a review of Cathy Marie Buchanan’s novel The Day the Falls Stood Still. I received this book from the publisher and read it last week and enjoyed it. By ‘enjoyed it’ I mean that I was absorbed in the reading of it, and I was engaged in the story and the characters and the writing.

But I’m having trouble finding the words to express my feeling for this book. It is a lovely book, it is well-written, and it taught me something about the history of Niagara Falls. Despite all these commendable qualities, it didn’t manage to astound me.

Before I try and explain why, let me give you the gist of the story. The novel takes place in Niagara, Ontario between 1915 and 1923 and mainly concerns Bess Heath and her fellow, Tom Cole. When Bess and Tom meet, Bess’ family is in the midst of a great crisis – her father has lost his job, her sister is unhappy and unwell, her mother is trying to keep the family together. The novel is, essentially, a love story. Behind that love story are some other themes – environmentalism, classism, the trauma of WWI, even a bit of spiritualism. There are many interesting side discussions running the length of the novel.

All of this, the larger story and the tangents, are handled well and the book is a smooth, pleasant read. In and of itself, it’s a fine piece of writing and a sweet story. Where I think it disappointed me is that it didn’t take any real risks. The book has its share of sorrows and although it deals with them respectfully, it doesn’t go quite far enough in their emotional exploration.

I’ll take an example that won’t ruin the story for anyone – Tom gets sent to fight in WWI and a part of the novel deals with his absence and fortunate return. He is a sensitive young man, with a great attachment and connection to the natural world. It follows that he would be affected by the trauma of fighting, and he is. So much so that when he comes back he is appropriately shell-shocked and Bess must find a way to help him heal. She does so, creatively, and the story continues.

But the highs and lows of that mini-story weren’t quite steep enough for me. I think Buchanan could have pushed her characters a little further, pushed the writing a little further and the reader would have felt more keenly the horror of World War I as well as the redemption Bess offered Tom. This pattern was repeated throughout the novel when each tragedy threatened. Even the book’s greatest sorrow is eventually smoothed away. I’m not arguing that this isn’t possible, but I felt it was done too easily, almost as if Buchanan or the story was unwilling to engage with the darker aspects of raw emotion.

But perhaps I’m arguing against a genre here. The Day the Falls Stood Still rests very comfortably in the tradition of mainstream contemporary fiction. The writing is even and careful, the story is interesting and takes the reader through a series of familiar emotions – disappointment, sorrow, elation, hope, more sorrow, more hope – which all lead the main character to a kind of mature and resilient strength by the end of the book.

David Benioff – City of Thieves

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David Benioff’s novel City of Thieves is set in Russia during WWII and centers on Lev (the narrator) and his friendship with Kolya, whom he meets when he’s caught looting the body of a German paratrooper and taken to jail. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are asked to find a dozen eggs for the wedding of Colonel’s daughter. They try finding these in blockaded Leningrad, but when that proves impossible they head out into the countryside, into German-occupied territory where a series of scrapes and adventures await them. Not the least of which involve Lev falling in love with a young woman who is also a sharpshooting assassin.

The book is entertaining and a quick read. I enjoyed it so don’t let what I’m about to say stop you from trying it. But I have some reservations, mostly because I can’t help thinking the book should really be a movie. And I don’t mean that something about the book makes it perfect for a screen adaptation. I actually think it should have been a film, rather than a book. The whole time I was reading it, I couldn’t help thinking that its aesthetic was simply more suited to film. By that I mean that although the story moves through a series of grave and difficult situations (it’s set during the siege of Leningrad, for goodness sake, when the Russians were eating paper and glue to stay alive), it has a frustrating lightness about it. I say frustrating because I got the sense the book wanted to be more serious and just didn’t manage it.

Lev and Kolya are the perfect comedic (and cinematic) duo – one dark and brooding, one light and handsome – and they spend the book navigating their dangerous quest with plenty laddish humor. I believe that the human soul can seek humor in the darkest of situations, but Kolya’s continual joking and teasing and bravado wore a little thin by the end of the book.

Take Benini’s Life is Beautiful for example, a film that gets criticized for trying to be funny about Nazi Germany. But the whole point of that film, as I see it, is that it’s actually a tragedy. What could be more tragic than a father trying to keep the magic of childhood alive for his son in a situation that is completely devoid of any sort of magic or goodness. That’s not funny, it’s enough to make you weep.

City of Thieves didn’t seem willing to ever let you weep, and yet all the ingredients were there. Even a prologue which leads the reader (falsely) to believe that the book is based on Benioff’s own grandfather.

All in all, I would consider City of Thieves a few hours of entertainment…with a lot of interesting history, some wonderful landscapes and just enough seriousness to make you enjoy the clever but somewhat corny ending. Somehow, I feel a little guilty for sounding so negative about this book because I did enjoy it,  it’s well-written, it’s compelling, it’s full of vivid scenes…but it just didn’t ever convince me to take it seriously enough. But if you want a glowing review, check out the New York Times.

more Fournier

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michèle Lesbre – Le Canapé Rouge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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two Davids

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

David Malouf – The Conversations at Curlow Creek

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

David Guterson – East of the Mountains

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