Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘contemporary literature’

Leigh Stein – The Fallback Plan

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This week at Necessary Fiction, I reviewed The Fallback Plan, a début novel/la from Leigh Stein. The book was published by Melville House in January; it was their 200th book and was selected to mark their 10th anniversary.

Small excerpt from the review:

Luckily for the reader, Esther’s parents force her to get a job as a nanny with some family friends. But this isn’t just an ordinary family. Amy and Nate have recently lost their second child, a baby girl named Annika. They hire Esther to watch their four-year-old daughter May so that Amy can get her life back on track and start painting again.

This combination of grieving-for-a-lost-child-family and refusing-to-grow-up-Esther is tailor-made for the kind of catharsis that Esther is going to need to get herself out of her parents’ basement and back into the real world. Minor incidents transpire. Esther makes mistakes. Amy and Nate reveal secrets. Esther, thankfully, gets a glimpse of real trauma.

Read the full review here.

Claire Messud – The Hunters

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I may not have mentioned this before, but I’m a huge fan of the novella form. I usually read in the evenings and on a good day, I’ve got about an hour and a half – just enough time to read 100 to 150 pages, depending on the kind of writing. And when I can start a fictional world and finish it in one sitting, it’s like getting to experience the author’s complete vision all at once. No time to forget details in between readings, no interruptions. Just me and the story. It’s an incredibly satisfying way to read.

I wrote in my last post about the first novella (A Simple Tale) in Claire Messud’s The Hunters; the second novella, however, is where the collection takes its title. It’s a funny title, actually, and one that only makes sense about halfway through. The novella isn’t about hunting, but it makes use of the idea of hunter & prey. The novella is about an academic, recently suffering a romantic break-up, who lives in a strange out-of-the-way flat in London for a summer doing research and about a relationship (an odd relationship) that springs up with one of the neighbors.

Now, it took me several tries to write that last sentence without giving away the gender of the narrator. This is something Messud actually withholds from the reader – I want to say completely, but I’d have to re-read the whole book to be sure. I think it is never positively confirmed one way or another, although I have my strong suspicions. While I found the technique a little awkward, I enjoyed what she ultimately did with this ambiguity because the story appears to attempt two things: first, it becomes universal, and second, it dares the reader to ask whether it matters and whether the writer has confirmed the narrator’s gender through diction and voice.

The Hunters is an interesting little book because it’s a character study, and in many ways it feels like an experiment. The writing is a little bit impenetrable with lots of subordinate clauses and hemming and hawing and this makes it feel as though Messud got deep into character to write in this particular first person. I like that kind of textual richness, even if I don’t instinctively love this kind of prose. A quick example from the narrator’s second run-in with the neighbor:

But when I next saw her—in broad daylight, on the Kilburn High Road, emerging from one of those murky junk shops whose merchandise is plastic tat of innumerable types and uncategorizable vileness, each item more useless than the last—there could be no doubt that she was no figment. People clearly saw her—although I imagined that they, like me, could not bring themselves to look at her—and she had, clanking at her side, plastic bags full of purchases that were undoubtedly real—as real as the Kilburn High Road itself.

This professor is not a happy person and much of the disgust turned on Ridley Wandor can be seen as a reflection of the narrator’s sorrow. It is interesting to see how Messud manages the transformation of both characters, mostly the narrator of course. Because of the way that Messud has a perfect stranger make such a profound effect on the narrator, The Hunters is a deeply psychological story. A thought-provoking one-sitting read.

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Claire Messud – A Simple Tale

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In 2001, Claire Messud published two novellas in one book, The Hunters and A Simple Tale. Pairing them together in this way invites comparison between the two, which is partly a shame because they are both strong, stand-alone pieces in their own right and, to my mind, comparison actually weakens one of them. (Perhaps with the recent changes in publishing, there wouldn’t have been such a commercial necessity to publish the two together as there was in 2001… but this is only just speculation.)

The collection opens with A Simple Tale. Set in Toronto, this is the story of Maria Poniatowski, an immigrant to Canada from the Ukraine and survivor of the Nazi work camps. The story begins in the present, with Maria’s job as cleaning woman for several of Toronto’s wealthy families, but it dips backward to tell of Maria’s childhood, her time in the camps, how she met her husband Lev and how the two made their way to North America. It tells of raising their son Radek, who becomes the very Canadian Rod and who has no interest, even no use for, stories from his parents’ immigrant past. The book also focused on Maria losing Lev and her long widowhood.

Just as the title suggests, it is a simple story, but carefully and respectfully told. Compared to the other work of Messud’s that I’ve read it involves a much quieter narration. Straightforward and conventional in a positive sense. Classic. A lot of its power lies in the judicious way that Messud moves from memory to memory – looking back over a life, big events can become less important than smaller events and I like how she handled this complex reality. It is one of those pieces of fiction that isn’t easy to read because it tells of difficult events and deep emotions, but the prose reads easily. I read it in one evening, wanting to move between the opening and closing of the story in one sitting.

Emigrant/immigrant narratives are fascinating to me not only because I’m an expat myself, but because they are what make up the collective American (and by this I mean North American) experience. Both Canada and the US are immigrant nations and with A Simple Tale, Messud has written a really thoughtful consideration of the identity shifts and feelings of disorientation that any immigrant goes through. Her story deals primarily with a particular immigrant experience, one of Canada in the 1940s and 50s, but much of what she brings out is universal.

 

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So many books

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Yesterday was one of those days that reminded me why being a booklover is so much fun. I took the train to a nearby city to have lunch with another translator/writer friend of mine. When we’d finished with lunch, we both had a little time to kill before heading back to our respective trains and she, by chance, knew of a little out of the way second-hand book shop. It was snowing, the streets were a gray, sloppy mess and I was loaded down with a backpack filled with several issues of The Paris Review she no longer wanted (now that is an excellent gift!) as well as her most recent manuscript (which I cannot wait to read). I was also carrying Zeppi, my 4 month-old puppy, who was extremely happy to be snuggled into a sling bag over my shoulder and not shoulder high in all that mucky snow. Despite these extra encumbrances, we trudged over to the bookshop.

And what a treat it was to discover this little basement bookshop. From the outside it looked like just one tiny book-filled room, but it stretched like a long, narrow cave beneath the building above. It had an extensive collection of books in both French and German, and, to my delight, an entire wall of English books. Finding second-hand English books is not easy in Switzerland and I’m so happy to add this little shop to my list of treasure-hunting spots.

Of all things, one of the first books I saw was Barbara Comyns’s The Juniper Tree. It seems that the universe is conspiring for me to begin a start-to-finish Barbara Comyns read sooner than later. I also took home Nathan Englander’s collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and a book of Emerson’s essays. And I’m sure I would have loaded my backpack up even further but I had to race back to catch my train.

Interestingly, this week has been an extraordinary one for adding books to my to-be-read lists. Most weeks bring one or two new or new-to-me books to my attention, all duly noted and eventually put into the spreadsheet (total nerd that I am) that I keep for tracking books I’d like to read. But something about this week has brought before me a great number of books I’ve never read, all books I want to have read yesterday. This is unusual enough I thought I should mention them all, just to pass on the love and panic of my overwhelming to-be-read book pile.

Yesterday, I read an interview at 3:AM Magazine of a philosopher named Hilde Lindemann. Lindemann works in feminist bioethics and the article is called, “No Ethics Without Feminism.” It’s a very interesting read and I’ve added Lindemann’s books (and books she’s edited) to my list: Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair and Feminism and Families.

I discovered a new web journal for women’s writing called Literary Mama and one of the first fiction pieces I read on that site was by a writer named Stephanie Freele. I loved her story, “Keeping Track of Insects” so much that I’d really like to read her short story collection, Feeding Strays.

A friend of mine read my most recent novel manuscript a few months ago and he very kindly gave me a list of three books that he felt my book echoed. One of those was Thea Astley’s Coda, which I also saw mentioned earlier this week at Whispering Gums, reminding me that I should hop to it and read this one. (The other two were Lars Gustafsson’s Death of a Beekeeper and Norman Lock’s A Long Rowing Until Morning.)

A recent Twitter exchange reminded me that I’d really like to read David Shields’s Reality Hunger.

I’ve now read a handful of reviews for a book called Quiet by Susan Cain. It’s about introverts and the power of solitude on thinking. How can I resist?

I can’t find it anymore, but at some point this week I saw an image of four Time magazine covers for the same week. The international versions all had a cover related to the crisis in the Euro Zone. The United States cover was about pets. The image was linked to a book called The Information Diet by Clay Johnson. I have to admit I am a little put off by the cover of the book, and by much of the marketing around it, but I’m very interested in discussions on media and information consumption.

Somewhere, someone (I’m sorry for not remembering who or where) posted a long excerpt from Orham Pamuk’s The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist and I was hooked.

And, finally, the last thing I wrote down on a little notepad by my computer was Jean Stafford. This is from Zhiv who recently wrote about her book, The Mountain Lion. I’d never heard of Stafford. I love this about being a reader – there is always someone new to read, someone who’s apparently written beautiful things that I would like to read.

And now I really miss (certainly not for the first time and certainly not for the last time) having easy access to an English-language library…

 

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Barbara Comyns – The Vet’s Daughter

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Almost ten years ago, I happened upon a book in a used bookstore in Urbana-Champaign, IL with a funny title: Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. I took it home out of curiosity and over the next few days delighted in the discovery of a wonderfully distinct literary voice. I’d never read quite anything like it—breathless like Woolf, but more fanciful, and yet extremely sharp and clear. (Some people might describe Woolf as fanciful, but I think Woolf is too intellectual to be fanciful… she’s playful, but it’s always intellectual. Comyns has a dash of fantasy, of magic, yet her writing is never incomprehensible.) At the same time, there was a sadness to the writing that made it all very interesting and mysterious. I have held on to this first impression of Barbara Comyns’s writing, eager to read more, and yet for some inexplicable reason, hadn’t done so.

So I was delighted to stumble across a NYRB volume of her novel The Vet’s Daughter (begun around 1952, published in 1959) at a used bookstore in Lausanne last week. Nothing gives a better sense of her writing than to read the first two paragraphs:

A man with small eyes and a ginger moustache came and spoke to me when I was thinking of something else. Together we walked down a street that was lined with privet hedges. He told me his wife belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, and I said I was sorry because that is what he seemed to need me to say and I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would have most likely worn kneecaps. We came to a great red railway arch that crossed the road like a heavy rainbow; and near this arch there was a vet’s house with a lamp outside. I said, “You must excuse me,” and left this poor man among the privet hedges.

I entered the house. It was my home and it smelt of animals, although there was lino on the floor. In the brown hall my mother was standing; and she looked at me with her sad eyes half-covered by their heavy lids, but did not speak. She just stood there. Her bones were small and her shoulders sloped; her teeth were not straight either; so, if she had been a dog, my father would have destroyed her.

That last line is devastating, isn’t it? And this illustration of her father’s cruelty is just one of many to come. Our narrator Alice is a gentle, and somewhat naïve soul. She isn’t naïve in the sense that she isn’t aware of unpleasant realities or even that she is locked up inside herself, a victim, as it were. Instead, she is observant, thoughtful and emotionally intelligent, yet her upbringing has left her sheltered enough to believe she might stand a chance at happiness. The book follows Alice through the death of her mother, a move away from London to work as a lady’s companion for a colleague of her father, possible love and an eventual return to her father’s home. There is also a very gentle supernatural plot line as Alice discovers she has the ability to levitate, a talent that will determine her future.

That Alice can levitate is not without a symbolic function in the story. For without any other viable option, Alice has found the means to free herself from a “heavy” existence. This shows an incredible courage on Alice’s part. I also can’t help reading this as a very sly and perhaps inadvertant social critique—except for Alice’s levitation, the novel is unfailingly realistic, and we all know that levitation is truly impossible. So it is only in fiction that Alice can escape her fate…and well, you have to read the end of the book to know that this escape is not without a high price.

Now that I’ve read two of her eleven novels, I can’t help comparing her to other writers working at the same time: Lessing (The Grass is Singing, 1950), Gordimer (The Lying Days, 1953), Murdoch (Under the Net, 1954), Pym (Excellent Women, 1952). Accepting Pym as the stylistic outlier here, there is still a strong connection between all these writers, especially along socio-political preoccupations. A connection that Comyns does not share. Comyns seems completely uninterested in engaging with the socio-political except in the way that it organically touches her narrators. Her world appears to be completely and dramatically sealed around the narrator’s consciousness. In this sense, and especially with the light touch of supernatural/magical, she reminds me of the Carson McCullers of The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951).

It goes without saying that I’ll be reading more Comyns. A really lovely small press called Dorothy recently re-issued her 1955 novel Who Was Changed and Who was Dead. And I have it on good authority (Jess Stoner, David Auerbach) that this is one of, if not her best…

 

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Barbara Pym – No Fond Return of Love

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Having just finished my second Barbara Pym novel, No Fond Return of Love, I can safely say she is now a favorite. I will return happily to both No Fond Return of Love and Excellent Women for rereading at some point. They are easily the kind of book a person could grab off the shelf on a rainy afternoon and vanish inside the story for several wonderful hours.

No Fond Return of Love is similar to Excellent women in that it tells the story of a woman (I was going to say a young woman, because she can’t be much over thirty, but alas, she is not quite young enough and that fact lies quite firmly at the root of her troubles) who is recently disengaged from her fiancé and attends an academic conference in an attempt to forget her sorrow. At the conference, she meets two people who will greatly change the next few months of her life.

Now, I quite like books with this sort of premise, because it is exactly the people we meet under the most banal circumstances who can change our lives unexpectedly, in both good and bad ways. And Dulcie Mainwaring is greatly in need of change. Her first encounter is with another woman on the verge of inconsolable spinsterhood, Viola Dace, and then she is subsequently introduced to a very handsome academic named Dr. Aylwin Forbes. These three are thrown together over the course of the novel and Pym uses their various situations to look at her central question about the nature of happiness and how it relates to love and marriage.

On the whole, I would say that No Fond Return of Love is an easy novel. That word easy is so dangerous, I think, because it can also mean (and I have myself used it this way) to imply that the book lacks depth. This is where Pym’s strength lies. Her books appear quite light, really, and are wonderfully readable and funny. But there is an almost harrowing sorrow in all that she brings up. Her characters are laughable, but they are also suffering an acute pain.

Lilian Nattel and Litlove brought up Pym’s endings in the comments on Lilian’s post on Excellent Women. As Litlove put it, “For such a funny writer, though, she often chooses frustrating endings, or at least endings in which few people win or make headway.” This is so spot-on that I had to repeat it here. The ending of No Fond Return of Love leaves her characters at a kind of impasse, in a situation that would certainly not be considered advantageous for anyone, and yet…it feels very real. Pym deals with the notion of compromise quite openly, as if compromise is the only way to move forward in love relationships. This is quite depressing, but gets to the complicated reality that IS a relationship. This is also probably why Pym could never be considered a romantic novelist even when all of her books focus almost exclusively on marriage and love.

One last thing I wanted to mention about this particular book is the way Pym handles the narrative perspective. It is actually quite uncommon how she slips back and forth into each character’s mind, even within the same paragraph. The effect can be a little destabilizing until you get used to it, but after that it creates a really intricate mosaic. Having such direct access into the minds of all the characters makes the reader the only one who really understands all that is going on. This technique, combined with Pym’s incisive satirical voice, actually generates a lot of sympathy. Satire always risks turning a character into a stereotype, or, at the very least, into an object of scorn. But Pym sidesteps this so neatly, by bringing the reader as close as possible inside the character that what remains important is their fragility—in whatever form that takes.

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John Irving – A Prayer for Owen Meany

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I wish I could remember when A Prayer for Owen Meany first appeared on my book radar. It was years ago now, and I immediately got an old mass-market paperback copy and then forgot it on my shelves somewhere. But I kept hold of the idea that I should read it, and that it was considered a “good book” by those in the know – whoever they are.

Having read it for myself now, I’m not certain I would call it a “good book.” I would call it: a long book, a book of ideas, an American book, and an ambitious book. These four descriptions don’t mean that it couldn’t also be a good book, but I found myself repeatedly disappointed with A Prayer for Owen Meany, mainly in the writing but also in the depth of Irving’s ideas.

The novel is told by John Wheelright, an American bachelor living in Canada in the late 1980s, but the bulk of the story occurs between about 1952 and 1969 and is about his best friend growing up in New Hampshire, Owen Meany. It is about their childhood, about the death of John’s mother, their search for John’s real father, their prep school lives and the onset of the Vietnam War. It is both a comic novel and a real tragedy—a mixture I usually like—and it’s also an example of a very typical kind of American realism: the details of small town life, boyhood trials, American sexual culture, and religion (lots of religion).

I must say right off that Owen Meany himself is an incredible character. I can only imagine how much fun Irving must have had writing this young man. He is a freak—a tiny kid with a horrific voice, zappingly clever, courageous, eccentric, loyal and hungry for love, starving even. Narrator John is so bland in comparison, as I’m sure he’s meant to be. But he is too bland, finally. I couldn’t even really figure out who John was until pages 421 – 424 when suddenly, he comes thrillingly to life. That’s a long time to wait.

John isn’t ultimately the point of the novel. The point is Owen—what becomes of him, what he brings to John and other characters. It isn’t really giving anything away to quote what’s written on the back cover of my edition:

Owen Meany, the only child of a New Hampshire granite quarrier, believes he is God’s instrument. He is.

This religious aspect of the novel is, perhaps, its most interesting. I am not an ideal reader for a book with a deep religious focus because I don’t have a lot of patience where religion is concerned. (Marilynne Robinson’s exquisite Gilead would be the great exception to that statement.) Having said that, I believe that Irving handles the theme with great detail and a lot of care. The novel reveals Religion in all its destructive, powerful glory and explores the intricacies and limits of personal faith. Irving also focuses a sharp eye on the gray zone where religion and superstition share uncomfortable territory.

A quick word on the book’s political preoccupation. I’m curious whether the book was at all controversial when it came out in 1989. It is fiercely anti-Vietnam war, and fiercely anti-Reagan (the two narrative time periods). My only complaint with the politics in the book is the heavy-handed and clumsy way they are delivered. No, that isn’t quite fair. Because the heart of the novel takes place during the Vietnam war, the political critique in those chapters is quite meaningful and feels more or less natural, but the 1980s political analysis is clumsily delivered in series of boring monologues.

Ultimately, my frustration with A Prayer for Owen Meany is similar to the feeling I get when I find myself in discussion with someone who is very bright but who doesn’t know when to stop talking and who takes me, or anyone else listening, for an idiot. The book engages with some fascinating ideas, involves one of the most interesting fictional characters I’ve ever come across and centers on events—both fictional and historical—of great import. Unfortunately, a lot of that “goodness” gets drowned out by too much “unnecessary.” Irving has his characters explain, many times over, all of the book’s symbolism. He also repeats himself. And worst of all, the book overprepares the reader for the impending tragedy. I got so sick of Irving’s allusions to what was going to happen to Owen Meany that when it actually happened I was too numb to appreciate what should have been an extremely powerful scene.

Anyone else read Irving? Are any of his earlier novels worth trying out? Thoughts?

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Agota Kristof – Le Troisième Mensonge

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Eventually, I did not have to restrict my reading of Agota Kristof’s Le Troisième Mensonge, the third book of her trilogy, to daylight hours only. Compared to the first two books, this one was quite tame.

Quick recap:

The first book, Le Grand Cahier, is about two young boys, twins named Claus and Lucas, who are sent to live with their grandmother during World War II. A lot of what happens to the twins is quite horrifying, as is their development and behavior. They are dealing with trauma and with abandonment, and they work very hard to rid themselves of the emotions that make their abandonment painful. A process which turns them, quite simply, into monsters. The book ends with one twin escaping across the border, leaving the other behind.

The second book, La Preuve, is about Lucas, the twin left behind. The novel follows what happens to Lucas living separate from his brother, but it also begins to raise certain questions about the “truth” of the first story. No one in the town remembers Lucas as a twin. Kristof introduces this idea quite ingeniously, quite subtly, but it becomes suddenly clear that the book, which I already knew was taking a sharp look at psychological trauma, is going to go much farther than I expected. This actually makes the ugliness of much of what happens in the story easier to stomach. By the end of La Preuve, Claus, the one who escaped, returns to his hometown to find his twin brother, only to discover that Lucas has vanished upon suspicion of murder.

Now, when Le Troisième Mensonge opens, the real question of the book is no longer what has happened to Claus and Lucas, but whether or not Claus and/or Lucas ever existed and whether or not the stories we’ve been reading about them actually occurred. In terms of story, I will leave it at that. This is one of the more difficult books I’ve ever had the pleasure of writing about, because I don’t want to give anything way.

What Kristof does with this trilogy is fascinating. Not only from a thematic perspective—everything about the books suggest she is dealing with the trauma of war, with oppressive government and the like, but by the end she’s gone very domestic, which is ultimately much more frightening—but also in the details of her writing: the POV shifts, the structure of each book and the simple, no-frills aspect of her prose. The power of her narrative and the ideas behind it kind of sneak up on you, because there is nothing showy about the project.

The trilogy is available in English as one book (Grove Press, 1997) and I’d be curious to hear if anyone has read it, and if so, how her writing worked in translation. For two reasons – because it was done by three different translators, and also because it seems to me her work would translate easily. Her sentences are very simple and spare. Each book gets progressively more complex, but even Le Troisième Mensonge is quite straightforward.

Aside from the trilogy, she has five other books. One is l’Inalphabète, a memoir, which I read over the summer, but the others are novels as far as I can tell. I’m very curious to see her other work and whether it is all as dark and psychologically complex as Le Grand Cahier, La Preuve and Le Troisième Mensonge.

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a bookish week

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Last week was my birthday, and I had an exceptionally bookish week that resulted in a nice haul of new books and a stack of Jane Austen BBC adaptations – none of which I’d actually seen before.

The first in the haul—and the only book I’ve started to read already—is Charles Dantzig’s Pourquoi Lire? (Why read?) I’d never heard of Dantzig until this lovely little book found its way into my mailbox. A gift from my mother-in-law, who is very good at selecting books I wouldn’t otherwise have come across. Dantzig’s homage to reading is so far really lovely. Funny and clever and sweet. Each chapter begins with another reason to read, like “We read because of love,” about falling in love with characters and stories, or “Read to get past the halfway point of the book” about those interminable books of 1000 pages and how we love them and hate them at the same time. This book promises many little gems.

The rest of my new book stack contains:

  • Chris Bohjalian – The Double Bind
  • Damon Galgut – The Quarry
  • Téa Obreht – The Tiger’s Wife
  • Julia Otsuka – Buddha in the Attic
  • Siri Hustvedt – The Summer Without Men
  • Colm Toibin – The Empty Family
  • Jeannette Winterson – Written on the Body
  • José Saramago – The Elephant’s Journey
  • Michael Cunningham – By Nightfall
  • Orhan Pamuk – The Museum of Innocence
  • Julian Barnes – The Sense of an Ending

I am really looking forward to reading the Otsuka, as I’ve already sampled two chapters in recent issues of Granta. The book is about mail order brides coming to America from Japan, and written in the first person plural. The samples I read simply blew me away, like this passage from “The Children” (Granta 115):

Sometimes we tried cutting off all our hair and offering it to the goddess of fertility if only she wold make us conceive, but still, every month, we continued to bleed. And even though our husband had told us it made no difference to him whether he became a father or not – the only thing that mattered, he had said to us, was that we grew old by his side – we could not stop thinking of the children we’d never had. Every night I can hear them playing in the fields outside my window.

 

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finishing Agota Kristof

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It takes a lot of courage to read Agota Kristof before going to bed. Or so I am learning. When I read the first novel in her trilogy, Le Grand Cahier (The Notebook), I read it in two sittings, both during the afternoon and there was enough distance between the dark scenes of the story and my bedtime that nothing overlapped. I am quite susceptible to nightmare. And the same thing happened when I read the second book, La Preuve (The Proof). But yesterday evening I sat down with La Preuve to skim through it quickly again in preparation to start the final book in the trilogy, Le Troisième Mensonge (The Third Lie), and realized that the story was too unsettling for that hour of my day.

Kristof’s world is brutal. I’ve read many a book with difficult subject matter (Pat Barker’s Blow Your House Down comes directly to mind), but Kristof is absolutely unflinching in her indictment of human nature, especially because her writing is so simple, so undemanding. This is what I wrote about Le Grand Cahier:

Such a deceptively simple little novel. An easy story – two boys must leave the city to live in the safer countryside during the war. Yet, the novel quite simply explodes with little horrors. I tried to find another word to describe it, something other than horror, but I can’t. The book is horrifying.

This whole trick about not knowing what the book is about is key. Of course the book is about WWII, about the separation of families, about violence, about neighbors helping neighbors and neighbors hurting neighbors. It’s a classic war story. But it’s also wholly unique.

Part of what makes Le Grand Cahier so unique (and compelling, if I’m allowed this reviewer cliché) is the perspective, the way it pretends to be written by the boys themselves. They are telling their story as one of a series of imposed exercises, recording events in their notebook. They’ve promised the reader to give nothing but the facts, no interpretation, no emotion. It’s an effective way of giving the reader the “story” but their very lack of emotion or explanation creates this effect where the reader begins to see too much in the boys’ silences, begins to understand what Kristof is actually getting at. And it isn’t nice.

The second novel, La Preuve, picks up the story at the moment the twin boys separate (one having crossed over the border, the other staying behind—how they get across is extremely disturbing) and follows Lucas, the one who stayed behind, for the next fifteen years or so, through two very important relationships, until he is forced to leave the town.

What I found so unsettling about this second novel is how cleanly Kristof depicts her psychopath. There isn’t another word for Lucas. To my standards, he’s a monster. As shown in Le Grand Cahier, he spent so many years exorcising his emotion away that nothing remains. Or at least only the primal impulse. The original want or fear or anger, and then he acts on that original feeling without allowing any other emotion or rationale to mediate. When he wants something—a woman, a young child to adopt—he does the simplest, quickest thing to fulfill the desire. Including murder.

On the other hand, Lucas is capable of infinite tenderness toward the small child he adopts. He does everything in his power to give this little boy a happy childhood. It doesn’t work, of course. The child is miserable for a variety of reasons, and as intense and emotionally frightening as Lucas. Their story can only be a tragedy.

Although I have to be careful about when I sit down to do it, meaning not before sleep, I’m quite eager to read the final book. Despite the difficult nature of the events in each story, I’d like to see where Kristof is going with her meditation on psychological trauma. Lucas isn’t normal, that’s easy to see, but the world around him is nearly as horrific and I’m curious whether she is making an argument against a certain kind of emotional abandonment or about a specific system of political oppression. The trilogy begins during WWII but extends thirty to forty years beyond. War is awful, yes, and the cause of significant personal trauma, but Kristof seems to be suggesting that redemption on any level is never possible.

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