Western Europe Archives - Page 8 of 10

Mercè Rodoreda’s Breathless Narrator in The Time of the Doves

May 28, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

The narrative voice in Mercè Rodoreda’s novel, The Time of the Doves, wraps the reader in the dizzying world of a young woman. Through first person narration and the use of stream of consciousness, Rodoreda places the reader inside the head of Natalia as life happens to her.

Rodoreda starts sentence after sentence with “And,” even she using it as a conjunction between sentences: “[a]nd I stuck up for Quimet’s mother and said yes, she had put salt in the food. And the neighbor said if she ate food that was too salty it took her appetite away and Quimet said…” This and the lack of commas gives Natalia’s narration a breathless feeling like she is so wrapped up in the story that she couldn’t stop talking if she tried. This hurriedness also gave me the impression that she wasn’t stopping to think about what she was saying, there was no after the fact analysis. It was an interesting effect for something narrated in the past tense. Most often writers add layers of reflection and reinterpretation to stories narrated in the past tense. The character has had years to mull over events and interject meaning. By combining the breathlessness with the past tense, Rodoreda gave me the impression that Natalia was reliving these events and there was a lot of unprocessed anxiety wrapped up in them.

Natalia is aware of the actions going on around her: “Quimet started complaining furiously about his leg;” and to a certain extent she feels how those actions impact her: “I felt like they’d emptied me out of myself and filled me with something very strange. Someone I couldn’t see kept blowing into my mouth and played at inflating me;” but she doesn’t even contemplate escaping it. Natalia needs a sympathetic audience and the reader is closer than a girlfriend to whom Natalia complains about her life, but she has no concept that she has any control over her own fate. This intimate quality means the reader is involved in Natalia’s confusion.

Natalia was so caught up in the whirlwind of her life that the war crept up on her. Her life existed outside of history or political context for most of the first half of the novel. Rodoreda drops in a reference to the king on page 71 and Natalia mentions “the rich were mad at the Republic.” It isn’t until “Cintet and Quimet never stopped talking about the street patrols and how they’d have to be soldiers again” that the war comes home for Natalia. This was a very interesting effect. Usually when I read books about wars, they are about wars, the war is heavily foreshadowed through the rest of the book and often there are battle scenes. What Rodoreda accomplished was showing how ignorant people can be about impending political strife when they are wrapped up in their lives. Natalia couldn’t meditate on ridding her house of doves, let alone how the political situation was shaping up around her.

Although I interjected my own thoughts and feelings into the novel, e.g. wondering why she didn’t know what a jerk Quimet was, so strong was the narrative voice that Rodoreda changed the way I read the book. Natalia is living without much premeditation, evidenced by sentences like: “[u]p to the moment he got undressed, you could say I’d never really taken a good look at him.” I am used to reading for clues to a character’s ultimate fate, to having some idea where the character is going. This sentence was like a smack in the face. It forced me to experience Natalia’s life as she was experiencing it because she was so unpredictable. I could worry for her, but I couldn’t anticipate her. We are so controlled by Natalia’s worldview that when “a militiaman knocked on the door and told me Quimet and Cintet had died” and she goes up to the roof “to breathe,” we don’t know if she is relieved or in shock or devastated.

I find myself slipping into the “and, and, and” mode sometimes when I am writing, but I usually go back and edit it out. This novel conveyed that sense of rawness, where the character is experiencing everything simultaneously, that I would like to experiment with, but I sometimes found it exhausting to read. I felt like I was being whipped around like Natalia was allowing herself to be and the only control I had was to put the book down. I think it is something I could use as an effect, but I wonder if I would be able to give up the control of having my characters act on their own behalves. Rodoreda’s treatment of Natalia and the war was spot on. To worry and anticipate political strife would have implied some sort of forethought and would have been completely out of character. I was truly placed inside Natalia’s world and at the mercy of her interpretation of it.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Time of the Doves from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Henry Miller: Origins and Originality in Tropic of Cancer

May 26, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, I felt like I was returning to the source. There were so many things I recognized in it from other books and other writers that I wondered if Miller was their originator or if he too got them from someone else. From the “crazy little gesture” of the Polish-Irish-English con artist that smacks of Milan Kundera’s obsession with Agnes in Immortality to the phrase “apropos of nothing at all,” Miller left me wanting to consult some grand, comprehensive encyclopedia of intertextuality to see where these ideas were coming from and who else he had influenced and who had influenced him or how much of it had come out of the atmosphere of collective inspiration.

Miller’s stripped-down language and raw reportage made me feel like I was inside the story and experiencing it with him. After leaving Serge’s flophouse, the narrator describes being at a concert: “It’s as though I had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards.” The narrator goes on like that for almost a page with everyday words twisted into this extraordinary description. As a reader I felt like I was an alien encountering my first concert and I loved it. It was strange but wholly evocative. Miller wasn’t writing about what happened at the concert but rather what it felt like to be at the concert. I wish I could do that.

Earlier in the novel Miller describes a dinner party at Tania’s and the effect is the same although his method is different. The paragraph contains no quotation marks but Miller is clearly capturing snippets of conversation: “Halitosis. Gaudy socks. And croutons in the pea soup, if you please. We always have pea soup Friday nights. Won’t you try a little red wine?” The paragraph goes on and on and continues with, “My next play will involve a pluralistic conception of the universe. Revolving drums with calcium lights.” Miller ties together all these short crisp sentences that are at once related to the scene but unrelated to one another so as a reader I felt like I was trapped inside a cocktail party where all the conversation was distilled and thrown at simultaneously. It is manic and dizzying and I loved it.

Miller also has a way of sketching a character with only a few short images. In reference to Olga he writes, “She weighs almost as much as a camel-backed locomotive; she drips with perspiration, has halitosis, and still wears her Circassian wig that looks like excelsior.” It’s incredible. He could have just said she was fat and had bad breath and an afro, but the way he wrote it engages the reader. The oddness of the Circassian reference threw me off balance a little and made me want to draw more of a mental image of this woman. I felt like I would recognize her anywhere.

Miller’s wild descriptions also mirror the wild bohemian lifestyle he was writing about. Even if he hadn’t written about drinking, I felt intoxicated reading these passages. There is a freedom and wildness in these descriptions that I envy. Miller manages to convey both the sense of what is going on and also the feeling of it all happening.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Tropic of Cancer from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Three Things at Once: Charles Baxter’s Character Descriptions

May 17, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In the stories in A Relative Stranger, Charles Baxter allows his characters to be seen through the eyes of other characters and what the observing character notices often tells as much about them as about the observed. All of this is brought together with brightly active language with connotations far beyond the few words spelled out on the page.

Prowlers

In “Prowlers,” Robinson, observes of his daughter: “[b]ehind her brown-rimmed glasses, her eyes are fierce. She looks like a twelve-year-old district attorney with a good case and witnesses.” He feels as though his daughter has put him on the defensive. She is young, “twelve,” but she is also insistent and he knows she has a point. She goes on to push him with questions about his wife who is downstairs flirting with his best friend. She is “fierce” in confronting the truth that he would rather avoid as he sits in his room writing about faith rather than insisting on faithfulness.

Westland

In “Westland,” Warren observes Earl’s new woman, Jody. He says: “she was pretty in the details, and when she looked at Earl, the lenses enlarged those eyes, so that their love was large and naked and obvious.” He doesn’t describe her eyes as doe-like, but the image is there all the same. Warren sees Jody as innocent, more innocent than Jaynee. Jody is not a classic beauty, but Warren finds her “obvious” devotion to Earl attractive but also simple. Warren with his background in therapy is observing a messy family dynamic between Earl, Jody, and Jaynee and he is simultaneously pulled in by the bareness of their relationships to one another and also repelled by the obvious dysfunction.

The Old Fascist in Retirement

When the old fascist in “The Old Fascist in Retirement” observes “that rare green scent of oak leaves that American women sometimes carried with them: the odor of innocence, the odor of what-if-everybody,” he is reacting as much to the woman’s culture as to her. The word “green” connotes freshness and his repetition of the word “odor” implies stench more than other words he could have used like “aroma” or “smell.” And his reference to “what if everybody” is a direct rebuke of the openness of American culture in contrast to his own. He later goes on to talk about the sense of history of the long-living oak tree.

The implication of meaning is also something I enjoyed in Grace Paley’s writing. I like the unexpectedness of some of Baxter’s phraseology. The viewing of one character through the eyes of another is something I enjoyed in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing. This colorful observation of one character by another gives the reader a rich view of both characters. I can learn from the economy of describing two characters at one time. One is described explicitly and the other implicitly through the author’s careful portrayal of what is important to that character. It allows a deeper understanding of the character. The grace with which Baxter introduces an abstract idea and then elucidates it just enough to get the reader’s mind moving around the possibilities implied by the words he has chosen is enviable.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of A Relative Stranger from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Madame Bovary: Flaubert’s Symphony

May 6, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

There are many beautiful phrases in Madame Bovary as Gustave Flaubert uses the world around the characters to evoke something greater about their condition, but his similes are some of the most melodious description.

He uses simple similes, often about natural phenomena, such as: “Then, like two scissors, they would cut him with their comments and their observations,” “she responded as do tightly reined horses; she stopped short and the bit slipped from her teeth,” “The patch splintered into an infinity of stars and their silvery light seemed to slither all the way down like a headless snake covered with luminous scales,” “On Emma’s satin dress, as white as a ray of moonlight, the watered texture shimmered.” These images turn the tune of the story into a harmony. Even more powerfully he uses similes that are later echoed by other similes or by occurrences or objects. These echoes give importance to seemingly simple parts of the story and bring all instruments of the story together in a symphony.

Flaubert uses rare plants as symbols of Emma and of love. Of Emma, he writes: “She felt that certain places on the earth must produce happiness, just as a plant that languishes everywhere else thrives only in special soil.” Emma sees herself as such a plant and when next she thinks of plants: “Didn’t love, like the Indian plants, need cultivated land, a special temperature?” I understood she is thinking about her own need for special cultivation. Emma blooms at the moment when she is first ready to cast her husband aside: “her continually youthful illusions had nurtured her gradually, as fertilizer, rain, wind, and sunshine nurture a flower, and she finally blossomed forth in all the fullness of her being.” The cactus Léon brings is a rare plant like Emma that dies before they can consummate their love.

Flaubert relates music to strong emotions: “[Emma] felt herself vibrating with all her being, as if violin bows were being drawn over her nerves” and “Her heart filled with the melodious lamentations that were drawn out to the accompaniment of the double basses, like the cries of the drowning amid the tumult of a storm.” In the beginning, Emma is a pianist and at the end she pretends to take up piano again in order to have time to see Léon. Chillingly, the argument that is brought forth to convince Charles Emma should go to piano lessons, is so that she can teach her daughter about music.

Sometimes the similes speak more directly to later actions of the characters: “There were no illusions left now. She had gradually spent them in all the adventures of her soul, in all her successive conditions, in her virginity, in her marriage, and in love; losing them continually as she grew older, like a traveler who leaves part of his money in every inn along the highway.” Of course Emma does eventually in fact also spend her money in the adventures of her soul, first on Rodolphe and then on Léon. The moral connotations of the passage are astounding. Each of the three “successive conditions” is sexual in nature. By referencing the “traveler” who visits “every inn along the highway,” Flaubert is alluding to a likeness between a prostitute and Emma who “visits” by at the very least flirting with every willing man she comes upon. The illusions Emma has “spent” refer to the idea that she can gain a sense of worth through her interactions with men. She starts out as a pretty young thing, men are attracted to her, and it makes her feel special that they take notice. She grasps at the very brief attentions paid her by the marquis and begins to believe she could aspire to his social milieu. While Rodolphe is having a bit of fun, Emma is having a love affair. She again thinks she has found the love of her life when she meets Léon, although for him she becomes a complication. It is Lheureux who ultimately shows Emma exactly what her beauty is worth. She can prostitute herself to pay off her debt, but he will offer her no sweet words beforehand. She finally sees herself as a commodity and starts to realize that her “love affairs” are in fact the object of ridicule. She has spent her reputation along with her fortune and she is ruined financially as well as idealistically. Her last illusion spent, Emma takes her own life.

Also regarding actions of the characters, Flaubert makes a great deal about people watching situations from the outside: “[Mother Bovary] observed her son’s unhappiness with a sad silence like a ruined person who watches, through the windowpanes, people sitting around the table of his former home.” When the Bovarys are at the ball at Vaubyessard, Emma sees “some peasants, their faces pressed to the window, staring at her from the garden.” The simile introduces an idea that is carried throughout the book as Emma strives for a life that is other than hers, a pursuit that leads to her ultimate ruin.

From houses: “He felt sad, like an abandoned house,” “her life was as cold as an attic with northern exposure,” to eyes: “Her eyes, filled with tears, sparkled like flames under water,” “her eyes were beginning to disappear under a viscous pallor, as if spiders had spun a web over them,” to horse hoofs: “In the dim light of the studio the white dust flew off from his tool like a shower of sparks beneath the hooves of a galloping horse,” “[he] remounted his nag, whose feet struck fire as it flew off,” Flaubert revisits images throughout Madame Bovary. Each time he addresses the subject, he adds a layer of nuance to the image, a melody to the harmony, and reminds me of where the characters have been and how that speaks to where they are.

Obviously, Flaubert’s language is beautiful and I’d love to emulate it in my own writing. Not every simile recurs, but they all enhance my understanding of the novel. Several similes surprised me with the obscurity of the comparison, but those were the strongest because the items compared were in fact alike. In my own work, I tend toward metaphor rather than simile, but the lesson I can take from Flaubert is how carefully placed these images are and how strong they can be if they recur “naturally” throughout the novel.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Madame Bovary from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Embodiment and Disembodiment in The Lover

May 6, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Marguerite Duras throws the reader into the memory of her narrator in The Lover. By switching narration between the first person and third person limited, Duras embodies the experiences of a fifteen and a half year-old girl who takes on a Chinese lover in Saigon. She also conveys the sense of the girl as object which allows the reader to both sympathize with the character and subject her to judgment. This mimics the way the narrator is simultaneously reminiscing about a specific period in her adolescence and also judging herself.

Because the narrative voice doesn’t change when the narrative point of view does, the reader has the sense that the same first person narrator is relating the story from two angles. In one section the narrator describes her shoes: “These high heels are the first in my life, they’re beautiful, they’ve eclipsed all the shoes that went before.” This is followed by a section break and then the very next sentence is: “It’s not the shoes, though, that make the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed.” Three sentences later in the same section the narrator is back to first person in describing the provenance of the hat she was wearing: “How I came by it I’ve forgotten.” In each of these sections, the narrator is talking about the same girl and her possessions but the reader is encountering her as both separate and part of the narrator.

Switching back and forth between narrative points of view could be maddening for a reader, but the switch is seamless and gives the reader a much fuller picture of the narrator’s recollections than one viewpoint or the other could have done. The ease of transition is accomplished by zooming in to look at one object (here the shoes and the hat) and then zooming back out to show the same object from a different vantage point.

The key to the reasons behind the shift in perspective is in the following passage: “He answers my mother, tells her she’s right to beat the girl…The mother hits her as hard as she can.” I was struck by the poignant disassociation in the shift here as the narrator transitions from “my mother” to “the girl.” Moments before, the narrator used the first person to describe the beginning of the incident: “My mother has attacks during which she falls on me…punches me.” “Has attacks” is habitual, not of the moment, and not in scene. But as the description progresses, the specificity of the action as the other brother flees and the mother calms down and the girl lies about her relationship with the Chinese man, makes the description seem like one particular instance. The narrator is separating herself from the girl who is the center of this action. She sets herself apart from the chaos and pain of these relationships as though it happened to someone else. This disembodiment is characteristic of someone who has undergone trauma and is particularly poignant because the character is at an age where one internalizes this type of experience and blames oneself for it.

Shifting back and forth between these narrative points of view is tricky, but Duras managed it well. As a reader, I was able to engage with the character on a deeper level and could feel the shift into third person almost as the narrator’s wince. I don’t think this could be prudently imitated except in the rarest of circumstances because it creates a very specific effect. However, it is important to keep in mind that our characters, being the astute little observers that they tend to be, are likely aware of how they are perceived. There are other ways to view even a first person narrator from the outside, e.g. conveying anxiety at how they are being perceived. In my novel, Polska, 1994, being seen and the perceptions of others is an important part of Magda’s world and I work to show this through how she thinks others are seeing her. Duras reminded me that it is important to consider how my character views herself.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Lover from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.