This was my end-of-year gift from the Book Club. It is probably an excellent book about misogyny in Japanese culture, with sharp satiric assaults on attitudes to food, with extra piquancy derived from its claim to be based on a true-crime story. It was evidently a huge success in Japanese and this English translation by Polly Barton has been reviewed enthusiastically.
The protagonist, Kira, is an ambitious young woman journalist working on a sensationalist magazine. In searching for a career-defining scoop she becomes enthralled by Manako Kajii, a woman who defies the social norms of slender femininity and is currently in prison for having killed a number of elderly men, after winning their hearts by cooking luxurious food for them. Manako introduces Kira, who until now has survived on a spartan, negligent diet, to the joy of butter – cooking with it and eating the results.
My guess is that the key to enjoying the book is to read it fast, and I’m a slow reader. The themes are real and interesting: feminism versus feminine wiles; social norms versus desire; career ambition versus enjoyment of life. But I struggled with it, and gave up soon after my obligatory 77 pages.
It may well be that Polly Barton has reproduced the feel of the original Japanese, but the best way I can describe my response to the book’s language is to say that it reads like the kind of English you find in school students’ translations. The information is all there, but in the process of capturing it, the student forgets to pay attention to the natural rhythms and sequencing of English prose. That’s fine if you’re a teacher correcting someone’s homework, but if you’re reading a novel, it keeps yanking you out of the story.
I don’t want to spoil anyone’s enjoyment, but I’ll try to articulate why I find the book such a slog. Page 77* isn’t particularly egregious, but it offers a number of examples. Rika is on an outing with her mother, partly to cheer her up, and partly with the undeclared intention of having a look at Kajii’s apartment. Rika’s mother becomes high-spirited as they inspect the building that has been ‘making a splash in the news’.
I’ll just talk about the beginning and ending of the page, but you can enlarge the image to read it in full:
The first sentence:
Even when a resident came out and gave them a withering stare, Rika’s prevailing feeling was still one of relief that her mother’s mood had shifted.
There’s nothing glaringly wrong with that, but a close look reveals a number of tiny problems contributing to the cumulative awkwardness.
To my ear, the phrase ‘even when’ suggests an extreme event of some kind, and it takes a microsecond to realise that this is something quite undramatic: a resident comes out of the building and gives the pair a withering look. For another microsecond, I wonder why the resident would pay them any attention at all. They’re just two women in a public street. And it’s not just a look, but a stare! How does Rika know that this more or less abstract person is a resident? Moving on, the awkward phrase ‘prevailing feeling’ suggests, if anything, that Rika is experiencing complex emotions, but that suggestion goes nowhere. ‘One of relief’ is clutter – why not just ‘relief’?
One last thing: the word ‘still’, which if you read this sentence without context is completely innocuous. But it’s another example of a micro-interruption to the narrative flow. This is the first time we’ve been told that Rika is feeling relieved. The reader (or at least this one) has to do a quick calculation: oh yes, Rika’s mother’s mood has lifted so of course it was implied that Rika felt relief, so now we’re being told that that relief has survived. This is a recurrent quirk: we’re told that something has happened, rather than seeing it happen.
I can enjoy a text that demands work of me, but these extra little bits of readerly labour bring no joy.
I won’t take you laboriously through the whole page, though I can’t resist mentioning the phrase, ‘In the temple heaving with people’. The meaning is clear, but it doesn’t quite feel like English.
At the end of the page, Rika and her mother are having a coffee (in a Doutor, which Rika’s mother prefers to Starbucks because Starbucks doesn’t allow smoking – in the kind of culture-specific moment that I confess to enjoying).
No sooner had she lifted her mug of coffee to her lips than she began her confession. ‘You know, I feel like I can really understand why Manako Kajii was so popular with men. The truth is … You promise you won’t mention this to anyone?’ She giggled like a schoolgirl and leaned across the table to whisper in Rika’s ear. What Rika heard nearly made her choke on her mouthful of milk tea. ‘What! You worked as a decoy at a matchmaking party? I need to hear more about this.’
Again, these are tiny things, but they accumulate. ‘No sooner than’ is just slightly wrong: can you begin to talk at the moment you lift a mug of coffee to your lips? Specifying a mouthful of tea is unnecessary and creates another of those micro-pauses: I suppose it’s technically possible to choke on a mouthful of liquid, but the term ‘mouthful’ suggests that it’s still in the mouth and more likely to cause spluttering. Having the reader learn what the mother says only when Rika repeats it is an unnecessary and (to me) annoying complication.
Your mileage may vary, and I hope it does. If you want a completely different take on the book, I recommend Theresa Smith Writes.
I wrote this blog post on land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation. I happily acknowledge their Elders past and present for caring for this land for many thousands of years.
* My blogging practice is to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently 77.
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech) – part way through Book 3, essay 10, ‘On restraining your will’ to end Book 3, essay 13, ‘On experience’
M A Creech, whose translation and edition of Montaigne’s essays I’ve been reading, a few pages a day, since March last year, says that it’s a mistake to read the Essais simply as a collection of separate pieces of varying lengths. There is a shape, he argues in his introduction, and in the final essay, ‘On experience’, Montaigne arrives at the place to which all the preceding essays have been heading.
Given the immersive task he has undertaken – not just finding English equivalents for Montaigne’s French, but also translating and identifying the sprinkling of quotes from Latin (and the few from Greek and more recent languages) – I’m not going to say he’s wrong, but I can’t see that he’s right.
But the final essay does read as a culmination, and a farewell. Its central argument is about the relationship between reason and experience, more specifically the limits of reason and the importance of giving full value to experience. There’s a long section in which he describes the mental process by which he comes to think of his extremely painful kidney stones as a good thing: the pain is intermittent so he has time to digest the experience; when the pain goes, its absence is delightful; unlike other diseases, this one doesn’t interfere with his normal life – he can spend up to ten hours in the saddle at the height of an attack; it’s an illness ‘which does not leave us guessing’ – that is, we know what it is, there’s no need to hunt for diagnoses; etc. At the end of the section, just as one is admiring his brilliant feat of mind over matter, he acknowledges that at least in part he has been whistling in the wind (page 1243):
With such arguments, both strong and feeble, I try … to benumb and delude my power of thought and to put ointment on its wounds. And tomorrow, if they grow worse, we will provide other escape-routes for them.
And then, in a twist that makes his writing as fresh now as it must have been nearly 500 years ago:
Since I wrote that, the slightest movements which I make have begun to squeeze pure blood from my kidneys again. Yet because of that I do not stop moving about exactly as I did before and spurring after my hounds with a youthful and immoderate zeal. And I find that I have got much the better of so important a development, which costs me no more than a dull ache and heaviness in the region of those organs. Some great stone is compressing the substance of my kidneys and eating into it: what I am voiding drop by drop – and not without some natural pleasure – is my life blood, which has become from now on some noxious and superfluous discharge. Can I feel something disintegrating? Do not expect me to waste time having my pulse and urine checked so that anxious prognostics can be drawn from them: I will be in plenty of time to feel the anguish without prolonging things by anguished fear.
This last essay goes for more than 60 pages. It’s intensely personal: Montaigne describes his not entirely admirable table manners. He goes into some detail about his habits around eating, sleeping, excreting, walking, dressing, a little about sex (which at the ripe old age of fifty-something is largely in his past). He argues that what is customary for any individual or community should be maintained – it would be as wrong for a Frenchman to drink his wine undiluted as for a German to dilute his! And when he hits full stride he argues brilliantly that pleasure is a good thing, that life itself is a good thing. This is from page 1258:
When I dance, I dance. When I sleep, I sleep; and when I am strolling alone through a beautiful orchard, although part of the time my thoughts are occupied by other things, for part of the time too I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the delight in being alone there, and to me. Mother-like, Nature has provided that such actions as she has imposed on us as necessities should also be pleasurable, urging us towards them not only by reason but by desire. To corrupt her laws is wrong.
And a little later:
What great fools we are! ‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say. ‘I haven’t done a thing today.’ – ‘Why! Have you not lived? That is not only the most basic of your employments, it is the most glorious.’ – ‘I would have shown them what I can do, if they had set me to manage some great affair.’ – If you have been able to examine and manage your own life you have achieved the greatest task of all. Nature, to display and show her powers, needs no great destiny … Our most great and glorious achievement is to live our life fittingly. Everything else – reigning, building, lying up treasure – are at most tiny props and small accessories.
How can I not love this man? All of this, of course, is interwoven with quotations from the ancients, with whom he sometimes argues robustly, even his beloved Socrates. Wonderfully, he ends with four lines from Horace:
Frui paratis et valido mihi, Latoe, dones, et, precor, integra Cum mentis, nec turpem senectam Degene, nec Cythara carentem.
Which, drawing on M. A. Screech’s translation and explanatory footnote, I can paraphrase as: ‘Grant me, O Apollo god of healing, that I may enjoy the things I have prepared and, with my mind intact, I pray that I may not degenerate into a squalid old age, in which the lyre is wanting.’
It’s not age or death he feared, but the prospect of an old age when he was incapable of singing.
This blog post was written on Gadigal-Wangal land, on a fully hot, humid day when even the birds are silent. I acknowledge the Elders past, present and emerging of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation.
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech) – part way through Book 3, essay 5, ‘On Some lines from Virgil’ to part way through Book 3, essay 10, ‘On restraining your will’
This post was due more than a week ago, but life in general made other plans for me. With a couple of lapses, though, I have consistently read four or five pages of Montaigne’s Essays each morning.
I won’t even try to summarise what I’ve read in the last six weeks. I’ll just mention that ‘On some lines from Virgil’ continued to be fascinating on the subject of sex and gender; in a piece with the innocuous title ‘On coaches’ Montaigne denounces the atrocities of the Spanish colonisation of Central and South America; in ‘On the disadvantages of high rank’ he pities those whose social position means no one will disagree with them, because they are deprived of the joys of conversation.
And then there’s ‘On vanity’, a long essay that made me fear age-related cognitive decline was catching up with me. As with many of the essays, ‘On some lines from Virgil’ being a prime example, this one’s title gives you no idea of its true subject. But in this case, I couldn’t tell if it even had a main subject. He writes about travel, about death (a lot about death), about how much he loves Rome. He explains why he’s glad he has no sons. He quotes at length from the document granting him Roman citizenship. He’s like a dog snapping – in slow motion – at whatever fly of an idea crosses his mental line of vision. But in the middle of it all, he has one of the passages that remind you that he is inventing the form of the personal essay – and k ows exactly what he’s doing:
There are works of Plutarch in which he forgets his theme, or in which the subject is treated only incidentally, since they are entirely padded out with extraneous matter … My God! what beauty there is in such flights of fancy and in such variation, especially when they appear fortuitous and casual. It is the undiligent reader who loses my subject, not I. In a corner somewhere you can always find a word or two on my topic, adequate despite being squeezed in tight. I change subject violently and chaotically. My pen and my mind both go a-roaming. If you do not want more dullness you must accept a touch of madness.
‘It is the undiligent reader who loses my subject, not I.’ I’ve been put in my place.
He defends his lack of coherence by applying to himself Plato’s description of a poet as someone who:
pours out in rapture, like the gargoyle of a fountain, all that comes to his lips, without weighing it or chewing it; from him there escape things of diverse hue, contrasting substance and jolting motion.
I don’t know that anyone seriously thinks that’s what poets do, but the idea that a reader needs to be ‘diligent’ to do justice to some writing has still got a lot of life in it, probably even more than it did in Montaigne’s day. He goes on to say he doesn’t stitch things together ‘for the benefit of weak and inattentive ears’:
Where is the author who would rather not be read at all than to be dozed through or dashed through? … If taking up books were to mean taking them in; if glancing at them were to mean seeing into them; and skipping through them to mean grasping them: then I would be wrong to make myself out to be quite so totally ignorant as I am. Since I cannot hold my reader’s attention by my weight, manco male [it is no bad thing] if I manage to do so by my muddle.
So, just as he’s getting tetchy with us for being lazy, he acknowledges that he’s a pretty lazy reader himself. And having claimed that his apparent incoherence is actually poetic brilliance, he now calls it a muddle.
Oh, and in the middle of all that charming back-and-forth between grumpiness and self-deprecation, there’s this lovely, enigmatic line:
Poetry is the original language of the gods.
I’m not sorry I gave up French Honours in 1968 because I found Montaigne almost as unreadable as Rabelais. I’m enjoying reading him now, in translation, much more than I possibly could have in the original when I was 22.
This blog post was written on Gadigal-Wangal land, where the days are getting hotter and more humid. I acknowledge the Elders past, present and emerging of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation.
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech) – part way through Book 2, essay 40, ‘On the resemblance of children to their fathers’ to part way through Book 3, essay 5, ‘On Some lines from Virgil’
Montaigne’s essays become even more interesting as he ages. By Book 3, he writes about his chronic pain from ‘the stone’ and, especially in the innocuously titled ‘On some lines from Virgil’, he does some spectacular writing about sexual politics.
I expect that whole books have been written about Montaigne and sex. I won’t try to untangle any of it here. I’ll just quote the paragraph from today’s reading that has given my poem its opening line. (For those who came in late, this November I’m writing at least 14 fourteen line poems, the first line of each coming from something I’ve heard or read that day.) The paragraph will give you just a glimpse of the complexity of Montaigne’s thought:
We do not weigh the vices fairly in our estimation. Both men and women are capable of hundreds of kinds of corrupt activities more damaging than lasciviousness and more disnatured. But we make things into vices and weigh them not according to their nature but our self-interest: that is why they take on so many unfair forms. The ferocity of men’s decrees about lasciviousness makes the devotion of women to it more vicious and ferocious than its characteristics warrant, and engages it in consequences which are worse than their cause.
I think he’s saying that making sexual behaviour a major criterion for a woman’s reputation is wrong; men make the rules that condemn women’s ‘immorality’; and the punishments are much worse than the so-called crimes. Further on in the essay he says that social expectations on women to be chaste are an intolerable burden.
I don’t know if he is putting a proto-feminist case, or arguing deviously that women should be more sexually available to men. Or both. Either way, it’s fascinating to have a voice from a very different epoch wrestling with questions that aren’t exactly resolved today.
But before I leave Montaigne for my own versification, I can’t resist quoting the final paragraph from Book 2, which follows some strong opinions about the medical profession, and rings out like a beacon of rationality for our times:
I do not loathe ideas which go against my own. I am so far from shying away when others’ judgements clash with mine … that, on the contrary, just as the most general style followed by Nature is variety – even more in minds than in bodies, since minds are of a more malleable substance capable of accepting more forms – I find it much rarer to see our humours and purposes coincide. In the whole world there has never been two identical opinions, any more than two identical hairs or seeds. Their most universal characteristic is diversity.
Yay Montaigne!
But on with my verse, which takes the phrase somewhere else altogether – and you can probably see the point when news from the USA knocked the poem off its tracks:
November verse 4: We do not weigh the vices fairly We do not weigh the vices fairly, thumb the scales to suit our whim: I exaggerate, quite rarely – you tell fibs – but look at him! His lies destroy the trust that binds us, lead us where no truth can find us. Crowds have wisdom, mobs can rule, electorates can play the fool. He's murderous and self-regarding, incoherent, vile, inane. He once could boast a showman's brain, but principles are for discarding. Lord of Misrule, theatre's Vice: How could you choose him once, then twice?
This blog post was written on Gadigal-Wangal land, where the tiny lizards are enjoying the beginning of hot weather, and jacarandas are the land’s most spectacular guests. I acknowledge the Elders past, present and emerging of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation.
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech) – part way through Book 2, essay 17, ‘On presumption’ to part way through ‘On the resemblance of children to their fathers’
These aren’t so much progress reports as monthly snapshots from my reading of Montaigne’s Essays four or five pages a day. Last month I was part way though ‘On presumption’ and enjoying his unflattering self-portrait. That essay became even more fabulously self-deprecatory, including this (on page 730):
As for music, either vocal (for which my voice is quite unsuited) or instrumental, nobody could ever teach me anything. At dancing, tennis and wrestling I have never been able to acquire more than a slight, vulgar skill; and at swimming, fencing, vaulting and jumping, no skill at all. My hand is so clumsy that I cannot even read my own writing, so that I prefer to write things over again rather than to give myself the trouble of disentangling my scribbles. And my reading aloud is hardly better: I can feel myself boring my audience. That apart, I am quite a good scholar! I can never fold up a letter neatly, never sharpen a pen, never carve passably at table, nor put harness on horse, nor bear a hawk properly nor release it, nor address hounds, birds or horses.
Last month I snuck a look into the future and predicted that this month I would be writing about ‘Three good wives’. Fortunately I don’t have to spend time on that essay, as its version of a good wife is one who will kill herself when her husband dies. Did I mention that some of Montaigne’s views and attitudes can be pretty repulsive? The essay after that, ‘On the most excellent of men’, is hardly less repulsive: his three excellent men are Homer, Alexander the Great and Epaminondas, and in all three cases, including Homer, he seems to regard military skills as the main criterion for excellence. He also seems to take Alexander the Great’s PR at face value. (I shudder to think that essayists a thousand years from now will speak of Donald Trump as the greatest president ever.)
Today, however, I have started on the final essay of Book II, ‘On the resemblance of children to their fathers’, which is surely one of those that have endeared Montaigne to readers for nearly 500 years
Typically, the proclaimed subject of the essay is nowhere in sight in the first couple of pages. Instead, he reflects on the nature of his work and on changes that have happened in his life over the eight years he has been writing essays.
I think it’s true that Montaigne invented the essay form, and these paragraphs give a charming insight into how he went about it.
All the various pieces of this faggot are being bundled together on the understanding that I am only to set my hand to it in my own home and when I am oppressed by too lax an idleness. So it was assembled at intervals and at different periods, since I sometimes have occasion to be away from home for months on end. Moreover I never correct my first thoughts by second ones – well, except perhaps for the odd word, but to vary it, not to remove it. I want to show my humours as they develop, revealing each element as it is born. I could wish that I had begun earlier, especially tracing the progress of changes in me.
It’s probably that spontaneity and the possible vulnerability that goes with it, that makes the essays so alive even all these years later. Maybe I should be less judgemental about essays like the one on good wives – he may have thought differently on the subject on another day.
But that’s enough about the work. He needs to tell us about his health:
Since I began I have aged by some seven or eight years – not without some fresh gain, for those years have generously introduced me to colic paroxysms. Long commerce and acquaintance with the years rarely proceed without some such benefit I could wish that, of all those gifts which the years store up for those who haunt them, they could have chosen a present more acceptable to me, for they could not have given me anything that since childhood I have held in greater horror.
I’m roughly 30 years older than Montaigne was when he wrote that. Though I’m in reasonably good health, I recognise his impulse to tell the world about his bodily ills. As I turn the page, he moves on to one of his recurring topics: when it makes sense to kill oneself (see essay on good wives etcetera). Happily, he is leaning towards staying alive:
After about eighteen months in this distasteful state, I have already learnt how to get used to it. I have made a compact with the colical style of life; I can find sources of hope and consolation in it.
That’s a good thing for his readers, as there was a whole third book to come.
This blog post was written on Gadigal-Wangal land, where understandings of the universe beyond Montaigne’s imaginings were developed millennia before the Ancients he so loves. I acknowledge the Elders past, present and emerging of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation.
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech) – end of Book 2 Essay 12, “An apology for Raymond Sebond’ to part way through Book 2, essay 17, ‘On presumption’
The month has flown by, and it’s time for another progress report on my project of reading Montaigne’s essays, four pages every morning. Two friends have sent me examples of Montaigne cropping up in their own reading: the first has just started reading Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, and was reminded of my project when the confined Count finally gets to read Montaigne; the second forwarded me Nicholas Gruen’s weekly newsletter for the 18th of August, which includes Montaigne’s essay ‘On a Monstrous Child’. I’m not alone in reading him.
It’s taken much more than a month, but I’ve now finished ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’. Whether from shrinking attention span, lack of interest, or the nature of the essay itself, I happily confess that I had trouble following its argument. It went on and on, endlessly quoting ancient philosophers, repeating itself, and proclaiming radical scepticism. I thought it was about to discover the scientific method, but no, it seemed to end up saying you can’t trust reason or the senses, but – implied rather than stated outright – you can always trust the revealed Word of God. I’m glad that one is behind me.
Today I’m part way through ‘On Presumption’. Having discussed in the preceding essay the relative worthlessness of reputation (‘glory’) compared with actual virtue, in this one Montaigne begins by saying that one’s opinion of oneself is similar to glory – prone to wishful thinking and no real indicator of one’s real worth. He’s now in the middle of a generally unflattering – and I think intentionally funny – self-portrait. He loves poetry, but is a terrible poet. He loves fine writing but:
There is nothing fluent or polished about my language; it is rough and disdainful, with rhetorical arrangements which are free and undisciplined. And I like it that way, by inclination if not by judgement. But I fully realise that I sometimes let myself go too far in that direction, striving to avoid artificiality and affectation only to fall into them at the other extreme. … Even if I were to try to follow that other smooth-flowing well-ordered style I could never get there. (Page 725–726)
False modesty? Maybe not. It does read as a genuine attempt to describe his own writing.
Beauty, he says, is the ‘first sign of distinction among men’, and height is the only quality that determines manly beauty, but his own ‘build is a little below average’. In one of the passages that makes reading him such a pleasure, he lists the qualities that don’t count:
When a man is merely short, neither the breadth and smoothness of a forehead nor the soft white of an eye nor a medium nose nor the smallness of an ear or mouth nor the regularity or whiteness of teeth nor the smooth thickness of a beard, brown as the husk of a chestnut, nor curly hair nor the correct contour of a head nor freshness of hue nor a pleasing face nor a body without smell nor limbs justly proportioned can make him beautiful. (Page 729)
Having just told us that only height matters, he implies the counter argument: he’s at least a bit sorry that men who look good and don’t smell bad aren’t regarded as beautiful. Not that he attributes those qualities to himself. He says his build is ‘tough and thickset’ and describes (in Latin, possibly quoting someone) his bristly legs and tufty chest, etc.
So this isn’t so much a progress report as a snapshot of where I’m up to when the blog post falls due. I just flicked forward 120 pages to see that next time I may be talking about an essay entitled ‘On three good wives’!
This blog post was written on Gadigal-Wangal land, where understandings of the universe beyond Montaigne’s imaginings were developed millennia before the Ancients he discusses. The weather is warming up alarmingly early. I acknowledge the Elders past, present and emerging of the Gadigal and Wangal Nations,.
Annie Ernaux, Une femme (Editions Gallimard 1987) —–, A Woman’s Story (translated by Tanya Leslie 1991, Fitzcarraldo Editions 2024)
Before the meeting: The press release announcing that Annie Ernaux had won the Nobel Prize in Literature spoke of:
the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.
Every word of that is well chosen. Ernaux revisits her own life story in every book, pitting her ‘personal memory’ against what she finds in old photographs and diary entries, constantly questioning and challenging herself. She makes most other autobiographies / memoirs seem at least a little glib and self-serving.
I read Une femme / A Woman’s Story in both French and English. I could do this because it’s a short book – 60 pages in English, 95 in French. Apart from an opportunity to flex my rusty French, I was motivated by the way the English title departs from the original. Une femme is literally ‘A woman’. Calling it A Woman’s Story is a tiny change, but it significantly shifts the meaning. I wondered if similar shifts happened in the body of the book. (I think they do, and I apologise in advance for the way this blog post gets bogged down in the details of translation – fascinating to me, but maybe not to you!)
A Woman’s Story / Une femme does tell the story of a woman: Ernaux’s mother. But actually there are three stories. There’s Ernaux’s reconstruction of her mother’s life: her youth, her time as a shopkeeper in an impoverished part of France, her marriage, her ageing, and at last her dementia and death. There’s the story of Ernaux’s relationship with her, including the times that she lived with her and her family, and at the very end a brilliantly concise statement of what, after the initial intense grief, her mother’s death meant for her. And there’s the story of writing the book, begun in April 1986, very soon after her mother’s death, and finished in February the following year. This is a book in which une femme writes about une femme, and either could lay claim to the book’s French title.
I love this book. It reaches tendrils into parts of my own life that could do with a bit of ‘courage and clinical acuity’. I find Ernaux’s sheer dogged determination to find truthful words completely engrossing. In one of several moments when she steps in to tell us about the process of writing, she says:
When I speak of her, my first impulse is to ‘freeze’ her in a series of images unrelated to time – ‘she had a violent temper’, ‘she was intense in everything she did’ – and to recall random scenes in which she was present. This brings back only the fantasy woman, the one who has recently appeared in my dreams, alive once more, drifting ageless through a tense world reminiscent of psychological thrillers. I would also like to capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris. The more objective aspect of my writing will probably involve a cross between family history and sociology, reality and fiction [la jointure du familial et du social, du mythe et de l’histoire] … I would like to remain a cut below literature.
(Page 17)
That is to say, don’t look for fine writing here. Look for a serious attempt to see the reality of this woman’s life and how it was interwoven with Ernaux’s own.
My practice of looking at page 77 is a good way of giving you a flavour of the book, and of some of the issues that must have faced Tanya Leslie, the translator.
On page 77 of the French edition, page 51 of the English, it’s the early 1970s. Ernaux’s mother, now a widow, has sold her business and abandoned her life as a shopkeeper. She has moved to Annecy at the other end of France to live with Ernaux and her young family. She isn’t thrilled with her new life: she is no longer a significant part of a community. Her life has shrunk. ‘Now she felt she was a nobody’ / ‘Elle ne se sentait plus rien.’ She was proud of the life Annie had made for herself, but felt uneasy with the middle-class life that now surrounded her.
I ought to say that after my partner’s father died, her widowed mother became a much bigger presence in our lives, after a time spending a couple of nights a week living with us and then moving in full time. We didn’t have the class difference that Ernaux describes, but this page resonates powerfully, and I am in awe of the way the writing reaches for a deeply respectful understanding of the mother’s point of view:
Living with us was like living in a world that welcomed her and rejected her at the same time. One day she said angrily, ‘I don’t think I belong here.’
The transition from the generalised to the particular in those two sentences is typical Ernaux. In the French, it’s slightly different:
C’était vivre à l’intérieur d’un monde qui l’accueillait d’un côté et l’excluait d’un autre. Un jour, avec colère: « Je ne fais pas bien dans le tableau. »
There are three departures from a literal, word for word translation. First, there is no ‘us’: it’s all about the mother. Second, the English has tidied up the second sentence and given it a verb – ‘she said’ – which is not there in the French. There’s a lot of that in the book. The French text sometimes reads like quick notes: no need to spell out who was speaking etc. The English tidies it up, with the effect that what in French feels rough and raw becomes in English a more polished, considered text. And third, what the mother says has been softened: the tentativeness of ‘I don’t think’ is an insertion, where the French just has an angry statement of fact: ‘I don’t belong here.’
The rest of the page, in English:
And so she wouldn’t answer the phone when it rang next to her. If her son-in-law was watching football on television, she would make a point of knocking on the door before entering the living room. She was always asking for work – ‘Well, if there’s nothing to do, I might as well leave then’ – adding with a touch of irony, ‘After all, I’ve got to earn my keep!’ The two of us would argue about her attitude and I blamed her for deliberately humiliating herself. It took me a long time to realise that the feeling of unease my mother experienced in my own house was no different from what I had felt as a teenager when I was introduced to people ‘a cut above us’. (As if only the ‘lower classes’ suffered from inequalities which others choose to ignore.) I also realised that the cultural supremacy my husband and I enjoyed – reading Le Monde, listening to Bach – was distorted by my mother into a form of economic supremacy, based on the exploitation of labour: putting herself in the position of an employee was her way of rebelling.
And in French:
Donc elle ne répondait pas au téléphone quand il sonnait près d’elle, frappait d’une manière ostensible avant de pénétrer dans le salon où son gendre regardait un match à la télé, réclamait sans cesse du travail, « si on ne me donne rien à faire, je n’ai plus qu’a m’en aller» et, en riant à moitié, « il faut bien que je paye ma place!». Nous avions des scènes toutes les deux à propos de cette attitude, je lui reprochais de s’humilier exprès. J’ai mis longtemps à comprendre que ma mère ressentait dans ma propre maison le malaise qui avait été le mien, adolescente, dans les « milieux mieux que nous » (comme s’il n’était donné qu’aux « inférieurs » de souffrir de différences que les autres estiment sans importance). Et qu’en feignant de se considérer comme une employée, elle transformait instinctivement la domination cultureIle, réelle, de ses enfants lisant Le Monde ou écoutant Bach, en une domination économique, imaginaire, de patron à ouvrier: une façon de révolter.
You can see what the translator had to wrestle with. She breaks two long sentences into shorter ones. I can’t tell if this is her way of making the text more elegant, or if it’s a difference in the way the languages work. And domination must have given her nightmares: ‘supremacy’ isn’t a dictionary equivalent, but it’s surely eccentric to describe reading Le Monde as an act of domination. Yet maybe that eccentricity is exactly what Ernaux intended – certainly ‘economic supremacy’ makes less sense than ‘economic domination’.
This is one place where I was happy I had read the French as well as the English. I didn’t understand the bit in brackets about the ‘lower classes’ until I read the French, where, rather than the ‘others’ choosing to ignore inequalities, they consider some différences to be unimportant (and yes, différences translates as ‘differences’, no inequality necessarily implied). Le Monde is just a newspaper to Ernaux and her husband, and Bach is pleasant to listen to. For the mother, they are markers of cultural superiority. A smaller oddity of the translation is that whereas the French insists that the ‘cultural supremacy’ / domination culturelle is real (réelle) and that the ‘economic supremacy’ / domination économique is imaginary (imaginaire), the English lets the word ‘distorted’ carry that distinction. On top of that, leaving out the word instinctivement, it seems to me, makes the mother seem much more calculating, and perhaps makes Ernaux less patronising. I don’t think Ernaux wants to blame her mother, or spare herself, in this way.
After I’d written that last sentence I noticed a moment in the previous paragraph that struck a chord with me. One of the things Ernaux’s mother has to do to conform to the household’s lifestyle is, in English:
‘observing personal hygiene’ (blowing the boys’ noses on a clean handkerchief).
That’s unremarkable, just one more detail in the list of things she has to adapt to. The original French is:
avoir de l’« hygiène » (ne pas moucher les enfants avec son propre mouchoir).
A literal translation of the phrase in brackets is, ‘not to blow the children’s noses with her own handkerchief’. They say a translation can never be complete, but still I allow myself to mourn the loss of this tiny, graphic image of grandparent–grandchild intimacy forgone in the name of upward mobility, and lost to the English text for who knows what reason: perhaps handkerchiefs themselves are so repugnant to modern Anglo sensibilities that sharing them is unspeakable.
After the meeting: In the Book Club, we traditionally discuss two books. This book was paired with Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (linkto come added later). I think the reason for the pairing was that they’re both by Nobel laureates. At the start of our discussion, an astute person pointed out that they both feature shops (the mother’s shop in Ernaux’s book, and two different shops where Gurnah’s protagonist worked). That’s about where the similarities began and ended. Our evening – or at least that part of it not taken up with excellent food and even more excellent conversation about life, physical afflictions, travel plans and so on – was split neatly into two parts.
As you’d expect, my having read the book in both languages was met with eye rolls, but there was general recognition that the difference was substantial between blowing a child’s nose on a clean handkerchief and not blowing it on one’s own handkerchief.
We had a very interesting discussion of a passage where Ernaux describes her aim as to set aside her own emotional memories about her mother (how she felt when she was angry etc) and tell the story from her mother’s point of view, but says that she finds those emotions breaking through anyway. I think we agreed that this, far from being a failure, is one of the things that makes the book so rich.
One person out of the five of us didn’t care for the book. Reading it, she couldn’t see any reason why Annie Ernaux would have been given the Nobel. Those of us who had read a number of her books tried to articulate our reasons for holding her in high esteem, but maybe it’s a matter of taste. What I/we saw as minimalism, for example, she saw as sketchiness.
One person spoke of the way the book had inspired her to try to write about her own childhood, focusing on specifics rather than a broad narrative. The exercise had led to interesting insights into her early life. We had a brief but interesting conversation about how for ‘our generation’ in Australia (we range from a couple of weeks short of 70 to a couple of years beyond 80), as for Annie Ernaux, there was a shift in class – ‘upward mobility’ – that hadn’t been so widespread in previous generations. This shift was due in part to increased access to education – so we did the Australian equivalent of listening to Bach and reading Le Monde.
It might seem that that conversation was of the same order as travel plans and medical reports, but I think it’s a quality of Ernaux’s books – not just this one – that they prompt readers to reflect on their own lives.
art of ignorance is the last of the small but substantial books I took with me on my recent fortnight in North Queensland. Like the others, it’s part of the Flying Island Pocket Poets series.
It’s a bilingual book – that is, each poem appears first in English then in Chinese. As there is no mention of a translator, I assume Sou Vai Keng wrote both versions. She also created the generous number of elegant drawings that intensify the book’s relaxed, contemplative feel.
A note tells us that all the poems were written in mountain areas in Germany and Switzerland between 2014 and 2018. Reading the book felt like sharing the experience of immersion in those mountains with someone with sharp eyes and a seriously playful mind – there’s not a lot of explicit description, things are seen in close-up, sometimes with a touch of surrealism, there are tiny fables and fantasies.
The opening line of the title poem could stand as an eight-word statement of the book’s prevailing mood:
the butterfly does not know the French call it papillon
Page 77* is a good example of how the book works: English on the left, Chinese on the right, with a delicate drawing in the middle (I’m sorry my tech skills aren’t up to showing the drawing without it being sliced in half by the gutter):
The poem starts with sweet whimsy:
she believes she is a tree
The rest of the first stanza elaborates: to be a tree is to ‘live on blessings from heaven’ in the form of rain and dew, and not to need anything else. A different poem might have mentioned roots and connection with other trees by way of the complex underground tangle of fungi. It might have mentioned birds’ nests, or arboreal animals, or fruits and flowers. But not this one. Here the character, like certain ascetics in the early Christian tradition, and in Chinese tradition as well I think, is opting out of active social life, choosing solitude and passivity in relation to a world she assumes to be benign.
But society intervenes. If she was ‘mean and nasty’, she could vanish, but her version of opting out is ‘a lovely idea’. It’s an idea that, by implication, the passers-by find attractive but not permitted. It’s ‘lunacy’. The poem is a parable of sorts, in which a character indulges for a moment a yearning to be stable and self-sufficient like a tree, only to be drawn back gently to the reality of human connectedness and instability:
out of sympathy and solidarity people drag her away from where trees stand firm and strong and from now on she has to roam and rove around together with other rootless nuts
The final word, far from offering a neat resolution of the poem’s conflict, raises more questions. What does it mean to equate humans with nuts? Nuts as opposed to sane, stable beings; nuts as fruits, insubstantial compared to the tree; nuts as bearing the possibility if one day taking root and developing into something more like trees? She is dragged away from her wistful belief, but at the very last moment the poem opens up to the possibility of her fantasy somehow becoming real.
It’s a fine example of the way Sou Vai Veng’s poem’s twist and turn beneath apparent simplicity. I enjoyed the book a lot.
I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, as the days are warming up, the worms are fat and busy in the earth, the adolescent magpies are developing their adult colours. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.
* My blogging practice, especially with books of poetry, is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech) – part of Book 2 Essay 12, “An apology for Raymond Sebond’
Since my last Montaigne report, I’ve been faithful to my four pages of Montaigne each morning except for two breaks – one for a fortnight and the other just a weekend. The book is too heavy to take on a plane, and travel tends to disrupt routines like this one.
Five weeks ago, I had just started reading the longest essay in the collection, ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’. Today I still have 60 odd pages of that essay to go. As I have only the vaguest idea of who Raymond Sebond was, or in what way Montaigne is attempting an apology, I’ll spare you any attempt at a summary, and just give a couple of snapshots.
Having declared himself to be a sceptic (as opposed to a dogmatist), Montaigne sets out to establish the limits of human reason. He piles on example after example of ancient philosophical versions of God, products of the ‘fierce desire to scan the divine through human eyes’. Arguing that if reason were able to determine the nature of God, then these versions would tend to some kind of agreement. Having established that this isn’t what happened, he (at least in M. A. Screech’s translation) drops his dignified mode of discourse altogether and exclaims:
So much din from so many philosophical brainboxes! Trust in your philosophy now! Boast that you are the one who has found the lucky bean in your festive pudding!
That’s on page 577. I’ve now reached page 625. In those 48 pages he has explored (and deplored) the limitations of reason in understanding even the world of nature or the human mind itself, and has been cheerfully insulting of many ancient writers whom he clearly admires enormously (including describing Plato as sometimes ‘silly’). Now he is going on about how philosophers can’t reach any agreement about the immortality or otherwise of the soul. He has reached the transmigration of souls:
the received opinion … that our souls, when they depart from us, go the rounds from one body to another, from a lion, say, to a horse; from a horse, to a king, ceaselessly driven from one abode to another.
And he’s having quite a lot of fun with it, citing the Epicureans’ objection:
What order could be maintained if the crowds of the dying proved greater than the number being born? The souls turned out of house and home would all be jostling each other, trying to be first to get into their new containers! They also ask how souls would spend their time while waiting for their new lodgings to be got ready.
Having added some lines of Latin poetry, he then goes on:
Others make our souls remain in the body after death, so as to animate the snakes, worms and other creatures which are said to be produced by spontaneous generation in our rotting flesh or even from our ashes.
In short, I’m enjoying this essay as a kind of romp in the history of philosophy. As a settled atheist who thinks my mind is a function of my body, I have a kind of museum-piece interest in a lot of the arguments. I was taught at school that until a certain point in European history people relied on the authority of, I think it was Aristotle, for their knowledge of the world. We knew from Aristotle how many teeth a human had, and only at a certain stage did it occur to people to look in each other’s mouths and count for themselves. As I read this essay, it feels as if I’m seeing that change happen before my very eyes, and it’s riveting. (Mind you, I think the essay itself is going to end with a declaration that Christian revelation is the ultimate source of Truth, but both things can be happening at once.)
To be continued.
This blog post was written on Gadigal-Wangal land, where understandings of the universe beyond Montaigne’s imaginings were developed millennia before the Ancients he discusses. It’s raining again, and my compost bin is alive with worms. I acknowledge the Elders past, present and emerging of the Gadigal and Wangal Nations,.
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech) from Book 2 Essay 7, ‘On rewards for honour’ to part way through Book 2 Essay 12, “An apology for Raymond Sebond’
Three months in and I’m loving my morning chats with Montaigne. Not so much a progress report this month, as I’m poised to fly to warmer climes any second and am squeezing this post in among house-cleaning and similar chores.
Usually as I make my way through these essays I ignore the notes and references, as I’m not making a study of Montaigne, just reading him and living with my sometime incomprehension. For the current essay, ‘ An Apology for Raymond Sebond’, I read 24 pages of M. A. Screech’s introduction to the book, and listened to a podcast from David Runciman’s ‘Past Present Future’ series (a fascinating account of the essay, which you can find here).
It’s a serious argument, tackling the relationship between revealed truth as understood in 16th century Christianity and knowledge that can be acquired by observation and reason. It’s serious, and intricate. In the passages I’ve just been reading, which is all I’m going to talk about here, it’s something else.
In this part of the essay, Montaigne is arguing against human exceptionalism. Animals (he doesn’t quite bring himself to say ‘other animals’) give signs of being able to reason, to be loyal, seek justice, have compassion, grieve, do basic arithmetic, follow the movements of the stars. In many ways, we learn from the animals, even while we believe ourselves to be infinitely superior. He notes in passing that ‘you can see some male animals falling for males of their own kind’. He tells the story that I know as ‘Androcles and the lion’ in some detail, calling the human character ‘Androdes’. He piles on example after example – mostly from antiquity and in particular Plutarch.
For the sake of his argument, just a couple of examples would have been enough, but Montaigne is like a child in a lolly shop: there are so many stories old and new, verifiable and fantastical, it’s as if he can’t bear to leave any of them out. Today’s reading ends with this (on page 534):
As for greatness of spirit, it would be hard to express it more clearly than that great dog did which was sent to King Alexander from India. It was first presented with a stag, next with a boar, then with a bear: it did not deign to come out and fight them, but as soon as it saw a lion it leaped to its feet, clearly showing that it thought such an animal was indeed worthy of the privilege of fighting against it.
Montaigne had fought in battle, and the religious wars of the 16th century were raging around him as he wrote the Essays. His casual acceptance of violence, as in this paragraph, is one of the places where we feel how different his times were from ours. But his insistence at such length on the dignity of animals has a surprisingly modern feel.
Ok, that’s all I have time for. I have a plane to catch and warmer climes to visit.
This blog post, was written on Gadigal-Wangal land in between bouts of heavy rain, which enables the ibises and magpies in the park across the road to have a great time fossicking in the soft soil. I acknowledge the Elders past, present and emerging of the Gadigal and Wangal Nations.
Me fail? I fly! 