Author: Rohan Maitzen

“Her Own True Voice”?: Noémi Kiss-Deáki, Mary and the Rabbit Dream

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Mary and the Rabbit DreamI knew I would read Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s Mary and the Rabbit Dream the first time I heard about it. It sounded like exactly my kind of thing: a fresh style of historical fiction, with a strange and subversive story to tell. It was published in the UK by Galley Beggar Press—and maybe that should have been a red flag for me, as they are the publishers and champions of Lucy Ellmann, whose Ducks, Newburyport I have begun three times, never making it more than 30 pages, but more significantly (because I still believe Ducks, Newburyport may be worth yet another try) whose Things Are Against Us I absolutely hated. On the other hand, I didn’t hate After Sappho, which they also published, and I do try, on principle, to push my own reading boundaries. So when Coach House Press here in Canada put out their edition of Mary and the Rabbit Dream, I promptly picked it up and happily began it.

Happily began it . . . and much less happily finished it. I did finish it, because it really does tell a weird and fascinating story, and I genuinely wanted to find out how it ended. It is about Mary Toft, an impoverished laboring woman who in 1724 claimed to have given birth to rabbits, although as Kiss-Deáki tells it, the tall tale was never really Mary’s but was a scheme cooked up by her overbearing mother-in-law to get attention and hopefully money from their wealthier neighbors, who value rabbits much more highly than they do poor people.

The fraud is carried on for some time even as interested and increasingly expert men (always men) investigate, and in case you’re wondering what counts as “evidence” of the rabbit births, well, bits of rabbit (and sometimes of other animal parts) are shoved up into Mary’s body so that she can be seen to “birth” them. It’s exploitive and horrific, and Kiss-Deáki emphasizes Mary’s great suffering along with the appalling indifference to it of those around her, all of whom are using her—and more specifically her wracked and wretched body—for their own purposes. This includes her mother-in-law and her accomplices, but also many esteemed men of science and medicine, who stake their reputations on disproving what is advanced as an extreme example of the fairly widely held theory that what a mother feels, sees, dreams, or otherwise experiences during pregnancy impresses itself on her unborn child. “I just dreamt of a rabbit,” Mary says at one point,

I really did, all my dreams are full of rabbits now, rabbits and hands, they are vile, they are nightmares, but I had one dream that was not vile, not a nightmare, it was a little rabbit, a little rabbit in my womb, ears pink and its little nose shivering pink

and although she is rambling feverishly and we know that she is confusing the nightmare she is currently enduring with a miscarriage she previous suffered, her interlocutor does not.

Mary Toft - WikipediaThere is a lot that is good and interesting about this novel, especially the way that, while it centers sympathetically on Mary and her experience, it also uses her story as a device to expose the cruelty of misogyny and the punishing self-satisfaction of a certain species of scientific certitude. There is a particularly harrowing scene in which a powerful man, determined to break her and expose her as the fraud he is sure she is, threatens Mary with live vivisection, explaining to her with truly menacing “objectivity” that

a vivisection is an operation undertaken on a live body through a series of incisions for the purpose of the betterment of science.

Never mind what might be for the “betterment” of poor Mary Toft, whose eventual confession (in Kiss-Deáki’s version, at any rate) is a damning indictment of everyone’s readiness to make her suffer. (Nobody cares, and off she goes to jail.)

What wasn’t so good about Mary and the Rabbit Dream—and here I have to insert the obligatory disclaimer, as other people may feel very differently, and indeed other people do, unless they were lying in the blurbs they provided! so, what didn’t work about Mary and the Rabbit Dream for me—was Kiss-Deáki’s writing. In parts, it is (as my quotations may show) intense and effective, if you like a spare style. But those short snippets do not capture the oddly stilted and highly repetitive quality of the writing, which at times I found almost comical. A sample, and I promise it was not cherry-picked:

Ann Toft is opposed to it. All the women are opposed to it.

Even Joshua Toft is opposed to it.

But Mr. Howard insists.

And Mary Toft has no opinion.

Mary Toft has suffered too much to have an opinion.

Mary Toft has been listened to too little her whole life to have the courage to form any opinions of her own.

And now she has no opinions. Not even if she tries.

She has suffered too much.

She is stunned with pain and fear.

She is fearful of the women around her. She is fearful of her surroundings.

Everything, right now, inspires fear.

She is the ideal person to use for people who wish to use other people for their own ends.

I suppose you could call it rhythmic or incantatory or something, but I’ll stick with stilted and repetitive, especially because the tic of repeating phrases from line to line is so consistent across the book and serves (to my ear anyway) no purpose. What or who is that supposed to sound like? Is it meant to create an impression of archaism? 

File:Cunicularii, or the Wise Men of Godlimon in Consultation MET DP824926.jpg - Wikimedia CommonsI might have tolerated the long stretches of this kind of stuff better if they hadn’t so often devolved into heavy-handed comments on what is perfectly obvious from the story itself, about how vile and prejudiced and uncaring the men are; or about how unfair the whole system is, especially to Mary (as happens in the example above); or about the symbolic meaning of what is going on. The worst such moment was this one, right after Mary, in excruciating pain and exhausted from relentless examinations, breaks down and begins screaming (“she slips down on the floor, she starts screaming, she screams and screams and screams”):

Sir Manningham asks,

“Are you done?”

And what Sir Manningham doesn’t realize with that question, is that on this night, at his feet, on the floor, Mary has given birth to something, not a rabbit, but her voice, her own true voice, voicing all the pain, all the anguish, all the misery, all the humiliation.

Honestly, if by this point in the novel, we aren’t able to read her screams exactly that way ourselves, the previous 138 pages were wasted efforts, and besides, it’s just clunky: a moment of high drama, of real emotional consequence, deflates completely with the words “her own true voice.”

Your mileage may vary, as we like to say, which is a reasonable acknowledgment that taste varies and that style is idiosyncratic. That’s what keeps things interesting, when we talk about books! That’s why, as I have occasionally argued at length and try always to demonstrate in my writing here, criticism is, at its best, both conversational and provisional. Also, any book worth saying this much about surely is not a bad book. Books, like people, are rarely all one thing. Still, I really disliked Mary and the Rabbit Dream. I thought that it was badly written. The note on Kiss-Deáki explains that English is her third language, and maybe that accounts for some of the awkwardness I felt in her style—but it also says that English is the language in which “she has found her author’s voice,” so I have to respect that the prose I am reacting to is not accidental, that it is her “own true voice.” 

Pest Control: Claudia Piñeiro, Time of the Flies

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Time of the FliesClaudia Piñeiro’s Time of the Flies is, like the other novels of hers that I’ve read, a crime novel. Sort of. It is about a convicted murderer, Inés: she killed her husband’s lover, but at the time of the novel is out of prison and making her living running an environmentally friendly pest control business. Then she is approached by one of her clients to provide a deadly pesticide—so that she too can kill “a woman who wants to take my husband the same way yours was taken from you,” or so she tells Inés. Inés, who is not in general a murderous person and who also would very much like not to go back to prison, is tempted only because her friend Manca urgently needs treatment for breast cancer but can’t afford to pay to get it right away. The situation gets more complicated when a connection emerges between the client and the daughter Inés has not seen since her imprisonment.

Already, then, we are in what seems like a familiar mix for Piñeiro: women whose troubles and also whose transgressions are partly the result of individual characters and circumstances and partly symptoms of a world in which women are constrained, ideologically as well as socially and economically. What are the limits of justification for striking back against patriarchy, or against the men who embody, however unthinkingly, its privileges and advantages? What counts as a crime in a context that is itself systemically unjust? What do women owe each other, in the name of friendship, or motherhood, or solidarity?

This is promising stuff! But. By the end of the novel, its various strands, though cleverly plotted, did not cohere in a very satisfying way, I thought—but that isn’t what made Time of the Flies a struggle to read. Piñeiro is a good enough storyteller that the parts of the novel taking us through Inés’s decision and its consequences would have kept me engaged, and in fact those parts of the novel did. The challenge is that interspersed with Inés’s story there are long discursive sections made up of this kind of debate, or commentary, or polemic, or analysis: Time of the Flies by Claudia Piñeiro | Goodreads

Let’s set the insects and fumigations aside for a moment and get to the bigger issue: one woman killing another woman. Are you talking about Bonar or Inés? Bonar wants to do it, Inés already did it. And is the woman being killed just because she’s a woman? No. Yes. Is she the husband’s lover ‘just because she’s a woman’? In a way. Really? Don’t be silly. What are you saying? That it’s not femicide. I don’t agree. Yes, the killer has to be a man. Can’t a woman kill another woman just because she’s a woman? It’s not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorise where violence comes from and what we can do about it a lot more productively.* There are violent women. That’s the exception, she said, ‘on the whole‘, didn’t you hear? Inés isn’t violent. But she committed a violent crime: she killed Charo. That’s different. Charo’s death wasn’t femicide. Yes it was. Let’s not get bogged down in a theoretical legal debate when we’re not even the jury. What are we? We’re the chorus. We’re an assembly.

*Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things To Me, Haymarket Boks, 2014, p. 24.

Another sample, from near the end of the novel, after the revelation that a key instigation for the client’s murderous intentions is actually her daughter’s transitioning to become a son:

Should we have a go at the issue or just stick to Inés and her poison? What issue? The issue of Timo-Tamara, Tamara-Timo. We address every issue. Not necessarily. But why wouldn’t we address this issue? Because it’s one of the most polarising issues in twenty-first century feminism. We should proceed with caution. We are not cowards. Let’s be careful. I’ll sit this one out. If it’s controversial, all the more reason to debate it. Is it controversial in Latin America, though? Less so, we understand marginality. It has nothing to do with where you are in the world. It would seem that it does at least somewhat. Feminism has to be committed to gender freedom, to radical equality, and to alliances with other minoritarian positions, sexual dissidents. Transphobic feminism is no feminism, that cannot happen.* Are there really people who want to leave trans people out of feminism? Incredible. I can’t believe it. Yes, that’s what they want to do. I think we should take some time to think about it a bit more.

*Judith Butler, from the ‘Pandemia, democracia y feminismo’, Lecture Series, Universidad de Chile.

EL TIEMPO DE LAS MOSCAS / THE TIME OF THE FLIES. CLAUDIA PIÑEIRO. Libro en papel. 9786073825030Clearly Piñeiro is doing something experimental here, creating a genre hybrid in a way that is actually reminiscent of Woolf’s The Pargiters, which I’ve been thinking about for some time because I’m fascinated by Woolf’s attempt to combine fiction and non-fiction, story and commentary. Woolf considered it an unsuccessful attempt and gave it up, turning her “novel-essay” into a novel (The Years) and an essay (Three Guineas). Maybe, I found myself thinking as I made my way to the end of Time of the Flies, Piñeiro should have done the same: if she didn’t trust her story to raise these questions for us, to stimulate those debates, she could have written a companion essay, or a different work altogether, leaving us the crime novel we expected when we picked the book up. It’s awkward, distracting, sometimes (to be honest) boring to have the plot, the suspense that Piñeiro is so good at building, constantly interrupted with these more abstract political sections, especially when they take such an uncertain form, voices themselves interrupting each other, offering competing arguments, incorporating references.

Until I copied out these samples, I hadn’t really thought about these as choric. I do find that a useful way to understand their role, and it also helps me appreciate that (I think) Piñeiro is trying to avoid didacticism by presenting topics precisely as debatable, though (as in the section on trans-inclusive feminism above) it is pretty clear that not every issue has, in her view, more than one legitimate side. Clarifying as the idea of a chorus is for the form of these sections, though, it doesn’t help me like them any better as part of my reading experience, which may e my own fault for resisting them as part of the book I thought I was reading. Hey, who spilled their feminist theory all over my mystery novel? But of course a lot of crime fiction has specifically feminist underpinnings, even before they got really explicit with the ‘feminist turn’ in the genre in the 1970s and 1980s. Piñeiro is just going much further, using her crime story as a provocation for feminist analysis.

The Body Lies: A novel eBook : Baker, Jo: Amazon.ca: Kindle StoreThat might be a good explanation for the hybrid nature of Time of the Flies, but it doesn’t necessarily make the book a success. I’d probably have to read it again (and again) to make up my mind about that, which I might do, given that I offer a course called “Women and Detective Fiction.” Last time around I almost assigned Elena Knows for it. Another title I’ve considered for the book list is Jo Baker’s The Body Lies, which is quite unlike Time of the Flies except that it too is a crime novel that turns out to be about crime novels, and especially about the roles and depiction of women in them, the voyeurism of violence against women, the prurient fixation on their wounded or dead bodies, the genre variations that both do and don’t reconfigure women’s relationship to the stories we tell about crime and violence. I thought Baker’s novel was excellent. I certainly didn’t have any trouble finishing it, in contrast to the concerted effort I made to get to the end of Time of the Flies. I really did want to know what happened! But I felt like I had to wade through a lot of other stuff to get there. If I do reread it, maybe that stuff will turn out to be the real substance of the book.

October Overview

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

October was a fitful reading month. I blame . . . everything? including my own bad habits, which currently include far too much election doom-scrolling on social media. I began the month by finishing up The Bee Sting, which I already mentioned in my September reading round-up. I really enjoyed it until, perhaps paradoxically, nearly the end. The reason this might seem odd is that the novel is a really slow burn, building up to the cataclysm of the conclusion, so it seemed as if I should have been more and more engrossed as the suspense built. But honestly, there was just so much going on that I got a bit worn out, especially as it eventually started to seem as if Murray was just deliberately and heavy-handedly deferring revelations about what exactly was going to happen. Suspense easily becomes cheap if it’s just about exploiting our dread while ramping up the stakes. I was relieved when the book was over, although it is a pretty shocking ending.

The only other book that really stood out to me of the seven I read in October (not counting Adam Bede for class) was Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, and I gave that its own post, which seems at the moment to be how this works: I can only muster the energy and enthusiasm for a one book post if the book really lights me up!

Treasure Island!!! - Sara LevineThat said, I did quite enjoy Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!!, which I picked up quite randomly at the library, mostly because it’s a Europa Edition but also because I vaguely recalled hearing good things about it online. It turned out to be a sharp and very funny send-up of the “great literature transformed my life” genre. Its narrator, whose life is in something of a shambles, reads Treasure Island and decides it offers her a template for turning things around. She adopts the novel’s “Core Values”—BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, HORN-BLOWING—and applies them to her job (which, improbably and hilariously, is at a “pet hotel,” where clients sign out cats, dogs, rabbits, even goldfish), her boyfriend, and her family, with hilarious if also sometimes weirdly poignant results. I have such a love-hate relationship with books that purport to turn literature into self-help manuals that I relished the premise, but Levine uses it as a launching point for something much zanier than I could possibly have expected or can possibly summarize.

I read another Abby Jimenez novel, Part of My World, and have already forgotten what it was specifically about. I read another Katherine Center novel, The Bodyguard, and did not like it nearly as much as Hello Stranger. I’m still on the waiting list for her latest, The Rom-Commers: it looks promising but clearly for me she’s a hit-or-miss author.

The Dry by Jane HarperI finally read Jane Harper’s The Dry—I say ‘finally’ because I regularly shop around for new mystery writers, partly for my own interest but also because I like to refresh the reading list for my mystery & detective fiction course, and Harper is someone that keeps coming up as a likely suspect. I thought The Dry was a good crime novel, but I can’t see assigning it. I thought the drought might be more of a theme, rather than primarily an aspect of setting, and a crime novel that turns in some way on the climate crisis would be a welcome addition to the syllabus, but The Dry did not seem to me to be built around that kind of political message. (If you know of a crime novel with a plot that intersects with ideas about ‘climate justice’ in an effective way, please let me know!)

Finally, I began but so far have not finished Claudia Piñeiro’s Time of the Flies. This is the first of Piñeiro’s novels that I have found a slog. I’m not sure why it isn’t working for me: it has a good and very political murder plot brewing—its protagonist, recently released after serving time for murdering her husband’s mistress, is hired by another woman to provide poison that will, presumably, be used to kill someone else. As this storyline is unfolding we got long sections of overt commentary, including citations to many famous feminist writers. This interferes with the momentum, but that’s clearly deliberate, and the combination could and should still be interesting, and yet somehow I’m just not getting through it. I am determined to persist: the root problem is pretty clearly a mismatch between my expectations, both for crime fiction and for Piñeiro, and what she has chosen to do in this case, and she’s smart enough that I believe it’s probably done well. At the very least I would like to know how the plot develops and concludes, but it seems like cheating to skip the talky bits, so I won’t. Probably.

The Lady of the Camellias (Penguin Classics) eBook : fils, Alexandre Dumas, Kavanagh, Julie, Liesl Schillinger: Amazon.ca: BooksNovember is off to an OK start: I just finished The Lady of the Camellias, by Dumas fils, which I read for my book club. It is our follow-up to Colette’s Gigi, which was our follow-up to Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, which was our follow-up to Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce. In other words, we have been on a French-themed kick! I think we are probably ready to go in another direction: I wonder what thread we will follow from Dumas’s tragic tale of passion and self-sacrifice. I have always known that La Dame aux Camelias was the original for Verdi’s La Traviata but I was surprised how closely the opera follows the plot, so closely that at every key scene in the novel I could match it exactly to the music. (It is the opera I know best, as it has been my favorite quite literally since I was 5 years old and got an LP of the highlights for my birthday.) What I enjoyed most about The Lady of the Camellias is that it entirely lived up to all the snarky comments about French novels in English novels of the period; in fact, I am reading Lady Audley’s Secret with my class at the moment and in his moments of idle self-indulgence Robert Audley himself is reading Dumas fils.

The Bridge: Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

To be like us isn’t easy, it requires constant attention to detail. I’ve thought it out; we’ve thought it out together. I’ve tried to explain to my doctor that it’s a question of working ceaselessly at being as different as possible because there must be a gap before it can be bridged. And the bridge is the real project.

Early in Cassandra at the Wedding Cassandra Edwards tells us how “attractive” the Golden Gate Bridge looks to her. That sounds innocuous enough until she clarifies that its irresistible pull is the “appeal of a bright exit sign,” a way out of a life in which she feels rootless, dissatisfied, unhappy, angry. All that “cancels it out” is her therapist—so maybe it isn’t surprising that when she travels away from her home in Berkeley and her doctor’s support she becomes increasingly unstable. It doesn’t help that she’s traveling to attend the wedding of her identical twin sister, Judith, an event that Cassandra finds intolerable to contemplate, an unacceptable tear in the fabric of their relationship and her own identity.

What makes Cassandra at the Wedding so gripping and ultimately heartrending? Cassandra’s a pretty privileged person—a running thread in the novel is the fate of the Bösendorfer piano she and Judith co-own, and the family home where she and Judith converge for this fateful event is an elegant house with a pool and all modern conveniences—and her clear intention to derail Judith’s wedding seems petty and selfish, even mean. Her passive-aggressive refusal to get Judith’s fiancé’s name right is just one symptom of how this plays out; getting so drunk and upset that even Judith is reluctant to firmly and clearly tell her that she will not in fact call off the wedding shows us Cassandra knows only too well how to deploy her own vulnerability to get exactly what she wants.

Cassandra, in other words, is an almost entirely unsympathetic protagonist and her manipulative mission is one we can hardly sympathize with, especially when the novel breaks from her first-person narration to Judith’s for an interval, a tactic which (among other things) makes quite sure we know that Judith’s love for John Finch is sincere, as is his for hers, and that Cassandra’s point of view is definitely not to be trusted. Unlikable characters are often the most interesting ones (I’m reading Adam Bede with my 19th-century fiction class at the moment, so the potential of virtuous ones to be wooden or static is much on my mind!), but the risk I felt Baker was taking is that Cassandra’s nastiness in combination with the basic set-up of “privileged people struggling with personal issues” could make the novel itself seem trivial.

And it was sometimes tempting to say to Cassandra “oh, just get over yourself!” What kept me going was Cassandra’s voice, which conveys so well the emotional mess she is in, as an aspiring writer inhibited from pursuing a writing career out of fear of comparisons to her mother, “author of two novels, and three plays, and quite a few screen plays, all quite well known,” dead from cancer but still a powerful presence in Cassandra’s life. Cassandra is, instead, pursuing a PhD “about writers, very current ones, women mostly and young,” work she only intermittently finds engrossing: it is, she thinks, a “gap-stopping degree.”

Her depression (if that’s what it is—I always advice against armchair diagnoses of fictional characters, but it read like Borderline Personality Disorder to me) is also very much related to what we could consider a form of separation anxiety about the coming breach in her bond with her twin. Cassandra and Judith are already living apart, and now Judith is taking the even more decisive step of establishing not just a separate life but a new identity, one no longer defined primarily by being Cassandra’s twin sister but by being Dr. John Finch’s wife. Cassandra cannot bear the thought of being herself without Judith; she doesn’t even know who that person—that half a person, as she insists—would be or what she would be worth. Not much, seems to be Cassandra’s conclusion: underneath her desperation about Judith’s marriage is a poignant current of both self-doubt and self-hatred, and that is where the power of the novel lies, in the pain Cassandra is constantly expressing but not explicitly admitting. A sample, as Judith sets Cassandra straight about the “plan” to intercept John at the airport and tell him the wedding is off:

‘I know I never said I’d let you go get him,’ she said now. ‘You thought it up; and after all the trouble about the dress, I didn’t think it was a very good time to get you all stirred up again. It was almost morning.’

‘Stirred up,’ I said, ‘girl you do talk like granny.’

‘What do you want me to say—disturbed?’ she said.

I felt a knife go in and twist around. For a moment everything stopped. Then I turned over again and lay flat and heard the pounding behind my ears, and felt the whirling in my head and the bitterness welling up out of m own personal well of bitterness, and I let it well. I think I may even have felt a certain relief, because nothing worse could happen now. I’d had the mortal blow, I’d received the Judas kiss with that word disturbed. . . . I lay there and listened to the roar, and once in a while the sounds would come down to me from up there where the assassins were hobnobbing with the traitors and hatching their plots, up there in the seersucker shirt. Who cares, it’s over. But I kept hearing my name in all its forms: ‘Cass, listen to me,’ and ‘Look, Cassie,’ and ‘Hey, Cassandra Edwards, don’t make a big thing of this. Let’s just not get into any more of these, shall we? Let’s not. Can’t we work up a little togetherness around here, and just accept the fact that I’m going to marry a man named Jack Finch, and his name isn’t Walter Thorson, and I’m sure you’ll like him very much, and that he’ll adore you. That’s how it ought to be, and that’s why we came out here to get married—so that he’d know my family and they’d know him. Don’t you see?’

But how can you see if you’re dead, and I was good and dead.

The hyperbole, the melodrama, the outrage, all juxtaposed against Judith’s perfectly reasonable attempts to talk her sister around: it’s hard, actually, to know who to feel more sorry for, because while Judith has every right to live her own life, Cassandra’s suffering, however unreasonable, is so palpable. And suffering is rarely reasonable anyway: if it were, people could be talked out of it. The question in this case is how far Cassandra should be allowed to set the terms for Judith, or what Judith should be willing to sacrifice to save her sister, if indeed that’s what Cassandra needs from her.

Cassandra does eventually take a drastic step to set her sister free. “We should have been one person all along,” she thinks, “not two, and this way the other one could live it out, possibly with some part of my spirit alive in her to the end of her days to make up for the part of her I might take with me today.” This is not a real or good solution, though: even Cassandra wonders what her decision might do to Judith. If the novel had allowed her to end her attempts at sabotage in this way, it would also have preempted the quest she is on from the first moment she tells us she is drawn to the bridge, the journey to confront and then accept herself, alone, one person. I didn’t think the flying visit from her therapist was a very plausible or convincing part of her extrication, but that she does ultimately attend Judith’s wedding seemed necessary to that process, and the novel’s ending successfully, I thought, walked the fine line between pat and thus unsatisfying optimism and a more provisional commitment to a way of being that is still uncertain but, at least in the moment, bearable:

I was wearing loafers and socks and on the way back I was walking faster and one of my socks kept crawling down behind my heel. I stopped and pulled it up two or three times and finally I slipped the shoe off and dropped the sock over the side and stood where I was and watched it go. Or tried to. It took immense concentration to stay with it. When I thought I’d lost it for good, the wind caught it far down and I saw it flash in the sunlight, once, and again, and maybe even a third time. But after that I don’t know. It was out of sight a long time before it could have hit the water.

You just have to keep going, Cassandra concludes, contemplating again her vocation as a writer: “Don’t lean. Stand up. Find a way.” If we are meant to read Cassandra at the Wedding as the result, it is more than a record of destructive self-absorption: it is a confession, an apology, perhaps even a redemption.

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September Reading: Mostly Light

Rohan Maitzen13 Comments

I read a lot less in September than I did in August—which makes sense, of course, given the return to the many immediate demands of the teaching term. That said, it seems fair to say that in addition to the books I’ll mention here, I also read all of Bleak House for class and most of Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (though I didn’t actually finish it until October).

Because I was busy and distracted, most of my personal reading was on the lighter side. I read another of Katherine Center’s novels, Hello Stranger: I liked this one quite a bit, even if the Big Surprise was painfully obvious all along (if you’ve read it, you know what I mean). I don’t think that’s a flaw in the novel, really; it creates a cute bit of suspense and dramatic irony as we wait for the penny to drop for our heroine.

I also read two novels by Abby Jimenez: The Friend Zone and The Happy Ever After Playlist. I enjoyed both of these as well, maybe The Friend Zone a bit more, though (and this is definitely just a matter of personal preference) I wish Jimenez would keep her hero and heroine apart longer. The trend in contemporary romances seems be to heat things up really quickly and then draw us along to the HEA not through sexual tension and the push-pull of figuring out if this is the right person but through some kind of crisis that breaks the central pair up (often in a very emotionally fraught way) and eventually gets resolved. I am generalizing from a pretty small sample, as I don’t read tons of romance (contemporary or other) these days. But the pacing of a lot of the ones I do read just feels a bit off to me, because the hot sex happens too soon and then there has to be some other kind of tension to provide the momentum. Imagine Heyer’s Devil’s Cub if Mary and Vidal actually got together a single moment sooner than they actually do in the novel! The delight is knowing they will get there eventually but not until everything else has been properly sorted. Does anyone else feel this way with current romances, or is my reaction idiosyncratic, or (another reasonable possibility) am I just reading the wrong ones (not in general, just for me)? Finally, another lighter read, also basically a romance but packaged a bit more as comic fiction, was Eleanor Lipmann’s Ms Demeanor. This looked fun but in the end I didn’t really find it so: it was OK, but did not particularly interest or entertain me.

The other three novels I finished in September were more “literary” or serious, and none of them really excited me either. Jane Smiley’s A Dangerous Business looked like exactly my kind of thing, and I have quite enjoyed some of her other novels (especially Private Life), but I have already forgotten almost everything about it except its premise. It’s a Western, with a protagonist who works in a brothel and begins trying to detect some mysterious disappearances inspired by her reading of Poe—you can see why I expected to enjoy it more than I did! In contrast, I picked up Anne Michaels’s Held in spite of suspecting it was not for me, because a lot of smart readers have raved about it (including Sam Sacks, one of my most-trusted critics!) and I thought it was worth a try. I suppose it was, but it has that “unfinished” approach to fiction that usually leaves me wishing the writer would actually do their job and write the book, not scatter fragments artfully around gaps. Kent Haruf’s Where You Once Belonged held my attention raptly until the very last page—and then I felt let down by its just ending and not really concluding. It’s not nearly as tender a novel as the ones of his I have liked the best (Plainsong and especially Our Souls At Night); I think if it had been the first of his I read, I would probably not have sought out more.

The Bee Sting was by far my favorite September reading (besides Bleak House of course), but by the time I finally finished it a few days ago, I was honestly a bit tired of it and just really wanted to get to whatever catastrophe was clearly going to happen at the end. (It’s clear from the outset and also from the jacket blurb that it will end in catastrophe, so the suspense is from wondering exactly what that will look like and how bad it will actually be—which is, it turns out, pretty bad.)

While I was reading The Bee Sting and mostly enjoying it, I was also thinking about Murray’s earlier hit novel Skippy Dies, which sticks in my memory less because of the novel itself and more because I so distinctly remember ordering it online late one night in 2010 because I was hearing so much about it and feeling so eager to be part of the wider book conversations I was just starting to participate in. At that time I didn’t buy a lot of books, as (given our overall financial situation and immediate priorities) they still seemed like relatively expensive luxuries, especially with good libraries close at hand. Of course I did always buy books, for myself and as gifts, but I was careful about it, not casual, and clicking a few buttons on my computer and having a book turn up in my mailbox a few days later was both a rarity and a novelty—and a sign that the balance of my world was shifting a bit in some new direction. As I recall, I ordered Skippy Dies from the Book Depository, which was still independent in those days, but I’m so old I can also remember when Amazon was a brand new and thrilling phenomenon—a giant online bookstore that seemed to have everything!—rather than an evil empire.

I realize this is not a particularly momentous memory, and I’m surprised how vivid it is. Clearly that small action felt significant at the time, though, and recalling it now adds to my current rather vertiginous sense of time passing and of the pieces of my life shifting around yet again.

This Week in My Classes: October Already?!

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

3032-Start-Here-cropI had such good intentions to post regularly again this term about my classes . . . and somehow the first month has gone by and I’m only just getting around to it. The thing is (and I know I’ve said this a few times recently) there was a lot going on in my life besides classes in September, much of it difficult and distracting in one way or another—which is not meant as an excuse but as an explanation. Eventually, someday, maybe, my life won’t have quite so many, or at least quite such large, or quite such fraught, moving pieces. Honestly, I am exhausted by the ongoing instability—about which (as I have also said before) more details later, perhaps—and the constant effort it requires to keep my mental balance.

Anyway! Yes, I’m back in class, and that has actually been a stabilizing influence overall: it turns out I do better when I am busier. I have two courses this term. One is a section of “Literature: How It Works,” one of our suite of first-year offerings that do double-duty as introductions to the study of literature and writing requirement classes. In the nearly 30 years I’ve been teaching at Dalhousie, I’ve offered an intro class pretty much every year, though multiple revisions of our curriculum over that same long period have changed their names, descriptions, formats, and especially sizes. I don’t think it’s just nostalgia that makes me look back wistfully on the version that was standard in my first years here: called “Introduction to Literature,” running all year, capped at 55 with one teaching assistant per section to keep us in line with the 30:1 ratio required by the writing requirement regulations. So many things about that arrangement were preferable to the current half-year version with 90 students . . . but even as demand has stayed robust for these classes, our available resources have shrunk, and so here we are. (Oh, but how much more I could do when I didn’t lose so much time to starting and stopping anew every term—and actually the change to half-year courses was brought about because the university acquired registration software that could not accommodate full-year courses and so we were forced to change our pedagogy to fit it. That still makes me angry!)

broadview short fictionThere are still things I like about teaching first-year classes, though, chief among them the element of surprise, for them as well as for me: because students mostly sign up for them to fulfill a requirement, and choose a section based on their timetable, not the reading list, they often have low expectations (or none at all) for my class in particular, meaning if something lights them up, it’s kind of a bonus for them; and for me, it’s a rare opportunity to have a room full of students from across a wide range of the university’s programs who bring a lot of different perspectives and voices to the class. I do my best to keep a positive and personal atmosphere—and some interactive aspects—even in a tiered lecture hall that makes it essential for me to use PowerPoint and wear a microphone; we have weekly smaller tutorials that also give us a chance to know each other better.

I continue to think a lot in my first-year teaching about the issues of products and processes that I have written about here before. This year I am also using specifications grading again, with its emphasis on practice and feedback rather than polish and judgment. I feel good about the basic structure of the course I have worked out over its recent iterations—but it seems possible I will get a break from teaching intro next year, and that would buy me time to give it a refresh, perhaps (who knows) the last one before I retire. This week is the last one of our initial unit on poetry (we will return to some more complex poems at the end of term). We’ve approached it in steps, focusing first on diction, then on point of view and voice, then on figurative language, then subject and theme—all, as I’ve tried to emphasize, artificially separated so that we can be clear about what they are and how to talk about them, but actually happening and mattering all at once. So this week’s lecture is “Poetry: The Whole Package” and the reading is “Dover Beach”—last year it was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” but that seemed to be too much for most of them, and no wonder.  (Still, it was fun to teach “Prufrock,” which I’m not sure I’d done before.)

bleak-housseMy other class is 19thC Fiction, this time around the Dickens to Hardy version. (Speaking of full-year classes, once upon a time I got to teach a full year honours seminar in the 19th-century British novel and let me tell you we did some real reading in that class! Ah, those were the days.) (Is talking like this a sign that I should be thinking more seriously about retirement?) I went with “troublesome women” as my unifying theme this time: Bleak House, Adam Bede, Lady Audley’s Secret, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. We have been making our way through Bleak House all month; Wednesday is our final session on it, and I am really looking forward to it. I hope the students are too! But I’m also already getting excited about moving on to Adam Bede, which I have not taught since 2017. It was wonderful to hear a number of students say that they were keen to read Bleak House because, often against their own expectations, they had really loved studying David Copperfield with me last year in the Austen to Dickens course. (You see, this is why we need breadth requirements in our programs: how can you be sure what you are interested in, or might even love, if you aren’t pushed to try a lot of different things? And of course even if you don’t love something you try, at least now you know more about it than whatever you assumed about it before.)

The_YearsIn many ways the first month of term is deceptively simple: things are heating up now, for us and for our students, as assignments begin to come due. After a fairly dreary summer, though, when the days often seemed to drag on and on, I appreciate how much faster the time passes when there’s a lot to do and I’m making myself useful (or so I hope) to other people. I also decided to put my name on the list for our departmental speaker series, to make sure the work I did over the summer didn’t go to waste, so I will wrap up this week by presenting my paper “‘Feeble Twaddle’: Failure, Form, and Purpose in Virginia Woolf’s The Years.” Wish me luck! It has been a long time since I did this exact thing; in fact, I believe the last presentation I made to my colleagues was about academic blogging, more than a decade ago. I have given conference papers and other public presentations since then: I haven’t just been talking to myself—and you—here, I promise! But I haven’t felt that I was doing work that fit very well into this series, which for related reasons I haven’t attended regularly for many years. I made a vow to engage more with my department and my colleagues this year, though, and so I’m going to the talks as well as giving my own. This is one result of my recent reflections on what I want this last stage of my professional life to be like: difficult as it still sometimes is for me to do this, I want to be present for it, if that makes any sense.

And that’s where things are at the moment, after the first month back in my classes. I probably shouldn’t make any promises about returning to the kind of regular updates I used to make to this series, but as always, I have found the exercise of writing this stuff up both fun and helpful—that hasn’t changed since I reflected on my first year of blogging my teaching. It’s a bit like exercise, I guess: if you can just get past the inertia, you feel better for doing it! We’ll see if that’s motivation enough.

August Reading Recap

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

I read 16 books in August. Two were audiobooks, which is new for me: Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (which I highly recommend) and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (which was narrated wonderfully by Dan Stevens and proved an excellent choice for me to listen to, just brisk and suspenseful enough to keep my attention on walks or while crafting). Two were for reviews for Quill & Quire: Ayelet Tsabari’s Songs for the Brokenhearted (my review is submitted and will be online pretty soon, I expect) and Jenny Haysom’s Keep (this review is in progress). One was Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (it me): I wasn’t sure I should count this, as to be honest I started skimming after a while, which is not to say it had nothing to offer me, especially its explanation of why positive thinking approaches to some kinds of mental health struggles can be not just annoying but genuinely counter-productive.

My book club decided to get in one more meeting this summer as a follow-up to our July discussion of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami. Keeping with our current French theme, we chose Gigi, which I think for all of us was our first experience of Colette. Although it’s a slight little book, it gave us plenty to talk about, from how we felt about the difference in age and maturity and agency between Gigi and her eventual fiancé to how much it is a romantic fantasy and how much a critique of the terms of that fantasy. Gigi takes a stand against her own commodification—but then she acquiesces to its terms just before she “wins” the real prize of a proposal. Does she really love Gaston? Does he really love her, or is he just getting her by whatever means he can? We were intrigued that Colette wrote the novel during the Nazi occupation of France, which perhaps gives some poignancy to its nostalgic evocation of the Belle Époque. We considered moving on to Lolita, but instead decided to stay in the French demimonde and read Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias (in translation), which I am keen about as it is of course the origin of La Traviata, which has been my favorite opera since my parents gave me an LP of highlights from it (the Sutherland / Bergonzi recording) for my 5th birthday. Joan Sutherland signed the record cover for me when I met her backstage at the Vancouver Opera in 1977.

I did some lighter reading that I mostly enjoyed, including two novels by Katherine Center, who I somehow had never heard of before I read Miss Bates’s review of The Rom-Commers. As often happens, after that I seemed to see her titles everywhere! I had to put a hold on the new one and my turn is still a long way away, but I was able to get What You Wish For and Happiness for Beginners from the library. I had actually watched some of the Netflix adaptation of Happiness for Beginners before, not knowing it was based on a novel, but I didn’t finish it, as I was finding it laborious and un-charming. I really liked the novel, though, more than What You Wish For, which I already forget almost entirely! Another light(er) read was David Nicholls’ Sweet Sorrow, which was a bit YA-ish for me but still pretty good. My favorite of his remains Us.

August was Women In Translation month. I didn’t go all in on this, but I did bookend the month with translated works, starting it with Maylis de Kerangal’s Painting Time and ending it with Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. Neither of them thrilled me, though both definitely kept me interested. Parts of Ogawa’s novel were also really haunting, though by the end it felt too much as if she was just pushing on to get finished with the concept she had for the novel. I sometimes feel the same about the enthusiasm for reading “books in translation” as I do about the enthusiasm for “lost gems”: both are not really coherent categories, and also just because a title has reached us from the other side of the world or from across the years doesn’t exactly guarantee its merits. (As I have said elsewhere, I wonder why middling books from 60 or 70 years ago seem so much more alluring than similarly middling titles from today.) On the other hand, there is a lot more advance curation of what’s available of both of these kinds of novels and it is certainly reasonable to expect that works that do get translated into English are above average and so worth trying. And of course it is intellectually beneficial not to be too provincial in one’s reading, for sure!

I had high expectations for both Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren and Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho, but neither of them excited me very much. On the other hand, I expected to find Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise overhyped, but it was a highlight of my reading month—gripping, morally urgent, beautifully told. I also was very impressed with Ann Schlee’s Rhine Journey, which I was moved to read after hearing a convincing discussion of its merits on Backlisted.

Finally, I am so glad Shawn (of Shawn Breathes Books) recommended Sara Henshaw’s The Bookshop that Floated Away: it was a delight. It was more acerbic than I expected, but that was actually fine with me, as sometimes I get irritable with books that feel too obviously designed to appeal precisely to book lovers and those who (sigh) occasionally and delusionally imagine that owning a bookstore would be a lovely retirement option. (There’s this vacant house / storefront on Spring Garden Road that desperately needs salvaging and would make such a charming site . . . but even if the whole plan weren’t unsound, that property also has “money trap” written all over it.)

All in all, then, a good reading month, with lots of variety, some hits, and some misses, though even the misses were well worth reading. With classes about to start, I don’t expect to get through quite so many unassigned books in September—but having said that, I’ve been setting some goals for myself and one of them is to read more and spend less time watching TV and doomscrolling on social media. Sometimes I need these distractions: they have a useful anesthetic effect when I just can’t keep it all up (and, as I remind myself, there are worse ways to get numb when you need to). But they don’t do much for positive energy—though aspects of social media, such as book talk and podcasts, definitely do! Anyway, writing these down as intentions (and making those intentions public like this) may help me make better choices in the moment.

Another goal for the fall is to blog more, including continuing my longstanding series of posts about my teaching. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want from the last phase of my career: I reach retirement age in 8 years, which, depending on the day, seems either very close or very far away. I don’t necessarily have to stop then—or, for that matter, to keep going until then! Things have been so turbulent in my life in recent years that I haven’t really been able to focus on this particular issue, but I do know that I don’t want to just drift towards retirement. Something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done! One small gesture in this direction (though I would not say it looks like noble work at this point) is that I have volunteered for our departmental speaker series, where I will present whatever it is exactly that I’ve been doing about Woolf’s The Years. The paper’s working title is “Feeble Twaddle,” which is one way Woolf herself described the novel while she was working on it but which also often seems a fair description of the shitty rough draft I have so far produced. Being on the speakers schedule will, I hope, motivate me to wrestle it all into better shape. I think the last formal talk I gave to my department was an attempt (along these lines) to convince my colleagues about the potential merits of academic blogging—another lifetime, that seems like. That ship has probably sailed, although it has been interesting to watch my institution embrace a carefully vetted and marketed version of blogging under the rubric “Open Think.”  You have to apply to participate! (Ahem, you could also just get your own free WordPress site and have at.) I guess it was the DIY version they didn’t like, maybe because they couldn’t control it, or take credit for it.

“Things That Were Herself”: Ann Schlee, Rhine Journey

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

She seemed to see herself moving about its unknown rooms, small bare white rooms through which the sun fell at an angle. Here she set a plant on a deep sill. There she hung the sampler she had worked for her mother as a child: her own possessions. All her adult life she had lived in houses built of deep accretions of other people’s lives. She had moved among them cautiously. But here, she herself might extend to the very walls and they would reflect back upon her, her plant, her sampler, things that were herself.

Ann Schlee’s Rhine Journey was almost too exactly the kind of novel I like. It is Lolly Willowes with a dash of Villette, or perhaps the other way around. Its protagonist, Charlotte Morrison, is stifled, repressed, mournful, and—somewhere deep inside—angry. She has no agency, or dare not claim any; she has money but doesn’t dare use it to turn herself into the main character in her own life. Her desires, like Lucy Snowe’s, manifest themselves in dreamlike fantasies shot through with both menace and eroticism; also like Lucy Snowe, she (and therefore we) can sometimes find it hard to be certain where the line is between her imaginings, conscious or not, and her reality. And like Lolly Willowes, she does finally break out of the role being assigned to her, though not in quite such a dramatic way.

Rhine Journey is a wonderfully tense and atmospheric book. Very little actually happens, and what does is largely within Charlotte’s mind, as Schlee hews very closely to her point of view—one effect of which is to make the reader chafe againstits restraints and constraints almost as much as Charlotte herself does. A sample, from a point in the novel when Charlotte has rebelled against the constant expectation that she will put others’ needs before her own, not by arguing or protesting but by taking to her bed, and then, when everyone else has finally gone away, by daring to leave it:

It would be hot in the streets. A triangle of hard blue sky came and went as the curtain blew. Idly as she lay a thin film of sweat formed between her skin and the nightdress. There was borne in upon her the luxury of being alone. And with it as the hour of eleven came and went the desire to be more entirely alone. To be out among the intensifying sounds of the city. To walk in streets that formed no pattern for her, taking a turning here or there at random, as recklessly as if at any moment she should walk off the edge of the world. To see no face that could made demand of her. The beautiful blankness of faces of whom one asks nothing not even recognition. This was what she wanted.

In the glen, a little short of Strasserhoff, it was cool. The earth smelt damp and sweet. The rushing stream sounded. Through the trees she heard the crushing of twigs and undergrowth, rapid, impatient footsteps, fleeing ahead? pursuing?

No, she cried to herself. No She must not lie here a moment longer.

It’s deft, isn’t it, the way we slip out of bed with her into that shady glen, with its hint of threat, only to realize we haven’t left yet after all?

I don’t think the novel’s plot is as important as its mood: it’s that feeling, that yearning, that insistence, so hard to acknowledge, that this cannot be all there is, that it’s not bearable to live life on these terms—this is what drives us, and Charlotte, along to the novel’s crisis, which is in a way a repudiation of Charlotte’s self-absorption. She has misunderstood: she has interpreted something as personal that was political. I found it interesting that this realization is what it takes to liberate her. Contemplating the man who has (by an accident of resemblance) been an erotic fixation for her since the first page of the novel, she suddenly sees him as someone “outside her imagination” and thus “nothing to her.” It is exhilarating: she feels “free of a great burden,” as if suddenly, or finally, she too can step outside her own mind and do something, not selfish but for herself:

She could have run towards the lighted garden so eager was she about some purpose that she had scarcely defined to herself. And all the time—so oddly the mind veers—she pictured to herself those whitened cottage rooms where she might quietly extend herself, and moving from room to room, meet and recognize herself in forms unaltered by the pressures of others upon her.

These are familiar themes and Charlotte’s is in many ways a familiar arc for readers of both 19th and 20th-century fiction, but it is all so meticulously and intensely and intelligently told that it kept me completely engaged.

My Top 10 of the 21stC (So Far)

Rohan Maitzen14 Comments

I really enjoyed listening to Trevor and Paul discuss their “top 10 books of the 21st century so far” on their (always enjoyable!) podcast, and so I thought I’d have a go at making my own list. I agree with them that the fun of this kind of exercise is in the conversations it prompts, with other readers, but also with ourselves. There is something clarifying about the process: it can’t possibly lead to a definitive list of the “best” books by some universally reliable standard (their two lists certainly illustrate this, as there is little overlap between them!) but it is one way to discover things about yourself as a reader, first by forcing yourself to make tough  choices and then by confronting you with other people’s choices.

I certainly had a vigorous conversation (if only in my own head) with Trevor and Paul about their choices, some of which I have found unreadable (ahem, Ducks, Newburyport – but also Austerlitz, as unlike Trevor I don’t usually like “wandering” books), some of which I also thought hard about in making my own list (The Road), and some of which I am more interested in reading than before, because they spoke so eloquently about them (Flights, 2666). They both read so widely: I have been seeking out more translated books already but one thing I definitely said to myself as I looked over my own longlist was that I needed to do even more of that.

This fun list-making project also had its sobering side: how many of us thinking about “the best books of the 21st century” will actually know much about the books that come out in the second half of the century, after all – or even the second quarter of it? We certainly won’t be around to see what the readers of the 22nd century think of our choices, fascinating as it would be to see which of them turn out to have any staying power. Perhaps our lists will look as comically misguided as the lists of bestseller lists from the 19th century, which are full of now-forgotten names. Maybe our idiosyncratic but deeply felt preferences will be starting points for the recovery projects of the future, the next generation of Virago and Persephone and NYRB Classics and Recovered Books!

So, without further ado, here’s my own list, my personal favorites of the 21st century so far. Compiling it was not a straightforward process: many of my “best of the year” titles, for example, were written well before the 21st century, so I couldn’t just pluck them for this purpose. I also didn’t start blogging until 2007, so it’s possible I have overlooked a book I read and loved but just didn’t think of while doing this, because I don’t have a record of it. Unlike Paul and Trevor, I have not ranked my titles: they are in chronological order. I know which one I would put at the top if I absolutely had to – but it’s my blog and my list so you can’t make me. 😁 I have written about almost every one of these books here or elsewhere, so I have included the links for you to follow if you want to know more about them. (How have I never written about Fingersmith?!)

Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai (2001)

Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)

Carol Shields, Unless (2002)

Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002)

Colm Tóibín, The Master (2004)

Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost (2006)

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall Trilogy (2009-2020)

Molly Peacock, The Paper Garden (2010)

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)

Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2019)

So, what do you think? Are any of these on your ‘best of the 21st C so far’ list? Are you aghast or just puzzled at any of them? Are any of them ones you’ve been curious about and now feel – as I do about Flights – that maybe it’s time to give them a try?

“The Sum of the Stories”: Maylis de Kerangal, Painting Time

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

In the clamor, Paula begins to paint, condenses the sum of the stories and the images into a single gesture, a movement sweeping as a lasso and precise as an arrow, since her painting contains at the moment something quite other than itself, gathers up the grazed knees of a five-year-old girl, the danger, an island in the far reaches of the Pacific, the sound of an egg hatching, the vanity of a king, a Portuguese sailor who bites into a rat, the rippling hair of a movie star, a writer gone fishing, the mass of time, and beneath embroidered swaddling clothes, a royal baby asleep, as if in a mythical nest, at the bottom of a shell.

Maylis de Kerangal’s Painting Time focuses on the personal and artistic development of Paula Karst, who when the novel opens is just beginning her studies at the Institut de Peinture in Brussels. She and her classmates are learning a very specific kind of painting: decorative painting or trompe-l’œil, the art of making one surface look like another, usually wood or marble or, as Paula chooses for her graduation piece, tortoiseshell. One of the recurring topics is whether this work is really painting, really art: is copying or recreating really, itself, creative? Or is it just highly skilled trickery? The goal of their painting is for the artistry to be indiscernible: is that all that really distinguishes it from painting that you know is painting? Doesn’t all art at least begin with copying, and isn’t copying also about preserving and sharing imagery that otherwise many people would never see for themselves?

These questions, both theoretical and philosophical, lurk but don’t dominate the novel. After graduation Paula and her friends deploy their training everywhere a deceptive surface is wanted, from hotel lobbies to movie sets. I didn’t feel that the story of Paula’s movement from one job to another had much momentum or interest: I didn’t have a strong sense that she was growing or changing as a person or an artist, though we are sometimes told that she is. The often highly technical descriptions of her work were more interesting, and I wondered if maybe that effect was deliberate on de Kerangal’s part, as the novel also seems quite engaged with ideas about the broad sweep of history as signaled by art history, with the artefacts and images ultimately outlasting their creators.

From this point of view, Paula is just one more painter, a point that is particularly emphasized by the final section in which she is hired to help complete a reproduction of the caves at Lascaux. To do this work, and indeed any of the painting she undertakes across the novel, Paula has to submerge herself in other times and places, in materials and processes, a kind of subordination of the self. Maybe this is how the novel asks us to think about decorative painting: instead of the insistent idiosyncrasy of works by the ‘great masters,’ which endlessly and beautifully and vexingly foreground their styles and their selves—their individual preoccupations—Paula and the other graduates of the Institut de Peinture disappear into the wood grain, the marbling, the cracks in the faux stucco. This erasure of the self makes an odd underlay for a book that is structured as a Bildungsroman or a Kunstlerroman, implicitly challenging the way those familiar fictional models drive our sense of what gives a life meaning, or what constitutes greatness or success in art.

An interesting book, then—but not, for me, a very engrossing one. Still, I enjoyed sections like this, which appeal to my longstanding fascination with ‘neepery’:

They’ve learned to glaze, to score, to soften, to stipple, to moiré, to lighten, to create a little iridescence with a polecat-hair round brush or an eyelet in the glaze with the brush handle, to draw short veins, to speckle, to wield the palette knife, the squirrel-hair two-headed marbling brush and the pitch pine brush, the large and the small spalter, the flat brush, the billiard cloth, and the burlap; they’ve learned to recognize Cassel earth and Conté, light cadmium yellow and cadmium orange; they’ve painted these same Renaissance ceiling angles with pudgy little cherubs, these same raspberry crushed silk draperies plunging from the cornices of Regency giltwood beds, these same Carrera columns, these same Roman mosaic friezes, same granite Nefertitis, and this apprenticeship has transformed them together, has shifted their language, marked their bodies, fed their imaginations, stirred their memories.

I also really enjoyed the sections about the discovery of the Lascaux caves: “For three days,” Paula tells us of the boys who first happened upon it, “they explored the cave, three days in which they toiled at extending the known world—extending known space and time—our great work.” Ah, the humanities.

Painting Time is translated from the French by Jessica Moore.