Of Books and Bicycles

I finished The Lover over the weekend. It’s a very short novel, more like a novella, really, at 115 pages, and a fascinating read. If you’re interested in the novel, you should check out Litlove’s post on Duras. There she discusses The Lover plus Duras’ life and reputation.

It’s a story about a girl of fifteen who lives in Indochina with a difficult, poor family — her mother and two brothers — and who has an affair with older Chinese man. But the novel doesn’t stay focused solely on the affair; it skips around in time, telling stories of the narrator’s later life in France and of what happens to her family members. We watch her as she realizes she wants to be a writer, and as she struggles with her love/hate relationship with her mother, and we see all this from different perspectives in time. At the beginning of the novel Duras describes the beginning of the affair, and at the novel’s end she describes the lovers’ fate, but in between, Duras takes us to many different years, often abruptly with rapid switches.

The narrator’s voice is simple and spare; the sentences seem empty of feeling, although emotion lurks under the surface, unexpressed but present. Here is a sample (from early in the book — I’m not giving anything away):

My younger brother died in three days, of bronchial pneumonia. His heart gave out. It was then that I left my mother. It was during the Japanese occupation. Everything came to an end that day. I never asked her any more questions about our childhood, about herself. She died, for me, of my younger brother’s death. So did my elder brother. I never got over the horror they inspired in me then. They don’t mean anything to me any more. I don’t know any more about them since that day.

The voice is halting and obviously pained but also detached, as though she’s trying to make sense of her experience but only can repeat sentences about the meaninglessness of it all.

The narrator is isolated; she feels loyalty to her family and yet the family fails her in many ways, she attends school but has few friends, and she quickly gets a bad reputation because of her sexual experience. She travels to and from school in an odd outfit that marks her as the outsider she feels herself to be.

The love affair is described in a similarly matter-of-fact manner; it is all-consuming — the narrator spends all her time with her lover and sneaks home late at night — but it seems emotionless. We learn very little about the lover, except that his father refuses to let him marry the narrator.

This is largely the story: the novel tells how the lovers meet, gives us some stories about the difficult family dynamics, describes the narrator’s desire to be a writer, and moves forward in time now and then to give glimpses of the narrator’s future life. What The Lover excels at is creating a mood; through its shifts in time and its short, simple sentences, it creates a feeling of a writer haunted by her past, exploring it but grazing across the surface of it rather than digging in deep.

Set in Indochina in the 1930s, the novel also gives a sense of what it was like to be a French family far away from their home country. It describes race and class tensions, as well as familial ones.

Although the story is a dark one, I enjoyed the experience of reading it; there’s something compelling in the voice of the narrator, haunted by the past as she is. I don’t usually like prose styles one might call “lyrical,” as one can call the prose in this book, but the blunt honesty and courage of the narrator saves it for me.

The novel is largely aubiographical; I’m curious to find out more about Duras and her life. She seems like a fascinating figure.

This book is part of my “From the Stacks” challenge — one down, four to go. Next up will be Alice Munro’s Runaway.

I just finished Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac and ended up enjoying it quite a lot. You’ll find my earlier post on the book and my musings on Brookner’s reputation here. The ending — I won’t give anything away — was satisfying; it was suitably, quietly dramatic. I’m eager to read more Brookner, but I’m thinking, based on comments people made on my earlier Brookner post, that she’s probably best read occasionally rather than all in a rush. She strikes me as someone, like Elizabeth Taylor, who is good to have on hand for when the right mood strikes. I’m going to try to get her latest, Leaving Home, when it comes out in paper, and I’m curious about Look at Me after the wonderful review on Book World.

The main character, Edith, is a romance novelist, and it seems to me that it might be fun for an author to have a main character who is a writer. You can play around with ideas about writing and what authors are like and what they do and you could explore some of your own feelings about writing, or maybe create a writer who’s very different than you are.

Brookner plays around with the genre of the romance a bit: Edith can be said to have a romantic outlook on the world and on her life, in the sense that she believes in love’s power to transform. She refuses to take a more “practical” approach to her life, although many people put pressure on her to do so when she has the chance to marry a good man she does not love. We find out early on that she is involved in an affair with a married man, and the drama of the rest of the book is not so much about what will happen to that relationship, but about whether Edith will give up on love itself. Hotel du Lac is not at all a romance novel of the type Edith would write, but it is a romance novel in another sense – it’s a novel that ponders what it means to be devoted to the ideals of romance.

The hotel itself is almost a character in its own right. It’s an out-of-fashion resort hotel where one finds people who have gone there for years out of habit, and it’s a place where families and friends send women they aren’t quite sure what to do with, women who need some rest and recovery, who may have strayed from acceptable behavior and need some time to ponder their sins. Edith is there for this reason, to get herself back to normal, and, as one might expect in a novel, this is precisely what she doesn’t do. As you can imagine, a hotel of this sort is a wonderful setting for a novel – it’s a confined space full of interesting people, and Brookner makes good use of it.

What makes this novel work, I think, is the strength of the main character. I loved seeing the world through her eyes. In several scenes, Edith sits in her hotel room writing letters to her married lover, describing the hotel’s odd characters and the slow pace of life there, and I was struck as I read those letters at the way Brookner creates a sense of a gap between how Edith felt about her life and how she wrote about it in her letters. She’s trying to give shape to her life and inject some energy into it through her writing – this is true of her novels too – and the writing seems very brave and hopeful but also that much sadder because we know that real life isn’t like what it is in novels and brave, cheery letters. Edith comes across as heroic – an odd sort of hero, but a hero nonetheless.

In addition to the four books I’ve had going in recent days, I’ve begun reading Sara Nelson’s So Many Books, So Little Time. I’ve got mixed feelings about it. It’s kind of fun, and it keeps me interested and happily turning the pages, but … I’m just not that impressed with her book discussions. The idea behind the book is that she’ll read a book a week for a year and then write about them. The chapters are short meditations on some of those books — she’s also got a list at the back of books she read but didn’t discuss — where she writes about how she found the book, what the book’s about, what she thinks about it. The chapters tend to have more on context, how she found the book and the circumstances in which she’s reading it, than about content.

She’s got a chapter on “The Clean Plate Book Club,” about how she learned to set down books she’s not enjoying rather than suffering through to the end, and another on what it means when a new friend gives you a book — it’s the moment of truth, when you find out for sure if this friendship will last. She writes about how important the location and the timing are in determining how much you will enjoy a book, and about what it feels like to get completely wrapped up in a book so much so that you can’t put it down.

All that’s good. But I’m reading along and thinking that my blog writer friends do this exact same thing and do it better. It’s a reading diary, and an exploration of what it’s like to be a reader, and a discussion of a lot of individual books, and I love that stuff, but I’m thinking I now prefer to get it from a bunch of blogs rather than a book. It strikes me as much nicer to read a person’s reading diary as it gets produced, in regular blog posts, and to be able to comment on it and maybe influence how that reader thinks and what he or she reads, and to be able to respond on my blog, and do all the things book bloggers do. As far as reading diaries go, they seem much more interesting on blogs than in books, where they can be interactive and immediate.

I’m also not connecting with Nelson’s choice of books, which accounts for some of my mixed feelings. I picked up the book hoping to get some good recommendations, at least, but nothing she’s reading is really getting my interest. For this type of book to work, the author has to win the reader over, and I’m feeling a little bit resistant still. I’m hoping to get a little more excited about the book as I read further (being a loyal member of the Clean Plate Book Club, I’m afraid), and it is reliably entertaining, but I’m coming away from it feeling more than justified in all the time I devote to reading book blogs.

I finished the book last night, and I liked the second half almost as much as the first (which I posted on here). A couple things bugged me, though. The first is that I felt the novel got a bit long; about 2/3 of the way through it, the pace slowed down and I felt ready to get to the end.

The bigger thing that bugged me was a conversation Henry and Clare had when Clare confessed to Henry some of her sexual experiences before their relationship began (The adult relationship, that is — they’d had a friendship going on when she was a child and he was time-traveling to her as an adult … it’s complicated). Henry had slept with lots of women before he met her and Clare didn’t have much trouble with that fact. She worried, though, about what Henry would say about her own experiences, and I kept waiting for Henry to point out the potential double standard or for Clare to realize it, but neither of them did. That struck me as strange.

And then at the end (I’m not really giving anything away here), Niffenegger gives us a quotation from The Odyssey about Odysseus and Penelope reunited at long last, and I’m reminded of how Penelope spent the whole Odyssey waiting, and I realize Clare spends the whole book waiting too; in fact, the first words of the book are “It’s hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he is okay. It’s hard to be the one who stays.” I’m bugged by the stereotypes here. These two things together — Clare as the woman waiting and as a woman who worries that her husband will be angry that she slept with another man, well before their marriage — are making me rethink my response to the book.

So, if this is a kind of retelling of The Odyssey, in a very loose sort of way, does Niffenegger do any updating of the traditional gender roles in that ancient story? I’m thinking not, but maybe I’m missing something. Any thoughts, those of you who have read this??

BUT, the experience of reading this book was great, and I do recommend it, the above reservations aside. Its chief pleasures, for me, were trying to wrap my mind around what it would be like to time travel and meet myself as a younger or older person. Also, Niffenegger does interesting things with the problem of how knowing the future can possibly change the future; Henry refuses to tell some things about the future, saying that he feels it would be wrong, but there’s nothing to stop him from giving things away, and, in fact, he uses his ability to time travel to make lots of money on stocks and lotto. He does tell people what will happen to them now and then. But he always says that those things will happen anyway no matter what people do and that they can’t change it — and in a few cases he creates future events by telling people that those events will happen.

So we’re left with the question of free will: it seems from what Henry says that the future is set and we can’t change it, and yet sometimes he seems to interfere with the future. But when he interferes with the future, is he really changing it or is he living out what would have happened anyway, no matter what?

The book makes you think about interesting questions like this — and it’s an entertaining love story. Not bad, eh?