Last year I undertook to blog on a Novella a Day in May, which I really enjoyed. I’m hoping to do it again this year, but I fear I may end up delaying it until 2020. To tide me over I’m going to do a mini-version with a favourite writer who wrote short novels: Colette each day for a week, starting today as it’s her birthday.
I’ll begin obviously, with Colette’s first novel, Claudine a l’ecole which I read in English translation, Claudine at School (trans. Antonia White 1956). Claudine is fifteen and in her final year at school. She lives in Burgundy with her father, who is distant but loving, interested mainly in slugs. As a result, Claudine is left to her own devices; her voice is strong and distinctive but she can also be something of a bitch, manipulating people and freely giving out slaps and other violence to her classmates.
“My name is Claudine, I live in Montigny; I was born there in 1884; I shall probably not die there.”
There are some lovely descriptions of the countryside which Colette clearly had great feeling for:
“The charm, the delight of this countryside composed of hills and valleys so narrow that some are ravines, lies in the woods – the deep, encroaching woods that ripple and wave away into the distance as far as you can see….Green meadows make rifts in them here and there, so do little plots of cultivation.”
A new teacher arrives at the school, Aimee Lanthenay, and Claudine is immediately entranced:
“My English mistress seemed adorable to me that night under the library lamp. Her cat’s eyes shone like pure gold, at once malicious and caressing, and I admired them, not without reminding myself that they were neither kind nor frank nor trustworthy. But they sparkled so brilliantly in her fresh face and she seemed so utterly at ease in this warm, softly-lit room that I already felt ready to love her so much, so very much, with all my irrational heart. Yes, I’ve known perfectly well, for a long time, that I have an irrational heart. But knowing it doesn’t stop me in the least.”
Claudine is aware of her own attractions and confident in them, including her appeal to the school’s District Superintendent Dutertre, who she sees clear-sightedly as something of a lech. Ultimately however, she loses Aimee to her Headmistress:
“The class was well-trained now. All the girls even down to those in the Third Division knew that, during recreation, they must never enter a classroom in which the mistresses had shut themselves up… we found them so tenderly entwined, or so absorbed in their whisperings, or else Madame Sergent holding her little Aimee on her lap with such a total lack of reserve that even the stupidest were nonplussed”
The treatment of sexual attraction between women is dealt with frankly in the novel. It is never apologised for, explained away as schoolgirl crushes, or treated as anything extraordinary. Claudine is at once inexperienced but wise and somewhat cynical beyond her years:
“In a week she will possess another fiancée who will leave her at the end of three months; she is not cunning enough to hold the boys and not practical enough to get herself married. And, as she obstinately insists on remaining virtuous, this may go on for a long time.”
The plot is minimal, the novel is Claudine’s diary of her final school year and all that entails. Yet Claudine’s distinctive voice propelled me along as I wanted to see what the precocious teenager would do next.
“Papa was sending me to Paris to a rich childless aunt… How should I do without the country; with this hunger for green, growing things that never left me?”
August is Women in Translation month, hosted by Meytal at Biblibio. I’ve been faithfully reading translated fiction throughout the month but I have failed miserably at blogging about any of it. Usually when bloggers disappear for a bit they’ve gone on holiday/fallen in love/started a new job. I have no such exciting excuses – I’m at the same job, feeling bitter about a lack of holiday & the nearest I’ve got to romance is shamelessly objectifying Tom Burke in the new Cormoran Strike adaptations on the BBC:
In a bid to catch up, here is a quick summary of the 6 novels I’ve read in translation, all quite short but all punching well above their weight in terms of powerful, affecting stories. They also include 2 more stops (France & Greece) on my much neglected Around the World in 80 Books Reading Challenge hosted by Hard Book Habit.
Colette – The Other One (1929, trans. from French by Elizabeth Tait & Roger Senhouse 1960)
Given I’m such a Francophile, it came as a great surprise to me that I hadn’t yet visited France as part of #AW80Books so I’ve rectified the situation with Colette’s tale of infidelity and complex family dynamics over the course of a summer in a villa in France.
Fanny is married to Farou, and awaits his return in a villa where she lives with her stepson Jean and companion Jane, with whom Jean is in love. Fanny subsequently comes to realise that Jane is one of Farou’s many extra-marital dalliances.
It’s a slim novel (157 pages in my edition) and in a sense very little happens. What The Other One offers is a beautifully written, subtle exploration of the psychological complexities that exist between people who are inextricably bound up in one another’s lives, with all the love and pain that can entail.
“Fanny turned on Jane her Paris smile, well made-up and full-lipped, and Jane, whose fair hair lit up a corner of the room, was instantly extinguished.”
Marguerite Duras – La Douleur (1985, trans. from French by Barbara Bray 1986)
I’m overcompensating now by staying France, with Duras’ typical mix of autobiography and fiction, regarding her war experiences. At the start of La Douleur she writes that the work is based on diaries she discovered which she doesn’t remember writing. The six stories/diaries move back and forth across the period of the war and create the sense of a fragmented narrative which explores the desolation and destruction of war and the impossibility of telling a tale of such insurmountable human loss in only one way. I found it incredibly powerful.
“Suddenly freedom is bitter. I’ve just come to know the total loss of hope and the emptiness that follows; you don’t remember, it creates no memory. I think I feel a slight regret at having failed to die while still living. But go on walking, I move from the street to the sidewalk, then back into the street. I walk, my feet walk.”
Sun-Mi Hwang – The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly (2000, trans. from Korean Chi-Young Kim 2013)
This is the story of a hen named Sprout. She decides she wants more from life than laying eggs to be taken away: she wants to live in the wild and raise a chick.
This fable is incredibly clever, in that you can read it to a child but there is plenty for adults here too. It’s a story written with great lightness of touch, and as such the lessons it teaches are various, depending on what you find in it. It could be about (for starters): going your own way in life, questioning authority, facing fears, attitudes to immigrants, the value of empathy, adoptive families, familial love, finding freedom…
“Sprout was the best name in the world. A sprout grew into a leaf and embraced the wind and the sun before falling and rotting and turning into mulch for bringing fragrant flowers into bloom. Sprout wanted to do something with her life, just like the sprouts on the acacia tree. That was why she’d named herself after them. Nobody called her Sprout, and she knew her life wasn’t like a sprout’s, but still the name made her feel good. It was her secret.”
The edition by Oneworld books also features lovely illustrations by Nomoco, worth seeking out.
Penelope S Delta – A Tale Without a Name (1911, trans. from Greek by Mika Provata-Carlone 2013)
Another fable, and another lovely edition from Pushkin Press whose description explains that this is ‘one of Greece’s best loved stories.’ It tells of an indulgent arrogant king who takes his nation into ruin and the son and daughter who bring it back to prosperity under a policy of meaningful employment for the greater good.
“Time always passes. But if you consume yourself in idle things you waste it; whereas if you do work that has a purpose, you make good use of time.”
It’s also a militaristic tale – much emphasis on vanquishing enemies and building armies – but ultimately it is about social responsibility. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see it as deeply political: Delta’s father was a mayor who narrowly avoided execution, her diplomat lover was assassinated and she killed herself the day the Nazis reached Athens. A Tale Without a Name presents complex political ideas in a deceptively simple style.
Han Kang – Human Acts (2014, trans. Deborah Smith 2016)
This novel caused me to deviate from a wholly WITMonth August, as I was so upset by it that I had to read a British Library Crime Classic to recover. I approached it wholly ignorant of the political turmoil that South Korea had experienced in the 1980s. Kang pitches us into the student uprising in Gwangju in 1980. It begins with a boy searching for the body of his friend amongst the piles of corpses that a brutal regime creates.
“Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin in the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that murdered them.”
Human Acts follows various people all connected to the uprising, and Kang absolutely does not pull her punches. What the piles of bodies mean in human terms is explored fully both in terms of the emotional ramifications and the hard reality of how to deal with so many bodies. It’s a novel that deals with extreme brutality in sensitive, subtle prose.
“Their faces had been covered in white paint, erased. I swiftly shrank back. Necks tipped back, those dazzling white faces were angled towards the thicket. Staring out into the empty air, their features a perfect blank.”
The novel contains scenes of torture that are hard to bear, but never gratuitous. In the final part of the novel, Kang explains her own links to the story, and how this is not quite fiction. It’s astonishing that someone personally affected by the tragedy can write something so carefully constructed, but this is what she has achieved. The story is crafted but absolutely unflinching in looking at atrocities inflicted by governments and their devastating fallout.
“She had no faith in humanity. The look in someone’s eyes, the beliefs they espoused, the eloquence with which they did so, were, she knew, no guarantee of anything. She knew the only life left to her was one hemmed in by niggling doubts and cold questions.”
Elena Ferrante – The Lost Daughter (2006, trans. from Italian Ann Goldstein 2007)
Finally, I’m a bit undecided about the Neapolitan quartet and feel slightly baffled as to why its garnered quite so much praise, but I did enjoy this novella from Ferrante and those who love the quartet will find much that is familiar here: a flawed female narrator, conflicts with loved ones, a sense of violence close to the surface.
Leda takes a holiday alone in southern Italy. She is disturbed by a loud extended Neapolitan family and a certain event draws her into their sphere. During the course of the holiday she reflects on her life and the repercussions of the choices she has taken, on herself, her marriage and her daughters.
“My daughters make a constant effort to be the reverse of me. They are clever, they are competent, their father is starting them out on his path. Determined and terrified, they advance like whirlwinds through the world, they will manage better than us, their parents.”
Leda isn’t likeable but the narrative is compelling and pulls you along to deliver a short sharp shock.
As regular readers will know, I need no encouragement to indulge in an 80s pop video. Here’s one that was a massive hit in the original German and in English translation. It’s about nuclear war; of course we have no worries about such an event now…
This is part of a series of occasional posts where I look at works from Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century. Please see the separate page (link at the top) for the full list of books and an explanation of why I would do such a thing.
When I first started this challenge, I thought it would never be complete as I have commitment issues Wikipedia told me that Tendrils of the Vine had never been translated. Yesterday in my favourite charity bookshop (handily located across the road from my flat, so I don’t have to stagger far with my heavy loads/nightmarishly located across the road from my flat – if you had a problem with drug addiction you wouldn’t live opposite a crack den) I picked up a huge volume of The Collected Stories of Colette for £3.50, and was very excited to see Tendrils of the Vine translated within it (by Herma Briffault – and I see Wiki no longer makes its fallacious claim).
In fact , Tendrils of the Vine, proclaimed A Fable in the title, is only 1000 words long and I may have been able to struggle through with my appalling French. The difficulty is, being only 1000 words long, I really can’t say too much about it without spoilers, so this will be an uncharacteristically short post from me 🙂
The story begins in typical fable fashion, describing how the nightingale got his song:
“While he slept, the vine’s gimlet feelers – those imperious and clinging tendrils whose sharp taste, like that of fresh sorrel, acts a stimulant and slakes the thirst, began to grow so thickly during the night that the bird woke up to find himself bound fast, his feet hobbled in strong withes, his wings powerless…”
The nightingale escapes, and sings relentlessly to keep himself awake through the Spring, thereby avoiding the terrors of the vine. I can’t say much more, except Colette then expands this into a truly creepy and oppressive tale. The fact that she does this in 1000 words within a pastoral fabulistic setting makes it like a short, sharp punch to the sternum. What a writer – I’m looking forward to reading the rest of my newly-acquired tome.
Colette, who when she wasn’t writing, sat around being awesome
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