Month: January 2016

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Books That Aren’t for Me: Zola’s His Excellency Eugene Rougon & John Braine’s Room at the Top

This translation is dreadful.

This translation is dreadful.

I recently tracked down Zola’s His Excellency Eugene Rougon, the sixth novel in his Rougon-Macquart series, and a copy of John Braine’s 1957  novel, Room at the Top.

Both books are minor classics, but, alas, I didn’t much care for either. Perhaps they’re the right books for you, though.

1. Readers of this blog will know that I recently enjoyed the new Oxford translations  of Zola’s Rougon-Moucquart series, a racy inter-generational chronicle of five generations of a family prone to alcoholism, addiction, madness, and promiscuity in Napoleon III’s Second Empire.  The 2012 editions are superb:  I wrote about Helen Constantine’s  translation of The Conquest of Plassans here, and Brian Nelson’s translation of The Fortune of the Rougons  here.

His Excellency Eugene Rougon may well be a great political novel about the Second French Empire, but who can tell in Ernest Alfred Vizetelly’s archaic 1897 revision of an earlier nineteenth-century translation?  Could we have a new translation, please?

In the preface, Vizetelly praises this realistic political novel.  He writes, “In my opinion, with all due allowance for its somewhat limited range of subject, [it] is the one existing French novel which gives the reader a fair general idea of what occurred in political spheres at an important period of the Empire.”

This brilliantly-structured but turgid translation of Zola’s complicated novel about a corrupt politician is compelling once underway.  The hero,  Eugene Rougon,  is a savvy lawyer who supported  Napoleon III’s coup d’etat and clawed his way up to a high position in the government. In the opening chapter, he resigns after a disagreement with the Emperor,  expecting soon to be recalled to office.  His allies and friends turn on him when he is out of power:  there are no enemies greater than friends.  The most dangerous is Clorinde, the beautiful, intelligent daughter of an Italian countess who obtains information through flirtations but seldom gives anything away.

After a few years out of the government, Eugene is desperate for power.  He suppresses information he gleans from a criminal friend about a terrorist plot.  Deaths and woundings of innocent men result, but his rival is discredited, and that’s all that matters to Eugene.  Ten days later Eugene is the Minister of the Interior.

This is the kind of reading that makes you NOT want to participate in the caucuses or vote in the primaries.

Okay, it’s a bold book.  But try reading prose like this:

For a moment the President remained standing amidst the slight commotion which his entrance had caused. Then he took his seat, saying carelessly and in an undertone:  “The sitting has commenced.”

A little of that goes a long way.

And that’s why we need a new translation.

Room_at_the_Top_(novel)_1st_ed_coverart2. I was curious about John Braine’s Room at the Top, published in 1957 and recently reissued by Valancourt.  It is  one of the “Angry Young Men” novels, and I love the  writers in this movement:  Kingsley Amis, Alan Silitoe,  and William Cooper.

But I cannot bear Braine, though he is witty, acerbic, and articulate.  The other Angry Young Men are misogynists, but this is perhaps THE most misogynistic of their novels.

The novel begins with the narrator Joe Lampton’s looking back regretfully on his eruthless rise to “the top” in his twenties.  Joe, a World War II vet and former prisoner of war, left the ugly working-class town where he was raised when he found a job in Warley as an accountant for the City Council.  He was brash and on the make:  he joined a community theater group to get to know women. Soon he hits on pretty Susan, the daughter of a wealthy man, because he sees her as a means to money and power.

He has an affair with Alice,  a bright, witty married woman  in her thirties who is the best actress in the company. He has double standards and double dealings but is in love with her. Joe’s friend tells him he cannot possibly marry an older woman without losing his reputation.

We women cannot help but hate Joe, and Joe hates himself, too.  I don’t want to give too much away, but at  one point, he  derealizes and reports his dialogue in the third person.  then he comments in the first person on this other Joe (the real Joe?).

“I expected it,” Joe said soberly…  I didn’t like Joe Lampton.  He was a sensible young accountant with a neatly-pressed suit and a stiff white collar.  He always said and did the correct thing and never embarrassed anyone with an unseemly display of emotion.  Why, he even made a roll in the hay with a pretty teenager pay dividends.  I hated Joe Lampton, but he looked and sounded very sure of himself sitting at my desk in my skin; he’d come to stay, this was no flying visit.

This uneven, well-written novel has its points, and, thank God, is short!

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Reading From Other People’s “Best of” Lists, #1 : Robin Cadwallader’s The Anchoress

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I jotted down an embarrassing number of titles from the “Best Books of 2015” lists.

I know, I know.  It’s already 2016.  But these recommendations are a sensible way to get back into contemporary literature, if , like me, you read mainly books by the dead.   Robyn Cadwallader’s The Anchoress  cropped up on a few lists. In an article in the Guardian about publishers’ favorite books of the year, Hannah Griffiths, publishing director of Faber, said she wished more people had read and reviewed The Anchoress.

Although I am not religious, and the extent of my spiritual reading in the Middle Ages is limited to excerpts from Julian of Norwich (thank God for The Norton Anthology!), I became interested when I learned  Cadwallader is a poet. The beauty of the language makes all the difference in a book like this. This brilliant short novel not only sketches the religious life of Sarah, an anchoress in the thirteenth century, but also explores her fears, the elation of prayer, her hallucinations,  her anorexia and ill health, and her changed view of prayer as she becomes involved with the lives of her two maids, Louise and Anna, and  female visitors from the village.

Sarah  is traumatized by the senseless suffering of her beloved sister Emma, who dies in childbirth.  Sarah chooses a religious life, though Sir Thomas, a wealthy landowner, wants to marry her.  She is attracted but has a sixth sense about the kind of man he is:  he is violent.  And she knows that his father would disapprove of a match with a merchant’s daughter.

And so where does a woman go for sanctuary?  The church.

The smaller the space, the greater the suffering, the more she is the bride of Christ, or so she reasons at first. While the priests and monks have liberty to wander at large, she retires to the tiny space.  In this short, tightly-woven novel, chapters alternate between Sarah’s first-person account and a third-person account from the point of view of her confessor, Ranaulf, a scribe.

She loves the idea of giving herself to Christ, but it is much more difficult than it was in imagination.  She is terrified by the ceremony.  After the bishop says the mass, she lies on the floor of her cell listening to the men nail the door shut.  She loses consciousness for a while.  When she comes to,

I startled, fright hot and sharp in my chest.  Blows shuddered the door. I stood and pressed my hands against it, felt nails splintering wood the sound sharp in my ears, then echoing inside my head.  These hammer blows that sealed my door were the nailing of my hands and feet to the cross with Christ, the tearing of his skin and sinew.  The jolt of each blow pushed me away but I strained to feel it, the shiver of resistance humming in my body.

Sarah is not completely alone.  She communicates with her two maids, her confessor, and visitors through a small window. She is responsible for her young maid Anna’s spiritual life.  But so much about her prayer is denial of her own bodily needs, and hallucinations brought on by starvation and deprivation. She hears Agnes,  the anchorite who died in the cell, speaking to her about Christ. She makes herself bleed and, on one occasion, wears a hair shirt.  But her convictions change when she learns that her predecessor, Isabella, did not die but left the cell. And after her young maid Anna gets pregnant, she realizes she has some responsibility for what had happened. When Sarah, Louise, and the women of the village try to shield Anna from a punitive exile demanded by the church, even Ranaulf  takes the women’s side.

The Anchoress is a gorgeous novel.  Every sentence is perfectly chiseled and formed. I grew to love and respect Sarah. My only criticism?  I am not quite sure Ranaulf would have changed his mind so readily about women.  Still, it is a great book.  Had I read it a day earlier, it would have made my Best of 1015.