Dubious Joys

Yesterday, in an incident that I have been telling my friends was a "flurry of post-gastroenteritic activity" (I am mostly well, but still get dizzy and nauseated when I eat anything, go up and down stairs, read editorials about the State of the Union, or sometimes when I stand up, so this leaves lots of time for reading novels), I flew through the last halves of "The Joys of Motherhood" and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall." And to tell you the truth, the feminist within did not feel greatly cheered. So, an expanded version of my book group notes:

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"The Joys of Motherhood" by Buchi Emecheta

After finishing this tale of Nnu Ego, the daughter of a powerful Ibo leader in colonial Nigeria of the 30s and 40s, and her quest for self-completion through motherhood, I complained to my book group that 'One thing I found curious, and in fact totally alienating in a number of senses, was the various strategies the author had for situating the reader as an outsider to Nigeria, the historical period, and Ibo culture. Rather than developing a sense of sympathy in the reader for various characters (including the protagonist, Nnu Ego) by inhabiting their point of view fully, the narrative often flits from one point of view to another, or features (unnecessary) contextualizing statements that begin "In her culture,..." or "At that time,...." The effect is rather didactic and even a little bit anthropological in a way that made me slightly uncomfortable.' One of my fellow members responded with the excellent possibility that these distancing strategies are perhaps a narrative strategy that has a long tradition in Nigerian literature. I am intrigued by this, but don't know quite where to go to research it. Suggestions, or authoritative answers, are welcome. Particularly jarring (but natural, perhaps, and even interesting in a novel written in a later period, from London, and in English - a language both nationalized and colonial in Nigeria) were contextualizing moments in which Nnu Ego thought (I paraphrase) : "I wonder if someday women will actually be free to make their own choices, to define themselves as more than mothers" before she goes back to telling her daughters that they must sacrifices their wishes for those of those of their brothers and fathers. The events of the novel tell a story more complex this abrupt and historically knowing sort of moralizing, I think.

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"The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Bronte

This is a book for which spoilers may indeed spoil, so I will be minimal in my discussion of the plot: the unbearably immature and impulsive Gilbert Markham becomes intrigue by a beautiful young widow who moves, with her son, into the dilapidated Wildfell Hall. As the town urges itself claustrophobically into her past and her mores, questions are raised regarding her virtue when she receives surreptitious visits from a coveted local bachelor. This summary covers roughly the first hundred pages of this five hundred pager, with the rest mostly consumed by her explanation to Markham. It is my first Chunkster of the year (triumph!), but it is a Chunkster that needn't have been: a mere wisp of a novella hiding inside an elephant suit. The plot creaks under Bronte's attempt to wring every last moment of pathos and didactic purpose out of the theme of alchoholism (of which she had painful first hand experience thanks to her brother Branwell). Bronte does excellent work populating her fictional world with a cast of flawed characters with whom it is almost impossible to feel any sympathy; it may be that her motivation was less a grotesquely (and thus, to my mind, interestingly) misanthropic worldview and more of a desire to highlight the incredible self-abnegating virtue required to be a loving Christian in such a world. Too bad. The result is a novel which is gripping, but rather dispiriting to read. The novel did provide me with a favorite moment, however, when woman of none-too-strict morals speaks to her acquaintance (and rival) about the latter's amorously meandering husband: ""At any rate, you can console yourself with the assurance that you are worthy of all the love he gives to you." Best backhanded compliment of the week.

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"The Joys of Motherhood" (UK/Nigeria 1979)
Buchi Emecheta
**1/2

"The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (UK 1848)
Anne Bronte
***

Life Lessons and their perils

So, after several days in the grips of stomach flu I have this to report:

I have been making my way, roughly in tandem, through two book club reads, Anne Bronte's "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" and Buchi Emecheta's "The Joys of Motherhood." The dual experience of these books (I am about halfway through each) has taught me two important life lessons:

1) Men are bad.
2) Marriage is a blight on the lives of women.

Oh, and perhaps a third, which may in fact negate the other two:

3) I am desperately glad to be living in 21st C Connecticut.

Perhaps not the most admirable of conclusions. More later...

"Silk"

My life is filled with weighty tomes at the moment (a fact not completely unrelated to my participation in the Chunkster Challenge," so I thought it might be refreshing to dip into a novella (a novella of fragmentary episodes, no less) while taking a break from "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," "Suite Francaise," and the New-York-Review-of-Book-that-never-ends-even-when-I-devote-whole-days-to-reading-it. Upping the novelty level by another notch, I chose a novella by an author who is totally unfamiliar to me: "Silk" by Italian music critic Alessandro Baricco.

It is the tale of Herve Joncour, a French dealer in silkworm eggs. When a blight infects Europe's hatcheries, Joncour ventures farther afield, to the Middle East, to India, and finally, in desperation, to Japan, which is largely closed to foreign trade. In fact, the unrivaled quality of their silk is so important to Japan that the penalty for taking silkworm eggs out of the country is death. While there, Joncour meets the lordly Hara Kei, who supplies him with eggs, and falls in love with Hara Kei's mistress. The story that unfolds has been hailed by critics as a love-story of the highest caliber, but this love story does not seem to me to be between Joncour and the unknown, almost untouched Japanese woman, but rather between him and the wife with a velvet voice he comes home to again and again, heartsick for Japan.

The only thing that keeps me from rushing out and buying this stunningly precise, poetic little book for all my friends is its unfortunate old-school Orientalism, its idea that the East is to be desired as the Other that reveals the Self (it is significant, and painful to read, that what makes Joncour's Japanese love so striking for him is that her eyes "did not have an oriental slant," a detail which he repeats which almost ritualistic fervor). Sometimes the book seems ironically (am I just being hopeful?) aware of the failures of its Orientalism. Throughout Japan (the "end of the world") is referred to in the terms of its silk - so light and luxuriant that it disappears into pleasurable nothingness, invisibility that conveys mystique. But then, in a breathtaking passage, Joncour returns to Japan while it is torn by civil war, only to find that Hara Kei's estate (and in fact the whole town) has been burned to the ground: "Behind him lay a road eight thousand kilometres long. In front of him, nothing. He had a sudden glimpse of what he had long considered invisible. The end of the world" (59). How skillful the translation (by Guido Waldman) must be to convey this knot of double meanings.

And then my favorite passage, a signal through the flames of civil war, which conveys a sense of the condescension and delight of Joncour's love. While across the world in France, he receives a letter, in Japanese: "It looked like a catalogue of the footprints of little birds, fanatically meticulous in its compilation. It was surprising to consider that in fact these were signs, that is, the embers of a voice destroyed by fire" (76).


"Silk" (Italy, 1997)
Alessandro Baricco
****