Good evening! Reporting to you live from my living room floor where I am leaning against the radiator. My body has the structural integrity of Flubber because I had a massage today, so I am feeling unstressed n blessed. Let us discuss, as per usual:
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I read Jean Rhys’ short story collection Tigers Are Better Looking (1968); the edition I read also had some stories from her first collection, The Left Bank (1927). A lot of the stories are more like little sketches, using a lot of tropes that appear in her longer fiction. What I found especially interesting were the moments when she deviated from these tropes and experimented a bit. There’s a story in there set in a French hotel, in which the protagonist is a classic Rhys character (melancholy, a little alcoholic, running away from something), but she interacts with an older woman who is much more hopeful and kind than most characters that she writes. Maybe it is in the shorter form that she found room to experiment, but it did occasionally surprise me, which I wasn’t expecting.
The selections from The Left Bank were also fun to read as a big Rhys fan — you can see how she has developed from this first collection, but you can also see why Ford Madox Ford was so keen to publish her. In his introduction to the collection, he comments on how ‘no word is wasted’ and how he was often met with rebuffs from her when he suggested putting more description or suggested using more ‘flowery language’. It’s true — she does not waste words, she gives you just enough.
It would be remiss of me not to comment on the most surprising story in there, which was ‘Let Them Call It Jazz.’ ‘Jazz’ made me confront the aspects of Rhys’s life and work that I find the most difficult. I don’t really think that she herself can be defined as a coloniser, as she left the West Indies as basically a teenager after being born there (something that none of us can help) and hardly ever went back. What is difficult about this aspect of her life is how she often writes about it, sometimes seeking sympathy for white characters in these settings, sometimes not, sometimes writing about Black West Indians with cold detachment, sometimes not. ‘Jazz’ is written from the perspective of a Black West Indian woman, which initially made me cringe, but the story itself shows that she was actually much more in tune with the subtle kind of racism that is often passed off as ‘personal dislike’ for someone.
She halfheartedly attempts a West Indian vernacular (which she kind of gives up on half way through) which, again, made me cringe a bit, so this isn’t a technically great story. However, the protagonist is given a lot of grace — we can see how she has, like Rhys’ white characters, a complicated history and a tumultuous ‘inner life’ as they say. She is targeted by some neighbours who constantly try and get her into trouble, and Rhys writes surprisingly well on how insidious racism that can be denied because no direct bigoted language has been used manifests in day-to-day interactions. It felt quite Gothic in a way, reading how this woman unravels because nobody will believe her when she tells them about her experience. There is an irony there, but it did make me feel like Rhys spent a lot of time thinking about race and her own place in it, but specifically in England not her birthplace, which she sets a lot of her texts in (at least partially) but doesn’t often reflect on.
I don’t have any conclusions to all of this really, and that’s largely because she didn’t either.
I also read Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) — I literally finished it about an hour and a half ago (afterwards I rang Rhys and had a bitch n a moan n a catch up, it was a nice little break).(Also realise I have been writing about the writer Rhys and then called my friend Rhys. I did not call Jean Rhys on the phone.)
I liked Atocha quite a bit, about an American man completing a poetry fellowship in Madrid. The whole thing is about translation, from literal language translation (both written and spoken) to how we translate the things we see in front of us to our own perception of them. I particularly liked the moments when Adam, the protagonist, is not able to understand the Spanish that people talk to him/around him, and he instead has entire conversations in which he is basically imagining what the other person is saying, and attributes greater significance to this dialogue than they perhaps intend. I also really liked the reflections on reading as an act of translation,and how understanding what we have read can be different to the act of it. For example:
Ashbery’s flowing sentences always felt as if they were making sense, but when you looked up from the page, it was impossible to say what sense had been made; while they used the language of logical connection — “but”, “therefore”, “so”— and the language that implied narrative development — “then”, “next”, “later”— such terms were merely propulsive; there was no actual organising logic or progression.Reading an Ashbery sentence, an elaborate sentence stretched over many lines, one felt the arc ans feel of thinking in the absence of thoughts.
It’s truly wonderfully written, with lots of moments like this that feel very bright and real. My issue with the novel overall, however, is that he labours the same point over and over again, which is probably intentional, but makes for dull reading after a while. Liked it, didn’t love it.
Books on my radar
I’ve been sent some great books in the mail this week! Highlights are :
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer (2023) (Extremely up my alley as I’m sooo fascinated by fame and how it is constructed. This is about when bad people make great art and how to respond to it. Relevant, maybe). Published by Sceptre.
Wild Geese by Soula Emmanuel (2023). Published by Footnote Press.
Never Was by H. Gareth Gavin (2023). Published by Cipher Press.
Books & Islands by Louise Erdrich (2023). Published by Daunt Publishing