Booklog for Charlotte

Fear and Trembling by Amélie Nothomb

Amélie Nothomb has written several short autobiographical novels; this one won the Grand Prix de la Académie Française. She was born in Japan as her father was a Belgian diplomat. After attending the University of Brussels, she became a translator for a large firm in Japan.

Fear and Trembling is about a translator named Amélie with a year-long contract with a large company in Japan where she encounters ogres and makes "mistakes" that result in her demotion to bathroom attendant. The story of her time there reveals the underlying aspects of Japanese culture that create the monsters. To some extent her mistakes are the result of being a Westerner in Eastern culture, but the corporate culture makes it impossible for her to succeed. 

You know that all will not go well when on her first day of work Mr. Saito rejects each of her efforts to write a letter in English responding to an invitation to play golf.

    The exercise seemed simple enough. I sat down and wrote a cordial letter, something along the lines of "Mister Saito would be delighted to play golf next Sunday with Mister Johnson and sends him his best regards, etc, etc." I took it to Mr. Saito.

    He read my work, gave a scornful little cry and tore it up.

    "Start over."

    I thought I had perhaps been too friendly or familiar with Adam Johnson, and composed a cold, formal reply. "Mister Saito acknowledges Mister Johnson's request and wishes to inform him of his willingness to conform with his desires by engaging in a game of golf with him, etc, etc."

    He read my work, gave a scornful little cry, and tore it up.

    "Start over."

This continued for some hours with Amélie eventually becoming playful in her attempts and Mr. Saito tearing up her efforts without reading them. It finally ended with the arrival Amélie's superior Miss Mori. Sometimes the counter-productive actions of individuals can be related to the culture or their own interests, but sometimes the causes are impenetrable.

At the end of her time there when she gives her resignation speech to Mr. Saito, he apologizes for her experiences. 

    Poor Mister Saito. I was the one comforting him. Despite his status and position, he was both a slave to and an inept torturer in a sytem that he almost certainly didn't like but which--out of weakness and lack of imagination--he would never question.

Tony (Tony's Book World) has been an Amélie Nothomb enthusiast for some time. Her books are available from Amazon and the UVa library. The public library has two of her works.

Amélie Nothomb, Fear and Trembling, trans. Adriana Hunter, St. Martin's Press, 2001, 132 pages.

Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore

Jane Franklin Mecom was the beloved younger sister of Benjamin Franklin with whom she had a lively correspondence.  She married badly and spent her young years caring for her many children and coping with the repossession of household goods to cover her husband’s debts. The Book of Ages is Jane’s small crudely made book that records the births and so sadly often, the deaths of her children. Later she cared for her grandchildren and continued to struggle to survive with the help of Benjamin. Eventually he set her up in a house and provided for her so that she lived a comfortable old age.

 Because the record she left is so scant, though far greater than most women of the 18tn century, the book is more a history of the lives of the times, including the experience of the Revolutionary War by people like her. And of course, you inevitably learn much about Benjamin Franklin from this account.

There are many justified complaints about the treatment of Jane; the last was that her house was demolished in 1939 to make room for a memorial to Paul Revere, not even the statue itself, but the public’s view of the statue. Many of the early chapters ended on a note of comparing Jane's life to Benjamin's.  

Jill Lepore wrote the story of this ordinary life “to offer a history of history and to explain how history is written from what remains of the lives of the great, the bad and not as often the good." A long section at the end of Jane's story recounts the treatment by historians of Benjamin Franklin. She writes scathingly of Jared Sparks, considered the first American historian, who wrote The Life and Writings of George Washington and a similar work about Franklin. He was taken to task for altering the text of these men, and by Jill Lepore for editing a portion of a letter written by Jane Franklin and apparently discarding the original. 

I listened to the book over the course of an unusually long period and considered abandoning it. Perhaps audio was not the way to go with a book like this. I found the reader's inflections too strong (too many pregnant pauses and other indications of how you should react to the words). 

Jill Lepore, The Book of Ages, Knopf, 2013, 464 pages (I listened to the audiobook version).

The Sugar Mother by Elizabeth Jolley

I was moved to read this by ANZ LitLovers' enthusiasm for it. She describes the plot which involves a fussy academic on his own while his younger obstetrician wife is away for a year as "delicious." It's hard to identify with these characters at the outset as their quirkiness defines them. By fussy I mean having three notebooks to record observations of his body: one for the external, one for the internal and one for intangibles. Cecilia laughs at all the foolish self-centered things he says, and apparently laughs all the time. She has left detailed instructions for his care with her friend Daphne and their set of friends with whom they have ritualized wife-swapping parties. Her plans are thwarted by a mother-daughter team in need of a benefactor who moved in next door shortly before Cecilia left.

Within moments of her departure, they arrive on his doorstep as they were locked out of their rental house and in their first conversation, the mother determines they have no children. 

"Aw, well, what will be -- will be as I always say," she nodded wisely. "They seem to go in these days for sugared mothers don't they."

"Sorry?" Edwin paused. "Ah!" he said, "surrogate." He laughed in his most charming way. "not sugared," he said.

"Yes," Leila's mother said. "that's the word. With no family," she pronounced it 'farmily,' "a woman can be very lonesome."

The mother and Edwin work out a plan to provide Cecilia with a surprise baby for the family and Edwin finds he appreciates the good cooking and care the mother provides as he falls in love with the soft and largely silent Leila. His anxieties and need to make records in his notebooks diminishes and it is many months before he begins to consider the possibility that Leila was already pregnant when they arrived.

As I have not withheld plot turns, you might wonder why I haven't revealed what happens when Cecilia returns early while mother, daughter, and new baby are still in the house. The end of this book is pleasingly, deliciously inconclusive.

Not surprisingly there is not a smooth flowing narrative, but a series of narrow escapes and surprising realizations for Edwin. For all their foolishness, the characters have their appealing moments and one laughs at them in a kindly way.

Elizabeth Jolley is a much respected Australian author who died in 2007.

Available at the UVa library and from Amazon.

Elizabeth Jolley, The Sugar Mother, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1988, 210 pages.

The Cleaner of Chartres by Salley Vickers

This is my second book by this author; I read The Other Side of You in 2007 so my memory of it is a bit vague. It was engaging but I wrote about some reservations relating to gender matters. I was moved to read this one by Annabel's House of Books' awarding it the book with the Best Sense of Place for 2013. Having loved the town of Chartres as well as the cathedral when we visited in 2010, I found that reason enough and it turns out to have been the case. 

We meet Agnes, the cleaner, in the present time, in Chartres where she has lived for 20 years. We learn about her beginnings in chapters that alternate with ones that occur in the present time. We know we are in "the present time" by certain occasional references, email, for example. Generally I had the feeling we were in a bygone era, as somehow Agnes had been handed over to a convent as a baby and never learned to read.

The fairy tale nature of this story is evident from the discovery of Agnes in a basket as a baby to her two years of bucolic life caring for the dying farmer who had found her to the evil widow trying to discredit her to her deliverance by the Abbe and the cathedral restorer (another cleaner) who loves her.  Fairy tales can be so satisfying.

You can see a hint of the cemetery where I took this photo of the cathedral.

 

This book is available at the public library and from Amazon.

Sally Vickers, The Cleaner of Chartres, Viking, 2013, 297 pages.

 

The House at Sea's End by Elly Griffiths

Having now read the third book in the Ruth Galloway series, I can say Elly Griffiths has created a pleasing setting and appealing characters. Ruth is a forensic archaeologist who teaches at a university on the Norfolk coast in England who is called in to help the police when bones are found. Nelson, the detective she has worked with is tall, gruff, good at his job and happily married. In the first book he and Ruth fell into bed after a horrifying event. Now in the third book, their daughter Kate is some months old, and only those two know who the father is. There are other fun characters, most notably Cathbad the Druid who organizes a naming ceremony for Kate.

Besides the characters, there's the interesting setting. It is the erosion of the coastline that sets the plot in motion by uncovering six bodies of young men who turn out to have been dead for decades. The erosion is threatening a house (the house referred to in the title) which has already lost its back garden and is perched on the edge of a cliff. The Norfolk coastal area is lovingly described with its salt marshes and quaint villages.

The murderous events were not the most interesting part of the book, but an adequate vehicle for these characters.

Elly Griffiths, The House at Sea's End, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, 353 pages. 

By the Book: A Reader's Guide to Life by Ramona Koval

Reading this book recommended by Reading Matters was a very fun meander through the life of a Melbourne literary journalist as illustrated by the books on her shelves. She was born in the mid-50s to Polish parents who were fortunate to survive the Holocaust and landed in Australia after the war. Her mother read widely and encouraged Ramona to do so as well, including buying the Kama Sutra for her when she requested it at age 12.

One book that landed in her path by happenstance was the first volume of a work called Home Management, apparently published in the early 1950s. It notably suggested ways to liven up the old scraps in the larder, for example, "cold diced meat takes on a new lease of life set in aspic jelly with a few peas and egg slices for colour".  From there she goes on to write about books that did influence her, such as Madame Bovary, books by Collette, short stories by Grace Paley, and many more. I made additions to my to-be-read list as I made my way through this book. 

The tone is conversational as when she says about Grace Paley's "Goodbye and Good Luck", "I really want to read you the whole story--it is so lovely, so full of hope and grace." She often mentions her mother who died too young with love and regret and matter of factly mentions in passing some of her unfortunate life-choices. But the focus is on the books which loomed so large in her life that she eventually presented The Book Show, "the world's only daily radio program devoted to books, writing and publishing" (according to Wikipedia). 

Somehow books also lead her to some great adventures that she recounts for us including camping with a naturalist in the bush who chastised her for pointing at a tree full of birds, saying that no self-respecting naturalist would ever point at birds. "It was like traveling with a British public school headmaster crossed with one of the chaps from Monte Python." And the time she traveled by sled pulled by seven huskies in Canada.

She mentions reading Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra, reminding me that I couldn't get that book out of my ten-year-old daughter's hands so that we could actually see it while we were there. I enjoyed listening to the audiobook version a few years ago. And she writes about seeing the Sarajevo Haggadah, but didn't mentioned Geraldine Brooks' wonderful People of the Book.

Available as a Kindle book and print version through Amazon. Her book, Tasting Life Twice: Conversations with Remarkable Writers is in the UVa library.

Ramona Koval, By the Book: a Reader's Guide to Life, Text Publishing, 2012, 256 pages.