For Your Gifts

This is the fourth in a series of five novels based on the author’s family. The first book, Fields of Glory, amazed me with its meticulous interweaving of mundane descriptions of family members until slowly the light breaks in and you realize that this is a story of monumental importance.

His second book, of which the New York Times reviewer said “it is clear from the first page that Jean Rouaud is a writer who knows exactly where he is going and how to get there,” focuses on the author’s father. The third book is about the author himself, and this book portrays the mother.

As the portrait develops, you realize why this women has done little more than hover in the periphery of the previous volumes. “She will not read these lines,” For Your Gifts opens, and this becomes a refrain: a lament and an explanation, a prerequisite for the book’s existence.

The impressive thing about this book is that it is sad and touching and only reluctantly recriminating. What difficult person could be more complicated for a son to understand than his own mother? He painstakingly sorts through her past, the circumstances that made her the way she is, the person she must have been before her marriage, how many things she lost and left behind before he ever knew her. It is only then that he approaches the motif that shadows every page of his writing, his father’s death, which left his mother a young widow.

It was hard at first for me to like this book. Rouaud’s tortuous sentences, his unremitting sensitivity to every detail and every possible significance of every combination of details, sometimes tire me. Sometimes I feel like his metaphors are too stetched, but then I realize he could be right. I think his striking comparison of death and grief to birth and infancy may be worth considering.

When the author’s father died suddenly at the age of 41, his mother summoned help by knocking on the wall they shared with their neighbor:

It seems that with her fists beating on the wall she made her first appearance, as if all those years spent taking care of her family were a long gestation, a waiting, so that when the moment came . . . being deprived so long of the weight of speech and remembering the drumbeats on TV that made you hold your breath as death approached, she only had that primitive resource to announce her entrance into the world, as if by this announcement of imminent death, pounding like a tragic funeral drum, she signaled, in a way, her birth.

We think that maybe mourning was an excuse, that she was charged with too heavy a load, that all of her sorrow was not necessarily because of the deceased—that she had to bring to this birth the cries of the newborn, to sort through the tears, and to distinguish the formulaic fear of death from the unformulated wail of life. For she cries, our mother brutally abandoned in the December night, just like the one emerging from the waters who is thoughtlessly plunged into the great bath of nitrogen and oxygen. How do you survive this?

Now, she knows an infant’s fragility. She lost her first child at three weeks. One year could have understandably appeared to her an unattainable horizon. One year, while sudden death prowls and a thousand traps, one year to learn to balance and stand upright, which took our ancestors three million years—one year, for any newborn, is the end of the world. And this silence of hers after the disappearance of our spokesperson, which she only broke to ask us what we wanted to eat . . . This silence that we instantly attributed to the event that left us voiceless—we could certainly blame our mother for not being precocious, but how long does it take a child to express itself correctly? Five years? Six? Ten years before being able to choose the right article and to tell stainless steel from aluminum, white glass from colored glass, cut from molded crystal. That’s exactly how much time she took from her stock of years to rediscover the full use of speech.

Like it or hate it, this is a pretty good example of the way this writer stretches your view of things.

I eventually even began to admire the person he was taking such pains to faithfully present. This power to gain sympathy should not be surprising from an author who brings such humor and generous curiosity to his study of death and loss.

I have learned that the translator of Rouaud’s first three books died about six months ago but maybe this gives you time to catch up on those until they find a translator for this one.

Plum Wine

I found this book at a library sale. I enjoy getting books I have never heard of at library sales, maybe partly because of the risk involved. It sounded good: a suspense novel about a young American woman teaching in Japan. Lee Smith called it “memorable” on the cover. I like reading about foreign settings. I myself applied to teach for a year in Japan once, and ended up teaching for a year in France.

In this book review I must be diligent to apply John Updike’s six rules for reviewers, which are well worth reading and following.

Plum Wine is not the book I hoped it would be. It has many merits, such as describing the effects of the atomic bomb on the people who lived in Hiroshima. I learned more than I knew about that particular experience.

The premise is intriguing: a woman who dies mysteriously and bequeaths her scroll-diaries to the American teacher Barbara, who then has to make sense of the gift. It is cute to read about the Japanese people’s efforts to pronounce her name—”Balabala.” But is the book as good as it could be, given what it is? It is hard to pin down what is lacking.

Some of the things that annoy me most about the book are actually very true to life. I was frustrated with the main character because she makes only the most meager, half-hearted efforts to learn Japanese, even though her failure to do so isolates her and magnifies all her problems. However, this seems to be very common among short-term American expatriates.

She has a superficial relationship with the people around her and doesn’t seek their guidance in very important matters. But I experienced a similar estrangement when I lived in France. It was hard for me to obtain guidance from the French people I knew. Whether it is caused by pride or by cultural barriers, this is realistic.

Barbara develops an intense devotion to a Japanese lady she seems to have known only very slightly. This seems contrived to the reader, but it is true that when you are all alone in a foreign country, you can become strongly attached to the people you are thrown together with, especially the other expatriates, without knowing much about their identity back home. We cannot blame the main character for caring deeply about someone she didn’t know very well.

Maybe the most unpleasant thing for me was reading about her unhealthy relationship with a Japanese man. Here Barbara is beginning to get to know Seiji better:

“Would you be interested to see my new work?”
She followed him into the pottery. There were several pieces laid out on a table. All of them had a jagged, unfinished look, a primal quality. “I have made by hand instead of on wheel,” he said as she touched the sharp edges.
“They’re powerful,” she said. “Strongly emotional.”
“Perhaps because I think of you as I make them,” he said. She took his hand and kissed it; he’d never expressed his feelings so openly before.

Of course he turns out to be exactly the kind of cad you sense he is in this passage, and the innocent American girl walks right into his trap. I suppose the story has been repeated over and over again around the world for centuries. It is true and lifelike, I am sure. But I felt like I was taken to a foreign country and then kept in a small room, taken out rarely to see only a few blurry scenes of that world.

The Country of the Pointed Firs

My grandmother gave me a 1968 edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories the last time I visited her, saying that she has read it over and over again. Taped in the flyleaf of her book is a January 1970 column by the Omaha World-Herald’s book editor calling it “lovely, if slight” and praising it along with Middlemarch as an example of beauty that endures. There is also a tiny clipping announcing that Alice Musselman will review this book for an Omaha neighborhood women’s club Wednesday, 2 p.m., at Mrs. T. Tennyson Harris’s home.

There is an address label in the back flyleaf of the book that appears to be that of Alice Musselman herself. Some passages in the book are marked for emphasis, as if for public reading.

The Country of the Pointed Firs was first published in 1896, when Sarah Orne Jewett was about 47 years old and Mrs. Harris, the hostess of the women’s club, was 9. The book review clipping is below the newspaper column, so if we assume that it was taped in afterwards, the widowed Mrs. Harris had to be at least 82 years old at the time of the women’s gathering. It is likely that my copy of the book was there, in the hands of the guest reviewer. I’m not sure where my grandmother got the book.

The only thing I had previously read by Sarah Orne Jewett was “The White Heron,” which seems to be the short story that is always chosen for the anthologies. It is a fine story, but it seems to be a rather limited example of Jewett’s writing, which is otherwise so full of human interactions and details of social life in coastal Maine.

The details are the glory of this book. I learn what it was like to live in another time, and I see fascinating characters portrayed with love and truth, their flaws described with humor rather than judgment.

Here are some examples of details about mundane life that are striking to a modern reader:

I found my luncheon ready on the table in the little entry, wrapped in its shining old homespun napkin, and as if by way of special consolation, there was a stone bottle of Mrs. Todd’s best spruce beer, with a long piece of cod line wound round it by which it could be lowered for coolness into the deep schoolhouse well.

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“Truth is, I’ve been off visitin’; there’s an old Indian footpath leadin’ over towards the Back Shore through the great heron swamp that anybody can’t travel over all summer. You have to seize your time some day just now, while the low ground’s summer-dried as it is to-day, and before the fall rains set in.”

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“It’s a dreadful long way to go with a horse; you have to go ‘most as far as the old Bowden place an’ turn off to the left, a master long, rough road, and then you have to turn right round as soon as you get there if you mean to get home before nine o’clock at night. But to strike across country from here, there’s plenty o’ time in the shortest day, and you can have a good hour or two’s visit beside; ’tain’t but a very few miles, and it’s pretty all the way along.”

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“No,” said Mrs. Hand, speaking wistfully,―“no, we never were in the habit of keeping Christmas at our house. Mother died when we were all young; she would have been the one to keep up with all new ideas, but father and grandmother were old-fashioned folks, and―well, you know how ’twas then, Miss Pendexter: nobody took much notice of the day except to wish you a Merry Christmas.”

Then there are the cute interpersonal insights:

“You must have felt very tired,” said I, eagerly listening.
“I was ‘most beat out, with watchin’ an’ tendin’ and all,” answered Mrs. Todd, with as much sympathy in her voice as if she were speaking of another person.

And finally, the philosophical musings that sometimes seem a bit too grand, but still never fail to keep you thinking about things:

More than this one cannot give to a young State for its enlightenment; the sea captains and the captains’ wives of Maine knew something of the wide world, and never mistook their native parishes for the whole instead of a part thereof; they knew not only Thomaston and Castine and Portland, but London and Bristol and Bordeaux, and the strange-mannered harbors of the China Sea.

In the introduction, the editor says that Willa Cather chose this, when asked, as one of three American novels “deserving of a long, long life,” along with The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn. I wonder which authors of our time, 100 years from now, will prove to have captured the world with such sensitivity and thoughtfulness?