Not One Day, by Anne Garréta

I choose short books to read for Women in Translation month in the hope that I can get through more books than I do in the average month. So now, although it took me a week and a half to read Go, Went, Gone, we are at the mid-point in August and I've finished my third book. Not One Day is just under 100 pages, but it's not an especially fast read. I found myself rereading paragraphs regularly, even sometimes going back a page or two because I found my mind wandering. But then on the second, or sometimes third (one chapter, Y, required even more) reread, the force of what Garréta had written would finally hit and I would find myself awestruck, and then perhaps I would reread it once more to feel it again. 

But let me back up. Not One Day is a book (a memoir? a confession?) that states at the outset what it intends to do: Each day for one month, the author will write from memory about a woman she has desired, or who has desired her. She will spend five hours each day on one woman, making a full-time job of it. Garréta is a member of Oulipo who regularly writes with constraints, and these are the constraints she has laid out for herself for this book. Right away, however, you (the reader) realize that something is off. Opposite the dedication (TO NONE!!), there is a table of contents. At a glance, you can tell it's not 30 chapters long. And besides, there is simply the length of the book: could five hours a day for 30 days produce a scant 100 pages? The post script reveals all (well, some). Garréta bored of the project after a week, she became distracted, she procrastinated, she got caught up in reading Chateaubriand, sixteen months later she had 12 accounts of desire (one of which is a fiction), and those are what we find in the book, organized alphabetically after the the first initials of the women have been reshuffled according to some cypher. 

I wrote a little about my experience with Oulipo last year when I read Garréta's first book, Sphinx. The Oulipo books I was familiar with by reputation – A Void most notably – always seemed to have constraints that I believed would make the writing more difficult (both to compose and to read – how could a novel with no Es not be clunky? – let alone to translate). Sphinx and to a greater extent Not One Day – as well as my own writing practice – really changed my perspective on constraints. The constraints that Garréta sets out for herself for Not One Day are not so different from the conditions I've set for myself during my most productive periods of writing. (I only wish I could devote five hours in a day.) I regularly participate in the novelist Jami Attenberg's 1000 Words of Summer, a writing accountability project where participants strive and mutually encourage each other to write 1000 words a day for 2 weeks (or one week in the mini versions). The pomodoro technique is also a type of constraint that encourages productivity. (Personally, I find that word count goals work better for me than time goals.) When I did 1000 Words of Summer in 2020, the project I set up for myself was in one way quite similar to Garréta's constraints for Not One Day. Every day, I wrote 1000 words, relying solely on my memory (or such was the intention), about a place I had visited. In parts of Not One Day where Garréta talks about memory – about the limits and fallibility of memory, something I both struggled with and wanted to represent in my writing about places and travel. So, where I always imagined the constraints would make writing harder, I think they often do the opposite. The trick, of course, is – within the constraints – to make a book that's still interesting or beautiful or profound (or to throw away the constraints when they stop serving you). Not One Day does all of this.

Happiness, as Such, by Natalia Ginzburg

Continuing with Women in Translation Month, I read Natalia Ginzburg's Happiness, as Such, which I picked up after reading and loving her book Family Lexicon. Happiness, as Such is an epistolary novel about Michele (the Italian title is Caro Michele or Dear Michele, as many of the letters open), a young Italian emigré to England, and the family and friends he has left behind in Italy. While Michele is the character who ties the story together, he's actually a small part in the book and only a few of the letters that comprise it are from him. We barely know him. But the same could be said for several of his correspondents. Or perhaps it's that each knows a different Michele. 

Michele's mother writes long, complaining letters expressing her dissatisfaction with her home life, with his departure, with the way she is treated by her family and friends. Michele's ex-lover, mother to a baby who might be his, writes funny, occasionally bitter letters revealing her own ineptitude. His sister is called upon to handle his affairs in Italy and her correspondence with him is mostly practical. The person who seems likely to have been Michele's closest friend, as well as possibly his lover, who probably could have best represented Michele to us, we mostly get to know through the what the others write about him. Instead, the Michele we know is incomplete. He is more of an absence than a presence – because that's what he was to the people he left behind.

Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck

After I read Jenny Erpenbeck's memoir, Not a Novel last year, I loved it and I knew I needed to read her fiction. Go, Went, Gone met my expectations. I went into it solely on the basis of how much I enjoyed the memoir not knowing at all what it was about*. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was a little to find the extent to which the themes from the memoir were present in the novel. 

The central character in Go, Went, Gone is Richard, a recently retired widower professor of classical philology who grew up in East Berlin then went on to have a comfortable middle class life in unified Germany. For reasons that aren't quite clear, he becomes interested in the African refugees in Berlin and ends up befriending a group of them. His acquaintance with the refugees begins to alter (to broaden really) his worldview and give his life  – which seemed to be drifting toward purposelessness on his retirement – a new vitality. While the book addresses the tragic histories and frustrating realities of the refugees, it does so in a very quiet way. These stories – Richard's and the refugees'  – could have been told very differently. They could have been action rather than memory (a two-star review on Goodreads describes the prose as "communist grey") – but the way they were told worked for me. I loved the quiet, meditative feeling of this book.

*I realize I say something like this often in these posts. I prefer to read books knowing as little as possible about them ahead of time. I almost never read the plot summaries on the back covers of books. If I do, I try to just read the first sentence. Instead, I'll read the first page to get a sense of the writing.