Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand. Fred Vargas, 2004

Ah, the French. The last time I read something translated from the French had to have been 8th grade for Madame Barnett. And I am guessing that Madame Barnett’s translation skills topped those of Sian Reynolds who translated this book. I think I was 3 pages in before I decided that the book must be translated or else Fred Vargas was a very very awkward writer. Turned out the former was the case. You would think that the fact that the story takes place in Paris would have clued me in on page 1 but, no, it was not until page 3, “The prospect gave him a cast-iron excuse for opening a bottle of white wine before six o’clock,” when I realized I was definitely in foreign territory. In the U.S. of A there don’t seem to be many cast-iron excuses for police officers finishing their desk work with a bottle of white wine at the office. But I diverge…that is really a cultural translation issue and my problems with this text lie in the literal translation. However, despite my concerns with the quality of translation, Ms. Vargas seems quite happy with Ms. Reynolds work as she has translated a number of her novels into English.

I had finally gotten used to the writing style when the plot of the novel moves us from Paris, France to Ottowa, Canada. Once the story arrives there Ms. Reynolds takes the liberty of creating a sort of dialect for the Canadians that was so distracting I often had to go back to read for content because I had lost part of the story while paying attention to such ridiculous lines as, “What about this weather! Hey, man, what have you been up to, with all that mud on your pants?” This appears to be Ms. Reynolds attempt at comparing the more casual French of the Canadians to that of the French. A note at the end of the book states, “Canadian French differs more in terms of idiom and vocabulary from the French spoken in France than Canadian English does from British or US English. The French characters here sometimes find the language difficult to follow, but the examples have necessarily been cut or modified for translation.” It is an understandably difficult task to get this across to the reader, but I truly believe this nuance could have easily been dropped when being translated. So, perhaps my issues do lie with both the cultural and literal translations of this book.

Anyhow, on to the story which gets second billing here to translation issues. This book is a French version of a trashy American mystery novel. It is complete with an obsessive, offensive and potentially sociopathic police chief who is lucky to have a cast of devotees that help him to get out of scrapes. The chief, Adamsberg is the central character in a number of books by Vargas, three of which have won various awards. The plot of this novel is vaguely intriguing and delves into the chief’s personal history. There are a couple of twists and turns but nothing breathtaking. All in all this is not a book I would recommend unless you have a strange fascination with the French and want to learn more about what books they must be reading on the beach this summer.

The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon, 2006

As a coda to my inadvertently 9/11-obsessed reading patterns of the past weeks, I stumbled across this book while perusing the library’s collection of graphic novels (I’ll leave my confusion as to why this was put in the fiction section aside). I had actually tried to read the actual 9/11 Report when it came out, and found myself bogged down in its 580 pages so, in the appropriately American tradition, I waited until it came out with pictures. But I actually found this to be a compelling and effective presentation. At 130 pages of illustrations and short snippets of text, it was infinitely more accessible than the report proper; moreover, I found there to be something nicely humanizing about the presentation. The report seems to focus pretty evenly on the acts of the terrorists leading up to the attack and the failures (and limited successes) of various American agencies and leaders during the same period, and they’re all rendered as familiar people, a similarity that can get lost in just reading the report, given how unfamiliar and even unpronounceable some of the foreign names can be. (A special mention should be made of the lovingly rendered, full page, grey scale portrait of Donald Rumsfeld on p. 125, which taught me more than I ever wanted to know about the details of his wrinkles).
There’s not too much to review here: it’s a straight forward, pretty even handed report about how efficiently the terrorists worked and how poorly we anticipated and responded, appended by a report card from 2005 showing that we’ve done a terrible job of taking up the commission’s recommendations. But if you’re in the mood for a beautifully illustrated, brutally honest and thoroughly depressing historical-graphic-text about September 11th, I’m pretty sure you’re pretty much stuck with this. Or Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers. Wow, I can’t believe there are really two of them out there.

The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell, 2002; Vintage Didion by Joan Didion, 2004

I had absolutely no intention of reviewing these books together, or reading them together, or for that matter reading them at all. I was reintroduced to Vowell by a mention of her in a Nick Hornby book review that I was reading (the two are friends) and have generally had good luck with the work of “This American Life” commentators, and this book of essays from 2002 was all the library had in stock. A couple of weeks later, I ransacked the library’s small collection of Didion’s work, which I’ve been meaning to dig into since I read and was moved by A Year of Magical Thinking.
But, as it turned out, the two collections had a great deal in common. At their heart, they are both examples of how to be a dissident patriot, written by two women whose topic of choice is American politics – for Vowell, the long duree of American political history, particularly the Civil War, on to the seeming futility of being a liberal during the 2000 election; for Didion, the brutal immediacy of America’s actions through the Reagan presidency and the mindless stupidity in Washington during the 1998 impeachment hearings. They bring to their political ruminations a great deal of humanity, offering glimpses of obsessed newsgroup users preaching vehemently to the choir and intimate portraits of Nancy Reagan and her contemporaries. Vowell is more overtly personal, with her own life as the focus of most of her essays and the politically oriented ones interspersed with more intimate portraits of her job working for an antique map dealer, or how it felt to grow up with a twin. But the personal is political, or at least the political is personal for Vowell, who recounts her difficulty looking at 16th century renderings of Cherokees without becoming mildly obsessed with the Trail of Tears, and the irony of using Andrew Jackson engraved $20 bills to pay for such a purchase.
What is perhaps most engaging about these two volumes is quite how personally Didion and Vowell seem to take American politics, how it is embedded in their daily lives and psyches, their admiration for the concept of American democracy. And alongside that is a deep, intense distaste for its perversion, although such perversion accounts for at least as much space in each of these volumes as the admiration does. Vowell tries to bring them together – to make the admiration of ideology triumph over the pesky and dirty details of reality – in “The Nerd Voice,” which recounts her trip to DC for the 2000 inauguration, and how she took time out to look at the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and to stop by the Lincoln Memorial to read a little bit of his second inaugural address. Didion is slightly more bleak, overwhelmed by the abhorrent political situation in El Salvador that the US helped create, by the corrupt relationships between Washington and Cuban Miami, and the atmosphere of racism and classism that created the necessary atmosphere for the Central Park Jogger case of the late 1980s (an aside: this essay “Sentimental Journeys,” that chronicles the factors that turned this shoddy case into a media-fueled slam dunk, was originally published in 1990; in 2002 the conventions were overturned when DNA evidence proved the guilt of another man).
Knowing the trajectory of Vowell’s book – namely, its publication date – and having closely examined Didion’s table of contents, it was impossible to read these books without acknowledging the looming spectre of September 11, 2001. With due respect to the editors for creating such a tension, part of what is so eerie as a reader is to watch the evolution of these criticisms knowing that each author is approaching what was, for any American with a tie to politics and a clear – if critical – patriotism, a watershed moment. That these women have both spent a good part of their life in New York (as is clearly related in Vowell’s earlier essays, but which plays little part in this collection of work by Didion, since it reflects mostly pieces from when she was living in California) means that one is expecting a response to the events of September 11th and to its aftermath, that one reads the earlier essays looking for hints as to how these women might act and how their views might prove incapable of accommodating such a shock to their worldview, and gives what could otherwise be relatively disjointed essays a feel of historical cohesion. And their responses to the event are not disappointing – well thought out, passionate, proclaiming their own right to have a say and protesting the jingoistic, fascist shut-down of opposition voices that both place in convincing, although different historical contexts (for Didion, it echoes back to the right-wing extremist assertion that the nation was outraged by Clinton’s sexual practices without actually considering if the majority of people cared about it or not; for Vowell, the tone mirrors her earlier laments about being part of a voting majority whose presidential candidate was summarily dispossessed by 5 Supreme Court Justices).
Vowell’s book was certainly an easier read, with shorter essays and a constant interjection of the wry humor that characterizes “This American Life.” Serious material is interspersed with a eulogy for Cowboy’s coach Tom Landry and nothing, not even her genuine grief and frustrations, is so intense that she can’t take a minute out to laugh at herself, a quality that makes The Partly Cloudy Patriot a fun and easy read, although it will also help you catch up on details of American history and politics that might have passed you by (the Gettysburg Address is only ten sentences! During the French Revolution, gangs roved the streets destroying references to the Church, including the word “Saint” in street names). In comparison, this collection of Didion’s work is much more somber and reaches a bit deeper, both chronologically and in terms of its content, although it too is chock full of historical facts that one should remember but doesn’t, like the United States’ involvement in Central American massacres or the close involvement between the Reagan White House and Afghani mujahadeen. It is perhaps better taken in small doses, where Vowell can be swallowed whole, but is worth the time to savor and, for anyone who’s frustrated with the current state of politics, to stew.