booklit

There’s something about the blurb  for Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s new novel, The Mirror In The Well (2008), that just makes it all the more tempting. How could anyone not want to read a book that declares “this novel will shock and offend some readers”, even if just to prove that it’ll take more than words scattered across pages to vex them, thank you very much. The obvious concern is that if its ability to shock and offend are its main strength then, as a reading experience, these traits may be its weakness. Thankfully, this isn’t the case and The Mirror In The Well is a strong, memorable piece of writing.

The Mirror In The Well, Marcom’s fourth novel, coming fast on the heels of an acclaimed trilogy about the consequences of the Armenian Genocide, is an erotic tour de force journaling the crests and troughs of an affair between an American woman and her foreign lover, told with an unashamed explicit vocabulary that proves sensual in its own unique way.

Told from both sides of the affair - the woman in the third person, the man in the second; both remaining unnamed throughout - The Mirror In The Well opens with their first arranged meeting, having chanced upon each other at a party. His marriage “one of habit and bitter convenience and notasked questions” and hers, at fourteen years, isn’t going anywhere, especially in the bedroom:

…you fucked her twice and not the once she had been lucky to get once every two weeks or month up until this today - the one if she’d been a good and obedient girl and wife and office-worker and citizen.

On their first night together, performing cunnilingus, the man triggers in the woman a previously unknown sexual power (”teaches her the unteaching of the limits…that he can bring her to the inside of outness and that she can arrive outward with him”) that leads to a prolonged relationship explicit in both action and the language used to describe it.

While the pages that follow feature frequent sex, any accusations of pornography can be dispelled. Yes, the language used can be harsh, featuring regular vulgarisms that some may blush at, but The Mirror In The Well is not a book to titillate, using this sexual awakening to explore layers of identity, sexuality, power, and love:

But perhaps as you make her you do make her fall in. The girl falls in to love, as if love were, what exactly?, the underground stone palace where the lover has hidden the beloved? the deepest well where the serpent lives? And you expect it, demand it: Stop fucking your husband, you tell her, I can’t bear it (fall in to love with me). She stares at you; she is silent and dark looking in the eyes. I love you, you say, and thrust this inside her like your cock: love me back love me back love me only in this possession.

Where the serpent recalls the Garden of Eden, The Mirror In The Well is not without other such Biblical allusions, such as the lover of “the girl who thinks that a man is a christ” being a blue-eyed carpenter from overseas. And it’s the traditions of the Bible that the couple fulfil in their liaisons:

…when you are together and naked then all of your human ancestry speaks in your cock and cunt; culture and caste is obliterated and made fine: a man; a woman: and in love, loving each other timelessly, across time and culture and his cock in her cunt and she is happy and he is happy to have stuck it in her: a man and in woman: open: the communion the old books spoke of.

Having written three books on her Armenian ancestry, it shouldn’t be a surprise that ancestry is important here, too, with the woman Janus-like looking back to her parents and considering her sons. And, when she deems to “pull open the labia of her cunt, invite the world, her lover, inside” there are hints that the woman is perhaps representative of America, her family’s adopted nation, one indiscriminately built on a history of immigration.

Indeed, America is a theme of The Mirror In The Well, with Marcom asking  “is there any where on earth as lonely as this country?” and answering “that we know everything, but we don’t wish to look at it”. In daring to look, the novel breaks out of “this Protestant modern theatre and its roles” and does so in an exhilarating fashion, her style one minute reducing the rush of sex to little more than chemical reaction before upping the ante to herald it in lush swathes of prose-poetry reminiscent of Clarice Lispector’s The Hour Of The Star.

There’s a thread of metafiction running through the book too, with the narrator constantly referring to “this book” or “this scene” - even certain pages. In doing this, we are reminded that this is only a story, it’s fabulist nature making the woman into an everywoman, a female cypher who comes to terms with the very nature of her femininity:

The lover has taught her to love her cunt because the cunt is her center, the cunt is pleasure, the cunt knows and knew him, picked him from a cavalcade of other men.

Of course, the harsh language and the range of sex acts described, may shock and offend but that is only a small part of the wider picture. In The Mirror In The Well the universal is told via the dot of a relationship, getting to the heart of sexual power and reflecting this back for all to see.

According to the inside flap Yoko Agawa has written more than twenty books and won every major Japanese literary award. Where else is there for her to go? Either it’s scooping every minor Japanese literary award - probably not worth her while - or it’s off to international waters, to a brand new audience, and perhaps add to her trophy case with an IMPAC, or something.

The Diving Pool, her first book translated to English, is not a novel but a collection of three novellas from early in her career, of about fifty pages, loosely connected by their content. All three are told by young women with a skewed outlook on reality relating stories about family members. In each, Ogawa deploys an precise style that maintains an eerie distance between the narrator and event, her words clinical and charged with meaning, always leading with a slow build that concludes with a twist - although backstroke is probably more apt.

Aya, the narrator of the title novella, lives with her parents in the Light House, which, she says, “is an orphanage where I am the only child who is not an orphan, a fact that has disfigured my family.” She has a crush on her foster-brother, who spends a great deal of time at the school pool honing his dive seemingly unaware that she is hiding in the bleachers (”I alone can see him, and he comes straight to me.”) admiring him from afar:

Does Jun let his body float free at the bottom of the pool, like a fetus in its mother’s womb. How I’d love to watch him to my heart’s content as he drifts there, utterly free.

It’s a frustrating thing, unrequited love, never mind being treated equal to the orphans by her parents, and Aya finds herself using one of the other orphans, a toddler named Rie, as an outlet:

When we grow up, we find ways to hide our anxieties, our loneliness, our fear and sorrow. But children hide nothing, putting everything into their tears, which they spread liberally about for the whole world to see. I wanted to savor every one of Rie’s tears, to run my tongue over the damp, festering, vulnerable places in her heart and open the wounds even wider.

The tone throughout is a haunting and detached, maintaining a clinical calm not unlike the pool before Jun makes his dive. Ogawa’s words, spare as they are, are carefully picked and shot through with meaning, so much so that it’s not hard to interpret Aya’s home as being a metaphor for people, also like a pool, where we can only question at what happens under the surface:

The church and the Light House are old, Western-style wooden buildings, their age apparent in every floorboard, hinge and tile. The structures have become quite complex through frequent additions, and from the outside it is impossible to grasp their layout. Inside, they are more confusing still, with long winding halls and small flights of stairs.

The Diving Pool, where each page drips with mentions of water, is a powerful story, the most powerful of the three contained in the collection, and the splash of its ending proves an excellent introduction to Ogawa as the dangers of living in the Light House become apparent, of standing solitary and staring off at one point with a single beam, oblivious to everything else around.

The other two novellas maintain the icy tone, with the epistolary Pregnancy Diary, in which a woman keeps a record of her sister’s pregnancy, annoyed that her sister seems to disregard the child growing within her (”The baby haunted the shadows that fell between us.”) and the more straightforward, yet downright creepy, Dormitory, in which a woman haunted by a sound from her past secures a room for her cousin at her old dorm, now in a state of decline, and finds herself caring for the manager, a man who has lost both arms and a leg.

It’s a pity that the novellas are presented in this order, as the prose of Dormitory is paciest and would have served as a better lead in to Ogawa’s cool, calculated style, and would certainly have made the impact of The Diving Pool much stronger, where the satisfactory snapping shut of the book would have left waves rather than ripples. But there’s much to appreciate here, and that Ogawa has a back catalogue ripe for translation, is reason enough to dive in, even if these three novellas are the shallow end.