Review of The Setting Lake Sun

The Setting Lake Sun

This engaging and deceptively simple novel, only ninety-two pages long, tells the story of a love affair between a young Metis girl, Angele, and a much older Japanese poet, Ueno.
Angele belongs to the artistic milieu of Winnipeg. A young installation artist is a friend and ex-lover, and another friend works for a small literary press. She herself has a job arranging flowers in a hospital gift shop, and has just been accepted into architecture school. She first meets the old man at the opening of a show by a Cree artist in a Winnipeg art gallery, where he innocently and frankly teases her about her “Indian side” (she laughs at him) and her “white side” (her admiration of the sunset.)

The publisher for whom her friend works is bringing out a letterpress edition of Ueno’s poems, and Angele meets him again at the print shop. Their relationship develops, and she visits his retreat, a log structure with elements of the tepee in its construction, located in the woods north of Thompson. Eventually, they become lovers.

This is really all there is to the story, but the young narrator has a fresh and unaffected perspective on everything, from her family background (“I had a memory of the silvery reflections of fish in clear water from the time, perhaps the only time, that I’d gone fishing with my father before he left us.” 17) to her intense young friends (“ ‘As if the universe entered our bodies and had a life of its own inside us?’ I said. Aron nodded his head as he poured the coffee.” 19). She loves the work of Douglas Cardinal, Brancusi, Gaudi, Jackson Pollock, the piano pieces of Scarlatti. She has a poet’s reactions to the streets and fountains of her native city of Winnipeg, as well as to the lake and forest by Ueno’s cabin where she tells him a story about Grey Owl. In a gift to Ueno, she quotes a little Chippeweyan song from her father:

The water is still
The fog is lifting
sometimes
I appear. (87)

By this time Ueno has persuaded her to start a French translation of his poems which are written in English. He introduces her to a Japanese aesthetic, of which, as it turns out, his poems and his whole life are an embodiment, called wabi-sabi. “Objects that have wabi-sabi are a physical record of the effects of air, wind and sun. These objects have a fundamental quality. Yet rust, fading, cracks and alterations in their shape are essential characteristics.” (20) As the story continues, we meet bonsai, ikebana, a Zen garden made with olive pits instead of sand, haiku, the koan, shakuhatchi (bamboo flute) music, Mukaiji-reibo, Wang Mo and poetry by the fourteenth-century Zen master, Ikkyu.

When they make love under a reproduction of Courbet’s The Origin of the World, Ueno quotes a modern Japanese poem which consists of a single line: “Like an old oak tree.” Despite the obvious point of reference, he says, “it’s the presence of the oak in the here and now that takes precedence.” For Ueno, art is not fundamentally representational (in spite of that Courbet.). ”The objective of art is not to represent nature, or even to symbolize it, but to make form appear by pulling it out of the Void. That’s the essence.” (47).

The story acquires a new tense as we are made aware that Ueno is ill and does not expect to live long. Angele reveals that she is continuing to translate Ueno’s poetry as an ongoing life work; the story is a memoir of their time together: “Of all the things I could say about Ueno Takami, these are the ones I enjoy talking about, the ones that come back to me just like that . . .”
The writing in this novel is delightfully clear and limpid, and many of the short sections have the quality of small poems. Often, I think, an author’s use of spacing is a kind of leftover from the way he tackled the manuscript, rather than anything integral to the text. In this case, spacing the scenes does seem to give them a special resonance, but I have to wonder why the author chose to number them as well.

The greatest pleasure I got from reading this book, aside from charming voice of the narrator, was the introduction to a unique Japanese approach to art, not one which I was familiar with except in the most superficial way. I felt a little research was in order, and of course, research is almost instantaneous in the electronic age. From an internet site on wabi-sabi, the three simple realities of which, I learned, are: “nothing lasts, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect,” I turned to the Zen poet Ikkyu, and found the story of his love affair with the blind flute player Lady Mori.

The tree was barren of leaves, but you brought new spring,
Long green sprouts, verdant flowers, fresh promise . . .
(from Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyu, translated by John Stewart.)

Born in 1394, Ikkyu achieved enlightenment in 1420 as a response to the cawing of a crow. When his Zen master failed to make him Dharma heir because of his behaviour while indulging in heavy drinking, he left the temple and lived as a vagabond, consorted with loose women even while wearing the robes of a monk, and generally made his appearance as the first of the Dharma bums. It was at this time that he met the Lady Mori, a blind flautist, who became the love of his life, to whom much of his poetry is dedicated.

The most beautiful and truest of all women:
Her songs the fresh pure melody of love.
A voice and a sweet smile that rends my heart . . .
(trans. John Stewart)

Although he practised Zen without reference to the established religion, later on, he was elected and reluctantly became master of a great temple and died at the great age of 87.
Well, but of course, this was really nothing other than the story I had just been reading, I realized, even right down to the cawing of the crow, which made its appearance several times at the end of the book. Deceptively simple, indeed.


— Susan Haley The Fiddlehead

More Reviews of this title

The Setting Lake Sun

This quiet, elegantly suspended story generates an aura that is softly enfolding, stirring respect for elusive connections and a gentle engagement with mysteries.


The Globe & Mail

The Setting Lake Sun

The book's low-key narrative style, despite the book's major events, lends the whole book a still centre, a tumultuous quietness much like Ueno's presence in the narrator's life. In the end, it's a story as brief as a kiss can sometimes be.


Uptown Magazine

The Setting Lake Sun

Some would say that The Setting Lake Sun is a love story, and some would say that it’s a love affair between two cultures. Some would say that it’s a sexual explo­ration, and some that it’s a religious journey into the unknown. The Setting Lake Sun is all those things, and no one who reads it will be able to forget its characters, or their voyage of self­discovery into the wilds of northern Manitoba.
    The story is told from Angèle’s point of view. Angèle is a young Métis woman who lives in Winnipeg. She’s a brilliant student who wants to be an architect. She meets an older man, Ueno Takami, a Japanese poet and artist. She is attracted to him, because he represents something completely new in her life. And we are made to feel the power of this attraction when she spends hours in front of the mirror, in preparation for meeting him.
    Ueno may prove to be unforgettable to all those who get to know him. He is one of the strongest, most clearly etched characters in Canadian literature. This is the kind of character portrayal that makes you long for a sequel. Only someone with the deepest understanding of Zen could have created a character like Ueno Takami. Every­thing the Japanese poet does or says is Zen­like, and yet it doesn’t seem bookish, because he’s so down to earth.
    Ueno takes Angèle to his cabin at Setting Lake. The drive to Setting Lake has a magic all of its own. J.R. Léveillé describes the wilderness, the trees and rocks of northern Manitoba with a spare but lyrical intensity. If you’ve driven down these lonely stretches of road, you’ll love this part of the book. They stop along the road to refuel, and Ueno chats with the people he meets at these roadside stops. He calls this “meeting the people,” and like everything he does, it seems to illustrate the Zen way.
When they reach Setting Lake, Ueno’s cabin comes as a revelation to Angèle, the young architecture student. It is a rough­hewn structure built with the help of the Indi­ans from a nearby reservation. The cabin harmonizes perfectly with the nature around it. As the sun goes down on the lake, Ueno introduces her to shakuhachi music. “Now you’re going to hear the real sound of Japan,” he says, playing a very ancient bamboo flute composition for her. As night falls on the lake, Angèle has a kind of reli­gious experience :
    It seems strange to say, but because of the solitary sound of the flute I had the impression that the oncoming darkness was not as dense as it appeared; it was, in fact, quite light, and night was a huge black horizontal skyscraper stretching towards me. In this darkness I found a huge relief. […] The expanse of lake water had become a vast stretch of night in which I was suspended. I felt calm and safe, I felt good about myself, I was at ease in that indetermi­nate space, as in a primordial soup. (Léveillé, 2001 : 69­70)
    This novelist has a quality that is hard to define, but that I would call lightness. He has a light touch. Léveillé never overstates anything. He always leaves you wishing there were more. There is a lighter­ than ­air quality to everything he writes, as if his whole story were hovering several inches above the ground. How he achieves this, how he manages to give this airy lightness to even the heaviest and most material images, is a secret I’ve never been able to penetrate.
    These pages are suffused with a white radiance of prose poetry, which S.E. Stewart’s English translation often conveys surprisingly well. The only thing English-­speaking readers will be missing is the magic of Léveillé’s style. He is the Mozart of the French language. His style is soft and musical, but one is hard put to say where this music comes from, because there are no obvious instances of alliteration or assonance. It is the strangest mixture of elegance and bare simplicity one can imagine. The highest level of skill is experienced as a kind of art­lessness. J.R. Léveillé’s writing seems natural and effort­less. He makes it look easy. They say the greatest actors don’t seem to be acting at all. This is true of J.R. Léveillé’s prose. His style has an ease and naturalness that can only be compared to those of Gide and Camus in their best moments.


Prairie Fire Review of Books

The Setting Lake Sun

A bit of publishing history came to Saskatoon recently when French and English versions of the same novel were launched simultaneously at a McNally Robinson reading.
    The novel, Le Soleil du lac qui se couche in its original French, was written by Winnipeg poet J.R.(Roger)Léveillé. Former Saskatonian Sue Stewart, who now lives in Ottawa, translated the work into the English version, The Setting Lake Sun.
    In an interview after a well-attended launch and readings in both languages, Stewart said the normal process is for a translation to come out several months after the original. In this case, two small Winnipeg publishing houses, Les Editions du Blé andSignature Editions, made a special effort to bring out bothversions at once. Stewart said the launch was well received in Saskatoon, especially by the francophone community.
    The simultaneous launch added pressure on Stewart during the translation process, but she said in the end it was one of the best projects she has undertaken. That was due in part to the novel. “I really liked this book,” she said. “It was written by a poet and that makes the sense of language one of the primary features.”
    A poet herself (she writes in English), she has a special appreciation of the kind of lyrical prose that characterizes The Setting Lake Sun. It’s the first appearance for Léveillé in English. He is a full-time journalist for Radio-Canada national television, and he has more than a dozen published works of poetry, fiction and essays to his credit in French.
    For this novel, he created narrator Angèle, a young Metis woman who lives in Winnipeg and who hopes to become an architect. She meets a Japanese poet and scholar, UenoTakami,a man several years her senior in whom she feels an instant rapport. 
    Ueno teaches in the city but owns a cabin near a remote lake at Thompson in northern Manitoba. The friendship becomes a romance. They divide their time between city and country and Angèle, a life-long urbanite, learns much about her own Native heritage.
    This is a gentle story in which much of what takes place is off the page, left to the reader to fill in.There is a handful of supporting cast members, but for the most part the focus is on the two central characters and the interesting process they go through as they meld three cultures,French, Indian and Japanese, into a comfortable relationship. That it may be short-lived becomes obvious early on, but Angele accepts Ueno’s fatalistic philosophy and simply lives for the present.
    Aside from the need to speed up the translation process in this case, Stewart said one of the biggest challenges she faced was getting the voice just right. “It’s partly an intuitive process, and partly a question of getting the diction of the character right. In this case, she is a person of mixed cultures.”
    She says there are always conceptual problems in translations, such as certain descriptions of behaviour or a state of mind,that are expressed by an idiom of some kind in the original language but for which there are no equivalents in English.”You have to be inventive at times,” she says.
    Stewart does at least three drafts of a translation before she completes a version she shows to the author.”I try to make it as purely a version in the target language as I can,” she says. In this case, both she and the author were pleased with the results.
    She has translated from English to French but mostly follows one of the rules of thumb for the business, which is to translate into your mother tongue, in her case, English.
    She also takes great care to not appear to impinge on the author’s role. ‘The translator is like a person who plays a piece of music on an instrument, not the composer.”
    Stewart grew up in a bilingual household. Her mother was from Winnipeg and “very much a francophile,” her father an anglo Quebecker who, as a journalist, covered the National Assembly in Quebec and wrote his stories in English. As a child Sue learned English at home but attended an all-French school. 
    She lived in Saskatoon for several years, working for Thistledown Press. She also served on the board for the Broadway Theatre and did committee work as a member of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild.
    She was a member of the Association of Translators and Interpreters of Saskatchewan, and frequently did projects for the government as a freelance translator. She lives and works in Ottawa now, and is co-owner of the Ontario-based publisher Cormorant Books.


— Verne Clemence The Star Phoenix

The Setting Lake Sun

Franco-Manitoban author J. Roger Léveillé’s next publication is something of an anomaly.
    His book of fiction, Le Soleil du lac qui se couche, is being simultaneously launched with its English translation, The Setting Lake Sun. (The French version will come out from Les Editions du Blé; the English from Signature Editions.)
    “lt’s unique to have both versions released at the same time,” Léveillé says. “Usually, the book is released in one language and then another language a couple of years later.”
    Born and raised in Winnipeg, Léveillé is an acclaimed Franco-Manitoban author. His publications include books of poetry, novels andliterary essays which have been published in Saint-Boniface, Montreal and Paris. His writing has garnered several awards, including le Prix du Consulat general de France in Toronto in l997, and Le Prix litteraire du Manitoba français in 1994.
    The Setting Lake Sun marks Leveille’s first book in English translation, and he says he’s thrilled. In fact, Léveillé believes more contemporary Franco-Manitoban authors should have their work translated, despite the difficulty of the job for the translator.“Having a book translated into another language obviously increases the number of readers of your work,” he says. “It gives readers a chance to experience your ideas, your thoughts, your style.
    “[But] I believe the job of a translator is sometimes harder than writing the original piece, since they are bound by the parameters of what has been written,” he says.
    The Setting Lake Sun is an unusual book. Set in Winnipeg and northern Manitoba, it is narrated by the main character, Angèle, as she looks back on the period of her life when she met visiting Japanese poet Ueno Takami. Angèle’s story is told by using short poetic fragments.
    “I call these sections memory pockets,” Léveillé says. “When you look back on an earlier period of your life, you don’t necessarily remember every single detail — you remember the most important parts.”
    The idea to to separate his writing into pieces came from a Japanese novel he was reading at the time he began working on the manuscript. lnspired by the novel, Léveillé would take a single idea, sentiment, image or word from the book, and work it into his writing.
    “For me, it’s no different from opening a box of photos, taking one out and begin the process of writing from there,” he says.
    Léveillé is fascinated by many elements of Japanese culture, although he doesn’t consider himself an aficionado. He has never travelled to Japan, but has read up on Japanese art and architecture.
    “I feel as though I have an affinity for aspects of Japanese culture,” he says. “I believe that some elements of culture are there for everyone to appreciate, and to incorporate into our lives, whether it’s our own culture or another culture.”


— Robyn Maharaj Prairie Books Now

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