Use the Words You Have: a reading list

Kimberly Campanello’s Use the Words You Have unfurls over a long, hot Breton summer as American student K's relationship with a Breton local ignites her self-actualisation as a woman and a writer. Barred from speaking English by their French Honors programme, the other American students’ identities flicker and fade from the estrangement. Yet for K, who immerses herself deeper into her exchange family’s life, this dissolution makes way for a profound transformation.

 
I was influenced by three strands of books when writing Use the Words You Have. First, the French nouveau roman and autofiction I had read as an undergraduate at the turn of the millennium – the transitional period when some of us went from thumbing the card catalogue and browsing physical shelves to a blinking cursor in a searchable library interface (it was still awhile before anything such as ‘readers also liked’ and ‘related sources include’). Second, I had another look at those short coming-of-age novels that metonymically conjure this heightened teenage period when great changes occur, sudden and blatant, sometimes without anyone noticing at all. Finally, literary biography. In Use the Words You Have, K ruminates on the fact that as she living her life, she is creating her own story for someone to write and read.

Marguerite Duras
L’Amant (1984) / The Lover (trans. Barbara Bray, 1986)
L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1990) / The North China Lover (2008, trans. Leigh Hafrey)
These books tell the same story – a transformative affair between a young girl and an older Chinese man in French colonial Indochina.  Duras wrote the second in response to the film version of the first, which she did not like. In both novels, Duras writes clothes, abodes, furniture and modes of transport (the lover’s car, the ferry on the Mekong) like no one else. 

Annie Ernaux
La place (Gallimard, 2016) / A Man’s Place (trans. Tanya Leslie, 2020) 
Passion Sample (1991) / Simple Passion (trans. Tanya Leslie, 2021)
Se perdre (2001) / Getting Lost (trans. Alison L. Strayer, 2022)
In La Place, Ernaux’s seemingly plainspoken style works to amplify the contrast she sets up between her father’s trajectory from labourer born in the 19th century to post-war small business owner and her own coming to self through education and reading. Her orbit changes – the central body shifts from ‘la place’ of her father, to her own mind and body. Whilst Se Perdre is the diary of a love affair between the author and a Russian diplomat, even in its 77-page distillation in Passion Simple, Ernaux carefully unpicks the upheaval and frisson created by even the tiniest interaction.

Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace (1963) (trans. Elizabeth Rokkan, 1966)
Two 11-year-old girls, Unn and Sis. A bitter winter in Norway. One girl goes missing after a powerful exchange, which reveals the icy crevasse between the parental order and a child’s experience of aliveness in all its perfect, and dangerous, beauty. The sentences themselves are alive. Each one thinks, often differently from the other, as the story unfolds.

Fleur Jaeggy (1989), Sweet Days of Discipline (trans. Tim Park, 1991)
Set in a boarding school in Switzerland and narrated by teenage Eve, this taut novel depicts the tensions and erotics of young friendship in a claustrophobic and controlling closed environment. Eve’s knowing voice unsettles us to reconstruct our own angle on existence when we were fourteen.

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019)
Readers can universally ache via the specificity of this poet’s coming-of-age novel. It is brief and gorgeous and earthy. The narrator, the queer son of a Vietnamese refugee, lives in a United States that cannot, or rather will not, acknowledge and attend to beauty, let alone pain.

Graham Robb, Rimbaud (2000)
Much ink has been spilled accounting for the life of Arthur Rimbaud, especially trying to figure out why he stopped writing poetry in his early twenties. Expert and unflappable, Graham Robb is known for taking on big lives in necessarily big tomes. This one is a page turner and brings readers through to Rimbaud’s post-writing period in which he was intimately engaged in a trio of colonial activities: cartographic, mercenary, and trade (including in weapons). 

Robert Duncan, The HD Book (2001)
Where Robb is systematic and anti-hagiographical in his treatment of Rimbaud, Duncan is soaring and worshipful in his wholly original book on Modernist American poet HD.  Despite being written in the early sixties, the book was compiled from photocopied pages and journal articles and published in full in 2001. The HD Book covers everything important – war, psychology, religion, sex, poetry, and history, and the biographer/critic himself, who works through it all by writing about another poet’s life and work. 

Use the Words You Have by Kimberley Campanello is published by Somesuch Editions, priced £9.99.