August 14, 2010
Far to Go by Alison Pick
Alison Pick doesn’t just take on history in her latest novel Far to Go, but she takes on what it is to take on history– can the fragments of history be turned into fiction or fact, and how much truth should we expect of either?
Ostensibly, Far to Go is the story of the Bauer family, secular Jews living in the Czech Sudetenland when Hitler annexes the region in 1938. Told from the perspective of their Nanny, Marta, the novel follows the family to Prague where they go to escape Nazi persecution, and recounts the anti-semitism that rises in Czechoslovakia so that the Bauers have nowhere left to flee to. Having been reluctant to leave their home, where Pavel Bauer is an affluent factory owner, a patriotic Czech, and respected throughout their community with his wife Annaliese, it becomes too late for them to receive the exit visas necessary to get out of the country, so they decide their only option is to send their young son to safety through the Kindertransport, which placed children from Nazi-occupied countries with families in Britain in 1938 and 1939.
Marta’s point of view provides an interesting perspective on the family, as she does not take for granted her loyalty to them. Though the Bauers have been good employers, her life is tied up with theirs in uncomfortable ways, and the tide of anti-semitism sweeping the country is difficult to avoid altogether. Her loyalty to their son Pepik, however, is never questioned, and Pick has created a fascinating dynamic between a mother-figure who is closer to the son than his mother is. The story of Pepik’s departure and his subsequent experiences (from his own point of view) are heartbreaking, and the plot hangs on many twists that are artfully constructed.
In places, however, the narrative seems artificial, clunky with exposition in that way that historical fiction can sometimes be, but then Pick frames the story with a present-day narrator who suggests all is not what it seems with the Bauers, creating enormous suspense as the novel progresses. These sections are also written in a tremendously powerful prose that suggests the novel is in the end of a writer who knows exactly what she is doing, that we should put our trust in her and let the pieces come together (and indeed they do– this is a novel I flew through). Pieces which include letters and fragments of letters from characters in the story, filed as historical documents noting the writers’ deaths in Nazi concentration camps.
“I wish this were a happy story,” the novel begins, “A story to make you doubt and despair, and then have your hopes redeemed so you could believe again, at the last minute, in the essential goodness of the world around us and the people in it.” Laying all the cards on the table, such a novel this isn’t, but also (and notably) there is nothing manipulative about how Pick uses her subject matter either. Truly, parts of the book are devastating, but the story leaves its reader with far more than just emotion, evoking intriguing questions about history and truth (and loneliness, and memory, and human kindness). Far to Go serves as a testament to the power of story, to the importance of historical record, and a tribute to the amazing power of art, and what it can render from fragments.
July 28, 2010
The Lovers by Vendela Vida
I will never forget my experience of reading Vendela Vida’s previous novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. I’d brought it away for the weekend, dipping in and out of between various activities, and I wasn’t sure what to think. The prose was so spare, the plot seemed aimless, and the font was just too big for a book so slim. I wasn’t sure if I’d been wasting my time, as I sat down to read the final stretch as our train got close to Toronto. I’d been to a wedding and won the centrepiece, so there was a bucket full of flowers on the seat beside me, and in those last few pages, Vida turned her entire novel inside out and into a story that was so affecting and devastating, I felt like an idiot for ever having doubted.
Her latest novel The Lovers lacks the punch of Let the Northern Lights…, but it has an effect that’s more sustaining. And it’s funny how often I’ll pick up a book of commerical fiction and sing its praises because, wonder of wonders, there be plot there! Forgetting that plot and literary fiction are not mutually exclusive, and thank you Vendela Vida for reminding me.
Because something is particularly ominous from the book’s beginning, Yvonne waiting in the airport for the ride she has arranged along with her vacation rental. It’s been two years since her husband’s death, and she’s venturing out into the world again, on a trip to Turkey to get away from her memories and remember those that she’s forgotten. She has been to Turkey before, on her honeymoon twenty-eight years previously, but the place she finds this time won’t be familiar.
Yvonne hasn’t been able to find her ride because she’s been waiting 0n the wrong side of the airport, which sets a precedent for everything to follow. All outcomes the opposite of her expectations, everything resembling something from afar that turns out to be different at close range. Returning to Datca, she finds the hotel where she and her husband stayed is now abandoned and crumbling. The holiday house she’d chosen from the internet is not as close to the sea as she’d been promised, and there are sordid books on the shelves, a sex swing on the third floor. She leaves the door open and an owl gets in.
Vida’s writing is angular, full of edges to grip, and– as Yvonne finds Turkey– everything is almost ordinary, but not quite. I’ve read about birds in the house, but never owls, and never about the stench the owl carries with him, and how between the owl and sex swing, Yvonne fears the house will restrict all of itself to her and she’ll have to sleep on the roof. Vida articulates the awkward details of human interaction so perfectly– Yvonne finds another American who pronounces a Turkish name differently than she has, and she wonders which of them is right (if either?). The experience of an American tourist in a poor country, how Yvonne vows to buy goods from a different local merchant every day, and then finds she can’t tell them apart. The local boy who Yvonne befriends on the beach, who she gives cash to for shells he will dive for, and the local people start talking about their relationship.
Are things as ominous as they seem, or is Yvonne simply paranoid? Has the sex swing tainted her experience and now everything seems sordid? She begins to reflect upon her marriage, and find it was not all it appeared either, that the banalities that frocked her with her widowhood did not begin to describe her experience of loss, or how complicated her marriage had been. There remains the matter of the owl in the house though, and then one afternoon when the boy on the beach is diving for shells, he swims out and disappears.
Yvonne plants herself at the centre of this drama, as Western tourists tend to do when they’re at large in the world, but she will soon discover that her role in all of this is actually incidental. Not that her actions don’t have consequences, but the consequences matter far more than she does. That in order to come to terms with her own loss, and what has happened since, she not only has to transport herself as she already has done, but she has to transport herself outside of herself. To get lost if she’s ever going to get found.
A wonderful, gripping, thoughtful book. Vida’s novel is the third in a loosely-linked trilogy about women in moments of crisis, but she has done something different and stronger with each one. A novelist who takes nothing for granted about the form, seemingly rediscovering it each time she revisits it, she makes much out of little and the effect of it lingers long after the last page is read.
July 26, 2010
Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner
Jennifer Weiner’s latest novel Fly Away Home is no guilty pleasure. Of course, it’s a pleasure, and maybe for that we’re meant to feel a bit guilty, but I didn’t really. I was too happy reading a fat book that was devourable, a funny and smart book that was so well written that it never broke the spell.
Weiner is a more versatile writer than she gets credit for. Though she’s well known for writing books with shoes in the cover, I really enjoyed her murder mystery Goodnight Nobody, and her latest is also something completely different. Less Sophie Kinsella, Fly Away Home made me think of two recent novels I loved, The Believers by Zoe Heller and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife. But set apart from these with the dry wit and breezy tone that have become Weiner’s signature.
So much of women’s fiction begins with a question of empathy, of an author wondering their way into a particular character’s mind (as opposed to wondering their way into a fast-paced plot, just say). In Fly Away Home, that character is a familiar figure, the wronged wife standing up beside her prominent husband as he tells the nation that he’s sorry for his transgressions. She’s standing there stone-faced as he admits to hurting his wife, his family, and as he vows to come to terms with his weaknesses, to make amends. As he asks for a bit of privacy, so he can calculate his eventual comeback.
That woman is Sylvie Serfer Woodruff in Weiner’s book, wife of Senator Richard Woodruff who has just been caught using his connections to fix a job for his mistress. Sylvie hadn’t suspected a thing, so busy was she fulfilling speaking engagements to support him, arranging his schedule, fetching his breakfast, and running the lint brush over his shoulders. Not to mention trying to stay twenty pounds lighter than she’d been in law school, getting her hair done, having regular botox sessions, and occasional plastic surgeries. In her spare time, she tried to contain their daughter Lizzie, who struggled with addiction and a host of other personal problems.
Lizzie’s sister Diana had always been the polar opposite, struggling with nothing, racking up one achievement after another to become an emergency room doctor. The news of their father’s affair comes at a curious time for Diana however, with her being in the throes of an extra-marital affair herself, with an intern from the hospital who’s everything her husband isn’t. (The husband is one of the funniest parts of the novel, Weiner pulling no punches in depicting his unattractiveness. Gary likes to announce, “Gotta go drain the dragon” before he uses the restroom; he comments on Youtube videos with the username Ithurtswhenipee. Their sex life is awful, usually culminating in Gary masturbating “with the burdened expression of a man who’d been forced to shovel the driveway just when the game was getting good”.)
Richard Woodruff is moved to the margins as the rest of his family attempt to put their shattered worlds back together again. Sylvie returns to her childhood home to reconnect with a self she hasn’t paid attention to in years, Lizzie finds her life assuming an unexpected direction, and Diana decides that her own direction should shift 180 degrees. In the end, things tie up neat and tidily in true commercial fiction style, but it’s a wonderful ride to get there, and no one would ever fault these characters for their packaged resolutions.
“‘What?’ Selma asked. ‘Divorce isn’t such a tragedy…. Nobody ever died of divorce.’/ ‘Sunny von Bulow?’ Ceil piped up./ ‘They never got divorced,’ Selma said. Sylvie glared at her mother, and Selma lowered her voice incrementally. ‘Claus just tried to kill her. See, if they’d gotten divorced, it could have worked out better for both of them.'”
Flay Away Home is a funny book, and such a smart book, with no holds barred. A trip inside the mind of that stone-faced lady, and the reader comes away with a broadened perspective of what her experience must be. And a broadened perspective also of questions of love, and marriage, and family, and what it means to truly get lost inside a book.
July 14, 2010
The News Where You Are by Catherine O’Flynn
Catherine O’Flynn’s two books have been imperfect novels packed solid with goodness. The News Where You Are, like her first novel What Was Lost, chronicles contemporary life in the English Midlands, its bleak dose of “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” nicely countered with humour, pop culture references, and an underlying faith in the human spirit. Her characters are vividly realized, their dialogue sharp, and the settings evoked with perfect detail. The plots and subplots are absorbing, both novels a pleasure to read, and so in the end all is forgiven even when they don’t quite work as wholes.
At the centre of The News Where You Are is Frank Allcroft, who serves less as a character than as an anchor for the various strands O’Flynn is weaving here– anchor fittingly, because Frank is a local news anchor, O’Flynn depicting the details and minutiae of his job in fascinating detail, and also showing him reflecting on the changing media scene, questioning the place for folksy local in a fast-paced globalized world; Phil Smethway, his old friend and mentor has died six months previously in a mysterious hit and run; Frank is finally beginning to admit to himself how much his mother’s unhappiness has always affected him, and he is also trying to reconcile his feelings regarding his architect father, whose buildings have one-by-one been demolished since his death; Frank makes a point of attending funerals of those whose lonely deaths he reports, and then one of these people turns out to be connected to Phil…
(Frank’s frosty co-anchor, responding to one of his famous corny jokes, asks him, “What the hell am I supposed to do? If I laugh, I look as if I’m mentally ill. If I don’t laugh, I look as if I hate you.” I can’t find another place to fit this in, but I want to repeat it because it’s funny, because it’s a dynamic I’ve never considered, and though a lesser author would make the co-presenter simply hateful and hating, O’Flynn opts more for the more interesting angle. Her characters are always surprising).
It sounds like a hodgepodge, but it isn’t, and in the end the whole thing comes together more effectively than What Was Lost. Too much is going on for this to be a masterful novel, but its strands are all compelling and they comprise the stuff of this world in a way that’s both familiar and surprising. Also a bit shamelessly heartwarming–though its premise(s) are sad, O’Flynn injects enough humour, enough pointed observation about the absurdity of everyday life, and provides Frank with a wonderful family whose solidity is never questioned. Without overdoing it then, O’Flynn gets the bleakness of contemporary England, the centuries of histories underneath the feet, which makes the recent past almost seem disposable, and how “the future” is now something looked back upon with nostalgia. What was lost and what remains.
July 4, 2010
I'd Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman
Laura Lippman’s I’d Know You Anywhere was the first of my hot summer books, and the perfect book for a sunny long weekend. It’s mainly told from the point of view of Eliza Benedict, an unassuming wife and mother currently preoccupied with adjusting to life in Maryland after six years living in London, and also with her daughter’s initial forays into teenaged awfullness.
The last thing on Eliza’s mind is Walter Bowman, from what she’s come to refer to (though she rarely refers to it) as “the summer I was fifteen”. That summer, after she stumbled upon him burying a body, Bowman kidnapped Eliza, and kept her prisoner for thirty-nine days, and then he let her go, to be the only one of his victims w ho’d live to tell.
Years later, Eliza appears unscathed on the surface, having managed a fulfilling life for herself, married to a man she loves, and as a devoted mother to her children. (Eliza’s academic background is in children’s literature; she claims, “Everything I know about parenting, I learned from Ramona Quimby”). Though she never feels completely secure, insisting that the windows stay locked even in the heat of summer, but there are indeed long periods of time during which she doesn’t think of Walter Bowman and that summer. So she is really rather rattled to hear from him again.
Bowman had been sentenced to death for the murder of another girl he’d picked up when he was with Eliza, but due to technicalities has been waiting on Death Row ever since. When he contacts Eliza, he is hoping to manipulate her into assisting him with one more appeal, the same way he’d managed to manipulate her into complying with his wishes during that summer long ago. Of course, Eliza initially resists his advances, but he has promised to reveal information about his other victims, and she also hopes that by meeting him, she might finally understand why he let her go.
In addition to Eliza’s point of view, the novel comes from the perspective of Walter, and from that of Trudy Tackett, mother of one of his victims. Trudy’s reason for living is to finally witness Walter’s executive, and her sections of the novel are the most compelling of the trio– Lippman nails the might of her fury and the hole that is her grief. Walter himself is less believable, though perhaps being inside his head is just discomforting. Eliza also is hard to pin down– she’s meant to be somewhat unknowable, even to herself, and far more impressionable than impressing, but sometimes she reads as though Lippman wasn’t altogether sure who she was either.
I’d Know You Anywhere is not as successful as Lippman’s previous stand-alone novels (Life Sentences and What the Dead Know), its structure as fragmented as Eliza’s character. By its second half, however, the book picks up steam, becomes more cohesive, and by the time Eliza’s facing Walter down in his cell, the whole thing is worth the ride. Lippman’s writing is so smart, the prose bursting with the stuff of the world, with facts and ideas, and her characters usually jump off the page– Eliza’s overbearing sister Vonnie, her eccentric but loving parents, her daughter and her son.
The book is devourable, suspense mounting as the plot whips along, and really, summer days were really made for books like this.
June 20, 2010
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake begins with Rose Edelstein, aged eight, helping herself to a bite of cake and becoming overwhemed by an awareness of her mother’s profound sadness. This awareness is devastating, and has enormous implications: that her mother is human, that life is complicated, that Rose is powerless to control the world around her. Childhood naivete ends at this point, when Rose realizes that she can taste people’s feelings in the food they create– her mother’s sadness makes family dinners unbearable, she eats a friend’s sandwhich and is “envious… that this lightness was where she came from”, and so the vending machines at school supply her with sustenence, the relief of their bland and innocuous factory flavour.
Aimee Bender is known for her short stories, and this seems like the perfect premise for one of these. The novel reading like an extended short story itself– the perfection of the details, the minute observation, the sense of play and whimsy, the genre-bending, the fantastic. And yet this is decidedly a novel too, with great expansiveness, development, and enormous weight. Cake-like, airy and solid.
There is so much that Bender gets absolutely right. Her narrative voice is a stellar achievement, Rose reminiscent of Ramona Quimby as the book begins, and yet undercut by a darker tone that takes over as the book proceeds. Bender manages a perfect balance of wide-eyed child and wry observer (see “[Dad] always seemed like a guest to me. ‘Welcome home,’ I said.” vs. “he loved her the way a bird-watcher’s heart leaps when he hears the call of the roseate spoonbill, a fluffy pink wader calling its lilting coo-coo from the mangroves”.) The story is perfectly timeless, flying on its own steam, freed from the cumbrousness of period. It has the tone and appeal of a YA novel– elements of A Wrinkle in Time in addition to Ramona. And yet, YA this is not– the sadness is heavy, the emotions complicated and awful, and too much for even Rose to understand.
With amazing acuity, Bender shows Rose’s reaction to her burden of empathy– how she eats an entire slice of the cake in an effort to convince herself that everything is fine, that she made up her feelings, but Rose only feels her mother’s sadness more, and how she tries to console her mother but doesn’t know what she wants or needs, and how Rose tries to explain that she can taste a hollow in her mother’s cake but can’t explain it well enough, and how after so much explaining, she eventually keeps it to herself.
Rose’s ability to taste feelings actually becomes secondary as the novel progresses, fading to the background– this is a novel with most of its two feet in reality. Understatement makes Rose’s affliction almost plausible, and we’re not meant to consider it too much anyway, but the story continues to be about her family’s dynamics, and how Rose deals with knowledge of her mother’s sadness as her older brother begins to retreat into his own world. It’s also about food, taste and eating, and where our food comes from, how little most of us actually consider this. And it’s about childhood, and things better unlearned, and a yearning to return to a simpler place that has been tainted by what is known now.
And so onto the bandwagon I jump, late for the party as always. Go Aimee Bender, whose novel is perfectly unlike anything else, and also perfectly perfect.
June 13, 2010
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Everything I knew about Henry VIII before Wolf Hall, I learned from Herman’s Hermits. And I’d planned to keep it that way, because I really can’t stomach historical fiction. Even when it’s written by Hilary Mantel, who I’ve read through suburban black comedies, ghost stories, memoirs and literary fiction (my two favourites of hers have been Eight Months of Ghazzah Street, A Change of Climate, and An Experiment in Love).
But then Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize, and it was nominated for the Orange Prize. And something else happened, though I don’t remember what Steph read it at Crooked House and included an excerpt as part of her babies in literature series, but it all led to me purchasing Wolf Hall when we were in England last fall. The book sat on my shelf for months and months, however, until I decided to tackle (most of) the Orange list, and so last Friday, I finally cracked the great tome (650 pages) open.
Once in a while I tried to remember why exactly I so disliked historical fiction, particularly since I never actually read any of it, but reading Wolf Hall did make my feelings quite clear to me. That the genre necessitates 650 page books, for one thing. In non-historical fiction, wouldn’t an editor do something about a book in which all of the major male characters are called Thomas or Henry? And a pace that goes so quickly, too quickly, and then you find yourself having to refer back to earlier passages, but how is one to find these in a 650 page book??
But, Wolf Hall was readable. It was. I was mainly reading it so I could finally say I actually had, but I found myself enjoying it too. It’s not an easy book, with so many characters and such a dense plot, and Mantel’s prose is not always immediately accessible (and yes, the pronouns were a struggle, but there’s a reason for it. “He” is usually always Thomas Cromwell, to show that Cromwell was everywhere.) But the story, about Cromwell’s rise and rise from lowly blacksmiths’ son to chief advisor to the King of England was fascinating, and Mantel has made Cromwell a complex, sympathetic and wonderfully-difficult character.
I didn’t really understand how fascinating this novel was, however, until I reread its review from the London Review of Books (which I’d read when it was published, but got nothing out of having not yet read the book, of course). The review explains that Mantel’s real genius is rendering a three-dimensional character of Cromwell, about whom little is known, and allowing his mystery to remain fundamental to him. And that nothing within her novel is without significance, in fact more often than not, peripheral characters and details would go on to be instrumental in historical events to follow, though this significance is only hinted at in the novel (and then glossed over entirely by readers such as myself for whom Henry VIII had merely been married to the widow next door, and she’d been married seven times before…). Even the novel’s title Wolf Hall refers to a place only barely mentioned in the story, and the suggestion of a visit there comes in the very last paragraph (and here, according to the LRB review, would begin “the undoing of Anne Bolelyn”).
I recently read that Mantel is at work on a sequel to Wolf Hall, and now I’m quite stunned to find that I’ll not be able to help but to read it. Because the whole 650 pages here was merely in anticipation of what comes next, and what comes next is the rise of Jane Seymour, who was a lowly lady-in-waiting in this book, and the downfall of the Bolelyns, and even (though a few years beyond this) Elizabeth I (who here is just an ugly red-headed baby). To discover that Spanish Mary (in Wolf Hall, petulant, teenaged, and put-out by having just been made a retroactive bastard) becomes Queen herself somewhere down the line– seriously, these are the most tantalizing spoilers ever.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
June 12, 2010
Vicious Circle Reads: Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich
I said I’d never join a book club, mostly because I get offended by book club questions in the back of paperbacks. Or rather, I get really disturbed by the idea of somebody finishing a book, and not being able to think of any questions on their own. Which isn’t snobbery on my part– surely, the most unschooled reader would come away with the most questions anyway? And that would be a fine thing, but to finish a book and come up with nothing? What’s the point of reading, let alone clubbing to talk about it?
When I finish a book, I usually come away with a mess of questions, and this was why I decided to finally join a book club. I also decided to join because they asked me, and “they” was a group of people/readers I really respect (and would enjoy sitting around drinking wine with). Also because “they” were going to ask other such people, and the whole group seemed like a worthwhile one to take my questions to. To check my reader responses, to clear up what I didn’t get, it fill me in on what I’d glossed over, to provide some fine enlightenment, new perspectives, and expand my readerly horizons.
The Vicious Circle had our first official meeting this week, to discuss Louise Erdrich’s novel Shadow Tag. Someone asked me beforehand if I liked the book, and I told him that I wasn’t sure yet– perhaps the best kind of book to be under discussion. I enjoyed reading it enough, admired the writing, was appropriatly disturbed by scenes of harsh brutality, but the novel’s slightness also left me perplexed. I was unsure of its wider context. Shadow Tag is the latest novel by Erdrich, who I’ve never read before. The novel has autobiographical over/undertones, as evidenced by this rave review, and the fact that the lead character is mirrored by a character called Louise.
The lead character is Irene, who begins to keep a second diary (“the blue notebook”) when she discovers that her husband Gil has been reading her original diary (“the red notebook”, and I couldn’t help but think of Doris Lessing too, but not enough to come to any conclusion). She begins to manipulate Gil with the first diary, pushing his boundaries, and the boundaries of their relationship. Gil is a painter who has come to fame with degrading images of Irene in the context of native-American history, and she is essential to his artist persona and to his art. Irene’s entire identity is wrapped up in being Gil’s muse, so she has a lot riding on their relationship as well, in addition to the fact that Gil swore he’d use her alcoholism to take the children from her if she ever left him. Which is also to say that their children are in the middle of this, and being damaged in the cross-fire.
A twist at the end of the novel reveals a mysterious narrator and brought forth many questions about everything I’d read already. How reliable was Irene’s other diary if she was lying in the first? How reliable was the third-person perspective? Could any of the novel’s weakness in plot or character be written down to being a deliberate part of the structure? I’d enjoyed the writing, the childrens’ perspective as witness to marital breakdown was heartbreaking, and I’d also enjoyed reading about native experience where the nativeness itself was not the point.
The Vicious Circle’s concensus seemed to be that I was reading into the book too much with my questions, applying layers of complexity that weren’t there. Everyone agreed that the prose was wonderful, but the characters were unlikeable, unrealized, and some readers just couldn’t bring themselves to care enough. That perhaps Erdrich’s own experience was the key to the novel– that she is writing to make sense of what happened to her, instead of creating a fully realized fictional world, but that didn’t necessarily make for a better book. That some of the dynamics of Gil and Irene’s relationship were perfectly depicted, and the scene in the therapist’s office was hilarious. That Stoney was definitely a bad name to give a child, and pot-smoking children were not convincing. That Erdrich has such a strong reputation as a novelist and story writer that perhaps the book had gotten a lighter treatment in reviews?
This conversation went on for ages, and it was wonderful. And though our response to Erdrich’s book was not overwhelmingly positive, there was enough substance for us to work with and many important discussion topics with bearing on literature in general. I came away liking the book less than I had going in, but gladder than ever that I’d read it. What a book club.
(For other Vicious Circlers’ responses, check out Bronwyn’s vlog [a vlog!] and Julie’s review).
June 1, 2010
Track and Trace by Zachariah Wells
The one problem with having defined tastes and a bookish reputation is that nobody ever gives you books (and when they do, you usually don’t like them). So it was a wonderful surprise to receive Zachariah Wells’ collection Track & Trace as a gift from my mother, since it’s a book I’ve had my eye on for quite awhile. Just to receive such a thing was a kind of gift, but then the book itself was also an incredible package– small and beautiful, its cover embossed with footprints, with the “decorations” by Seth (which are plain and wonderful landscapes, horizons as broad as Wells’ poetry).
Reading this collection was a series of such unpackings. The poems themselves in general are about man’s relationship to the natural environment, the marks he leaves upon it, but each poem is also very distinct in how it relates to these ideas. Within each poem, the words fit together in surprising ways, with subtle rhyme, rhythm and alliteration. Within each word, the syllables, the vowels and consonants on and around my tongue. I read these poems aloud, lying on the carpet while my daughter threw blocks in the mornings, and the poems were a pleasure to put my mouth around, the starts and stops and open spaces.
Of particular interest to me were the poems about fatherhood (read “Going Forward” and “There Is Something Intractable In Me”). “Slugs” is as vulgar and wonderful as slugs themselves. Nature is not idealized here– from “Heron, False Creek”, “Heron, stand there/ in my shadow, stare/ up at the seawall/ skronk, and awkwardly/ flop up into the air”. In “Cormorant”, the bird is shot repeatedly– “It puked mustard stuff, guano/ streamed from its anus. Bile rose/ in my throat, I choked– and I swallowed”. I think my favourite line in the whole book, for its sheer beauty, is “Finicky fuckin thing that old silver Ford…”
The unpacking wasn’t finished with just one read, however. There are layers to these poems, unexpected things beneath the surface. A present I’ll have the pleasure of opening time and time again.
May 31, 2010
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
It took me about 200 pages to get into Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel The Lacuna. Usually, I would not persevere so much through a book that wasn’t satisfying, but this is Barbara Kingsolver, it’s been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and I was intrigued by reviewers who’ve had such different reactions and assessments. I’m so glad I kept on though, because the last two-thirds of the novel totally gripped me, I’m now sure that it’s one of my favourite novels this year (or ever), and when it ended, I was absolutely heartbroken.
The Lacuna is the story of Harrison Shepherd, half-American and half-Mexican, a man who is a foreigner no matter where he goes. His lonely childhood spent in Mexico, in the shadow of his errant mother always on the hunt for a new man with some money. Against a backdrop of revolution, Harrison learns skills both in survival and the culinary arts. After a period of schooling back in America (during which he is witness to the Bonus Army riots), Harrison returns to Mexico and becomes a servant in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, mixing paints and making dinners. When Rivera’s friend Trotsky arrives in Mexico, Harrison becomes his secretary, and when Trotsky is murdered, Kahlo helps him get out of the country. Settling down in Asheville, North Carolina– and still traumatized by Trotsky’s death, and unable to leave his house– Harrison becomes a novelist, writing stories of Mexican history from the perspective of the common-man. In the era of McCarthyism, however, Harrison’s ties become suspect, and this tragic period in American history takes Harrison as its victim.
The book is composed of fragments, from Harrison’s diaries, letters and newspaper clippings, all compiled by a mysterious someone called Violet Brown. The fragmentation was what put me off at first, as well as copious description of Mexican landscapes, but as Harrison’s life began to be tied up with those of such interesting people as Kahlo and Trotsky, I got hooked on the plot. And then as the story went further, details of Harrison himself became clearer and I found him to be an incredibly sympathetic and compelling figure.
A lacuna is a hole, an empty place, and Harrison himself is quoted as saying that, “The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.” Plenty of reviewers have found that empty space to be Harrison himself, that the soul of this novel is hollow, but I thought otherwise. Of course, he is an elusive character, the “eye” much more so than the “I”, but his vision is so clear that we’re given to understand everything around him. That although we’re not treated to a view of Harrison himself, the Harrison-shaped space that’s left out is so well-defined at its edges that he’s real, multi-dimensional. The space ceases to be hollow at all.
What the lacuna is indeed, however, is this whole book itself. These fragments were what went untold from Harrison’s official story, what he– determined that he would not have to justify himself or answer to anyone– persuaded his secretary Violet Brown to burn one afternoon, but she didn’t. She’d gone against his wishes and kept all his papers: “If God speaks for the man who keeps quiet, then Violet Brown be His instrument.” Interestingly though, the book still contains numerous gaps, not least of which being those imposed by Brown herself, the “unimportant” pieces she offhandedly admits to omitting from the whole. A reader can’t help but wonder if she’s the lacuna here, that she might have shaped these records with her own kind of agenda and what particular spin has been the result of this.
Because the lesson of The Lacuna itself is that history is a series of accidents, that what becomes official record is just circumstance. Harrison writes to Kahlo, “The power of words is awful, Frida. Sometimes I want to bury my typewriter in a box of quilts. The radio makes everything worse, because of the knack for amplifying dull sounds. Any two words spoken in haste might become the law of the land. But you never know which two. You see why I won’t talk to the newsman.”
There are obvious parallels made between the paranoia of 1950s’ America, and the American political climate today, and also between the outraged responses to Harrison Shepherd’s work (usually by people who have never read it; “Why does a person spend money on a stamp, to spout bile at a stranger?”) and responses Kingsolver herself has received to her writing. Sometimes these parallels are too obvious, Kingsolver’s history taking on a determinedly teleological bent, but these instances are rare enough to be forgiven, particularly since these connections are the whole point– that we are tethered to history, like it or not.
Kingsolver has rendered history here with such richness and colour, resurrected real-life figures through the wonder of fiction, and with the the astounding power that is her reputation as a novelist, she has imagined her story into a world that is decidedly real.
