December 1, 2013
Wood by Jennica Harper
Jennica Harper is the poet whose books I stay up reading late into the night. She has uncanny ability to zero in on my fascinations, articulate questions I’ve vaguely wondered about, to use the very things located in the world around me (songs, cultural lore, television characters, celebrity references) and spin their own mythology. In a recent conversation, she asked, “Is there such thing as a “gateway poet”? That’s what I’d like to be.” And she has certainly succeeded at this, most recently with her latest collection, the beautiful, quietly powerful Wood.
Wood is meticulously packaged, the trunk-ring design from the cover repeated on the endpapers.The package is important, first because it’s beautiful, but also because Wood is a project of parts rather than strictly a whole and how these parts fit together is a huge part of the book’s appeal.
The first section is “Realboys: Poems for, and from, Pinocchio”. Like much of Wood, this is a story about progeny and disconnect. Pinocchio who is not quite a son, whose burgeoning sexuality extends the “wood” metaphor further (ha ha), who takes on Gepetto’s disappointment that he won’t grow to be a man–Gepetto, the man who made him! Who longs for the accoutrements of manhood without really understanding what they are. The only thing that isn’t rigid here is language: “I make things hard.”
“Liner Notes” is section 2, a long-poem from the perspective of a young woman 10 months into her first serious romance, thinking over the matters of her life as she cares for a disabled child and listens to “Crimson and Clover” by Tommy James and the Shondells. “Tommy James and the Shondells went on vacation in 1969/ and never got back together…” The connections between the band, the song, the girl and the child in her care. She is on the cusp of adulthood, and the child stands for an unspoken possibility for the rest of her life, a possible narrative thread. She is playing house, experimenting with roles, hypnotized by the melody “over and over”, by her own power, by the possibilities still before her. The child is a window onto a way of life that nobody ever imagines, evidence that life takes on its own trajectory. And what does the child know about being a realgirl, about being being human? What does she know about being beyond human?
“There are various interpretations of the meaning of “Crimson and Clover”/…Many continue to believe it’s simply about being high, floating, synesthesia/letting go.”
“Papa Hotel” is imaginings on the father figure as iconic Hollywood movie stars, continuing the father-child (dis)connection theme that began with Pinocchio. Like the previous section, it’s an exercise in the hypothetical (wood/would!). Or the poet is imagining a context for inexplicable behaviour instead? “My Father, As Jack Nicholson”: “A man who knows a pretty girl when he sees one, and he’s always seeing/ one. He reads waitresses’ tags, calls them their names…”
Next is “The Box” (wooden?), poems about Harry Houdini and his wife, about their marriage–“They had no children”. The poet imagines herself into the experience of Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner: “Now I’m the wife of the Handcuff King.” Poems about the tricks of their life together, and about their “Dream Children”. And then in “Wife”: Her imagined children are your imagined children. For all you know/ she was content, childless, her small womb unstretched, a balloon/never blown. Her belly skin taut ’til the end. You want her to want/ those children. Then she’d be missing something, like you…”
“Would” comes next, poems from the point of view of “you” in the preceding section, with a few variations. Once again, we’re delving into the hypothetical, including a poem about Lizzie Borden’s parents supposing that they, like the Houdinis, had had no children. The last line of a poem about the impossibility of real-estate is “Once more, knock wood for the happy ending.” A poem about miscarriage, another about the prospect of childlessness (and with these, we see a connection between this longing and Pinocchio’s), and then “Ring in the Grain” (see cover image, of course) about birth from the point of view of a witness, a record of the event addressed to the child front one cognizant enough to articulate the profoundness of the moment, note the details of the blur.
And then finally, “Roots: The Sally Draper Poems,” which you may have already read because they were published online last winter and then went viral and were quoted on Slate, which is pretty amazing. The poems are clever in their conceit, but their power goes beyond cleverness or pop-culture connections. This is Sally Draper specifically, buying a present for her specific father, for example. I loved the line in “Sally Draper: Upwardly Mobile”: At home, my mother had it made and brought to her by the help. Something/ I think about when I pour.” “Sally Draper Contemplates the Interstellar Mission” reaches back to Harper’s first book, The Octopus and Other Poems, while this whole sequence engages the same intimate knowledge of the teenage mind as her second book, What It Feels Like For a Girl. More hypothetical exercises, disconnected dads, an abortion, red lipstick. Last night of the book: “Would that be so bad?”
Wood appears to have emerged from several different projects whose connections were secondary, and yet how these connections function–how these poems speak to one another, echo one another, underline and overwrite–is the book’s most compelling quality. It’s a kind of puzzle to discern how these pieces fit together, and each reread will unearth a new layer of understanding (or perhaps another ring in the grain?). Which is good reason then to stay up reading late into the night.
December 1, 2013
December the First
November is done. This is a triumph. November was filled with arduous things, and then fate compounded it all by throwing funerals and sickness into the mix. But now it is December, and while my entire life (and yours?) these days feels like a hardscrabble round in a hamster wheel, we’ve managed to get our stockings hung and get a start on Christmas baking. Door Number One is opened in our Lindt Advent Calendar, and we’ve chosen the winner of our Christmas CD giveaway. This evening, the CD itself was playing, and it was wonderful, Elizabeth Mitchell’s voice creating a lovely, mellow mood. We sat down and read Margaret Laurence’s The Christmas Story, which I loved even more than I’d remembered–it’s a fantastic way to teach my kid what Christmas is all about. And it’s just one of a whole stack of Christmas books that we’ve pulled out again after 11 months away in boxes. I’m looking forward to getting to know them again.
November 27, 2013
Reading is where the wild things are.
“The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.
Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture–exploit the new thing then move on.
There’s a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations.
Reading is where the wild things are.”
–Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?
November 26, 2013
Disaster Series: Our Trip to England
We were already quite sure that travelling to England with two children was going to come with its challenges, and when Harriet threw up the night before we left, it was almost funny. Almost. Like how bad can things really get? It was sort of an amusing way to top off the whole experience, but then vomit turned out not to be the top, no, but instead just the beginning of the experience. She woke up in the morning even sicker, her eyes rolling back into her head. A couple more hours of sleep transformed her back into someone human-seeming, but we knew that we still had trouble on our hands.
The flight itself turned out not to be so bad, and Harriet threw up again just once. Iris was fine, and doesn’t sleep for long periods anyway, so her short naps in the carrier were to be expected. Neither Stuart nor I slept at all that night, but we arrived in Amsterdam pretty proud of ourselves for having survived the longest part of our haul. We had breakfast in the airport, bought Holland souvenirs, and arrived to board our connecting flight in plenty of time… when we realized that we were missing our passports.
It was all very curious. I’d kept all our travel documents together, and we still had the children’s passports. We couldn’t understand where ours had gone. Operating on sheer panic (and completely no sleep, remember?) I raced through the airport to see if we’d left our passports in one of the shops we’d visited. At the gate, Stuart and the very kind airline staff unpacked our carry-on baggage three times. They were as desperate as we were that we get on the flight, but when the passports failed to turn up anywhere–no dice.
We missed the flight and were sent to file police reports for our missing passports. With the police reports, we’d be able to leave the airport in order to go to our respective consulates and obtain emergency passports. To make things even more complicated, our respective consulates are in different cities. This was the point at which we thought perhaps we’d have to live in the airport forever, which seemed so much easier than running after consular officials. We were totally exhausted, and then had to call our family in England to let them know we wouldn’t be arriving that afternoon.
We had to wait for the real police to arrive after the immigration police called them about our predicament. They were kind but a bit incredulous, which we understood because the story of our missing passports made absolutely no sense. “I”m going to have to ask you to unpack your things one more time,” the officer told me, which I thought was completely ridiculous. There is only one place where our passports could have been due to my impeccable organizations skills, plus we’d unpacked our stuff three times already.
Or rather, the airline staff and Stuart had unpacked our stuff three times already. I hadn’t unpacked them once, and when I did, the first place I looked was inside the pocket of my new computer bag, and there are passports were. “Thank fucking God!” exclaimed my husband. “I knew they were there,” said Harriet the Horrible. “Every time,” the police officer said to me, “they’re somewhere in the luggage.” Me, I was relieved, but now a bit disappointed that the ending to this story had been so incredibly stupid, that I’d never be able to write an essay about the time I wandered around Amsterdam without a passport like Theo Decker in The Goldfinch, that our passports hadn’t been pick pocketed by a Russian thief called Boris, but instead, I’d just packed them somewhere dumb.
With the problem solved and no one having thrown up in ages, we raced to the flight counter to get on the next flight to Manchester. On the basis of our looking exhausted, and schlepping two small children, airline staff took pity on us and booked the next flight, charging us for administrative costs only. We had breakfast again, and within a few hours, we were in the air again, flying to where we were supposed be. And we even got there!
Only problem was that our luggage didn’t, which would have fine, except that our luggage included the carseats without which we couldn’t leave the airport. And so we had no choice but to wait for our stuff to arrive on the 5pm flight from Amsterdam, sitting in the Arrivals area at Manchester Airport, whose sliding doors open and open and it’s so cold in there. And because this is the north of England in November, it wasn’t long before the sun went down. We hadn’t slept in oh so very long, and when the luggage arrived, we still had an hour’s journey by car ahead of us. I drove while the children cried, and my eyes ached.
We arrived though, and fortunately we were in a land where I wouldn’t have to cook or do laundry for the duration of our stay. The next morning I even got to sleep all morning without a single child in my bed while wee Iris was held by her grandmother. I ate Dairy Milks for breakfast, drank strong strong proper Northern tea, had a full English breakfast and afternoon tea in a single day, bought too many books, was terrified while driving down oh-so-narrow windy roads at 50 miles per hour but never once crashed into anything, breathed in the sea air, walked on cobblestones, had fun with family, celebrated Stuart’s birthday, read lots of books, and decided that chocolate-covered digestives are the food I love most in the world.
It was exhausting though. Harriet continued to be ill, and then passed her cold onto Iris who is far too little for such a plague and now she’s still sick with the most agonizing cough. Iris also refused to sleep in her own bed at all, and so she was basically on me for most of the week, and one gets tired of such things quickly. Halfway through our stay (and mostly because of jet-lag, I think) Harriet started coming into our room in the middle of the night and crying that nobody loved her, which had the effect of making nobody love her. I was crabby, and nobody loved me either.
It was a very good week though, and so wonderful for our English family to meet wee Iris for the very first time, and for Harriet to have her first English visit that she will remember. Fun to be by the seaside and exciting to imagine our next trip back when Iris is a bit bigger, and how much further we’ll all be along by then. (Gulp. This is wonderful and terrible. Six months ago today, we were celebrating Harriet’s fourth birthday and Iris was just over a week away from being born. How very far we’ve come since then. How much road ahead there is to travel, but how quickly it all speeds by…)
I do love England. Land of green, rolling hills, unceasing cups of tea and tiny cars. And of bookshops, oh yes. I’d purchased Love Nina by Nina Stibbe, and it delighted me during my first few days of vacation. (I’d been hooked by a description of the book as “Mary Poppins meets Adrian Mole…”). After hitting the bookshop in Waterstones, I’d bought Mutton by India Knight, whose novels are always such a pleasure. I read that book for the rest of the trip, and will get through the rest of my English stack in the next few weeks. I did make the mistake of reading the Guardian’s Books of the Year piece after visiting the bookshop, and now I mustn’t rest until I have a copy of Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald biography for myself.
We were owed something for our flight home, I think, and fate delivered. Harriet watched movies and Iris went in and out of sleep, enough in for me to read an entire novel. A short novel, Alice Thomas Ellis’s The Other Side of the Fire, but a whole novel still. Amazing! And they gave us ice cream en-route. It was great. Our luggage arrived back in Toronto with us, and we took at a cab home and nobody had a meltdown. It was a miracle, probably because our journey the week before had been such a disaster. It all comes out even in the end, I guess. And all and all, it was a very good time away.
November 20, 2013
CD GIVEAWAY! The Sounding Joy by Elizabeth Mitchell and Friends
I fell in love with Elizabeth Mitchell’s music when Harriet was a baby, and suddenly the whole world was a richer, sunnier place. Her music is the soundtrack to our family life, and I love that with her folk songs she gives us roots, but also keeps us rocking out to covers by Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Van Morrison. I love how she brought us Remy Charlip. “Alphabet Dub” on her You Are My Sunshine album is hands-down the best version of the ABCs ever.
Her latest is an album of Christmas songs, The Sounding Joy. And you can listen to a preview here, the song “Children, Go Where I Send Thee (Little Bitty Baby: A Cumulative Song)”.
More about the album for Smithsonian Folkways:
Grammy-nominated recording artist Elizabeth Mitchell releases The Sounding Joy, ann exploration of Christmas and solstice songs from the American folk tradition. Drawn almost exclusively from the often overlooked but deeply influential songbook of revered composer and anthologist Ruth Crawford Seeger, these songs evoke an era before mass media and the commercialization of Christmas, when sacred song, dance, contemplation, and gathering were prized above all else during the holiday season. Mitchell’s fifth album for Smithsonian Folkways, The Sounding Joy features husband Daniel Littleton, daughter Storey, and special guests Peggy Seeger, Natalie Merchant, Amy Helm, Aoife O’Donovan, Gail Ann Dorsey, Larry Campbell, Dan Zanes, and John Sebastian, among many other family, friends, and neighbors. This gorgeously reverent 24-song collection attempts to save these traditional American holiday songs from an “unmarked grave,” as Merchant puts it in her essay included in the liner notes.
Although the songs presented are specific to the Christian tradition, Mitchell’s husband Daniel Littleton cites the inclusive nature of the project, describing the assembly of musicians as an “ecumenical summit” of sorts, with participants of many religious and non-religious backgrounds coming together happily to bring the songs to life. Mitchell sums up the spirit of the album best in her notes: “However you and your loved ones celebrate the last month of the year, I hope it is filled with the sounds of joy.”
And even better than news of a brand new Elizabeth Mitchell album? Why, that Smithsonian Folkways has provided me with a CD copy to give away to one of you. If you leave a comment on this post by midnight November 30, I’ll include your name in a random draw to win the CD.
**Congrats to Suss. Thanks to all who entered. Hope you’ll get your own copies. It’s a really lovely album.
November 18, 2013
GlobeBooks Review: Ann Patchett’s This is the Story of a Happy Marriage
I had the great privilege of reviewing Ann Patchett’s new book, the essay collection This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, and my review appeared in The Globe and Mail this weekend. The book was an absolute pleasure to read and reread, and to explore in writing.
“Patchett expounds on her craft with the verve of Annie Dillard in The Writing Life, but with both feet on the ground. She also makes explicit her influence by Joan Didion, revealing in Do Not Disturb that she’s been rereading all Didion’s books, which shows, and works to her detriment because she isn’t Joan Didion, which also shows. Though to be Joan Didion (who, it must be noted, got her start writing for Vogue) is a lot to ask of anyone, and some of Patchett’s best essays are of Didion’s calibre. She may well prove to be to the contemporary mythology of Tennessee what Didion is to California, with her own particular bent*.”
Read my review here!
*I kind of see Patchett as the anti-Didion, actually, particularly when she throws out the line, “I didn’t worry much about snakes” in her essay “Tennessee”. If you’ve read much Didion, you’ll know what I mean by that.
November 18, 2013
Breastfeeding Carnival: Send in the Nipple Clowns
This post is part of the first Humor in Parenting (and Breastfeeding!) Blog Carnival inspired by the anthology Have Milk, Will Travel: Adventures in Breastfeeding, a collection edited by Rachel Epp Buller and published by Demeter Press in August 2013. The anthology looks at the lighter side of nursing. All of its contributors found something funny to say about their days as a non-stop milk shop, even if it was a tough job to have.
This carnival celebrates the craziness that is parenting and asks the question of how we use humor to get through our days, or minutes, or years. Just what’s so funny about being a parent? And why is it so important to make life with kids funny even when it doesn’t exactly seem hilarious?
Please share widely and connect us with other funny parents who are blogging and Tweeting. Use the hashtags #funnybreastfeeding and #humorcarnival along with whatever witty originals you come up with. Those ought to be worth some laughs, too!
See below for links to the other contributors. And, as you might have said to your nursling once upon a time, enjoy the buffet!
***
Two years ago, someone told Similac that I’d had a baby, even though I hadn’t, or at least not for some time. But regardless, a huge box was couriered to my doorstep containing cans of liquid formula and a great big tin of the powdered stuff. I was kind of outraged, committed breastfeeding mother that I am. My daughter had recently been weaned at 2.5 years, a peaceful end to a pretty lovely breastfeeding experience, and I’ve been trained to be wary of formula marketing schemes. All the same though, I put away that tin of powdered formula deep in the cupboard, supposing we’d have another baby someday. Everybody’s got a secret stash of something. And I wondered what I’d done to make Similac so confused. (Six months later and six months after that, I’d receive new packages from Similac congratulating me on my imaginary baby’s latest milestones, and including coupons for our next visit to Walt Disney World.)
**
Now imagine a montage, the comedy story of my breastfeeding life. Because breastfeeding comedy? I’ve known breastfeeding comedy. (Note: when you haven’t slept more than 3 hours in a row in 6 months, nothing and everything is funny.) Like when my baby was new and my breast was bigger than her head and she cried because it scared her. None of us blamed her.
This feature is shot on various locations, the first being at the zoo this summer as we sprinted toward the pandas in attempt to avoid the lineups, a jiggly shot from behind with my whole back exposed, me yelling at my four-year-old to hurry up. We got there, and the pandas were sleeping, of course, but at least we missed the lines. And the baby got fed.
All this flurry was so new to me. I never breastfed while mobile with my first baby, instead requiring soft-lighting, two pillows behind my back, a mid-range breastfeeding pillow, a good book and cup of tea in order to complete the transaction. This is also funny. Whereas with Baby 2, it’s not just at the zoo; I find myself breastfeeding on the subway while chaperoning a group of 15 children on a class trip. I’ve breastfed on a ferry boat, on a crowded streetcar, in the car while speeding down the highway.
**
But let’s go home now, back to the beginning for a shot of me and Baby 1, who at six weeks old decided that she would only feed without screaming if I rocked back and forth while nursing her. I don’t remember how long this went on. It was hard, and sometimes I spilled my tea, but we made do. I remember a Facebook conversation at the time with someone who suggested that if breastfeeding weren’t easy, we were doing it wrong, and how I laughed and laughed. Comedy gold. Zoom in next on my mother’s anxious face as I tried to feed the screaming baby around the same time. “Maybe you don’t have enough milk?” she suggests, to which I respond by squeezing my breast, milk shooting across the room. “I don’t know,” I replied. “What do you think?” Not so secretly delighted because I’d been dying to pull off such a stunt for ages.
It is possible that the second-greatest pleasure of my breastfeeding life has come from horrifying people. This was a huge draw to breastfeeding my first baby into toddlerhood. We even had a plan, my husband and I. We were going to pump like mad with Baby 2 so that I could have a life of my own and also so that we could make breast-milk ice cream. We were going to make breast-milk ice cream so that we could eat breast-milk ice cream, but moreover so we could tell certain people that we had eaten breast-milk ice cream. “It was delicious,” we imagined reporting. “We flavoured it with mango.”
Unfortunately, that part of the movie never got made. The breast-pump we borrowed was fourth-hand, and the motor didn’t work. We tried it twice and it sounded like a dying cow, and so we pulled out the manual pump instead. Not so much for the ice-cream now, but because I had this fantasy of leaving the house for two hours when the baby was nine weeks old. But just as had been my experience with the first baby, I pumped and pumped and nothing came out. My midwife had suggested that perhaps I try pumping while not reading a novel. “You have to be thinking about your baby,” she said, but I didn’t understand that. In my mind, there was a direct correlation between lactating and reading and I didn’t want to know how to do the one without the other.
Desperate times though–we figured out a way to make it work. Picture this: during one Sunday in August, every time the baby fed (which was often), my husband would hook the manual pump to the breast she wasn’t feeding on and he would pump until his hand cramped. And how that milk would flow. He ended up with carpal tunnel, but we managed to fill an entire bottle, and I even got a couple of chapters read, though it was awkward to hold my book with him there.
Of course, when I went out, the baby wanted none of it. This is when the scene transitions from comedy to horror. All that effort was poured right down the drain, and then we put the manual pump away too, the way we always did, and consented to use formula instead when I went out by myself. As though we had control over any of this. I still had that tin of Similac left over from my imaginary baby. My actual baby, however, was as uninterested in the formula as she was the pumped milk, so now I just go out and she cries a lot.
Life is a compromise.
It is terrible and exciting that she starts solids in two weeks.
***
Please check out these the other submissions to our humor carnival:
In “I Will Sleep When I’m Dead,” Zoie at TouchstoneZ needs some sleep but her kids have other ideas.
In “Laugh or looney bin,” Virginia of Ready or Not Mom shares how laughter (and tears) got her and her husband through two NICU stays and a whole lot more. “Just call me Bessie…on the move” shows some love for a nursing mom without a lot of spare time on her hands.
In “Boobs Are in the House,” Jenny of Half Crunchy Mom shares how her love affair with her nursing breasts was hindered only by the act of pumping, but she found a way to party with the pump.
In “Send in the Nipple Clowns,” Kerry of Pickle Me This shares a story in which a mother who hasn’t slept more than three hours in a row for six months reflects back on the comedy of her breastfeeding life.
And, from Have Milk contributors:
In “The importance of laughter,” Jessica Claire Haney of Crunchy-Chewy Mama gets serious about looking for humor with her kids where her own parents didn’t.
In “Underwater” and “Excuse Me,” Adriann Cocker of Cockerchat muses on the absurdity of parenting while leading a hip loft lifestyle
in downtown Los Angeles.
***
To learn more about Have Milk, Will Travel, or to buy a copy for your favorite mom (or the people who love her), visit the Have Milk page at Demeter Press or on Amazon.
See how much Literary Mama liked the book at this review.
Keep up with readings and happenings on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/HaveMilkWillTravel and follow the book’s feed on Twitter at @HaveMilkTravel.
November 17, 2013
Eat It and A Recipe for Disaster
Eat It: Sex, Food & Women’s Writing is both a standalone book, and the latest issue of The Feathertale Review. Its editors have assembled a smorgasbord of Canadian women writers who write about food from a wide range of perspectives. Standout pieces are Amy Jones’ “Emotional Eating in the Digital Age”, stories by Jessica Westhead and Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, essays about women and poisoning, Chinese penis cuisine, and a perspective on an eating disorder that I’ve never before encountered, and a fabulous ode to dairy (yum). The book is smartly designed, and even has an index referencing all the foods mentioned in the volume. It made me hungry, but I devoured it.
**
I figured that A Recipe for Disaster & Other Unlikely Tales of Love by Euphemia Fantetti would be fitting companion read, and I was right. This slim little volume is sometimes about food, mostly about hunger, and makes connections between these and Catholicism. Fantetti’s characters are lovelorn, sometimes desperate, and blessed with a darkly humorous edge. I loved this book’s subtle sweet, sweet subversion.
November 16, 2013
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
For nearly two weeks, I was reading The Goldfinch, carting it everywhere I went, having to pull out a bigger purse in order to accommodate its heft at 771 pages, my hand cramping as I read it while breastfeeding. I ripped the dust jacket when I tried to tear off a sticker, and then took the dust jacket off altogether when it started getting tatty from the travel. After that, I put the book down on the table on something green, and then the cover started to disintegrate when I wiped the stain off with a damp cloth. I don’t usually treat my books so poorly, but The Goldfinch is so large and solid, a piece of furniture nearly. It has presence, is lived with, is experienced. And it is interesting to think about my wear-and-tear on the book when I consider how much of the book is about what time does to physical objects. The Goldfinch is about its thingness just as much as it is about its text.
Part of this is because The Goldfinch is an event, a new Donna Tartt novel being a once-in-a-decade experience. I bought it the day it came out and for once got to be reading what everyone else was reading, which was fun as we marked our progress on Twitter. The book has been receiving mixed reviews, but those which are positive are ecstatic, and everybody on my Twitter feed seemed to be enjoying it as much as I was.
In some ways, my destruction of The Goldfinch is a tragedy, because the book itself is exquisitely designed, with thin pages and a subtly beautiful cover, though the cover seems to anticipate my treatment of it–food stains aside, the wear seems like part of the design. And on the flyleaf is a rendering of “The Goldfinch” by Carel Fabritus, a 17th century Dutch painter. It’s this painting which the book revolves around, this story of Theodore Decker whose own live turns on an explosion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which killed and his mother and many others when he is thirteen years old.
The novel is a curious mix of old and new, strangely so at times. Though perhaps it’s just me who is surprised when a novel so steeped in longing and nostalgia refers back to a time in which email and emojis were a thing. What a thing to consider–how the present becomes the past, and how the past devours the future so that we look back and it’s there. Theo is writing his story from Amsterdam a decade and a half later, where something is desperately wrong and we’re not quite sure what, and then we forget about the present day altogether as Theo takes us back to the museum, and the explosion: “when I lost [my mother] I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me to someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.”
Instead, he is traumatized by the incident, and left alone, by default falling into the care of a friend’s wealthy family. Compounding his trauma is fear of consequences to his actions directly following the explosion: listening to the curious instructions of a dying man, Theo removes “The Goldfinch” painting from the disaster scene, takes it with him, keeps it hidden. He tells this secret to no one, but lives in fear of its discovery. He tells us that he couldn’t tell anyone what he’d done for fear of repercussions–his whole life is unstable, he’s terrified of being thrown into foster care, he imagines being imprisoned for theft, and all this seems illogical because he’s so young and because of what happened. Surely her would have been forgiven? But I wonder now if really Theo didn’t tell because he knew that if he did, it would be taken from him.
The unreliability of Theo as a narrator, apparent or otherwise, as one of the book’s most fascinating features. He is a compelling storyteller, his story utterly gripping, and yet I was quite far into the book before I remembered that Theo had been at the museum with his mother only because he’d been suspended from school after some wrong-doing. What had he done, I wondered? I went back to check, and then realized that Theo claimed that he doesn’t even know, that it may have been fuss over a cigarette. He brushes past this. Situating himself as the hero of his story, or at least its victim, but it is remarked that Theo knows what to say and do to impress his friends’ parents, that perhaps Theo is not entirely genuine.
But these thoughts onto turn up here and there. Mostly we’re caught up in the twists and turns of his life, how his estranged father arrives back on the scene and whisks Theo away to live in Las Vegas where he’s making a living as a shady dealer. Here, Theo befriends the inimitable Boris, similarly lost, neglected, and prone to trouble. The two friends get up to trouble of their own, with drugs and petty theft, but Boris provides Theo with the first stable force he’s had in his life since he lost his mother.
The plot turns on coincidence, tragedy, collision and fireworks. There’s nothing subtle about this structure, though this is a book that is very aware of itself–Theo remarks upon the power of misdirection, the force of coincidence and chance. He ends up back in New York living with Hobie, a friend connected with the dying man he’d encountered in the museum. The friend deals in antiques, repair and reconstruction, and Theo begins working for him, making a racket selling forged pieces. He’s still hiding his copy of The Goldfinch, hiding this secret as desperately as he hides the painting itself.
Meanwhile (and this is a novel with a whole lot of meanwhile), he’s long been in love with a red-haired girl who’d been with the dying man and shares his experience of the tragedy, he is very addicted to drugs, he continues the orbit the world of his wealthy childhood friend. That friend’s mother has turned into a Miss Havisham figure after her own tragedy, the red-haired girl is called Pippa, and Hobie is a kind of Joe Gargery. The only explicit Dickens reference here is to Oliver Twist, however, the Artful Dodger in particular, in relation to Boris, though Tartt is subtly trickery here, and I think we’re meant to wonder if Theo himself is just how artfully dodgy in his own right.
I really liked Zsuzsi Gartner’s critical review of this novel from a few weeks back, because engaging with it even if only to disagree made me think deeper about The Goldfinch. She is also terrifically right about that Velveteen Rabbit moment, but I think Tartt is far too capable and tricky a novelist for us to write these off as shortcomings. The substance of the book is as such that its shortcomings seem inherent to its very fabric, and one can read into them to discover the novel’s deeper meaning. I am not sure that Tartt intended to write a realist novel, as Gartner asserts. Tartt, in reference to art, considers paintings which appear realist from afar, but upon closer look are constructed of dots and brush strokes–but then what isn’t? (It’s also worth noting that novels which insist on their novelness are the kind that I love best.)
It occurred to me that this novel so steeped in its thingness and in things was terribly complementary to Pinterest, so I created a pinterest board for The Goldfinch. Definitely a stupid way to waste a previous hour of Baby’ s nap on Thursday afternoon, but it turned out not so much. It was fun to go through the book again in search of things to pin and to include accompanying text, and an excellent way to further engage with the text–it turns out that 771 pages just weren’t enough for me.
November 16, 2013
Children of Air India by Renee Sarojini Sakiklar
On June 23 1985, Air India Flight 182 was blown up by a bomb, exploding over the Atlantic Ocean in Irish airspace. 329 people were killed, 268 of them Canadians, making this the largest mass-murder in Canadian history. And 82 of the dead were children under the age of 13.
In Children of Air India: Un/Authorized Exhibits and Interjections, Renee Sarojini Saklikar injects life and story into an event whose devastation has been dulled by time and newspaper headlines. An event that should have become part of the national consciousness, but never did, Canadians–because of racism, xenophobia, and general ignorance–choosing to regard it as another country’s tragedy, the product of another’s country’s troubles.
The collection is a combination of found object piece, memoir and imaginative flight. Saklikar’s sources include official documents and reports from the Air India Inquiry, books on the subject, interviews, and her own experience as one whose life was touched by the tragedy–her aunt and uncle her among those killed on Flight 182, flying home to India from Canada, having changed their travel plans in order to get back to their son.
In the book, Saklikar takes on the persona, N, to elegize the events of June 23 1985, and the individuals who were lost–in particular those 82 children. These poems are harrowing to read, unimaginable facts from coroners’ reports of the trauma suffered by bodies of the dead, and also in the lives she imagines as lived by these people who in death were reduced to numbers:
We are mother-father-daughter-daughter
three of us India-born, one of us Canada-made,
each grain of each minute, cascading days
the 1960s rush into the 1970s rush into a new decade
1980—
no signs come to us
that we might one day end, no portents accumulate
to brush against our skin…
(from “Exhibit (1985): the unknown family”)
In addition to these biographies, Saklikar considers N’s own grief, her family’s response to the tragedy, and also the circumstances behind the RCMP’s famously bungled work on the case, both before and after the incident. Further, she evokes the idea and ideal of Canada, showing how each is tarnished by Air India Flight 182, and sets Air India alongside other shameful components of our national identity, including colonialism and inaction surrounding missing and murdered women.
This poetry collection is beautiful, devastating, difficult and important. Difficult in terms of subject matter, but yet the narrative was so compelling, N herself leading the reader through so many lives and stories, plot and intrigue. Throughout, I needed to take short pauses because it all was a little too much, but then I’d pick the book right up again, the poetry accessible and fascinating, rich with history and voices.
Read Marsha Lederman’s piece on the book in the Globe and Mail.
