September 1, 2022

Sweet Spot

I’ve written before about the too-muchness of summer, and also about what the last two summers of less than optimal circumstances have taught me about “enough,”and somehow, miraculously, summer 2022 has found that sweet spot right in the middle, a perfect balance. Some of which I deserve credit for, because staying within my limits has been important for me this season (in June I didn’t, and it was not a great time), and so I’ve been seeking so much rest and moderation, healthy things to restore me after the first six months of this year during which I’d periodically compare my mental health to a fraying thread. I feel so much stronger now, and grateful for this reprieve from struggling, and grateful to summer for being such a gift, for being so soft and gentle when I needed it most.

I’m still not about to say goodbye to summer—we haven’t even been to the CNE yet. But I’m still afloat on the memories of our camping trips, days on the beach, drives up north, leaps into lakes, the card games and the board games, and the books I read, and the tarts we ate, and the friends we saw, and patio meals, and ice cream cones, Shakespeare in the park, tending my garden, farmers’ markets, bike rides, campfires, and the songs we sang, and the times I laughed until I cried.

Oh, how I’m satisfied. So very satisfied.

September 1, 2022

Gleanings

• What if we knew and trusted and embodied a felt feeling and awareness of even mere moments of being satisfied, content — of having and doing and being … enough. What might become possible?
• Don’t make the mistake of thinking that contemporary fiction is all there is. Older books need not be the traditional classics that you read at school, if those aren’t your thing. Seeking out books published in earlier decades can provide you with a plethora of new favourites…
• What happened to the Retro Frosted Cake Brownie, y’all? Is it out of fashion? This is criminal!
• While I swam, the last of the swallows were dipping over the surface of the water, two of them swooping right over my arms, windmilling me backwards from one grove of cedars to the other, my sentinels.
• It has been much more than a week of lasts — indeed many happened much earlier, without out us being cognisant or marking those occasions.
• First come the peonies, then the Dahlias –– and then come the sunflowers, summer’s last laugh.
• in the face of countless calls to health insurance companies, car troubles, worries about money, automation, depersonalization, there are roses, there are flower petals dropping to the ground while no one watches. the fans oscillate. the artwork falls cockeyed in the frame. there is a chill to the air today, reminding me that i’ve survived another summer. jazz plays while i am on hold and i enjoy it. lots of horn.
• Is the world, ever so slowly, righting itself again? Stabilizing? So, so slowly? And if not — or if this sense of balance, possibility, and normalcy is also only temporary — can I enjoy it for this moment? There’s the bigger question.
• When asked about books that have stayed with me forever, what comes to mind immediately is a childhood collection of stories…
• When I sit to do my daily meditation, I try not to look at my meditation streak.
• I still can’t give a particularly good reason for getting the very large tattoo, or even for the chosen image (an owl made of woven ribbons), other than I like it.
• So, my advice would be to celebrate every success like it was the end goal. Finished an entire draft? That’s a huge accomplishment! Stop and revel in that. Revel in every moment. By all means, keep climbing, but don’t forget to take in the view on your way up.

August 30, 2022

More Vacation Reads

For the second summer in a row, we’ve gotten away for two one-week-holidays at a cottage, and I feel so lucky that this is possible for us and will go out of my way (if necessary) to continue to make it so because it’s just the very best thing, so relaxing and restorative, which has been the theme of my summer in general, and what a gift. And not just because I got nine whole books read!

The first was The Smart One, by Jennifer Close, which I stole from the resort library of the cottage we stayed at in July (though I left two books in its place, so that’s okay, right?). Since reading Marrying the Ketchups in July, I’ve been wanting to launch a Jennifer Close kick, because I enjoyed it so much. The Smart One, her second novel, is similarly a book about adult children coming home again after failures to launch, and it started out fine enough, very typical commercial fiction fare, I thought, but then I started to notice the thread of thoughtfulness that wound the different parts of this story together, and the questions the book asked about what it means to be “the smart one” or “the pretty one,” and the impossibility of any woman making the right choices. Surprise pregnancies, Catholic guilt, people called Cla(i)re and the ties that bind were introduced in this novel, themes that would appear in subsequent books I read.

In Watermelon, by Marian Keyes, the pregnancy is not, in fact, a surprise, but what is a surprise is that Clare’s husband announces he’s leaving her right after their child is born. (He didn’t want to mention it before, because it might have been a risk to her health then.) And so Clare decides to pack up her London life and head home to Dublin, to the house that she grew up in with her legion of sisters, and there she proceeds to drink away her pain and then plot her way toward a better life, so that when her husband finally appears to win her back he’s not really sure what’s happened. I will confess that this is not the best Marian Keyes book I’ve ever read—and I found it in a Little Free Library anyway, so no matter. It was entertaining enough but also utterly implausible—Clare’s newborn baby seems remarkably independent and leaves her mother with plenty of time and space to explore her own needs, which was certainly not my postpartum experience. I also found it very amusing when everyone in this book from 1996 worries that their bum looks big from the vantage point of the 2020s when big bums are all the rage and unflattering jeans are where it’s at. This book was something of a relic but also a perfect diversion for a summer’s day.

Next I read Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, which was the odd man out of these books in many ways (such as, I didn’t find in a Little Free Library), but had more in common with Marian Keyes’ Watermelon than you might imagine (and intersected with Aminatta Forna’s Happiness in interesting ways). It’s true that this is not a novel about ties that bind, instead it’s about being free of those ties, which doesn’t always feel like freedom. Intimacies is a novel about exile, about belonging nowhere, and features a protagonist who’s dating a man whose wife has left their family, inviting some of the parallels to the Keyes. It’s a curious and alienating novel, one just a little too cold and precise for my liking, but that’s not a criticism, just taste.

After that I read Siracusa, by Delia Ephron, who I’ve never read before, and I think I found this book as a secondhand bookshop. It’s a novel, like Intimacies, with an atmosphere that feels oppressive, but far more revealing, and actually intimate. Could be described as a taut thriller, but it’s weirder than that, about two couples who travel to Italy together and whose lives seemingly unravel on the journey with players being played and too many secrets threatening to be revealed. Quick and eerie, I really liked it.

And remained by the Ionian Sea for my next book (or at least it’s beginning), Julia Glass’s Three Junes, which I knew nothing about, except that it won the National Book Award in 2002, and my friend Marissa recommended it to me (and she never steers me wrong). I loved this book, which comprises three distinct sections—the first of Scottish widower Paul on a Greek holiday months after the death of his wife; the second from the perspective of Paul’s son Fenno, a NYC bookseller coming home to Scotland after the death of his father five years later; and the third set five years after that when a character we glimpse in the first section meets Fenno on Long Island where she is accidentally pregnant (and there’s a pro-life activist; curiously, there is not an abortion in any of the books I read in this bunch, truly a holiday indeed) and waiting for her boyfriend to return home from Greece so she can tell him about the baby. This novel is a bit strange, and its connections aren’t always clear, but I found it utterly absorbing.

And then I read Frankie and Stankie, by Barbara Trapido, which blew my mind. I read Trapido’s reissued debut, Brother of the More Famous Jack, when we were in the UK in April, and while I enjoyed it, it was so unlike anything else I’ve read before that I had trouble placing it in my mind. This novel, written more than thirty years later, is helping me do so, however, because it’s brilliant. Ostensibly a coming of age novel set in South Africa during the 1950s and 1960s, it manages to be a fascinating (and hilarious) character study, story of a family, but also the most interesting history of South Africa I’ve ever read at once. (In her notes at the end of the book, Trapido explains that the forty years that she’s spent in the company of her husband, Stanley Trapido, a professor of South African history at Oxford, certainly informed her point of view.) I learned so much from this book, but it was also delightful, and now I am officially Barbara Trapido-obsessed.

All the while we were listening to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express in the car on audiobook—it was so good!! We all kept coming up with reasons to go somewhere just so we could get in the car again and hear what happened next. Truly a delight for the whole family, even Stuart, who had watched the movie recently so had a good idea of what was coming.

And then I read Happiness, by Aminatta Forna, which I purchased at the Toni Morrison event I attended at Luminato in June, and like everything associated with that event, it was just so fantastic. As unfathomable as it seems, a novel about urban foxes in London, coyotes in the northeastern United States, and PTSD from war in Sierra Leone, amongst many other things, the novel becomes a study of wildness, of humanity, of love and goodness. Part of it also spoke directly about my own anxiety, my fear of hardship and suffering, a fear of trauma which is seemingly a condition of white, middle class, privileged people in the West, which might cause us to turn our backs on those for whom trauma is lived experience. And trauma also doesn’t have to be destiny—it changes one, but it doesn’t necessarily leave one damaged, as psychiatrist Attila explains. There’s so much to unpack here, but I’m looking forward to reading it again and getting to work.

And finally, Maine, by J. Courtney Sullivan, which I’d saved for the end, something light and easy, another seaside book with Catholics, accidental pregnancy and someone called Clare, though it was probably the most forgettable of the bunch, so I’ll leave it at that.

Hooray, hooray for holiday reading.

August 25, 2022

There are no edges.

I was reading Katherine May (again; I am nothing if not consistent), a post about how her people are “edge people,” about how she’s drawn to margins as a result of growing up far from the centre, and it made me think about how growing up smack dab in the middle of a continent (I didn’t see the sea until I was 10) might have informed my own tendency to adhere to the status quo, to centre my own experience instead of seeking a broader understanding (though I think a lot of people do that; though isn’t that just what somebody with such tendencies would think?!?), but also how it has truly left me hungry to know the edges of places sometimes, which is why—in my most pivotal moments—I find myself so drawn to the Great Lakes shores, to their infinite horizons.

The lakes more familiar to me, however, provide a very different sense of being in the world, instead of edginess, immersion. (And maybe this is what you love when your people are middle people?) The lakes of Haliburton, ON, in particular, just north of the Kawartha Lakes I grew up with, and different too, more rugged with such rocky shores, self-contained instead of each lake merely a conduit to another place, water instead of a waterway. The cottage we’ve rented there for the past three summers does not have a beach, instead a dock with a ladder at the end, so you’re either in or out, there is no in-between, and when I’m in, I feel like I belong to the world in the most peaceful and meaningful fashion.

There are no edges, the lake a giant rocky basin that turns into trees that turns into sky that turns back into trees again as you trace the shape of the visible universe, everything a circle, leading back to the lake, leading back to me there, buoyant and held, connected to all of it, grateful to be one with these waters, clear, silky and cool.

August 9, 2022

Gleanings

• Instinctively, I started referring to the city of my birth by its Ukrainian name, Kharkiv, rather than Kharkov. The vowel change might seem insignificant, but it marked a shift in my thinking. I could no longer bring myself to say “Kharkov” aloud without confronting the stench of imperialism, violence, destruction and forced occupation. I have stopped telling people I am from Russia, because not only is it disingenuous, but it embraces an oversimplified understanding of history.
• As I orient myself, today, I hope to find new and continuing ways to conjure and appreciate experiences, both ordinary and extraordinary, that make possible profound connection with others. I want to be open, always, to that swirl and whirl of delight in what is, that grounds us in what’s happening with joy, trust, light, and lightness.
• How often life can feel this way, like there’s so much to do, could do, should do, could have, should have, could experience, should experience … that has us grasping at scarcity and urgency and fear and the elusive satisfaction that will be found somewhere out there.
• Last year we were away for two months traveling and I longed for this place of blue sky, and mountains, and wide open spaces. I dreamed about this place when we were gone.
• As I have learned more about grief and what helps people move through it, I have realized that the compulsion I felt starting very soon after Owen’s death to write about it was probably an intuitive reaching towards what in therapeutic jargon is sometimes called “meaning making.”
• It’s a reminder isn’t it? A reminder to find some balance between the sludge and the sparkle. A reminder to peek out of the (often unavoidably) muddy bits when and if you can. A reminder that there are beautiful bits tucked all around us, just waiting to be welcomed into each day, if we only take the time to notice them.
• A million years ago when I first left home and moved to Toronto I met a woman, a potter. She had her own studio. I wasn’t yet twenty and she might have been twenty-four, twenty-six, something ancient…. I remember she was ancient.
• books don’t go stale. Books can wait for you to (re)discover them, in your own right time.
• But my favorite kind of souvenir, no surprise, is the one that doesn’t get put on a shelf or forgotten about immediately upon its homecoming. The best souvenirs settle themselves right into the way of things—souvenir objects that transition themselves into everyday objects.
• A heat wave book if I ever read one. You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi is a book that colourfully conjures sun, sweat, and that shimmer in the air on a hot, hot day. Oh, yes, and a little splash of blood, too.

August 4, 2022

That’s not how I see it

I’ve been sort of obsessed with Katherine May lately, whose podcast archives I’ve not delved so deeply into (yet!), but every time I listen, I come away with a gorgeous revelation that’s blown my mind. I’ve included some of these amongst my “Gleanings” lately, including the following, from her conversation with Emma Dabiri: “We all end up using the same language over and over and the effect is just deadening. You just think, I’ve heard that, I know that already, and the brain gets over it. There’s nothing interesting there anymore because we’ve all said it.”

And I think about that all the time, the affect of everybody speaking from the same script with permissible takes, and how meaning gets stripped of all of it. For example, what does toxic even mean? Or gaslighting? Or narcissist. When you’re using buzzwords, it’s time to stop talking, and start thinking, and this is what galls me about everybody who thinks they’re so brave in critiquing the flaws in progressive politics, because they too all start speaking from their own reductive scripts (and subscribing to obligatory substacks) and it’s so boring. When, all the while, thinkers like Katherine May are applying their own rigorous analysis (and sense of curiosity and wonder) to these very same issues, and it’s actually deepening connection and thoughtfulness, which is everything we need right now.

I signed up for May’s Patreon at the conclusion of the podcast where she talks about how one need not increase one’s own suffering in order to meet the hardship in the world, and I so needed to hear that. (There was also something she wrote in an instagram post ages ago about how none of us are obligated to watch over the entire world. Yes, there is a part of the world for which we’re responsible, but there are limits to that responsibility, and I needed to hear that too.)

I also love this line from her recent announcement about her forthcoming book: ” My books always have their feet in uncertainty. They don’t come from a desire to hand down wisdom, but instead to acquire it.”

And, most essentially, this line, from her newsletter, delivered on June 30, in the wake of the overturning of Roe vs. Wade: If nothing else, keep making the world beautiful. Keep singing and dancing, drawing and planting gardens. This is no insignificant thing in the face of a movement that wants to make everything plain and ugly, cruel and sour. There is radicalism in refusing to judge. There is radicalism in listening. There is radicalism in saying, gently, ‘That’s not how I see it.’

There is radicalism in saying, gently, ‘That’s not how I see it.’

I’ve been thinking about that steadily ever since, as I continue to think about and evolve in the ways in which I want to be political. Because my former aspirations to be the witchy woman ever with the placard on a broomstick have been dampened by seeing neighbours* who are my political opponents taking up the very same tools to what I regard as most nefarious ends. I’ve seen masses take to the streets in the last few months, and the effect has been horrifying, and I don’t want to be part of anything to do with that, and I really am starting to think that it’s all—whatever your side, with the rage and contempt—feeding the same terrible, monstrous machine.

So, what to do?

There is radicalism in saying, gently, ‘That’s not how I see it.’

To live my life with integrity, according to my principles, gently, and honourably. My intention not to to beat anyone over the head with a placard, metaphorically or otherwise, not to try to convert everyone around me to my way of being and my way of thinking, because I don’t want to live in a world where everybody thinks the same—how uninteresting is that?—and, when I meet opposition, to say gently, “That’s not how I see it.” Not that I’m necessarily correct, even, in how I see it, but just to continue to complicate things, thoughtfully, generously.

There is radicalism in saying, gently, ‘That’s not how I see it.’

August 3, 2022

Happy Anniversary

I’ve never observed my abortion anniversary before. I didn’t even know the date, had to look it up (20 years ago on August 1) but when the Supreme Court overthrows Roe Vs Wade on your birthday it’s not the time for business as usual. And so I’m so grateful for my woman friends who showed up in short notice on a holiday weekend to gather with me and commemorate the milestone of twenty years since this pivotal event that gave me my beautiful life. (I’m also grateful for the friends who would have been there and sent their love and support.) I asked my friends to come and bring flowers to add to a bouquet I’d started myself. Gorgeously, my vase overfloweth—and what a thing that my husband did the flower arranging. Twenty years ago, I was so lost and sad, but I am so grateful for the courage and conviction of that young woman who set me on the route to here, and what would I be without the friends who were there for me then and who are there for now (and my family too). What an extraordinary blessing, to get to own your own soul. I’ve said it before, abortion is unfathomable mercy. If that doesn’t resonate with you, I’d love you to get more curious. Happy anniversary to me.

July 29, 2022

Summer Reading

I would say that time’s gotten away with me since my week in Muskoka earlier this month, but that’s not strictly true. In fact, time has very much been on my side these last two weeks, which means that I’ve not been very busy, had enough time to do the things I need to do, and haven’t pushed myself to accomplish very much extra, such as recapping my holiday reads. But I’m finally going to get it done right now, because the reading was just so excellent.

I started with a reread of Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters, which was published in 1998, and I don’t recall the circumstances under which I read it the first time, except that I think it was a book I enjoyed along with my mom and sister. And when I read it again, I was surprised to find out how much of it was still so familiar to me, even though I probably haven’t read it or even thought about it much in the last twenty years. Such a great summer book, rich and sweeping and just a little bit trashy. Holds up entirely, except for Vix’s reference to that Cherokee ancestor who’d gifted her those cheekbones, because we just don’t do that anymore. Lots of swimming in the pond on Martha’s Vineyard.

And next was Black Cake, by Charmaine Wilkerson, which I found absorbing, even if the storytelling style didn’t really work for me, skimming a (too) broad surface instead of plumbing depths. But it was still really fascinating, first with lots of ideas about food and colonialism and culinary history, and one of the characters is even an ocean scientist—there’s a whole lot going on. My favourite part, though, was the swimming, which I wasn’t expecting, because most Black characters in Caribbean-set books don’t get to swim so much, but swimming is a big part of the storyline here, as well as surfing, and I loved that.

And then I read Ghosted, by Jenn Ashworth, which I bought when we were in the UK because it was shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Northern English writing. I also bought her novel The Friday Gospels, and loved it, so expectations were high—and oh, she delivered. Ghosted is about a woman whose husband disappears, and she doesn’t tell anyone, which is kind of suspicious, plus she leads a pretty isolated life anyway and has a complicated relationship with her ailing father. There are secrets, but just like in Gospels, they’re not what you think they are, and Ashworth has such a gift for crafting suspense and writing sympathetic characters who are heartbreakingly human. No swimming, but scenes set in Morcambe and Brighton mean beaches definitely factor.

Following that, I read Tara Road, by Maeve Binchy, whose books I always dismissed with literary snobbishness, but I’ve come round, though hers is a curious kind of storytelling, very much telling. But what a wondrous tapestry of family and community Binchy weaves here, and I was utterly absorbed in this story which sweeps decades and continents, with women at the centre. Wasn’t expecting much swimming in this one, but there is a scene at the beach which inspired the opening scenes of James Joyce’s Ulysses!

Another Irish novel up next, Love and Summer, by William Trevor, the third novel I’ve read by him, and the least subversive, though it was in its own way, just more subtly so than the others (Miss Gomez and the Brethren and Death in Summer, both of which had evil lurking on its fringes and such wonderful dark humour). I think I love the works of William Trevor, and want to read them all. No swimming here, but there is a lake where Florian Kilderry walks his dog, and this is very much a novel about the pains of restraint and so nobody dives in.

I’ve already written about What Storm, What Thunder, by Myriam J.A. Chancy (SO GOOD!), which is definitely not a swimming novel. The one character who ventures into the sea ends up in a tsunami, so consider that a warning, but oh, what a book.

And finally, Every Summer After, by Carley Fortune, which is a much hyped book of the summer, perhaps too hyped for my liking, but I enjoyed it well enough, and its main character swims across the lake every summer, which is the kind of project I can get behind.

July 22, 2022

Freudenfreude

Freudenfreude (finding joy in other people’s pleasure) is truly one of the best habits that I’ve managed to get out of this pandemmick, and lest you think that I’m being repulsively sanctimonious right now, I can promise you that I am also well acquainted with freudenfreude’s much less salubrious evil twin (although I aspire to be better than that, and even sometimes succeed). But there was a time, when things were really rough and uncertain, that if I hadn’t figured out how to be happy for other people, I wouldn’t have been able to be happy at all, because there just wasn’t a whole lot of goodness going around.

This was about a year and a half ago, when the pandemic fatigue was real, and vaccines were only just beginning to happen. The very first person I knew who received a Covid vaccine was a friend who is a first responder, and we made him a card, delivered it to his house, because we weren’t going anywhere else, and had all the time in the world to do so. I wasn’t sure when I would get my own shot—predictions were for September 2021, perhaps?—but he needed immunity far more than I did, and I was happy for him, and for all the other people who love him who’d get to worry a little bit less. In a time that was rather bleak, this was a very good day.

And then friends in America started getting their vaccines, and I started saying, “I’m so happy for you!!” when they posted about it on social media. Partly because I was happy for them, but also because I’d come to realize that it didn’t really matter who was getting vaccines exactly (obviously it does, vaccine equity is a thing, and access is far from fair, especially on a global scale, but see, I was practising being magnanimous) because a shot for any of us is a shot for all of us. It helped too that those early glimpses of vaccine rollouts were a harbinger of similar goodness coming for us down the line. (I’ve felt the same seeing US kids under five getting their shots, knowing that so many families in my own community are going to be feeling the relief of having their own small children vaccinated very shortly!)

Possibly the root of my freudenfreude really is selfish after all, or maybe just not only altruistic, because I really do think we all win in a world in which good things happen and people get what they need. (I remember reading in Tara Henley’s Lean Out about how wealth inequity even made wealthy people less happy, because who wants the world surrounding them to be going to shit?)

Also being happy for other people was such a better feeling than what we’d all been through over the previous year, when you’d see someone on a playground swing, for example, and become enraged at the way they were putting lives in danger. When people were furious at twenty-somethings for sitting in the park. I was finished with the self-righteousness, with the shaming, and altogether tired of having the joy sucked right out of my life, and so every bit of goodness someone else experienced shone a little light upon my world. Family reunions, holidays, exquisite cakes, backyard pools, masked gatherings with friends six feet away in the garden—I was there for it. I was THRILLED for you.

It helped that I was finding my own small pleasures, going out of my way to care for myself and the people I loved. I knew what it meant, is what I mean, the hugeness of these small bits of normal, pleasure and connection. I felt it too.

When we FINALLY arrived in England in April, two days after our cancelled journey in March 2020, after such a long road, so much sadness, stress, and bother, a lot of people in my circles were feeling the freudenfreude, because they told me so. So many people were so happy for us, because they knew what that trip meant after what we’d all been through, how wonderful it was to connect with family again, to have any kind of a getaway after so much loss and anxiety.

It wasn’t just a trip. Nothing is “just a” anything anymore. A child’s birthday party in the park, dinner in a restaurant, being there when your grandfather blows out the candles on his birthday cake, a picnic with old friends, cousins playing together, sleepover parties, backyard bbqs, a trip to the movies, a day at the beach: I am so so happy for you.

And I am so so happy to be happy for you.

July 20, 2022

What Storm, What Thunder, by Myriam J.A. Chancy

In June, I attended the second of a two-night spectacular in downtown Toronto celebrating the works of Toni Morrison and Black women writers (and had even contributed a short written piece about Morrison in anticipation of the event!) produced by Donna Bailey Nurse who, that night, was interviewing Myriam J.A. Chancy, Aminatta Forna, and Dawnie Walton, and I purchased Chancy’s latest novel, What Storm, What Thunder, which I read it on holiday last week, and it really is the very best book I’ve read in ages.

To read this novel, set in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed 350,000 people, is to feel humbled. By the power of Chancy’s prose, first of all (I couldn’t help but read aloud an entire passage about leatherback turtles hatching on the beach: “They’d survived the Ice Age, continental drift, volcanoes erupting below and above ground, asteroids. They were the first superheroes. All that, and still, like most things, they began puny and fragile, scared and scrambling.” SO GOOD.) Humbled also by how puny and fragile are the lives we build in contrast to the destruction the earth might yield, as it did on January 12 2010, buildings collapsing, thousands of people trapped beneath the rubble. And finally humbled by how little I’ve thought about the Haitian earthquake in the years since it happened—how easy it has been to have the stories of lives lost fly beneath my radar.

Chancy, who is Haitian-Canadian, was not in Haiti when the earthquake struck, but in the months and years that followed, as she travelled and campaigned for organizations supporting Haiti and its recovery, she heard so many stories of people who had been. “Listening for years, I realized later,” she writes, “was a big part of the process of writing this novel.”

And so, fittingly, this is a novel constructed of a variety of voices—Ma Lou, the old woman who sells fruit at the market; a young boy makes money delivering her produce to the fancy hotel where Sonia, who works as an escort, runs into Leopold, a drug dealer, just moments before the hotel collapses. The boy’s mother is Sara, left traumatized by the loss of her three children, and her desperate existence in a camp after her home is destroyed. Ma Lou’s estranged son, Richard, a wealthy executive of a bottled water company, has returned to his home country from Paris in hopes of outrunning his own demons. Sonia’s younger sister Taffia tells her story of life in the camps, where rape is a common occurrence and resources are scarce, donations from other countries inappropriate and useless. Taffia’s older brother Didier is living in Boston, driving a taxi without a license, and he experiences his country’s tragedy from afar. Sara’s husband Olivier has left Port au Prince to follow rumours of factory work in other parts of the country. And Richard’s daughter, Anne, an architect who works with NGOs, leaves her placement in Rwanda to come home and volunteer in the camps.

Chancy writes in her acknowledgements, “In the end, what I wanted to capture was the way in which lives were disrupted, what those lives may have been life, before, what might have remained after.”

What Storm, What Thunder is vivid, brutal, gorgeous, devastating, its pieces so artfully woven, its storytelling invested with immense beauty and power. Haunting and mesmerizing, it’s the novel I’ve been trying to urge everybody to pick up since I read it, an extraordinary testament to what fiction can be and do.