Would opening words such as these turn you away from a book?

“I wish this were a happy story. 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. There are few things in life, though, that turn out for the best, with real happy endings.”

They shouldn’t. They’re spoken by the world-weary but compassionate modern day narrator of a generations-old tale. The narrator leads those not stymied by that opening into the compelling story of an unusually courageous family facing increasingly troubling and demanding challenges, dilemmas, changes and decisions in the face of the start of World War II. While that might sound daunting and indeed, not a happy story as the narrator warns, it’s the narrator’s own unwitting warmth that will draw you in, that counterbalances the grim aspects of the unfolding story, and ultimately offers forms of hope and redemption, more than the narrator would even credit.

The Bauers, Pavel and Anneliese and their six-year-old son Pepik, are a well-off, secular Jewish family living a quiet life in a small town in the Bohemia region of western Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. Their story begins with a jolt, as they learn of violence touching their extended family, as rumours of the growing Nazi occupation start to intrude on their comparatively idyllic existence. The characters of the Bauer family, including Pepik’s young, beloved governess, Marta, business associates from Pavel’s textile factory and others, start out somewhat wooden. The initial jolting sequence aside, you might be slow to connect with any of them and feel their rising concerns and confusion. (Thankfully, the present day narrator offers a plausible explanation later for some of the woodenness.)

Even so, the Bauers and their child’s governess gradually develop into complex beings facing complicated times and situations, with often conflicting but very believable motivations and desires. At the same time, their eventual courage and determination seems unusual because these individuals don’t initially seem capable of great or even resourceful acts. They’re all in varying degrees of denial about the encroachment of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, seemingly too young or too sensitive to understand and cope with what is going on, or simply absorbed in day-to-day business and busy-ness, much of it ephemeral, trivial or distracting. In other words, the Bauers are authentically human in the face of forces beyond anyone’s comprehension.

Author Alison Pick was inspired by her grandparents’ own arduous five-year exodus from Czechoslovakia to Canada during World War II in constructing the story of the flight of the Bauers. She couples down to earth, propulsive description and dialogue with occasional flourishes of the cinematic, all interwoven with the deft and poignant use of literal and symbolic images. Trains, which bookend both the story of the Bauers and the voice of the narrator, are a powerful case in point. Pepik’s toy train set interconnects the Bauer home, is a source of both distraction and solace for him and his family, and is a reminder of his absence when his parents secure him a place on a Kindertransport, part of a series of trains used to rescue children from Nazi occupied territories to be placed with families in the United Kingdom until and if the children could be reunited with their parents after the war. Arrivals and departures on train platforms, especially Pepik’s dramatic departure, are on one hand like typically dramatic movie scenes, but Pick underpins them with the earthy sights, sounds and smells of desperate, frightened human beings. Throughout, she invests images like this with both thematic potency and realistic dramatic resonance.

Other examples of pervasive, effectively used imagery include references to lost children and lost childhood, and suppressed and denied identities. Marta, in that regard, is darker and more dimensional than her callow, innocent exterior first suggests. Most wrenchingly, the Bauers struggle with revealing or suppressing their Jewish heritage or assuming different identities in order to survive.

The voice of the present-day narrator in Far To Go – wounded but resilient – is a reassuring and steadfast guide to the conclusion of this riveting story of a family torn asunder, then reassembled in a perhaps somewhat surprising fashion.

“There was not joy, exactly, in finding each other – we were too old, too set in our ways – but our pain was dulled. What we felt was not quite pleasure, but contentment. We had each finished our searching.”

The voice is wary, damaged, almost resigned, but the note of contentment suggests a faith not entirely extinguished by the cruelties of history. This is a journey and a voice worth following to an unexpectedly redemptive resolution. Even the green-tinged tones of the cover convey a hopefulness that builds with a subtle momentum over the course of this absorbing book.

See also

Alison Pick recently discussed “Far To Go” on CBC Radio’s The Next Chapter
http://www.cbc.ca/thenextchapter/2010/11/alison-pick.html

Thank you to House of Anansi Press for providing a review copy of So Far to Go, by Alison Pick.

Here are the books I’ve read so far in 2010. In 2009, I read 52 books, inspired in part by great discussions and suggestions I found amongst the book blogging and reader community on Twitter. I’d like to at least match my 2009 total … but then again, are total numbers of books or pages really the point? What do you think?

1. Sink Trap – A Georgiana Neverall Mystery
   by Christy Evans

2. Matter
   by Meredith Quartermain

3. Invisible
   by Paul Auster

4. This is Water – Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
   by David Foster Wallace

5. Man Gone Down
   by Michael Thomas

6. The Museum of Innocence
   by Orhan Pamuk

7. Awake
   by Elizabeth Graver

8. The Ordeal of Oliver Airedale
   by D.T. Carlisle

9. The Bishop’s Man
   by Linden MacIntyre

10. Outliers
    by Malcolm Gladwell

11. The Children’s Book
    by A.S. Byatt

12. Solar
    by Ian McEwan

13. The Last Woman
    by John Bemrose

14. Nox
    by Anne Carson

15. Chronic City
    by Jonathan Lethem

16. So Much For That
    by Lionel Shriver

17. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
    by Alan Bradley

18. Coal and Roses
    by P.K. Page

19. Pigeon
    by Karen Solie

20. Useless Dog
    by Billy C. Clark

21. The Certainty Dream
    by Kate Hall

22. The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle
    by Monique Proulx
    (translated by David Homel & Fred A. Reed)

23. The Imperfectionists
    by Tom Rachman

24. Migration Songs
    by Anna Quon

25. Grain
    by John Glenday

26. The Sun-fish
    by Eilean Ni Chuilleanain

27. 2666
    by Roberto Bolano

28. A Single Man
    by Christopher Isherwood

29. Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems
    by Randall Maggs

     

Truth be told, I came to this book by way of the movie (and hence the book cover art which, for sake of accuracy, is the version of the book I read, showing Colin Firth depicting central character George). I love thoughtfully made movies, but they are not my preferred avenue to discover books … but sometimes it works out for the better and this is one such case.

A Single Man, the mid-1960s short novel by Christopher Isherwood, captures the delicate minutiae of one person’s day, along with that person’s welling emotions and surprising spirit. George is a literature professor at a college in Southern California, set in the time in which the book was written and published. He is grappling with the sudden death of his longtime lover, Jim. While going about his day and his usual encounters in his neighbourhood and workplace, he is struggling from moment to moment with, well, how to *get* from moment to moment in the face of pervasive grief. I won’t spoil either the book or the movie by saying that each interprets differently George’s success in this struggle. In both, the end of George’s day is both ironic but oddly life affirming. In both, it’s entrancing to share the protagonist’s 24-hour journey.

Migration Songs by Anna Quon is a most worthy addition to the CanLit mosaic. The book’s own mosaic is a sympathetic and memorable cast of characters of varying pedigrees contending with literal and figurative migrations in their respective personal journeys.

By the dictionary definitions, a migration is the seasonal passage of groups of animals for survival, feeding and breeding, or the movement of a person or persons from one country or locality to another. While one sounds natural, normal, organic and positive, the other sounds possibly artificial, forced or prompted by negative reasons. This dichotomy distinguishes the types of migrations of various characters surrounding the troublingly static main character, who is finally compelled and inspired to set her own migration in motion.

The narrator of Migration Songs is reclusive, rueful Joan, a 30-something variously un- or underemployed loner. She sits at the eye of a storm of swirling and intersecting migration paths that enfold and perhaps protect, but increasingly intimidate, confuse and paralyze her. Joan’s mother Gillian is a fiercely determined Chinese-Canadian immigrant who forged her own migration from her parents’ tradition by resisting an arranged marriage to find her own choice of partner, David, who in turn migrates from England to start a new life with his wife. He had perhaps already set his personal migration in motion before even meeting Gillian by diverging from his British upbringing to become an avid if perhaps naive Maoist. David and Gillian’s transition into marriage and parenthood ultimately separates into divergent personal migrations.

As influential as her parents are to Joan is Edna, a feisty Hungarian immigrant who works as a live-in housekeeper in Joan’s family’s neighbourhood. Edna becomes a de facto parent, mentor and champion for the often fragile Joan. The true extent to which Edna’s own life was a series of daunting migrations – not just from one country to another, but over and through harrowing personal terrain – does not emerge until Edna has aged, has moved to a retirement home and is starting to descend into dementia. When Joan is finally in a position to both repay Edna’s devotion and pay tribute to her personal courage, she is able to set in motion her own migration, unfurl her own migration song and confidently take hold of her own life.

While there is much to recommend this book, Quon particularly excels at capturing the perceptions and wonderment and misapprehensions of a child as she traces Joan’s life and arrested maturity. While fragile, Joan is still extraordinarily faithful and stalwart, and even determined in her fashion. Quon has managed to create an indelible character in Joan who is comparable to young, troubled but striving heroines from Anne Shirley to Madeleine McCarthy of The Way the Crow Flies to Thebes Troutman of The Flying Troutmans.

Is having migrated in one form or another (through parentage, heritage, what one calls home) a self-fulfilling or self-denying construct? Some survive and thrive when they migrate, others allow the fact of having migrated in one form or another – or maybe to have been denied the opportunity to migrate – to always impede them. As frustrating as Joan’s inertia and reticence can be at points throughout the book, the reader is always rooting for her, hoping she’ll ultimately find some direction for her own migration.

Author Anna Quon offers some inspiring insights into her own journey or migration to write this book in the following interview:

(translated by David Homel & Fred A. Reed)

“Nothing is simpler than to step through the doors of the universe. First, you switch on your computer. Then rapture begins, when you teeter on the edge with the world at your fingertips, gaping open like a gigantic box of candies that your two hands and your one lifetime could never hope to exhaust.”

This description sounds the first note of genuine passion in the voice of the forlorn narrator of Monique Proulx’s “The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle”. That it follows the emotionally stunted heroine’s last moments with her dying father is very telling. That Proulx is able to sustain the reader’s interest in the misadventures of a cynical, often thoughtless, only sporadically motivated and interpersonally inept narrator illustrates how deceptively accomplished and ultimately winning this book is.

Florence is a Web designer whose only other passion apart from drifting into the online ether is Zeno, the owner of the small Web design firm for which she works, and her on-again, off-again lover. Even the presumably most important and most passionate relationship in her life is intermittent at best. But it’s through the Web design business, which specializes in developing online presence for obscure or underappreciated writers and artists, that Florence finally discovers a subject worth abiding focus, interest and yes, passion. As she becomes entangled with a Thomas Pynchon-esque writer and his wife, Florence begins to confront the life she has lived thus far and assesses why she has not really invested in anyone or anything to that point.

“The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle” bogs down ever-so-slightly about midway, but the murkiness is more likely a reflection of Florence’s inarticulate bewilderment at the new feelings welling up as she becomes more enmeshed with the enigmatic writer than any shortcomings in Proulx’s (and her translators’) precision of expression. Overall, the book is very intriguing and insightful in terms of creating some rich, albeit sometimes frustrating but therefore authentic, characters. Surprisingly, the book’s plot grows increasingly suspenseful as Florence’s involvement with the writer and his wife, and her perhaps on-again relationship with Zeno reach interesting crescendos. The book also offers some intriguing asides about people and their personae and relationships or lack thereof as interactions are conducted online, which sit in striking and instructive contrast to the fumbling interactions of the characters in real life.

The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman is not just an exquisitely crafted gem of a book – it’s a series of exquisitely crafted gems that each stand and glimmer gorgeously on their own, but have considerable additional power and depth arranged together in one elegant setting.

The book serves up a connected series of chapters or short stories about the people running and contributing to, with varying degrees of effectiveness and dedication, an international English-language newspaper in Rome. The main stories are set in the near present, but each story concludes with a chronological series of sharp snippets tracing the founding of the paper back in the 1950s. In addition to the particular personal or professional challenges of the central character of each chapter, there is a strong undercurrent of the overall challenges of a news organization contending (or pointedly not contending) with social, cultural and technological changes in news gathering and consumption.

Rachman’s own background as a former foreign correspondent with Associated Press gives The Imperfectionists’ clear and confident industry insights. These are coupled with Rachman’s formidably acute emotional sensitivity, gracefully understated and all the more powerful for it. With just a few brush strokes, Rachman captures the essence of each of his wide range of characters, and makes even the supporting players in each vignette well-rounded and memorable. Gerda Erzberger, the aging feminist writer who appears in obituary writer Arthur Gopal’s poignant sequence, is a standout. With just a few words, she becomes a striking presence who adds resonance to Arthur’s heartwrenching story.

Rachman combines his subtle and unforgettable character portraits – much deeper than just character sketches – with often surprisingly riveting storylines. Resolutions range from the comic to the tragic to even the vaguely menacing, but they all ring true as they are grounded in soundly believable people and circumstances.

The fact that this is Rachman’s first novel (or collection, if you prefer to view it that way) makes this reader both impatient and slightly wary of what will come next from him. The prospect of more finely honed delights like The Imperfectionists is delicious, but has he set the bar impossibly high for himself? I’m certain I’m one of many readers eager to find out.

The poems of The Certainty Dream by Kate Hall all have that clear-eyed, precise and utterly wacky conviction about what is right according to the opaque, hilarious and sometimes terrifying logic of dreams. This conviction (certainty, indeed) permeates almost every poem in this strong first collection, but “This is a Dream Letter” is an especially haunting standout.

Bird and flight imagery also pervades much of the work here, just as the inexplicable but perfectly logical ability to fly often shows up in many dreams. However, Hall’s birds are not always soaring and trilling sweet songs. As well, the bird imagery is sometimes slyly and perhaps menacingly counterbalanced by cat imagery.

The Certainty Dream’s inclusion in the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian shortlist was both charmed and deserving. It was charmed in that Hall shared the shortlist with the late PK Page, who was an early mentor as Hall embarked on what will undoubtedly be a notable literary career … and charmed as well because she shared it with Karen Solie, this year’s Canadian winner who previously appeared on the Griffin shortlist with a lauded and memorable debut collection. And yes, the inclusion is deserving, because The Certainty Dream is singular and assured and explores intriguing territory, as summed up in the Griffin judges’ citation:

“As the dream world and the waking world blur, the body and the dimensions it inhabits become a series of overlapping circles, all acting as containers for both knowledge and uncertainty. At times disarmingly plainspoken, at others, singing with lyric possibility, these poems make huge associative leaps.”

 

Perhaps this snippet from “Suspended in the Space of Reason: A Short Thesis” suggests that Hall intends to hone further her creative acuity and demand much of herself as she embarks on her particular literary journey:

Bats basically scream
until they hear their voices
echo off bugs and trees. Then they know
where they are and exactly what and how large
the thing is they are hunting.
…
Yesterday I yelled at myself and
nothing came back at all.