I’m pleased to welcome long-time bookish friend on social media Marion Agnew to present her first guest review to this blog.

Marion Agnew lives in Northwestern Ontario, near Lake Superior. She’s published fiction and creative nonfiction; her 2019 personal essay collection, Reverberations: A Daughter’s Meditations on Alzheimer’s, was shortlisted for the Louise de Kiriline Lawrence award for nonfiction. She is currently at work on a novel.

Fuse, by Hollay Ghadery, is a remarkable book. I’ve seen it labeled “memoir,” but I’d describe it as a collection of personal — very personal — essays. Organized around themes, the chapters include poetic fragments and reflections, narratives and insights, considerations and re-considerations. Instead of building to a narrative climax, this rich material forms a mosaic, a representation of a life that’s coherent but still in progress. Ghadery deftly supplements her lived experience with background information to give readers insight into a larger cultural context.

And culture, in many iterations, lies at the core of this book. She explores clashes around Iranian-Canadian identity, both in her own life — in her own mind/body and in her community — and in the varying degrees of closeness and understanding in the relationship between her English-Canadian mother and Iranian-Canadian father. She looks at what it’s like to be culturally Muslim in a theoretically secular (but really waning-Western-Christian) society, and how differently her two brothers respond to their family’s nominal exposure to Islam.

Her subjects range widely: Life in a family, with its sometimes well-meaning expectations. Life in a human body, with its imperfections and demands that change with time and our experiences (pregnancy, fitness or lack thereof, age) of it. Life in a country with loud demands for conformity around all of the above, plus definitions of beauty.

Ghadery takes us along in her many attempts to make sense of these demands, through binging/purging food, starving, running, booze, men, and cleaning. All are forms of her drive to create and maintain order in the chaos of life.

And she doesn’t shy away from naming what she finds, in herself and in others. Here’s an example, about how people line up a stack of papers or wipe down a kitchen counter, then say, “I’m so OCD”:

“I have to swallow hot anger when I hear these comments. My disease has taken over my life. It’s made it so I’ve considered taking my own life rather than live for one more moment in my own head. And when I wasn’t actively thinking about killing myself, I was passively trying to kill myself by drinking and using prescribed pharmaceuticals.”

She adds this energizing, satisfying summary, one I’ve wished for to combat “jokes” around dementia:

“Increasing dialogue to create more knowledge about mental illness is great. Casual appropriation of these illnesses is not.”

Yes, this book might be difficult for some people to read, but it will be transformative for others. In sharing her actions, Ghadery is searingly honest — yet her exposure isn’t performative. There’s no parade: “look at me, I’m drinking vodka at all hours, fighting with everyone, and quitting yet another job!”

Instead, she owns these actions and their role in her life. Many of them were physically harmful, all of them were attempts to lessen spiritual pain. And all are part of her, part of what she has fused to create herself—a complicated woman and skilled writer.

Learn more about Fuse by Hollay Ghadery [Guernica Editions (MiroLand)] here.

I’m very pleased to welcome back again guest reviewer Mary Schulz. Mary is a treasured friend and neighbour, a silent book club stalwart and life force and a discerning reader who articulates beautifully how a book captures her interest (or doesn’t, as the case may be). She most recently reviewed Finding Meaning: the Sixth Stage of Grief, by David Kessler. She returns with thoughtful and beautiful observations about a beloved novel this time, one that happens to have captivated several readers in our silent book club. Before we enjoy her review, allow me to reprise Mary’s bio:

Mary Schulz, a Social Worker by background, has enjoyed a rich and rewarding career in virtually all areas of health care, focusing primarily on the care of older adults, including those living with dementia. Now that that period of her life has come to a satisfying close, she is figuring out what the next phase of life may bring. Happily, books play a huge part in this, as entertainment, escape, instruction and catalyst for reflection.

Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I think our world needs more characters who live their lives with grace and a philosophy of treating every person they meet – regardless of occupation, cultural background, net worth or social standing – with dignity and genuine curiousity. Of all the attributes one might ascribe to Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov in Amor Towles’ novel, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), these are two of the most endearing.

For those of you who have not yet read this captivating novel, you are in for a treat. In 1922, Rostov is condemned to exile in an iconic Moscow hotel, The Metropol, as a consequence of having written a “subversive poem”.

Now I realize that being exiled to a luxurious “grande dame” of a hotel, complete with waiters, a renowned restaurant, top flight entertainment and well stocked bar may not sound like much of a hardship. But we soon realize that Count Rostov is relegated to a closet sized chamber (literally) and stepping outside the hotel’s doors even for the briefest breath of fresh air puts him at risk of being shot. We come to understand that freedom, even when realized in the most humble surroundings, is preferable to imprisonment in a palace.

The novel advances in part through story lines that cleverly bridge Rostov’s earlier life in the genteel company of his beloved sister and grandmother at their country estate with his current life in the Metropol. The reader is advised to pay close attention to Rostov’s seemingly innocuous musings and reminiscences as they tend to have relevance later on in the novel. Nothing is introduced in this story without a reason.

This book is, at its heart, a testament to the strength of the human spirit and of community. Despite bouts of understandable despair, Rostov’s warm and often unlikely relationships with individual hotel staff and key guests sustain him. And is this not a fundamental truth for most of us? Who among us has not come to realize, with fresh eyes, how interconnected we all are? Rostov’s genuine interest in others enables him to navigate and find meaning in a world replete with apparatchiks and artists, seamstresses and starlets – none of whom is any more instrumental to the plot than another. When a young girl comes into his life, Rostov’s bemused interactions with her highlight how a child is a creature as foreign to him as the prospect of enjoying dinner without a precisely paired glass of wine.

And just where, as a member of the cossetted Russian elite, did Rostov acquire his varied survival skills? It is here where so much of the magic and charm of this novel rests. We are reminded that the world functions most effectively when good manners, grace and kindness preside. For example, it is proven to us without any doubt that drawing up a dining table seating plan of potential allies, lovers and foes requires at least as deft a hand, and has the potential for at least as deadly consequences as drafting a military plan of attack.

Towles has studied hard to understand not just the history but the very soul of Russia and her people. Key figures in Russian art, music and history such as Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov are brought into conversations as though they were characters being invited to pull up a chair. One notes with interest how similar Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov’s name is to that of Leo Tolstoy’s character in War and Peace, Count Nikolai Ilyich Rostov. A coincidence? I think not. There are no coincidences in this finely crafted tale.

Now if all of this sounds quite heavy and ponderous, take heart. One of Rostov’s most charming qualities is his ability not only to laugh at himself, his country and fellow countrymen (within reason, of course) but also to note the absurdity of so many events that transpire around him. He is a witty character indeed!

This novel has it all – a tableau of diverse characters whom we come to care about deeply, historical people and events as signposts for daily life, life and death struggles, humour and pathos.

And it is Count Rostov who challenges us to reflect on how we would fare if put in a similar situation. Would we be as determined, disciplined, accepting, gracious and yet driven to orchestrate our best possible life? This is a quietly hopeful novel with much to teach us about the power and grace of the human spirit.

I’m beyond thrilled to welcome a new guest reviewer to this blog. Mary is a treasured friend and neighbour, a silent book club stalwart and life force and a discerning reader who articulates beautifully how a book captures her interest (or doesn’t, as the case may be). Before we enjoy her moving review of a book that truly inspired her, here is her bio:

Mary Schulz, a Social Worker by background, has enjoyed a rich and rewarding career in virtually all areas of health care, focusing primarily on the care of older adults, including those living with dementia. Now that that period of her life has come to a satisfying close, she is figuring out what the next phase of life may bring. Happily, books play a huge part in this, as entertainment, escape, instruction and catalyst for reflection.

One cannot get to a certain stage in life without experiencing the death of some of those closest to us. If we are lucky, that experience is not “out of order”, a term I have learned refers to deaths that happen earlier than expected. One also hopes that the experience will be delayed for as long as possible. In my case, the recent deaths of three of my dearest family members were neither out of order nor premature. Does that being comfort? Absolutely. How much? Hmmmm … not so sure. But that said, books written by grief therapists and personal accounts of loss and bereavement all provide ingredients for a new kind of recipe – a “how to” of sorts- everything from realizing you are not the only person who believes you can still hear his key turning in the lock nor are you unique in suddenly marvelling at the sight of people who seem so HAPPY.

I have read many of these books about grief and grieving in the hopes they will shed a light that will enable me to place my feet on the path ahead, even if only for a few measures. Some have spoken to me like a wise friend, testament to this being the glow of yellow highlights throughout their passages (books like Option B by Sheryl Sandberg). Of course some have been quite dreadful. (Spoiler alert. Flip to the back of the book. If the widow/widower ends up remarried just in time to wrap up the book, give it a pass). Surely one of the best is David Kessler’s Finding Meaning: the Sixth Stage of Grief (2019).

David started out in his career as a grief therapist collaborating with Dr Elizabeth Kübler Ross, famous for outlining five stages of death and dying that were modified to help understand stages of grieving, as well. Not to put too fine a point on this achievement, this work changed the way we talk and think about these orphan subjects that are so often the victims of silence, awkward clichés and shame.

The book, Finding Meaning builds on the work of Dr Ross and makes the case that there is a sixth stage to coming to terms with loss and grief, namely that it is in making meaning of a person’s life and death that one is able to build a different life for oneself. Make no mistake; this is not about “moving on”, getting over the loss or forgetting the person. Quite the opposite. As David says, “the funeral ritual is important in witnessing grief because we will grieve alone for the rest of our lives” (page 45). Sound daunting? Yes. But that is the nature of grief. It is daunting. But one learns that grief is love – an extension of love. As surely as love is about skipping down the street, grief is also part of the continuum of love that includes holding hands in the sun during another session of chemotherapy. And because we will hold that love – and therefore grieve – all our lives, making meaning of that love will lessen the suffering and let in some light.

Reading this book is not always easy and it is absolutely do-able to skip specific chapters that deal with the unique losses associated with death by suicide or the death of a child, whether miscarried or in infancy. Most of the content is highly applicable to all types of loss. Strategies for making sense of life after loss are regularly illuminated by helpful case examples, including the author’s own experiences with death and loss.

The book challenges us to think about what possible good can come from loss. This is indeed a challenge and not one most people can even contemplate when their hearts rest in a million pieces. But as the gaping hole starts to be surrounded by some pleasant distractions – the contented fatigue that comes after a long walk, the loving lick from a beloved pet, a laugh with a dear friend – one can start to think about how this loss – which cannot be undone- can bring some good. Perhaps you become a more empathic person. Perhaps you make a point of reaching out right away when you hear of someone else going through a loss. Perhaps you get involved in a community cause. Whatever. The point is that loss and death happen. And when they happen to you, you have choices about how you make meaning of that loss – or not.

Of course not all relationships are loving. The book spends some time talking about finding meaning when there is regret about never having another chance to “make things right” in the relationship. This, too, is reality for many people and the importance of finding meaning in these relationships is no less urgent. At its heart, it seems to be about coming to some peace about what we bring to these relationships and how we tried to make them as good as they could be. And where that didn’t happen? Trying to go forward in life with some new found wisdom and commitment to not repeat the same behaviour in another relationship.

For those of us who have been blessed beyond any reason with immeasurable love in all forms, we accept this gift knowing that the only way to avoid loss is to avoid love. And that is not a life many of us would willingly choose. So David spends a lot of the book debunking myths such as “is there a loss worse than any other?” (Hint: the worse kind of loss is yours. How kind and validating is that?) Or “grief will grow smaller over time” (No such luck. We must grow bigger around the loss, bringing curiosity to the rest of our own life story so that the gaping hole of grief becomes smaller in relation to the other things in our life.) After all, since grief is love and love doesn’t die with the person, it stands to reason that grief does not ever end. And why does this not send us back under the covers? Because those of us who are mourning want to keep the person we have lost very, very close and never lose sight of the love.

Of all the books I have read on a way forward in the midst of soul aching loss and grief, Finding Meaning has been one of the most helpful. No pretense. No quick fixes. No happily ever after. Those of us who are grieving have a well tuned radar for that kind of deception. Instead, the book gives us permission to continue to live our lives infused with love and invites us to dig deeply to find new avenues for making meaning of the love we have been so fortunate to know.

I am very pleased to welcome Hannah Brown as a guest reviewer to this blog. I’m delighted to present her thoughtful contribution, and I’m equally thrilled that she has gazed so perceptively and sensitively on Kevin Hardcastle’s powerful In the Cage, a book that I devoured with admiration and astonishment to prepare to moderate a Toronto Word on the Street book club session in September, 2017.

Born in Hastings County, Hannah Brown currently lives in Toronto. She won prizes as a screenwriter and wrote for anyone who’d pay. After a very happy sojourn teaching English and film at the college and collegiate levels, she returned to writing. Her work has appeared in several North American literary magazines, such as Superstition Review, and her short story, “The Happiness” was nominated for the 2016 Journey Prize. Her first novel, Look After Her, will be released in the spring of 2019 (Inanna Publications).

When we were eleven and seven, my brother and I boxed. We lived on a farm miles from other children, in the former country home of the head of Massey-Ferguson International. He and his family had departed for Bermuda, leaving behind bright lime-green leather slippers with the heel bent down flat, as is the case of all good Spanish footwear, a painting of square-bottomed sheep, a copper tray with Arabic writing, and a double pair of sawdust-filled, suede boxing gloves. My brother and I agreed: nothing above the collar and nothing below the waist. It was fun and didn’t hurt: getting socked was like being thudded with a small, firm pillow.

I have always avoided pain: I consider it humiliating. Too many times trying to get away from my spanking mother, crawling under dining room tables and chairs, with her on her hands and knees crawling right after me, furious and intent.

Kevin Hardcastle’s In the Cage, however, draws upon the experience of pain, receiving it and inflicting it. He does so in such an objective, sober fashion that I found myself trying to imitate the complicated and precise moves, such as when the main character, Daniel has ”one hand clasped over the other behind the other man’s neck and there he pinched his elbows together.” I was reminded of how people always ended up trying to explain their idea of Ondaatje’s famous kitchen sex scene in In the skin of a lion. “If her hand is there,” someone would say, “he has to be this way to reach the icebox, so they’re like this” — you know, the way Canadian literature causes people to behave. Maybe not just Canadian literature. There is that oft acted-out scene in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge when Sergeant Troy shows Bathsheba his remarkable sword-fighting moves. In their minds, if not in their living rooms, I imagine other readers standing up to follow Hardcastle’s calm instructions on mayhem.

In the Cage draws upon another kind of pain, seen before and reckoned with in that same early novel of Hardy’s. Usually the phrase, “the industrial revolution” conjures up images of urban factories and urban blight, but the mechanization of farm labour threw the “workfolk” (as Hardy called them) out of their former crofts or homes, and forced them to trade their skills for part-time employment, unstable shelter, and low wages. Sound familiar?

That kind of bewildering social wound is certainly felt again in formerly prosperous rural communities all over North America, and wherever people are marginalized. Hardy claimed to be, not a pessimist, but a realist. An evolutionary meliorist. Hardcastle, too, is not a sunny optimist. If things are not good, they are not going to be made better by not saying just how bad things actually are — a stance for which Hardcastle’s contemporary, Ta-Nahesi Coates has received much barbed criticism. Hardcastle writes about those who have been left behind, with limited options, who are stoic, resourceful, and — here’s where his book will get you — noble.

His main character, Daniel, is a welder who has had success as a Muay Thai fighter, getting better and better until a sidelining injury introduces him to a woman with whom he makes a life and a child, and for whom he struggles, especially after the theft of all his welding equipment. His nobility, his restraint, seems to arrive equally out of the discipline of rural life as out of Korean martial arts.

If you have read Cormac McCarthy, or watched the series Justified, you know that rural life has sunsets to die for, and drug dealers? — same, same. With his financial back to the wall, Daniel agrees to be an intimidator for a local gangster cum money launderer, and things go very wrong. The local criminal gang in this milieu provides shady employment.They also betray, exploit, and kill. The story moves from page-turning complication to alarming crisis after crisis. Daniel has to make many choices, both honorable and dreadful.

The straightforward presentation in the novel of a constant consumption of alcohol to calm anxiety is startling, as is the matter-of-fact understanding that nursing homes are among the few stable enterprises in rural Ontario. The night shift at the nursing home is a prized position, even if you’re as overqualified as Daniel’s wife, Sarah. We see how warm and practical she is in an extended scene of camaraderie between caregiver and cared-for, where she shares a drink with a dying man — the respectful thing to do, if not the respectable thing to do, and we see this again in the actions of Daniel’s and Sarah’s child, Madelyn, when she stands up to a bullying trio.

This is a physical book: it makes sense that a fighter like Daniel will be aware of what is underfoot, or for that matter, under tire. We run with Daniel “over hard uneven ground and knots of tallgrass” and we always know if it’s a gravel road or if the wheels are going to throw “broken bits of brittle tarmac.” It is also a book with unashamed poetry: like Hardy, Hardcastle employs wordtwins, like the aforementioned “tallgrass.” Somehow, “roadgravel” delivers how crunching, hard, and uneven that surface can be, better than a prosaic construction such as ‘the gravel of the road.’ And, also like Hardy, Hardcastle delivers the authentic sound of regional speech, as in a tense scene at a construction site where “they “waited yet” and where bikers “set to laughing.”

Besides these sensual and poetic elements, Hardcastle’s style is remarkably cinematic. In scene after scene, we are given a long shot establishing where we are, a cut to a close-up of a someone’s face or a significant object, and often, a travelling shot to arrive at plan Américain, the so-called American shot of two people acting out their relationship in front of us, as here, when one of the rural gangsters is about to dispose of evidence:

“He got out of the truck with the garbage bag in his hand, weighted enough that it swung while he walked the ramp. Down and down to where the jetty left the beach. The inbound boat had one headlamp and it cut out sudden. The engine idled low. Wallace stood on the planking and waited. He knelt and reached for something. Another man got out in the shadow and started tying ropes to the dock cleats. He stood full and they were talking.”

In the Cage is a novel you watch as much as you read. It is also full of emotion held in, as in this crucial passage, where an out-of-work Daniel comforts his wife:

She wiped her eyes and slid the letter across the table to Daniel and then she looked up at the ceiling.

He set his beer down and took up the envelope. He took the letter and unfolded it carefully as he could. He read. He put the pages back into the envelope and held it in his hand for a while. Finally he slid it back over to Sarah. She just let it lie on the tabletop in front of her.

“You are gonna go to that school, Sarah,” he said.

She shook her head and ran a knuckle under her eye again. “Did you see what it costs?”

“There’s government loans they give for that.”

“I can’t be off work that long. If something goes wrong, we’re done for.”

Daniel got up with the chair in hand and set it down beside her. He sat and put an arm around her, She was rigid but he kept on. “Is that what you want to do or isn’t it?” he said.

“I wanted other things I didn’t get. It won’t be the last one.”

Daniel promises to find the money needed in the same unsentimental tone. In truth, the novel is never sentimental. Like Hardy, Hardcastle writes in close sympathy with his characters, and like Hardy, he not only brings a calm, unsparing view to the life of rural workingclass, it would seem he recommends and admires their struggle to live, and live right. You will find yourself on the side of Daniel, on the side of his wife and his daughter, and the hint at the end of In the Cage about how the mills of the gods might yet grind for the better is likely to leave you deeply moved.

I’m delighted and honoured to welcome novelist and essayist Pauline Holdstock to the bookgaga blog. She offers a thoughtful examination of Ann Patty’s interesting memoir, both an exploration of Latin and celebration of learning and literature. Before we plunge into the review, allow me to introduce our esteemed reviewer:

Pauline Holdstock is an award winning Canadian author, originally from the UK. She writes literary fiction, essays and poetry. Her novels have been published in the UK, the US, Brazil, Portugal, Australia and Germany. In Canada her work has been nominated for, and won, a number of awards.

Of her eight books, the most well-known are Into the Heart of the Country, longlisted for the Giller Prize, and Beyond Measure, short listed for a number of awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It was the winner of the BC Book Prize Ethel Wilson Award. Pauline’s essays and book reviews have appeared in Canada’s national newspapers and have been broadcast on CBC radio. Her essay Ship of Fools was the winner of the Prairie Fire Personal Journalism Prize. Learn more about Pauline and her work at www.paulineholdstock.com.

A New York editor, laid off from her high-powered job and forced into early retirement, moves to the country and sets out to learn Latin as a way to keep her mind engaged.

It’s an interesting and unlikely concept: a journey into a dead language as a way forward into a rewarding new life. At the outset of her memoir, Ann Patty paints a convincing picture of the new life she doesn’t want — a future bereft of purpose, prey to the inherent dangers of boredom, not least of which might be the alcoholism that destroyed her mother’s later years. And indeed in the course of the book a new life does slowly take form, one where Patty finds a new community to replace her vanished world of publishing, as well as an absorbing new pursuit.

Living With a Dead Language is more than an account of the intellectual challenges Ann Patty faced in her self-imposed undertaking. It’s also a memoir that gives glimpses of her career in New York, reflections on her parents and sketches of her friends and partners. Ambitiously, Patty has attempted to marry personal memoir with the Latin topics covered in her college courses. Sometimes it works. The poetry of Catullus, for instance, is the perfect launchpad for the wicked ways of decadent and driven New York, and Lucretius’ philosophy the perfect entry to her forays into Buddhism and the personal crises that prompted them. At other times the connections felt contrived, superimposed.

Often, I found myself wanting to be reading a different book. Her scheme, I felt, was doing the book a disservice. It was limiting. She was glancing off too many interesting questions while squandering precious time laying out the grammar topics covered in her various academic courses and meticulously illustrating their complexity.

Although the Latin language was what drew me to her book in the first place — I still consider it the single most useful subject of my high school education and daily reap the benefits of being forced to learn it — I had no particular wish for a refresher course in the basics of grammar and syntax or an advanced course in their intricacies. A chapter would have been all Patty required to demonstrate the syntactical elements of the language and convince us that its mastery presented a daunting challenge — especially for an older student who hadn’t, as she confesses, had to memorize anything in close to thirty-five years. The linguistic passages felt to me like the author revising her subject, making sure it had stuck, perhaps, too, simply wanting to impress us. I’d have welcomed more pages devoted to the wealth of coincidental knowledge — like those she offers on Roman calendars, or marriages, or burial practices, for example — that the study of Latin inevitably confers.

The book would have benefited, too, from a more rigorous treatment of some of the connections Patty tentatively introduces. Observations on the subordinate role of Roman women, for instance, are linked too loosely to an evocation of the limited version of feminism that flourished in the 1970s and followed by a sketch of the kind of pervasive passive aggression that her mother’s generation suffered earlier.

The book’s very title prompted many questions and connections that were never fully addressed. What does it mean to learn any language, for example? How does that open the mind? Or alter one’s perception of one’s own culture? And what about recent research on the plasticity of the brain and the effects of language learning. And how might the experience of learning Latin in particular enhance the brain’s abilities, working as it must with the new word orders possible in an inflected language? And what effect did it have for Patty in her own recognition of Italian when finally she goes to Rome.

“Don’t tell me Latin isn’t alive and well in literature” she says after making an amusing but feeble link between Ovid’s and romantic (small R) novelists’ predilection for sexy tresses. But what of popular culture’s apparently ineradicable interest in myth and supernatural influence? An afterlife? And what of the persistence of certain literary forms right across our culture — the epic, the elegy? Of certain figures of speech in literature? Much later in the book she does edge closer to examining those questions in a moving recollection of the death of a dear friend when in an “elegiac funk” she buys a copy of Anne Carson’s Nox. But enquiry and argument are not her modus operandi. Her writing is governed by emotion and enthusiasm, much, I imagine, as were her editorial decisions.

Most of all I’d hoped to see some discussion or even acknowledgement of the connection between syntax and thought or on the role of grammar as vital link between intuition/inspiration/idea and expression. It’s a vast and boggy philosophical field and perhaps it’s obvious why Patty wouldn’t want to venture there, but not offer even an observation on its effects on her own critical thinking …?

Finally, and most frustratingly, she only brushes against the whole question of elitism implicit in the study of a dead language. Her fellow students are a privileged lot as she remarks early in the book. But she doesn’t emphasize the liberating potential of studying for study’s sake, surely the true privilege. That becomes clear, to this reader at least, when, later, Patty visits Still Waters. Still Waters is Stephen Haff’s after school sanctuary for decidedly un-privileged children. Patty visits and works with two nine year-olds carefully translating a Latin picture book. Latin is on offer Haff’s after school program, along with yoga and violin — three subjects to exercise the mind, the body, the spirit. There’s a Buddhist “purposelessness” to all of those pursuits, an escape from what Haff sees as the “soul destroying and deadening” core curriculum.

Clearly Patty recognized the value of what she witnessed at Still Waters and it’s to her credit that she went on to volunteer both her time and newfound expertise there and to facilitate a connection with a wider community. It’s interesting but not surprising that she derived a true sense of purpose and reward from the experience, something she doesn’t mention in relation to her entry to the elitist academia of the Latinists.

The chapter on this visit was, for me, the most intriguing and sent me straight to Google. Here’s a quote I found online — a testimonial, to use the Latin — from one of the children at Still Waters. It could well express the feelings too of Ann Patty — ever enthusiastic, ever up for a challenge, ever ambitious.

“I love Latin! Latin is a big, beautiful puzzle. It is a mystery to be solved. I feel brilliant here.”
– Still Waters in a Storm

With literary life force Kimmy Beach at the guest reviewer controls, we’re not only in for a treat, but we’re going to learn a lot. First, let’s meet our bookish guide:

Kimmy Beach’s fifth book, The Last Temptation of Bond (The University of Alberta Press, 2013), was chosen as one of the best five poetry books of the year on Quill & Quire’s 2013 Readers’ Poll. The book was longlisted for the 2013 Alberta Readers’ Choice Award, and was featured on CBC Radio One’s The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers.

Kimmy’s poetry, fiction, articles, and reviews have appeared in journals across the country and in the UK, and she has read across Canada. Her second book, Alarum Within: theatre poems, has been adapted as a full-length stage play by both the University of Toronto and the Red Deer College Theatre and Film Studies Programme. She’s working on a novella about a giant puppet, and a novel featuring 1970s romance comics and This is Tom Jones (1969-1971). Kimmy holds a First Class Honours Degree in English from the University of Alberta, and lives in Red Deer, Alberta with her husband, Stu.

Constance (Connie) West is the narrator of Beverly Rycroft’s first novel, A Slim Green Silence. Connie has died, but she’s not yet left Scheepersdorp—her small South African town. Don’t worry; I’m not giving anything away. We know this within a few sentences as Connie herself tells us. Rycroft gives us this fairly familiar premise in which to place her narrative and its central character. Connie says, “Below this cluster of roofs are all the people I ever loved.” But A Slim Green Silence is far more than the story of an earth-bound soul peering in on her loved ones’ lives going on without her, and trying to decipher why she’s still here. It is also an allegory for a country on the verge of redefining itself.

Rycroft’s drawing of Connie is sharp and unflinching. Despite her declaration of love for the people she’s left behind, Connie makes no bones about her ambivalence when her daughter Marianne is born. She actively ignores the child, and is happy to let everyone else raise her. Everyone else includes her sister Sheila, her “uncle” Harry, and their domestic worker, Princess, who rules the place with an iron fist.

From her vantage point outside the windows of her former home, Connie’s spirit watches life carry on without her. She grows more affectionate toward those she took for granted: particularly Marianne. A boatman accompanies her, waiting to take her to the other side. The image of the boatman (or ferryman) is a common figure in narratives of this kind, in which a dead character is tied to the place he or she lived and needs to be ferried to the other side. Rycroft’s boatman, however, differs in that he himself has been wounded. Rycroft writes that he “doesn’t seem to notice the red-black stain seeping through the blue fabric on the left side of his chest.” The boatman stays by Connie’s side and gives her until half past six that evening to find what she needs to set herself free.

The idea of this time limit appeals to me, and I like that Connie (and perhaps the boatman as well) is on the clock and yet powerless to make her former friends and family move more quickly to help her discover what will release her. As the family prepares for Connie’s memorial, Rycroft gives us flashbacks to when Connie was alive. Now, she searches for meaning and for the missing puzzle piece that will set her soul free.

~

The image of an unruly, almost unbearably loud pandemonium of parrots runs through the book, humorous and lyrical at turns. The parrots roost in an ancient yellowwood tree on Connie’s property, on an untended plot of ground that is a point of contention between Connie and her neighbours. The parrots fly out of the yellowwood at 6:30am every day to strip Harry’s pecan trees bare: “immediately, the sky will cloud over and a rippling orange-green carpet of parrots will tear through the valley to drop to the plot below.”

Wild parrots are largely unfamiliar to a North American reading audience, but the image of noisy birds in organized packs is nothing we haven’t seen. On any July morning in a tree-filled suburb in Alberta, the families of baby magpies would try the patience of Saint Monica. Rycroft speaks to the universal with images like this, and reminds us that birds are birds and people are people, no matter where they are. Connie remembers her mother, who “didn’t seem to care what [we] did, so long as we did it outside.” I had an instant flash of recognition remembering my own mother’s admonition when we claimed—dramatically—that we were dying. “Die quietly,” she’d say. “And do it outside.”

These touches—and the strength of the story itself—do not alienate the reader from the South African setting. Rather, they draw us in with their reminders of our shared experience. Beverly and I connected via social media and briefly discussed my reading of her book. I point to the wide-reaching accessibility of her narrative as during our conversation, she had expressed a touch of worry that the Afrikaans and Xhosa phrases might be off-putting for a North American reader. Because there is no glossary in the book, she offered to translate the phrases for me if I stumbled on anything I didn’t understand. I told her I felt confident that because I’d read a good number of South African books, I was sure I’d be able to read the expressions in context.

As a great believer in meeting an author halfway and not wanting to have anything spoon-fed to me, I went into the book with my Afrikaans dictionary nearby. But I didn’t need it. That’s not a commentary on how many words I know; rather, it shows Rycroft’s tremendous skill in giving us a little of the language without the need for a glossary. Her sentences are seamless and incorporate other languages without the narrative losing pace or drive. Even if a reader knew not one word of Afrikaans, I don’t know a reader anywhere who would not understand this: “As they reach the back step of the stoep, the dogs inside the house start to tjank.”

~

A Slim Green Silence is set in 1994: the year of South Africa’s first democratic election following the end of apartheid. I think it’s no accident that Connie dies that year. The transformation she undergoes as she tries to understand why she cannot leave seems to parallel the great changes 1994 brought to South Africa.

Constance’s name is in itself a metaphor, I believe. The elections of 1994 brought about an end to the troubled but constant rule of apartheid. Constance’s death coincides with the death of the oppressive structures that had been holding South Africa and its peoples hostage for decades.

Connie is able to stay near her family long enough to know that they will be preserving the overgrown plot of land, including her beloved yellowwood tree. If the plot of land represents South Africa itself (as I think, on one level, it does), then she is earthbound until she knows that her loved ones and her home—her country—are safe.

As the ferryman rows her away:

For the first time, he smiles.

      It’s like the sun coming out. It’s more like a flash of lightning in a midnight storm. For those few dazzling seconds, the landscape ignites and everything is clear and comprehensible: the lake, the murky sky, the last pinpricks of light from Scheepersdorp. Even the darkness crawling towards us from the nearby shore. […]

      The Boatman can see all this, too. His sloe eyes are larger than the moon. They see everything. They contain everything. I want to lean forward and brush my fingertips against the skin of his hand, but already the edges are starting to dissolve.

If Connie’s plot of land represents South Africa, I like to think of the ferryman as the wounded heart of that country setting Connie and itself free at the same time.

In 1994, there will be challenges and difficulties for the family in the preservation of Connie’s plot of land, just as there will be challenges and upheaval as the edges start to dissolve in her post-apartheid country. Without being heavy-handed, Beverly Rycroft parallels Connie’s personal search for meaning and eventual freedom with the birth of a new South Africa.

A Slim Green Silence by Beverly Rycroft (Umuzi/Random House, South Africa, 2015)

My thanks to Helen Moffett for her editorial eye on this piece.

~~

See also:

Guides, Drinks and Stacks of Books: My Journey into South African Literature
By Kimmy Beach
(first published in WestWord: Magazine of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, 35:6)

Heaven sent
Samantha Gibb is enthralled by A Slim Green Silence, Beverly Rycroft’s beautifully crafted debut

Over the moon only starts to describe how thrilled I am to welcome Canadian writer, poet and playwright Leslie Greentree as a guest reviewer here. Her second collection of poetry, go-go dancing for Elvis, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. (Enjoy excerpts here and here.) I reviewed her short story collection A Minor Planet for You here. Oral Fixations, Greentree’s first play, co-written with Blaine Newton, was premiered in late 2014 by Ignition Theatre in Red Deer, Alberta. You want to follow her on social media, where her thoughts on things literary and theatrical are insightful and damned funny. You want to pay attention to her book recommendations and keep your ear to the ground for future literary announcements of her own …!

1936. A bleak and rainy night in Providence, Rhode Island. An impoverished Arthor Crandle makes his way to the home of his mysterious new employer, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Crandle is desperate for work, unfamiliar with Lovecraft’s fictions, and all too ready to overlook his employer’s idiosyncrasies. Crandle’s approach to the dark house is met with words of foreboding from a neighbour and, once within, no sign of his employer. And his initial ascent up the dim staircase becomes his first encounter with the dark presence that inhabits the landing.

The reader needs no familiarity with the work of H.P. Lovecraft to delight in the slow, delicious burn that is The Broken Hours. This work of gothic-style fiction is based in a solid knowledge of the work of H.P. Lovecraft and the final year of his life; from those points of fact, Jacqueline Baker builds her spooky world with a masterful hand, piling eerie moment on eerie moment, interspersed here and there with an uneasy, short-lived relief.

That first night, as Crandle makes his way past the landing, calling out to his unresponsive employer, he pauses for a moment, chilled at a sudden thought: “The unnatural, studied silence coming from the other side of the door was neither that of someone having just gone out nor of someone at focused work or even in deep sleep. Rather it was the stillness of someone’s strained listening, just on the other side. Watching, perhaps, through the crack there.”

The passive Crandle continues on to bed, clutching a letter that he discovers on the hall table. He adjusts to communicating with his reclusive employer through sporadic notes, and begins his work transcribing a haunting Lovecraft story. And then the beautiful Flossie arrives, bringing a certain light – and even more questions – into the house. Where is her roommate? In fact, where are all the women referenced by Lovecraft, and Crandle himself – an aunt, a mother, an estranged wife – a bevy of women just out of reach, apparently on their way back to this creaking, breathing house where the furniture shifts, where mysterious lights and figures appear and disappear? And what of the white-clad girl who drifts through the night garden?

The book is replete with images of damp, of bloat – a gleeful celebration of the moist and its shuddery effect on readers. Rain, damp clothing and heavy, humid skies are only the beginning. When Crandle first encounters the presence on the landing, he says that the air changed: “I do not know how else to describe it. It darkened, became more dense. The carpet grew unpleasantly thick beneath my shoes, a swollen thing.” Ugh. Lovely.

Crandle’s passivity, at first the recognizable response of a desperate man, begins to take on an eerie tone of its own: he arrives at Lovecraft’s home penniless. He’s also faint with hunger, but he sets aside the meagre and unappetizing fare Lovecraft provides. The house has no mirrors. As the narrator occasionally catches glimpses of himself in windows, he realizes he has lost weight, neglected to shave – indeed, become unrecognizable to himself.

And then there’s the letter Crandle’s employer has begged him to deliver to Lovecraft’s hospitalized mother. He can’t seem to do it; the days get away on him, only partly through Flossie’s welcome distractions. The unfulfilled mission builds anxiety in the reader’s mind even as it seems to escape Crandle’s. And the reader’s sense of unease with our narrator builds.

The creepy beauty of this novel lies in Baker’s steady, relentless build of atmosphere, a slow piling on of realizations and new questions. She sets us inside striking colour palettes: the gothic greys of dim rooms and heavy skies are offset by occasional moments of gilded light over distant buildings, flickering lights seen through night windows. And Crandle notes a lighter palette of cool purples and mauves in moments of reprieve: in the morning light, and as splashes of violet cushions and drapes that Flossie incorporates into her apartment. The same palette that offers temporary respite, however, is then mirrored in threatening skies that don’t quite rain, and – in perhaps the most disturbing scene of the entire book – in a monstrous, bruise-coloured tentacle Flossie and Crandle discover on the beach.

This is a book filled with moments where the reader feels – as Crandle does – that much of the action is happening just at the corner of your vision. Baker knows how to chill a reader more effectively than through ghouls shrieking out from the dark places. Things slither, our imagination grows: a jar of baby teeth scatters across the rug in a dimly lit room, a stone is lifted in a darkened yard, a hand passes over a nest of baby rats.

Early on, Crandle says, “I wonder, sometimes, what lives in us. I wonder what comes calling, what we invite inside.” It’s a sentiment the reader slowly catches up with – a slow and creeping recoil that leads inexorably to a twisty ending.

Crandle says, “If you want your secrets kept, they say, cloak them in candour.” On finishing The Broken Hours, you’re left with a satisfied crawling sensation, one that makes you want to wait a little while, to chew on what you saw and what you didn’t see, to move only slowly from the secrets of the moody mauve setting toward whatever candour you might find.

I’m delighted to welcome Celia Ristow as the latest guest reviewer to contribute to this blog. Celia is a respected technical communications professional with an abiding love for literature of all kinds. She offsets many hours spent in front of a computer with ample hammock-and-good-book time.

At times touching and poignant, at others brutal, tragic and refreshingly honest, Rebecca Rasmussen’s Evergreen is a study in contrasts; and yet throughout, the story moves forward with the certainty and ease of time itself. Like the river that flows through the centre of this multi-generational epic, and the enduring beauty of the natural foliage for which it is named, Evergreen is a story of endurance, resilience and promise. Although somewhat overstated at times, Rasmussen carefully and skillfully develops a delicate balance between contrasting forces — contrasts in character, story and setting — emerging in the end as an unquestionable narrative of hope and redemption.

The plot opens with newlyweds, Eveline and Emil, as they set up their first home in Evergreen, a remote corner of the Minnesota woods in the 1930s. After Eveline’s somewhat unconventional arrival at their wilderness cabin — a Lady of Shalott figure, asleep in a rowboat without paddles — she and Emil eke out an existence from the land and river around them. It is a traditional, if somewhat familiar tale of two pioneers in unforgiving surroundings, full of struggle yet reward, a new baby boy, Hux, and marital happiness, until Emil must return to Germany to care for his ailing father.

The story becomes centered around a trio of characters at this point — all of whom paint a portrait of compelling conflicts and contradictions — as Eveline is sustained by her straight-talking, rough-around-the-edges neighbour and friend, Lulu, and her husband, Reddy. Rasmussen brings the characters of Lulu and Reddy to life with ease. Like her worn coonskin coat, Lulu has endured much and survived with a clear and unflappable view on the events and people around her. She accepts and cherishes Reddy for who he is — the “honourable” alcoholic who travels to town for regular drunken binges, but always returns with supplies; who once saved Lulu from a life of prostitution and now fills the role of “good father” to her son, Gunther. Within the larger story, Lulu and Reddy are two characters who have lived and continue to play out Rasmussen’s theme of hope and the redeeming power of love.

Like the somewhat tarnished pasts of Lulu and Reddy, the idyllic tale of Eveline and her friends is suddenly tarnished itself with the rape of Eveline by a seemingly charming government surveyor, Cullen O’Shea, and the subsequent birth of a baby girl. Here Rasmussen delves into the utterly dark world of a rape victim as she explains how Eveline had “never felt so deeply hated”, conveying Eveline’s shame, fear and self-blame as she cannot seem to forget the “boyish” dimples that led her to trust O’Shea in the first place. And yet throughout this dark episode and following it, Rasmussen never lets us lose sight of the beauty and reassurance in nature, whether it be the inevitable return of spring and “tender green buds” to Evergreen or the little bird, Tuna, who feeds and sings without fail outside Eveline’s cabin.

Fearing Emil’s reaction to the baby born of this violation, Eveline leaves the baby at the Hopewell Orphanage, a name fraught — perhaps not so subtly — with the same contradictions Rasmussen has evoked previously. A place of supposed “hope”, the head nun at the orphanage develops a torn love/hate relationship with the girl, bestowing one her the demon name, Naamah. Despite dreams of finding her mother, and her view of the enduring evergreens from the orphanage — “Green as far as she could see” — Namaah inevitably leaves Hopewell and winds up a prostitute.

From here, Rasmussen moves the story forward easily, re-introducing the themes hope and redemption when Hux goes in search of and eventually finds his long-lost sister. The story now focuses on a new trio in Evergreen, Hux, Naamah and Lulu’s son, Gunther, who like the previous generation, continue to live a rough but idyllic life in their (now deceased) parents’ former cabins. As the story progresses with Gunther’s marriage to Naamah and the birth of their daughter, Racina, it becomes increasingly evident that the struggles and conflicts within Naamah have not dissipated. Afraid she “will do something terrible” to Racina, she abandons her, leaving her to be raised by the rough but dependable Gunther — a slightly over-stated echo of the past with Eveline’s abandonment of Naamah, and Lulu and Reddy’s predictability, but this thread weaves the generations and the story together in a way that seems perfectly natural and in its own way, reassuring.

Throughout Evergreen, Rasmussen evokes the beauty of the wilderness with vivid detail, taking its fundamental contradictions of brutality versus beauty, isolation versus connection as a backdrop to the struggles within the characters themselves. Occasionally somewhat forced — the image of Racina running into her mother’s arms at the conclusion of the story might seem somewhat Disney-like to some — and the evergreen imagery a little insistent at times, the story is compelling. The internal struggles of the characters are well-developed, and the plot moves forward at a steady pace so that we cannot help but read on. It’s a feel-good story, an honest portrayal of troubled lives, but reassuring in its simple yet affirmative final phrase, ‘Love was’.

Thank you to the author, Rebecca Rasmussen, for providing a complimentary copy of Evergreen.