Worth Your Time

The Future, this year’s Canada Reads winner, at times reads like poetry. It’s written by Catherine Leroux and translated from the French by Susan Ouriou. This is especially impressive because it’s a translation. The beautiful lyrical language is what carries The Future. But in terms of plot and characters it leaves a lot to be desired.

The story takes place in an alternate version of history, in which Detroit hasn’t been ceded to the Americans. It’s a dilapidated city run by the French, and called Fort Détroit. Groups of children who have lost their families or fled their homes live in camps in one of its parks, Parc Rouge. There’s no adult supervision and the children have their child-leaders. They fight each other, look out for one another, gather food, struggle and survive.

Gloria, a woman who’s come to Fort Détroit in search of her two granddaughters, and answers to the death of their mother, her daughter, is not able to find either, and decides to venture into the park. Gradually some painful details are unearthed, but some hope and love also make an appearance and grow.

Both Leroux and Ouriou are masters of language. A description of an abandoned house’s kitchen reads, “Gloria opens the door to the pantry. A space meant for abundance, designed for generosity. Gloria breathes in the scent of brown sugar and mustard that clings out of sheer nostalgia to the flaking paint, because other than calcified stains and insect wings in the corners, these shelves have been bare for decades…On the table shadows cast by a sudden sunbeam striking the fan transform into stunning reflections. One escapes, climbs the wall and attacks the wallpaper like the flame from a lighter.”

Leroux, who in one of her interviews says she’s sensitive to dialects and how language changes depending on location, has invented a different dialect of French which Ouriou has skillfully rendered into a dialect of English. This language is used mainly in the dialogues among the children. The narrative is always in the mesmerizing prose.

Local folklore, fantasy and magic realism are used in the book. These make the book entertaining. One of the children lives in the trees and somehow flies around. There’s a stray pit bull who appears at the exact time when her help is needed and saves the day. A river suddenly starts bubbling and flowing. Despite environmental degradation, nature rejuvenates and yields crops that haven’t been planted. Houses have a way of renewing themselves.

But the plot isn’t always coherent. The motivation of certain characters isn’t clear. The characters are not very well-developed. The children, despite their telling nicknames such as Terror, Lego, Wolfpop, Bleach, at times seem interchangeable.

Although grief, guilt, isolation and fear are part of the themes, there’s also hope, help, friendship and renewal. “She will live again in that house. She will learn to live with the crucible of their transgression. In the clouded rooms she will recognize the walls and cracks, ceiling and windows. Years of fear and guilt will be overcome by years of restitution.” 

If you enjoy savoring good language, The Future is worth your time.

A Real Treat

The winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, is an epic novel about gender, identity, family, incest, guilt, crime, race, immigration, nationality, religion, war, history and a whole lot more.

It is like reading a novel with the scope of One Hundred Years of Solitude written in Kurt Vonnegut Jr. style.

With his explosive prose, Eugenides takes you from the turn of the 20^th century in Asia Minor to the great fire of Smyrna, to Detroit in its hay day of auto-manufacturing and its race riots, the Great Depression, first and second world wars to late 20^th century Germany.

Calliope Stephanides, the narrator of the story, who is a hermaphrodite, traces their 5-alpha-reductase deficiency (a kind of genetic mutation) through her grandparents’ forbidden love and marriage, and her parents’ forbidden love and marriage, to her unique gender identity, transformation and coming to terms with it. In this process the reader develops a newfound appreciation for the impossibly complicated life and inner world of an intersex person.

But the plot and the themes are not the only elements that make this novel rich and profound. The first prize goes to Eugenides’s writing style, which is luxuriant and inimitable.

Calliope/Cal’s voice is distinct, opinionated and combustive, describing everything with feeling, humour, irony and sarcasm. There are few neutral sentences in the whole novel. Instead, there’s a steady flow of sentences like “The Siberia of his side of the bed,” “Nothing deterred the stoic alcoholics from their calling,” “He had a camel’s head, drooping on its neck,” “White hair…plugged his big ears like cotton.”

There’s also an abundance of long paragraphs like, “When my father still refused, Desdemona unleashed her secret weapon. She started fanning herself.” The hilarious page-long paragraph describing Desdemona’s fanning ends with “The force of Desdemona’s fanning could be felt all over the house; it swirled dustballs on the stairs; it stirred the window shades; …After a while the entire house seemed to be hyperventilating.”

Transferring deftly among his first, second and third person narratives Jeffrey Eugenides delves into the minds and psyches of three generations of the Stephanides family. “After decades of neglect, I find myself thinking about departed great-aunts and -uncles…Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!” At the end of the passage he apologizes to the reader: “Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That’s genetic too.”

Eugenides’s characters are also technicolour. There’s a grandmother who is “a sick person imprisoned in a healthy body”. A bootlegger and criminal uncle, who fakes his own death and makes a comeback in a diametrically opposite personality. Father Mike is a priest who poses as a kidnapper to collect ransom from his own brother-in-law. There’s an aunt who after being married for years and having a child, discovers she is a lesbian and goes off to live with her female partner. There are the ultra-religious and the agnostics. There are Muslims and Christians, whites and blacks. There are Americans, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, and Germans. And they are all painted in full detail and fit perfectly in this multi-dimensional, cosmopolitan, extravagant novel.

Dickensian names like Desdemona, Julie Kikuchi, Jimmy Zizmo and Dr. Philibosian, add to the colorfulness of the book. So does the technique of calling major characters by unique names such as  Chapter Eleven, and Obscure Object of Desire (Object for short).

I should also mention that I listened to the audiobook of Middlesex, read by Kristoffer Tabori. His narration with its gusto, acting, intonations, and accents was nothing short of magical. It added an extra dramatic dimension to the book, (not that it needed one) and enhanced the impact of an already powerful piece of literature.