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 Book you Don’t Want to End

Six short stories, as varied, dramatic and colourful as you’d expect from the imaginative genius and formidable wordsmith, Anthony Doerr, are collected in Memory Wall.

“Memory Wall” the 87-page story/novella is about Alma, an elderly white woman in South Africa, who is losing her memory. A doctor is helping her harvest her memories through portals installed in her skull. The random memories are stored in cartridges, which she’s got stacked on her “memory wall”. Doerr’s chapters and language are like Alma’s mind. Short and fragmented. “She was a widow. No children, no pets. She had her Mercedes, a million and a half rand in savings, Harold’s pension and the house in Vredehoek. Dr. Amnesty’s procedure offered a measure of hope. She signed up.”

Roger, a black thief/dealer, is looking for something in Alma’s memory cartridges, by making young Luvo, his captive apprentice, experience them through the portals Roger has had installed in Luvo’s head.

Yes, that’s the premise.

Alma’s accountant and doctor decide to move Alma to a nursing home. Pheko, a poor black man, with an adorable bespectacled five year old son, who has worked for Alma and her late paleontologist husband for years, is going to lose his job. The story takes off from here and goes through some serious twists and turns with a language to match. “What is there in Luvo’s life that makes sense? Dusk in the Karoo becomes dawn in Cape Town. What happened four years ago is relived twenty minutes ago.”

“Procreate, Generate” portrays an American couple trying to conceive through in-vitro fertilization, and the horrific toll it takes on their finances and their marriage. “The doctor gives a quarter smile.”

“Village 113” happens in China. The government plans to build a dam that will flood a number of villages. The villagers are offered money and resettlement in the city, “…clinics, furnaces, refrigerators, karaoke machines…electricity…red meat…You will leapfrog half a century.” Many people move willingly, but the seed keeper, an old woman, and the retired teacher Ke are reluctant. It’s not easy to leave the village behind. Once again, Doerr’s amazing imagination paints a picture of decades in a couple of sentences. “Every stone, every stair, is a key to a memory. Here the sons of her neighbors flew kites. Here the toothless knife-sharpener used to set up his coughing, smoking wheel. Here, forty years ago, a legless girl roasted nuts in a copper wok and here…”

In “The River Nemunas” 15-year-old, recently orphaned Allison, is shipped from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her Grandpa Z. She looks like she’s got it together and even consoles her Grandpa when he tears up. She befriends his neighbor Mrs. Sabo, an old woman who is losing her memory and sleeps hooked up to an oxygen machine. Allison takes Mrs. Sabo fishing on an old boat she finds in her Grandpa’s garage, and she and Mrs. Sabo hang out and watch TV together. But grief still pursues Allie. “Don’t tell me how to grieve. Don’t tell me ghosts fade away eventually, like they do in movies, waving goodbye with see-through hands. Lots of things fade away but ghosts like these don’t, heartbreak like this doesn’t. The axe blade is still as sharp and real inside me as it was six months ago.”

In “The Demilitarized Zone” a middle-aged man, the caregiver of his “Pop”, who has Alzheimer’s, is reading his son’s letters. “Paper my son has carried with him, touched a pen to. I press it to my nose but it smells like notebook paper, nothing more.” The son is a soldier in Korea, doesn’t know his mom has left his dad for a new boyfriend, and starts his letters with Mom, Dad:

“Afterworld” is a lyrical and philosophical depiction of the effects of childhood trauma on a person’s worldview. As a child Esther and her fellow Jewish orphanage residents aged 5-15 look out their window in Hamburg, on a night in WWII, and Esther feels, “…fields of rain fall across the water, …fish travel in numberless schools and whales freight their colossal hearts through the cold dark.” In Ohio at 80, “Why Esther wonders, do any of us believe our lives lead outward through time? How do we know we aren’t continually traveling inward, toward our centers? …toward a miniature, shrouded, final kingdom that has waited within her all along?”

Memory Wall is one of the books you don’t want to end, because it transports you to unknown worlds and introduces you to vibrant people through unparalleled language.

Not much of a story but language to melt your heart

Sarah Winman’s Tin Man is a short, romantic and sad novel, with a simple plot which is nevertheless poorly organized. What saves it and makes it readable and enjoyable is its inventive, imaginative and emotionally charged language.

The novel starts with a killer opening paragraph: “All Dora Judd ever told anyone about that night three weeks before Christmas was that she won the painting in a raffle.” Said painting, adored by Dora, who valued art and beauty, was a reproduction of Van Gough’s “Sunflowers”. Both the painting in particular, and sunflowers in general, come up through the novel in various parts and carry an emotional heft for the characters. “I rise early with the sun, open the shutters…and let my eyes gaze out onto that shimmering sea of yellow…and as the morning lightens, I watch the sunflowers lift up their heads and learn to decipher their whisper.”

The story is about Dora’s son, Ellis and his close friend, Michael. The first part of the novel is called “Ellis”. In the 60’s in their childhood Michael and Ellis hang out at Ellis’s grandmother, Mabel’s house in Oxfordshire. Up to their early twenties they stick together all the time, exploring the world around them, their bodies and developing a romantic relationship.

Enter Annie, who Ellis falls in love with, and marries. Although Michael is emotionally hurt, the three of them become pees in a pod for a while, until at the advice of Mabel Michael moves away and they lose touch. A number of losses later Ellis becomes a melancholy and lonely middle-aged man, stuck in a dead-end job.

The second part of the novel is called “Michael”. It follows Michael’s life in London, as he nurses his younger boyfriend, G, who has AIDS. Michael stays with G until he dies. This part explores the AIDS epidemic in London in the 1980’s, the suffering, isolation and stigma caused by it, and how friends and family of those affected deal with the pain. Michael turns into a lonely and disconsolate man as well, and finally decides to go back to see Ellis and Annie again.

Winman’s language is lyrical and creative. On being misunderstood she writes: “Billy and his nineteen years understood.” On retirement: “Garvy died a year after retiring. This place had been his oxygen. They reckoned he suffocated doing nothing.” And on loneliness: “He staggered up and felt so much space around him he almost choked.”

Despite her amazing use of language, Winman’s style leaves a lot to be desired.

First, the story is not told sequentially. It jumps back and forth with no apparent reason and without serving a purpose.

Second, she breaks one of the cardinal rules of contemporary North American writing, which is “Show, don’t tell.” After establishing how depressed Michael is because of losing G, and other friends to AIDS, a worker at the restaurant where he works tells him, “People here call you Monsieur Triste, Mister Sad. Did you know that?” and proceeds to invite him to dinner to her house. This offends the readers’ intelligence. It assumes that they weren’t paying attention for the whole second half of the book, or worse, were dumb enough not to notice how miserable Michael was. So Winman adds those lines to make sure they get it.

And finally she uses a tired trick to fill in the missing parts of the story. A diary is discovered in the attic, and that’s how we find out what happened to Michael.

If Tin Man did not have the advantage of the lovely language to carry it, it wouldn’t be worth the read. As it is, a slim volume of slightly over 200 pages, it is readable.

Stream of Lullabies

Kim Thuy’s Ru – which means lullaby in Vietnamese and flow/stream in French – reads like a poem.

It’s written in 112 short “chapters”, some as short as three lines. It’s a stream of consciousness lyrical novella, at times factual, at times subjective, with minor details that are devastatingly emotional, mostly when they’re not about actually sad things.

Ru is about Thuy’s experience of immigration from Vietnam to Canada.

She was born in a rich family in Saigon and lived a privileged life until the communists invaded her family mansion and took over half of it. She fled with her family, hiding in the belly of a boat. They were a few of the lucky ones who survived the sea journey and washed up on the shores of Malaysia, where they lived in a squalid refugee camp. Again, they were some of the lucky ones who immigrated to Canada and settled in Granby, Quebec. Later, as an adult Thuy went back to Saigon to work.

She has an uncanny ability to give voice to the hidden hollows of human mind and spirit. Her language is arresting, partly owing to the expert translation of Sheila Fischman.

The different short “chapters” jump around from one setting to the other. At times they also include flashbacks to previous settings for contrast.

For example she compares love measured by the number of hearts on a card, with the love measured by willingness to abandon your child to save her life.

On many occasions she contrasts lifestyles: “Nowadays my aunt Six and her husband, Step-uncle Six …travel first class and have to stick a sign on the back of their seat so the hostesses will stop offering them chocolates and champagne. Thirty years ago, in our Malaysian refugee camp, the same Step-uncle Six crawled more slowly than his eight-month-old daughter because he was suffering from malnutrition.”

Thuy bears no resentment against those who wronged her.

She talks about the communist youth inspectors who invaded her house with empathy. They grew up in jungles and wanted to free Saigon “from the hairy hands of the Americans”. They hadn’t seen brassieres in their life, so they thought her grandmother’s numerous brassieres were coffee filters but didn’t understand why they came in twos. “Was it because we always drink coffee with a friend?” After a while of living with the communist youth Thuy says, “…we no longer knew if they were enemies or victims, if we loved or hated them, if we feared or pitied them.”

She views the American soldiers with similar compassion. One of her relatives became rich selling blocks of ice, one meter long and twenty centimeters wide, to the American GIs. “They needed to cool down after weeks of sweating with fear in the Vietnamese jungle…to drive away the cries of their comrades with mutilated bodies…to leave the women who were carrying their children… without ever revealing their last names.”

Some of her passages have graphic descriptions of her physical experiences, like living in poverty and stench with maggots, fleas, flies, scabies and lice. Or scenes from the war: “Panic muted him. Soldiers silenced him. His frail body collapsed on the ground, and the soldiers left chewing their gum.”

Others, more touchingly -if that’s even possible- describe the psychological effects of being uprooted from a privileged life and thrown into filth, poverty, and foreign environments with unfamiliar languages.

For example, she says she sleeps in a new bed as well as in her own. She tries never to acquire things that extend beyond her body. She never leaves a place with more than one suitcase. She loves men without wanting them to be hers. “That way they’re always replaced or replaceable.”

“Only those who have long hair are afraid, for no one can pull your hair if you have none.”

Despite her conscious or subconscious efforts to protect herself from any attachments, to her great surprise, she can’t fight the feeling of homesickness. The trigger for feeling homesick for her north American life? The smell of Bounce! It brought tears to her eyes when she smelled it on the clothes of her boyfriend, who had arrived in Vietnam from Canada.

About love she says, “If I had known what it was to love, I wouldn’t have had children, because once we love, we love forever.”

“Motherhood, my own, afflicted me with a love that vandalized my heart, puffed it up, deflated it and expelled it from my rib cage…”

And thus, in a stream of a poetic lullaby Ru offers us “a slice of history that will never be taught in any classroom.”