We sat up that whole long night with our mother, and the world grew black as we wept, which was right, and the stars winked on one by one, like cosmic comedians with unbearable mirth, and when the sun had not yet risen, Mama pulled out the mats and bent herself forward and back, stretching in silence from Bhujangasana to Parvatasana, her whole body seeming to collapse and expand in turn as she moved through her yoga postures like a dance with space.Bone & Bread is a book with alternating timelines. In the first, we meet Beena – single mother to the nearly grown Quinn, living in Ottawa – whose sister Sadhana has recently died mysteriously; her body laying undiscovered in her Montreal apartment for nearly a week. In the second timeline, we watch as the sisters begin their lives in a small apartment above the Montreal bagel bakery that their parents own. Their father is an observant Sikh who nonetheless defied his parents' wishes by marrying their mother; an American hippy convert to Sikhism; a woman deeply into yoga and meditation and the wisdom of the gurus. By the time they are teenagers, the sisters have become orphans (losing their father when very young, and eventually their mother, too), and under the perfunctory guardianship of their father's brother, Beena becomes pregnant by one of the “bagel boys” from the shop below and Sadhana has begun a lifelong struggle with anorexia. In the present timeline, Beena needs to clean out her sister's apartment and look for clues: Was Sadhana happy? Was she eating? Could Beena have prevented her sister's death? While the concept was interesting enough and the writing was often lovely, I didn't really love this book: it felt overlong without actually telling me anything.
As Oscar Wilde quipped, “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness”, but if author Saleema Nawaz needed to kill off the elder Singhs in order to set her events in motion, then that's her authorial privilege (though I do find it an interesting contrast that in the original short story – Bloodlines – upon which this novel was based, their father doesn't keel over in the bagel shop until after Beena tells him she's pregnant). I think that Nawaz did a good job of showing how becoming orphans at 16 and 14 is a unique experience: it's certainly a tragedy, but in the form of an untethering from loving concern; the girls are forced to grasp ways of taking over responsibility for themselves and both make dangerous, life-altering decisions. But I want to note that while their father's weak heart is a good device to add mystery to Sadhana's later death, their mother's manner of death made me want to fling the book against the wall.
Here's my main complaint: No one in this book ever wants to answer a direct question; everything is evasion and cold shoulders. Quinn always lies about where he's going (and while the reader knows this is true, we have no more idea what he's up to than his mother does); if teenaged Beena wants to know what Sadhana is thinking, she needs to read her sister's poisoned-pen diary (which the reader doesn't get to read along with); at family group counselling sessions, the sisters would rather fight over whether Beena is rolling her eyes than actually contribute anything (and while I understand that this does a fine job of illustrating their attitudes, I never understood their inner workings). Quinn secretly met his father and there's hidden camera footage of it? Well, maybe he'll tell Beena about that some day – we never hear the details. The absolute worst for this, though, was Libby: A character who is desperate to meet with Beena because she has important information about Sadhana, “But, no, I'm too upset to share it even if you came all the way to Montreal to meet with me...Okay, well, maybe this time I'll just tell you that I was together with your sister...but there's more...but I'm too sad to tell you...here's a big spoiler, and by the way I stole Sadhana's final diary that you were looking for but I threw it away...oh here's the diary that I didn't actually throw away and there's someone I need to introduce you to but first let's do all this shopping...hey, where are you going?” I hated every bit of that (and especially the big spoiler! Come ON!), but when Beena threw the final diary and all its hidden clues into the fountain unread, I wanted to throw this book in the fountain after it.
I see some reviewers are put off by the political subplots, but I don't think you can set a book in modern day Quebec without acknowledging these realities; and as refugees are obviously more front of mind today, it's not unhelpful to contrast the resettlement of thousands with a specific individual case from just a few years ago. My complaint is a bit more specific: I honestly don't see how a first generation Indo-Quebecois like Ravi Patel could whip up a group of isolationist pure laine protesters; how this brown man could be a top player in a political party devoted to reducing immigration and promoting in-province birth rates was an irony beyond my understanding and seemed to betray Nawaz as a recent transplant to Quebec herself.
And to get specific about the writing, Nawaz is all about the long metaphors which can be lovely – as in the passage I opened with – or faux-meaningful as in the following:
The church boasts verdigris spires in limited heights – its size meant to accommodate a goodly sized parish and elevate their spirits to a modest degree. Once, when these roads were still dirt, it might have held all who could hear the peal of its bell. Now the faithful tread to its doors on a shell of concrete, the second great crust of the earth.That paragraph satisfies the tongue if you pause to roll it around a bit, but what does it mean ultimately? It doesn't state outright that the church no longer holds a goodly sized parish now that the roads are paved to ease passage to services there (it also never says that it ever did attract a crowd, for that matter, only that it “might have”), and then you pause to wonder if “a shell of concrete” actually is “the second great crust of the earth”; why let that go unchallenged? This book is chock full of paragraphs just like that, and while the reader gets the sense that great writing is happening, that feeling just doesn't survive closer scrutiny. If it feels like I'm being unnecessarily harsh on my one chosen example, I defy you to make sense of this line: Regret has simply become the shadow I would cast if I stood in the sun.
At 445 pages – in a book where no one will answer a straight question, much of the interesting action happens off the page, and there are pages and pages of overwritten metaphorical passages – this book just felt too long. There was much to admire in Nawaz's world-building – I would have especially liked to have gotten to know the girls' parents better – but I don't think this book stacks up against the other Canada Reads titles I've enjoyed this year.
