She was a Virgin of lost things, one who restored what was lost. She was the only one of these wood or marble or plaster Virgins who had ever seemed at all real to me. There could be some point in praying to her, kneeling down, lighting a candle. But I didn't know what to pray for. What was lost, what I could pin on her dress.After recently reading and highly enjoying Diane Schoemperlen's new book This Is Not My Life, I decided to go back and check out her earlier work. I mistakenly thought that it was Our Lady of the Lost and Found that netted her the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, and now that I've read this book and found it rather dull, I don't know if I have the desire to seek out her actual award-winning novel. Such are the vagaries of the reading life.
In this book: We meet an unnamed middle-aged, single, successful author, living alone and contemplating her next novel. One morning she discovers the Virgin Mary (another middle-aged woman in ordinary dress, with a suitcase by her side) standing in her living room, and when the Madonna confesses to being tired and in need of a place to rest for a while, the writer invites her to stay. The routine week that follows is described in exhaustive detail, and interspersed, are dozens of accounts of historical Mary sightings. Both the dull minutiae of domestic life – so many lists! – and the unembellished details of the sightings – one after another after another – became very boring to me, but I do understand that, in theory, it all served a purpose.
With or without Mary, it seems to me that history itself, the actual unfolding of events through time, takes no prisoners: everybody dies in the end. But the writing of history takes them by the thousands: prisoners of interpretation every one; prisoners of revisionism, positivism, determinism, deconstruction, reconstruction, skepticism, subjectivity, twenty-twenty hindsight, tunnel vision, cause and effect; prisoners of the paradox of being stuck in their own place and time.During and after the visit, the writer muses philosophically on the nature of history and whether what we learn in textbooks is a fair account of it. As a writer, she understands how those who have recorded history had to make decisions about what to put in and what to leave out. And as a woman (and particularly when in the presence of “the most important woman in history”, Mary), the narrator is confronted with the fact that “official” history tends to be the stories of men's pursuits (primarily war-related). The dull details of a purse's contents, a typical Saturday cleaning routine, or the items one might purchase at a pharmacy, while boring, do serve to balance this male-centric view of what is noteworthy. But it's still boring. The narrator also spends a lot of time pondering the natures of truth and art and faith:
Now I see that the opposite of fact may not be fiction at all, but something else again, something hidden under layers of color or conscience or meaning. If I were a visual artist, I might call it pentimento. If I were a historian, I might call it palimpsest. But I am a writer and I call it the place where literature comes from. It is a place akin to those “thin places” in Celtic mythology. Like the thin places in both palimpsest and pentimento, these are threshold bridges at the border of the real world and that other world, still points where the barrier between the human and the divine is stretched thin as a membrane that may finally be permeated and transcended. Now I see that the opposite of knowledge may not be ignorance but mystery; that the opposite of truth may not be lies but something else again: a revelation so deeply embedded in the thin places of reality that we cannot see it for looking: a reverence so clear and quiet and perfect that we have not yet begun to fathom it.When an author starts writing about Heisenberg and paradox and “thin places”, I tend to sit up and take notice; these are some of my favourite themes. But Schoemperlen made it all so dull and rambling and about her and her processes, and just like listening to an inebriated stranger trying to school me on politics, much of the time I could only smile weakly and mentally check out. About halfway through the book is this passage:
As I listened to some of Mary's longer stories, the more meandering ones, those more liberally punctuated by tangents, digressions, and tantalizing asides about other saints, other shrines, other times, I trusted her in the way a reader trusts a good writer. I trusted that no matter how disparate or disjointed the stories might seem in the telling, still they would indeed amount to something in the end.That seemed as though Schoemperlen was asking me to trust to her to pull everything together, and while I do think I understand where she was trying to go with everything, the payoff just wasn't worth the tedium of every page. And I don't think I will trust her again. It is a wonderment to me that reviewers on Goodreads are split between giving this book one and five stars; this is love it or hate it I guess; I can't get worked up beyond a middling three star rating.
