Dual Citizens

I filmed the teenagers who gathered at the ice cream parlor, the girls flirting by pressing their hands quickly to the boys' arms and then recoiling from their muscles as if burned; the boys yelling insults to each other or calling out from the rolled-down windows of passing cars, everyone performing, summertime a stage. I was recording an adolescence I'd never had. In the garden shed I cut the film together, cicadas and girls, old men and moonlight. All my life I'd gathered tidbits – things I read, a picture that lingered, the memory of an afternoon in a movie theatre, the face of my sister as she laughed – and sometimes my head felt cluttered as an attic with them. But stitching a film together satisfied this collector's itch perfectly, my magpie treasures woven and spackled into a nest.

Dual Citizens is a story of two sisters – from the POV of the elder, from childhood up to her late thirties – and although some really large events happen in their lives, Alix Ohlin writes with such calm and equanimity that nothing feels melodramatic or excessive in hindsight. This is a realistic story that captures the truth of relationships, heartache, and the quest for meaning. Quiet and relatable, this was a lovely read. (Note: I read an ARC and quotes may not be in their final forms.)

I remember Olga lecturing in an almost empty hall at Worthen; she was talking about Eisenstein, the great Russian filmmaker, and his theories of dialectical montage. He was interested in editing for contrast as well as continuity. If you juxtapose two images, he said – or Olga said – no matter how different, the viewer will make meaning from the montage. The second image in the sequence will alter the meaning of the first. It was, I thought, how memory worked: yoking disparate elements together across time. My sister next to me now changed how I thought of her then. My sister next to me changed how I thought of myself.

Born to a disinterested single mother and with two different fathers, Lark and Robin essentially raise themselves in Montreal. Lark – always out to please – does exceptionally well at school, and when they discover that Robin has a gift for the piano, they secretly arrange for lessons with a local teacher. The girls couldn't be closer – whispering in their beds at night, Lark protecting and supporting Robin with everything she needs – but when the elder sister gets a chance for a full-ride scholarship to an American college, she jumps at the chance to escape their cold and abusive mother. Within a year, Robin runs away from home to join her sister in exile – and while this will eventually put Robin on a path to Julliard and recognition for her remarkable talents, the sisters will have suffered a rift that might never be healed again. As Lark switches her interests from making her own films to editing those of a rising documentarian, the sisters' paths diverge; Robin, as always, following her own path and Lark, as always, allowing herself to become a supporting player in someone else's drama. When Lark does eventually realise what self-fulfillment might look like, she'll need her sister's help; but is it too late for them to come together?

That's a rough overview of the plot, but so much more is going on in this novel. I think that Ohlin nailed the complicated relationship between these two very different women, and especially their different attitudes towards their mother (Robin will neither be drawn into complaining about how awful their childhood was, nor will she offer any sympathy as their mother begins to need them). I liked everything I learned about filmmaking and piano playing, and as ever, I tend to think that when an author is writing about other art forms, she's really writing about her own. I liked Robin rebelling against Julliard instructors who wanted her to remove her own emotions from her playing (if you remove the self, what is music?) and I liked Lark's eventual embracement of (heavily edited and moulded) reality television as the only honest art form. These quotes about filmmaking and film watching could easily be about writing and reading novels:

He talked about the camera as a kind of mirror held up to the content of the scene, making its presence felt even though the equipment is itself unseen. He said any filmmaker embodied the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, affecting the proceedings by observing them, and that the complexity of filmmaking embraced this complication rather than attempting to smooth it away.

And later:

I've watched the movie many times since then. And each time I see it differently; sometimes its wit makes me laugh, other times I've shuddered at the meanness of it, its smartly directed blows. On that day, which was my first viewing, it made me feel as if something had been taken away from me, though I couldn't have said what; like all films, it showed me a reflection of myself, and the reflection was injured and dented, open to theft.

And I'm left musing on the book's title. Each of the sisters had been fathered by an American and born in their mother's Montreal; each of them choosing to live on an opposite side of the border in their adult lives. This physical boundary no doubt affected their emotional distance and “dual citizens” speaks of divided loyalties and unfixed futures. Maddeningly, for me, Ohlin didn't use the phrase in the body of the book, so I'm left to muse on this without her help (which is another interesting choice).

Dual Citizens is a lovely montage/magpie's nest of scenes that give a thoroughly relatable overview of a life and its most important relationship. Interesting events occur, but mostly it's quiet and introspective; a joy to read.

The longlist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize:

Days by Moonlight by André Alexis

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
Late Breaking by K.D. Miller
Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin
Lampedusa by Steven Price
Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta

Reproduction by Ian Williams


The prize was won by Ian Williams for Reproduction, but my favourite was Michael Crummey's The Innocents.