The Lowland

The Lowland begins as the story of two brothers, born fifteen months apart and inseparable companions, who are raised in (what I suppose is) middle class comfort in the teeming city of Calcutta. I have long enjoyed novels set in India, and not having read anything specifically set in Calcutta, I was prepared to be mildly familiar with the culture and hoping to learn something new. I wasn't disappointed in this as I had never heard of the Naxalite Movement -- a revolutionary group, born in tragedy, that sparks a Marxist quest for justice in the younger of the brothers, Udayan. Unsurprisingly, this has tragic consequences and the remainder of the story is weighted with grief and regret and longing.

The Lowland takes big jumps in time as it goes along: the young brothers are playful boys then serious high school students, then suddenly they are men following separate paths. It is told mostly sequentially, but especially near the end, there are leaps backwards in time to fill in some missing information. This notion of time-- of how we allow the past, present and future to affect the way we live our lives -- is an important element of this story, and especially for Gauri, the young widow who becomes a Philosophy professor. As I have always had an interest in the nature of time, these sections were especially interesting for me. Not only does Gauri write a comparison of Nietzsche's and Schopenhauer's concepts of circular time and study On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, but she has a unique perspective:

She had been born with a map of time in her mind. She pictured other abstractions as well, (but) her strongest image was always of time, both past and future; it was an immediate horizon, at once orienting and containing her. Across the limitless spectrum of years, the brief tenancy of her own life was superimposed. To the right was the recent past: the year she'd met Udayan, and before that, all the years she'd lived without knowing him. There was the year she was born, 1948, prefaced by all the years and centuries that came before.

To the left was the future, the place where her death, unknown but certain, was an end point…

Only the present moment, lacking any perspective, eluded her grasp. It was like a blind spot, just over her shoulder. A hole in her vision. But the future was visible, unspooling incrementally.

She wanted to shut her eyes to it. She wished the days and months ahead of her would end. But the rest of her life continued to present itself, time ceaselessly proliferating. She was made to anticipate it against her will.

There was the anxiety that one day would not follow the next, combined with the certainty that it would.

This unique perspective led to her studies:

She saw time; now she sought to understand it. She filled notebooks with her questions, observations. Did it exist independently, in the physical world, or in the mind's apprehension? Was it perceived only by humans?...

In Hindu philosophy the three tenses -- past, present, future -- were said to exist simultaneously in God. God was timeless, but time was personified as the god of death

Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance…

In one of her notebooks from Calcutta were jottings in Udayan's hand, on the laws of classical physics. Newton's theory that time was an absolute entity, a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. Einstein's contribution, that time and space were intertwined.

He'd described it in terms of particles, velocities. A system of relations among instantaneous events. Something called time reversal invariance, in which there was no fundamental distinction between forward and backward, when the motions of particles were precisely defined.

The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator.

Gauri, now studying in the United States where she lives with Subhash (her dead husband's brother who married her, raising Udayan's daughter as his own) makes her discoveries during the time of hippies and campus riots and women's lib -- it is nearly unsurprising that the atmosphere, coupled with her inability to live in the present, prompted Gauri to abandon her family and go off to pursue her own life. I recently read about two women who did just that at about the same -- in fiction, Inez Gallo in Night Film, and in real life, Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize winning author. Reading about it without context, that's a hard act for the mother in me to understand, but we get to know Gauri just enough to see that her escape is inevitable and pitiable. When Gauri and Bela meet near the end of the book, decades later, I was in tears, understanding the pain on each side and seeing that the characters couldn't have behaved in any other way -- there was truth in the messiness of it all and recognising these moments of truth is the reason why I read.


And as an aside, although the 2013 Man Booker has already been awarded, I would have rated this book above The Luminaries.

The Luminaries

I had been on the library waiting list for The Luminaries since the Man Booker longlist was announced, so I was pretty excited to finally get the call to go pick it up a few weeks after it had already been chosen as the winner. As the librarian took it from the hold shelf, she looked at the moon phases on the book's cover and said, "Now that looks like an interesting book."

I said, knowingly, "Yes, it should be good since it won the Booker."

Her eyes were glazed with disinterest or incomprehension. "Well, what I mean is it's so heavy." Turning the book over in her hands and seeing the maple leaf on its spine, she added, "And it's Canadian, too."

I said, "Well, the author was born in Canada but raised in New Zealand -- I don't imagine she considers herself Canadian."

"Well," she laughed, "we take what we can get, eh?"

It was in this aura of literary snobbery -- one in which I assumed I was in for an artistic and enlightening experience, one that might even go over the head of my local librarian -- that I began reading The Luminaries. I was immediately intrigued by the Victorian language and structure of the book, especially the little summaries at the beginning of each chapter (In which this and this happens…) and I could recognise that Eleanor Catton was no small talent; it was impossible to not be impressed by how note-perfect every word and phrase was; here was a true wordsmith.

I was fascinated by the introduction of the first character, Walter Moody, and the mystery hinted at as he unwittingly interrupts a conference of twelve men in a hotel smoking room. I relished the mental image that I had of these men: hastily arranging themselves in innocent poses -- asleep in a chair by the fire, nonchalantly reading an old newspaper, picking up pool cues and pretending to play -- and then stopping dead-still in their charades and leaning ever so noticeably closer to Moody as he began to relate to one of their number a tale of interest to their meeting -- the setup proved to be gripping and curious. And then it fizzled out for me.

The first 361 pages are set in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel with each of the twelve men and Moody himself relating their parts in the central mysteries of the book: the wealthiest man in the small New Zealand gold mining outpost went missing; a fortune in gold was discovered in the shack of a dead hermit; and the town's favourite prostitute attempted an opium overdose. In this beginning portion, the book introduces each character, moving backwards and forward in time, overlapping each other's tales, and pointedly does nothing to solve the mysteries. I had some real life distractions while reading this part, but I don't think that my slow reading was solely to blame for my confusion: I couldn't keep the characters straight, despite the cast of characters listed in beginning, and there were just too many, met out of any kind of order, for me to understand their relationships to each other. Helpfully, at this point Moody recaps everything he's been told so far, putting the events in chronological order, and I could almost say that this is where the book truly begins -- after 361 pages.

The Luminaries made much more sense to me after this point, and although I continued to enjoy the sentence-by-sentence language of the book, the overall story didn't do much for me: despite the convoluted plot, it doesn't seem clever upon reflection -- merely weighted down. This novel had a Dickensian feel but the main difference between Dickens and Catton is that the former had a sort of love for his readers -- the plot twists in a Dickens novel are surprising but organic; readers of all abilities can be delighted when a near-forgotten character returns from abroad with the fortune owing to the young orphan or whatever. Catton, on the other hand, seemed to be writing for the literati: even the structure of The Luminaries is a strict literary exercise -- there are twelve parts, each half as long as the one preceding it, mimicking the waning of the moon, and the original twelve men of the Crown Hotel smoking room represent each of the astrological signs, their personalities described accordingly (and at great length, seeming to break the show-don't-tell rule). The most curious thing about this book, to me at least, was the dabbling in the supernatural -- and I think it would be rather easy to keep parts of a mystery unsolved over 800 pages if in the end it can be blamed on the stars. It really felt like a cheat that Anna and Emery were "astral soul-mates", explaining why Anna accidentally firing a gun at herself actually shoots Emery somewhere off in the wilderness, or how he, lost and stumbling through that wilderness, causes Anna to nearly starve to death. 

In the end, The Luminaries didn't really work for me, and despite my pretensions of literary snobbishness, this book didn't connect with me the way it must have with the big prize juries. While I was reading it, The Luminaries was also awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award, meant to honour the best in Canadian literature. This made me a little sad -- it's one thing to, like my local librarian, be proud to claim an author as our own based on her place of birth, but it's another to celebrate her with a prize meant to acknowledge that which is Canadian. The most beautiful part of The Luminaries is when Catton describes the New Zealand landscape and its people; this was a thoroughly Kiwi book, as it should be, celebrating the land and history of the country that Catton so clearly loves. We have enough of our own stories in Canada, enough incredibly talented Canadian authors, that I'm a bit offended on their behalf by this grasp at reflected glory.

Night Film

After an intriguing prologue, the following is the opening of Night Film:

A large chandelier showered golden light on the crowd as I surveyed the party in the bronze mirror over the mantel. I was startled to spot someone I barely recognized: myself. Blue button-down, sports jacket, third or fourth drink -- I was losing count -- leaning against the wall like I was holding it up. I looked like I wasn't at a cocktail party but an airport, waiting for my life to take off.

I cringed a bit and needed to immediately make a decision: Could I treat this book as a Chandleresque pastiche or would I need to dismiss it as irredeemably cheesy? Since I decided to accept this book on its own terms, I guess it's only fair to rate it that way, too; to consider it as a plot-driven pot-boiler and not a great work of literature. My biggest disappointment in this regard: I enjoyed the Sam Spade-y narration of this audiobook well enough but do believe I missed out on half of the experience by not having the actual book in my hands; stuffed as it is with reproductions of magazine articles, photographs and web pages. If those additions can sometimes be dismissed as gimmicky, I regret not experiencing the gimmick.

In Night Film, Scott McGrath is an investigative journalist who lost his family, job and credibility over an obsession with Stanislas Cordova -- the reclusive director of a series of outlawed movies that push the limits of psychological horror. When Cordova's daughter, Ashley, is found dead of an apparent suicide, McGrath is drawn back to his case notes, hoping to finally prove the depravity of the director and redeem his own life and career. As he reopens the investigation, following in the doomed Ashley's last footsteps, McGrath: picks up a couple of quirky, young sidekicks; breaks into an asylum, a fetish club, and the director's fortified mansion; interviews a host of Cordova associates who seem eager to finally break their enduring silence; learns a great deal about magic, witchcraft and the Devil's Curse; and manages to narrowly escape frequent and fatal dangers. What saves the close calls and helpful strangers from seeming like eyerollers out of  The Da Vinci Code is the knowledge that Cordova, as a master of manipulation, just might be behind each new discovery, laying out a trail of breadcrumbs for his own nefarious purpose.

Just as there are two possible drivers for the plot, so, too, are there two competing explanations for Ashley Cordova's final months and ultimate suicide: one full of intrigue and the supernatural, the other sad and mundane. Like at the end of Life of Pi, where the reader is asked to choose between the fantastic and the ordinary, McGrath must choose which explanation satisfies the evidence and his own peace of mind. An ending after the ending may or may not settle the issue once and for all.

The main characters are pretty wooden, with unbelievable dialogue and unclear motivations, and the plot is improbable, with nick of time rescues and long-winded interviewees, but…the entire Cordova world is rich and complete. Marisha Pessl makes Cordova live and breathe with her glimpses into his cult following and their secret, underground film screenings and hidden blackboards; with her slow revelation of Cordova's movies, their plots and stars; by the way she places him in the real world with a cover on Rolling Stone Magazine and having his assistant make a protest acceptance of his Oscar (and having the real life winner for that year, Robert Benton, be so convinced that he would win for Kramer vs Kramer that he rose from his seat as Cordova's name was announced, lol) -- all of these details, coupled with a real sense of danger surrounding McGrath and his assistants, made for an enjoyable -- nearly thrilling -- experience; I needed only to surrender myself to it.

P.S. The Blackboards actually exists. See here.

Mind Picking : ICU as Psychological Torture

As I have posted here, my father-in-law had bypass surgery a week ago. We visited him within a few hours of the surgery and he was still out cold. We visited him the next day, and although he couldn't open his eyes yet, he tried to nod in answer to our questions and he even squeezed Dave's hand when we were saying goodbye. The next day, we brought the girls up to see him, and while he was still in pain, Grandpa was in good humour and tried to be sociable with us. We were at home for the next day, Sunday, but on Monday I returned to London because my sister-in-law needed to get back to work and we have decided that the stress is making it a bad idea for my mother-in-law (with her onsetting Alzheimer's) to be home alone. This makes Tuesday, five days after his surgery, the first time I saw Grandpa sitting up.

He was still in the ICU -- an open ward of post-surgical cardiac patients, separated from each other just by curtains -- and although he should have been sent to the cardiac recovery floor within forty-eight hours, he was waiting for a bed to become available. He was wearing a full oxygen mask and was labouring to breathe, apparently because he had just been up for a short walk, and the sight was upsetting for Granny -- and as is her way, when she doesn't know what to say, she starts chattering about whatever, and as she was telling about how it had started to snow overnight, Grandpa, still breathing hard and looking a little panicked, started waving his hand and shouted, "I don't care." This wasn't like him.

Not long after, his lunch arrived and Grandpa took off the mask, and with some difficulty, started poking at the items on his tray. With frustration, he took the pulse monitor off his finger so he could pick up his spoon, and Granny jumped up and said, "You need to leave that on, Jim. They need to keep track of that." Grandpa didn't seem to react to her, but since taking off the monitor made the stats machine beep loudly, he turned to it and said, "Damn that cursed thing and its beeping." Not one to be ignored, Granny ran over and began trying to wrestle the monitor back onto his finger.

"You need to leave that on!"

"Get the hell away from me. Everybody out of the pool!"

I had no idea what my role was supposed to be, how I was supposed to intervene, so I asked, "Are we tiring you? Did you want us to leave?"

"No," said Grandpa, settling down. "No, that's fine."

The nurse came in and turned off the beeping, saying that it's okay for Grandpa to have the monitor off while he's eating. Granny sat back and started chattering again as if nothing had happened. She then asked, "Do you want me to open your milk for you?"

Grandpa answered, "No. Don't worry about it."

Granny started bawling. "You just won't ever let me help you with anything. Never. You just don't need me."

Grandpa sighed and said, "No. That's okay. It's okay."

I still didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. What a mess. Happily, when Granny next asked if she could feed Grandpa his pears, he agreed and that was accomplished. Suddenly, he asked us when he would be going to the hospital. Granny and I exchanged worried looks, but when she explained that he is in the hospital already, had already had his surgery, Grandpa looked confused and then calm and said, "Right. Of course." Then he leaned forward and said, "I just knew this was going to happen. Dr. McIntyre came in and looked at me and said, 'I told them not to put the vein in you because it's going to kill you'. I just knew it."

There is no Dr. McIntyre -- this conversation never happened -- and I told him that it must have been a bad dream. Grandpa agreed that he had been having some strange dreams : Every time he closed his eyes there were crowds of people dancing all around him.

At this point, and although we had been there for less than a half hour, Grandpa said he was worn out and we may as well leave. 

We asked the nurse about the delusions and she said it's completely normal for patients to become disoriented when they spend too long in the ICU; it's noisy and there are no windows for the patients to keep track of the time of day or even the passing of days. She suggested they might give him some medication to help him sleep and confirmed that Granny had signed a consent form for restraints in case he became a danger to himself (!!). We left, concerned and hoping that Grandpa's bed would become available soon.

The next day is when things got really weird.

Grandpa had been moved to the CCU -- to a private room where he could remain until his permanent recovery bed became available -- and he had been able to spend the previous night there. As soon as we arrived, Grandpa leaned forward in his chair, a paranoid glint shining in his eye (and that is not hyperbole, at a glance he was not himself) and he said to Granny, "Something has to be done about those terrible, terrible people."

Now, I don't know if it's the Alzheimer's or just a lack of intuition, but Granny was not picking up the fear and paranoia. She laughed and said, "What people? Who's terrible?"

"The ones in the house."

I could immediately see that this was another delusion, but Granny laughed again. "What house?"

"The house. The one attached to the hospital. The one with those freaking terrible people. They have the people, all the people on tables. And there's paperwork. And there's dead people in there, too, on the tables. And you think it's the doctors who are in charge of the hospital, but it's not, it's these people. And they keep you on the tables and they want you to pay to get a hospital bed. But I didn't have any money."

Granny laughs. "You don't have any money here, but I've got some money on me."

"I didn't have any money so they kept pushing me to the back of the line. With the dead people."

This story came out really fast and I could see that Grandpa believed that this had happened to him exactly as he described it. I jumped in and said, "That was just an awful, awful dream."

He turned on me, "A dream? A bad dream? But it happened -- it was as real as you sitting here talking to me now."

"The nurses told us that bad dreams are totally normal after being in the ICU and you just had a bad dream," I said. (Granny laughing, "Boy, that is a doozy.")

"Just a dream?" Grandpa became calmer and pensive. "Every time I closed my eyes I was back in that room. The room with the people. With the dead people. And it was just a dream."

As frightening as his delusion had been to hear, I couldn't believe how easy it was to make him understand that it hadn't happened.

This visit lasted for hours and every now and then he would mutter, "Those freaking terrible people. Just a dream after all."

Yet he was still delusional, but aware of it. At one point he closed his eyes and said, "Right now, I see a post. Two posts with coats hanging on them. And there's a wee little man. And he's opening his coat and it's full of tiny hockey sticks. And he's waving at me. Hellooooo." Grandpa waved a toodle-oo and said, "He's a little Scottish man." 

Granny laughed and said, "Is he wearing a kilt?"

"Certainly, he's wearing a kilt," Grandpa blustered.

Every time he mentioned one of these delusions, I'd remark, "Well, at least that sounds like a happier dream." I have no idea what the proper response would be to the hallucinating, but I thought it was important to keep reinforcing what is real and what is not.

I found this visit to be really upsetting, especially the very frightening room Grandpa had been trapped in, and I told him it would make a good horror movie (since he's a fan of old horror flicks). By the end of the visit, every time he thought of the room and the terrible people, he'd say he was going to write that screenplay one day.

This talk of screenplays may have inspired the following story: "I can remember the opening shot, of a long beachfront. There's a beach-house and that's where the jailers live, you see. There are all these candy houses (maybe he said shanty houses?) and that's where the prisoners live. They're divided  into houses, with all the Cubans together and the African Americans (that's an unfamiliar phrase for him to use, I would have expected "Black people") and so on, and that's the way they live. And they work to get their stipend, which is five dollars a week, but that's okay. You better believe that every day they take out their boats and they get their quota of fish to get that money. And that's the way it was."

Granny asked at this point, "Was that that movie you were watching last month?"

And he answered, "Yes. That's Third Hand Luke."

Needless to say, when I looked it up later, there is no such movie as Third Hand Luke.

Like I said, I thought this whole visit was terribly sad and I felt so awful that my father-in-law had lived such a nightmare. But my mother-in-law was left with the impression that the whole thing had been hilarious. As she talked to different people on the phone that night, she comically told  how Jim had asked if we could see the black dog with the red squares on it that was walking by. Lots of laughs, but although I could see that she had been rather missing the point, I also couldn't see the benefit of me telling her any different.

As I was telling Dave and his sister about the horrifying experience their Dad had had, I came to the following epiphany: The ICU is like the Chinese Water Torture (if that's considered insensitive these days it's not meant to be; just using the colloquialism) -- there is the nonstop beeping of machines, sleep deprivation, no sense of time, and people jumping out from the shadows to jab at you with sharp objects. The experience is pretty much designed to make a person delusional, and the nurses take it as normal. As I remarked to an American friend, this highlights the major difference between our health care systems: While Grandpa, and every other Canadian, can expect world class medical care that won't cost them a dime out of pocket after the fact, I have no doubt that a private hospital would have had the proper bed available when he needed it, preventing what I believe to have been a form of psychological torture.

That night, Grandpa was finally given a sleeping pill and moved to the proper floor, and although he did dream that he was on a train with eighty-thousand people, it wasn't upsetting and he was a bit more himself the next day. He was groggy from the lingering effects of the sedative, and he spent the day on the verge of sleep, and every now and then he'd open one eye and ask me if there was actually a cat on his bed, or if I could also hear the whispering voices, but overall he could tell the real from the not so much.

The next day he was even better and the next day, yesterday, he was rested and his mind was totally clear.

How much sooner would he be on his way home had he not been forced to lose his marbles; all for the want of a quiet bed?

*****

Update added September 24, 2015:

In today's paper, I read an article about how common (and unstudied) this phenomenon is, with many patients experiencing longterm PTSD after an ICU stay. I don't think that Grandpa is still suffering but it would have been useful to know about the possibility of delusions beforehand. 

As an interesting aside, the woman featured in the article is the same Cheryl -- Kevin's older sister -- who was getting her PhD at Oxford and allowed us to stay at her flat some thirty years ago, which I wrote about here.

The Son of a Certain Woman

Most of the people who knew my mother either slept with her or wished they had, including me, my aunt Medina and a man who boarded with us…As for me wanting to sleep with my mother, if you disapprove, try spending your childhood with a face that looks long past its prime, with hands and feet like the paws of some prehuman that foraged on all fours -- and then get back to me. Or better yet, read on.

This opening salvo appropriately prepares the reader for what is to come: Anyone who might be offended by incest or lesbians or rationalised prostitution should close the covers and back away. As someone who is not offended by a literary treatment of incest (and not in the least offended by lesbians and prostitutes), I was prepared to accept whatever came along after such an intriguing start -- and I was left rather disappointed. 

Percy Joyce, eponymously The Son of a Certain Woman, was born with a benign form of a congenital defect (playfully referred to throughout the book as False Someone Syndrome, or FSS) that left him with a port-stained face, large and drooping lower lip, and oversized hands and feet; making him the subject of ridicule and cruelty from everyone outside his family; a situation that intensifies when he starts school. His only advantage (beyond the unfailing love of his mother and aunt) is the attention of the Archbishop of Newfoundland who, because he believes it auspicious that Percy was born on the Feast Day of John the Baptist -- Patron Saint of St. John's -- delivers a sermon that warns the boy is under his personal protection; sparing Percy not only the physical bullying of his peers but also the corporal punishment of his school teachers (making him the only child in all of Newfoundland not beat to shreds by the sadistic nuns and Christian Brothers charged with their education). Nothing, however, can prevent the other children from shunning Percy, or testing the limits of the Archbishop's protection with name-calling and vulgar taunts, and the loneliness that the boy feels was the most honest part of this book for me.

Apparently, Wayne Johnston's goal was to do for St. John's what James Joyce's Ulysses did for Dublin, and although I've yet to read Ulysses, I don't know if he has succeeded with The Son of a Certain Woman. (But hey, nudge, nudge, the abandoned Mom is named Penelope and the missing Dad is Jim Joyce -- get it? Nudge?) Johnston captures a time and place, and especially the stranglehold that the Catholic Church had over that time and place, but he only shows us one small street and only the part of that small street that leads from Percy's home to his school -- hardly an odyssey of epic proportions. Not only is this street tread over and over, but the same things happen over and over: for a 400+ page book, it felt like very little happened -- Percy gets teased or tries to get attention with one of his "give me myth or give me death" lies; his mother overreacts; the church has a response. And while this book is considered humorous, it's more farce than anything else, and I don't know that James Joyce by way of John Irving was what I was expecting.

As the book drew to a close and the machinations of the Archbishop were finally revealed, I had hopes that the payoff would be worth the journey, but the ending scene undermined whatever claim to seriousness that The Son of a Certain Woman may have been preparing. I was left cold.

What I did like was the portrayal of the Catholic Church's absolute power over its adherents at the time (even if it may have gone over the top with the sadism of the teachers -- but who knows, maybe that was Johnston's experience -- my mother doesn't have a lot of nice things to say about the nuns who taught her). And I felt compassion for Penny and Medina -- I can't imagine a time when two consenting adults lived in fear of being "hauled off to the Mental" for acting on the love that dare not speak its name. By now I know that Johnston didn't win the Giller Prize for this novel, and based on the few books on the shortlist that I have read, that seems appropriate.

I'll repost here a story I included in my review of Galore, which is all I know about the Catholic Church in Newfoundland at this time of this novel:

A true story: I have a friend who married a Newfoundlander, whose own father was a fisherman in a coastal community of less than two hundred people, fifty and more years after Galore concludes. This man was away on the fishing boats most of the time but when he was home, he was a mean and abusive drunk who forced himself on his long-suffering wife, eventually siring fourteen children by her. The woman was so overwhelmed, barely able to care for and feed the ever growing brood, essentially all alone, and she went to the parish priest for advice. The priest called down all the wrath of God upon her head for daring to complain about her lot in life and impressed on her that her only duty as a wife was to submit to her husband.

We Need New Names

Look at the children of the land leaving in droves, leaving their own land with bleeding wounds on their bodies and shock on their faces and blood in their hearts and hunger in their stomachs and grief in their footsteps. Leaving their mothers and fathers and children behind, leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what they are, leaving because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same.

When I started We Need New Names, I was immediately enchanted by the main character, Darling, and her gang of friends as they made a raid for guavas on the relatively rich town of Budapest -- they stuffed their empty bellies full of the stolen fruit, despite knowing that it would lead to painful constipation. I later learned that this opening chapter was originally a short story (Hitting Budapest) that won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Literature for NoViolet Bulawayo -- no doubt richly deserved. Despite their hunger and their tin shacks and their ratty clothes and the fact that their school had been closed some time before, the preteen friends accept their lot, make up games, and dream of emigrating to South Africa or Dubai or America. These children aren't innocents (one of them is pregnant, the result of a grandfather raping her) and they are hyper aware of American celebrity culture and how to manipulate western volunteers:

What we really want to do is take off and run to meet the lorry but we know we cannot. Last time we did, the NGO people were not happy about it, like we had committed a crime against humanity…They just like taking pictures, these NGO people…they don't care that we are embarrassed by our dirt and torn clothing, that we would prefer they didn't do it; they just take the pictures anyway, take and take. We don't complain because we know that after the picture-taking comes the giving of gifts.

As an aside, I was surprised that this NGO gave the children toy guns. I know when we have packed a shoebox before for Operation Christmas Child, there were explicit instructions to not include war toys, as it might be traumatising. This also made me pause and think since I have seen the pictures sent back to the classrooms that show the smiling children opening their gifts -- it never occurred to me that they might resent having their picture taken, that their dignity might have been too high a price to pay for dollar store pencils and toothbrushes.

In a later chapter, Darling remembers how she and her mother had lost the nice brick house they had been living in; the events that had forced them to construct a shack in Paradise:

The men knock down our house and Ncane's house and Josephat's house and Bongi's house and Sibo's house and many houses. Knockiyani knockiyani knockiyani: men driving metal, metal slamming brick, brick crumbling…When the bulldozers finally leave, everything is broken, everything is smashed, everything is wrecked. It is sad faces everywhere, choking dust everywhere, broken walls and bricks everywhere, tears on people's faces everywhere. Gayigusu kicks broken bricks with his bare feet and rips his shirt off and jabs at the terrible scar running across his back and bellows, I got this from the liberation war, salilwelilizwe leli, we fought for this facking lizwe mani, we put them in power, and today they turn on us like a snake, mpthu, and he spits. Musa's father stands with his hands in his pockets and does not say anything but the front of his trousers is wet. Little Tendai points at him and laughs.

On one of their guava raids, from their perch high in a tree, the friends watch as a gang of weapon-waving young men, all the time chanting "Africa for Africans", confront the wealthy white owners of the home and garden:

No, you listen, the white man says, like he didn't just hear the boss warn him about telling black men to listen.

I am an African, he says. This is my fucking country too, my father was born here, I was born here, just like you!

Even though they had watched the gang punt a little dog out of the yard, enter and destroy the home, and lead the couple away against their will, Darling and her friends go into the house and make a game out of using their things and eating their food and answering their phone -- they are always capable of regarding the violence around themselves with a detached interest, and I found many instances of this to be deeply touching (from straightening a coat hanger to get rid of the pregnant girl's "stomach" -- even though they don't quite know what to do with it -- to pretending to beat one of the boys to death after secretly watching the funeral of a political activist -- when a Westerner with a camera who has been filming them asks, "What kind of game is that?" one of them replies, "This is no game, it's life".) Perhaps most affecting is when Darling's father finally returns from South Africa:

Father comes home after many years of forgetting us, of not sending us money, of not loving us, not visiting us, not anything us, and parks in the shack, unable to move, unable to talk properly, unable to anything, vomiting and vomiting, Jesus, just vomiting and defecating on himself, and it smelling like something dead in there, dead and rotting, his body a black, terrible stick; I come in from playing Find bin Laden and he is there.

Although he is supposed to be kept a secret, Darling's friends enter her shack and immediately show compassion, with songs and touches, to someone whom they recognise as dying of AIDS. In the first half of We Need New Names, Darling and her friends are smart and funny and can dream of "richer" lives without feeling sorry for themselves -- I could admire them without pitying them, and I really felt like I was getting a glimpse at an African, or at any rate a Zimbabwean, childhood.

But in the second half of the book, Darling finally joins her aunt in Detroit and the American dream turns out to be not what she had expected -- there is snow and gunshots and an obese cousin who plays video games all day. Her aunt is obsessed with being skinny and is exercising any time she isn't working (which is two jobs so she can afford to send money back home). With her new friends (a Nigerian and an African American), Darling watches porn (and for no good reason, a video of a young girl suffering a Female Genital Mutilation ceremony) and whereas she used to be charming and resilient, Darling is now flat and doesn't really react to what's going on around her. Years pass and Darling continues to be disconnected -- and I was disconnected from her. 

Things felt less real in the American half of the book -- it felt cliché to have the daughter of the rich man who Darling is cleaning for turn out to be an anorexic. Or when Darling confronts her African American friend about the amount of slang she uses, Kristal replies:

First of all, it's called Ebonics and it be a language system, but it be our own, naamean, 'coz we ain't trynna front.

I didn't buy for a minute the use of the word Ebonics by this teenage character. 

By the end of We Need New Names, Darling starts to realise that she would have been better off staying in Zimbabwe, that hiding out illegally in the US (after letting her visitor's visa expire, like so many of her compatriots) and working night and day to improve the lives of the family she left behind (who are now asking for satellite dishes instead of care packages) is no life at all. I can't argue with that conclusion if the author believes it, she certainly portrayed Darling as happier and more herself when she was in her real home, but this book was so uneven to me that I couldn't fairly compare the two halves of Darling's life -- they seemed to have happened to different people. 

I wanted to give this book its proper context and have been looking at Zimbabwe and Mugabe, and seeing what others have had to say about We Need New Names. I was intrigued by these two reviews, one from The Guardian which discusses whether NoViolet Bulawayo is guilty of writing the "Caine-prize aesthetic":

The Guardian

And this one from New Zimbabwe that found the second half of the book to be more profound:

New Zimbabwe

If We Need New Names had ended as strongly as it began, it would have been one of my favourite books of the year. As it is -- as can be seen by my lack of passages from the second half if nothing else -- it screeched to a halt and left me wanting.

Just to start a conversation, I asked my younger brother recently, "Why is it, as Canadians, we can look at places like apartheid-era South Africa and see that a minority white rule over the original black inhabitants is obviously wrong while seeming not to care about having taken the land we live on away from its original inhabitants?"

Kyler immediately took issue with my premise: "Who says what's 'obviously wrong' or not? Zimbabwe was the bread basket of Africa until the white farmers were kicked off the land they had developed for generations. Now everyone is starving, so how is that better? And as for the Natives, why does everyone go around talking about an Indian genocide when there were 200 000 inhabitants in Canada before the Europeans came and now they number 2 million?"

I can't find the sources to back up his numbers, but his statements made me plenty uncomfortable. The scene in We Need New Names in which the white couple are removed from their home is written judgement-free by NoViolet Bulawayo; it is what it is, and even protesting that his family had lived on the land for generations didn't make the white man any more African. So how does that work in reverse?

Can people who voluntarily emigrate to America (or Canada or wherever) ever really belong there? Is there irony in Africans voluntarily following the path of those ancestors who were kidnapped into slavery? Do the Natives in Canada have some case for kicking out all of us non-Natives and reclaiming the land -- and back to my original question -- why does that sound ridiculous to me whereas redistributing the farmland in Zimbabwe sounds fair (even if it was grossly mishandled by that thug, Robert Mugabe)? Is it because the non-Natives are the majority and that's just democracy? My family has been in Canada for at least 150 years, is that long enough for squatter's rights?

It's at a time like this that I wish I was in a book club...so much to discuss.

Mind Picking : A Tale of Two Dads

I'm freaked out, and although I don't want to be jumping the gun at memorialising someone, I thought I'd lay out a timeline of recent events here.

On Thursday, October 24th, my father-in-law (Grandpa) took a dizzy spell while bowling, and since it is a senior's league and he was surrounded by a bunch of old guys, and despite his protestations, an ambulance was called and he was brought to the University  hospital. The first we heard of this was when my mother-in-law (Granny) called in tears to say what had happened and to let us know that she was on her way to see him. We waited hours for an update, and when Granny called again, she said that it didn't look like there was a real emergency -- Grandpa had had his dosage on one of his medications doubled recently and the doctor's best guess was that he was having a reaction. Great. The most concerning factor: Granny was so stressed by the situation that she got lost driving the ten or so blocks home (in the city she's lived in for 55 years…) and she ended up out in the country and had to pull into a laneway and ask someone how to get back to town. With a history of Alzheimer's in her family, this made us panic a bit.

We went to see Grandpa on the Saturday and he was himself; all smiles and anxious to get back home. They were going to keep him in until the Monday, however, to do some stress tests on his 20 year old bypasses -- as they said, they normally last about 15 years, and we thought that this was a silver lining; that he would be getting some tests that might not otherwise have been available to him. Meanwhile, my own father (Pop) had bought a VW Thing from a local guy on Kijiji and drove up from Nova Scotia to pick it up, arriving early Monday morning. There was no news from the hospital until Tuesday, and it came in the form of another panicked phone call from Granny: Grandpa's bypasses were all disintegrated and he would be having surgery on Thursday to replace them.

My immediate memory was of a time, nearly twenty years ago, when Grandpa told me that open heart surgery was so painful and the recovery so hard that if he had known what it was like, he never would have done it. And that's when he was in his fifties and had many many healthy years ahead of him. I couldn't imagine what was going through his mind now.

As it happened, Pop and I had plans to go to Burlington together to visit my brother and his family on that Tuesday. I was very distracted as we drove along and, despite the knowledge that my own father isn't a particularly empathetic man, I told him about the situation. He said a few variations of, "At 75 years old, maybe the time has come to just accept what's what and not encourage him to have this major surgery" and "There's no reason for you to go down the day of the surgery, it's not like you're a surgeon or anything". Well, I felt worse for having told him so I stopped talking about it -- there's no way I was going to shout,  "But we need Grandpa in our lives; it is absolutely necessary that he dance at my daughters' weddings!" Then, when we got back home, Dave called to tell me that his mother had gotten confused and had the story wrong again -- Thursday was to be an angiogram to get more information; this wasn't surgery but a small procedure. My father left for home the next day -- wouldn't want to visit here with all of his kids and grandkids for more than two days -- and I didn't bother correcting the story. What did he care? (And that wasn't totally fair because he did text me as soon as he got home to ask "How's Jim?" I replied that it turned out to be just an angiogram and that was the end of the exchange.)

Then, late Thursday, Dave called his Dad directly and got the straight scoop: The angiogram had shown that only one of Grandpa's bypasses was working properly and he would have two options -- the open heart surgery to put in the new bypasses that we had been panicking about or medication and a life of zero activity to maintain the health of the last working artery. After a meeting with the surgical team Friday -- yesterday -- it was decided that Grandpa will be having the bypass surgery this coming Thursday. Heaven help him.

During the week, Dave had a conversation with his sister who said, "Dan and I were talking last night and if anything happens to Dad, we'll take Mom in." That knocked the wind out of me. Is this what we're talking about? Yes, my inlaws are in their 70s, but I want them around for a long time yet; if only because their warmth and caring balances out the chill and indifference of my own parents. (And to be fair, my mother did text me yesterday to see how everything is going. And to ask if she should send a card.)

Off to see Grandpa today.

*****

Update: November 5

The surgery has been confirmed for this Thursday and at least me, Dave and his sister will be going up Wednesday night to be there for both Granny and Grandpa. When we visited on Saturday, Grandpa told Dave that he had seen the EKG of his heart and even the "good" artery is blocked and weak; he said he'd be lucky to make it to the operating table. He must be so scared.

The bigger issue again: Granny called me in tears last night to say she had had the worst day. She had decided to drive herself to the hospital for a visit, and when she was entering the parking garage, she scraped the side of their car against a concrete pole. It was the first accident she had ever had, in sixty years of driving, and she was devastated by the timing. According to Grandpa (in a later conversation with Dave), Granny came into his hospital room in a panic and he had to get her to sit on his bed and put his arm around her and soothe her; let her know that it just didn't matter. 

When she went to leave the hospital, Granny was sure she had parked on the sixth level of the parking garage, but no matter how long she walked around, trying to get the car to honk with her remote, she couldn't find it. Eventually, a man (bless his heart) offered to drive her around until they found it, eventually going up and down all of the levels twice until successful.

In the middle of this conversation, Granny lowered her voice even though she was home alone, and asked me, "You wouldn't happen to know what day the operation is, would you? Sandy from across the street asked me a while ago and I just couldn't remember." 

I had offered to stay down in London with Granny -- I am the only one not needed at some kind of employment -- but while I may have been of help to her yesterday, it's been deemed unnecessary at this point: Sandy from across the street has offered to make sure Granny has a drive back and forth to the hospital until we get there. 

When it rains, it pours, and it is pouring.

*****

Update: November 17

Boy, I hate not having my laptop with me -- this is a late update. 

Grandpa went in on the 7th to have his bypass surgery. We got to the hospital at 7:30 am and were able to hang out with him in his room and then accompany him down to the surgical floor, waiting with him until just before they took him away. As we were saying goodbye and good luck, I noticed that my lovely sister-in-law was bawling and this made me start to panic -- am I really so dumb that I don't recognise the danger? Granny was at the bedside, gripping Grandpa's hand, and bawling, and Dave, seeing his sister and not wanting it to upset their father, took a step forward to block her from the old guy's view, and I saw that Dave had tears in his eyes, too.

This begs the question: Is there something fundamentally wrong with me that seeing someone off to major surgery doesn't make me want to cry? Is my heart a shrivelled bean or did I marry into a family where the hearts are overly, wonderfully, large?

We were advised that the surgery would take 7 or 8 hours and were encouraged to leave the hospital and come back later. Reluctantly, we went out for breakfast and then hung out at the inlaws' house, returning to the hospital after 6 hours; surely enough time to be back before there was any news. When we arrived at the ICU waiting room, the Reverend Bill White was sitting there and gave us a big smile and a thumb's up.

Bill White is a former school teacher and principal who, upon retirement, decided to attend seminary and become an Anglican priest. He has been a friend and barber client of Grandpa's for 30 years, and following an invitation from the reverend, the inlaws have been sporadically attending Sunday services at his small church; the Anglican mass being a satisfactory compromise between her Baptist upbringing and his Catholic one. White renewed the inlaws' wedding vows on their 50th anniversary this year and Dave, his sister and I found him to be pompous and phony and in love with the sound of his own voice. We are not fans. But...the Rev. White has been a source of comfort during this health emergency and has been visiting Grandpa and phoning Granny, and while we might not like him, he has been the very example of a pastor and a friend.

So while it grated on me and Dave and his sister that, because he is a minister, the surgeon gave White the post-surgical update in our absence, Granny was relieved not to have to wait for news, and seeing him there gave her much joy. The update was: When the surgeon opened up Grandpa's chest and surveyed the anatomy of his heart (this was explained to us beforehand -- because he has had two bypass operations already, the doctors wouldn't know exactly what the heart would look like until they got in there; there were four or five veins hanging off the heart and the complete picture needed to be seen in person, not through the MRI or whatever, to really appreciate the landscape) it was decided that the connections were too small to do more than two bypasses this time. (And that's why the surgery took only 6 hours and we weren't present for the news.) White explained that the surgeon believes this will allow Grandpa to live a normal life but his days of shovelling snow and cutting grass are behind him. He repeated, in that smug and knowing voice, "This isn't the result we wanted for Dad, but it's not bad. Not good news, but not bad." This is comfort? 

White proceeded to hang around, mostly telling lame jokes, and as Dave noted later, trying to be the cool reverend who'll say damn and hell. As an example: "Hey, we can't tell the future, only Gypsies can and that's why they make such caring, gentle lovers -- because they have crystal balls." Har dee har har. I did my best to not show my annoyance, but the following story is where I stopped pretending to smile:  

Wearing this collar gets me a lot of attention, especially at hospitals. If I'm in an emergency room I can hardly walk from one end to the other without someone asking me to pray with them. One night, it was the day before Christmas Eve, I was in an ER and I spent two and a half hours putting this old guy back together. When I went to leave, his wife came and thanked me, but when it came up that I'm not Catholic, she said, "Oh, you're not a real priest." I thought, "I just spent two and half hours putting your husband back together and you're going to say I'm not a real priest?" So I looked at her and said, "Well, plenty of people I know would say your Pope isn't a real Pope." 

That's Christian charity? Some old woman is spending the night before Christmas Eve at the ER and she can't be forgiven her biases? Wouldn't "your Pope isn't a real Pope" be a crappy thing to say to an old Catholic under any circumstances? I pretty much started ignoring the Rev. White at that point, but Dave, seeing what a comfort it was to his mother, was man enough to remain polite and chuckle at the jokes.

After we spoke to the surgeon ourselves and were told that we wouldn't be able to see Grandpa until later, we left the cellphone-banned area and began texting and emailing and calling people to let them know everything went well. My exchange with my own mother:

I know that my parents and my inlaws are friendly without exactly being friends -- they don't live anywhere near each other but our mothers do chat on the phone sometimes; mostly about their shared granddaughters -- but even if I was talking about the surgery of someone she didn't know at all, wouldn't a normal mother care enough about my feelings to respond more than a "K" when I sent this message?

This was also our last text exchange. Ma called me last Monday, here at home, to ask how things were going and I told her that I was packing to go back and spend the week with Granny and Ma's phone made a weird noise and disconnected; she didn't call back; that's our last conversation. She said at that time that she knew my mother-in-law must be overwhelmed with calls and visits so she wouldn't be adding to the pressure, and I was able to tell Granny that that's why my mother hasn't called her at all, but I can't help but feel that this indifference reflects poorly on me. I suppose this post might also be titled A Tale of Two Moms.

Although I have more to say about our post-surgical adventure, this is nearly all I have to say on the topic of my parents vs. my inlaws.

I say "nearly" because I want to tell one last story, related to that text conversation with my mother and that first message about Dave's cousin's wife coming out of a coma (which my mother didn't even respond to?). The short version of that is that Jenn was giving birth and the placenta didn't detach and they had to do an emergency hysterectomy and she lost so much blood that they kept her in a coma for a couple of days while rushing her back and forth to the OR for emergency procedures. This was happening the same week that Grandpa was waiting for his surgery, so although we're not super-close with Jenn, it did add to the overall stress. (And her story has a happy ending, too.)

So last night, my first night back home in nearly a week (because I have been staying with Granny to keep her company and keep her focussed while the Alzheimer's starts to scramble her memory), Ken came over to ask us how we are and how the inlaws are. He made some offhand comment about, "Has Aunt Susie been to visit?" (Aunt Susie is Granny's sister and Jenn's mother-in-law; Susan has spent the week helping out her son and worrying that his wife was going to die.) So I started to say, "Susie's daughter-in-law nearly died in childbirth..." And Ken says, "I don't care about all that." And, trying to explain how it did affect us, the people he's asking about, I said, "Yeah, but, when she was in the hospital..." And he cut me off again with, "I don't give a shit about those people. I care about you and I care about Dave. I care about your kids. I care about Jim and Bev. Rudy. Dan. That's about it."

That's exactly the way our Dad talks about people, and the older Ken gets, the more he affects our father's mannerisms. What a rude and stupid way to talk to me -- especially when it feels like an affectation -- and then I'm supposed to sit here and listen while he tells some stupid story about how he's buying a trailer from our cousin and flipping it for profit to a friend of his? On what planet is that a more interesting story than the near loss of a human being; even one you don't know; even someone you "don't give a shit about"?

It's easy to say that our lack of empathy comes from our father's aggressive misanthropy but the fact that my mother's compassion ends at the tip of her own nose has also affected the people that my brothers and I have become. I may not always have the appropriate emotional responses but I do try to act with the compassion that I'm not truly feeling. Here's hoping my own girls have their father's heart.