Friday, 31 January 2020

The Story of My Teeth

I’m the best auctioneer in the world, but no one knows it because I’m a discreet sort of man. My name is Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, though people call me Highway, I believe with affection. I can imitate Janis Joplin after two rums. I can interpret Chinese fortune cookies. I can stand an egg upright on a table, the way Christopher Columbus did in the famous anecdote. I know how to count to eight in Japanese: ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi. I can float on my back. This is the story of my teeth, and my treatise on collectibles and the variable value of objects.

The Story of My Teeth is divided into six sections (plus a series of photographs and a bonus “Chronologic” added by the book's translator) and I found the first of these sections (“The Story”) to be delightful: dripping with irony and absurdity, it was just off-kilter enough to pique my interest. But as the sections proceeded, the tone eventually wore on me, something began to drag the story down, and when I read the author's afterword about the book's creation (details to follow), I realised that the problem I had with The Story of My Teeth is that it's just too deliberate and self-aware; too manufactured to come across as relatably human. I picked this up not realising that I had read Valeria Luiselli before (Lost Children Archive) and both of these books suffer from the same sort of novel-as-art-installation-project that I can find alienating; Luiselli is making art, but it's not really to my taste.

I wasn’t just a lowly seller of objects but, first and foremost, a lover and collector of good stories, which is the only honest way of modifying the value of an object. End of declaration.
Set in a suburb of Mexico City, Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, known as “Highway”, worked as a guard, and then a counselor, at a juice factory until, at forty-two, he decided to learn auctioneering. Leaving his wife and baby son behind, Highway studied auctioneering in America and returned to become very successful, wealthy, and at the height of his powers, replaced his own shamefully uneven teeth with those said to have belonged to Marilyn Monroe. Asked to help a local parish by auctioning off some of his own collectibles, Highway demonstrates how it's stories that create value in items (asserting that the individual teeth he's selling belonged to such notables as Plato and Virginia Woolf), and when he sees his now grown son in attendance, Highway puts himself on the auction block. When his son then becomes vengeful, Highway hires a young novelist to write his dental autobiography. End of plot summary.
I need you to write my story, the story of my teeth. I tell it to you, you just write it. We sell millions, and I get my teeth fixed for good. Then, when I die, you write about that too. Because a man's story is never complete until he dies. End of that task.
Along with the six sections of straight narrative that the book is divided into, The Story of My Teeth includes a number of pages with fortune-cookie fortunes, some fairly inscrutable epigraphs, a section at the end with photographs of actual locations from the book, and endless referencing of other literary works (which are attributed to such writers as Miguel Sánchez Foucault, Marcelo Sánchez Proust, and Fredo Sánchez Dostoyevsky; a joke that grows old fast). Nothing about this reads like a familiar novel.

So, how this book came to be: Valeria Luiselli was commissioned to write a work of fiction for the catalogue of the Galería Jumex; an experimental art gallery located in a juice factory in the “marginalized, wasteland-like neighborhood of Ectepec”. Luiselli wrote the first section (which I really liked) and it was then read aloud to the workers at the juice factory, a recording was made of their reactions, and based on that feedback (and integrating the workers' personal anecdotes), Luiselli wrote the next section, and so on. In this way, she refers to this effort as a collaboration between everyone involved (“a reverse Duchampian procedure”), and as for the Chronologic section – which is a timeline of real and imagined events from the years of Highway's narrative – added entirely by her English translator, Christina MacSweeney, Luiselli writes that it is, “a map, an index, and a glossary for the book, which both destabilized the obsolete dictum of the translator's invisibility and suggests a new way of engaging with translation”. And all of this is apparent in the result: The Story of My Teeth was experimentally manufactured from disparate bits, intended for the catalogue of an art gallery that once hosted a room whose four walls were each entirely taken up by a video of a different bored clown doing little more than periodically sighing or blinking (an exhibit both described in the narrative and featured in one of the ensuing photographs). If you're intrigued by that exhibit, this book might be a perfect fit for you; like, both are art, but not for me.

When the bar was starting to close the owner would let Highway auction his stories. It was at Secret of Night that Highway finally put into practice the now full-fledged theory of his famous allegoric method, where it is not objects that are sold, but the stories that give them value and meaning.
And then I'm left wondering about this story that Luiselli tells us at the end of her book and relate it back to Highway's philosophy – is her novel “worth” more or less to me because I know about the commission and the collaboration and the deliberate experimentation? Is a pile of pitted and yellowed teeth worth more if they once belonged to a famous philosopher or actress? Is all value to be found in the stories we attach to items instead of reflecting something inherent in the items themselves? The whole thing could be a hoax that Luiselli is playing on the reader (a reverse reverse Duchampian procedure), but any way you look at it, it's using manipulation to provoke a response (which, of course, all fiction does), and I can't say that I enjoyed the experience overall.


Wednesday, 29 January 2020

The Weight of a Moment

It was my own personal theory that most lifetimes could be summed up by ten to twenty moments, meaningful snippets ranging from a handful of seconds to a few spins around the clock face that contained both the best and worst of one's character and experiences. Like a home movie on Super 8 film, twenty impactful moments that told the story of a life.  Often those moments were first glances, tearful good-byes, fortunate turns, unfortunate accidents, promises kept, promises broken, triumphs, failures, and regrets. In my case, it only took thirteen moments from my forty-three years to convey an insightful understanding of my life, twelve recollections that I told proudly and one that always stung a little bit in the telling.

When author Michael Bowe contacted me and offered to send me a review copy of his self-published sophomore effort, The Weight of a Moment, I first looked to others' reviews, and seeing that they were by and large positive, I accepted his offer; why wouldn't I be pleased to help promote an Indie author who's just looking for some traction? But having now read the book, I'm in a bit of a pickle: I didn't really like it. And while I'm not here to eviscerate the guts of anyone's art, I can only be honest about what I read (and hope the following may be taken constructively?) Overwhelmingly my critique would be that this book needed a cold-blooded editor: to catch the errors; to rein in the excess; to focus the plot. This comes across as more amateur than merely Indie.

I first met Tom Corbett on a sticky July afternoon in The Bashful Rooster around 3pm when there were no other customers in the diner. Finished with my BLT and fries, I noticed Tom sitting alone in a booth on the far side of the restaurant near the tall glass case with fresh cakes and pies on display. I recognized him immediately from the Internet video as the Dream Squasher, but I knew not to mention his notoriety as I strolled toward his booth. Better than most, I knew what it meant to run from yourself and I figured that was the reason he'd come to our little town.
Essentially, the plot sees the meeting of two middle-aged men – both running from “weighty moments” that have destroyed their personal and professional lives in the big city – who have returned to the same small Pennsylvania town where they grew up. Although they did not know each other when they were kids (ten years separate their ages), as the pair gets acquainted in the present, their backstories become fully revealed and they help one another to face their pasts and to move on into the future. If you can buy the details – that these particular moments would destroy these men's lives and that they would form an instafriendship that heals all wounds – then you just might enjoy this as a triumph-of-the-spirit friendship story. I couldn't buy into much of it.

As for the particulars of the writing: Perspective shifts between the first person POV of Nick (a former award-winning journalist who continually tells us what a great and insightful writer he is; always a potential minefield in my opinion) and a third person omniscient POV of former art and antique appraiser Tom (which is also narrated by Nick, who couldn't possibly have this omniscient insight into Tom's thoughts and motivations, and especially for all the scenes from the past that he wasn't present for). These weird shifts are just one of my complaints that could have been solved with better editing, but I was also constantly distracted by improper comma and word usages. At least four times, Bowe used “passed” when he meant “past” (which makes that not a typo but a disdain for language) and in the following sampling, that usage is not the only thing cringeworthy:

Well passed the age of backseat fumbling, I thought I understood the act of making love, but this encounter produced a union that exceeded anything I'd experienced before, one that far exceeded the introduction of a penis to a vagina.
So, spellcheck and grammarcheck could have eliminated some distractions, but even worse for me was Bowe's constant need to explain things to the reader. A Spanish-speaking housekeeper has her brief foreign language utterances immediately translated in brackets (a device I've never seen before and which turned me off), and Bowe uses the same brackets device to explain a name brand he drops (tinned tobacco), and to expand well-known abbreviations like IED (which would work better if he didn't write “Improvised Explosive Devise”). And worse, Bowe (in the voice of Nick narrating his and Tom's stories to the reader) feels the need to explain ordinary things like: what a viral video is and how “virality” is achieved; what insider trading is and how that works; and perhaps worst of all, what an excavator is and how that works. Okay, worst of all is how Nick and Tom, in the course of fixing up Tom's inherited farmstead, both unearth dinosaur bones and build a guest house, with Nick explaining how the digging in the earth is helping the pair to exhume their own pasts and how erecting the structure is helping them to focus on the future; I really don't think that Bowe trusts his readers to understand anything at all and I was a bit offended.

I really did want to like this book, and I really wanted to give it at least three stars, but I didn't, and I couldn't.



Monday, 27 January 2020

Married to a Bedouin


Much, much later, when they couldn't dance or joke any more, a group of Mohammad's friends escorted us back to our cave. They didn't stop singing all the way; their words reverberated around the basin, echoing from the mountain walls that surrounded us. It had been a long wedding and very successful from Mohammad's point of view, but for me, I was just happy to have him to myself at last.

I recently travelled to the two thousand-year-old Nabatean city of Petra, and as we entered the narrow Siq that leads to the famous red rock monuments, our guide told us the story of Marguerite van Geldermalsen – a backpacker from New Zealand who met and fell in love with a local Bedouin in the 70's – informing us that Marguerite has a souvenir shop along the main path, and if we were lucky, we would be able to meet her, perhaps buy her book about her experiences; a book she would happily sign and inscribe for us. Turns out that Marguerite was at her stall that day, and it also turns out that while she would rather resignedly sell and sign her books for us tourists, she would much rather hawk the silver jewellery that her fellow Bedouin women make for the shop (she rather impatiently asked my husband if he didn't need a pair of silver cufflinks; he did not). As Marguerite's grandson sprawled on a chair nearby, scrolling through his iPhone, we persisted in buying Marguerite's book (while she grumbled to herself about accepting credit cards, “Why does everyone think I'd prefer a card to cash?”), and happily, it turns out to have been a delightful read. For a nonprofessional author, Marguerite's writing is clear and evocative, she manages to capture the dying days of a now vanished way of life, and most of all, she has crafted a fitting memorial for a man she loved; a man who died too young. Maybe not a perfect read for everyone, but in the context of my trip, Married to a Bedouin added a lot of colour to the black and white history I was learning.

We reached a plateau of iron-red rock and had a short rest with our legs dangling over the drop-edge. Petra stretched below us like an inhabited map. We could see the rock outcrop of our cave and the tent set up for our wedding. We could see girls driving donkeys laden with jerry-cans, goatherds following flocks down rock steps, wood gatherers, horsemen riding lazily and souvenir sellers – we could see the Bedouin heading home. The once nomadic Bedouin of whose tribe I was about to become a part.
Even rereading the early bits, it's hard to figure out just why Marguerite and Mohammad got married within two months of meeting one another (Because his friends and family kept teasing them? Because her tourist visa was about to run out?), but it seems undeniable that this was a love match; why else would a Western woman leave the comforts of (our notion of) civilisation to move to a cave, cook over an open fire, toilet behind a designated bush? The Bedouin community that Marguerite became a member of certainly helped to ease her path: the women fought over the privilege of sharing food with the young bride until she was ready to learn to make her own bread and balls of dried yogurt; the men brought her water and firewood; this was a close-knit and generous community that welcomed Marguerite into their fold. It was a coup for the community that Marguerite had trained as a nurse back in New Zealand – she was able to operate the often closed local clinic – and while she happily adopted the dress and customs and eventually the religion of the surrounding Muslims, Marguerite retained enough of her Westernised independence to join in (formerly all male) card games and to insist on sitting with her husband at gender-segregated gatherings. In a series of short and consistently interesting vignettes, Marguerite completely captures the way of life for the cave-dwelling Bedouin of Petra in the late 70's/early 80's, and that gives this the feeling of an important artifact: UNESCO officially declared Petra a World Heritage Site in 1985, and at that time, the Bedouin were moved into a nearby permanent village (and as a trade-off, given the sole right to open souvenir shops and other tourist ventures inside Petra).

As Married to a Bedouin ends, Marguerite describes her husband's early death from diabetes-related complications, and at the time of writing (2008), she and their three young adult children had left Petra:

I might go back and see if I can find a Petra I can live in without Mohammad. I know that it is still an exciting place to be. The Bedouin have settled into Umm Sayhoon, but by day they inhabit the ruins of Petra. They bring them back to life – using donkeys to take tourists to the High Place and Monastery, camels to get them to Wadi Sabra and Jabal Haroon, and almost any means at all to get them into the shade for a glass of mint tea. And, if there's one happening, they invite them with typical enthusiastic hospitality back up to their village for a Bedouin Wedding. But I wasn't in Petra for the mountains or history – nor even for the culture. Without Mohammad to hold me, I am no longer married to a Bedouin and, despite all the things we have accumulated, I have become a nomad once again.
I don't know what eventually brought Marguerite back to Petra – and I'm assuming that her grandson's presence at her shop indicates the return of at least one of her children, too – but she is there, selling her book and finely-made silver jewellery. I thoroughly enjoyed this read, and if you have the chance to buy a copy from Marguerite herself, and you don't want to be grumbled at, bring cash.



Bonus: Marguerite today -




Sunday, 26 January 2020

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade


They stopped and stared. The narrow canyon led into a broad, open area like an arena, and carved into one of the rocks on the far side was a spectacular Greco-Roman facade. Wide steps led up to a landing with massive columns, and beyond them was the entrance to a darkened chamber. The Temple of the Sun, Indy thought.

I bought Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade because I knew that scenes from the movie were shot in Petra – the “Treasury” standing in for the fictional “Temple of the Sun” – and I wanted to pose in front of the monument holding this book on a recent trip there; because that sort of thing warms my book nerd heart. And I didn't expect this book to be terrific, and I wouldn't have read it at all if I hadn't run out of other books, and after reading it, I didn't want to review it – it's just that bad. But then I decided that it's so bad that I ought to at least give a (probably unnecessary) warning: don't waste your time on this.

I appreciate that a novelisation of an action-adventure movie can't help but suffer from: “He threw a punch and ducked and ran and jumped onto a passing train and looked over his shoulder and saw with horror that he was being followed”; it's pretty hard to capture the quick-cut action scenes without and...and...and then...But consistently, this is just poorly written, and especially where author Rob MacGregor attempts to add his own flourishes. Consider the famous scene where Indiana Jones finds himself face to face with Hitler and the Fuhrer mistakenly thinks that Indy wants an autograph and he signs the Grail diary:

Indy quickly recovered his sense of place. He clicked his heels and delivered a straight arm salute. At the same time, he secretly countered his show of fealty. He held his other hand behind his back, and crossed his fingers.

There's a reason something that stupid and childish didn't happen in the movie. MacGregor also decided to put in some literary flourishes – in one case having Indy note a series of birds that his father recorded in his Grail diary that define the stages of the Grail quest. And that subtext could, potentially, serve as a satisfying device for the close reader, but MacGregor prefers to make it all overt with Indy noticing each bird at key junctures of his adventure:

He noticed a pond next to the castle; gliding across its surface was a solitary swan. Its long neck was gracefully arched, and its snowflake-white feathers seemed luminous against the pond's dark waters. He was reminded of the swan in his father's Grail diary. It represented one of the levels of awareness in the search for the Grail and meant something about overcoming weaknesses of the mind and heart. Elsa was his weakness. He had quenched his desires like a man who had found an oasis after days in the desert without water. He had taken her greedily, and she had fulfilled his every wish. Why would he, or anyone, want to overcome such pleasures?

And don't get me started on “He had taken her greedily, and she had fulfilled his every wish”. Ick. Not recommended even for a long flight when all other options are exhausted. Dreck.





Bonus: The point of buying this lame book -



#goodreadswithaview


Saturday, 25 January 2020

The Slaughterman’s Daughter: The Avenging of Mende Speismann at the Hands of Her Sister Fanny

Although her slaughterman father, Meir-Anschil Schecter, was never one to lavish affection on his daughters, he had made them banquets fit for kings. In recent times, however, Mende has scarcely touched meat herself, only ever sucking out the marrow of the chicken bones her children leave on their yontev plates on feast days. But now a terrible craving for meat has awakened within her, an uncontrollable desire for the taste of beef. A chasm opens up in her stomach and her head spins. Her mouth waters like the high seas, and she is so weak that she has to lean against the wall of the nearby synagogue. This will be her birthday present, it's a clear-cut decision. A mechayeh, what a treat.

I felt lucky to have been sent an ARC of The Slaughterman's Daughter – the English translation of which is about to be released – before a recent trip to the Middle East; what a treat to be able to read something by an Israeli author while in Israel. Turns out, this story isn't actually set in Israel, but when I finished, I realised that this whole thing seems to be a metaphor about modern Israel and it left me with plenty to think about. On the surface, The Slaughterman's Daughter is quite long, intensely detailed about Jewish culture and history, sometimes funny and often farcical, and ultimately unspools a complex and tension-filled plot. Digging a little deeper, it's (I believe) a call for Israel to examine its past in order to evaluate its present. On every level, it's a fascinating read. (Note: As I read an ARC, passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

It is not every day that one comes across three dead bodies, Jewish slaughter techniques, accusations against a belligerent military convoy and one large and terrifying woman, all of which are supposed to come together to form a consistent story. I'll be damned, thinks Novak. This country is losing its mind.
Set in the Pale of Settlement (an area in western Russia where Jews were allowed to settle between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, with harsh restrictions), at some point after the Crimean War, The Slaughterman's Daughter opens with the stories of two sisters: Mende Speismann (whose husband disappeared over a year before, leaving her and their two children at the mercy of his parents' charity) and Fanny Keismann; a notorious wilde chayeh who decides to abandon her own beloved husband and five children in order to track down her sister's missing husband. Fanny picks up a disparate group of allies along the way to Minsk, and between descriptions of village life for the sisters in Motal, conscription practises for the Czar's army, and the dangers and discrimination that Fanny et al. face in their underground journey to the big city, author Yaniv Iczkovits paints a very vivid picture of Jewish life in this time and place. Ratcheting up the tension, Fanny and her group are being tracked down by the Secret Police, and the sections told from the perspective of its chief detective, Colonel Piotr Novak, make very clear the uninformed and racist views that the Russians had towards the “dirty zyds” living in their midst. As historical fiction, this book is a fascinating education.

As I wrote above, situations are often farcical (especially those scenes involving a drunken and incontinent cantor), often funny, and also, often, heartwrenching. The writing can be beautifully descriptive:

The moonlight is wrapped around the night like a tie, its beams sliding down a suit of darkness. A cool wind caresses the earth's curved back, which has grown limp beneath the weight of the day's heat, pleading for relief.
And Iczkovits employs many intriguing metaphors and similes:
He has managed to prove yet again that his thick-headed deputy is incapable of thinking creatively, because, like a short blanket, Dodek's brain is destined to leave the essentials uncovered.
Taking it all at face value, I thought that The Slaughterman's Daughter was a well-written, well-researched bit of historical fiction reminiscent of the world of Fiddler on the Roof. But when I got to the author blurb at the back, I read that Yaniv Iczkovits “was an inaugural signatory of the 'combatants' letter', in which hundreds of Israeli soldiers affirmed their refusal to fight in the occupied territories, and he spent a month in military prison as a result”. And then I needed to reevaluate the storyline, which I will oversimplify here. As it turns out, Mende's husband, Zvi-Meir, had been a student at the yeshiva but was kicked out when he became obsessed with a question surrounding Adam and Eve's exile from Paradise: How could they have understood the difference between right and wrong before they had tasted of the fruit that gave them that knowledge? Essentially, the thesis becomes that people can only avoid doing wrong when they have knowledge of what's wrong, and I think that Iczkovits' point is that a people who have experienced the kind of racism and oppression and second-class citizenship as the Jews did in the Pale of Settlement (and elsewhere) ought to know better than to impose these same conditions on others. (Note: I'm trying to avoid getting political here, this is simply what I believe to be the author's intent.) And unsurprisingly, upon reevaluation, the literary value of this book was elevated in my estimation, and despite feeling a bit too long and slightly repetitive, I am left with heightened admiration for the effort. Turns out, this was exactly the right book at the right time for me.




Bonus: This is the book that I'm "reading" while floating in the Dead Sea here -






Thursday, 9 January 2020

Tunesday : Jerusalem


Jerusalem

(Words by William Blake, Music by Hubert Parry, as Performed by "Blake")
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.


On Thursday, Dave and I will be travelling to Israel - with a tour of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and many other sites around that country, as well as a brief side trip into Palestine to visit Bethlehem and a few days at the end in Jordan (where we will be seeing Petra, Amman, the Dead Sea, and the Wadi Rum desert). We are really excited to experience both the history and present of these storied lands, and even though recent events have heightened the travel advisories around visiting the Middle East right now, we're eager to get on that plane. 

Officially on vacation for the next couple of weeks.

Monday, 6 January 2020

The Moth Presents Occasional Magic: True Stories about Defying the Impossible


Occasional magic refers to those moments of beauty, wonder, and clarity, often stumbled upon, where we suddenly see a piece of truth about our life. As Moth directors we spend our days helping people shape their stories. We help people identify the most important moments of their lives (as we sometimes put it, “the moments when you became you”) so the audience will understand why they mattered so much.

This is the second “The Moth Presents” collection that I've read (after All These Wonders), and although I deeply appreciate the candour and vulnerability shown by these forty-seven authors in sharing those seminal moments that represent a major shift in their lives, as with the earlier collection, there is definitely something missing when oral storytelling is translated to the page. Each of these short vignettes is interesting and worth a read, but the format does rob them of magic; what's weird is that you feel that absence. And yet, still worthwhile. A few highlights:

Theory of Change, by teenaged storyteller and community activist (whose stated focus is “holistic health for the hood”) Journey Jamison, shook me with her casual recounting of how she had put a first aid course to good use when a neighbourhood shooting victim stumbled through her front door (and how she later used that experience to fight for local change):

You hear all the time that children are the future. But I refuse to settle for being the future when I can be the right now.
I was touched by the humanity in Mike Destefano's The Junkie and the Monk (about learning to live again after incredible loss):
You have to have amazing karma, they say, to have a lama actually want to do tonglen with you, which is giving and taking. When they put their head to yours, what they are doing is saying, Give me all your pain, and I'm gonna give you all my joy.
I was inspired by Krista Tippett's spiritual journey in Gaggy's Blessing and appreciated the light that journey shone on her relationship with her strict Southern Baptist grandfather:
I think that Gaggy held the strength of his mind in tension with his faith – and not a creative tension. He held it off to one side of the passions and beliefs that were so important to who he was in the world. I don't believe he ever felt that his mind – and its questions – were invited into his faith.
It's probably not surprising that a highlight would come from George Dawes Green, the founder of The Moth, and he tells a story that is weird, funny, and touching in The Haunted Freezer. Songwriters also tell stories that translate well to the page (Roseanne Cash's Until the Real You Shows Up is very thoughtful and Beth Neilsen Chapman's Seven Shades of Blue is a very affecting story of love and death). Comedians probably tell the best stories, and some of my favourites were: David Montgomery's Spice (about channeling your inner Spice Girl in order to take back your life); David Litt's Have You Met Him Yet? (about working in Barack Obama's White House); Jon Bennett's Curses (what it takes to push one's religious father to swear); and Mary Theresa Archbold's Our Normal (about the challenges of one-armed motherhood.)

There are many stories about families and the process of becoming parents, and I found a nice irony in comparing a gay man challenged by his mother's oft-repeated phrase, “The love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world, and people who don't have children never get to know what it is like”, in Andrew Solomon's My Post-Nuclear Family and its opposite: a woman who never wanted children but who finds herself pregnant, whose own mother warned her, “Never get married and never have kids. They'll ruin your life!” (Ophira Eisenberg's Inside Joke) Spoiler: Both end up as parents, wonderfully happy and fulfilled. And there are many stories that I found uniquely intriguing: Terrance Flynn's C'est La Vie (a close encounter with a serial killer); Ann Daniels' Living in the Extreme (a mother of triplets becomes a polar explorer); D. Parvaz's Bearing Witness (an Al Jazeera reporter is held in a Syrian prison).

There are many stories with international themes that expand understanding – from escaping South Vietnam before the country collapsed to being a Saudi Arabian student in Boston post-9/11 – but I really don't know what to think of Fatou Wurie's When the Heart is Full: about a liberal-minded woman returning to her home country of Sierra Leone and reconnecting with her roots at her grandmother's funeral. (Wurie's grandmother, as a Chief Sowie, was the one who performed FGM on the community's little girls, but she decided to leave her granddaughters intact. However, custom holds that before such a Chief's funeral, seven young girls must undergo the ceremony so that her spirit could rest in peace, and that is reported as matter-of-fact; just tinged with regret for the little girls she had watched playing before they were led out into the bush, Wurie nonetheless concludes that she comes from a place that is strong, bold, and brave. Huh.)

Lots to think about here – I'm trying to pinpoint the moment at which I became who I am today; it's not easy in the absence of some big event– and despite the feeling of something having been lost in putting these oral stories down on paper, I'm happy to have picked this up.



Thursday, 2 January 2020

Daughter of Family G: A Memoir of Cancer Genes, Love and Fate

As a child, I listened to the women in my family tell stories of the past – grandmothers, aunts and cousins sitting around the kitchen table with my mother, sometimes laughing until they cried, sometimes sobbing through words of grief. They spoke of relatives who lived before I was born – people who came from nothing, who faced great hardship, who died too young. The women in those tales stared down death, looked after the sick, and conversed with fate. They spread the truth through story, even when others didn't wish to hear it. This is how I learned that stories have power – to make sense of the world, to give voice to dreams, to nurture hope and banish fear. What I didn't know then was that those stories would provide me with what I need to navigate life with Lynch syndrome. Sometimes the best advice on how to live comes from listening to the dead.

Throughout all of her growing-up years, novelist Ami McKay knew that members of her family had a history of dying young from a number of gut-centered cancers. She eventually learned that her immediate family line had been studied for over a century (going back to her great-great-aunt Pauline Gross, after whom the medical label “Family G” was named) in an effort to prove the theory that certain cancers are hereditary (an apparently controversial theory before genetic testing could prove it out). Having spent her adult life investigating her genealogy and its unique medical history, and assembling all that she has learned into this book, McKay's Daughter of Family G serves as a thoughtful memoir for herself and her family line, provides a fascinating look at the history of cancer research (and its wider implications), and explores the very personal ramifications of dealing with this particular diagnosis. The storytelling moves between the distant past (I especially enjoyed McKay's decision to write Pauline's parts as creative nonfiction; narrating her story like a novel instead of simply duplicating what is known of her from the records truly brought Pauline to life as a real, feeling person), stories from McKay's personal life history, and stories from the present as McKay faces Lynch syndrome as an adult. This is a book with plenty of intriguing science, but more so, this is a book with a beating heart: I was constantly touched by the humanity with which McKay imbues her family members – whether quoting from her parents' love letters or describing how one prepares for the results of genetic testing – and I was surprised to find myself touched to the point of tears more than once. This is everything a medical memoir should be and I appreciate McKay's courage in sharing her story with the world.

I try to imagine what it must have been like to live in a eugenics-infatuated America as a member of an “unfit family”. Did the family members who left Michigan think they could escape the past by starting over someplace new? That was the path their ancestors had chosen by leaving Germany. Was that what I'd done when I'd moved to Nova Scotia? My research to this point had led me to believe that after Weller's report in 1936, certain branches of the family made a conscious effort to “forget their blood” and abandon their roots – even those who'd chosen to stay close to home.
When Pauline Gross shared her fears of dying young of cancer to a pathology professor, she couldn't have known that her story was falling on the most receptive of ears: Dr Aldred Scott Warthin was looking for a topic with which to make his mark on the medical field, and with the aid of Pauline and the meticulous family records that she was eventually able to assemble, Warthin would write papers and serve as the keynote speaker at conferences that would thereafter seal his reputation as “the father of cancer genetics”. Pauline also couldn't know that Dr Warthin would eventually, based partly on her own family's evidence, become a vocal eugenicist who would advocate for the sterilisation of those with “inferior” hereditary material. While it goes without saying that the eugenics movement was reprehensible, it remains a thorny question to knowingly bring children into the world when there's a 50-50 chance of a parent passing on the MSH2 mutation that causes Lynch syndrome (overall, McKay seems to conclude, like she has Pauline saying back in the 1800s, that any stretch of life is worthwhile to those living it). Genetic testing is now available to easily identify those with the mutation, and McKay was surprised to discover that even within her immediate family, not everyone wants to participate: While on the one hand, a positive test would give individuals the information they would need in order to direct their own health care as “previvors” (yearly colonoscopies, evidence to push back at a doctor who might dismiss symptoms as benign), some family members feared that a positive result could cause them to lose their health or life insurance. With the rising popularity of ancestry-based spit swab sites, it's probably not undue paranoia to wonder at just what is being done with all that genetic information.
There's no room for “why me?” with Lynch syndrome. The mutation is only part, not all of who I am. Rather than let it rule me, I choose to fold the rituals of annual screenings and tests into the cycles and rhythms of my life. If I give the disease the space and attention it needs (no more, no less), just as my mother did, then I'll give myself space for everything else – hope, love, dreams, bliss.
In the end – and in no small part, because of the way her loving mother had lived her own shortened life – Ami McKay is able to write a memoir about living with a death sentence (she, and everyone else with Lynch syndrome, will eventually suffer from colorectal, pancreatic, or reproductive organ cancer) that sings of life. McKay's story is fascinating, touching, and well told.