“There’s so many,” Richie says. His voice is molasses slow. “So many of us,” he says. “Hitting. The wrong keys. Wandering against. The song.”
It seems unfair that in attempting to describe what is so unique in Jesmyn Ward's writing, all I can think to do is to compare her to others – to the Southern Gothic style of William Faulkner, to the particular magical realism of Toni Morrison, to the cycling of cultural history in Colson Whitehead – but perhaps what does make Ward so unique is that she melds all of these styles in a voice utterly her own, making Sing, Unburied, Sing a beautiful, if brutal, examination of race and class and family in today's rural Mississippi. This is my first experience with Jesmyn Ward, and although I have some small quibbles with this book ( I'd say four stars is a rounding up), I am looking forward to spending time with her again in the future.
Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and I wake up and it ain't changed none. It's like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.
I had a lump of anxiety in my chest, a surge of protectiveness, throughout this read due to one of the central characters, Jojo: A just-turned-thirteen-year-old mixed-race boy, decent, upright, and responsible in the care of his baby sister, whose meth-cooking white Daddy's about to be released from prison; whose self-centered, meth-addicted black Mama is determined to bring her kids along on a peril-filled drive up to fetch her man; whose hard-working Pop has stories that make his hands shake from his own time as a railroaded youth at that same Parchman Prison Farm; and whose Mam – the steady well of affection from which Jojo draws comfort – is rotting away from cancer in her bed. If anything is going to get to me, it's a good and still innocent kid experiencing injustice and adult pressures before his time.
Add to this poverty (hunger, want, and shame), prejudice (including white grandparents who want nothing to do with Jojo or his sister, Kayla), the rural drug crisis (Jojo's father was a decent guy until he survived the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, leaving him with PTSD and unable to do that kind of work anymore), and the kind of systemic racism that saw children sent to prison in another age and children put in handcuffs in our own (or put another way, that saw lynchings in another age and “hunting accidents” in ours) – all of this is ready-made, realistic tension and drama. By adding supernatural elements – including ghosts that can interact with some characters – Ward is able to both soften the edges and focus the centres of these issues: who better to comment on how little has changed over the years than the earth-bound spirit of a boy who lives in a stream of “all times are present in the now”? When the climax of the plot came – with a dramatic and menacing confrontation between the living and the dead – it was the relatable humanity of the moment that overwhelmed me and I was in tears; it was completely over the top, and totally worked for me. (The denouement and eventual resolution were less satisfying for me, but that's all the complaining I'll do.)
I liked that the POV shifted between Jojo, his mother, Leonie, and eventually, the ghost boy, Richie. And as much as I loved Jojo, and as much as Leonie is not a very sympathetic character – it's hard to like someone who takes such poor care of her kids, who lives with her aging parents and expects them to take care of everything – seeing things from her own perspective (and especially seeing how her children turn to each other for comfort and never to her) brings a bit of understanding. Most especially, I just loved Ward's way with words, whether describing the uncomfortable:
Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants. Once a year or so, I see it in Pop, how he got leaner and leaner with age, the tendons in him standing out, harder and more rigid, every year. His Indian cheekbones severe. But since Mama got sick, I learned pain can do that, too. Can eat a person until there's nothing but bone and skin and a thin layer of blood left. How it can eat your insides and swell you in wrong ways: Mama's feet look like water balloons set to burst under the cover.
Or the sublime:
Where the road meets the Gulf, it skirts the beach for miles. I wish it ran straight over the water, like the pictures of the bridge I've seen that links the Florida Keys to the coast, wish it was an endless concrete plank that ran out over the stormy blue water of the world to circle the globe, so I could lie like this forever, feeling the fine hair on his arm, my kids silenced, not even there, his fingers on my arm drawing circles and lines that I decipher, him writing his name on me, claiming me. The world is a tangle of jewels and gold spinning and throwing off sparks. I'm already home.
Despite the persistent lump of anxiety in my chest and some ugly events that I was asked to witness, I inhaled this book quickly. I think that Jesmyn Ward is a masterful writer and a necessary voice; can't wait to get to the rest of her work.
I hope that, in spite of many questions still unanswered, this brief study with nevertheless fulfil its purpose: that it will answer questions that have long been discussed about Backhouse's work, and provide a truer history than has hitherto been available about the mystery man whom a Chinese scholar has described to me as “though a recluse, certainly the most interesting and colourful of the Europeans of his time in China”.
The year was 1973 and Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper – eventual Baron Dacre of Glanton, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, author of countless influential treatises on the philosophy of historical research, and former MI5 agent – was contacted out of the blue by a Swiss scientist who wished for him to inspect, and if he deemed them appropriate, to pass on to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, two volumes of memoir by the long dead and nearly forgotten sinologist, Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, 2nd Baronet. Further, this Swiss scientist wished to hand over the memoir in person as the contents were too inconvenient to send through the post. As Trevor-Roper received and then examined said memoir, he immediately understood the Swiss concern: In graphic and obscene detail, Backhouse filled his two volumes with a veritable Who's Who of famous people he allegedly slept with at the turn of the twentieth century – literary stars, well known politicians, several Empresses, and Imperial Eunuchs. In trying to confirm the details of what appeared surely fantastical, Trevor-Roper was led deeper and deeper into the warren of filled-in rabbitholes that were all that remained of Backhouse's outsized and incredible life. What Trevor-Roper learned of Backhouse and assembled into his biography, Hermit of Peking, makes for a fascinating story of one man's life, but even moreso, it gives much to consider about the details from history that we accept as “true”: history is not just written by the victors, but sometimes too, by conmen. Part history, part scavenger hunt, written in a wry but Oxfordly donnish tone, I found this book to be equal parts enlightening and entertaining.
There's far too much detail to go over all of Backhouse's life here, but the most important fact seems to be that he was a gifted linguist who ended up in Peking in the late 1890's and was eventually the coauthor, with J. O. P. Bland, of two very influential books on the end of the Manchu Dynasty (China Under the Empress Dowager and Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking). The first of these works was primarily based on a diary that Backhouse had found in the study of a Court official (Ching-shan, who had had to flee his home during the Boxer Rebellion), and Backhouse would eventually donate this rare and valuable document (along with tens of thousands of other Chinese manuscripts) to the Bodleian Library at Oxford (where he attended, but never earned a degree, and where his name is still inscribed on a tablet today as a major benefactor). There was controversy over the years as to the authenticity of this diary, but so far as Trevor-Roper could ascertain, no one ever suspected or accused Backhouse himself of forgery or fraud relating to it. And yet...
So ended the story of Backhouse's career as an entrepreneur. It had been a glorious career – or rather a glorious pipe-dream – while it lasted. Fleets of battleships, millions of bank-notes, arms for warring nations, imperial jewels, had been the substance of it. Cabinet ministers, industrial magnates, high financiers, envoys extraordinary of four nations had been involved. But now all was over.
Through Trevor-Roper's dogged research, he was able to discover many instances of forgery and fraud committed by Backhouse throughout the non-literary areas of his career. It would seem that most people, companies, and even governments, who suffered from dealings with Backhouse over the years attempted to bury and forget their interactions with him – Trevor-Roper several times refers to them collectively as a “nest of gulls” – but from a line in this man's diary or a veiled reference in some other's telegram, the historian found himself led to bigger and wider intrigues than he could have imagined. Even after Hermit of Peking was set to go to press, Trevor-Roper was directed to a single reference to Backhouse in the archives of the Foreign Office which led to the entire project being recalled so he could add a new chapter – on Backhouse's efforts as an arms-dealing secret agent for Britain during WWI – that caused the historian to rethink everything he thought he knew about Backhouse. What can we really know about any historic figure outside of eyewitness accounts? And what if we can't trust the eyewitness accounts?
In this dream-world of Backhouse's autobiography, two recurrent features deserve attention. One is the uncertainty of the boundary between fact and fiction. The iridescent centre of the web is too obviously a work of art, deliberately spun. But where exactly does the web of fantasy meet the solid thorns of fact? Through the mysterious Backhousian twilight it is difficult to distinguish the gossamer from the twig. Sometimes a shaft of external light enables us to do so at one particular point; but without such external aid we can never be sure. We know that fiction, at some point, is joined to reality; but the point of contact escapes the naked eye.
Ultimately, Trevor-Roper demonstrates conclusively that we can't trust anything from Backhouse: his business and interpersonal dealings were shady, his memoirs are a fantasy, and as Ching-shan's diary was eventually proven to be a forgery, we can presume that it was Backhouse who wrote it. Which brings up all kinds of interesting philosophical questions about the reliability of primary sources (Backhouse was not remembered to history as a fraudster until the memoirs he wrote, which were penned in part to support the material in Ching-shan's diary, were brought to light in a more liberal age; he might still be quoted as a reliable source had not Trevor-Roper begun this investigation). I also found it very interesting/ironic to learn from Trevor-Roper's Wikipedia page that: 1) He believed that preliterate societies (and in particular, African societies prior to European exploration) had no history at all because it wasn't written down, and 2) The nadir of his career was when he inaccurately authenticated the so-called Hitler Diaries. So, you can't trust history if it isn't written down, and as Trevor-Roper definitely learned, you can't trust everything that is written down. Fascinating stuff; so much more than there's room to share.
My husband picked up his spoon again; then to my great surprise, I imagine because he was jealous, he said we could smoke hashish together.
“When?” was the only thing I managed to say. How indelicate.
Indelicacy is another ARC I brought into self-isolation without knowing much (other than some great reviews) about it. Now I wonder: What was the fuss? And I need to conclude: This is a book for other writers; based on the reviews, perhaps only they who live in their minds and who sweat out words on the page really connect with what Amina Cain has crafted here. As for me: Right over my head. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)
I didn't write for a month: my mind was somewhere else. But I was writing a book; I knew that now. I had been writing it for two years. The problem was that it would make little sense to most people, and how would that work out? Everyone always wants sense.
In its blurb, Indelicacy is described as “a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling.” But I really don't think it's that universal. We have a woman, eventually learning her name is Vitória, who while working as a custodian at an art museum, caught the eye of a rich man and became his wife. And while she thought this would finally give her the time and leisure to really focus on her writing, her husband insists that she put away all forms of labour and just enjoy resting, as the wife of a rich man ought. Vitória writes anyway. And she attends concerts and walks frequently to the museum she used to work at; takes ballet lessons and makes awkward friendships. We also learn early on that Vitória will eventually leave her husband – the timeline dips forwards and back – but she's such a passive character that she accepts whatever comes along, never works for anything. I learned nothing, really, about “the barriers faced by women in both life and literature”.
“You try to make yourself abnormal on purpose,” he said. “You think it makes you better than the other people around you.”
“I do no such thing, and still I am better.”
I know how that sounded, but I couldn't help saying it, and I suppose I did think I was better than him. If I'm being honest. If I'm being shallow.
As for the title: The only indelicate character – as in “unladylike”, I suppose – is Vitória herself. She tells us, more than once, that she eats like a pig. When she used to clean the museum's bathroom, it was all she could do to stop herself from throwing her bucket of water at the patrons. When she attends an author's reading event at the library, and is bored by what had been a favourite novelist's interview by another writer, she tells them before leaving that they're a pair of worms, “when you open your mouths, you are male worms eating from a toilet.” And when she decides to leave her husband, she creates a situation in which he'll feel the need to support her; she'll never need to work again, other than the writing.
And Vitória really is passionate about the writing. For the most part, she stares at paintings in the museum and describes them on the page. And I got nothing from these passages:
One day I looked for a while at a small painting and saw something in it. A man and a boy in muted suits doing their engraving work, the background behind them completely dark. We are not meant to see anything beyond this task, their concentration on it. Yet we want to know, it is only a scrap. What is in the darkness?
We're in an unnamed country and time period – there is no technology mentioned beyond trains – and there's no way of knowing what the societal expectations are for a young and uneducated woman such as Vitória. We learn that in the beginning she was happy living in one plainly furnished room because it was so peaceful compared to the large, loud family she had escaped from, but once she's married to the rich man, she's quick to take a life of luxury as her due. She is forever writing about interiors and exteriors, waves and the leaves of plants, the progressing seasons, empty spaces and “clumping”. And it all went right over my head. On the other hand, there was quite a bit that was darkly amusing and otherwise intriguing in the writing:
After that, the winter dragged itself through its January, its February, its March, with its dirty snow and frozen mud. I felt I was dragging myself through as well. I hated March more than any other month, with its promises of warmth that never came.
But it didn't add up to much for me. Another wishy-washy three stars.
I wanted to write Randy's story, and my story of being his sister, because there are so many people who live through the sorrow and pain of not knowing how to manage a family member who has a singularly unique view of life: a sibling who doesn't fit in or follow the paths the rest of us take; who challenges and bewilders, upsets and dazzles us; who scares some of us away; but who still loves us, in his or her way.
Initial disclosure: I have no particular interest (or disinterest) in Diane Keaton, haven't especially followed (or avoided) her work as an actor, and haven't read her other memoirs; Brother & Sister was simply one of the books making up a stack of ARCs I was able to bring into self-isolation. Having said that, I wonder if I would have connected with this more if I felt more connected to Diane Keaton herself – this is quite a personal narrative of her own family, without a lot of introspection or universality, and while she states that her purpose in writing this was to investigate the sources of her younger brother's demons, I don't know if she found any answers; I certainly don't know how this would help others who are trying to understand difficult sibling relationships in their own lives. So: not really for me, maybe for another. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Pinpointing a mental illness is like finding a needle in a haystack. I wouldn't want to be part of a team that labels the most complex organ of our body with a name. Randy was not a category, and medicine is not an exact science. Part of his saving grace came from the outlet he found in expression, whether it was seemingly negative – visualizing women in sadomasochistic positions – or something aiming for transcendence: writing lyrical poems on the wonder of birds.
Early on, we learn that Diane Keaton's mother kept photo albums, journals, and scrapbooks her entire adult life, chronicling her husband's successful professional career and the lives of her four children. Although her only son, Randy, was sensitive and introverted right from the start, he was the apple of his mother's eye, and even as his teenaged and then early adult years didn't follow traditional paths, his mother encouraged Randy's emerging art and desire to be alone. As Randy lived out the end of his days in a memory care facility, Diane had access to all of her brother's journals, collages, and poetry, and along with her mother's documents, she went looking for clues about what went wrong with Randy's life – and it doesn't look like she really found it (and especially because her mother tried to put the rosiest spin on everything she recorded). Diane mentions that Randy took medication for bipolar disorder, that he was once diagnosed as a “schizoid type” (which she disagreed with), and even hints that his brain may have been damaged by forceps during childbirth – but as Diane left her California hometown for an acting career in NYC right out of high school, it doesn't seem that she was present for the long years of intervention and heartache that the rest of her family faced in trying to support Randy, and I didn't get the sense that she ever really understood what his problems were; she went looking for the answers in her mother's and brother's writings – and there are many interesting bits excerpted from each of them – but she didn't really find any answers there.
Of interest: When Randy – a lifelong and unrepentant alcoholic – was in the end stages of liver disease, his other two sisters asked Diane if she would call the transplant centre (who were, understandably, not willing to put Randy's name on a transplant list as he refused to stop drinking) and use her celebrity to change their minds. That call, and a sizeable donation from their rich father's estate, put Randy on the list – and while he did end up getting a liver, and soon after started drinking again, he did live for something like another twenty years. On the one hand, you hate to hear about money and fame bending such life-altering rules, but even though he ended up being tough on that new liver, it certainly wasn't “wasted” on him.
And also: In a passage quoted from their mother's scrapbook, she describes seeing Annie Hall for the first time, which Mrs Hall (for that is Diane Keaton's actual family name) described as, “a love story, covering six years in the life of Woody Allen and Diane Hall Keaton.” And while she was touched by Diane's performance, she was less amused by the depiction of their family in the Easter dinner scene (although she did like Christopher Walken's portrayal of Randy as “a sensitive person with a unique personality.”) So, as an added bonus for the self-isolating, I convinced the family to watch Annie Hall with me after I finished reading this book, and even if Woody Allen apparently bristles at anyone suggesting that there's anything autobiographical in this film, the “Can I confess something” scene (found here on YouTube) – which shows a mentally disturbed young man, complete with strange collages on his bedroom wall – sure looks like Woody Allen interacting with (and kind of cruelly dismissing) the brother that Diane Keaton describes here. Funny that she allowed this.
How had Randy come to find himself sitting in a rental on the wrong side of the Pacific Coast Highway, bordering on old age? How had I, the eldest of four Southern California kids who grew up in the 1950s, become an ambitious eccentric who couldn't stop worrying? There was something about Randy traipsing around his apartment that reminded me to try to let go. No matter how truncated and seemingly lost, Randy was fine, living his life with a mind let loose. Sitting across from him, I thought: There is no scale tipped in either direction that can measure the worth of one person over another. All of us are, as Randy put it best, “a blink between here and never.”
And of course, that's the only possible conclusion: Randy may not have been able to hold down a job or return his mother's affection, he may have caused decades of worry for the rest of the family, but he never hurt anyone but himself, and his life of uncelebrated art and poetry is as valuable as any. I hope Diane Keaton worked out what she needed to with this book, but I really think this is of more value to her than to the general public. Happy to have finally seen Annie Hall all the way through though.
“I told you it's a djinn,” Faiz says. “You won't catch it on the Purple Line.”
First time novelist Deepa Anappara started her writing career as a journalist in her native India and in her author's blurb it points out that “her reports on the impact of poverty and religious violence on the education of children won the Developing Asia Journalism Awards, the Every Human has Rights Media Awards, and the Sanskriti-Prabha Dutt Fellowship in Journalism.” What could possibly be more important to write about, than the welfare of children, in a country that apparently sees 180 children go missing every day? With Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, Anappara revisits this area of her concern and expertise, and as my ARC explains through an interview with the author in the endnotes, Anappara's intent here was to give a voice to the powerless or missing individual children who tend to get lost in dull statistics or lurid tabloid headlines. I applaud Anappara's intent, think that she did a really nice job of capturing the voice and experience of children, loved the gritty setting that she brought to multi-sensory life, but there was something just a bit too didactic about this story; too heavy with repetition, peripheral social issues, and telling-not-showing. To be sure, there were plenty of nicely novelistic touches here, but this wasn't a complete success for me. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Do you know there are people who'll make you their slaves? You'll be locked up in a bathroom and let out daily only to clean the house. Or you'll be taken across the border to Nepal and forced to make bricks in kilns where you won't be able to breathe. Or you'll be sold to criminal gangs that force children to snatch mobiles and wallets. Take it from me, I have seen the worst of life. This is why children should never travel unaccompanied. This is why I'm giving you a lecture. What you're doing, it's irresponsible. It's downright dangerous.
Jai is a nine year old boy living in an illegal slum (or basti) on the edge of a “hi-fi” neighbourhood. He likes to play cricket in the alleyways, argue with his older sister (the celebrated athlete, Runu), daydream in class, and watch true crime TV shows with his parents when they finally get home from work every night (his Ma is a maid for a demanding woman in the closest hi-fi building, and his Dadi works on the metro's Purple Line nearby). When one of the neighbourhood kids, and then another one, goes missing, Jai enlists his two best friends – the most brilliant girl in class, Pari, and the hard-working Faiz – to join him in “detectiving” the case. What starts out as a Hardy Boys-type adventure becomes much more serious as more and more children go missing from their slum, and along the way, we are told about: a corrupt and indifferent police force; a sexist and downtrodden society that sees young girls taking care of their even younger siblings while their parents work long hours at unstable jobs; the frequent flare-ups between Hindu and Muslim neighbours (exacerbated by a self-serving political class); rampant child labour (out in the streets and with piecemeal work in their homes); and frequent comparisons of the food, hygiene, homes, job stability, access to justice, and education opportunities available to the rich and to the poor. It's a lot. The best part was Jai's naive and mischievous nature (many of his actions and observations are innocently humourous within the surrounding seriousness) and it was novelistically satisfying (if emotionally heavy) to watch as his innocence becomes corrupted by the reality of his world:
Believe me, today or tomorrow, every one of us will lose someone close to us, someone we love. The lucky ones are those who can grow old pretending they have some control over their lives, but even they will realise at some point that everything is uncertain, bound to disappear forever. We are just specks of dust in this world, glimmering for a moment in the sunlight, and then disappearing into nothing. You have to learn to make your peace with that.
I did find this to be a heavy read – I was rarely excited to pick it back up again – and as it is at heart a mystery, I knew that the plot would need to resolve into either: a) The missing children are all found alive and returned to their parents; or b) Some unhappy fate would be revealed. And as I read, I couldn't really decide which would be the more satisfying (as in “real” or “earned”) ending, and I will note that Anappara's conclusion didn't disappoint me. Again: this isn't totally unsatisfying – and I did learn plenty – but it didn't feel like a complete success, either.
When I asked Zainab what advice she would give to young queer Muslims who are looking for support and community, her response gave me chills. I still turn to her words for motivation:
“We have always been here, it's just that the world wasn't ready for us yet. Today, with all the political upheaval in the Muslim World, some of us, those who are not daily threatened with death or rejection, have to speak for others. They have to tell stories of a community that is either denied or scorned. Together, through facing distinct realities, we should be united – united in the desire to be, in the desire to enjoy being free, safe, and happy. It is not going to be easy and one may never reach a reconciliation with oneself (or with religion), but at least we should care for each other. In face of the challenges, our sense of community and our shared aspirations for a better world should make us stronger.”
Shortlisted for the 2020 Canada Reads program – a tournament of books put on by our national broadcaster, with this year's statement of intent being “one book to bring Canada into focus, (with an) aim to inspire readers to consider a different perspective about the country and themselves” – We Have Always Been Here seems custom-ordered to fill this purpose. As a memoir written by a queer Muslim woman who came to Canada with her family as persecuted refugees in the 1990s, Samra Habib's account is an eye-opening look into her life as a person at the outer margins of our society. Suffering racism, classism, a suffocating form of Islam within her family and the effects of Islamophobia from those outside of it – all before Habib began to identify as queer – it would seem that Habib's biggest challenge growing up – whether in Pakistan or Toronto – was living in a world where she didn't see herself represented. To that end, this book feels really vital; to claim visible space for her community within Canada and to prove to others on these margins that they are not alone. I have some quibbles with the writing style (I just wanted more; more detail, more introspection, something more philosophically universal) but such quibbles always seem petty when considering a memoir: this is what Habib decided to share we us and it's a gift as is. I could see this winning Canada Reads.
Our understanding of the interior lives of those who are not like us is contingent on their ability to articulate themselves in the language we know. The further removed people are from proficiency in that language, the less likely they are to be understood as complex individuals. The audience often fills in the blanks with their own preconceptions. But visual language is more easily parsed and is a much more democratic form of communication.
With a degree in Journalism that saw her eventually working in advertising – often going along on photoshoots where she was tutored in photography – Habib decided to start a project of photographing and collecting the stories of other queer Muslims, curated on the tumblr Just Me and Allah. We Have Always Been Here is the story of the life that led to the creation of this project.
Growing up as an Ahmadi Muslim in Pakistan (a small sect within Islam that routinely sees itself the target of extremists), Habib learned early to make herself invisible; invisible to her teachers and classmates (who weren't to know that her family were Ahmadi) and invisible to her father (who would often bellow, “Allah hates the loud laughter of women!” when she and her sisters would play around). When government-sponsored discrimination and attacks became too much to bear, Habib's family fled to Canada as refugees – leaving behind not just the entire world they knew, but also trading in a comparatively luxurious lifestyle for a small apartment and meagre welfare payments. Habib tried to be the compliant daughter her parents wanted her to be – excelling at school despite constantly being bullied, going along with an arranged marriage to her cousin as a teenager – but when she eventually decided to leave the loveless marriage, Habib was forced from her mosque and become estranged from her parents. It took Habib many years of exploring – the world, the arts, her own sexuality – before she found herself, and along the way, she fully reconnected with her family and discovered the Unity Mosque in Toronto (an underground space for queer Muslims) and there, she was finally able to reclaim her Muslim identity.
Growing up, I wish I'd had access to queer Muslim writers and artists who saw, felt, and feared like I did. Who didn't want to denounce Islam and instead wanted to see whether there was still a place for them in it. Who hurt like I did. Perhaps if I had, I would have sought comfort, company, and answers in their work when I was at my loneliest.
I suppose my main quibble is that Habib writes like a journalist and her prose lacks somewhat in emotionality. But that's a small complaint when she has so obviously met her own objectives with this memoir: to add representation of a marginalised group where before it was lacking. We Have Always Been Here is a quick and informative read that broadened my own ideas about how people outside my own immediate community live, but more importantly, it might well serve as a liferaft for someone who needs it. All good stuff.
It is history these accounts offer, but history deprived of generalizations. The writers are strangers to omniscience. The varnish of interpretation has been removed so we can see people clearly, as they originally were – gazing incredulously at what was, for that moment, the newest thing that had ever happened to them.
Made up of nearly three hundred contemporaneous accounts, Eyewitness to History gives a truly fascinating insight into what people were thinking in the moment while experiencing those events from the past 2500 years that we still talk about today. Edited by Oxford professor and renowned literary critic John Carey, and initially released in 1987, my only complaint would be that these accounts are overwhelmingly written by white men – too often recounting battle scenes that failed to engage me – but I understand that this reflects the interests of the book's editor and the ethos of its time; I wouldn't want this book itself to be changed but I would be interested in reading other books of this type with more varied points-of-view. Thoroughly valuable romp through history, as recorded by the folks who were there to witness it.
These essays range in length from less than a page to ten pages, and feature everything from transcribed court proceedings to the reportage of well-known authors. I didn't know what to expect when I first picked this up, and while I didn't find anything particularly interesting about Julius Caesar's account of invading Britain, the ensuing piece about the burning of Rome in 64 AD was riveting (the perverse Nero may not have been fiddling, but it was rumoured that the Emperor took to the “stage, and comparing modern calamities with ancient, had sung of the destruction of Troy”). And although I intended to just dip in and out of this book, it became hard to put down when the pieces that immediately followed included an eyewitness account of the eruption of Vesuvius, a dinner with Attila the Hun, a Viking funeral (the poor girl sacrificed to accompany her dead master! The string of the master's friends who lay with her, saying they did this only for the love of their dead friend!), and then the Green Children of East Anglia. Every story short but fascinating; what matter one more, and then another? Read this as you will: seven hundred pages go by pretty quickly. Some of my favourite bits (which I am collecting here for myself; this is far too long for others to read):
Plato reporting on the death of Socrates in 399 BC: When he was implored by his friends to wait as long as possible before drinking the court-ordered hemlock, Socrates replied, “I think I should gain nothing by taking the poison a little later. I should only make myself ridiculous in my own eyes if I clung to life and spared it, when there is no more profit in it.”
I could not help but be particularly moved by women's stories, even if by necessity recorded by men, so we have the cruelty of the Great Mogul (Jahangir) towards a wife in 1618, as witnessed by Edward Terry: “For his cruelties, he put one of his women to a miserable death; one of his women he had formerly touched and kept company with, but now she was superannuated; for neither himself nor nobles (as they say) come near their wives or women after they exceed the age of thirty.” (The death itself involved this woman being buried in the sand up to her neck and left in the hot sun to die.)
There is a description of the various regional methods that Hindu women employed for suttee, written in 1650 by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier: “This miserable condition causes her to detest life, and prefer to ascend a funeral pile to be consumed with her deceased husband, rather than be regarded by all the world for the remainder of her days with opprobrium and infamy.”
There's a harrowing first-person account of a mastectomy performed without anesthetic, written by Fanny Burney in 1811: “When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast – cutting through veins – arteries – flesh – nerves – I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittently during the whole time of the incision – & I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still!”
A suffragette (the Lady Constance Lytton, disguised as a lower-class woman) is force-fed during a hunger strike in Walton Gaol in 1910: Laying in her own vomit afterwards, exhausted and “quite helpless”, Lytton writes, “Before long I heard the sounds of the forced feeding in the next cell to mine. It was almost more than I could bear, it was Elaine Howey, I was sure. When the ghastly process was all over and all quiet, I tapped on the wall and called out at the top of my voice, which wasn't much just then, 'No surrender,' and there came the answer past any doubt in Elaine's voice, 'No surrender.'"
Henry G. Wales reports on the execution by firing squad of Mata Hari in 1917: “She seemed to collapse. Slowly, inertly, she settled to her knees, her head up always, and without the slightest change of expression on her face. For the fraction of a second it seemed she tottered there, on her knees, gazing directly at those who had taken her life. Then she fell backwards, bending at the waist, with her legs doubled up beneath her. She lay prone, motionless, with her face turned towards the sky.”
A woman is stoned to death in Jeddah in 1958, as recorded by R. M. Macoll: After her male partner had been quickly and mercifully beheaded, the woman was given one hundred debilitating blows with a stick, and while lying sagged on her side, a crowd of men and boys began pelting her with stones. “It was difficult to determine how she was facing her last and awful ordeal, since she was veiled in Muslim fashion and her mouth was gagged to muffle her cries...It took just over an hour before the doctor in attendance, who halted the stoning periodically to feel the victim's pulse, announced her dead.”
And there were so many fascinating literary references, as with the open-air cremation of Percy Shelley, written by Edward John Trelawny in 1822: “The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had anyone seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine.”
George Bernard Shaw, writing about his mother's funeral in 1914, begins with, “Why does a funeral always sharpen one's sense of humour and rouse one's spirits?” And after humourously describing his mother's cremation – making plain that she would have joined in on the laughter – GBS concludes with, “O grave, where is thy victory?”
George Orwell was shot during the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and the entire account is fascinating. “There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock – no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing. The sandbags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in the space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.”
I was intrigued by Walt Whitman's description of the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865 and was thoroughly entertained by Mark Twain's breaking of a quarantine to visit the Acropolis in Athens in 1867. On the other hand, I wasn't much moved by Charles Dickens' account of a guillotining in Rome (1845) or Charlotte Bronte's visit to the Crystal Palace (1851). I don't know if the brief contributions by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Fielding, or Ernest Hemingway would have been included if they weren't well-known names. Further, I was a bit turned off by Gustave Flaubert's story of cavorting with Egyptian “dancing girls” in 1850 and totally disturbed by Paul Gauguin's story of how he (“nearly an old man”) came to “marry” a thirteen-year-old Tahitian girl in 1892.
There are many famines recounted (spoiler: famines always lead to cannibalism) and many accounts of cruel and inhumane behaviour (from the rapacious Spanish conquering the New World, to American slavery, bull-baiting, and factory conditions in Britain). There are enlightening eyewitness accounts of those people and places in history that we think we already understand: whirling Dervishes (1613); a survivor's story from a lethal night spent in the Black Hole of Calcutta (1756); Samuel Pepys describes the Fire of London in 1666 and Jack London describes the earthquake, and ensuing fires, that decimated San Francisco in 1906; H. M. Stanley recounts the entire day leading up to him famously inquiring, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” There are numerous executions (from the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots, the massacre of Tsar Nicholas II's family, to the Nazis sentenced to hanging after the Nuremberg Trials), scientific reports (Charles Darwin in the Galapagos, Captain Scott's South Pole Expedition, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon), and frequent slice of life essays (derbys and hunts, the Louis-Schmeling fight in 1938, a man loses a foot trying to hop a train to Winnipeg in 1899).
There was more about Trafalgar and Napoleon and the World Wars than suited my tastes, but there were often nuggets that piqued my interest even in the battle stories: Lord Nelson playfully putting a spyglass to his blind eye and reporting that he couldn't see his commander's semaphored orders to "close action" (and later, Nelson's drawn-out death – now one-armed, one-eyed, with a bullet in his spine – and his oft-repeated, “Thank God, I have done my duty”); the commander of a U-Boat in 1916 lamenting the imminent loss of the beautiful horses he could see on board the steamer he was about to torpedo; a sixteen-year-old apprentice pipe fitter witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor (and refused an officer's orders to go alone onto the burning Pennsylvania and attempt to put its fires out; the kid wasn't even in the army but later faced a military tribunal over this incident); flying in a plane accompanying the superfortress The Great Artiste on its way to bomb Nagasaki (“It is a thing of beauty to behold, this 'gadget'. Into its design went millions of man-hours of what is without doubt the most concentrated intellectual effort in history. Never before had so much brain power been focused on a single problem.”), written by William T. Lawrence, one of the architects of said “gadget”. I wasn't interested in much regarding the Korean or Vietnam Wars, but was interested in a Veterans' protest march on Washington D.C. in 1971 (“The truth is out! Mickey Mouse is dead! The good guys are really the bad guys in disguise!”) The final entry is on the fall of President Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, and by this point, it was obvious that I was reading the work of a professional reporter, and I have to admit that I liked the more amateur (unpolished) accounts better.
Overall: This was a fascinating journey through history and I enjoyed pretty much the whole thing.
The cops announced that LisasDad1990 had used Tor Browser extensively and had left behind no browser breadcrumbs, nor any records at AT&T's data centres. Inevitably, this set off a whole witch hunt over the “darkweb” and everyone wondering where the mystery man from the video had been “radicalized.”
I picked up Radicalized because it's on the shortlist for this year's Canada Reads program – an annual “battle of the books” run by our national broadcaster, meant to encourage Canadians to read and debate Canadian books – and while I've never read Cory Doctorow before (speculative sci-fi isn't really my thing), I guess I was expecting more from this. Only the first of the four stories, Unauthorized Bread, is set in the near future (with a plausible warning about where present actions could lead if we continue to sleepwalk in that direction), and the other three stories serve as activist commentary on present-day life in the U.S. (concerning racism/white privilege, health care, and income disparity). Of course sharing the longest undefended border in the world with America means that what happens down there has plenty of impact on life up here, but even though Doctorow was born in Canada, I fail to see how Radicalized really fits this year's brief as described by the CBC: The books reflect this year's theme – "one book to bring Canada into focus" – and aim to inspire readers to consider a different perspective about the country and themselves. These stories are fine, and I may have enjoyed them more if I had picked this book up for any other reason, but this honestly didn't feel like a necessary, or Canada-focussed, read.
There was another world, vast beyond her knowing, of people who didn't know her at all, but who held her life in their hands. The ones who thronged in demonstrations against refugees. The politicians who raged about the scourge of terrorists hidden among refugees, and the ones who talked in code about “assimilation” and “too much, too fast.” The soldiers and cops and guards who pointed guns at her, barked orders at her. The bureaucrats she never saw who rejected her paperwork for cryptic reasons she could only guess at, and the bureaucrats who looked her in the eye and rejected her paperwork and refused to explain themselves.
Unauthorized Bread begins by exploring the refugee/immigration camps in a near-future America, but when Salima is finally free to pursue the American Dream, she will realise that literally everything has a price and is controlled by unseen authority. I thought that this was the strongest of the four stories and best explored a recurring theme of powerless people trying to disrupt entrenched and unfair systems.
The American Eagle had seen a lot of man's inhumanity to man in various war zones across the decades, had even had to clean up after one of the “good guys” had lost his shit and done something not so good. But this affected him differently. This hadn't happened on a battlefield in the fog of war, this had happened in a little private parking lot in Staten Island in broad daylight, committed by a group of guys who could have stopped each other, but instead shouted “stop resisting” for the benefit of one another's body cams.
Model Minority sees a very thinly veiled Superman confront his own presumptive whiteness in the age of BlackLivesMatter. If the American Eagle – who isn't even human, let alone American – really has been around for decades, fighting for the underdog, just where was he in the days of Emmett Till and Woolworth's lunch counters?
You know what happened next. Their insurer told Lacey that it was time for her to die now. If she wanted chemo and radiation or whatever, they'd pay it (reluctantly, and with great bureaucratic intransigence), but “experimental” therapies were not covered. Which, you know, OK, who wants to spend $1.5 mil on some charlatan's miracle-cure juice cleanse or crystal therapy? But adaptive cell transfer wasn't crystal healing and the NIH wasn't the local shaman.
The title story, Radicalized, is about the American health care system and allowing life-saving decisions to be in the hands of money-making insurers. Again, the powerless will attempt to disrupt the system, but I really didn't think that this added much to the current conversation. At least there was some Canadian content here, of the sort that the CBC would revel in: The Canadian prime minister weighed in on the subject and said that even though she was a conservative, she understood that there were some places where markets couldn't do the job, and health care was one of them. And while we Canadians love our socialised health care, there isn't enough money in the communal pot to pay for the experimental cancer treatments that this story is about: these treatment plans would likely be denied here as well.
Before The Event, Martin Mars spent a lot of time trying to game it out. Would the collapse be sudden, catching him off guard and unprepared, having to fight his way to his fortress as he escaped from Paradise Valley and into the desert hills? Or would there be some kind of sign, a steady uptick in civil disorder and failures from the official powers that counted down to the day, giving him a chance to plan an orderly withdrawal to Fort Doom?
In The Masque of the Red Death, a group of the filthy rich escape to a hidden bunker as society begins to collapse; having a great time playing at survivalists until they are confronted with actual threats. In a not very subtle turn of events, it's the common people outside the bunker who learn to cooperate and actually survive.
Speaking about Radicalized with the CBC for Canada Reads, Doctorow said, “If you want to write speculative fiction that is both salient and perennial, just write stories in which the underlying reality of technology doesn't change, lawmakers continue to fail to come to grips with it, and the consequences of that failure become more dire with every passing day.” And that is precisely what we have here: not so much a warning for the future as commentary on the now; and not particularly piercing or enlightening at that.
“He has a whole library of books about the things that swim in the water and the things that crawl out of it, ma'am.” Agnes wrinkles her nose. “There are things in jars.”
Ahhhh, this is the book I was waiting for from Jess Kidd! When I read her two previous novels (Himself and Mr. Flood's Last Resort), I peevishly complained that while I loved her comic voice, Gothic sensibility, and gorgeous sentences, I didn't think that Kidd pulled off satisfactory story arcs. But with Things in Jars, I delighted in the writing, big and small, rereading single lines and forcing myself to put the book down in between chapters so it wouldn't be done too soon – but then couldn't stop myself from picking it right back up because I needed to know what was going to happen next. I tend to be strict about awarding five stars, and while this isn't groundbreaking literature that shook my worldview, this novel is an absolute gem and perfect for what it is. I was thrilled, touched, and amused throughout: I couldn't ask for more (maybe I could ask for half stars so I could put this at 4.5, but I'm rounding up for the sheer entertainment value).
“I would strongly advise you to keep the nature of this discovery to yourselves, Mr. Cridge,” says Bridie. “London has a taste for aberrations.”
The widow Bridie Devine – with fiery red curls tucked messily beneath London's ugliest black bonnet – is a “domestic investigator”, often called upon by the constabulary to use her trained observational skills to (unofficially) determine the causes of death for those poor souls the city is forever churning out. When Bridie is hired by Sir Edmund Athelstan Berwick to discreetly recover his kidnapped daughter, Bridie will encounter some of Victorian London's most colourful characters – murderers and brigands, scientists and showmen – and will be forced to confront her own past as well. The plot is Sherlock Holmes by way of Dickens, overlaid with Gothic strangeness, and to say any more about it would be an unkindness to future readers.
A cloth covers the jar that Bridie took from the bookcase in the nursery, and Ruby is thankful for this. For the contents have the ability to rearrange even a dead man’s sense of reality. As with all terrible, wondrous sights, there is a jolt of shock, then a hypnotic fascination, then the uneasy queasiness, then the whole thing starts again; the desire to look and the desire never to have looked in the first place.
The narrative rotates between two mysteries: Bridie's present investigation and the unravelling of a significant time in her childhood. In the present, Bridie is aided in her efforts by Cora (a seven foot tall housemaid with a baritone voice and a five-o'clock-shadow), Ruby (a recently risen ghost with animated tattoos who says he knew Bridie in the past; Bridie does not believe in ghosts but enjoys Ruby's company), Prudhoe (an expert on death-by-poison, producer of fine opiates, friend of ravens), and Inspector Valentine Rose (a longtime friend who just may be sweet on the widowed Mrs Devine). Orphaned early and raised as a ward to a series of scientific gentlemen, the story revealed of Bridie's upbringing will eventually explain her particular concern for imperiled children, the genesis of her medical knowledge, and the true nature of the danger she now finds herself in. Each part of the story is paced and plotted perfectly, and Kidd's writing delighted me on every page:
• The slums are as they have always been: as warm and lively as a blanket full of lice.
• A muculent man, of the type who tends to snort, his nose having the bulbous quality of a seasoned imbiber of strong spirits, various.
• All around you: sky. The raven turns in her element and the world turns, too, confirming what she already knows: she is the center of everything.
I found everything about the strange situation (which I haven't even described here) to be fascinating, the climax to be thrilling, and the ending very nearly made me cry. My only quibble: An opening was left to make this an ongoing series, and as much as I enjoyed this romp with Bridie Devine and her oddball gang, maybe this ought to be left as a perfect little standalone gem. Or maybe I'm wrong about that. What I do know: I'll read whatever Jess Kidd comes out with next.
No matter that Pastor Kurrtson believed their survival after the storm to be a miracle: now Maren thinks that the mercies of God would have been better spent drowning them all.
I picked this up when I learned that the plot of The Mercies was based on a true story: After a freakish squall off a remote Norse island wiped out all of a village's men in the 1600's, the women were able to rebuild their lives, living successfully on their own, until accusations of witchcraft attracted powerful men to bring the women back in line. Author Kiran Millwood Hargrave writes beautiful sentences and she uses them to richly convey this intriguing time and place. Even so, there's something kind of amateurish about the overall effort – too much melodrama (so not necessary in a story inherently laden with interest and tension), too many unnecessary details that are brought up and then forgotten, a plot that comes to a slow boil and then abruptly ends. This was a fast and easy read – I did enjoy the writing at the sentence level and what I learned about these actual events – but it didn't knock my slippers off.
From the first short chapter and the description of the storm, Hargrave's writing enchanted me:
And then the sea rises up and the sky swings down and greenish lightning slings itself across everything, flashing the black into an instantaneous, terrible brightness. Mama is fetched to the window by the light and the noise, the sea and sky clashing like a mountain splitting so they feel it through their soles and spines, sending Maren's teeth into her tongue and hot salt down her gullet.
And then maybe both of them are screaming but there is no sound save the sea and the sky and all the boat lights swallowed and the boats flashing and the boats spinning, the boats flying, turning, gone. Maren goes spilling out into the wind, creased double by her suddenly sodden skirts, Diina calling her in, wrenching the door behind to keep the fire from going out. The rain is a weight on her shoulders, the wind slamming her back, hands tight in on themselves, grasping nothing. She is screaming so loud her throat will be bruised for days. All about her, other mothers, sisters, daughters are throwing themselves at the weather: dark, rain-slicked shapes, clumsy as seals.
In the narrative that follows, initially told from the perspective of a young woman, Maren, who has lost her father, brother, and fiancé in the storm, the women of Vardø must learn to take over their lost men's chores – even going out fishing: a controversial decision that will divide the women irreparably, even if it saves them all from starving – and slowly, all of them find ways to carry on. Meanwhile, a new Commissioner has been appointed to oversee this wayward village – a Scottish witch-hunter whose skills might be needed according to whispered rumours surrounding the nature of that awful storm – and on his way north, this Absalom Cornet is able to procure both a ship and a wife in the city of Bergen. This wife, Ursa – a cloistered and pampered young thing who has never set foot outside the city of her birth and from whose perspective the narrative rotates – will be totally unsuited to life in a one room former boat shed (she has never made bread, let alone butchered an animal or stoked a peat fire), but a fortuitous friendship struck with Maren will see the two of them learn about life outside their own circles, and learn something about themselves as well.
Ursa is very close beside her, and Maren is not sure if the heat she feels comes from the fire, or her friend's body. She imagines leaning against her, resting her head on Ursa's shoulder. It would not be out of place, not beyond the intimacies they have already shared. But Maren is unsure whether she could rest her head so close to Ursa's, breathe in her sweet smell, feel the brush of Ursa's soft skin against her own dry forehead, and not turn her mouth towards her.
As historical fiction, Hargrave does a really admirable job of capturing life in both the remote fishing village and Finnmark's more “civilised” centres. And as feminist fiction, Hargrave credibly explores the limited options open to women in this world; neither Maren or Ursa truly has control over her own life and weak women seek power by aligning themselves with the church. I liked that Hargrave included an indigenous Sámi character, Diina, whose long-accepted pagan practises will make her a target of the witch-hunt:
I remember once when runes gave you comfort, when sailors came to my father to cast bones and tell them of their time left to come. They are a language, Maren. Just because you do not speak it doesn’t make it devilry.
All of this makes for a strong and interesting framework, but again, there's something amateurish in the overall package. So many seemingly important details have nothing to do with the overall plot: Why did Ursa's sister need to be sickly? Why was Diina's baby not developing appropriately? Why was the sea captain shocked that Ursa didn't remember him visiting their home when she was a child? Why add all of this (and so much more) if it doesn't affect anything in the end? Even so, there was authentic tension in this plot (there is a witch-hunt after all), I did like Hargrave's sentences, and time and place were captured beautifully. I'm not unhappy to have picked this one up.
