We’ve never lived on earth. I point this out to him as the bus veers up the street. In the world we’re creating together, no animals exist, no seasons either. We live eight storeys up and never touch soil. We follow highways not rivers. We name our heat waves after our grandmothers. We pretend our pain is weather. We dream of houses we’ll never own. Of second homes, seventy minutes out of the city. Of well-lit rooms and comfortable chairs, of gardens, but never children. ~We Have Never Lived on Earth
Longlisted for the 2023 Giller Prize, We Have Never Lived on Earth is a series of related short stories that add up to something like a novel. Mostly told from the POV of Charlotte — the older of two girls brought from South Africa to the interior of British Columbia by their newly single mother, their dad having been left behind — these stories start off pretty slowly (mostly straightforward [what reads as autofictional] tales of an immigrant childhood), but as they go along, some of the later stories are more abstract and literary. These do add up to something all together, but as short stories (apparently, mostly previously published elsewhere), I’m left thinking they wouldn’t be very satisfying individually. Probably three and a half stars overall, not leaning towards rounding up.
Lukas said that he imagined that the moon would be a lot like Antarctica, a place he planned to travel to. It would be remote and cold, but life was certainly possible with the right equipment. If I lived there, on the moon, he meant, he promised to visit. Only if I invite you, I said. ~How to be Silent in German
After the upheaval of immigrating and a fractious teenaged relationship with her mother, Charlotte’s stories are mostly about leaving home and travelling around the world: working and writing in Germany and Crete and Amsterdam; writing a book on women artists because, as her partner Lukas accuses, she’s not brave enough to make her own art. I liked the one story from Charlotte’s father’s POV (set just after his separation from his wife and just as he learns she plans to take his kids away to Canada), and I liked the final story with a later in life visit between Charlotte and her mom, but some of the early stories set in small town B.C. were less interesting. Even the writing early on didn’t seem promising, as in House on Carbonate, about Charlotte meeting the boy with whom she’ll have her first kiss:
Kent and his friends Jake and Roy joined us and we continued south together, like the monarchs, finding security in numbers. We stopped at the 7-Eleven to buy Fuzzy Peaches and Twizzlers, which allowed me to get a better look at Kent. He was tall and thin in the effortless way of adolescent boys and supermodels. Though — Lucia often reminded me — supermodels live on diets of Coke Zero and iceberg lettuce to maintain their birdbath collarbones; teenage boys do not. His thick hair slid over his eyes making my aorta cancel all blood circulation to my head.
If the immaturity of that voice is meant to reflect Charlotte’s age at the time, it really only works as a part of this collection, where you can watch the character grow and change; on its own, it felt unaccomplished; I was never unaware I was reading a collection of short stories and considering them individually. In a later story, Cellular Memory, Charlotte makes reference to many details that occur over the course of this collection:
What have you lost?
People mostly, I tell him. Not just my parents, who are both alive, on separate continents; or Lukas, who is alive but no longer writes; not just friends, who, at one point, occupied large quadrants of my attention but now don’t seem to matter anymore. Like a film projected on water, they waver and disappear. It’s not just lovers, either, with their seed bank of memories, or the woman, sleeping in her toy tent on some lifeguard-less beach, or in her houseboat, alone, or the toddler at the train station in Montreal, or the injured octopus…
And it’s the callback details in these later stories that make this feel something like a novel, but again, I think only a few of the stories really stand on their own. I found that distracting, and in the end, while this does add up to the story of one woman's rootless life, there's neither anything particularly personal shared about her experiences or anything universal to be learned from her (so what's the point?). Good, not great.
