A Writer's Death

Feeling a bit melancholy this Labour Day weekend.  The weekend got off to a sad start, when I had drinks with some of the other writers in my writing circle at a pub in the queer village.  Normally, when I see them it's to workshop our writing or clink glasses at a book launch.  But this time, we were having drinks because one of the writers in our group recently died in what appears to have been suicide. 

Wendy was a fascinating woman - warm, funny, anxious, vulnerable, fragile.  I recall her sexy librarian glasses and dimpled smile and insistence that she "wasn't a writer," even though we all insisted her writing was improving greatly; she was well on her way to finding her voice.  But what made Wendy particularly fascinating was that despite her fairly normal exterior, she came from a troubled past, to say the least: she'd been a child sex worker.  And she talked very openly about it.  After escaping an abusive home, she aged out of the foster care system and found herself on the street working as a sex worker (Wendy was always careful to use the word "sex worker," rather than "prostitute" - she'd made a career for herself as an activist working to advocate for sex worker protection and child protection, and was even pursuing her law degree at Osgoode, when she died).

The memoir that she was working on chronicled parts of her painful past, which, however turbulent, she captured with a good shot of humour.  I recall her reading aloud scenes of sex and violence that made my own life feel incredibly tame (one scene involved a hermaphrodite), yet the overriding feeling that came through in her writing, I would say, was a sense of horrible loneliness and searching.  Here was a woman who desperately wanted to be loved - because she'd never felt loved - and that made her susceptible to being exploited by a certain man, who occupied a central part of her memoir.

Yet it seemed to all of us that Wendy was at a really positive place in her life, despite the fact that she'd missed the past few workshops, and maybe been languishing in depression.  I was stunned by the news of her death.

One of the writers draped a bright pink feather boa over the chair at the head of the table, and we toasted to Wendy's life.

Although her memoir will probably never be shared with the world, I'm glad she wrote what she did.  Her words will stay with me.

Photo from: here

Book #54: The Other Side of My Bookshelf

"Darwinians, with their unconscious teleology, as usual put forward hypotheses about the possible selective advantages of the emergence of consciousness, but, as usual, these didn't explain anything; they were just so-so stories, no more.  Then again, the anthropogenic model was hardly more convincing: life had thrown up something which could contemplate itself, a mind capable of understanding it, but so what?  That in itself didn't make understanding human consciousness any easier."                                                           -Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

A couple weeks ago, my agent Sam had a bunch of us over, and upon opening the second bottle of wine, one of the other writers there put forth the question: if you had to recommend just one book to the group, what would it be?  We went around the room, and people waxed lyrical about Flannery O'Connor, Marguerite Duras and Toni Morrison . . . all beloved friends on my bookshelf.  But Sam's choice caught my attention: The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq.  I was struck by this title because I have it on my bookshelf - or to be more precise, I should say we have it on our bookshelf.  When my boyfriend Chris and I moved in together a little over a year ago, we combined our two book collections into an encyclopedic wall of books, and I often find myself, late at night, if I can't sleep, venturing over to the shelves dominated by Camus, Sartre and Musil - all those existentialist Continental authors whom I've never really gotten into.  The Elementary Particles was tucked alongside this set.  I'd observed Chris flipping through it and rereading sections a few times; he'd mentioned that the novel had stayed with him.  So in picking up this book, I had high hopes indeed: I was hoping to gain insight into both my agent's and boyfriend's unique minds (and the male mind more generally, if such an abstraction can be said to exist).

I was not disappointed.  The Elementary Particles puts under the microscope the strange, symbiotic relationship between two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno, who on the surface appear polar opposites.  Michel is an almost asexual, brilliantly gifted molecular biologist whose only sense of connection to humanity is through his beloved body of research into the origins of human consciousness and individuality from the primal muck of animal life.  Bruno, on the other hand, is animal man incarnate.  The novel traces the vicissitudes in their love lives, as Michel is granted a second chance with Annabelle, his childhood sweetheart, a girl of extraordinary delicate beauty, and Bruno find love in the most unlikely of places: at a beachside orgy, where he meets Christiane, a cynical older woman whose taste for orgies proves not at all incompatible with a sensitive, wonderfully generous soul.  Fleeting moments of connection and lyrical beauty are possible in such relationships, the author seems to suggest, but in the end both Michel's and Bruno's affections are exposed as elusive and unstable.  Perhaps the most moving scene occurs just after Christiane has been paralyzed - depriving her of the carnal pleasure so core to her being.  Bruno steps forward for a glimmering moment:  "He kissed her on both cheeks, then on the lips. 'Now you can come to Paris and move in with me,' he said.  'Are you sure that's what you want?'  He didn't answer, or at least he hesitated."

Ultimately, Bruno's disappointment with his own inability to overcome the bounds of his own selfishness and believe in a form of love that transcends the fragile, ruined body seems to be at the heart of the author's disenchantment with the human race.  Yet I was surprised to discover that some reviewers - most notably, The New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani - have dismissed this novel as nothing more than an unsparing case study of humanity's vileness.  For me, Michel's and Bruno's search for something more - whatever that "more" might be (a new mode of existence? a new mode of writing? a new way of inhabiting the world and our bodies?) - is a pay-off unto itself.  Reading about their search and its tragic limits filled me with melancholy awe and moments of piercing awareness that few authors are capable of provoking.

Photo from: here  

                                                                                      

Book #53: The Paradox of Holocaust Fiction

"She closed the door on the little white face, turned the key in the lock.  Then slipped the key into her pocket."                                                              -Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah's Key

I just finished reading Sarah's Key, a novel that I wanted to love.  I wanted to love it and indeed learn from it, since I'm currently working on an intergenerational historical novel - and who better to learn from than an author whose novel has been made into a successful film?  Tatiana de Rosnay carries off her interweaving of past and present storylines with consummate skill, and yet I have to say I found something profoundly unsatisfying about the result.  

The historical plot focuses on Sarah Starzynski, a young Jewish French girl who suddenly finds her entire life under siege, when the French police, working under Nazi orders, evict the Starzynski family from their apartment in Paris and throw them into concentration camps in the French countryside.  But Sarah's torment is compounded by a personal guilt: in an attempt to save her little brother from the police, she locks him in a tiny closet, and only later, after she and her parents have been dragged away, realizes the consequences of her actions.  This strand of the novel I found utterly compelling and moving in how vividly it brings to life the horror of everyday-life-turned-upside-down through the eyes of a young girl.

Yet the present storyline that intersects with this narrative falls flat.  Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris, discovers that the apartment her French husband has inherited was once inhabited by the Starzynski family and the tragic events that unfolded there come to haunt her conscience - leading to upheaval in her personal life.  While all the characters are skillfully depicted enough, I found myself unable to become emotionally invested in their crises: a marriage on the rocks, an unplanned pregnancy, the stresses of busy careers.  These normal concerns of contemporary life seem trivial and meaningless, juxtaposed with the unfathomable sadness of Sarah's plight.

And yet, don't get me wrong, it isn't that I wished de Rosnay had stuck strictly with the historical plot by telling the entire novel from Sarah's perspective.  To do so would have led to an utterly bleak novel (for who can honestly imagine a happy outcome for Sarah?)  No, I see why the author felt the need to allow for some moment of redemption through Julia's coming to terms with her sense of collective guilt.  Yet by creating Julia as a kind of stand-in for me, the reader, guiding my emotional response, I found my emotions invariably falling short of what I felt they should be, given the history at stake.  Perhaps this is the risk or paradox that any novelist may face in attempting to represent the Holocaust?  Shedding a few tears over Julia's angst felt like an overly sentimental and self-indulgent response, and yet I can't say how I would have told this story differently.

Photo from: here 

At The Glass Menagerie

Over the weekend, I saw a marvellous play with my mother – The Glass Menagerie, at Soulpepper Theatre.  I took her to see it for her birthday.  As my mom and I were waiting for the play to start, I was reading Tennessee Williams’ bio in the programme and a couple sentences jumped out at me.  I read aloud: “Success came after poverty and odd jobs, a nervous breakdown, three attempts to get his undergraduate degree and a first play that flopped.  He was 34 years old.”

My mom looked over with mirthful, ironic eyes.  “That is so you!”

I’m turning 34 this year, and my first book will be published shortly (hopefully this fall, though my publisher tells me we may need to delay until early spring….)  I’m crossing my fingers it won’t be a flop, like Williams’ first play.  My dissertation rather fell on its face, so I’m counting that as getting my initial flop out of my system.  And like Williams, I suffered a breakdown while peddling my trade as an adjunct prof in the backwaters of Nova Scotia, which I definitely consider an “odd job.” 

My mother smiled and we settled back in our seats to a play that we both agreed was the best we’d seen in quite a while.  The matriarch at the centre of The Glass Menagerie is Amanda Wingfield, a faded southern beauty who parades around the living room of her shabby apartment in St. Louis, driving her two adult children, Tom and Laura, mad with stories of all her “gentleman callers” and former glory.  The actor who plays Amanda (Nancy Palk) brings just the right balance of manic energy and melancholy nostalgia to the role.  That her search to find a husband for timid, awkward Laura is doomed from the beginning is something everyone in the audience can just feel in their bones.  Laura is a strange, almost autistic young woman caught in a perpetual state of girlhood, her only interest playing with a menagerie of tiny glass animals.  Meanwhile, Tom – a factory worker and would-be poet – proves no less fragile and fallible on his own journey to escape the stifling conditions of home.

Their vulnerability makes these characters fascinating to watch, and most importantly, you can really feel their suffering.  And yet, even the darkest scenes are cut through with flashes of levity and beauty – a boy Laura had a crush on in high school nicknames her “Blue Roses,” because he misheard her say she suffers from pleurosis.  These fleeting moments of connection, humour and intense feeling somehow make all the suffering of life worthwhile, the play seems to suggest. 

The following evening, “Blue Roses” still lingering in my mind, I couldn’t resist renting Blue Valentine – a no less tragic, beautiful movie about lost love and thwarted expectations.  Just to make sure I’d thoroughly worked myself up into an emotional lather.

And the next morning, after a lethargic spell of a few days, I found that the words were flowing again.  What a relief.  I didn’t leave my desk for the next several hours, immersed once again in writing the world of my novel.

Photo from: here

Book #52: What's Historical about the Historical Novel? Toni Morrison's Latest Novel

"I will keep one sadness.  That all this time I cannot know what my mother is telling me.  Nor can she know what I am wanting to tell her."

                                                                                                    -Toni Morrison, A Mercy

Recently, I've found myself craving historical fiction ... perhaps because I'm trying to write an historical novel myself.  Seeking to learn from the master of this genre, I picked up Toni Morrison's latest novel, A Mercy. It's a surprisingly slender novel, but perhaps one of her most ambitious.  It seems as though throughout her career, Morrison has been progressively stepping back in time: beginning with her partly autobiographical first novel, The Bluest Eye; winning the Pulitzer Prize for her masterpiece Beloved, set in the antebellum South; and now receding even further into the historical imagination with A Mercy, set in the 1680s when slavery and the very idea of "America" were still in embryonic form.

The mercy at the core of the story concerns a young slave girl named Florens, born into slavery at a plantation in Maryland.  Yet Florens is not your typical slave girl; since childhood, she was "never able to abide being barefoot and always beg for shoes, anybody's shoes," leading her mother to accuse her of putting on the airs of a "Portuguese lady," and she is quick to learn how to write from an old Reverend who secretly teaches her.  When Jacob Vaark, an adventurer from the North, visits the plantation to claim repayment on a debt, he finds the plantation in financial ruins.  In lieu of the debt, Jacob is offered payment in the form of a slave, and although he finds the slave trade distasteful, on a whim, he accepts Florens - perhaps moved by how the girl's mother beseeches him, kneeling on the ground.

But Florens' life on the Vaark farm - particularly after the master dies - proves anything but serene.  She becomes part of a strange survivors' colony of displaced women, centred around the master's wife Rebekka, a woman who might just as easily have been a prostitute back in England, had she not opted for her arranged marriage overseas.  The voices of these eccentric characters are all vividly rendered, but what I found most enticing about this novel is the emotional conundrum at its core.  Uprooted from the only home she knew and torn away from her mother, Florens is stripped of her identity and left flailing to forge a new self in the wild, never able to understand or forgive her abandonment - ironically, the "mercy" that was her mother's greatest sacrifice.

As I thought further about this historical novel, it occurred to me that what makes it so delightfully readable is actually the dearth of historical details.  The history of the period is used very sparingly, more implied than explained.  For instance, as Jacob tours the D'Ortega plantation, the "tobacco odor, so welcoming when he arrived, now nauseated him.  Or was it the sugared rice, the hog cuts fried and dripping with molasses, the cocoa Lady D'Ortega was giddy about?"  These carefully chosen details about what he was served for lunch encapsulate a whole history of conspicuous consumption and plantation culture, which, however fascinating, never overpowers the story.  History does not intrude on the emotions of the characters who drive the narrative.
 
A couple weeks ago, I was at my writing workshop, where my friend Diane warned me against the pitfalls of using too much historical research and exposition in my novel.  She quoted the author David Gilmour: "It's not what you put into your writing, it's what you take out."  Too true.  Time to read A Mercy again....  So much to be learned from Morrison's pared down aesthetics.

Photo from: here                                                                                                                     

Book #51: Stereotypes and Desire

"Whatever Sam Finkler wanted, his effect on Julian Treslove was always to put him out of sorts and make him feel excluded from something.  And false to a self he wasn't sure he had."
                                                                                  -Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

This morning after awaking from a turbulent dream, I made myself a double espresso and curled up on the sofa with Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, which I've been reading for the past couple weeks.  This novel, which won the Man Booker Prize last year, gives a brilliant and hilarious glimpse into the fantasy life of Julian Treslove, a man who has envied his Jewish friend, Sam Finkler, since childhood days, and at some primal level yearns to be Jewish himself.  Something of an artist manque and failure when it comes to relationships with women, despite years of womanizing - particularly after landing a job as an impersonator of Brad Pitt - Treslove has a love-hate relationship with Finkler, who seems to be everything he is not.  Successful.  Bitingly funny.  Rich.  Centred in his sense of self and heritage.  Married to the late Tyler Finkler, an impressive Jewish woman, whom Treslove was disappointed to discover, after their tryst in the sack years ago, was actually only a converted Jew.

That elusive thing Finkler possesses is constantly slipping away from Treslove, eluding his grasp.  For the rest of the morning, this book made me smile as I indulged in the happy-sad, melancholy-ironic ups and downs of Treslove's journey through a world where stereotypes and desire map on to each other, and one can only be experienced through the other.

And might I venture as a personal aside, that this absurd yet real predicament goes beyond Jewishness?  As I was reading this novel, I found myself thinking about all the bizarre moments in my own life, most of them involving ex-boyfriends, when it became clear that my "Japaneseness" somehow made me desirable.  I can recall one or two guys during university telling me that in some strange, inexplicable way they felt Japanese, and dating me was helping to bring this side of themselves out (admittedly a good deal of drinking was involved in these late night confessions).  As a fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian who doesn't speak the language, and who had a near breakdown when I lived in Japan for a summer several years ago, I myself have never felt very Japanese and have often felt there's something strangely misleading about my Japanese appearance.  But such is the ironic reality of living in an age where stereotypes make people desirable....        

Photo from: here

Doc Shimo & Other Ghosts of Kaslo

About a month ago, I blogged about receiving a mysterious phone call from a woman who used to know my great grandfather, the late Dr. Kozo Shimotakahara, the dashing older man furthest left in this photo.  (If you'd like, you can here that blog entry here).  Well, over the past month, I have been communicating with this woman quite a bit (for purposes of protecting her privacy - she's an elderly lady who probably values her privacy - I'll call her "Norah").  Emailing back and forth and chatting on the phone with Norah has been very exciting because I'm currently working on a historical novel based on my great grandfather's life during the Second World War, when he was a doctor at the above internment camp in Kaslo, BC.  Getting to know Norah and hearing about her memories of my great grandfather - "the great Doc Shimo," as she calls him - has been a fascinating experience.

First of all, I had no idea that he was so adored by the Kaslo locals, or that he was seen as such an eccentric, trailblazing man.  According to Norah, a teenager at the time of the war, her experience getting to know Doc Shimo utterly dispelled the government propaganda disseminated about Japanese-Canadians.  At first, most people in the community weren't pleased by the prospect of having their little mountain town inundated by 3000 evacuees, who had been labelled as "the enemy," and they were even less thrilled that the internment camp was to be built in deserted buildings right within the town.  Kaslo, being a ghost town, had no shortage of deserted hotels and derelict buildings - relics of the gold rush days.  These buildings were retrofitted into tenement houses, where dozens of Japanese-Canadian families were crowded in.  Not your ideal living conditions.  But once Doc Shimo set up shop as the camp's physician, the locals quickly realized that they could benefit from having a doctor of his sophistication and skill set a stone's throw away.  Norah told me that when her brother contracted a severe case of bronchitis from working at the local mine, Doc Shimo treated him by giving him one of the earliest shots of penicillin.  When the boy asked, "How much?"  Doc Shimo said, "Give me your wallet!"  Peeling out $3, he said, "This'll have to do."

Norah's father, an artist, who had been deaf since childhood, befriended Doc Shimo.  It seems that the two men bonded because Norah's father had also felt discriminated against by certain locals, on account of his disability.  Thus Doc Shimo often drove out to Norah's home by the beach (as the camp doctor, he was allowed special privileges; his car was never confiscated, unlike the cars of other internees).  He sat to have his portrait painted.  Apparently, he told funny stories about his days working as a waiter in Chicago to put himself through med school.  According to Norah, he was a very charming man who could be a bit of a ham.  Upon glimpsing the boats lining the shore, Doc Shimo begged to be allowed to take one out.  Hitching up his pants and climbing into a small life boat, he had a strange way of rowing.  Rather than facing backwards, Doc Shimo faced forward rowing fisherman style (probably a habit acquired from his teenage summers working as a fisherman's apprentice).

Later, when Norah wasn't sure what she wanted to do with her life ("there were no school guidance counsellors, back in those days," she informed me), Doc Shimo encouraged her to consider UBC's nursing program.  A few years later, she had the pleasure, as a newly minted RN, of assisting with the birth of a baby, working alongside "my idol ... the good Doctor Shimotakahara."

At the end of our conversation, Norah put me in touch with her friend, a local historian, who kindly provided me with the photograph above.  It's a beautiful, evocative photo....  Who know what my imagination will make of all these memories, but I couldn't resist sharing them right now.

Photo from Langham Cultural Society