“. . . it doesn’t come easily, nor should it.” Own Sweet Time: A Diagnosis and Notes by Caroline Clark

. . . questions I’ll never get any further with the thing that I do. Auto fiction? Essay of the self. I need to do this in fits and starts. Straight to the desk after drop-off. I used to get up in the silence of 5 a.m., write, then go back to bed.

Major life events—the loss of a spouse or parent, serious injury, significant upheaval, illness—often inspire those already inclined to seek understanding through words to want to write about what they have experienced. Cancer, with all of the unknowns and the complex treatment options that come along with it, is a diagnosis as frightening as it is overwhelming. But how to tell the story? Writer and translator Caroline Clark’s Own Sweet Time: A Diagnosis and Notes breaks from the expected breast cancer memoir to offer a very different response to the reality of facing, and living with, the news no one wants to hear.

Her inventive approach to writing about her experience is one that is less about the entire journey, although we see many unvarnished moments, than it is about placing the diagnosis and treatment plans, and the heavily weighted silence that weighs over that first critical appointment with an oncologist against all the unspoken truths of the situation. With permission, Clark and her husband recorded this initial session which is reproduced verbatim, with all the attendant “um’s” and “mm-hm’s” on the right hand page throughout this small volume. On the facing page, individual words are picked up, prompting the author to respond with childhood memories, random thoughts, parenting challenges, and emotional reactions from the past and the post-treatment present. Scattered among these passages and fragments are questions about writing itself, especially in the face of such a life altering experience.

The diagnostic discussion is dense with information, the basics—drugs, treatment schedules, surgery, possible side effects—and, the most unnerving inquiries—what to tell the children, the probability of a full cure, the risk to her daughters in the future—those unknowns that fall somewhat outside the oncologist’s script, no matter how commonly they arise. The words that Clark picks up on are indicated with a faint ° that does not interfere with the reading of the transcript. Where those words take her is occasionally directly related to the context or phrasing of the source, but for the most part her notes have a free flow. They are also deeply personal.

Her notes touch on faith, the body, therapy. Some are passing observations. But two themes seem to take up more space on those open facing pages: memories that go back to an anxious childhood leading into an ongoing struggle with hair pulling (Trichotillomania), and reflections on parenting that lay open the stressful reality of going through such a physically and emotionally demanding process as the mother of two young girls:

. . . time I thumped my fist down hard with all my strength on the duvet next to her. It wasn’t the duvet but her stomach. She was winded. I was scared. Got her out of bed into mine. She tried to tell me it was okay. It wasn’t. Something had to change. Slowly after the cancer year, I realised it wasn’t her that needed changing, it was me. I needed to change. I needed to want to be there with her. How can you make yourself want something? You can’t. Your only hope is to find inner peace.

A disarming dissonance arises in the juxtaposition of the relatively ordered and clinical nature of the appointment against the myriad of thoughts those words trigger as Clark looks back on the most demanding and difficult time she has ever endured. What an oncologist can tell you about the journey will never begin to encompass the physical and mental challenges that lie ahead. For each individual the path is unique. But how to make sense of it all? Caroline Clark’s original, honest work is beautiful, heartbreaking and important.

. . . feel. That wide new space of truth-telling. Is this what writing is? Putting down the truth?

Own Sweet Time: A Diagnosis and Notes by Caroline Clark is published by CB Editions.

Grief-tinted memories: Reflections on Mother Muse Quintet by Naveen Kishore

The loss of a beloved parent inspires a tumult of emotion and weaves complex webs of images that fragment and coalesce over time. It is, I have learned, a living grief, something that ties us to our own past in ways that shift and change in a manner that cannot be mapped or predicted.

Today, as I gather my thoughts about the latest poetry collection by my friend Naveen Kishore, my own mother has been gone for exactly seven years. On July 9th, 2016, my daughter and I sat at her bedside waiting for my brothers to make it to the city. When they arrived, we knew her respirator would be removed and we would say good-bye. She had been plagued by an increasing frailty for many years, but had remained mentally sharp until her final month which was marked by a rapid decline. Meanwhile, in another local hospital, my father lay unconscious following a stroke and head-on collision and, within a few days, a similar, if more prolonged vigil would commence at his bedside. But on this day, what I remember most vividly is my daughter gently tickling her grandmother’s arms as she had once done for her when she was a little girl. Her presence was a comfort to myself and my mother that day.

Over the five sections of Mother Muse Quintet, Naveen Kishore, the highly respected publisher of Seagull Books, honours his own mother, moving through the varying shapes and forms that memories take, and the way they continue to embrace and comfort us as we ourselves age. It is both a tender, personal tribute and a gentle lesson about opening ourselves up to capture our own memories on the page.

The first part evokes a son’s tribute to a mother who offered security and continuity to a young child, filling him with the stories and songs of her own childhood and family history and now, as the fog closes in around her, looks to him for guidance and assurance.

Build me a self. She pleaded. A whole one? I asked. One
I can call my own. Self. Again. She said. I looked at her.
Swiftly. Almost surreptitiously. My gaze. First taking in the
dignity. The earnestness. Hers. And of the request. The
controlled undertone. Not quite panic. Yet. And trust. The
faith. That I could. And would. Help rebuild. Not just her
self. But also her sense of being. Hers. No room for doubt.

In verse and in measured prose, this sequence introduces us to Prem (her son always called her by her first name) as a young girl in Lahore, as a confident woman, and as someone drifting away from the familiarity of her own reflection. And to giving up her ashes “to the care of the river.” But that is only the beginning. As the progression through the following parts of this quintet demonstrate, grief, which may begin long before death, unfolds as an ebb and flow of memories that are sometimes fragmentary or fleeting, other times taking shape in the imagining of one’s earliest years. Time loses its chronological dominion over our hearts as the beloved parent’s presence takes on a new form. They are deeply missed, but somehow always close by.

This is what I draw from Mother Muse Quintet. There are poems that often call to mind very detailed circumstances, as in the piece that records the poet’s grandmother’s prolonged illness and death and the strain it placed on his mother as she cared for her mother-in-law. Those are the moments we experience, even assist with as children, that take on a new poignancy after we have become the caregiver in turn. There are other open poems, words scattered across the page that reflect the way that the memories that stay with us down the years often become moods, qualities of light, seasons and colours. What arises can be an emotion without specific image or form, but you know who it is.

endings
endings unending
night      how you grow pale

breathe into         this parting
punctuated
by urgency

I would if I could night              sing you awake
among the          birdcall
the         barking of dogs

Not all of this volume is completely new to me. I have been privileged to receive a passage or two, shared, in earlier form, when it seemed appropriate. I treasure these in my “grief folder,” created after my parents’ deaths. There is so much of the mother connection/memory in this collection that I recognize, that triggers my own equally personal response. The final poems imply that Naveen also wishes to inspire others to write—to record their own memories, so we too may hold our loved ones as ever present as daylight and pale moons, as that essence we are forever aware of, lingering.

Mother Muse Quintet by Naveen Kishore is published by Speaking Tiger.

“Things are always ever only about to happen”: Falling Hour by Geoffrey D. Morrison

We all know the Sebaldian trope—man/woman goes for a walk and thinks about “stuff.” In Canadian poet Geoffrey D. Morrison’s debut novel, Falling Hour, a man takes a picture frame to a park on a summer day, the outside world mysteriously recedes, and he spends the rest of the day thinking about “stuff”—or so it seems. Over the course of this oddly distended day, the narrator who introduces himself gradually as Hugh Dalgarno will reflect on, among other things, his life, his criticisms of Canadian political history and the audacity of colonial ventures in the Americas in general, his thoughts on literature, and a series of tales of less than illustrious (in his mind) historical figures, most of them Scotsmen as, for his sins, is he. Hugh is, by his own admission, an odd fellow, isolated and adrift within the murky reaches of his own existence:

The dark sea of myself existed in unclear relation to my brain and its brokenness: was my brain the sea, or a vessel on this sea, or the navigator in the cabin, or her instruments? Or was my brain the wind and rain and bitter crosscurrents that churned the sea’s surface like a fearsome avenging hand? I did not know then, in the park. Wherever it is I am now I continue not to know.

Did I mention that his brain is broken? It is, or was, or perhaps may still be, but he reminds us, his listener/reader/audience, of this fact on a regular basis.

The story begins with a rather mundane premise. Hugh has come to the park on a hot summer day to meet a stranger who has, through emails, agreed to purchase a picture frame that he found hanging off a fire hydrant. While he waits, his mind begins to wander and, when the stranger fails to materialize, he begins to wander as well, making his way across the eerily empty park, into the forest on one side and back again. As the hours stretch on, uncounted because his cellphone has died, Hugh becomes aware that he has seen or heard no signs of human or domestic animal life for hours; his only company are birds, insects and amphibians. He also comes to realize that he is unable to leave. He is, in essence trapped within the rectangular frame of a large park in a “suffering inland industrial town” in Ontario that he never directly names, but only barely disguises.

Hugh’s personal history is a curious one. He was born in Scotland but his parents, about whom he knows little, apparently struggled with addiction so, at the age of four, it is deemed best that he be shipped off to Canada to be raised on the west coast by his great aunt and uncle. Although they were in their sixties when he came into their lives, theirs is a loving home within which he is steeped in socialist values. Meanwhile, in the outside world, he is a bit of a outsider, not quite fitting in with his peers. That misfit nature seems to accompany him, to a greater or lesser degree, until, at the age of thirty-one, he finds himself lingering on in the city he moved to for grad school, a loner content to work from home, missing the seaside of his youth but unable or unwilling to return.

For someone so socially isolated with a brain he describes as “broken” without ever making it explicit whether that brokenness has a psychiatric basis of some sort, Hugh’s endlessly divergent account of his day in the park reveals a man with a wide range of interests, questions, doubts and opinions. He dissects the opening scene of the movie The Conversation, takes Keats to task for any number of shortcomings as expressed his letters, examines the impact of Calvinism on the Scottish working class and Methodism on Canadian history, and marvels at the unique appearance of the arbutus tree and the seductive call of the red-winged blackbird. His discourses fall in and out of rants, and branch off into fascinating historical asides that somehow link back to earlier themes and obsessions. He quotes poetry and song, and philosophizes about the nature of reality—a reality that becomes more slippery as the day goes on:

But without waiting to resolve the metaphysics, I passed under the door shape in the leaves anyway and out into the open space of the park. The forms and shapes I had passed on my way to the forest were present as before: the toilets, the benches, the baseball diamond. Only they weren’t those things now. They too were in some sense visible but not real.

The game of baseball had never been played. There were no games. There were arbitrary geometric dances across temporary lines in the sand. Nothing on earth was truly the name we called it by. Nothing. So I felt in that moment, and which second that passed, the workings of a certain familiar mind virus grew stronger inside of me. It often came to me after I reached the heights of an enthusiasm and my enthusiasm crested and I was left panting and ragged like a defeated army on a plain. Enthusiasm, that nineteenth-century word. The virus was a strange hypercorrection to enthusiasm, a dousing in the coldest and deepest waters of the inner sea the former flames of my broken belief.

Oh yes, Morrison is fashioning anew the mechanics of the man/woman-walking-and-thinking internal monologue by giving it to a mildly absurd narrator who is intelligent, sensitive, opinionated and somewhat paranoid. And one who is not entirely in control of his own story, even in the telling. We see this in the measure of uncertainty running through Hugh’s narrative—it’s a double stranded quality, one strand tied to the ongoing strangeness of the day he is describing, the other stemming from his attempts to place himself “wherever it is that I am now” against the “now” of the story unfolding in a past, be it near or far. He loses his place, retraces his steps, and acknowledges that he is holding off on particular subjects for a time, yet it’s unclear whether the digressions that arise belong to his thoughts on the day in question, or to his effort to reconstruct it, or a little of each. When he reaches a discussion of “stream of consciousness,” assuming his listener/reader has likely wondered why it has not already emerged, he details his attraction to and skepticism of the concept while the text itself takes on the form of chapter-long unbroken paragraphs until, several chapters later, a pattern of paragraph breaks resumes as Hugh once again attempts to step outside himself to assess his progress and circumstances. It is probably fair to view the entire novel as a “stream of self-consciousness” but, no matter how one wishes to imagine it, Hugh’s strange day in the park with an empty frame packs a wealth of interesting and entertaining  “stuff” into one rectangular space—this book, that is.

Falling Hour by Geoffrey D. Morrison is published by Coach House Books.

The ties that bind and confine: Mothers and Truckers by Ivana Dobrakovová

Meet Svetlana, Ivana, Olivia, Lara, and Veronika, the protagonists who carry the five stories that comprise Slovak writer Ivana Dobrakovová’s collection, Mothers and Truckers. They are each, to a greater or lesser extent, caught up in the tangled webs of memories, failures and desires that occupy their thoughts and drive their actions, often to potentially counterproductive ends. Memorable and intense, these stories pull the reader into the interior lives of five very different, complicated, and not always likeable, women trying to navigate the expectations of family and society for better or worse.

Born in Bratislava in 1982, Dobrakovová studied English and French translation at Comenius University before moving to Italy where she works as a freelance translator of Italian into Slovak, notably of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. The present collection, her third, was awarded the 2019 EU Prize for Literature and is her second work to be made available in English (following her novel, Bellevue which was, like this,  also published by Jantar in Julia and Peter Sherwood’s translation). Her stories here tend to be on the longer side—two are about 50 pages in length and one is almost 70—and clear or suggested mental instability is a common theme, one that reflects, she says, an interest arising from the fact that her husband and sister are both psychiatrists. It is a quality that lends the three central, longer stories a particular claustrophobic, compelling power.

“Ivana,” the near-novella length piece, offers the most explicit portrayal of the impact of serious mental illness with its tragic and endearing narrator, a thirty-one year old woman who lives with her mother. Ivana, in a sometimes disjointed and exuberant narrative, recounts her childhood love of horses and the long hours she spent at the stables to the cost of her education, all the while hinting at the horrifying trauma that marked the sharp shift in her personal destiny. In the meantime, she has met R., a journalist and local celebrity, through the one friend who has not long since abandoned her. This has given her a renewed interest in life, even if she risks threatening peace with her overbearing mother, this budding relationship largely bound to fantasy, and her own mental stability which is being carefully contained:

It’s taken my psychiatrist in Tehelná Street years to fine-tune my medication, to find the right level between my mood swings and make sure I was neither too subdued and slowed down or too hyper and upbeat, that I was under control, hers, Mum’s, my own, that I didn’t get so high that I would have to be dragged down to earth, or get so low that I would need to be helped back onto my enfeebled legs, in a word, so that I would be myself again, albeit within some sensible, clearly defined limits, myself but not too much myself.

Ivana has a wonderful sense of self-deprecating humour and, although she is pretending to be working on a novel and hiding the truth of her circumstances from R., she demonstrates a canny ability to vividly unfold what is ultimately a very painful story.

Olivia’s eponymous tale, the first of two stories set in Turin, presents a conflicted narrator obsessed with the news story of a teacher who was seduced by a young student to very unfortunate ends. She is also a teacher, albeit it one who was married and, in her own estimation, still attractive for her age. Surely she would not be so gullible. As her monologue proceeds, she reveals herself to be lonely, bitter and excessively paranoid about germs. As she tries to justify the situation in which she has found herself at the age of thirty-nine, she cannot quite accept the part she has played in her own life. And she prides herself in the fact that, unlike Gloria, the victim in the news reports, she is not living with—heaven forbid—her parents. Like all of the protagonists in Mothers and Truckers, relationships with parents, especially mothers, are fraught. Even though she has long been out of the house, Olivia’s mother still manages to intrude on her life almost daily, by phone, WhatsApp, Facebook, more so now that she is once again “single.”

Because my mother, by contrast, is present. Far too present, in fact. The usual story. She compensates. My mother spreads like mildew around the window. She devours everything that happens to find itself in her way. Overpowers it, supresses it. She’s everywhere. When I’m with her, it’s as if she was twice my size, with me being just a kind of external appendage  to her body that has never managed to cut itself off.

The third longer story, “Lara,” is also set in Turin, but her mother is dead and sorely missed. One has to wonder if her presence might have mediated what this unhappy, brutally self-centred mother of two has become. Lara’s internal monologue is perhaps the most exhausting and disturbing. She’s a complicated, damaged woman who questions her own mental functioning, but seems powerless to stop the very dangerous path she is on.

Together, the three central stories in the collection confirm Dobrakovová’s ability to inhabit distinct, multifaceted women caught in complicated predicaments that offer no easy resolution. The intensity of their internal monologues is fueled by a fluctuating style and form. At times, thoughts unwind in long sentences, strung together with commas while other passages feature short, staccato sentences. She also relies on a strong sense of space, her characters traverse the environments in which they live, in memory or in real time, in Slovakia or Turin, places she knows well. By contrast, “Father,” the opening story is a somewhat simpler tale of a man who largely neglects his family in pursuit of impossible, if relatively humble, dreams until alcohol and madness take a toll, but the final tale, “Veronika,” the only third person narrative, paints the portrait of a student who is embarking on a path that is bound to become difficult, even threatening, as she loses herself in chat room flirtations on the pretext of improving her French. As a whole, this volume is an immersive and intense reading experience.

Mothers and Truckers by Ivana Dobrakovová is translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood and published by Jantar Publishing.

Pride Month reading 2023—None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary by Travis Alabanza

I have long been ambivalent about Pride, but the rising waves of anti-LGBTQ, and especially anti-trans, sentiment seen over the past few years has made me very concerned. As a transgender individual who is white and fits visibly into the accepted gender binary, I have been able to stand in the shadows for a long time. For more than two decades. In fact, when I was a single parent supporting two children in a world without any legal protections on the grounds of gender identity, keeping my gendered history hidden was essential. On the occasions that I dared to out myself to a co-worker, job loss invariably followed. But, for the most part, especially outside of the LGBTQ world, I have encountered very few problems because I am older and exceptionally ordinary in my presentation. I pass so well that often I am not heard or believed when I try to tell someone that I am transgender.

For British writer and performer Travis Alabanza, on the other hand, none of the above applies. So when I heard about their Jhalak Prize-winning book None of the Above: Reflections on a Life Beyond the Binary, I knew I’d found my perfect read for this year’s Pride Month. And, even though our ages, lives and experiences differ greatly, I related more closely to many of the ideas they explore in this thoughtful and articulate examination of what it means to exist as an openly gender non-conforming person of colour in a world that is bound to the binary, than in most of the more “conventional” trans-themed books I’ve read. This is a bold and honest work that rides on a shifting current of hurt, uncertainty and self-affirmation against an unspoken pressure for trans identified people to be determined, self-assured, and often stubbornly binary in a world that increasingly strives to deny our validity. There is little room for doubt, less for admitting how exhausting it can be.

In our journey to ‘own our gender’, is it ever really our own? Or does it rely on us conditioning those around us to act and be a certain way too?

None of the Above is neither a typical memoir, nor an explicit defense/explanation of non-binary identity. It is, rather, something in between—a personal account structured around seven statements that have had a particular impact on Alabanza, as a youth and as a public figure, exploring their identity, sexuality and gendered expression. As they dissect these statements, there is a persistent question of how long an obviously gender-defiant presentation can be maintained before it simply becomes easier to move toward a more “acceptable” or “proper” presentation of transness. Of course, given the ongoing escalation of hostility directed at trans women, it’s not clear that such a progression toward hormones and surgery would be easier.

With chapter titles such as “So, When Did You Know?”, “But I Mean, Proper Trans”  and “This Ain’t A Thing We Do Around Here, Son,” Alabanza talks about growing up poor in a council project, their first joyful expressions of femininity, and their development of a successful career as a performer and theatre maker. The questions and comments they encounter come from curious, well-meaning friends, neighbours, fellow performers and critical journalists. Yet, in exploring their reactions and possible responses to these statements that weigh so heavily, there is a willingness to open up their experiences to concerns that intersect with those of others who may be white and/or cisgender. After all, the rigid strictures associated with the gender binary impact people who are not trans in many ways even if they also drive transphobic attitudes. The same gender binary can force trans people to consider medicalization as the measure of “true” transness and look at the openly queer and non-binary as troublesome distractions. For trans people of colour all of these contradictory forces are heightened.

Often what is projected onto those who are visibly gender non-conforming and non-binary, is that our existing, and claiming transness, will ruin it for those wanting (and deserving) a quieter life. Gender non-conformity and being outside of the gender binary cannot be seen as quiet: it is seen as purposefully choosing to cause trouble. To those so wanting a life of peace, others’ disruption can feel like a threat to that fought-for sanctuary.

This is a book that strives to come to terms with the feeling of being at odds with the gender one is assigned at birth, but not feeling comfortable identifying as a man or woman. It’s not a new phenomenon—I have friends who have identified as “gender neutral” for decades. What has changed, for better and for worse, is a wider public forum for people to see and be seen defying or transcending gender. I am grateful I transitioned before the advent of social media, but without the internet I would have had no community. Likewise, without the fabulous gender-bending musicians of the 1970s, I would not have survived my teens. As it was, I was thirty-eight before I finally had an understanding of the differentness I’d always known. But, even though my ultimate path was quieter and more conventional (to a point), my strongest connections have always been with those who stand at the intersection of masculine and feminine. So, for me, there was much food for thought in None of the Above that is beyond the scope of this brief reflection/review. Perhaps it will emerge elsewhere. Meanwhile, I will say that, for readers inside and outside the trans community, this is a very valuable and entertaining read (though one that might anger some on both sides).

None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary by Travis Alabanza is published by Canongate in the UK and will be published by The Feminist Press in the US in October.

“I have ghosts inside my head”: The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro

The feverish paragraph that extends across the first six pages of Augusto Higa Oshiro’s The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu opens rather innocuously, with the titular character walking through the Parque de la Exposición in Lima, Peru on a pleasant afternoon. Suddenly the restrained and mild-mannered professor experiences a terrifying break with reality:

In the eternity of the instant, in a manner of speaking, the green of the afternoon flickered out, the park’s babbling was erased, as if the world had taken flight, the pebbled paths disappeared, no serene gardens, or laughing families, or murmuring young couples, or ponds full of fish: the only thing in the air now was the sakura tree, its branches and its luminous flowers. And in that fragment of afternoon, from that imperturbable beauty, Nakamatsu noticed, sprang a death drive, a vicious feeling, like the sakura were transmitting extinction, a shattering destruction.

The ominous atmosphere that descends on him triggers a panic attack that sends him raving through the streets of the city. Or perhaps he’s dreaming, it doesn’t matter, for his nightmare is only just beginning.

Not long after this first premonition of death, Nakamatsu finds that he has been forced to retire from his position at the university due to his age. He is fifty-eight. This leaves him with empty hours to fill as his anxieties and paranoia continue to grow. He returns to working on a novel based on the life of a friend of his father’s, Etsuko Untén, traces an endless network of named streets and alleys, and visits the cemetery where he pauses at the graves of his mother, father and his long dead wife. Self-exiled from his siblings and fellow members of the Japanese-Peruvian community, he seems to be engaged in a battle with his own Asian identity. Throughout his long days, he continually seeks to clear his mind of thoughts, exercise discipline over his imagination. When he doesn’t wish to go out, or watch TV, he crochets squares for a blanket that will never be finished, losing himself in the rhythms of the task. But hallucinations find him all the same.

They arrive as the sounds of birdsong and nature emanating from his bedroom. When he goes to investigate he finds himself surrounded by a chorus of song and babbling water so impossibly realistic that he is momentarily swept away:

It might have been a brief second, five minutes perhaps; in reality Nakamatsu, surprised, withdrawn into himself, couldn’t pinpoint exactly how long the happening lasted, the miracle occurred again and again over the next two weeks, intermittently, whether in the morning, in the afternoon, or at any hour of the night, and every time he was left astonished by that sensation of unusual beauty.

But astonishment eventually turns into uncertainty, and Nakamatsu begins to doubt his sanity. Soon he is back out seeking escape on the streets. At night he is troubled by horrific dreams, and as they intensify he grows increasingly despondent. And estranged. He purchases a felt hat, long coat and walking cane, affecting the 1940s style of both his father’s friend Utsén and his favourite poet, Martín Adán who had waged his own battles with alcohol and madness. Under this new guise, Nakamatsu’s wanderings become nocturnal and more torturous. He takes to hanging out in the dark corners of the city where prostitutes, addicts and homosexuals gather, always watching from the sidelines, engulfed by his own darkness, ever struggling to find a point of stillness.

This hypnotic novella moves with a steady, tumbling pace, intensifying as it traces the protagonist’s descent into madness. There is, at first, an odd uncertainty to the narrative, a speculative quality, that is explained when the narrator is revealed as a colleague of Nakamatsu’s who has taken upon himself to prepare this report. Because he is not exactly a friend, his account carries a slight tone of cynicism that only serves to heighten the crumbling state, mentally and physically, of a man who has long cut himself off from a natural support system, pursued and driven mad by the strangled ghosts of his father’s generation—the Japanese labourers who found themselves stranded in a distant hostile land where many managed to build lives and futures, but some never managed to adapt.

Born and raised in the working class centre of Lima in 1946, Higa Oshiro was the son of immigrants from Okinawa. His early writing was inspired by the neighbourhood in which he grew up, but after spending a year and a half doing factory work in Japan, he began to explore the experiences of the Japanese-Peruvian community, aliens in their New World home yet alienated from their ancestral land. The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, originally published in 2008, belongs to this latter period of his career and represents his first publication in English translation. Sadly, Higa Oshiro died on April 28, 2023, just two month shy of its May 30th release. Translator Jennifer Shyue’s Afterword describes her 2019 meeting with the author and his warm support and generosity so hopefully we can look forward to further translations of his work.

The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro is translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Shyue and published by Archipelago Books.

The boundary between the psychiatric ward and the real world: Hospital by Sanya Rushdi

But why have we turned to the right? That’s where the psychiatric ward is. Of course, there must be examples in history of those who, in an effort to protect their non-mainstream alternative thinking, pretended to be who they were not in order to shield themselves from politics. This may be a similar arrangement. Even as I’m wondering about this, a wheelchair emerges from somewhere and I am told to sit in it. I refuse, saying I’d rather walk. They say if I don’t sit in it on my own, they will make me. So I sit.

Books and movies about mental illness and psychiatric wards frequently play to either the horror or mystique of madness, while language related to psychiatric conditions—bipolar, psychotic, schizophrenic—is often applied carelessly to describe a range of circumstances that have nothing to do with actual diagnoses. Around the world, the stigma of mental illness is difficult to shake. A heart attack will bring friends and family to your hospital bedside; a serious breakdown can leave you isolated and alone, at home or if you are sick enough, confined to a psychiatric unit. From the outside, a worse fate cannot be imagined but, in reality, once the shock of finding oneself hospitalized subsides, the world behind the locked doors tends to contain a community, at once strange and familiar, within which one can recover. Days pass with a certain routine that gradually returns structure to a life that has been temporarily, or periodically, upended, distorted, weighed down or wired up. Hospital, by Bangladeshi-Australian author Sanya Rushdi, takes you into that environment as seen through the eyes of a patient experiencing psychosis.

Based on real-life events, this debut novel is set in Melbourne, originally written in Bangla and translated by Arunava Sinha. Rushdi’s protagonist, is, like the author, a Muslim woman named Sanya. Years earlier, psychosis interrupted her PhD studies in Psychology. Now, with her third episode pointing to a diagnosis of schizophrenia, she finds herself at odds with her family, a community mental health team, and everyone who seems to be conspiring to force her to comply with the medical model of treatment that she distrusts. She acknowledges her past psychosis, but is unable understand that the curious coincidences, obsessive behaviour, and lurking paranoia might signal that she is sick again. That is the cruel nature of serious mental illness—what one experiences from the inside is increasingly at odds with what others observe from the outside. As her psychosis progresses, the world is simultaneously terrifying and brilliant, but Sanya resists all efforts to encourage her to access care willingly, so ultimately she arrives at the hospital under police escort.

Sanya’s narrative is restrained and oddly lacking in affect, even when she describes her tears and outbursts. She is continually trying to observe herself and logically reason her way through whatever arises. However, her reasoning is often disjointed and confused. She is constantly seeking symbols of significance, spends a lot of time trying to figure out the secrets behind the thoughts and actions of others, questions why certain song lyrics keep coming to mind, and fitfully attempts to draw strength from her faith. Rushdi’s ability to present this state of fractured association and allow her protagonist’s processing to slowly become more coherent as the story progresses is very impressive. Madness has a logic of its own as anyone who has experienced depression, mania or psychosis knows well.

Rushdi captures this shifting state of awareness by combining Sanya’s internal monologue, readings, and diary entries with the use of a dramatic format to capture external dialogue. This allows a record of what is said apart from what Sanya hears or wants to hear. It is also especially effective for reflecting the banter between the residents on the ward. On her first day in the hospital, one of the patients, an older man that Sanya describes as “so handsome,” exposes himself to her as she passes his room. Her self-appointed tour guides try to explain:

Michael: Please don’t be upset. He does these crazy things, but he has a beautiful heart. Give him a day or two and you’ll see what a lovely person he is.

Me: I’ve seen it already.

Glen and Michael laugh.

Glen: Yes, many of the girls are crazy about him.

Me: They need a reason to be here, after all.

Glen and Michael laugh again.

Initially, most of the men Sanya meets seem exceptionally attractive to her—a charged energy between the sexes is not uncommon on the unit. She becomes obsessed with a few of the male patients during her early weeks in the hospital, while other women barely register unless she senses that there might be something between one of them and a man she fancies. At such moments, jealous and conspiratorial thoughts immediately engulf her. At one point, when a doctor suggests she seems to be spending too much time following the male patients around, she becomes defensive. She will leave that session with another drug, lithium, added to her regime as a mood stabilizer and eventually these persistent passions will start to subside.

With her education in psychology and her prior experience with psychosis, Sanya feels she is in a good position to determine whether or not she is sick this time. She blames her family for sending her to the hospital and is resistant to drugs.  She argues that a particular type of language-focused talk therapy would be preferable, but, if she wants to be released, she knows that medication is part of the game. Convinced of the value of language, she pours her thoughts into her diary, filling pages with arguments that are, at the height of her psychosis, bound by incoherent and tenuous  connections. Reasoning and recognition are slow to return.

I read this book very slowly, although it is neither long nor difficult. But as someone who has been hospitalized for manic psychosis, I was impressed and sometimes shaken by Rushdi’s ability to draw on her own experience to craft such an uncanny portrait of psychosis from the inside. Her protagonist appears very logical and rational, and within her own inner construct she is, but from the outside, it is clear to her family and the medical personnel that she is unaware or unwilling to believe that she is ill. She lacks insight. It is almost like being separated from the rest of the world by a one way mirror. On her side, are her fellow patients who form among themselves a community, an island.  She remains convinced that language is the answer to her survival and recovery. And perhaps she has a point there, as Rushdi has demonstrated through her own use of language to create a work that is masterful, moving and tightly controlled.

Hospital by Sanya Rushdi is translated from the Bangla by Aruava Sinha and published by Seagull Books. In Australia, Hospital is published by Giramondo.

Not all there: My Life as Edgar by Dominique Fabre

With a child narrator it is always a challenge to strike the right note, the right balance of insight and innocence, but when the child in question has a developmental disability it can be even more difficult to create a believable, engaging voice. Or, as in Dominique Fabre’s My Life as Edgar, it can be an opportunity to present the world through an unusually sensitive, yet unfiltered lens. As is clear from the opening sentences, Edgar has a clear sense of what it is that sets him apart from others, even if he and those around him are never really certain just how far apart that truly is:

I was a quiet, unassuming child, but I had features of a kid with Down syndrome—a kind of coldness around the eyes, pale lips, big cheeks, a big butt, though my chromosomes weren’t really to blame. I could hear people around me say He’s not all there, is he? in soft voices, secretively, only I had ears, phenomenal ears, Micky Mouse was deaf compared to me, nature didn’t do me any favors, except for my ears.

When we first meet Edgar it is 1964, he is three going on four and living in Paris with his single mother, Isabelle. Life is pleasant. They go to the park, she takes him to visit a psychiatrist he is fond of, and when she goes to work he stays at a day home. But things start to change when a married man comes into his mother’s life. Suddenly his small world becomes a little uncomfortably crowded, perhaps too crowded. Before long, Edgar is sent to live with a foster family in Savoy. He will remain there for the next seven years, his care paid for by monthly cheque. He will talk to his mother on the phone weekly, write her letters, carefully copying the examples his caregiver prepares for him, and, on occasion, she will come to visit. But in a sense, out in the country he has more attention, freedom, responsibility and companionship than he had at home in Paris. He is even allowed to go to school. With Auntie Gina and Uncle Jos, and the other kids of unwed mothers who pass through their home, he has a second family and freedoms that urban life would never have afforded a young boy who is “not all there.”

On the surface, Edgar’s story is simple, but his telling of that story is neither simple, nor direct. The first section, recounting life in Paris with his mother, has a certain charm. He understands more of what is going on around him—or at least he appears to—and reports his observations and responses with a clarity that belies his age. However, this is a relatively focused period of his life that he may well have replayed in his mind many times over the years that he lived apart from his mother, because, with the second and longest section, the tone changes. Unfolding as an internal monologue addressed to his psychiatrist, Madame Clarisse Georges, he confesses: “I’m still not all there, but I know how to hide it well. I’m grown up now. I’m still quiet and unassuming too, but I’m not sure that won’t change.” He is eleven—a good year for him, he says—it is the year he will return to the city. But he admits that the years before that were also good, and he wants to talk about them. So he sets out to “dive into the past without remembering much actually.” And, sometimes, remembering too much.

As one might expect, Edgar’s efforts to fill in the gaps in his memory leads to a narrative that can be rather disjointed. He reports what comes to mind, moving back and forth in time, from event to event, often unaware of the larger context of what he sees and hears. His foster mother is of Italian descent, while his stepfather apparently doesn’t like Italians “even though he married one and she’s not the first, but I only know that because I let my ears listen.” Uncle Jos is a man who has chosen Stalingrad over the Catholic Church and works for the local municipality:

[H]e has road workers from the Department of Roads and Ditches who are all the time filling the holes of the world so it won’t spill over on all sides. Sometimes at night he goes out in his underwear, wearing his Damart thermals, when the roads collapse  and no one can get through.

His narrative is peppered with stock expressions seemingly incongruous with that of a young child, especially one who is supposedly “not all there.” He talks about his mother’s “dark and traumatized gaze” and accepts that he is the “village idiot.” He calls Italians Dagos and talks of cuckolds without understanding that the terms are being used in a derogatory fashion. His language absorbs and reflects the prejudices and politics of 1960s working class rural France.

As a narrator, Edgar has no filter. He tells what he remembers, the significant and the insignificant alike, from the quality of his bowel movements (especially after the weekly polenta dinner) to the excitement of the Revolution of 1968. What he reveals is often quite telling, even funny, but he his always very serious in his accounting. His is a monologue that invites one to read between the lines, revealing much about the society and the family units within which he exists. And his observations can be quite profound as when he describes his stepfather’s relationship with his adult son on a day when his own mother has come to visit:

They also fought about the Algerian war. I’d often heard the story since being here. Uncle Jos had tried to break Ricardo’s leg so he wouldn’t go back and help the French get killed over there in the colonies, but his leg had held up against the hammer blows, so Ricardo returned to Algeria covered in gauze and bandages. Since then, the two of them didn’t talk much. Me, if we had to go to war for independence, I think I’d go see Ricardo, not Uncle Jos. It feels weird, Madame Clarisse Georges, I’ll always know more about Uncle Jos and Auntie Gina than about Edgar and Isabelle, and all the rest. But today, in case you’re still alive and don’t mind listening to me, I’m like a separated Edgar, I’ve already lived a long time.

In the final section, Edgar, now eleven, returns to Paris and after a few weeks with his mother, is sent off to boarding school. He navigates the dynamics of this new environment for a while, but ultimately  will try to take control of his life in a world which has repeatedly pushed him off to the sidelines.

Dominique Fabre is a writer who is interested of illuminating the lives of people on the margins. This is a brave little book that I suspect may have missed the mark with some readers who fail to connect with narrator. Edgar, for all his concerns about the gaps in his memory, is an endearing child trying to tell his own story as best he can. In the process, he unwittingly tells a much larger tale about the lives of children whose parents are unable, or unwilling, to care for them, the systems in which they find themselves—day homes, boarding schools and foster families—and the value of consistency and support, wherever one may find it.

My Life as Edgar by Dominique Fabre is translated from the French by Anna Lehmann.

Roughghosts is nine years old today

It seems I skipped the annual anniversary post last year, but since I’m not writing the review I should be working on, I thought I’d stop and acknowledge this small achievement and thank everyone who has stopped by this literary space since I first recklessly launched it while I was unknowingly spiraling into a manic crisis that would ultimately end my career back in 2014. If nothing else, it has provided me a place to talk about books and writing, and make the acquaintance of many wonderful readers, writers, translators and publishers around the world. Roughghosts would be nothing without the company of others who also cherish literature.

In its early days, my blog was filled with much of my frustration about chronic mental illness and the stigma that has never been overcome. The subject still arises here on occasion but many of angriest posts have been made private. I try to stick to books, sometimes the subject of writing, and only when I am really down, do I open up a little more. (Of course, those are the posts that tend to get the strongest immediate response—always supportive—but I try not to complain about the world too often.)

The past year has been pretty smooth, if quiet. I have stayed close to home, tracing the same beloved trails and trying, with some difficulty, to regain the level of fitness I had prior to breaking my leg last year. I am, I suppose, at the age when it takes longer to get back to where I used to be. The weather—prolonged cold through the winter and unexpected heat early in May—has been one factor, but a new respect for caution has slowed me down a little. I rarely go out without my trekking poles and (wisely) take fewer risks than I once did. I’m also looking forward to travelling for the first time since 2019, hoping to return to India in September.

As I look back over the last twelve months, I’m pleased with the number and quality of the reviews I’ve published. I’m a slow reader and a slow writer and, aside from a post like this, I rarely ever compose online—every piece is typically written over several days on a Word document and uploaded to WordPress. For now this is still a satisfying activity for me; I have yet to feel a strong desire to pitch essays or reviews for publication elsewhere. To be honest, I do like being able to track the amount of attention my reviews get, at publication and over time. It’s a window into the varying interest certain books generate. And because this is my blog, I am not tied to reading only new releases. That is, I believe, the true beauty of the book blog, or when I’m being fancy, “literary site.” Over the past year, for example, my most popular post—over 4500 views since last September—is a review of Mahsweta Devi’s classic Mother of 1084. I can only assume it has been on the school curriculum in India (and wonder how many suspiciously similar reports teachers have received).

I have no special objectives for the next year of roughghosts. I read and write about books for myself first and foremost—that is, as an exercise in both reading and writing—and I am ever grateful for everyone who has stopped by (even those who, judging by their bizarre search terms, must have been sorely disappointed by what they found). Here’s to another year of great books and excellent company!

In the end, only the laughter remains: Austral by Carlos Fonseca

“Only someone who knows he is condemned can clearly see the path to salvation.”

Carlos Fonseca is a writer who delights in spinning complex webs that blend history, fiction and a distinct fondness for archival elements to create a framework within which important ideas and themes can be explored. As with his earlier works, Colonel Lagrimas and Natural History, his new novel Austral reaches across time and space to craft a unique literary environment complete with eccentric characters and grand schemes that gradually reveal the secret of their connections. But this time, the key to the puzzle the narrator is seeking to understand lies closer to home than he suspects when he is first drawn into this most unusual mystery.

Julio Gamboa’s world is unravelling when an unexpected summons arrives from his past. His distant past. The letter, postmarked in Argentina, bears an unfamiliar name, but the contents inform him that his friend Alicia—or Aliza as he had known her—Abravanel has died following a long illness that had, ultimately, left her almost entirely mute. However, as the letter writer, Olivia, assures him, she remained perfectly lucid to the very end. And, in passing, she entrusted a most important task to Julio, even though it had been more than thirty years since they last spoke or saw one another. An invitation to visit Aliza’s home in Humahuaca accompanies this curious missive and, with winter taking hold of Cincinnati and the future of his recently fractured marriage uncertain, Julio imagines not only a welcome reprieve, but a potential return.

Julio had met Aliza as a teenager in his native Costa Rica. To him she was exotic—a British girl bursting with poetry and stories of punk music who had run away from home at seventeen in pursuit of freedom and adventure. By contrast, he was cautious and uncertain, reluctantly committed to trying to meet his parents’ expectations that he pursue an academic future. Knowing that a scholarship awaited him, Julio and Aliza headed off on a last road trip up through Central America, finally ending in Guatemala during the volatile years of the early 1980s. That is where they parted ways, Julio leaving an angry and disappointed Aliza behind. Over the decades that followed, he moved to the US where he studied, got married and eventually settled into life as a professor of literature. Aliza, on the other hand, stayed in Latin America, changed the spelling of her name and began to write and publish novels in Spanish. When a stroke left her with a progressive form of aphasia, she moved to a commune in northern Argentina to try to complete the last installment of an ecologically themed tetralogy. But that goal had perhaps been too ambitious so her focus changed and she turned her attention to a new project. When she died, she left that manuscript with the explicit instruction that Julio was the only person who could edit it.

Upon his arrival in Humahuacha, he is given Aliza’s text—memoir or fiction, he is left to decide—and he begins to read a most remarkable account of Karl-Heinz von Mühlfeld, an anthropologist who travelled to Paraguay in the 1960s seeking the ruins of New Germany, the failed utopia founded in 1886 by Elisabeth Nietzsche, sister of Friedrich, and her eugenicist husband Bernhard Förster. But Karl-Heinz’s intended research takes a different turn when he meets Juvenal Suárez, the last surviving member of an indigenous tribe and only living speaker of the Nataibo language. Over several subsequent visits, the anthropologist’s efforts to record and preserve this soon-to-be-lost language increases while his sanity deteriorates. Aliza’s father comes into the picture a number of years later when he is invited to meet with the anthropologist in the Swiss sanitarium where he lives. He is inspired to carry the torch he believes the older man is attempting to pass him—a destructive path that left him ever changed but may have kindled his daughter’s attraction to Latin America.

As Julio makes his way into Aliza’s manuscript, titled A Private Language, he is impressed by the richness of the writing given the author’s declining ability to communicate while haunted by the notion that he is dealing with a work somehow composed in a “private key”—a text that “all could read but only one person could understand.” As her chosen reader, he feels that Aliza is offering him precious insight into the girl he once knew, but wonders what deeper message she might be sending him after all these years. Then, at a party, he learns of a companion piece she was working on, a dictionary of sorts. It is suggested that an indigenous man who visited the commune daily might know more. The following day, as Julio sets off by bus for Salinas Grande in search of this man, Raúl Sarapura, he is beset with his own linguistic anxieties:

Though he wouldn’t say so, he was bothered by that sense of foreignness that fell over him every time he came back to Latin America. That feeling of never really returning. An anxiety over belonging that occasionally even translated into grammatical errors and pronunciation mistakes, making him feel that little by little he was losing his language, and the last traces of his past along with it.

He returns bearing Dictionary of Loss, a notebook filled with almost child-like collages featuring images and entries with meanings, etymologies and commentaries for various words. If the key to understanding one text, and Aliza herself, lay in the other, and it was now Julio’s task to find the key to unlock the secret buried within this dual project.

Such a journey, of course, will lead Julio into a labyrinth lined with historical, philosophical and literary references, all somehow inextricable from his memories of his time with Aliza. But from his sofa back home in snowy Cincinnati, the logic connecting it all eludes him. Until he realizes that the roads he seems to be wandering down all lead to Guatemala, to the site of a village destroyed during the genocide, where a man he read about in the Dictionary, has constructed a memory theatre containing images, objects and recorded recollections—a space where fellow survivors of the war can honour their lost community and, through sharing memories, heal their trauma. Julio is certain that this is where he will find the answers he needs to complete the posthumous request his friend has made.

Austral is, clearly, a book about language, about the relationship of language—on an individual and societal level—to memory and legacy. It offers much to contemplate, but at the centre is the question of what can be done, in the face of the loss of language, to preserve the memory of a person or a people. Language does not exist in a vacuum, it needs to be spoken or read or committed to memory. Language is a link between the past and the future. A key image, repeated twice in the text, drawing on the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 – 1913) depicts a sketch of two rivers, one representing thought and the other representing language. The caption reads: “The trick, then, would be to learn to pass from one bank to the other without ceasing to speak.” For Saussure, language was a social phenomenon, in Austral the isolation of one speaker from a social network that has completely disappeared is mirrored by the potential loss of the ability of another speaker to navigate an existing system because the tools make that language possible have become inaccessible to her. But where an attempt to record a dictionary to preserve a dying language without a community fails, a dying speaker losing language is able to employ a community to reach an audience of one.

Fonseca, like his protagonist, is also from Costa Rica although he spent much of his adolescence in Puerto Rico, and Austral marks his first return to Central America in his writing. He notes in an interview that it meant a lot to finally feel comfortable “narrating from a region that I recognise as home but which I left long ago.” It may have taken three novels to get back there, but, having read and loved both of his previous works, I would suggest that this

is perhaps his strongest, most focused and most rewarding to date. Sometimes you can go home again.

Austral: A Novel by Carlos Fonseca is translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell and published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.