Life in the Court of Matane by Eric Dupont – My Numéro Cinq review

The publication of my most recent review for Numéro Cinq the other day, was, for me, a welcome opportunity to revisit an intelligent, humourous, bittersweet tale about growing up in Québec during the 1970’s and 80’s. This debut release from QC Fiction, a new imprint from Baraka Books created with the bold ambition to bring a new generation of Québec writers to an international audience through a subscription funded model, is first and foremost a story about family.

I have been thinking a lot about family myself these days as my brothers and I have been shaken and shattered by the critical injury of our father and the sudden passing of our mother within the span of the past week. Like all families, ours has its share of idiosyncratic dysfunction, but in our heartbreak we’ve been remembering the beauty and the humour above all of the difficulties and anxieties that have divided and united us over the years.

The family that Eric Dupont brings to life in Life in the Court of Matane, separated, defined and redefined by divorce and remarriage, shimmers with sparks of love, respect and affection. Even in the court of this latter day Henry VIII and his past and future queens, a sense of humour goes a long way, setting the ground for an unforgettable, original coming of age tale.

Here’s a taste of the review, please click through the link at the end to read the rest. A second link leads to an excerpt:

A Very Funny Novel: Eric Dupont’s Life in the Court of Matane — Joseph Schreiber

Growing up in a broken home is rarely easy. Too often children become pawns on the emotional battlefield as their parents face off against one another. This is the atmosphere of uncertainty and insecurity in which the eponymous narrator of Life in the Court of Matane and his sister find themselves at an early age. So it’s little wonder that they would recognize their predicament in the feats of a certain young Romanian gymnast swinging between the uneven parallel bars at 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. But Nadia Comaneci is only one of a number of personalities evoked in this inventive coming-of-age story. She joins the re-imagined court of Henry VIII, key figures in the debate between Québec Separatists and Federalists, and a menagerie of assorted birds and beasts in Eric Dupont’s engaging account of a childhood defined by divorce.

Originally published as Bestiaire in 2008, Peter McCambridge’s translation of this acclaimed novel heralds the debut of QC Fiction, an ambitious publishing initiative dedicated to introducing readers to an new generation of Québec literature. Their goal is to be able to offer “surprising, interesting novels in flawless English translation” to a wide audience through a subscription funded model inspired by publishers such as And Other Stories, Deep Vellum, and Open Letter Books. With this in mind, it is difficult to imagine a more enchanting and original novel to launch this new imprint than Life in the Court of Matane.

Continue reading here:

Read an excerpt here:

Thoughts on writing about The Surrender by Scott Esposito for Minor Literature(s)

The moment I heard that this book was on the horizon last year, I knew it was one that I had to read. But I could never have anticipated how tightly the release of The Surrender would intersect with my own fledgling efforts to put a voice to my own journey. The precipitous timing coloured not only how I read, but how I would go on to write about this book.

I entered Scott Esposito’s sensitive and intelligent three part essay into the heart of his own gendered identity armed with two notebooks. In one I catalogued my observations about the essays themselves–the structure, the form, and the content–while the other captured the flow of emotion, the moments of recognition, the ideas that spoke to my soul. One could say that I surrendered to this book. But I could only review it by putting my deepest personal reactions to one side and allowing Scott and his accounting centre stage. To do anything else would have been self indulgent, unprofessional. At the same time I simply wanted to open the work to the point that other readers would be drawn to enter in. One deserves to hear a story like Scott’s directly.

For my part, writing about The Surrender was an absolute joy. Thank you to Tomoé Hill at the wonderful Minor Literature(s) for entertaining my review.

You can read my review and see the original photograph I created to accompany it here.

Personal reflections on identity, for better or worse, on Canada Day

Today, July 1, is Canada Day.

Exactly one year ago I was in Cape Town. I arrived back in the city that day at 5:30 in the morning after seventeen hours on a bus from East London. Dragging my luggage with its maple leaf ID tags I encountered many who would note the flag and say “Ah, Canada, that’s just about the perfect country, isn’t it?” Invariably I was hearing this from black or coloured South Africans and, I have to confess, at that time in my country’s recent political history I was feeling most despondent, embarrassed even, to be Canadian. For the very first time in my life.

What a difference a year makes.

Hard to measure the shifting sands in the glass but while our Federal election last year brought home to the ruling Conservative Party the cost of divisive politics, the limits of denial and disrespect, and the risk of stoking xenophobia to sway sympathies; we now seem more and more like an island in a sea of unrest. And, I don’t pretend that we are immune to hatred, or that we don’t have a legacy of shame four “our” treatment of the First Nations on this land, but this is a huge and vastly underpopulated place so there is greater room to breathe.

At least for now.

As Canadians we also have another advantage: an identity that is relatively amorphous, ambiguous, sometimes even apologetic. A contest held in 1972 on the CBC Radio program, This Country in Morning, famously invited listeners to finish the statement: As Canadian as ________. The winning entry?

As Canadian as possible under the circumstances. And proudly so, I say.

Which leads me to wonder about identity, a question that has been troubling me of late.

There is a series of advertisements running on the television for a company that, for a fee, will analyze your DNA and tell you what your ancestry is, in percentages, no doubt with colourful pie charts to justify the cost. Perhaps you’ve seen them or something similar. You know, there is, for example, a man who always believed he was of German heritage but thanks to a little DNA sleuthing he discovers he is Scottish. He promptly trades his lederhosen for a kilt. And there are other variations but you get the drift.

How can your DNA define your cultural and ethnic identity? It might and then again it might not. Peoples migrate, borders shift, cultures evolve. An aboriginal survivor of the 60’s Scoop that literally pulled First Nations youth out of their homes and communities and deposited them in white foster homes may justifiably have a need for healing and reconnection with their heritage, but a DNA test that simply reflects possible ancestral bloodlines going back centuries or longer does not tell you who you are. Cultural and ethnic identity are complex and cannot be understood divorced from lived experience.

As I find myself, midway upon my life’s journey, to paraphrase Dante, I carry two questions of identity that, to some degree, offer an understanding of myself that reaches back into childhood and adolescence. But even if they are grounded in some understanding of a genetic/epigenetic heritage I own, the degree to which they can and do form part of my identity is troublesome. Identity is, as far as I am concerned, a choice. That is not to say it is not grounded in fact and reality at some level, but what does it mean to say “I identify”? And how is that to be differentiated from “I am”?

I have bipolar disorder (I touch on this in some of my earliest blog posts) and I was born with a pervasive sense of a gendered self that was at odds with the sex/gender that I appeared to be (I address this most explicitly here). I did not begin to understand either of these facts until I was in my mid-30’s. But they are inextricable from my experience of myself in the world, they are formative and I have no idea what it would be like to have existed without either although I have learned, with greater or lesser success, to live with each one. Both are treated, neither is cured. I have written about both, but I would be hard pressed to say that I identify as either bipolar or transgender. Would someone identify as a diabetic? Would you say you identify as brown-eyed?

I know people who do hold a mental health diagnosis or a gender identity with pride. Perhaps I did too at one time. Perhaps I still do even though I don’t want to admit it.

Recently my psychiatrist suggested, having reviewed the only records she had from my past—the report of an inpatient stay during acute psychosis almost twenty years ago, the turning point at which I finally began to unravel the fractured and unhappy state against which I had raged for several years—that she did not believe I was bipolar. That cheerful announcement set off weeks of rumination in which I replayed all of the episodes of depression and hypomania I had surfed for so many years, blaming myself for a failure to commit to any single course of study or employment. I began to appreciate how my understanding of the place I find myself at this point is contingent on having an explanation, an illness to blame. Combined with acute gender dysphoria I can assuage the sense of failure that haunts me. Justify all the paths I took or did not take.

Or, as my therapist challenged me yesterday, have I been using bipolar as an excuse to avoid grieving the losses I have experienced?

I don’t even know how to begin to grieve and the thought terrifies me. And, if I find my way through it all, perhaps I will write about it. But I do believe it may be the one path I have not yet dared to take.

Finally, what of gender? That is a topic for many essays I’m afraid. My differently gendered existence is essential to who I am, but again, it is not my identity. If forced, I “identify” as male, but prefer to understand myself simply as a man, and every time I qualify myself by appending trans* I feel reduced, dehumanized. One only has to exist within the LGBTQ community, such as it is, as a man attracted to men, to feel the full force of transphobia from within. And to have transitioned when I did, before it was fashionable and trendy to be trans, other transgender men were often exceptionally homophobic toward anyone who identified as gay. For everyone who claims to defy gender binaries there is a whole cast of characters propping them back up. I’m probably in there myself.

So, although I tick three out of the five basic boxes in LGBTQ, I have no Pride. But then I have no shame either. And identify? Well, here I stand I can be no other. Even if I don’t feel I belong. June is always tough for me. This month with all the difficult emotions stirred by the Orlando shootings has been especially hard.

I actually do belong to an LGBTQ community and have good friends there. My very closest friends are all queer. And yet I always feel like I am on the outside looking in. An impostor. But in what way? And who decides who belongs and who does not? Even apparently marginalized groups seem to find a way to splinter and divide.

Which brings me full circle to the angry racist, xenophobic, sexist and homophobic aggression and violence that threatens us all, at a time and in a world in which we should know better.

At least, for now, and on this day, the one thing I can say is: I identify as a proud Canadian.

Haunting fables for a modern world: Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams

She was a writer on my radar, Joy Williams, somehow unknown to me until recently, but then, the world of literature is large and sometimes voices pass us by until fate or chance draws them to our attention. Or, if the rather ambivalent and perplexed Lord who appears in so many of the stories in her latest collection has His way, a little divine intervention is exercised. And so it happened that I found myself in the ER earlier this week, an advance reader’s copy of Ninety-Nine Stories of God on my phone. Between the tests and assessments to rule out any heart problems (my own private post cardiac arrest paranoia I’m afraid), I devoured a healthy measure of these bite-sized fictional treats. The true cause of my symptoms laid me under for a good 36 hours, but I emerged today to finish the collection, slowly only for the sake of savouring these deliciously dark, reflective, engagingly original tales.

A healthy dose of the unique joy of Joy Williams proved the perfect medicine.

The ninety-nine vignettes and mini stories that comprise this precious volume run the range from the brief and aphoristic to “longer” tales that run for a page or two. A cast of literary, philosophical and other assorted personalities make appearances, as characters or subjects. Williams delights in building fables that feature Kafka, Karl Jung, Simone Weil, or Philip K. Dick among others. At times she reduces her musing to the very simplest of terms, as in this one sentence micro-story which receives its context, as most of the stories do, by the title which is always placed at the end:

You should have changed if you wanted to remain yourself but you were afraid to change.

SARTRE TO CAMUS

The Lord Himself is a regular presence, as one might expect. He tends to appear in the most innocuous situations—He waits in a pharmacy line for His shingles shot, dreams of participating in a demolition derby, and expresses horror at the suggestion that He go to Home Depot to purchase supplies for a tortoise He wishes to adopt. Williams’ God is as curious and confused by His creations, especially those of the human form and He seems to have little control over the fate of His charges.

The Lord was asked if He believed in reincarnation.

I do, He said. It explains so much.

What does it explain, Sir? someone asked.

On your last Fourth of July festivities, I was invited to observe an annual hot-dog-eating contest, the Lord said, and it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever witnessed.

NEGLECT

Bemused and caring, lovingly benign, this is a God one can’t help liking. Good thing too, because the world of the ordinary people (and animals, for that matter) who feature in the majority of these stories is often marked by loss, despair and an odd isolation from others.

In his Numéro Cinq review of The Visiting Privilege, a recent compilation of her first three collections of short stories, Jason DeYoung describes her work as:

Strange and dark, her stories and novels make their foundation in realism, but then you never know quite where they will lead to. Most stay firmly planned in the “manifest world,” while others drift off toward the uncanny.

This description holds fast here too, even in abbreviated form. The humour is black, and a disturbing energy courses just below the surface. Nothing is spelled out beyond the most spare, necessary, imagery. So many stories pivot, or pack their punch, not in the ostensible actions recounted but in the reactions of the characters which are often counterintuitive. There is a suggestion that we cling to our dysfunction, our delusions, possibly as a stand in for faith, leaving the poor Lord Himself an awkward outsider in a world He designed.

The style and format of this collection is most strongly reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator. Of course, it would be remiss if the great writer did not make an appearance as he does in a story about a woman reading book reviews:

She was reading a broadside that reviewed a number of books. The reviews were extremely intelligent and gracefully presented. She read about a cluster of works by Thomas Bernhard, the cranky genius of Austrian literature, works that had been translated into English. She doubted that she would buy these books. She learned that he always referred to his lifelong companion, Hedwig Stavianicek, as his “aunt”. She was thirty-seven years older than Bernhard. She couldn’t imagine she had been his lifelong companion for long.

Given the condition I’ve been in over the last few days that, through a wicked case of the flu, I reveled in these ninety-nine gems. This story goes on in a way that most wonderfully spoke to my state and made me smile:

She had had a fever for several days and she was loafing around, drinking fluids and reading. With her fever, the act of reading became ever stranger to her. First the words were solid, sternly limiting her perception of them to what she already knew. Then they became more frighteningly expansive, tapping into twisting arteries of memory. Then they became transparent, rendering them invisible.

I can assure you this will not be my last encounter with Joy Williams. I would encourage anyone whose interest has been sparked to check the review I’ve linked above which contains a video of Williams reading an essay entitled “Why I Write.” Ninety-Nine Stories of God will be released in July by Tin House.

Surfacing: Some reflections on the general messiness of life

I have been quiet these last few days. Not entirely absent, but definitely lying low. I’ve needed to claim a little cleansing time, hold social media at arms length for a while and, you know what? It feels really good. My life has taken on a fine shade of hell lately–at the least serious end a recalcitrant major household appliance, and at the most serious, an alcoholic adult child who confessed to making active suicidal plans. And since this is real life, there have been a few more critical pressure points in between, familial and financial.

With the worst of the most critical crises calmed, but of course not “over,” I thought I would emerge a little and take a deep breath.

Today I submitted my latest outside review and I am looking forward to spending a little time reading simply for the sake of reading. I may write about what I read, I may even write reviews, but I am keen to lose myself in words and ideas for a while without the pressure of dragging a notebook along. Fortunately I have no reservations against marginalia, love a book with a few blank pages at the end for notes, and never read without a pencil handy.

I have recently acquired a number of collections of short stories and essays that I am anxious to explore, I realize that I am almost a year from my trip to South Africa and I have barely touched the stacks of books I dragged home, and I am presently making my way through some works that I hope will contribute to my own writing. So I will not be at a loss for reading material, which is a good thing because my book budget has just been ruthlessly slashed by unexpected expenses.

But first and foremost I am caught in the absolute brilliance that is John Keene’s Counternarratives. This collection of short stories and novellas has me captivated. After noting it in my peripheral vision for months I finally bought a hardcover copy just before the paperback was released. Now that I am into it, I take it everywhere on the chance that I might have even a few minutes to slip back into it. I can’t remember the last time a book had me in it’s thrall like this one.

And when I am finished I might even write about it. But for now I just want to read.

PS. Warm thanks to DC, MM and JT for supportive words over the past few days. Who says you can’t meet some fine folks on Twitter?

Goethe Dies by Thomas Bernhard – My Numéro Cinq review

I have written about Thomas Bernhard’s novels before, but faced with prospect of writing a longer critical review of a book containing four short stories I was faced with a dilemma: What does one say about Bernhard?

The question really is: How much familiarity with Bernhard should one assume? He is, most definitely, a singular writer. Those of us who count ourselves among the converted tend to have bulging bookshelves filled with a healthy supply of Bernhard’s novels, memoirs and poetry. Others are uncertain or fail to be immediately captivated. A bit of Bernhard primer is thus in order for those potential new readers, especially in this instance, because Goethe Dies, the collection at hand, offers a perfect opportunity to experience the magic of the master in miniature. A treat I argue for readers no matter their degree of prior acquaintance.

So in the following review published at Numéro Cinq earlier this week I tried to balance my general discussion of Bernhard’s prose style to provide a context for the appreciation of my analysis of the stories that would not be too redundant for the experienced or too vague for the novice.

Here’s a taste of the review, please click through the link at the end to read the rest. And while you’re there have a look around. There is another great issue shaping up at NC.

A Master Set Loose in a Small Space: Review of Thomas Bernhard’s Goethe Dies — Joseph Schreiber

Once acquainted with the work of the late Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard, it is difficult to remain indifferent. One is either put off by his endlessly convoluted sentences, his bitter, misanthropic vision, and his fondness for digressive, contradictory and self-obsessed narratives; or one is swept up in the singular energetic flow of his darkly comic genius and never looks back. For those who find themselves in the latter camp, the announcement of a newly translated collection of four short stories originally published in periodicals in the early 1980’s is good news indeed.

Bernhard in short form may lack the unleashed full force intensity afforded when a single paragraph is allowed to unspool over one or two hundred pages or more; but these minor works, if you like, offer a valuable and entertaining opportunity to observe a master at play in a small, contained space. As with the early stories of Prose and the micro-fiction of The Voice Imitator, the short pieces collected in Goethe Dies, recently released by Seagull Books, highlight many of the essential elements that lend Bernhard’s work such a distinctive, infectious voice. Consequently, they may be best appreciated against a certain familiarity with the author and the idiosyncratic features that characterize his novels.

Continue reading here:

Innocence betrayed: My Father’s Dreams by Evald Flisar

Adolescence is, at the best of times, a period of turbulence. Hormones take over, driving hopes, desires and emotions. For Adam, the fourteen year-old narrator of My Father’s Dreams puberty becomes a twisted, surreal experience as he finds himself swept up in a world in which the line between dreams and reality becomes dangerously blurred. In this dark multi-faceted tale, Slovenian author Evald Flisar sets the stage for a story that is oddly out of time and place—a contemporary novel that evokes, in its backward rural setting and naive tone, a feeling of gothic horror or psychological drama that would be perfectly at home in the literature of the early twentieth century. But themes running through the narrative that are distinctly modern in their context and execution create an atmosphere that is eerily discordant and profoundly disturbing.

Adam is a loner. He lives with his parents in a small rural village in an unnamed country. He describes his mother as shrill, over emotional and unduly concerned with social appearances. But he adores his father, the local doctor, unreservedly. He is the centre of his universe and he cannot imagine that he would ever cause him any harm. Adam spends his free time devouring books borrowed from his father’s library, a wide range of classic literature that runs the gamut from Zane Grey to Goethe to de Sade and Kafka and more. Not one to make friends easily, his sole confidant is his assumed brother Abortus, a jarred fetus who “lives” in his father’s secret laboratory in the basement of the health centre.

As puberty hits, Adam is increasingly beset by vivid dreams. He is unaware of just how odd and unnerving the content is until he allows it to fuel a school assignment. His teachers and his mother respond with shock. However, his rich dream life quickly becomes an object of fascination—or perhaps manipulation—for his father. Before long Adam finds that he is losing the ability to define the intersection of dreams and ordinary life:

. . . soon I was having too many dreams, and they began to suffocate me. Daily hallucinations merged with nightmares so imperceptibly that I was finding it harder and harder to draw the line between them. Afraid that I would sink in the burgeoning swamp of my own imagination, I began to flee in the direction of hard reality, grasping at anything that could be seen, felt, heard, or smelled. Soon I became so oversensitive that I registered the slightest rustle, the tiniest change in light, the least noticeable smell.

Over the course of the summer, the content of his dreams continue to haunt his days and nights. They regularly feature a familiar theme. Time after time he finds himself observing his father engaged in sexual activity with Eve, an attractive young teenaged girl from the city who is staying with her grandfather for the school holidays.

His father had warned him not to discuss his dreams, but encouraged him to record them. In his journals, Adam documents his thoughts and dreams which, with the blurring of his sense of reality, he has come to understand as being one and the same… the dream context granting immunity from the content of his thoughts which are peppered with images of sexual arousal and a desire for revenge against his parents. He quickly learns that these diaries are better kept hidden. And he has the perfect location—behind his jarred little brother, with whom he shares all of his secrets without reservation. With adults he is cautious to edit his responses to their queries about his dreams which are then subjected to Freudian and Jungian inspired debates. The only adult with whom he dares to approach an honest account is Eve’s kindly grandfather, who listens with a sharp concern that Adam notices but fails to appreciate.

During his strange dreams, Adam sometimes questions his ability to fall in and out of a hallucinatory state as well as his peculiar ability to exercise some agency, but he invariably seems to be able to assure himself that he is dreaming and, as a result, safe from any real danger. He continues to trust his father implicitly even when during an intentional “shared dream” proposed as a potential cure, he finds himself abandoned in a strange town with two young women:

The mist is now all around us, I can feel it on my cheeks; it is cold. The church clock delivers eleven strikes. There is no sign of Father. They are closing the inn, we have to leave. Like shadows we slink off along the the road leading into the centre of the town. It’s a very small town, almost a village. I am tired and sleepy. I am beginning to worry that Father might not return. Where will I sleep? It’s a strange thought, asking oneself where one will sleep in a dream, but the night is cold, and my worry is almost real. We roam around, passing houses, shuttered shops, and silent buildings. The church clock announces the time: half past midnight. And still there is no sign of Father.

Curiously (or not), the dreams involving his father and Eve cease as soon as the latter returns to the city in September. With autumn’s arrival his mother makes increased efforts to salvage the family, while his father’s behaviour becomes more erratic and threatening. Adam’s “dreams” begin to seem more like a protective psychological suggestion or even a defense mechanism evoked to cloud his perception of the events he observes or experiences. But again, he never openly contemplates this. His narrative, offered from a future perspective, looking back, belies a folkloric sense of innocence that cannot entirely be trusted. It casts a strange shadow across the work contributing to the odd tone. Dark topics such as addiction, suicide and pedophilia lurk at the heart of this tale amid the supernatural, surreal and grotesque elements. As a result the reader is left to navigate a slippery substrate that, even as tensions build to to a horrifying conclusion, refuses to yield to clear interpretation. The result is a complex, unnerving, unforgettable novel.

Novelist, playwright, essayist, and world traveler, Evald Flisar is one of Slovenia’s best known writers. Translated from the Slovene by the author and Alan McConnell-Duff, My Father’s Dreams is published by Istros Books. In their new collaboration with Peter Owen Publishers, they will be releasing Flisar’s Three Loves, One Death in November.

Reading into writing: Two years of roughghosts

Beyond the ear there is a sound, at the far end of sight there is a view, at the tips of the fingers an object—that’s where I’m going.

At the tip of the pencil the line.

Where a thought expires is an idea, at the final breath of joy another joy, at the point of the sword magic—that’s where I’m going.

– Clarice Lispector, “That’s Where I’m Going”

Today is the second anniversary of the rather haphazard and ill-defined birth of roughghosts. The evolution of this space that I tend has far exceeded my expectations. When I look back at my very first post, a quick note to self, I talk about having long put aside the desire to write so as to live a little first, acknowledging that life had given me more material than I was comfortable addressing–a theme I’ve revisited since. My first year of blogging saw a collection of random observations and occasional book related posts develop into increasingly structured book reviews interspersed with the occasional reflective essay. Looking ahead to my second year I had hoped to broaden my reading while privately I was more actively playing with ideas that I hoped would eventually lead to a serious creative effort of some measure. But as much as I had been filling notebooks, I was writing more about wanting to write as if wishing could make it so, rather than believing that I would ever offer something beyond the confines of this blog.

For me, my blog, no matter how seriously I consider every word I offer here, no matter how many hours I spend constructing essays or reviews, has always been a twilight place. It belongs to neither the day nor the night but sits at the intersection of the two: a place where I can imagine that I am not quite exposed to the full light of day, a place where the darkest truths remain unspoken. For that is the realm of real writing and what am I, editing my efforts and posting them myself, but pretending to the art?

I know, of course, that this is not true.

The past twelve months have changed everything, and in more ways than I might ever have imagined.

Writing is the conscious attempt by the human to participate in his fate, that ‘story’ written from birth to death. Casting spells, exorcising, whistling in the dark, inventing the textures and structures of consciousness, keeping a backdoor open to memory, getting to know who or what we are, both reflecting what is and shaping the new. Memory is nothing but dead time, but death seeds the soil: from forgetting new shapes sprout. . .

For writing is a means to transformation: using words and their interacting combinations—the meanings, the feel, the sounds and the shadows—to broaden our scope of apprehending and understanding ourselves and others, and in the process creating new spaces and references. Sometimes looking down into hell.

– Breyten Breytenbach, Intimate Stranger

Last year, on July 7 to be exact, with the majestic Table Mountain rising in the background, I started to write the essay I had been toying with for over a year. It was my last full day in South Africa and looking back over the preceding year I envisioned this grand narrative that would guide my writing, shape the story I wanted to tell. On July 27 a pulmonary embolism caused me to go into cardiac arrest. I stared into the abyss, metaphorically speaking, that is, because I have no memory of the event or of the days immediately before or after, but I do know that if my son had not been home that night I would not be here.

And I know that every idle word to page before that moment was precious more than wishful scribbling. To write, honestly and openly, was now critical.

My path from the confines of my blog to the publication of my first piece of essay/memoir writing earlier this month has been quite remarkable. Doors have opened, starting with Douglas Glover at Numéro Cinq where I am proud to be on the masthead. I have since published reviews for several other sites or publications and have more forthcoming, and I have another piece of creative writing that will be in the Seagull Books Catalogue this fall. It does mean that my attention is necessarily diverted from my blog at times but I will link to new pieces as they appear and have created a page of links to outside writing. I never would have dared to dream that I would need such a page at this time last year. Nor did I imagine that I would now call myself a writer.

I derive a great deal of satisfaction from the challenge of writing longer critical reviews. To read and engage with a text at a deeper level opens an entirely new appreciation of language and literature. It fuels and, I hope, enhances my own ability to write. And over the past year I have been fortunate to become acquainted with some truly gifted thinkers and writers who inspire and encourage me, as well as building stronger intellectual and readerly camaraderie with fellow bloggers.

I don’t know where fiction is born, but I am certain that the best essay/memoir writing does not have its roots on our brightest days. Rather, it emerges from the shadows, when we are wounded, grieving, shaken to the core. We write to make sense of pain, of confusion, of loss. We write out of the darkness toward the light. We write in the in-between spaces—daybreak, twilight—find the patterns, themes, edit, shape, refine and edit again, careful to leave room for tension, friction, the beating heart.

And, of course, we write because we have to.

Here’s to a new year, so to speak.

The pursuit of happiness: Sergio Y. by Alexandre Vidal Porto

“If happiness is not where we are, we must chase her. She sometimes lives very far away. You must have the courage to be happy.”

When it comes to the depiction of transgender individuals in literary fiction, I will confess that I am a rather cynical customer. Lets just say I know the reality too well. So much of what I have read does not even come close to scratching the surface of what it means to be at odds with one’s own birth-assigned gender. Intentions are good and, of course, the transgender or intersex character always allows for an interesting twist but the results can be misleading, even distressingly off base. That’s why Sergio Y. by Brazilian author Alexandre Vidal Porto is such a refreshing and original read. Here is a novel that treats the subject with intelligence and compassion—quite the feat for a book in which the transgender character meets an untimely and unfortunate end before the story even gets started.

The title character, Sergio Y. is the son of a wealthy businessman in São Paolo, Brazil, and the great grandson of an Armenian immigrant who escaped the tragic fate of so many of his countrymen, including the rest of his family, when he crossed the ocean in 1915, seeking his happiness in the Americas. The narrator is Armando, a well-respected seventy year-old psychiatrist. Sergio had been referred to him for therapy at the age of seventeen, described simply as “articulate, intelligent and confused.” They meet regularly for several years. This mature young man—so handsome, wealthy and talented—intrigues Armando and yet, in spite of all of these advantages, he professes to be possessed by a deep and abiding unhappiness.

Following a visit to New York City one Christmas, Sergio informs Armando that he wishes to discontinue therapy. He has had a revelation, he says, and he believes he has found a way to be happy. Our narrator is a little disgruntled to be dismissed as such but, as the years pass, Sergio Y. fades from his mind until a chance encounter with his former patient’s mother. She reports that her son has moved to New York where he attended culinary school and is now about to open his own restaurant. Armando is surprised, but pleased by this news and the praise he is afforded for his role in helping Sergio find happiness at last. However, this boost to his ego is short lived. Armando’s world begins to crumble when he learns, quite by chance, that Sergio Y. has been murdered at his home in the West Village.

Obsessive by nature, Armando becomes haunted by the need to know more. What he discovers with the help of a private investigator is completely unexpected and sends him reeling. The murder victim is identified as Sandra Yacoubian, female. Sandra and Sergio he soon learns are, in fact, one and the same person. His young patient had found his happiness as a woman and now she was dead at the age of 23! How could he have failed to recognize that Sergio was transsexual? And, even more serious, was his failure in some way responsible for this tragic outcome?

The main source of my frustration was not having detected any hint of Sergio Y.’s transsexuality. I felt I had been duped solely and exclusively by my own incompetence. I had always though that the secret to transsexuality was not all that deep, that it revealed itself in all of the individual’s attitudes, at all times, in all the decisions he or she took, since early childhood. As far as I was concerned, the pain in the patient’s soul and their inner confusion would be so visible that one did not need to be a Freudian or Jungian psychoanalyst to make the diagnosis.

Armando’s search for answers and his personal quest for understanding lie at the heart of this book. He begins with a handful of stereotyped assumptions. He labels them, admits to them, and lays them out. In the end, as he comes to a clearer,more nuanced appreciation of the decision his patient chose to take to find happiness and the determination with which she pursued it.

The narrative tone is highly idiosyncratic, dictated by the analytical, mildly obsessive-compulsive, immodest character of Armando. Even when he begins to doubt and second-guess himself as the account progresses, he maintains the matter of fact, dry, clinical delivery of a psychiatric report. The attention to detail—his clothing choices, his tendency to note the approximate height and weight of people he encounters, even his reports of his own emotional ups and downs—all create the illusion of a sterile account. But when the careful veneer cracks from time to time, we see a moody, somewhat petulant character, prone to bursts of pride, mixed with episodes of guilt and shame. He is continually measuring himself against his own successes and failures. His internal machinations are fascinating.

Ultimately, Sergio Y. is novel that approaches the transgender experience from the inside and the outside, allowing for the comfort with names and pronouns to vary, over time and from person to person, reflecting the complexities of relationships that others, even loving family members, can have when an accepted and assumed identity is challenged. In his own journey to understand and set his mind at ease, the questions Armando raises and the answers he finds serve to create a moving and compassionate portrait of the transgender person’s conflicted internal experience and the search to find a way to be happy in the world.

Happiness may be an ideal; comfort or contentment might work as well. From my point on this same journey I would hasten to add that it can be a difficult and lonely path, but that does not mean it is not worth following. In fact, if it is the right path, there is no other. Semantics aside, this novel is an important, engaging read. It deserves to be written about and it needs to be discussed.

Sergio Y. is translated from the Portuguese by Alex Ladd and published by Europa Editions.

Immersed in the moment: Incidents by Roland Barthes

In his Publisher’s Note to the French edition of Roland Barthes’ Incidents, a collection of essays published shortly after the theorist’s death in 1980, François Wahl suggests that the four very different texts assembled form a coherent whole because each piece “strives to grasp the immediate”. These are not theoretical or critical investigations in any sense, rather, in each text, Barthes is immersed in the moment, observing, reflecting, and recording his reactions. There is an unchecked flow and intimacy, by turns nostalgic, sensual, and melancholic but always tuned to the instance of occurrence: to the incident.

These are works that invite the reader to engage with all five senses, mediated through words and memory–they are not formal pieces but rather take the form of journal entries, diary writing, and fragmented travelogue. Barthes writes people and he writes place, never really entirely at ease with too much of either. Delight, boredom, and sadness filter through his reflections creating an immediacy that is at times startling. He is not writing for posterity, he is writing for himself.

The collection opens with “The Light of the South West”, an evocative essay/memoir, a personal tribute to the south west region of France. He writes about the experience of traveling south from Paris. Passing Angoulème he becomes aware that he is on the “threshold” of the land of his childhood. It is the quality of light that defines the place:

. . . noble and subtle at the same time; it is never grey, never gloomy (even when the sun isn’t shining); it is light-space, defined less by the altered colours of things . . . than by the eminently inhabitable quality it gives to the earth. I can think of no other way to say it: it is a luminous light. You have to see this light (I almost want to say: you have to hear it, hear its musical quality). In autumn, the most glorious season in this land, the light is liquid, radiant, heartbreaking since it is the final beautiful light of the year, illuminating and distinguishing everything it touches. . .

He goes on to turn his attention to the elements of the south west that resonate with different aspects of his childhood, to reflect on the way that memories formed in childhood inform way we remember the places associated with that time, the magical spaces and the difficult times will each carry their own tone, their own qualities.

The title piece is the earliest in the book. Recorded in 1969 when the author was in his mid-50s, “Incidents”, as the name implies, captures moments from an extended stay in Morocco through an incidental series of fragmented encounters and experiences. Here, people form the scenery; with a special attention reserved for young men. Barthes demonstrates a a particular eye for detail (and somewhat of an obsession with hands) in these passing observations, combined with an acute sensitivity for scents and colours. The vibrancy, shades and contrasts of the country come alive. As a reader you become aware of the blinding light, the dark shadows–they are not described, you sense them in the background.

A young black man, wearing a crème de menthe-coloured shirt, almond green pants, orange socks and, obviously, very soft red shoes.

A handsome, mature looking young man, well dressed in a grey suit and a gold bracelt, with delicate clean hands, smoking red Olympic cigarettes, drinking tea, is speaking quite earnestly (some sort of civil servant? One of those who track down files?), and a tiny thread of saliva drips onto his knee. His companion points it out to him.

Some young Moroccans–with girlfriends they can show off in front of–pretending to speak English with exaggerated French accents (a way of hiding the fact without losing face that they will never have a good accent).

The art of living in Marrakesh: a fleeting conversation from open carriage to bicycle; a cigarette given, a meeting arranged, the bicycle turns the corner and slowly disappears.

The Marrakesh soul: wild roses in the mountains of mint.

The third essay, “At Le Palace Tonight . . .” is a tribute to a Paris club in a converted theatre. He describes the ornate detail, the mood and the atmosphere of this place where he seems to almost prefer to be an observer, watching the dancers and the human interactions rather than taking part. And as in the first essay, we find once again a wonderful evocation of light, this time light as informed by the interior of a structure:

Isn’t it the material of modern art today, of daily art, light? In ordinary theatres, the light originates at a distance, directed onto the stage. At Le Palace, the entire theatre is the stage; the light takes up all the space there, inside of which it is alive and plays like one of the actors: an intelligent laser, with a complicated and refined mind, like an exhibitor of abstract figurines, it produces enigmatic shapes, with abrupt changes: circles, rectangles, ellipses, lines, ropes, galaxies, twists.

This collection closes with “Evenings in Paris” a series of journal entries from 1979 that open with words Schopenhauer wrote on a piece of paper before he died: “Well, we’ve escaped very nicely.” The Barthes who comes through in this selection is tired, often impatient with colleagues and irritated by noise. A certain loneliness and dissatisfaction underscore his descriptions of dinners with friends, failed attempts to win the affections of the younger men he covets, and an unresolved mourning for his beloved mother. Most nights he finds himself heading home alone, half despairing, half relieved, to settle into bed in the company of Pascal, Chateaubriand, Dante, or the echoing ghost of Proust. Although he still enjoys longingly watching attractive men, he has little patience for crowds or social functions. This is a heavier, more emotionally intense offering, the intimacy of “the immediate” weighs heavily as Barthes commits his thoughts to paper, unaware in the writing as we are in the reading, that he is nearing the end of his life.

And, because he is recording the ordinariness of the daily encounter of the self with the world, there is the possibility of shock waves that ring down the years with a new intensity in light of the incidents (that word again) that have unsettled Paris in recent years:

The guy who sells Charlie-Hebdo walks by; on the cover in the publication’s idiotic style, there’s a basket of greenish heads that look like lettuces: ‘2 francs the head of a Cambodian’; and, right then, a young Cambodian rushes into the café, sees the cover, is visibly shocked, concerned, and buys a copy: the head of a Cambodian!

Not without a little social commentary, even in a deeply personal journal, Roland Barthes, remains ever relevant down the years.

Reading Incidents is, in itself, a sensuous experience, it is doubly so in this edition from Seagull Books. With a sparkling fresh translation by Teresa Lavender Fagan and illustrated with the evocative photographic images of Bishan Samaddar, this collection of writings becomes one that can, as Barthes himself would have intended, be savoured.

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