Tag: books

 “. . . 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.

“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.

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.

It’s raining light: Second Star and Other Reasons for Lingering by Philippe Delerm

In the waiting area, they’ve installed a piano. There’s one in each of the big Paris railway stations now, but you never know how that will go. In the Gare du Nord the other day, an older woman set her suitcase down beside her and then played, with great application, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring before melting back into the crowd, aware that no one had stopped to listen. She left without looking around, suitcase in hand, a little smile on her lips, of annoyance or contentment.
(from “En Route Virtuosos”)

French writer Philippe Delerm is a thoughtful documentarian of the quotidian experience. His signature pieces, one or two pages long, zero in on the small details of familiar actions or activities. Some might be thought of as meditations, others like character sketches or vignettes, and yet others like prose poems. Each one welcomes the reader in, sometimes addressing “you” directly, to consider a task, interaction or activity with a degree of attention you might otherwise overlook or disregard. It takes a special talent, after all, to celebrate the special satisfaction of washing windows. But that’s just one of the many subjects Delerm entertains in Second Star and Other Reasons for Lingering, a collection of sixty brief essays, drawn from his most recent collections of “literary snapshots”—The Troubled Waters of the Mojito and The Ecstacy of the Selfie—and translated by Jody Gladding.

Delerm approaches his topics with a careful eye, gentle wisdom and a little humour. They may be best appreciated a handful at a time, allowing space for the lingering the book’s title suggests. His subjects range from the whimsical to the profound and cover a considerable amount of territory from seasonal meditations, to the dissection of the enjoyment of a clementine, a slice of watermelon or a raw turnip.  Looking to the past, he ponders the watch pocket from the days of the pocket watch while in our futuristic present he contemplates the fingertip memory our cellphones now afford us. Delerm excels at creating scenes into which he invites you to imagine yourself gazing at a glass of whisky, directing a reluctant shopping cart or rolling up your sleeves. He takes you out onto the streets of Paris, visits Venice, spends time on the beach. Many of his “snapshots” capture familiar, common everyday moments, but, even in places and activities you’ve never experienced, he manages to kindle recognition because it is the intricacy of experience itself rather than the specific place or act. And, in doing so, we are inspired to take extra notice of our own small moments.

Like a prose poem, Delerm’s meditations tend to move toward a final moment that balances the prosaic with the profound—and sometimes this arises in the most unexpected context. Take for example, “The Embarrassment of Vaping” which suggest that vaping, if not hidden, lacks that certain mystique once associated with cigarettes:

There’s none of that with vaping. At first it was thought to be harmless, quite an insult to a self-destructive ritual. Doubts were raised, which have yet to spawn a new mythology. That’s because of the gesture. So sad in its asceticism, its privacy, surly Epicurean reduced to Jansenist. Someday maybe they’ll be a Gainsbourg for vaping. Although it’s hard to imagine. In the meantime, we have to go on living, or else smoking. Because smoking kills. But then living does too.

In other pieces, sentiment is clearly the guiding force, leading to a moving portrait as in “Memory of Forgetting” which looks in on a blind woman, newly moved to the Alzheimer’s unit of  a nursing home. Disoriented and frustrated, she tends to become irritated easily. When she informed that her husband has come to visit, she is surprised to learn that she has a husband, excited when she is told he has photos of her that he looks at often. She asks if she can meet him:

She’s happy to come sit beside his man who, five minutes earlier, she wasn’t the least bit aware of. She hums along with the Schubert impromptu and you’re amazed at her incredible memory for melodies, for songs.

Her face has relaxed and become almost radiant, ecstatic. For someone doing so badly, how can she still be so well? Why must she suffer the same anguish in her room again tonight? She’ll remember that she lost something, she won’t know what. They say it’s hell. But there isn’t a word for it.

Philippe Delerm is capable of taking the smallest sensations and observations and turn them into quiet meditations that fit within a frame that is never too tight or too large. It is fine skill, representative of a form or genre that he created over two decades ago. Now, with this attractively presented collection, English language readers can experience its charms.

Second Star and Other Reasons for Lingering by Philippe Delerm is translated from the French by Jody Gladding and published by Archipelago Books.

Rain like this doesn’t wash away the filth: Hawa Hawa and Other Stories by Nabarun Bhattacharya

The gleaming wet road, the rusty tin roof of a motorcar repair garage, behind it an old paint-peeling stunned-still old house and a chimney precariously propped up with haphazard wires—the sky can see all this. And, not as clearly, the burnt-black tin-backed shops and buses and the in-between blocks of darkness that were Matador sheds and not the half-rotten bellies of fish but the shells of banged-up taxis. There were crumbling and dead accident cars too, their mouths full of dirt. The sky view mists over every now and then, for it has been raining continuously.

This is the setting of “Last Night,” one of the pieces in Hawa Hawa and Other Stories, the recently released collection of inventive short stories by Bengali writer Nabarun Bhattacharya. As the angry rain beats down on the trash-filled water logged street, two young men are fighting. They are unevenly matched, a condition mediated by sheer intoxication, but they are each intent on doing damage to the other. And in a very unexpected way they are also best friends.

Bhattacharya (1948-2014), the son of writer and activist Mahasweta Devi and actor and playwright Bijon Bhattacharya, worked as a journalist from 1971 to 1993, before turning his attention to writing fulltime. His magic realist tales tend to feature eccentric characters drawn from the shadows—dirty cops, nostalgic former revolutionaries, unsavoury figures and an assortment of anxious souls. His Calcutta is gritty, pungent, dark and unforgiving. The scenes that unfold, on these streets and beyond, range from sharp political and social satire to strange meditations on violence, madness and love. Set primarily in the 1970s and 80s, but reaching back as far as the 1940s, there are stories that play out against the early Communist-led peasant movements in West Bengal, the Naxalite uprising and the 1975 Emergency, as well as more intimate dramas set in family homes, trains and, of course, on the street.

Bhattacharya excels at creating memorable characters, and rapid, witty sequences of dialogue peppered with English words (indicated in the translation with the use of italics) and references to popular Indian films and songs. A number of his stories rely heavily on a steady back and forth between two people who happen to meet up and share some kind of common past or current circumstance. Others unfurl under surreal conditions, influenced by alcohol, madness or some impending fear. There is an immersive quality to these dark tales.

Take, for example, “Mole,” the story of a seemingly unrepentant cop with a patch of skin on his neck that begins to itch and become inflamed just before he murders someone—“murder” being an accepted language for the state-sanctioned killing his investigative role entails. The itch causes his restless right hand to fumble in his pants pocket where his pistol awaits. The sweat, the smells and the agitation grow. We follow him on a mission to a nightclub. Once the job is done he kicks at the corpse bouncing on the floor of the police van and emotionally decompresses as he returns to the station. A bleak and grim premise perhaps but for the banter in the office (with its water tank filled with bombs to be deactivated), the pointed parenthetical commentary on authorized violence, and the insatiable demons that haunt the protagonist:

Back home, he usually takes a bath, uses soap—puts some ointment on the itch—the sweat from his body and the dirty soap-lather swirl into the drain and disappear. He rubs scented oil on his hair. He is very sleepy, but sleep never comes without dreams. Dreams have eyes, they ask questions, they laugh, they beat on drums. Their limbs are ripped and shredded, bits and pieces bloody. His family has told him he sometimes talks in his sleep, groans, slurs out orders. Sometimes he scratches his back so furiously that he wakes up in the morning to find it bleeding.

There is a deeply embedded hallucinatory fear that follows him down the darkened Calcutta streets and adds a spark of troubled humanity to his situation.

Fear and superstition mark several of the tales, most tragically perhaps in “A Piece of Nylon Rope” in which two men meet outside a hospital on a rainy night. The narrator is there to look in on a colleague who had a stroke at the office, while the other is waiting for news of his son who suffered a serious football injury. The latter, Jagadish-babu, has a uncertain confidence despite the poor prognosis. He feels his fate has turned. He explains that he was already inclined to seeking fortune tellers and good luck charms when he learned that what he really needed was to get a piece of a hanging rope:

‘Hanging rope?’

‘Yes. Suppose someone hangs themselves to death. If you can get a piece of that rope and keep it with you, then boom!—whatever you want is yours. All the evil eyes on you, the vexing, the hexing—the whole fucking lot will vanish. Khoka’s injured so badly. But do you see any fear in me?’

Jagadish shows the narrator the length of nylon rope he has acquired and carries with him everywhere, but admits that the good fortune it promises comes with a steep price. He cannot be alone, for fear the suicide victim will return and demand the rope back. For a man with a trusted talisman, he is a nervous wreck.

Several of the stories in Hawa Hawa, including the title tale and “Mole,” highlight the brutality of the West Bengal police, while another demonstrates the inability of a newly elected politician to protect an old friend and revolutionary comrade. Elsewhere we meet a child with a cruel streak, the brother of an accused murderer who holds to his belief in his innocence, a businessman offering the perfect suicide—for a price—and a gangster who prophetically spends the evening with a headless prostitute. Inequality, injustice and the abuse of power are common themes driving the world that Battacharya wanted to bring to the surface through his darkly humorous, weirdly engaging fiction. And if his comfortable contemporary Bengali audience was disturbed by what they found in his work, he was hitting his mark.

Notably, this translation is the work of a young translator, Subha Prasad Sanyal, and his ability to bring Battacharya’s subversive and playful writing to life is impressive. He pays careful attention to rhythm and tone. As mentioned, the English words transliterated in the original Bengali text are italicized, yet many Bangla terms are left intact where context is sufficient to imply meaning, a choice that helps maintain a distinctive narrative feel. Meanwhile, any cultural, political and place references that enhance understanding are explained in the Translator’s Note.

Hawa Hawa by Nabarun Bhattacharya is translated by Subha Prasad Sanyal and published by Seagull Books.