One more circle

Life After Life - Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown and Company, 2013)

This is one of those books that you want to tell people about, but you can't quite find a concise way to do so. If you are like me, your pitch goes a little like this:

So there's this girl, and she keeps living her life over and over again. Like, she's born, but she dies in childbirth, and then she's born again... [interjection: reincarnated?] no, the exact same life, but this time the doctor arrives in time to save her, but then she drowns, and then she's born again but hesitates in the water and so is saved but then... and then there's the flu epidemic after World War I and...

This is the point where my FH admitted, "I lost you awhile ago and haven't really been paying attention." My mom tried, but was also stuck on the reincarnation point. Or then parallel universes, except they are not parallel since Ursula seems to maintain ghostly remembrances and premonitions relating to past lives, often in ways that help her save herself or a loved one. (And since it's nearly impossible to discuss this novel without reference to Groundhog Day, RIP Harold Ramis.)

But the reincarnation thing is a really awesome point, since a character even explicitly mentions the Buddhist notion that we keep living over and over again until we get it right. And while I've always understood that as living other lives throughout one chronological experience of time, there's no reason it couldn't be living the "same" life again and again.

But if that's the case, what is "getting it right" and is that something that's even possible? Atkinson dances up to this question, but I'd say she engages with it more implicitly than explicitly. She raises far more questions that she answers.

It's funny, reading how Ursula dies again and again mitigates the pain and sorrow of those deaths, but only to a point. You still grieve when awful things happen to her (and they do) and when a life that seems to be going well comes to an end before its time. And you grieve even more for the loved ones who are lost along the way, particularly when they appear to be collateral damage in Ursula's half-conscious attempts to alter her fate. Oh, while some sections (and lives) are short, other scenes are much longer and a huge chunk of the book is comprised of Ursula's varying experiences during World War II. And it should come as no surprise that there are an awful lot of (terrible) ways to die in that war.

So the book is really something. For the beautiful writing and the way that the premise never feels gimmicky first and foremost, but also for the metaphysical questions that it raises. I'll be thinking a lot about what the implications would be if we did indeed live our lives time after time.

You bear the unbearable because you have no other choice

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)

You have to know this book is setting you up to carry a heavy weight. The setting: Nazi Germany. The narrator: Death. That's all you really need to know, yes?

Liesel steals her first book at her brother's graveside. Her brother, who died beside her on a train as her mother accompanied them to a new foster home. Her father? A Communist, so who knows where he was. Liesel gets new parents, a harridan of a mother and a gentle musician father. And a new life. She learns to read, makes friends, all against the backdrop of a gathering storm, that breaks out in Poland, and then everywhere.

And then... her new Papa owes his survival in the First World War to a comrade who lost his life. He vowed to the widow that he would be there to repay the debt. And so the family finds itself sheltering a young Jewish man in the basement.

Because it's Nazi Germany, even the glimmers of joy are against a background of dread, destruction, and death. Speaking of death, the narrator helpfully softens the blow by foreshadowing much that befalls them. And yet, each time the dagger falls, it cuts. Reading this book is a devastating experience.

And yet, there are those glimmers of joy and beauty. For one, you discover that beneath the carping facade of Liesel's foster mother is a loving, giving, and strong woman. Zusak offers a plausible depiction of a town where many of the people (with a capital P if you like) do not subscribe to the policies and beliefs of the Nazis, and perform their own small acts of rebellion. Everyone was culpable, but maybe some did all they could.

Hope & Faith

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka (Penguin, 2005)


So the two sisters are Hope & Faith (except the family is Ukrainian, so they are Nadezhda and Vera) - this is important enough that it gets spelled out. Their elderly widower father decides to marry a voluptuous Ukrainian immigrant, to help her get her papers. And because he is in his mid-80s, and utterly infatuated with this woman who makes him feel like a man again. The sisters, unsurprisingly, are not excited about this plan.

So he marries, and then everything (predictably) goes to hell. And much of the book is a tale of how they are going to get rid of this monstrous woman, sprinkled with occasional questions of whether one should admire her tenacity and/or have sympathy for her striving. But what it reminded me of was - of all things - Catch-22. I felt that same profound discomfort and unease while reading, that same sense of being trapped in an illogical world, where life was profoundly unfair. Through the looking glass, I suppose. Or like life in the USSR, for that matter. I kept reading because I wanted to know how it played out, but I felt... well, icky.

Then, somehow, it picks up a lot of speed. Maybe because you start learning more about the trauma of the family's past. This is a family whose origins can be found in the Terror, and the terror famine, and then the War and the German camps. And somehow, being reminded of all that made me feel somehow safer. I grew to believe that Lewycka had too much sympathy for her characters to make them truly suffer again. Writing that, I can see how it doesn't make much sense, but it's how I felt all the same.

And, because in a way it both wraps up the novel and a broader project in my life to consider the importance of the narratives we create to make sense of our experiences:

I had thought there was a happy story to tell about my parents' life, a tale of triumph over tragedy, of love overcoming impossible odds, but now I see that there are only fleeting moments of happiness, to be seized and celebrated before they slip away.

Re-discoveries, Obasan

In twelfth grade, I took the AP exam in English Language. It included a reading passage about a young girl getting on a train with her grandmother, and the accompanying preparations and observations. What made it spectacular was that it was not a voluntary trip - they were Japanese-Canadian, and being relocated to the interior.

This wasn't my first encounter with the internment of North Americans of Japanese descent during WWII; I had read Farewell to Manzanar in middle school. Perhaps more importantly, I was "in love" with Paul Kariya, whose father had been born in a Canadian internment camp.

The passage was gorgeous, and the topic was one that interested me, so I made a note of the novel - Obasan, by Joy Kogawa. That summer, during a drive to Vancouver, I read the book. And while I have yet to meet Paul, I did two projects on the Japanese internment camps while in college.

But I digress. The thing to know about Kogawa is that she writes lyrical, evocative prose. Opening at random, I find the following:

The handwriting in blue-black ink is firm and regular in the first few pages, but is a rapid scrawl later on. I feel like a burglar as I read, breaking into a private house only to discover it's my childhood house filled with corners and rooms I've never seen.

Or another:

I stand beside her and over the redness of my body she scrubs vigorously, like an eraser over a dirty page. The dead skin collects in little rolls and falls off into the water. She exclaims at the rolls.

And it builds to a painful, yet still poetic, crescendo. Lovely, just lovely.

Re-discoveries, mad romantic

The English Patient has pulled off the accomplishment of being among my all-time favorites in both novel and movie form. (The film's soundtrack, for one, is stunning.) Michael Ondaatje is amazing - when I read the novel at age 17, I had never come across anything quite like it.

While the film has two main narratives (present and past), each goes in roughly chronological order. The novel goes into the past of more characters, and completely mixes up the chronology in favor of an unveiling, piece by piece, of the characters and their tales. And the descriptions - they are lyrical and haunting. Ondaatje has also published collections of poetry, and it shows in his prose.

God, I love this book. It's been so long since I've read it, I can't give specific details. But reading it is like stepping into a whole other world, and putting yourself into Ondaatje's very sure hands.

Sweet Suite

After finishing Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise, I decided I needed a few days to mull over what I wanted to write here. But then I waited too long, and I have to return the book right after work. So here is my capsule review:

This novel is gorgeous - the descriptions are so lush, and the people are real even as they are archetypes. (I also loved the scene in which the cat goes exploring, arriving back at his owner's bed seconds before an air raid.) The juxtaposition of love and life with invasion and occupation is fascinating and very moving - the French were not innocent in their loss to the Germans, but nor should they be held fully accountable for collaboration. There were so many shades of grey.

But what makes the book truly amazing is the story of its genesis. Nemirovsky was a well-known writer in France before the war, a Ukrainian Jewish refugee from the Soviet Revolution. She wrote the novel essentially contemporaneously with events, and while struggling to survive. A losing battle, it turned out; she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in summer 1942. Her husband followed her a few months later, but her two daughters lived, hidden, with her notebooks.

In the 1990s, they revisited the notebooks, which were previously too great a source of pain, and discovered that in addition to notes and a journal, there was a full-fledged novel taking shape. Suite Francaise is only the first two sections of what was to be a full "suite" of France during the war and occupation, a difficult task for Nemirovsky, as she did not know France's fate. After the body of the novel, the book includes Nemirovsky's journal and notes, laying out a rough sketch of her plans for the future parts. One guiding light was Tolstoy and War and Peace, which should give you a sense of why I liked this book so much.

Anyway, it is stunning. Purely stunning. I will be looking for more of her work in translation (or possibly even in the original French).