I’d basically had it with this book when the memoirist’s father, German actor Mathieu Carrière, talked about his dream of making a film in which he anI’d basically had it with this book when the memoirist’s father, German actor Mathieu Carrière, talked about his dream of making a film in which he and his teenage daughter Alice would star as lovers. There would, of course, be a sex scene. Could it become more sordid than that? Well, yes, perhaps it could. The “banality of evil” is the phrase that came to mind once I’d reached that point. I had struggled to find a sympathetic human in the text and realized it wasn’t gonna happen. (Okay, maybe the nanny, but her time on stage was brief.) Alas, there’s just too, too much of Alice and her dysfunction.
Also, contrary to the comments of many, I don’t think the writing is anything special at all. The author is perhaps less interesting than she thinks she is. There’s something flat about the whole endeavour. I question the book’s being published. To what end? Sensationalism? By turns dreary and debauched, this memoir could not and in fact did not end soon enough for me. I simply stopped at the one-third point. Two hundred more pages seemed like unnecessary torture. Cannot recommend....more
I have no doubt whatsoever that litigation lawyer Brian Claypool has important stories to tell about his own childhood trauma and the child protectionI have no doubt whatsoever that litigation lawyer Brian Claypool has important stories to tell about his own childhood trauma and the child protection work and advocacy he does. However, it’s evident that this galley has undergone no editing whatsoever. It reads like a very rough draft and is full of grammatical errors and repetitive, poor-quality writing. I read fifty pages and felt I couldn’t persist with the book for these reasons. I really hope BREAK THE CODE OF SILENCE receives a rigorous edit. In its current state, I don’t think it’s worthy of publication....more
Although I found this an absorbing novel, it was too similar to Hjorth’s recently published Is Mother Dead? for me to ful**spoiler alert** Rating: 3.5
Although I found this an absorbing novel, it was too similar to Hjorth’s recently published Is Mother Dead? for me to fully appreciate. It’s the first-person-singular narrative of an obsessive adult estranged from her family of origin, the members of which are unwilling to accept her claims that her father sexually abused her when she was a young child.
The matter comes to a head when Bergljot, the main character, and her elder brother, Bård, who’s also had a fraught and painful relationship with “Dad,” learn that the elderly man is planning to give the family’s summer cabins to his two youngest daughters, Astrid and Åsa, even though he’d promised there would be equal distribution of his assets among his four children. Bergljot had earlier indicated she had no interest in inheriting anything, but her brother reaches out to her. He had wanted his family to continue to have access to the summer places on the island, and he believes there should be shared ownership. What follows are the efforts of the two to be heard by their younger siblings who are invested in having things remain as they are. Bergljot’s mother, a once beautiful, always dependent and manipulative woman, who threatens (and occasionally attempts) suicide, is also committed to denial.
Hjorth gives us texts, emails, dreams, and conversations between these characters. Bergljot’s friend, Klara, urges her on. Her boyfriend, Lars, on the other hand, is clearly weary of his partner’s interminable family drama. I should add that Bergljot is not a young woman, but a divorced mother of three adult children—and a grandmother. Her children are supportive of her. With their mother’s blessing, two maintain contact with their grandparents; the visits with the extended family take some of the heat off her. However, the third adult child, Tale, is incensed by the family’s hypocrisy and treatment of her mother. To add to the overall mess, the patriarch dies. A “dignified” funeral is insisted upon, and there’s no telling what stunt Bergljot might pull at the service.
Will and Testament comes to a credible conclusion—i.e., there is no actual resolution. The reality, of course, is that “closure” in life is rare, often just a pipe dream. Hjorth does, however, effectively communicate the frustration and rage of a person who is persistently dismissed and disbelieved. As with all first-person narratives, there are questions about the reliability of the narrator. Hjorth appears to have anticipated this. Bergljot is believable and can see how family members might perceive her actions and the situation overall. The perspectives of others—their commitment to the family narrative and the status quo, their frustration with the explosive sibling whom they’d just like to see go away—are also well communicated.
As I said, I wasn’t fully satisfied with this novel. It’s repetitive and quite claustrophobic, and the obsessive narrator does become tiresome. Even so, I was invested enough to complete it....more
M. Sindy Felin’s young adult novel was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award in the category of Young People’s Literature. It didn’t win, and itM. Sindy Felin’s young adult novel was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award in the category of Young People’s Literature. It didn’t win, and it really does have some weaknesses, not the least of which are a somewhat unconvincing conclusion and an inconsistent tone. Still, it’s a solid enough work of fiction, and a fairly brave one, tackling as it does the weighty subject of the violent physical discipline of children within the Haitian immigrant community. The novel begins with an arresting opening paragraph:
The best way to avoid being picked on by high school bullies is to kill someone. Anyone will do. Accidental killings have the same effect as on-purpose murder. Of course, this is just my own theory. My sister Delta would say that my sample size isn’t big enough to draw such a conclusion. But I bet I’m right.
Touching Snow is narrated in the first person by smart-talking Karina “Katu” Lamond, who lives in a white folks’ neighbourhood in New York with her mother, sisters, very young half-brothers, as well as her aunt, cousins, and her brutal stepfather, Mr. Gaston—referred to throughout as “the Daddy.” Karina and her sisters, Delta and Enid, have been victims of their stepfather’s “beat-ups” for the most minor of offences. Not finishing all their supper, for example, is grounds enough for a beating. The girls have been thrown, slammed against walls and stoves, kicked, punched, and whipped with a belt. It appears that Karina has developed either epilepsy from head trauma or functional seizures (events that look like epilepsy but are not due to an epileptic disorder) from psychological trauma. Karina’s mother is fully capable of similar discipline, but she never goes as far as the Daddy. Excessive corporal punishment is apparently the norm within the Haitian community. (The novel is set in the mid 1980s, but from an online search, I see that the physical abuse of children persists in immigrant communities—not just among Haitians. It appears that social services have put a lot of effort into providing corrective education for immigrant parents who have settled in the US.)
The plot of Felin’s novel revolves around a particular incident in which Enid, Karina’s elder sister, is beaten to the point of unconsciousness. There’s a conspiracy of silence around this violence. If the Daddy’s actions were reported to police and he were charged, the family would be out on the streets and Karina’s aunt, cousins, and a lodger would be deported back to Haiti. The killing that Karina speaks about in the first paragraph is, of course, part of the story, too—though it’s neither as big nor as believable a part as I thought it would be.
I know. I know. This sounds like a very grim read, and, yes, in some ways it is, but Felin leavens the darkness with a lively, blunt, and sometimes funny narrator, who often directly addresses the reader. Karina is also an immensely resilient character.
There’s a secondary, not-entirely-convincing plot strand that concerns Karina’s work as a volunteer at an immigrant centre and her friendship with/crush on Rachael Levinson, the spoiled rich-girl daughter of the community-centre director. In some ways, Rachael is less a credible character than a convenient plot device, one reason things come to a head at Karina’s house.
As far as I know, Felin did not follow her debut with further young adult or other fiction. That’s too bad. I’m not aware of a lot of children’s and young adult literature that provides insight into the culture, customs (including superstitions), and family life of Haitian immigrant families....more
An odd book with a peculiar, quite childlike voice at times. Emotional, rather nebulous, occasionally irritating. I don’t really know what to make of An odd book with a peculiar, quite childlike voice at times. Emotional, rather nebulous, occasionally irritating. I don’t really know what to make of it....more
This unconventional novel initially read like an autobiographical record of a young woman's medical training. However, for this reader at lRating: 2.5
This unconventional novel initially read like an autobiographical record of a young woman's medical training. However, for this reader at least, as the pages turned, the book became increasingly frustrating--nihilistic, fragmented, and difficult to follow. It was only minimally less exasperating and slightly more comprehensible than A K Benjamin's recent The Case for Love: Reflections on a Medical Career. That isn't saying much, however. De Forest's book has a twist that is very similar to the one in Benjamin's first book, a memoir, Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds. The twist worked in his book, but it just irritated me here.
A History of Present Illness is an intense, demanding book. Barely over a hundred pages, it feels a great deal longer. While sharply observed and thought-provoking at times, for the life of me, I cannot say what the author was ultimately attempting to achieve. Less distracting MFA affectation would have served the author well....more
It's unclear what Guterson was aiming to accomplish in this mixed bag of a novel. At its core is the trial of a rigid and extreme fundamentalist ChrisIt's unclear what Guterson was aiming to accomplish in this mixed bag of a novel. At its core is the trial of a rigid and extreme fundamentalist Christian couple whose many biological children are homeschooled and harshly disciplined. Delvin and Betsy Harvey have been charged with "homicide by abuse" of their recently adopted Ethiopian daughter. An elderly lawyer, the father of the novel's unnamed narrator, has agreed to defend Betsy. The mostly riveting middle section of The Final Case focuses on witness testimony; it is the book's only real strength. The rest--fragmented musings on the writing life in a polarized America and esoteric subjects, such as the culture of tea and tea drinking--don't really add much. Guterson's prose is occasionally long winded and ponderous. Sentences that at times run on for more than dozen lines aren't worth the effort, failing to reward even the most patient reader. In the end, I felt I'd been given a lot of puzzle pieces, not all of which belonged in the the same box....more
In this competently written work—a combination of biography, memoir, and social history— Justine Cowan reflects on the life of her difficulRating: 3.5
In this competently written work—a combination of biography, memoir, and social history— Justine Cowan reflects on the life of her difficult, emotionally disturbed mother, Eileen, the “Dorothy Soames” of the book’s title. Shortly after her birth in January 1932, the infant Eileen was placed by Lena Weston, her unwed mother, in London’s Foundling Hospital, where she was promptly renamed Dorothy Soames. The institution, dating back to the 1700s, was founded by British sailor, shipbuilder, and philanthropist Thomas Coram as a refuge for illegitimate children. The original idea was that these poor unfortunates would be clothed, fed, housed, and trained for service (to the wealthy)—the boys, for a life at sea; the girls, for domestic service. Cowan demonstrates that although Dorothy’s bodily and medical needs were met, she and the other foundlings were deprived of essential emotional support and affection. In fact, some of the staff—most of whom were unmarried older women unable to find better employment—were downright sadistic. A teacher, Miss Woodword, was a particular terror to Dorothy from the time the girl was eight or nine years old. This woman beat Dorothy publicly and mercilessly. Once she even removed her from class for some mysterious infraction, only to throw her in the deep end of the on-site pool, using the long rescue pole to dunk the girl back under the water each time she struggled to the surface. The Foundling Hospital’s matron, Miss Wright, was another menacing figure. Carrying a leather strap, she regularly patrolled the corridors of the institution on the lookout for misbehaving girls. Solitary confinement was a practice adopted by the hospital long before Dorothy’s time, after one of the institution’s prominent governors wrote a pamphlet on the matter. Miss Wright reserved this most dire of punishments for Dorothy, whom she regarded as a bad seed. Numerous times the woman had the child locked up in cupboards, closets, and storerooms.
Justine Cowan was told none of these details verbally by her mother. When she was growing up, questions about Eileen’s past were strictly verboten. Justine was acutely aware that her mother had secrets. These appeared to be related to her being robbed of her standing as a descendant of the Welsh aristocracy. A demanding, hypercritical woman, Eileen was certainly preoccupied with social status. Also an accomplished pianist and painter, she was determined to produce a well-turned-out daughter. In childhood, the author had music and horseback-riding lessons. Private tutors for any number of subjects, including penmanship, regularly came to instruct Justine in the family home located in a desirable San Francisco neighbourhood. During her teenage years, Justine would go on to attend a prestigious boarding school. All bills were footed by her adored father, a prominent San Francisco attorney. Compliant with all of his wife’s wishes, he was the peacemaker, whose role in the family’s intense dysfunction would only become clear to Justine much later in life.
Given the childhood trauma she endured, Eileen had tremendous difficulty nurturing her daughter. Eileen was evidently mentally unstable—at times, even suicidal. During one episode, Justine’s father called her home from college in Berkeley to keep an eye on her mother, as he was due in court. Eileen couldn’t be left alone, he said. On that day the woman pressed a scrap of paper with the name “Dorothy Soames” into her nineteen-year-old daughter’s hand. Justine did not probe to find out the significance of the name. In fact, she soon put as many miles as possible between herself and her disturbed parent, moving from California to the southeastern US where she pursued a law degree and work in environmental protection. Communication and family visits were infrequent. As the years passed, Eileen attempted to broach the subject of her childhood, but her daughter, who had tallied a long list of resentments and allowed anger to harden into a protective carapace, refused to engage with her. A manuscript that Eileen eventually presented to Justine, documenting her experiences at the Foundling Hospital, was left unread for many years. In fact, it was only after a happy, later-in-life marriage and Eileen’s death from Alzheimer’s Disease that Justine begin to research her mother’s story.
Cowan’s book moves back and forth between her own growing-up years, her mother’s story, and the history of the Foundling Hospital. She’s clearly read and synthesized a great deal of information on the latter. It’s my impression that the history of institution rather drowned out the more personal story in the first half of the book. Abundant details about the Foundling Hospital and its governors became tedious to me and at times seemed irrelevant to Eileen/Dorothy’s story. I think a quarter of the book could safely have been cut. The pace improved considerably in the second half. (view spoiler)[At age twelve, Dorothy and another girl briefly escaped from the Foundling Hospital. Shortly after this, Dorothy’s birth mother reclaimed her, taking her to live in Shropshire. Sadly, details about this part of her story are almost completely lacking. The inference the author draws and supports is that this reunion did not go well. (hide spoiler)] Cowan does manage to sympathetically and imaginatively present what she learned about her mother and grandmother, Lena Weston, from the Foundling Hospital’s records. However, this is no substitute for a personal, emotionally resonant oral history from her mother. I found that the book, especially in earlier sections, often read like a research project, an academic exercise. Eileen—“Dorothy Soames”—did not fully live on the page.
This is a sad story in so many ways. First of all, there’s the tragedy of women alone bearing the deep shame, stigma, and burden of pregnancies that they were obviously not solely responsible for. Unwed mothers seeking to place their infants at the Foundling Hospital had to undergo a lengthy process to determine if they were of good enough character to merit the privilege of having their illegitimate offspring accepted. Part of the procedure involved being interviewed and judged by the wealthy male governors. Later, when many of these women found themselves in a better financial situation and sought to reclaim their children, they were almost always denied; the governors knew best.
Cowan’s book also reminds us of another kind of sadness. Often we don’t appreciate until later in life what some difficult people we have known may have endured, their hardship and emotional pain. While understandable, it seems deeply unfortunate, even tragic to me, that Cowan and her mother could not have somehow bridged their fraught relationship so that peace of some kind could have been achieved while Eileen was still alive. Cowan’s book is a brave and honest effort to come to terms with how the harms inflicted on one person ripple down to the next generation.
Set in the mid-sixties and based on stories of abuse from the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, The Nickel Boys is a well-enough-written noSet in the mid-sixties and based on stories of abuse from the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, The Nickel Boys is a well-enough-written novel about an idealistic young black kid, who clings to the words of Martin Luther King Jr., even as he is sent to a brutal reform school for a crime he did not commit. There he is beaten, sees other kids beaten, learns of the sexual abuse of others, and attempts to perform a heroic act: expose the corruption and utter brutality of the place to those in authority.
I have no complaints about Whitehead's writing at the sentence level. However, the author opens the novel with an archeological dig on the grounds of the now-closed school. (The official cemetery is there, of course, but there is another secret graveyard, where the remains of murdered boys are found.) Therefore, the reader knows from the start that this will be a grim book in which abuses will be exposed, and that's exactly what the reader gets. There are no surprises, except for a (token) plot twist near the end.
Fiction is one way to expose the horrors of the past. Whitehead, as expected, focuses on the "coloured" section of the reform school campus, telling the stories of a number of boys, but mostly focusing on Elwood Curtis's.
I think that I am the type of reader that would probably prefer to read nonfiction accounts about the Dozier School over fiction about the place. As sympathetic as some of the characters are, I found this oddly flat and strangely lacking in impact....more
Oh, how I loved this quiet, beautiful, sad, and (at times) enraging book: the story of Irish writer McGahern’s painful childhood, including the loss oOh, how I loved this quiet, beautiful, sad, and (at times) enraging book: the story of Irish writer McGahern’s painful childhood, including the loss of his beloved mother to cancer and his policeman father’s brutal mistreatment of the boy and his younger siblings. The portraits of the figures who populated McGahern’s early life are rich and nuanced, and the evocation of the rural Irish landscape is extraordinary. Few books move me to tears; this one did. A treasure.
Read in February 2018 I have never felt I could do the book justice. Now, before year’s end, I’ve tried....more
Read to page 35. The endless sentence fragments from our central teenaged character, Molly/Annie, grated and I felt not one iota of suspense. Did not Read to page 35. The endless sentence fragments from our central teenaged character, Molly/Annie, grated and I felt not one iota of suspense. Did not relish the thought of pushing through a plodding, tedious read....more
After being challenged for being judgmental of people who “enjoyed” this book or who find it some kind of a masterpiece, a**spoiler alert** Appalling.
After being challenged for being judgmental of people who “enjoyed” this book or who find it some kind of a masterpiece, after whimping out and not wanting to enter the fray, I feel I must stand by my original response to this book:
I find it concerning, worrisome, disturbing even, that large numbers of people should rhapsodize about a book so dark, cruel, and violent. I see the graphic depictions of child abuse--physical and sexual-- as exploitative, part of a wider trend of the sexualization of children in our culture. People aren't raving over this book because of the fine nature writing--they are attracted to the darkness, the sordid details, and the taboo.
I would add: examine why you like this. What contribution is it really making to the world? What is the great statement here? Could it have been achieved by other means?
In response to an earlier observation I made on this site-- that the central child character’s reaction to her abuse (i.e.,wanting to be raped and responding with gun violence)--was not representative of an abuse/assault victim, another Goodreads member sought to take me in hand by (flippantly and dismissively, I believe) pointing out that an author is under no obligation to create books and characters that are “poster children for victims of sexual violence”. It should be made clear that I was not asking for political correctness. Obviously, authors can do whatever they damn well please. However, I as a reader also have rights: including the right to object.
With regards to sexual and physical violence, I believe that authors do have some moral, human, obligation to depict a victim, particularly a child victim, with sensitivity and psychological realism, not perpetuate should-have-died myths or titillate their audience with graphic details, language that romanticizes incest, or exclamations about love.
Turtle, the central character in this piece (and her responses) is/are dwarfed by the graphic, sensational, and frankly gratuitous details of the physical, sexual and emotional violence done to her. To me, the descriptions are exploitative. They read like violent male sexual fantasies—descriptions of snuff film scenes. At one point, Turtle painfully and horrifically dangles from ceiling beams while her father holds a knife to her crotch area, ready to impale her should she drop—perhaps the most violent penetration image in the book, but then again, perhaps not. Even a lovable, loyal elderly dog’s evisceration is described in shameful and horrifying detail.
Wrap these horrors up in what some call “lush” descriptions of the northern Californian landscape, lots of literary and philosophy allusions, and we are supposed to believe this is an American masterpiece. American, it is. Masterpiece, it is not. I don't care what Stephen King says about it.
I am not interested in having intellectual debates with other readers about how the story might have changed had Turtle been given a credible inner life and response to her terrible violation. You can't convince me that the author’s choices were necessary ones or served some higher, artistic goal. I also don't happen to believe that being male disqualifies one from apprehending and sensitively and credibly depicting a female’s response to abuse or sexual assault. However, it is perfectly clear to me that Gabriel Tallent was in no way up to the task. While his bank account may not be suffering for it, his book does. My Absolute Darling is an opportunistic, sensational, manipulative piece. It is not great art. It is not art at all....more
When Rita Zoey Chin moved with physician husband, Larry, to a spacious, light-filled colonial-style home in rural Massachusetts, she felt she was finaWhen Rita Zoey Chin moved with physician husband, Larry, to a spacious, light-filled colonial-style home in rural Massachusetts, she felt she was finally putting a very difficult childhood and youth behind her. Her husband soon started a new, high-pressure job as director of neurosurgery at a Boston hospital, and Rita’s plan was to write at home. Alone in the house during the day, Rita felt her heart begin to race at such a clip that she made a 911 call. The paramedics appeared, confirmed that her pulse was indeed racing, smiled when she told them she’d run out the door when she’d felt the alarming symptoms, and hinted that she might be having a panic attack like another lady who called them fairly regularly. Rita’s husband reassured (or dismissed) her, telling her she’d be fine.
The fact was: Rita’s heart had been racing for a long time, and there were reasons. In the first six chapters alone, the reader learns that during Rita’s childhood, her mother spent a lot of time weeping; believed she saw Jesus; made a point of driving off on Rita—leaving her stranded in shopping mall parking lots, apparently to scare the child, but usually returning for her after 20 minutes or so; and argued loudly with Rita's father. If her mother was seemingly an intermittently psychotic depressive, Rita’s father wasn’t a great deal more stable: in fact, he was violent, hurling objects at Rita for the most minor of childhood offences.
The author makes clear early on that her chaotic childhood propelled her into a life on the streets with all its attendant dangers. Somehow, though, she’d eventually managed to get it together: attend university, find fulfilling work, and now move with a beautiful husband to a beautiful place.
I liked the evocative title of Chin’s memoir. I liked the cover photograph of a young woman clinging to the earth—very Andrew Wyeth, but with the added feature of a horse (a hint that an animal would play a therapeutic role). I also liked the epigraph from a Stanley Kunitz poem. So what was the problem? The writing. It’s functional, yes. There are no glaring grammar or usage errors to grate on one’s nerves . . . but, boy, is it bland. I pushed myself to the end of the sixth chapter (p. 42), and I had no motivation to go any further. If the tornado did come, I wasn’t there to read about it.
The problem these days, of course, is that there are so many misery memoirs, an author needs to be possessed of extraordinary talent and sensibility to pull one off. Chin’s writing is serviceable, but wholly unremarkable as far as I got. (At this point in my life, having wasted hundreds of hours seeing dozens of books I didn't like to their sometimes bitter--but mostly just mediocre—end, I feel 5 chapters or 50 pages is a fair chance for a book to hook the reader--or not. No more clean-plate club for me.) I know many other readers loved Mira Bartok’s The Memory Palace, but I did not. To see Bartok's warm back-cover blurb about Chin's book , then, seemed even further reason to abandon it. I really enjoyed returning it to the library.
I want to make clear that I do not dismiss Chin or her experience. I just wish her writing had been of enough quality to make me want to continue (or that the author had condensed the narrative into a brief, cleanly written personal essay). As far as I got, not a single person approached living and breathing on the page.
Some people object to people rating books they didn’t complete. However, I feel my rating of 2 acknowledges that yes, I believe there was a story to tell here; there was promise--but, for me, that's just not enough anymore....more
In the early 1960s, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth is living a hardscrabble existence on a Manitoba farm. She is the only girl among a passel of brothersIn the early 1960s, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth is living a hardscrabble existence on a Manitoba farm. She is the only girl among a passel of brothers. Her mother is almost perpetually pregnant, so Elizabeth has many domestic duties. After returning from the Second World War, George, Elizabeth’s taciturn father had left his hometown of Kingsford and brought his young English war bride and infant son to this land. Embittered by his wartime experiences and feeling he had failed to live up to others’ expectations of him, he believed moving to a new place, with new work as a farmer, would somehow redeem him. Saddled with several children and in serious debt, George now knows the farm he so hopefully named "Paradise Regained" is actually "Paradise Lost". The earth is poor, almost entirely clay, and unsuitable for crops. Farm animals frequently die. On finding a dead calf strangled in a rope, Elizabeth's brother, Jonathan, sardonically comments (in one of the better lines in the book): “Even the animals will do anything to get out of here.”
Given the tough circumstances, it is not surprising that Elizabeth leaps at the chance to escape the farm. Her ticket out of domestic drudgery is offered by her paternal grandmother, Henrietta Anderson--fondly known in Kingsford as "Andy". Having come into an inheritance, Andy sends her son enough money to pull him out of debt, and she offers to pay her granddaughter’s train fare to Kingsford, a four-hour journey away. The plan is for Elizabeth to live there with her grandmother for the next three years in order to attend the local Catholic high school and prepare for university.
Andy is widely regarded in Kingsford as a paragon of virtue and Christian charity. She tends the sick, babysits, and performs any odd jobs that will help members of the community. She seemingly knows everyone in town—and next to everything about them—but she always carefully steers conversation away from herself. However, Elizabeth quickly learns that Andy has a dark side. Her behaviour at home is weird and sometimes frightening. Andy has a ritual of checking all closets before bedtime, she refuses to close the door when she uses the bathroom, and she is compulsively frugal. (She will, for example, use a tea bag six times before disposing of it.) Voluble and cheerful at times, She is also prone to sudden, violent mood swings or “fits”. When these unprovoked "furies" seize her, she beats Elizabeth, while screaming about the girl's lack of gratitude or threatening to kill her.
Paterson's novel goes on to detail how Elizabeth deals with the very difficult situation she is in. Although she longs to return home to the farm, she knows she cannot. Her parents wouldn't even be able to afford the train ticket. Elizabeth has made no friends at school, and the 1960s school personnel are either oblivious to her bruises or willfully turn a blind eye to them. Just when the situation seems bleakest, however, an unusual friend, "Brain", comes into Elizabeth’s life. (Apparently everyone in this odd little town goes by a nickname.) Brain is a physically handicapped middle-aged librarian who gets around in a wheel chair. (Her husband “Crane”—no kidding--carries her up stairs.) With an intimate knowledge of people’s histories, Brain is able to explain to Elizabeth why her grandmother is the way she is. A story of childhood abandonment and abuse emerges. Brain provides the young girl with strategies for dealing with her grandmother, and she introduces Elizabeth to others whose stories are interwoven with Andy's. This includes a First Nations (Native) woman named Thelma, who was removed from her family in childhood and placed in one of Canada's shameful residential schools. Thelma implausibly becomes a live-in social worker, helping Andy adjust when an estranged family member re-enters her life.
As I read, I kept wondering what Elizabeth’s malignant memory consisted of. Was it connected to the shameful secret Elizabeth’s beloved literature and history teacher shared with her? As a young nun, Sister Margaret Rose had taught in the very Indian residential school that Thelma was forced to attend. But, no, apparently not. The conclusion of Paterson’s book focuses on an extremely bizarre secret about her friend, Brain. It also clears up more of the mystery surrounding Elizabeth’s grandmother’s (melodramatic) childhood and gives an overview of Elizabeth’s life after university. Only right at the end is the “malignant memory” revealed. Given all the melodrama that has preceded it, it is pretty anticlimactic.
Paterson apparently gathered and melded family stories with those she heard as a professional from First Nations people to create her novel. A personal memoir might have been the better vehicle for them. For a variety of reasons, Malignant Memory does not work as a novel. Short on incident and heavy on description, it often takes longer than it should to communicate ideas. The lengthy prologue is a case in point. It takes several pages to inform the reader that many people tell their secrets to Elizabeth (who will narrate the story), but that she herself has a secret--a "malignant memory"--that she needs to be free of. Many pages are also dedicated to enumerating Andy's idiosyncrasies and strange behaviours. The better approach would have been to show Andy in action and let readers draw their own inferences. (“Show. Don’t tell,” might be a writers’ cliché, but it is still a good piece of advice.)
A fair bit of the “action” in this novel happened in the past, before the story proper. Many scenes consist of one character telling another a story. There are also letters and diaries that tell backstories. This does not make for a very dynamic read. The events that do occur are often implausible (money and objects are “magically” and conveniently bequeathed at just the right moments) and the author does not resist the urge to moralize. Characters are often caricatures-- unrealistic and inadvertently comical. Melodrama runs high in this tale.
Successfully juggling all the elements that make a novel is challenging for any fiction writer, never mind a first-time novelist. The author’s difficulties with plot, pacing, and (often mawkish) characterization might be more easily overlooked if the writing itself--by this I mean the basic building blocks: words and sentences—were stronger. The biggest problem is insensitivity to the nuances of words. For the most part, the usage problems are just distracting, but sometimes there are unintended comic effects. A few examples (with my emphasis) will, I think, give you a sense of what I mean:
“Father spent several weeks discerning a name for the farm.” (p. 14)
"The muscles in her cheeks danced spasmodically as she attempted to control her tension." (p. 22)
“A photograph of my father as an infant adorned the wall behind the cot. I was fascinated by the abundance of blonde curls on his head in the photo. I wondered when his hair had decided to elude him [. . .] had the torment of war devastated his follicles causing his hair to abandon him forever?” (p. 24)
"She touched me only in cursory ways, to straighten my hair as she passed by me in the narrow hallway or to call my attention from a book I was reading." (p. 25)
"Gradually over time my [dead] grandfather assumed a real persona in my imagination." (p. 30)
"I struggled to make sense of the cornucopia of emotions I was feeling [. . .]. I was exhausted, hopeful, angry, puzzled, relieved, and overwhelmed with sadness." (p. 60)
“She had betrayed her friends in order to incur the staff’s favour.” (p. 134)
Problems with sentence structure, especially with misplaced modifiers and pronoun reference, are common. (“The boys’ job was to do farm chores once they were no longer toddlers.” p. 15; “It took painful effort for her to walk with her arthritic knees and hips from the house to the lake . . .” p. 128) The writing often sounds wooden and unnatural, sometimes because of a lack of sentence variety. Brain’s speaking style, for example, has an almost robotic quality: "'Please call me Brain. Everyone else does. They call me that because they think I am smart. I won some awards in high school. After that, I was Brain. This town loves to give people nicknames.' She laughed delightedly."
Writing a novel is no small thing, and I acknowledge the author’s efforts and obvious sincerity. However, I found reading Malignant Memory rather a struggle, and I cannot recommend the book. Barbara Paterson clearly has stories that she wishes to tell, and there is the kernel of a good story here. Having the guidance of a skilled editor or the feedback of a writers' group might help her achieve better results with any future writing projects.
Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a digital copy of this novel for review purposes....more
Reposting this in light of the recent discovery of the bodies of 215 indigenous children in the grounds around Kamloops BC Residential School. As wellReposting this in light of the recent discovery of the bodies of 215 indigenous children in the grounds around Kamloops BC Residential School. As well, for those interested, watch this video of Justice Murray Sinclair, head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as he addresses this discovery:
[image] Sainte Thérèse Residential School in Sturgeon Landing, Saskatchewan, where Augie Merasty was “educated.”
“When I was at that school, it seemed always to be winter time. The days of that time always seem to have been colder.”
In 2001, Augie Merasty, a retired Cree trapper in his early 70s, wrote a letter to the dean of the University of Saskatchewan. He wanted help with a memoir he was working on. More specifically, he wanted an outdoorsy person who enjoyed fishing, someone who had a tape recorder and a good command of the English language, to come to his cabin in the bush and record the stories of what he and his schoolmates had experienced at Ste. Thérèse Residential School. Augie’s request was passed on to David Carpenter, a former English professor, who had left teaching to become a full-time writer. As it turned out, Augie didn’t have a cabin at all. He sometimes lived with his daughter in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, but, consumed by alcoholism, he spent most of his later years homeless and on the streets. When Carpenter first spoke with him, he told Augie he could only be helpful if the memories were written down. Over the next several years, Augie sent his notes and stories in batches. All were written in his distinctive, flowing cursive. In the end, Carpenter had a total of about about 75 pages.
Born in 1930, Merasty, like thousands of young aboriginal kids, had been forced into a residential school run by the Catholic Church. (The Anglican, Presbyterian, and United churches also ran Indian schools in Canada). As The Report on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples notes, the first of what would become a network of schools was opened in 1849 in Ontario: “Church and government leaders had come to the conclusion that the problem (as they saw it) of Aboriginal independence and 'savagery' could be solved by taking children from their families at an early age and instilling the ways of the dominant society during eight or nine years of residential schooling far from home.” These institutions stayed open for over 150 years. Augie Merasty spent almost a decade at one located on the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border. From age five to age fourteen, he lived at Ste. Thérèse Residential School in Sturgeon Landing, about 300 miles (500 km) east of Prince Albert. At the time he first contacted the University of Saskatchewan, Augie had recently written testimony for the Working Group on Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an organization founded in the 1990s “with a mandate of documenting the history and impacts of the residential school system.”
In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2017, Augie’s co-author, David Carpenter, acknowledged the challenge in taking the “tatters of stories that sometimes had no ending to them” and putting them “all together in a sequence” while “try[ing] as hard as possible to preserve Augie's voice.” Augie’s education and capacity to write were limited, Carpenter said, but he had “a great storyteller's voice. And I didn't want to correct his English” and make him sound like someone other than himself. “I would only change the words on the page if he contradicted himself or if his limited ability with English obscured the meaning of what he was trying to get at." Carpenter fact-checked details with people who knew Augie and was reassured “that the core of the story, what happened to him at the school, was absolutely true." Names of people and places were changed to protect the identities of individuals and their families.
Carpenter has done a remarkable job organizing Merasty’s material. The memoir begins, quite surprisingly, with Augie’s recollections of those religious fathers, brothers, and nuns who showed kindness to the children. There was his grade-one teacher, Sister St. Alphonse, “one of the kindest and most loving persons in that institution,” who played games with the boys. She cried when administering the mildest corporal punishment: taps of a ruler to the hands of disobedient boys. Sister St. Famille, the school’s baker, who knew only a few words of English, gave the kids something they never received at mealtimes: small, round loaves of bannock bread. “Big Brother Beauville,” who drove the team of horses and worked in the barn, was another “good guy,” never saying a mean word to any of the boys. In fact, they prayed for him after he was injured by a horse and required two months’ hospitalization in The Pas, some 40 miles away.
Before the darkest memories of abuse are presented by the memoirist, he tells of other staff at Ste. Thérèse—not the good, the kind, and the jolly, but those whose failings Augie could nevertheless regard with some degree of warmth, humour, and even compassion. About these people, he observes: “They were all human beings, and they all had human feelings and weaknesses.” Take Brother Languir, for example: He’d come from Montreal and was teased by the older boys for his unfortunate, long chin. Languir had previously read some history about what Indians had done to whites, and he lived in fear of the boys at the school, regarding them as brutal savages. Not surprisingly, the kids played jokes on him, surrounding and poking him until he would suddenly burst from the circle, crying out and “running like the devil was after him.” Both Brother Languir and William “Scotty” Cameron, a Scottish bachelor employed by the school, also experienced the misfortune of unrequited love. They pined for beautiful Métis girls who were entirely beyond their reach.
According to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission website, “The policy behind the government-funded, church-run schools attempted to ‘kill the Indian in the child’.” Merasty’s memoir makes clear that notions of racial superiority certainly fuelled those who worked at Ste. Thérèse. About his vile chief tormenter, Merasty observes: “Brother Lepeigne was a man dedicated to preserving the image of the Superiority of the Semi-Super Race of Whiteman over Indian, like the German Super Race tried to establish during the time of Hitler’s regime. As I look back, what was happening at the school was basically the same thing except on a smaller scale with the same principles.”
The hypocrisy and toxicity of religion are regularly commented on by Merasty. He writes that when Bishop Lajeunesse visited the school, the children were dressed in their best clothing, made to perform concerts, and served food that was actually, and uncharacteristically, edible: beef stew, for example. However, during such visits the kids were also made to listen to the bishop hold forth about “how lucky we were to be looked after in such a school . . . and [how] we should be thankful to God and the administration for such blessings.”
Merasty’s recollections are occasionally punctuated with a kind of astonishment that the bishop was never told about the terrible abuses so many of the children endured—in particular, Brother Lepeigne’s method of securing the silence of seven boys he had molested. For years, Lepeigne engaged in daily, ritual beatings of the boys, using a corrugated hose to whip them as they lay on their dormitory beds. Augie, one of the seven, estimated he’d received 500 to 600 of these beatings in his time at the school. Sister St. Mercy, “the meanest of all the nuns”—“I can’t say enough to vilify her name,” he writes— forced Augie and a friend to walk miles in sub-zero weather to retrieve lost mitts. When the boys returned without the mittens, she strapped them 20 times on each hand. Sister St. Mercy also used her strap on Augie’s face one night, damaging his left eye. All he’d been doing was talking and laughing in his sleep. She regularly made him and other boys kneel for hours on cold cement floors after the other children had gone to bed, and she even burned his hand during a lecture on disobedience so he’d know what the fires of hell felt like. Sister St. Mercy and her disciple, Sister St. Joy, “really enjoyed causing pain and other kinds of suffering as punishment for the smallest infractions.”
Augie’s observation, “I always wondered why our keepers and teachers talked about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and all the love they had for mankind [ . . . ] they never practiced what they preached, not one iota,” is the understatement of the century. It was his view that anyone who belonged to the order of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate was “considered to be infallible . . . respected with unshakeable reverence, especially by my parents.” Even worse than the hypocrisy and the blind, undeserved respect, however, was the culture of silence. “If any of our teachers ever claimed that there was no evidence of sodomy in the school, they were lying. There is no doubt that these things were forced upon many of us at St. Therese in those days.”
Merasty left Ste. Thérèse when he was 14. He felt as though he’d been sprung from prison. He writes that the hard lessons he learned there ensured that no one would ever again abuse him. However, what he’d experienced—endured—left him tremendously vulnerable to substance abuse. David Carpenter, who was instrumental in getting Augie’s powerful memoir published, acknowledges that “Augie was a nightmare of a father and a husband. He was a drunk, he was a sinner. And yet to me he feels like a real hero. A hero and a martyr. . . I think what was martyred there (at the residential school) was his innocence. . . yet because he got his story out and thousands of people are reading his story now, it’s almost as though there’s a bit of redemption at the end of his life.”
The Education of Augie Merasty is a tiny book, only 76 pages long and a mere 4 ½ inches by 7 inches in size. It is an important historical document about “the abuse and terror in the lives of Indian children.” The testimony it delivers—in natural, unembellished language—is incredibly powerful.
Augie Merasty died in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan in February, 2017. He was 87.
I loathed this book when I read it years ago. It was a tremendous slog--due in part to the writer's use of the first person present tense to recount tI loathed this book when I read it years ago. It was a tremendous slog--due in part to the writer's use of the first person present tense to recount the past, a device that very few use well (Lauck is decidedly not one of the very few). Having a dreadful childhood doesn't uniquely qualify you for writing a memoir. Not recommended....more
Finished the book. Felt oppressed by it. Very heavy indeed. Unrelentingly bleak. I still don't quite know what to make of it months later.Finished the book. Felt oppressed by it. Very heavy indeed. Unrelentingly bleak. I still don't quite know what to make of it months later....more
Up Ghost River is less "a chief's journey through the turbulent waters of native history" (as the subtitle suggests) than it is a record of his confroUp Ghost River is less "a chief's journey through the turbulent waters of native history" (as the subtitle suggests) than it is a record of his confrontation with the ghosts of his past. Born in Fort Albany in Northern Ontario, Metatawabin was sent, as a young child, to Saint Anne's, often described as the worst of the residential schools for Aboriginal children. Among the abuses Metatawabin (and others) endured and documents here were sexual abuse, being forced to consume his own vomit, and being made to sit in an electrified chair after he and another boy tried to run away. Along with Catholic Church officials, a Hudson's Bay Company employee is identified as a perpetrator. A good deal of the book looks at the impact this treatment had on Metatawabin. He is painfully honest about his downward spiral into alcoholism, its impact on his marriage and family, and his struggle to pull himself out of addiction with the aid of Aboriginal spiritual practices. The work concludes with reflection on the "Idle No More" movement, in which young Aboriginal Canadians have sought to take back their power. This is a hopeful, informative, and valuable work, which I highly recommend....more
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