books

this is not a review: ‘a tale for the time being’, by ruth ozeki

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

Tra la, tra la, you go, thinking you’re reading a book about a journal that gets washed up on the BC coast (possibly after the 2011 tsunami but we’re not sure), written by a teenage girl in Japan who is telling the story of her grandmother Jiko’s life before she (the girl) kills herself. In the process the girl of course tells the story of her own life in a voice reminiscent (though also entirely different) of Baby in Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals. That voice is how Ozeki captures the specific brand of un-selfconsciousness unique to someone (especially young) who is both dramatic and casual (in the same moment) about most events in their life whether they be major… such as trauma, or minor… say drumming, or lunch.

So there you are, tra la, reading this tale…. A Tale for the Time Being, told in alternating voices and perspectives — one being the above-mentioned young girl and the other, a woman in BC, a writer named Ruth, who finds the journal and becomes drawn into the girl’s words and life and of course the possibility of her death, either by suicide or tsunami, and not only that but you are getting the added loveliness of bits of Japanese culture such as the custom of saying tadaima when you enter your house… which means ‘just now’, as in ‘just now, here I am’.

This is what you THINK you’re reading.

Then as you near the end it occurs to you that what you are actually reading is about quantum physics.

That, essentially, in a nutshell, is it.

Head-spinning, but in the best way.

And I will not spoil it by saying more.

“While I’m [drumming], I am aware of the sixty-five moments that Jiko says are in the snap of a finger. I’m serious. When you’re beating a drum, you can hear when the BOOM comes the teeniest bit too late or the teeniest bit too early, because your whole attention is focused on the razor edge between silence and noise. Finally I achieved my goal and resolved my childhood obsession with now because that’s what a drum does. When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you’re breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder. Jiko says that this is an example of the time being. Sound and no-sound. Thunder and silence.”

The person who recommended this book said: I read this six years ago and I’m still not over it.

I get that.

Much to think about, much to like.

Also, a beautifully told tale. For any time at all.

♦

this is not a review: ‘a serious widow’, by constance beresford-howe

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

Like many people, I fell in love with Beresford-Howe’s work after reading her gorgeous The Book of Eve. She writes so well about the experience of womanhood, of middle age and beyond, freedom often being a theme. Like ‘Eve’ (a senior citizen who reinvents herself)… the title character of A Serious Widow  (Rowena) finds herself suddenly ‘free’ of a loveless marriage. Unlike Eve, however, Rowena is more bitter than celebratory and that seems to make at least some of the difference.519ty8GB2NL._SY346_

Turns out that Rowena’s husband has for decades been leading a double life and has a whole other very normal family in Ottawa, where he spent one week a month ‘on business’. Rowena discovers this only after his death. The other family is equally clueless about the duplicity but, unlike Rowena, the other wife was The First Wife, making that family more legit. At least as far as the estate goes.

To further complicate matters, no will can be found.

The premise of the book is pretty much to find the will and in the process Rowena finds her sense of self. As with Eve, she takes up with a few unlikely-but-nice, usually older, frumpy chaps but who surprise her sometimes in Fabio-like ways.

I thoroughly enjoy Beresford-Howe’s writing and her style and respect her feminist leanings at a time when such leaning may not have been entirely popular (I read somewhere that she was a tiny innocuous-appearing firecracker of a thing who quietly, yet fiercely, stood for what she believed in— including Canadian spelling when publishers tried to convince her to go U.S.). While I’d recommend the book, I’d add that I’d have liked it better as a novella. Not everything needs to be a full length novel. (And do not get me started on foie gras books, i.e. those stuffed mercilessly with fatty content…)

However…

Despite my opinion on the unnecessary word count, there is indeed much loveliness in the book. Relationships mostly between older people, and parents and grown children. It would appeal to anyone who liked Hotel du Lac, for example, by Anita Brookner or, more recently, And The Birds Rained Down, by Jocelyne Saucier, where themes of change, aging, loss are not seen as a negative but merely part of life to be lived with as much pleasure as the bits that preceded it. And often more.

This from a scene where one of Rowena’s lovers tells her what it was like entering his mother’s room after her death.

“She looked exactly as she did when I left her just a few hours before, as if she were asleep. But it was different, because she wasn’t there anymore, Rowena. She’d gone—somewhere. For good. No mistake about that. Nothing could possibly be more empty than that room”

And later, in the same scene, this from Rowena’s pov after her bereaved lover has finally found sleep:

“With care I draw off his glasses and tuck the afghan around him. Outside like another voice the November wind shakes the windowpane. Wiping my own eyes, I turn out all the lights and leave him sleeping there. Sooner or later, one way or another, I think, we’re all orphans. It should make us kinder to each other than it does.”

I’ve been reading and re-reading Beresford-Howe for years and was sad when she died in 2016 at age 93. I’d always meant to write her a note to thank her for her work. (I wonder now, what was my plan? To wait until she was 94?) Ah well, this post will have to do instead.

♦

summer postcards: what stays

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

swings - Copy

When asked about books that have stayed with me forever, what comes to mind immediately is a childhood collection of stories (can’t recall the title but something totally obscure; I remember those obscure stories still, the one about the farmer who sent his son to deliver three perfect cherries on a velvet pillow to the king but the son ate two of them en route and when the king read the accompanying note from the farmer saying here’s three perfect cherries for you, he asked the boy what happened to the other two and the lad said he ate them — I remember loving this kid’s honesty, how he had no sense of being afraid of the king — and the king said you ate them!!! how could you have done that?? and without missing a beat the boy picked the last one off the velvet pillow, popped it into his mouth and said, in all innocence, like this! I mean, how does a story like that NOT stay with you forever?). Also Nancy Drew mysteries, which I remember devouring but not as voraciously as a girl in my class who used to boast about how quickly she read them and for a wee moment in time I was jealous, thinking how grand to be able to read a thousand books a week but fast reading has never been my thing and over the decades I’ve come to accept and embrace a sloooow read. Girl of the Limberlost (I coveted her forest life and the contents of her lunch pail); Fires of Spring, by James Michener (it felt so grown up), I was thirteen and it was summer and I’d been biking through the orchards of Niagara near my home; I read it in the shade of a giant maple or similar while eating stolen peaches; The Velveteen Rabbit (only discovered as an adult and with possibly the best life lesson ever); The Little Prince (ditto about discovery); The Stone Angel; Roughing it in the Bush; Hotel du Lac; Animal Farm, The Road Past Altamont, the best book about home (regardless of where home is) I’ve ever read, The Book of Eve (a different view of home), Drinking the Rain (home as self)…

But this is meant to be a postcard, and a quick top of mind answer to the question.

What has ACTUALLY stayed with me is probably… everything. And that would take at least a letter.

♣

this is not a review: (summer edition, wherein even blue skies and gentle breezes demand quality reading or crankiness quickly sets in)

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

 

Under no circumstances will I name this book so don’t bother sending bribes in the form of fresh baked anything or even exquisite cheese.

However, I will say this.

It was published in the last ten years. The author is a man. Or possibly a woman. Canadian. Lives east of Alberta. The book is a collection of stories. Some of which are pleasant enough reading. Too many are carbon copies of one another with teensy alterations of character or place or circumstance, which hardly disguises the sameness. Because we’ll never notice, right?

Yawn.

The women are ALL flakey.

Yawn.

Too many people are having affairs.

YawnYawnYawn.

Most of the couplings have big age gaps, which is always highlighted as if it means something to the story but it never does.

Characters DO things but no one knows why. (In every story I have to ask this question: who are these people? In every story I have no idea.)

I swear that if you changed the main character in (any) story midway with the main character in (any other) story I wouldn’t notice this sleight of hand.

Nor would I care.

Have I mentioned voice?

EXACTLY the same. Every time. And worse than ‘just same’, it’s quirky-same. Different stories, different characters, different ages. Yet everyone speaks as one, adding to the sense of interchangeability. (If this were a theme or important to the overall vibe of the collection that would be great, but it isn’t.) A common trait many characters have is that way of speaking where the sentence is left dangling, meant as emphasis but when over-used is just plumb annoying. So awful you can’t. So awful you almost.

(And no, this isn’t some clever intentional use of sameness to make a commentary of ANY kind.)

Are you kidding? Oh… if only!

All of which to say this is a writer whose work I have admired in the past, a writer who knows how to write exceedingly well and who has received much attention for their work, and (and this is the unfortunate bit) is lauded for all of it as if all of it is equally laudable.

And, yes, of course, publishers need to survive and writers such as this one are integral to the industry and fans are loyal and will buy much and forgive even more while waiting for The Next Great Thing…

…but.

What’s sad is that there are so many others writing really good stuff, being innovative, taking chances, saying things that matter, that go unread, even when published. Sadder still, that a writer of this caliber can (easily I suspect) publish a book that would be rejected coming from an unknown.

And rejected for good reason.

I know very little about the economics of publishing but am heartened to know there still exist houses who respect the work of creativity and literature itself, enough to take chances more often than merely selling out with main stream names and less than fine work. 

On that note… 

…rant over.

& my lips remain sealed.

cheese

 

♠

the way of love

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

I’m talking about books of course, book love.

The way a book finds you just when you didn’t know you needed it.

The way a friend who isn’t known for popping things in the mail sends you a book and you think: oh dear because it’s not your usual kind of book and now what? and you open it and begin reading, just to say you did, and before you know it you’re ‘away with it’ because of course it’s your kind of book, you just didn’t (yet) know it and you’re just a little surprised at how she’s glimpsed a side of you you didn’t realized showed.

The feel of the paper (we all have our favourites).

The art of the cover.

The marginalia!! (either finding it — the joy of second-hand books — or adding your own, which is a whole conversation in itself; I would love to have a book club meeting limited to the book’s marginalia; in fact I’m reminding myself that there is a book circulating right now among five friends, each of us encouraged to add notes before passing it along to the next person; each of us using a different ink so we know who’s who)

The books of our childhood, of our lives, that just by opening to a random page or illustration take us back to some summer afternoon and yellow peddle pushers, cool grass on bare legs, an afternoon of pages, a stack of buttered saltines and solitude and never once feeling alone.

Please note: I will never borrow a book from you, at least it would be very very unlikely, because I’m too familiar and relaxed with books. I bend them backwards and fold down pages, mark them up; I take them into the kitchen where the olive oil and blueberries live and to lunch and on tea breaks with chocolate. I stuff them into beach bags among mustard sandwiches and leaky water bottles and leave them under maple trees at night when it might rain and sometimes it does.

Would I lend you mine? Depends. If it’s one I’ve formed a strong relationship with, probably not. But I would love to buy you your own copy to christen with salsa and jam.

~

After all this, and in the spirit of book love magic, what do I stumble across this morning but this passage, by Jill Robinson.

“Once in a very rare year, there comes along a new book, and I say, as I am reading, as my eyes eat words without a blink, as my heart and mind grab each other, This, I say, is The Best Book. I know before the first page is gone. I sense it building. And as the book finishes, I go as slow as I can. I don’t want to leave the book’s world.”

~

And on the same page, my handwritten response:

Treasures that come to us in the arrangement of letters and punctuation. Who knew in grade one that the alphabet we were learning would be everything?

the-new-novel

♥

this is not a review: ‘the book of eels’, by patrik svensson

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

 

I’m committed (for the next wee while anyway) to re-posting older posts with fresh introductions, usually as one thing relates to the other or which sparks some memory. In this case The Book of Eels is the latest among books recently read about peculiar critters and it comes to me as a recommendation by friends who said if I like books on peculiar critters I would like this one.

They weren’t entirely wrong. I did like it. Though until the very end I couldn’t understand the reason for the book’s structure (alternating chapters of eel history, facts, and lore, and memoir of the author’s relationship with his eel fishing dad). It’s the ending that pulls it all together quite sweetly.

In a nutshell, Svensson writes 235 pages about what we don’t know about eels. And it’s honestly never dull because you are gobsmacked with HOW MUCH NO ONE KNOWS about eels. (And not for a lack of trying as many bright lights from Aristotle to Rachel Carson and beyond have been trying to figure them out forever.)

Here’s what we do know, sort of. There’s a pretty strong idea they’re born in the Sargasso Sea and then, while still tiny glassy things, no bigger than a willow leaf, they make their way to various parts of the planet’s rivers, oceans, lakes, to hang out for a life time, twenty, twenty-five years if they fancy it, before heading back to the Sargasso to breed, immediately after which they die. Conjecture points to them staying alive only as long as they don’t propagate. And aren’t caught by eel fishers.

That’s almost all anyone knows and they’re not even sure that much is right. This critter is FULL of mystery that goes back millions of years. How and where, exactly, they live (deep deep water) and how they propagate (there’s some thinking they may be hermaphrodites because an eel coupling has never — in millions of years — been witnessed and there’s no proof it even happens. No one can find their reproductive organs).

“When dad talked about the Sargasso Sea, it sounded like a magical fairy-tale world… Every time we caught an eel, I looked into its eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of what it had seen. None of them ever met my gaze.”

They have the ability to resurrect after being killed (and other extraordinary feats that defy explanation).

Also, the eels are in decline in a way that may represent the most recent universal mass extinction, of which there have been only five others where huge percentages of life forms disappeared (the last one being eons ago). Some reckon we are now in the sixth mass extinction, and at the rate we’re going we stand to lose 50% of current life forms within the next 100 years, a ridiculously high rate and entirely attributed to man-made causes (past mass extinctions were due to natural causes and spanned millions of years).

There is a short section on sea cows that I loved and how and why they went extinct and the dodo as well and how the eel may be next replacing the vernacular of dead as a dodo with dead as an eel.

Apparently eels were the reason Freud turned to psychoanalysis… before that he’d been into biology and got hooked on eels until the mystery of them drove him bonkers.

My computer will not currently let me upload any new photos, which is a shame as the cover is worth a look.

I’ll leave you also with the two other peculiar critter-book Not a Reviews on the off chance your critter whistle has been whetted.

How to Catch a Mole

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

If you like the sound of eels, you will love moles and snails. Honest.

♦

I’ll also leave you also with the final paragraphs of The Book of Eels, which is not a spoiler in any way but merely a satisfying point in the overall journey.

“I know it was an eel because I saw it. It slowly slithered up out of the shadows and came toward me. It was large and a pale shade of grey, with black button eyes, and it looked at me as if to make sure I could see it. I let go of the line and saw the hook come out just as the eel reached the surface, then it turned and slid back into the hidden depths.

“For a while, I just sat there by the water’s edge. Everything was quiet and the lake completely still; the sun sent a white sheen spreading across the water and everything beneath the surface was hidden, as though behind a mirror. What lay hidden underneath was a secret, but now it was my secret.”

♦

eels

this is not a review: ‘her name was margaret’, by denise davy

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

 

I’ve pretty much spent every waking hour of the past twenty-four reading this book that, essentially, tells how a homeless woman ended up dying on the streets of Hamilton, Ontario, a story that might strike one as being not especially new. After all, there are only so many ways a homeless person dies. Usually from some form of violence, neglect, or addiction.

This is what I thought, that there was no new story to tell on the subject, so why read?

And yet once started I could not stop reading.

Why? Partly because of how Denise Davy tells the story. Oh my god, where do I begin to even say how well written this is. Throughout, I marvelled at how she, the author, was so very adept at restraint, keeping her emotion out of things and letting the story be entirely Margaret’s.

Margaret Louise Jacobson is the Margaret of Her Name Was Margaret: Life and Death on the Streets. Born to ultra-Christian, missionary parents, she spends the first fourteen or so years of her life being devoted to the church as her (rather unpleasant, austere) parents spread god’s word throughout every aspect of her childhood and the Caribbean. The book doesn’t go into the unnecessary details of their work, only suggesting the effect of all that fundamentalism on Margaret.

Then the voices start. And her family returns to Canada. The reader’s hope at this point is that they’ve come back in order to get help for Margaret, that they will stand by her in what is obviously the early signs of mental illness. But they deliver her instead into the arms of the Canadian mental health system while they return to god’s work and the system lets her down miserably.

That’s the story in a nutshell, but that’s not the story. That’s what we like to think the story is, or a version of it, for every ragged bit of humanity we see sleeping on sidewalk grates. Ah, well, we tell ourselves as we gingerly step around them or cross the street, some tragic tale, some sad past, another person slips between the cracks of a well-meaning system, probably their own fault in some way we can’t quite be bothered to name. If we’re in the mood to make ourselves feel noble, we drop change into a cup.

The other reason I couldn’t stop reading was because of how my mind and my eyes were being opened to a subject I thought I understood.

What Davy has done in this book is not only bring one person to life through making a small, personal connection with her, but also effectively taking us by the hand and walking us through a day, a month, a decade or five, of that life. And she’s done so without lectures or blame or righteousness but simply by saying look at this, and see that over there, and here’s a bit of info you may or may not care to know…

Davy, a well known journalist, received permission from a family member to access Margaret’s extensive medical files and with that (800+ pages), and access also to family letters, photographs and conversations with various people who knew her, she pieced together a life that with every page becomes more real.

Also more unreal insofar as the mind-boggling insanity of ‘the system’.

It is a story both shocking and endearing.

Davy honours one woman especially in this book, but in doing so she honours the homeless collectively and best of all, she offers suggestions for how we, as individuals, communities, and as a society, can honour our most disenfranchised fellow citizens by writing letters and demanding meaningful supports be put into place.

It’s not possible to read this and see homelessness the same way again. Not possible to carry on consoling ourselves with thoughts of how the homeless choose this lifestyle (the majority do not) or that there is simply nothing to be done with people who snarl and lash out, refusing to help themselves or allow others to help.

Because there’s a reason for that.

And there’s a solution.

On top of everything else, homelessness is expensive. The use of emergency and health care services, police, fire, prison, etc., (services used more frequently by the homeless due to lifestyle, mental health issues, and no other options) amounts to approximately $100,000 per year per (chronically) homeless individual. If anyone wants to talk money, it’s actually much cheaper to create supportive housing than support homelessness.

Along with the problems, Davy cites some uplifting examples of countries and cities that have adopted programs (like supportive housing) that work and where homelessness numbers (and costs) have dropped considerably.

Her Name Was Margaret is a compelling, unputdownable and strangely optimistic book for many reasons, not the least being that Davy shows us there IS a way out, a way both humane and economically viable. For that reason alone it’s must reading. Schools and universities included. We need to understand systems in order to fix them, not just sympathize with those caught in the middle.

I don’t know what I was expecting when I opened the book. To learn about one person, that would have been enough. I assumed there would be sadness, but I couldn’t have guessed that it would also contain such hope and be a source of enormous inspiration to DO something toward change.

I will be writing letters asking for change.

Thanks to Denise Davy for the extraordinary heart that has gone into the research and writing of the book. And to Wolsak & Wynn for publishing it.

♦

this is not a review: ‘in praise of retreat’, by kirsteen macleod

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

I have my own preferred forms of retreat, not the least of which being an annual solitary escape at xmas to a tiny highway motel about an hour north in the country. The kind of place (I have discovered) divorced men go to lick their wounds and couples whose house burned down await insurance dollars and where you park your car in front of your room, where there’s a metal chair beside the front door if you feel like being conspicuous and a wooden one out back on your tiny private patio. It’s the latter I choose and sit wrapped in a heavy blanket under an awning on a snowy night with a glass of wine or a mug of chai; more stars than at home, the dark is darker, the silence more silent. I’m the only holiday traveller to this lonely sweet place at this time of the year where everyone leaves everyone else alone. I read and write and every night I stamp a labyrinth in the snow behind the motel as I watch the sun set. I eat wonderful meals from my cooler and in the morning I have a square of dark chocolate in bed before breakfast.

I can and I do all of this at home too (not the chocolate in bed and maybe that’s key) but on my retreat it all feels different. That too is key. Not what you do but how it feels.

I’m thinking a lot about all this currently and in the way of how things find you when you need to be found by them, I was found by Kirsteen MacLeod’s ‘In Praise of Retreat’, in which she writes of various retreat-ers, from Thoreau and Celtic hermits to E. Jean Carroll, Emily Dickinson and others whose lifestyle or parts of it demanded serious and regular isolationg from society. A gorgeous and enlightening read in which I’ve learned so much about ’emptying’, including that ‘kil’ is the Celtic word for ‘cell’ and refers to the caves of hermits up and down the Scottish coast.

Each of those place names that begin ‘kil…’ indicate they were once an inhabited space by some monkishly minded soul.

Written in my favourite style, heavily researched but conversational in tone, like lunching with someone whose every word you hang on to the point your soup gets cold and you don’t care one whit. In personal stories of yoga retreats, writing retreats, high and low end, historic and new-fangled retreat facilities in various corners of the world as well as accounts via third parties, MacLeod knows exactly how to balance research with a good anecdote. She tells of people who are drawn to retreats and the different and same things they, and we, are all looking for.

“A retreat is a place, but it is also an act of independence. A resolute effort of will is required. While it’s easier to go with the powerful tide of the mainstream, which requires no thought or cultivation, we can choose to withdraw our attention, step back. Like prayer, piano playing, tennis, yoga and meditation, retreat is a practice –the effort you put in shapes what you get out of it. The practice of retreat attunes you to the extraordinary, to the sacramental world.”

I’ve read other things on solitude that can get preachy or downright ho hum but not here. There isn’t a part of the book that feels heavy-handed, overdone or slow moving including a lovely section on Leonard Cohen that feels fresh with insight, in which she quotes him with this that I love because I love seriousness and it makes me happy to see someone taking it seriously:

“I think there’s an appetite for seriousness… [it] is voluptuous, and very few people have allowed themselves the luxury of it… Seriousness is the deepest pleasure we have. But now I see people allowing their lives to diminish, to become shallow, so they can’t enjoy the deep wells of experience.”

I’d like to paddle in this stream a bit longer, the idea of retreat and solitude, what it means, the various forms it takes, so if you have something to share on the subject, a quote, a photograph, a personal experience, a book, please do. I will be all ears and eyes and gratitude.

♦

this is not a review: ‘brighten the corner where you are’, by carol bruneau

~ carin ~ 7 Comments

 

Based on loving my (limited) experiences of limited spaces, I have this idea that I would love a tiny house. Also I’m drawn to stories about living in small spaces or trailers so it was wonderful, a few years ago, to visit the site of the one room house Maud Lewis shared with her husband Everett in rural Nova Scotia (as well as seeing the actual house which is now permanently installed at the Art Gallery of Halifax after a citizen’s group fought to save it). To imagine her painting by the window, arthritic fingers, little money, a miserly and odd/rather cold husband… going nowhere, speaking to few people, zero luxuries or conveniences, and yet… all those happy cows and cats and sleds and flowers, not to mention the house itself, the stairs, the walls, door, stove, everything in sight essentially, painted… brightly.

I’m only sorry that at the time I visited the house I hadn’t yet read Carol Bruneau’s Brighten the Corner Where You Are.

A novel narrated by Maud herself, dead and in heaven and from which vantage point, in case you’re interested, one can still covet Salsibury steak and where one is no wiser as to understanding humans. “You can’t know the heart or mind of someone else, not even from here.”

In a voice that so drew me in I had to keep reminding myself it was fiction, Bruneau spins an utterly charming (and eye-opening) imagination of what Lewis’s life might have been like in that tiny space with that crotchety, mean, and downright weird husband, and what she herself might have been like, what she thought of her strangely isolated life.

It’s also based on a sizeable amount of research judging by the bibliography.

In Bruneau’s version, Maud doesn’t complain much, she accepts the choices she’s made, the safety of marriage being something she’s grateful for after being spurned by a man with whom she had a child (a child she never knew). There is a beautiful through line involving a ring that Everett gives her, which she sees as a symbol of belonging and legitimacy. Somehow, as a couple, they work. She can’t cook but she ends up being the one to bring home the bacon, $5 at a time through her paintings, which are sold at the side of the road or by word of mouth.

Paintings now worth tens of thousands.

But it was never money that inspired her.

“When the wind blowing in through the cracks finally lulled me to sleep, I dreamt of an orange. It was fresh from the hold of a sailing ship from the south seas, round and bright as the sun. As I sucked its juice its seeds stuck in my teeth. And in the dream Ev yelled at me for not saving him some. For he expected me to share it: what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine. That orange was the colour I would’ve painted the entire house if I could have.”

Lewis is nobody’s ninny, nor is she a Polyanna. The fact that, despite her circumstances, she chooses to paint only joy, is what makes her so interesting and becomes the angle at which Bruneau excavates: what kind of a person can live like this and still see the world as she does?

“It’s colours that keep the world turning, that keep a person going.”

It would have been easy to sentimentalize the story or play on the reader’s empathy for Lewis but Bruneau does neither. There are scenes where I wanted to scream get out, or they’re only trying to help you, or you don’t need him. But I’m glad no one was listening. Bruneau finds a beautiful balance in Maud, showing us one possibility of Why She Stays, an account that could be entirely true for all we know, certainly an example of the times when women like Maud, especially, rural and poor, physically disabled, with ‘a child out of wedlock’, were happy to have any kind of place in society. A husband and a shack by the road would do nicely.

Even so, you can’t help believe Maud Lewis had something special, a quality that helped her almost thrive.

“What these folks don’t see is that these cages made me the bird I was and the bird I am, made me sing in the way I did, the way that brought me happiness and joy and a starry life I wouldn’t have known otherwise.”

What surprises me most is how joyful the story feels, despite the not so joyful reality. In whatever way Maud managed to turn difficulty into a tolerable happiness, so has Bruneau turned a difficult story into one of ultimate brightness, capturing the essence of Maud’s pragmatic outlook. Whenever I put the book down I could hardly wait to get back to it in that way where you hope the characters haven’t got up to anything while you’ve been having your lunch. The reading felt like hanging out with Maud, hearing a sometimes painful story told with heart and sprinkled throughout with laughter, wry observation, and Maud’s maybe unintentional sense of humour.

“…Mama had a strict arrangement with Mae, who did my hair in exchange for cards. Dis-for-dat: the barber system, Mae called it.”

All that and…. it has one of the most beautiful endings I’ve read in a long time.

1200px-Maud_Lewis

Image courtesy WikiCommons.

♦

this is not a review: ‘field notes from an unintentional birder’, by julia zarankin

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

 

In a nutshell: personal essays, each focusing on one bird or aspect of birding, as well as a gentle inter-weaving of childhood memories that embrace the disciplines of piano, Russian literature, ballet, which in alternating ways both parallel and contradict the author’s approach to a growing fascination/obsession with birds.

Also in a nutshell: an entirely lovely read.

So lovely in fact that I found myself looking forward to settling down with a chapter or two in the way you might call a friend and say, so what have you learned today about your beloved birds and KNOW you will be getting a fabulous story if only, and maybe especially, about the most ordinary of moments, about how these moments reflect so much more than the moment and how there is always some very great thing learned, about birds, yes, but about self at the same time, in a completely NOT self-focused way.

There is no navel gazing here. Observations, both avian, and self-reflection, come as happy surprises.

Zarankin writes (along with so much else) about getting up in the wee hours, in all weather, driving to meet birding groups in parking lots and from there heading to wherever sightings of note have occurred. She writes about how she can hardly believe she’s doing this, how she notices her house filling up with birding books and décor, her conversation laced with avian facts; she is considering the purchase of a multi-pocketed vest, the likes of which once made her cringe. Having reached her thirties without noticing much more than a robin she is stunned to realize the variety of birds that exist in the city of Toronto and, to be honest, I’m stunned right along with her. How is it I don’t know a nuthatch… have I ever even seen one? Apparently they identify themselves by walking headfirst down tree trunks. And warblers, well, they’re everywhere it turns out, and, get this: there is something called a veery. Also a phalarope, a towhee. These are birds that live… right here.

My mind is blown by how much we don’t know.

This is a book about discovery. Birds, yes. But passion mostly. It’s uplifting in a down to earth way; there are no promises that following your passion will lead you to what you expect, in yourself or otherwise, but, as Zarankin shows by her own example, there’s a very good chance it will lead you to the surprise of your own heart.

Also birds.

♦

“It’s hard to measure my birding progress. Ten years later, I am no longer a neophyte… But I know I’m still far from being a skilled birder.

“…. Maybe the point isn’t about measuring at all; it’s about seeing.”

♦