Whetstone by Lorna Crozier

There is a brand of quiet poetry that appeals to and influences me in my own work. To that end, I’ve returned to Lorna Crozier’s work, specifically her collection Whetstone. As with any similar collection, some of the poems resonated and others did not. It’s more about occupying the same psychic space and allowing yourself to be guided along.

The titular poem stands out as one of the highlights for me, particularly because of its vivid first lines: “The stone that sharpens stars, / their slow slice across the sky” (13). Jan Zwicky’s essay about resonance in poetry has proven enduring in the way I think about poems. Resonance often seems to use juxtaposition as a medium for finding connection, and following this idea of a stone sharpening stars in the sky, Crozier says, “it must have mingled with the gravel / on the road I run. Now its light / has reached my eyes” (13). I can see a parallel between the smattering of stars across a night sky and the stream of stones that form the gravel, every once in a while one standing out. There’s also an odd inversion here, though, because typically we’d think of the light from stars’ light taking years to reach our eyes, but the pronoun here refers to the whetstone. It intimates the slow labour of sharpening but at the same time, the stone is placing a demand on the speaker: “What does it want from me? / To be moved into another / galaxy of knives?” (13). Alternatively, the stone could be making a call “to be looked upon and left / where it has found me?” (13). The stone is given agency, while the speaker is being called towards agency. Or, perhaps there’s no difference between them: “Maybe it’s just a stone // among other stones, desireless / and unafflicted” (13). As with other poems in this mode, a small phenomenon is then extended into something much larger, more cosmic. The narrator reflects: “Does it know I am // dulled by God? / His negligence, / his under-use” (13). I think the poem, at its core, is a matter of agency and responsiveness, and ultimately the choice to either act or not act.

Crozier’s mode here feels so similar to Jan Zwicky; I notice her guidance is documented in the acknowledgements of Whetstone. This influence also emerges in the meditations on nature. The book is largely wintery, and “Prayers of Snow” sets that tone, which reads, in part, as follows:

Snow is a lesson in forgetting, a lesson in gravity,
a long loose sentence spiralling to the end of thought.
It prays to the young god robed in white, his ascent
a blizzard returning to the sky. (11)

As I suggested, there’s a kind of cosmic quality imbued to the natural phenomenon. The laws of the universe (gravity) are embodied by a particular, observable phenomenon (snow). Having tangible images like this really gives readers something to latch onto. Imagining snow as a kind of language is also delightful; the snow streams down as a “long loose sentence” and the odd inversion of a blizzard returning to the sky is a nice touch. The poem then reads as a kind of prayer and ultimately the snow “closes the gap / between drought and plenty, belief and blasphemy, / the ear and silence” (11). The idea of snow being something that joins disparate phenomena together feels true. Consider the way that an endless stretch of white snow erases distinct features and makes everything into one canvas. Snow becomes “a migration of birds / without eyes, without feet, who settle white in branches / on breasts and wings. When you stride through snow / in dreams of waking, you are a star-walker. / It prays to the soft fall of your books” (11). I like the way the snow prays to the world around it and the distinction between snow and other things fades: snow and birds are the same. The idea of being a “star-walker” every time you walk through snow also gives the poem its cosmic quality and makes sense with the idea of snow being star-like in its shape.

There are other poems that have a similar motif: a totalizing phenomenon that reveals connection. In the poem “Solitude,” for example, Crozier describes “Sometimes the dark’s so dark / nothing can move through it” (38). She specifies that the wind and the geese can’t move through it, despite how an hour ago they “charcoaled their journey from star to star” (38). I love noun-verbs, and “charcoaled” here feels evocative. Again, there’s a motif of stars that stand as nodes in a network of connection. The poem then continues to describe in second person that “you love the lake at night / because water keeps its distance / yet carries sound, crackled and clear, from the farthest shore” (38). Again, there’s these spaces that are vast and empty but serve as bridges of connection to the farthest shores. Crozier again gets more precise: “the hard notes of a party / drift through the screen from cabins / on the southern spit” (38). If you’ve ever sat by water in the darkness, you know these two emptinesses that connect: “You said / nothing moves through this dark. / But music does, and voices, / and you go on” (38).

One more poem I’d like to comment on is “The Physics of the Rose.” The poem opens with an epigraph about the electron and us living in different worlds. In describing the rose, Crozier says “each petal [is] an eyelid, blood-fused, over what / invisible eyes!” (24). The idea of an eyelid sealed shut by blood is both beautiful and horrific. Continuing to describe the rose, “fold after fold, its silence so enclosed / it seems a kind of speaking, light’s muted // hallelujah brought inside” (24). Crozier reads into silences and finds their voice. She looks into the quiet phenomena and imbues them with a voice, just as these roses speak in the silence of their folds. Later in the short poem, she describes it as “the antithesis of absence, / of stillness, its red fist unfurling / this, this and this, a daring to be open / so immoderate you want to say outrageous, / you want to say ridiculous, but can’t” (24). The idea of the rose being the antithesis of absence is a compelling phrase and emulates Crozier’s philosophy. Despite the silence, the rose speaks. Despite this, there’s a dark tone that gets couched in pretty imagery. Crozier describes the rose as “shocking as a heart cut out and set in glass” (24). The gruesome undertone draws attention to that which is otherwise quiet. The final lines of the poem then invert our expectations: suddenly we are the one being watched. She writes, “Clothed or not, you stand naked in its eyes. / Small and unadorned, / without a lover” (24). We are no longer the observer; the brilliant presence of the rose is observing us…I suppose when you stare into the rose long enough the rose stares back?

Throughout the collection, there were a number of poems I liked, a few that I loved, and a few I failed to linger on. It’s a good collection and, as with all poetry, the more time I spent thinking through it the more I was able to see what Crozier’s mission might be. It’s worth reading and I’ll stand by my philosophy that poems are best read as part of a full collection. The more time you spend with a voice, the more you’re able to hear its nuances.

Happy reading!

Mornings Without Mii by Mayumi Inaba

  If you’ve ever had a pet, you’ve probably felt gratitude for how they’ve been there for you during any number of significant moments in your life. The memories we form alongside our pets have a special place in us, so it makes sense that Mayumi Inaba grounds her memoir Mornings Without Mii in memories of her cat. It is her life, but through the lens of a beloved pet.

The book is a quiet, meditative reflection on Inaba’s life that reads like an episodic novel. Each section is also punctuated with a poem that parallels her experiences with her cat Mii. The account of finding Mii is heartrending; she finds the cat hanging on a school fence and rescues her from her vulnerable state. She brings the cat to trust her and they have a clear special bond and they ultimately go on walks together.

There’s a sequence that I thought had a really interesting framing. Inaba talks about the dissolution of her marriage. The relationship is clearly coming to an end but it’s anchored in their relationship with the cat. Inaba is trying to find a home but the leases all have specifications against cats. In the end, she finds a place where she can move with her cat to write, but her husband cannot make the move with her. She then reflects on her choice and sees that choosing her cat was a way of making the harder choice to let her marriage end.

As the book progresses, Inaba recounts a few significant neighbours in her life around their interactions with Mii. There’s one memorable sequence in which she remembers Mii running away and the panic of trying to find her—and then finding her with a neighbour and having to reclaim the cat. There’s also a great part where she hires a cat sitter who takes a lot of effort to personalize Mii’s care.

I think that the last third of the book is probably the most powerful; we witness Mii’s declining health and eventual death. For years, Mii declines such that her digestive system no longer functions. We then see a tenderness in Inaba as she tends to Mii, making it a routine to squeeze her bladder to help her urinate and to manually push feces through her system. They have evening walk routines and Inaba it’s clear how deeply she cares for her cat. It’s tragic watching her realize that there is nothing to be done for Mii; I think most pet owners will recognize that feeling—you know it might be time, but can’t bring yourself to do it. Inaba also recollects the memories for which Mii was her ongoing companion and, despite the book being fewer than 200 pages, it feels like an earned tragic walk down memory lane.

As I mentioned, the tone of the book is a quiet, meditative one. There’s a directness and simplicity in the language that serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, it gives the text an accessible quality and presents these nostalgic moments as matters-of-fact. On the other hand, the text’s elliptical quality gives it a weightiness, a mysteriousness. The poems at the end of the chapters are a nice touch; because the relationship with her cat develops alongside her writing career, the pairings have a formal purpose.

Of the poems, one about the loss of Mii and the mornings without her stands out as a highlight. The poem starts with the line “The night split split and never closed” (171). In the latter part of the poem, there’s a series of lines that I think encapsulate grief and loss beautifully:

“Your time in your body receded like the tide
leaving it empty
The dawn sunrise

A single unmoving point in a world on the move
The newspaper came   but there was nothing in it I

    wanted to read.” (171)

I think the line about there not being anything of the note in the newspaper is so true to life. Losing a pet creates a numbness where nothing else feels like it matters. And the fact that this comes at the end of a book about the loss feels like a nice parallel: words get to matter again as Inaba processes the loss of her beloved cat.

The book navigates difficult feelings: there’s a tension between the deep love you have for a pet, but the frustrations of caring for an ailing pet. There’s the grief and regret and doubt of doing what is best for your beloved animal companions. The book is pretty sweet, but at the same time offers its fair share of heartbreak.

If you’re looking for a bit of tenderness or if you’re processing your own pet grief, this book may well be for you. It seems inappropriate to end this review with my usual “happy reading” so instead, I’ll just request that you comment pictures of your little animal pals.

Ru by Kim Thúy

  Kim Thúy is a writer of beautiful books that work through a series of resonances. Each book is a series of connected sketches that read like prose poems. Being Thúy’s first book, Ru lays the foundation of Thúy’s special magic.

Ru is the story of a Vietnamese family whose lives are forever disrupted by war. The central character’s family has their home occupied by Communist soldiers and flee by boat through Malaysia, where they lived in a refugee camp, before moving on to Montreal. The novel recounts vignettes from their lives and the characters they meet along the way. The book hops between the present and different pasts, often in a free-associative Proustian way. For example, the narrator recounts going to a lotus pond in a suburb of Hanoi where “there were always two or three women with bent backs and trembling hands, sitting in a small round boat, using a stick to move across the water and drop leaves into open lotus blossoms” (40). Lovely description aside, the passage continues that “They would come back the next day to collect them one by one before the petals faded, after the captive tea leaves had absorbed the scent of the pistils during the night. They told me that every one of those tea leaves preserved the soul of the short-lived flowers” (40). The passage ends there, but the following page (chapter?) begins that “Photos could not preserve the soul of our first Christmas trees” (41). We jump from the past to the present around a concept: preservation of the soul. Visually, there’s enough of a contrast between a lotus and a Christmas tree, the latter of which whose “branches gathered in the woods of suburban Montreal, stuck in the rim of a spare tire covered with a white sheet, seem bare and lacking in magic, but in reality they were much prettier than the eight-foot-tall spruce trees we have nowadays” (41). I’m a little bit stunned by the way Thúy cleaves contrasting ideas together through a more metaphorical or conceptual connection. This is one example, but most of the text operates with this associational approach.

The character studies throughout the text are opportunities to form rich portraits while also offering philosophical insights into the human experience. Often, we hear about the behaviour of a character and the passage culminates with some reflection that sums up the core of the person. One agèd character passes away but “he hadn’t grown old before he died. He had stopped time by continuing to enjoy himself, to live until the end with the lightness of a young man” (59).Another character is particularly severe and “all the fun of childhood slipped between her fingers while, in the name of propriety, she was forbidding her sisters to dance” (62). These observations feel both particular and universal and hover on that horizon in a touching way.

The vignettes throughout the novel also stand out as cautionary tales or flash fictions that would fit in something like The One Thousand and One Nights. In one vignette, the narrator is in a cube van on the way to pick strawberries or beans and her mother tells her the story of another day labourer who would wait for her employer across the street every day. The narrator’s grandfather’s gardner would bring her a treat for breakfast every day and one morning he fails to appear. She keeps waiting and he keeps failing to appear. The story becomes a more tragic tale where the woman brings the narrator’s mother “a sheet of paper darkened with question marks, nothing else” (71) and then the mother never sees her again, “She disappeared not knowing that the gardener had asked his parents in vain for permission to marry her” (71). As it turns out, the grandfather had accepted the gardener’s parents’ request to send him away and “no one told [the day labourer] that the gardner, her own love, had been forced to go away, unable to leave her a letter because she was illiterate, because she was a young woman travelling in the company of men, because her skin had been burned too dark by the sun” (71). The vignette works as a standalone tale, but also picks up on some of the broader themes of displacement and loss that resonate throughout the text.

In another vignette, Thúy’s symbolism rings out. The narrator discusses Monsieur An, who was nearly executed. She talks about how “the days followed one another like the links of a chain—the first fastened around their necks, the last to the center of the earth” (86). The idea of links in a chain feels significant for the structure of the novel as a whole, but also Monsieur An “felt his chain getting shorter when the soldiers took him out of the ranks and made him kneel in the mud before the fleeting, frightened, empty gazes of his former colleagues, their bodies barely covered with rags and skin” (86). The idea of chains securing people in place and the impact of them being severed serves as an interesting juxtaposition to the unmoored freedom of refugees who have lost everything. The meaning of freedom, the significance of freedom, is uneven across similar characters. Monsieur An felt “the hot metal of the pistol” against his temple, and “in one last act of rebellion he raised his head to look at the sky” (86). In that desperation, he sees all the shades of blue in the sky equally intensely and experiences a Platonic dazzling “almost to the point of blindness” (87). Then, “at the same time, he could hear the click of the trigger drop into silence [...] That night, the shades of blue that he’d seen earlier filed past his eyes like a film being screened over and over” (87). After surviving, he feels that “the sky had cut his chain, had saved him, freed him, while some of the others were suffocated to death, dried up in containers without having a chance to count the blues of the sky” (87). The idea of the chain being severed gives him complete freedom but also gives him commitments: “every day, then, he set himself the task of listing those colours—for the others” (87).

The narrator takes away the message that Monsieur An “taught [her] about nuance” (88) and then jumps to another central figure in her life, Monsieur Minh, who “gave [her] the urge to write” (88). She describes how he took being a delivery man very serious and how “he was saved not by the sky but by writing” (88). She talks about the books he had written during his time at the re-education camp, “always on the one piece of paper he possessed, page by page, chapter by chapter, an unending story” (88). There’s a replacing of his senses through writing: “without writing, he wouldn’t have heard the snow melting or leaves growing or clouds sailing through the sky” (88). I like the idea of hearing the snow melting but “nor would he have seen the dead end of a thought, the remains of a star or the texture of a comma” (88). I love that phrase: “the texture of a comma.” It gives writing such a sensual dimension and that same character then recites words in his personal dictionary “like a mantra, like a march toward the voice” (88).

As the book comes to a close, Thúy reflects on the power of stories themselves. Running through the text there is reference to a pink bracelet and then it turns into a reflection on time and truth. It has been long lost and “absolutely no one will know the true story of the pink bracelet once the acrylic has decomposed into dust, once the years have accumulated in the thousands, in hundreds of strata, because after only thirty years I already recognize our old selves only through fragments, through scars, through glimmers of light” (139). In the final pages, then, she reflects on the thirty years of Vietnam rising like a phoenix from “its iron curtain.” It’s in the final pages where the artistic vision of the text is given a clear articulation:

“Alone as much as together, all those individuals from my past have shaken the grime off their backs in order to spread their wings with plumage of red and gold, before thrusting themselves sharply towards the great blue space, decorating my children’s sky, showing them that one horizon always hides another and it goes on like that to infinity, to the unspeakable beauty of renewal, to intangible rapture” (141).

The idea that the individuals are both alone and together is similar to the vignettes and the resonances between them throughout the novel. There’s also reference to vibrant colour and decorating “my children’s sky,” which recalls Monsieur An’s near-execution. There’s always another horizon, always another layer. The critical optimism of the text shines through, that there’s an “unspeakable beauty of renewal”, even if these memories are borne from wounds.

The final passage remarks on the legacies that feed into the book, into history, into truth: “it is true all the way to the possibility of this book, to the moment when my words glide across the curve of your lips, to the sheets of white paper that put up with my trail, or rather the trail of those who have walked before me, for me” (141). The narrator comments on moving “in the trace of their footsteps as in a waking dream where the scent of a newly blown poppy is no longer a perfume but a blossoming: where the deep red of a maple  leaf in autumn is no longer a colour but a grace; where a country is no longer a place but a lullaby” (141). I love the way Thúy allows for these near-synesthesiac supplantations and imbues colour with metaphysical significance. Laying out the philosophy after having so thoroughly demonstrated it closes the book beautifully, where the final line seems to speak for the whole book: “And also, where an outstretched hand is no longer a gesture but a moment of love, lasting until sleep, until waking, until everyday life” (141).

Happy reading!

The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra

I’ve been on an Alejandro Zambra kick, and after reading his Chilean Poet a few weeks ago, I’m returning to one of his short fictions, The Private Lives of Trees, a one hundred page novella that explores similar themes to his other works: family, parenthood, time, memory, the act of writing.

The initial premise of the story is that Julián is at home with his stepdaughter Daniela waiting for his wife Verónica to come home from class. As he waits, he watches a soccer game from years earlier where he vaguely remembers the ending and reflects on the stories he tells Daniela where trees are central characters. He thinks about how he and Verónica met and he thinks about Daniela’s future when she will one day turn 30.

There’s a seeming omniscient eye that hovers over the tale, like in Samuel Beckett’s short stories or in Haruki Murakami’s After Dark. This writerly omniscience provides a passage early on in the texts that casts a shadow, perhaps the shadow of death, over the rest of the novel:

“But this is not a normal night, at least not yet. It’s still not completely certain that there will be a next day, since Verónica isn’t back yet from her drawing class. When she returns, the novel will end. But as long as she is gone, the book will continue. The book goes on until she returns, or until Julián is sure that she isn’t going to return. For now, Verónica is absent from the blue room, where Julián lulls the little girl to sleep with a story about the private lives of trees” (6).

The text’s premise rests on this out-of-text construction that knows when the novel will end. Like in other of Zambra’s works, the line between fiction and reality is fraught with odd divisions. Here, we are pitched the idea that either Verónica will return or she won’t—something that the narrator would presumably know about yet expresses doubt or ambivalence to the issue. Partway through the novel, Julián develops some hypotheses. In the first, his wife faces two blown tires and is walking down the highway in search of help in the middle of the night. In the second, his wife is underneath her teacher, entangled in an amorous tryst from which she’ll never return. No one version is given primacy.

Zambra then does something interesting with time and fiction. His central character presents some options of what will happen to his stepdaughter in the future. He leaps to her life in five year intervals, which are not impacted by the loss of her mother. Whether or not she returns, Daniela’s life plays out the same way with her at thirty reconnecting with her father and dating a man named Ernesto. Julián’s fictions then blur around temporally; she “will” be living a certain way, but then she is, and then she was, and the verb tenses get jumbled so that even astute readers are left uncertain regarding what happens or will happen in reality and what is part of her stepfather’s stories.

This blend of temporal shifts is something that gives Zambra’s work its subversive power. It continually pushes at its own boundaries. Even when it comes to the private lives of trees, the stories that Julián tells Daniela as bedtime stories, there’s also a part about him in real life getting a bonsai tree that serves as a symbol of his own writing process. He writes hundreds and hundreds of pages and then scales back, eventually curating 40 pages of a novel, possibly composed of other peoples’ voices as they pass the window. This selective process gives shape to his own manicured writing. Yet, it’s worth pointing out that Zambra has another short novel called Bonsai which retains enough parallel here to cast doubt on their self-sufficiency as texts à la Beckett or Paul Auster (who is specifically referenced and derided in this text).

Throughout the book, I couldn’t shake the metafictional note that it ends when Verónica comes home or when Julián stops believing that she will. In the final pages of the novel, we return to the present (rather than the fast-forward of Daniela’s possibly-fictional life) and Julián is taking Daniela to school and it seems her mother has still not returned home. Her English teacher bombards them and says how Daniela needs to step up her efforts. Julián goes on an anti-imperial rant to voice his distaste for English. The English teacher schedules a parent-teacher interview for the following week. The novel ends with Julián taking Daniela’s hand lovingly and saying that they’ll have to study English more. She agrees but says she has to get to class. Her stepdad gives her a kiss and then lets her go. The end. To me, that implies that that is the moment he realizes that Verónica is never going to come back. We’re left with that ominous feeling of her absence but at the same time consoled by his clear love for his stepdaughter, making it seem as if the mother’s disappearance is immaterial. It’s an unusual sort of end, a precariously happy ending that sustains an ongoing mystery.

The Private Lives of Trees demonstrates some of Zambra’s tenderness towards characters and stylistic charm. Perhaps Chilean Poet spoiled me—as I mentioned in my review for it, I consider it essentially perfect—but The Private Lives of Trees is a good novel that just doesn’t quite hit the same heights. It’s very good, and well worth the afternoon it will take you to read it, but Zambra is operating in the shadow of his own greatness and that is a demanding task for any author. It may be apocryphal, but Joseph Heller was apparently once asked how he felt that he had never written a book better than Catch-22, to which he responded that nobody had written a book better than Catch-22. I feel a bit of that same spirit operating here.

Happy reading!

We Do Not Part by Han Kang

It’s hard to write about the books that are most finely wrought. I finished Han Kang’s We Do Not Part a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been letting it sit with me because there are so many elements that all play off of one another. It’s hard to explain the craftsmanship of the book in a way that is both succinct and that does justice to Kang’s vision.

We Do Not Part is a novel that teeters on the edge of documentary and dream sequence. Some portions are narrated like investigative journalism, focused on fact and unravelling the threads of a messy history. Other portions read more like a dream sequence in which ghosts appear, the past and present are seemingly not in cooperation, and the impossible presents itself as a matter of course. At times, it felt reminiscent of The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, where we are perpetually waiting for a resolution that is not, and never was, forthcoming (silly us for thinking so). The way Kang navigates these different registers is impressive and makes the book feel satisfying in more ways than one.

The timeline of the book might be a barrier for people’s immersion in the text. The novel jumps around into different times in Kyungha’s life, developing in particular her friendship with her colleague Inseon. Kyungha seems to imply that their relationship is not close, and yet there’s an intimacy between them that runs deep and, quite honestly, is beautiful in its quiet tenderness. Inseon is a filmmaker, and Kang’s accounts of her films are so vivid that it’s hard to imagine that they don’t exist. Years earlier, Kyungha shared an idea for a film, based on a recurring dream, with Inseon. The two have long planned to create the film, but, as in life, there are perpetual excuses not to start the project. The project is simple: place a bunch of cut-down trees upright again in the earth during a heavy snowfall and film as the snow piles up. It is, as Kyungha realizes, perhaps too late, an image of death.

At the start of the book, for reasons largely unexplained, Kyungha feels compelled to draft her will. She writes draft upon draft only to rip them up and realize she does not have anyone close enough to whom the will should be addressed. In the midst of the process, Inseon sends her a message asking her to come see her immediately. It turns out she is in the hospital having severed her fingers in an accident with her workshop—it turns out that she injured herself because she decided it was time to start their project and was cutting logs. It feels prophetic and poetic that she loses her fingers. Kyungha visits her in the hospital, where Inseon has to have her severed digits poked with a needle every three minutes or so to ensure her nerves don’t die before they can reattach her fingers.

As I mentioned, the friendship between them comes across beautifully. There’s a surreality to it that I really appreciate—and even just in terms of writing style alone, I would put We Do Not Part nearly on par with the author’s award-winning The Vegetarian. During Kyungha’s visit, Inseon asks her to go care for her bird. It’s been a few days and she’s worried that her pet will have run out of water and will pass away if Kyungha doesn’t go immediately. So, Kyungha makes a reluctant trip to Inseon’s remote village.

This is where the dream-like quality of the book really shines through. In the transitional, (dare I say) liminal space, we seem to shift to a dreamlike unreality. There’s an extended section, for example, where Kyungha is waiting for a bus that does not come. There’s an elderly woman waiting for the bus that seems to know the score, but it’s taking forever. And the snow just keeps coming down. It’s the kind of static, directionless, scene that might present as a dream. When Kyungha eventually disembarks from the bus and tries to trace a path to Inseon’s remote workshop, she falls in the dried up river and awakes ready to move forward—it’s unclear how long she was unconscious in the snow; in fact, it’s unclear whether she survived the fall at all.

From there, Kang develops a motif of death and rebirth. As one might predict, Kyungha arrives too late to save the bird. She takes the time to dig away the snow near the tree she thinks would be suitable for the bird’s gravesite and buries the bird with a great deal of care—only for it to return to life the next day. Later, Inseon arrives unexpectedly—after Kyungha attempts to contact her in the hospital and eventually a nurse answers the phone only to tell her to call back later. From there, it’s a Beloved-like surreality where it’s not clear if Inseon is a ghost or a spirit or living, breathing Inseon—if she’s a figment of Kyungha’s imagination, she seems to know far more than Kyungha possibly could.

The motifs in the text cycle and overlap in an intricate pattern. There is much about birds—Kyungha traces the shadows of birds on Inseon’s wall and the palimpsestic approach feels significant to the overall project of We Do Not Part. The book is infused with poetry throughout, but one moment in particular stands out where Inseon has encouraged Kyungha to feed the birds and she gives them some dry noodles: “Each time the birds bit off a piece of the noddle with their beaks, I felt the faint impact on my fingertips, like the lead of a mechanical pencil as it breaks” (102). There’s a fragility to the birds—to life—that carries on throughout the text.

Another motif, of course, is snow. This is one of the coldest books I can think of and, if you’re reading this on the 25th of January, it is entirely appropriate. The documentary angle of the book is giving a family history that intersects with the Jeju uprising. I’m no expert; my understanding is that the United States was influencing Korean elections and the Workers’ Party organized a general strike. The resistance of the ‘communists’ (including women and children) was violently put down by the Americans. The inhabitants of Jeju were summarily executed and hidden in mines. One of the most powerful moments, I thought, was when Inseon’s aunt and mother were away from the village while everyone else was rounded up, taken to an elementary schoolyard, and killed. Inseon’s mother and aunt then had to then go through the bodies, wiping the snow off their faces to find their relatives. There’s a ghostly parallel with snow accumulating on Kyungha’s face when she falls into the dried river. There’s a double-ghostly parallel when Kyungha and Inseon go lay down in the snow as it falls and they stare up at the sky, confusing stars and snow. The book is full of these stunning moments.

The book delights in its ambiguity. For instance, the opening of the book reveals that Kyungha has written a book about a massacre in South Korea and feels afflicted with a post-traumatic kind of response. It sounds like it could be autobiographical if you’re familiar with Han Kang’s Human Acts. There’s enough in We Do Not Part to separate it from reality, though. As I mentioned, there’s also ambiguity whether Inseon is a ghost or not. At the end of the book, it becomes unclear whether Kyungha is dead, Inseon is dead, neither, or both. Even the title, We Do Not Part, is given some commentary: Kyungha wonders whether it means that they do not separate or whether they never get the opportunity to ‘part’ and say goodbye as they should. The motif of not being able to say a proper goodbye is critical, given the political context and the Jeju massacre.

We Do Not Part offers a rich account of both political and personal experiences. It’s a stylistic masterpiece where everything is so densely packed into just a few hundred pages. It’s the kind of book that when I read the closing lines I thought, “Well, darn, I’ll never write anything that good.” It’s the kind of book that warrants, probably, endless rereading and interpretation. It requires you to sit inside its pages and watch the snow accumulate. Unfortunately, for now, I must trudge on to new territory.

Happy reading!

Scenes from a Childhood by Jon Fosse

        Jon Fosse’s writing is truly inspiring to me. The distinctness of his incantatory voice is entrancing, magic as a modern day Beckett. Like his other works, Scenes from a Childhood reads like pure poetry, despite being essentially a collection of flash fiction, short stories, and little novellas.

There are five sections in Scenes from a Childhood. The first retains the same title as the collection and offers a kind of semi-fictive memoir through a series of vignettes. “How It Started” is a tender, more extended short story of a boy’s first kiss with a girl. Fosse navigates the complexity of feelings of young teenagers and the imagery is absolutely stunning. “Dreamt in Stone” is about witnessing a slow avalanche and imagining all the small stones shifting—which is, incidentally, what the narrator feels in himself. “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is the longest piece in the collection, essentially serving as a standalone revenge fantasy. “Little Sister” returns to childhood and focuses on a four year old with his three year old sister and their misadventures, ending on a beautifully sad moment of the boy’s parents recounting a time he crassly embarrassed himself when he was two and everyone dying of laughter.

Of the lot, I think “Scenes from a Childhood” is my favourite. Fosse’s style is well-suited to the specificity of the vignettes. Fosse’s language is rarely complex; the bare simplicity of the language is touching, and the repetitiousness of his phrasing, the sentences that go on and on with commas and subordinate clauses, the return to key images and mantra-like phrases—all these are suited to encapsulate the experience of memory. I always love getting to hear about particular moments in someone else’s formative years; despite having a different upbringing Fosse’s semi-fictions are so resonant and connect me with memories of my own childhood that have long been buried. The scenes are often concise, pared down to the essential. “Hamburger,” for example, is a one-paragraph account of being hungry but having no money for food, “just enough for the bus ride home” (25). Atle “Is sitting at the same table, he is a few years older than me and they say he’s a terrible drinker” (25). He’s set up as a kind of Boo Radley figure and “He buys himself a hamburger” (25). The narrator continues, “I am so hungry. I don’t say anything. But then Atle asks if I’m in the mood for a hamburger and he goes and buys a hamburger for me too. I’m sure that Atle has barely any more money than I do, and still he buys me a hamburger. It tastes incredible” (25). The vignette ends there, and the story feels absolutely complete. It’s just a quiet moment where an outsider shares with another outsider, a simple gesture that is so mundane, but exactly the kind of thing people remember. In another vignette, Atle (the same Atle?) is at a community centre during a dance. The narrator steps out of the youth centre and sees that Atle has a full bag of beers. He waves a beer around, offering it to the narrator, and—isn’t life just like this?—”he turns somehow and drops the bottle and then falls head first down the stairs” (26). These odd and fateful spasms! The narrator runs over and Atle is “smiling up at [him] from the middle of a mess of blood and [he] sees that [Atle has] broken all his front teeth” (26). Again, the story ends there and it’s enough. The postcard tells us everything we need to connect and see why this scene would stand out.

One of the more extended scenes, though still only about a page and a half, is “My Grandmother is Lying in Bed.” It’s a moving account of the narrator’s grandmother passing away. As if by fate, the grandmother has been sent to hospital and the narrator is going to school in the same city. They’re both away from home but bound together. In the hospital, “There’s another bed along the other wall and someone’s lying there talking nonsense all the time” (19). The details of the interaction are so briefly described: “My grandmother smiles a t me. I smile back at her. I ask her how it’s going and she shakes her head from side to side” (19). The two then have a brief conversation where the narrator essentially trains his grandmother to respond to questions: “Do you want to come back home? I say. / I see her mouth trying to move. / Yes? I say. / My grandmother looks at me. I say yes again, slowly, clearly moving my lips. My grandmother looks at my lips. She shapes her own lips, copying mine. / Yes, she says” (19). Following this moment, a new section of the vignette starts. In part two, Fosse accounts for similarities and differences in the two experiences. He brings her bananas. Again, the narrator instructs her speech: “Everything all right? I say” [notice how the questions are framed as declarative statements instead of questions] “My grandmother doesn’t answer. / No, I say. / My grandmother looks at my lips, I say no again, slowly moving my mouth clearly” (19-20). The repetition illustrates their ongoing dynamic, but this time the grandmother can only make “some strange sounds” (20). In the face of her suffering, the narrator relates that “things are going well at school. [...] I tell her about where I’m living” (20). It’s the kind of futile storytelling that I think fills the silence when we can’t confront suffering directly and then they manage to find connection: “I tell her about someone I don’t like and my grandmother shakes her head and he eyes smile and we agree completely” (20). The final section of the vignette points to a disconnect when she’s actually passing; she’s scared and the narrator says, “I think she’s scared because she’s about to die and because she’s Christian. I see my grandmother writhe from side to side to her white nightgown. I’m not Christian. I  put the bag of oranges I’ve brought down on the bedside table” (20). I can’t quite articulate why I find it so powerful, if perhaps not for the repetition of the phrases and the recycling (with a difference) of previous parts of the story.

I don’t know if there’s a specific word for repetition-with-a-difference as a literary device. I find it powerful, whatever it may be. In “Its Maybe Four O’Clock,” there’s a great deal of imagery and embedded in the middle of it are two phrases that describe an old barn: “A rusty hook is hanging from the door-frame. The door is hanging from the door-frame too” (10). I love constructions like that where you could just say both things are hanging from the door-frame but each are given their own separate, unique, but conceptually linked existence. The whole of “It’s Maybe Four O’Clock” is just beautiful imagery. I offer it here in its entirety:

It’s maybe four o’clock when Trygve and I go out to the old barn. My grandfather built this barn but now it’s falling apart, the unpainted planks in the walls are rotting away, there are holes in the wall you can see through in some places and a couple of the roof tiles lying in the nettles, three more sticking out of a puddle of mud. A rusty hook is hanging from the door-frame. The door is hanging from the door-frame too, attached with hay-baling cord, swinging crookedly. A warm summer day, afternoon. Trugve and I sit on a large round stone a few yards from the barn. There are plastic bags under our legs with our lunches inside, slices of bread with brown cheese, we each have a soft drink. It’s hot. We’re both sweating. Mosquitoes are buzzing round our heads. (10)

I find Fosse has such a beautiful knack for description that he requires neither many nor fancy words to create a complete picture. Just lovely.

Perhaps my favourite imagery in the book as a whole comes from the story “How It Started.” The story revolves around teens who meet at a community centre and go gallivanting together before walking one another home. There’s a scene in which they are huddled under a bus shelter as rain pours down and they play a kissing game. In just a few words, Fosse creates a vivid image: “The rain picks up, the wind gets stronger and the waves beating on the shore sound clearer. The evening gets darker. We dare to get closer to each other” (68). The passage then continues with a Beckettian description of systems (think: the pebble-sorting scenes in Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable). The narrator explains, “We say Kiss, and once the ones who said it were assigned to the ones who were to receive the kiss, who, according to the random chance of the game, were going to be kissed, when those going to kiss step out of the darkness towards those who are going to be kissed, no one looks, we all look down” (68). Even these convoluted and unnecessary explanations add to the tone of the piece. We then return to the imagery: “There is only darkness and rain around the pair, we others have disappeared, each into our own mute solitude even though there is a silent companionship surrounding the solitude, yes, a companionship, where no one says anything but we are with each other, not that we’re people for each other, but we’re there, and then it was her turn and I catch a sight of her eyes in the darkness” (68-69). Fosse is a master of describing darkness and light. The idea of these characters illuminated despite the darkness and rain and other obstructions around them is beautiful to me. The story then continues with a description of their first kiss and the sentence goes on for quite some time, but what I appreciate is how the physical qualities of the characters are mirrored. Embedded within the other description of the event, the narrator comments, “with my hair, with my body [...] I stand there, not feeling the rain” (69). Several clauses later, he stands there in his “wet jacket, [his] hands hanging straight down” and she comes out of the darkness “with her eyes, with her hair” (69). The parallel construction of the miniscule parts of them that emerge is like little illuminations in the gloom and then they “stand there, jacket to jacket” and feels “the warmth from her lips, her mouth, and wetness, / a warm wetness, nothing more, but so unlike anything else, so separate, a single short second and everything’s different, there in the bus shelter, the darkness, the rain” (69). A master of the form. The choice adjectives and the use of commas to pace the passage are just stunning.

Meanwhile, “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” reflects an uncharacteristically vindictive character—I’m not saying it isn’t justified: a neighbour shoots and kills his dog. He then goes on a quest for revenge, repeating to himself how much he hates the man and how he’s going to kill him, before literally doing so. The repetitive phrases of Fosse’s writing usually feel spiritual to me and inspire a tenderness for his characters; their repeated phrases are like a periapt. Seeing repetitive phrases that are here rage-fueled feels more obsessive, compulsive, scary. There’s a tension in “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” that shows the diversity of emotion Fosse is able to create. The story is a slow tension, where repetition prolongs the experience and uncertainty. Will the man follow through on his mission? Seeing the first-hand account of this distressed man also breeds sympathy as you see his thoughts become more muddled and disjointed, expecting that his dog will return to him at any moment—a dog whose head was blown away and whom he has already buried. It’s a powerful piece.

Returning to “Scenes from a Childhood,” there’s a section called “Asle Has Never Read a Book.” It goes as follows: “Asle has never read a book. And then they read a novel for school. Asle discovers he really likes it, because everything that in life only moves back and forth is like music somehow in the novel, so he really likes it, but it’s not exactly the same as music, because he knows what music is but this is a kind of music where everything that goes back and forth stays quiet and nice to think about” (42). Scenes from a Childhood,  indeed all of Fosse’s work, has that musical quality. I adore the way he’s able to string the audience along with such musicality, and evoke the same emotion as do the swells of powerful music.

That makes it all the stranger when he offers the strangely imperative comment in “I Always Agree With Those Who Disagree”: “I understand that some of what matters most is missing from our lives. So there needs to be a revolution” (49). I feel like Fosse has the power to bestow that which is missing from our lives, and if, as Adrienne Rich says in her poem “Dreamwood” that “poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing”, Fosse also seems to offer a new approach, a new way of knowing and a new way of being through his writing. However prosaic, Fosse’s writing is poetry. I am elevated by it every time I read his work.

Happy reading and happy New Year!