Food, Food, Glorious Food

Food fascinates. I think of Babette’s Feast, my dear friend who awoke at 5am to reserve a Michelin two star in Amsterdam, and how we talk about food, recalling with details a luscious meal that stayed in our mind’s eye for years. We savour the thought, even salivating a bit, lips wet, eyes shining. And then of course, we remember our aproned grandmothers’ monumental family dinners where laughter and enjoyment surrounded an evening that lingered for hours over unending courses: sweet labours we took for granted.

 The Land of Milk and Honey, a story of food scarcity and plenty, introduces us to a situation becoming unfortunately, too familiar, a world declining, climate  waning, meals reduced to chemicals, scraps, and in the story, only an ersatz substitute standing in for the multitudes of flour we now know, for this  civilization’s survival  rests on the bland, grayish  specially engineered mung bean flour milled from plants that can be grown under low light condition: the necessary result of intractable, crop-smothering smog.

 Into this struggling world, our unnamed narrator, a former chef from Pasaje,California reminisces about her days as a line cook, an impulsive jaunt to Paris, and-her mother’s disappointment when she  decides her profession will be in the kitchen. The protagonist mutters, “What it amounted to was skies that were gray and kitchens that were gray. You could taste it: gray. No olives, no quails, no grapes of the tart green kind … no saffron, no buffalo, no polished short-grain rice.”  And with no surprise, she laments her visa refused in order to return to the States, and being stuck in England: “ As they shut borders to refugees, so countries shut their palates to all but those cuisines deemed essential. In England, the shrinking supplies of frozen fish were reserved for kippers, or gray renditions of cod and chips…” The smokey grayness has enveloped every aspect of life.

But in this world of rotting vegetables and fruits, somehow  she locates her dream position. Lying about her experience, she succeeds in achieving her  goal. Flown to Italy in a private jet and driven up a mountain where magically no smog has invaded, her senses begin to recall the colours, the smells, the touch of ripening produce. Having felt  depressed and obsolete in a world where the livestock have been slaughtered and  vegetation  withered, she re- experiences delight at a box left by her new employer on the mountain in Italy that contains flour, vanilla, eggs and fresh strawberries “ and a note: “Impress me.” Much like Alice in Wonderland, her curiosity is peaked.

Given a temporary contract at the new job at the French- Italian border town,, her contract relies on  cooking extravagant Sunday dinners for a selection of investors wiling to support this enclave where soil, crops, and sunshine can continue to be harnessed to re- establish and re- introduce the delicacies  for the palate.

She soon learns that she’s working for a man in thick orange makeup with dead shark eyes, one whose background involves no royal inheritance but a clever knack at self promotion. She will discover it is more than her culinary skills that have landed her this privileged position. With an unwieldy ego, he manoeuvres his investors by offering them sweet treats, those Sunday dinners that showcase her reawakening their memories through their appetites.

 Besides the magical event of having escaped the deadly of suffocating gray, in a subterranean laboratory, the planet’s lost diversity is culled, of “chickens, pigs, rabbits, cows, pheasants, tunas, sturgeon, boars,” along with extinct grains, vegetables, fruits and spices. All this substantiates the eight-course dinners  served for her employers’ wealthy investors. Every week, the unnamed narrator  is “steered [by] the powerful [through] their tongues, “ everything from tuna ventresca, onion soup, petits fours, caviar, Koshihikari rice over blood oranges, braised duck in macadamia milk, panna cotta, Spanish mackerel, mapo tofu lasagna…frisée  aux lardons topped with the orange yoke of country markets…experiments in sourdough…macadamias, buttery, fragrant and thumb- sized, fresh blood ice cream…jewel bright Japanese yams:” all carefully selected, even precious song birds that have been eliminated by the ravaging  climate and appeal to the desires of a crowd wealthy enough to have dined on these specialities in a previous world where even extravagances were de rigeur.

The protagonist, unimpressed by her employer, also meets his daughter, Aida, who at  first glance presents as a spoiled  overdressed rich kid, the offspring of a wealthy father, who arrives in a red sports car. Our 29 year old narrator is repulsed by this person, but eventually will discover that Aida is a talented geneticist and biochemist, researching and re- establishing the mountain colony’s precious foods sources bringing fowl, chickens , even wooly mammoths and whale to the table. Her program has included breeding rare and even extinct varieties of plants and animals. As in most ventures, this realm  is subject not only  to the will of government officials but caters to the whims of the wealthy investors who can afford to sustain its mission. Foremost is a plan to bring on board  Roman Kandinsky, reported to be the world’s richest man.

The book is a mixture of themes. The evil philanthropist who wants to mingle and become a Svengali to classes and billionaires who would ignore him otherwise, finding him reprehensible: foreign and far flung investors, actresses, heiresses, the world’s elite who can afford what the employer is offering, food and eventually survival for a select number.

The fact that the narrator is an Asian – American woman, invisible and mistaken for  other Asians also figures into the narrative. “It has always been easy to disappear as an Asian woman. …[To be] mistaken for Japanese or Korean or Lao women decades older or younger, several shades darker or lighter, for my own mother once I hit puberty.”  Her work requires her to dress in white silk,  be silent, and impersonate her employer’s wife:  playing an evocative, mysterious role in these feasts, wordlessly communicating with patrons and able to commandeer them. The employee is in deed brutish, aggressive and dominating, defining the parameters of his production. Her role as a woman demands her fealty, her  subservience. For a time, she revels in the cooking, the food, the role and a loving relationship  as thick as pea soup.

The  over abundance and excess of food on the mountain, described in lush, mouthwatering detail contrasts the starving  hoards in most of the world laid waste. Author C. Pam Zhang provides us with a powerful scene when the narrator and Aida venture into Milan on a mission to resurrect  lost food.  To break up a gaggle of children who have swarmed her car in response to an incident, Aida throws the last of a bunch of rare apples to a crowd of dirty, emaciated children. Rather than savouring the taste of this rarest of rare treats, they spit out the fruits, the skin, the pulp, the pips in disgust. She  considers that having been brought up without the taste for ripe fruits, vegetables, they are unschooled in understanding the sweetness, tartness or any delicious quality that good produce engenders. Aida explains that  a turn of the century study produced research that children eating fast food were, “unable to distinguish more subtle flavours.. their tongues were left calloused. As if MacDonalds and Wendy’s have vanquished all the delectable foods, rendering them obsolete to the tongue, a diet of cheetos and chips substantiating  the standard of excellence.

The repetitive life force and passion in the ripeness of food, the need to maintain and reproduce is also threaded throughout. But above all it is the indulgence of foods, rich, succulent, delicious, tempting , mouthwatering morsels  prepared for those Sunday investors that readers will recall, the dark contrast to food no longer able to be grown and gathered in a planet dead from over production, processing and neglect: the lavish descriptions of  melting, fragrant, dazzling textures; the ambiance of cascading light on expensive plates and cutlery that recreate remembrance of dinners beautifully planned and shared at fine dining experiences or a family home, at say, Christmas, a wedding celebration.

Even the narrator is so entranced by these Sunday spectacles that recalling the passion for a lover, she writes of these meals,”..their perfume is complex, not sugar: closer to flesh, the flesh of a loved one, not sanitized, not anodyne, but full of many waters. Strawberries and spring, strawberries and musk, strawberries and sex flooded back as I crushed my tongue to sugar. I’d come to that country hardly daring for bitter green and here, now, this rupturing sweetness.” As the chef recalls the food of her past, from the crunch of spinach to the sweetness of freshly picked produce, we  as readers gain an appreciation for the food we consume daily and find in ubiquitous markets, dithering between dragonfruit or jalapeños or yellow and purple carrots. 

And again, amazed at the surfeit she finds,, she expounds on what she locates in Aida’s stores, “ Others have estimated the value in those rooms of grains, of nuts, of beans; … I can only say what happened when I pressed my face to a wheel of ten-year Parmigiano, how in a burst of grass and ripe pineapple I stood in some green meadow. … And I can tell you of the ferocious crack in my heart when I walked into the deep freezer to see chickens, pigs, rabbits, cows, pheasants, tunas, sturgeon, boars hung two by two. No more boars roamed the world above. … I knew, then, why the storerooms were guarded as if they held gold, or nuclear armaments. They hid something rarer still: a passage back through time.”

At 29 years old, the narrator was disillusioned and dislocated, worsening  global environments and food crises depressing and detaching her from the world she once knew. She left her job in England and departed for  a food oasis. For a time, she found fulfillment, both personal and professional, but there is of course the devil in the details,  and she could not sustain her role as chef in a world , perhaps even  less ethical  on a smaller scale than the one she had happily abandoned for the dream of fresh cream and roasted chickens. Unable to endure, her life changes, but she too endures. The story does not end here, but veers interestingly towards the unnamed narrator’s next life.

Readers will recognize the devastating extremes of climate we witness daily : a warning that with climate, food and existence are put at peril. C. Pam Zhang’s book is a warning, a fable of how our food supply could vanish if we do not take immediate steps to preserve the delicate balances that are being destroyed, truly ravished by big business. We, the ordinary, and our sad offspring will become that group of ragtaggle kids whose palettes will not ever know the tantalizing bite of an apple, for when the snakes have overrun our gardens they will keep for themselves the delectable and cast us out with a jeer, a smirk and knowledge we will never know the possible joy of a sun-ripened peach or strawberry, dripping over our lips.

 

Food, Food, Glorious Food

Food fascinates. I think of Babette’s Feast, my dear friend who awoke at 5am to reserve a Michelin two star in Amsterdam, and how we talk about food, recalling with details a luscious meal that stayed in our mind’s eye for years. We savour the thought, even salivating a bit, lips wet, eyes shining. And then of course, we remember our aproned grandmothers’ monumental family dinners where laughter and enjoyment surrounded an evening that lingered for hours over unending courses: sweet labours we took for granted.

The Land of Milk and Honey, a story of food scarcity and plenty, introduces us to a situation becoming unfortunately, too familiar, a world declining, climate  waning, meals reduced to chemicals, scraps, and in the story, only an ersatz substitute standing in for the multitudes of flour we now know, for this  civilization’s survival  rests on the bland, grayish  specially engineered mung bean flour milled from plants that can be grown under low light condition: the necessary result of intractable, crop-smothering smog.

Into this struggling world, our unnamed narrator, a former chef from Pasaje,California reminisces about her days as a line cook, an impulsive jaunt to Paris, and her mother’s grand disappointment when she  decides her profession will be in the kitchen. The protagonist mutters, “What it amounted to was skies that were gray and kitchens that were gray. You could taste it: gray. No olives, no quails, no grapes of the tart green kind … no saffron, no buffalo, no polished short-grain rice.”  And with no surprise, she laments her visa refused in order to return to the States, and being stuck in England: “ As they shut borders to refugees, so countries shut their palates to all but those cuisines deemed essential. In England, the shrinking supplies of frozen fish were reserved for kippers, or gray renditions of cod and chips…” The smokey grayness has enveloped every aspect of life.

But into this world of rotting vegetables and fruits, somehow  she locates her dream position. Lying about her experience, she succeeds in achieving her  goal. Flown to Italy in a private jet and driven up a mountain where magically no smog has invaded, her senses begin to recall the colours, the smells, the touch of ripening produce. Having felt depressed and obsolete in a world where the livestock have been slaughtered and  vegetation  withered, she re- experiences delight at a box left by her new employer on the mountain at the French-Italian border that contains flour, vanilla, eggs and fresh strawberries “ and a note: “Impress me.” Much like Alice in Wonderland, her curiosity is peaked.

Given a temporary contract to prove her skills, her employment relies on  cooking extravagant Sunday dinners for a selection of investors wiling to support this enclave where soil, crops, and sunshine can continue to be harnessed to re- establish and re- introduce delicacies for the palate.

She soon learns that she’s working for a man in thick orange makeup with dead shark eyes, one whose background involves no royal inheritance but a clever knack at self promotion. She will discover it is more than her culinary skills that have landed her this privileged position. With an unwieldy ego, he manoeuvres his investors by offering them sweet treats, those Sunday dinners that showcase her reawakening their memories through their appetites.

Besides the magical event of having escaped the deadly suffocating gray of her former existence, in a subterranean laboratory, the planet’s lost diversity is being culled, of “chickens, pigs, rabbits, cows, pheasants, tunas, sturgeon, boars,” along with extinct grains, vegetables, fruits and spices. All this substantiates the eight-course dinners  served for her employers’ wealthy investors. Every week, the unnamed narrator  is “steered [by] the powerful [through] their tongues, “ everything from tuna ventresca, onion soup, petits fours, caviar, Koshihikari rice over blood oranges, braised duck in macadamia milk, panna cotta, Spanish mackerel, mapo tofu lasagna…frisée  aux lardons topped with the orange yoke of country markets…experiments in sourdough…macadamias, buttery, fragrant and thumb- sized, fresh blood ice cream…jewel bright Japanese yams:” all carefully selected- even precious song birds that have been eliminated by the ravaging  climate and appeal to the desires of a crowd wealthy enough to have dined on these specialities in a previous world where even extravagances were de rigeur.

The protagonist, unimpressed by her employer meets his daughter, Aida, who at  first glance presents as a spoiled  overdressed rich kid, the offspring of an overly wealthy father, who arrives in a red sports car. Our 29 year old narrator is repulsed by this person, but eventually will discover that Aida is a talented geneticist and biochemist, researching and re- establishing the mountain colony’s precious foods sources bringing fowl, chickens , even wooly mammoths and whale to the table. Her program has included breeding rare and even extinct varieties of plants and animals. As in most ventures, this realm  is subject not only to the will of government officials but caters to the whims of the wealthy investors who can afford to sustain its mission. Foremost is a plan to bring on board  Roman Kandinsky, reported to be the world’s richest man.

The book is a mixture of themes. The evil philanthropist who wants to mingle and play Svengali to classes and billionaires who would ignore him otherwise, finding him reprehensible: foreign and far flung investors, actresses, heiresses, the world’s elite who can afford what the employer is offering, food and eventually survival for a select number.

The fact that the narrator is an Asian – American woman, often invisible in society, also figures in the narrative. She reflects, “ It has always been easy to disappear as an Asian woman. …[To be] mistaken for Japanese or Korean or Lao women decades older or younger, several shades darker or lighter, [even] for my own mother once I hit puberty.”  Her work requires her to dress in white silk,  be silent, and impersonate her employer’s wife, playing an evocative, mysterious role in these feasts, wordlessly communicating with patrons and able to commandeer them. The employee is, in deed, brutish, aggressive and dominating, defining the parameters of his production. Her role as a woman demands her fealty, her  subservience., her submission.For a time, she revels in the cooking, the food, the role and a loving relationship  as thick as pea soup.

The  over abundance and excess of food on the mountain, described in lush, mouthwatering detail contrasts the starving  hoards in most of the world laid waste. Author C. Pam Zhang provides us with a powerful scene when the narrator and Aida venture into Milan on a mission to resurrect  lost food.  To break up a gaggle of children who have swarmed her car in response to an incident, Aida throws the last of a bunch of rare apples to a crowd of dirty, emaciated children. Rather than savouring the taste of this rarest of rare treats, they spit out the fruits, the skin, the pulp, the pips in disgust. She  considers that having been brought up without the taste for ripe fruits, vegetables, they are unschooled in understanding the sweetness, tartness or any delicious quality that good produce engenders. Aida explains that  a turn of the century study produced research that children eating fast food were, “unable to distinguish more subtle flavours.. their tongues were left calloused. “ As if MacDonalds and Wendy’s have vanquished all the delectable foods, rendering them obsolete to the tongue, a diet of cheetos and chips substantiating  the standard of excellence.

The repetitive life force and passion in the ripeness of food, the need to maintain and reproduce is also threaded throughout. But above all it is the indulgence into. foods, rich, succulent, delicious, tempting , mouthwatering morsels  prepared for those Sunday investors that readers will recall, the dark contrast to food no longer able to be grown and gathered in a planet dead from over production, processed and neglected: the lavish descriptions of  melting, fragrant, dazzling textures; the ambiance of cascading light on expensive plates and cutlery that recreate remembrance of dinners beautifully planned and shared at fine dining experiences or a family home, at say, Christmas, a wedding celebration.

Even the narrator is so entranced by these Sunday spectacles that recalling the passion for a lover, she writes of these meals,”..their perfume is complex, not sugar: closer to flesh, the flesh of a loved one, not sanitized, not anodyne, but full of many waters. Strawberries and spring, strawberries and musk, strawberries and sex flooded back as I crushed my tongue to sugar. I’d come to that country hardly daring for bitter green and here, now, this rupturing sweetness.” As the chef recalls the food of her past, from the crunch of spinach to the sweetness of freshly picked blueberries, we  as readers should gain an appreciation for the food we consume daily and find in ubiquitous markets, dithering between dragonfruit or jalapeños or yellow and purple carrots. 

And again, amazed at the surfeit she finds,, she expounds on what she locates in Aida’s stores, “ Others have estimated the value in those rooms of grains, of nuts, of beans; … I can only say what happened when I pressed my face to a wheel of ten-year Parmigiano, how in a burst of grass and ripe pineapple I stood in some green meadow. … And I can tell you of the ferocious crack in my heart when I walked into the deep freezer to see chickens, pigs, rabbits, cows, pheasants, tunas, sturgeon, boars hung two by two. No more boars roamed the world above. … I knew, then, why the storerooms were guarded as if they held gold, or nuclear armaments. They hid something rarer still: a passage back through time.”

At 29 years old, the narrator was disillusioned and dislocated, worsening  global environments and food crises depressing and detaching her from the world she once knew. She left her job in England and departed for  a food oasis. For a time, she found fulfillment, both personal and professional, but there exists of course the devil in the details,  and she could not sustain her role as chef in a world, perhaps even  less ethical  on a smaller scale than the one she had dreamily abandoned for the lure of fresh cream and roasted chickens. Unable to stay in this world, her life changes but she too endures. The story does not end here, but veers interestingly towards the unnamed narrator’s next life.

Readers will recognize the devastating extremes of climate we witness daily : a warning that with climate, food and existence are put at peril. C. Pam Zhang’s book is a warning, a fable of how our food supply could vanish if we do not take immediate steps to preserve the delicate balances that are being destroyed, truly ravished by big business. We, the ordinary, and our sad offspring will become that group of ragtaggle kids whose palettes will not ever know the tantalizing bite of an apple, for when the snakes have overrun our gardens they will keep for themselves the delectable and cast us out with a jeer, a smirk and knowledge we will never know the possible joy of a sun-ripened peach or strawberry, dripping over our lips.

 

Experiments in Social Media

 I admit it right out, I’m a Luddite, especially when it comes to technology but again ,something about my thinking processes are off. My husband sweetly says it’s my creative side. But for me it’s just damn frustrating as my mind translates ideas weirdly, overthinking and distorting them. Maybe loose connections between the right and left sides of my brain that fight over metaphorical and literal meaning.It always amazes me to observe the solutions I find,  or alternatively, the problems I miss. But back to social media…

I learned to knit from my mother who was exceptional, careful and talented. As was my auntie Toby, my mother’s  sister who actually designed and taught knitting on knitting machines. I’ve loved colour, texture and design forever so I found my way into the craft, often making mistakes but occasionally excelling at transforming wool into children’s sweaters or shawls.

 So when my fingers recently sought activity while watching tv, I explored wools I’ve previously enjoyed working with. One, although not cheap, always impressed me with its feel of  softness and  beautiful variegated colours. I discovered a group knitalong or KAL with a friendship shawl so I thought, why not ? Besides if you signed up, the pattern was free and weekly zoom discussions provided incentive over a period of a month and helpful support from the designer of the project.

 I bopped from website to website trying to actually figure out colour combinations : were the selections of red mixed with other reds? Purples. Wines? Magentas? Were there hints of green and blue? Trying to discern  colours on line is challenging, especially as each ball is hand painted and is individual.And what other colours might pop  up when the yarn was splayed, not wound tightly in a hank as pictured? Much like counting freckles on a redhead or spots on a brindled cow.  And once one ball was chosen, what to contrast or enhance it with as the pattern cited three balls.

 Without available yarn stores, there is no choice but to go on line and try to figure out what colours might work together. It can take days or weeks after deciding on a plan, but as knitting is a desire to resurrect yards of wool into something beautiful, fashionable and wearable, I continue to peruse the sites and consider, ruminating on my trio of colours, suddenly realizing  I was required to register on social media.

 Yes, I’ve purchased wool on the internet successfully. I even scouted patterns in Ravelry, the knitters compendium of all things wool. But besides Facebook where I publish my book reviews, I’m not on Instagram, TicToc or any other vehicle. But to be eligible for  the zoom meetings and “ prizes”, one has to join a community.

 I began to check out  the home page. Just investigating  and going to the spot, I find some engine that invites me to join the 2500 others who are toiling to put together three balls of wool, selecting, waiting and anticipating a group experience. By adding my moniker to the participants, I, too, could post a report on my progress and share comments with the other knitters.

 Interested in this demographic and excited to be a first time involvee , I approach rather timidly, aware my ability to work technology could erase, confound or obliterate any project. I had all ready been provided with help by sending an email when my piece was not looking as I imagined it should. Assured that I had in deed miffed  the first twenty rows, I started again. I eventually learned  ripping out or tearing back  is referred to as” frogging” and that you can impose a “ lifeline” in your work so as not to drop or unravel your stitches in that process. Who knew there was a special, secret language this group could use when explaining success and failures? My mother- that lifelong knitter- communicated in a language of everyday words.

 Becoming bolder and figuring out how I might even post a photo, I began to wonder at the hundreds or so who were now part of a knitting community. Were they old? Young?interested in other arts?  Able to spend almost $100 for unseen, untouched balls of wool?   My interest, call it research, was piqued.

 With a specified name and location in Facebook, I too began my investigation. In the weeks to follow, I would track and read comments of the few who cared to comment.  Not surprisingly, almost all comments featured discourse on the variability of different groupings of colours: not one selection was the same. In deed,  combination of colours were   being discussed, labelled and clarified in beginning segments of the knit along  and serious  attempts made by the members of the community to share their choices: as in two reds and one blue labelled by the manufacturer  as Portia, Lettuce and  Descent ( names had little to do with colour designation.) Would they really looked nice together?

 I was eager to learn where the conversations of the knitters might go, especially after initial colour setups, early stitch cast ons or worries about wool arriving in time. I too joined the chorus of “ very pretty… nice colours”. Obviously  quite a bit- for I received a sticker of “ top contributor “. In terms of interchange, the following comments except for a few mention of arthritis, tendonitis,  difficulty in locating  the pattern, slow starts, delight in being included in the group and a few  issues in the techniques were reiterated : as I myself had experienced; however, chatter beyond complementary responses did not advance. I too joined the supportive parlance , jotting down positive words to celebrate the completion of various sections of the garment in the works. And I do admit, the juxtaposition of colours was intriguing. The growing shawls were lovely. Some parties even hung them from trees or arranged them colourfully  in gardens although most knitters just proudly laid them out on carpets or beds. A few featured family pets nearby, one even a baby in a rocking seat. Perhaps a way to personalize their passion.

Of course, I realized this was a knitalong,  but except for those tiny photos chosen besides usernames, there were few identifiers. Except of course, for those occasional pets or child . So besides my supportive compliments,  I did eventually venture to enquire  if anyone might be interested in my blog post on my mother and aunt’s knitting. I had received great responses from other knitters on WordPress so I assumed people engaged in a knitalong might also be interested in narratives that focused on the art or craft of the process. Also, hoping to increase my readership, I mentioned my particular blog that was focused on that lure of texture and technique..

 But to my surprise, only one person responded: that she too had a blog which I later discovered was coauthored with another person. I did read her blog which was sensitive and heartfelt. I even referred to her comment on line” that hope is a feathered thing, “ a quote from Emily Dickinson. But besides that lone writer, there were no other comments. No one interested in going beyond the tangles at their fingertips.

 Not to be deterred, I also commented on another’s  knitter’s choice of purple, citing Joseph’s poem “When I Get Old, I’ll wear purple. “ Surmising the participants might be older, or at least visually inclined- the large number of posts and chatter about colour prompted me to think colour might be a way to understand the mentality, the realms of my co- knitters.

 Now I didn’t expect personal revelations  that identified the knitters, but I did wonder at the personalities who were exuberant  over skeins of wool, extolling the vibrancy  of colours:azulejo, sunset, legend, skis, three pigs, teal feather( yes: those are more  names  assigned to colours!).The only conclusion I could draw was that all were committed to task, a few obsessive types completing even two shawls in the first week even though  my own eyes were painful after my own commitment to knitting several repeats each week.

 But again only a single knitter commented, “, I love that poem.”

Yet the lion’s share of  exchanges was almost totally homogenous, albeit supportive of the colour choices of their co-knitters. Into week three,  as people were beginning to finish their work, I noted no personal revelations.  As a novice to this world on social media, I was surprised that none ventured further

 Until today.

 Of course, it’s nice to get mail: that signal that someone is noticing you or wants to tell you what a great job you’re doing.

I go to the site and one very frustrated person posts that she feels excluded from the knitalong for several reasons. First, she is allergic to properties in the wool’s “ camelids” and no thought was given to an alternative. Second, the wool is expensive.Third, she is excluded from the prizes if she does select another wool. From my perspective, fair and reasonable contentions.

 But quite quickly five or so “ mean girls” sweep in to admonish the comments, telling her that it’s like being allergic to certain foods at a party, but that shouldn’t stop one from attending.

 “Wow! Entitled much? I have a food allergy, but that doesn’t prohibit me from attending a potluck. I just bring “safe” foods for sharing with others. I don’t expect others to make sure all food at the potluck are allergy-friendly. I know “prizes” aren’t involved in a potluck, but gathering together with a common theme is about community.”  These harsh comments are aimed  at the participant who has dared to express her feelings. More derisive attacks are slung at the person who expresses a negative thought.

 Calling someone “ entitled” because she feels left out. Really? I’m thinking  of teenage girls in particular who are ridiculed for their looks or clothes.And the overwhelming number of adolescent suicides. Recently on Bill Maher, his author guest explained the amount of damage cell phones, Social Media has wrecked on young people. I think of my early teaching days when we advised that cell phones should not be brought into classrooms because they posed distraction or worse. But parents overruled, worried that Jack or Janie might miss a call. The tipping point of the group holding sway.

 On my knitting site, another  jumps in with”Well said” lambasting the contrary Kate who dared to post an unpopular sentiment, contrary to the bliss these knitters are experiencing. One tartly comments that she does not participate for “ gifts” which is really the community of like minded knitters”

Still another critic adds, “A number of people joined in using different yarn and there is no reason why you can’t do the same since gauge isn’t super important for the pattern. As far as the prizes go, those are a real long shot. The real prize is the community and the lovely shawl you end up with! Pick your favorite yarn and join in! “ An smiling emoji completes the comment. Adding insult to injury, perhaps or an attempt to be friendly?

 I  think of cancel culture, bullying stances and the right to express a contrary point of view. Is this what so-called trolls do? After reading the barrage  of objections, I return to the book I’m reading, but I’m annoyed at the sudden change in the tone of the comments and return to reread the contentions. Maybe I’ve misunderstood them as previous rosy comments only became slightly contentious when asking where to find the pattern or how long it has taken wool to arrive.

 The out of sync writer has turned off her post. No wonder.

So this is social media, the love child of those who agree and preen at their own success. Okay- one did post she was giving her shawl to a friend whose husband is having surgery. And as time goes on, a few shawls include pictures of full bodies and even heads,  modeling their knitted works, taking possession of an identity.  As most complete their project, I feel a shift in the group, expressing accomplishment and pride in project that  displays exuberance. A few more suggest the shawls are gifts, something warm for a friend’s shoulders as she sits in the hospital; one even alludes to life getting in the way , suggesting personal troubles or issues. A bit of humanity  has seeped through.

So I’ve finished my shawl too, learned a new cast off technique although I had to explore an explanation on another site. I too will make a second shawl. No connection has been made with even one other person. I find these so- called “ communities” misnomers  as I believed a community is more than a mere rallying point around a ball of wool. And ultimately, beyond increasing the sale of wool, and engaging in parallel play, I’m wondering at other communities that social media lauds.

By that’s me. A different kind of thinker.

Hiroshima

We’re on a 12 day tour, part of a 12 person group and we have been hurtling through Japan, much like the bullet train that speeds by so quickly you cannot catch it on film. We’ve spent incredible days in Tokyo, with lovely people, the four ladies from Perth, the retired bankers from Wall Street, a tech guy from Rhode Island, a Mic Jagger wannabe in jean jacket from Austin, Texas, to name just a few. From temple and shrine hopping, fish market searching, garden exploring with quick stops to transform our faces onto lattes, squeeze through the teenage haven of Harajuku Takeshita, climb the tower at Scrambled Crossing, zoom onto  public transport -over and over again: day hops on subways, trains, gondolas, buses and ferries.

Then we head north to Hakone and Takayama, where we soak in onsens, spring water baths, investigate saki bars and try local bean paste delicacies, chase one another through narrow alley ways; it’s breathless and fast and we feel our feet are always moving, moving, going, going, keeping pace, chatting with our companions, hectic, rarely stopping for a breath: faces, crowds, shops, sometimes a blur except perhaps to notice a trendy lady in louboutins fantastically put together or pop a black egg into our mouths in hopes of a promise of extending our lives seven years. Or maybe noting in a UNESCO preserved site how thatch has been forever transformed into houses and ice cream made from Hida milk is lighter, more delicious than one might have thought possible. This trip is so loaded with culture, different foods, on and offs, early risings, brief discussions. It is a breathless whirlwind of experiences.

Until now.

Now is Hiroshima. And the world falls away so we must pause in respect and horror, for they had no choice but to pause- when Enola Gay dropped the A bomb August 6 at 8 o’clock 1945.

We go to the peace garden and it’s huge and envelops not just us tourists, but all  travellers, their total bodies and minds, but above all, their souls. Of course we have read accounts, listened to, been attentive to the plight, the birth of the explosion that would change and corrupt innocence forever, particularly as the recent Oppenheimer film redirected our attention to the creation of the bomb. And we learned again the randomness of life : that Hiroshima was chosen over Kyoto because Secretary of War Harry Stimson and wife had visited the city and were charmed by it, so altering the lives and future generations to come. At least, that is one explanation. Just a simple decision- when the war was all ready won, but a final stand to demonstrate power.  A way to pound your breast in triumph?

But to stand at the epicentre of the explosion and imagine the world shaking, crumbling, disappearing to rubble and stone for the ordinary, everyday population who were waking up that morning,en route to the grocery shop, communicating with their neighbours, walking their child to school. As they turned their faces to the blast and because they were thirsty, opened their mouths to the poisoned black rain. So, too, one in our group described the white ash that tumbled down the day of 911 as her eyes froze on the second plane crash into the World Trade centre while people fell. Too terrible. Ironically, black and white ash, both poisonous, both deadly.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum presents burned people, keloded skin, missing limbs, melting wads of  flesh, dislocated eyeballs, all manner of desecration of those maimed survivors caught, but who remained alive as collateral  damage and evidence in the turmoil. Here records the human nightmares displayed  in variations of grey, remnants of once pink healthy flesh. But so too evocatively etched in stone  is the residue of one person who was sitting at the entrance of Hiroshima Branch of Sumitomo Bank. It is also known as Human Shadow of Death or simply the Blast Shadow, symbolising forever the ones who were reduced to the merest of shadows, compromised to the faintest of outlines of  what was once exuberant life; and the lives of human beings in a city decimated in a second. No pamphlets fell to warn families to escape; or more likely, no desire or thought given to the desecration of crushing, destroying families, traditions.

It’s easy, the Nazis knew, that as well, when there are no specific details, you need not think of details, of individual people, repercussions : a ponytail, laughter, a rocky path strewn with flowers, a single cherry blossom caught in the wind. Here in the commemorative museum, a burnt tricycle speaks for a photographed child who would never stretch her legs to balance precariously on the seat or her proud Poppa who would cheer at his child’s graduation. Only fragments of a toy never to be played with, left to rust in disuse: a testament to the loss of not one but too many, vaporized away that August day.

The photographs in the museum are grey, rubble, devastation, collective agony. The solemnity is only  infrequently alleviated by some colourful drawings, made more horrible, by depictions of the horror that juxtaposed these gruelling unbearable artefacts. And the documentation continues around walls, blistered bicycles, melded metals, bits of pottery and everywhere destruction. Recalling again the artifacts of 911 housed in New York’s decimated trade centre.

Outside of the museum walls, in Hiroshima Peace Garden,the immense garden with its  monuments, peace bells, flowers, statutes, arches, flames and pathways  that remind us life can continue, but most sadly and terribly for me, the story of little Sadako emerges, the young girl who believed that if she made 1000 cranes she would be cured of leukaemia incurred by the blast when she was only two years old.Her friends tell her that the crane, a sacred bird in Japan, lives for a hundred years, and if a sick person folds 1,000 paper cranes, then that person will soon get well.

After hearing the legend, Sadako decided to fold 1,000 cranes in hopes of regaining her health. But of course, she did not. A statute honours her memory: the child cast in stone who holds aloft the framework of the bird that will never fly, just as Sadako Sasaki herself had imagined dreams and hopes that would never be realized except- as a sad sad story like Anne Frank’s:  once again, a child unable to fulfill a potential: as an artist?  a pioneer of health technologies ? a dreamer ? an aunt? a traveller? Protected under glass are the additional cranes created by her classmates, evoking the plight of a child who desperately wanted to survive. But could not.

Nearby there is another statute recalling “the red bird stories” by  Japanese author, Miekichi Suzuki, distinguished author of Meiji and Taisho period and considered “the father of children’s literature” here. Another boy and girl sit listening, quietly, side by side frozen in stone forever. And what of their dreams? Their future?

Our catapulting through the streets of Japan ceases as we wander carefully, contemplatively, through the wide spaces here. There is that eternal flame and stunningly huge red tulips and the peace bell. And a story of the Japanese American artist Noguchi whose design for peace was refused. The rock and roller in our group says it’s the same bell used in AC/DC  Back in Black and he pulls back the gong strongly, more interested in the sound , I think, than the association with the past and peace. My husband almost tenderly pulls back the gong and you can hear the tone vibrating through the layers of time and grief, providing voice for those in ashes. My husband remarks at the solemnity of this place and the others, such as Barack Obama, who stood in this hallowed  tarnished place, performing the ritual to all those ghosts hovering.

 They say within three days trams ran after the blast and work was eventually focused on rebuilding. The human spirit rising to create order and re- establish life as it was known, set right the wrongs, the destruction . One story  I follow on the museum walls describes a man caught in the blast who left a makeshift hospital, twisted and wracked with pain, his family dead, his wife soon succumbing and engulfed by his own strong desire to commit suicide. But he does not, and continues, feeling  he must continue on in life.

It’s indescribable to come to Hiroshima and wonder about the Hiroshima Prefectoral Commercial Building at the edge of the peace Park by the river Motoyasu the near missed target of the bomb. Designed  by a Czech architect in 1915, the building somehow almost withstood the blast and remained upright, not totally destroyed as did the bank building in the nearby market that was untouched somehow by the evasive hungry bomb. The tiniest of miracles and yet they persisted , to endure: even now, a slap against the desire to destroy the city.

And at Himeji, too, the last Samurai Palace that also stood in spite of the bombing of WWII that levelled all around. Strange and magical, isn’t it? And like the man who decided against suicide, they shook, but remained upright, and carried on.

I’m in a tram in Kyoto, back into the hustle of this trip, when a woman besides me enquires of my age. In spite of months of Duolingo, I am useless in the Japanese language but she is able to communicate with me. She asks where I’ve travelled, and I respond, Tokyo, Hakone, Takayama, Kyoto and … “Hiroshima”.There is a second of frisson I experience and her somewhat searing look. Something has happened. Conversation ends but as she’s about to disembark at her stop and with a wane smile she murmurs, “Enjoy.” Is it ironic? Well meant? Did she lose someone dear in the flames ?When the news of Hiroshima finally arrived in Kyoto, did she reach up her arms to her mother for a hug, not understanding the cloud that engulfed her dear one’s face?

What to say about Hiroshima? A place forever associated with the bomb, death and radiation? Maybe the spirit of anime breathes new life into the country, a new generation severing themselves from a world that preceded them, wiping away their parents’ memories to forge a fresh beginning, a world of cartoons, of freshness, I’m pondering, hopeful.

Yet nothing is black or white, deceptively simple. Anime  said to have been born with Japonisme in the 19^th Century,( See Van Gogh in Arles) but found its flowering in the 70’s. Artists did draw on their own families’ personal experiences such as in Barefoot Gen with the narrative graphic depiction of the impact of the bomb on one single family. And as well,  the aftereffects and the long term vestiges of the bombs, some still felt today: children left parentless, having to become adults too early, bereft of parents and grandparents, others permanently disfigured or crippled by radiation, babies’ mutated bodies with encephalopathy, missing, twisted limbs, scars, etc etc. .In anime and manga, I gather radiation  has been transformed into extraordinary powers, abilities to fly or assuage doom or harm to others, much like AstroBoy. For these reasons, anime films depict children surviving on their own , alone.

“In essence, what we have seen is that the atomic bomb indeed affected Japan to the point that the works of artists such as Tezuka and later artists inspired by him reflect on the bomb’s effects on families, society and the national psyche. Much like the cycle of life, or the immortal Phoenix in Tezuka’s case, Japan was able to reinvent itself and come back strong as a powerful world player capable of starting anew, but with the idea that mankind must learn from its mistakes and avoid repeating history… The bomb became a particular obsession of Tezuka’s. His films and comics both address themes like coping with grief and the idea that nature, in all its beauty, can be compromised by man’s desire to conquer it…orphaned kids, radiation sickness, a loss of national independence, the destruction of nature – would also influence the genre, giving rise to a unique (and arguably incomparable) form of comics and animated films. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – along with the firebombings of Tokyo – were traumatic experiences for the Japanese people. It’s no surprise that for years, the devastation remained at the forefront of their conscience, and that part of the healing process meant returning to this imagery in literature, in music,and in art. “The Conversation: The deep influence of the A- bomb on anime and manga.” Published August 6, 2015am EDT.Updated August 3, 2020,9:51 am EDT.

There’s so much to absorb. I’m a visitor to this place who only can stand and witness the gong of the peace bell, the evocative reverberating sounds. In my mind the words  “ the horror…the horror” run over and over and through my thoughts. Ironically, I think on William Blake’s poem that fills my head,

 To see  a World in a Grain  of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand.

And Eternity in an hour

 

Prophet Song Terrifies

Dystopia: an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.

In the 1990’s I taught Atwood’s Handmaids Tale to Grade 12 students and much later, it became the series of the week. We were pinned to the television wanting to know  Offred’s  future, if she had escaped from her situation to safety in Canada. We knew that every hideous attack in the book against humans had been committed somewhere in the world previously, from deprivations , tortures, rapes , hangings, impulsive and erratic slaughters, and we were shook by the horrors that happened and terribly, continue to happen. And yet Atwood provided the stories of the Handmaids with small streaks of joy from hidden friendships, babies’ chatter, a smile, a glimpse of green.

In Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, from the outset, there is only darkness, fear and grief, all whispers or minuscule peeks to alleviate the overwhelming canceling of human life. From the first knock at Eilish Stack’s door by two nondescript men, her world is polluted, invaded by a virus that is so heavy that it changes the very air she and her family breathe. From that moment, her world begins to collapse “…for something of that darkness has come into the house.” And we experience her unease, “she wants to put the baby down; she wants to stand and think…  and into the hallway of its own accord, something formless [is] felt. She can sense it skulking alongside her as she steps through the living room.”

Although the signs were all ready in place, that heaviness, that invasion of brutality envelops more and more. The location of the story is Ireland but the details, the whys, the actual opponents are not named, not competing religions nor nations, merely repressive acts. She is encountering the government, agents of the Garda National Services Bureau and later as they rise up, the rebels, who will further tear apart her life. Our entry into the demise is through this one single family and Eilish, scientist, wife, mother, daughter and friend who attempts to hold her world together as it is dissembled, initiated by that initial corrupting knock at her door.

Nothing important, the men say, just have him ring us. Paul, her husband, deputy general secretary of the teachers’ trade union is the first block to be removed from Eilish’s scaffolding. Her children resent her, believing she is somehow responsible, for all children think we can protect them endlessly. Indeed, she tries. She’s just an ordinary person making calls, reaching out, engaging lawyers, doing her limited best to unravel the tangle in which she finds herself.

Bailey, her 12 year old, calls her an old bitch, blaming her for sending their father away. Yet she attempts to maintain the routines of normalcy for her children, getting them up for school, going to work as manager in her biochemist job, attending to her father’s needs, keeping the semblance of everyday life alive as her existence continues to come undone . But in spite of her ongoing endeavours to have Paul released, he has been sucked up into an unknowable vacuum of blank faces, meaningless words, useless outreaches.

Bailey admonishes her with talk of “ the worm” who has gotten them. She brushes that attack away, but it is true. This world where there are more and more restrictions, more barriers, more limitations  marked by controlling newsrooms, national emergencies, armed guards, nondescript detectives, illegal arrests and detentions, silenced lawyers, increased spying, more bombings… does resemble a burrowing worm. It quietly works beneath the surface, digesting the once recognizable surfaces by infiltrating  quietly, insidiously, overturning familiar space into ugly unrecognizable lumps.

Her sister Aine in Canada beseeches  Eilish to leave as quickly as possible, but like people tied to their homes and certainly too many Holocaust dwellers before the final solution, she is rooted, unable to cast off her associations, relationships and ,of course, is determined that Paul will be released( is organizing a peace march a crime?) and she must look to her father Simon’s needs as dementia creeps into his life, and what of Molly’s sports and Mark’s girlfriend, Samantha? Aine repeats, “history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave, yet leaving is not simple. Ironically, occasionally Simon does see clearly as he reminds Eilish that she believes in rights that don’t exist, “the rights you speak of cannot be verified, they are a fiction decreed by the state”. He implores her to leave him behind and go to Canada – anywhere but here. Eilish pushes the idea aside.

And yet Paul does not return and Mark at school receives a call up for the army. So in spite of Eilish holding things together, the platforms of her existence are cracking: Molly quits sports, refuses to eat; both Mark and Bailey disregard government curfews, people disappear from jobs and on the street and at work, and Eilish cannot stop the darkness, the troubling invader that has arrived at her door with the knocking of those two men.

Lynch’s style reinforces the terror as sentences of thoughts, and spoken interchanges are not separated on the page, nor designated by quotation marks. We are caught in Eilish’s world, held captive to her thinking and doing. It is difficult to immediately discern sentences spoken out loud from sentences in her mind. And there is that continual confusion of the mind’s darkening paranoia.

The word “body” is a motif repeated throughout. She is merely another body to either group that shoots innocent people at barriers, dispensable, faceless, grist to their mill, to be moved about, made to disappear. She experiences events in her body, not intellectualizing them. Details are grounded in concrete experiences and when Bailey is hit with shrapnel that requires an operation, Eilish is caught in a labyrinth of hospitals, lies, equivocation and horrors that are more dreamlike than real. The reader, you, is increasingly and more and more deeply drawn into  this unrelentingly breathless style that Lynch commandeers so we cannot disregard the ground crumbling beneath our feet  along with Eilish’s holding at bay the entrapping reality that is swallowing both her and her son. We whirl in meaningless obfuscation, talk that hides and manipulates the ordinary person when we need answers to our worst nightmares; the only question: where is my son?

Life as Eilish once knew it plummets and plummets. the truth of anything cannot be known; she “learns again and again that there is so little we can control and understand in the face of societal collapses.”

Indeed, when he wrote Prophets Song, Lynch said that  he was then thinking of “the unrest in Western democracies [and] the problem of Syria — the implosion of an entire nation, the scale of its refugee crisis and the West’s indifference.”

In these unbelievable days of totalitarian and fascist governments, horrors worldwide, Paul Lynch’s novel continues to frighten, almost documenting attacks in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza… bringing them closer. “The end of the world is always a local event,” Lynch writes near the end of his tale. “It comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.”

No packing up, no exit, no reprieve, no Canada as sanctuary, and nowhere to run. Well written, engaging and troubling, and although one friend described it “ miserable”, I find it worse .

 

 

Big and Small in The Colony

There are books that house small local issues and those that work with big ideas. The Colony captures both. From an isolated three mile island in the Atlantic off Ireland’s west coast with a population of 92, hardly touched by time, in a remote treasure trove of beauty and hardship, Audrey Magee provides us with alternating chapters of worlds inside and out. In spite of size, and seemingly isolated from age old conflicts, they are linked.

 These alternating chapters document The Troubles, 1968-1998, the  worst times of violent conflict between the IRA and England, the senseless murders between Catholics and Protestants with no concern for population demographics, babies. Francis in the book coldly refers to the people who chance to be at bus stops or open their doors to knocks as “ collateral damage.” These actual stories frame the essential story of the family of Mairead and James on the island, barely subsisting on fish in the harshest of climates.

 Theirs is a location only reachable by boat, a spot so remote that one summer occupant, JPMasson, is studying the roots of Irish as it has continued to persist  without the intrusion of the English language. A promising doctoral student, he interviews and records the existence of an age old tradition and the fight to preserve it. Fully immersed in the Gaelic language, Masson’s focal subject is James’ grandmother, Bean Ui Fhloinn, the source for his dissertation and subsequent book, which he hopes will  be a great success. He is passionate to preserve this way of  life, even insisting her grandson James be called by the Irish version of his name Seamus.

Masson’s quest is ironic:  as the son of an Algerian mother, he has removed himself from his own heritage. Resentful of his own abusive father, Masson lives in the shadow of an adored mother whose desire for her son was to maintain traditions. Instead he has been acculturated into French, only occasionally recalling memories of boring after-hours classes, spurning Algerian traditions and having become totally immersed in his father’s French. But for five summers, he  has returned to this remote island to document and attempt to holdback the morphing of the language. His intent is to preserve(fossilize?)  the traditions, keeping them pure from erosion.

Yet, at the crux of the story is a new source of language pollutant, Lloyd, an English artist who has come to paint the cliffs and resurrect  himself as not only an  important artist, but a respected husband. Masson accuses Lloyd,  “You can’t speak on this. You have spent centuries trying to annihilate this language, this culture.”, but Lloyd responds, “ it’s theirs to kill. Not yours.”

Perhaps specifically named to recall Lloyd George, Magee evokes George’s government that  was responsible for the Government of Ireland Act that partitioned Ireland and created two governments ( one in Belfast and one in Dublin) with limited powers.

Mr. Lloyd in the book, much like Masson, desires immersion, but a personal one, painting the rough environment. However, his quest is taken off course when he meets James, a 15 year old prodigy who impacts on Lloyd, heralding a breakthrough in his work. James who has lost his father, grandfather and uncle to the  sea while fishing, desires a life unencumbered by Irish traditions . He says, “ because if I smell of something other than fish, of paints and oils, they might all see that I should leave, that I am not a fisherman, not a proper island boy, but something that has to be elsewhere, somewhere other than here looking after my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother,”. Resentful of Masson, he explodes, “..and now they’re giving me the mother tongue to look after as well, to save that mother too, to save it all and the other mothers. I don’t want so many mothers.”

Curious about Lloyd’s work, James badgers him to be allowed to paint with him. Eventually the cool distant Englishman gives in and he discovers that James possesses fresh eyes, insightful perspectives and true talent. James in examining  Lloyd’s painting of terns and gulls explains that their heads are too large for their bodies and the water Lloyd paints requires an awareness of what is floating beneath, not just on the surface.

For James’ mother, Mairead, the experience of posing for the artist and being recreated in Rembrandt’s sketches, is freeing as she aspires to be preserved not as a dead man’s wife on an island, but for herself, her true self:  “a desire for her essence to be captured in oils, taken away from this deadly island that has claimed her trinity of men and be hung in a gallery for posterity as an image to endure.” Although tied to established ancient roles on the island as her mother and grandmother, she aspires for her own kind of freedom along with a desire for her son, James, to be free and follow his heart, even if it means more hardship for herself.

Lloyd unable to share the turf with Masson, isolates himself to a shack on the cliffs where he can paint in solitude with only James and Mairead’s occasional visits. It is here that he reprises Gauguin’s” Where do we come come from…”using a half clothed Mairead as its centre piece and transporting the  island’s animals, flora and occupants into his work. The painting echoing Gauguin’s represents island identity, a kind of Garden of Eden, experience, loss and more. James is excited to see how he has been portrayed with paintbrushes in Lloyd’s take on his primitive home. He is delighted to view  Lloyd’s  rendering that symbolizes the fulfillment of his dream to depart. Lloyd promises that James and he will share an exhibition in London, one sponsored by Lloyd’s “ half- wife”. And so James anticipates a life free from his uncles’ trades and an existence   that has in deed continued for centuries.

But into the mix, particularly  with alternating chapters documenting the violence and vicious murders on both sides by the English and Irish, the underlining hostilities cannot be removed from both the artist and researcher’s  egos, resentment and mentorship: the rivalries between ways of life, the repetitive subjugation and colonialism of taking and using without permission which lead to terror and terrorism. Both Masson and Lloyd are self righteous defending their travail as their right, willfully ignoring the interests of the residents. Neither accepts nor can understand the perspective of the other; both of course, are intruders and disturbers to the worlds they covet, choosing what they take and what they leave behind, then return home, having disturbed the pattern of lives. They select as they please, unconcerned with the suffering , “ the collateral  damage” they inflict and although Mairead of her own will comports her body as she chooses, she is called out as a slut by her family… “an English- speaking slut.”

 To further underscore the  daily trials,  James’ grandmother, wise and watchful, has reiterated the impact of the English over too many years ,

They take our land, she says, starve us and then to alleviate the poverty, to assuage their guilt, they set us up with knitting. Make jumpers this way and sell them, they said. Earn your living that way, they said. Earn your rent that way, they said, though, we liked earning our living the other way, from the land that was our land, the sea that was our sea. But they told us to knit, so now we knit. Well, I’m not knitting, says Bean Uí Fhloinn. Not that knitting. Their knitting. Their Scottish, English, Irish knitting. I’ll do my own knitting. Knit as my mother did. As my grandmother knitted.”

In spite of being wary of all foreigners to the island, but necessitated by financial survival, the inhabitants  accept a kind of camaraderie  with both Masson and Lloyd. And  in spite of being told by both mother and grandmother not to paint the inhabitants of the island, Lloyd sketches, paints and uses them for his own purposes. This is not the only betrayal that Lloyd will undertake on the island. And just as Masson dreams of success, Lloyd too imagines festivities that put him in circles with Manet, Picasso and of course, Gauguin: “ Manet mixed the classical with the modern,”. In his head he lauds himself, “Lloyd has radically blended primitive, naïve, impressionistic and post-impressionist art to create something utterly original and new.” He sees himself a celebrity, “equal to Freud, Auerbach..to Bacon.” Laughing he adds, “ No. Better.”

Although James can relate that Mr. Lloyd has taught him to appropriate colour, light, “how to see , and how to see the unseen,” the insightful youth also realizes Lloyd has taken his ideas.  Finally viewing Lloyd’s huge canvas that has been rolled and hidden in the shack’s corner, he leaves Lloyd , muttering, cursing, swearing through his tears, “ [I]t was mine,Mr Lloyd, my idea and you stole it, stole from me to use as your own.”  Sadly,  a naïve James had warmed to Lloyd, hopeful his art would be his means of passage  off the island. But cooly and unabashedly, Lloyd ignores James’ pain ,

“We had a deal, Mr. loyd. An arrangement.

Circumstances change, James

Only if you let them, Mr.Lloyd. If you want them to..

As I said to Francis, what I do has nothing to do with you

I’m sorry it’s not working out for you at the moment, James, but it’s beyond my control”.

With the old rationalizations, the casual casting off of responsibility  of those who come , smash up lives and depart, it seems that the big world of expropriation has even occurred on the smallness of an island where as always, not just populations, but individuals- much like the people specifically named in the chapters that alternate with this story- suffer and are crushed by those with power and money

So the big questions have even arisen from kernels as small as what to knit and the need to find a rabbit for tonight’s stew: what to keep, what to reject. Both Masson and Lloyd are guilty.

 

 

 

 

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Eve and Toby’s Knitting Gene

My mother often regaled me with stories from her childhood. She had arrived by boat from Poland, a five year old who would recall staring through barred windows at a blanket of tulips in Amsterdam and the feeling of steely cold pins that pierced her scalp searching for lice at Pier 21 in Nova Scotia. She and her sister would pursue their own amusements in Toronto, fleeing taunts of greenhorn, popcorn, five cents a piece. Her sister had shown her how to use popsicle sticks as knitting needles. I imagined the heads of two little girls close together, the older teaching the younger how to cast on stitches.. Occasionally their eyes might have met, smiling, in their own protected world, away from the barbs thrown at them as immigrants.

Over the years, my mother caught in a difficult life would tell me that knitting had saved her. It was her meditation, her comfort, and her joy. When she knit my cousins red angora caps and mitts for Channukah, I was envious, hoping that maybe she had discovered enough wool on sale for me too. I had heard the other girls at school go on and on about Channukah gifts, but my heart cried out for my mother’s knitting.

My mother knit incredibly complicated patterns of majorettes and animals, set out line by line by Knitograms or Mary Maxim. She was methodical and precise, reproducing the tiny black and white squares translating them into bright colours from the remnants basket at Eatons. Night after night, she retreated in our living room and knit, much like the magical elves turning dross into gold.

Later when I had children, while walking in Markham Village a passerby stopped to admire my three year old’s Humpty Dumpty sweater, knit, of course, by my mother: Humpty sat perched precariously on a red brick wall that juxtaposed his broken egged self on the cardigan’s back. I dashed for a phone booth .And I could feel her pleasure as I shared the compliment. Her skill so exact that a machine might have created the masterpiece.

Had life been different, she mused, I might have been a nurse or a designer. How often did she tell me that as a girl she had worked with her dressmaker to create snoods or capes? How often did she regret her talents had been crushed by her demanding mother?

I attempted to emulate her skill, finding frustration where she had found relaxation and relief. My inability to count stitches resulted in bulging humps or alternatively, gapping holes. Eventually I overcame the need to hide my faulty work behind embroideries or buttons: my numerous mistakes or failure to read patterns correctly tidied by circling directions.

I persevered and my knitted garments began to resemble the fashionable models in the books.Over the years as I was drawn to a strand of tweed, a soft twist of something, a need to keep my own fingers engaged, I continued my mother’s legacy. Where she had demonstrated talent, I merely followed instructions.

But most recently as I patterned tiny butterflies into six feet of a shawl,I felt the start of arthritis in my thumb from repetitive motion of rigidly holding knitting needles for so long in my fingers. Still the resulting design was worth the hours. My mother rarely complained of aching fingers, but I now understood how her attention had been channelled, thwarting the rigours of her life as her mind focused not on her struggles but on a creative exercise that not only excised demons but also uplifted her spirts. In truth, I think it was a kind of meditative practice to avoid the flooding of bad thoughts that spoke to her, recalling a freer, healthier time.

In the meantime, my aunt created her own patterns, demonstrating knitting machines in department stores in California.

My own children had scant interest. Neither, might I add, did my aunt’s children.

My grandchildren soon noted my fingers flying over bits of wool and asked to be taught and indoctrinated into the chants of yarn over, yarn under, needle through…. Both of my grand boys could knit a few lines by themselves, occasionally changing colours, fascinated by the bumps and bridges made by cables. But as other activities , music lessons, sports and school overtook their time, they lost interest, even though I lauded how the old art made fingers nimble should they decide to become surgeons.

As they grew from toddlers to teens, I, like my mother, created rocket ships and strange animals for them to wear to school, likely the only children to prefer Dinda’s( as they called me) to Gap’s sweatshirts, obviously ignoring the taunts of friends.

Last birthday I made a toque for the older boy, now a tween. More style conscious and in deference to his perfect hair, the hat received little wear, but his brother appeared interested. Both boys were captivated by crocheting- an art I had dabbled with but could not conquer. The older one was about to crochet a bikini for his friend. And the younger one had discovered the world of wobbles, small characters that have taken over social media. The younger played with the patterns, adding and changing these little guys, some Pokémon or Harry Potter characters. He added swords, fruits, going beyond the prerequisite of the patterns.

Just as one might commandeer Lego, he was testing the limits as if yarn were a science experiment, open to exploration. Where my mother had turned inward to keep the outside world away, my grandson turned outward, eager to bound beyond prescriptive restrictions of what wool was supposed to do.

I was impressed. He had become curious in the properties, design and possibilities of taking a line, actually a bit of yarn,  not just for a walk- as Paul Klee suggested a dot might do-, but a tumble, a stroll,  searching out the possibilities of an ancient activity.

Using his own money, the younger bought a mini knitting machine and produced toques of his own. I nearly exploded with surprise. The toque he was cranking out far better, certainly more perfect than I could knit and where mine was a labour of 3-4 days, his arrived in a few hours- neat, a gift for a friend.

I wish my mother or aunt were still alive so I might share this story with them. I would call it Eve and Toby’s Knitting Gene.

 

 

Women Face Barriers in Books : House of Doors and The Vaster Wilds

Sometimes things come together in a cluster.

The Gilded Age is a wonder of surface detail from extravagant hats to ornate furnishing. At its heart is Mrs. Bertha Russell, a social climber, scheming to enter into societal circles.We’re viewing late 19^th Century society grounded in rules, the realm of robber barons and railway magnates, expectations and affectations. Bertha’s desire to rise and be accepted is set against people whose backgrounds have long been established by family money. Bertha is an upstart, nouveau riche, a manipulative woman focused and anxious for entrance into New York’s privileged class, wanting to challenge the kingpins( queen pin)of her stratified world, especially Mrs. Astor whose wealth has been accrued through bloody fur trade and real estate. Based on the real life Alma Vanderbilt, of the Vanderbilt shipping and railway empires, Mrs. Russell like her counterpart, is willing to marry off her daughter, Gladys, into royalty to establish her footing in this rigid world.

Barriers and limitations have been in place, against groups but especially against women forever. In the show Julia, Julia Child herself faces numerous challenges. Determined to get her cooking show on public television in Boston, she’s willing to even pay for its production herself. The men gossip, crack jokes at her expense, but all are overwhelmed and resentful at her success. Her program has sparked interest by women, however when her producer Alice attempts a show “By women for women” where the topics are birth control, contraception, politics, she’s informed it’s not the time.

At a ceremony honouring Julia’s triumph, she is roundly chastised by Betty Friedan, lambasting her as harming women, not heralding them, Julia’s topic appears to be seemingly banal, reinforcing their kitchen, kitsch and kin, not in the serious workplace world. “. I’ve seen your program, and it’s not helping things,” Friedan informs her. “You think you’re opening doors for women, expanding their horizons. They may be dreaming of France, but they’re stuck in front of a hot stove.” Friedan attacks Child’s recipes for creating hours of work for women, cooking and doing dishes. “How can these women, who you have locked in the kitchen, possibly find time for anything else, let alone a career?” she demands. Julia herself is disturbed, reflective at the attack, considering she had set out to make a difference, aimed her show towards women. Yet she has in deed impacted American society, changing how people think, prepare and eat their meals. The New York Times suggests the attack by Friedan triggers a crisis of confidence in Julia. Julia does not deserve the feminist author’s venom, especially as her honesty, kindness and support to other women as well as her focused desire to speak directly to them has little to do with keeping women down, and more to do with following one’s own heart and overcoming the insecurities many have experienced at the hands of men in society.

In The House of Doors in far away in Panang, author Tan Twan Eng also deals with gendered positions of elitism, particularly of women who must bear and accept the burdens of society. Creating a sweaty racialized verisimilitude of Malay in 1921, Eng bases his story on Somerset Maugham’s visit to warbuddy, Robert and wife, Lesley, and his rewriting it triggered by Maugham’s short story, The Letter. The feeling of this depicted world is not dissimilar to that created by Graham Green and Marguerite Duras and their envisioning of Indochina in The Quiet American and The Lover. Society is programmed and strategized to maintain colonized people, women included in this oppressive designation.There is confinement, restrictions of belonging, acceptance of who can and cannot traverse enforced boundaries.

Maugham was a traveller, fascinated by the people and places he visited , but his desire was to build his narrative repertoire, gladly transforming people’s confessions into his oeuvre. Here in Malaya in The House of Doors, people have been deliciously scandalized by his latest story entitled Rain.He has even used the real name of an adulteress woman, Sadie Thompson. Everyone has read it, savouring and condemning the salacious bits. They do love gossip, especially when the victims of the tales are part of their world. Lesley and Robert’s house where Maugham sojourns is called Cassowary named after the casuarina tree, for its leaves resemble birds’ feathers. But it is also referred to as the whispering tree, appropriate for the whispers, the gossip that circulates through this closed, vindictive and judgmental society.

The longer Maugham resides with the pair, the more he becomes aware of Lesley, her strength of character, her insights into her prescribed, regimented situation with small attempts to overthrow the confiding structures : as she relates the tales he will weave together in his books and short stories.

Lesley has confided a story to Maugham, sharing a friend’s situation. Ethel Proudlock was a real woman, charged with the murder of William Steward and incarcerated at Pudoh Gaol before her trial. As confident to Ethel, Lesley is privy to the true and real story which she has promised not to reveal. Again, the weightiness of a slanderous society impacts women’s lives to such a degree that Ethel would prefer to hang rather than be known and remembered as an adulteress: her life to be shunned and condemned by her contemporaries should she survive accusations of murder. She becomes both her father and husband’s pawn, unwilling to speak for the sake of being labelled and ridiculed by the small world that unflinchingly determines her fate in and out of the courtroom .

The House of Doors through Eng, and Maugham’s retelling in The Letter, transfigures Ethel’s plight and, exposes Malay and Kuala Lampur as cruelly insensitive, recalling Mrs. Russell’s and Julia’s tight realms, carefully structured by class and genre. When describing the conflict in The Letter, Maugham writes of Ethel’s assault and attack on Steward, renamed Hammond in the short story,

“She was frantic with terror now. She did not know what she was doing. She heard a report. She saw Hammond stagger. He gave a cry. He said something, she didn’t know what. He lurched out of the room on to the verandah. She was in a frenzy now, she was beside herself, she followed him out, yes, that was it, she must have followed him out, though she remembered nothing of it, she followed firing automatically, shot after shot, till the six chambers were empty. Hammond fell down on the floor of the verandah. He crumpled up into a bloody heap.” All of these specific details are presented at trial, Ethel claiming she did not recall the deadly act.

To add in advancing the evidence of Ethel’s guilt, she is roundly criticized for wearing a dress too revealing in her own home, flirtatious and seductive. As well, her medical history that includes painful periods is discussed. In any case, she is an easy target for societal bias, never have been fully accepted because of her background : her father, the chief of the fire brigade, lampooned as” a person of no consequence”, and possibly, the societal gurus smirking behind fans, “she’s Eurasian.” As well, the reader later discovers her husband’s blackmailing of Steward/ Hammond; however his involvement is never revealed.

Lesley’s husband, Robert, lawyer friend of Maugham, in The House of Doors explains, “Hypocrisy reigns here as numerous affairs occur but are not acknowledged : for fear of that same ostracism that reinforces class… witnesses edit their stories about things they’ve said and done; they rearrange facts… you only hear one aspect of it. You can never get the whole truth, the whole story.” Maugham considers his role as the writer :”to fill in the gaps.” When he rewrites Ethel’s case, he twists the tale, creating an alternative ending although her malicious self- consumed peers are not whitewashed.

Living in a British colony, the colonizers relish their superiority over the inhabitants. The classes are strictly separated in Panang. Lesley decides she will help China’s SunYat Sen’s work at their offices with the Tong Meng Hui , correcting and translating pamphlets to spread information about the revolution in China: “ Documents, articles and pamphlets and editorials describing in histrionic tones the corruption, of the Chinese government…riddled with errors and mangled grammar.”

But Robert emphatically admonishes her,” I forbid it.” Sun Yat Sen himself understands Robert’s concern with this comment: “ Ah yes. Of course. Your wife should not be seen in the company of Chinamen.” Lesley is admonished, “You must obey your husband .”And at her first visit to Dr.Loh’s home, a staunch follower of Sun Yat Sen, also involved in championing the philosophies of the revolutionary leader, the doors are left open to the street so as not to incur gossip when a white woman crosses the threshold of a man’s house, especially a Chinese man.

The censure of women’s behaviour has been deeply ingrained in society and recalls the thoughts in Lauren Groff’s story of Lamentations Pallat in The Vaster Wilds. Also known as “ the girl”, she is a servant to a wealthy British family who sails for the new world of Jamestown in the 17^th Century and surmises, “ For what is a girl but a vessel made to hold the desires of men”. In The Vaster Wilds, the reader experiences the ravages of the girl on her mind and body in the wild inclement landscape of Virginia, the home of the Powahattan, native people. In spite of being powerless in the civilized world of England and the fort at Jamestown , the girl manages to create fire, house herself and outwit any human or animal who blocks her escape. Much like clever Julia, she is well able to navigate and overcome a man’s world. Whereas both the girl and Julia use their ingenuity, wit and intelligence, Bertha Russell relies on scheming and deception: well schooled by the upper class which she desires to emulate.

Interestingly, the monsters the girl in The Vaster Wilds fears in the shadows are not raw-toothed creatures, but men: “even a good man was more deadly than the worst of bears”. Author Groff demonstrates her cunning protagonist’s power, strength and instinctual awareness not usually attributed to women: from stripping the bark of trees to make shelter and quite able to break the necks of squirrels and ducks to feed herself and her readiness, such as the theft of a small boat when the opportunity arises. As well she is capable of outdistancing herself from the man who tracks her and a hermit who would kill her. She fully demonstrates abilities and character not just equal but superseding men. Groff in her earlier novel, Matrix, displays this interest in how women make meaning in the world and manage to survive in harsher past eras.

Ironically reflective but also insightful, Lesley in The House of Doors, in spite of her refusal to accept the superiority of men, is still entranced by the charismatic leader Sun Yat Sun, cognizant of his ability to manipulate through his speeches. She finds hypocrisy in the person and party that although allows women to fight side by side with men, but unlike men, are only permitted one husband. Rebuffing Sen Yat Sen’s calm discussion of his “ three” loves and marriage, she demands, “Let me ask you this: after you’ve establish your republic, will you allow us women to take as many husbands as we like?” Sun Yat calmly replies, What are you demanding ! Lesley- it goes against the natural order of Heaven.” Angrily, Lesley concludes, “Your talk of equality means nothing.”

Yet she is willing to work for his cause in hopes of pursuing a future of equals.

As well, in The Letter by Maugham, further bias is levelled because of suspected interracial liaisons between the victim, Steward/ Hammond and his lover: ” That was one of the things which had turned public opinion most vehemently against Hammond,( the man shot six times). It came to be known that for several months he had had a Chinese woman living in his house”- which was discovered after his death-that “ gave us something very definite to go upon. That robbed him of any sympathy which might have been felt for him.” Whispering of the cassowary tree!

When in The House of Doors, the actual story related to Maugham by Lesley and Ethel’s verdict comes down in court, her lawyer appeals to the Sultan of Selangor to pardon her. Again Robert weighs in, “The sultan may have pardoned her, but her own people- us whites- will never forgive her” , for her fate, a white Englishwoman, has been decided not by a peer but by a nonwhite. Lesley reports Robert’s thoughts ”, Ethel Prudock has damaged our prestige among the natives. How can we allow an Asiatic potentate to exercise the power of life and death over a European , an Englishwoman?.” Even in matters of clemency and mercy, class bias is at stake, undermining the privilege of a white class is not permitted.

Maugham and Lesley become close, he gathering her recounts , considering how he might restructure and use her stories as his own. In total disregard to the tight world in Malay, they swim naked at night together . But there is more than just divisions between classes and races, and men and women here in this colony. Maugham himself is travelling with his secretary Gerald and they are lovers. Maugham worries that Gerard, upon hearing of his financial ruin, will leave him. Previously Maugham’s wife in London, Syrie, has made it impossible for Gerald to return, and especially with the trial of Oscar Wilde, new laws forbid liaisons between men. Although not broadcasting their relationship, neither Maugham nor Gerard is terribly discreet, yet society there tends to ignore or look away, for these are white men, British white men whose behaviours if not openly flaunted are truly their own business. Yet Maugham admits to living in fear should someone discover notes letters. When towards the end of the novel, a friend of Robert’s, Noel Hutton, dances openly with his Chinese lover at a party, people again are shocked at the openness of thwarting of barriers..

Here in the tropics, Lesley and Robert have grown apart and both have taken forbidden lovers. In the first chapter, Lesley wonders, “which of the two was more oppressive: the silence of the desert ( in the Karoo), or the silence between the husband and his wife”. In spite of festering marriages, as long as routines and protocols are maintained, society supports and encourages the established ritual. And although Lesley and Robert continue their own feigned dance of marriage, she is more strongly asserting herself, but still preferring to stay in the marriage for her sons’ sake, but her own as well. Like Ethel, she worries for financial ruin and parental rights, not to mention, the stigma of a destroyed reputation: issues that have keep women in place for ages.

The title of the narrative, The House of Doors refers to the symbols that demarcate the opening and closing of boundaries, as in Mrs.Russell’s immense house in New York, Julia’s in Boston, Lesley and Ethel’s . For Lesley, there are the actual doors of Dr. Loh’s house gathered from temples and shop houses. She writes of the effect of the doors that hang from the ceiling in Loh’s house, as if they were floating above,

“I had the dizzying sensation that I was walking down the corridors of a constantly shifting maze, each pair of doors opening into another passageway… There are 30-40 pairs, some dating from the18^th century, the oldest from Hokkien province…”

Loh explains he has collected these doors to avoid their demolition, interesting relics that possess connotations of closure and opening . Doors and windows, these literal barriers keep people out but also provide protection, regulation of temperatures, movement and freedom to enter or prevent entrance. Openness and closure suggest how society is structured by people, owners or takers of property who decide when to shut the doors that can limit entry. Per usual, placement in society determines liberty or restrictions, money and class controlling power.

But so too, Maugham is not blameless in his own ability to hold or withhold. He relates a story concerning the hypocrisy of acquiring tablets of paintings created by Gauguin. He is quite willing to take advantage of indigenous and less privileged people should it be his desire. Maugham brags that he was able to cheat the owners, purchasing Gauguin’s work for a mere 200 francs. So too, his writing that bares the actual facts or names of those involved is his discretionary want. All is grist for Maugham’s process : “Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other. .” A good tale is worth any obfuscation.

These stories of umbrage at the expense of the colonized are fodder for the rich. Wherein women are pawns, to be moved, disgraced, discarded or, abandoned at the will of others much as the colonized classes. Maugham documents these lives and other authors such as Groff and recent shows such as Julia and The Gilded Age put the roles of earlier eras on display. This is important.

Understanding context does not disavow or laud bad behaviour, nor does it extoll the virtues of those like the Vanderbilts, Asters, occupants of Jamestown or even Julia’s distractors in Boston: for too many others take advantage. Instead of ignoring, censuring, these narratives expose to contemporary society the breaches, disruption, harm and catastrophes of ignoring moral behaviour. These terrible, ugly underpinnings and abuses that have fashioned our world still maintain ceilings and restrictions by class and colour: quite willing to deprive populations of their rights. Books, films, open discussion are the antidote, necessary to expose past wounds. These are important lessons to be learned. Doors need to be removed so that all of us might pass freely without restriction.

Moving to Africa, Lesley says, “ With time, I adjusted to my new life in Doornfontein. People here didn’t give two straws about who I was related to, which committees I sat on, or which wives of important men I had had tea with.” Ironically, she refers to her life in South Africa!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anna and Albertine in Monsieur Ka

Back in the 60’s, I was enrolled in Soc &Phil. That first year honours program at university opted me out of taking a science class;  so I was advised by another non science type who preceded me. I could investigate all the “ologies” such as philosophy, sociology, psychology: every thing university was supposed to offer to a neophyte such as myself without the burden of a science class. I could, however, continue to read and study literature, my actual fav, but an unlikely subject for a profession. I don’t recall this being explicitly stated, but  implicitly conveyed .

My initial choice that first year was a survey course of American books, which, I later discovered meant reading a major tome every single week by Melville, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Emerson, Twain…. The instructor was a grad student, patient with us newbies, even the tall gawky Catholic boy who in that first class queried, “I don’t understand, sir. “ “What don’t you understand? ,” responded our teacher who would eventually become a professor of said subject, “What’s a phallic symbol?”

We, most of us, bubbly virgins ourselves, were engulfed in choked back laughter at his innocent guffaw. We being so much more sophisticated! In any case, we were deluged with great books written by Americans: Brits,Russian, French, Slavs, all excluded. And in spite of always having my nose in a book, I somehow did not read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, to my great shame. I was, however, well aware of the plot lines, Anna’s infidelity, overriding themes of betrayal, suicide, in the real ambiance of Dr. Zhivago heavy edifices, and veils of thickly falling snow.

Fast forward so many years and the reading of Monsieur Ka by Vesna Goldsworthy in which Anna Karenina is the trigger for the novel. Our narrator, Albertine, not a Russian herself, is a refugee from Bucharest, Paris, Egypt during post wartime presently living in London in 1947 with her British colonel husband, Albert. Although they met during his convalescence in a hospital in Alexandria , he continues his undercover wartime work in the field, often away, in Berlin or other European countries. Albertine worries he has a mistress. To forestay loneliness, our protagonist notices an ad and becomes involved with reading for an older gentleman, recovering from a stroke. He is Russian.

Immediately, she discovers he is the son of Anna Karenina, a Russian prince no less , once a curator of ancient manuscripts in St.Petersburg , displaced from his home, country and mother’s tarnished reputation. Through their growing friendship, Albertine becomes aware of the stories of his family’s fall, their displacement and descent into poverty, his abiding love for his mother, his own marriage and residence in London. Her first assignment is to read Madame Bovary aloud, a suggestive beginning for her visits. Albertine becomes so consumed by Monsieur Carr’s reminisces that she decides she will ghostwrite his memoirs, even learning Russian to better communicate his story from the details he offers,

“I  had such a lonely, uncomprehending childhood…in that bleak house …a mausoleum  where we prayed for her(Anna’s) sinning soul four, five times a day, with a procession of priests and monks who hovered over Father like vultures around a particularly juicy carcass…”

He brings her deeper into his fascinating narratives by disclosing he had unlocked a box in his father’s study to come upon a sliver of red leather, he explained, “ She (Anna) was at the railway station. All the railway stations were new then. She carried a red bag. She threw it aside before she jumped…Empedocles took his sandals off before he jumped into the volcano, left them by the crater, like someone taking a swim in the municipal pool. My mother’s dive must have been different. I imagine it as a plunge taken by someone escaping a house fire in a panic, finally getting away.” Albertine is mesmerized, consumed by the family’s lore and Anna’s story.

Eventually Sergei, Monsieur Carr/Ka admits to Albertine, “ I told no lies, certainly no lies, but I left so much ugliness out, and I don’t mean just the ugliness that followed my mother’s death. That was nothing compared to this century of ours…” He moves between present and past, drawing her in.

All ready romanticized, the narrative of czars, Romanoffs, Rasputin so fascinates that even filmmaker Alexander Korda, founder of British Lion Films, is transforming it into a film. Charmed by the older gentleman and becoming closer to Monsieur Carr’s son, also named Alex, Albertine becomes even more deeply involved in the family, perhaps because her own husband, Albert, is often away, inaccessible for he is constantly surrounded by his former comrades in arms or she intuits a distance between herself and her spouse. Confiding to the son, Alex, she explains that she is pleased with her gift of a manuscript to his father, reflecting “ I think I am almost done. And I believe I have succeeded in catching the charm of your father’s voice..It feels almost, as you read it, as if he had written it himself…”

Her teacher of Russian is, as well, a displaced countess, once beautiful, disapproving of Jews, but allowing instead for Albertine Frenchness. Elizabetha Maximilianovn is very glad to regale Albertine with her own romantic and pragmatic tales of Russia, literature, their authors, tea, trysts. In Elizabetha’s cosy subterranean apartment cramped with a glass cylinder of soil, silver caskets, irons and nicknacks, Albertine’s perspective is increasingly narrowed as she deciphers the Cyrillic alphabet. She observes, “ the basement window looked – through the grilles…a procession of trousered and stockinged legs, of headless children and pram wheels, and just occasionally, a whole dog, a daschund or a spaniel, looking in, straight at the two of us.” She is a sudden voyeur glimpsed from her shared hiding spot below the surface.

Albertine adds that one of the cats jumped off Elizabetha Maximilianova’s lap ( ( swathed in shawls), the other burrowed a sleepyhead deeper under the balloon, a cloud of hairs flew into the air,” . The metaphor suggests the closeness and incomplete pieces of a refugee’s life that Albertine’s is experiencing in this overstuffed and stifling atmosphere. And through a mist of cloying hairs like tiny snowflakes , Albertine is being enchanted, to unlock a new language, a difficult and confusing one, picking up phrases, bits of an experience that have focused her attention away from her own marital life.

What is most wonderful is Goldsworthy’s language.To subtly foreshadow themes of Anna Karenina and her fateful end, Goldsworthy inserts this line as Anna, a talented seamstress is lulled by her work of “ her [s]ewingmachine [ that] sounds like a train, the needle piercing the fabric and the beat of the cast iron base- not unlike the sound of a railway engine.”

Never intrusive or drawing attention to itself, Goldsworthy frames her story through the telling by Albertine and Alexei/ Monsieur Carr- not only of Russia but also of London of the day. From ripping up floorboards in the houses of aristocrats by squatting vagrants to warm their toes in St.Petersburg to gliding over glistening ice to avoid dangerous falls in London to garden parties there, a Russian Orthodox Easter one that features careful tables of food, “ blinis and savories of…painted eggs, bowls of salt, pickles, salad and red and white radishes and even a tiny bit of Russian caviar from Paris. Albertine comments” in the face of austerity and rationing..there was nothing extravagant about the feast.”

We wonder at Albertine’s naïveté, being taken in and overwhelmed in these situations, especially as Albert does not accompany her and we have only her thoughts in her first person narration alone to view the surviving Kareninas. When Albert does agree to accompany her to an event, he notices the son, Alex’s, attraction to her, but outwardly-focused on the fantasy of the family, Albertine is totally unaware of his eyes on her.

Through Alexei’s/ MonsieurCarr’s accounts of his life, we learn that London itself did offer a safe haven for refuges. The relief and security for these Russias is expressed by Monsieur as he states, “ Isn’t it beautiful here…Have you noticed that chameleon quality in London, how it turns itself into any European city you’ld like it to be.Suddenly you’re in Rome, or in Paris, or in Vienna, or God forbid, even in Berlin. Suddenly you are at home… We could be back in Russia…the world around us was still, wrapped in snowy silence”.

Albertine enhances this magically transformed world where [s]nowdrifts were ten feet high in places, milky and yellow at the peaks where sun touched them, bluish and solid like icebergs at the foothills.” Again, nostalgia, confinement, enclosement and images of safety separate the deposed arrivees and their narrator by physically dislocating them from reality- at least in their own minds.

With an emphasis on words, meaning, we ,the reader, understand stories translated by Albertine are often like the front and backside of a tapestry, the crafter’s talent observed, tight knots, loose ends, patches, spliced endings and beginnings: romanticized histories and stories.

The Russians, especially, are not truly afforded the process of acculturation into a new world. In fact, in spite of Alexei’s tales he is decanting to Albertine, we learn of Tonya( , Monsieur’s Ka ‘s wife, and Monsieur Carr, also known as Sergei) dependence on charity in London, crying themselves asleep in their host’s Hannah Wilson’s English house. So, although the wintry backdrop might suggest a storybook setting, the Russians are real people with issues of readjustment from one world to another, even though London promises safety. The son, Alex’s eventual ownership of an English brewery suggests a far cry from soirées, military bravado on the battlefield or even libraries from his father’s world. He is as well awkward in speech and appearance, juxtaposing his wife, Diana’s, stunning beauty.

In contrast to the safe haven being established by the Kareninas themselves , the actual born British husband Albie, ironically exclaims , “How I love London, to me it is synonymous with freedom”, yet he is constantly leaving, searching for a place to call home: as opposed to the Russian émigrés who acknowledge that “they were offered lives of comfort and support for those who survived the war, lives destined to get better and more plentiful; English lives” . The Kareninas underline, “We Russians had always loved England much more than England loved us.” Perhaps the same might be said for Albie as well.

Anna Karenina is subtlety featured, her presence echoed in the storyline, not just as a beloved mother, or an unhappy deceptive woman, but alluded to through metaphors, as noted above. So too, we view relationships that are complicated, as in Anna’s in and out of marriage evoked in the story related by Monsieur Ka and his meetings with Albertine. We understand that Albert and Albertine are in love, their conversations and actions for the most part, loving , demonstrating thoughtful concern, but yet there is a feeling, a frisson, a je ne sais quoi of something: a hint of secrecy, of keeping the other safe by guarding secrets, and keeping the reader beyond absolute knowledge of their relationship. Albertine and Albert possess an awareness of this: keeping quiet and not revealing all. Early in the novel when Albert speaks of new postings in the Far East, China or Russia the newly wed Albertine implores Albie,” Anyway, promise not to leave me alone here.” He does just that and later, she is unable to reveal her secret to him.

Even glimpses of Monsieur Carr’s son Alex and his wife Diana appear perfect from afar. And the presence of Vivian Leigh and Lawrence Olivier, actors and lovers who will portray Anna’s story in Korda’s film are distanced, seen as beautiful, idealized across a green lawn, but flawed ,almost standing in as cutouts for the great Russian romance whose love will not endure. Both actors, too, had abandoned their spouses and children to be together. They have been immortalized, distanced and glorified in photos by Cecil Beaton, larger than life, portraying examples of love and loss.

Against the much touted actors, their flamboyant clothes, and described as outlined against “ the red glow of the setting sun[ that] illuminated the lawn” , Albertine herself is constantly described as a prettier Leigh, occasionally but momentarily mistaken for the film star. But Alex’s wife weighs in on their“ physical similarity, on which everyone had commented, [ but] did not seem to register with her.” In contrast to the stories of film stars and Russian princes’, Albertine’s story is ordinary, often repeated, a fleeing Jew during wartime, a hospital administrator who marries a handsome military man. Happy, not happy, we are not certain.

Describing her wedding, Albertine does romanticize her plebeian outset , saying, “ Mine was a wartime , civil ceremony…a blue wedding, not a white one. I wore a cobalt blue suit and the Mediterranean obliged with the backdrop: a cloudless sky, the sea.” Small juxtaposed to a larger, more dramatic setting. This is of course wartime as she later adds with the realism of the day, “There was a young man with a wooden leg next to me, protruding out of his unseasonably heavy winter coat, a field- grey coat with strange buttons.” And to further remind the reader of the surrounding scenes of deprivation and destruction, she adds that when Monsieur Carr is in hospital with broken ribs, he shares a room with Polish men, one with a bandaged head, the other with” a leg in plaster, suspended by a pulley”,remnants of a society that has been punished by war and its aftermath. For even in a tale of romance, it needs to be grounded in facts, suffering that contrasts and heightening the fantasy of love.

There are secrets and secret languages and codes, and more words unsaid. When Albertine meets up with Alex, son of Sergei, at a small coffee shop by a railway station recalling Anna and Vronsky’s final meeting, she records the place smells of ordinary garlic, butter and tarragon, a décor of smoky posters advertising events from the 1930’s where Albertine imagines another ghost, the green eyed one of Diana, Alex’s English wife, occupying a chair. But Albertine surmises and again naively rationalizes, “ We were not going to have a secret language…and I, I thought as I walked across the grimy linoleum. There were no secret languages in London, anymore. It did not matter; what would we need a secret language for.” Yet her retelling this tale is one of omissions, secrets, misunderstandings, betrayals and surprises, much like Monsieur Carr’s. Her own mystery embellishes, and involves itself in Monsieur Ka’s own history as she becomes a kind of extended family figure.

Yet, Albertine’s presence, her meetings with son Alex trigger the reader to suspect some idle chatter, nonchalant kisses or even the sudden rendezvous at a café could evolve into something more, for she had initiated the meeting decided in order to share a perplexing dream in which he was the main figure. Albertine allows herself to be trapped by her fantasies. It is fitting that the book ends at a party celebrating Korda’s film attended by Olivier and Leigh, the elision of film and reality in a background established by a Russian princess, Anna Karenina.

Previously asked if she was happy in London, Albertine had explained that she felt disoriented in England, once more reinforcing the underlying thoughts in Tolstoys opening line of Anna Karenina, “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. The reader is left to probe Albertine in her final scene, wondering about her fate that has entwined her in Goldsworthy’s reimagining the lives and loves of the iconic family.

 

Rachman Pulls Back the Curtain in The Imposters

There are myriad ways to enter a novel. Sometimes as in The Great Gatsby or American Pastoral, the author provides an alter ego who can apparently and dispassionately narrate the story. The story telling is a level removed from the action, but most often is somehow connected. Nick Carraway becomes Gatsby’s confident, old chap, who sympathizes with his friend, but because he’s intimately involved, he can observe first hand the occurrences we are viewing. But sometimes it’s an outside voice, neutral, uninvolved , but even so in this trope there can be a feeling of judgement as we discern jealousy, fear, an emotion that tinges the telling as we become acquainted with our antagonists or protagonists . Of course too, an omniscient teller can get into everyone’s mind, motivations, observing with an unbiased eye: as if there were such a thing as truly an unbiased recounting.

What’s clever about Tom Rachman The Imposters is the number of frames the author has set up, weaving the character of his writer, Dora Frenhofer, into the story in many unexpected ways, providing insight, most unexpected as if we have suddenly stubbed our toes on a bed post. Dora Frenhofer is a Dutch writer of small importance, her books published with dwindling interest over the years. When we encounter her, she is in the the declining stages of her life, fighting dementia, recalling her own father’s struggles, yet she is attempting to write more, be heard and published before she has finished her writing career.

We eventually discover that she has incorporated people she had known or interacted with into her stories. Not surprisingly, this is part of a writer’s craft, observing, collecting, interpreting , building, embellishing their daily lives into fabric, transforming the threads of experience into tapestries of thought. At a writer’s conference where Malala is actually the star presenter, one fellow jokes with Dora, saying, “I might be one of your characters.” She responds, “Oh, you are. Are you only realizing that now?”

At the conclusion of each chapter, she reminds us her foretold story is not real, but a new part of her emerging oeuvre. She does this by providing her first sentence with which she is grappling, two previous attempts crossed out, the third as the opening line in the following chapter.

Yet Dora herself usually plays some role, unexpectedly in each chapter. Whether it is with her previous lover, a delivery man, an estranged daughter, a friend or a brother, there’s a connection, a relationship, small but occasionally prominent that reveals more and more about our protagonist, fleshing her out, providing details. She continually tells us she is forthright, not sugar coating her communications, responses, because her heritage from the Netherlands stands in for the rationale of being forthright.However, in each chapter, each main character she develops can stand for themselves, fully described, motivated, Dora, a link to be puzzled out later.

Like those Russian dolls, one story is housed in another, taking us to Paris, Iran, England, the US. For the most part, it all hangs together, with Dora as a pin, a writer, even as a minor player. In the final chapter, connections are surprisingly revealed so we can place pieces of this jigsaw together and contemplate more of her method , the how and possibly the why of her transporting certain characters, their origins, her imaginative appropriations.

In this way, the telling is refigured: made more distant yet situated as a concocted work that exposes a writer’s machinations and writing processes.They are stories of crisis, disappointment , love soured. Some are great leaps from the source as in the murder of two innocent children, but the mother’s reactions of vengeance and grief are real. We had been taken into her stories, but the final chapter explaining the connections causes us to dislocate somewhat from them, now understanding them not in themselves but as a writer writing and exposing her thinking.

So, an emotional entanglement has been reduced to the practicalities of fasting a plot, a character. The distancing of writer and reader is slightly unpleasant as I now know where Amir, the strangled twins, brother Theo have been seeded. And rather than entire real pictures, they have been grown plants, roots grafted and exposed .

Now, in truth, that is an author’s process. Amy Tan in Masterclass discusses the four old ladies sitting at a game board in The Joy Luck Club as outgrowths of people she knew, her aunties. In Monsieur Ka, Vesna Goldsworthy puts her characters’ relationship to Anna Karenina right on the page and even in The Personal Librarian by Marie Benoit, she gives us the specific names of Belle da Costa Greene and her employer millionaire, JP Morgan , actual people who lived in actual times, their reputations and names known to the public- at least J Pierpoint Morgan’s. But the authors of these novels do not pull back the curtain to show us themselves as the writers composing the tales and including themselves in the works. And even though it is a fictitious character, Dora writing about writing, not Tom Rachman himself, we, the readers experience that unpleasant distancing, an exposed cleverness, a game perhaps.

Yet our interest has been piqued. In perhaps the best of these stories, a young man named Amir is arrested and tortured for images on his cellphone that he carries when he flies to Iran. Because of the present unrest in the world, the capture of attendees at a rock concert in Israel, Amir’s situation feels immediate, precipitous and we’re made uneasy.

Zipped into a bag with another prisoner, “Amir’s arteries swell, blood rushing around his body. The disgusting animal beside him parts those lips, leaning to Amir’s ear. ‘Are you hurt?’” This fragment furthest from Dora’s settled life is for me, the strongest. This story is presented before Dora divulges her methodology of writing so I’m focused on the capture of Amir, not Dora’s writing process of composing Amir’s traumatic event.

As well, Dora’s rumination on her brother Theo, his trip to India in order to expand his horizons also stands out: before all is revealed in that final discussion. The memories of being stuffed in a voxwagon with new international friends, a life threatening event and the gauzy remembrance of those days that have become vague with essential pieces missing does ring true with this baby boomer and her ilk who hitch hiked at our own peril so many years back, bits recalled, others absented with the fog of age.

Now, 73 years old and isolated in her London home by the pandemic lockdown, Dora works on a new novel each chapter centred on a different character. These chapters alternate with diary entries that describe Dora’s experiences during the lockdown. Truthfully, for-me, these were the most uninteresting part of The Imposters.

She has invented stories of unrequited love, imprisonment and torture, the murders of children—that are slowly revealed to be Dora’s embroidery of events from her own history.

Or in her fading memories, have fantasies been leached into her own days, made up , absorbed and reworked to become part of her own memoirs? In deed, does separation exist between fact and fiction when a writer embraces a character so well that they have entered into their consciousness as an extended memory of lived life?And is the aged declining Dora even capable of segregating personal from published?

In Zed, The Zoomers Bookclub, Rachman himself considers the act of writing, saying,

We are quite evidently living in a period of immense cultural upheaval and it’s not clear how it’s going to end up…. Is there a point to literature at a time of such cultural transformation, when people are distracted and able to concentrate less?”

“It feels like literature has a different kind of place than when I started trying to do this 20 years ago,” says the 48-year-old author, “and I don’t expect that it will for my son or for my grandkids. Storytelling? Yes, but not in this form. And that’s a painful belief. It’s something that has meant so much to me and that I felt was important and that I felt was as permanent as the rocks in the mountain.”

So the purposeful engagement of reader as in a video game suggests for Rachman a necessary outreach to involve contemporary readers, a new way to ensure readers continue to read, be involved: stories reduced to isolated chapters, shorter, more compact, yet part of a whole wherein the game of Where’s Waldo?( Dora) entertains while maintaining the need for storytelling to persist?

But this reader queries, Has the writer pulled back the curtain too far?