Book review of YVR by W. H. New

Micheline Maylor
A review of

YVR
by W. H. New
Oolichan Books (2011)
ISBN 978-0-86492-668-5
$17.95

In W. H. New’s tenth book of poetry he investigates his hometown, Vancouver. The collection won the Vancouver book award in 2012 and is a nostalgic and moody view of his feeling about home and time’s effect on the place. Many of the poems begin with narrator as child observing the world around him. Vancouver locales are plentiful and specific. This observance comes from “Grade” (31).

At six I thought if I climbed into the cab of
Old Engine 374 I could see the whole world.
and I could: Kits Beach up close, the Sleeping
Beauty further off: in my head I was already
through the next range and the one after,
out of the spiral tunnel, over the top,
free pass to beyond –

New often navigates out of this voice and into the one of mature narrator enveloped in remembrance and wonder. Here we find narrator musing on the essential question, “what have I stopped noticing?” (51). The poems competently fold time and reminiscence together to create portraits of time and place, sometimes too specifically to be inclusive of everyman. Yet, there is a sense that these things matter to New, that his memory is important.

I am caught in a tangle,
fishnets of caution, repetition:

where has the moment gone, single
featherstroke, sudden

berryblush,
vermilion cheek and child hurrah –

voices –
                fixed forever

and then –
                 dropped in fogbank,
                  murmured into approximation,
                  lost, like
                 willow play and grey signs – (51)

W. H. New is a retired professor of Canadian Literature and lives in Vancouver.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013

Book Review of “Duck Boy” by Bill Bunn

Lynn C. Fraser
Review of

Duck Boy
by Bill Bunn
Bitingduck Press (2012)
ISBN 978-1-938463-37-2
e-book $4.99

Duck Boy is a novel filled with symbolism and Alchemy. The first symbol, “Duck”, is in the title and represents both the derogatory Webster’s dictionary definition of “one that cannot act effectively because of a disablement or other cause” and, symbolically, as a journey of the soul.
      Steve, the main character, starts the novel filled with self doubt. Through a journey of discovery and growth he changes into an able confident young man. Having lost his mother under mysterious circumstances Steve is trying to fit in while accepting the loss, yet he continues to believe he will find her. Will he be able to find her? Can he bring her back? His wacky Aunt Shannon thinks so. Steve doesn’t believe her.
      The addition of alchemy to the story creates a new level of interest. Transformations are not limited to changing one object into another, along the old lead to gold theory line, but, include the movement of the alchemist through space. Steve learns that his mother, along with his aunt are both alchemists, and that perhaps alchemy is responsible for his mother’s disappearance. Aunt Shannon teaches Steve that alchemy is performed through the appropriate use of language and a benu stone. Bill Bunn emphasizes the value of words to change ourselves and the world around us, and gives the reader a clue as to how Steve will change his situation.

You can change a thing with words much easier than you can with fire. I can bend words so many ways, break them, and put them back together again. And when you change a word in just the right way, you change the world.” Aunt Shannon paused (51).

Bill Bunn’s use of language in Duck Boy is superb with remarkably fresh images starting in the prologue and continuing throughout the novel. Images like, “[a] brown pond of coffee on the floor … surrounded by the shark-fin shards of a shattered mug” (2), a part of the scene when Steve discovers his mother has disappeared. Then later when he thinks he sees his mother at the mall, and she starts off “slaloming through the food court tables” (7) while Steve’s progress to catch her is thwarted by a crowd that sprouts up. Steve is awoken from this daymare by “[a] badly dressed frown with legs” (8), his teacher Mr. Pollock. Further on while Christmas shopping with his Great Aunt Shannon, Steve mentally voices the depressing thought, “I’m going to the mall with a cartoon” (64). The wacky aunt character made me laugh.

Symbolism abounds throughout the novel with such instances as Aunt Shannon’s white “1966 Dodge Monaco convertible” (64) being referred to as “the dragon rumbled to life” (65) when it started. Later in the story Steve has to master the dragon — drive the car — to return to Aunt Shannon’s house after she goes missing in the same manner as his mother went missing.

At first Steve doesn’t believe his aunt can change one object into another, until he sees her do it, and then has success causing a transformation himself with the aid of his aunt and her benu stone.
      Once Steve finds his benu stone and starts to experiment, he discovers that perhaps he shouldn’t short change his own abilities. The choice of benu, as the name of the stone that allows for transformations, brings in more symbolism: the Benu Bird (also known as the Phoenix) whose meaning in alchemy refers to a rebirth from its own ashes after combusting voluntarily. By the end of the story we see a new Steve, one who could be said to have returned from his own ashes.
      At the end of the novel Steve proudly refers to himself as Duck Boy with the proclamation that he is master of the world of pieces. “You are my world now…You will listen to me. I am a whole one: I am the Duck Boy” (281).

I expect I will come back to Duck Boy for an additional read in the future.
      In the past ten years a number of novels written for a younger audience have crossed over to the adult market, I think Duck Boy by Bill Bunn has the potential of making that crossover.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013

Book Review of “Malarky” by Anakana Schofield

Rea Tarvydas
a review of

Malarky
by Anakana Schofield
Biblioasis (2012)
ISBN 978-1-926845-38-8
$19.95

Some novels are laid out on a grid: turn left at the careful transition to arrive at the next chapter. Others are a tangle of intersecting roads and side streets, and there’s a car wreck on the fast road that’s creating havoc with traffic patterns. Malarky is the latter. Don’t expect detailed directions and a simple trajectory. This is one wild ride. Annabel Lyon said, “Malarky spins and glitters like a coin flipped in the air — now searingly tragic, now blackly funny. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.”
     I agree wholeheartedly.
     Set in present day west of Ireland, Anakana Schofield tells the story of Our Woman, a farmer’s wife, as she struggles to understand both her adulterous husband and her college-age son, Jimmy — and, caught in her thoughts, discovers her own life is unfulfilled. She is obsessed with sex as an antidote to her joylessness and, as she methodically explores her sexuality, comes to understand both her husband’s infidelities and her son’s sexual life as a gay man. Delightfully, she sides with her son “at the same malarky” (21) and explores this through a series of hilarious sexual encounters.
     I loved this book from its opening lines. “— There’s no way round it, I’m finding it very hard to be a widow, I told Grief, the counsellor woman, that Tuesday morning” (7). What captured me was the strong, real voice of a woman who “wasn’t in my ordinary life, I was in an extraordinary moment in my ordinary life” (129). A woman-on-the-verge, you might say.
     Although the reader soon discovers that both husband and son are deceased, this novel is delightful and funny. I was struck by how engaging the character of Our Woman is as she alternates between compulsively caring for a snoring drunk on the bus by wiping his face clean with wet wipes, thinking, “She could bring him home and fix him up” (145), and rebelling against her husband, “I remaining furious, paid little heed. I’d paid so much heed, now I was on strike” (48). I was also struck by the strength and value of her friendships. Our Woman’s girlfriends appear at her kitchen door on a daily basis for a spot of hot tea, provide meddling advice, and the tape measure. Jimmy’s friends are also there for him. When Our Woman escapes to Dublin to get away from marital discord and visits son Jimmy, she sits with them in a gay bar with her knitting in her lap, enjoying their company. “They were young, they were young lads, all of them…[b]ut they were pleasant, laughed together” (42).
     Malarky is an episodic novel and, as such, shifts back and forth through time. Each episode involves tense and point of view shifts, and challenges the reader to follow along. This is not an easy book to read and the reader must have faith. Schofield’s structural choice is perfect for an exploration of loss, and mimics the movement, back and forth, through the messy process. It’s real life.
     Schofield’s strong beautiful prose is compelling, propelling you through this turbulent story.

In the Blue House today she sits on the low Chinese fabric stool amid the rubble and jumble of the life that departed here so inexplicably that day. Those waves from Jimmy’s hand are still with her from the bus and new ones arrive as she sits in the house she is not supposed to be in (148).

     Of interest, Schofield’s prose falls apart as Our Woman falls apart, another stylistic choice that mimics Our Woman’s mental dissolution in the psych ward of Castlebar Hospital. Throughout, her girlfriends are by her side, warning her, bickering and berating one another while Our Woman acts out yet again. Here’s an example:

     Joanie thinks Bina’s greedy eating all Our Woman’s Quality Street. As Bina is blaming Joanie, and Joanie is blaming Bina, Our Woman inquires where does Bina think the woman on the front of the puzzle book lives.
— For the love of God, Bina hushes her, don’t ask me such a thing, or they’ll have the sheets off ya (210).

A gang of middle-aged women looking out for one another reminds us of what’s important in lives — our friendships.
     Malarky reminded me of a rowdy Greyhound bus ride I took in the 90s. A curtain of winter rain triggered avalanches at either end of a mountain town, effectively closing down the highway, and the bus driver deserted us: stoners in the back; a couple of old ladies with asthma in the front; and, me and my seatmate. In the crowded all-night diner, the conversation deteriorated into an admission of a diagnosis of ovarian cancer from my seatmate and a flailing fistfight between the stoners. A love-struck taxi driver deposited me at the train station where a drunken MP and his sober wife argued, loudly, careening from one wooden bench to the next. The train was hours late. I wasn’t sure if I’d make it home but I did. I’ll never forget it.
     I can’t wait to read Anakana Schofield’s next offering.

Anakana Schofield’s Malarkey won this year’s Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Congratulations Anakana.
This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013

Book Review of “I Know Who You Remind Me Of” by Naomi K. Lewis

Ryan Stromquist
A review of

I Know Who You Remind Me Of
by Naomi K. Lewis
Enfield & Wizenty (2012)
ISBN: 978-1-926531-51-9
$29.95

Naomi K. Lewis’ I Know Who You Remind Me Of is a collection of nine short stories. Lewis playfully toys with the art of narrative like a clockmaker. Each part is carefully examined but the whole is never compromised. Instead, Lewis invites you into her world: an intimate portrayal of sexuality juxtaposed against sensuality. The tone is set with her first story “Warp,” which depicts the main character, Karen, in a sexual coming-of-age yarn.

Why did Gavin have to be so nice to her, staring hard, like he’d never forget her? Why did he have to sleep with his forehead pressed between her shoulder blades? And why did she never believe him when he reminded her he didn’t love her, was biding his time, waiting for someone real? (24)

These lines show that Karen realizes that her sexuality is intrinsically linked with how others view her, which leads her to an epiphany of loneliness. I love this story not because Lewis paints a vivid picture (she does), not because the dialogue springs off the page (it does), but because each sentence is ripe with insight. Consider the lines: “[h]ardly anything was really her . . . without him telling her, she would never have even guessed that Green Day was okay to like, but Aerosmith wasn’t” (24). Lines like these display the painful truths of the awareness of adolescent innocence.
     In “Weft,” her character Ben claims: “I’ve been questioning the dichotomy between intimacy and loneliness” (134), which becomes a central discussion recurring throughout the stories. Indeed, each of Lewis’ characters are struggling with intimacy in one way or another, whether it’s intimacy leading to loneliness in “Warp,” yearning for lost intimacy in “Nix and Six,” or the desire for intimacy in “Seesaw.” Connecting each story with the dominant themes of sexuality, sensuality, intimacy, and loneliness, I Know Who You Remind Me Of maintains a tight knit narrative that never falters. A story like “Flex,” which is uniquely told through the span of a week, forwards and backwards, walks a tightrope of plot, yet never allows the plot to strangle the writing.
     Referencing the act of writing, Hemingway wrote: “[w]rite the truest sentence that you know;” Lewis’ I Know Who You Remind Me Of is an exercise in the “truest sentence.” Lewis wastes no words; rather, each sentence is imbued with wisdom.

She pressed her pelvis up against his and closed her eyes, lifted her face, lips parted. He ground her hips down against the bottom of the tub, and she grunted in discomfort, but then she smiled. Ben tugged her knees, sliding her until her head dunked under water. She came up sputtering, coughing with her mouth wide open like a little kid’s in a swimming pool. He kept her arms pinned down so she had to hold her face above water with the strength of her neck, and she freaked out, wiggling like a fish. He released her arms. (141)

So much is said here with so little. With very little descriptors Lewis is able to create fully formed characters with movement alone. The characters’ distaste for one another was beautiful. Rarely have I pondered a line, “[p]rofoundly distasteful” (141), and wondered if the character both simultaneously believed and didn’t believe it. It is this indecisiveness that humanizes Lewis’ characters. Lewis writes: “Some things are describable, that’s all, and some things aren’t” (113), but I get the feeling that Lewis doesn’t come across much she can’t describe.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013

Book Review of “Floating Like The Dead” by Yasuko Thanh

Shelley McAneeley
A review of

Floating Like The Dead
by Yasuko Thanh
Emblem Editions (M & S) (2012)
ISBN 978-0-7710-8429-4
$22.00

Yasuko Thanh creates a fascinating collection of spell binding anecdotes of lepers and lovers, and other quirks. Her explorations of these topics, the squeamishly shunned, are bold and inviting. The collection begins with a tale of a man on death row while eating his last meal; he ponders life.

     Waves of sadness then numbness ran through my body, one after the other. Maybe these waves would wash me clean. Maybe they’d pulverize me, grind me down to the size of a stone, then a pebble, not stopping till I was as invisible as a grain of sand (25).

Our precognitive awareness of death and its impending existential crisis are explored in the title story, “Floating Like the Dead”. Several experiential reactions are woven together through the co-existence of men isolated on an island for lepers.

     As a boy, he would float in the warm water of Chongwu Bay until he felt his body liquefying, his loose limbs pulled by small currents and pushed by gentle swells. He would float as if he were dead while the sun burned his back. Then he grew and fished with the older boys. He went to work in the tin mines of Malaysa. He went to the plantations of Borneo. He forgot how to turn into the sea (68).

The Walter Mitty-ian story about the quiet life of Helen and Frank revels in ordinary movements and then blossoms into a most touching love story.

     Frank watches Helen as she sleeps. His little girl. He parts her hair and kisses the scar that marks where a third ear had been long ago. For a moment he wonders if he should carry her back to the car. But the car doesn’t have enough gas to make it back to the main road and would be as cold as an icebox anyway. Besides from this vantage point as long as he’s awake he can see the moon (119).

Each story Thanh writes is equally exploratory and as exciting as the last. Her book is insightful, interesting, and intelligent in its content and revelation.
This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013

Book review of “Particles” by Michael Penny

Micheline Maylor
A review of
Particles
By Michael Penny

McGill-Queen’s University Press
ISBN 978-0-7735-3846-7
$14.95

Michael Penny’s premise for Particles rests on William Blake’s aphorism, “To see the 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. “ The book consists of 99 similar length poems musing on themes of existence, attraction, being, mortality, and time. Numbered meditations dissect moments of sensory experience into reflections or contemplations.

Penny takes an interesting tact on narrative. He personifies particle through the use of second person narration. Levels of meaning accumulate and show sliding scales of being. Particle can be viewed on both the microcosmic (particle) and marcocosmic (person) level. In this way the shifting of size, shape, and scope of particle becomes more meaningful in its metaphor. Particle becomes the protagonist.

10

There’s a gap between where
an electron is and where it might be
and that’s the only real work-place.

You occupy that office of possibility.
With what will work out for you there.

The place itself is as imaginary
as all things described.

The job description is not you;
instead, you are this to do list:

pass time; gain energy; make it matter.

And the last “to do” is yourself
that gap, your work-day, today.

These reflections are relatable, and there are real moments of clarity and insight, but the resonance of the material could be deepened by more muscular language choices. I recognize that this preference for language play and variation is what, to me, moves a book of poetry from good to great. And, at times, the lines felt ‘heard’, as in I’ve heard this before, from 19:

There might be hills and valleys
but those are mere landscapes not where you stand.

Memory has its own geography
as it delineates its countries
colouring them in so gradually.

Particles gains momentum and energy as it builds on impressions and the writing strengthens towards the end of book. Additionally, Penny’s ideas are pleasant to contemplate and well worth the meditative space. The author moves into some of the varying diction that I crave, too.

74

You work with the idea that an idea
can be a mountain, or a tree
or that crawling speck

which sights the shadow that is
your foot coming down, and is no more.
Thus even your walking can be a calamity.
So be it; it’s only an idea
but what brought it along?
Word-whelped, as you watched?

Or there, meaning there all the time
inside, surrounding, and merely itself
because it’s there?

Particles does, in the words of Jan Zwicky, do what poetry is supposed to: “Poetry articulates the necessary truths of mortality.” Each account builds on the next for a deeper set of impressions. Yet, each poem stands alone. Penny’s book could easily be used as a thought-a-day sort of contemplation guide and a good one at that.

Michael Penny is a 59 year old Edmonton based author and lawyer. Particles is Penny’s fourth book.

This review first appeared in FreeFall Volume XXII Number 1.

Book review of “Western Taxidermy” by Barb Howard

Annie Vigna
A review of
Western Taxidermy
by Barb Howard

NeWest Press
ISBN 978-1-927063-11-8
$19.95

Western Taxidermy is a collection of sixteen new and previously published stories by Barb Howard, former-lawyer-turned-author. Some of the stories contain elements of satire, skillfully masking whispers of emotions. These stories explore perfection versus naturalness, and often provide lessons in empathy, as evidenced in The Smile that Bites. Even crotchety old women like Mrs. Wasnyk, despite her annoying habit of click-snapping the sections of her purse, deserve to be treated with courtesy. Juxtaposed to Mrs. Wasnyk and her reluctant young friend/chauffeur, is the little drama going on at the next table in Timmy Ho’s between a young mother and her toddler, illustrating an early lesson in courtesy and empathy.
Egos are stuffed. Hunted animals are stuffed. Little nylon sacks are stuffed. A large stuffed mouse is given as a gift. Brother Tom’s snakeskin shit-kickers are stuffed with the newspaper on which his obituary is written. A young woman’s “fibrousy red stuff like red algae” (62) is stuffed into a jar. Emotions are stuffed, as in “Breaking the Mould,” until they can no longer be contained or controlled.
Perhaps the picture of a stuffed white owl adorning the cover of this collection serves as a harbinger of what follows in these 196 pages. This predacious bird aptly introduces the title story, a gathering of “Rurban acreage [women]” (12) at a “baby celebration.” (9) Kay, the narrator, is a taxidermist whose client is Bob, the father of the baby girl, and husband of the new mother Deirdre, and a shameless flirt. Kay is clearly alien among the plastic women, all perfectly coiffed. She observes silently, “I know quite a bit about hair and I can tell you, there wasn’t a natural pelt at the party.” (11) Question: Why was she invited? Answer: Bob. “Everything I had done for Bob, five hunting season’s worth of work, was junked [in the basement trophy] room”. (15) As layers of the story are stripped away, the disenchanted Kay admits, “Maybe Bob just likes the hunt.” (16) She returns to her shop and works on an audacious revenge.
Howard’s irreverent stream of consciousness continues as each subsequent narrator tells the story. In “Big Fork Campground” a conscientious Jeanie takes charge of a poorly planned camping adventure by Craig, “legendary outdoorsman . . . asshole” (21) who passes out on her chest after a clumsy attempt at seduction in his tent that “looks like a body-bag.” (24)
“Basic Obedience” tells a poignant story of a father’s love for his daughter and her dog. The father sacrifices his time to take the dog to obedience classes while maintaining a safe distance from which to observe the upwardly-mobile boyfriend whom the father suspects is physically abusive to both his daughter and the dog.
“It’s all about control” (125) is the overriding tenet that advances the drama in “Mrs. Goodfellow’s Dog”. “And Mrs. Goodfellow wore an elegant velvet choker around her neck.” (122) Following the debacle of the dog getting out of his cage, and the furtive groping of the babysitter by Mr. Goodfellow, “She brought her hands to her neck and unclasped her velvet choker, letting it dangle like a pendulum from her fingers.” (131)
Unrequited love and a mutual determination to leave it in the twenty-year past are the emotions that prevail in “Still Making Time.” Nadia and Scott, separately and privately reminiscing about “the heat of a summer fling.” (182)

Whether Howard is describing the anguish a mother feels when her daughter leaves for university in another city Hydro Cyst, or the naϊvete of a newly divorced Paul who flees to the country with new dreams of reclaiming his manhood in “Marking Territory,” her writing seems effortless. Her wry sense of humour flawlessly teases out contemporary social characteristics and practises.
“Vacuuming the Dog” offers total comic relief. The pace and diction in this zany story is what drives the narration. It’s the kind of story that begs to be read aloud for extra appreciation. If I ever get the chance, I’ll ask Barb Howard to read this story to me.
When you are near a library or a bookstore, pick up a copy of Barb Howard’s Western Taxidermy. This is her fourth book. Her previous publications are Whipstock (NeWest Press, 2001); Notes for Monday (Recliner, 2009); The Dewpoint Show (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2010).

This review first appeared in FreeFall Volume XXII Number 3.

Book review of “Dancing, with Mirrors” by George Amabile

Lynn C. Fraser
A review of
Dancing, with Mirrors
by George Amabile

The Porcupine’s Quill
ISBN 9780889843431
$19.95

This collection of eleven cantos is a memoir in verse that follows a rough chronological order where George Amabile shares his life through a lyrical narrative. The opening poem “Tangents & Vectors” uses vivid weather and sea images to create a link between the parts. I can see the cars/drivers thrusting forward bent on reaching their destination regardless of the weather, bent on reaching an edifice where the work they do creates nothing more then an abundance of fish eggs most of which will have little or no effect on the condition of man or the world.

Dawn is a salmon run
of tail lights. Exhaust
curdled by the arctic (11)

Freezing rain
smeared across the windshield
like a bird’s eyelid
changes the carbon steel lights (11)

The law is all

that’s left of good

intentions.

We pass it copiously like roe. (12)

This poem connects the mundane travel to and from work daily with thoughts on environmental, sociological and biologically innate behaviour before stringing together life’s events that lead into the more autobiographical Cantos that follow.

“Burnt Wings” begins with a barbecue then leaps into the defining moments of childhood through a first person tour. “…, flying / into the great white sun” (17). These leaps show the exploration of a young boy’s sense of invincibility. Amabile then pushes that invincibility into a loss of that sense, which is clearly apparent with the illness and its dramatic result: “The priest made a rare house call” (17) . . . While “feeling my thighs melt from their bones.” (18). He shows the slow recovery from the illness and childhood illusions, before moving on to the poems only stanza written in third person. Amabile sharply displays the child’s loss of kinship and trust with his father.

The father cannot fathom
how he has changed
from partner, mentor, friend
to a predator that stalks the boy in his dreams. (21)

The following section returns to the opening adult when the protagonist declares “I am a part of the morning, / the part that watches while it burns.” (22)

Amabile portrays the pain and confusion created when a memory is thrust to the forefront of perception in “What We Take with Us, Going Away”. A trip through Europe where the sections are tied to family history past and present, where what went before nearly repeated itself. Where, a collision with a cyclist throws Amabile back into the accident that killed his brother.

I knelt, still

shouting, trying to shake him
awake, then rocked him senseless in my lap.

I kneel now, in broken glass,
in the headlights of stopped traffic, feeling
his cold neck for a pulse, confused
by the scent

of wine

in the air, and my breath

explodes

when I understand,

he’s dead

drunk, and snoring. (43)

Throughout this collection the reader is invited to share in the very personal ethos of one man, George Amabile, through his elegant and extraordinary verse.

‘ What muscular lyricism! Amabile is a fearless singer who finds the right note for every human emotion.’
Lorna Crozier

This review first appeared in FreeFall XXII Number 3.

Book Review of “Any Bright Horse” by Lisa Pasold

Beth Everest
A review of
Any Bright Horse
by Lisa Pasold

Frontenac House Poetry
ISBN: 978-1-897181-55-3
$15.95

What intrigues me most about Lisa Pasold’s poetic narrative is the perspective. The book contains six sections, alternating focus between Marco Polo’s journeys and those of a contemporary dancer. But this is what happens: after we are introduced to Marco Polo and his stories, the contemporary narrator wonders “what if my neighbor believes he is Marco Polo” (33). Once suggested, their stories overlap. As Polo’s stories are recorded by Rusticello and given to the world in many versions, so the dancer’s stories are told by her neighbor in the second person perspective and thereby involve not only the dancer but the reader as imaginary participants. Of course, all of this is filtered through Pasold’s imagination and scribed by her.

Any Bright Horse is also a narrative about narrative, and while this trope has been done many times before, Pasold’s strength is in her words. Her narrator asks, “what if I tell him every story I know…/ what will he tell me in return?/ A red bird released from his hands, flying distantly” (33). Red becomes an important symbol of release and desire, as does the horse, “more noble, more ready to rise up” (52), “a mare with a shaking mane and a route across the snow (55). Poetic elements such as these capture the wonder, the fantasy, the fantastic. All this mixed with the reality.

The reader doesn’t get bogged down by questions of belief and truth, however, but is taken up by the energy of the narrative and the clever anachronistic details. For example, Marco Polo stands at the border before the customs guard:

I ripped open the seams of my clothes
with the bronze nib of a pen designed to fill in
dishonest declaration forms. I tore those seams and
they spilled into my fingers so I might give her
strings of pearls white as the eyes of snakes,
handfuls of uncut rubies that sparkled with
congealed blood (15)

Here one can see Pasold’s wry smile as she combines the historical with the contemporary, with political commentary, and multiple narrators speaking through one voice. Or as Pasold says, “Is he speaking only for himself, or for us all?” (22). We don’t even need to ask whose stories are these anyway, because it doesn’t seem to matter, “That whatever it was, was red and moving, leaping/partly from joy, that’s what it seemed” (34).

Any Bright Horse is a journey narrative, but the journey itself is not Pasold’s focus so much as is the impact of the return and the telling of the journey. Or at least the story of the journey as it has been told by the layers of narration, ultimately Pasold’s narration, but filtered through Rusticello or the touring dancer with a wounded ear and specks in her eyes, and the dancer’s neighbor. Of course, they are not making the journey for the sake of the journey, but are on a quest to bring back “the rock, the gem, the object….and if you are lucky and brave and if you find your way, you’ll come back with the story, with the word” (101). The problem is, of course, that on your return, “you enclose all that ocean within/ your mind. No wonder you can’t rest. You have returned/ speaking a language your neighbors refuse/ to understand” (11). I question, however, if it is not a refusal but an inability to understand; as Pasold reminds us, those on the journey are changed by the journey, and those who have not gone cannot know what they cannot know. As the Venetian commander says, “I did not know how greatly a cold thing could be missed, like ice,/ melting” (81).
What is certain, however, is that the narrator can spellbind. And s/he does:
The Genoese children chant, Messer Marco, tell us another lie….Oh amuse us, we grow impatient! (85).

This review first appeared in FreeFall Volume XXII Number 3.

Book review of “Ru” by Kim Thúy translated by Sheila Fishman

Micheline Maylor
A review of
Ru
by Kim Thúy translated by Sheila Fishman

Random House Canada
ISBN 978-0-307-35970-4
$25.00

Refreshing and devastating, Kim Thúy’s (pronounced two-ee) Ru is translated superbly to English by Sheila Fischman. Ru previously won the Governor General’s award in French in 2010. It is the story (fiction/memoir hybrid) of Nguyen An Tinh and her family’s journey from war torn Vietnam in 1968 while fleeing the communists. It is a tale woven in vignettes. Each vignette is artful in its prose. Thúy shows moments, or develops character precisely. These vignettes then tumble towards a full story in an effective accumulation of impressions.

Thúy manages a deft and powerful telling of her migration, and immigration with poetic skill, potent imagery, and engaging narrative. With sensitivity Thúy recreates a number of experiences. In this passage about her journey as a “boat person”, she pinpoints her child point of view: “[F]ear was transformed into a hundred-faced monster who sawed off our legs and kept us from feeling the stiffness in our immobilized muscles.” (5). Ever increasing stakes for the narrator and her family are related in such a way that I read the entire collection wide-eyed. The tension did not relent even as the family immigrates to Quebec.

Thúy also manages metaphor with complexity. Memes seamlessly entwine: money, corruption, class, motherhood, mental illness, illusion, home, love, life, similarity, dreams, cycles of life, hopelessness, woundedness, heroes, knowledge, dislocation, and desire. Metaphor is handled poetically and creates a layering effect in the storytelling. Just one reading of this book impossible, and improbable. The author’s subtle handling of so many issues is pleasing and crafty. I re-read the book through seven times over the course of a few days and continued to extract new ways of seeing the subject(s), scenes, and characters. Every reading was equally wide-eyed for me. Perhaps this had to do with the complete absence of sentimentality and nostalgia, and Thúy’s adept use of language. In addition, her narrative point of view takes on a childlike quality, as though other realities, beyond the one told, do not exist, a trait the narrator inherits from her father.

As for my father, he didn’t have to reinvent
himself. He is someone who lives in the
moment, with no affection for the past. He savours
every instant of the present as if it were the best
and only time, with no comparisons, no measurements.
That is why he always inspired the greatest, most
wonderful happiness, whether holding a mop on the
steps of a hotel or sitting in a limousine en route to a
strategic meeting with his minister (64).

The present encompasses each narrative in Ru until the totality of the collection forms an overall dominant impression and it feels like something profound has happened, something refreshing and devastating.
In a CBC on-line interview with Thúy, she reveals the structure of Ru was not intentional. She merely, “picked up where she left off the day before,” nor is she comfortable calling it a novel or even a book. She claims, “my job was to remove the unnecessary words.” What she leaves is the essential moments that build to a full and impacting picture. Consider this partial passage, just one of Thúy’s many character portrayals.

I thought he was mute. If I ran into him
today, I would say that he’s autistic. One day his foot
slipped on the morning dew. And bang, he was
spread out on his back. BANG! He cried out
“BANG!” several times, then burst out laughing.
I knelt down to help him get up. He leaned against
me, holding my arms, but didn’t get up. He was
crying. He kept crying and crying, then stopped
suddenly, and turned my face towards the sky.
He asked me what colour I saw. Blue. Then he
raised his thumb and pointed his index finger towards
my temple, asking me again if the sky was still blue (85).

Ru allows us to consider these simple questions on the crest of subliminal and political complexities without direct questions. Thúy challenges us to different ways of seeing. The craft of the lines and words becomes spellbinding, just the way a good piece of narrative should. This book is highly recommended.

This review first appeared in FreeFall Volume XXII Number 3.