Month: February 2015

Ru by Kim Thúy

RuCover3-187x300Ru is Kim Thúy’s time-shifting biographical novel about fleeing war-torn Vietnam in 1979 to start over in Granby, Québec.

While labels are reductive, names and nouns are a linguistic starting point we rely on to understand what it is we’re working with.

As a reader, I struggled with the book as a biographical novel. Which parts are true? Which bits are fiction? The fact that the line blurs, troubled me. I visited Hanoi, Vietnam for a short week, but of all my travels, it’s been my favorite trip. I guess — and my inability to digest this book as a biographical novel is not a criticism, simply my personal response — I’m eager to know more about a country I loved and want to return to from someone with first-hand experience far deeper than mine.

Even memoirs have hazy edges; memory is malleable, imperfect, and fallible, though a fictionalized biography seems to taunt you with the truth. This book is a series of short, detailed, vivid vignettes — scenes set before you like a delicious, carefully prepared full-course meal, but you’re left wondering if the crab cakes you’re eating are actually made of pollock, or something else entirely.

The definition of “ru” in French and Vietnamese as it appears in the beginning of the book gave me pause:

In French, ru means a small stream and, figuratively, a flow, a discharge — of tears, of blood, of money. In Vietnamese, ru means a lullaby, to lull.

For me, “Ru” rings true in French as a river of tears, of blood, and money flows from re-education camps into Mirabel Airport in France as refugees flee Vietnam with all their worldly wealth (diamonds and gems) embedded in their teeth. I found dissonance in “ru” in Vietnamese as a lullaby, given the torture, expropriation, poverty, and depravity the book depicts.

These questions aside, Ru is a beautiful novel translated from French into English. It’s featured as one of the books in the 2015 Canada Reads competition. It’s worth your time.

February, 2015

Carrying love in your head, not your heart

Just recently in Montreal, I saw a Vietnamese grandmother ask her one- year- old grandson: “Thu’o’ng Bà để dâu?” I can’t translate that phrase, which contains just four words, two of them verbs, to love and to carry . Literally, it means, “Love grandmother carry where?” The child touched his head with his hand. I had completely forgotten that gesture, which I’d performed a thousand times when I was small. I’d forgotten that love comes from the head and not the heart. Of the entire body, only the head matters. Merely touching the head of a Vietnamese person insults not just him but his entire family tree. That is why a shy Vietnamese eight- year- old turned into a raging tiger when his Québécois teammate rubbed the top of his head to congratulate him for catching his first football.

Ru by Kim Thúy

Tell by Frances Itani

francesitani_tell This is the second Frances Itani book I’ve read this year. Set in Deseronto, Ontario just after the First World War, Tell takes us into the lives of side characters from Deafening. Maggie and Am, (Grania’s aunt and uncle) and Tress and Kenan (Grania’s older sister and her war-damaged husband) take centre-stage in this novel.

Tell is the story of two tattered marriages, one just starting and one many years old. The epigraph is especially prescient:

But isn’t that why we fall in love anyway, to be able to say the secret, dangerous words that are in our heads? To name each other with them in the dark? –Anthem, by Helen Humphreys

Two couples, both unmoored, are forced apart by different types of horror and helplessness: the horror of the First World War and catastrophic injury; the helplessness of watching your two children die horrible, slow deaths from diphtheria, isolated from medical help on the farm in the pit of a Canadian winter.

Tell is a novel of loss. It’s about our secret selves — the parts of ourselves we keep hidden from our spouse — that one person who is supposed to understand, and to love us, regardless; that person to whom we’re supposed to be able to “say the secret, dangerous words that are in our heads.” It’s about the relentless silences, shame, and grief that eat away at us over the years. The pain eventually gnaws its way out — leaving a messy, bloody hole that can only then begin to heal.

But pain was pain. One person’s and the next person’s and the next. One kind of pain was no more weighty than another, surely. Where the pain took place, the map of it, made not a speck of difference.

This is a book worthy of a re-read, and worth your time.

January and February, 2015

Deafening by Frances Itani

deafening-cover Proceed with caution: here be spoilers.

Deafening is a beautiful and poignant novel set in Deseronto, Ontario, Canada and in the trenches during the First World War. The novel tells the story of Grania O’Neil, a woman who lost her hearing to scarlet fever as a five-year-old.

This book explores “death” in distinct forms; from the death of language in illiteracy, the death of potential in marginalization, to mortal peril from the Spanish Flu and the First World War.

Mamo, Grania’s maternal grandmother and steadfast champion, sees Grania’s full potential and helps her achieve it. Grania recovers language as she and Mamo work through painstaking one-to-one lessons from The Sunday Book. It is Mamo who argues for Grania’s education, urging her parents to send her away to the nearby School for the Deaf.

Mamo’s boundless love is not without its costs: once students at the School for the Deaf enter in September, they’re forbidden from seeing family members until the following June and Grania and Mamo are deprived of one another through the long school year. Later in the novel, Mamo sacrifices herself, refusing to allow anyone else into Grania’s sickroom when Spanish Flu strikes. In nursing Grania back to health, Mamo catches the flu and falls victim to the pandemic. It is the scenes with Mamo and Grania, and Grania after Mamo’s death that are among the most poignant in the book.

This book shook me out of my own comfy, peaceful reality. Grania marries Jim and he promptly enlists and heads off to serve Mother Britain in the First World War. Jim is gone for three years. Three. Years. The newlyweds’ relationship survives off a brave hope and intermittent letters. I can’t possibly imagine a world where my husband would be drawn off to war for three years. This separation, isolation, abject horror, and sacrifice for someone else’s cause is entirely foreign to me. As the war continues, casualties mount, “the boys” who do return do not come back whole; they’re either maimed or scarred in body, mind, and soul. As Grania observes, no one remains unaffected:

“Everyone has lost something in this war, she thought. We have waited so long, and we have all lost something.”

This was a book I enjoyed much more on the second read. With full understanding of the plot, the second read reveals even greater depth in the connection between Grania and Mamo as we truly learn what and where they go and do when things get bad, a form of release and a coping mechanism Grania eventually reveals to her sister Tress in a bid to help heal her war-damaged husband Keenan.

Deafening is worth your time.

December 2014 — January, 2015