Tag: Frances Itani

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

The hands in death

If Grania were here beside him he would be able to tell her about the hands. If only he did not have to look at the hands. In death they told more than the face; he knew that now. It was the hands that revealed the final argument: clenched in anger, relaxed in acquiescence, seized in a posture of surprise or forgiveness, or taken unawares. Clawing at a chest, or raised unnaturally in a pleading attitude.

Interesting image here — Deaf folk use hands to communicate in life, and in this passage it seems as though hearing people’s hands communicate their final truth.

Deafening by Frances Itani

I listen to your body

“You can’t know. You’ll never hear me sing,” he teased. “Did you hear me hum the ‘Sparkling Waltzes’ when we danced at our wedding at Bompa Jack’s?”

“I felt the hum. I watch your words. I see your fingers on the keys. I feel your song. I follow your body when we dance. That’s how I listen. I listen to your body.”

Deafening by Frances Itani

Grania, who is Deaf, explaining to Jim how she “hears” him sing. I feel your song…I listen to your body. Beautiful.