Category Archives: Reviews of the written word

Novel explores moral distress

The Dove in Bathurst Station

By Patricia Westerhof

Brindle and Glass

229 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Katrin Horowitz

According to one character in The Dove in Bathurst Station, moral distress is “when you know what you should do but you don’t do it because it seems impossible.”  And how, Patricia Westerhof asks, do you extricate yourself from the life-sucking tentacles of moral distress?  That’s the core dilemma raised in her novel, which follows the tortuous journey that protagonist Marta takes as she looks for a way out of the guilt-baited trap she has painstakingly constructed for herself over the past 13 years.

Westerhof ‘s novel is an intriguing exploration of belief systems, from simple faith in chance and omens to more complex varieties of religious thought.  She highlights the profound impact that our beliefs have on our lives, and she does a masterful job of making the protagonist’s inner life feel real and important.

At the start of the book Marta, a 30- year-old guidance counsellor, focuses on the seemingly impossible, like the rock dove that hops into her subway car at Bathurst Station.  She interprets it as a mysterious sign from God and struggles to understand it.  This search for meaning in unusual places also leads her to explore the earthy underside of Toronto.  She finds a pungent, quiet place where the temperature is always constant, a labyrinth of confusing tunnels, drains and storm sewers full of leaks, echoes and impenetrable darkness.  And she knows that she’s risking her career by trespassing.  It is, of course, an extended metaphor for her interior life, with its dark memories of her teenage boyfriend whose suicide is the source of her guilt.

Meanwhile, Marta is ambivalent about everything in her life above ground, including her career and her marriage.  She is an insightful guidance counsellor who takes on issues ranging from an obscene t-shirt to a potential suicide, but she mourns her former career as a singer.  She enjoys the rich diversity in her inner city neighbourhood, especially St. Anne’s Anglican Church with its Group of Seven paintings, but she also blames her husband for his lack of a real job that would support moving to an upscale part of the city.  Marta claims to love her husband, but she suspects him of various infidelities and she’s frustrated by his failure to succeed as a band manager.  As the distance between them grows, she has a series of internal arguments with herself about whether to divorce him.

Unfortunately her husband never quite convinces us that he is anything more than a foil for her ambivalences.  And despite an early sex scene, their interactions lack emotional resonance.  Most of their conversations seem to be between a couple of roommates who barely know each other.  But that’s a minor flaw in a novel that is less about interpersonal relationships than about Marta’s relationship with herself and her God.  Throughout the book we find ourselves hoping that Marta will find forgiveness for her trespasses.

Katrin Horowitz’s latest novel, The Best Soldier’s Wife, was published in September 2013 by Quadra Books.

 

 

 

Love thy grandmother, says memoirist

The Truth About Luck

By Iain Reid

Published by Anansi

254 pages, $18.95

By Richel Donaldson

The Truth About Luck is Ontario author Iain Reid’s second memoir. Reid, whose first book was about moving back home after university, was recently named as one of five up-and-coming Canadian authors by the Globe and Mail. In The Truth About Luck, Reid invites his grandmother, 92, on a five-day vacation. When it turns out that the vacation is really a stay-cation in Reid’s apartment, his grandmother takes the opportunity to share some of her life story with her grandson. What ensues is a charming and bumbling dialogue between two people getting to know each other.

Reid’s writing is honest and self-deprecating, full of humor and detail.  Readers can easily put themselves in his shoes when he describes waking up in the morning, his fear of house centipedes, or his nightly insomnia: “I might start thinking of all the moments in a day when it’s possible to choke on food or catch a foot and fall down some stairs. Other nights I think about something completely arbitrary.” The way he so carefully describes his grandmother brings her to life in the same way: “Her hands have held on to elegant toughness, apart from the odd liver spot or new freckle  . . . they’re strong, womanly hands.”

The narrative starts almost too slowly. It takes a while for Reid and his grandmother to warm up to one another, and the awkward silences become monotonous.  Only when Grandma starts telling her stories does the memoir become engaging. The actual events of the story exist in a confined environment – mostly the apartment – and a brief time span. Reid’s grandmother’s memories about her little brother Donald are some of the most powerful in the book:  “There at the bottom of the stairs was this lanky figure, a few feet away, a boy. I never would have thought I could recognize his posture, but I could . . .I knew it was him.” Grandmother tells stories about her experience in the war and childhood memories with such vivid sensual experience that when she stops, and the focus returns to the vacation, it is almost a letdown. Reid’s attempts to entertain his grandmother and make her comfortable are heartwarming, but they pale in comparison to the richness of his grandmother’s recollections.

Even though some parts of the memoir may be monotonous, the read is worthwhile. Reid’s realizations about his grandmother are incredibly powerful. She teaches him a great deal in the course of five days — about what it means to be alive and how to approach death. The ending of this book will make you want to grab your grandmother and listen to her with the dedication and interest that Reid did.

Richel Donaldson is a political science student at UVic. She grew up on Vancouver Island surrounded by family. She enjoys writing about indigenous culture and has learned a great deal from her own two grandmas. 

Vagabond’s candour makes memoir worthwhile

Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents

By Elisabeth Eaves

Seal Press

304 pages, $17.50

Reviewed by Isabela Vera

Elisabeth Eaves first began her love affair with travel as a college freshman, spending the summer in Spain as an au-pair with a penchant for Pepe, the suave bartender down the road. Now a middle-aged freelance writer living in New York City, she returns through her travel memoir to reflect upon a decade and a half spent pursuing pleasure in places that the meeker among us may only dream of. Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents untethers Eaves from the grey, drizzly backdrop of her “disappointingly unexotic” university life in early-90s Seattle, pushing her through roles ranging from an exchange student in Cairo, a backpacker in Australasia, a hiker in Papau New Guinea, and a Master’s student in New York.

“I had woken up at the age of thirty-four to realize that I wanted to go home, only to discover that I had no idea where that was,” writes Eaves in her opening prologue.   It is our first hint that Wanderlust may not be your run-of-the-mill tale of self-discovery. Eaves’s memoir is darker and more thought-provoking than its cheesy tropical cover suggests. Although this final revelation looms over readers from the start, we initially indulge in 20-year-old Eaves’ adventurous spirit. Her opportunities seem endless, and we barely bat an eyelid when, after a failed attempt at diplomacy in Karachi, she writes that “the ebbing of this professional direction didn’t yet worry me much . . . what I most wanted was to travel more, without an end date or obligation in sight. I wanted to wander and feel free.”  The memoir moves constantly between different men and countries as her wanderlust intensifies. Each new part of the world is revealed through a lens of love, separation, and sex.

Her journey has a theme: “travel equals longing equals love.”  For Eaves, the conventional aspects of  travel–the food, the culture shock, the self-discovery–have always been entangled with desire. If we can first accept the memoir’s romantic focus, than we can appreciate her personal revelations. Wanderlust flirts with the men and the places, but at its core lies Eaves and her inability to stay with them. “I know that I’m the problem,” she writes. “I’m perverse . . . Nothing with me can last.”

This problem makes Eaves a frustrating protagonist. We begin to mistrust her judgement by the book’s second section, when she tells us that “the jungle, with its never-wavering pattern of life and death . . . was a rational place compared to my own heart.”  In moments of emotional climax, her attention to other characters is minimal, and we feel that she cares little about them. It is the frank exposure of both her strength and her vulnerability that keeps us with her. “Even if I don’t love the reality . . . want to have the enviable life, just because it’s enviable,” she admits. The prose is simple, humourless, even narcissistic. The honesty is refreshing and forces us to admit that we, too, were once seduced by her limitlessness.

At first, each new sexual and geographical conquest is exciting to us. By the memoir’s last section, it all feels repetitive. Eaves does a clever job of closing down the opportunities we once saw as never-ending, making us want to scream “enough!” and book our own return flight home. She drags us through the claustrophobia to reward us by picking up the pieces, acknowledging “when traveling stops changing you, it’s time to go home.”

Wanderlust is not so much a bubbly beach read but a companion for a long, winding journey, preferably with a lot of time to spend staring out the window of a train. The author’s candour ultimately makes the entire tumultuous ride worthwhile.

Isabela Vera is a tea-loving world traveller and a UVic student.

 

 

Book on English hilariously informative

The Rude Story of English

By Tom Howell

Published by McClelland & Stewart

300 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Bonnie Way

English is a patchwork quilt of a language, with words borrowed from other languages and “rules” applied arbitrarily.  We probably all memorized the “I before E except after C” rule in school and have seen the meme going around on Facebook that shows the exceptions to that rule.  In his debut book The Rude Story of English, Tom Howell attempts to trace the paths of English through time and place and find out how some of the words evolved—or didn’t.

Howell is a graduate of the University of Victoria who wrote definitions for the Canadian Oxford Dictionary and thesaurus entries for the Canadian Oxford Thesaurus—an excellent background for this book.  He’s also worked for CBC Radio as in-house word nerd and poetry correspondent.  He is originally from London, England, and now lives in Toronto, Ontario, and has thus experienced firsthand the changes wrought in a language over time and place.

Howell begins his history of English by creating a hero—a personification of the English language whom we can follow and cheer for (or groan in disgust at).  To find his hero, he goes back to another word nerd: J. R. R. Tolkien, who also worked for Oxford’s dictionary department.  Tolkien also understood English’s need for a hero and chose Hengest, an “ancient warrior who had somehow gained a reputation for discovering Britain on behalf of the Angles, a tribe in northern Germany, thereby inventing the English language.”

From the opening pages of The Rude Story of English, Howell had me laughing out loud.  He sprinkles just enough research and fact through his story to make it believable, yet most of it is “asterisked” as he fills in the gaps of our knowledge.  The story is rude, irreverent, and hilarious, with penis jokes sprinkled among word jokes.  Howell lopes through the centuries, showing how English grew up as a language and mentioning key figures in its evolution, such as Beowulf,  Chaucer and Roger Williams.

Howell includes samples of poetry in Old English with his own translations.  In regards to various anonymous works of poetry and prose that have survived from English’s early days, he says, “I know several male poets.  The idea that they would contribute anything of significance without pasting their real names (including, often as not, their middle names) all over the material strikes me as implausible.  If Anon’s true identity was lost to the ignorance and carelessness of time, I bet she was an Anonyma, a woman who chose the pseudonym to dodge the biases of critics.”

The Rude Story of English is a book for lovers of words, puns, history, language and humour.  If you want a good dose of humour with a bit of learning thrown in, I heartily recommend it.  As Howell himself says:  “I’m often struck by how tenuously I know my own language, which is why I like to look words up in dictionaries—for the sense of reassurance that somebody out there has been keeping track of it all.”

Bonnie Way has a B.A. in English and History and is completing a second B.A. in Writing.

Daughter recalls father’s past with heart, humour

Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter; Growing up with a gay dad

By Alison Wearing

292 pages; $24.00

Reviewed by Cecania Alexander

When I pick up a book, my dearest hopes are, admittedly, a bit unfair. Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter – a nonfiction family memoir about Wearing’s growing up as her father discovers his gay identity in a time of political turmoil – met all of them, and threw in a few delicious surprises.

Wearing’s voice is delightful, not surprising as she is a musician, a dancer, a theatre performer, an award-winning one-woman-show star (including an adaptation of Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter). Her first book was an international bestseller (Honeymoon in Purday: An Iranian Journey). Wearing conveys humour, emotion and soul through art – she could make a fun, heart-warming journey out of peeling a baked potato.

In Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter, anecdotes, research, and lively stories are combined with her voice to form a fantastic ride. The memoir  begins in peachy childhood with an artistic, caring mother and a goofy father who “enjoyed skipping down sidewalks singing choruses from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas while pumping his elbows out to the ides and snapping his fingers like castanets,” and all things “festive.” But Wearing grows up amidst choppy waters as her father explores his gay identity, keeping his double life from the family, eventually coming out amidst great obstacles. At times I was dumbfounded with shock; at others I felt a surprising familiarity and connection to the family’s struggles; mostly, I was laughing.

The disruption of Wearing’s family was hard on her, as was accepting her father’s homosexuality but the strife is washed with wildly hilarious stories in which Wearing pokes fun at her family (recounting one brother’s obsession with poo, a family Christmas in which everyone accidentally ingests hallucinogenic mushrooms, and of course her father’s many quirks), and at herself   At one point she describes her hair as “thick knuckly masses, something a (brief) boyfriend was once generous enough to inform me was the stuff that makes up a rhinoceros’s horn.”

About two-thirds into the book, the point of view shifts to her father via diary entries, newspaper clippings, letters and notes during his coming out. These scraps of overwhelming struggle blew me away, revealed a violent world that I could not have otherwise fathomed. The story culminates in a sentimental, occasionally overly sentimental, acceptance, love and appreciation for family in all its fairy dust and demons. However, I forgave the story its sentimental weight because I just plain enjoyed it so much, and felt its resounding relevance.

This is an important memoir. Fortunately, it is also a story that anyone with a heart will enjoy.

Cecania Alexander is a fourth-year Creative Writing student at the University of Victoria.

Absorbing novel recreates Aleutians campaign

The Wind is not a River

By Brian Payton

Harper Collins

$29.99;  308 pages

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

War has provided storytellers with material for thousands of years. Whatever one’s viewpoint, there is a terrible fascination in extremes;  for fiction writers, examining the best and worst of individual behaviour against the collective excesses of armed conflict is irresistible.

Brian Payton’s absorbing second novel, The Wind is not a River, is part of this long tradition. In essence, the novel is a love story played out against the background of a Second World War campaign. That may sound familiar, but there is nothing predictable, from first to last, about Payton’s foray down a well-worn path.

For a start, the campaign is in the northern Pacific, and involves the only battle fought on American soil. Then, Payton’s protagonists are a young, happily married couple living in Seattle. John Easley is a journalist usually occupied with National Geographic projects; his wife, Helen, works in a store. After his sudden puzzling ejection from the Aleutian islands, and his brother’s death, John feels compelled to return to Alaska, despite a quarrel with Helen which both regret.

“Someone wants this battle fought beyond the view of prying eyes. What were they hiding in the Aleutians?…Easley was one of a handful of journalists with any knowledge of this corner of the world. What kind of writer shrinks from such a duty?”

Wearing his brother’s RCAF uniform, John talks his way into the role of an observer in the Aleutian theatre and a flight on a routine sortie. His plane crashes over the island of Attu; he survives, along with 19-year-old Karl Bitburg. Three thousand miles away, Helen struggles with her father’s poor health, and her own growing conviction of her husband’s peril. Despite her complete lack of qualifications, she is hired as part of a USO troupe and sets off on an epic search into the unknown.

Unknown, because Payton’s other protagonist and constant presence in the novel is the terrifying isolation of the Aleutian islands. Flung in an arc from the Alaskan mainland across the North Pacific towards Japan, they are sparsely inhabited. The climate is relentlessly hostile—cold, wind, and fog, rain or snow.

“…it becomes clear that the island does not offer up shelter gladly. Beaches curl round coves and end on rocky headlands. Up from the high tide line are rolling fields of rye slicked tight against the land. Then, after some two hundred feet of elevation gain, snow. Neither tree nor shrub worthy of the term. No bushes laden with summer berries. No grazing cattle or sheep, or even deer, rabbits, or squirrels. The only possible sources of protein are also visitors here—birds of the sky and fish of the sea.”

John’s life is pared to an increasingly desperate struggle to survive.

Payton alternates between John’s and Helen’s narratives, a device which provides momentum and grapples attention. There is a visceral excitement in the race against time as Helen fumbles her way through song and dance routines, moving ever closer to the husband she believes is still alive, while John endures the lonely road to physical and spiritual exhaustion until another quirk in the fortunes of war snatches him south again.

The fact that neither is aware of how close they come is heartrendingly realistic. Like the fog ebbing and flowing over the island, concealing and revealing, the censorship and secrecy about the Aleutian campaign, which ignite John’s journalistic instincts in the first place, and hamper Helen’s dogged search, isolate the couple in an opaque and bewildering world in which the only familiarity or strength lies in memory and belief in love.

Margaret Thompson’s new novel, The Cukoo’s Child will be released shortly. 

 

Technology helps us manage ourselves

The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering The World Around Us

McClelland and Stewart

$19.95, 229 pages

Reviewed by Jenny Aitken

Nora Young is a well-known Canadian broadcaster and writer who lives in Toronto and hosts CBC Radio One’s Spark, a program that focuses on how technology affects the world around us. In 2012, she released the book The Virtual Self: How our Digital Lives Are Altering The World Around Us, which has since gone on to become a national bestseller. She also visited the University of Victoria recently to discuss the implications of technology with students.

In The Virtual Self, Young explores the concept of self-tracking and how technology is changing the way people manage and register information. Using examples that range from Benjamin Franklin’s journal entries to the social media posts that helped pinpoint the location of a pipe-bomb in 2010, Young identifies different methods of self-tracking that increase self-awareness and make people more accountable for the way they spend their time.

One thread of this self-tracking relates to weight management. As Young explains, the web is rich with services to help people lose weight and stay fit through recording diet and exercises. In the book, Young identifies several technologies that are helping people shed pounds, such as FitBit, a small wrist monitor that tracks calories, exercise and even sleep by using 3-D motion sensors. There are also countless websites, such as FitDay.com, dedicated to giving specific information about the nutritional information for different foods in order to make it easier to keep tabs on how many calories users consume in a day.

Although Young discusses the benefits of these technologies, she acknowledges the concern that if people are too vigilant about their tracking, the danger is that “sources of bodily delight and physical expressiveness, such as running or eating a meal, are reduced to stats driven, objectified activities.” By demonstrating the positives as well as the negatives of these budding technologies, the reader is given a comprehensive look at the technological tools available today.

I appreciated that Young not only describes these technologies, but also tries them herself, creating authenticity and character in a research-driven book.

In The Virtual Self, Young examines surprising uses of tracking technology that could greatly improve the health of users. From the asthma inhalers that have a GPS to better monitor where flare-ups occur, to Twitter feeds that pin-point and monitor the spread of infectious diseases, tracking technology offers many opportunities to advance our health.

The Virtual Self is well-written and packed with historical and contemporary examples. It opened my eyes to opportunities available to me, many readily accessible through the Internet or my iPhone. Several books already outline how technology is shaping our society, but few do it with such a fresh voice or attention to detail. Young puts it nicely, “Self-tracking is our gin. It’s an almost impulsive desire to document the actual states of being and physical presence.” If that’s the case, we can all drink up.

Jenny Aitken is about to enter the technology-rich job market after finishing her undergraduate education.

 

 

Comic-strip memoir on prostitution shockingly authentic

Paying For It

By Chester Brown

Published by Drawn & Quarterly

290 pages, $19.95

By Lachlan Ross

Taking the prostitution debate into “comic-strip memoir” form, Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown documents his relations with sex workers. The Toronto-based writer’s eighth book depicts a 14-year period (from 1996-2010) during which 36-year-old Brown gives up on the “romantic love ideal” after his girlfriend dumps him. Rather than mourning the failed relationship and searching for a new partner, Brown continues living with his ex, but searches sex sources online.

Paying For It illustrates Brown’s interactions with prostitutes, both sexually and personally, while also including his friendships with ex-girlfriends and close friends. His friends’ reactions to his new lifestyle choice make for numerous debates, sparking the topic of ethics in prostitution. Brown’s clear advocacy of decriminalizing prostitution is backed by endless encounters with professional sex. While Brown notes in a foreword that he didn’t include all conversations to uphold women’s anonymity, the behaviours and reactions of Brown and the escorts create an understanding of why women work and why Johns pay.

Brown’s blatant honesty comes across on the page in thought bubbles during scenes. On page 137, during paid sex, he thinks, “She’s deliberately placing her hair over her face. She’s ashamed. She doesn’t want me to be able to see her face while I’m screwing her… I feel bad for her, but not so bad that I’m giving her a tip.”

While this account may upset some readers, the inclusion of thoughts like this made me believe in Brown as a reliable narrator. His character’s thoughts often don’t match his speech during both sexual interactions and conversations; I think that is a credible human trait. While Brown is a soft-spoken gentleman in speech, he has thoughts like, “That she seems to be in pain is kind of a turn-on for me, but I also feel bad for her.  I’m gonna cut this short and come quickly.” (188) I think this conflict between his outer persona as an introvert cartoonist and his up-front thoughts make for an authentic protagonist, to whom I felt connected.

Brown accepts that not every interaction is successful, but the reader grows with Brown in his journey, discovering what he likes and doesn’t like about each woman. Brown guides with strong narrative voice, forcing me to wrestle alongside him with the ethics of prostitution.

The blatant cynicism expressed by one friend, matched with the logical voice of another, provide both emotional and reasonable concern for Brown’s involvement in the sex trade. The scenes with ex-girlfriend, Sook-Yin, with whom he is still living after their break up for the majority of the book, adds odd twists and comic relief as Brown is also forced to live with her new boyfriends.

Paying For It is an entertaining read.  Brown’s skillful cartoons and sometimes brutally straightforward dialogue make for a frank account of life as a John. His story drew me in; I felt engulfed by a life I had previously not considered. The book shows a regular, honest, man paying for a service, and presents his argument that most Johns aren’t bad people. While some readers may be off put by the content of this memoir, this is a great read for those who can withstand the surprisingly graphic comic strips. For those who pick up the book expecting something different, jaws may hit the floor; this book isn’t for churchgoers.

            Lachlan Ross is a fourth-year student and athlete.

Leacock-winner’s characters warm-hearted at core

Dance, Gladys, Dance

By Cassie Stocks

NeWest Press

300 pages; $19.95

By Joy Fisher

When 27-year-old Frieda Zweig answers an ad about a beautiful old phonograph for sale, she’s hoping to meet Gladys, who’s selling the phonograph because she’s giving up dancing and needs the room for baking. Frieda, in retreat from a broken romance and determined to give up her attempts to become a visual artist, hopes Gladys can show her how to lead a “normal” life.

Instead,  answering the ad puts Frieda in touch with the paranormal .  Gladys, it turns out, is a ghost, albeit a friendly one who has Frieda’s best interests at heart. When she answers the ad, Frieda meets an elderly but lively man named Mr. Hausselman, who teaches photography at the local art centre. “Mr. H.,” as Frieda soon comes to call him, offers her a room in his house at a price she can’t turn down. Thus begins an adventure that will ultimately lead Frieda on a path of personal growth.

Gladys and Mr. H are just two of many colourful characters convincingly drawn by Cassie Stocks—an accomplishment worth celebrating in the author of a first novel — which has won the 2013 Stephen Leacock Award for humour.

There’s Norman, Frieda’s ex, a well-meaning fellow who feels duty-bound to keep his promise to his dead father to manage the family’s string of porno shops; Norman’s mother, Lady March, who fancies herself a spiritualist but isn’t afraid to bare it all for a worthy cause; Ginnie, Frieda’s art school mate, who’s determinedly climbing the corporate ladder in the commercial art world; Mr. H’s son, Whitman, a Hollywood filmmaker who buys his best screenplays from Marilyn, a brilliant druggie who lives in a Winnipeg flophouse; Mr. H’s neighbour, Miss Kesstle who crochets incessantly and, though never married, has a solid maternal instinct; and a doomed girl named Girl who is the last of Gladys’s line.

It’s a little easier to understand how this novice author managed to create such diverse characters when you read her bio. No spring chicken when this novel was finally published, Stocks is described as “a biker chick, a university student, an actress, and a rich man’s gardener.” She had also worked as a waitress, an office clerk, an aircraft cleaner, had raised chickens and had even been the “caretaker of a hydroponic pot factory.” In short, by the time she wrote this book, Stocks had already lived a long and diverse life, and she clearly poured all of her experiences into her characters.

And almost all of them, in spite of their individual differences, eventually come to have the best interests of the others at heart. The book is set in Winnipeg and is imbued with all the solidarity and fellow-feeling of the participants in the Winnipeg General Strike. These characters eventually organize a sit-in on the roof of the local art centre when the city decides to sell the building to a chain store. They succeed in saving the centre, of course, and, in the process, weave a web of support for one another that’s also revitalizing for the reader.

And what of Gladys? Well, in the end, Gladys dances one more time while Frieda cheers her on, and then she disappears for good, but not before Frieda reclaims her own identity as an artist by getting out her paints to capture the dancing image on canvas.

“I hoped you’d do it,” Gladys says to Frieda, when she sees Frieda plying her brush once again. “Mission complete.”

This is not a profound novel, but it’s a warm-hearted one. I loved hanging out with the characters in this book.

Joy Fisher graduated from UVic in 2013 with a BFA in writing.

 

Ozeki’s meta-fiction challenges reader

A Tale for the Time Being

By Ruth Ozeki

Viking Penguin

422 pages, $30

Reviewed by Vivian Moreau

For those of you who walk West Coast beaches with eyes trawling for washed-up treasure, the Man Booker Prize-nominated A Tale for the Time Being may be a vicarious pleasure. But if you’re hoping for a narrative sustained over 422 pages, you may be a bit disappointed. But just a bit because Ruth Ozeki’s story —  that veers from Tokyo’s seedy Electric Town to a moss-embraced monastery —  is readable, timely, and for the most part, fun.

It’s post Fukushima, and a barnacle-encrusted garbage bag washes up on a British Columbia Gulf island – likely Cortez but it’s never named – and inside is a Hello Kitty lunchbox with a 10-year-old diary, a circa-Second World War wristwatch, and a bundle of letters from the same wartime era. It’s picked up by Ruth – the character shares the same name as the author – who begins to read the diary in her rural wooded home.

Teenager Nao has recently moved to Japan from California with her parents. Her father is listless to the point of suicide after losing his Silicon Valley job; her mother spends her days watching jellyfish at the aquarium. Tormented by her bullying classmates and teacher, Nao skips school to write in a manga cafe. She intends to chronicle the story of her activist-turned-Zen Buddhist nun great-grandmother Yasutani Jiko, who, at 104, lives Yoda-like in a tiny, mountainside monastery. Nao had been sent to spend the summer at the monastery, where Jiko serenely unravels the secrets behind Nao’s burns, scars, and anger. By the end of summer, Nao is wiser, having learned some of Jiko’s secrets.

But did Nao survive the tsunami, Ruth wonders as she reads the journal in allotments, not wanting to get to the end too quickly. In alternating chapters, Ruth’s narrative of her small island life filled with clichéd rural folks is an annoyance, but perhaps meant to be. Ruth the Character is a frustrated writer that Ruth the Author takes on a meta-fiction dalliance, ruminating on reader/writer relationships that push the true reader  — you and me — away from who we really want to hear about: Nao.

Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist and filmmaker, does have a gift: her ability to create believably the delicate, healing monastery life as well as the frenetic pop-culture-infused Tokyo that alternately shelters and abuses Nao. Also remarkable is Nao’s fresh voice, the teenager moving between those worlds:

“And because we’re friends, here’s something else I will share with you. It’s kind of personal, but it’s really helped me out a lot. It’s Jiko’s instructions on how to develop your superpower. I thought she was kidding when she said it. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when a really, really old person is kidding or not, especially if she’s a nun.”

Ozeki has worked as a bar hostess in Japan and also sets Nao in that eerie workplace for a short time. But Nao figures out she has more important things to do, like write in her journal, the time transporter that connects Nao, Ruth the reader/writer, Ozeki the author, and you and me, the readers. The meta-fiction- Zen-Buddhist-traverse works in some places, with footnotes that could be fiction or not. “Can’t find reference to medical cafes or Bedtown. Is she making this up?” character Ruth asks, tripping up the reader. Is this the same Ruth who explains in footnotes that Ijime is Japanese for bullying and omuraisu is a rice pilaf-filled omelette seasoned with ketchup and butter?

Meta-fiction when taken too far is like a plot spoiler. It can deflate verisimilitude, that diaphanous place to which fiction readers either float or strain. As with the waves Juki uses as life metaphor to explain to Nao the futility of flailing against the inevitable, sometimes it’s best to not try too hard. Nao’s conclusion is akin to the reader’s experience in absorbing A Tale for the Time Being: “I never completely understand what she’s saying, but I like that she tries to explain it to me anyway. It’s nice of her.”

Vivian Moreau is a Victoria freelance writer and editor.