December Reading, Part II

I split my reading post for December because it was becoming too long. Read Part I here.

As usual, the numbering comes from my handwritten annual reading journal, and the italicized text below is directly transcribed from that journal’s pages (once upon a time, I simply included photographs of those pages, but too many of you found my handwriting tough to decipher, especially in the photographed format). I’ve used regular font for any additions to my journal notes and included references to any posts from my Instagram Reading account.

85. The Swift and the Harrier. Minette Walters. Historical Fiction (England, Civil War 1642-46); History of Medicine; Feminist history; Romance.

I grabbed this from the library’s New Fiction shelf because I really liked Walters’ mysteries (gruesome though some were) especially for their feminist perspective. So even though this is historical fiction (not a genre I read as much), I brought it home.

Set in England’s Civil War of 1642-46, the novel has for its protagonist a female doctor — yes, unusual for the time, but trained by one of the most respected doctors of her day. Strong-willed, courageous, dedicated to her patients’ well-being — and determined to stay neutral during a war that’s dividing family and friends based on their loyalty either to the King or to Parliament’s demand that the King yield some of his authority.

There is also a romance developing through the novel, but it’s much more than a love story. Rather, the prospective couple’s relationships serves the exploration of the divided loyalties, of the suspicions and the allegiances, responsibilities and unreasonable demands of wartime. Class, relation to authority, conflict between individual and communal morality . . . and the development of medicine throughout a period of war in which scarcity is accompanied so much injury and mortality. Parallels to the present historical moment in the attention to the importance and vulnerability of our own medical systems, public health, hospitals, etc.

Some admirable older women in this novel, women who manage to exercise agency in creative and productive ways despite the patriarchal laws and structures of their time.

My Instagram post

86. Deep House. Thomas King. Mystery; Thumps DreadfulWater series; indigenous / First Nations writer.

I think I’ve missed a few Thumps DreadfulWater mysteries, but couldn’t resist scooping this up from VPL’s New Fiction shelf just before Christmas (you’ll be noticing a theme by now — I really need to keep blinders on when I pick up or return library books — the New Fiction shelf is dangerous!).

I recognize so much of (King’s 1989 novel) Medicine River’s Will in the character of Thumps (despite the more than three decades between the two books’ publication dates). Thumps, though, is more comfortably integrated in his First Nations community. Same wry humour in both books, with a rhythm that builds slowly, requires and rewards attention to the unsaid. So many great characters, so many forthright and resilient and funny and strong. Stubborn and annoying, idiosyncratic and lovable.

Yes, there are bodies (murdered ones), but also indicted / investigated and exposed are corporate and individual greed, institutionalized and bureaucratic racism, careless (mis)use of the environment. . . As is King’s talent and strategy, though, we readers are entertained while being informed (or simply asked to look) rather than preached at.

Oh, and there are several endearing animal characters as well — to say more about these might constitute a spoiler, so I won’t. But if you like cats. . . .

Instagram post here.

87. Les Années, Annie Ernaux. Literary fiction; Autobiographical fiction; French Literature; Women’s Lives; 20th-century; France; Memory (personal and collective); Nobel prize-winning author. I read it in French, but it’s available as The Years, in 2018 translation by Alison Strayer.

An autobiographical novel, first published in 2008 — when Ernaux was a year younger than I am now. Somehow, I’ve never read her work, but was finally spurred on by her having won the Nobel Prize for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”

In Les Années, personal memory is narrated in the plural (“nous”) or the impersonal (“on”), or 3rd person (“elle”) and always in the context (in the very fabric or in the shadow, or the stream?) of the “collective restraint” of History (histories, social, cultural, political as well as national and global, generational).

The narrator of Les Années chronicles the life of a woman born in 1940, so that her memories really begin just after the war. She offers a litany to start, a catalogue of these memories, specific instances of a provincial village life marked by the church calendar and by a very basic economy — food and shelter, simple family life, no indoor toilet.

She remembers Scarlett O’Hara, Simone Signoret, an ad for dish soap, a particular house with a tunnel of grape vines in Venice, other impressions from school trips as she moves from her first decade to her second . . . by the end of which she’s longing for more but finding no clear direction for her longings. So she studies literature, becomes a teacher, then marries and has two sons, all while years of increasing comfort and convenience and, above all, consumerism are changing the world she was born into, delivering her into a bourgeois lifestyle that has to compete with the seductively purposeful activism of the 60s. And through each decade she recounts, she offers specific political contexts, leaders, technologies, products, actors, foods, advertising slogans, etc.

Although much of this historical context is particular to France, much is also recognizable to this reader (I stopped occasionally to google political figures, to research a controversy regarding a new law being passed, and so on) thanks to globalization — an important element, target even, in this novel. So many of the same cultural products being disseminated through radio, television, film. Similar retail products being marketed albeit with advertising tweaked to suit different languages and countries. Local iterations of international activism, the opening of possibilities for women, for example, the increasing rate of divorce, reliable contraception.

And, of course, what the narrator experiences as an educated woman in her late 60s, viewing her life (and her country’s over the same period) retrospectively, assessing what her age — her années, her years — mean for her now.

In my Kobo, I’ve highlighted several passages towards the end of the novel about life in one’s mid-to-late 60s. In one of these, the narrator speaks of a woman who, looking at a photograph of herself taken some years earlier, says: “c’est moi — je n’ai pas de signes supplémentaires de vieillissement.” (it’s me — I have no additional signs of aging.” The 3rd-person narrator continues,

“Signes auxquels elle ne pense pas, vivant habituellement dans une dénégation générale, non de son âge, soixante-six ans, mais de ce qu’il représente pour les plus jeunes, et ne s’éprouvant pas différente des femmes de quarante-cinq, cinquante ans — illusion que celles-ci détruisent, sans malveillance, au détour d’une conversation, en lui signifiant qu’elle n’appartient pas á leur génération et qu’elles la considèrent comme elle-même voit les femmes de quatre-vingts ans: vieille. À l’inverse de l’adolescence où elle avait la certitude de ne pas être la même d’une année, voire d’un mois, sur l’autre, tandis que le monde autour d’elle restait immuable, maintenant, c’est elle qui se sent immobile dans un monde qui court.”

Les Années, Annie Ernaux.

My rough translation: Signs which she doesn’t think about, living habitually in a general denial, not of her age, 66 years, but of what that represents for those younger, and not feeling herself different from women of 45, 50 years — an illusion that these [younger women, the 45 and 50-year-olds] destroy, without malevolence, in the course of a conversation, by telling her that she doesn’t belong to their generation and that they consider her as she herself sees the women of 80: old. Unlike adolescence, when she was certain of not being the same from one year, even one month, to the next, while the world around her stayed the same, now it was she who felt herself motionless in a world that ran.

And this one — ouch! — this struck such a strong chord of recognition, my work before retirement having been similar to the narrator’s

“sa mise à la retraite, qui avait signifié pendant si longtemps l’extrême limite de son imagination de l’avenir, comme, plus tôt, la ménopause. Du jour au lendemain les cours rédigés, les notes de lecture pour les préparer n’ont plus servi à rien. Faute d’emploi, le langage savant acquis pour expliquer les textes s’est effacé en elle — obligée, quand elle cherche sans la retrouver la dénomination d’une figure de style, de convenir comme sa mère le faisait à propos d’une fleur dont le nom lui échappait, “je l’ai su”

Les Années, Annie Ernaux

Again, excuse my rough translation: her retirement, which had signified for so long the extreme limit of her imagination of the future, as menopause had, earlier. From one day to the next written lessons, lecture notes, no longer served for anything. From lack of use, the scholarly language acquired to explain the texts has faded away — she’s obliged, when she searches fruitlessly for the name of a style figure, to use the same response as her mother used to when the name of a flower escaped her: “I [once] knew it.”

For more about Ernaux’s life and writing, this article in The New Yorker, written by Alexandra Schwartz on her interview with the writer days after she’d been awarded the Nobel Prize, is very good.

88. Permanent Astonishment: Growing Up Cree in the Land of Snow and Sky. Tomson Highway. Memoir; Creative non-fiction; Coming-of-age memoir; LGBTQ/two-spirit writing; indigenous literature; Canadian First Nations writing; residential school; Canadian sub-Arctic.

I bought this in hardcover at a local indigenous-owned bookstore, Massy Books (no remuneration for mentioning this — I’m just so pleased to have this shop within walking distance! But for those who don’t, their wonderfully curated selection of books used and new is available online).

Canadian playwright, novelist, and children’s author Tomson Highway writes of growing up as the 11th of 12 siblings in the sub-Arctic, his Cree family a loving one who roamed a vast landscape from the base of a small community (Brochet) on the northern shore of Reindeer Lake (in Manitoba not far from the Saskatchewan border). Tomson tells of his parents Balazee and Joe Highway in near-mythic terms, proud of their strength, intelligence, humour, resilience, knowledge and especially of their ability to live joyfully in a tough but beautiful geography.

As much as they loved their children, Joe and Balazee, having lost five of TH’s siblings in childhood, wanted the two youngest — Tomson and his little brother, Rene — to benefit from the best education they could find. So Tomson was flown south (there is still no year-round road service for the mostly Cree community; the winter road is safe only for a few months) to residential school when he was only six; Rene joined him a year later.

Highway does not shy away from writing of the harms done at/by residential school There is one very short chapter (later in the memoir, in the last third) that is harrowing — nighttime sexual predation by a Catholic lay brother in the boys’ dormitory whereby “Brother Felix Lemoine ends up stealing the bodies of one hundred boys ten times each, at the very least.” He writes of the “horrific” aftermath of this abuse, the nightmares suffered throughout entire lives, the dysfunctional marriages and families that result. He says that for many victims, “their lives are destroyed. And they think about it and think about it and think about it. Sometimes to make the thinking stop, they kill themselves. And the fallout goes on to affect the next generation and the next and the next. The field is littered with dead male bodies. From what I understand, that is their experience, And one day, I hope they write about it because I can’t. And to those who can’t, I have tried my best to write this story of survival for you.”

So Highway acknowledges these horrific harms. But his memoir is primarily a response to his brother Rene Highway’s final words: “Don’t mourn me, be joyful.” (Rene was a world-renowned classically trained dancer who died in 1990 of an AIDS-related illness.)

As he writes, several paragraphs after describing Brother Lemoine’s systematic predation (which he also experienced), he chooses to focus on love, laughter, joy, music, on “the very act of breathing [which for him] is reason a-plenty for permanent astonishment.”

He creates vivid images and scenes of Brochet’s community of lively and engaging and hilarious residents who must communicate through a mix of languages (Cree, Dene, English, French) and spiritual beliefs and who blend a rich mixture of cultural traditions in creative ways suited to their environment. Humour abounds in his detailed accounts of hunting, fishing, dancing, gambling, courting . . . and cooking. The memoir is worth reading if only for his loving descriptions of his mother Balazee Highway’s legendary recipes.

He brings that same attention to his memories of his classmates at residential school, to the humiliations he suffered there for his lack of athletic prowess, the challenges suffered by a two-spirited child in a very strictly binary-gendered institution. But he also describes friendships built alongside his joy of learning, the respect he gains for his talent and skills on the piano and his consummate mastery of English.

The vast northern landscape, the awesome beauty of its winter, the sweet explosion into spring, the rich profusion of foods Nature offers during the summer, all told with the observant eye of one who loves the land, and its flora and fauna. . . and who has the rich resource of the Cree language which has been speaking this place since time immemorial. (You could read the book for an introduction to Cree’s adaptability — and, above all, its humour — alone.)

Oh, I could go on and on . . . and I haven’t even written about the winter dogsled trips, of Tomson’s birth (in 1951) in a snowbank where, the following day, the family risks starving and freezing to death when Joe Highway cuts his foot (severely!) when chopping wood, the nearest hospital 200 miles away. You’ll have to get a copy and read it for yourself — highly recommended! (To further convince you, this interview in LGBTQ magazine Xtra with Highway — about his life and about this memoir).

Okay, that’s it! It took me two full posts, and now that I’ve told you what I read in the last month of 2022, I’d love a good book chat to get our year started. Thanks to all of you who commented on Part I, but don’t let that stop you if you have more you’d like to say here — recommendations (or their opposite!), questions or comments about what I’ve read, comments about what you’ve been reading lately or hope to read soon. . . I’ll be putting together my annual summary of the last year’s reading in the next week or so, but meanwhile, let’s talk books!