Joan Flood's Left Unsaid (#CanBookChallenge)

Left Unsaid is the story of Delia Buckley, a Catholic Irish woman born in the late 1940s. The story is mostly set in Kiltilly, what I assume is a made-up village, near to Limerick, in Ireland. The novel occurs in two times:

In 1967, Delia has an affair with Daniel Wolfe, married, twenty years older, a famous author, Protestant, and owner of the village's Big House. She gets pregnant, thinks maybe he'll leave his wife for her, but, of course, she's wrong.

More of the novel occurs in 1990. Daniel Wolfe is now widowed and recently diagnosed with terminal cancer; Delia Buckley is an established nurse specializing in end-of-life care. Daniel offers to hire her--at well above her usual rate--to look after him until the end. He's presumably feeling guilty, and she's wary of the tangle, but she needs the money: her sister is institutionalized and her aging parents' farm is mortgaged to the hilt.

The novel starts with a bang, and it ends well, too, with a satisfying amount of surprise and resolution. There was a point in the middle, though, where I was a little less happy. With a title like Left Unsaid and the backstory outlined above, we expect some secrets. Quite unsurprisingly Delia didn't get the abortion Daniel gave her the check for in 1968. Ah, but where's the child? was a question we were clearly meant to ask.

But there were too many secrets. (So very many secrets!) This led to some portentous prose in the middle whose double-meaning irony I admit to not quite seeing through, but was too obviously there. "Surely she'd understand that if her mother felt the need to stay away from the family all those years there was a good reason for it." "Your mother kept things from you for a good reason, I'm sure." There were a few too many statements along those lines.

Ah, well. I still enjoyed it. The prose is clear and straightforward, with a pleasant acknowledgment of Irish dialect. (For example, streelish--a word I didn't know and which I see my spell-checker disapproves of, but is easily Google-able.)

Left Unsaid came out with Signature Editions in 2017. Part of my process of poking around in Canadian small presses. Joan B. Flood is a Canadian who emigrated from Ireland. She's written an earlier YA novel, plus some shorter works, none of which I've read.

Jim Nason's Spirit of a Hundred Thousand Dead Animals (#CanBookChallenge)

Jim Nason's Spirit of a Hundred Thousand Dead Animals came out from Signature Editions in 2017. It's the story of Skye Vannan and her grandson Duncan Johnson. It covers a great swath of time from 1938, when Skye is just eighteen and deciding on her path in life, to 2011, when Duncan Johnson finds love as his grandmother dies.

Skye Vannan makes for quite a fascinating character. Though not as extreme, she has a bit of the irascibility of Olive Kitteridge. She's born into a wealthy family in Edinburgh, and though she's not a beauty we're told, she could marry well. (As her mother expects her to try--we see how Skye comes by her difficult nature.) Instead she wants to be a veterinarian, still an unusual profession for a woman in Scotland. She marries a Canadian soldier at the end of World War II and moves to rural Ontario (Kincardine) where she becomes the region's vet. Her wealthy family mostly drops her.

Skye's one child, a daughter, dies in a car crash; her daughter's husband, wracked with guilt--he was driving--descends into the alcoholism he was already approaching. Skye is left to raise her two-year old grandson. Duncan shows a preternatural talent for drawing animals.

Can Skye come to terms with her own brusque nature? Can she break the cycle of difficult parents producing difficult children? Those are the questions of the book, and they're well-handled. Though she can't make it work out perfectly in the end, there's a measure of hope for the future with Duncan, though I did feel he was the less interesting character.

The other thing particularly to be said about the book is Jim Nason's astute handling of time. It covers a period of seventy-plus years, and the book moves successfully back and forth in time, revealing as it needs to to move forward, but with mysteries still hidden.

The title, though? It's suitable enough, I guess, with a veterinarian as the main character, and it has particular  reference to the veterinary school in Edinburgh she attends. But not particularly appealing, I thought.

Read because I'm poking around in contemporary Canadian literature from small presses, for the Canadian Book Challenge.

Endre Farkas' Never, Again

Never, Again (2016, Signature Editions) is the story of Tomas "Tomi" Wolfstein, an eight-year-old who, with his Jewish, Holocaust-surviving parents, escapes Hungary during the chaos of the Russian invasion of 1956.

I assumed from the start it was an autobiographical novel and, in an afterword, Farkas does say that he draws from his own experiences, but that it should be read as a novel. But Farkas was eight in 1956, and emigrated at that time to Canada with his Holocaust-surviving parents.

Farkas is a poet and playwright based in Montreal, but I believe this is his first novel.

Most of the chapters are told from young Tomi's viewpoint in 1956. He first appears in what seems a pretty idyllic childhood in a small town in Hungary: he wants to be a soccer star and actually seems pretty good; Hungary had won the gold at the 1952 Olympics so it's popular. He's a good student. His relationship with his parents is lovely and charmingly presented; his cousin is his best friend; his aunt and uncle also look out for him. Only gradually do we learn how protected, how limited Tomi's view is.

There are flashbacks to when that aunt and uncle tried to leave Hungary (in 1948) and were arrested and convicted as enemies of the state. Then there are more flashbacks to the actual events of the Holocaust his parents suffered and survived.

Farkas writes extraordinarily well about childhood and Tomi's limited viewpoint is sweet but also allows us to be shocked by what happens. It's great for building suspense: the actual days of the escape across the border to Austria do thrill, even though we know or at least suspect what's going to happen.

The flashbacks I found less successful. The look at 1948, when his aunt and uncle tried to leave and failed was interesting enough and probably necessary. I'm afraid I found the actual episodes in the concentration camps to be unnecessary and second-hand. I wish I felt that the literature of witness was enough to prevent it happening again, but I don't: those who least need to be reminded are the likeliest to consume the book, and, as a society, we're informed about one horrible example and fail to see it when it occurs the second time, just a bit differently.

The interesting historical thing in the book to me was the fear of resurgent anti-Semitism in Hungary in 1956; the parents in the volume are anti-Communist to the extent they can be, but they also don't trust the Hungarians not to resort to right-wing anti-Semitism, especially in the chaos of what might be revolutionary times. In the village where they live, the family is targeted because they are Jewish. We think of Imre Nagy as heroic, and he did die for his resistance to Russian tyranny. But were all the elements of his coalition equally admirable? An interesting question.

Well, Farkas does change the rallying cry of "Never again" to his title Never, Again.

Anyway, quite a strong novel, even if I found the 1956 parts better than the others.

Good for a couple of challenges for me: it completes my Canadian Literature challenge at thirteen, though I'm sure I'll read a few more before next Canada Day. And it actually also completes my European Reading Challenge at five books by covering Hungary, though I'm quite sure I will go way over the top again this year...

Cora Siré's Behold Things Beautiful (#CanBookChallenge)

Alma Álvarez left Luscano in 1991; she had been rounded up with other 'subversives,' i.e., college students and intellectuals, and held in the notorious La Cuarenta prison; she was tortured there; she narrowly escaped becoming another one of Luscano's los desaparecidos. The junta in Luscano fell in 1995, but there's been no reckoning. It's now 2003, Alma is living in Montreal, teaching Spanish literature to undergraduates, and trying to forget. But her mother back home is dying, and her friend Flaco arranges for Alma to give a talk on her field of expertise at the university in Luscano. Alma's feelings about returning home are complex to say the least.

If you haven't heard of Luscano, don't worry, you're not meant to; Cora Siré made up the country, like Ruritania, Orsinia, or most particularly the Costaguana of Conrad's Nostromo. It's nestled in somewhere between Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay.

Like Nostromo, the novel blends the personal and the political in a small society; and, while it doesn't have the boys' own adventure quality of Nostromo, there is tension and danger. The psychological after-effects of torture feature in both novels. Flaco has more in mind that just giving Alma an opportunity to see her mother. Retribution and protest is in the air and Alma feels her life threatened, not unreasonably. There's also the possibility of romance; Alma (and others) have had their emotional life curtailed, damaged by the terrors of the junta in the early 90s. Can they trust again?

I thought it a very strong novel. It made me want to reread Conrad, and possibly Vassilikos' Z or Puig' Kiss of the Spider Woman, the better to place it in their company.

I did have an issue, though. It's clear that Siré is very interested in the poetry of Delmira Agustini. Agustini--I'd never heard of her--is a real Uruguayan poet, born in 1886 and dead in 1914, murdered (by her estranged husband) probably, though possibly as part of a dual suicide. The title, Behold Things Beautiful, comes from a poem of Agustini's:

Turn out the lights and behold things beautiful;
Close all doors and enter illusion;
Uproot from mystery a handful of stars
And cover with flowers, like a triumphal vase, your heart...

Agustini is Alma's field of expertise, the reason she returns to Luscano. As such, she's the McGuffin that sets the story in motion, and can't be disposed of entirely. But she occupies an indeterminate place in the novel. She's treated at too much length to be just a McGuffin, but Agustini's themes are insufficiently integrated into the novel as a whole to warrant the space given to her. I wanted either more or less, and I can't say which of those would have been correct: I just felt the way it was wasn't quite right.

But still. Agustini's an interesting enough find, and the novel as a whole is powerful.

The novel ends ambiguously, uncertainly, with the possibilities of both hope and new dangers. Correctly, I thought.

Canadian Book Challenge