Room by Emma Donoghue

Tedious, absorbing, unputdownable.

About Room by Emma Donoghue: To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.

Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.

My two cents

Here's yet another book I held off on reading because of the hype. All I've heard are raves; it's gotten so many awards; it's now a movie. I also held off because based on the synopsis, was I ready?

But I decided. It was time. And now I'm glad I did.

This book is unlike any I have ever read. I disliked it from the beginning - the tedium, the child-like voice, the horrors. I remember wanting to stop but Jack's voice, his love for his mother, and his mother's ferocity were so compelling, I couldn't stop until I found out what happened to them. I wanted to know that they would be ok.

This is extremely tense reading. Horrors are revealed in unlikely ways as Jack narrates his day to day. The days roll on and it seems like nothing changes. Repeated names of Things, like Room, capitalized, as this was the only world that Jack knew. Routines being explained from a 5-year-old viewpoint, with five-year-old language.

I couldn't help getting absorbed in getting to know Jack and his Ma. But descriptions of Old Nick made my skin crawl. The simple horror of the situation with the child's voice really messes with your head -- a psychological journey for a reader.

There is nothing pleasant about reading this book. Nothing. But what kept me going was the hope and the palpable love of mother for child, a love that never allowed hope to die.

Verdict: One of the most difficult books I've ever read. If you don't flinch at difficult subject matter, the first person, five-year-old voice in which this story was told will surely make you weep. Highly recommended.

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews

The title says it all.

About A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews: Nomi Nickel lives with her father, Ray, in East Village, a small Mennonite town in Manitoba. She dreams of escaping to the big city, but since her mother and sister left home, it's hard to imagine leaving her father behind. As she begins to piece together the story behind her mother's disappearance, she finds herself on a direct collision course with the town's minister. With fierce originality and brilliance, Miriam Toews takes us straight to the centre of Nomi's world and the complicated kindness at the heart of family life.

My two cents

What a heartbreaker! This is probably one of the saddest, most tragic of books I've read. It's about the Nickels family who live in a very closed touristic Mennonite community in Manitoba, Canada. This is told in retrospect by Nomi who was born and raised there. 

Without going too deeply into the storyline, this tackles the challenges of living in and ultimately being (or feeling) stuck in a very small, closed community. It is also about the difficult and often painful decisions that need to be made to be able to break away from such a community. Tackling a hot button topic (religion does it all the time), here it is scrutinized and given life, with the impacts quite profoundly playing themselves out on the Nickels family in general and Nomi in particular. 

The Nickels family is an interesting study with the relationships within their nuclear family sweet, a little oddball, but with the wellbeing of the family always front and centre. The relationships within the community are much more tenuous since the Nickels are related to its leaders. As I pieced together the reasons for the breaking up of the tight-knit Nickels family, so too did I realize that this was not a straightforward story!  

In the beginning, I thought Nomi was pretty clueless and she seemed, well ... pathetic. But in her cluelessness, my heart went out to her. After all, she didn't know any other life than what she was born into. I also realized that Nomi is quite the spunky one; she's a character that grows on you. She's an innocent so it is difficult see how Nomi struggles to comprehend what is happening to her family and to her life.

I found that the storyline can get confusing. But when I digested what I had read, it was a huge "aha" moment for me, and it made things so much more tragic. It is about leaving, it is about staying, and the heartbreak associated with either decision; a predicament that is underscored by Nomi's innocence. Kudos to Toews for injecting some humour and quirkiness into her characters or this may have become quite depressing.

The title aptly captures the complexity of family life bound within a highly conservative religion and community.

Verdict: An inside look into the impacts of a closed community on family and individual life. I would highly recommend this to those who enjoy stories told from the viewpoint of young people, and those who like unexpected twists to their reads. If you have kids, this one will likely make you a highly empathetic reader. Read it.

Ru by Kim Thúy

Stripped, stark, unapologetic.

Synopsis of Ru by Kim Thuy: Ru. In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow--of tears, blood, money. Kim Thúy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful water.

In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and revels in the chance to be part of the American Dream. As an adult, the waters become rough again: now a mother of two sons, she must learn to shape her love around the younger boy's autism.

Moving seamlessly from past to present, from history to memory and back again, Ru is a book that celebrates life in all its wonder: its moments of beauty and sensuality, brutality and sorrow, comfort and comedy.

My two cents

In short snapshots, we piece together the life of Ru: living a wealthy life in Saigon, struggling to survive in an overcrowded and squalid Malaysian refugee camp, transplanted in the strange world of Quebec. It is a story of hope and possibility, of remaking and rebuilding oneself . An immigrant story that is short, non-verbose, honest and hard hitting.

***

I am guilty of letting this review languish in my drafts as I don't quite know how to verbalize how this resonated with my own immigrant experience. While I never faced the extreme conditions that Ru did, I can definitely relate to the feelings of displacement, alienation, and the need to be "can do" in a new culture and environment. How else can one rebuild their life? How else can one move on? She her retrospective so succinctly:

"...after only thirty years I already recognize our old selves only through fragments, through scars, through glimmers of light."

In very stark stripped, even poetic writing, Thúy shares a fictionalized version of her true-to-life story through the character of Ru. Much of what is recounted is quite horrific -- the horrors of war and what one must do to survive, the squalid conditions that had to be endured, the life left behind, and the uncertainty of a new life in a foreign county. But it is surprisingly unsentimental, a recounting of what is, without passing judgement on what can be labelled as unethical or immoral.

Uh-oh
I was at times struggling to make sense of the series of events in Ru's life -- she jumps around from present to past and back again, from country to country, that it constantly left me confused. However, I think while this is an uh-oh for a time, the fluid structure of these streams of consciousness grew on me. That's how memories are -- there doesn't need to a structure to it, they strike at the most innocuous times. However I can see this being a problem are for those who are more inclined to a structured reading experience.

I wonder why Thúy decided to make this a fictional version of her life as I would've welcomed a memoir in this format too. I guess she has taken some artistic liberties or maybe wanted to protect the identities of certain people. Your guess is as good as mine.

Verdict: AVietnamese immigrant's life story told in poetic snapshots. A story that I will keep close to me to remind myself that I too had a different life and have a world of possibility in this new life I've chosen. This makes my favourites list for this year!

I recommend it to those who like immigrant stories, experimental books, and minimalist writing.

 

 

Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

Not exactly The English Patient 


Amazon.com review of Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje:  .. The novel explores that territory where the personal and the political intersect in the fulcrum of war. Its style, though, is more straightforward, less densely poetical. While many of Ondaatje's literary trademarks are present--frequent shifts in time, almost hallucinatory imagery, the gradual interweaving of characters' pasts with the present--the prose here is more accessible. This is not to say that the author has forgotten his poetic roots; subtle, evocative images abound. Consider, for example, this description of Anil at the end of the day, standing in a pool of water, "her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her." In Anil's Ghost Michael Ondaatje has crafted both a brutal examination of internecine warfare and an enduring meditation on identity, loyalty, and the unbreakable hold the past exerts over the present.

Quick take

Interesting in many respects: the prose is easy yet lovely, the topic (forensic medicine with a human rights angle), and the treatment of shifting in dimensions. But somehow I didn't really like Anil's character. She didn't seem quite real, a trite stereotype of the many do-gooders. Somehow her motivations seemed forced. While using the same successful and engaging writing style, Ondaatje's Anil doesn't seem quite to make it.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Back blurb of The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin opens with these simple, resonant words: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister’s death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura’s story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel.

Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist. Brilliantly weaving together such seemingly disparate elements, Atwood creates a world of astonishing vision and unforgettable impact.

My take

I started out pretty well, then slowly got more and more disoriented. With more characters introduced, I felt things getting murkier. After recovering several chapters in, and sorting out who was who, backtracking to understand the importance of newspaper stories interspersed … I started picking up pace and started enjoying myself. I was hooked.

Once in that quagmire of several stories happening all at once, I actually resisted leaving. I felt like I was racing to the finish line. Seemingly discrete characters and mini-stories magically melded and converged at the end. I was ecstatic yet reluctant at having finished the last page. It was like I had became privy to a huge secret. Atwood is truly a master at pacing her readers!

This is my first Atwood book and I am blown away by how unpredictably she has treated the oft-times predictable themes of familial love and dynamics. Isn’t the title brilliant? You read so much into the title alone … who is the blind assassin? Who killed whom? Was the character truly blind or merely casting a blind eye?

Spoilers here: On the other hand, I can’t say that this book isn’t without its flaws. For one, I disliked the two main characters. Our protagonist Iris is a boring old lady and somehow I was nagged that I couldn’t plausibly reconcile the risk-taking lover with the old lady she had become. While I enjoyed the character of Laura, she too became quite a tired, predictable character, at least she was consistently inconsistent throughout. Most of the characters were quite flat and stereotyped, particularly Iris’s husband Richard and her sister-in-law Winifred.

Are Atwood’s storytelling devices maybe, maybe overshadowing the story itself? The pulp science-fiction story narrated by Red, the lover, was interesting but did I miss the metaphors? I felt a little lost here. Sometimes the loveliest of tales don’t need any bells and whistles, a good yarn is a good yarn. Reduce the story to its bare bones and somehow the book loses its appeal and sad to say, is actually lackluster.