While Canada purports to be multicultural, Toronto in particular, a place where everyone is holding hands and cops are handing out ice cream cones instead of, say, shooting black men, our inability to talk about race and its complexities actually means our racism is arguably more insidious. We rarely acknowledge it, and when we do, we're punished, as if we're speaking badly of an elderly relative who can't help but make fun of the Irish.
With One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi Koul joins the ranks of other web-based writers – like Lindy West or Jenny Lawson – who have lately collected essays into book form, and as with these other writers, I find Koul's writing to be smart, funny, and self-deprecating; a suitable tone for exploring weighty ideas without getting all heavy about them. Yet I confess to finding a samey-sameness to this writing – to the web-shaped voice; the breezy confessionals; the casual f-bombs – and when one could be reading their ideas for free and at leisure on BuzzFeed, Jezebel, or The Bloggess (when I never personally seek out long-form web-based writing; pretty sure I'm not the target audience for your average BuzzFeed article), I need a reason to pick up one of these books. I was led to ODWABDANOTWM by a glowing newspaper review, and happily for me, as she is the Calgary-born daughter of Kashmiri immigrants, Koul does have an interesting and unique viewpoint – on being a Canadian, and a woman, and a bridge between two cultures – and I was enlightened and entertained by the whole thing.
Only idiots aren't afraid of flying. Planes are inherently unnatural; your body isn't supposed to be launched into the sky, and few people comprehend the science that keeps them from tumbling into the ocean. Do you know how many planes crash every year? Neither do I, but the answer is more than one, WHICH IS ENOUGH.
Koul opens her book with an essay about a trip she took to Thailand with her boyfriend Hamhock, and this allows her to introduce the three most important people in her life: the boyfriend who encourages Koul to do the things that scare her, and the overprotective parents who try to keep her safe by promoting fear. She deals with outright racism and subtle shadeism – in India Koul is considered very light-skinned, but in Alberta she was the brown kid; she recognises and is uncomfortable with her own shadeism (and especially as it relates to her niece, Raisin, whose mother is white) – and details the time that trolls (calling for her rape and murder) forced her off Twitter for a while. She writes about party-culture at university and rape-culture in general (and the two times she was roofied); she writes about learning to accept her body and the futility of fighting against it with clothes and compulsive grooming. And throughout it all, Koul speaks long distance to her parents every day; needing to hear their voices as much as they need the reassurance of hers. The essays are broken up by email exchanges she has had with her father throughout the years, and each of them made me laugh at his quirkiness. After reading about their visits back to India (and Koul's rejection of sexism and patriarchy and all the old, traditional ways she finds there), the final essay – in which Hamhock forces Koul to finally tell her parents about him (after four years together) – didn't end the way I expected: Although they liked Hamhock when they met in person, Koul's parents were adamant that the older, white man wasn't suitable for their daughter. And when she moved in with him despite their objections, Koul's father stopped talking to her for months, with the following serving as the semi-hopeful ending to the book:
Papa has never been the strongest person in the family – that's always been Mom, who carries everyone's burdens on her back. He's never been the most stubborn either – that's always been me. He's not even the most sullen – that's my brother, at least since my birth. But Papa will crack, putting his surly contemplations about my relationship aside for good and not just in temporary bursts, as suggested last week when he answered the phone with, “The vagaries of time are taking their toll” (believe that this is him in a good mood), or a month before when he ended our call with, “You are brave, you are too brave.” Or at least I need to believe in his ability to let things go when they are ultimately out of his control, because otherwise we're both just alone, spinning separately when we're supposed to be in this together.
I found that a sad note to end on. Like Koul, I have lived in Alberta, and although I currently live within an hour of her on the other side of the country, my experience as a (older, white) Canadian woman couldn't be more different. I might not have found much unique about the web-shaped voice Koul writes in, but her story is entirely her own, and worth hearing.
After you died I couldn't hold a funeral, So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine. These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine. These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine.
I think of myself as someone who knows what's going on in the world, but somehow, what I thought was going on in South Korea isn't the whole picture. I remember the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul as colourful and successful; nod approvingly when I hear of a North Korean escaping to the free and democratic south; commend the recent impeachment of the corrupt President Park Geun-hye. But just a cursory search describes the 1988 Olympics as “a horror show of human rights abuses”; the government in Seoul still routinely clamps down on public protests (two of Park's supporters were killed in a clash with police this month); Park Geun-hye herself is the daughter of Park Chung-hee (the military strongman who ruled the country as a dictatorship, from his coup in 1961 until his assassination in 1979). Yet, in my mind I had labelled South Korea as a successful democracy and hadn't given it much more thought. In Human Acts, author Han Kang confronts this lazy thinking by revisiting the Gwanju Uprising of 1980, and through sharing the perspectives of various characters – in the moment and over the ensuing thirty years – Kang demonstrates how very different life in South Korea is from what we in the West might imagine. I personally preferred Kang's dreamy, surreal style in The Vegetarian and might have given this book four stars based on the writing alone, but ultimately, Human Acts feels too important not to award all five; everyone could get something out of reading this book.
Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered – is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?
Han Kang was born in Gwanju in the southern reaches of the Korean peninsula, and although her family had moved to Seoul before the 1980 massacre, it's understandable that her narrative would focus on this tragedy from her hometown. Some historical context: After the assassination of Park Chung-hee, his protege Chun-Doohwan grabbed power and imposed martial law. And when the students at Gwanju's university protested the closing of their school, Chun sent in the military; providing 800 000 live rounds to confront a total citywide population of 400 000. Students and labour organisers peacefully gathered in a public square on May 18th, and when the army arrived, they indiscriminately shot and killed the unarmed protesters. Events escalated, and within ten days, this “uprising” was quashed.
We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.
Bodies figure prominently in Human Acts and the book opens in the aftermath of May 18th; in a municipal gymnasium holding dozens of dead bodies awaiting identification. The central figure in this first chapter is fifteen-year-old Dong-ho – pretending to be older, Dong-ho is helping with the care of the corpses in the hopes of finding his missing friend – and although each chapter that follows is from a different perspective, each will relate back to Dong-ho or his co-workers in the ersatz morgue. There are chapters from the perspective of a freshly released spirit (who recognises that his body is nothing but a lump of rotting meat), from people who later remembered having been imprisoned or tortured (whose bodies had been treated inhumanely by the police and military), from a mother who finally receives her son's bones in 2010, and from “The Writer” (presumably Kan) who returns to Gwanju in 2013 to begin the research that will conclude at a cemetery. In my favourite chapter, “The Editor, 1985”, a theatre company proceeds to mount a play that has been nearly completely redacted by the Censorship Office – and that really brought it home for me: South Korean was operating under a Censorship Office in the years leading up to the 1988 Olympics? Why didn't I know that?
Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times, when committing such actions in wartime won them a handsome reward. It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanjing, in Bosnia, and all across the American Continent when it was still known as the New World, with such a uniform brutality it's as though it is imprinted in our genetic code.
Human Acts is primarily concerned with “how”: Just how can anyone's first response to dissent involve snipers and cudgels and middle-of-the-night body-dumping? And how can a military/police force evolve that will follow these orders to commit violence against their neighbours? Are cruelty and brutality written into our genetic code? Our bodies? Are these, therefore, the most human of acts? Kan doesn't present any easy answers, but with spare and lovely language, and a non-prurient look at the bodily effects of totalitarianism, she has written a book that bears witness to events that flew beneath my own radar and challenges what I think I know of the world. This book succeeds on every level and deserves to be widely read.
He can't shake that sensation of being watched by someone you don't know. The feeling that a hidden presence is nearby while your eyes are closed, observing, leaning closer, emanating ill will.
Ill Will is a book crammed full of interesting ideas and situations, and while it had the potential to make for some mindless, trashy fun, it pretty much collapses under the weight of its ambition and fizzles out to an unsatisfactory ending. It'll fill the empty hours without leaving anything of itself behind, and there's a market for that.
Most people seemed to believe that they were experts of their own life story. They had a set of memories that they strung like beads, and this necklace told a sensible tale. But she suspected that most of these stories would fall apart under strict examination – that, in fact, we were only peeping through a keyhole of our lives, and the majority of the truth, the reality of what happened to us, was hidden. Memories were no more solid than dreams.
I was struck by this line – I never understood why people from the 1980s thought there would be flying cars – because I just referred to myself the other day as “someone from the 80s” (to someone younger who found that to be a strange way to refer to myself), so I will share here: As someone from the 80s, I remember watching Oprah on TV as she revealed memories of childhood abuse that she had repressed for years. As to this widespread repressed-memories phenomenon, Oprah concluded, “When someone asks you if you were abused as a child, the only two possible responses are, 'Yes and I don't know'.” I remember that flooring me at the time, and as this was the era of children under hypnosis telling lurid tales of satanic/sexual abuse occurring at their day cares, we were all primed to believe that anything was possible. And this is a central theme in Ill Will: As a child in the 80s, Dustin Tillman lost his parents, aunt, and uncle in a grisly mass murder with satanic overtones. He studied Psychology at college, eventually becoming an expert witness in satanic ritual and the retrieval of repressed memories through hypnosis – receiving his PhD just as both of his areas of expertise were being exposed as nonsense. Now a therapist/life coach who uses hypnosis to help his patients stop smoking or relieve psychosomatic pain, when Dustin learns that the man who had been sent away for life for the murder of his family has been released by the efforts of the Innocence Project, he needs to reexamine his own memories from that time. The irony in this situation had so much potential (even if Gillian Flynn already covered the falsely-imprisoned-satanic-killer idea in Dark Places).
No doubt this must happen to everyone at a certain age: You look up for a moment and you're not sure which life is real. You've split yourself into so many honeycombed parts that they barely notice each other – all of them pacing, concurrently, parallel streams of thought, and each one thinks of its self as me.
As Dustin is focussing on the past in his personal life, a new case presents itself to him professionally: Aqil Ozorowski is a former cop who is obsessing over the idea of an at-large serial killer; sharing dossiers of information on officially unrelated deaths between which only he can see the connections. As Dustin finds himself being drawn in by Aqil's logic and evidence, their relationship crosses strict therapist-patient boundaries, and there are parallels drawn between modern day serial killer hysteria and the satanic ritual scare of the 80s. This idea – that as with the constellations, humans are conditioned to find patterns where none actually exist – was another theme that was dangled and then incompletely explored.
I did like the way that the narrative jumped back and forth between the present and the late 70s; dishing out the past slowly enough that the tension of a mystery was maintained. I liked the image of the drug dealer and self-declared vampire “sipping from the aura” of his customers; and also how this parallels a discussion of torture-killers feeding off the energy from their victims; and how this parallels a young woman declaring that her boyfriend won't be drained by family drama anymore. But author Dan Chaon made some other, less satisfying, choices. I found it annoying near the beginning when there would be extra spaces after a sentence in a paragraph, and I wondered if that was just sloppy typesetting (as the book has justified margins). But it didn't happen in every paragraph, and as the book goes on and Dustin gets more and more spacey, he begins to leave sentences and paragraphs unfinished, in his thoughts and in his speech, and I realised that these early extra spaces must have been intentional; and that's even more annoying to me. Chaon also uses another device late in the book that seemed to come out of nowhere: dividing pages into two or three columns and having several characters tell their stories concurrently (it wasn't a bad tool, it just came late and then was used only twice). And there was an inconsistency to the way that Dustin used jargon in his thoughts (someone late in the book notes that as a kid Dustin had an impressive vocabulary, but that's never shown in the flashback scenes). Sometimes his knowledge would be shared with the reader organically and added interest:
It made me think of the neurology class I took in college, the professor talking about eingengrau – intrinsic gray, brain gray. It was the color you “saw” when light was totally absent, a kind of visual noise, like snow static on a television. That was the color of the sky above us.
And sometimes knowledge was just stuck in jarringly:
She had the fingers of a severe onychophagiac. It was the kind of nail-biting that seemed like the sign of an impulse-control disorder.
More than one character begins to talk about astral projection late in the book, and I watched enough Oprah and read enough Sybil-type books back in the 80s to understand that abused children are said to mentally leave their bodies – and is this what Chaon is saying is happening to Dustin every time his mind wanders and he leaves a sentence uncompleted? (That was never made clear but for the longest time I worried that this book was going to take a Fight Club turn.) And then the solutions to the mysteries and the actual ending...so unsatisfying. I don't regret reading this book, exactly, but three stars can be considered a rounding up.
Two further notes: I remember driving somewhere with my Mum back in the day and telling her what Oprah had said about repressed memories, “When someone asks you if you were abused as a child, the only two possible responses are, 'Yes and I don't know'.” I said this in a wide-eyed, "Can you imagine this is happening all the time out there?" kind of a way. And she sighed and replied, "It happens more than you know. It wasn't that long ago that I remembered that when I was a little girl and played over at the house of (some friend, I can't remember the name), she had a father that was always laying on the couch with a blanket over him. He didn't work, he wasn't a well man, and he was always just laying there when I'd go to play. Well, we'd be running around, and he'd often say to me, 'Let's play hide and seek', and he'd hide me under the blanket with him. And I know now that what happened wasn't right, but at the time I thought it was a game. And I don't know if this was a repressed memory, exactly, but it just popped into my mind for the first time in the longest time, and for the first time, I realised that it was wrong." I was so gobsmacked by this story that I didn't ask her for any more details - I was all, "Gosh, can you imagine?" and now I didn't want to imagine what happened under that blanket - but this is what was at the edge of my thoughts throughout this book: there certainly were false memories implanted by well-meaning therapists, but not all recovered memories are false memories.
And, as I wrote about once, when my older brother ran away from home as a teenager in the 80s, it was with another troubled kid who liked to blast heavy metal and play with satanic ritual. So that was on my mind, too: kids were being influenced by all this talk of satanism, and while I'm pretty sure there were never any sacrifices to Beelzebub at day care centres, there were plenty of pentagrams traced in the dirt by the roadside.
When I fall in love, it will be forever Or I'll never fall in love In a restless world like this is Love is ended before it's begun And too many moonlight kisses Seem to cool in the warmth of the sun
When I give my heart, it will be completely Or I'll never give my heart And the moment I can feel that you feel that way too Is when I fall in love with you
And the moment I can feel that you feel that way too Is when I fall in love with you
So we arrive in my timeline at my wedding day, and like all wedding days, mine was like everyone else's in its stresses and emotions and ultimate relief; and just like everyone else's, it was thoroughly unique. As I have mentioned before, Dave and I planned our wedding at a distance - living in Edmonton at the time and intending to get married 3300 km away in London - and while, on the one hand, we refused to get stressed about all the details that were beyond our control, on the other, we didn't know a lot about weddings and had no idea how many things could go wrong. In the end, it was a perfect day.
We arrived in Ontario a week or so early, and one of the first things I did was go with Rudy to pick up the bridesmaids dresses. She tried hers on - Delight wasn't in Ontario yet, but I wasn't very concerned about her - and once those dresses were sorted, I reminded the saleswoman that they were meant to rent me a crinoline for under my own dress (it was one thing to bring my dress on an airplane, there was no reason for me to have bought and brought along a crinoline as well). She had no record of this arrangement and regretted to inform me that they had none available for my date. I had never even tried on my dress without a crinoline - having only worn it twice: at the bridal shop and the alternations shop - but I was going to need to go commando, so cheerfully resigned myself to it. (This didn't turn out to be a terrible look, and who knows if I would have eventually regretted it if my dress had been too poufy. It somehow never occurred to me to call around to other stores. I simply refused to worry about anything.)
We rehearsed my hair at Rudy's favourite salon and I let the stylist convince me to keep my hair down (perfect choice even if, at the time, I thought an updo would be more bridal). When Delight arrived we went shoe shopping for my girls, and even though I wasn't fussy about what they picked, both of them thought they'd get the most future use out of bone-coloured pumps. We met with the DJ (for the first time), and as Dave wanted to pick the song for our first dance, this was when I learned that he had decided upon When I Fall in Love: a song that had zero personal meaning for us. There had recently been the after-death duet between Nat King Cole and his daughter Natalie - so that might have been why it was on Dave's radar - but Dave wanted the original version, and since that was the only decision (other than the style of tux) that Dave offered to make, I grinned and beared it. The DJ also asked what song I wanted for my dance with my father, and I hadn't thought about that at all. He had a few suggestions and I settled on James Taylor's How Sweet It Is - Dad used to use that expression all the time (a la Jackie Gleason), so it seemed appropriate. We learned at some point during this week that the Ramada Hotel we had booked for our reception had gone into receivership, and although they were honouring our booking, the kitchen was no longer open and our food would need to be shipped in from a different Ramada. Things weren't going to be perfect, but we refused. To sweat. The details.
At some point during the week, my future inlaws asked what we were giving as wedding favours, and Dave and I looked at each other blankly: we didn't know anything about that custom and hadn't given it any thought. Happily, the inlaws had: Dave's Dad said that if we had someone take our picture coming out of the church, the owner of the One Hour Photo beside his barber shop was willing to temporarily close his store (on a Saturday afternoon) to develop the film, select the best photo, and print off enough copies to have waiting at the wedding reception. Dave's Mom said that there was a box of old stock cardboard picture frames in the storeroom of the Woolco where she worked that her manager said she could have for next to nothing, and these would display the pictures nicely at the guests' place settings. In the days before digital photos and personal printers, this seemed like a type of magic, and we were very grateful for the idea and the efforts of everyone who would make it happen.
My parents drove up for the rehearsal (and hosted the dinner afterwards at The Seven Dwarfs Restaurant; the same place where my inlaws had their wedding reception twenty-eight years earlier), and all went well at the church until the priest (who had married my inlaws twenty-eight years earlier) asked us what arrangements we had made for music at the ceremony. Dave and I looked at each other blankly and reminded Father Williams that he had told us the year before that there was an organist who always provided the wedding music for his ceremonies. He informed us that we should have confirmed that we wanted her at some point: she was currently on vacation and unavailable. Just before we panicked, though, he said that he could ask the man who was providing music for the church's masses while the organist was away - just a guy with his guitar - and we were happy to jump at any option. Not gonna sweat the details.
The night before our wedding, Dave went out for a dinner with his friends and family (this was the closest he got to a bachelor party, and I believe it just involved steak and scotch), and while his Dad eventually came home, Dave stayed the night at his friend Denton's house. Meanwhile, my girls and I were gluing on fake nails and painting them up while drinking wine coolers; while Delight told dirty jokes to embarrass me in front of my nearly mother-in-law.
Finally: the wedding day. We woke up early enough to get to the salon, and my girls and I all had our hair pulled back in a half up/down style. When we got back to the house, Anthony was there - Dave's best man and a professional makeup artist (who had worked on everything from pageants to haunted houses) - and he did up some glam makeup for me. The flowers were delivered, and they were exactly as I had wanted. Dave's Mom gave me a gold pin that had belonged to her mother, hoping I would wear it as my "something old", and I fastened it beneath my dress. The photographer arrived and started taking posed and candid (also posed, lol) pictures of me, and finally, my parents arrived and got into some of the pictures. Soon enough people started leaving for the church, and last of all, me and my parents left in a slight drizzle; which stopped as soon as we got to the church.
When we entered - greeted by my two brothers who were acting as the ushers - I couldn't believe my ears: the "guy with a guitar" was playing one of my favourite hymns from the folk masses I used to attend with Cora when I was a kid (incidentally, Cora and her husband were in attendance; the last time I saw her), and I immediately realised that if I had given thought to and actually chosen the perfect music for my wedding day, this would have been it; all of his song choices were my favourite old folk hymns. Perfect. I had both of my parents walk me down the aisle - which felt like a repudiation of any patriarchal notion that my father was giving me away; I thought of it more as a public display of solidarity - and not much after that was of note. Delight's daughter Cara - the spitfire flower girl whose behaviour couldn't have been predicted - was sweet and well-behaved. Delight's boyfriend Dennis - who we had asked to do a reading just to give him a role - was unpredictably nervous and shaky and stumbling over everything. It was incredibly hot in the small church (made uncomfortably humid by the now pouring rain outside) and Father Williams quipped that they were installing air conditioning the following week (true fact). I beamed through everything; holding Dave's hands and exchanging rings; my nervous voice barely audible as I said my vows. Before we knew it the ceremony was all over, and as we charged down the aisle afterwards in a glare of popping flash bulbs, my Aunt Carlene tried to mouth, "Slow down", but the relief was too great for me to make a slow display of exiting; we tore for the doorway, barely remembering in time to seek out Jeff and his camera: the guy (Julia's husband from a short-lived marriage) who was to take our picture for the guest favours. Incredibly, the rain was finished for the day.
We stood around for a little while, receiving congratulations and best wishes (I believe it was at this time that my Uncle Dennis - always an inappropriate pig - said, "You look pretty good but it's too bad you don't have the tits to hold that dress up"; who talks like that?) and then took off to Springbank Park for photos. As I said before, Dave had had a vision of getting married in June so we could have pictures at the rose gardens, but I guess no one ever told him that the roses aren't really in bloom until later in the summer, and that those areas need to be reserved in advance; no matter, the spot our photographer found was lush and green and beautiful; particularly so post-rain.
We eventually made it to the Ramada and after we had some posed pictures cutting the behemoth of a wedding cake my Mum designed, someone said that we should form a receiving line outside the reception room, so we did as we were told; chatting and grinning and receiving hands and hugs. My Grammie made her way down the line and we later told my Dad that Dave was worried that she would press her four-footed cane into the top of his mangled foot (*description of the foot-mangling-event was recounted last week), and ever after, Dad has liked to talk as though Grammie actually had put her cane and her full (not unsubstantial) weight onto Dave's recent injury. As everyone entered the reception room and found their framed photo of the moment they had witnessed just a scant hour earlier, they responded with delight; it was a lovely picture and our guests were in awe of the effort.
I had asked my Mum if she could get her Dad, my Pop, to say grace before dinner, and while he wanted to, he just couldn't get up the nerve in front of the crowd, so my creepy Uncle Dennis (proper Knight of Columbus after all) offered to fill in. Dinner was served and we needn't have worried about the hotel being in receivership: the food was all hot and delicious; many guests saying that it was the best wedding food they had ever tasted. Dave's friend Burqhardt served as the MC and he's a great speaker - he kept everything moving along with interesting and funny stories. My brother Ken gave a nervous toast to me, someone must have toasted the bridesmaids. My Dad gave a brief speech welcoming Dave into the family and Dave's Dad gave a long and rambling and emotional speech welcoming me. I'm sure the guests tinkled their glasses to get us to kiss, but none of that stands out in my memory.
After dinner we danced our dance to this curious song choice - Dave barely able to shuffle around, wearing Denton's larger dress shoes, unlaced (*see the foot-mangling-event as recounted last week) - and then I danced with my Dad for the first and only time in my life, to a curious song choice, and then the party really started. The music was all good, Dave and I walked around and tried to talk with everyone. We danced and drank and the open bar was flowing all night. I tossed my bouquet (I think Dave's cousin Shannon caught it?) and Dave tossed my blue garter (maybe to Anthony?); we served the cake at midnight or whatever, doing our best to observe all the kitschy traditional-type stuff that we didn't really know that much about. Guests trickled out - even my own family had an hour drive to get back home and didn't stay 'til the end - and finally my inlaws took all the presents out with the aid of a bellboy cart, and Dave and I went and collapsed in the Honeymoon Suite. A perfect day.
There was a feeling of fate about our wedding day: as noted, we were married by the same priest who had married my inlaws, and the year we got married (1991) was the same year that my parents had celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary; the same year my mother's parents celebrated their fiftieth. Not wanting to sweat the details may have been a naive (and potentially disastrous) mindset, but in the end, the things that might have been the biggest upsets - the music at the church, the missing guest favours, the hotel going into receivership and needing to cater in the food - turned out to be everyone's favourite parts. Dave just being able to walk and stand and shuffle after his accident was a blessing. I couldn't have asked for a more perfect day.
And the moment I can feel that you feel that way too
An astrologer emailed me to say she had important news for me concerning events in my immediate future. She could see things that I could not; my personal details had come into her possession and had allowed her to study the planets for their information. She wished me to know that a major transit was due to occur shortly in my sky. This information was causing her great excitement when she considered the changes it might represent. For a small fee she would share it with me and enable me to turn it to my advantage.
Transit is the second book in a planned trilogy by Rachel Cusk, and following on the heels of Outline – which I found to be thin, and dull, and lacking energy – this intermediate work suffers all the same drawbacks with the added detriment of purposefully not reaching any kind of conclusion (my perpetual complaint about all middle volumes of series). According to The New York Times(“fat with substance”), The Atlantic(“elegant, spare, and often very beautiful”), and The Guardian(“tremendous” and “triumphant”), Cusk's writing is all going over my head as she attempts to reinvent the novel, and while I acknowledge my shortcomings as a reader, I know what I like; and this simply isn't it.
Outline saw a woman named Faye (named only once, late in the book), escaping her failed marriage by taking the opportunity to travel to Greece in order to teach a writing course. Transit picks up Faye's story (again, she's named only once, late in this book) as she decides to move to London with her two sons, and as the “worst house on the best street” that she's able to afford needs a complete reno, the boys are sent to stay with their father. As in the first book, Faye is a careful listener and the plot (such as it is) mostly involves conversations about other people's lives. In what seems like a nod to the first book, the first conversation Faye has is with an ex from long ago, Gerard, and of him she thinks, “In those days he was a sketch, an outline; I had wanted him to be more than he was, without being able to see where the extra would come from.” Many of the ensuing conversations seem to cover and recover recurring themes. In response to a contractor who says families in the homes he renovates treat him like he's invisible, Faye responds:
I said it must be interesting to be able to see people without them seeing you. It seemed to me that children were often treated in the same way, as witnesses whose presence was somehow not taken into account.
This idea is picked up later by a memoirist at a writer's festival:
Parents sometimes have a problem with that. They have this child that's a sort of silent witness to their lives, then the child grows up and starts blabbing their secrets all over the place and they don't like it.
And taken to the extreme by a Swedish immigrant at a dinner party:
It was perhaps this feeling of unreality that had caused her, at a certain point, to begin recording her family without them realising it. She used a cassette player she'd been given, positioning it on a shelf near the kitchen table and changing the tape each day.
And the various conversations recall and intersect each other – covering such topics as fate, loneliness, parenting, and creativity. Concerning freedom, this is Faye speaking to her hairdresser:
When people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else. But it didn't necessarily follow that to stay free was to stay the same. In fact, the first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them.
And a Polish labourer:
For as long as he could remember he had felt it inside him, the frantic presence of something trapped that ought to be wild, something whose greatest vulnerability lay in its capacity to lose its freedom.
And one of the trolls who live in her basement (a couple who don't appreciate the noise coming from upstairs):
She was growing aroused: I watched her big body writhe slightly, her head twisting from side to side, as though something inside her was rising and unfolding, wanting to be born. She was, I saw, goading herself on: she wanted to traverse boundaries, as though to prove to herself that she was free.
While there is much about freedom/fate that seems to concern the first use of the word “transit” in the book (from that initial quote about the astrologer), there is another meaning used that might explain this focus on converging themes in the various conversations:
The Tube station stood at a junction where five roads converged like the spokes of a wheel. The traffic sat at the lights, each lane waiting for its turn. Sometimes it seemed that the junction was a place of confluence; at other times, when the traffic thundered constantly over the intersection in a chaotic river of buses and bicycles and cars, it felt like a mere passageway, a place of transit.
It's not just broad themes that get repeated, but details, too. Faye comes straight out of a conversation with the contractor who is renovating her home (a man estranged from his father because of differing house-building aesthetics), to having coffee with an old friend (whose house has been under constant renovation for years – a fact she was finally able to use to make a connection with her house-flipping parents; this woman is now trying to adopt a baby), and Faye soon meets a man for dinner who relates the unhappy history of his own adoptive family (and laments that his handyman father didn't leave him his tools in his will). Faye's old boyfriend, Gerard, says that he removed all the interior walls from his flat, wanting to be able to see all the way through from front to back; the Polish contractor talks later of having built a home of windows, without interior walls. Gerard bonded with his current wife when he took off her dog's leash and it ran away; a writing student relates buying a hunting dog that doesn't need to be leashed. And I don't know what to make of it all.
There really isn't much plot – it can be reduced to, “A recently divorced woman buys a flat and has it renovated” – and while there are all these conversations, they're minutiae; not poignant or fascinating moments. And I think that what bothers me the most is that we don't get to know Faye at all and I have no one to identify with; I'm not having any kind of emotional reaction. And while I'm sure the fault is entirely mine, I'm not recognising the genius of the effort; I'm having no intellectual reaction either. As I'm sure I'll eventually pick up the third book of this trilogy, here's hoping it all makes sense in the end.
Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.
Last summer, my seventy-six-year-old mother-in-law, beginning to show the anticipated signs of the Alzheimer's that runs in her family, was diagnosed with bowel cancer. She was rushed to surgery, a large mass was removed, and she was declared cancer-free without further intervention. The good side: She couldn't keep it in her memory that she had cancer (even in the hospital pre-surgery she would whisper, “Why am I here again?”), and even today, she is absolutely free of any worries that her cancer might come back. The flipside: The strain of the surgery, even if she wasn't really conscious of it, has advanced her dementia at an alarming rate. My inlaws live over an hour away from the rest of their family, and so it is to my nearly eighty-year-old father-in-law, alone, to get his wife out of bed every morning, clean, dress, and feed her, help her move from room to room, take her to appointments, and do all of the shopping, cleaning, cooking, etc. She had to have her teeth removed just after Christmas, and now has dentures that she refuses to wear. Most nights she wets the bed, stubbornly having removed her Depends, and as she doesn't like the feeling of sleeping on the plasticky mattress protector, she has a habit of removing (and hiding) it, along with all her sheets and blankets, and wrapping herself in dirty laundry for warmth. Some nights she gets up, takes off all her clothes, and goes to sleep on the bathroom floor. Last week, not half an hour after putting her to bed, my father-in-law went to check on his wife, and when he had to force the door to her bedroom open, he found her laying on the floor blocking it, yelling at him to leave her alone. Every day, she looks out the front window of the house she's lived in for over thirty years and says, “It's nice here but I want to go back home. I don't know why you won't take me home.” Naturally, my husband and his sister are feeling helpless, and for years their main line of conversation has been about how stubborn their parents have been to remain in their home this long; if they had moved closer to us five years ago, we'd be able to help them more. Now, suddenly, the conversation has turned to, “What if we've waited too long and Mom needs to go straight into care?” Having had an idea what Being Mortal was about, I didn't pick it up this week by coincidence.
The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life – to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be. Sickness and old age make the struggle hard enough. The professionals and institutions we turn to should not make it worse.
The book is divided into two sections, with the first describing the alarming lack of gerontologists (even with the aging population, 97% of med students don't take any courses on gerontology), the history of the care of the elderly (from home-based, to poorhouses, to warehousing in hospital wards, to the modern day nursing home), and a look at the contrast between typical medical-based eldercare facilities (where health and safety are the only concerns) and assisted-living communities (which aspire to provide autonomy and dignity and a true feeling of “home” for their residents). When my husband was a boy, his grandmother's Alzheimer's advanced to a stage where she wasn't able to take care of herself safely, and she moved into his family home for the next ten years. When she became a safety risk for the entire family (nearly burning down the house) and the stress of a broken hip rapidly advanced her dementia, the family made the hard decision to put her into a nursing home; a sterile ward that provided no privacy or autonomy, but certainly, health and safety. Putting her mother into an institution was the hardest thing my mother-in-law ever had to do, but she made it perfectly clear to her children, “When and if this happens to me, I don't want you to feel any guilt. You'll need to be free to live your own lives and I won't know the difference. I trust you both to know when it will be time.” Over the past few weeks, my sister-in-law has posted an article on her Facebook wall that exposes the fact that seniors' homes spend less per day on food for their residents than do prisons, and shared a letter to the editor that complains that PSWs in local seniors' homes are so overworked that they are allotted only six minutes per resident to get them up, toileted, groomed, and dressed before mandatory breakfast. Both were posted without comment by this concerned, bewildered, conflicted, most loving of souls.
Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.
The second half of the book is about end-of-life care, no matter the age of the patient. Author Atul Gawande – himself a surgeon and professor of medicine – confesses that his first instinct when confronted with a terminal patient is to look for what parts he can fix; even if the life expectancy is only barely extended and the quality of that life is reduced, looking for the fixable is the priority of Western medicine. He provides examples of those terminal patients who were encouraged to keep fighting right up until the day they ended up dying in the ICU hooked up to feeding tubes and ventilators, and counters with stories of those who were offered hospice care and ended up dying in their own homes, surrounded by loved ones, in control of all decisions. It isn't hard to determine which is the option that affords the most dignity.
Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person’s life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it the good we do can be breathtaking.
I went to visit my in-laws this week – about to turn eighty, my father-in-law had to attend an hours-long driving test, which he, thankfully, passed – and I was there to keep my mother-in-law company. No sooner had he left when a PSW showed up, unannounced, and explained that she was there to provide aid and respite. I explained that I was there to provide aid and respite, and because my mother-in-law had already been cleaned and dressed and fed before even I showed up, the PSW sat down with a coffee and chatted for the next two hours. My husband and his sister have been pushing their father to demand the community services to which they are entitled, and it looks like help is starting to trickle in (there have also been introductory visits by a PN and an OT). Also, my mother-in-law had had her medications tweaked last week and she looks much steadier on her feet; a little clearer in her mind. As we sat in the living room and she looked out the front window, she said, “When I look in this direction, nothing seems familiar, but if I look back this way, I see Sandy's house across the way and know that I'm home. But sometimes it doesn't seem like my home and I wonder if I'm starting to crack up. Sometimes I wonder if it's time for the nursing home, ha ha ha, but thank God it's not time for that yet.” I smiled and nodded uncomfortably.
Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?
These are the questions, and most importantly, these are the questions that we need to ask my father-in-law. He has been incredibly patient and uncomplaining, but as one thing was piling on top of another and progressing so much more quickly than we had anticipated – as a blood vessel burst in one of his eyes and a cold took away his voice – we (middle-aged) kids were conspiring, trying to figure out, “What can we do with Mom to protect Dad's health?” What Being Mortal has really taught me is that that's not our decision: My father-in-law may be pushing eighty, but he's a thoroughly competent, engaged-with-life man, and if taking care of his wife of fifty-four years is giving him a feeling of purpose, and if living in the family home adds to the quality of life for both of them, it's wrong for us to think that institutionalised care is the preferred, or indeed only, option. For as long as possible, it would seem our roles should be to support them in their decisions, advocate for all the community care they can receive, and be ready to accept whatever comes next. I think I may need to buy this book to pass on.
Interesting aside that didn't fit into the review -- Gawande mentions the case of Nelene Fox: a woman who was suffering a chemo-resistant form of breast cancer and couldn't get her insurer to cover an experimental treatment, and while she was able to fundraise enough money to get the bone marrow transplant privately, she died anyway (leading to a lawsuit, won by her family, that spooked insurance companies into covering all such experimental procedures from then on.) Ultimately, it was proven through clinical trials that the bone marrow treatment wasn't effective anyway. Here's the interesting part: while Gawande uses this story to illustrate why American medicine will always press for a fix, even when it may be hopeless and therefore a cruel waste of a patient's last days, in The Emperor of All Maladies, author Siddhartha Mukherjee uses this same case to demonstrate the wonderful evolution of cancer treatment into an advocate-based system, where patients are free to demand their doctors keep trying everything until the bitter end. These are two Indian-American doctors/science writers, such similar backgrounds; such opposite conclusions. And not for nothing, I'll add: When a Goodreads "friend" commented, "My parents are a decade younger than your in-laws, but the conversation has just started to trickle in amongst my siblings and I. My parents simply won't address it in any way. Zero discussion. "I'm too young to even think about it" my mother says. Tough stuff! I've had this book on my radar, but didn't realize the depth it would go into. Maybe I should be getting to it sooner than later", I replied with: "My parents are also a decade younger and they live 2000 km away from us "kids", deep in the woods of Nova Scotia, 45 minutes from the nearest town. When a 90 year old neighbour, stubbornly living alone to the end, died alone on his kitchen floor, my mother said, "That's the way I want to go". That HORRIFIES me, but this book is telling me it's her choice. I have no idea what to think about that."
1. (in Tibetan Buddhism) a state of existence between death and rebirth, varying in length according to a person's conduct in life and manner of, or age at, death.
All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be. It was the nature of things. Though on the surface it seemed every person was different, this was not true. At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end. We must try to see one another in this way. As suffering, limited beings – perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.
I read enough that it often feels like I'm encountering the same book over and over. Starved for novelty, I nevertheless balk at those po-mo stylists who embrace novelty for novelty's sake; straining my brain only to discover that their work doesn't have much to say beneath the tricks. Enter Lincoln in the Bardo: Told in a wholly unique mode, we find a blend of fact and fiction, the personal and the universal, grief, and love, and humanity. This is everything – everything – I hope to find in a book.
Author George Saunders was inspired by a true historical fact: In the weeks after his beloved son, Willie, died of typhoid fever in February of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln was known to visit the boy's body in Georgetown's Oak Hill Cemetery; cradling the small corpse in his arms in the dark of night. Not quite a year into his presidency at the time, and fast on the realisation that the Civil War wouldn't be ending any time soon, Saunders imagines this as a moment of reckoning for Lincoln – cradling his dead child and envisioning those thousands of parents of dead soldiers who will never again hold their own sons. What must Lincoln have thought at that moment; when he knew that, with a few concessions and the stroke of a pen, he could have ended that bloody antagonism?
But them's just the facts. In addition to the historical, we are introduced to the incorporeal residents of Oak Hill; a chorus of spirits, stuck in the bardo, too attached to their former lives to even acknowledge they are dead (referring to their coffins as “sick-boxes” and pussyfooting around reality; closing their eyes and stoppering their noses when the dawn forces them to reenter their decaying cadavers). When young Willie first emerges from the crypt and refuses the old-timers' advice to move on – Willie knows his father needs him too much for him to leave – a variety of characters join the unfamiliar scene: from a pious reverend to a foul-mouthed white trash couple; from a decorated slave owner (who brags of keeping his men in line by raping their women in front of them) to a well-spoken Uncle Tom (whose only regret upon death was never thinking to bash in his owner's head while he slept); from a trio of merry bachelors to a young mother who is literally crushed under the weight of her concern for the daughters she left behind. The three main spirits who try to help Willie are the reverend (the only one who has glimpsed what lays beyond the bardo), a naked man with a swollen member (who died before consummating his marriage), and a closeted gay suicide (who sports myriad eyes and hands as he too late glimpsed, and now yearns for, the beauty of the world he chose to exit prematurely). These three, in their efforts to help Willie, provide for the reader all the rules and reality of this self-imposed purgatory.
But that's just the what. As for the how: This novel is told as a series of quotes and citations (complete with proper attributions) from real and imagined sources. There are snippets from newspapers, memoirs, and letters describing a reception held at the White House on the night of Willie's death – many criticising the Lincolns for hosting a party while the country was at war; others knocking them for laughing and feasting below while their son lay abed upstairs; still others relating how one or the other was constantly checking on the boy – and engrossingly, even the “factual” sources are inconsistent in their details (some say the moon was full and glowing, others a dim sliver; later snippets disagree as the colour of Lincoln's eyes, or whether his hair was greying). When the sections move to the graveyard, the story is still told in quotes – as though after the fact, despite seemingly occurring in the present – and often, but not always, dialogue is reported as though witnessed by another (instead of “I said this”, the three main spirits have conversations by quoting one another). And this quirk, in addition to having background spectres tell their stories as though quoting their own memoirs, allows for a variety of fascinating writing styles: The educated bachelors (We Three had never Wed, not truly Lov’d, but once Night fell again, and if we found ourselves Resident here, might strike the ‘never’) are distinct in voice from the barely literate commoner (I steal every chanse I git) and from the drunken lowlife (We couldn't even fit that f----er, that beautiful couch, through the s----y little door of that s---thole by the river.) There are funny bits and deep thoughts and somehow with this format, Saunders is able to both show and tell at the same time. And while all of the action takes place over the course of one night, Abe himself is never far from the scene:
His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow, toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow, that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.
One man's grief stands in for the grief of an entire nation, and with a chorus of individuals adding their unique contributions, the reader is zoomed in and out, encouraged to empathise with both the personal and the universal (for we will all lose and eventually be lost ourselves). There were so many fine, small moments, all adding up to a big, cohesive whole – told in a refreshingly different, compellingly readable format – and this is everything.
Eventually won by Lincoln in the Bardo, I would have given the Booker this year to Days Without End. My ranking, based solely on my own reading enjoyment, of the shortlist is:
