Frightened and Brave: Connie Willis, Doomsday Book

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

I don’t want you to blame yourself for what happened. I know you would have come to get me if you could, but I couldn’t have gone anyway, not with Agnes ill.

I wanted to come, and if I hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.

Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog did not really prepare me for Doomsday Book, even though they are in the same series and are structurally very similar: both belong to her “Oxford time Travel” series and involve “historians” sent back in time as part of current-day (actually futuristic) research. In both of them, the novel’s present is marked by bureaucratic stuffiness, mostly well-meaning incompetence, and crises more or less of the “stuff that goes on at work” variety—dealing with annoying colleagues, for example. But in To Say Nothing of the Dog it all stays essentially comic, and the trip to the Victorian period is an affectionate pastiche, full of clichés and peppered with literary allusions, many of them to the Golden Age crime fiction to which the intricate puzzle plot is overtly paying homage.

To say that Doomsday Book is darker is an understatement. In this one, both historical layers deal with unfolding pandemics (linked, we eventually learn, through an archeological dig). While the present-day storyline retains some comic aspects, the humor recedes as the crisis mounts; the bureaucratic rigidity that prevents a more nimble and effective response also felt less funny because it was a bit too real. As the infection spreads and characters become ill and even die, well, that’s not funny at all, of course. I’m going to avoid making a lot of COVID connections, but I do feel as if it would be salutary for some segments of our society to remember how virulent and scary our virus was—and how prevalent it still is.

Along those lines, the atmosphere of mounting dread in Doomsday Book felt pretty familiar to me—and though in the novel’s present the characters have all kinds of highly effective responses, it still takes them a while to figure out what exactly they are dealing with and actually enact the right measures. Even so, things are much worse in the other timeline, where the modern researcher, Kivrin, has been erroneously transported, not to the relative benignity of 1320, as intended, but to 1348 just as the bubonic plague is beginning its deadly spread across England.

The 14th-century part of Doomsday Book would have been a completely gripping historical novel all on its own. Willis gives us a detailed picture of the setting, from the pristine forests and the astonishingly starry skies of the pre-modern landscape to the cold, grime, and stench of medieval peasants’ huts—and, for that matter, of a manor house of the same period. Before the plague arrives (and before Kivrin realizes the mistake made in her “drop”) she is ill herself, so her first impressions combine the disorientation of temporal relocation with her feverish confusions. Eventually her ‘translator’ begins working and bit by bit she gets to know the people whose lives she has landed in the midst of, with their aspirations and jealousies and forbidden loves. She becomes especially close to Agnes, the younger daughter of the house.  These personal connections make the onset of the plague something Kivrin bears witness to in a way that is in one sense entirely out of keeping with her role as a historian, but in another sense fundamental to it. In other contexts I have often quoted what Carlyle said about Scott’s fiction: that his historical novels

 taught all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught: that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies and abstractions of men. Not abstractions were they, not diagrams and theorems; but men, in buff or other coats and breeches, with colour in their cheeks, with passions in their stomach, and the idioms, features and vitalities of very men. It is a little word this; inclusive of great meaning! History will henceforth have to take thought of it.

This is very much Kivrin’s experience, and thus ours, as we read both Willis’s conventional narration of Kivrin’s time in 1348 and the more fragmentary bulletins Kivrin records for those back home in her own time, which gradually take on more and more the character of the few remaining testaments of those who actually lived through the plague years, documents which had once seemed to Kivrin melodramatic and implausible. Where the archive is scant, as it must be in such dire circumstances, we rely on our imaginations to fill in the blanks and to fully humanize it. I don’t think anyone could read Doomsday Book and not be overcome with horror and pity for those who faced what they understandably believed was the end of the world.

But Doomsday Book is not just a historical novel, and though at times I wondered about the value of the time-travel framing, by the end I appreciated the layers Willis had added through it. The most obvious one was just the point that, for all our advances in science and medicine, we are not immune from catastrophes, including ones caused by mutating viruses. A more subtle and thought-provoking one was the interplay between the science fiction aspects of time travel and the religious beliefs of the 14th-century people Kivrin encounters, especially the priest, Father Roche, who tends Kivrin in her initial illness and then labours beside her as one by one the others around them fall victim to the plague—until his turn comes as well. It turns out that Father Roche sees Kivrin’s arrival as literally miraculous, her presence among them a kind of gift or grace from God, whose love and mercy he never doubts, in spite of everything he sees and experiences. For Kivrin, fighting against a malicious, invisible enemy, and always thinking of those who care for her and especially of her tutor, Mr. Dunworthy, whom she believes to the very end will come to her rescue, the line between science and religion starts to blur. Who is Mr. Dunworthy to Kivrin, after all, but an unseen presence—the thought of whom gives her hope and strength in her darkest hours—and an audience for her testimony, which is spoken into a recording device which it had seemed so clever to place in her wrist, so that she would appear to be praying? “It’s strange,” she says in one of her final such messages to someone who may or may not ever receive it;

When I couldn’t find the drop and the plague came, you seemed so far away I would not ever be able to find you again. But I know now that you were here all along, and that nothing, not the Black Death nor seven hundred years, nor death nor things to come nor any other creature could ever separate me from your caring and concern. It was with me every minute.

Village Life: John Bowen, The Girls

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In summer, and particularly when the wind blows from the south-west across the lawn, the septic tank gives out a strong stench, and guests move uneasily nearer the house. ‘Oh, it is a body,’ the girls say. ‘We have a body in there, no one you know. It decomposes, of course, but so slowly one quite despairs.’

John Bowen’s The Girls is subtitled ‘A Story of Village Life’ and if it weren’t for the macabre note struck by its first chapter, “The Septic Tank,” you might read quite far in it and think it was exactly that: whimsical, often comical, sketches of life in the country, the sort of thing its second chapter, “The Day the Pig Escaped,” both promises and, hilariously, delivers.

“The girls” are Janet and Susan, who live quite happily together in their cottage producing and creating most of what they sell in their village shop and at local craft fairs: honey, elderflower wine, embroidered smocks:

So it had gone for seven years. Consciously or unconsciously, the girls had fashioned a way of life which was as intricate as the web of any spider, the nest of any wren, and of which the purpose was not much to do with self-sufficiency of sweeping a room for anyone’s laws, but was a framework which would allow them to live together without hindrance and without being bored.

It’s all very wholesome and joyful—until one day Susan starts to wonder “What am I doing?” She needs something more, or at least she needs to try something else. She decides to take a solo vacation to Crete.

Left behind, Jan falls into a spiral of doubt, becoming increasingly convinced that one thing Susan is definitely trying out in Crete is being with a man. She pictures “Susan dancing, Susan laughing, Susan frolicking in waves with others, windsurfing with others, held closely with others.” “Jealousy!” remarks the narrator. “Which of us has not at some time felt it, and been damaged and diminished by it?” In this “damaged” condition, Jan goes off to a craft fair where she and Susan have traditionally gone together to sell their wares, and there she is the one who takes up with a man, Alan, a rabbity (her word!) young maker of early musical instruments. They have sex, which is “a new experience” for Jan:

It was not unpleasant. When she thought of it, it was not all that new. The penis was new, but really it was only another piece of throbbing anatomy, to be felt and stroked.

They part as friends and once Susan is back, she and Janet settle happily back into their routines. And then Janet discovers she is pregnant, and then the girls have a baby, “Butch,” and then Alan comes back . . .

I’m not going to give away any more details of the plot, although it’s really the tone of the novel that makes it so disturbingly delightful, as well as its pleasurably disorienting combination of lovely descriptions of nature, wryly funny accounts of people’s idiosyncrasies, and grim, even grotesque, moments of violence and horror. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that combines quite these ingredients in quite this way. It even, at the very end, allows a moment of pathos, a bit of touching sincerity that makes the insouciance of its previous approach to some pretty morally execrable behavior seem a bit less funny. All this and an Edward Gorey cover! What a treat.

Last Term In My Classes

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

Before this term picks up much steam (today was the first day of classes, so we are still in the warming-up phase, with its illusions of ease), I thought I’d catch up a bit on last term. I had good intentions to post at least more regularly, if not weekly, as I once did. Maybe it’s boldly declaring such intentions that fatally undermines them! Just in case, I won’t make that mistake here.

Overall, I think last term was a pretty good one. I had my standard assignment of two courses a term, something we “achieved” (if that’s the right word) years ago by increasing class sizes. (Class sizes have gone up pretty steadily since then, and since numbers are the only case we can apparently make any more for our value, that’s a trend that seems likely to continue.) One of them was yet another iteration of “Literature: How It Works,” one of our core first-year writing requirement classes. I initially designed my current version of this course for online teaching in 2020, during the first COVID lockdown term. I put an enormous amount of effort into it, and especially into its specifications grading system. I taught it online three times and then moved to teaching it in person last fall, after a disastrous term in which 1 in 5 of the students in the class ended up in an academic integrity hearing. This was pre-Chat GPT, so it was all the old-fashioned (!!) “cut and pasted from the internet” variety of plagiarism. I admit I’m a bit nostalgic for those days, and even more for the era of “copied something from a book in the library,” when  the student was suddenly using terms like “hermeneutics” or “ekphrasis” and then, when challenged, was unable to explain what they meant. At least they had to go to the library to do that! I remember distinctly showing a suspicious essay on Elizabeth Barrett Browning to my former colleague Marjorie Stone, who took one look at it and said “Oh, that’s from so-and-so’s book,” and of course it was.

How much of a shadow did AI cast over my term? It’s actually a bit hard to say. I tried not to be preoccupied with it. I had just two cases of clear use, both evident from their hallucinations. There were many other submissions that made me wonder. I hated that. I don’t want to be suspicious about my students; I certainly don’t want fluency to become grounds for accusations. I’ve seen a lot of professors confidently declaring that they can spot AI usage. Maybe I’m naïve, or maybe I don’t assign tricky enough questions, or maybe my general expectations are too low, but I’m not nearly so confident. I know what they mean when they talk about the vacuity of AI responses and the other (likely) “tells”—previously rare (for students) words like “delve,” everything coming in threes, too-rapid turns to universalizing proclamations. I caught what I considered a whiff of AI from a lot of students’ assignments. But many of these things used to show up before there was Chat GPT, sometimes because of high school teachers who taught them that’s what good writing or literary analysis should look like, or because some students are authentically fluent, even glib, and nobody has pulled them up short before and demanded they say things that have substance, not just style. I honestly don’t really know how to proceed, pedagogically, beyond continuing to make the best case I can for the reasons to do your own reading, writing and thinking. I do know that I wish we could slow the infiltration of AI into all of the tools we and our students routinely use. I also believe that there are many students still conscientiously doing their own work, and they deserve to have teachers who trust them. I try hard to be that teacher unless evidence to the contrary really stares me in the face.

Anyway. The first-year course went fine, I thought. I wish it didn’t have to be a lecture class, but with 90 students (next year we will all have 120), there’s really no other option. I always try to get some class discussion going, and we meet in tutorial groups of “only” 30 once a week as well, but the real answer to “what to do about AI” is the same as the answer to most pedagogical problems we have: smaller classes, closer relationships, more individual attention, especially to their writing. I probably won’t be teaching a first-year class next year, for the first time in a long time, because I will have a course release for serving as our undergraduate program coordinator. In part but not just because of AI, I am glad for the chance to give the course a refresh, maybe even a complete redesign. I want to keep using specifications grading but I’d like to reconsider the components and bundles I devised. I want to think about the readings again, too, maybe moving towards more deliberate thematic groupings, or including some full-length novels again. When you teach a course for several years in a row the easiest thing to do is repeat what you just did, because the deadlines for course proposals and timetabling and book orders come earlier and earlier. I’ve done a lot of different first-year classes since I started at Dalhousie in 1995. Who knows: the next version I develop might be my last! And maybe by the time I am offering it, probably in Fall 2026, the AI bubble will have burst. I mean, surely at some point the fact that it is no good—that it spews bullshit and destroys the environment and relies on theft—will matter, right? RIGHT?

My other class was The 19th-Century British Novel from Dickens to Hardy. I enjoyed it so much! The reading list was one I haven’t done since 2017: Bleak House, Adam Bede, Lady Audley’s Secret, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It was particularly lovely to hear so many students say they had no fears about Bleak House because they had enjoyed David Copperfield so much last year in the Austen to Dickens course. I think I have mentioned before in these posts that in recent years I have been making a conscious effort to wean myself from my teaching notes. I still prepare and bring quite a lot of notes, but I try to let that preparation sit in the background and set up topics and examples for discussion that then proceeds in a looser way. The notes are always there if I think we are losing focus or running out of steam, but I don’t worry about whether I’m following the plan I came with. It was interesting, then, to dip into my notes from that 2017 version, because I realized how much my approach has in fact changed since then. I was very glad to have them to draw on and adapt, but although if you’d asked me in 2017 whether I did much “formal” lecturing I would have said I did not, in fact they show that I did run much more scripted classes than I do now. The things I want to talk about have not changed that much, although of course I do browse recent criticism and introduce new angles or approaches that interest me. Basically,  though, I guess my attitude to this class (and the Austen to Dickens one) is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”: I believe them to be rigorous, stimulating, and fun, and students seem to agree. Unlike the first-year course, then, these ones are likely to stay more or less the same until I retire. More or less, not exactly! They have evolved a lot already, in more ways than my own teaching style, and I will not let them go stale. I wouldn’t want that for my own sake, never mind for my students’.

This is all very general, without the kind of “here’s what we talked about today” specificity that I used to incorporate when I really did post nearly every week about my classes. (There are 318 posts in that ‘category,’ can you believe it?!) The best reason I have for wanting to get back to that kind of routine posting is that I miss it: I think, too, that it helped my teaching evolve, that the writing both prompted and supported me as I tried to become a better—more reflective, more responsive, more effective—teacher. So without making a bold pronouncement, a promise I maybe won’t be able to keep, I will say that I would like to post more regularly about teaching in 2025. I said a little while ago that, after the past few very difficult and disruptive years, I wanted to be genuinely and meaningfully present for the last stage of my professional life. Odd as it may seem, blogging about it seems to me one way to live up to that aspiration.

OK, onward! This term I’m teaching a seminar on Victorian women writers and the mystery fiction class. I’m genuinely enthusiastic about both of them. Wednesday is “orientation day,” with overview lectures in both classes. Then on Friday it’s a selection of Victorian writing on women writers in the seminar, including George Eliot’s scathing and hilarious and, perhaps, inspirational “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” and George Henry Lewes’s “The Lady Novelists” (don’t you wish you could overhear their dinner table conversations about this?); and in the mystery class it’s Poe’s delightfully gruesome “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” . . . and that’s what’s up this week in my classes!

Novel Readings 2024: Part II

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

What a nice conversation unfolded under my previous post! I suppose it isn’t surprising that those of us who gather online to share our love of books also share a lot of experiences with books, including making often difficult decisions about what to keep. Acquiring books is the easy part, as we all know, especially because our various social channels are constantly alerting us to tempting new ones. I have really appreciated everyone’s comments.

Now, about the books I actually read and wrote about in 2024!

My Year in Reading

When Trevor and Paul once again invited me to share my ‘book of the year’ with them for their year-end episode, it took me no time at all to decide on J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country. I haven’t had any second thoughts about that choice—it is, as I said to them, pretty much a perfect book. But I think there was some recency bias in my selection: going back through my notes and posts, I see two other books that I loved every bit as much. The first of them, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, was one of the first books I read in 2024 and I thought it was completely marvelous, so I was thrilled to see it go on to win the Booker Prize. The second, Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World, is a thoughtful and wide-ranging and sensitive and thought-provoking meditation on art and life: I read it in a library copy, but I keep thinking (after all that talk about pruning and purging!) that I’d like to have my own copy so that I can go back to it whenever I want. I do wish there was a fully illustrated edition—it would have to be very expensive, I suppose, but it would be worth it.

There are another dozen or so titles that stand out to me as particularly rich reading experiences. My blogging was a bit fitful in 2024, but usually when a book really excited me (for better or for worse) it got its own post, instead of being included in a hastier round-up, so it wouldn’t be hard to find out which ones they were by just scrolling back through my year’s posts! But I will highlight a few. One absolute delight, which I did not in fact write up individually (but I read it in February, the month I actually moved, so it’s amazing that I wrote anything at all!) was Herbert Clyde Lewis’s Gentleman Overboard. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Its premise is so simple (it’s about a man who falls overboard—surprise!) but between his thoughts as he tries to stay afloat and the reactions of those left behind on the ship, the little episode takes on real philosophical, even existential, weight without every becoming ponderous. Another book, in a completely different style, that also takes on Big Issues is Joan Barfoot’s Exit Lines, a darkly comic novel about what makes life worth living, and who has the right to decide what those reasons have run out. Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment, which I reviewed for the TLS, also takes into questions about the meaning of life, but with such delicacy and tenderness; it is my favorite of Perry’s novels to date (although if your tastes are more Gothic, I highly recommend Melmoth, which I thoroughly enjoyed). I suppose it stands to reason that someone whose favorite novelist overall is George Eliot would appreciate novels with a philosophical dimension. The challenge, as Eliot herself noted, is never to “lapse from the picture to the diagram,” and I think each of these novels in its own way invites us to contemplate important questions without becoming programmatic.

I read two fabulous memoirs in 2024: Mark Bostridge’s In Pursuit of Love (which deserved but did not get its own post) and Sarah Moss’s My Good Bright Wolf (which did). Bostridge’s book is actually a hybrid of biography and autobiography. It is mostly about the sad life of Adele Hugo, Victor Hugo’s younger daughter, who broke away from her father’s overbearing presence and confining household to follow the soldier she’d fallen in love with all the way to Halifax and then to Jamaica. Unfortunately, he was not in love with her, which makes the whole saga both more dramatic—imagine the daring it took, in the mid 19th century, for a young woman to cross the oceans to get what she wanted—and more tragic. Bostridge weaves into this reflections on his own relationship with his father and his own pursuits of love. It’s a compelling narrative on both counts, and the local colour added to its interest, as Bostridge retraced Adele’s journey to Halifax and explored her haunts here (and had dinner with me, incidentally).

Ann Schlee’s Rhine Journey has been highlighted by many others in their ‘best of’ lists; I was very impressed by it too, as I was by Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding. Neither of these is exactly a feel-good read! Another book that has consistently had a lot of buzz in my reading circles is Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man; I finally read it and yes, it is indeed excellent. I think I consider In a Lonely Place a slightly better novel (more subtle, more artful) but The Expendable Man is so clever and does such important things within its noir-ish form that I couldn’t resist adding it to the reading list for my Mystery & Detective Fiction class this coming term.  I was not so enthralled by Claudia Piñeiro’s Time of the Flies, which was the least intelligible and satisfying of her novels for me so far. I got a lot out of reading and thinking about Denise Mina’s The Long Drop, but I’m still not entirely on board with true crime as a genre—although, perhaps inconsistently, I am not bothered by historical true crime, and along those lines I quite enjoyed my King’s colleague Dean Jobb’s A Gentleman and a Thief, about the jazz-age jewel thief Arthur Barry. 

In lighter reading, I loved David Nicholls’s You Are Here—he seems to be a really reliable sort of writer, one whose fiction is accessible without being hasty or flimsy. I still think often about Us, which I read well before my own separation, not because its protagonists are like my own family at all, but because it shows them grappling with changing needs, and just with change, in really perceptive but not melodramatic ways. I discovered (belatedly!) Katherine Center and found much to enjoy in her intelligent romances; I read several of Abby Jimenez’s novels and then decided I’d had enough.

My book club got on a French kick that began with Diane Johnson and took us through de Maupassant, Colette, and Dumas (fils). (I also read Zola’s La Bête Humaine—the One Bright Book people made me do it! Ok, they didn’t make me, but I was inspired to read it so I could properly appreciate their episode. The novel is . . . a lot! And Sarah Turnbull’s astute and lively Almost French was an unanticipated connection between these French books and the other memoirs I read.) We chose Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera for our last book of the year and it is another I highly recommend, especially if you read and liked Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Vera has a lot in common with Rebecca—the whole plot, really—but the tone is quite different, darker, I would say, because the shadows in Rebecca are Gothic ones and so can be shaken off more easily than the more chillingly realistic menace von Arnim offers up.

If I had to identify a low point of my reading year, it would probably be Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s Mary and the Rabbit Dream, though I’m a bit reluctant to characterize it that way. There is so much that’s interesting about it, and its style (while off-putting to me) does have an idiosyncratic kind of freshness to it:  it doesn’t sound like any other book I’ve read, not just in 2024 but maybe ever! Was the author being innovative, taking an artistic risk in writing it this way? or is she just not a very good writer? If you read it, I’d be interested to know what you decided!

These are not all the books I read in 2024, of course, but they’re the ones that stand out when I look over my notes and posts. One other change in my book habits seems worth mentioning: I experimented quite a bit with audiobooks this year, partly because of all those extra hours I’ve found in the day, which have meant more time on things like crafts and puzzles. In the past I have not had much success with listening to books, but some of them were great. I would especially highlight Dan Stevens’s wonderful reading of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None; Naomi Klein’s reading of her own (exceptionally thought-provoking) Doppelganger, which is really worth reading (or listening to) as we head into the second (sigh) Trump presidency; and David Grann’s The Wager, read by Dion Graham, which kept me spellbound.

My Year in Writing

I’m a bit disappointed in how much (or, I should say, how little) writing I got done in 2024. It was my slowest year yet for reviews at the TLS, with just two, of Perry’s Enlightenment and, “in brief,” Sara Maitland’s True North. (I am working now on a review of Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June, so they haven’t quite forgotten me!) I reviewed three novels for Quill and Quire in 2024: Elaine McCluskey’s The Gift Child, Jenny Haysom’s Keep, and Ayelet Tsabari’s Songs for the Brokenhearted. And I did my second review for the Literary Review of Canada, this time of Tammy Armstrong’s Pearly  Everlasting, about a girl whose brother is a bear. (What is it with CanLit and bears?) I worked quite a bit on my “project” (I hate that word, but what else is there?) on Woolf’s The Years as a failed ‘novel of purpose’; I kept myself motivated by putting myself on the list for our department’s Speaker Series. I think the presentation went fine. As always, the tough questions I anticipated and fretted about greatly beforehand were not the ones asked, and in fact I really enjoyed the Q&A.

As we head into 2025, I am thinking about how to “level up” a bit in my writing. I do really like doing reviews that have a limited scope, which I find creatively and intellectually challenging (what can I do in just 700 words?), and also comfortable, in their specificity. But I used to sometimes publish more essayistic pieces too, and I want to give some thought to what else I might do along those lines. I also don’t want all that Woolf work to stop with the presentation version, but at the same time I find it very hard to feel motivated to turn it into an academic article, even though that was my initial plan. I think I need to crack it open and reconsider it as something that might (might!) work for the kind of venue I used to dream of getting into—and did, unsuccessfully, submit to a couple of times—in the past, something like the Hudson Review, maybe. A writer’s reach must exceed her grasp, right?

My previous, somewhat paradoxical, experience has been that writing more means I write more—when I kept up my blog more faithfully, for example, I published a lot more other writing as well. Of course, a lot of other things were different in the past, and I don’t know if 2025 will be the year I get my momentum back. I hope I at least try, because I don’t feel altogether satisfied with my recent output, which is not about “productivity” but more about the kinds of things we were talking about in a more tangible context in the comments on my previous post: what matters, what lasts, what remains.

And on that note—is it sobering or uplifting, aspirational or anxious? all of the above!—I think that’s a wrap on this year-end review. It’s hard to imagine that 2025 can be even a fraction as tumultuous as any of the past three years, personally at any rate (politically, on both sides of the border, it seems likely to be a big old mess). Whatever happens, at least there will always be books, right?

Novel Readings 2024: Part I

Rohan Maitzen23 Comments

In my year-end post last year I remarked that the final months of 2023 had been “frantic.” The reason, as I’ve since explained, is that near the end of that year my husband and I separated, one consequence of which was that we both moved out of the house we’d lived in for over 20 years—which in turn meant I dove headlong into “downsizing,” some of it as rapidly as we could manage together before he moved to North Carolina last December, and the rest on my own, before I moved into my new apartment in February. Yes, that’s a short timeline for changes this big!

As a result of all of this, in 2024 my relationship to books and reading was unusual in a couple of ways. In the first place, as I moved into a 1-bedroom apartment, I had to confront a significant reduction in shelf and storage space, which meant, one way or another, getting rid of a lot of books. I know many folks online who are really dedicated book collectors—by which I don’t at all mean that they don’t also read their books, but they have extensive and cherished libraries. I have never had quite that relationship with books, more for practical reasons than principled ones, but I have always loved owning books and feel, as I know so many of us do, that my book shelves are in some ways an expression of my self. I also have many books that mean a lot to me for personal reasons, ones inscribed by my mother or my grandmother, for example, or ones that I picked out on my travels, or ones that I have reread so often I can’t imagine who I would be without them. Still, I always tried to be reasonable about how much room I actually had on my shelves (no teetering stacks on the floor for me!), and I regularly rounded up a bag or two to donate to the big book sale that raises money for the symphony, or some nice volumes to trade in at Agricola Street Books, both of which are great ways to maintain what I like to think of as the circle of (bookish) life.

Still, this kind of incidental and largely voluntary pruning is nothing compared to the process I went through before I moved, which was often both logistically and emotionally overwhelming, especially at first. It got a lot easier as it went along, and in some ways it even started to feel good as the burden (literal and metaphorical) lifted. It involved admitting that there were books on my shelves I was never going to read again, and some I was never going to read at all, however good they might actually be (sorry, Europe Central, which took up the space of 2 or 3 other books for over a decade). It involved confronting the truth about dictionaries, desk encyclopedias, the Mayo Clinic Family Health Book, and the rest of our fine “reference” collection: nobody wants them anymore, including me, so their covers came off and their pages went into recycling. It meant carting bags of aging paperback mysteries to the Salvation Army and around 15 boxes of good quality fiction and non-fiction to the book sale depot. Hardest of all, it meant facing Owen’s books, which was particularly poignant for me because so many of them are ones I picked out for him over the years, for birthdays and Christmases. Most of his chess books went to the Dalhousie Chess Club, where he was a regular during his student years, though I kept Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess, his first and favorite book about the game. I kept all of his beloved Calvin and Hobbes collection, and many others that speak to me of the child he was and the young man he became—more than I needed to, maybe, but unlike my own books, his can never be replaced. 

In the end I brought around 22 boxes of books with me to my apartment. I still sometimes look for a title only to realize I let it go, but mostly I think I did well: I cleared a lot of space mentally as well as physically. And in fact I cleared enough shelf space that I have room now for more books! I find pruning easier after all of this: my attachment to (most) books is just lighter. Sometimes I even put a book in the ‘donate’ pile as soon as I finish it! I don’t think of those purchases as wasted money. I want bookstores to thrive and authors to make money, after all. My wise sister pointed out once that a paperback is about the same price as a bottle of wine, and we don’t think we’ve wasted that money just because we can drink the bottle up in a single dinner party! And I still keep plenty: any that really hit hard, any that aren’t readily available, any that come with extra sentimental attachments, any that I think I’ll read again, or that I might want to write about.

So I started 2024 by clearing out a lot of books. The other change since the separation has been to my reading time. I don’t quite understand why, but there seem to be a lot more hours in the day now that I live alone! I have wasted an awful lot of them watching TV, and many of them idly scrolling online, and plenty also just moping or mourning. I think (though this may be just making excuses) that I should not be too hard on myself about these bad habits, as the past few years have been pretty tough and we are all entitled to our coping strategies. I make intermittent resolutions to do better, to use my time better; I have made some of these for 2025. (Yes, blogging regularly again is one of them. We’ll see.) However! I have had more time for reading, and I have sometimes taken advantage of it. I have especially enjoyed taking time to read in the mornings. For many years—around two decades, really—mornings were my least favorite time of the day, what with all the kid stuff (breakfasts, lunches, getting dressed, remembering backpacks and permission slips and other forms, trying to get out the door on time) on top of bracing for my own work days, with the non-trivial (for me) anxiety of driving in winter weather adding a nice additional layer of stress from November through April. Things were simpler once the kids were older then out of the house, but I never felt like it was a good time for relaxing: I still had to get off to work, for one thing. Now, between habitually waking up early and living easy walking distance to work, even on weekdays I can afford to get in some peaceful reading while I have my tea and toast. We used to end most days in front of the TV; I still do that, especially on days when I’ve read a lot for work, but other days I can settle into my reading chair, put on some quiet music, and there’s nothing and nobody to interrupt me.

The combination of chaos and quiet time over this time of significant personal change has meant that overall 2024 was neither a particularly good or a particularly bad year for reading. I don’t think that in total I read a lot more books than usual, though I have never kept count, so I can’t be sure. I read a lot in some months and hardly anything in others. Since this post (which I realize is probably not of much interest—sorry!—I’m trying to recover my willingness to just sit down and write what’s on my  mind) has already gone on long enough, I’ll do my usual year-end review of highlights and low points in my next one.

Three Years After

Rohan Maitzen13 Comments

TWO YEARS AND TEN MONTHS LATER:

No time at all. No Time.

THREE YEARS AFTER:

And by now I’ve stopped making these notes.

– Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow

Content warning: depression and suicide.

Owen died three years ago today. I wrote about his death a lot in the first year: I felt a strong urge to write about it. I needed to gather up my pain and shock and confusion and shape them into something that made some kind of sense—to bring the chaotic, unbearable feelings under some kind of control. (“In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,” Tennyson says on In Memoriam, a poem I have returned to over and over since that first day.) I also wanted to reach out to my community of friends and readers, who showed me so much kindness, and still do. I also see now that this writing was a way of holding on to Owen by showing what I could of who he was and what he meant to me, what his loss meant. There’s a lot I don’t remember very clearly about the first few months after his death, but I do remember the way sentences would rise up in my mind and nudge at me until I used them—and the way lines of poetry would surface (as they still do), haunting me until I figured out where to put them, whether in my journal or in a sampler or in a post.

I also remember how angry it made me, in what I now know to call the “acute” phase of grief, to be told “it takes time.” Time for what? What could possibly change, with any amount of time? “My son is in a box!” I raged at the nice woman on the other end of the help line I called, before I had the right kind of person to talk to. “What difference is time going to make to that?” Seeking my own way to understand that, however I felt, time was going to keep passing, I thought about Woolf’s idea of To the Lighthouse as two blocks joined by a corridor:

One way I suppose I could think about where I am right now is precisely in a corridor between two blocks, one of them my previous life, which included Owen, and the other my future life, which will go on without him.

I have thought about that model a lot, as time has passed—time in which I have learned that both things are true, that it does take time, and that the passage of time doesn’t change how much it hurts that Owen’s life ended the way it did (or that Owen’s life itself was, to him, so painful that he ended it the way he did).  When people said, kindly, helpfully, “it takes time,” I resented the implication that I would one day stop grieving, even though the prospect of feeling the way I did indefinitely was also terrible. What I think they actually meant, or should have meant, is rather that over time you learn to live with those feelings: that they do not destroy you. The grief does not end—how could it? It does not get any less—why would it? A. S. Byatt said of the death of her young son that she was haunted by the thought “He is dead . . . that will go on and on till the end of time.” People say, she said in an interview, that “after a time, you get to want to celebrate somebody’s life. All I can say is no, you don’t. It’s just terrible. It stays like that.”

The model of grief that makes sense to me now is that, as time passes, you build new layers around it: it is a lasting part of you, a big part, but it is not all of you any more. So I’m not sure that a corridor was the right metaphor. I like these lines from Julia Copus’s poem “The Grievers” a lot:

What we can’t absorb we carry in us,
a lumpish residue. It’s truly a wonder
we manage to move at all; let alone
as freely as this, with the ease at times
of our old and lighter selves.

Her emphasis on the heaviness of grief matches my own experience of it as weighty, hard to carry. I still carry it with me, but I do also sometimes move now with ease, with lightness. I am doing much better. I am stronger. I have worked hard at this: therapy is hard. The work is not done, but I am better at it too.

Like Riley, whose meditations on grief have been interwoven with my own since almost the beginning, after three years I have nearly stopped writing about it, at least publicly. As I realized long ago, there is a terrible sameness to grief: it is repetitive, including for me. I don’t talk about it much any more either, and sometimes that’s tough, because it means I’m not always honest. How are you? Oh, fine. I’m fine. For other people, time has passed; they have moved on, and probably it seems as if I have too. I have, of course, in a way, because time does pass – for me, just not for Owen. “The dead slip away,” Riley says, “as we realize we have unwillingly left them behind in their timelessness.” 

It’s a grey, foggy day here today; the lines that are pressing on my mind on this sad anniversary are Tennyson’s again, the starkest lines in In Memoriam:

He is not here; but far away
    The noise of life begins again,
    And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain,
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

He is not here: after three years, what else is there really to say? But it has helped me, as always, to put some of what I’ve been feeling and thinking into words.

Meal Plan: Sarah Moss, My Good Bright Wolf

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

She was surprised to find it more or less possible, most of the time, to follow her meal plan: it seemed that perhaps the battle was over, the endgame complete. She had followed the rules all the way to the end, until it was possible to go no further. She had met the experts’ standards until her heart and liver and kidneys failed in quantifiable and quantified ways, until other experts told her that it was time to stop and now, surely, there must be a period of grade, a little mercy.

If food issues or eating disorders are a problem for you, you may not want to read either this post or Moss’s book.

My Good Bright Wolf is a harrowing, disturbing, honest, vulnerable account of Sarah Moss’s anorexia, though that neat diagnostic term seems inadequate to the complexity of the story she tells about the childhood, the parenting, the schooling, the culture of femininity and beauty, and the “experts” that all played a part in making it impossible for her to accept food as nourishment her mind and body needed – never mind to embrace eating as pleasure.

How do you tell a story like this about your life, and especially about your family, that does justice to your own suffering, and your own rage, while still also, as far as is possible, doing justice to good intentions, to sound principles, to the tensions and struggles of the people who did you so much harm? How do you convey the extraordinary power of feelings – compulsions – that to other, “healthy,” people do not, cannot, make sense? How do you bring both yourself and your readers to an understanding that is not (because it can’t be) the same as an explanation? How do you orchestrate the voices in your own head, both the ones expressing your unreasoning, impossible, self-destructive conviction that you should not eat, and the ones – trained, educated, hyper-rational – that know better? While Moss’s experience would, I think, have been gripping and heart-rending if told in a more conventional expository way, the most remarkable thing about the memoir she has written is the form she created for it, which is constantly interrogatory, and which adopts elements of allegory or fairy tale to shift our thinking away from the strictly literal towards something at once more surreal and more affecting.

Her mother, for instance, is always “Jumbly Girl,” her father “the Owl.” They are characters as much as people; Moss is aware of that, self-conscious about herself as in some sense their creator, certainly their narrator. The artifice does not signal untruth, but truth, in memoir, is a function of memory, and she knows memory can never be wholly reliable:

They’re gods and monsters, your mum and dad, mythological. Larkin was right, they were fucked up in their turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats. Fools who taught them, one way and another, that love takes the forms of surveillance and judgement, that children will stay dependent and needy forever if not forced to grow up. Fools who taught them that care and attention are scarce resources, not to be wasted on the undeserving. And maybe they’re not really your parents, the Owl and Jumbly Girl, not really human at all, just voices in your head.

But their real voices – the ones she remembers – say things like “We know she’s fat” when she is taken for a mandatory weigh-in with the school nurse, who replies “She’s not overweight, nothing to worry about there,” much to her shock – “Next she’d be saying you could do maths. Nonsense.” They say things like “no need for any lunch, there’s plenty of meat on those bones.” They permit only “natural” foods, only organic produce, no fast food or processed food, no sweets – healthy, in theory, but punitive in practice. They preach (though the Jumbly Girl does not always practice) a doctrine of self-control, and eventually, in early puberty, Moss learns she can win at that game, “dieting” so much she stops menstruating:

You had only another two or three periods, not enough to learn how to manage or accept them. Bones emerged comfortingly, hips, clavicle, shoulders and then ribs. Even the popular girls . . . envied your bones, as they had never envied and would never envy anything else about you. You began to get tired on the two-mile walk across the city to school, to get a bit dizzy sometimes on the stairs, and you greeted it all with relief. Here was safety. Here was something you could do.

A severe case of frostbite from a sailing trip leads her to a doctor who is “concerned about how thin you are”; he diagnoses anorexia and refers her to a psychiatrist, but her mother says “we’re about to spend a month hiking,” so “she’ll have to manage.”

Sailing, hiking, trips to the Continent, ballet lessons, organic food: Moss is very aware – sometimes uncomfortably so, I thought – of her “privilege,” though her self-conscious admissions of it are unhappy echoes of her parents’ rebuttals (real? imagined?) of her “complaints.” “You must be sick in the head, complaining about this stuff, ballet and sailing and private school”;

Do you have any idea, even now, what a lucky girl you were? Have you forgotten the food collections for the families of striking miners another two junctions up the motorway, have you forgotten how skinny some of the kids at your first school were?

Answer me this: would it be better to know that your parents wanted to feed you and couldn’t, or to know that they could and didn’t want to?

Seriously?

Moss is astute about the social contexts and structures that meant her father, a professor, was away all day and resentful, at home, about incursions on his time and attention, and also about the frustration of her mother – indeed, her mother’s whole generation, able to get an education (her mother had a Ph.D. too) but then too often expected to conform, “clever girls . . . before marriage and maternity enclosed and enraged them.” Her mother cooked and sewed, and young Sarah admired and emulated those skills even while absorbing guilt, even hatred, of them fueled by feminist rejection of them. Her sympathy for her mother’s thwarted aspirations complicates her resentment at her own miserable treatment and fills her with ambivalence about her own ambitions: “Bad scholar, bad writer, bad clever girl.”

Through all of this, Sarah reads, and My Good Bright Wolf has long, fascinating sections about Little Women, about Little House on the Prairie, about Swallows and Amazons, about The Bell Jar, drawing out what they have to say about food, about nourishment, about ideal girls. Moss goes on, of course, to become both a literary critic and scholar and a novelist. This is not, by any means, however, a “literature saved my life” kind of book. The “life of the mind” she idealizes often seems, to her, to be at odds with her own physicality; the one argument that works, when any argument does, to get her to eat is that if she doesn’t, she will not be able to think and thus to write. Her success, as a student then an academic then a writer, only changes the terms and the stakes of the battle she fights with her body. Once – quite recently – in Italy, on a fellowship, in just the kind of circumstances that seem ideal for writing (“What a privilege, to have a room of one’s own with all meals found, all housework done, for six weeks!”), she finds herself in a particularly devastating spiral, unable to eat, dissociating, disintegrating. “I’ll get over it,” she insists to her therapist, who responds “You’re not safe” and insists that she come home.

My Good Bright Wolf is not, as I said, a book about writing (or reading) as salvation, and it is also not a recovery narrative, though by the end there are glimpses of reconciliation between Moss and her hungry body: “No making of art – or love, or war, or peace, or dinner – without a body, no body without food.” What would it feel like for her to be at ease, at home, in her body (“my house / my horse my hound,” as it’s called in her epigraph, May Sarton’s poem “Question”)? It would feel like the time she and a friend stop at a café in Lombardy, “with a view of the mountains and the sound of wind in the leaves”:

There’s a small bowl of the estate’s honey and one of preserved wild berries, and for now, for this sunny moment, you’re not scared, it’s just good food in a good place . . .

Sunlight, earth and water become grass becomes milk becomes cheese becomes you walking and thinking and writing.

The moment is the opposite of anorexia.

It feels fragile, precious, whole.

“Eternally Incomplete”: Han Kang, Greek Lessons

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

Greek Lessons: A Novel eBook : Kang, Han, Smith, Deborah, yaewon, e.: Amazon.ca: BooksThat instant, the memory of a long-lost word rises up in her, cut in half, and she tries to grab hold of it. She had learned that, in times past, there had been a word, a Hanja word . . . by which people had referred to the half-light just after the sun sets and just before it rises. A word that means having to call out in a loud voice, as the person approaching from a distance is too far away to be recognized, to ask who they are . . . This eternally incomplete, eternally unwhole word stirs deep within her, never reaching her throat.

I had looked at Greek Lessons more than once in the bookstore before Han Kang won the Nobel Prize, partly because she’s a writer I’d read about as far back as J. C. Sutcliffe’s excellent review of The Vegetarian in Open Letters Monthly, and partly because the title kept catching my eye: what could a novel called Greek Lessons be about? Language, certainly, and lessons, both of which already hint at themes of (mis)communication, translation, and (mis)understanding. It was the Nobel Prize that finally tipped the balance for me to try one of her books, and my curiosity about its (to me) promising title that made me choose Greek Lessons.

I’m not sure how I feel about Greek Lessons now that I’ve read it, and I’m not sure if I will read any of Han Kang’s other novels. I suspected going in that it was not exactly the kind of novel I typically like, but I often try to test these expectations, to challenge myself a bit. It’s funny, maybe, that a novel as quiet as Greek Lessons could be a challenge, but I often struggle to engage with novels that are more mood or experience than plot and character, that are evasive or elliptical—and Greek Lessons is all of these things.

It could hardly be more explicit or expository, of course, and still preserve its “aboutness” (a librarian’s term I find so useful!). An incredibly simple story, on the surface, about a relationship slowly and haltingly developing between a man who is losing his sight—the Greek teacher—and a woman who has lost her voice—one of his students—it is also a delicately profound, wistful exploration of gaps and silences and the struggle for expression, the ways language clarifies but also obscures our feelings and our meaning. One of the clearest accounts of this comes fairly late in the novel, when she is reflecting on why she stopped speaking:Greek Lessons – The Book Lounge

She knows that no single experience led to her loss of language.

Language worn ragged over thousands of years, from wear and tear by countless tongues and pens. Language worn ragged over the course of her life, by her own tongue and pen. Each time she tried to begin a sentence, she could feel her aged heart. Her patched and repatched, dried-up, expressionless heart. The more keenly she felt it, the more fiercely she clasped the words. Until all at once, her grip slackened. The dulled fragments dropped to her feet. The saw-toothed cogs stopped turning. A part of her, the place within her that had been worn down from hard endurance, fell away like flesh, like soft tofu dented by a spoon.

The paradox here, of course, is that Han Kang’s own language is expressive and evocative: surely that passage, ostensibly about the failure or abandonment of language, is its own rebuttal?

But other parts of the novel are more fragmented, especially (and again this felt paradoxical) as these two wounded, lost, and lonely people move closer to each other:

At one moment, moving your index finger over the flesh of my shoulder, you wrote.

Woods, you wrote, woods.

I waited for the next word.

Realizing that no next word was coming, I opened my eyes and peered at the darkness.

I saw the pale blur of your body in the darkness.

We were very close then.

We were lying very close and embracing each other.

It is perhaps a failing in me—in my reading habits, or my reading sensibility, or the way I have trained as a reader—that I find this kind of writing portentous rather than captivating or moving. It provokes a kind of impatience in me; it distracts me with attention to the writing, rather than immersion in the written.

희랍어 시간 | Greek Lessons - Han KangAnd yet overall I was captivated by Greek Lessons, not so much by its particulars as by the melancholy space it created. Ordinarily I prefer some forward momentum in a novel (both cause and effect of my specializing in the 19th-century novel for so long!). What Greek Lessons offers instead, or this is how it felt to me, is a kind of time out, from that fictional drive and also from the busy world that these days overwhelms us with “content” and noise. In the intimacy of the portrayal of these two people, both of whom are retreating from the world partly by choice but mostly from the cruelty of their circumstances, there is some recognition of how hard it is to be ourselves, to be authentic, to see each other. The quiet sparseness of Han Kang’s writing could be seen as an antidote to the pressure to perform who we are and to insist on making space for ourselves out there. (Pressured by her therapist to break her silence, the woman thinks, “she still did not wish to take up more space.”)

The novel isn’t consoling, though: it’s deeply sad, almost tragic. Even the connection the two people achieve feels less like a triumph or a happy ending and more like a concession: this is the best we can do. “It felt like I was being kissed by time,” he thinks;

Each time our lips met, the desolate darkness gathered.

Silence piled up like snow, snow the eternal eraser.

Mutely reaching our knees, our waists, our faces.

Novels in November!

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

VeraNovember wasn’t a bad reading month, considering how busy things were at work—and considering that “work” also means reading a fair amount, this time around including most of both Lady Audley’s Secret and Tess of the d’Urbervilles for 19thC Fiction and an array of short fiction and poetry for my intro class. (I have not managed to get back into a routine of posting about my teaching, but I would like to, so we’ll see what happens next term.)

My book club has been trending French for a while: in November we wrapped up a thread that began with Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce back in April, then took us to Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami in July and Colette’s Gigi in August until we arrived at Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias. I’ve known the story of Dumas’s novel for most of my life because La Traviata has been my favorite opera literally since I was 5, so what was most surprising to me about actually reading The Lady of the Camellias (in English translation, sorry) was how exactly Verdi’s opera maps its every scene. I kept half expecting the characters to burst into song! It was pretty funny to be reading a scandalous French novel at the same time as I was reading about Robert Audley’s scandalous habit of lazing about reading French novels—and I have to say that Dumas’s novel really lived up to the bad reputation French novels have in English novels of the period. Within just the first few chapters there’s an abortion and an exhumed corpse, and the novel as a whole is much more sexually explicit than any mainstream Victorian novel I’ve ever read. (I mean, by contemporary standards it’s more implicit or suggestive than graphic, but compared to the nearly imperceptible details of Hetty’s pregnancy in Adam Bede that so outraged some 19th-century critics, Dumas is really out there!). The Lady of the Camellias: Dumas fils, Alexandre, Kavanagh, Julie, Schillinger, Liesl: 9780143107026: Books - Amazon.ca

Somehow we didn’t find The Lady of the Camellias that conducive to discussion, and we decided we would head off in a fresh direction with our next book. At the suggestion of one of our members, we chose Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera, which I also read in November, and it is superb. It is a lot like Rebecca but more domestic realism and less Gothic melodrama, which actually makes it more chilling. I don’t think I’ve read a better account of the kind of coercive control he exercises over her, and her attempts—so loving at first, so gutting as it goes along—to figure out how she can possibly anticipate his ‘rules’ and demands and so avoid his unpredictable rages. As I got nearer and nearer to the end, I got more and more puzzled about how this naïve young second wife was going to get out from under the shadow of her predecessor and/or out of the clutches of her increasingly terrifying husband in the few pages that remained. I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone who hasn’t read the novel yet but I will say that I found it pretty devastating.

To Say Nothing of the Dog: A novel of the Oxford Time Travel series eBook : Willis, Connie: Amazon.ca: Kindle StoreI felt the need for something cheering in the wake of The Election and landed on Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog: it was a great choice, genuinely comic and warm-hearted but also endlessly clever. I had a lot of LOL moments over its characterizations of the Victorian period, and it is chock full of literary allusions, many of which I’m sure I didn’t catch. A lot of them are to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers: who know that Gaudy Night would be one of its main running references. I liked it enough that I’ve put The Doomsday Book on my  Christmas wish list, even though I don’t ordinarily gravitate towards this genre.

I also really enjoyed Clare Chambers’s Shy Creatures, which I picked up on the strength of her earlier novel Small Pleasures. I remarked on Bluesky that it reminded me of Anne Tyler, in that it is a very unassuming book but everything it does, it does well—this kind of fiction can be too easily underestimated, IMHO, especially if, as with both Chambers and Tyler, the seeming simplicity of the writing is accompanied by quietly persistent insight into what makes people tick and what makes things matter. My first review assignment for 2025 is Tyler’s forthcoming Three Days in July and I am really looking forward to both reading and writing about it. I haven’t loved all of her novels equally, but I’m never sorry I’ve read one of them.

I managed to finish Claudia Pineiro’s Time of the Flies and wrote up my thoughts about it already; I also wrote about my rather vexing experience with Mary and the Rabbit Dream. In lighter options, I read my first novel by crime writer Jane Casey, Let the Dead Speak, and thought it was good enough that I will look for more by her the next time I’m at the library; and I read Katherine Center’s The Rom-Commers, which I enjoyed.

Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris: Turnbull, Sarah: 9781592400829: Books - Amazon.caAll in all, then, there was a lot of variety in both style and quality across the month. December is off to a good start: I’ve just finished Sarah Turnbull’s very engaging memoir Almost French (thank you, Helen!), and at the top of my TBR pile is Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, though I may actually turn next to Mark Bostridge’s The Pursuit of Love, which looks fascinating and which I also have a very small peripheral connection to because I had a nice dinner with Mark when he was in Halifax a few years ago doing research for it. (We have a mutual interest in Vera Brittain, which is how we first got in touch.) December is often one of my best reading months, with the constant busywork of the term calmed down and “just” (ha!) papers and exams to deal with. So thanks to all of you who have already put out your “best of 2024” lists, as I browse them happily looking for treasures to wrap up my own reading year.

“Her Own True Voice”?: Noémi Kiss-Deáki, Mary and the Rabbit Dream

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Mary and the Rabbit DreamI knew I would read Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s Mary and the Rabbit Dream the first time I heard about it. It sounded like exactly my kind of thing: a fresh style of historical fiction, with a strange and subversive story to tell. It was published in the UK by Galley Beggar Press—and maybe that should have been a red flag for me, as they are the publishers and champions of Lucy Ellmann, whose Ducks, Newburyport I have begun three times, never making it more than 30 pages, but more significantly (because I still believe Ducks, Newburyport may be worth yet another try) whose Things Are Against Us I absolutely hated. On the other hand, I didn’t hate After Sappho, which they also published, and I do try, on principle, to push my own reading boundaries. So when Coach House Press here in Canada put out their edition of Mary and the Rabbit Dream, I promptly picked it up and happily began it.

Happily began it . . . and much less happily finished it. I did finish it, because it really does tell a weird and fascinating story, and I genuinely wanted to find out how it ended. It is about Mary Toft, an impoverished laboring woman who in 1724 claimed to have given birth to rabbits, although as Kiss-Deáki tells it, the tall tale was never really Mary’s but was a scheme cooked up by her overbearing mother-in-law to get attention and hopefully money from their wealthier neighbors, who value rabbits much more highly than they do poor people.

The fraud is carried on for some time even as interested and increasingly expert men (always men) investigate, and in case you’re wondering what counts as “evidence” of the rabbit births, well, bits of rabbit (and sometimes of other animal parts) are shoved up into Mary’s body so that she can be seen to “birth” them. It’s exploitive and horrific, and Kiss-Deáki emphasizes Mary’s great suffering along with the appalling indifference to it of those around her, all of whom are using her—and more specifically her wracked and wretched body—for their own purposes. This includes her mother-in-law and her accomplices, but also many esteemed men of science and medicine, who stake their reputations on disproving what is advanced as an extreme example of the fairly widely held theory that what a mother feels, sees, dreams, or otherwise experiences during pregnancy impresses itself on her unborn child. “I just dreamt of a rabbit,” Mary says at one point,

I really did, all my dreams are full of rabbits now, rabbits and hands, they are vile, they are nightmares, but I had one dream that was not vile, not a nightmare, it was a little rabbit, a little rabbit in my womb, ears pink and its little nose shivering pink

and although she is rambling feverishly and we know that she is confusing the nightmare she is currently enduring with a miscarriage she previous suffered, her interlocutor does not.

Mary Toft - WikipediaThere is a lot that is good and interesting about this novel, especially the way that, while it centers sympathetically on Mary and her experience, it also uses her story as a device to expose the cruelty of misogyny and the punishing self-satisfaction of a certain species of scientific certitude. There is a particularly harrowing scene in which a powerful man, determined to break her and expose her as the fraud he is sure she is, threatens Mary with live vivisection, explaining to her with truly menacing “objectivity” that

a vivisection is an operation undertaken on a live body through a series of incisions for the purpose of the betterment of science.

Never mind what might be for the “betterment” of poor Mary Toft, whose eventual confession (in Kiss-Deáki’s version, at any rate) is a damning indictment of everyone’s readiness to make her suffer. (Nobody cares, and off she goes to jail.)

What wasn’t so good about Mary and the Rabbit Dream—and here I have to insert the obligatory disclaimer, as other people may feel very differently, and indeed other people do, unless they were lying in the blurbs they provided! so, what didn’t work about Mary and the Rabbit Dream for me—was Kiss-Deáki’s writing. In parts, it is (as my quotations may show) intense and effective, if you like a spare style. But those short snippets do not capture the oddly stilted and highly repetitive quality of the writing, which at times I found almost comical. A sample, and I promise it was not cherry-picked:

Ann Toft is opposed to it. All the women are opposed to it.

Even Joshua Toft is opposed to it.

But Mr. Howard insists.

And Mary Toft has no opinion.

Mary Toft has suffered too much to have an opinion.

Mary Toft has been listened to too little her whole life to have the courage to form any opinions of her own.

And now she has no opinions. Not even if she tries.

She has suffered too much.

She is stunned with pain and fear.

She is fearful of the women around her. She is fearful of her surroundings.

Everything, right now, inspires fear.

She is the ideal person to use for people who wish to use other people for their own ends.

I suppose you could call it rhythmic or incantatory or something, but I’ll stick with stilted and repetitive, especially because the tic of repeating phrases from line to line is so consistent across the book and serves (to my ear anyway) no purpose. What or who is that supposed to sound like? Is it meant to create an impression of archaism? 

File:Cunicularii, or the Wise Men of Godlimon in Consultation MET DP824926.jpg - Wikimedia CommonsI might have tolerated the long stretches of this kind of stuff better if they hadn’t so often devolved into heavy-handed comments on what is perfectly obvious from the story itself, about how vile and prejudiced and uncaring the men are; or about how unfair the whole system is, especially to Mary (as happens in the example above); or about the symbolic meaning of what is going on. The worst such moment was this one, right after Mary, in excruciating pain and exhausted from relentless examinations, breaks down and begins screaming (“she slips down on the floor, she starts screaming, she screams and screams and screams”):

Sir Manningham asks,

“Are you done?”

And what Sir Manningham doesn’t realize with that question, is that on this night, at his feet, on the floor, Mary has given birth to something, not a rabbit, but her voice, her own true voice, voicing all the pain, all the anguish, all the misery, all the humiliation.

Honestly, if by this point in the novel, we aren’t able to read her screams exactly that way ourselves, the previous 138 pages were wasted efforts, and besides, it’s just clunky: a moment of high drama, of real emotional consequence, deflates completely with the words “her own true voice.”

Your mileage may vary, as we like to say, which is a reasonable acknowledgment that taste varies and that style is idiosyncratic. That’s what keeps things interesting, when we talk about books! That’s why, as I have occasionally argued at length and try always to demonstrate in my writing here, criticism is, at its best, both conversational and provisional. Also, any book worth saying this much about surely is not a bad book. Books, like people, are rarely all one thing. Still, I really disliked Mary and the Rabbit Dream. I thought that it was badly written. The note on Kiss-Deáki explains that English is her third language, and maybe that accounts for some of the awkwardness I felt in her style—but it also says that English is the language in which “she has found her author’s voice,” so I have to respect that the prose I am reacting to is not accidental, that it is her “own true voice.”