loss

Widow: Stories

mandy — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

The collection of stories in Michelle Latiolais’ Widow pull at a common thread – shading, sketching, and putting together a picture of what it is like to walk the Earth as a woman who has lost her husband. While none of these women carry any outward signs of trauma, the lens through which each of them sees the world has shifted, leaving each of them off-kilter. In many cases, the characters are left watching as life unfolds in slow motion before them, experiencing every excruciating detail with a painful clarity and the knowledge that this may not change.

Latiolais’ mastery of storytelling colors each story with a singular kind of grief, even as it offers playfulness, pain, humor, and history. The actions and thoughts of each character are imbued with meaning and weight beyond that of any casual activity. The reader is left with a sense that every choice the widows make has been somehow tagged by the death of her husband and is made in some effort to come to terms with this new view of the world.

The author walks the fine line between becoming morbid and being flippant amazingly well. Each story is told with a measure of respect and reverence, so as to engage the reader in the tale and draw out emotion without weighing so heavily that it is painful to read.

Widow is a book for anyone who has ever been in a loving relationship and felt the sting of separation. Above all, these are poignant stories of humanity, love, and life experience that ring true and leave the reader with a deeper understanding of love and loss.

Written by: Kari O'Driscoll, March 21st 2011

Song Over Quiet Lake

admin — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Sarah Felix Burns

Second Story Press

In Song Over Quiet Lake, Sarah Felix Burns tells several intertwining stories of loss, love, and healing. The novel centers on an unlikely friendship between a young white woman, Sylvia, and a Tlingit elder, Lydie Jim. Both are students at the University of British Columbia, and they meet when Sylvia is assigned to be Lydie’s tutor. Although their relationship is formal at first, they gradually become deeply drawn into each other’s lives.

Sylvia learns the painful story of Lydie’s past: snatched away from her family at a young age and forced to attend a residential boarding school, Lydie has spent her entire life struggling to salvage enough dignity, rootedness, and love to take care of her own children in the face of a world determined to tear First Nations families apart. In return, Lydie learns about the tragedy in Sylvia’s past: the younger brother who was kidnapped as a toddler, leaving Sylvia’s mother frozen in time and grief, unable to love her two remaining children.

Sylvia and Lydie narrate most of the novel, but interspersed with their voices are the voices of the other characters in the web—Sylvia’s erstwhile boyfriend River, Lydie’s sons Jonah and Mitchell, Sylvia’s mother Miriam, and several others. Serving as an overlay to the personal stories, the broader historical narrative shows up in the voice of a priest who was once one of Lydie’s boarding school teachers. Well-intentioned but passive, the elderly priest relives his memories of complicity—his participation in the residential school system, his failure to stop a cruel practical joke that resulted in a young boy’s death, his refusal to demand that Canada grant asylum to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

All the characters in Song Over Quiet Lake are victims of the ravages of historical or personal tragedy, and they are victims of the intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma. They are struggling to move forward with their lives, to emerge from past sorrows in order to build something new. They are also struggling to be able to give at least a little bit to each other, like the song (referenced in the novel’s title) that Lydie’s mother gave to Lydie as a young child. Even when Lydie returned from boarding school having lost her native language, with the result that she could no longer speak with her mother in words, they could still sing together and know they had each other’s love.

The novel’s dialogue is limp and stilted, and the prose as a whole lacks life. However, the characters are convincing and moving, and their complex, interwoven lives tell important stories about national guilt and communal resilience.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, April 7th 2010

Motherland

admin — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Directed by Jennifer Steinman

Gigantic Digital

Director Jennifer Steinman’s debut, Motherland, is a poignant documentary about six American women who have lost their children (and a brother) and find themselves together on a quest of healing. Previously strangers to one another, these grieving women travel to South Africa to volunteer for seventeen days helping at-risk children.

Steinman developed the idea for this documentary while watching her friend Barbara, one of the six women in the film, mourn the the loss of her son. She simultaneously considered the burgeoning numbers of mothers in Africa mourning the deaths of their children due to HIV, AIDS, and other disasters. She decided to set up the Motherland project in December 2006 in the hopes that women going through the same pain could find healing through one of the greatest gifts: offering healing to others in need.

Thus, six women thus found themselves among South Africa’s poverty and desperation—right where they were needed most. They volunteered at an orphanage to help care for 230 children in need of hugs, food, nurturing, and any and all types of love. Some of these children had lost their mothers to HIV. Notably, the volunteers were also asked to help teach a grief workshop for the children.

The brokenhearted women and children hugged, danced, laughed, played, clapped and cried with each other. It is impossible not to smile at the love and joy they enjoyed together when they could, and not to tear up at the consolation they bestowed on one another in their sorrow. We get to know the story of each mother and her dead son or daughter as well as that of a woman grieving her dead brother through stories, memories, and photos. There is no glitz, no makeup, or emotionally manipulative music to distract us from the raw emotion running through these women’s veins.

One mother took the trip as a chance to honor her dead son. A twenty-something had lost her brother, and their mother was in such a pit of despair that she didn’t leave her apartment, so the daughter went on the trip instead. All of the women were unable to let go of their overwhelming pain at the beginning, but were able to start healing as they let go and gave love to the children who needed it. These women, it turns out, found that they needed those children in return.

The director’s sympathy for the mourning women is evident through the screenshots and their nuances: Steinman’s attention to detail, the close-ups of faces, silent gazes, and smartly chosen landscapes. The authentic nature of this narrative and film is undeniable. I got choked up more than I’d like to admit. Consider that a warning.

Written by: Natalia Real, January 10th 2010

It's Beginning to Hurt

admin — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:01:00 +0000

By James Lasdun

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

As the title of It’s Beginning to Hurt suggests, one may expect this book to be a compilation of short stories filled with love, despair, loss, and anguish that reach into the profound depths of unimaginable hurt—and it is. James Lasdun writes his stories without embellishment, and intricately examines life in its most mundane form.

Lasdun’s stories run along a similar thread of exploring the human condition through everyday thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that overwhelm all of us without giving into hype or dramatic overtones. Instead, he concentrates his work on creating realistic worlds that are as simple as making a cup of coffee or taking a swim. Each character he introduces experiences the world in a different, personal way. In a similar vein, each character suffers from her or his inaction. Lasdun's stories take on a feeling of paused lives; any motion is somehow slowed or suspended to the point that the characters’ worlds do not change much at all.

Throughout It’s Beginning to Hurt__, Lasdun endeavors to downplay the difficulties the characters face in their worlds. The stories do not grapple with conflicts in order to reach a resolution. Instead, most of the stories come back to beginning without much, or any, movement. In “The Anxious Man,” the narrator is a neurotic, middle-aged man on the verge on having a fling with his neighbor. He is a good husband and father, but frustratingly weak. I easily became impatient when characters conformed, remained static to a fault, and avoided conflict at any cost. Their resistance to act resulting in the creation of more problems down the road.

Two stories worth noting that depart from this mode are “Caterpillars” and “Cranley Mellows.” They involve more direction and incite a more intense emotional reaction. Their twist of fate upon the characters’ actions is both appalling and genuinely unfathomable. Unfortunately, these two stories do not capture the gamut of Lasdun’s writing talent.

Written by: Mona Lisa Safai, October 16th 2009

April and Oliver

admin — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 17:17:00 +0000

By Tess Callahan

Grand Central Publishing

Tess Callahan’s debut novel, April and Oliver, begins with the death of April’s beloved younger brother, Buddy, in a car accident on a snowy winter afternoon. As Buddy takes his last breaths, he recalls a childhood memory of being lost in the woods with April and her friend, Oliver, and the reassurance of holding both of their hands. This brief prologue, like the next 300-plus pages of this novel, is beautifully rendered and sets the tone for the rest of the book.

In many ways, April and Oliver is a novel about loss. Both April and Oliver (who has recently returned to his home town with the woman he plans to marry after a long absence) have lost someone they cared for deeply in Buddy. And April’s grief in particular permeates the whole book.

In addition to losing Buddy, these former childhood friends have also lost significant parts of themselves now that they are adults. While April bears the scars of the sexual abuse she experienced as a teen and continues to choose older men who mistreat her, Oliver has given up the music he felt passionate about in his youth for a more practical career in law. April, wracked by shame, would prefer to forget the past, while Oliver insists on digging into it in order to discover the truth about what he considers to be some important events. During this process, these two complex characters must each confront their long-held feelings for one another. And over the course of the book they must decide what these feelings mean and whether they should be acted upon.

Tess Callahan is a talented writer whose prose is precise, evocative and, at times, simply exquisite. She paints vivid characters and has a particular gift for creating compelling scenes. Her talent falters a little, however, when it comes giving the reader an entirely satisfying story. In one instance, a key scene between April and an abusive boyfriend is played almost entirely off-camera. And the boyfriend is subsequently conveniently (and a little unconvincingly) disposed of, abruptly ending this story thread. In addition, it was also hard not to feel a little cheated by the novel’s climactic scene, which seemed a little heavy-handed. Still, I have to admit that I was left guessing about how the story would conclude until the very end.

Despite its flaws, April and Oliver is an extremely pleasurable read since Callahan weaves such shimmering and delightful prose, and explores some compelling and universal themes. Callahan is clearly a novelist who has much to offer. I look forward to her next book.

Written by: Elaine Beale, August 1st 2009