Anna In-Between

admin — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

The premise of Anna In-Between is simple: Anna Sinclair, a thirty-nine-year-old editor at a big book publishing company in New York City returns to the (unnamed) Caribbean nation where she was born and raised in order to visit her parents, Beatrice and John Sinclair. While there, she learns her mother has advanced breast cancer, but refuses to go to the United States, which has better hospitals and equipment, for the operation that could save her life. Far from being melodramatic, Nunez's straightforward prose and subtle characterizations give the story a sense of truth.

Anna has always felt she is not good enough for her mother. Her failed marriage is a bone of contention between the two women—as is Beatrice's lack of physical affection towards her daughter—and her feeling that she is now an outsider in the land of her birth is a recurring motif. Afraid of disappointing her mother, Anna allows her to believe she is an editor at the large publishing company, Windsor, rather than at the small Windsor imprint, Equiano, which prints “urban lit” by and primarily for people of color. We get a glimpse of Anna's struggle with the ghettoization of her authors into racial categories and her efforts to promote serious works by authors of color to a wider audience.

In addition to exploring the complicated relationships between an adult child and her parents, Anna In-Between touches on issues of colonialism and collaboration. Anna's father became one of the top men at the British-run state oil company shortly before England granted the island independence. He is seen as a traitor by some, but explains his decisions towards the workers with dignity. We also see how his new job affected his wife and young daughter as they moved away from the neighborhood and people they knew, but were not accepted in their new surroundings, providing an incisive depiction of intersecting class and racial prejudices.

The Sinclairs' domestic help—Singh the gardener and Lydia the maid—are well-drawn, compassionate portraits. Anna feels that her mother talks down to them, but they protest that they are used to her mother's sometimes harsh tone. With Lydia, in particular, we see how despite her outward appearance of strictness and conformity Beatrice truly cares for her maid, going out of her way to protect her from an abusive ex-husband and providing school uniforms for her grandchildren. The message is clear: even the people we have known the longest may surprise us.

Beatrice's illness allows for an intimacy between mother and daughter that is much closer than they've experienced before and the two reveal aspects of their lives that were previously hidden. Nunez does not give these revelations too much weight; she allows them to shift the characters' feelings and viewpoints to a degree, but not to cause a complete seismic shift in the relationships. And not all of Anna's problems—her relationship with her mother or her struggle to better advocate for her authors— are solved in 347 pages.

Nunez has written a contemplative and absorbing examination of a woman standing in two worlds: the land of her birth and the country she now inhabits. While I felt I gained a new perspective on life in the Caribbean, the well-drawn characters are what ultimately make this story resonate.

Written by: Karen Duda, December 11th 2009

Anna In-Between

admin — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Nunez

Akashic Books

In her newest novel, Anna In-Between, Elizabeth Nunez explores the complexity of relationships between parents and grown children as well as the delicate nature of a marriage and the complexity of place. This moving novel charts the many obstacles that arise when an adult child becomes the caretaker for a parent. Anna is a Caribbean-American in her forties visiting her folks on the island of her childhood when she learns that her mother, Beatrice Sinclair, has cancer—and not just the beginning of cancer, but a fully developed and bleeding tumor that has been ignored by both John, her father, and her mother for quite some time.

Anna cannot comprehend such an avoidance of this life-threatening illness and spends much of the novel in upheaval over the decidedly cautious ways her parents seem to relate. She does not understand their patterns, and she struggles to find a correlation between her own feelings about relationships and the marriage her parents share. In some ways, what her parents see as quiet respect for each other is viewed by Anna merely as caution and fear. She now lives in America where marriage can be temporal and she sees her parents’ restraint as weakness rather than strength.

A sadness and fury falls over Anna as she comes to realize that Beatrice hides from her sleeping husband in a darkened bathroom to say nightly prayers over the rosary. This is her mother’s manner of attending to the illness. Anna’s anger is deepened by John’s admittance that he knew of the tumor, but stayed quiet out of respect for his wife’s privacy. Nunez writes through the view of the father, “Privacy matters so much he will guard his wife’s secret even from herself.”

In a way, Anna’s parents do not have to accept the terrifying potential of the illness if they do not discuss its presence. They may carry on with their quiet and pleasant life in chosen ignorance. Avoidance seems to be a theme in the novel, as Anna’s mother will not go to America for treatment because Blacks are mistreated in the country. While Anna struggles to defend America, she finds herself reviewing the many ways racism runs deep in her new country, and is torn apart by memories of the racism that defined her childhood on a Caribbean island under British rule.

Anna In-Between outlines the many ways Anna cannot comprehend her parents, and sometimes cannot understand herself. She lives torn between the island of her homeland, its tropical mannerisms that revive precious memories, and the life she has built as an American. With starkly poignant language, Nunez paints a picture of Anna’s confusion about her place between these two worlds and how to understand her bond with both lives.

Anna In-Between carries a heavy weight, but is written with a light hand. Nunez knows just how to paint a picture with both depth and breadth while remaining accessible in her use of language. The novel tells a poignant tale that will bring out feelings of intensity for the reader, and these strong emotions are well worth the time invested.

Written by: Djuna A. Davidson, December 11th 2009