A Tale of Sex, Birth, Love and Pain

The Birth House

Author:
Ami McKay
Published:
Knopf Canada (2006)
Number of Pages:
400
Review:
What started out as a fun Autumn read turned into an enlightening, nostalgic walk back in time. Here in the 21st century duties such as giving and aiding in birth is no longer a very feminine thing. Men are now aiding in the birth of babies and some men are even trying to have babies. The time frame that this novel takes place in is a time of innocence and strong female/male barriers. One that if crossed, the party involved would have to endure serious consequences, all of which are covered in this wonderful gem of a novel.
Set in the early 1900’s Nova Scotia in a time when women were not considered persons and feminism was an ideology away Dora Rare dares to become an independent female. An elderly midwife, Marie, takes Dora under her wing and trains her in her field of work only to leave Dora to deal with a loveless and burdensome marriage, a child left in her care after being abandoned by her parents and a university educated doctor that claims he can deliver babies “pain free.” Through birth, love, sex, and pain we see the development of a young naive child grow into a passionate feminist woman, a woman who first discovers what an orgasm is in the medical chair, a woman who joins in with the suffragette movement and a woman who had she have been living in the 21st century would probably choose the same path of life that she had lived.
Ami McKay’s The Birth House is a phenomenal piece of literature. Each sentence explodes with detail, emotion and history. Reading this book was like stepping into a journal, the narration is passionate and told by a young feminist who captures her audience with her charms, naivety, and wit. Humorous, and delightful, this colourful account of life and the collection of scrapbook type newspaper clippings to provide proof of her accounts of life leave the reader in awe of the main character: Dora.
This novel was clearly written by a strong feminist voice and it is evident in every sentence of the novel that women have a purpose in this world other than to serve men. “If women lose the right to say where and how they birth their children, they will have lost something that’s as dear to life as breathing.” McKay's Dora was a strong woman trying to live in a man’s world, a world which condemned her practise of birthing as a midwife as barbaric and immoral. Her birthing ways were passed on from generation to generation, from female to female, and was used to birth thousands of babies yet when compared to the new (man invented) way of birthing which is basically the basis of modern gynaecology, it was seen as unfashionable, dangerous and unsafe.
What I love about McKay’s novel is her approach to showing that what is old isn’t always bad; her character although facing ridicule and shame from the new doctors who claim their way of birthing is better than a midwife surpasses all of her obstacles and eventually shows the world that sometimes a man's way of running the world isn’t always the best way.
I also love the prose. It flows so beautifully from one sentence into another that it’s like watching ripples form in the ocean. It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’ve read in a very long time. So beautiful I found myself rereading certain phases and sentences. “Everything I’ve learned from Mother, every bit of her truth, has been said while her hands were moving.” This simple sentence holds so much beauty, thought and emotions that reading it could evoke the reader to cry tears of sadness or tears of joy for either emotion is very much present in this quotation. The sheer wonder of this novel lies within quotations like these. McKay’s writing is pure poetry at it’s best.
With unforgettable characters, illusive descriptive writing and historical value, McKay's Birth House is a priceless read. She has written a Canadian masterpiece that is likely to enlighten and entertain readers for years to come. I hope you decide to read this fascinating story.
Happy Reading!!!

The Depressing Bones

The Lovely Bones

Author: Alice Sebold
Published:
Brown and Company (2002)
Number of Pages:
328
Review:
”These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.” At first I didn’t want to touch this novel because of the depressing issue of rape and murder (both of which have affected many members of my family, myself included) and I did not want to face up to haunting memories that I had put behind me, but I did put this on my TBR challenge (that I started before I started this blog) because I wanted to read it for a while I just never had the courage to.  Not only did the novel put me past my demons, but I also enjoyed reading something of spectacular prose.
Sebold was quoted as saying (and I paraphrase), she wanted to write a novel about violence because it is all around us. She herself was a rape victim and therefore fitting that she included this plot line in her first novel.
The main character, 14 year old Susie Salmon, is dead and lives her afterlife in “heaven” a place where everyone has their own sanctuary, hers is much like the schoolyard she left behind.  While she spends the remainder of the novel coming to terms with her death, her family spends the time trying to piece together the mystery of her disappearance.  Through their grief, the Salmon family grow and learn to accept her death while learning to come to terms with the emptiness of their lives. While the hole, that was Susie, never quite mends their lives continue to the best of their ability and one sees a broken family survive the best they can.
While the novel touches on themes of grief and loss, it also brings to the forefront a topic that one doesn’t like to dwell upon often: murder and rape.  The murder scene is raw and unforgiving, and it’s what makes the reader so much more sympathetic for the main character.  Sebold was BOLD when it came to writing out this scene for many people would not want to hear or read about a child brutally raped and murdered, however bringing this issue to the masses and merging it into a plot line is probably, however extreme, the best way to address the real horrors it is to experience rape. There is also a scene where Susie’s sister also experiences sex for the first time. “At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.” The contrast of the two scenes is brilliant. In one you see horror, violence, the evil humans are able to commit and in the other scene you see beauty, love and the tender gentleness that comes with human affection.
There’s also this underlying feeling- throughout the novel but also evident in this quotation- that Susie doesn’t want to let go of her family, the experiences she’s never going to get to experience, or of life itself.  In one scene -“When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things,“ Franny said. “What about the dead?“ I asked. “Where do we go?”- the conversation she has with one of the inhabitants of heaven clearly shows that she is confused about where she belongs and that she clearly longs to be in the world of the living to experience what she’ll never get the chance too. The vast spectrum of human emotions and their capabilities that Sebold plays with is nothing short of brilliant.
Throughout the novel the child is sometimes sympathetic towards her killer. Going into the minds of a psychopath as Sebold attempts to do is risky however, she does it tastefully. The reader is angry at the Murderer but also feels somewhat sympathetic towards him, for he’s a man possessed who desperately wants to break out of the mental frame he finds himself in yet doesn’t want to end the pleasure he gets from murdering his victims. You also see how complicated the character of Mr. Harvey really is. His isolation from the rest of the neighbourhood, his quirky habits, his internal confliction, he really is a complex character to analyze. One quotation I loved was: “He wore his innocence like a comfortable old coat.” An observation that Susie makes which implies that Mr Harvey, who’s gotten away with so many killings in the past actually believes in his innocence and portrays this innocent act to whatever community in which he happens to find himself.
The characters in the novel all deal with the disappearance of Susie in different ways: her father becomes obsessed with finding the Murderer, her mother becomes a shadow, her sister suppresses all emotions, and her neighbours eventually get over it. She becomes “the girl who was murdered,” not even her name is remembered in that statement.  The one person she affected the most was Ruth, whom she passed (her ghost) as she was exiting the world.  Ruth later becomes possessed by women victims of murder and starts to see them everywhere and befriends Susie’s only boyfriend Ray.
The book, however well written it is, is not without flaws. The ending is drab as the author tries to give Susie a coming-of-age type of epiphany. This scene is not necessary and seemed a bit rushed and to me the ending doesn’t seem that fulfilling… the irony of the bones I guess is what disturbs me. All in all it was a well written story and I was glad I got the chance and the courage to read it.

From Harlem to the Himalayas

The Inheritance of Loss

Author:

Kiran Desai

Published:
Penguin 2006

Number of Pages:
324

Review:
For a book with “loss” in the title I was expecting to end this book with a sense of nostalgia, sadness and fall into an ultimate depression for the two and a half days it would have taken me to recover. Surprisingly this is not the case with Kiran Desai’s novel “The Inheritance of Loss.”

A winner of the Man Booker Prize for 2006, although I have not read the other novels short listed, I do believe Desai has written a book worthy of that title (despite the controversy surrounding a fixed vote by her mother). Loss is present in every city, in every character, in every chapter; however, it is often offset with dry humour and wit. Appropriately titled, the sense of loss is being passed down from one generation to the other.

The story starts off in a Darjeeling, India during the Gorkhaland Movement in which the conflicts of the Nepali-Indians have escalated into a civil riot and takeover of the city in which our two main characters live: the sixteen year old orphan Sai and her android-esque grandfather Jemubhai the Judge. When Sai’s parents unexpectedly died in a car crash in Russia her only family left alive was her grandfather who grudgingly took her into his home. The judge is often left in a state of hatred for all things Indian which in flashbacks reveal that he was in fact often ridiculed and ignored in Britain as he studied law at Cambridge. At the time of his arrival in England, the British were not in favour of those with coloured skin and he was often the scorned victim of brute jokes about his smell or colour. This hatred of himself has been implemented to the point that hatred defines his character, passing his hatred on to those whom are closest to him, especially his wife.

“By the year’s end the dread they had for each other was so severe it was as if they had tapped into a limitless bitterness carrying them beyond the parameters of what any individual is normally capable of feeling. They belonged to this emotion more than to themselves, experienced rage with enough muscle in it for an entire nations coupled in hate.” Sai, on the other hand, is young and naive and her liveliness is a bright point in the novel. Her intrigue in the world, in people and in love makes this story what it is. Her curiosity shifts the focus from hatred to budding life and intelligence. Her love of National Geographic and literature has made her ideals and morals childlike, romantic and not yet matured. Yet despite the childlike innocence surrounding Sai, it is clear that she is inevitably doomed to live a life of loss, like her grandfather.“Sai thought of how it had been unclear to her what exactly she longed for in the early days at Cho Oyu, that only the longing itself found its echo in her aching soul. The longing was now gone, she thought, and the ache seemed to have found its substance.”

The supporting characters each have their role to play and provide a further sense of loss to the audience reading. The cook, lost in his memories, lives and cares for Sai and her grandfather and provides Sai with the support and comfort of a caretaker. He often reminisces about the past and his mind wanders to that of his son Biju, who is lost in the city of opportunities. Biju is a continent away, trying to survive as an illegal immigrant in New York. He is bullied, exploited and alone in the fast paced city, away from everything he knows, he is almost a mirror image of the younger Jemubhai, alone and ridiculed in a foreign country. There is Gyan, Sai’s first love interest. Gyan is smart, witty and misguided in his priorities when he gets sucked into the Gorkhaland Movement and eventually loses himself in the politics. And then there is India herself, lost in independence and freedom, she is unravelling without the guidance, intelligence, political stability and longevity of fellow independent countries.

Although it is set in a political conflict the novel fails to take sides in the argument and thus it portrays a clear and objective look at India as well as its characters. Beautiful prose, wonderful descriptions and intelligent insight, Desai has created a masterpiece, a piece of Desi literature that will forever enlighten intellectual thinkers regardless of ethnicity or race.

Happy Reading!!!