Month: January 2018

Journeys: a Writer’s (incomplete) Oeuvre (Prose: One Room in a Castle 1995; The Lizard Cage 2005; Burmese Lessons 2009; The Change Room 2017. Poetry: The Border Surrounds Us 2000; and Grace & Poison 1990 by Karen Connelly)

I know this. Our lives begin and end with journeys made alone.
“The Lid Over Europe” (100-101), One Room in a Castle

Karen Connelly makes many journeys. Travel introduces us to strangers and both her poems and prose reveal ways of understanding the other and experiencing ourselves.

In her 2017 novel, The Change Room, she notes two paths toward knowing: listening and storytelling. “Listening,” she writes, “was a way of pulling a stranger toward you without touching.” And so is storytelling: Shar or Shaharzad or Sheherazade – the great storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights – is the siren of enticement in The Change Room and the sensual “amazon” of the story. Listening and storytelling, strangers and borders, are common themes in Connelly’s oeuvre.

Writers’ recurrent themes interest me. I like their unfolding like fans, and their closing tight. I like the way they spread across continents and genres – always surprising, maturing, shifting but remaining, in important ways, the same. In Karen Connelly’s writing, the travellers and lovers among us glimpse ways of knowing ourselves and the other. This holds true from her earliest stories to the most recent novel.

In Connelly’s stories, strangers often become intimate in a variety of ways, sensuality being one. In “Esmeralda, a story” (One Room in a Castle 36-67), readers glimpse insights into what has matured into the novel The Change Room.

From Castle: “Our greatest similarity was our love of water, the freedom of motion it creates. ‘It’s flying,’ Esmé said. ‘It’s the closest we’ll come to being free of our bodies.’ We began to meet in the change-room before swimming….” Esmé swims; she is also a musician. Music, like water, is freeing and sensuous: “She closed her eyes, bent herself over the piano, and laid her hands on its black surface…. Then I leaned forward and kissed her eyelids.” These themes sown in Castle dominate in Room.

In The Change Room, the writing is more complex, layered and mature, but in the early work, we glimpsed seeds that later became mature fruit. (For more on recurring themes of individual writers, please also see my review of Bicycle Thieves by Mary di Michele.)

Connelly writes across genres, which leads me to think about truth in nonfiction and fiction. One Room in a Castle, for example, was published as nonfiction – purportedly as correspondence and travel. The Change Room – 22 years later — as fiction. It begins with an Emily Dickinson quote:

“Ourself, behind ourself, concealed,
should startle most.”

And we are left wondering about the difference between reality and imagination – a conundrum for writers and readers. Connelly does provide hints. For example, in “Extrah-dinary” (Castle 33-35) she writes “It is difficult to get to the truth of one’s self; how much more difficult to create an imaginary world and reveal its truth.” Still…. (For more on this topic of fact and truth, please see my review of Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel.)

I was introduced to Connelly’s writing through a book club reading of her mid-1990s memoir, Burmese Lessons, which still pops into consciousness despite the time lapse. But it’s the poetry collection, The Border Surrounds Us, which remains my favourite – especially section II – which I’ve read over-and-over again.  It is only recently that I discovered Grace & Poison, a compilation of Connelly’s first two poetry books. Even in 1990 her themes were clear and her voice strong. From that collection, a prose poem – “A Story for Suradev, In Bangkok” – stands out. In it we find her mature themes of intimacy/compassion, strangers/self. The closeness of her observations stand stark.

Her passion for travel and imagining the experiences of those she meets into story is continuous. Perhaps Connelly’s most intense book is The Lizard Cage, published in 2005, which drew me back to Burmese Lessons. Burmese Lessons is essentially a love story/a political story. The Lizard Cage is darker, taking readers inside a Burmese prison and into the isolation of an ancient man and a small boy, cruelty beyond comprehension, love, and survival. Somehow Connelly manages to maintain dignity, love, compassion, and beauty.

Karen Connelly began her writing career with the idea of borders, journeys from the known into the unknown: “Our lives begin and end with journeys made alone,” she wrote in her early twenties. In between life’s bookends, many other journeys are made and borders crossed: some geographic and cultural; some social and political; most intimate and sensual. They are all crossed personally, alone, and usually with risk of one sort or another. The intimacy with which she crosses borders can challenge us; she touches the heart, the soul, and the body.

22 Connelly Bks LR (1 of 1)

Various publishers have put Karen Connelly’s writing into print. Search her name or the name of one of her books and that will take you to a source. Most are available through your local bookstore or online.

Existential Travel (Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel)

“…we thrive or wither depending on how nourishing our environment is.”

The environment of Beatrice and Virgil is anything but nourishing. The landscape is bleak. For the most part, two characters hover around a tree in barren space.

Panned by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, I found Yann Martel’s story haunting. It slips into waking moments and has entered my dreams, which is a bit unnerving but says volumes about the power of the story.

Reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: there’s neither plot nor action to speak of. But unlike Beckett, Martel’s characters are animals, not tramps – the donkey Beatrice and the howler monkey Virgil. Martel also alludes to Animal Farm among other literary references. Perhaps, too, he’s evoking the dark side of his very successful Life of Pi. Yet another aspect toward understanding Beatrice and Virgil is the obvious allusion to Dante’s Inferno wherein Virgil guides Dante through hell and Beatrice accompanies him through Paradise. However, in this story Paradise is absent. Yet, there’s still one more curve: he’s explicit about the Holocaust, making this story an allegory.

Martel is a philosopher and a writer. As he did with Life of Pi, Martel frames his story, creating a story-within-a-story. In the beginning, his protagonist philosophizes: “A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.” This fictional author proposes two stories to his publisher, each with a front cover, a “flip book.” One side would feature an imaginative novel about the Holocaust, while the other side would provide a factual essay. Readers would have “a choice…when dealing with upsetting matters.” Hold the book one way: creativity; the other: historical fact. Given the subject, the publisher wants only nonfiction. Henry makes a ploy for including the creative story:

Fiction, being closer to the full experience of life, should take precedence over nonfiction. Stories—individual stories, family stories, national stories—are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

Henry continues to argue for the flip book idea: “But behind serious nonfiction lies the same fact and preoccupation as behind fiction—of being human and what it means—so why should the essay be slotted as an afterword?” He wants two perspectives and two front covers. He loses the argument and slips into writer’s block. Then we get into the longer middle story—the creative interpretation.

An amateur playwright (also called Henry) becomes the antagonist; the setting is his taxidermy shop where he practices his craft and displays dead animals, many in diorama, including the donkey Beatrice and the howler monkey Virgil. Taxidermist Henry has asked author Henry for his help in writing a play and the writer Henry visits and listens to excerpts read by the tall, gruesome taxidermist. It is not a happy experience, yet he’s drawn to the man, his shop, and the “conversation” between Beatrice and Virgil as excerpts from the script are read to him. Their situation is stark and as gruesome as their creator. Near the novel’s end, the author Henry reflects: “Once you’ve been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness.”

After more horror and some healing, author Henry muses about the donkey and the monkey and what his lingering memories mean: “All that remained now was their story, that incomplete story of waiting and fearing and hoping and talking. A love story, Henry concluded.”

A bleak love story, but should we ever be faced with the dystopian reality of Beatrice and Virgil, we could hope for the kind of love they shared.

Beatrice and Virgil is not a story for everyone, but for those who like puzzles and allegories and the “theatre of the absurd,” I recommend Martel’s book to you.

21 Beatrice & Virgil

Available through your local bookstore or online: Beatrice and Virgil

Travel Madness (Congo Journey by Redmond O’Hanlon)

“The Western Bantu word for hero comes from the verb meaning to enter oblivion, to be lost, to become a spirit.”

If these are the terms and conditions for becoming a hero, then Redmond O’Hanlon is a hero: he enters oblivion; he becomes lost; and enters dark places of the spirit. O’Hanlon is a traveller, a student of natural history, and a serious risk-taker. In Congo Journey, O’Hanlon searches for a mythical dinosaur – Mokélé-mbembé – that is believed to live in Lake Télé deep in the equatorial swamps and forests of the northern Congo.

The story opens with a visit to a féticheuse who tosses a handful of cowrie shells and forewarns O’Hanlon’s traveling companion – American university professor Lary Shaffer – that he will die if he remains in the Congo for a day more than two months. To O’Hanlon she says, “You don’t speak your desires. You think them.”  It seems observation, complaint, and foretelling. The mood and tone are set for increasingly surreal and nightmarish experiences. At times, I wondered if the book actually relates a traveler’s tale or if it is pure fiction.

O’Hanlon has credentials: as a travel writer and as a naturalist. He did a doctorate at Oxford on Conrad and Darwin, and it is clear that in key ways he’s caught in the era of British exploration. The Guardian calls O’Hanlon a “legendary bonhomie.” He is a throwback, entering the unknown – not as an observer – but as a full participant, an informed participant. The party paddles through rivers, trudges along barely discernable pathways, and take refuge in villages right out of a bygone era. Scattered among these harrowing experiences are fascinating details about the birds that enamour him as:

I was woken at dawn by a loud and discordant chorus of alarm, the ka-ka-ka of a flock of Plumed guineafowl disturbed at their scratching through the leaf-litter, somewhere off to the left. You’re ancient birds, I thought, and you sound like it, you cackling old aunts in a tizzy, you fossils, you date from forty-five million years ago.

One book close by in his pocket is Birds of Tropical West Africa that we learn grows mouldy and mottled (but O’Hanlon provides an extensive bibliography, more than seven pages long.)

Redmond O’Hanlon made an extraordinary journey that took him to his destination. It simultaneously carried him deep within himself, testing him on the deepest levels. All this is shared with bluntness and honesty, blindness and seer-like vision. Readers gain more than glimpses into a man’s determination, more than knowledge about the natural history of the Congo, and more than a superficial snapshot of the people who inhabit the swamps, jungles, and villages. (Speaking of snapshots, Congo Journey includes a section of photographs.)

Highly recommended…especially for armchair travelers who want more than the common gloss of travel articles, and for those dreaming of such an adventure, Congo Journey will inform and also make you stop and think.

20 Congo Journey

Available through your local bookstore or online: Congo Journey