Fiction, Poetry and Essay Reviews
The Circle
by Katherena Vermette
Hamish Hamilton,
272 pages, $32.00
ISBN: 978-0-7352-3965-4
It’s not necessary to read The Break (2016) and The Strangers (2021) before reading The Circle, Katherena Vermette’s luminous and heart-breaking third novel in a trilogy spanning the lives of a compelling cast of Métis characters in Winnipeg. But I strongly recommend reading the three novels in order as they display complicated relationships amidst a challenging social and legal environment for Métis and indigenous people.
Discrimination and violence haunt many members of the Stranger family. At the beginning of The Circle, Phoenix Stranger is about to be released from prison. Her sister younger Cedar has conflicting emotions about Phoenix’s release. The girl whom Phoenix assaulted, and whose life changes as a result of the attack, is forced to relive the horror. Everyone is in a state of high alert, including Phoenix, whose first step is to try to get glimpses of Sparrow, the son she gave birth to in prison. Waves of fear and anticipation ripple out from Phoenix as questions abound about what she will do, if there will be some kind of retaliation, and how people will cope. And then Phoenix disappears.
The novel has three parts, and each part has multiple narrators, both first and third person. It opens with Cedar contemplating her sister’s release and her crime. Cedar is a university student and lives in a house with other young people. Her housemate and best friend, Zig, struggles with her Moshoom’s choice of his grandson, Zig’s brother, to learn traditional ways. Vermette attends to the old ways, but is brilliant through characters like Zig, in showing the problems of privileging males. And Cedar struggles with a secret she has kept from Zig. Cedar says, “I know that when [Zig] was thirteen she got beat up so bad she was hospitalized and her best friend was brutally raped. There is no other word for it: she was raped even though it was girls who did it. And I know it was my sister, Phoenix, who did that.” Vermette also excels at dealing with a basic human problem—loving someone who has done a terrible thing and also loving the victim and wondering about telling the truth.
No one excuses Phoenix, but what is fascinating is how the novels show how discrimination and violence can be intertwined. What Phoenix did is awful, but what is done to her is also awful. The legal system has failed her, and it continues to cause irreparable harm in The Circle, which is a kind of verbal healing circle allowing the various voices to explore and explain how they view and deal with Phoenix’s crime and then her physical freedom.
Along with glimpses in traditional life, Vermette also offers a trenchant look at contemporary life, with topics such as Tinder, videogames, junk food, gender, and sex. The young people are completely plugged into the social media world while still trying to navigate beliefs and practices from long ago. The pandemic is touched on. And at the heart of the novel is the question of identity and how it is constructed when identity is often unjustly loaded onto a person. People struggle to get along with their family members, their peers, and the various communities they move in. Cruelty and kindness co-exist, but the negative vastly outweighs the good.
One of the most moving sections is the third in Part One, title “Ben,” which opens with a different kind of battle: “Phoenix’s old counsellor Ben is at war with skunks.” Vermette makes terrific use of white space on the page in this section, a technique that slows the pace of reading and allows readers to enter a kind of introspective headspace typical of Ben even though the section is third person: “Years of his life listening to their stories and giving them space. For all the good it’s done. They still did some horrible shit. The people they hurt were still hurt. And most of the time, they themselves were still hurt. Half a lifetime of trying to do good and Ben really hasn’t done anything at all. He hasn’t changed a single thing.” But maybe he has. And failure certainly doesn’t mean giving up trying.
The Circle abounds with humanity as does the trilogy. Katherena Vermette is an insightful and eloquent writer. Her powerful novels oblige readers to reflect on hard truths that must be addressed so that individuals and communities can build better lives than they have been allowed to in the past.
The Red One
by Safia Fazlul,
Mawenzi House,
224 pages, $22.95
Safia Fazlul’s second novel, The Red One, focuses on Nisha, a beautiful and desperately unhappy young woman. Married to a rich man, Nisha wants for nothing material, but her life is controlled by her domineering husband, Azar, and the expectations of her South Asian community near Toronto. Nisha is obsessed with her looks and shopping, and while it would be easy to dismiss her as vacuous, Fazlul, does a lovely job of humanizing her and demonstrating how few options Nisha has while she tries to make sense of her life and the sexual abuse she suffered as a child.
But before she can figure out what to do, Nisha spirals further down, succumbing to the numbing power of a drug called red powder. She has few skills apart from being expert at applying make-up, and everyone expects her to become pregnant. The novel rips apart gender roles as it lays bare the emptiness of valuing appearances and social connections more than real family care and friendships. Nisha describes her parents on page one, and it’s clear that things are not going to go well: “My parents, Muslim Indians loyal to the traditions of the old country and obsessively religious, had a stellar reputation in the community. They valued their reputation more than they valued money because the latter they didn’t have and the former secured invitations to parties, networking, and a sort of social validation they could not get anywhere else.” Nisha recognizes that her father, a cab driver, works hard, and her mother takes care of the family, but suffers in isolation as she cannot speak English and is in a loveless arranged marriage. Th first chapter is delivered in past tense by Nisha, and then she shifts to present tense. The tense shifts signal where the story is in time.
It’s a challenge to find anyone, certainly no female, who is living a happy and fulfilled life in Nisha’s world. Her wealthy female acquaintances are expected to look good for their husbands, and the men are supposed to make the money. The women abide by a strict set of rules while the men do what they want, including being unfaithful. So externally Nisha looks she has a fabulous life. But it’s all a sham. The red powder makes her feel better, and she requires more and more of it as time passes. She even starts to meet a mysterious man she calls the Red One. They have sex, and the graphic descriptions are overdone, but the intensity shows that something serious is happening. But is it actually happening? Out of her pain and need and drug abuse has Nisha invented the Red One?
The world depicted in this novel is populated by so many desperate and lonely people that it’s hard to turn the page at times. But it’s necessary to understand the isolation created by prescribed roles that no longer work, if they ever did. And it’s really important to understand how devastating sexual abuse is for anyone, perhaps especially a child, whose innocence is stolen and whose dreams are shattered. It takes years for Nisha to even begin to cope with what was done to her. And it’s obvious that such harm causes life-long changes in the survivor.
The Red One shows with staggering clarity how abuse harms a person. It also effectively demonstrates the perils of defining people by appearance or wealth. To do so hurts everyone as authentic relationships are impossible. The quirkiness of the red powder or the Red One do not take away from the essential truths of Fazlul’s novel.
Spiritual Pursuits and Other Stories
by Lien Chao,
Mawenzi House
186 pages, $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-77415-100-6
The five stories in Lien Chao’s new collection, Spiritual Pursuits, shine a light on the experience of Canadians of Chinese descent and their lives in and around Toronto. Perhaps the stories have an element of autobiography as some of the details of Chao’s life are used, in particular Chinese Brush painting, which Chao has also written about, in addition to being an artist herself.
The first story, “An Abiding Dream,” has a third person narrator on the lives of Ming and her mother and the struggles of artists, who have challenges everywhere. But the difficulty is compounded by lack of knowledge of English and the American and Canadian lack of knowledge of Chinese art. And there’s often a split between Cantonese and Mandarin speakers among the Chinese immigrants. Big Brush, a Chinese artist, says, “Fifty years after oil painting was initially introduced to China from the West, it has been accepted and adopted by Chinese artists and audiences. . . . Why can’t Chinese brush painting be accepted in the West?” Ming, a portrait artist, and her mother, a Chinese brush painting artist, have no idea, but the accidental meeting of the four leads to a friendship, largely based in art.
The final and title story is also about art and culture. Harry, an art teacher and artist; Linda, an artist; and Andy, a worker at a non-profit meet at the Aga Khan Museum, and the narrator says, “Attracted to each other by a mysterious energy, they decided to meet again so to form a meditation group for spiritual pursuits.” They end up creating a multi-media stage presentation of Taoism for the Asian Heritage Month Festival. It’s a lovely story about how people committed to an idea manage to put it into action because of their dedication and the help of other volunteers. References to Lao Tzu abound, and these help to explain the growth and change in the group and what they present.
The other stories tend to have a similar trajectory in that relationships are at the heart of plot and theme. As characters form deeper relationships, they move forward in their lives, even when what is happening is negative. For example, in “Five W and H” (a slogan from journalism), it’s easy to see that the narrator, Pearl, and her friend Wendy are being taken for a ride by a company purporting to sell luxury goods. It looks like a pyramid scheme that plays on people’s desires for brand name items, such as purses, but the venture doesn’t get off the ground in Canada. The company then tries to develop customers in China, given the rise in wealth. Pearl is a retired teacher and a very trusting soul. The story has more sections with “how” in the title than the “w” words. Plus, it has a Prologue and Epilogue, making the structure unnecessarily fragmented. But again, the gentleness of the characters is appealing, and their hopefulness, while somewhat naïve, is realistic as that’s how such schemes get traction.
Chao occasionally uses Chinese words and characters, and she has published bilingual books. The language of these stories is straight forward, with some stiffness at times, but overall that tension gives a sense of the feelings of people working in a world that has no much unfamiliarity in it and which sees these characters as unfamiliar because of differences in culture. But the mild and open personalities of the Chinese characters mean that the narrative always has a calming undercurrent. It’s a great change from all the online noise in our time, and it means that readers are invited to consider differences thoughtfully and respectfully—and ultimately to recognize similar dreams.
Best Canadian Essays 2024,
edited by Marcello Di Cintio,
Biblioasis
176 pages, $23.95
ISBN: 978-1-77196-564-4
The 2024 version of this annual collection of Canadian essays skews toward the personal, but as that’s perhaps the most popular genre these days, it’s not a surprise. Marcello Di Cintio has chosen 14 selections, and the task was, as he says, “profoundly difficult,” in part because of the sheer volume of works to pick from but also because of “the time we live in”—that being having just come through two years of unease caused by the pandemic. But Di Cintio found solace in the essays, and he pays respect to the writers by saying that their essays’ “real achievement was inspiring me to think deeply at all” after being unable to do so as he was dragged down by anxiety about the illness affected the world.
The first essay, “Ruffled Feathers: How Feral Peacocks Divided a Small Town” by Lyndsie Bourgon is a slightly light-hearted and yet serious look at an unusual problem. Naramata, BC, was once home to peafowl, who took up residence in the early 2000s, but no one is sure where they came from. The birds were popular with tourists and some of the townspeople. Peacocks are dazzling in their feathery beauty, but they are not pleasant to hear. Their raucous voices grate. They also leave evidence of their presence: “Every Thursday, the peafowl could be seen chasing the garbage truck. Their droppings littered the streets, and their shrill cries echoed throughout the quiet town.” Bourgon explains the history of the birds, as much as is possible, and sees them as emblematic of Naramata itself, “quirky and colourful.” The demise of the birds matches the changing culture of the town. This essay is one of the few non-personal ones.
The second essay, “One Route, Over and Over” by Nicole Boyce, explains how a couple copes with a crying baby by spending unbelievable amounts of time in their car, driving the baby around so he will sleep. Parents who have had this experience are likely to recognize the exhaustion of Boyce and her husband, and anyone without a baby may be put off the whole experience, especially if they value sleep. However, it’s clear that loving parents will do what it takes to care for their child. Other personal essays deal with such varied topics as Alzheimer’s, gender, sick children, ableism, and vasectomies.
One of the most heart-wrenching essays is Fiona Tinwei Lam’s “Bad Days,” about the overt and vicious racism endured by people of Chinese descent because of covid. Lam uses the second person effectively in the essay, drawing readers of any ethnicity in to become the target of thoughtless and cruel people. “The model minority myth has splintered into tinder. The present equation is simple: all Asians are Chinese; all Chinese embody the virus; you are the virus.” She details several incidents in which people are verbally and physically abused because of their appearance, building to the horrific murder of six women of Asian descent and two white people in Atlanta. The murderer’s reason is offered by a police captain: “Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.” Everyone has bad days, but going on a killing spree, motivated by racism (the white female who died was getting a massage; the white man who died was a handyman at a spa) is hardly an answer.
Another devastating essay is “The Fight of My Life” by Hamed Esmaeilion. He tells the story of falling in love with his wife Parisa when they are both dentistry students in Iran and how they flee to Canada because of the repressive government. It takes them years. Their dedication to each other and their daughter is absolute. They miss their families in Iran, and when Parisa’s sister is getting married, Parisa decides to take their child and attend. Hamed cannot go as he has published works against the regime. The return trip is on Flight PS752—which crashes and kills everyone. The Americans say the plane has been shot down by Iran. Hamed feels his life is over now that his wife and daughter are gone, and he has dedicated his time to protesting. As he says, inflamed by such events as the death of Mahsa Amini, “We’re fighting against our country’s injustice and calling for change, for democracy.” While he says, “I live in darkness” because of his grief over his family and his country, he is not giving up. Such strength demands respect.
Every essay in this collection has value. They vary in topics and style. But all of them offer worthwhile glimpses into the many ways of being human and many notable similarities. Justice, love, beauty—the search for and appreciation of these aspects of life make life both difficult and tolerable.
