The Blizzard Voices

Everyone I love who has died has been cremated. The coffin disappeared with a mechanical whoosh, or a discreet curtain covered it up, and that's the last we saw of it. It's cold, clinical, institutional, fake, and it's not enough for me. I want to watch dirt cover the coffin and know that it's done. I want a place to visit, a place to sit and chat and cry and think.

So my husband and I will be buried. We will sink into the soil and turn into good earth. We will be in a place where our children can hold a picnic, and listen to the trees, and breathe goodbye over and again. In my fantasy world, I will be buried at a friend's block, quiet, unremarked, ignored for the most part, but a good place for a picnic; a place where the wind sings and a rainbow is often to be seen spanning the valley. In reality, we're visiting country cemeteries and seeing what's available.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to The Blizzard Voices. I find most poetry to be unutterably omphaloskeptical (I have always wanted to use that word in a sentence) and excruciatingly tedious.

And then there's Ted Kooser. Kooser is a poet who uses the cool spare language of the Great Plains. He is the poet for people who like stories, and other people. His language is clear, strong and wiry; and he tells the most wonderful tales.

The Blizzard Voices is a collection of poems about the terrible storm which struck the Plains in the late nineteenth century. Teachers and students were trapped in schoolhouses with limited fuel and food. Farmhands perished in the fields, unable to find their way home. Fathers sheltered under upturned wagons with their livestock, and lost hands and feet to the cold. Mothers sat anxiously at home waiting for their husbands and children to return: from school, from the neighbour's house, even from the barn just yards away.

Kooser collected the stories from those who remembered, and from old diaries and other reports. He shaped the material into a series of short poems, each speaking in a different voice to relate an image, a snippet, or an experience. Together, the poems form a chorus, and provide a sense of the many faces of the blizzard: finding a loved one dead in a snowdrift, and the methodical calm of a plainsman in dealing with it; the surprising experience of discovering turkeys days later, buried by the snow but alive and well; the quiet devastation of a young teacher who lost her way and held three young charges close as they died in the night; the sight of a man who lost arms and legs to frostbite being loaded onto a train; the line of sunflowers which led a teacher and her children to safety.

Reading the book, I felt I was sitting at the feet of a grandmother or a great-uncle, listening as they told stories by the fire. It is a deeply nourishing set of poems, tied to a particular time and place, but drawing the reader into a collective history, and giving the reader a sense that the history is part of our shared story.

As in his book Local Wonders, Kooser finishes the collection with a deeply moving piece which is a benediction of sorts; here, a blessing on those who died. He writes that the names of those buried unremarked and unremembered in the corners of fields are still carried on the wind. And I'm back to where I began. Two lifetimes and half a world away, I think of those lines whenever the wind blows, and hope that I too can one day be buried in a field somewhere, remembered for a few years, then left to the song of swaying grasses, and the ever changing crooning of the wind.

(You can read more about Kooser's book Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps here.)

Her Fearful Symmetry

I loved the The Time Traveler's Wife, so I immediately sought out Niffenegger's next novel, Her Fearful Symmetry. Don't make the same mistake; it's awful. The characters are tedious; some of the plotline is so obvious I wanted to scream, and the rest is so bizarrely idiotic that I was gobsmacked. The writing clunks and drags, full of clichés and inane comments; I wonder if an editor even saw it? I finished it only out of pride; I had it listed as 'what I'm reading' and thought I'd better see it through.

To summarise, Her Fearful Symmetry is a twee ghost story set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London (cliché alert!). Yet it doesn't feel at all like London, but instead like Disney London aka Ye Olde London Towne. The characters are stereotypical Londoners, all white: the bookseller with a stuffed animal in her study; the frail but impressive grande dame who oversees the volunteers at the cemetery; the slightly ineffectual academic; the obsessive-compulsive crossword setter. They all live in magnificent spacious flats near the cemetery, because, as you know, second hand booksellers, crossword compilers and PhD students make so much money. Oh please.

Into their midst arrive bland American twins, insipid, tedious, vapid and boring. They have inherited one of the flats from their aunt, who now haunts it. The story appears to be about their struggle to separate identities, just as their mother and aunt, also identical twins, struggled to separate theirs. With the aid of the ghostly aunty, her former lover and a Ouija board, the weaker twin embarks on a plainly disastrous attempt to draw away from the other; of course, she can't just move out of the flat and get on with her life like a halfway normal person. That would be too straightforward, and the reader would miss out on her riding on a raven over London's tourist hotspots.

The only character to provide a glimmer of interest is the OCD-afflicted crossword compiler, Martin; yet even this character is hard to swallow. Being a paranoid obsessive, he agrees to take 'vitamins' (aka Anafranil) administered by a stranger (aka the bossier twin), just because she says he should; he shows dramatic healing as a result. Such behaviour beggars belief.

The book is a total bomb. I can't quite believe that the author of The Time Traveler's Wife wrote it; I find myself wondering whether this ghost story was ghost written in some clever little game played on readers everywhere? Ghost written or not, don't waste your time. It's awful.

The Time Traveller’s Wife

Warning: This review contains spoilers!

I don't have great reserves of patience for speculative fiction. Yet I have just read, in two sittings, a rollicking good novel in which one of the main characters is a time traveller. In The Time Traveler's Wife, Henry has a genetic disorder which shoots him out of current time and into another without warning, leaving a pile of clothes behind him. He arrives at the alternate time with not a stitch on. He must immediately commandeer clothing and a wallet to keep himself warm, fed and safe until he is jolted back to his own time.

Clare, on the other hand, lives in one time. Henry is shot in and out of her time; at some stage, they meet in current time, and marry.

This is all rather ridiculous, of course. And yet the marvel of this book is that the relationship between Henry and Clare is so gripping, so energetic and passionate and sad, that I was happy to suspend belief and enjoy the story – and what a story it is. This is a great love story, the story of a man and woman who love each other in any time zone, at every stage of development; and it is a story of loss, as the man disappears reluctantly and reappears sometime later, often dishevelled, bloody, bruised and sickened by the time travel and the consequences of arriving suddenly in a dark alleyway behind a nightclub (or wherever) with no clothes on.

In Niffenegger's relaxed version of time travel, there is no rupture in the space-time continuum when Henry meets an earlier self. Instead he borrows some clothes, has a conversation, or sleeps with a differently aged version of his wife. The time travel is treated matter-of-factly: despite some benefits (playing the stock market), overall it's inconvenient and stressful and takes a heavy toll on the characters.

The story alternates between Henry's and Clare's voice, and events are scrambled out of order, reflecting the way Henry is jolted between times. He meets Clare for the first time when he is 28, and she is 20; and yet an older Henry has been meeting Clare regularly since she was six, having been shot repeatedly into the field at the back of her house while she was a child.

For all the flipping around time, over the course of the novel the characters progress and mature, each shaping the other and helping the other to grow into adulthood. The time travelling makes it more interesting, in that it is an older Henry who spends so much time with the child Clare, helps her with her schoolwork, and watches her grow; and it is the adult Clare who shapes Henry into the gentle and patient man who is good for and kind to the young Clare.

Yet the time travel does not feel like a gimmick; instead, it feels like an accurate portrayal of a good marriage. We all encounter the five year old, the sixteen year old, the forty year old in our partner at different times; and express these many versions of ourselves to our partner. A terrible week, and the child comes out, and together we help the child grow up – or perhaps just enjoy the child's playfulness; at other times, the mature adult emerges, giving us insight into who we can become. Niffenegger's concept works in part because it makes concrete what we experience metaphorically.

Henry's genetic disorder make it difficult for them to have children; and the author writes with honesty and insight into the trauma of repeated miscarriage, and Clare's desperate longing to have a baby at almost any cost. While the story raises interesting questions about genetic mutations – should they be subjected to gene therapy, encouraged to die out, or allowed to turn into something new and interesting? – the philosophical ideas never overwhelm the storytelling, or the real grief of the character unable to keep a baby. Each miscarriage is real; as in life, it's bloody and painful and devastating. Several women I know have been in the awful situation of losing a foetus, and holding the impossibly tiny body in their hands. Clare's experience is drawn in all this messiness, and the telling of these episodes, so rarely spoken of in our culture, is a gift.

Sorrow haunts them. Because of the time travel, Henry and Clare know the approximate date of Henry's death. The frustration and anger as they near the end is well written. After Henry's death, Clare does callous things in her grief which are just awful and yet make perfect sense. She is not a paragon of virtue, and I like her for this.

Some characters feel clichéd – the bitchy black lesbian friend, Henry's now-suicidal former partner –; and I'd have to say everyone's a bit too cool for me. Despite this, the story is enormously readable and a real gift. It led me to reflect on my own relationship: like Henry and Clare, my husband and I have lives which feel utterly intertwined, even as we have separate interests and commitments; and like them, we have matured together and with each other's help. To be reminded of this, and of how much I love my husband, I am grateful. The Time Traveler's Wife is a terrific read, and a relationship tonic to boot. Read it.

PS - Yes, I'm told there is a film. Don't care, won't see it.

Baby’s Own Adventure

I could tell you all about A Lion in the Night by Pamela Allen. But let my daughter, who is almost two, do it instead:

***

"Baby crying. Baby in cot."

"Wake up!" to the queen, "Oook! Lion taking baby!"

"Puppy! Helmet! Hat! Crown! Bikle! [bicycle]" as the great chase, featuring queen, king, admiral, captain, general, sergeant and little dog begins.

"Moon!" as they race through the forest.

"Boat!" as they chase over the sea.

"Where bikle?" as it's squashed against the sergeant on the boat. "Where puppy?"

The Lion stops. Her face is quiet, bursting with expectation as Mummy and the Lion say GrrrrrrRRRAAAAAAH... [chuckle chuckle] then "GraaaaaahHhhhh!"

"king castle dirr rascal" as the Lion taunts the chasers, then invites them in for...

"befast" [breakfast], then "nana, toast, bottle, egg, strawbees"...

"Bye-bye Lion! Lion in cot! My cot!" and she closes the book and toddles off to her bedroom to take a look.

***

Now if that isn't a recommendation for a book for a two year old, I don't know what is.

And thanks to Nuradin, who read it to her first.

Stories for all the lovely people*

About this time last year I found myself hunting down books for young African refugees. Now it's time to do it again. I'm looking for books for all the lovely people in the class, and I'm delighted to report that I have found a few more excellent titles to add to last year's list.

Fire on the Mountain, by Jane Kurtz and EB Lewis, is a re-telling of a traditional Ethiopian tale. Alemayu is a young cowherd. Circumstances force him to become the servant of a boastful rich man who claims to be the only one able to spend a night on the cold mountain with nothing but a shemma for warmth. But Alemayu has done so many times. The rich man forces him to prove it, but when he finds out Alemayu stayed warm by looking at someone's fire on another mountain, denies him his reward. So Alemayu's sister cooks up a great feast for the rich man. As he sits and enjoys the cooking smells wafting in from another room, the rich man is served... nothing. 'What kind of person thinks that smells of food can fill a man's stomach?' demands the rich man. 'The same kind of person who believes that looking at a fire can keep a boy warm,' answers the sister. Check mate!

Fire on the Mountain is gently illustrated in the soft muted colours of the desert. The characters are beautifully depicted, especially Alemayu and his sister; and I very much hope some of the Ethiopian kids in the class recognise the story and enjoy this re-telling. But I must admit I am looking forward to reading this with one particular boy for another reason. The rich man's feast features injera, the Ethiopian bread; and this boy has a passion for it. When I first asked this boy if he ate injera, he was so astonished that I knew about injera that he actually fell over backwards. I look forward to seeing his reaction when he finds injera mentioned in a book!

Jane Kurtz also wrote In the Small, Small Night (illustrated by Rachel Isadora). It's the story of two refugee children trying to get to sleep; but Kofi is afraid that he will forget his family in Ghana now that he is in America. So his sister Abena, remembering the village storyteller, recounts traditional stories from home: Anansi and the pot of wisdom; and the turtle and the vulture. Between their stories and the conversation, Kofi is soothed back to sleep.

The story is told without a hint of mawkishness; yet it is very touching as these two young children, so far from home, talk about their fears and what they have left behind. But what is just as moving is the way Abena has brought the gift of storytelling with her from Ghana. The wisdom contained in those stories will sustain them as they start at a new school, in a new culture, where everything is different.

One small difference is the hair! The girls in my class and I wonder at each other's. 'Why you cut it like a boy?' they demand when my hair is freshly cropped; but they like to stroke it all the same, and play with my daughter's bunches, admiring its softness. I adore their hair right back, whether it's braided down their backs, or plaited in wild directions, or tipped with beads. Thus I was delighted to find the book I Love My Hair, by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley and also illustrated by EB Lewis, a celebration of African hair. In this story, a little girl is having her hair done. As her mother combs and tugs, the little girl's eyes fill with tears. So her mother stops, and tells her stories about her beautiful hair: it can be woven like yarn into a 'puffy little bun'; it can be parted into rows and planted with braids like a garden; it can cloud around her head like the world; it can stick out in ponytails like wings. And the little girl, thinking of all these things, imagines she can fly.

The illustrations dreamily illustrate the metaphors for the girl's hair; and the image of the girl sitting between her mother's thighs having her hair combed is so intimate, you can feel the weight of the bodies leaning into each other. A wonderful book.

*which is what I call the kids as a group, and what they now call their class to me.

Waiting for Mummy

When I was a child, my mother worked. She was a minister, and juggled working from home with working from a church office; we kids juggled playing at home with cooling our heels in the church hall. During the week, she made phone calls while stirring pasta sauce, held meetings in the lounge room, and ran around frantically Getting Things Done. But Sundays were the worst. While other kids fooled around and went out for lunch, we hung around after church while she had just one more, and one more, and one more conversation. If we had the temerity to stand near her or, god forbid, tug her skirt, we'd be resolutely ignored; then later we'd have The Conversation about how this was mummy's work and we had to let her be. All very well, but my sister and I were stuck there too, just waiting, waiting for mummy.

A more gentle sort of waiting is encapsulated in the beautifully understated book, Waiting for Mummy by Tae-Jun Lee and Dong-Sung Kim. In this story, a little boy waits at a tram stop, 'nose flaming red', for the tram which will bring his mother home. As tram after tram goes by with no mummy, the boy exchanges a few words with each driver, leans on a pole, drags a stick along the ground, or just squats. The resolution, when it comes, is wordless and requires the reader to examine closely a picture of a town blanketed in falling snow; this restraint lends the story great strength.

The illustrations are exquisite. They remind me of the gentler forms of manga, or perhaps the rich imagery in Miyazaki's brilliant film, Spirited Away: trams swoop dreamily out of the sky, the sea, and the trees. Just as I saw the world as a child, here the landscape looms in mysterious form and reality is far richer and more layered than adults comprehend. Trams and adults and steps are enormous, snow falls out of a yellow sky, and a little boy's hands go red with cold. In the background are soft images of a traditional Korean town: many-storied shops, men hauling goods on bicycles, and women with baskets on their heads.

My sister bought the book for us to read, but as I, like my mother, juggle other commitments along with child-rearing, my children find no small resonance with the story. After all, they too wait for mummy, and no doubt will do so until they are mummies themselves.

Waiting for Mummy is a pearl, but especially for the child whose mother works out of the home. It gives dignity and beauty to the experience of waiting – and reminds the parent just how patient our children can be.

> Tae-Jun Lee and Dong-Sung Kim Waiting for Mummy (Elwood, Vic: Wilkins Farago, 2006).

Consider the Camellia

I was a pissy little teenager. Smart and judgemental and oh so knowing, I am forever grateful to the various loving adults who took me under their wing and showed me how large the world is, and how wonderful it is to be alive.

Reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery* took me right back to those miserable self-righteous days. The story is written in two voices. The first, Renée (meaning 'reborn'), is that of the testy old concierge in an exclusive apartment building. To all appearances, Renée is a thick-witted peasant, but closer scrutiny reveals a cunning autodidact who hides her knowledge and insight behind the veneer of fluffy slippers and soggy cooking smells so that she can read and think in solitude.

The second is that of a very bright young resident of the building, Paloma. Disillusioned by the facades presented by those around her, and sickened by the trappings of wealth, Paloma has decided to commit suicide to draw attention to their bloated lives. She chooses a date to die, and decides to keep two journals in the meantime in which she will observe beauty and see if she can find something to live for.

The tale is very simple, very predictable: the two lives intersect through the gentle machinations of a third resident, the characters blossom, and we have a moment of ineffable beauty. In between, we are invited to reflect on philosophy, academia, grammar, art, social distinctions, Japanese aesthetics, the nature of time, the camellia's exquisite beauty, and what lies beneath through the observations and acerbic comments of these two characters.

Reviewers have raved about the author's lightness of touch, but phenomenology is phenomenology. The deftest of hands cannot leaven it enough for me; sections of the book are heavy going. These aside, the rest of the book is so gentle and so funny that I found myself alternately weeping and laughing out loud in public places.**

Paloma's diary in particular felt painfully, if hilariously, familiar. Like Paloma, I too was outraged by the injustice in the world, and sure that I was the only one to see it. I loathed my parents, thinking I saw right through them – and I am so glad that I lived long enough to begin to love and understand them again. Barbery realises the voice of a bright young teenager to perfection, just as she captures the spirit of a free-thinking and terribly private concierge.

My only quibble is the ending. The book starts very slowly, but gathers pace so that the ending is upon the reader shockingly fast – and it is so predictable, and so French! The last few pages made me feel Anglo through and through. But enough said. Read it yourself, and laugh, and weep. Then go for a walk, and find a camellia.

> Muriel Barbery The Elegance of the Hedgehog trans. by Alison Anderson (Europa: New York, 2008).

*Thanks, Brenda, for the recommendation!

**I usually read at the pub, far from the cares of three young children and an eternally gritty floor that could really use yet another vacuum. So there I was, sitting by myself at the smallest table which just happens to be on the edge of the stage, that is to say, in full view of the rest of the rapidly filling pub, reading and weeping and wiping my eyes on the enormous cloth napkin that came with my dinner. I know how ridiculous I must have looked – thank goodness that I'm getting to an age where it bothers me not one whit. Truth be told, I'm rather proud of it. I always thought I might like to grow up to be an eccentric; at times it feels like I'm well on the way. Cheers!