Review of Leona Theis’ “If Sylvie Had Nine Lives”

By Annie Wesko

If Sylvie Had Nine Lives
by Leona Theis
Freehand Books (2020)

If Sylvie Had Nine Lives is Leona Theis’s third book, a novel in nine stories written
in five-year increments beginning in 1974 and ending in 2014, as her protagonist Sylvie advances from age 19 to 59. More than “a slice of life,” a descriptor commonly ascribed to Anton Chekhov, Theis presents a veritable banquet for the indulgence of Sylvie, a woman eager for life and experience. It’s a story of the life of a passionate woman who lives in small-town Saskatchewan facing choices, making mistakes, suffering from physical pain resulting from injuries, accidents and still standing to make yet another choice. This woman faces her demons even though not always successfully conquering them.

But you can’t have everything all at once. Everyone knows the heat of the beginning fades. Everyone knows you take what’s left and fold it into something that will keep. There’s no sense starting over only to end up miles away a year from now in a place the same but different. (297)

Married to Jack for 20 years, Sylvie muses, “Sometimes I think about how there are so many different doors a person has the choice to walk through” (135). And she asks Jack, “Don’t you ever look at all those choices and think, This one looks interesting, but this one grabs me in a different way, and, wow, what about that yellow door” (136)? Jack affirms that he always knew which door he’d go through.

But she wanted. More touch more thrill more people paying attention more of what she couldn’t even name … Sophocles talked about desire as pleasure and pain intermingled. A ferocious bite, and at the same time a hot melting. (117)

Working in the basement of the university library to produce a book comprising a “year’s worth of journals at a time. … At noon she’d take her sandwich and find a patch of lawn out of range of the sprinklers and watch the university people as they carried their shoulder bags from one building to another. What would it be like to be one of them? To write the words in the journals that crossed her workstation. Even to read them. Maybe she would do that: begin to read them” (35).

Where will Sylvie be as she approaches 60? And Theis reiterates:

At lunchtime I would pick up one of the journals from the stack on my desk and read while I ate my sandwich. The Humanities, mostly. Within that, Classics. Day after day for years. The more I read, the more I began to believe, finally, that I could do this too, study these things and have my own ideas about them. (206)

I enjoyed this unusual book that definitely struck a chord with me beginning with the preface, but unlike or perhaps like Stevie Smith’s poem, “Not Waving but Drowning” the reader is cognizant of the reference to the river and its delta.