Dan Lockhart joins Shelley McAneeley to discuss his new work Tukhone, the Winsor area, and much more.

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Shelley McAneeley

Do You Think This is Strange?
Aaron Cully Drake
Brindle and Glass Publishing
ISBN 978-1-927366-387

Having just completed my usual morning talk with my aged mother, I notice that I panic, and mentally search for meaning during the conversation with her.  I hope to respond at the right moment, which requires knowing what we are talking about. I think I am listening, I try to listen, but I am often challenged to even know what the topic is. It seems to be skipped over, assumed perhaps, and I have to solve the puzzle quickly before the test question comes. Are you listening? What are you thinking about? I wonder if the conversation includes me, as she will often hang up mid-sentence. I wonder if the difficulty arises from age, or if communicating has always been this way, and I chose to ignore the problem? I wonder if youth has its own focus and finds most conversations irrelevant enough to ignore. But here, too, is Freddy’s problem.

Drake’s plot focuses on the strange world of Freddy, a high functioning autistic. I laughed often when reading this book at the weird dilemmas caused by miscommunications. Freddy’s dilemma below illustrates the issue. He is resisting his mother’s efforts to take him to meet a stranger called Jesus, who he is not sure he really wants to meet.

At the time, I had not yet met Jesus. Many people recommended that I get to know Him, but I had yet to be introduced, and my mother decided it was time for me to make His acquaintance. I remember struggling with my mother, who held my mask in the air as I jumped frantically, trying to snatch it back… “You can’t go to church with a mask on,” my father told me as he watched from my bedroom door. “Jesus might think you’re a mugger.” (Pg. 25)

Freddy’s world is logical, and in his mind everything proceeds without the emotional investment that plagues most humans. Literal translations are typical of his understanding of language. His worldview lands him in difficult situations where his meaning and the perception of the listener are at odds. Another event occurs for Freddy on a cold winter day.

This was the state of my thread when it was interrupted. If allowed to continue, I would have reasoned that people preface remarks with other common words, such as “Jesus Christ,” but I shouldn’t infer that the person is Jesus. Proof of this it that my father frequently addresses me, as Jesus Christ, but we both understand that my name is Freddy. “Jesus Christ!” he will shout. “I swear, the next time you spit toothpaste all over your shirt, I’m going to make you wear the damned thing all day!” (Pg. 93)

The book is not about religion. Above are delightful examples of how we assume meaning in our quick-paced daily discourse. Our social experience is tied to our ability to make giant leaps in our understanding through language. Freddy’s internal dialogue yields an interesting and heart-warming journey into his adulthood. The absurd is part of Freddy’s life, just as it is for my aged mother. The gap between two people is bridged through communication.  The richness of the world is embedded in the magic of words, words that embody emotion, but for Freddy, this is missing. Freddy’s world is a mystery to most others, understanding him and his understanding of the world are at odds. And, perhaps through the elderly, we get a first hand glimpse of that gap. Words can trigger memories, allow extrapolation, grant conceptualization and share reporting, only if the mind does its job. Do You Think This Is Strange explores a new language, and if you make the effort to discover Freddy’s world, you will be amazed. The book is a delightful read full of laugh-out-loud moments.

This book review is exclusive FreeFall Blog content.

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Various Positions
By Martha Schabas
Doubleday Canada (2011)
ISBN: 978-0-385-66876-7
$22.00

Veiled in the joy of acceptance into an elite ballet school, Georgia, our protagonist, begins an exploration of beauty, body and desire. Various Positions discloses the darker world of desire and takes us on a journey that illustrates how strong desires can twist perceptions and remodel reality. Martha Schabas vividly portrays the sexual imaginings and the fiery desires of the young. Our protagonist deepens into her ever darkened and isolated journey creating scenarios of positions, words and motions of people that feed her obsession for perfect body, history, and friends, which result in longed for love.

I turned off the overhead light in my room and replaced it with my desk lamp and the lamp on my bedside table. I selected the timer setting on the camera and the automatic flash. I took off all my clothes and started taking pictures. I had no problem recreating Mandi’s position, sticking my bum up at just the right angle so that it was curved and taut and exposing the skin in between (265).

What swirls around these events is the philosophical questioning of ballet and other cultural constructs that affect body image, sexuality, love, and friendship. She struggles to recreate in reality the dreams she wants, all of it a terrific leap from innocence.
In an effort to abate her delusions heroes change, but dilemmas worsen and damage increases with most external efforts. Cracking open the vision to see her situation clearly is a self-endeavor.

And the truth I told was even better than the real one, edited of all its grey zones and uncertainties, so that not even the scent of responsibility could be found on him. I understand something at last, maybe what Roderick has always been trying to teach me: that the rules of the real world just aren’t suited to ballet. I’ve tasted something of this real world now and it is the saddest flavour imaginable, dreary as a piece of gum that’s been in your mouth too long, that’s been waiting to be spat against the sidewalk” (355-6)

Various Positions is an interesting and novel read especially if you have children; be prepared for some thought provoking moments that may even remind you of your own leap from innocence.

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Why Men Lie
by Linden MacIntyre
Random House (2012)
ISBN: 978-0-307-36086-1
$32.00

Linden Macintyre takes us on a journey through a new relationship with a flame from Effie’s past. Effie fails to recognize JC Campbell immediately, but she soon recalls his presence from their respective natal hometowns near Cape Breton. Memories are dredged up and Effie recalls deeds, which bring both guilt and innocence to mind. Her two marriages have filled her with mistrust and doubt about men. She prefers a life alone. Quizzically, she ponders why her relationships are void of trust and truth.

She’d suspected, for a while, that he was homosexual, that his remoteness came from a feeling of exclusion. But Sextus told her that he probably held himself a little apart because of the fallout from an incident when he was still a student. JC had secrets, but he definitely wasn’t gay (7).

Deed after deed by, the then committed, JC causes Effie to wonder about his honesty. JC is embroiled in one strange relationship after another. His journalistic escapades familiarize him with those living on the edge. Strange characters enter his world. A host of characters come and go: a prisoner in Texas on death row, a daughter, a granddaughter, a priestly brother, and an estranged lover. Truth and lie, like the compounding and interweaving behaviours of the character, are so tightly woven the ultimately truth and lie are irrelevant in the overarching act of living.

“You realize that he was probably a gunrunner. The IRS had them planted all over the world, set up as legitimate businessmen. There was even a banker in Toronto.”
“Connor was getting out of it. He promised me.”
“Men promise all sorts of things.” He was smiling (254-55).

Effie’s previous husband Sextus wrote a book that remains unopened through most of the story. When Effie finally opens the book, truth may or may not be what she wants in her relationships with men.

“The safest place, she realized, was memory, where there were no longer any
questions of importance. But memories were painful. She left her bed, stood
by a window that overlooked the lane. . . . She raised the window, felt the
instant breath of cool, moist air and shivered. Then she donned jeans, a T-
shirt, a sweater, running shoes, and followed her brother into the revealing
night.” (349).

What is truth? Do we need it or do we need to hide from it? Macintyre explores truth within the complexity of relationships both intimate and fleeting.

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The Selector of Souls
by Shauna Singh Baldwin
Knopf Canada (2012)
ISBN 978-0307362926
$32.00

Damini, one protagonist, is presented as both murderess and goddess. Damini’s belief in the Pantheon of Hindi gods and their patient permission through eternal reincarnation, allows her to resolve the paradox of who she is, so that she can comfortably go on living with herself and her choices.

              O spirits of the prêt-lok, come and receive this atman, this jee become matter, that mistakenly entered this world.
Anamika Devi, overcome the hungry ghosts that will haunt me if this deed be wrong. If this be wrong, let me, not my Leela, take my next birth in a sweeper’s hovel. This is my role in the movie of Leela’s life (9).

This story circumambulates moral and ethical questions surrounding gender bias and caste in late twentieth century India. The Selector of Souls entrances the reader and the book resists being put down. Moral paradox is demonstrated not only in the difficult questions presented in the story but Baldwins’ characters. The reader enters the story through these fully rounded imperfect characters that are in a constant moral flux. More than once a self appointed “selector of souls” contemplates the sacrifices involved with this role.

              Thy Will be done – but how can I know what is Thy Will and not my own?
She must overcome conscience and empathy to become a selector of souls, and do what must be done (540).

Topics of religion, sex, prejudice, gender bias, and age bias are all ensconced in her intricate tale of the lives of various different people who find themselves fated to interact. Bon, Sikh, Hindu and Catholic all melt in the same pot of life. Baldwin carefully integrates illustrations and definitions of India’s many customs and religions into her story creating a precisely seasoned journey.

              “You’ll see, we all need redeeming in our own way, Sister. For our sins”
“We should be responsible for our own sins, rather than foisting them on poor Jesus. Why is he our whipping boy?” (476).

Baldwin presents a story that illuminates the difficultly humans have in living with paradoxical characteristics and the personal choices that result in such tangled self-identity. Baldwin proceeds to create a pantheon of complex characters affected by memes, and nature, and their own selected choices. What unravels is stranger than fiction, but forms an absolutely believable, real life story. Every detail resonates with the mundane life that each character stars in, and oddly enough ends in. The wheel turns round and round and the questions remain safe in the hub.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013

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Floating Like The Dead
by Yasuko Thanh
Emblem Editions (M & S) (2012)
ISBN 978-0-7710-8429-4
$22.00

Yasuko Thanh creates a fascinating collection of spell binding anecdotes of lepers and lovers, and other quirks. Her explorations of these topics, the squeamishly shunned, are bold and inviting. The collection begins with a tale of a man on death row while eating his last meal; he ponders life.

     Waves of sadness then numbness ran through my body, one after the other. Maybe these waves would wash me clean. Maybe they’d pulverize me, grind me down to the size of a stone, then a pebble, not stopping till I was as invisible as a grain of sand (25).

Our precognitive awareness of death and its impending existential crisis are explored in the title story, “Floating Like the Dead”. Several experiential reactions are woven together through the co-existence of men isolated on an island for lepers.

     As a boy, he would float in the warm water of Chongwu Bay until he felt his body liquefying, his loose limbs pulled by small currents and pushed by gentle swells. He would float as if he were dead while the sun burned his back. Then he grew and fished with the older boys. He went to work in the tin mines of Malaysa. He went to the plantations of Borneo. He forgot how to turn into the sea (68).

The Walter Mitty-ian story about the quiet life of Helen and Frank revels in ordinary movements and then blossoms into a most touching love story.

     Frank watches Helen as she sleeps. His little girl. He parts her hair and kisses the scar that marks where a third ear had been long ago. For a moment he wonders if he should carry her back to the car. But the car doesn’t have enough gas to make it back to the main road and would be as cold as an icebox anyway. Besides from this vantage point as long as he’s awake he can see the moon (119).

Each story Thanh writes is equally exploratory and as exciting as the last. Her book is insightful, interesting, and intelligent in its content and revelation.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013

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