Recent Reviews
Little Nothing by Marisa Silver
When the wonderful leader of my disability book group selected Little Nothing by Marisa Silver, I expected to read about the trials and tribulations of a young girl born a dwarf. Yet after the first few chapters, it became clear that Silver’s ambitions were bolder and more complex. What begins as a simple fairy tale evolves into a dark and disturbing meditation on identity. Marissa Silver’s evocative and powerful prose captured me from the first page and didn’t let me go until the last.
The story begins in some unknown country (the Czech Republic?), in some unknown time (the 20th century?). A girl is born to an elderly couple and they name her Pavla. Certain attributes about the infant are different. Since Pavla’s mother sought advice from the local witch doctor, she blames herself for her daughter’s differences and pays her infant little attention. Pavla’s father delights in Pavla from the beginning and Pavla senses it. “…..Pavla feels, for the first time in her life, but not the last, the exquisite pain of love.”
When she fails to grow, Pavla’s parents, who have come to love her completely, are now overwrought with fear. In their minds, Pavla’s very survival depends on her becoming a “normal” girl even though she is intelligent, insightful, and industrious. They consult a doctor in the village who advises them to pursue horrific remedies. “Neither can bear to form the words that will make a lie of what they’ve said all her life: that they love her just the way she is and that she never needs to change.” Pavla endures these horrors that include a machine built to stretch her. “Pavla wonders who they are, these people she loves, who she believed would protect her.”
I think a psychologist might say that Pavla has a dissociative experience. In order to endure these remedies, she separates her mind from her body. She transforms from a dwarf to a wolf girl to a wolf and finally to a prisoner who resembles Pavla. And instead of doubt and disbelief at this turn of events, I believe Pavla’s iterations. Though we experience Pavla in different forms, her soul, her spirit, and her essence remain consistent. And the only person that recognizes her in these different forms is Danilo, the boy who loves her but cannot commit to her.
Silver’s ambitious book comes at an important time in our history. Women’s stories must be told and believed. Silver also seeks to repudiate the healers of every generation who act on their own prejudices and fears. She also reminds us that it is often women who perpetuate the fables that denigrate, hurt, and punish other women, even those they love.
Silver’s book is an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual meditation on the often-fractured lives of women. The novel is raw and primal, and it strikes at the core of what it means to be a young woman whose identity and destiny are determined by others. Little Nothing is as much an experience as it is a novel.
the other side of you by Salley Vickers
Salley Vickers 2006 novel The Other Side of You explores the many dimensions of love and loss and celebrates the healing power of being heard and understood. After the love of her life dies, Elizabeth Cruikshank, a divorced mother of two, attempts suicide and lands in a mental hospital. She becomes the patient of David McBride, a psychiatrist who is haunted by an older brother who died when David was five years old.
Cruikshank initially sits in silence and will not speak to McBride. Yet in one magical moment brought on by a shared admiration of the artist, Caravaggio, a sense of safety wafts into the room. Elizabeth tells the tragic story of how she found true love, how she doubted the love, and how she lost it. As Elizabeth talks and McBride listens for seven hours, Elizabeth understands more about her relationship with Thomas Gallagher and the ways and reasons she sabotaged her own happiness. Vickers, a psychologist, seems to be lifting up the healing powers of listening and understanding another person without judgment and opprobrium. As David McBride states, “We all long for someone with whom we are able to share our peculiar burdens of being alive.”
In listening to Elizabeth Cruikshank’s heartbreaking tale, David McBride realizes something about his own life. Every choice he has made connects to the guilt he feels over the death of his brother. "I had lived with this invisible gash in my side, this breach in my dyke, this crumbling portion of my sea wall.”
Vickers seems to believe that people carry within them shame and embarrassment for choices they have made or things that they have done and so they hide their most authentic selves from themselves and others. McBride states, “It is hard to account for the common human resistance to happiness, unless it is that we would rather be crippled by what we lack than risk the pain that is one potential consequence of placing our secret selves in others’ hands.” And yet, paradoxically, he also says, “I believe that we are in anguish until someone finally finds us out.”
Though I found the characters distant, I applaud Vickers attempt to write a novel rich with history and ideas. The Other Side of You includes the poetry of TS Elliot, the art of Caravaggio, parables from the Bible, a positive representation of a therapeutic relationship, and the encouraging premise that people can be healed.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
In honor of Kazou Ishiguro’s recent Nobel Award for Literature, I reread for the third time his most famous novel, The Remains of The Day. This book never ceases to amaze me, as the novel requires the reader to understand all that is said, but more importantly all that is unsaid. It speaks to England’s role in WWII and the resulting change in the social structure. Ishiguro’s restraint, elegance, and skills as a writer are stunning. The story is told in the first person by James Stevens, the head butler on an English estate named Darlington Hall. He undertakes his job, like his father before him, with solemnity and seriousness as if he is a member of the British military serving his country.
When the novel opens in 1956, eleven years after the end of WWII, Stevens is preparing to travel from Darlington Hall to a small town a few hours away. The journey wakes him to the sad possibility that he might have made a miscalculation in his obedience and incuriosity toward his boss who supported the enemy during the war. “You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship's wisdom. All those years I served him; I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can't even say I made my own mistakes.”
And yet Stevens doesn’t linger on his possible miscalculation. He possesses a professional pride such that even when his father lies dying upstairs, Stevens carries out his responsibilities rather than remaining with his dad. And when Lord Darlington demands that Stevens fire two Jewish housekeepers and his colleague Miss Kenton objects, Steven responds, “Surely, I don’t have to remind you that our professional duty is not to our foibles and sentiments, but to the wishes of our employer.”
Stevens intends to visit Miss Kenton, the former head housekeeper at Darlington Hall with whom he worked for many years. While Miss Kenton’s love for Mr. Stevens seems apparent, Mr. Stevens’ is unable to access his feelings about Miss Kenton. Stevens embarks on this pilgrimage, not to untangle his feelings toward her. Rather he psychologically projects his perspective about his life onto her, “All in all, I cannot see why the option of her returning to Darlington Hall and seeing out her working years there should not offer a very genuine consolation to a life that has come to be so dominated by a sense of waste.”
Stevens so embodies his role that he doesn’t know what he thinks or feels, even while he unconsciously fears those feelings. In working to contain his responses, his access to his emotions becomes like a stuck door unable to open. He says, “After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?”
Will Stevens change his life after these small epiphanies of introspection? Not likely. Underneath his professional persona, the reader can see melancholy and pain and a surge of defensiveness. And though Stevens' perspective softens on his journey, I suspect he will fortify his façade for the remainder of his days.
