I do write mainly of movies on this blog. They seem so easy to wrap in a tidy package for posting. Books require deeper analysis, though of course not all films are easily summed up either. For a change though I've responded to a book I've just read given me by a friend. A favorite novel of hers, she said. Darkly charming and sage, Howard Norman's What Is Left the Daughter proved at once disconsolate and affording of a bereft companionability this Mother's day weekend.
Set primarily in 1930s and 1940s Nova Scotia among personal misfortunes and societal tragedy (WWII no less), a hapless narrator has fallen victim to his parents' and then uncle's misbehaviors, indeed, full-fledged criminal infraction. Moreover, a chance at love remains perpetually out of his reach, although eventually, of one seemingly forlorn encounter, a daughter is born.
It is to this twenty-something daughter the narrator has not seen in as many years he writes in the novel, dredging memory much as he cleans the local harbour, rendering not regret so much as intimate story, and revealing himself through bits of beauty and humor he uncovers in the detritus of lives lost and lived. It is a sad and sullied world he writes of--sullied, that is, by violence, evil, really, and the vengeful rage of men gone mad as a result of it.
I suppose the author Norman might suggest, did suggest, really, if I take it right, the novel itself is "a possible anodyne." There exists, after all, an empathic relation between reader, character, author, the latter who guides the way of the reader toward seeing real life in fictional frame. It is a tragic world, yes, but it is also a strangely beautiful world in which there is hope for love and redemption.
They are knowable yet otherworldly characters that Norman brings to life and death in his ethereal fictional sphere of Nova Scotia in WWII. Their story reverberates in space and time, and memory.
