Deafening

I may have been overly ambitious with the number of books that I brought on vacation, but I did manage to finish two books that I’ve been reading for awhile – Harbor and Deafening.

Deafening was one of the books I picked for the ORBIS TERRARUM Challenge – Canada. The main character in the book, Grania, loses her hearing as a child after she has Scarlet Fever. The first part of the book focuses on her grandmother Mamo’s devotion to teaching her to read lips and speak. She’s eventually sent to a school for deaf children. Grania later falls in love with Jim, who goes off to fight in World War I. The novel alternates between Jim’s experiences as a medic and Grania back at home.

I can’t remember enjoying a novel as much as I did Deafening. There wasn’t a false note in it. I also found it interesting reading about World War I from a Canadian perspective.

My grandfather was born in 1901 and lived in Kemptville, Ontario. I remember him talking about the great flu epidemic, which Itani writes about. My grandfather had the flu – many died of it. When he was recovering, there was an armistice parade and someone moved his bed, so he could watch the parade out the window.

I found it interesting how the language in the book changed as Grania grew older. It was also fascinating how she interacted with the hearing world and saw things that others didn’t because her heightened attention to detail.

In on scene she tells her brother-in-law the way she sees the people in their town:

“Mr. McClelland, the baker, has a stern face and a pucker at the side of his mouth. He holds his wife’s hand in the summer. They sit on the stoop at the side of their house on Main Street, and he doesn’t looks stern at all when he’s with her…”

This a rare book where the characters and story linger. The type of book that I want to buy multiple copies of to urgently press in friends’ hands and say ‘You must read this.”

AUTHOR PROFILE: Frances Itani, http://www.quillandquire.com/authors/profile.cfm?article_id=2701

Mr. Pip - Lloyd Jones

I just finished my first book for the ORBIS TERRARUM Challenge – Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones (New Zealand).

http://exlibrisbb.blogspot.com/2008/03/orbis-terrarum-challenge.html

Mr. Pip takes place on a small island – Bougainville - that’s in the midst of a civil war. As the battle rages between rebels and the government's forces, the village is increasingly cut off from the outside world. Only one white man remains – Mr. Watts, known as Pop Eye to the villagers. He lives with a villager – Grace, but the two don't interact with the rest of the village. That changes when Mr. Watts offers to teach the children, who no longer have a school teacher.

Every day, Mr. Watts reads a chapter of Great Expectations. The narrator, Matilda, finds herself drawn to Pip’s world. Her increasing fascination with Great Expectations causes tension at home, with her mother worrying that Mr. Watts is leading the children astray. She distrusts Mr. Watts because he does not share her faith in God and is worried Matilda is becoming disconnected from her family's values and traditions.

“As we progressed through the book something happened to me. At some point I felt myself enter the story. I hadn’t been assigned a part – nothing like that; I wasn’t identifiable on the page, but I was there, I was definitely there. I knew that orphaned white kid and that small, fragile place he squeezed into between his awful sister and lovable Joe Gargery, because the same space came to exist between Mr. Watts and my mum. And I knew I would have to choose between the two.”

On the surface Matilda and Pip have nothing in common – she’s a black girl growing up on an isolated island in the grips of civil war in the 1990s, he’s an English orphan in the 1800s. But Dicken’s story transcends boundaries and helps provide Matilda with a refuge where her imagination can take flight.

“People sometimes ask me “Why Dickens?,” which I always take to be a gentle rebuke. I point to the one book that supplied me with another world at a time when it was desperately needed. It gave me a friend in Pip. It taught me you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own, even when that skin is white and belongs to a boy alive in Dickens’ England. Now, if that isn’t an act of magic I don’t know what is.”

Mr. Pip shows us the magic of books - that they can cross time, race and geography. That when the imagination is sparked, we learn we can truly transcend even hardships. The stories Mr. Watts and the children's mothers tell draws the reader in.

****

I wasn’t aware when reading Mr. Pip that the island Bougainville exists and it did undergo a civil war.

A Bougainvillian Gives Mr Pip The Thumbs-Up - http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0804/S00080.htm

Bougainville Backgrounder - http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0804/S00085.htm

Mr. Pip also won the Kiriyama Prize, http://www.kiriyamaprize.org/winners/index.shtml

ORBIS TERRARUM Challenge!

I just read about the ORBIS TERRARUM Challenge! And thought this sounded pretty fun. In a nutshell, the challenge is to read nine books by nine different authors from nine different countries by December 20.

In no particular order, here’s my picks:

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez (Columbia)
2. Death in the Andes - Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
3. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami (Japan)
4. Deafening - Frances Itani (Canada)
5. Night Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko (Russia)
6. The Island of Eternal Love - Daina Chaviano (Cuba)
7. Mr. Pip - Lloyd Jones (New Zealand)
8. How Green Was My Valley - Richard Llewellyn (England)
9. Closely Watched Trains - Bohumil Hrabal (Czechoslovakia)

Some of these have been on my list to read for a long time like One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s a little all over the map here ::ducks:: some magic realism, science fiction and fantasy and more.

I’m looking forward to the challenge.

http://exlibrisbb.blogspot.com/2008/03/orbis-terrarum-challenge.html