Book Reviews

Migrations

Farzana Doctor (Author)
Stealing Nasreen. Inanna
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Gale Zoë Garnett (Author)
Room Tone. Quattro
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Patricia Robertson (Author)
The Goldfish Dancer: Stories and Novellas. Biblioasis
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Reviewed by Jodi Lundgren

“Oh, we’re not exiles, are we Linda? Exile is something you didn’t choose. Something you can’t go back from. This is—oh, a kind of temporary floating.” Thus Patricia Robertson’s twenty-something Annabel, raised in a wealthy West Vancouver family, describes her life as an activist in London, England. The phrase “temporary floating” also suits Gale Zoë Garnett’s narrator, Nica Lind, a European actress who accepts thirteen weeks of work in Hollywood—then stays for eight years. Conversely, most of Farzana Doctor’s characters have left Bombay for Toronto permanently: “This is home now,” Shaffiq, an accountant-turned-night-janitor tells his homesick wife, a teacher-turned-tutor named Salma. Whether or not their characters enjoy the luxury of choice, the authors’ choices of tone, narrative structure, and psychic distance shape the reader’s journey through each text.

A third-person, linear narrative, Stealing Nasreen creates an extraordinary degree of intimacy by juxtaposing sensory detail—“the air holds memories of thousands of meals cooked here, hints of cumin mixed expertly with tumeric, coriander, and chili”—with the probing self-reflections of the central characters. Shaffiq’s perspective alternates with that of Nasreen, a Canadian-born social worker whose parents emigrated from Bombay; the two work in the same building. Their lives intertwine further when Nasreen, preparing for a trip to India, takes Gujarati language lessons from Shaffiq’s wife, Salma (who then becomes a third point-of-view character). Bringing the novel to its crisis is the couple’s mutual (but secret) obsession with Nasreen. As a lesbian, she represents Shaffiq’s fears of what a Canadian upbringing can do to his daughters while, for Salma, she triggers memories of a past love affair.

Doctor’s concern to educate the reader about conditions faced by diasporic people occasionally creates a false note, as when Shaffiq says to Salma, “perhaps in a few years, you can go back to university to take those courses you need,” and Salma informs him, “I am a fully trained teacher, but to even be considered for a job I need more courses.” The point is made more organically when Shaffiq examines budget sheets at work after emptying a recycling bin. Challenged by “the woman in the business suit,” he explains that he is an accountant: “‘I see,’ she says with a frozen smile that tells Shaffiq that she doesn’t, that it would take a leap of understanding to see beyond his janitor’s uniform, and listen beyond his Bombayite accent.” If accompanying Shaffiq to his job night after night becomes tedious—well, Doctor rests her case, and the reader understands all the better the characters’ quests for work in their fields.

The child of a Swedish filmmaker and a French actress, Gale Zoë Garnett’s Nica Lind works in the “Family Business.” Teased at school for her deep voice, at age ten she embraces Marlene Dietrich as a role model because, like Nica, her voice is “not frog-like. It is throaty.” Memoir-like, Room Tone sustains a candid, lucid pitch throughout. Garnett selects peak experiences in Nica’s life and shapes them into titled, stand-alone episodes, and some of them, like the one-page “Room Tone,” resemble prose poems: “Room Tone is, for a moment or two, humans at our best. Quiet. Listening together to the sound of the room—a sound of which each of us is a breathing part.” Unfortunately, Garnett’s compression (into three pages) of the decade in which Nica establishes herself as a European film star means that subsequent references to her “career” and “life” in Europe ring hollow. Still, this stature empowers her in L.A. when, for example, her agent wants her to “have a rack job.” Outraged, she resolves to decamp until she is offered a lucrative TV series (sans surgery).

Although Nica enjoys a privileged cosmopolitan lifestyle, she longs for home. Doctor’s novel ends with Nasreen’s widower father proposing that he and his single daughter buy a house together: “I believe we make home with the people we love.” Similarly, Nica buys her father a flat in his hometown of Stockholm and moves in with him. Freud would pathologize the way that Nica’s deep affection for both parents (long divorced) replaces romantic love. But her re-rooting suggests that, regardless of wealth, connections to family and place mean everything.

Many of Patricia Robertson’s characters in The Goldfish Dancer not only migrate but also create stories. In “Graves of the Heroes,” a Canadian academic travels to Spain looking for her great-uncle’s grave but finds a dead baby instead; she thinks contentedly of her affidavit as “her own version, in her own words.” In “My Hungarian Sister,” a girl in England fantasizes about an adopted sibling but loses interest when she meets an actual Hungarian refugee. In “After Annabel,” the Canadian point-of-view character, Linda, supports her London roommate in her work at the Immigrant Welfare Council, where the clients include Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi refugees, but she resists devoting herself to the cause. Back in Vancouver when disaster strikes, Linda knows that “among each set of fragments was a story,” and she attempts to find it. Detached and observant, Robertson’s characters generally stand apart from the flow of life.

Robertson’s exactness of imagery is reinforced by her control over perspective; for example, the sky appears “pink as a peeled scab” when a seven-year-old boy is filtering the narration (of “Badlands”). In another story, a prairie farmer “still didn’t believe in the existence of any job that involved sitting down.” “Agnes and Fox” sympathetically depicts an ailing, elderly British Canadian woman (who has an imaginary pet fox); the narration intermittently dips into the mind of her hired caregiver, who has recently emigrated from Pakistan (and is ostracized by her local relatives for fleeing an abusive Canadian marriage). Impressive as is the range of this collection, the emotional centres of the stories often do not hold, leaving us with masterfully executed exercises in diverse settings and points of view. Still, Robertson proves that between Doctor’s didacticism and Garnett’s sometimes decadent aestheticism (did I mention the orgy in Helsinki?) lies a middle ground of conscientious artistry.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #198 (Autumn 2008), Canada and Its Discontents. (pg. 121 - 123)

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