A freehand approach to books
Ottawa’s Writers Festival presents must-see reading
Saleema Nawaz
Susan Olding’s Pathologies is a very aptly named book. It is an elegantly paced collection of essays that calmly dissect the recollections of her life with clinical thoroughness. The medical theme of the collection is drawn from memories of Olding’s father, a pathologist. “The origin of the word contains clues to our riddled relationship. Pathos, meaning pity, desolation, suffering. Logos, meaning reason. The word.” The habit of careful observation and classification has been passed on to the writer along with the habit of reconstituting a whole being through assembly of its pieces. Each essay is a creation of multiple ideas in a fragmented collage, but always meticulously leading towards an ultimate end. The prose stays at a constant rhythm, always moving forward in short, hypnotic sentences. Her language describes without embellishing and invokes ideas without exploding them. She writes with a surgeon’s hand: deft, and firm.
Young writer Saleema Nawaz’s first collection of stories, Mother Superior, is a truly impressive debut. She writes a flow of domestic observations that wrap around you smoothly, sometimes roughened by a sentence of probing pith. It’s a style that I find very appealing – a calm flow of water, a ripple, then onward. But the real power of these stories is in the very practiced way the narrative unfolds. “My sister and I stopped bleeding at the same time. It was the start of a baby that stopped me, or what my father called my shame before he died of it, keeling over downstairs in our bagel shop.” Everything happens in on itself in a tightly packed bundle, a uniform and engrossing movement that wraps everything together. Sometimes I wished that she could have let her talent explode more fully, and really plow into words and ideas without restraint. But this is a satisfying and beautiful first collection of stories.
As most Canadian fiction does, Marina Endicott’s book Good to a Fault hinges on a single device to move the plot forward: Protagonist Clara Purdy is involved in a car accident with a family, and on the revelation that the young mother (Lorraine) has an advanced stage of cancer, she invites the family to live with her. The rest of the book unpacks their emotional relationship and interdependence. Characters move not simply along single arcs, but evolve in leaps, doubling back, always in motion. Clara and Lorraine, for example, learn to love each other but also to hate, to struggle for the love of a family – a struggle that seesaws through the book with powerful honesty: “Salt taste licked at the back of Clary’s throat. They were both very angry… Clary just nodded, because she had a dragon inside her mouth, and it would come out in fire if she opened her lips and let it.”
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Sept 25, 2008
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=15610
