
Liberating Journeys: An Omnibus Review of Book*Hug Press
Brewer plunges into Suture with a film scene from Eva’s feminist undergrad thesis projected onto a police station wall. In the projection, naked, ghostly Amazonian women “riot,” reading police reports and drinking tea while a crowd gathers to watch. Police try “to shatter the crowd.” Brewer’s prologue outlines a quixotic “map of your journey,” in which “your” refers to the reader, where women fall in love with women, injustice, rage, justice, potential, beauty, life, loss, grief, the past, themselves, and finally fall in love again. The life and worldview depicted are of the artist and narrator Eva, a driven filmmaker. Actions of love reverberate throughout this blue moon novel, where we enter a mysterious, magical world. We pass into a nightmare where the requirements for artists are unfathomable, self-inflicted wounds. Brewer’s world is a metaphorical rendering of reality, in that artists literally bleed for their work. She repays readers’ trust through character building that reveals the dark heart of artistic creativity. Though the enigmatic behaviours of her artists occur within the context of ordinary family life and modern urban settings, such as art classes, school and university attendance, and museum visits, Brewer’s story is plausible as metaphor.
Suture is an allegory. Brewer describes the acts of mutilation with the cold precision of a surgeon. Eva takes out her eyes and uses them as batteries for filming. She leaves her husband, meets and falls in love with Dev, who becomes her devoted wife and assumes the role of supporter and caregiver. As a child, Finn witnesses the suffering of her father, who literally uses his heart to create visual art. She follows his lead, taking out her lungs to paint. She arrives in the realm of artistry, “peeling away her sternum like suction cups.” Light-headedness, shaky hands, shallow breath, and a bottle of Tylenol aid bodily distress. She’s collecting photos for college, driven to “near lethal” accommodations of her many professors’ contradictory demands, trying to tailor a portfolio that would satisfy them all. In time, the “veins and arteries attached to her heart were too skinny to effectively perform; her chest ached for days after she put it all back in, her butchered muscle trying its best to push just enough blood, just enough oxygen, just enough survival back through her body.” Her daughter, Paige, is destined to follow, using her forearm bones as drumsticks in her musical band. Grace becomes a prolific writer by using her blood to power her word processor. Anyone in the act of producing original art understands the ambition to push boundaries and explode conventions. Brewer’s unbending vision projects a world of mutilation and injury in pursuit of glorious creations.
Brewer knits together her fantasy with crisp prose about the lives, art, and relations of the four women. Does Suture succeed at revealing the importance of sympathetic understanding as medium and glue? At first, it succeeds in startling the reader into a white light of incredulity. It’s hard to imagine this world where artists look harder, cut deeper, and bleed onto the page, to succeed at producing work that takes us to the edge of human consciousness.
Brewer’s unbending vision projects a world of mutilation and injury in pursuit of glorious creations.
However, rich characterization rescues our disbelief. Grace is a brilliant example of the complexity of Brewer’s characters when Grace chooses to drive her lover, Olu, away. Grace elects to live life as a recluse while caring intensely for humanity, possessing and revealing wide generosity. She lives with the uncertainty of when to end it all. It’s in the way she cares that Brewer’s realism succeeds. Grace admits that she hurts the people she loves and perhaps “cares more than anyone knows what to do with.” Her apology-not-an-apology letter to Olu opens up a quagmire of questions about her motives, desires, and intentions even as she admits artists “can’t wait to die.” Internally conflicted, she is a fatally flawed character riddled with contradictions, tossing between kindness and cruelty. Reliably relatable, we recognize in her those deeply-felt contradictory emotions that result in her punishing the ones she loves most. Something of hamartia, an aspect of our human condition, prevents Grace from overcoming the emotional obstacles necessary for the successful resolution of her internal struggles.
Internally conflicted, she is a fatally flawed character riddled with contradictions, tossing between kindness and cruelty.
A Convergence of Solitudes begins in medias res aimed at surprise. It works. Hami asks Sunil for her car keys while he’s distracted. In this scene, he freezes at the thought of being wire tapped, deeply relieved when he discovers the bugs are his wife’s glittering diamond earrings. Anand’s strategy is a slow, subtle reveal of Hami and Sunil’s plight. Mélanie’s perspective as she rides a bus with her mother, flipping through the Montreal Gazette, is an intrusion. The convergence becomes clear later in Anand’s narrative, after Rani’s insecure childhood and adolescence are laid bare. Mélanie’s difficult upbringing is paired with Rani’s life within Quebec’s unique political and linguistic landscape.
A Convergence of Solitudes is ambitious in scope, merging the personal with the cultural and the political. Anand starts her tale in 1996, developing a family genealogy of more than 50 years. She weaves a web of lives in which Rani claims centre stage, beginning with Sunil and Hami meeting in 1945. The couple immigrate to Canada under conditions of India’s bloody partition. When the British withdrew from India in 1947, communities that had coexisted for almost a millennium attacked each other in a terrifying outbreak of sectarian violence, with Hindus and Sikhs on one side, and Muslims on the other. It was an unprecedented mutual genocide. Two decades later, Rani navigates her way through cold school environments, never feeling that she belongs anywhere. Her mother struggles to construct a meaningful life, different from the one she would have chosen, with a husband whose schizophrenia erupts in unrealistic dreams and delusions.
Movement is the shape of this story as the author takes us on intersecting journeys. Sunil’s illness causes the family to often relocate in Montreal, establishing Hami as the family’s source of income and anchor when Sunil loses every job. Yet Hami never blames her husband; rather, she loves, protects, and defends him. Each new move means a new school for Rani. As the book opens, she’s relieved that her latest move is too late for picture day. With no school friends, and forced to wear “strange clothes covered in little mirrors,” life can’t be any unkinder. Except things change. Her uncle Krishen tells her to speak only English to his wife, Rani’s hippie aunt, when she visits. It’s a sign of the widening English/French divide in the mid-1970s and the movement toward the 1980 Quebec plebiscite to grant the Government of Quebec a mandate to negotiate sovereignty-association. But Rani adores her aunt, who loves children, and who enjoys their French conversations. Heartbreak and disappointments outline the contours of Rani’s internal and external daily existence.
Confused and directionless, Rani escapes into Serge Giglio’s music. It is as if he’s written “Pour toi, mon amour,” for her alone. When he locks eyes with her saying softly, “Tu es radieuse,” a shock of electricity races through her. He’d said it to her “in a voice she was sure no one else could hear.” Feeling untethered, this musical obsession powers her through a sullen, disgruntled adolescence and connects her to what’s most important to Serge: “Having a culture, a language, an identity … a country!”
Heartbreak and disappointments outline the contours of Rani’s internal and external daily existence.
The fortuitous encounter imbues Rani with enough self-worth to change her life’s trajectory. She’s addicted, fixated on his haunting music, connected to Serge in her giddy head. The link only becomes grounded in reality when Rani meets Serge’s adopted daughter, Mélanie, as a child and later as a young adult. Mélanie reminds Rani of her own untethered youth and past tribulations. Readers feel a sense of rightness when Anand unites these two characters. By then, Rani is a college guidance counsellor. To become whole, Rani conquers an insecure adolescence, inhabits her parents’ searing story, travels to India, and finds a life partner in Europe.
Letters to Amelia begins with “no lead-up, no indication Jamie was going to leave” the seven-year relationship he and Grace shared. His explanation that he didn’t know if he loved her anymore sent Grace reeling. That same week at work as a library tech, she is tasked with participating in a discrete project about the famous Amelia Earhart’s recently discovered letters to her lover, Gene Vidal. Grace is transfixed by this daredevil, unfettered woman who disappeared with her plane in 1937 while piecing together her own shattered life. When Grace becomes pregnant, she starts writing letters to Amelia, visits with her parents, and delays giving them the surprising news. She hesitates to reconnect with Jamie simply for the unborn baby’s sake. In the third trimester of pregnancy, she takes an arduous trip to see Amelia’s plane. Zier-Vogel’s Grace is drawn so credibly that she succeeds in depicting how Grace lives, suffers, and deals with her problems within an ordinary urban setting and the rituals of everyday life.
The complexities of Grace’s ordinary life shine, even as they silhouette against the light of a historic trailblazer and aviation hero. Inner and outer quests give this story its definition. Why is a dead female pilot so important to the arc and meaning of this tale? Zier-Vogel brings into focus Amelia’s life for Grace, infusing both tiny, private details and large, valiant accomplishments with a rare quality Grace is primed at this susceptible stage in her life to exploit. Amelia pursues independence and personal integrity with resilience, even in the face of structural obstacles. Restrictive social norms for women in the 1920s and 1930s, along with a lack of solid financial footing, are significant but not insurmountable hurdles for Amelia, the dreamer. For Grace, Earhart’s tale becomes personal: an idealized but imperfect heroine has a secret pregnancy while following her passion, flying, and finding true love outside a marriage of convenience. Grace gains the solace and inspiration to reassemble splintered fragments of her life in a new way. She shares the news of her pregnancy in a letter to Amelia before she even tells Jamie or her parents. A charming aspect of this narrative is Zier-Vogel’s singular skill in recreating Earhart as a lively, unique personality, letter by letter.
The complexities of Grace’s ordinary life shine, even as they silhouette against the light of a historic trailblazer and aviation hero.
Why does Zier-Vogel decide that Grace should keep her baby? Perhaps it makes for a more satisfying end. From Grace’s viewpoint, the choice is convincing: she’s in her early ’30s, may not have another child, and has genuine support from Jamie and her parents. In the end, the seemingly innocuous victory Grace achieves in journeying to see Amelia’s Vega operates as a cathartic release: “It’s a beautiful plane. Amelia’s first love, which she managed to land somehow, in a cow field in Ireland, even with the leaky fuel tank and iced over wings.” Zier-Vogel instils that moment with significance through a palpable immediacy.
The novel’s epistolary form is a strong stylistic device. The correspondence of a dead female pilot is read and internalized by a modern-day library tech facing her own personal and relational tests. Grace’s letters to Amelia are meant for herself. Collectively, they provide a window into Grace’s troubled emotional and psychological state. This kind of familiarity, like confiding in a best friend, is set free only by Grace’s knowledge of the female aviator’s private life and loves. The letters facilitate Grace’s emancipation as a woman facing prospective single-status motherhood. She writes to Amelia, saying “I want to know what eight weeks felt like for you. And what ten weeks was like. And 12 weeks. And 38 weeks and 39 weeks. I want to know what your labour was like.” That the letters are meant not for Amelia but for Grace is a technique that builds the structure of the story, one letter at a time, with deeply authentic voices.
Suture, Letters to Amelia, and A Convergence of Solitudes are shaped by characters whose stories construct their identities while navigating the intricacies of familial, relational, and social bonds. Characters pursue personal and metaphorical journeys where the tension between searching for self, purpose, and triumph establish, develop, and transform their lives. In Suture, Brewer spotlights the dark inner search in which artists engage to energize brilliant works of visual art, film, and literature. In Letters to Amelia, Grace Porter pursues and liberates the real Amelia and a new Grace after personal heartbreak. A Convergence of Solitudes unpeels the layers cushioning Rani to establish her within her family and a home province wracked by political and cultural divisions.
Suture, Letters to Amelia, and A Convergence of Solitudes are shaped by characters whose stories construct their identities while navigating the intricacies of familial, relational, and social bonds.
In Suture, Finn’s relationship with her mother is necessarily complicated. Cleo rejects the idea of art as anguish, never wanting it in the house. Finn’s coming out act of artistic rebellion is to co-opt her sidekick Anders into helping with the removal of her own lung. Her relations with her mother strain, but never actually snap from Finn’s ingenious acts. Cleo can barely visit Finn’s apartment, look at the seeping scars on her chest, or see the drips of blood. On the way to the Sobeys’ Art Award gala, all of the tensions triggered by Finn’s youthful art pursuits surge. Cleo wishes she could have been different, offering Finn something like her father. She thinks she’s failed: “Always late, always trying to be a different kind of mother, a mother in charge, a mother with something to offer, a mother like Stephen.” She asks why her daughter isn’t embarrassed by the blood on her chest. Finn answers, “Why should I be?” They inhabit different universes. After the gala, Finn wins what her heart hungers for: commercial and critical acclaim.
Perhaps the reality of what this artistic life demands is best understood by Finn’s character development. To spare her daughter the anguish her own mother felt about Finn’s life of painting, she sets aside her creative work for 18 years, for Paige’s sake. She falls in love with her partner and then with Paige. There is too much to lose; that is the weight of the price she pays. When Paige graduates and leaves home, Finn returns to the addictive life she missed and all it means for self-injury and disfigurement.
Suture lights up the need for forgiveness while exploring how family and supporting social networks can be at once helpful and injurious. Mental health emerges as a significant theme in the cruelties people inflict upon themselves and others by their actions. Spouses, parents, children, and friends are all drawn into a cycle of self-harm for the sake of realizing truth and beauty in art. Artistic identity means everything to Eva, who willingly relinquishes her sight to produce her best work. One of her voice-over scripts asks the question: “Do people realize how much art hurts everyone, the artist, the people who love them, the people they love? Death is an ever-present threat.” For the artists, stark built-in conflicts and dilemmas remain. Parents, mentors, and teachers want them to improve in their work, but they also want them to grow old. At 41, when Eva receives a fabulous lifetime achievement award, she’s blind.
In Letters to Amelia, when Grace’s long-term partner leaves her, she reacts oddly, building a relationship with a dead heroine. In the meantime, her attempts to re-establish a meaningful relationship with her ex-fiancé wavers and fails. She gradually discovers the independent spirit and grit she shares with Amelia, which becomes her guiding light to personal sovereignty. In her imagination and actions, Grace transforms ordinary life into the improbable magical realm of a cultural icon.
In A Convergence of Solitudes, Rani’s search for her identity leads her to develop a true sense of self within a family she struggles to understand and love. On a visit to India, she revels in the chaotic, vibrant culture of her origins and in seeing her mother’s face in her aunt’s. Finding her roots births self-love and acceptance of family in the truest sense. She loses shame and feels closer to her parents. Suddenly, she recognizes “the sounds of her parents’ language and looks up to see a stunning beauty, with shining dark eyes, skin the colour of Chai.” She’s struck, caught, and curious. As a result, her love for the Sensibilité singer melts. She begins to love herself, her imperfect parents, and her ancestral roots, along with what her heritage represents within a multilingual, politically and culturally separated Quebec. Her identity and good fortune are grounded in the conscious choices she makes to marry an Irish man, raise two beautiful daughters, and cultivate a relationship with the “lovely, tormented Mélanie,” now starting to find her own way home after her origins-journey to Vietnam.
I found the novels of Brewer, Zier-Vogel, and Anand fresh and invigorating, with superb characters pursuing unique journeys that I followed to their resolutions. Each character’s life is told through an objective third-person narration. Life’s meaning is achieved for the filmmaker, visual artist, and writer liberated by acts at once harmful and vastly freeing. Rani’s freedom winds through the confines of childhood and adolescence to a family of mature adulthood. The realism of Grace’s misfortunes and mistakes are at once enlightening and emancipatory when coupled with the inspiration of a woman who broke through traditional social boundaries. These three books, representative of the recent works published by Book*hug Press, are songs to the intricacies and complexities of daily living. The stories they shape are subjects fit for art.
These three books, representative of the recent works published by Book*hug Press, are songs to the intricacies and complexities of daily living. The stories they shape are subjects fit for art.