Cereus Blooms at Night, by Shani Mootoo

More often that not, I pick the next book I’ll read on a whim, which generally works out pretty well. As I started Cereus Blooms at Night, I felt that I’d made the wrong decision, yet it’s a testament to the power of this formidable book that I quickly changed my mind. Content wise, it’s reminiscent of The God of Small Things – a story of love, childhood trauma, transgression, lost voices and tragic poetry.

When Cereus Blooms at Night opens, we meet Tyler, a gay male nurse in Trinidad (or a country quite like it) who, disliked by his coworkers, receives the assignment no one wants – caring for the town’s legendary crazy woman, Mala Ramchandin, who was recently tried for murder. Mala doesn’t speak, just emulates noises from the natural world, and seems no longer civilized. Tyler is captivated by the mystery of how she became this way, and as he gently helps Mala reconnect with the human world, the reader is privy to bits and pieces of Mala’s story.

This dark, multi-generational story is perhaps above all one of boundaries – some crossed, some lost – but none to be ignored. The story begins with Chandin Ramchandin, Mala’s Trinidadian father, who falls in love with Reverend’s white daughter, Lavinia,  who is supposedly like a sister to him. Yet for the Reverend, race is a major boundary, though he insists he objects rather to the Chandin’s “incestuous” attraction (some rather dark foreshadowing here). When Chandin hears Lavinia is engaged to be married to someone else from the Shivering Northern Wetlands (England, or somewhere like it), he proposes to Lavinia’s best friend, Sarah, a local woman.

After Sarah bears Mala and Asha, Lavinia returns from the Shivering Northern Wetlands, unmarried and as it turns out, not in love with Chandin, but with Sarah. And so there is to be an interracial match after all, one far more forbidden than the Reverend could have imagined. Yet despite inklings that something is not right, Mala and Asha marvel at the womens’ affection and are just as besotted with their aunt as their mother. The foursome decide to leave Chandin, but their departure is interrupted by his unexpected return and the women fleeing for their lives, must leave the girls behind.

After this tragic event, things can only get worse for Mala, whose abusive, alcoholic father eventually turns to her and Asha to satisfy his own lust and desire for control. And so with the violation of the most fundamental of taboos another boundary is crossed – and unlike many of the others, this one leads not to love, but suffering.

Mala, now a woman marked for suffering and tragedy, eventually abandoned by her only friend Ambrose, by her sister Asha and by society which sees her as a tainted woman, is separated from all possible support, all possible love and must turn to nature instead – to its plants and insects, to its natural cycles as her only consolation. She in fact, creates her own boundary, between her childhood self  “Pohpoh” and the wild woman she has become. Since there is no one else to take care of her, she must become the caretaker for her younger, more fragile self.

There is more to the story, but I’ll leave some to be discovered and focus instead on a major question: In a novel where women may love women and women may become men and women who become men may love other men and whites may love blacks and brothers love sisters and fathers desire daughters there are few boundaries that remain.  So how to decide which ones are necessary? It seems the most insurmountable violence of the novel is in fact separation, and consequently, Mootoo seems to suggest that crossing boundaries out of genuine love is permissible.  It may mean ignoring traditional boundaries as to who makes an acceptible life partner, or it may simply mean helping someone, who, like Mala, has crossed too far beyond those boundaries that are necessary (here between sanity and insanity, between loneliness and community).

Like the cereus flower, Mootoo’s language is rich, heady and at times overpowering, but not overwraught. As a first novel (or any novel) Cereus is deserving of all its praise (nominated for the Giller, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize) and I can’t wait to read Mootoo’s newer books to see how this young author has blossomed.

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Fruit, by Brian Francis

I think the world would be a lot better off if we all had truth-telling nipples. Sure, there’d probably be a national masking-tape shortage, but we’d get by with the help of those two sage advisers. But if we can’t all have talking nipples, the next best thing is to read a unflinchingly honest book about a boy who does. Fruit is the story of Peter Paddington and overweight 13-year-old from Sarnia, Ontario, who is dismayed to discover that his nipples have popped out.  It’s bad enough that they look like cherries, but they also whisper things Peter may not be ready to face.

Francis remembers seems to remember exactly what it’s like to be a 13 year old, and provides all the details that give the book its disarming authenticity. Whether it’s the girls in the schoolyard who categorize their stickers by scent, the Slut girls who are popular because they let the Bangers (metalheads) finger them at recess, or the ugly girl who even someone as unpopular as Peter doesn’t want to be seen with – the cast of characters are all-too familiar. So are the interactions between Peter’s family – his self-important sisters who bicker incessantly, his smothering mother who makes Peter wear a whistle around his neck when he goes out in public, or his patient, but withdrawn father.

Peter’s deluded idealism (he will be thin, popular, athletic and have a boy friend, rather than a boyfriend, in grade 9) is perhaps what makes him most endearing – despite the continual humiliations of being 13 and unpopular (volunteering in the library at recess, being bullied, eating lunches with mom and I Love Lucy), Peter is hopeful that things can change for him and those around him.  Take his list to become a new and improved Peter Paddington:

1) Lose weight.
2) Buy more clothes.
3) Learn how to play sports.
4) Try to look Mr. Hanlan in the eye.
5) Get a boy friend.
6) Smile more.
7) Be vague.
8) Get tanned.
9) Act confident.
10) Lose weight.
And here I was , almost a year later and I hadn’t managed to do one thing on the list. In fact, the list only got bigger. I grabbed a pen.
11) Get normal nipples.

Perhaps the most touching moment in the book is when Peter realizes that he is cut from the same cloth as his ugly, bed-wetting neighbour Daniela – hopelessly unpopular, but still courageous people with the potential to change. They can change some things (Peter can lose weight, Daniela can get a real job), but there are some things not even the intervention of the Virgin Mary can help…

The one thing that Peter can’t change is that no matter how much he wants to (not that his nipples will let him ignore it) – his search for a boy friend is really a search for a boyfriend. Though Peter’s battle with his emerging homosexuality is one thing perhaps I can’t identify with, I found it genuinely touching to share Peter’s tentative forays into same-sex attraction and alternate lifestyles: Bedtime Movies (PG fantasies about the men in his life with the potential to go PG-13), his diligent monitoring of the men’s underwear fashions in the Sears catalogue, and his joyous private drag performance as Olivia Newton John in his living room. Peter knows that he shouldn’t enjoy these things the way he does, but as the novel progresses he starts to acknowledge that maybe his nipples speak the truth. There is hope that maybe one day he won’t have to tape them up.

Fruit is a quick and entertaining read, and whether straight or queer, fat or thin, boy or girl, is sure to provide some laughs and shivers of recognition, for above all this is a novel about that overwhelming desire for acceptance that dominates our teen years, but never fully leaves most of us.  So in true Peter Paddington style, here’s my mental telepathy message to you: “Read this book and discover your inner Fruit.”

Fruit is a CBC Canada Reads pick for 2009. You can find out more about it on the Canada Reads website, the Fruit site, or at ECW’s website, . Fruit will be championed by author Jen Sookfong Lee, whose first novel, The End of East, I’ve also reviewed.

As a fun bonus, listen to Brian read excerpts of Fruit – it’s guaranteed to make you smile.

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A History of Forgetting, by Caroline Adderson

“The first thing she learned working at Vitae was about history: that the present rests upon layers of the past, but is a stratum so unstable, so shot with fault lines, that now and then the then rears up and knocks down the now.”

Often, when I’m choosing a book to read, I stand in front of my bookcase and pull possible titles. Usually there is one that just feels right. In this case, it took me by surprise, as did the story itself. A History of Forgetting has two protagonists: 1) Malcolm, a hairdresser who is dealing with his partner’s worsening Alzheimer’s and 2) Alison, the salon receptionist, and the story’s ingenue. Both are shaken by a brutal event that leaves Alison diving into the history of the Holocaust, and Malcolm even more unable to recover from the loss of his lover. Both are plagued by remembering what others would rather forget – for Malcolm it is personal history, and for Alison, social history, which all of the sudden, has become personal. This painful situation is laced with such love and hate that neither can adjust to normal life and so they take a pilgrimage to Auschwitz together.

Adderson’s language is compelling and poetic without ostentation. I read this book in two days, charmed by the wonderful relationship between Malcolm and Denis, horrified by the cruelties inspired by hatred, saddened by our obligation to remember. This book is a fantastic illustration of what I would have explored in my never-written phd thesis: that fiction is as an effective a vehicle for history as so called “historical” writing, indeed more effective, permitting multiple perspectives and forcing us to participate imaginatively and emotionally in the past.

The only part of the book which I felt didn’t work was the intrusions of strangers linked by the use of second person. While I understand the need to draw the reader into the story, Adderson’s prose is quite sufficient to the task. Each of these passages is heralded by foreign signs, here signposts of a history we can’t quite understand as we journey back. Thus Adderson forces the reader back outside, away from intimacy with the characters, staring at the incomprehensible actions of others – in the present and in the past. For this is the most dangerous thing of all – to forget the personal, to generalize, to fall prey to History and forget the “histories”. Even as the “you” draws us into the story, it makes us spectators, complicit in the violence of inaction and lack of empathy. Unfortunately, the heartbreakingly beautiful final scene of the novel is somewhat overshadowed by one of these heavy handed interludes. But at the risk of ending on a similarly unsatisfactory note when the novel was for the most part well-wrought and moving, let me leave you with a piece of Adderson’s beautifully rendered prose that contains what I think is the novel’s principle message. [Looking at a case of leftover shoes in Auschwitz]:

“The shoes were once all colours – here a red slipper, there a white Cuban heel – but only just. Most are now a near-uniform lustreless brown. Gradually, they have blended together into a mass, indistinguishable and, again, impersonal. They are becoming, once again, abstract. The shoes are fading as memory is fading, melding as they disintegrate…How to put ourselves into these shoes, when these shoes no longer exist?”

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