I suspect at some level, I was blocked because I didn't really know quite what to say about it. I'm sure I'll still do only a marginal job of it, and I may come back around later to clean the review up a bit more. This blog has quite a bit of information about John Lavery's writing career (he came to writing quite late), as well as the fact that Sandra Beck was his only novel, along with two short story collections. He died of cancer at the age of 62, and concerns about cancer are rife in Sandra Beck. I will warn you that the interview with Lavery embedded in the blog do contain SPOILERS.
As does the rest of this review (SPOILERS ahead).
I'm not sure if it should really count as a spoiler if the back cover blurb gives away a major plot point, but so be it. Sandra Beck is by all (or at least most) accounts a pretty incredible mother, wife, musician and manager at the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. And then people need to deal with the sudden loss of her out of their lives. Indeed, she is only a very shadowy figure in the first large chunk of this novel, which focuses on Sandra's daughter, Josee, but she is clearly not dead. Quite a bit of this chapter involves Josee moving between English and French, with her teachers and classmates and so forth. She has the general spirit, if not quite the anarchic impulse or brattiness of Raymond Queneu's Zazie, so in that sense it did feel like a bit of a retread. I also really struggled reading about Josee having sexual relations with "Uncle" Danilo, who was the clarinetist in the orchestra. There are lines I just don't even like to read about being crossed, and this went too far for me and certainly spoiled this chapter.
I thought in general, this would be a little bit like the prismatic view of a missing (or in this case dead) person, like Jack Fuller's The Best of Jackson Payne, first getting Josee to reflect on her mother and then get Sandra's husband's recollections and then some of the musicians to chime in. But it wasn't like that at all, aside from the fact that we never really get a sense of Sandra's interior life (a bit odd for a book named after her...). As I mentioned Sandra is alive throughout Josee's chapter. There was sort of a cloud of gloom hanging over P.F. Bastarache or some sort of postmodern finger of God, but then in the end it was sort of explained that this was his happiness gone up in smoke (again, a terrible paraphrase) as he forced himself to think about the fact that she was dead, whereas she is only occasionally in his memory throughout this stretch of the book (possibly because it is simply too painful to think about her). The vast majority of the book (the sections from P.F. Bastarache's perspective) is almost entirely about him dealing with a police brutality case. (No question this would feel even more relevant today, but it still has very little to do with Sandra Beck, the namesake of the book after all.)
To add even more to the confusion there is a short story embedded after the novel ends which is a flashback of Sandra and P.F. Bastarche visiting Josee in Bolivia (she apparently went down there after graduating from high school).
I think this is a book that either wasn't as clever as it thought it was or it was in fact too clever for me and I simply didn't appreciate it. That said, it is a reasonably good example of the Canadian postmodern novel, and if that is your thing, then you probably do want to check out Sandra Beck.
No comments:
Post a Comment