Elitism, at what cost? (Upper East Side, Manhattan, present-day): New York City is a state of mind.

It’s the state of minds of seven Mommy characters (professionals, singles, SAHMs/stay-at-homes) that drive Elizabeth Topp’s acutely perceptive second novel, City People.

Turning the reader into a psychological detective, you’ll find yourself combing the electric prose for the subtler emotional clues that lurk beneath the façade of upper-class perfectionism – looking the part, hiding truths, ignoring, repressing, denying them – all for the all-mighty, insanely competitive, coveted world of private school admissions as the ticket to a guaranteed future of “wealth, power, prestige” when one of the Mommies commits suicide, leaving her two young children, ages five and two, behind, along with her husband.

Two plot points, one unfolding infecting the other. Some Moms more than others. Their reactions – or not – reveal their pasts, secrets, agendas.

The fact that Susan was a psychologist emphasizes how difficult it can be to recognize the warning signs that someone you know is in crisis.

Susan’s husband, aware of his wife’s history of mental illness, isn’t the focus. It’s the other six women through proximity of their preschool age children attending the same elite private school, and all competing for a slot for their child to be admitted into the next step in climbing the educational ladder of privilege: entry into one of the most elite K-12 private schools in New York City. Fictionally named Kent; in real life The Dalton School where Topp graduated from. 

Topp has taken to heart the write-what-you- know canon. Using it deliciously, voyeuristically to give us an inside scoop into a rarified world most of us haven’t been privy to. She’s lived on the Upper East Side her entire life in the same pre-war apartment, and, as noted, draws from her real-life experiences of attending The Dalton School that she projects onto Vic, who thinks it’s the most elitist school in the world. Depending on which rankings you look at, it’s in the top tier in New York City. Topp through Vic makes it clear the school has changed a lot since she went there. The reason Kent seems inspired by Dalton and not another top NYC private school is inclusion of its “anti-racist curriculum.” Founded in the early 1900s on progressive values of Equity and Diversity, today it boasts its inclusiveness. Tuition costs of over $61,000 a year; “over 20%” receive financial aid.

One of the truths made clear early on is that these women weren’t really friends with Susan, even Vic who thought she was. Readers who are mothers can relate to how they may or may not have become friends with their children’s school playmates. For two of the mothers – high-powered corporate types and women of color, race and ethnicity become an issue. One of the many reasons Topp’s exposé reveals an underbelly of resentment, anger, and rage despite acting like all is well.

All is definitely not well. How could it be when Susan tells us in a one-page prologue she’s finally at peace having decided her children will be better off without her? How does someone come to conclude they’re a burden to their children? It’s one of the signs of suicide, shown in this video by a suicide prevention group, bethe1.com, Topp recommends, among other resources: 

The skillful unraveling begins with Vic, who’s shocked to hear Susan’s died. The next Mom’s voice is Kara, who barely knew Susan and yet she immediately grasps the unstated cause of death. Why doesn’t Vic? Topp silences her voice for a while, cleverly using the structure of her rotating-character-voices novel to reflect why. When Viv realizes Kara was right from the start, she must confront how good a friend was she? Her self-doubt expands, deepens to the core of her identity. How could a four-time novelist fail at the very thing she prides herself on: understanding characters?

Topp’s uncanny juggling of the psyches of seven women is another strength. Perhaps she became a pro at multi-tasking through her other occupation as a personal assistant to one of the city’s major philanthropists. Aren’t you dying-to-know more about another opaque world that inspired her debut novel, Perfectly Impossible? Count me in as I rushed to buy a copy. Yes, City People is that stirring.

Topp could be a psychologist. Better yet, she’s an incisive social and cultural commentator, astutely attuned to people’s hidden emotions.

An interesting, realistic element – a transit strike – makes its way through these women’s stories, impacting how they handle the madness of the private school admissions process when one of their group has perhaps warned them in a horrific way:

  • Vic: the so-called good friend. Struggling with writer’s block and how she’d pay for Kent, if her daughter was accepted since she’s separated and faking that she doesn’t need any help.
  • Kara: the outsider from the Midwest pretending to be one of them. For the hoops she jumps through, the obsession she descends into, the aloneness she’s left to deal with over three-crazed weeks, she’s the character you’ll likely empathize with the most.
  • Chandice: the former corporate lawyer going through a medical crisis. Hits the right buttons when it comes to being a strong Black women who feels patronized by and not sold on Kent’s diversity commitment. Recent race eruptions at The Dalton School add fuel to controversial fictional realities.
  • Amy: the mysteriously guarded single mother. With family ties to Taiwan, she has a lot at stake to prove herself despite the incredible wealth she already has.
  • Penelope: the most scrupulous. Has more “access to privileged information” than the others, which we don’t appreciate until we do. Addicted to an anti-anxiety drug enabling her to project perfect coolness along with her perfectly put together designer outfits.
  • Bhavana: has made a career on beauty. From India, she’s taken her mother’s village impoverishment to the ultimate extreme, wanting the “best of everything.” Long-term user of people for personal gain.

Provocative, City People leaves you asking more questions than you started with.

Do you have a special friend? Does she/he pick up on your moods, show they care? Do you consider yourself a good friend?

Do you know or wonder what it’s like to be a Mom always on edge, always assuming “worst-case scenarios” that keep you in a constant state of depleting, free-floating anxiety?

Do you believe a private school education is superior to a public one? If yes, would you go so far as to shelve your true self, lose your identity, so your child could join the elitists? How do you think that might gnaw at your state of mind?

“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger,” writes award-winning writer, essayist, feminist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her 2021 Notes on Grief.

How ungentle the lives of these seven women are. Desperate to have it all, tearing them down. Was it worth it? Topp’s message.

Lorraine

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A love letter to the majestic beauty and lifegiving powers of the ocean world (Pembrokeshire, South West Wales, and sailing the North, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Celtic, Caribbean seas; mid-2010s to present): If it only takes 120 minutes a week for humans to feel the benefits of being in Nature, what does that tell us about Welsh-born Hannah Stowe who says, “There was never a time when I did not know the sea”?

For Stowe, who grew up in a “cottage by the sea,” enveloped on three sides by the waters of St. Bride’s Bay that empties into the Celtic Sea and the English Channel, she found “solace,” “energy,” and “always felt safe.”

Strumble Head, Pembrokeshire
By Manfred Heyde [CC BY-SA 3.0]
via Wikimedia Commons

Tucked away on a secluded tip of the southwestern coast of Wales, lulled by a “lullaby” of “gentle worlds,” Hannah Stowe learned to swim when she learned to walk. Fascinated by “celestial light” and the “beacon, of Strumble Head Lighthouse,” she climbed treetops to get better views of the seascape, bicycled to the rocky beaches where she explored coves, tidal pools, eyed sea birds, seals, dolphins, snorkeled, surfed, and became “obsessed” with walking the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path, considered one of the most beautiful walking paths in the world. 

For Stowe, this meant “there was a current inside me” “as natural and as essential as the act of breathing.”

For us, it means Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea is a captivating, coming-of-age story of a sea observer, navigator, researcher who became a marine biologist offering us an authentic voice for the sea. It also means you’ll be treated to some of the most exquisite nature writing, awakening and refreshing us to ocean worlds we may get glimpses of but haven’t experienced in the immersive, intensive way Stowe has.

Stowe’s story highlights the growing body of research and a movement called Ecopsychology, which provides scientific evidence on the connections between our physical and mental health. Transporting us to how she’s felt and what she’s learned over her twenty-something years “being out there in the elements” that “creates an entirely different state of mind.”

More expansively, the memoir makes the case for how our health is affected by the health of our waters, Stowe having witnessed the human impact of commercial exploitation and climate change on the health of the marine animals who depend on them.

A story that’s painted with vivid imagery by an author who, like her mother, is also a painter. Each chapter is introduced presumably by one of Stowe’s charcoal sketches of the animals you’ll learn about. If it weren’t for the beauty of the prose, you could almost tell this story through images. Then again, if it weren’t for enchanted prose those images would not be painted for you at all or as deeply. 

That’s why there’s six chapters named for seabirds and sea mammals – giant, large, and small: Fire Crow (the Cornish Chough), Sperm Whale, Wandering Albatross, Humpback Whale, Shearwater, and Barnacles.

Only one chapter, Humans, veers dramatically different, although the lure of the sea is fundamental to Stowe’s recovery, healing. Riding a wave bigger than she could tackle, she suffered a serious accident, leaving her in excruciating nerve pain, two surgeries, and a lifetime of adjusting to knowing her limits when they seemed limitless. In spite of it all, when Stowe could get out of bed she returned to her university science studies and later bought her first sailboat she aptly renamed Brave.

Comb Jellyfish
By The Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk
[CC BY-ND 2.0] via Flickr

If you’ve been raised as a city slicker, you might find Stowe’s remote UK homeplace terribly lonely rather the sustenance she derives from natural landscapes with endless horizons and stunning wildlife, including sightings of majestic sea creatures and discovering smaller delights.

There’s too many seabirds to list. To give you a sense of an impressive one, here’s a description of the Manx Shearwater:

“Elegant of wing, making a long gliding journey north from South America, up the eastern seaboard, following the Gulf Stream, to take up residence in burrow nests on Skomer, Ramsey, and Skokholm” (islands in Wales where the world’s majority breed).

Manx Shearwater chick, Skokholm
By Hugh Venables [CC BY-SA 2.0]

The memoir, then, is a mix of the personal with the science, ecology, history, and the living, breeding, birthing, nurturing conditions of an amazing winged creature known for its ability to migrate thousands of miles from their homes.

Stowe’s prose is vibrant, tingling with an itch to explore seas around the world beyond the “western edge of Britain, the edge of my world.” Even if you’re not a sailor, you’ll relate to how “bonds form quickly at sea, when “you are trusting each other [sailmate(s)] with your life.” 

The first ocean going vessel discussed is the Valiant 40, a research vessel Stowe volunteered to assist on led by Professor Hal Whitehead, a global expert on cetaceans – whales, dolphins, porpoises. Meeting his then doctoral student Laura Feyrer inspired her career direction. Now we see the author as a strong feminist voice rising above male-dominated traditions when it comes to the sea who had to “work twice as hard for half the opportunity. You prove everything, and prove it ten times again.” Loved the irony when Stowe points out boats are named after women!

It was on this expedition that Stowe, manning the deck in the dark of the night, “felt a deep presence” of an “ocean giant.” Awe, in hearing a sperm whale’s eerie whale songs. “The loudest single animal in the ocean” shows us the importance of sounds, not just sightings.

The whale is a persuasive example of environmental activism making a huge difference as these giants almost became extinct in Antarctica in the mid-sixties. Boycotts, quotas, bans, and legislation made it illegal to kill whales for commercial reasons, though a few countries still do.

Wandering Albatross
By 3HEADEDDOG [CC BY-SA 3.0]
via Wikimedia Commons

Stowe’s captivating journey continues to enlighten and carry us to other sea creatures, such as the Wandering Albatross, a “bird of legend” known for the “mastery of its force” flying through fierce winds, requiring both parents to switch turns to care for their young.

And then, “Sometimes, something is just beautiful. You don’t know why, it just is, and the world is better for the fact that it exists,” Stowe writes. The literary world is better for her story of the sea. She hopes, so will the health and future of the seas.

Lorraine

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Humanizing the dehumanization of asylum seekers (US-Mexico borders, especially Tijuana-San Diego 2016-2019 immigration activist experiences): What does it feel like to hold someone’s life in your hands?

In 2016, when Mexican-American Alejandra Oliva volunteered to use her bilingual translation skills to help Spanish-speaking asylum seekers cross into America “the right way” as “enshrined in the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” she felt her activist work “a matter of life or death.”

The dream of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration is to change minds, even a little, on the humanitarian crisis on our southern borders. What’s remarkable about this eloquent, piercing, candid, poignant memoir – a personal story embedded with the stories of seekers of freedom from oppression, torture, death – is Oliva’s inner strength despite becoming “wrapped up in a grief for a world I thought existed but doesn’t; for a country I feel still has to be good but isn’t at all. I am horrified by my own safety and comfort; I am in danger of flying apart at any moment.”

Whatever you think of Oliva’s razor-sharp critique of our immigration system – she coming from a position that it’s “fundamentally unjust” – you have to admire the courage it takes to tell it like it is based on real experiences on a hot button issue Americans have hard-core opinions about. She clear-eyed that:

“Fixing the immigration system means fixing everything else in this country that is tired of living up to its promises or never did, means transforming this country, and the reach it has across the world, into one that does not take resources – including people – rapaciously for capital while leaving those it considers disposable by the wayside. Any work you do to improve the world is work that can be done to improve it for everyone.”

Oliva tells us her last name means “a call to watch over and guard peace.” It’s hard not to be affected by Rivermouth IF you keep an open mind to this highly controversial issue. Perhaps approach it like sitting in the jury box having sworn you can when presented with the evidence?

How do you translate someone’s trauma and fears into a mere 140 words permissible on the form an immigration judge uses to decide whether an asylum seeker can stay in America or be deported? Should we really be shocked how badly the odds are stacked against them? (80% of immigrants we’re told are sent back to their country of origin.) Even pulling out all the stops, seen as applying a richly expanded, interdisciplinary approach to our concept of translators of the “written word,” the memoirist still feels “utter powerlessness” of the “bureaucratic violence” (a lawyer’s words) perpetuated on human rights victims.

Oliva feels gratitude she can use her bilingualism for social justice. Preparing immigrants for the all-mighty Credible Fears Interview during the “worst moments in their lives,” perhaps more than anything she brings to bear is an act of the Faith in the subtitle. You may assume that’s the secret to her fortitude. You’d be right and wrong. She admits to a “complicated relationship” with Christianity, although she was a student in divinity school who stopped to do G0d’s work (now graduated). “The closest I’ve come to finding God is in the rivers.”

Rivermouth is a book with an aching soul. Rather, many aching souls in “deep grief.”

Trained by a social justice activist group in NYC, the New Sanctuary Coalition, Oliva calls asylum seekers “friend.” Her ability to walk in someone else’s shoes gives new meaning to the definition of empathy. Writing out of pain and love, she’s the best friend an asylum seeker can have when she may be the only person standing by his/her side in the courtroom. How cruel the legal seeker of “a better life” is locked up in abysmal detention centers and doesn’t even have the money to make urgent calls looking for a pro bono attorney to defend their life is worth saving.

The do-or-die form cited above is known in immigration circles as I-589: Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal. Chilling how even the word removal conjures up treating humans as trash.

This manifesto bears witness to horrific stories of migrants, particularly from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and South America, who wait endlessly in long lines hoping to hear their names called on a mystifying list so they can cross the border and a “border river” that nurtures lives or destroys them: the Rio Grande River that runs nearly 2,000 miles flowing into our southern borders. The focus is on the Western border between Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California; Oliva’s parents came from Mexico into Texas.

The biggest, delightful surprise is learning how much grander translation is than we thought. Language, an overriding theme. Translation theory and practice is seen as a holistic, humanistic view of what it means when you’re translating in the real, spoken world, not the literary one. Drawing on inspiration and guidance from literature, poetry, art, philosophy, history, mythology, biblical references, psychology, body language, and political/social/cultural insight, we’re presented with an intelligent, vivid, disturbing, complex discussion that lets us see what “in-between” people are willing to do when they “start walking across a continent.” What must it feel like to suffer a “both-and-none identity crisis”?

Spanish is the language of “tenderness” spoken at Oliva’s home with her family and friends, notably when lingering after dinnertime in the Spanish tradition of “sobremesa” (English translation roughly “over the table”); English, the language of education and cultural assimilation.

“Spanish speakers of the United States have little in common as a group” despite so many of us thinking they’re homogenous. “They are of different races, religions, nationalities, political alignments, economic classes, immigration statuses.” What they do have in common is a “shared language and the shared misfortune of proximity to a world superpower.”

It’s this shared language that acts as a “bridge” enabling Oliva to do the heroic work she describes – even more than being a translator and interpreter. She’s a social worker, counselor, therapist too. And like the workers in those professions, she has the emotional scars to prove it. Which is why she doesn’t come across as looking down on us or preachy. Especially when you learn why she became personally invested. Could no longer bear to “look away.” Her plea: “Don’t Look Away.”

Rivermouth is not a scathing partisan rebuke. While it begins in the 2016/2017 era when a Republican President “systematically dismantled” our immigration system, Oliva is an equal opportunity critic. Words aren’t minced for Democratic presidents either, nor America’s historic role in stirring up the immigration crisis in Central and Latin America. This is an American critique, not a polarized one.

Expect more Spanish words than usual. Many translated in a sentence or more afterwards so you can figure out enough of the meaning not to disturb the flow. A couple of chapters are loaded with Spanish conversations you may or may not want to stop to google. You’ll get the gist. Search, you’ll easily find the English translation. Like everything else in this book, it’s intentional. To show how language is a critical tool for feeling welcomed or excluded.

The “real work” turned out to be “very different than what I expected,” Oliva says. You’ll feel the same about this searing, award-winning read that calls upon us “to step into the river.”

Lorraine

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Why Andy Warhol, ultra-avant-garde pop culture artist, was a lightning force for vulnerable girls during a historically revolutionary era, and why it matters (NYC, 1966 to 2010): “Do you ever feel like no one is listening to you?” asks the aching voice of Mae, narrator of this hypnotic, edgy coming-of-age debut. Even the title announces Irish writer Nicole Flattery’s contradictory story of a young woman’s craving to remake her unloved self into something special.

The bulk of this fictionalized historical retrospective takes place inside the underground nerve center of sensationalism and extremism at Andy Warhol’s NYC’s art studio during the late 60s, known as The Factory.

Mae was a profoundly lost soul when at seventeen she landed a job inside Warhol’s feverish sanctum as an “invisible” typist transcribing audiotapes (alongside a second typist, Shelley) from sexually-charged, stream-of-consciousness conversations the radical artist had a penchant for recording, and they were aware of its publishing significance. In 1968, Grove Press released a: A Novel by the artist. 

Bursting with complex and contrary emotions, unsettling frankness, insightfulness, and discomforting voyeurism, Flattery shows us that Warhol didn’t just push boundaries but had no limits, particularly when it came to what others held sacred, private instead of used for public consummation and commercialism. Warhol was openly gay, which gave his queer sensual work authenticity and a rawness that created an aura about him.

Nicknamed Drella, a contradictory cross between Dracula and Cinderella, raises one of the novel’s many provocative questions: To what extent was Warhol a groundbreaking artist or a brilliant marketer to make himself famous?

Questions pour out of us similar to the gush of emotions provoked by this fantastical novel. What is about our culture that’s so obsessed with celebrity no matter how far-out? What defines a great artist?

Andy Warhol wasn’t “just an influential; he created a new genre of contemporary art – pop art.” Originality, whether your taste or not, separates the greats.

The focus is really on Mae, who gets caught up in the cultish fanaticism for Warhol. Flattery shows us why. Mae calls him “he,” only twice cites Warhol’s name, giving the artist and her story a surreal quality.

Mae is thirty-five and sixty years old when she’s reflecting on those scintillating and “disorienting, shattering” Warhol years from 1966 to 1968. An extraordinarily lonesome and rebellious time in her life when she became energized feeling part of something special having never felt part of anything before.

The novel is not for the faint of heart. Its shock value is a wake-up call as to why vulnerable girls overwhelmed by a profound sense of aloneness/detachment/alienation, powerlessness, and ennui can be attracted to wildly unorthodox, charismatic leaders. 

Andy Warhol Museum
By Daderot [Public domain]
via Wikimedia Commons

Mae, from a broken family, justified her behaviors when “an entire city was tuned into a different frequency: young, wild, open to experimentation.” Flattery’s gutsy prose is a marvel of seduction. Seductive prose mimicking seductive Warhol. “What sort of pathologies did I possess that allowed” that? Mae asks.

Older Mae examines those “self-mythologizing” years when “we hurtled through two decades like falling from a high-window,” echoing how the reader feels hurtling through this novel and wondering why it was so gripping when there’s plenty to disturb? One way to think about the reading experience is to compare it to how torn you feel driving by a bad car accident, hearing the sirens, knowing you should not turn to stare because it’ll be disturbing and voyeuristic, and yet you do.

The sixties counterculturists were bold, principled, and influential activists who stood up to America’s denial of civil rights, gay rights, feminist rights. America is conflicted like Mae split between fighting for those freedoms, while others are working to deny them.

Warhol has an entire museum dedicated to evolving views and scholarship on his multi-talents – iconic psychedelic-colored silkscreen printmaking of the famous and the ordinary; painting; documentary filmmaking; and writing.

Mae (and Shelley) represent Warhol’s book world, and there’s a haunting scene when the two sit in a movie theater for three+ hours glued to his jarring film The Chelsea Girls.

Two strange, intense love/hate female friendships contribute to the contrariness of emotions. One, Mae’s only friend in high school, Maud, who became toxic for her, and Shelley, a runaway like Mae. She gets under Mae’s, and our, skin. What’s she hiding? She won’t tell Mae where she’s from, who her parents are, what brought her to the city, whereas Mae confides in her. She keeps telling Mae she’s her only friend, but you’ll wonder about that observing their competitive natures and the drama that ensues.

Despite not being acknowledged for their typists’ role in putting together Warhol’s novel, Mae doesn’t care for a longtime. The typewriter became her best friend not just for eight hours a day but to the exclusion of almost everything else back then. She found purpose, belonging even though sometimes she was “shocked by what I saw.” But she rationalized Warhol’s art as “exhibitionist” not “exploitative.” What will you think?

Why were Mae (and Shelley) able to listen so intently to tapes filled with profanity, coarseness, sexual eroticism when others couldn’t bear to? They’re fictionalized characters, inspired by the true story of typists who refused and others who didn’t. Voices heard on the tapes and in the studio are also drawn from some real people: Ondine, the dominant voice on the audiotapes was an actor called The Pope. Brigid, referred to as The Duchess, was artist Brigid Berlin. Edie, model and actress, was Edie Sedgwick.

Edie Sedgwick
By Laura Loveday [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0] via Flickr

Opening in 2010 with an insightful tale of a rare occasion when Mae’s mother is reading a book to her young daughter about a farm with animals, leading us to believe at first it’s a children’s book. Soon after you’ll figure out its Animal Farm by George Orwell, the experimental classic when Mae singles out the sheep that “took on existential qualities.” Is Flattery suggesting Mae and Warhol offer different viewpoints on the meaning or meaninglessness of life?

Mae’s family shows us how the breakdown of a nuclear family can dangerously affect a child’s persona and emotions. She can’t remember when her alcoholic mother gave her any “affection.” Worn down by life, a waitress paid low wages, eking by in a city that can make or break you. What’s she’s taught Mae is how hard, unfair, and undervalued life can be. No father in this picture. A boyfriend, Mikey, who moved in when Mae was eight. He comes and goes, while we keep asking why he returns? Their apartment is dismal, “characterless,” and her mother destroyed him he says like Mae does. Mae warms to him since he’s the only one paying any attention to her. We like him more than any of the other characters for that.

The bigger question is how likeable is the narrator? Like everything else, we’re betwixt-and-between about her. She cries out to us, but we don’t like what she does to herself. How reliable is she when she tells us she “strived for pleasantness in all things” yet repeatedly does unpleasant things?

Mae recognizes how her “sensational impulses” disappeared when she “stepped out into the real world.” Is that why Nothing Special lures us into her hallucinatory world? Hers is “quiet aggression” whereas ours is much louder.

Lorraine

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The existential scars of oppression and the wellsprings of activism and change in modern Ukraine (Lviv, Kyiv, & Uzhhorod, western Carpathian region; 1990s): Ivan and Phoebe isn’t an easy read. But it’s an important one.

A read to remember, not to forget. Soulfully aimed at, “hoping that the world will hear us and gasp at the beauty and the sadness” – the poetic words of awards-winning Ukrainian writer/poet/scholar Oksana Lutsyshyna from one of her poems.

What Ivan and Phoebe does is challenge us, makes us think. Makes us want to understand. Translated books are more difficult, as the history, culture, traditions, language are unfamiliar to us. All the more reason to read this no-holds barred examination of a country besieged by horrific wars, oppression, human rights denials, poverty and economic insecurity – yet today leads the world fighting for Democracy.

Where does this remarkable resoluteness, resistance come from? “What kind of people were these dissidents that neither prisons nor labor camps could break them?” What about those traumatized? The novel is a powerful study of contradictions. Nothing is straightforward nor guaranteed.

Viewed through the lens of Ukraine’s long and complex history, how does a young marriage survive when it seems doomed from the start?

If Ivan doesn’t even know his own country’s history, how much do we know?

Ukraine’s history matters, but you don’t have to google as many references as I did (how can a reviewer share her thoughts without doing her best to understand?) to viscerally feel the tensions, conflicts, themes. Stunning prose unlocks the door for entering and becoming immersed. You won’t want to turn away, even if you wish there was more beauty than sadness. 

The novel’s structure sets up the darkness in store, with a “pinprick of light”: Part I, “The Gloaming,” Part II, “Revolution,” Part III, “The Choir,” striving to reform/transform when there’s so much “leftover from the Soviet days.”

Lutsyshyna is also a professor of Ukrainian Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas, in Austin. Citing Ukrainian poets and writers, and others from elsewhere, she brings unexpected pleasure in elevating the arts, predominately literature and poetry. For persecuted people, inspiration and hope in seeing life can be better and offer ways to endure.

Taras Shevchenko
Photo by Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada [CC BY-SA 2.0]
via Wikimedia Commons

Ivan and Phoebe won the prestigious UNESCO City of Lviv Literature Award and the Taras Shevchenko National Literature Prize, honoring the Father of Ukrainian Modern Literature whose influence spread around the globe.

Symbolism abounds. While all reviews are interpretations, Ivan and Phoebe stretches the imagination. This one warrants a caveat: you may see things differently.

The striking cover seems to capture the plot’s trajectory of trying to bridge the gap between the Old and the New – from Soviet rule until 1990 to Ukraine becoming an independent country in 1991. The design seems to depict the transition. Embroidery, an example of Ukraine’s traditional craftsmanship, connecting to the importance of goats, from conventional goat farming to entrepreneurialism (making profitable goat cheese.) Ivan’s brother-in-law, Styopa, represents this spirit and resourcefulness. Or in the quoted words of Ukrainian dissident/poet/writer Vasyl Stus, Styopa seen as “adjusting and filling-oneself-with-oneself.” Dangers seen in that too, one that shocks.

Why give Ivan and Phoebe equal billing in the title when its Ivan’s voice we predominately hear? Phoebe’s silence – except for two caustic outbursts told in two free verse monologues – signals a feminist perspective defying a woman’s place was to only hold up the home. (Not now, when women are on the frontlines defending Ukraine against Putin’s War.)

About to be married when the novel opens, their marriage is a case study of what goes wrong when love isn’t assured; when parents/society pressure you to become a man (Ivan); when one partner has other aims in life and isn’t given the freedom to pursue them (Phoebe).

The marriage adds another “tectonic” layer to an already stacked tale that digs into the meaning and purpose of life. “Meaninglessness,” “uselessness,” “hopelessness” versus finding meaning, purpose, and hope through rallying against tyranny in a country battling for independence over a century. While the focus is narrowed down to the birth of Ukraine’s modern era in the revolutionary 1990s and the aftermath, it’s still complex and plagued by depravation, corruption, exhaustion, and who’ll have the will to carry on what was begun?

The married couple live under Ivan’s mother’s roof. Margita, hardheaded, dominates. Whatever you think of her, she’s as “immovable” as some of the student protestors Ivan gets mixed up with when studying IT at Polytechnic National University in Lviv. Ivan’s father, a heavy drinker, “flattened by life.” When Ivan wonders, “How does a man choose to remove himself from the world?” he shows he badly lacks self-awareness that expands to Phoebe’s needs. The novel paints a nation’s struggle for identity, Ivan and Phoebe’s too. 

Phoebe’s real name is Maria. Named Phoebe, after Phoebus we’re told, the Greek goddess of poetry. Phoebe yearns to be a poet but Ivan doesn’t understand why homemaking and motherhood wouldn’t satisfy her. Margita has zero use for poetry, as there’s so much work to be done.

Phoebe’s poems hit a nerve with Ivan. Seems to date back to his university days where he met “red-hot” Rose, poet and activist. In Lviv, his best friend/roommate/poet encouraged him to join the hunger strike that grew and spread to Kyiv, culminating in the peaceful Revolution on Granite. Thought to be an energizing force that led to Ukraine’s independence when the Soviet Union collapsed.

After protesting in Lviv, Ivan becomes terrorized by what he believes is a Soviet spy after him, evoking a black-and-white spy chase thriller. “The tension he felt was unhuman, unbearable.” So he flees to his childhood home, doubting he was ever courageous. This is the haunted state of his psyche when he steps into the fraught marriage. 

If you believe “writing and reading are revolutionary acts that can and should change the world,” as Will Evans does, founder of Deep Vellum, the largest indie US publisher of translated books, then you’ll appreciate Nina Murray’s translation. A poetess too, from Lviv, the Cultural Capital. Ivan’s home in Uzhhorod, a small city in the Carpathian Mountains southwest of Lviv, is where the author is from.

By Lencer [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons

Atmospheric prose distinguishes one ancient city from another. Kyiv the beautiful one, with its riverbanks and pedestrian bridge over the Dnieper River (“no other city in Ukraine could boast a waterfront so European, so Parisian!), compared to Lviv, “cavernous, gray, full of spires,” and where “the entire community had developed its own strategies of resistance and survival.”

Parkovy Bridge, Kyiv
By Mstyslav Chernov [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons
Voloshyna Street, Uzhhorod
© Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Margita highlights Ukraine’s great ethnic diversity (100 different nationalities). She’s from Transcarpathia bordering Hungary. Regions are depicted as having different political parties, besides the traditional cultural uniqueness, owing to the historical reshuffling of territories and boundaries. This explains why pálinka (Hungarian vodka), holybtsy (stuffed cabbage) and other dishes flow through Ivan’s home, and why this minority group is looked down upon by those Ivan encounters, who seem to believe Ukrainian-Hungarians may be more susceptible to Soviet/Russian influences.

Citing Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Castaneda’s “psychedelic texts” enlarges the philosophical/existential quality of the novel. Stus’ “The Road of Pain” poetry collection said to speak of the worst kind of mental and physical cruelty (Soviet solitary imprisonment and grueling labor camps) and yet he found the strength to write uplifting poems. “The debris of torment/might give birth to flowers” sums up Ukrainian empowerment.

“Ukrainians know fear. They also know how to overcome it.”

Lorraine

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