Reviews - 12 June 2008
The Rowing Lesson - Ann Landsman
Kwela Books
Review by Jennifer Crocker
Some years ago when Anne Landsman's first book, The Devil's Chimney, came out I fell in love with her ability to write words that were so visceral as to make the reader want to reach out and caress them. She takes us by the hand and leads us into the landscape and story she has created.
In the time since the publication of that book and the arrival of her new novel, The Rowing Lesson, Landsman has lost none of her skill.
This is a story that has a deeply personal slant to it, a story that moves between time and tense to tell a tale about love and ultimately about having to say goodbye.
To give the person who gave you life, permission to leave his.
Betsy has arrived in South Africa; she's pregnant and exhausted from her flight from her home in New York where she makes art.
Her father, Harold a doctor, is lying hooked up to monitors in Groote Schuur Hospital dying.
"There's obviously a lot of my own story in this book," said Landsman when she was in South Africa recently.
Landsman's father was a country general practitioner in Worcester and her knowledge of hospitals and the role of the physician was clearly picked up as she grew up in the shadow of a healer in a small town.
In The Rowing Lesson the father Harold is a complex character and through the clever device of using the second person narrative for his story and allowing it to be told in the first person of her character, Betsy gives the reader a chance to see the story from both sides as it were. It also gave me a strangely seasick feeling at times, almost as if one is being rocked in the boat on the cover.
Water and fluid are important elements in the book, as we meet Harold as a young man rowing while on holiday with his family. Watching from a watery spot at the deathbed of her father, Betsy's child swims in amniotic fluid.
Betsy tells the story of her father's life, how he was a scrawny young man, how he came to decide to become a doctor and travelled away from his home to study. Harold's life as a young student is laid as bare to the reader as are the complex relationship medical students come to have with their cadavers.
Just as Harold as a young man once sliced open a body and saw what was inside a man, Betsy sits in a hospital ward and watches her father disintegrate and reform before her eyes.
She probes the past to make sense of the present in search of a blessing and, perhaps, exoneration, for the myriad complex pains, that area carved into our souls by dint of us being part of families.
When Landsman's father was dying she was pregnant and in America. Unlike Betsy, she did not travel to his bedside, she made the decision to protect the life she was carrying from the dangers of travel and stress: a perfectly valid and sensible choice, and perhaps one that has led her to write with such beauty about a daughter who does stand physically next to her father as he is dying. It was a "gift" denied to Landsman herself and in this book she almost recreates the scene as it might have been if she had been there.
Of course Betsy is not Landsman and Harold is not her father, this is not an autobiography. It is a well-crafted novel, one in which the author places audacious bets on her ability to stretch language to its limits and wins the bet every time.
The Rowing Lesson is a novel that is very South African in its sensibilities and because Harold is Jewish it gives an insight into what it meant to be Jewish in South Africa as a young man in 1938.
There's a sense of both belonging intensely to the community, Harold's father is a shopkeeper; and yet being an outsider, when the Great Trek is re-enacted and a young Harold expresses excitement he is told by his father that the holiday is not theirs.
It's a story about a young man from a small town coming to the big city and meeting a young woman from a sophisticated family and the inevitable fact that he measures himself against them, is to his credit that he comes away from the city with a sense of his own self-worth intact and returns to the world of the small town.
The story of Harold's life is told with a precise attention to detail, the reader can smell that distinctive metal scent of railway carriages, can almost taste the chicken his mother has packed him for the journey.
There's a sense of history (and it pulls the reader up to realise how different our lives are as we flit through lives lived on e-mail, the internet and instant access via cellphones) when Harold receives a letter from his mother telling him that his father is unwell after he returns from his father's funeral. The pain it causes him to see this letter on his return from the funeral that his uncle in Cape Town has fetched him away from university for, brings back the sense of how letters and telegrams used to be the sole means of communicating across distances.
There is that sense of discord between the immediacy of the event and the telling of its genesis that we no longer live with.
Beneath the happy recollections of family life, there are also currents and eddies of discord, the stuff of family life. Harold is enraged when his son drops out of medical school, he loses his temper and there is a strange sense that Landsman displayed in The Devil's Chimney of being able to see beneath the skin of civilisation most of us wear successfully and to map out the minute rifts in the fabric of her characters' lives, and by implication in our own, that threaten to tear and let the darker matter that lurks within us all seep out.
In the dying moments of the book Landsman writes for her father the final truth: that however strange and magical our lives are, however marked we are by our childhood and adulthood, whatever good or bad we have done in the world is distilled in one last moment: when we are set free from the temporal bonds that tie us to this earth and set us free to live on, but only in the minds of those who remember us.
Landsman
has written a book of great beauty. She is calm regarding her reasons
for it, and generous to a fault into allowing the reader to share her
memories of her father. Which of those memories is fact and which is
fiction is not discernable to the reader, nor should it be. But if she
was my daughter I would be very proud to have this book as my epitaph.
© Cape Times 2008. All rights reserved.
This review appeared in the Cape Times on 12 June 2008.
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