Library Limelights 234

 

Annie Lyons. The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett. USA: William Morrow/ HarperCollins Publishers, 2020.

Sometimes a book comes along nicely in sync with other things in your life. Eudora is eighty-five years old, not all that well, and determined on my death, my way. Being in the U.K., she has applied to a Swiss clinic for euthanasia, or as we call it here, Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID). Eudora is not the most inviting character at first, unless one is on equally single-minded telepathy. Her life is physically quite circumscribed by now but her wits are together; she has her daily routine and let no one interfere. Until, that is, a new neighbour bounces up to her doorstep. The exuberant ten-year-old Rose amazingly becomes her best friend. Not without a lot of doubt and resistance on Eudora’s part. The contrast between Rose’s flamboyant zest and Eudora’s disapproving reactions is beautifully played out; co-starring Montgomery the cat, Rose’s perfect parents, and Stanley, the kindly old gentleman widower with yappy dogs.

We can expect Eudora to be up-ended somehow, with such last-minute intrusions into her quiet existence, she preferring to be alone. And we could expect the tale to drip with cute stereotypes or mawkish sentiment. But not when such a gifted author as Lyons is at work. It’s all real and tender for anyone who wants to meet death on their own terms. The not-so-subtle message is let’s not shy away from talking about death. The repressed Eudora is unaccustomed to admit to, or speak of, feelings; actually, she wants to avoid thinking about them. Her background years were filled with sad events, hard choices, family strife. But Rose and Stanley open the door to fresh air. Thank you, Annie Lyons, you rank as an inspiring death doula!

One-liners

▪ Eudora stares as Rose hugs the cat tightly while firing a series of questions at her. (28)

▪ She was sure that if she did exactly as her father asked, God and Mr. Churchill would send him back to them unharmed. (30)

▪ “Is the garden this way?” she asks, pointing her stick toward the back door, hoping that this will move things along. (57)

▪ If I can have the choice of how I live my own life, why can’t I choose how to die my own death? (158)

▪ Their concern stems from kindness of course, but it also stems from that fundamental principle of preserving life at all cost. (158)

▪ She flings open the door and shouts, “Eudora! Are you still alive?” (365)

Multi-liners

▪ “I would like to book myself in for a voluntary assisted death,” she says firmly. The rush of adrenaline at finally uttering these words out loud is dizzying. (23)

▪ As Eudora is about to leave, Rose wraps her arms around her middle. Eudora freezes at the rare experience of human warmth. (62)

▪ It’s such a nuisance that elderly people have to look so old. This shrunken, prune-like appearance, as if someone is slowly deflating them, is most unprepossessing. (197)

▪ She knows that this child will always change other people’s worlds for the better. She feels melancholy that she won’t be here to see it but takes sheer delight in this truth. (367)

Tea with Rose:

“We had other dogs before them, but I think these two were Ada’s favourites.” Stanley’s eyes mist. “They’re all I’ve got left of her now. Little blighters.”

Rose stands up and puts her arms around Stanley, squeezing him to her small frame. Eudora watches, appalled and intrigued. “You must miss her,” says Rose.

Stanley nods and, to her horror, Eudora realizes he’s crying.

“It’s okay, Stanley,” says Rose. “It’s good to cry sometimes. It always makes me feel better.”

Eudora is panicked at this public outpouring of grief. She reaches into her handbag, retrieving a clean handkerchief. It’s the only way she can think to make him stop. “Here,” she says, handing it over.

“Thank you,” says Stanley, smiling at her. “I’m sorry. I get a bit down sometimes. It comes over me all of a sudden. You must think I’m a silly old fool.”

Eudora welds her lips together. (60-61)

Listening to a woman being interviewed:

“But no one can live forever, can they?”

The woman laughs. Eudora scowls at the sound. “Not necessarily in this life, but I believe that on passing from this world we are merely transitioning to another. And we therefore can and will live forever.”

Eudora almost chokes on her toast. “Passing? Transitioning? What in heaven’s name are you blathering on about? It’s called death—D-E-A-T-H. For goodness’ sake, stop talking in euphemisms, you foolish woman!”

“Some people might say that you are failing to face the reality of life and death by using this kind of language,” says the interviewer.

“And some people would be right,” says Eudora, nodding at the radio with approval. (70)

Comeuppance for a patronizing doctor:

“Is your mother proud of you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your mother. I was wondering if she would be proud of the way you conduct yourself. I mean, you’ve clearly achieved a great deal in your professional life and yet you appear unable to behave in a civilized fashion.” Mr. Simons opens his mouth to protest. Eudora holds up a hand to silence him. “I am an eighty-five-year-old woman with no time for bullies. I suggest you rethink your career, because to my mind you shouldn’t be dealing with other people. You are rude, undignified, and unkind. You owe this young woman and me an apology.”

Mr. Simons glares at her for a moment before clamping his mouth shut and storming out of the room without another word. (102-3)

Party manners:

“What are you two talking about?” asks Stanley, placing a bottle of champagne and two glasses on the table.

“Meddlers for nosy parkers,” says Eudora.

“See what she’s like, Paul?” says Stanley.

“I do. I think she’s brilliant.”

“Don’t tell her that. She’ll get bigheaded.” (148-9)

Thomas King. Indians on Vacation. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers, 2020.

Speaking of the best kind of humour, the wonderful Thomas King does it again. His newest protagonists have accordingly aged along with the author who never fails to deliver a multi-level tale. Blackbird Mavrias and his partner Mimi Bull Shield, senior citizens, are tourists in Prague; their various travel destinations have been determined by a series of postcards from European cities, sent to Mimi’s family by her thieving Uncle Leroy. He posted them a hundred years ago. When he left Canada, Leroy took the Bull Shield medicine bundle with him; a bundle of small objects, each of which summons a valuable memory, especially important family stories. Faint hope exists that somewhere in Leroy’s wandering, the bundle might have ended up as an artifact in a museum. Prague is not the first postcard city they’ve explored, encouraged by Mimi’s mother Bernice back home in Standoff, Alberta, although Bernie never lost her suspicions of a Cherokee with a Greek surname (they’ve even explored Bird’s maternal ancestry in Greece). Mimi actually prefers her tourist agendas to a sacred mission, dragging the cranky but pliant Bird to one site after another. Not so much cranky, we learn, as beset with physical and psychological malaise.

It’s a true soul match in that Mimi adroitly, instinctively, counters Bird’s every mood; she has even identified his demons. Eugene = self-loathing; Kitty = worst case alarmist; the twins Didi (depression) and Desi (despair); Chip = “For that big you-know-what on your shoulder.” Only the deftest writer’s touch can lighten a malady like depression or diabetes. The sight of displaced people—unwanted refugees―preys on Bird. Over his years as a photojournalist, he mulls: what had he ever done to combat injustices? Mimi sees his dark pondering as a throwback to the trauma of residential school removals. Nonetheless, dialogue between the two, and elsewhere, is sheer reading pleasure—all the while revealing nuances of Native life. The importance of stories is family treasure. King’s use of humour ever enthralls and comforts me.

One-liners

▪ “You see an animal in a cage and you think of residential schools.” (17)

▪ “Leroy was no drunk,” she would say, “but he did drink.” (32)

▪ I was not pleased that Mimi had given my demons names, and I was more than put out when she shared them with her mother. (47)

▪ “We could take a photo of a nice-looking house and pretend that was where your grandfather was born and raised.” (130)

▪ For me, thrift stores are in the same category as the garbage bins behind fast-food joints. (154)

Multi-liners

▪ “Stories don’t die. Stories stay alive so long as they’re told.” (33)

▪ “I don’t have any problems,” I tell her. “And I don’t want to talk about them.” (54)

▪ “The chairs at residential schools weren’t nail chairs,” Mimi reminds me. “They were electric.” (82)

▪ “Here we are,” says Mimi. “You on the toilet, me in a warm tub. This is life, Bird. This is our life. This is our life right now.” (179)

▪ “I don’t lie,” says Mimi. “Sometimes I leave details out.” (180)

▪ Truth be told, we make up stories for all sorts of reasons. To protect ourselves. To feel superior. To deflect blame. To turn disaster into advantage. For no better reason than that we can. (180)

▪ The breakfast selections are proudly North American. Cholesterol rich and deep-fried yummy. (221)

At Standoff, Alberta:

Bernice, or Bernie as she prefers, is a large, sturdy woman who keeps herself well supplied with strong opinions, and every time we visit, she shares them with us.

“Wouldn’t hurt you to move back to the reserve,” she would tell Mimi. “Traditionally, Blackfoot women brought their men home to live with their mother’s family.”

“No, they didn’t, Mum.”

“You remember that story I told you about fishing?”

“God, Mum, not that one again.”

“Men are like fish,” Bernie would start. “No real skill needed. Drop a line in the water and wait. But just because you catch one doesn’t mean you have to keep it.” (28)

The best tales:

The problem is that travel stories are only interesting if something untoward happens, if trouble makes an appearance, if a disaster is survived.

No one cares that your trip to Turkey went off without a hitch, that your plane was on time, that your room was lovely and had a view of the Aya Sofya, that the food was marvellous and cheap, that everyone spoke English, and that you weren’t robbed, mugged, or annoyed in any way by the locals, the police, or other tourists.

The first expectation of a good travel story is that something went wrong. (59)

Bird’s bottom line?

“It’s the refugees, isn’t it?” says Mimi. “You don’t like seeing children in distress.”

I can’t imagine that anyone likes to see anyone in distress, but as soon as I think this, I remind myself that I’m wrong. For the most part, no one cares much what happens to other people, just so long as it doesn’t happen to them. We have the capacity for compassion. We simply don’t practice it to any degree.

It’s more an ideal that we hang on a wall where it’s easy to see and almost impossible to reach. (136)

Barbara Amiel. Friends and Enemies, A memoir. Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada Limited, 2020.

Right off the bat I had no intention of reading the entire weighty opus. After all, she’s packing in almost eighty years of social significance. My dearly missed sister-in-law shared time at Whitney Hall with the admittedly promiscuous Barbara; come to think of it, one of my future POSSLQs was cutting a swathe around U of T at the same time, so was Margaret Atwood, and then so was I for a year wherein I met none of these people then. But the SIL had a few additional, if speculatively sordid tales, one of which involved annoying everyone else with the fire alarm. Amiel herself glosses over the Argonauts’ football team rumour, covering her university years with the remark that she “dated with manic ferocity.” Take that, you modest wallflowers. To her credit, she is not bashful about the string of names she slept or cohabited with over the years.

Amiel is highly aware of the gossip, envy, or scorn she generated. Her version is that on each step that she climbed up to baroness heights, she had floundered out of her depth, being but an authentic journalist at heart. True, her early path was not easy without family or financial support. She also suffered from depression all her life that she says left her emotionally dead a lot of the time. She earned her career. I was sucked in to read as far as when she married Conrad, Barbara being about fifty-two then, with three marriages and plenty of international name-dropping behind her. Hard to believe she’d never thrown the slightest of dinner parties up to that time. Do I sound judgmental? Trying not to. Everything I read in her own words says libertine in pursuit of self-indulgence, yet she had the love and sorely tested loyalty to stand by her man ... by which the POSSLQ lost our bet.

A few lines

▪ This focus on clever would unfortunately become something of a problem for me in adult life, when I realized that my intellectual ambitions were greater than my intellectual muscle. (5)

▪ My own view is that my mental capacities never recovered from the fairly lengthy coma induced by an unoriginal cocktail of barbiturates and alcohol that I took during and after one of my beseeching transatlantic telephone calls when David suggested I kill myself, a not unreasonable suggestion given my tiresome repetitions of an inability to live without him. (95)

▪ I looked at Conrad chatting to Isaiah. How did I not see this, I wondered. Yes, he had lost some weight, but that was not sufficient. My God, he was a very attractive man. (114)

▪ Later he told me this was the moment he had better corner me before I got married again. (120)

The proposal came first:

My conversion to witless and in love was sudden, swift and horrible. Now that the impossible had happened, the notion of being in reciprocated love with a man who was younger than myself by four crucial years and was funny, kind, tall, rich and armed with massive brainpower was worrying. ...

I had one real fear about this marriage, should it take place. Conrad was so large a personality that I was afraid I would get lazy, simply rely on his prominence and stop working hard to get my place at the table. Writing was not an “enjoyable” process for me, although I sometimes had a very good feeling on finishing a day’s work—only to think it drivel the next day. Writing was simply all I could do, and my life felt empty without it. Writing was my entry to the world, the currency I used to barter my way, whether at school or beyond. I sensed that I would accomplish much less if I didn’t have to fight to secure the ground beneath my feet. This fear was not strong enough to torpedo my marriage, though I was correct in seeing it. (123-4)