Library Limelights 280

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Amanda Bestor-Siegel. The Caretakers. Ebook download from TPL. USA: William Morrow, 2022.

Foreign au pairs in Paris: a special kind of caretakers. I learned that au pair is not the same as nanny; au pair lives with and is treated as family; child-minding earns her some pocket money rather than a salary. Perhaps none have presented the subject as carefully, as densely, as Bestor-Siegel. A young boy, Julien, dies in a fall and Alena, his caretaker, is arrested. But we don’t know the truth of what happened until all the surrounding circumstances are taken into account. A cluster of women in the wealthy suburb of Maisons-Larue have interconnecting lives that touch on Julien, directly or indirectly. Each in turn advances the backstory with subplots. The boy’s mother, Charlotte, is disturbingly cold, devoid of human feeling, caring only about appearances; she recently cancelled her teenage daughter Nathalie’s sole passion: aerial dancing with silks, leaving Nathalie bitter and angry. Alena has been stolidly doing her job, silently resenting Nathalie’s extra demands, challenged by the wild and unpredictable Julien.

Lou is the brash, self-confident au pair next door, working for Séverine de Vignier and family. Séverine is also a hands-off mother, socially prominent, and Charlotte’s idol. The au pairs regularly meet at Mme. Géraldine’s French classes, making friendships for weekend bar-hopping in Paris. Lou picks Holly as a sidekick; Alena stays aloof. Géraldine is likely the only compassionate human being in this mixture as the author explores gaining and losing friendship, what it is to be isolated or rejected (whether by language or an individual), and the tragic consequences of emotionally neglected children. Their original expectations tarnished, can the young women apply hard learning experiences to strengthen their own forward motion? Solid characterization keeps the pages turning.

~ An OFF OF writer ~

Bits

▪ Lou should have known: you don’t fuck with French people and their gardens. (18)

▪ In giving her permission to take a lover, Simon had denied Charlotte the most obvious form of revenge. But surely Simon wasn’t thinking of their neighbour, one of his oldest friends, the man against whom he compared all his own success. (76)

▪ Séverine saw Charlotte as a nouveau riche imposter, a wannabe aristocrat who married into her fortune. (79)

▪ Charlotte had forgotten; she tried so hard to forget Victor, the son she’d failed. (100)

▪ “Victor and Nathalie are both fine. We all are. You can share that with whichever friends you’re reporting to.” (114)

▪ Alena—withdrawn, morose Alena―was Géraldine’s challenge that fall. (138)

▪ ... Lou had something Holly didn’t, and never would: it didn’t bother Lou to be foreign. (221)

▪ “Julien, look at me,” said Nathalie, and she waited until he did. “This is a secret, okay?” 287)

▪ “The kid is psycho,” said Kelsey. “No, really. He gets mad whenever you tell him to do anything.” (352)

▪ Alena stayed up all night, reading the Facebook horror stories of au pairs past. (355)

▪ He was a fully formed person, desire and neglect and rage all knotted together inside him, too tight for Alena to untangle. (359)

Omar El Akkad. What Strange Paradise. Canada: McClelland & Stewart, 2021.

Probably one of the most touching books of the year, nominated for multiple awards, El Akkad unveils a story of Mediterranean migrants that could apply to every overloaded boat that sets out from North Africa with hope and expectations. The inexorable sinking of a crowded old fishing boat near an island is the fulcrum for “Before” and “After” segments that follow nine-year-old Amir, a displaced Syrian refugee and survivor of the wreck. *Unwittingly, he’d followed his uncle to the harbour right onto the dilapidated boat. The author perfectly captures the faith or pessimism among the seaborne refugees, their bickering and fears; the weariness of island bureaucrats who process them into a miserable detention camp; the general antipathy of the local residents. Migrants staggering ashore from the sea are not a novelty in these islands.

Most of all, the tale dwells on a tender bond instantly forged when fifteen-year-old islander Vänna spots Amir hiding from pursuing policemen. Fully aware of the dismal camp he would languish in, without thought of reprisal she conceals him. Basically, they are two children with no common language ‒ strangers. Yet mutually resourceful, Vänna and Amir communicate almost silently to elude the cops and avoid tourist hotels. However, the stern and cynical Colonel Kethros is not to be denied his prisoner. Sparse, elegant prose delivers a universal message: kindness always elevates the human spirit.

Before

▪ “It was bombed, it was destroyed. Our whole neighborhood was destroyed.” (14)

▪ Of all the chaos of the passing storm and the passengers’ screams and prayers, it was the sound of people beneath the boards that frightened him the most. It made the boat living, made it organic and coldly voracious, a stomach in mid-digestion. (72-3)

▪ Amir could make no sense of the conversations taking place around him. Nor could he understand why so many people had lined up for this trip. (74)

▪ It wasn’t long before the boat’s ceaseless movement acquainted all the passengers with their immediate neighbors, and erased some of the distinction between where one body ended and another began. (103)

▪ “Did you really think there’d be a goddamn cruise ship waiting for you, because you saw it in the picture?” (162)

▪ Gone was the ceaseless wheezing, so constant over the past two days that the upper-deck passengers had all but become desensitized to it. Gone was the stink of diesel. The engine had stopped running. (191)

▪ “Whatever happens you’ll have to promise me you’ll do whatever you have to do. Whatever kind of person you need to be—quiet, loud, violent, invisible―you be that person. Promise me.” (195)

After

▪ Madame El Ward doesn’t reply. She has seen so many over the last year: alone, malnourished; orphaned by war or by sea; made into the undercurrents of themselves, broken in ways that rendered them unable to continue as children and yet a part of them left childlike forever. (96)

▪ ... Vänna could not help but think of ancestry as a kind of shackle one could never fully unclasp, no matter how deeply cut, could never be severed. (99)

▪ “When we caught them, they claimed they were from Syria, which is pretty well a made-up place now, so many of them lie about being from there.” (113)

▪ That she understands what the boy means on some instinctual level doesn’t surprise Vänna, nor does the subconscious realization in that moment that it is natural for certain words to be subject to universal understanding—that, following its phrases for greeting and introduction, every culture’s first linguistic export should be the directive Let’s go. (133)

▪ “You’re getting melodramatic in your old age,” Lina replies. “It’s not a colonization, it’s just a bunch of people on boats.” (153)

The smuggler’s rant on the boat

“You stupid, sad people,” he said. “Look what you’ve done to yourselves. The West you talk about doesn’t exist. It’s a fairy tale, a fantasy you sell yourselves because the alternative is to admit that you’re the least important character in your story. You invent an entire world because your conscience demands it, you invent good people and bad people and you draw a neat line between them because your simplistic morality demands it. But the two kinds of people in this world aren’t good and bad—they’re engines and fuel. Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be engines and you will always, always be fuel.” (179)

Matti Friedman. Who By Fire. Canada: McClelland & Stewart / Penguin Random House Canada Limited, 2022.

Sub-title: War, Atonement, and the Resurrection of Leonard Cohen. In 1973, Leonard Cohen felt his career was stagnant, dead; singing to Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War had a way of reviving him. Putting him back in touch with his roots is a far too simplistic description. The book is the product of painstaking research, because this was not a scheduled “tour,” there was no publicity, little or no advance notice that he would appear, and very few photographs that the author chased down. After leaving his home on the island of Hydra, Cohen was able to latch onto Israeli musicians who would know where an army command point was and they would spontaneously head there, literally sitting on the sand to sing to troops. Cohen already had something of a worldwide reputation, and the soldiers who’d heard of him were flabbergasted. Unassuming, he made no fuss, carried an old guitar, and slept rough when needed.

Interviews with survivors who were there for such impromptu “concerts” were grateful, in the main—Cohen’s songs gave them moments of love and peace away from fear and exhaustion. The activities of individuals he’d met along the way provide more sense of life or death than he does (soldiers like Asher, Isaac, Schlomi, Patzi, are profiled). Friedman had access to archives in Montreal and Los Angeles, including contemporary notes and the unpublished journal Cohen created after the War. The once self-acknowledged lecher was a very complex man, a poet who could only grow into the melancholy giant he became. Friedman salutes his song “Night Comes On” as an autobiography. Cohen’s philosophical struggles with terms like war, and Israel, and Judaism, are evident. Whether he ever finally accepted owning the spiritual role of his ancestors is open to interpretation.

Author

▪ Cohen was stalked by depression for much of his life, and the months on Hydra before the war seem to have been dark. (28)

▪ The way he writes about women, and the way he related to them, was part of the style of those days but is out of step with our own times. It might come as a shock to those unfamiliar with his earlier poetry and novels—who know his transcendent hits without knowing what he was transcending, or whose memories of the man come from his last incarnation as a gentleman in a suit. (28)

▪ The poet at thirty-nine, the one who travelled to Sinai and who typed this manuscript, is in the grip of anger and urges. (28)

▪ He didn’t travel to Israel as Leonard Cohen the artist. He might not have been sure that’s still who he was. (63)

▪ There was no stage, just mikes set up on the grass and a small amplifier that had seen better days. (82)

In his own words (journal & notebooks)

▪ He seized both my hands in his and squeezed them with true enthusiasm and something like gratitude. Evidently I now represented certain old virtues which he cherished deeply. (36-7)

▪ I must be doing something really stupid, I said to myself, to make another man so happy. (37)

▪ People like me wrote the Bible. We did it out of malice and despair. (47)

▪ Where do you get to stand up and speak? For what and for whom? And how deep is your experience? How significant is anything you have to say? (55)

▪ Feeling good in the desert. War is ok. People at their best. As my friend Layton said about acid on his first ‘trip’: They’ll never stamp this out. (146)

▪ We would just drop into little places, like a rocket site, and they would shine their flashlights at us and we would sing a few songs. Or they would give us a jeep and we would go down the road toward the front and wherever we saw a few soldiers waiting for a helicopter or something like that we would sing a few songs. (181)

Others

▪ [Amos] “The experience, as I remember it, was forgetting everything and going to another world, one that wasn’t all of us racing around, and the dead people, and the fear,” he said. “I recall it as a formative event—one of the world’s greatest singers coming in the middle of the war, amid all the chaos, bringing us some quiet and the sound of something else.” (82)

▪ There was something in Cohen, Asher wrote, “that is beginning to cry out to be real and realized.” Asher meant the poet’s priestly lineage. Cohen’s ancestral calling, he wrote, was buried under the false image of a despairing artist in bondage to the seductions of the world. (87-8)

▪ [Shlomi] “A lot of people say they sang in the war,” he said, “but actually it was just air force bases, and the next day they were back at Café Casit [in Tel Aviv]. Not Leonard Cohen. He was really there. He ate a combat ration with us. I opened a can for him. He was a human being.” (149)