Autobiography of Childhood
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The Combals are not unacquainted with death: they have never quite recovered from the loss of one of them in childhood. And now, on Valentine's Day, they are losing another.
Guddy races to see her sister, Jerry and Bjarne avoid the phone and its news, Jean finds himself on a beach, and Annie fends off her mother's persistent questions about what's happening. And Therese tries to forgive them all before it's too late.
As each is forced to face the news of Therese's impending death, their actions weave a nuanced portrait of a family, of the devastating reach of childhood grief.
What if thinking is all we have at the end of the day? What if how we react really is all we can control? This transcendent first novel from award-winning poet Sina Queyras tells the story of childhood by illustrating six adult minds grappling with it: noticing, reaching, loving and flailing.
'Queyras's novel scores the jagged incisions of childhood. How her characters escape or embrace or succumb to the damage, she manages through an exquisite prose that cannot comfort them, nor ease us. Yet we cannot help but be held by the language.' – Dionne Brand
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Death has ruled over the Combal family for generations. Now Therese Combal living in Vancouver and dying of cancer is in her last days, and it's her family's reactions to her impending passing that are the focus of Canadian poet Queyras's first novel. Each relative has one turn on stage: sister Guddy, an academic, leaves her partner, Sara, in New York City and flies west to say goodbye. Brother Jerry, married twice and virtually forgotten, would rather not hear the news. Bjarne senses something is wrong, but his schizophrenic neuroses prevent him from engaging with reality. Even Jean, Therese's father, has a chance to muse from beyond the grave. But it's the family matriarch, Adel, who provides the narrative's tension she is "irritating," "visceral," and "embarrassing " and, though she has "burned all her bridges," she's the glue that holds the Combals together, at least in mutual frustration and hatred. Queyras (Expressway) has a lyrical eye ("linoleum curls like tulip leaves" and the air is "so fresh it's like biting into an apple still hanging from the tree"), but the novel's structure prevents most of the characters from confronting one another directly, resulting in an oblique portrait of scattered grief. By the time Therese takes the stage, she is pretty much alone, left to make an observation that reflects how the book's emotional core and character development feel rather empty: "flaws are only interesting when they are overcome."
