Darkenbloom

by Eva Menasse, 2024

From the first paragraph, Eva Menasse presents a foreboding picture of a tangled, overgrown garden, hiding corruption and secrets, with shadows peering out of darkened windows. She describes it with wry irony and sharp wit. It’s an excellent introduction to her dark and tangled story.

The storyline jumps from place to place and from time to time, with multiple layers and multiple points of view. In spite of the helpful table of characters, a reader has to pay attention to keep track of how the characters fit into each others’ lives, although that gradually becomes clear as the novel progresses.

It tells the story of the town and many of its residents. A town on the periphery of the second world war and on the border with Hungary (which Darkenbloomers choose to call “Over There”), it’s become a backwater village from which young people leave and return only for family obligations. Some residents want modern economic development like centralized water works, but they are held back by those fearing what it might dig up. A winemaker moves forward with crafted quality wines, while his parents cling to their old customers who have ordered the same wine for decades because it is cheap. Characteristically, the acting mayor seeks guidance from his mentor who is lying comatose in a hospital in Vienna.

In many ways, the novel reminded me of Middlemarch, where George Eliot uses the residents of a small town to represent a changing wider world, both describing the action and commenting on it with a clever wit. But where Eliot comments on the scene with warmth, Menasse uses a dark tone to describe a far nastier scene. She visits many of the households in the town and notes the silences and deceptions that have deformed the relationships between people and within families. They all have secret resentments and histories that go back to childhood, or to past generations. To them, the danger is the contemporary characters who threaten to break through the façade that covers up the stories people don’t want to know. When a body is found in a field, the sense among the locals that “you don’t want to get involved in anything, not after all we’ve lived through, on the border.” Being on the border, keeping outsiders away and protecting themselves from danger, is at centre of their psyche.

The townspeople don’t know the whole truth (they don’t want to) and describe the unpleasant stories from the past as “rumour.” But the travel agent (naturally, the one who crosses borders) who is putting together a town history, finds the stories don’t line up. People leave out details that might put them in the wrong place, and say it wasn’t as bad as the rumours claim. The bad things were the fault of a few Nazi thugs – who sanitized their history and ran the town with the support of the Russian army after it overran their feeble defenses. When one former Nazi leader candidly describes his story, the locals say that you can’t take the old guy seriously. Some surviving victims of the violence don’t want to live with the pain that the past brings up.

The story takes some curious turns and ends on a lighter tone, when the old Nazi youth welcome refugees from Eastern Europe, perhaps as a joke against the modern state. When more of the story comes out, it feels like a weight has been removed, But the novel ends on an ambiguous note – an old farmer enters a church expecting quiet meditation, but little devilish voices around the Messiah chirp away saying this is not the end of the story.

This was a totally engrossing story, leaving me trying to understand the various characters and their perspectives on the town and its history. It examines a dark, painful history, but Menasse’s sharp commentary keeps it from feeling heavy, and the imperfect attempts of several characters to find the truth allow some light to break through. Menasse seems to be calling on Austria to stop hiding from its history and face up the need to repair the damage it has inflicted on contemporary society. Although drawn in a particular place, this lesson applies to many countries, including here in Canada with our colonialist past.

Heated Rivalry

By Rachel Reid, 2024

To be honest, I found this novel annoying. I liked the sexy bits and the overall sense of sex-positivity. The story of two gay guys developing a loving relationship after meeting for casual sex is welcome, and rare in any kind of literature. Reid’s descriptions of how Shane and Ilya notice each other, how Ilya brings the naïve Shane along, how they (mostly Shane) experience sexual pleasure are fully believable. I wonder if she has interviewed a lot of young gay men to research the story or are these well-developed tropes in fantasy stories. And I’m cheering the fact that Shane and Ilya are paraded in front of millions of readers in mass market publishing and streaming television. I imagine locker rooms full of hunky men surreptitiously reading the explicit descriptions of men like themselves finding sexual ecstasy and wondering about themselves.

Particularly, I would congratulate Rachel Reid for showing how a macho relationship can negotiate consent and gain pleasure from it. While gay porn may be more explicit and more lingering in its description of sex scenes, it often plays into power and dominance in ways that normalize unequal, non-consensual relationships. (Interestingly, the recent movie Pillion explores a realistic relationship of dominance and submission in which the characters respect their partners’ boundaries even when they conflict with their own. If this is a trend, it’s a positive one for mass media.)

The problem that holds me back is the cleaned-up story line. The story is a fantasy. That’s what Reid intended to write, and it’s what her readers are looking for, so kudos to her for setting an objective and achieving it. But it’s not what I want in a novel and it’s not what the topics of sexual pleasure, homophobia and consent deserve.

Reading the story, I wanted to know how these two queer guys deal with casual locker-room homophobia. Do they join in, watch silently, lead their teammates toward a healthier understanding of gay sexuality? Reid acknowledges that it’s a major factor in their lives, but we don’t know much more than that. Does their relationship affect other relations with their teammates, coaches, business managers? Their pretences and secrecy would certainly affect those around them, and affect their own mental health, but that’s not here except for a few superficial descriptions about their families and one friend. Even Shane’s biracial identity is lost – we know his mother is Japanese Canadian, but does he ever deal with racism? It feels like a theme that Ried explored in an earlier draft and then decided to remove, perhaps on the advice of an editor who said it makes the relationship too complicated for a fantasy novel.

By contrast, Reid makes more of their relationships with key women in their lives, Shane’s movie star girlfriend and Ilya’s Russian American girlfriend. They figure out the boys’ real erotic interests and offer the non-judgemental support they need, someone to talk to and to support their straight façade. This is a little stereotypical, but at least it shows that Reid can make their lives a bit more complicated if she chooses.

The reason the sanitized storyline bugs me is that I want the relationship to feel like it takes place in the real world. I want it to be not a fairy tale with some enlightening moral examples, but an exploration of how two real people work out their lives in a setting that I can relate to. So while I think this could have been an engaging and thoughtful queer-positive story, I find myself disappointed that it’s nothing more than a fantasy.

All That Matters

By Wayson Choy, 2004 

Set very specifically in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the interwar period, All That Matters is a fascinating and complex book about family, friendship and community in an immigrant community. It’s specific but the themes are universal.

The descriptive detail that Wayson Choy brings into his story make it easy to visualize the reality of the characters’ lives – especially for a Vancouver resident who can place each incident in a well-known setting.  When Choy says that someone could hear the roaring trains passing through the neighbourhood, or could sit on their back porch and watch the sun shining on the mountains, I know exactly what he means. But even for a non-resident, I think the settings would be concrete and real.

Since the story deals with specific historical events and locations, this concreteness helps set the story as the lived experience of people in a real place and time, in spite of a mystical layer that Choy also weaves in. He places things so specifically that I kept thinking the story was autobiographical, although it is not.

Choy offers an insight into an immigrant experience that helps to understand the complexity of the city’s past. Although the Chinese and Irish kids are neighbours and play together, they rarely enter each other’s houses, and their parents barely acknowledge each other over the back fences. And the Chinese immigrants want Canada to enter the war against the Japanese because they know the brutality their families face in China, and hope to take over confiscated Japanese Canadian property. Even within the Chinese community, political and social factions compete, and often resent the benefits that luckier ones have won – such as the children that the single men are unable to father because they cannot bring a wife from China.

Choy also shows the complex relationships within the family. Third Uncle, who is a clan member but not a blood relative, sponsors Father, Grandmother and Kiam-Kim (the narrator as a child) after the death of his own wife. This creates feelings of gratitude, but also obligation, When Second Wife arrives to replace Father’s dead first wife and bring up the family, resentments also grow, although over time that develops into deeper, positive emotions. Kiam-Kim’s own relationships as Eldest Son make him responsible for the adopted Second Son, although he also resents him. When Father and Second Wife have their own children, the family seems to grow together more naturally into a loving unit. Later in the story, secret relationships are revealed that explain some of the underlying family tensions.

I’m not sure what to think of the mystical elements that Choy introduces to these very concrete scenes. Kiam-Kim’s dead mother seems to hover over his life and he sometimes feels her as a real presence. His grandmother communicates with her past lover, and makes artworks that seem to be inspired by unseen forces. These elements seem to be more than the traditional spiritual practices of the community, but represent a powerful force in the lives of the characters – perhaps the weight of their past and their community’s history.

By the end of the story, Choy seems to be saying that what matters is not nationality or community or even family, but supporting the people who are important to you. This will include family, but also others who are part of your life. This perspective is unexpected in a culture where family is central, but as a gay writer, Choy knows that “chosen family” is as important as legal family, even when traditional family ties are complex and deeply part of a character’s psyche.