Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Författare till All the Broken Things
Verk av Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Associerade verk
Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories about Ordinary Things (2012) — Bidragsgivare — 57 exemplar
Taggad
Allmänna fakta
Medlemmar
Recensioner
Priser
Du skulle kanske också gilla
Associerade författare
Statistik
- Verk
- 6
- Även av
- 6
- Medlemmar
- 89
- Popularitet
- #207,492
- Betyg
- 3.8
- Recensioner
- 9
- ISBN
- 11
- Favoritmärkt
- 1
During Kathryn’s stay in eastern Ontario, there are intense spring rains that cause unprecedented, even apocalyptic, regional flooding. Cooped up indoors with her parents, she probes them for information about Wulf. They aren’t just displeased about this; they are committed to obstruction and regularly press their daughter to return to Toronto where her duty lies. Refusing to go back to her moribund marriage, Kathryn does agree to make herself useful. She helps her mum sort through multitudinous cast-off objects, including boxes of photos and documents, that have accumulated over the generations in both the cellar and an old pig shed. As she and her mother sift through these old things, Kathryn hears stories about her ancestors. One kept a diary. Another, a bride from Scotland who was always pining for the sea, was said to be a selkie. The woman had webbed fingers, just as Kathryn does. Of greatest interest to the protagonist, however, are details about her great-great-grandfather, Russell Boyt. During the American Civil War, he had signed on as a soldier substitute for a wealthy American prosthesis maker, believing the money earned for performing military duty for another would gain him financial independence from his harsh and disapproving father. A medical student who was mentally ill before he set foot on the battlefield, Boyt evidently grew more unhinged from exposure to the carnage. He also became physically disabled: a leg had to be amputated. Diagnosed with Soldier’s Heart—now known as PTSD—he murdered a freed slave woman while in the throes of psychosis.
By researching and imaginatively immersing herself in Boyt’s story, Kathryn believes she can “by indirections find directions out”. While she doesn’t create the auto fiction about her brother she intended to, in writing a biographical novel about Russell Boyt, she does intuitively uncover a family secret and comes to understand why she has been haunted by her dead sibling all these years. Whether the entire novel is auto fiction based on the life of the actual author, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, is not clear.
Wait Softly Brother has been structured to shift back and forth between the main character’s story in the present and her ancestor Russell Boyt’s experiences in the mid-to-late 1860s. There are also a few chapters from the point of view of a young orphan connected with Boyt.
Kuitenbrouwer’s is an interesting and unusual novel, but I often found the writing strange, clumsy, and even amateurish. One might excuse the awkward execution of the sections written from Boyt’s point of view. These chapters are, after all, parts of a first draft which the protagonist works on late at night while at her parents’ home. Even so, Boyt’s diction still sounds distractingly modern, the prose too loose, casual, or inappropriate for the 1860s. For example, one character uses the word “genocide”—a term that would not be coined until the mid 1940s by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin. As for chapters concerning the protagonist, Kathryn: they ought to have provided a little more detail about her marital troubles. For the sake of credibility, it also wouldn’t have hurt for Kuitenbrouwer to have toned down her namesake’s almost total self-absorption. Instead, the protagonist arrives unannounced at her parents’ home, unrealistically expecting to be understood and indefinitely accommodated by people in their mid-eighties. I couldn’t buy that a middle-aged adult would be so little concerned about her mother’s illness and fairly sudden cognitive impairment. It also didn’t ring true that a grown woman would walk off in an adolescent huff and slam doors when her parents didn’t or wouldn’t deliver the details she was after. While it’s certainly true that adult children can find themselves regressing to former roles when in the company of their family of origin, I found Kathryn’s behaviour hard to believe. Her dedication to “finding” herself is paramount, and she appears constitutionally incapable of understanding that others may not be as invested in her voyage of self-discovery as she is. She really is quite tiresome.
I liked the book well enough to complete it, but not enough to wholeheartedly recommend it.Had there been more nuanced characterization and more careful prose, Wait Softly Brother might have been an exceptional novel rather than a merely interesting one.… (mer)