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Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Författare till All the Broken Things

6+ verk 89 medlemmar 9 recensioner 1 favoritmärkta

Verk av Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

All the Broken Things (2014) 51 exemplar
The Nettle Spinner (2005) 15 exemplar
Perfecting (2009) 11 exemplar
Wait Softly Brother (2023) 8 exemplar
Way Up (2003) 3 exemplar
What Had Become of Us (2014) 1 exemplar

Associerade verk

Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2012) — Bidragsgivare — 25 exemplar
Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond (2015) — Bidragsgivare — 18 exemplar
Gods, Memes and Monsters: A 21st Century Bestiary (2015) — Bidragsgivare — 17 exemplar
The Lion and the Aardvark: Aesop's Modern Fables (2013) — Bidragsgivare — 13 exemplar
Schemers: Betrayal Knows No Boundaries (2013) — Bidragsgivare — 9 exemplar

Taggad

Allmänna fakta

Födelsedag
1965
Kön
female
Nationalitet
Canada

Medlemmar

Recensioner

Kathryn, the protagonist of Kuitenbrouwer’s 2023 Giller Prize nominated novel, flees her marriage and teenaged sons in Toronto for her elderly parents’ eastern Ontario home. It’s the place where she and her sisters grew up, an old stone dwelling built by her ancestors, full of history, stories, and memories. Kathryn, a writer, hasn’t been able to move forward with her current project: a piece of auto fiction about her dead brother. She’s long been told that Wulf, the sibling who came before her, was stillborn, but she is driven to know more. When her parents hear about their daughter’s book, they wonder how she could possibly write about a person who never actually lived. Indirectly, it turns out.

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)
 
Flaggad
fountainoverflows | Sep 17, 2023 |
This book should be listed as a YA novel as the plot is pretty simple and very slow. The main character is a 14 year old Vietnamese boy who has a severely disabled younger sister. The right of the story borderline on distasteful events as he becomes involved in training bears for a carnival, which usually involves animal cruelty. Another carnival worker that runs tries to get the boy's younger sister in his freak show. At the point, the story gets too weird.
 
Flaggad
kerryp | 4 andra recensioner | Dec 7, 2020 |
All the Broken Things by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is a devastatingly marvellous book, a story that focuses on the unfortunate sufferings of its main character, 14-year-old Bo, a young refugee from Vietnam who lives with his highly pessimistic mother, Rose, and his violent four-year-old sister who is severely disfigured from the affects of Agent Orange.

While Bo is burdened with school and taking care of his disabled sister, the responsibilities deferred to him by his incompetent and devastated mother, he is also haunted by the defiant memory of the untimely death of his father, and what it means to be a cultural outsider.

Though he does have some people rooting for him, his happiness, and success, in the form of his teacher, Miss Lily, and mature classmate and friend, Emily, the only way he can cope with his turbulent anger and frustration is by fighting with a schoolyard bully named Ernie.

An outlet for his pent-up rage, he fights Ernie on a daily basis until he is discovered and recruited by a carnival worker and bear trainer, Gerry, who not only befriends him, but eventually gives him his own bear cub to raise, who he names, for lack of a better word, Bear.

While he must fend off the interest of carnival owner, Max, from discovering the uniqueness of his sister, Orange, and deter and manage the depression of his mother, Rose, who is unable to hold a job, or look at, or look after the daughter who incites in her the pain of guilt and memory, Bo, takes solace from secretly training and raising Bear in the confines of his small backyard until they both become nomads in the wilderness of High Park.

To read the rest of this review, you're more than welcome to visit my blog, The Bibliotaphe Closet: http://zaraalexis.wordpress.com

- Zara
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
ZaraD.Garcia-Alvarez | 4 andra recensioner | Jun 6, 2017 |
I was very much minded of Rohinton Mistry's novels when reading Kuitenbrower's All the Broken Things, albeit we've changed from writing about the tragedies of India's people to the tragedy of Canada's.

In this case Kuitenbrower tells a deftly-crafted tale of a Vietnamese mother, son and daughter who are refugees just after the infamous civil war that ravaged their country. Not only are they victims of the war, but of that deadly and devastating chemical known as Agent Orange, large quantities of which were produced in Grimsby, Ontario, by Uniroyal.

The story centres around the boy, Bo, who attempts to find the strength and compassion to not only deal with his mother who is rapidly sinking into depression, extreme poverty and the effects of Agent Orange, but his sister who was born grotesquely deformed because of the chemical.

It is also a story about freaks and misfits who find a home in the carnivals and sideshows that toured southern Ontario, and were featured at the Canadian National Exhibition.

So it is a story about broken people, broken in body and spirit. It is a story about broken morality. Broken promises. Broken trust.

And it is utterly, completely mesmerizing in the simplicity and beauty of Kuitenbrower's phrasing and story-telling ability.

Highly recommended.
… (mer)
1 rösta
Flaggad
fiverivers | 4 andra recensioner | Feb 7, 2015 |

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Statistik

Verk
6
Även av
6
Medlemmar
89
Popularitet
#207,492
Betyg
3.8
Recensioner
9
ISBN
11
Favoritmärkt
1

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