The documenting of this long-gone critter fascinates me and many others. Hope in a dreary world, that’s Wojtek.

So I ask myself why I find him so touching. From all accounts, Wojtek seemed to think he was a man, like his army buddies. Maybe he’s just us without the bad stuff. Wojtek was innocent. He went to war and spread joy and happiness. Orphaned in 1942, he romped and played in the Middle East, didn’t kill anyone (even the spy he trapped in the shower), lugged artillery shells in the battle of Monte Cassino in Italy (but didn’t get PTSD), kept up his ursine taste for sweets, chugged beer, ate lit cigarettes and suffered no lifestyle illnesses.  In all of this, he brought out the best in troubled humankind, especially in his Polish comrades, freed from Siberia and based in Iran, exiled from home and family, who were kindhearted enough to love and care for a foundling cub. They enlisted him in the army as their mascot, rewarding him for his voluntary bravery by emblazoning his image (clutching an artillery shell) on their company’s insignia.

It’s hard not to love that big bear Wojtek. He speaks to the heart.

So I dare you to to resist this story. Check those Facebook pages, and you’ll see schoolkids learning about a 200-kilo bear who lumbered through countries that could use a few laughs — Iran, Palestine and Egypt. More good news: Wojtek’s loved in Poland and Scotland, and hailed by the Italian newspaper La Stampa as “l’orso che libero l’Italia” (the bear who liberated Italy). There are war vets alive who still remember him, stacks of wonderful photos online, memorials created and planned, and even a song from Scotland (available on YouTube), where Wojtek “retired” to the Edinburgh Zoo, to die in 1963.

Yet memory’s a stubborn thing, and now a new generation is learning his story, along with the forgotten and distinguished history of the Polish armed forces who befriended Wojtek. Best of all, 2012 marks the late soldier-bear’s seventieth birthday. Spread the word and celebrate! Raise a glass to Wojtek, to his loyalty, bravery and innocence, and to these small gifts that touch our hearts in such mysterious ways.

I’ve always enjoyed Helen Humphreys’ delicate prose, but I approached her novel Coventry with these caveats in mind. So it’s reassuring to know that in this case, the reader’s in good hands with a poet and a novelist whose use of language is never clouded by sentiment. Humphreys writes with honesty and care about one of the twentieth century’s many grievous crimes — the German destruction of the British industrial city of Coventry during the Second World War, killing over five hundred people and burning its 14^th-century Gothic cathedral to the ground.

Humphreys narrates through the voices of two characters: Harriet, a woman who lost her young husband Owen in the First World War, and Maeve, an artist who met Harriet on the day she saw Owen off to battle. Their carefree afternoon together was their last contact; their lives parted until that fateful night in November, 1940 when Coventry was bombed. That single event occupies the present time of the novel, which moves in memory from the cathedral (where Harriet and young Jeremy are fire-watchers as the attack begins) to Harriet’s life with Owen and her brief connection with Maeve; returning to Harriet and Jeremy as they make their way through the devastated city, helping some of the injured, searching for Jeremy’s mother.  As readers we feel a poignant depth of connection between the lives of these three people (along with the desperation of their search for safety). Yet we know more; we see facets of their relationship that remain hidden from the characters themselves, and it’s this tension between what the reader knows and the characters can’t see that drives the novel forward to its sorrowful conclusion.

There’s an epilogue that brings the story into the 1960s; Harriet’s a writer and Maeve’s an artist, and living at a distance from each other, they use poetry and drawing to communicate about a terrible night that has changed their lives forever. This is not about art “redeeming” a nightmare. It is about art as memory and how it dignifies the passage of time.  In Humphreys’ words: “Every act is an act of mourning…Every moment is about leaving the previous moment behind.” Maeve uses her artist’s gifts to hold on to what she has lost. Yet “the night still makes no sense, no matter how hard Maeve looks at it, no matter what pictures she is able to pull from the wreckage.”

The attack on Coventry and all the atrocities that have followed in our time will never make sense, and that is the great truth spoken by this small but penetrating work. What brings hope to these characters — without conferring “meaning” — is compassion and friendship in the wake of tragedy. Harriet and Maeve — and their creator — embody this truth in a beautiful work of fiction.

Coventry by Helen Humphreys was published in Toronto by Harper Collins Publishers Ltd. in 2008 (175pp).

TO THE NEW YEAR

By W. S. MERWIN

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

 
W. S. Merwin, “To the New Year” from Present Company (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by W. S. Merwin.

Having been through my cynical phase — groaning over shopping-mall Santas and tinned music and a census in the reign of Caesar Augustus that hasn’t a scrap of evidence to prove it happened — I sense something new. Between these extremes of commercialism and piety, there is mystery as the earth turns, the sun returns and life dances at the tip of a cosmic match. Here we are, by some unaccountable wonder, strung across the 21^st-century darkness like new stars igniting, luminous nodes in the web that connects us.  Although we live with so much sorrow in our world, hope still moves us to reach out to each other, and it’s hope that we celebrate this season.

Many thanks to all of you for following and commenting on this blog over the past year. However you may honour the return of light, may the New Year bring hope and connection to us all.

On the Proper Use of Stars by Dominique Fortier gives a fictional account of  the doomed Franklin Expedition. Those of you with no Canadian smarts, read on: In 1845, two sailing ships (with 129 men and five years worth of provisions) left Britain to find the Northwest Passage through Arctic waters and claim it for the British Empire. Having set sail in May of the year, they were hemmed in for winter by Arctic pack ice. Three years later, the ice hadn’t budged and neither had the ships. With rations depleted and sailors dying (some of them from toxic tinned food), the survivors embarked on a death march across the ice, dragging behind them canoes full of useless artifacts, including flatware, button polish, bibles, wax seals, bedroom slippers and curtain rods. Behind them remained the detritus of British civilization, scattered across the ice in a massive garbage heap around the two stranded vessels, and not a Blue Bin in sight. Needless to say, things did not end well.

Fortier unfolds this novel through an impressive grab-bag of narrative techniques and wild juxtapositions, all of which move the story along and mirror its subtext of civilization’s clutter rendered useless by the crushing force of ice and snow. The novel navigates between the voyage itself and the drawing rooms of England, told through both first- and third-person narrative and from multiple points of view, including those of the confident Captain Franklin, his second-in-command Francis Crozier (a voice of rectitude and moderation), and Lady Jane Franklin (whose intelligent assessment fails to persuade the admiralty of the need of a rescue mission). Most poignant are the bunkroom conversations between chilled sailors grown hungry and desperate. Their anguish is rivaled only by Crozier’s sorrow over his unrequited love for Lady Jane’s niece Sophia, left behind in a country forever lost to him.

The literary flotsam scattered throughout this tale includes Lady Jane’s Christmas dinner menu, a play script, excerpts from journals and diaries and various undecipherable scribbles (A 19th century plum pudding recipe is appended to the text). This entertaining overflow of detail makes the reader uneasy; like the doomed voyage, it hints at excess, reminding us that we know the characters’ fates before they do, and that their fate may be ours.

One year into the ships’ imprisonment in the ice, champagne is still being poured at the captain’s table; later, as conditions worsen, the remaining officers are served “brownish gruel” on silver trays. Yet as flawed as her characters may be, Fortier allows us to care about their fates, reminding us that their human frailty and depth of denial are a distant echo of our own.

On the Proper Use of Stars by Dominique Fortier is translated from the French by Sheila Fischman. It was published in Toronto in 2010 by McClelland and Stewart.

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This awakening is the whole point. The occupiers bear witness to the silence that corrupts us and the moral power of people who say no. They are the voice of conscience; that is their function. They are Kafka’s axe for the frozen sea inside us. The Occupy movement has woken me up from a long sleep, a torpor that bordered on despair. Like most people, I don’t know what to do about the crimes of High Finance; in my writer’s tower, I coax my most difficult thoughts away from the window-ledge; I’m afraid to look down at the shattered lives below, the out-of-work and homeless. Yet now the occupiers have got us talking and sharing thoughts, feeling the sting of conscience and the relief of long-supressed outrage. Their encampments stand for the psychic space they’ve cleared for hope to grow. They’ve brought us home to our humanity, from which no one can evict us.

This movement is a blessing. I wish it well.

Solitaria is Gunn’s third novel, and it’s built of an admirable combination of depth, language, and compelling storytelling. It concerns the discovery of the body of Vito, eldest brother in a large Italian family, a man murdered in the 1950s and thought by his siblings (and his abandoned wife, Teresa) to be living in Argentina.  It’s clear that contact with Vito was not a priority for his brothers and sisters, but neither did they draw close to big sister Piera, who narrates much of this story. Seen by her siblings as bossy, domineering and sharp-tongued, she nonetheless eased the family out of poverty by a marriage of convenience to a wealthy man. Her sole confidant is her nephew David, a professor in Canada who spent summers with his aunt in Italy while his mother Clarissa — Piera’s sister and a world-renowned opera singer — traveled the globe.  He feels close to his aunt, who responds to the discovery of her brother Vito’s body by taking to her bed and refusing to speak to the family members who’ve gathered for the funeral.

The family saga unfolds as Piera shares a cache of old photos — and well-worn memories — with her nephew David. As we learn about the impoverished life of Piera’s family during the Second World War, we wonder whose version of events is true: Piera’s view of herself as long-suffering and generous, or her siblings contention that she’s brought them nothing but misery. It’s this tension — and the seamless shifts in point of view — that propel the story along. Yet delusions abound in this family, and the first to shed them will be the one to confront the secret of Vito’s murder. (I’m happy to report that my whodunit hunches proved wrong).

Solitaria rushes toward its ending at a fast clip, but it does so with depth.  A metaphor of railway tracks and travel runs through this book; through it, we understand the peripatetic family whose father worked for the railroad, the scattering of siblings across continents, and David’s struggle to situate himself in the world. The story hints at the many dimensions of identity and belonging, from the personal and familial to the social and cultural.

In reviewing Solitaria, I should admit my bias; I’m of Italian descent, and I find that family passions writ large in the Mediterranean style — tales of honour and personal sacrifice, love and vengeance, retaliation and even redemption — are irresistible. In this context, I’m reminded of the novel’s power to show us that, whatever the particulars of our cultural background, we are not strangers to the human condition and we are not alone in the world. That said, you don’t have to be Italian to enjoy this reflective page-turner. It’s a wonderful, engrossing read.

Solitaria by Genni Gunn was published in Winnipeg by Signature Editions in 2010.

His story is set during the Nazi occupation of Holland, where a young Dutch couple, Wim and Marie, hide a Jewish man, Nico. Only the most trustworthy people know about their guest, and the chronic fear of discovery seeps into the mood of a tranquil home. The cleaning lady runs into Nico as he peeks out of his room; later, the co-operative doctor who comes to tend the ailing fugitive has to find an alibi for his frequent visits.  Yet instead of discovery and death at the hands of his Nazi foes, Nico meets an ordinary fate when he dies of pneumonia and Wim and the doctor are left to dispose of the body in the dead of night. Successful in this nerve-wracking task , Wim’s informed by Marie of a glitch in their plan that would have been comic, had it not put their lives in danger.  Now the roles are reversed; their Jewish guest is safe in death and his hosts are on the run.

What makes this small book so compelling is its quiet tone, its depiction of the ordinary lives of two gentle people whose simple domesticity is juxtaposed with an exterior madness that we feel but never see. Tea and laundry, stacking wood and setting the table keep harsh realities at a distance: the far-off rumble of Allied bombers, the awareness that their country is under occupation, the knowledge that the world outside the house is full of suspicion and dread.  That troubled world is mirrored in the upstairs room where Nico is in hiding. Yet the writing conveys a mood of tranquility, while Nico’s presence disturbs the calm surface with an undertow of tension. That tug-and-pull makes for gripping reading.

Wim and Marie’s home shelters them in domesticity, and the calm deliberation in which they carry out their daily tasks allows a glimpse into the brave souls of the two main characters — and by extension, into the lives of many ordinary people who endured the war’s privations with strength and patience. It’s only when the couple flees their home that the reader senses the strains that circumstances have placed in their otherwise loving relationship. Their crisis ends, and in a beautiful scene during the evening blackout, they return home to touch and reclaim in darkness all that was once familiar and visible, all that must be understood in a new and poignant way.

Both ironic and tender, this novella is a nuanced exploration of a time in history that still has much to tell us about unimaginable bravery and the simple tasks of everyday that see us through the night.

Comedy in A Minor Key by Hans Keilson was translated from the German by Damion Searls and published in 2010 by Farrar Strauss and Giroux (New York).

Think about this: last Friday, the Occupy Wall Street movement took scrub-brushes and buckets of suds, and set about cleaning up their scruffy little park in lower Manhattan. Faced with possible eviction, protestors out to take capitalism to the cleaners decided to tidy up after themselves when faced with the threat of a power-scrub from the property managers who own the park. A storyteller loves these details, these plot twists that befuddle political theory, that reconstruct the work of social change. Brooms, not guns: nonviolent active resistance, a line of protestors prepared to greet the police not with firepower, but with garbage bags, squeegee mops and buckets of suds.  Meanwhile, we modern illiterates, schooled in party platforms and rhetoric, wonder how to read all of this. A tiny polis in the park with its own cleanup crews, food distribution, and decision-making body — it’s too idealistic; it can’t last. Sure, but duration isn’t the point.

The point’s found in a print analogy: the protests with their encampments are giant magnifying glasses that enlarge the most important words in a paragraph: the ones that call us to wake up, to face the endemic hopelessness that robs social life of its creativity and value. Whatever the outcome of this movement, it’s given us at least that much.