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From Amazon.com
The novel is filled with sounds and their absence, with an understanding of and insistence on the power of language, and with the necessity of telling and re-telling our stories. When Grania is a little girl at home, she sits with her grandmother, who teaches her: "Grania is intimately aware of Mamo's lips--soft and careful but never slowed. She studies the word as it falls. She says 'C' and shore, over and over again… This is how it sounds." After she and Jim are married and he is sent to war, he writes: "At times the ground shudders beneath our boots. The air vibrates. Sometimes there is a whistling noise before an explosion. And then, all is silent." When Grania's brother-in-law, her childhood friend, Kenan, returns from war seriously injured, he will not utter a sound. Grania approaches him carefully, starting with a word from their childhood--"poom"--and moves through "the drills she thought she'd forgotten… Kenan made sounds. In three weeks he was rhyming nonsense syllables."
A deaf woman teaching a hearing man to make sounds again is only one of the wonders in this book. Because Itani's command of her material is complete, the story is saved from being another classic wartime romance--a sad tale of lovers separated. It is a testament to the belief that language is stronger than separation, fear, illness, trauma and even death. Itani convinces us that it is what connects us, what makes us human. --Valerie Ryan --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Books in Canada
The story begins very slowly as we are introduced to Grania, her guilt-ridden mother, her loving grandmother, her sister Tress, and the rest of her large family. The story doesn’t pick up for nearly 100 pages until Grania is finally sent to the Ontario School for the Deaf. Descriptions of how deaf students are taught, and of her teachers and friends, are interesting. We then jump ahead ten years to 1915. Grania has stayed on to work at the School for the Deaf, where she meets and marries a hearing boy named Jim, who is a medical assistant. Jim goes to war in Europe as a stretcher-bearer. The focus then switches to Jim’s war experiences, cutting back occasionally to Grania working and waiting at home. I found Jim’s story of the horrors of war more interesting, as my own father was a stretcher-bearer in the American army in WW I and never spoke one word about his time there.
Grania nearly dies from the flu epidemic of 1918, but despite this she is generally a passive character to whom very little actually happens. She is difficult to get to know and there are no sparks in her relationship with Jim. There are several lapses where we are given too much information, and some cutting is in order, like the lengthy scene where Tress and Grania visit Toronto in preparation for Jim’s homecoming. Still, Itani has a remarkable facility with words, and this is a fine effort. Itani has published poetry, three collections of stories, and a novel, Leaning, Leaning Over water.
W.P. Kinsella (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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