Visible Worlds Marilyn Bowering
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Visible Worlds
In Visible Worlds, award-winning Canadian poet and playwright Marilyn Bowering has created a beguiling, multilayered fiction that brings together two seemingly disparate stories as it races the shattering personal consequences of war. Spanning the middle part of our century, with World War II and the Korean War as its fulcrum, the novel expertly distills an epic story into a finely limned, elegant narrative of understated proportions. Set in Canada, Germany, Korea, and the Soviet Union, Visible Worlds begins in 1960, with the death of Nate Bone on a Winnipeg football field, as his family and friends stand by and watch. The story then shifts to the tundra of Siberia, where, at the same time, a young woman identified only as Fika is trying to make her way from the Soviet Union to freedom. As the novel unfolds, these two seemingly unrelated events--literally worlds apart--become key pieces in Bowering's astonishing fictional puzzle. That puzzle is assembled by Albrecht Storr, one of twin sons of German immigrants, who becomes the primary narrator of the novel. Looking back to 1935, when he, his brother Gerhard, and Nate were children together, Albrecht slowly recounts a chain of extraordinary events set off when Nate, still suffering from the death of his sister, kidnaps an infant girl. That reckless, long undetected act leaves few lives unaffected, and will lead, a quarter of a century later, to Fika's remarkable journey across the spare, life-threatening, yet inconceivably beautiful frozen landscape. A cast of singular and highly memorable characters play out the drama of Visible Worlds. Albrecht's mother is a proud German whose devotion to what she views as the superior culture of the Fatherland has tragic consequences. His eccentric father believes in the literal power of human magnetism. Nate's mother, a once-beautiful bareback rider, plunges into insanity, while her philandering husband runs off with a tiger trainer for the circus. Seen through the prism of these characters' lives, the public horrors of this century come to reflect a personal legacy of abandonment, betrayal, and collective guilt. A masterful, highly imaginative storyteller, Marilyn Bowering has infused her fiction with a lyrical magic and haunting emotional resonance. "In Visible Worlds, Marilyn Bowering stretches a net of precise and capacious language across decades, continents, history, and landscapes, then gradually tightens it until her quarry stands revealed: the conjunctions of will and chance of which human fates are made. And always hovering are the magnetic lines of the heart--which burst forth sometimes in speed or deed, sometimes in celestial displays, always in the abiding mystery of connection." --Jane Hirshfield
To All Appearances a Lady
"To All Appearances a Lady" is Marilyn Bowering's haunting, evocative debut novel and one of her most loved and memorable works. As Robert Lam sets off on his voyage up the coast of Vancouver Island, the last passenger he expects is a ghost. But when the spirit of Lam Fam--the woman who raised him--suddenly and mysteriously appears, the trip they embark on initiates a quest for the truth about a past both have been avoiding for too many years. Together Robert and Lam Fam relive a harrowing story that begins in nineteenth-century China and takes them on a journey through the South China Sea, across the Pacific to the shores of British Columbia and the dangerous, secretive labyrinth of the B.C. opium trade. There follows a rich and compelling tale of love and deception, greed and drugs--all set against a background of fascinating historical detail and the clash of transplanted cultures.
What It Takes to Be Human
What It Takes to Be Human, the haunting new novel by Orange Prize–shortlisted author Marilyn Bowering, considers the life of Sandy Grey, an idealistic young air cadet who wants nothing more than to enlist in the Second World War. Sandy’s father, a fundamentalist preacher, refuses to grant his son’s request, fearing that the world is living its very last days. When Sandy’s attempts to oppose his father turn violent, the novel takes a dramatic shift in setting into the fragmented world of an asylum for the criminally insane. Bowering pushes her characters to the very fringe of civilization, love and sanity during the darkening days of a distant conflict to expose the acute parallels between their lives and the lives of those being torn apart by war. "One of Canada’s most eloquent storytellers has given us a compelling and exquisitely crafted tale about hope, love and creativity."—Susan Swan "Marilyn Bowering has written an astonishing novel, full of hope and courage—a brilliant antidote to cynicism and despair."—Isabel Huggan "Marilyn Bowering is one of our whistle-blowers. Her new book tells us What It Means to Be Human—something we seem on the brink of forgetting. Classic in form, this white-knuckle book leads us through a contemporary underworld before bringing us up, once again, to the light. Required reading!"—P.K. Page