2011.09.08 — Luck Finished & a Fushigi*

Finished today. Began 2011.08.20.

★★★★☆

Joan Barfoot.
Luck.
Toronto: Vintage Canada. ISBN: 978-0-676-97701-1 (0-676-97701-4).

Barfoot likes to play with how the obvious in people can be so wrong. And she does this very well, again, in Luck, where she adds the ambivalence of luck, especially that of perceived luck, both good and bad.

The stage upon which Barfoot's characters explore luck is in the extended quasi-family dynamics of three disparate women living together who find their relatively impersonal work-based relationship instantly and confusingly personalized by the sudden death of Nora's middle-aged husband.

I thoroughly enjoyed how Barfoot introduces Nora with an early morning scream at her discovery that the husband she had laid down with the night before has become in their sleep a corpse. She is a successful mixed media graphic artist and Barfoot's nuance and detail make her very interesting. But as day one of the post-mortem evolves Barfoot quietly and slowly expands the depths and complexity of the other two characters to the point that Nora eventually becomes the least interesting of the three characters.

The story is told primarily through Nora, but the other two get to tell their tales too until they are all fully fleshed out. Sophie, the personal assistant who was traumatized by the failure of her good intentions to change or even ameliorate evil in the world and is in hiding inside Nora's household from that and her own do-gooder hypocrisy. There is Beth, the beautiful and pliable model who appears to the other two as an oddly vain and empty-minded ex-beauty queen with nothing of interest to offer them except to be the butt of their condescension and feigned tolerance for her compulsive need to push on them her complex health teas and other infusions.

The exploration of luck begins with how each of them have felt lucky: Nora for having found Phil and Beth and Sophie; Sophie for having found Phil and Nora; and Beth for having been found by Nora. But it is an ambivalent sort of luck because it has trapped them all in a pattern of relative unchanging — I was going to write, "comfort" but that's not quite right. Undemanding familiarity, perhaps, because their interpersonal demands are not of family, not of work mates, not of school mates. Oddly, they relate to each other from the strict requirements of their own self-interests which have been unthreatened by the others' own sell pre-occupations.

And with the ostensible bad luck of Phil dying young all that changes. The barriers of self-interest are breached in ways that are unexpected to all women and disorienting, The exploration is at times delightful and sad. Barfoot is unafraid to present characters who are seriously flawed and undoubtedly unlikable, but with such sympathy that I cared to see how each of them survived. The characters are complex enough that their interpersonal and psychological devolutions are not predictable. And the ending is a very pleasant surprise of character development.

So, with all that, and even though I thoroughly enjoyed the book I am still hesitant to give this five stars because it didn't quite blow me away, hence my having given it …

★★★★☆.

But, as luck would have it, Luck participated in two small fushigis. The first was so small and odd that I wasn't going to blog it, but after the second one popped up blogging them both became worthwhile.

Earlier this week I flipped through my cable company's free video on demand movie listings with the hope of finding a diverting comedy. Nothing stood out. But out of desperation I looked at the synopsis of the unknown to me Prada to Nada, which by its title was likely to be at least an attempt at comedy. I became a bit more interested when I saw that it was based on Jane Austen's great novel Sense and Sensibility. Sometimes, if the writing is good, such transformations can be very entertaining, like 10 Things I Hate About You which was a remake of The Taming of the Shrew.

It turns out that the IMDb reviewers have given Prada a cumulative 4.8 rating. Yup, that's about what I'd give it, too. However, the following day there occurred a curious overlapping between the movie and Luck. In Prada the flower The Bird of Paradise had a role in helping bridge the gap between the once rich Orange County girl and her circumstance of poverty in East LA. The Bird of Paradise is just seeable in the picture above. Below is another, picture:

So, the next day after having learned something about a flower about which I know nothing and have barely heard of, I read the following:

Then when storytelling time was over, she watched as her mysterious uncle, that flamboyant, raving bird of paradise, stepped up to the front (156).

When was the last time you read a book

character described as a 'raving bird of paradise'? So, as you can see this is an odd fushigi because I didn't know until the movie about a flower named after a bird, and within 48 hours I get two references to it.

But what did give me the impetus this fushigi began when I read:

The music Nora and Sophie finally chose yesterday is no Tom after all, but a Leonard — a Cohen song they agreed would suit all of them. Nora and Sophie and Philip. "It's very long," Sophie said, "but beautiful."

"Yes."

"it's not exactly funeral music."

"No."

Now, after a service in which music must constitute only the most minor shock and surprise, the opening bars of Dance Me to the End of Love commence their grim lilt (232-3).

Those were amongst the last words I read before leaving for work on the morning of September 7, 2011. When I started my car to go to work, I hear the last three or four words of Tom Power, the CBC-R2 morning host, before he spun up … yup, you guessed it, 'Dance me to the End of Love.'

Yup, I find that puzzling too. And I always love music fushigis.