This week’s blog brings together several compelling works. One is a musical related to 9/11 while the other two are books. One book is a wonderful novel about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, while the other is a cancer memoir, painful yet ultimately redeeming.
POWERFUL VIEWING: Remembering 9/11
Come from Away (Apple TV+)
I doubt there is anyone of a certain age who doesn’t recall where he or she was on September 11, 2001. Come from Away (2013) is a musical about the passengers whose planes were diverted to Gander, Newfoundland, and how they were embraced by the local residents. Unabashedly energetic, even boisterous, it is also a compelling and heart-tugging perspective on five days of confusion, chaos, and community. Folks of different religions, nationalities, and cultures were thrown together at a tragic, uncomfortable time.
Members of the cast play multiple roles, switching back and forth from Gander community leaders to one of the many passengers. Standouts for me were the female airline pilot played by Jenn Colella based on the real Beverley Bass; Joel Hatch as the mayor of Gander; and Beulah Davis, chief organizer and comforter, played by Astrid Van Wieren. There is conflict, craziness, and coming together. I found watching it an uplifting experience. A live Broadway performance was filmed for this production and is aired with no breaks or intermission. Highly recommended!
RECENT READING
THE LANGUAGE OF WOMEN
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
I loved this novel and read it in just a day. If you love words and their meanings and how they are used, you too will be fascinated. Author Williams wondered how gender affects the use and understanding of words. Given that the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was largely the work of older white Victorian men, she crafted a novel that reflects first a child’s, then a young woman’s participation in the creation of the dictionary. Some of the characters such as Dr. James Murray, the chief architect, and several of the male lexicographers are historic figures. So is Edith Thompson, a historian who contributed definitions and quotations for many thousands of entries.
The novel focuses on Esme, a child of six, who hides under the sorting table collecting the occasional stray definition slip of paper. Over the course of publication of all the fascicles from A-B to Z , Esme becomes a woman. Esme spends hours in the Scriptorium where the work is carried out. As she gets older, she becomes involved in sorting mail, then checking quotes at the Bodleian and other libraries, and eventually taking on some editing and correction duties. Lizzie, the household maid of all work, takes care of Esme and a friendship develops.
Esme is curious and full of questions and begins to wonder why some words, particularly those spoken by the lower classes, but not written down in books, are not to be included in the OED. She gets a graphic education in colorful language from Mabel, a down-at-the-heels vendor in the local market and creates her own slips with quotations for these less than polite terms. An only child whose mother has died, Esme leads a sheltered life until she meets actress Tilda and her brother Bill, encounters the suffragist movement, and delivers pages to the typesetting room at the press where she meets Gareth, a handsome young compositor.
The novel relates the laborious process of releasing the letters of the alphabet in sections from 1888 to completion in 1928 alongside the coming-of-age of Esme from age six to middle age. For Esme, the treatment of the suffragettes is disturbing, while the exodus of men to war means more work coupled with an all-consuming worry for their safety. How Williams weaves in the suffrage movement and the impact of WWI add to the richness of this story. But, some readers may be surprised at the ending and question if the author wraps things up too neatly.
Esme is not a common name. I wondered if Williams chose it as homage to J. D. Salinger’s notable story, For Esme with Love and Squalor, about a 13-year-old girl and a soldier during the Second World War.
Like the process of compiling a comprehensive dictionary, this novel unfolds slowly and gradually. I was committed to it from the first paragraphs. Highly recommended! (~JWFarrington)
CANCER AND BEYOND
Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad
Cancer memoirs often take one of two forms. Either they are an account of battling and surviving the medical aspects of cancer or they are one individual’s experience and reflections which end just before death. Ms. Jaouad’s memoir is somewhat different in that she was diagnosed with leukemia at age 22, just after completing college. It was a delayed diagnosis, and she was by then very sick. She underwent massive chemotherapy treatments, endured numerous hospitalizations due to infections, and ultimately required a bone marrow transplant, a long and arduous process involving months of isolation.
The medical details in the first part of her memoir are graphic, frightening and often unpleasant. Yet she writes about them with candor, humility, and even occasional humor. She was blessed with loving parents and an unbelievable new boyfriend who re-arranged his life to be her primary caregiver.
What is perhaps more appealing is part two in which she attempts to regain a sense of normalcy. All treatments are over, and she’s deemed able to travel and work again. Yet her immune system is still, and may always be, fragile. She tires easily and finds it difficult to focus and apply herself without the goal of the next medical procedure. How to be normal again is not something the medical team has covered.
Probably what saves her, or at least provides emotional and intellectual sustenance, is a solo cross-country journey she undertakes. Dubbed the One Hundred Day Project, it is to visit individuals who wrote or e-mailed her after she published a regular column in the New York Times. Meeting these almost strangers, Jaouad gains perspective on herself and reflects on how she was often self-centered and needy in some of her relationships. I found this section of the book satisfying as she finally goes beyond her four years of treatment and comes into her own as a more well-rounded person. I wouldn’t recommend this book to everyone, but some readers may find her journey amazing and her sprightly writing a gift. (~JWFarrington)
Note: Header photo of morning clouds ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).
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