Which isnt’t much when I think about how little I know about my ancestors. How little I know of my grandparents, or even my parents. It’s as if their lives are closed off and hidden. I can’t help but think that a part of me will always remain a mystery because of it.
I’m thinking about family and the past because of Wally Lamb’s novel This Much I Know Is True, which I finished over the Fiji Day three-day long weekend, 10th to 12th October.
Lamb’s novel was one of three books (pictured above) I bought on Saturday, 10 October, Fiji Day, from Bargain Box, Nadi Town. I started reading it, and couldn’t let it go, and read it through Saturday night, Sunday, and I finished it on Monday. All 897 pages of it, with page 1 marking the beginning of chapter 1, and page 897 marking the end of the story. There are more pages before page 1 and after page 897, so it’s a fat little book.
I bought the novel because I liked the opening sentence, and it was only FJ$5.00. I wouldn’t have bought it if it had costed more. That’s what I do now, in trying to expand my reading range, and trying out authors whose works I’m not familiar with, I read their opening sentence. That’s how I bought other books like Vanishing Point by Thea Astley, or The Wife and the Widow by Christian White, and others. Fortunately, Bargain Box does not impose any no-reading policy, and that helps readers like me to take our time and choose carefully.
It has been a while since I focused my reading attention, and complete a big book like this one. It was the first sentence, and the narrator’s voice that held my attention. I felt his struggle, but I also thought him an idiot, not only because of some of the things he did, but also because after everything he’d been through, he didn’t humble himself enough to ask God for help. Even in the midst of loss, grief, and heartache, he never asked God why. He never spoke to God.
Now, I know that the book is a made-up story, but I’ve met people like that, who think they are the only ones who know how to deal with whatever troubles they face in life, and ignore God altogether.
They might ‘tap into a higher consciousness’, or go try ‘new age’ teachings, or even look to Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and so on. I think It could be, because these beliefs tend to be more tangible, in that you have statues, as in Hinduism and Buddhism, that they pray to. And I suppose they get a faster and more compatible response from these sources than the patience-building wait necessary in Christianity.
The novel is in first-person point of view, and is narrated by the main character, Dominick Birdsey, who tells the story, a memoir of sorts, about his life as ‘the sane brother of a schizophrenic identical twin’, and the many troubles he faced as the result of his brother’s mental illness. He goes back and forth, between the present and the past, including episodes from their childhood, and his marriage and divorce.
At a certain point, the story goes even further back into the past through the manuscript of his late maternal namesake grandfather’s autobiography that his mother gave him before she died from cancer.The entire story is like a collection of horrible generational curses, fueled by arrogrance, pride and racism. And with the need to dominate the weaker threading through it all.
As a Christian, I’m always interested in how people live their lives when they don’t believe in God, particularly how they react to problems. In this novel, the protagonist chooses therapy. But what interested me more was the fact that his grandfather wrote and left behind his autobiography. It just seemed too neat to me, like a nicely wrapped gift that somehow makes life makes sense. And I thought of how fortunate some people are, real life people, whose grandparents or parents leave behind writings about their lives. How fortunate to have diaries or notes from your ancestors where you can discover what they were like.
That’s something I’ve wished for a few times, writings and notes, maybe letters from my great-grandparents, or grandparents, with their stories, their testaments of faith, and how they related to God, how they kept the faith.
This is why I write. Whay I have this blog.