Reviewed by Alison Gillmor
“We were strange little girls in our way. We had a hard time knowing where one of us left off and the other began,” writes Saleema Nawaz in this insightful but uneven debut novel about the complicated bonds of sisterhood. Caring but cutting, close but competitive, the relationship between Beena and Sadhana is formed by a childhood of sudden losses and later tested by adult tensions. After Sadhana dies at age thirty-two, her body lying undiscovered in her apartment for a week, Beena is left to unravel their knotted past: “I remember all too well the way that a single exchange could never be isolated but hearkened back irrevocably to other fights, old resentments spoken and unspoken. The deep trenches of our relationship that other people recognized only once they’d fallen in.”
The Montreal-based Nawaz won the Journey Prize in 2008 for “My Three Girls,” later published in her critically lauded short story collection, Mother Superior (Freehand). The thirty-four-year-old’s early recognition has brought acclaim and exposure. It has also created expectations, which seem to weigh heavily on the novelistic framework of Bone and Bread. Onetime Winnipegger Nawaz (she received her MA in English at the University of Manitoba, along with the 2006 Robert Kroetsch award for best creative thesis) explores family dynamics with tenderness and perception and pulls off some powerful descriptive passages. But in the move from short story to longer form, she struggles with structure. The novel feels both padded and slight.
This tale of two sisters centres on the characters found in “Bloodlines,” a story that was first published in The New Quarterly. When Beena is sixteen and Sadhana is fourteen, they both stop menstruating, but for very different reasons. Sadhana has become a dangerously underweight anorexic, while Beena has become pregnant by a callow kid who quickly disappears. As Sadhana becomes thinner, attempting to control the uncontrollable, Beena becomes heavier, taking on the unpredictable weight of another life.
Nawaz has found an expressive metaphorical fulcrum, one that suggests the ways in which the sisters are close and yet very different. The narrative, recounted by Beena, pivots on this point, slipping between the girls’ eccentric childhood and their diverging adult lives. After a cramped period in which the two barely grown girls live together, Sadhana ends up running with a creative crowd of actors, dancers and anarchist knitters in Montreal, while Beena concentrates on working as a freelance editor and raising her son, Quinn, in Ottawa. (One extremely uptight point here: If Beena is as an editor, she shouldn’t be misusing the word “disinterested.”)
Nawaz describes the caretaking role with agonized precision, suggesting the way in which Beena is driven to monitor her sister’s every mood, word and glance, to scrutinize each bite of food that she does or does not take. After Sadhana’s death, Beena is devastated but not surprised: “I spent so many years watching her disappear, little by little, that it is impossible for me to believe that there could be any of her left over.” But Beena’s grief is soon complicated by a growing suspicion that anorexia didn’t kill her sister. Sadhana’s fridge was full; her friends suggest that she was doing well. The connections between past and present become more urgent as Beena is drawn into a mystery, one that might trace back to Quinn’s long-gone father, Ravi Patel, now a hustling political opportunist aligned with a Quebec-based anti-immigration movement.
Nawaz’s strongest writing comes in the sections dealing with Beena and Sadhana’s childhood, with vivid pictures of the warm, yeasty, crowded apartment over the family’s bakery and of the multicultural Canadian mix of a Sikh-run bagel shop in a Hassidic Jewish neighbourhood in francophone Montreal. There is a brief glimpse of the girls’ father, who dies early and suddenly, and a slightly longer look at their sweet Irish-American mother, a New Agey spirit who follows him shortly after. (Hard not to think of Oscar Wilde—to lose one parent is a misfortune, but to lose both parents looks a bit like authorial carelessness.) Sadhana and Beena are left adolescent orphans under the gruff guardianship of their uncle, a traditional man who has a long list of things of which he does not approve: “music, sleeping in, caffeine, movies, phone calls for any purpose besides making plans, bright colours, Hallmark holidays, novels, exhibitions of emotion.”
Unfortunately, the sections set in the present time lack texture. We learn a few things about Beena’s relationship with Quinn, now a teenager who is becoming increasingly obsessed with finding his biological father, and about her romantic relationship with Evan, a prairie-boy cop who feels almost too good to be true. But neither connection feels as emotionally urgent as sisterhood. Maybe that’s the point.
Bone and Bread is one of those novels where individual sections succeed, often beautifully, but somehow fail to work together. The uncertainty surrounding Sadhana’s death should provide a narrative through-line, but the suspense feels trumped up and the solution strangely anticlimactic. The Ravi Patel subplot, which seems designed to bring in topical content—at one point, Nawaz references the infamous Hérouxville “guide for new immigrants”—also stalls out.
When Nawaz won the Journey prize for “My Three Girls,” the judges praised her for “condensing a novel’s worth of sorrows and joys into a few pages.” In Bone and Bread, she moves in the other direction, taking the concise core of a story and expanding it into a novel. While the work retains Nawaz’s psychological insight and emotional generosity, its language feels loose, the storyline stretched. In this case, bigger isn’t better.
House of Anansi | 445 pages | $22.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1770890091
‘Bone and Bread’ by Saleema Nawaz
Book Reviews
“We were strange little girls in our way. We had a hard time knowing where one of us left off and the other began,” writes Saleema Nawaz in this insightful but uneven debut novel about the complicated bonds of sisterhood. Caring but cutting, close but competitive, the relationship between Beena and Sadhana is formed by a childhood of sudden losses and later tested by adult tensions. After Sadhana dies at age thirty-two, her body lying undiscovered in her apartment for a week, Beena is left to unravel their knotted past: “I remember all too well the way that a single exchange could never be isolated but hearkened back irrevocably to other fights, old resentments spoken and unspoken. The deep trenches of our relationship that other people recognized only once they’d fallen in.”
The Montreal-based Nawaz won the Journey Prize in 2008 for “My Three Girls,” later published in her critically lauded short story collection, Mother Superior (Freehand). The thirty-four-year-old’s early recognition has brought acclaim and exposure. It has also created expectations, which seem to weigh heavily on the novelistic framework of Bone and Bread. Onetime Winnipegger Nawaz (she received her MA in English at the University of Manitoba, along with the 2006 Robert Kroetsch award for best creative thesis) explores family dynamics with tenderness and perception and pulls off some powerful descriptive passages. But in the move from short story to longer form, she struggles with structure. The novel feels both padded and slight.
This tale of two sisters centres on the characters found in “Bloodlines,” a story that was first published in The New Quarterly. When Beena is sixteen and Sadhana is fourteen, they both stop menstruating, but for very different reasons. Sadhana has become a dangerously underweight anorexic, while Beena has become pregnant by a callow kid who quickly disappears. As Sadhana becomes thinner, attempting to control the uncontrollable, Beena becomes heavier, taking on the unpredictable weight of another life.
Nawaz has found an expressive metaphorical fulcrum, one that suggests the ways in which the sisters are close and yet very different. The narrative, recounted by Beena, pivots on this point, slipping between the girls’ eccentric childhood and their diverging adult lives. After a cramped period in which the two barely grown girls live together, Sadhana ends up running with a creative crowd of actors, dancers and anarchist knitters in Montreal, while Beena concentrates on working as a freelance editor and raising her son, Quinn, in Ottawa. (One extremely uptight point here: If Beena is as an editor, she shouldn’t be misusing the word “disinterested.”)
Nawaz describes the caretaking role with agonized precision, suggesting the way in which Beena is driven to monitor her sister’s every mood, word and glance, to scrutinize each bite of food that she does or does not take. After Sadhana’s death, Beena is devastated but not surprised: “I spent so many years watching her disappear, little by little, that it is impossible for me to believe that there could be any of her left over.” But Beena’s grief is soon complicated by a growing suspicion that anorexia didn’t kill her sister. Sadhana’s fridge was full; her friends suggest that she was doing well. The connections between past and present become more urgent as Beena is drawn into a mystery, one that might trace back to Quinn’s long-gone father, Ravi Patel, now a hustling political opportunist aligned with a Quebec-based anti-immigration movement.
Nawaz’s strongest writing comes in the sections dealing with Beena and Sadhana’s childhood, with vivid pictures of the warm, yeasty, crowded apartment over the family’s bakery and of the multicultural Canadian mix of a Sikh-run bagel shop in a Hassidic Jewish neighbourhood in francophone Montreal. There is a brief glimpse of the girls’ father, who dies early and suddenly, and a slightly longer look at their sweet Irish-American mother, a New Agey spirit who follows him shortly after. (Hard not to think of Oscar Wilde—to lose one parent is a misfortune, but to lose both parents looks a bit like authorial carelessness.) Sadhana and Beena are left adolescent orphans under the gruff guardianship of their uncle, a traditional man who has a long list of things of which he does not approve: “music, sleeping in, caffeine, movies, phone calls for any purpose besides making plans, bright colours, Hallmark holidays, novels, exhibitions of emotion.”
Unfortunately, the sections set in the present time lack texture. We learn a few things about Beena’s relationship with Quinn, now a teenager who is becoming increasingly obsessed with finding his biological father, and about her romantic relationship with Evan, a prairie-boy cop who feels almost too good to be true. But neither connection feels as emotionally urgent as sisterhood. Maybe that’s the point.
Bone and Bread is one of those novels where individual sections succeed, often beautifully, but somehow fail to work together. The uncertainty surrounding Sadhana’s death should provide a narrative through-line, but the suspense feels trumped up and the solution strangely anticlimactic. The Ravi Patel subplot, which seems designed to bring in topical content—at one point, Nawaz references the infamous Hérouxville “guide for new immigrants”—also stalls out.
When Nawaz won the Journey prize for “My Three Girls,” the judges praised her for “condensing a novel’s worth of sorrows and joys into a few pages.” In Bone and Bread, she moves in the other direction, taking the concise core of a story and expanding it into a novel. While the work retains Nawaz’s psychological insight and emotional generosity, its language feels loose, the storyline stretched. In this case, bigger isn’t better.
House of Anansi | 445 pages | $22.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1770890091