Stranger comes to us two years after Scotiabank Giller Prize winner David Bergen’s Leaving Tomorrow. In Stranger, which has just been longlisted for the 2016 Giller, Winnipeg-based Bergen sets his narrative rolling in the Guatemalan countryside, charting the early life of a girl named Íso Perdido. As in his previous novel, Bergen begins with a character who is knowledgeable about only a small corner of the world and follows her as she experiences a culturally disparate, wider one.
Íso works as a sort of companion to women at a fertility clinic near her hometown in the highlands of Guatemala. Things become complicated when Íso and an American doctor named Eric Mann begin an affair. The love triangle is completed when Dr. Mann’s estranged wife comes to Guatemala to attend the clinic as a patient, and Íso is assigned to look after her. Just as a relatively straightforward end to Íso and Dr. Mann’s relationship seems inevitable, Íso becomes pregnant. Following the birth of the child and the subsequent theft of the baby, Íso embarks on an epic journey to recover her child and return home.
Though the attention to detail and tone of the novel are pleasingly balanced in the opening few chapters, the upright and noble Íso and the Harlequin-esque, long-haired doctor visiting her on his motorcycle feel uncomfortable for their familiarity. At first glance it appears that Stranger is unrolling in the tradition of a melodrama. If not for Bergen’s subtle and thoughtful undercuts, this would be true:
She said that she loved this time in the evening, when the birds had settled down, and the day was over, and the tumult of the day had finished. She chose the word “tumult” because he had used it just that morning when talking about the tumult of his heart. She liked the word but thought that it was much too dramatic to talk about his heart. It was too intimate.
Without offering too many details, Bergen crashes the melodramatic motorcycle both literally and figuratively in a way that shifts the novel in a new direction.
Stranger follows an unusually alert rendering of the loss of innocence, or the trading of innocence for experience. In other words, Bergen encourages us to take nothing for granted. As Íso sets off on her mission to retrieve her child, Bergen describes her in a way that is declarative of a desire to adjust the lens through which we see her: “She had no identification, and everything that was true about her—anything that could be known—was inside her own head.”
Much has been written about Bergen’s talent for characterization and sharp attention to thrifty details, and this novel is no exception. Stranger is populated largely by passing characters (or strangers). Bergen consistently hits the mark with each of them, deftly bringing the reader into belief without needing to convince. As the novel progressed, I began to notice a pattern, not so much in the feeling or technique that Bergen presented, but in my own reaction to it: I continually felt surprised that each of these characters possessed the knowledge and experience that Bergen assigned to them. It was never a question of belief that such knowledge was true of each character, but blankness somehow comes along with each of them. The feeling with Bergen’s characters is something like hearing a child who seems too young to speak suddenly utter a word —it is both impossible and easy to accept.
For example, when Íso is talking with a Guatemalan woman named Vitoria whom she meets in America, there is an assumed blankness between them that is slowly populated with experience:
Vitoria asked her if she believed that things happened for a reason.
What things?
Good things. Evil things.
Man-made things?
Or those things brought on by God. Like earthquakes and tornadoes and floods. She said that she had witnessed a tornado in Kansas…
You’ve been in an earthquake?
Yes, twice… A tornado arrives like a lion.
You know a lion?
No. But I’ve seen movies, and heard the noises they make.
The childlike questioning adds a sense of awe to these lines, but there is also potential for it to rub the reader the wrong way. Occasionally, Íso’s innocence feels a little overplayed or perhaps overly idealized.
The narrative provides a way of watching Íso recover from the trauma of her failed relationship with Dr. Mann. Friends and family remind Íso of the dangers of the relationship before it goes wrong. Bergen, thankfully, does not give in to the temptation to let the affair feel like a colossal mistake and simplify Íso’s stepping out from her own world as an equally important mistake. Rather, he uses the experience of the failed relationship and the events that result from it as a way of showing how Íso gradually becomes conscious of her distance from her own nature and intuition. As a result, each of the many characters she encounters from then on serve as a both a testing ground and opportunity for her to get to know her own instincts and reactions to the world.
The title Stranger, while at first seeming indefinite, is applicable to both Íso and the many people she comes across. Bergen repeatedly studies how Íso relates to passing individuals—each encounter is a test that is obscure in nature but essential to her journey.
While Stranger provides an ever-deepening look at Íso’s personal journey, there is also a wonderful attentiveness to the importance of food. Bergen goes into great detail explaining meals that are offered between characters as celebrations, welcomes or goodbyes. The varying styles of cuisine and the statement and universality of the blessing that characters bestow on one another seems to be one way that Bergen subtly gets beyond the superficiality of the issues surrounding multiculturalism and immigration that are present in Stranger. Rather than playing its part as a narrative prop or a lame-duck attempt by an author to show off cultural research, Bergen’s treatment of food imparts a kind of timelessness and kinship. It is an ongoing return to ritual, to need and to sharing.
While there is plenty of play with types and clichés at work in Stranger, one of the most satisfying aspects of the novel is how completely Bergen steps into the wider world. Like the sprawling work of Roberto Bolaño, Bergen freely moves through dozens of real and imagined spaces, all the while keeping hold of a very specific thread and continuing to recognize each passing detail as a contributing clue in some great mystery.
Harper Collins’ hardcover edition of Stranger is wonderfully laid out, even if the fad of uncut pages is starting to feel a bit tiresome. The cover plays on an image of submersion that Bergen uses when describing Íso’s experience of childbirth. Though this is an important image for the novel and is thematically spot-on, the stylized nude-dancer-wrapped in fabric is perhaps a bit wide of the mark in terms of the feel of the novel as a whole and especially in how Íso is presented. Much like the shift from the initial love affair with Dr. Mann to the surprising depths that come later in the novel, removing the dust-jacket yields a much more satisfying red and black cover with tasteful gold lettering on the spine.
Bergen has a knack for writing novels that are impossible to summarize without using the language of generic conventions. His previous novel, Leaving Tomorrow, creatively works within the confines of a traditional coming-of-age framework (see Mark Sampson’s review here), while Stranger, at first glance, might be called an out-and-out melodrama. Though Bergen is re-evaluating and placing pressure on generic conventions even as he is using them, it might make it difficult to explain to a friend what sets a novel like Stranger apart from other popular fiction. Stranger reads as both melodrama and adventure novel, but under its clothes there is a great deal of investigation going on. There is a subversive undercurrent in Stranger that toys with its own clichés and occasionally challenges the reader to understand something that is just out of reach.
‘Stranger’ by David Bergen
Book Reviews
Stranger comes to us two years after Scotiabank Giller Prize winner David Bergen’s Leaving Tomorrow. In Stranger, which has just been longlisted for the 2016 Giller, Winnipeg-based Bergen sets his narrative rolling in the Guatemalan countryside, charting the early life of a girl named Íso Perdido. As in his previous novel, Bergen begins with a character who is knowledgeable about only a small corner of the world and follows her as she experiences a culturally disparate, wider one.
Íso works as a sort of companion to women at a fertility clinic near her hometown in the highlands of Guatemala. Things become complicated when Íso and an American doctor named Eric Mann begin an affair. The love triangle is completed when Dr. Mann’s estranged wife comes to Guatemala to attend the clinic as a patient, and Íso is assigned to look after her. Just as a relatively straightforward end to Íso and Dr. Mann’s relationship seems inevitable, Íso becomes pregnant. Following the birth of the child and the subsequent theft of the baby, Íso embarks on an epic journey to recover her child and return home.
Though the attention to detail and tone of the novel are pleasingly balanced in the opening few chapters, the upright and noble Íso and the Harlequin-esque, long-haired doctor visiting her on his motorcycle feel uncomfortable for their familiarity. At first glance it appears that Stranger is unrolling in the tradition of a melodrama. If not for Bergen’s subtle and thoughtful undercuts, this would be true:
She said that she loved this time in the evening, when the birds had settled down, and the day was over, and the tumult of the day had finished. She chose the word “tumult” because he had used it just that morning when talking about the tumult of his heart. She liked the word but thought that it was much too dramatic to talk about his heart. It was too intimate.
Without offering too many details, Bergen crashes the melodramatic motorcycle both literally and figuratively in a way that shifts the novel in a new direction.
Stranger follows an unusually alert rendering of the loss of innocence, or the trading of innocence for experience. In other words, Bergen encourages us to take nothing for granted. As Íso sets off on her mission to retrieve her child, Bergen describes her in a way that is declarative of a desire to adjust the lens through which we see her: “She had no identification, and everything that was true about her—anything that could be known—was inside her own head.”
Much has been written about Bergen’s talent for characterization and sharp attention to thrifty details, and this novel is no exception. Stranger is populated largely by passing characters (or strangers). Bergen consistently hits the mark with each of them, deftly bringing the reader into belief without needing to convince. As the novel progressed, I began to notice a pattern, not so much in the feeling or technique that Bergen presented, but in my own reaction to it: I continually felt surprised that each of these characters possessed the knowledge and experience that Bergen assigned to them. It was never a question of belief that such knowledge was true of each character, but blankness somehow comes along with each of them. The feeling with Bergen’s characters is something like hearing a child who seems too young to speak suddenly utter a word —it is both impossible and easy to accept.
For example, when Íso is talking with a Guatemalan woman named Vitoria whom she meets in America, there is an assumed blankness between them that is slowly populated with experience:
Vitoria asked her if she believed that things happened for a reason.
What things?
Good things. Evil things.
Man-made things?
Or those things brought on by God. Like earthquakes and tornadoes and floods. She said that she had witnessed a tornado in Kansas…
You’ve been in an earthquake?
Yes, twice… A tornado arrives like a lion.
You know a lion?
No. But I’ve seen movies, and heard the noises they make.
The childlike questioning adds a sense of awe to these lines, but there is also potential for it to rub the reader the wrong way. Occasionally, Íso’s innocence feels a little overplayed or perhaps overly idealized.
The narrative provides a way of watching Íso recover from the trauma of her failed relationship with Dr. Mann. Friends and family remind Íso of the dangers of the relationship before it goes wrong. Bergen, thankfully, does not give in to the temptation to let the affair feel like a colossal mistake and simplify Íso’s stepping out from her own world as an equally important mistake. Rather, he uses the experience of the failed relationship and the events that result from it as a way of showing how Íso gradually becomes conscious of her distance from her own nature and intuition. As a result, each of the many characters she encounters from then on serve as a both a testing ground and opportunity for her to get to know her own instincts and reactions to the world.
The title Stranger, while at first seeming indefinite, is applicable to both Íso and the many people she comes across. Bergen repeatedly studies how Íso relates to passing individuals—each encounter is a test that is obscure in nature but essential to her journey.
While Stranger provides an ever-deepening look at Íso’s personal journey, there is also a wonderful attentiveness to the importance of food. Bergen goes into great detail explaining meals that are offered between characters as celebrations, welcomes or goodbyes. The varying styles of cuisine and the statement and universality of the blessing that characters bestow on one another seems to be one way that Bergen subtly gets beyond the superficiality of the issues surrounding multiculturalism and immigration that are present in Stranger. Rather than playing its part as a narrative prop or a lame-duck attempt by an author to show off cultural research, Bergen’s treatment of food imparts a kind of timelessness and kinship. It is an ongoing return to ritual, to need and to sharing.
While there is plenty of play with types and clichés at work in Stranger, one of the most satisfying aspects of the novel is how completely Bergen steps into the wider world. Like the sprawling work of Roberto Bolaño, Bergen freely moves through dozens of real and imagined spaces, all the while keeping hold of a very specific thread and continuing to recognize each passing detail as a contributing clue in some great mystery.
Harper Collins’ hardcover edition of Stranger is wonderfully laid out, even if the fad of uncut pages is starting to feel a bit tiresome. The cover plays on an image of submersion that Bergen uses when describing Íso’s experience of childbirth. Though this is an important image for the novel and is thematically spot-on, the stylized nude-dancer-wrapped in fabric is perhaps a bit wide of the mark in terms of the feel of the novel as a whole and especially in how Íso is presented. Much like the shift from the initial love affair with Dr. Mann to the surprising depths that come later in the novel, removing the dust-jacket yields a much more satisfying red and black cover with tasteful gold lettering on the spine.
Bergen has a knack for writing novels that are impossible to summarize without using the language of generic conventions. His previous novel, Leaving Tomorrow, creatively works within the confines of a traditional coming-of-age framework (see Mark Sampson’s review here), while Stranger, at first glance, might be called an out-and-out melodrama. Though Bergen is re-evaluating and placing pressure on generic conventions even as he is using them, it might make it difficult to explain to a friend what sets a novel like Stranger apart from other popular fiction. Stranger reads as both melodrama and adventure novel, but under its clothes there is a great deal of investigation going on. There is a subversive undercurrent in Stranger that toys with its own clichés and occasionally challenges the reader to understand something that is just out of reach.
HarperCollins | 272 pages | $29.99 | cloth | ISBN # 9781443450973