The Dictionary of Animal Languages

Writer Heidi Sopinka gives us a fascinating and unusual character in Ivory Frame. She's an artist and biologist, and after 90 years of age, she is stunned to learn she's a grandmother. This is so shocking to her because she tried to forget that she had a child, since she was told the child died at birth. 

I couldn't always follow The Dictionary of Animal Languages, but noted some memorable Ivory musings including when she describes her distant, detached mother: "I live in equal parts of fear and awe of Mother. A brusque contrarian. Her obsession with cleanliness, both inside and out, was delineated by purges, the necessary ritual for those seeking perfection. It's why she didn't like sunny days,though she would never say it. Because they show all the dust. It is also why she had to be the thinnest woman in the room. It is not only that it makes her the most envied,but that, I suspect, she is actually disturbed by her own corporeality. Though she was not entirely a devastating presence. When I was allowed to visit her in her sitting room, she would hold me rapt with her descriptions of the paintings I loved... But when at the conclusion of these visits I was given a chocolate, I saw what I was. A guest." 

Ivory on convent school: "I am expected to have no emotions. Do as I'm told. And though I understand this would be the easier course, I cannot help but do the opposite. It is a life of indoors full of silence, full of blame. Not unlike the precise attention of my parents, constantly obsesses with correcting my behaviour, my posture, my manners. I love being outside. What I miss is air. Cut off from sounds of my childhood, I feel unethered and dull. When I arrive, the nuns' first words are, Rule number one." 

On getting older and aging: "Your powers flag. When you are old you are transparent. Is it possible to hide and yet be annoyed when no one notices you? ... Beauty is wasted on the young. Like leaves in autumn at their most brilliant, when the tree doesn't need them."

Upon seeing a young woman in complicated sandals with wrap around slave girl ankle straps, Ivory says, "For all its practical improvements, feminism has not yet freed women from a sense that their value resides in how they are seen by men." How true. 

Her honesty about new motherhood: "... you don't sleep for months, and you are stuck in this grueling toil. If the baby is screaming and I am half starved, do I still make a sandwich for myself while he cries? While he sleeps inside, is it illegal for me to be sitting here, on this bench? I feel unhinged, she says. Like I am capable of doing something crazy."  

Her painfully detailed memory of going into labour and then being left alone without her baby afterwards is heartbreaking. Sopinka packs a lot into her writing. Ivory's thoughts are full and she doesn't hold back, which makes this a big and gratifying read. 

I received The Dictionary of Animal Languages in a GoodReads giveaway. 

Until next time,

Kara