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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Powerful Novel Brilliantly Written, March 27, 2010
This review is from: February (Paperback)
Just beyond the middle of this incredible novel, the central character, Helen, is part of a yoga class. And it serves as the perfect metaphor for the theme of the novel. The yoga instructor, as they do, is uttering those ¡§yoga¡¨clicheVs about finding inner peace, blah, blah, blah. And Helen thinks, ¡§I am supposed to achieve balance.¡¨ This might well have been the opening of the novel.
In 1982 The Ocean Ranger, a vessel owned by an oil company, sinks in the North Atlantic. And everyone aboard drowns, including Cal, Helen's husband, leaving her with three young children and, unknown to her at the time, another on the way. In 2008 Helen has yet been unable to come to any resolution about his death and the impact it has had upon her life while she waits for her oldest and only son, John, to arrive from his world travels with a woman who is pregnant with his first baby, a woman with whom he had a one-week affair in Iceland seven months earlier. So in a sense this novel is about that one moment in time except, of course, it isn't.
We are provided with up-close and personal grief and what it has done to the central character and, in turn, her four children, most especially the older three. It is very powerful and so artistically handled in the hands of Lisa Moore, the author of Alligator. (I had been ill-informed about February being a sequel to Alligator. If it is¡Xand I read Alligator before getting into this one¡XI certainly don't see any connections except they both take place in Newfoundland.) Alligator is very well written, very engaging. This one is even more so.
Helen has spent her adult life being ¡§grateful for all the brief escapes¡¨ offered her, often escapes she creates by allowing her mind to imagine what happened and how others responded and thought. If ever there was a postmodern existential novel that reaches out and grabs, this is it. There is no end to grief. None.
Lisa Moore is a master at point of view, skillfully allowing us into Helen's head (and occasionally other characters' heads, especially her son John's) with what essentially are scattered thoughts that all of us have, seemingly disconnected ones. She bounces back and forth in time, giving us little pieces, almost like doing a picture puzzle but without the package cover to guide us. And that is the beauty of the writing; it is so lacking in a linear plot line. So as a reader you say, ¡§Wow. So that is what happened back...¡¨
The style fascinates me. But it could take some ¡§getting used to¡¨ for readers who have not experienced what I will call a collage style, one in which thoughts from the present and past exist together, often in the same paragraph. But it is a wonderful style if the reader gives the first few pages a chance. There are no quotation marks for dialogue, not even question marks when a question is ask. But it works brilliantly and makes this such a unique reading experience.
Helen's has been a rudderless life. She is clearly depressed, a woman who refuses any of the drugs suggested to her, a woman who parents with a because I told you to attitude. Now in her mid-fifties she wonders if she might find love somehow, somewhere. I will not disclose how she goes about doing so. But we know nothing will work out because it is a world where essentially love seems not to exist much, at least not for Helen who truly did love Cal. And he apparently loved her as well.
I can honestly say this is one of the most moving novels I have ever read.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Emerging from Grief, August 9, 2010
This review is from: February (Paperback)
This book by Canadian novelist Lisa Moore is on the long list for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. It is a curious choice, because it is a quiet book, entirely domestic in scale, in which very little actually happens. I suppose that Anne Enright's THE GATHERING (the 2007 winner) would be the closest comparison. Lisa Moore's novel is similar in being centered around a single family in the aftermath of a death, and moving freely through several decades. But Moore does not have Enright's hysteria or obsessive sexuality, and I appreciate her for that. What she does have is sheer good writing, rich characters, and a sense of truth.
At fifty-six, Helen O'Mara is the mother of four grown children and the grandmother of two. She had only just become pregnant with her last child when her husband Cal was drowned in the collapse of the Ocean Ranger oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982 (a real historical disaster). For more than a quarter-century, she has mastered her grief, seeing her children grow to adulthood, and building up a business for herself as a dressmaker. But she feels unfulfilled and lonely, and will remain so until she comes to terms with Cal's death. The book jacket suggests that there may be undisclosed secrets here, but that is not Moore's way. The facts are as they always were, but the unexpected homecoming of her son John (who also works in the oil industry) triggers a series of memories in Helen, jumping freely in meticulously-labeled short sections between 1972 and the present, which eventually lay out her entire adult life in some kind of a pattern, and enable her to think towards a future.
When reading (and not especially liking) Ayelet Waldman's recent RED HOOK ROAD, another novel about a family in a coastal town dealing with grief, I put down my disenchantment to a personal dislike for novels that were small-scale and domestic, rather than dealing with large themes. But FEBRUARY is even smaller in scale, and I enjoyed it greatly. Mostly because Moore writes so well. Little descriptive touches such as "the scrudge-squeak of a naked foot on the royal blue gym mats" in a yoga class, or a tired woman sitting down in a coffee shop who "unzips her jacket and sighs so deeply she falls into herself like a cake." But more than that -- she writes the way people think and talk, in interrupted phrases and non-sequiturs, illuminated by sudden flashes of insight. Yes, there are flaws in the book: it tends to meander a little, some promising ideas go nowhere (such as the fact that John works for a company that perpetuates the same risks that killed his father), and the conclusion is perhaps too pat. But the sense of being inside the mind and heart of such a well-observed character counts for a great deal.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A widow for many years, September 1, 2010
This review is from: February (Paperback)
"February," by the Canadian writer Lisa Moore, is a lovely book. The title derives from the February, 1982, sinking of the oil-drilling rig Ocean Ranger in the North Atlantic. Helen O'Mara, the novel's protagonist, loses her husband Cal in a disaster (there were no survivors) later attributed to flaws in safety, design, and crew training. Some things never change.
Set in Newfoundland, the story of Helen and Cal shifts in time. The novel flashes back to their courtship and marriage, shifts to the moment when Helen learns that she has lost her husband, moves forward to her current life as a widow in her mid-fifties. Woven into this is a minor thread: the relationship of Helen's adult son John and Jane, a woman he meets while traveling. The novel is constructed as a series of cameos: Helen and Cal on their honeymoon; Helen listening to her father-in-law describe his identification of Cal's body; Helen being stood up in a bar as she waits for someone she has met through an online dating service. Her life is mundane, but her thoughts are not. Ceaselessly, she retraces the mechanics (which were actually detailed in a government report) of the sinking of the Ocean Ranger: was Cal asleep when it happened? was he playing cards? was he thinking of Helen and his four children? when did he know he was going to die?
While this is a novel about grief, it is also a novel about life. Helen's kids grow up; the bank threatens to take the house; the yoga teacher instructs Helen in mindfulness. The philosophical bent of the novel moves it far away from the genre of commercial women's fiction. It is a novel for anyone who has ever muddled through sorrow, and it well deserves its place on the 2010 Man Booker long list.
M. Feldman
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