Customer Reviews

February

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

"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

This engaging novel emphasizes how grief is a difficult journey and everyone travels it differently. In order to raise her young children she puts aside her own grief issues for many years and just plows on. But eventually she does have to deal with it and it is a lovely healing to watch.

This book was a gift from a dear friend....so I tried. I think she chose it because, like the main character, I was suddenly widowed at a fairly young age.
I read 100 pages and then decided life is too short and there are too many other books I want to read.
This is the first book I have read by this author who has won a prize for an earlier work. Her style seems to be based on some advice she was once given to insert details and descriptions. She does have a LOT of details which are for the most part, not illuminating in any way. I remember one particular tedious section when Jane is buying a cookie at an airport ....excruciating detail on the store clerk and the difficulty she had in finding the cookie Jane wanted. I finally gave up the book when I came upon two non plausible parts. Jane has had a week long fling with John in a country foreign to both. No further contact until Jane calls him on his cell phone 6 months later. No explanation as to how she had his cell number as they were apparently pretty much inseparable during this week and parted with the understanding that it was over. BUT after Jane hangs up on John we are told that John doesn't have Jane's number to call her back. LOOK ON YOUR CELL PHONE JOHN - even I (old as I am) know that. Then we are told that in 1982 or 1983 when John (age 10 or 11) goes to a school counselor with troubling dreams after the death of his father, the school counselor asks him if he "had an orgasm" because the dreams had some sexual overtones. Please - I cannot believe any school counselor would use that word or make that inquiry....
Others seem to love this book - but I can't figure out why.

Moore's prose depicts true grief, powerful and evocative, with glimpses of a life that come and go unhindered by time and space. For me the book reflects memory, love and loss so perfectly. Her talent is as solid as the island that is the setting and her home.

This is my first discovery of Lisa Moore; what an extraordinary writer. The book explores the interior lives of two characters, Helen and John, a mother and son (other characters are rendered in wonderfully acute detail). I can understand why some readers might feel impatience with the patchwork style of writing, but I found it endlessly fascinating and real, the way real thoughts and feelings move from place to place and back again (and not in a meandering way. There's purpose and motivation in the way thoughts move in this book). Moore seems to have an unerring sense of how people's emotions move through the body and she is precise and beautiful in her descriptions. I found this book very powerful. 4 stars rather than 5 because the son is described by the mother in ways I didn't find true in his behavior, and I can't tell if that's purposeful or a gap in the writing. There's something missing there. And the ending feels rushed and not entirely satisfying (Helen's sister Louise was left out of the end, for one thing, which seems a terrible oversight, unless I missed something about her earlier on. And John's story leaves us hanging terribly). But the son carries within his narrative a sense of hope that was lost when his father died (as experienced by his mother), and I find that idea exquisitely moving. Very glad to have found this author.

The novel is written in short vignettes that jump back and forth through time. Each vignette has a descriptive title and year to guide the reader. The center of the story is Helen, who lost her husband Cal in the 1982 sinking of the Ocean Ranger. Most of the events happen between 1982 and 2008, but Moore also jumps to the early days of Helen and Cal's relationship.

I have rather ambivalent thoughts on this novel. Moore's writing is lovely. I tend to enjoy character-driven novels, but this one never fully captured me as a reader. When I was reading it, I was engaged in both the writing and the characters, but it wasn't a novel I pondered much when I wasn't actively reading it. The pacing was slightly off for me. I'm curious how much thought Moore put into the ordering of the vignettes. At times, the neighboring vignettes seemed perfect, but there were times I became invested in a subplot and wouldn't see the character again for far too many pages. In a nod to the realism with which Moore writes, there was no beginning, middle or end to these character's stories. This passage from early in the book, when Helen learns about Cal's death, illustrates Moore's use of language and character:

"Looking at his dead son must have been like watching a movie where nothing moved. It was not a photograph because it had duration. It had to be lived through. A photograph has none of that. This was a story without an ending. It would go on forever. And Helen was trying not to faint because it would scare the living daylights out of her children, and besides, she had known. She'd known the minute the bastard rig had sank. (p. 50)

I confess, there were times I wanted to give up on this novel. I wondered if it was worth it. I stuck with it, despite not loving it universally, because there were parts I did love. My favorite vignette, "Her Profile, 2006" (p. 153-157) was brilliant, and it would work well even as a stand-alone short story.

Overall, I certainly loved parts of it, but I didn't love the novel as a whole. Moore's writing is strong and poetic, but parts still fell flat for me. I liked it, and I'm glad I read it, but I didn't love it, and I'm not sure how long it will stick with me. I do think it will stand up well to multiple readings and become more nuanced. Recommended for fans of character-driven fiction and short story lovers.

While I appreciate the author's research, the book itself was lousy. I could not make heads or tails out of her "jumping around" in time. Any one of these characters could have been developed into a worthwhile novel, but this just was not the book I was expecting.

The plot is easy to summarize and this is not primarily a plot driven book. In 1982, the Ocean Ranger tragedy occurred off the coast of Newfoundland and many men lost their lives. Lisa Moore's lead character is Helen, a woman who has lost her husband in the disaster and is left with two children and with one more on the way.

The story is less so about the Ocean Ranger and more about a woman surviving the grief as she flashes back to the happy moments in her life and to the horror and numbing aftermath of the tragedy. Her eldest son John is also a key character. He has a job that sends him around the world and one of his affairs has left soon to be a father.

John's story breaks up the core story nicely and the switching back and forth works quite well. I didn't muh care for the John story stream on its own.

I liked February well enough but it didn't strike me in the heart the way that it did with some other readers. While I don't often say this, I think gender may affect how one views this book. A lot of it is Helen's journey from being a young mother to being a middle aged widow who longs to share her life with a partner even though in some ways she's too tough to admit it. Her journey is very personal and Moore writes it well but for me, it didn't hit all the emotional buttons that it did for others.

I did think the end of the book was terrific as Helen, in her 50s, awkwardly finds romance again. The description of her new romance is both touching and funny.

I liked it and recommend it but it didn't quite work for me in totality as my interest in the characters came and went.