Customer Reviews

Lost Geography

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

 

 

Images of maps, bits of geography float through this excellent story of four generations of women--Margaret, Hilda, Danielle, and Sophia. Margaret is a nurse in Saskatchewan when she meets her future husband Davis, a Scots immigrant searching for his fortune in the new world. Davis, felled by a fever, changes course and settles down as a farmer-husband-parent. Daughter Hilda chooses to move onto Toronto where she makes a different kind of life with an antiques dealer. Margaret's granddaughter Danielle leaves her mother Hilda and migrates to Paris where she meets Osman, a dealer in antique oriental rugs. After Danielle dies, Osman and their two children Sasha and Sophia move to New York to begin again.

On the surface, the stories of these women's lives do not contain obvious morals or seem to have a purpose other than their recounting. However, this is a tale not only of shifting landscape, but of the search for one's place in the geography of the heart. It puts me in mind of the short-story novels of Alice Munro--'Friend of My Youth' or 'Lives of Girls and Women.' The richness of the text is like a Bazaar. Colorful and original images abound--the grandmother who is bent like a cipher and feels like a raspy husk when she hugs you; the former library-cum crater, filled with mushrooms feeding on mouldering books and lined with Queen Anne's Lace; the little boxes filled with copper pennies turned green, stacked and hidden behind the old kitchen stove--and rugs, maps, and mellow old wooden antiques. Bacon's writing is as rich as the antique Yatak pictured on the book jacket.

Lost Geography is a beautifully written book. The discriptions of place, and the thoughts of each character are so poetic and unique it took my breath away. It is a generational story about the way we fall in love, how fate and place and those we meet shape us, how our plans may get changed but life can lead us to the unexpected, that even through pain there is joy. Charlotte Bacon weaves us a tapestry with her words and characters. You should read it.

I really wanted to like this book. It's episodic expanse of multi-generational portraits were like looking in an old photo album of family pictures. Each character was interesting enough. However, like looking at the old photos, nothing much actually happened in the book. I kept expecting that events would also lead to a sense of the profound. Ultimately, this only achieved a sense of the mundane. After reading through these 259 pages, I felt like I'd labored through an 800-page Russian novel or the collected short stories of Mavis Gallant. I suppose in what was supposed to be a true-to-life portrait, the sudden deaths were to reveal the meaning of life rather than simply being jarring. And the ending left me clueless. What was that? What is one supposed to get from standing in the window other than the book is over with the characters left standing in the windows? If there was a hidden profundity in the ending, I totally missed it. Perhaps this is a book that would resonate more with a woman than a man. If you spend the time with this, I hope you find it a more satisfying read than I. -- And if you get the ending, why not email me to let me in on what I should have gotten? BuddyBipkin@excite.com

Lost Geography is a story about the search for each character's place in the world. Each character is uprooted from the familiar and must find a place that 'fits' in a new and strange landscape in which they are in many ways an outsider. And as they find a place in which they 'fit', they find that each choice closes off channels of possibility, of adventure, and that in settling into their place, they must face up to the joy and pain of real (though sometimes mundane) life. These common threads of exploration, adaptation, choice, these tie four very different generations together. Margaret and Davis find on their wedding night that they really do fit. Hilda finds Armand, then devotes herself to her daughter. Danielle is both the light and the anchor for Osman's roving soul. And Death is, inevitably, part of life. In this story the separation of children from their parents severs them from familiar modes of understanding, from their history, and this forces them, with varying degrees of success, to forge new ways of understanding their place in the world.

I found the last scene quite moving. Osman's carpets, thick with dust from their previous owners, are a piece of history that he cannot let go of, just as he cannot let go of his memories of Danielle. Lost Geography is an easy read, but I believe the 'morals' may be deeper than it seems at first glance. Osman's story as he tells it to his children during Danielle's illness may be much like Bacon's intention for her novel. Sasha and Sophie are disappointed with the story because they did not expect such an abrupt ending. "What's the moral?" they ask. And avoiding cliche, Bacon also seems to answer casually, "I don't know," leaving the pondering to the reader.

Bacon has a talent for carving out unique characters in simple, spare terms. With love stories that resonate with deep romance, subtle shades of understanding, sharp observations about people's intentions, Lost Geography is a very moving account of four generations of 'migrants', in the literal and metaphorical sense of the word.

At first this book reminded me of Carol Shields' "The Stone Diaries". The first section, the story of Davis and Margaret was written in a spare, even cold fashion. I never got a real feeling for their relationship. To me, it was detached and not terribly involving. The book gained emotional momentum as it continued, to the point where the last section was like a full-blown "women's weepie", the sort of book that has gold-embossed covers and is a blockbuster family saga.

I like this book, but wouldn't place it in my canon of 'great books' because I don't think it had anything particularly profound or even original to say. Its examination of grief in the final section, and the relationship between parent and children is territory familiar to readers of Anita Shreve's 'The Pilot's Wife'. Why does everyone die so young? This is one of those books where the 'tragedies' are signalled right from the beginning, and where if happiness and contentment is a character's lot, then it will be snatched away very soon via death.

I also do not think that the cover blurb asserting it has so much to say about migration is true. Migration in this book is wholly linked with a personal need to place distance between oneself as an emerging adult and one's parents, or the milieu of one's parent/s. That is but one motivation for migration, and certainly debatable whether it is a majority motivation. Economic and political circumstances are never a factor, whereas I would suggest they are in 'real life'.

This book is unchallenging and undemanding, a 'good read' for a quiet weekend or a plane journey (unless you are prone to tears when characters die and don't want to cry in public!).

I thought this book was a little strange--not necessarily in how it was written, but that the lives of the women in this book seem so SILENT. Margaret & Davis don't talk to each other, Hilda goes through live pushing everyone away, and not saying the things that are important, Danielle & Osman drift along until Danielle gets sick, and then no one talks about her being sick. Sophie has to struggle through live without a mother and trying to bring her father back to life.

It's depressing because just when you think life is turning around for the characters, someone dies. Some of the deaths are romanticized, but it doesn't quite erase the fact that the person is dead.

THe writing on the book jacket sounded interesting--maybe they were trying to relate the title to the novel itself. I can understand why some people are drawn to stay in one place and others aren't, but that really only affects the first part of the book. Davis stays in Regina because he falls in love with Margaret, Hilda moves to Toronto to escape after her parents' death, Danielle is forced by her mom to move to Paris to protect her from men, and Sophie is forced to move to New York with her family to escape memories of her mom.

The book is good, and if you want something quick to read, then maybe this is it, but you probably got most of the plot from this review. It's a good book, just extremely dry.

I loved this book. It was eloquent, intersting and grabbed my attention. A very smooth read. When I read books like this I marvel at those who have the gift of telling a story.

The common thread in this book is the transcontinental distances that characters put between themselves and their families. It all starts with Davis leaving Scotland for Canada, not so much to find a living, but to escape the stifling constraints of tradition. Then Hilda, his daughter, left her past in Regina and moved to Toronto. Hilda's daughter, Danielle, needs to escape her mother, who is larger than life without even trying, and in order to find hr own identity, moves to Paris. There she falls in love with Osman, who has also abandoned his native England escaping a sad childhood. And so it goes...

The first chapters of the book are definitively for the impatient reader, as the author does not spend too much time recreating scenes or circumstances. There is a certain economy of language, and the flow hassles through. Once we get to Paris, the pace slows down, and we get to savor the intricacies of the characters. I enjoyed this book, and identified especially with Danielle's character. I did not appreciate the common use of archetypes that the author used, though, above all when it came to define French or Canadian people. Still, this is well worth a read.

Charlotte Bacon has written a fine book about sex, death, grief, joy, fire, water, air, dust. Ranging from Depression-era Canada to Ataturk's Turkey to Imperial India to 60s Paris to London during the blitz and finally to New York, this wise and wonderful persian carpet of a book draws together the elements of life and shows us the regeneration that proceeds from loss and the muted joys of survival. And in the age of the Nucelar family, it reminds us of the essential role that families play in helping its members bear the strains of life. It is simultaneously a dark book and one full of refracted underwater light, all shown through the exquisite prism of Bacon's prose. I don't think it rash to compare this book to The Shipping News and The English Patient. Bacon's images are fresh and startling and you recognize as you read that you have the real thing here: a new way of looking at the world.

Bacon's first novel is beautiful and poetic. All of her characters touched a place in my heart, and when I was done reading I still wanted more. In this story of four generations of women, I was most drawn to the story of Margaret and her Scottish husband. It was lovely and heartbreaking.