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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Walking Toward the Past, April 19, 2009
[5 stars plus] This wondrous and evocative novel begins with a man walking over the ice to a distant island. He is so stricken with Alzheimer's that he cannot even remember his own name, Andrew, but the four pages in which Jane Urquhart describes his situation are almost poetry: "The whole unnamed world is so beautiful to him now that he is aware he has left behind vast, unremembered territories, certain faces, and a full orchestra of sounds that he has loved." He is walking, as one of the other characters later remarks, toward his past. The book that follows will be the slow uncovering of that past, not only as it applies to Andrew and his forebears, but by extension to the whole of Canada, its natural resources, and the way of life that squandered then vanished with them.
All this will be the subject of the central section of this three-part novel, an elegantly-told family saga beginning with an English immigrant, Joseph Woodman, who founds a timber and ship-building empire on an island just where Lake Ontario flows into the St. Lawrence River. But the main focus is on Joseph's son, Branwell, Andrew's great-grandfather. Trained in Paris as an artist, he spends the rest of his life on an uneasy balance between art and commerce, two opposing viewpoints that emerge as one of the philosophical axes of the book. Branwell's sister Annabelle in a way has it easier, because as a woman she is not expected to enter the business and so can devote herself to painting -- but all she paints are her father's ships and their destruction by water, fire, or time.
Were the novel confined to this historical story, it would still be a very good one. What makes it remarkable are the framing sections set in the present. Andrew, it turns out, was a landscape geographer, a kind of archaeologist who reconstructs earlier lives from the traces people leave in their surrounding world. Jerome McNaughton, who finds Andrew's frozen body, is an artist engaged in similar pursuits, making careful excavations, taking photographs, and building imaginative reconstructions. Both, in their different ways, make maps. So does Urquhart's primary character, Sylvia, who makes tactile maps for a blind friend, Julia, so that she may explore her landscape by feel. It is Sylvia's closeness to Andrew that brings her to Jerome's studio and begins the process of linking past to present -- a linkage that Urquhart reinforces by a web of subtle cross-references that are intricate without ever being obtrusive.
Julia is blind; Andrew developed Alzheimer's; Annabelle was lame; Sylvia appears to suffer from a form of autism; even the young and apparently healthy Jerome will turn out to have been spiritually crippled by the legacy of an alcoholic father. The most amazing of Urquhart's many feats of alchemy is that she manages to turn these apparent disabilities into gifts. The reader turns the pages with wonder, enthralled by the writer's inexhaustible ability to see familiar things in a new way. Central to it all is Sylvia, whose social limitations and fear of change will nonetheless turn her into the virtual author of a story of love and family whose very subject is change.
A MAP OF GLASS is even greater than Urquhart's excellent previous novel, THE STONE CARVERS. Both share a three-part structure; both go back into Canadian history; and both are centered around a work of visual art. The underlying inspiration here is a 1969 piece by Robert Smithson entitled "A Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis)," an 18-by-15 foot pile of broken window panes that suggests the debris of lost civilizations, but which nonetheless catches the light in unexpected ways and glistens with a mystery of its own. Urquhart's MAP is also a lament for the past, but its quiet glow of consolation is nothing short of a miracle.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fire and Ice, March 23, 2010
In a haunting, topographically rich novel that transports the reader to a disappearing region of a rural, Canadian peninsula, two narrative time periods tell a story. The novel, textured with the natural world of impermanence and change, progresses with an almost hyperreal cohesion, drawing out its themes under drifts of snow, sheets of ice, bare-branched trees, windswept sand, and glassy lakes. The map of this region moves from macrocosm to microcosm, from the mutations of the landscape to the private storms of it inhabitants, from early nineteenth century to recent times. The story flickers beneath the earth and through the air.
Sylvia is a middle-aged woman with an unspecified "condition" that sounds a lot like Asperger's. She has one friend, who is blind, and a husband, Malcolm, who is blind to her secret life. She stays shuttered in her house, images of tables and bibelots running through her head ceaselessly, the light from the windows casting shadows and reflections that play on the artifacts and with her consciousness. She is an autodidact of esoteric knowledge, of the entire history of this isolated, disappearing, glacial town, and she makes luxuriantly detailed, three-dimensional maps of the area. One day, she gets her driver's license and starts combing the peninsula. She meets a historical geographer, Andrew Woodman, and has a long, secret passionate affair that becomes the focus of her existence. Time passes, (their affair is interrupted by a seven year separation) and she knows that Alzheimer's is eroding his mind and his life, until one day he just disappears. A year later, she reads in a newspaper that he had died (a year ago), was in fact found floating in an ice floe and discovered by a three-dimensional wilderness artist named Jerome McNaughton.
Jerome is a young man suffering from an unresolved past--an alcoholic, abusive father and withering, spineless mother--who now has difficulty committing fully to the woman he loves (Mira), of sharing all his private sorrow and rage. When Sylvia contacts him to meet and discuss Andrew, he reticently agrees. The series of meetings between Sylvia and Jerome and Mira focus on Andrew's ancestral journals--the history of the Woodmans going back to Andrew's great-great grandfather and the timber industry. What the journals reveal about Andrew and his family forms a cynosure between Jerome and Sylvia. And, in turn, their tenuous, brief bond becomes a niche where history, love, and home are revealed and a palpable epiphany takes place.
The novel's most transcendent attribute is the poetic fusion of the landscape with the themes of loss, identity, and home. The story of Andrew is told in reflection. His profession as a historical geographer cleaves with the history and geography of the region (much of it contained in the journals) and progresses to his relationship with Sylvia. Time vacillates between static and dynamic as events almost pour out of time, while the present feels stagnant until the journals' history can influence the ones left behind. There is never an immediacy that the reader feels between Andrew and Sylvia, because Andrew is already a piece of history when the novel opens. I believe the author intended that, and she effectively placed Andrew as a polestar for the healing of others.
The nineteenth century sections were, for me, the most vivid and electrifying. It was through that lens that I was able to visualize the landscape evolving by unchecked capitalism--from forest to deforestation, from rich soil to topsoil for barley, and, eventually, to sand. The tycoon daddys were reminiscent of the American robber barons J.P Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller, steely tycoons who were often tyrannical. The female characters are particularly well fleshed out here. Annabelle, Andrew's great-great aunt, and Marie, his great- grandmother, added pathos to the grandeur of the industrialists. The parallels between characters from both centuries were finely drawn and the fusion of all Andrew's ancestors into his psyche gave the story its most authentic depth of character.
I did have a hard time believing that someone as cloistered as Sylvia for thirty-odd years, who is afflicted with a pronounced social disorder, could go out and have this passionate affair of tremendous life-altering proportions and yet be unnoticed by her husband. I cannot believe that Sylvia has the capacity to live a double life unobstructed. However, she is effective because of the momentum she creates around her and how she is contrasted to the changing environment, as well as paralleled to the history of this region--the hyperreal context I referred to at the beginning of my review.
The story also suffers from a clumsy construction at times. Some of the events are told in a hurried narration and some revelations are telegraphed rather than experienced. There is also a character named Ghost, an archetype who enters late and feels forced into a centerpiece arrangement.
Fortunately, the grace of this story resides in the timeless humanity that is poetically and symbolically rendered. I recommend this unique novel for its astonishing beauty, breathtaking prose, and moving themes. The flaws of this novel dissolve into the scintillating landscape.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing. Three stars for finishing it., October 17, 2011
Map of Glass was a tough read for me. Very respected reviewers enjoyed this very much which gave me pause to see what was it that did not appeal to me. The book centers around a married early 50's woman who explores the details surrounding the death of her former lover; Andrew. Sylvia lives in a rapidly developing exurb far from Toronto with her physician husband in the same house she grew up in. She appears to have agoraphobia. Other commentators have speculated that it may be autism. It's left vague and for the reader to interpret. The story moves between the current day where Sylvia searches for the people who found Andrew. Andrew's death is neither a mystery nor crime but it awakens strong memories in Sylvia and a desire to share them. This is done first through her dialogue with Jerome who had previously come across Andrew's body and then through more subtle drifting back in time. From there the story takes a leap back a further 100 or 150 years to life on the eastern side of Lake Ontario which was just beginning to boom with agriculture, mining, forestry all from a booming immigration from Europe. There were a number of things that bothered me as I continued to read. How did this woman with clear phobias if not outright illnesses suddenly find the ability to leave her house and venture into a a big unpredictable city (Toronto)? Orderliness and predictability are dwelled upon as critical to her and for her. She has an episode as a child where she cannot adjust to even a breeze moving through an open window. Still later how could she possibly have had a intimate romance when she again is so challenged to have any relationship deeper than a brief discussion let alone a physical encounter? These thoughts lingered on. Further on I found myself drifting constantly from the page. The timeline bounces from present, near past and far past which I think adversely slowed down the pace. One character takes a full chapter to travel for work which seems to only result in the author introducing another minor character (Ghost). When Sylvia and Jerome talk about Andrew it provokes Jerome to recall his own sad childhood ruined by an alcoholic father. He recounts his father's death leading ultimately to his mother's death. At which point Sylvia says "she died for him (the father)". It seemed too strong. The conversation was too elevated. It strained credibility. Sylvia constantly has second thoughts about sharing memories of Andrew with Jerome. She realizes he is young (25). At one point she makes a self-deprecating comment about her bad cooking or coffee. It's unlikely that someone with the myriad of socialization problems brought to light at the beginning of the book would have such capacity for insight, empathy or humility. Gentle poking humor at oneself is generally a sign of a very high functioning adult which she clearly is not supposed to be. How all this plays out was again in conflict. Slyvia's husband is a very intelligent and compassionate man and he has an extremely high EQ and yet Urquardt would also want us to believe that is he condescending and somehow suffocating Sylvia keeping her somehow locked in mental trap but it just does not seem to be the case. His role seemed inconsistent to me. The book is often tedious. It felt like every word or phrase had a double with metaphors and symbolism that I was missing. The snow, vision, the way a flower might be picked or some of the dialog (Says Jerome at one point commenting on art: "It's strange, now that I think of it, how much attention is always given to construction when decay is really more pervasive, more inevitable" to which Mira responds "Decay and change," said Mira. "People moving from place to place. leaving things behind."). Syliva. I was constantly re-reading to see if I was supposed to understand more than was what literal. It frankly became nearly unreadable in parts. What I'd suggest to the curious is to read a page or 2. The writing style is consistent throughout the book. If you like the random page or 2 than this may like it. I think it's really a question of personal taste.
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