Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

·         Paperback: 288 pages

·         Publisher: Random House, 2009

·         Price: $17.00

·         ISBN-10: 0812980352

·         ISBN-13: 978-0812980356

As I began to read Lisa See’s meticulously researched novel based on 19^th-century life in China, I was instantly transported to my girlhood days of reading Pearl S. Buck’s wonderful books about China (The Good Earth, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932; Peony; Pavilion of Women; A House Divided; and many others). I have always been very interested to learn about other cultures, especially those very different from mine, and Buck had early on introduced me to life in China, as seen through the eyes of women. Now, Lisa See reopened my eyes and brought me back to that adventure and all of its exotic intrigue.

Lily is the voice of the narrator, an 80-year-old Chinese woman recalling her life as a girl, then as a woman, in a culture that subjugated women and considered the female gender in general almost entirely worthless. The author shows us, helps us to feel and understand, what it meant to be a female in this particular time and place.

Lily is a child as the first scene opens, a little girl who is contemplating the cruel practice of foot binding that she is about to endure. This tradition, supposedly started by a Chinese empress who had a club foot and wanted other women to match her deformity (other variations on this tale include a Chinese ruler who thought the tiny feet of a dancer were so erotic that he wanted all Chinese women to have such feet, later called “lily feet”), was perpetrated for centuries, elevated to the erotic by Chinese men (one wonders why the male idea of eroticism so often seems to involve some form of forced control over women), and raised to the level of being a external sign of belonging to the upper class, of having grace and education. Indeed, lower classes were spared this horrendous practice.

Foot binding, as the author describes it, would begin as early as at the age of 3. Because it was the only way to have a marriageable daughter, mothers were often those who bound the feet of their daughters. The process began when the bones of the foot were still malleable, and the foot would be bound in ever tightening strips of cloth, and the little girls forced to walk back and forth, back and forth, on their bound feet throughout the day. Beneath that binding, toes were folded under the foot, so that walking would, usually over a period of a few days, effectively break the bones of the toes and curl them permanently under the foot. As the girl grew, the foot would become nearly folded in half, a deep cleft forming in its middle section. Since toenails continued to grow, often directly into the flesh of the foot, infection would result, sometimes leading to the girl’s death. Adult women with bound feet would hobble on these tiny stubs that were the size of a small child’s feet, but a few inches in length. The pain these girls and women had to endure from their crippled feet lasted a lifetime.

“Only through pain will you have beauty. Only through suffering will you have peace,” writes See of the thinking of that time.

A Wayfarer in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania by Ellen Chivers Davies

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

Publisher: Robert M. McBride and Company, New York, 1937

Pages: 280

ASIN: B000K13SHG

Fitting, that to prepare for my return to my ancestral home of Latvia, the middle of the three Baltic States, I should find some of my more meaningful and pleasant reading in a book long out of print. Latvian is, after all, one of the oldest languages still spoken today, and our cultural roots go deep into history, back to the times of Roman trade routes for amber, Teutonic Knights, and the first colonization of the island of Tobago. While I am born in the United States, a newborn nation by comparison, these three small but culturally rich countries have been in existence for many, many centuries.

Perhaps that is my draw. Or anyone’s, really, to turn back time and return to what was so long ago. If we should learn from history, alas, we rarely do, with humankind repeating the same mistakes over and over again, like a worn argument never resolved. But I am a firm believer in tapping into one’s roots, because to understand one’s own inclinations, a look back into family history can reveal much. Beyond our own personal memories are the genetic memories woven deep into our own fiber. Too often, we have little or no understanding of why we do what we do, how our life sense was formed, and why we long so achingly for we know not what. It could very well be in our history. In our family treasure chest, a dowry passed from generation to generation.

So I return, soon, for the first time in nearly 17 years, a long absence after many trips, beginning at age 15 during the gray and wretched Soviet years. Little as she is, Latvia has been occupied by one great power or another, for almost her entire existence. The Livs, the Poles, the Swedes, the Germans, and most recently, the Russians, have taken her by force and kept her people subjugated in often unspeakable cruelty. Yet on November 18, 1918, Latvia declared herself an independent nation, if under a benevolent dictator, and thrived by any measure for about two decades. Yes, only two decades, before the Red Army invaded from the east, clashing with the Nazis from below, and with the help of Roosevelt at the bargaining table, was tossed like a poker chip, up for sale, not even that, merely a bit of bargaining between the super powers. The Baltic States were handed over to Russia and its communist government, and the deportations to concentration camps, the executions, the waves of fleeing refugees began. My own parents, still in their teens, among them …

I visited my local libraries to seek out travel guides and histories, to refresh my mind for what I would wish to see and experience on my return trip. It is not that I have forgotten. If my mind has pushed away painful personal memories, my spirit has had its own demands. One cannot deny oneself. One’s true self. My eventual return, I believe, was a given, only a matter of time.

Yet the libraries held little on their shelves. As the global community expands, of what significance are these three tiny countries on the Baltic Sea? Even as I now see amber from their shores sold in most every jewelry store, grabbed up by customers who know or care little of their origin, the white sands where storms and angry waves wash up the golden nuggets, solidified pine resin from trees that grew on the shores ages ago.

I found this book, then, a travel essay written by E.C. Davies, from Great Britain, and published in 1937. Sixteen photographic plates are included. Oh, you can have your Kindles and new-fangled e-readers! I hold in my hands this old book, dating back to that time when these were free nations, prior to World War II when they were washed with blood. Would anything here make sense to me today, in 2010?

Ah, here is the beauty of countries so old that in some respects, time stands still there. Whereas I now live in a country where houses are considered old if they are built within half a century, where everything is changeable, where change itself seems to be a thing of worship, how refreshing and reassuring to turn these faintly yellowed pages, gaze into these black and white photos, and see what is still there—today.

It could be that I will see many changes on my journey back. I am sure I will. Some of those will no doubt be welcome, while others, equally without doubt, will make my heart ache. But when I read E.C. Davies’ almost tender account of her Baltic travels, I recognize what I know so well. I recognize streets, stores, buildings, villages and towns, natural landmarks, styles of living, characteristics, that I first observed in the late 1970s, when I first traveled there. And those, unchanged, on every trip after. I recognize places and stories that my parents told me as a child, or that were taught to me when I attended private Latvian schools in the States. There it was, and here it is, still and ever so.

I very nearly do not need a new travel guide at all. The wonder of traveling to much of Europe, in fact, is that much of it remains the same, century after century, and buildings survive, built for such centuries, even through so many wars.

Davies writes of her entry by train into Latvia’s capitol city, Riga: “There is an immediate sense of recognition, of acquaintance which rises up in you, even as you set foot for the first time upon the shores of these countries. For me the Baltic lands hold this spell… the thrill quickens, the night passes, and morning light brightens the spires and steeples of Riga, that seagirt city which has seen the argosies of so many  nations sail up to its walls. Perhaps the sea way to the Baltic lands is of all others the pleasantest and most fitting. No one can realize how lovely these Baltic cities are until he has seen the long skyline of Riga from the water.” (pg. 94)

“From the very onset Riga gives one the feeling of an Imperial city; her fine buildings, wide, tree-planted avenues, the stately squares and beautiful parks make a lovely picture… the charming façade of the National Theatre, the dignified Ministries and civic offices, the beautiful Opera House and the fine blocks of modern shops and apartment houses… but take only a few hundred steps away from the centre of the modern town, and you are in that very ancient Riga which lies in a compact block between the river and the wide boulevards: a maze of narrow, twisting, cobbled streets, pierced by the tall spires of its many churches; the alleys, darkened by the shadows of the tall Hansa houses…” (pg. 95)

I was not born in that time when Davies traveled there, yet I recall in every detail my own observations, so like hers, some 40 years later, and again over the coming years after. Indeed, even now, planning my return journey, I am browsing tickets to the opera at the very same Opera House she mentions in the center of Riga. Will I buy a ticket to see the opera, Anna Karenina? Or Carmen?

My rented apartment is within that ancient Riga she describes, and my previous photo albums are already filled with my own yellowing photos of those many church spires, those twisted and winding cobblestone streets where I skipped hand in hand with my beloved. My own stories are buried among those cobblestones …

Could anyone pick up a travel essay for the United States from 1937 and still find there the same places, the same attractions, the same life sense of a people still living there? Probably not. And perhaps not everyone would want that. But for me, this stability of the ages come through to the modern day is fiercely reassuring and warmly comforting. I have the sense, again, of returning home. Not only to mine, but the home of my parents, of my grandparents, and the many generations before them. I will find those ancient, mossy stones beneath which their bones have long ago turned to dust. My digital photos in bright color will stand beside Davies’ black and white plates, and if a hairstyle has changed, the makeup or some item of clothing, the Baltic features have not. The buildings neglected in the Soviet years will now show fresh faces, newly painted and renovated, yet standing where they stood so many centuries ago, and the same ones that my parents saw as children.

Davies is of British background, yet she has apparently spent great spans of time and taken great care to understand the local history and tradition of these three Baltic countries. I read her descriptions of known places—of Dobele, where my father was born; of Riga, where my mother was born; of Jelgava, where my father’s family last lived before the war; of Ventspils, port city near where several generations of my family lived and some live yet today; of Tukums, where I myself lived for a time in an old yellow house that had survived centuries—and I am warmed by her gift of time to understand a place and not just pass through it.

That’s what creates something that lasts through the ages. The care and the time taken today to create something of lasting value. Her travel essays of 1937 are quite relevant and informative still today. Arguably even more so than a more contemporary travel guide.

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

·         Paperback: 256 pages

·         Publisher: Vintage, 1997

·         Price: $13.00

·         ISBN-10: 0375702709

·         ISBN-13: 978-0375702709

The older and, one hopes, wiser I grow, the more I admire and respect simplicity. Simplicity is not simple. Simplicity means clean lines, all that is unnecessary pared away. Simplicity means choosing that one golden word where ten would only confuse the issue. And, that one word can be clear and true.

Ernest J. Gaines is a master of simplicity. A Lesson Before Dying is clean and clear writing, descriptions that say just enough to evoke an entire scene with all senses engaged, all heart and mind present. His dialogue is bare bone, sparse as the dialogue I so admired as a young writer-in-training, enthralled with that other Ernest—Papa Hemingway, and his unique way of capturing the way that people actually speak rather than the stilted narrative voice of the author him or herself.

“It don’t matter,” I heard him say. He was looking up at the ceiling.

“What don’t matter?”

He didn’t answer.

“What don’t matter, Jefferson?”

“Nothing don’t matter,” he said, looking up at the ceiling but not seeing the ceiling.

“It matter to me, Jefferson,” she said. “You matter to me.”

He looked up at the ceiling, not seeing it.

“Jefferson?”

“Chicken, dirt, it don’t matter,” he said.

“Yeah, it do, Jefferson. Yeah, it do. Dirt?”

“All the same,” he said. “It don’t matter.” (Page 73)

Ah yes, there is that mastery, like a reincarnation of Hemingway, with an artist’s understanding of the way that life moves—not in straight lines, but in circles, ever circling on the same spot, trying out its parameters until it is known, only then shifting to the next circle, a slight distance this way, or that, or even back again. I admire this accuracy portrayed in the written word. The novel becomes life.

The life portrayed in this novel is based on two main characters, set in 1940s Louisiana, the deep south, when racism and segregation ran deep, and a black man was imprisoned just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, innocent that he might be. Jefferson is a simple-minded man who inadvertently ends up in the middle of an armed robbery, and although he has done nothing wrong, is sentenced to die by a legal system that has nothing to do with justice but everything to do with enforcing the status quo. Grant Wiggins seems, at first, Jefferson’s opposite—a black man who is educated and intelligent, a teacher at a church school. Both men, however, live in a prison, even as only one of those has tangible bars.

When Jefferson is called “same as a hog” by his own defense attorney, likening him to a dumb animal in the hopes that the jury will deem him innocent out of sheer lack of enough intelligence to commit a crime, his aunt, Grant’s grandmother, can accept the final verdict of death, but not the image of her nephew dying like an animal. She calls in a favor from Grant, who reluctantly agrees to visit Jefferson in prison and teach him to die like a man.

If this injustice, the death sentence of an innocent man, cannot be changed in a deeply racist society, then one’s attitude about it can be. Jefferson bitterly accepts being called a hog—“it don’t matter”—but the story unfolds in those gorgeously clean lines with the meetings between the two men, some of which are nothing more than sitting together in a prison cell for an hour and staring at the ceiling. There are no lectures, no fist-pounding diatribes, no soapbox rantings to vaguely disguise the views of the author in need of getting something off his chest. There is just this fly-on-the-wall observation of two men sharing space, different yet same, both locked into place, both suppressed by their life sentences to a destiny neither deserves but inflicted upon them because of their race.

So how does a man become a man? What differentiates a man from a dumb animal? Our teachers are not always those with the highest intelligence quotient. Our leaders are sometimes those who are silent, but walk to their destiny, however unfair, with clean conscience and straight spine. Whatever is done to a man matters little. What a man does to himself, and how he handles the circumstances of his life, is all that matters. Live or die, a man does so with honor. Just or unjust, a man answers to himself if he has lived with integrity. If he has, he can walk through any trial, toward any fate, with his head held high.

Edward J. Gaines was born on a plantation in Louisiana, where he is now writer-in-residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Previous books include The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and several others.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

·         Hardcover: 464 pages

·         Publisher: Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, 2009

·         Price: $24.95

·         ISBN-10: 0399155341

·         ISBN-13: 978-0399155345

On recommendation by the book club to which I belong, I opened the cover of The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s debut novel and one which has garnered a great deal of attention—including well over 2,000 reviews on Amazon and counting fast. Indeed, a second review appears on The Smoking Poet, written by Jeanette Lee, which pretty much sums up all that, to my mind, needs be said.

I add, then, my personal opinion. First impression: yikes. I read a few sentences and went to double check. Yes, the author is Caucasian. This is either daring, bounded by heavy research and editorial input on authenticity, or it’s downright risky and potentially offensive. Stockett, also from the south, is writing as a black woman. As several black women, in fact.

“Taking care of white babies, that’s what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying, and go in the toilet bowl before they mamas even get out of bed in the morning.” (Page 1)

This is the voice of Aibileen, one of the main narrative voices in The Help, a black maid working in a southern white household. The time is 1962, the place is Jackson, Mississippi, and the civil rights movement is just gathering seedling strength. Eugenia Skeeter Phelan, known simply as Skeeter because she is as thin as a mosquito, is a fledgling writer trying to break into the publishing world. Her first break is to become a local newspaper columnist, writing columns of household cleaning hints. Alas, she knows nothing about cleaning. The family maid does that. She gets her columns fed to her by Aibileen, but her writer’s eye is on a bigger prize—a book, and part by suggestion, part by lucky bumbling, she begins to gather stories told in the voices of “the help,” the black maids of Jackson. The stories, predictably, range from the cruel and demeaning to the benevolent racist, those who profess to “love” their help, almost as if they were favorite pets.

Even as I bit my lip reading the stereotypical speech of the black women, I, like so many, confess that I was drawn to the story. It’s a fast reader. Stockett has good instincts for what makes a reader turn pages. Her cast of characters is colorful, if leaning dangerously close to one-dimensional, and she adds comic relief with Celia, a white woman so completely out of her element in a rich white world that she doesn’t seem to have a clue why no one ever returns her calls. I caught myself laughing out loud several times. Celia plays the role of “white trash” to the fine southern rich women who are all about fashion and parties and charities, ironically enough, for the “poor, starving children of Africa.”Celia, too, however, is borderline stereotype so-called white trash, with her tight sweaters and bleached blonde hair and tipsy behavior. That she can’t cook at all is surprising, considering she comes from a poor background without maids and cooks in her childhood home.

That would sum it up, then. There is an element of Disneyland here. It’s a very interesting story to read. There is conflict, and risk, and bungled and recovered love stories, and villains and nasty neighbors. Beyond that, we see glimpses of domestic violence and a depraved white man who exposes himself. We see horrendous examples of racism, both from those who are well-meaning and those who enjoy their false sense of superiority all too much. That element of fantasy, however, squeaks in continually, with bad folk like Hilly, first to build a special bathroom for the help to avoid catching their dirty diseases, drawn in all dark shades, and Skeeter, painted in all bright colors, seems to miss her own occasional lapses into that more benevolent racism. Skeeter is likeable, and perhaps too many of us might recognize ourselves in her—a person with good intentions who still seems to have too simplistic a grasp on the risks she is asking these women to take by interviewing them for their frank stories. I suspect we saw too little realism here of just how much risk.

Personally, I’ve never dared to write across genders for my main voice. Daring to write across such deep divides as racial ones would certainly be beyond my own scope and, arguably, beyond most anyone’s. I had to search online to satisfy my curiosity about how the general African-American reader perceives this book. It didn’t take long to find some fascinating responses. The point is frequently brought up that the maids in this novel speak in dialect, while the white southerners do not. Why not? Interviews with the author have unearthed a lack of research, basing the novel only on personal memory from living in a white southern household with a black maid (Aibileen apparently is modeled on the author’s actual maid). Unfortunately, by the time Stockett started writing this novel, the family maid was long ago deceased and could not offer her perspective.

There is a place for books that help us, all of us, to understand the perspectives of those different than ourselves. There is always a place for literature that makes us think harder, look closer in the mirror, examine ourselves for where we may be in need of enlightenment. Stockett does accomplish this with her novel. By sheer popularity of the book, she is being read and discussed by many, and one would hope, those are valuable discussions. This book delves into hard and very serious themes, the aftereffects of which are still infused in contemporary society.

Stockett’s book debuts as popular literature, and her talent is evident, if her research lacking. It is a first novel, yes. I fully expect in this writer’s second, she will have learned to add more dimension to her characters and more research to her story. If The Help relies too heavily on stereotype, the author’s ability to tell an interesting story should win out with even better work to come. I’m betting this is an author to watch.

See Jeanette Reviews for another perspective on The Help.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

Paperback: 400 pages

Publisher: Riverhead Trade, 2004

Price: $15.00

ISBN-10: 1594480001

ISBN-13: 978-1594480003

Being multicultural myself, I have always been drawn to books that tell me about other countries and cultures, life experiences that are very different than mine. With current events what they are, I felt especially drawn to this book, The Kite Runner, a first novel by Khaled Hosseini, born in Kabul, Afghanistan, but living in the United States since 1980. Like so many Americans, I know little of this country, even as we are deeply embroiled in its affairs. I wanted to learn, to see, to better understand.

“I became what I am today at the age of twelve…” Hosseini begins, and I am already hooked. It is one of those opening lines that in simple and clear language speaks volumes. What could this profound and transformative experience be that it would change a man forever?

I ran breathlessly after Hosseini’s kite runner through all the following pages. With an uncomplicated literary style, but masterful in storytelling skills, Hosseini kept me entranced for the full 400 pages. The story unfolds with two Afghan boys, similar in so many ways, yet different in those ways that can be crucial in the direction one’s life takes and the opportunities and privileges one has. One of the boys, Amir, the narrator, lives a life of relative privilege, while the other, Hassan, is his servant. While through much of their play this class difference does not seem to affect them—indeed, in so many ways the servant boy seems superior in intellectual and emotional maturity, even if without the same level of education—their differences arise in situations that test a boy’s mettle.

The string that binds this story together is the string of a kite. Apparently, a much loved activity for Afghan boys is kite flying, and that alone brings forth interesting descriptions of this sport. I had no idea, having flown one only once or twice in my own life, that a kite could be so expertly maneuvered and even used aggressively against another. Amir is a good kite flyer, but Hassan is an extraordinary kite runner. Never even looking up at the sky, Amir says, but almost as if by some inner sense knowing where the kite will fly and land. He runs for Amir, and he does so with utmost joy and devotion. He is not merely a servant to Amir, after all, but a devoted and utterly loyal friend.

It is during one such kite running episode, when Amir has won a tournament and longs for his father’s reticent approval in doing so, that the reader sees what is in the heart of each boy,  and of what their spines are made.

Hassan has run for the kite, determined to bring it back to Amir as trophy, to be presented to his father. Unfortunately, the town bullies catch up with him first. And there is that moment that changes lives, and with its domino effects, as such moments do, one moment of weakness turning into a lifetime of coping with guilt and consequences, even, eventually, to the death of grown men and an orphaned boy.

“A havoc of scrap and rubble littered the alley. Worn bicycle tires, bottles with peeled labels, ripped up magazines, yellowed newspapers, all scattered amid a pile of bricks and slabs of cement. A rusted cast-iron stove with a gaping hole on its side tilted against a wall. But there were two things amid the garbage that I couldn’t stop looking at: One was the blue kite resting against the wall, close to the cast-iron stove … “ (page 75)

What brings greatness to this novel is that it finds those moments that reveal us, that change us, that direct our lives ever after. It could be argued that each and every moment that we draw a breath does so. Yet some moments do so more than others. Those difficult moments, those moments when we are faced with hard choices, those are the defining moments. We see in the next scene the crass difference between the hero and the coward. And because life is not drawn in black and white, we see also that cowards occasionally show heroic traits, and that guilt can weigh so heavily, that it, too, can become a force for good.

If there is escape in the more obvious ways, in place and distance and time, there is no escape from such defining moments. They follow us everywhere, they taint every day of our lives ever after. If they do not, then we belong to the group of human beings known as sociopaths and psychopaths—those without conscience. Those without hope. Amir, at least, burns with his shame and his guilt, and as life so often does, he comes to another difficult moment many years later when he can choose once again—hero or coward. He may have his redemption, perhaps, but the price is even higher.

Hosseini never releases his reader. Not one scene is unbelievable. Not one scene is out of place. Not one moment isn’t important in some manner for this story to proceed, and take the reader along with it in vivid experience. Moments of choice are known to us in all cultures, but by the end of Hosseini’s tale, we have learned something more about the Afghan culture, about the Taliban and the war and the cruelties of which man is capable, even as we see the true heroism of which, sometimes, the very same man can also be capable. We also witness the bad seed, the man with so much darkness in his soul that he is beyond redemption.

So often when we hear about a great book, our expectations are so high that we are bound to be disappointed. I had heard much. I was not disappointed. My only disappointment was in later watching the movie—even while true to the book, it lacked the author’s fine nuances that brought the story to immediate life. Skip the movie. Do not miss the book.  

Stitches, A Memoir, written and illustrated by David Small

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

·         Hardcover: 336 pages

·         Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009

·         Price: $24.95

·         ISBN-10: 0393068579

·         ISBN-13: 978-0393068573

Good thing I was on vacation when I received the news that my book club, the indomitable Book Mavens, was going to have a special luncheon with David Small and his writer wife, Sarah Stewart, in their hometown of Mendon, Michigan. Wonderful! I would have an opportunity to feature the author/illustrator in the Summer 2010 Issue of The Smoking Poet. First, however, I must get my hands on Stitches …

Vacation, off the clock. I wandered into the first, eclectic little book store, locally owned, that I could find in Madison, Wisconsin. I didn’t even have to ask. There it was: Stitches, A Memoir, written and drawn by David Small, on the front shelf, eye level. I set a copy down on the counter next to the cashier, and she started paging through it and very nearly forgot me. Hello? Could I buy this book? Oh! Yes!

And that’s what I did when I got back to my cozy B&B. I, too, got lost in Stitches. Very much like the little David, six years old, spreading out the white page before him and diving into it, gone, gone, sunk into it. I was immersed for the remainder of the evening and late into the night. I dreamt Stitches. In the morning, over breakfast, I’d finished it.

Almost a guilty pleasure. Like reading comic books as a kid when I should be reading something serious, only this was serious, very serious, as serious as the topic of child abuse and deeply dysfunctional families. No caped wonder here, only a little boy growing up in Detroit, Michigan, with a physician father who seems to think radiation cures every possible ill, and a frustrated and angry lesbian mother, who isn’t doing such a hot job of keeping up the closeted façade. The memoir takes us from David at age six to David at age 16.

David Small, as I would learn at our book club luncheon back in Mendon, Michigan, is more illustrator than author. Drawing, he says, is his language. Images, after all, as we all know, speak a thousand words if skillfully formed. Small is known as an illustrator of many fine children’s books, many of which are stamped with prestigious medals in children’s literature. Some of these have been written by his wife, Sarah Stewart.

But Stitches was something that was swelling inside of him, something that cried for release. Small's childhood was a strange and dark time, a time of being caught between adult dynamics, the scapegoat for adult idiosyncrasies and adult mental illness. Small was compelled to mold his own suppressed rage into drawings, pages and pages of drawings, three years' worth of drawings—and this book was the final result.

Pages of this memoir are nothing but drawings. Words are sparse, and often, there is no need for them. Small’s artwork is the sort that speaks volumes in but a few freely expressed lines. A boy’s wide-eyed expression of stunned confusion. Or, the perspective from the boy’s eyes, looking out at the odd and often frightening world around him.

Images: Immense radiation equipment, a father holding him down on the cold, tiled floor for a forced enema. A mother who ignores the swelling on his throat until a glamorous woman attending a party at the Small house points out the growth on the child’s neck and embarrasses his mother into doing something about it. Waking up in a dark hospital room to find a long, ragged wound down his throat, cancerous vocal cord removed, voiceless. A maniacal grandmother who drags the boy upstairs and forces his hands under boiling water. A teen being arrested for driving the stolen family car without a license, long shadows falling from the block building of the police station. A large rabbit with immense eyes, offering therapy to the growing boy. The beginning of an answer to a stitched-up life …

This is no comic book. This is more like the experience of being drawn into a movie—indeed, in meeting the author/artist, he spoke of thinking as a movie director might, coming in for close-ups, withdrawing into the distance to evoke isolation, clipping scene after scene. Reading, or viewing, something like this was a new experience for me, and if I had picked up Stitches expecting something like a comic book, I was stunned at how profound pages of gray-washed images could be. For while Small’s language is in art, mine is in words, and I was taken aback by how moving his language, his ability to express a full spectrum of emotion, his artistic power, could be in the format of a book.

Stitches was a finalist in the 2009 National Book Awards, and has garnered much praise and acclaim among artists and book lovers of all kinds. I count myself among them.

Read the account of a book club luncheon with David Small.