Home »
A deeply touching novel
Book Review
By Derryll White
Kvern, Lee (2010). The Matter of Sylvie.
There is a lot of experimenting going on in ‘The Matter of Sylvie.’ Lee Kvern plays with time, weaving her story back and forth in large intervals. She gives the reader a prescient feeling – the past and the future, all at the same time the present. I appreciate the way she portrays brain damage, creating a world of special insights and longings. She gives an inclusive feeling of shared understanding, between Sylvie and her mom, to something that normally repels and freaks people out.
Kvern also brings a feeling of Western Canada sensibilities to her work. She features small prairie towns with characters that loom out of my own past – a philandering RCMP corporal, a woman trapped in the abandonment and insensitivities of the cop’s carrying-ons. Common stories, but all the same sad for the overpowering sense that this happens time and again to an expanding list of women.
To some degree or other every reader has the experience of family. And that experience, early in life, helps to shape who we become. Lee Kvern looks, with very clear intent, at how a severely challenged young daughter formulates the development, or disintegration, of her family unit. It is a sad, touching journey and here it echoes through 30 years of loneliness and longing.
I thought that Lee Kvern did a very good job of taking a complex issue and putting it out for examination and contemplation by almost anyone, outside of age or gender. Sylvie touched me deeply.
****
Excerpts from the novel:
CHOICE – Surely the world his oyster, at his fingertips, innocent in his eighteen-year-old hands? Welcome to life and death, Lloyd thinks. He can chase the fairness all he wants, but he knows it will never pan out.
TIMING – She knows there aren’t any hard, fast rules around that, but she suspects that once you are out of your prime like so many other things in life, if you haven’t already proved yourself worthy, then your chances for career, marriage, even simple companionship taper off distinctly.
ABSENCE – Her husband wasn’t there for his children, and that betrayal is far worse than any woman he may have slept with. The chickadees, two-note refrain of Be-there where her husband is concerned died a long time ago, years before this afternoon. In truth his presence fades with each child they have.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
