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The Invitation (D&M $16.95)
"What's another story, more or less, unless you've lived it yourself?"
--B. Traven.
B. TRAVEN, THE GREAT GERMAN- MEXICAN storyteller, kept his personal life hidden behind many pseudonyms. Practicing what he preached, Traven lived among and wrote about the Chiapas Indians, researching his stories with lengthy field trips without which he claimed nothing of interest could come from his pen. Of his fiction, Traven said he created "documents" which he put into storyform so that more people would read them. Traven's funeral in 1969 in Chiapas was attended by the President of Mexico. The local descendants of the Mayans renamed their town in his honour. One of his books alone, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, has sold over 40 million copies in dozens of languages, and is still in print nearly 25 years after his death. So Joan Haggerty is in fine company. In her novel The Invitation (D&M $16.95) Haggerty has changed the real persona of her life into characters for fiction by altering only subordinate decorative details. Running her fingers over tender spots, caressing favourite moments, she manipulates her painful experiences into a story.
The Invitation is the true but thinly fictionalized story of a young Canadian woman who gave up her second child for adoption to a French couple she had just met. Her story opens with an invitation to the now 18-year-old's birthday celebration in a 12th century chateau in France. The narrator decides to go and meet her son, the child she barely knew. The way Joan Haggerty chose to live, so common now, was outrageously ahead of its time in the early 1960s. She lived the Bohemian life: three children, different fathers, single woman, writer and self-exile. And then the revolutionary act at the centre of the book, arranging an adoption. The child grew and flourished. The two remaining with her bloomed with exceptional heartiness, because of having more room to grow. After the fact, it seems easy. Between the lines of the narrative, however, are faint echoes of uncertainty seeking support. So what do we call stories such as The Invitation that have been accurate or semi-accurate records of real events? Are they fiction or nonfiction? Does it matter? Is The Diary of Anne Frank, for example, more or less a masterpiece for having really happened? In The Invitation Haggerty is writing in a distinctly Canadian documentary tradition which exists beyond our filmmaking. Yet in an afterword, she makes a special effort to distinguish her book from this tradition. "While The Invitation is a true story, it is not a documentary but a memory." One way or another, the life led leads to the life recorded. Unlike Traven, and perhaps ever the Canadian, Haggerty dares the personal exposure, and puts what we call "the family" under unique and convincing review. 1-55054-097-1
--By Tom Shandel
[BCBW 1994]
--B. Traven.
B. TRAVEN, THE GREAT GERMAN- MEXICAN storyteller, kept his personal life hidden behind many pseudonyms. Practicing what he preached, Traven lived among and wrote about the Chiapas Indians, researching his stories with lengthy field trips without which he claimed nothing of interest could come from his pen. Of his fiction, Traven said he created "documents" which he put into storyform so that more people would read them. Traven's funeral in 1969 in Chiapas was attended by the President of Mexico. The local descendants of the Mayans renamed their town in his honour. One of his books alone, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, has sold over 40 million copies in dozens of languages, and is still in print nearly 25 years after his death. So Joan Haggerty is in fine company. In her novel The Invitation (D&M $16.95) Haggerty has changed the real persona of her life into characters for fiction by altering only subordinate decorative details. Running her fingers over tender spots, caressing favourite moments, she manipulates her painful experiences into a story.
The Invitation is the true but thinly fictionalized story of a young Canadian woman who gave up her second child for adoption to a French couple she had just met. Her story opens with an invitation to the now 18-year-old's birthday celebration in a 12th century chateau in France. The narrator decides to go and meet her son, the child she barely knew. The way Joan Haggerty chose to live, so common now, was outrageously ahead of its time in the early 1960s. She lived the Bohemian life: three children, different fathers, single woman, writer and self-exile. And then the revolutionary act at the centre of the book, arranging an adoption. The child grew and flourished. The two remaining with her bloomed with exceptional heartiness, because of having more room to grow. After the fact, it seems easy. Between the lines of the narrative, however, are faint echoes of uncertainty seeking support. So what do we call stories such as The Invitation that have been accurate or semi-accurate records of real events? Are they fiction or nonfiction? Does it matter? Is The Diary of Anne Frank, for example, more or less a masterpiece for having really happened? In The Invitation Haggerty is writing in a distinctly Canadian documentary tradition which exists beyond our filmmaking. Yet in an afterword, she makes a special effort to distinguish her book from this tradition. "While The Invitation is a true story, it is not a documentary but a memory." One way or another, the life led leads to the life recorded. Unlike Traven, and perhaps ever the Canadian, Haggerty dares the personal exposure, and puts what we call "the family" under unique and convincing review. 1-55054-097-1
--By Tom Shandel
[BCBW 1994]
Submitted on December 15, 2005 in By David.
