Home
AFFLICTIONS & DEPARTURES
This gathering of experiences shakes, and deepens, my sense of the world, its ironies and its sacredness. Madeline Sonik's recent book provides pleasure, information and facts new to me, and elicits feelings and sensations, moving me outside of myself.
From the author's conception during her parents' voyage on the Queen Mary in l959, crossing the Atlantic Ocean from England to the United States, through her late teenage years, we receive a series of pictures of her moving through the world; her personal world as well as the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. Her writing evokes a different kind of imagery for me; very sharply etched outlines sometimes filled in with muted colors.
Throughout the book we are reminded of the poignant ignorance and innocence of childhood, not knowing the meanings of some words, nor suspecting negative actions of those closest to us. But we recognize in her narratives that a child can naturally be bodywise and follow inner messages, despite a lack of experience. We follow her through the interface of inner and outer; between the author and her world as it is being created.
Many of her afflictions attacked her breathing, or her life spirit. Her mother smoked throughout her pregnancy. Both her parents smoked heavily, creating a polluted home atmosphere, compounded by alcoholism, depression, and compulsiveness on their parts. The chapter on the environmental disaster at the Love Canal, and her descriptions of the effects of chemical residue in the air and ground around Niagara Falls is a brave, in-depth scrutiny of people's carelessness, greed, and apathy.
As a young child, she developed croup several times a year, serving to separate the family at holiday times, to her mother's great relief. In l975 she travelled to Toronto to "get away from this suffocation.";
As a child of her times she experimented with smoking. She spent five years cleaning toilets to support herself, using a toxic cleanser, inhaling its fumes. At the same time, she spent every spare minute in her drafty upstairs apartment writing with a manual typewriter.
In the final essay, she is diagnosed with tuberculosis, from which she does recover. She says, "It would be years before I'd learn, of all the famous writers who'd succumbed to tuberculosis. Writers such as Anton Chekhov, Anne and Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Franz Kafka, John Keats, George Orwell, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Writers ...who 'd sat day after day, toiling in the filth and dust of humanity."; Yet, Ms. Sonik taps into her strengths to survive, demonstrating to us all our ability to endure and grow from adversity.
by Judith Levi Grey
From the author's conception during her parents' voyage on the Queen Mary in l959, crossing the Atlantic Ocean from England to the United States, through her late teenage years, we receive a series of pictures of her moving through the world; her personal world as well as the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. Her writing evokes a different kind of imagery for me; very sharply etched outlines sometimes filled in with muted colors.
Throughout the book we are reminded of the poignant ignorance and innocence of childhood, not knowing the meanings of some words, nor suspecting negative actions of those closest to us. But we recognize in her narratives that a child can naturally be bodywise and follow inner messages, despite a lack of experience. We follow her through the interface of inner and outer; between the author and her world as it is being created.
Many of her afflictions attacked her breathing, or her life spirit. Her mother smoked throughout her pregnancy. Both her parents smoked heavily, creating a polluted home atmosphere, compounded by alcoholism, depression, and compulsiveness on their parts. The chapter on the environmental disaster at the Love Canal, and her descriptions of the effects of chemical residue in the air and ground around Niagara Falls is a brave, in-depth scrutiny of people's carelessness, greed, and apathy.
As a young child, she developed croup several times a year, serving to separate the family at holiday times, to her mother's great relief. In l975 she travelled to Toronto to "get away from this suffocation.";
As a child of her times she experimented with smoking. She spent five years cleaning toilets to support herself, using a toxic cleanser, inhaling its fumes. At the same time, she spent every spare minute in her drafty upstairs apartment writing with a manual typewriter.
In the final essay, she is diagnosed with tuberculosis, from which she does recover. She says, "It would be years before I'd learn, of all the famous writers who'd succumbed to tuberculosis. Writers such as Anton Chekhov, Anne and Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Franz Kafka, John Keats, George Orwell, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Writers ...who 'd sat day after day, toiling in the filth and dust of humanity."; Yet, Ms. Sonik taps into her strengths to survive, demonstrating to us all our ability to endure and grow from adversity.
by Judith Levi Grey
Submitted on April 19, 2013 in By David.
