Tag: Illness

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Tiny Pieces of Enid by Tim Ewins

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I was so emotionally invested in this deeply moving story, written with such care and empathy for the characters, but also the people who are going through similar experiences in real life. I would also suggest hankies or tissues, a big bar of chocolate and a cat to cuddle. This is an incredible read – but you will cry, in fact if you don’t there’s probably something wrong with you. Our heroine Enid has had a stroke and also has a diagnosis of dementia. She has aphasia causing problems with comprehension and formulation of words. Often, people with aphasia know what they want to say, but find something stops them expressing it. Having looked after people who’ve had a stroke I know it is one of the most frustrating neurological symptoms someone can have. The author has set the book inside Enid’s brain – we learn that she’s not completely senile, in fact she has moments of incredible clarity and is often witty, with a great sense of humour. However, she is forgetful and shows a lot of frustration about her lot. Enid has lived with husband Roy for many years, but after another incident at home their daughter Barb has to make a horrible decision. She decides her mum would be better in a specialist nursing home, but this means separating her from her beloved husband. Enid believes that this is a temporary separation and that soon Roy will come live with her in the nursing home. Meanwhile Roy is trying to cope alone, missing his wife terribly but having to plod on without her.

In the home Enid meets Olivia, a young mum who frequently visits another resident and they have an affinity. While they might seem to be very different on the surface, they connect on a deep emotional level. Every time Olivia visits, Enid is reminded of her first marriage and the memories are painful. Enid’s husband was violent and she can see that Olivia’s husband is also a very angry man. She wants to help, to explain that she doesn’t have to stay with him, that there is happiness beyond here. The fact that Olivia and Enid become friends, despite all of Enid’s challenges is so important because Enid’s life experience could help Olivia make a definitive decision. To save her own life. Their experience shows that friendship comes in so many forms and we shouldn’t make snap judgements about who can bring something meaningful to our lives. It made me think of an observation I made a long time ago, when someone has a long term illness their life doesn’t stop at the time of diagnosis. Some people seem to think that an unwell person steps out of life, has treatment, then comes back when they’re cured but it isn’t so. There are so many of us out here, like Enid, living with an illness and even if our lives look different they’re still meaningful and worthwhile.

When Enid isn’t watching life pass by she’s remembering, it’s like her own personal movie running behind her eyes. She sees Roy, from their earlier life together and when they’re falling in love after the trauma of her first marriage. There’s her old home and her daughter Barb who was fascinated with birds, her Tom Jones & Elvis records waiting to be played. She then remembers a scar she has on her forehead. When was that from? It feels like another life. Then she’s back with Roy. Remembering their love story. Roy is her best friend.

The way the author has constructed Enid’s inner world is brilliant. All the information is there, but it’s fractured and complicated. It isn’t always there when she needs it. She’s a time traveller, not present in the moment but enjoying her early years with Roy. Then she’s with a little girl, her daughter. These memories are so clear, but the moments of lucidity are so fleeting and we’re aware that eventually they may disappear altogether. I’ve worked in a dementia unit and every week I would push one of our residents down through the village to the home he’d shared with his wife. He seemed to have no idea where we were, he was rarely, fully in the room. Mostly we would do jigsaws and he would try to wipe his nose on my cardigan. One day we were sat with his wife in the kitchen and I was helping him with his cup of tea when he looked over at her. Then he looked at me and said ‘I don’t know who this lady is, but isn’t she kind? I like her’. It made me cry that they had a whole history that he couldn’t recall, but in that moment he knew she was special. There was a little glimmer of feeling. It’s hard to live separately from someone you’ve had a life with, especially when the relationship hasn’t ended. You’re living like a single person again and while you can always visit your partner (and appreciate the respite from being a full time carer) there are parts of that person you miss. The tragedy is you didn’t need to separate from the person, just their condition. So it was easy to understand Roy’s decline without Enid, he’s lost the shared jokes, the conversational shorthand and that sense of it being the two of them against the world. Although Enid is safe, part of Roy will wish she was still at home with him. I would imagine he must miss her sense of mischief more than anything. Enid will try anything to be with Roy again, and she relies on an imaginary parrot to help her.

Tim Ewins has written a really special book with such fully rounded characters who have busy inner lives, including Enid. I have a long-term illness and it’s great to read a writer who understands that journey and shows how rich our lives can be, even if they are different. My late husband had the same illness as me and this book reminded me of the snatched moments we spent together between carers, district nurses, palliative stays and hospital admissions. Despite all of that ‘stuff’ no one could take away that connection we had and some of my happiest memories were in those snatched moments; the tiny pieces of life that Enid remembers might seem commonplace, but they are the very moments I’ve treasured and remembered ever since. This is a special book, written with such heart and compassion.

Meet The Author

Tim has enjoyed an eight-year stand-up career alongside his accidental career in finance.

He has previously written for DNA Mumbai, had two short stories highly commended and published in Michael Terence Short Story Anthologies, and enjoyed a very brief acting stint (he’s in that film Bronson, somewhere in the background). We Are Animals is his first novel.

When not writing, he enjoys travel, reading (of course), cycling and spending time with his wife, son and dog in Bristol. Follow him on Instagram @timewins and @quickbooksummaries where he writes inaccurate but humorous book reviews.

Posted in Netgalley, Publisher Proof

Cut Out by Michèle Roberts.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

This is an interesting book, focused on the later years of Henri Matisse and those who cared for him. This was the period where Matisse was creating his famous ‘cut out’ works, works that are linked inextricably to the body that’s failing the artist and the structure of this novel. I visited Tate Modern for the Matisse exhibition a few years ago, and because I’ve studied disability theory and life writing I could see that these cut out pieces were a metaphor for a body that was failing, piece by piece. By taking a whole piece of paper, cutting out these shapes, and rearranging them to make a piece of art, I felt the artist was trying to communicate what it is like to have all the pieces, but no longer in the order that makes up a whole. When we become sick or disabled our body doesn’t work as a cohesive whole any more. The pieces are different, rearranged and not necessarily working together harmoniously anymore. In my writing therapy groups, often for people with disabilities, I encouraged journal work that experimented with structure. I wanted to encourage writing that was the embodiment of the writer’s illness or disability. The writing produced is often fragmentary, moving between long lyrical sentences and short, snappy statements. In my own work there are gaps where I don’t have the language to express how my multiple sclerosis feels or how my emotions process the change from day to day. Often fragmentary paragraphs don’t seem related at all – representing the nerve damage that occurs in this disease, preventing the signals that keep a body coherent and working in harmony with itself. As a group we talk to our illness, we give it a name and a body of its own, then chat to it and record what comes back.

I believe all of this is what Matisse was representing within a cut out piece and I’m sure that Michèle Roberts is doing something equally clever in the structure of this novel, that can seem a bit bewildering at first. Sentences are very free form, there are fragments from different unnamed characters, there is speech without punctuation and time differences that are not obvious straight away. Might this lack of structure alienate some readers? Quite possibly, but I don’t think Roberts is thinking about clarity, she’s making a work of art. The best thing to do is just go with it and let the writing flow over you, until the meaning becomes clearer. Sometimes, when we visit a gallery, we need time to engage with some pieces. We simply have to stop and look for a while with no expectations. In the same way, I did find myself having to go back and reread sections of this book, so it isn’t a quick read, and it won’t be for everyone.

In his final years, Matisse is living at the Hotel Regina in Nice, where he has a studio and is making his famous cut outs with the assistance of Lydia (Delectorskaya ). Eventually he cannot get out of bed and needs nursing care, for day to day living. One is named Monique and one voice of the novel is Clémence, a friend of another of his nurses. There’s also Clémence’s friend Camille, who is pregnant to another artist. In a later time we meet Denis, a man in his sixties who was adopted when he was a baby by friends of Clémence. Denis is attracted to a man called Maurice who he allows to sublet his flat while he’s away in Paris trying to uncover the secrets of his birth. All of these character’s stories come in ‘cut outs’ and the reader has to make sense of it. What we do get is an incredible sense of place, from Roberts’s long, lyrical and descriptive passages. We move from character’s memories, back in time to the actual events. The past explains the present day in parts, but not in others. While I didn’t feel I was fully engaged with the story, I did love the sensual descriptions of art and food, and my senses were fully engaged with these parts, The ending, when it came, was sudden and rather abrupt. It felt jarring after such a slow, meandering narrative. However it was a book that left me thinking and that’s never a bad thing.

Published by Sandstone Press 12th August 2021.

Meet The Author

Michèle Roberts is the author of fourteen critically acclaimed novels, including Daughters of the House, which won the WHSmith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and, most recently Ignorance, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2013 and the Impac Award. Her memoir Paper Houses was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.