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Personal Effects
Lilith and Ross have always been moving; from Cervantes on the Turquoise Coast of Western Australia, to Calgary in Canada, and places in between. Now, in middle-age, the work at home has dried up and they're back in Calgary, where many years before they suffered a miscarriage and where decades later they have returned for yet another new start. While Ross works away on the oil rig for weeks on end, Lilith unpacks their apartment and is confronted with the need to balance being alone with true loneliness. Her mind wanders, back to the windy plains and white sand beaches of the Turquoise Coast, to her strained and damaged relationships with her parents and brother, to the love between her and Ross and the ache of missing her daughters. She is reminded of the compromises she has made for this life of uncertainty. Of the achievements and disillusionments of her many selves - wife, mother, friend, lover, sister, daughter, artist, expat. Brimming with dualities, Personal Effects deals with the ambiguity of life, and the decisions we make in the hope that they will change our lives for the better.
250 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2014
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August 5, 2016Middle-aged couple Lilith and Ross have just moved back to Calgary, Canada, as Ross once again has to take a job on an offshore oil rig. The pair lived in Calgary once before – many years ago with their two daughters, Nan and Kate, and coming back brings back many of the memories of that time. That might well be the simple plot of Personal Effects by Carmel Macdonald Grahame, but saying that is like saying that Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is about reminiscing over Madeleines. Personal Effects is the story of a couple on the move –repeatedly changing country in search of work, exiled and migratory, homeless yet rooted through their sense of family; of consistency in their relationship. Beyond that the story explores what we lose, what we gain, throughout any ordinary life, it explores the shifting and cyclical perceptions of time passing, and it examines, in a deep, poetic way, the way we make meaning out of our lives. Throughout Lilith’s adjustments to life in Calgary, she drifts forward and back in time to other moves and other experiences that weave through her narrative. The result is poetic, surreal and natural at the same time. What Grahame creates is a kind of eternalism, where all of Lilith’s experiences coalesce into the present moment – equally real and equally present.
Structurally, the narrative swaps between Lilith and Ross’ first person confessional style, though Lilith has the lion’s share of the narrative and most of Ross’ passages take Lilith as the subject. Though there is plenty of self-reflection, much of Lilith’s narrative is about Ross. The voices of the two main characters meld, referencing their subject through the longing that comes from the other’s absence. In addition to the present tense there are also Lilith’s journal fragments which are scattered through the book. These passages are particularly poetic in a novel full of poetry, presenting moments from the past in present tense.
The book is rooted in the many places the couple (or with the children, family) have lived: Dubai, Cervantes and Rottnest Island in Western Australia. The novel moves between those spaces, taking us to the heart of what it means, now, at this moment in time, to have lived in those spaces in the past. Memory becomes an open door to a new space, new perceptions, or, as Grahame puts it, an eruption:
Though there is a straight line progression through time—we are always aware of the narrative present, Lilith and Ross’ life can also be measured in a series of pulses. These are key notes in any life – the moments of pain or pleasure that mark the couple. There are moments of great joy with their daughters, on Rottnest Island in Western Canada. There is the pain associated with the loss of their son, Lilith’s brother and sister’s death, the death of Lilith’s mother. Lilith’s narrative is full of loss, but also full of love. Her love for Ross is a consistent thread through the book, binding the characters through the inevitable pain of life and building in memory fragments through the novel. Lilith and Ross change, but the changes, pain and transitions bind them. Lilith becomes an artist, creating pique assiette mosaics from bits of broken china, salvaged initially from a breakdown after the loss of their child – the anger and the healing coming together: beauty arising from the breakage. In some ways, the book itself is that kind of mosaic, created out of the fragments of memory and put together in a new, beautiful way. At times Lilith rails against her dependence on Ross – the way they have to compromise and move to support his career, the personal and artistic sacrifices she has to make, and the ongoing loneliness and fear while Ross is away on his oil rigs. Despite the difficulties, Lilith never gives way to self-pity. Instead she explores and unpacks her own life even as she unpacks the boxes that come along with her – playing with the many identities she has had, and the nature of how experiences and change adds up to a life:
Personal Effects is an exquisite novel. The writing is rich, deep and moving, taking the scattered fragments of Lilith and Ross’ life and turning them into a mosaic that reflects our own lives. Ultimately, this book works like an extended poem. There is plenty that the reader will recognise here, about the layers we lose of ourselves and those we love, and how we come to develop new layers. This is a novel about life, and the meaning we make of it through our interconnections, and will resonate with the reader long after its story is finished.
Structurally, the narrative swaps between Lilith and Ross’ first person confessional style, though Lilith has the lion’s share of the narrative and most of Ross’ passages take Lilith as the subject. Though there is plenty of self-reflection, much of Lilith’s narrative is about Ross. The voices of the two main characters meld, referencing their subject through the longing that comes from the other’s absence. In addition to the present tense there are also Lilith’s journal fragments which are scattered through the book. These passages are particularly poetic in a novel full of poetry, presenting moments from the past in present tense.
When Ross and I look back on all this we’ll see we’ve lived in small increments, this one made up of islands streaming into the distance, our lives reeling away too, as if before our very eyes. We are becoming a concoction of places been to, time spent, experience had, effort made – all past tense and words that make me aware of our far selves heading towards finality…(197)
The book is rooted in the many places the couple (or with the children, family) have lived: Dubai, Cervantes and Rottnest Island in Western Australia. The novel moves between those spaces, taking us to the heart of what it means, now, at this moment in time, to have lived in those spaces in the past. Memory becomes an open door to a new space, new perceptions, or, as Grahame puts it, an eruption:
I don’t want this to be just another place I pass through with all the old memories, dissatisfactions, my husk-self intact, want to let go, be able to imagine life so far as something elemental, part of a dust cloud being tossed across white space by a wind leaving behind countless fragments of possibility in its wake. (89)
Though there is a straight line progression through time—we are always aware of the narrative present, Lilith and Ross’ life can also be measured in a series of pulses. These are key notes in any life – the moments of pain or pleasure that mark the couple. There are moments of great joy with their daughters, on Rottnest Island in Western Canada. There is the pain associated with the loss of their son, Lilith’s brother and sister’s death, the death of Lilith’s mother. Lilith’s narrative is full of loss, but also full of love. Her love for Ross is a consistent thread through the book, binding the characters through the inevitable pain of life and building in memory fragments through the novel. Lilith and Ross change, but the changes, pain and transitions bind them. Lilith becomes an artist, creating pique assiette mosaics from bits of broken china, salvaged initially from a breakdown after the loss of their child – the anger and the healing coming together: beauty arising from the breakage. In some ways, the book itself is that kind of mosaic, created out of the fragments of memory and put together in a new, beautiful way. At times Lilith rails against her dependence on Ross – the way they have to compromise and move to support his career, the personal and artistic sacrifices she has to make, and the ongoing loneliness and fear while Ross is away on his oil rigs. Despite the difficulties, Lilith never gives way to self-pity. Instead she explores and unpacks her own life even as she unpacks the boxes that come along with her – playing with the many identities she has had, and the nature of how experiences and change adds up to a life:
Life is turning out to be a constant fission, identities peeling away. (87)
Personal Effects is an exquisite novel. The writing is rich, deep and moving, taking the scattered fragments of Lilith and Ross’ life and turning them into a mosaic that reflects our own lives. Ultimately, this book works like an extended poem. There is plenty that the reader will recognise here, about the layers we lose of ourselves and those we love, and how we come to develop new layers. This is a novel about life, and the meaning we make of it through our interconnections, and will resonate with the reader long after its story is finished.
January 20, 2016
Personal Effects, the debut novel of Carmel Macdonald Grahame, is a most accomplished book. My initial reaction was delight because the writing was so exquisite and I was enchanted by the descriptions of place. However it was not long before I was totally absorbed in the story and its characters, and identifying with the issues raised as well.
Lilith is an older woman from Western Australia faced with an unenviable choice: her husband’s work on the oil rigs in WA is drying up and they can’t afford to retire. They have two options: Dubai or Calgary. They have been to both places before in their itinerant life, but moving house across the world again is a daunting prospect. For her, this lifestyle impacts profoundly on whether she can have a career or not, and therefore, also on her sense of identity:
No matter how easily I use it to name my relationship with Ross I have never been comfortable with the word wife to describe my occupation, but here we go again. Little else feels familiar about being back in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Not for us a suburban vista this time. Outside, the untidy three dimensions of the downtown core are being licked by snow. A crane’s boom slides across the sky and disappears into the flurry. A cityscape silently enveloped while I watch, and a delivery of beauty that depends on silence, is nothing like the windy storms I am used to, where noisy rain-dimpled ocean thrashes white sand.
Which could explain why snow seems to represent some quintessential otherness just now, has me feeling my strangerhood keenly and as if some kind of nomadism were always unfolding in me. Cervantes. Calgary. Places on opposite sides of a world. There can’t be many in whose lives they meet. I feel like a stitch binding them together, a stitch in place. (p.3)
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2014/05/03/pe...
Lilith is an older woman from Western Australia faced with an unenviable choice: her husband’s work on the oil rigs in WA is drying up and they can’t afford to retire. They have two options: Dubai or Calgary. They have been to both places before in their itinerant life, but moving house across the world again is a daunting prospect. For her, this lifestyle impacts profoundly on whether she can have a career or not, and therefore, also on her sense of identity:
No matter how easily I use it to name my relationship with Ross I have never been comfortable with the word wife to describe my occupation, but here we go again. Little else feels familiar about being back in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Not for us a suburban vista this time. Outside, the untidy three dimensions of the downtown core are being licked by snow. A crane’s boom slides across the sky and disappears into the flurry. A cityscape silently enveloped while I watch, and a delivery of beauty that depends on silence, is nothing like the windy storms I am used to, where noisy rain-dimpled ocean thrashes white sand.
Which could explain why snow seems to represent some quintessential otherness just now, has me feeling my strangerhood keenly and as if some kind of nomadism were always unfolding in me. Cervantes. Calgary. Places on opposite sides of a world. There can’t be many in whose lives they meet. I feel like a stitch binding them together, a stitch in place. (p.3)
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2014/05/03/pe...
May 13, 2014
Link to my review: http://amandacurtin.com/2014/05/13/bo...
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