In Fond Remembrance of Me: A Memoir of Myth and Uncommon Friendship in the Arctic

by Howard Norman

Howard Norman spent the fall of 1977 in Churchill, Manitoba, translating into English two dozen "Noah stories" told to him by an Inuit elder. The folktales reveal what happened when the biblical Noah sailed his Ark into Hudson Bay in search of woolly mammoths and lost his way. By turns startling, tragic, and comical, these inimitable narratives tell the history of the Arctic and capture the collision of cultures precipitated by the arrival of a hapless stranger in a strange land.

Norman himself was then a stranger in a strange land, but he was not alone. In Churchill he encountered Helen Tanizaki, an Anglo-Japanese woman embarked on a similar project--to translate the tales into Japanese. An extraordinary linguist and an exact and compelling friend, Tanizaki became Norman's guide through the characters, stories, and customs he was coming to know, and a remarkable intimacy sprang up between them--all the more intense because it was to be fleeting; Tanizaki was fatally ill.

Through a series of overlapping panels of reality and memory, Norman recaptures with vivid immediacy a brief but life-shifting encounter and the earthy, robust stories that occasioned it.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Canada, Biography Memoir

166 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Howard A. Norman (born 1949), is an American award-winning writer and educator. Most of his short stories and novels are set in Canada's Maritime Provinces. He has written several translations of Algonquin, Cree, Eskimo, and Inuit folklore. His books have been translated into 12 languages.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

(2.5) A strange, short book that blends memoir and Inuit legends. In 1977 Norman travelled to Churchill, Manitoba to transcribe an oral storyteller’s folktales. Most of these were about Noah, the biblical figure, coming into contact with the peoples of the far north and displeasing them by refusing to give over the exotic animals of his ark as food. At the time Helen Tanizaki, a scholar in her late thirties who tried half-heartedly to hide the fact that she was dying of stomach cancer, was there to translate the stories into Japanese. It’s easy to see why she impressed Norman, then only in his mid-twenties, with her almost mystical stoicism. She was also a keen birdwatcher, and declared she wanted to be reincarnated as a seabird.

The portrait of Helen is compelling, but the book doesn’t hang together very well, especially because the interspersed legends (printed all in italics) are so repetitive. They all seem to tell variations on the same story. I’m taken aback to see that this was published in 2005 – the layout looks old-fashioned, and it’s surprising that Norman would wait nearly 30 years to adapt his diaries and translations into a book.

[Lynda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is beautiful in its celebration of relationships, language and the far north. I also cherish the honest self reflection Norman presents.

Besides: if you've ever suspected that Noah was the biggest biblical dork, you HAVE to read this book! :)

(but someone PLEASE make me stop reading books where people die from cancer...)

[Susan Schefflein · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I didn't understand why Howard maintained a certain distance from his friend, Helen. His task was to keep her memory alive by telling her story. Then I understood that all the ways of telling the Noah story, all the many versions, paralleled the way Norman was telling Ruth's story. It was the only way for us to see it fully. Beautifully done. Wonderfully effective ending.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was mesmerised by this memoir. Howard an adrift young man, unsure of himself, of who he was; melancholy; sad. But got a job in Northern Canada to transcribe the "Noah Stories" of an Inuit elder, Mark Nuqac. There, he met Helen, an Anglo-Japanese woman; who knew herself, or was more in tune, perhaps, in contrast to Howard.

He says he didn't fall in love with her, but was enamoured with her; which sounds right - he never saw her again, afterwards, though they wrote for a time. Interspersed in these remembrances, are tellings of 11 of Mark Nuqac's Noah stories: of Noah, in his ark, drifting into Hudson bay, at the start of winter; they record variations, different stories, possible interactions, with the Inuit people who lived there... But Noah always meets the same fate, though events, conversations, decisions by others vary; but in effect the stories are hypnotically repetitive. It is as if they affording Noah a chance to change the nature of this first abrasive contact between peoples; but he doesn't, or can't; he cannot get beyond himself, and accept where he is, or the people he meets.

These stories seem to echo around Howard, who just can't... fit; whereas Helen seems to absorb the stories, and relate to people intuitively. Its a very haunting account, and is obviously very formative and important in helping Howard, if not change, at least provoke movement; in sensing something beyond his sight and reach.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

*4.25 stars. A book different than any other I've read. I found it charming and the Noah stories quite funny, even though they were all very similar. In addition to the phrase "seal-breathing holes," I reveled in the following language:
"In discussing novels, Helen appreciated when a plot unfolded or a truth was revealed by indirection. This was paradoxical. Because in her own life, in conversations, she did not suffer indirectness" (26).
"The proper terminology, I believe, is 'a parliament of ravens'" (29).
"I would like to see
a red phalarope
(please)" (79).
"Never mind; I ask, please, to see a harlequin duck" (80).
"Sometimes this happens, winter lands suddenly as a raven. Now it was winter" (105).
"'No,' said a hunter. 'Stop complaining. We're not poking you with knives, we're not poking you with ice chisels, we're not making you get rid of our dogs' fleas. Stop complaining'" (108).
"'The cries of the birds I have drawn echo in my heart, as though my heart was the beach itself'" (125). -quoting Tabuboku Shinoda
"...floating woven rugs of slick kelp" (155).

[John Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book along with Howard Norman's first novel, THE NORTHERN LIGHTS, and they have many overlaps. Both this book and the novel have some basis in the events depicted in this memoir. Howard Norman tells of how he was hired to interview, Mark Nuqac, an Inuit elder in Churchill, Manitoba in the Fall of 1977. Helen Tanizaki, a Japanese-English woman 10 years older than Howard, had also been hired by a Japanese publication to interview Mark about his folktales. Howard and Helen became fairly close friends, but Howard soon finds that Helen is dying of cancer. The book is rather short, only 166 pages, and jumps between the growth of their friendship, his and her thoughts on her upcoming death, and Inuit takes on the Noah and the Ark story. It feels quite disjointed until near the end as we hear about Helen's death and her hopes for rebirth. The book was written almost 30 years after the events in the book but end up being quite touching as they tell of this unconventional friendship and death.

[Marty Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I have been drawing shorebirds. Each evening when they fly off to their secret haunts for the night, I am not merely a little forlorn. The cries of the birds I have drawn echo in my heart, as though my heart was the beach itself.”

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ish

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most unique memoirs I have read.

Norman the younger man is just beginning to learn the Inuit language and culture when he meets the indomitable Helen Tanizaki, a Japanese-English linguist, who has spent years working in the arctic with its people, but is now dying. She becomes his guide and go between for two and half months in Churchill on Hudson’s Bay in Canada, where they work translating Inuit folktales spoken by the Inuit elder, Mark Nuqak. Eleven of the surviving English translations of the Inuit Noah stories are woven throughout the narrative, an element that makes for a striking poetic chorus.

Norman catches the subtle humor and stark pragmatism of the Inuit in his translations. The setting and the stories feel familiar for the subarctic and indigenous people I have known in Alaska. More importantly, Norman is humble enough to mature under the harsher chiding of Mark, the gentler one of Helen. This is a memorial to both teachers. It is a summer love story that elevates what love is.

[Cynthia Egbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not the greatest bit of writing I have ever experienced but it is a beautiful record of a friendship that touched this man deeply. And this is a huge reminder of the importance of writing down the things we experience in this life. I am so grateful that this man found his old notebooks and used them to offer us a view of the wonderful woman that was Helen Tanizaki.

Some nice passages and quotes:

"What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?" -Ryunosuke Akutagawa

"Nostalgia for a formative period can become an intensifying element in one's life."

"I knew during that autumn something interesting was happening in my life, but on reflection I can scarcely claim that at the time I had even a modest comprehension of just how much intellectual - and yes, spiritual - life Helen had introduced me to."

"If only the rain and the flying cranes would enter themselves into my diary." Ryunosuke Akutagawa

"Memory is more a séance thank anything, replete with the desire to resurrect original presences and attendant emotions."

"I have seen birds far from where I was born."

"Obsessing is a kind of sustenance."

"How many actual real decisions do we make, in a life? I mean, we all the time say 'yes' or 'no' to all sorts of things, naturally. But Life and Death things, how many? How many?"

[Maria Maniaci · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of Howard Norman's work translating as ethnographer and linguist translating the Inuit folk tale versions of the Noah's Ark stories as told to him by Mark Nuqac, an Inuit elder in Manitoba. Norman, then 27, weaves the folk tales themselves with his personal experience of meeting and befriending Helen Tanizaki, who as fate would have it is there translating the same stories into Japanese while struggling with terminal stomach cancer. You would think this is a recipe for disaster and melodrama, but it's neither. For its quick and fluid and sparse 170 pages, this book deals gently with friendship, loss, myth, linguistics, and ornithology with poise and equal dexterity.

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read anything else by Howard Norman, but I quite enjoyed this quirky little memoir telling the story of his brief by intense friendship with Helen. Both Howard Norman and Helen arrive in a remote part of Canada to translate some Inuit folk tales: Helen is translating to Japanese, while Howard is translating to English. Translations of the folk tales, all telling the story of when Noah and his ark accidentally landed in the Hudson Bay and encountered the Inuit people living there, are interspersed through the narrative. A nice, light book with interesting meditation of the meaning of friendship and the terminal illness of Helen.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have loved everything I've read by Howard Norman, including this memoir. It's the moving story of a chance friendship interwoven with Inuit myth. Both Howard Norman and Helen Tanizaki are in the Arctic to interview an Inuit storyteller and to translate various versions of the Noah myth. Norman celebrates the quirky eccentricities of the people he meets -- they are as engaging and unexpected as his fictional characters, and he gets deep into the essential nature of his friendship with Tanizaki. I tried to find more info on Tanizaki, but nothing came up except references to this book (?!)

[sisterimapoet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting to read at the same time as a novel by Norman. Interesting to imagine how one might influence and feed into the other. Great sense of place, discovery of a somewhere as well as a someone. I like seeing someone get to know them self, someone else and their world through the medium of their writing.

It was fascinating to see how repetitive the myths he was told were, but then perhaps that's the very nature of myth - what we need it for, to keep retelling the same story, with slight tweaks, till it makes some kind of sense to us.

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

i read this one aloud to my husband. i liked the relationship between Howard and Helen, but the book didn't seem to have enough of that. Helen Tanazaki seems like a wonderful person - wish there was more information about her out there. The Noah stories in the book seemed repetitive and we ended up skipping them later in the book. I'm not even sure where they originated. We have loved other Howard Norman stories, although they have all been fiction.

[Libby · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short memoir of the author's stint translating Inuit folktales in Churchill, Manitoba. It is also about the author's friendship with a woman translating the same folktales into Japanese, who died soon after. I enjoyed the book but it was really too short with not enough there--I would have liked to know more about the translations, the friendship, life in Churchill in the late 70s (when the book is set).

[Theresia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes a book stays with you because of its timing, more than anything. HN gave me this book a couple of weeks before I heard the news of a dear former professor of mine (also a linguist, also from cancer, also oceans apart) passing away. Disastrous, right? Not really. This book did for me with the utmost gentleness and softness a gesture of fond remembrance of a person who left tender marks in me. I did bawl my eyes out as I closed this book, but I did so with a lighter heart.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange little memoir, almost more like a meditation: on remembrance, memory, friendship, mortality, and folklore.
Norman evokes his younger self and a shortlived friendship that had a lasting impact. It's simple, but he deftly captures the way life goes, except in memory.

[krin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting look at an Inuit culture and their retelling of the Noah story set in the Arctic. I liked how Norman reflected on his conversations with Helen and her maintaining a sense of dignity in spite of adversity.

[son pham · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always with Howard's prose, as soon as the reader closes the book, a sense of pleasure overwhelms you and you just want to turn back to page one and start again. As with great novelists, you are left with your real emotions from reading their prose.

[ami · Rating 3 out of 5]

quirky. touching tribute to a lost friend.

[Emily]

Perhaps I won't ever read this one. Perhaps I will. I know for sure that I have never seen a lovelier color on the cover of a book.

[Chrissie]

Howard Norman is a great writer. His books are usely set in Canada, Nova Scotia or Manitoba. I would love to know more about his experiences; and this is a memoir. It is also bout Inuit tales.

[Pavan · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me this book is beautiful and if you are going through some kind of loss whether it be a relationship or death, it’s something that makes your heart feel a little lighter in a heavy time.