What do you think?
Rate this book
Sandra Beck
No writer in Canada today is more in love with the English, and French, languages than John Lavery. That love is gloriously requited. In inventive, incantatory prose, Sandra Beck, his long-awaited first novel, paints a very unusual portrait of a lady. This is a book about many the struggling antics of adolescence, the banal delusions of solitude, the city of Montreal. But it is, above all, a deeply moving tribute to a woman who is both present and absent on every page.
Who is Sandra Beck? She is a mother, a wife, a musician, a manager; but, too, she is the ghost in the seat behind us, always just outside the edges of easy description. Her story is told in the voices of others - namely, her daughter, the wordstruck and lovestruck Josee and her husband, the police chief and TV personality P. F. Bastarache. In a book that embraces paradox and defies the expected limits of what a novel can do, language is at once a gleeful celebration and a crutch, a trick. Despite their keen investigative powers, the "testimony" of Josee and her father is often untrustworthy, even self-interest hobbles their understanding. Sandra herself becomes a crutch for them both - a crutch they must learn to live without.
Who is Sandra Beck? She is a mother, a wife, a musician, a manager; but, too, she is the ghost in the seat behind us, always just outside the edges of easy description. Her story is told in the voices of others - namely, her daughter, the wordstruck and lovestruck Josee and her husband, the police chief and TV personality P. F. Bastarache. In a book that embraces paradox and defies the expected limits of what a novel can do, language is at once a gleeful celebration and a crutch, a trick. Despite their keen investigative powers, the "testimony" of Josee and her father is often untrustworthy, even self-interest hobbles their understanding. Sandra herself becomes a crutch for them both - a crutch they must learn to live without.
272 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2010
1 person is currently reading
31 people want to read
About the author
John Lavery
16 books3 followersJohn Lavery was the author of two acclaimed story collections, Very Good Butter and You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off, and of one novel, Sandra Beck. Very Good Butter was a finalist for the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and Lavery has twice been a finalist in the annual Prism International fiction contest. Sandra Beck was made the Globe and Mail's top 100 books of the year. His stories have appeared in This Magazine, Canadian Forum, the Ottawa Citizen, and the London Spectator, as well as in the Journey Prize Anthology. He lived in Gatineau, Quebec.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 27, 2011
John Lavery's Sandra Beck is entrancing, at times infuriating and ultimately unforgettable. This applies to both the mercurial, enigmatic titular character and the book of which she is the beating heart, the central obsession and the puzzling, then gaping, then heart wrenching absence.
What we do know fairly factually about Sandra Beck is that she is ravishingly beautiful, musically gifted, an indefatigable administrator for the Montreal Symphony and equally tireless about perambulating through the world on fiercely wielded crutches as the result of losing a foot to bone cancer. The impressionistic portrait of the spirit of Sandra Beck is painted by the two people who love her most, and perhaps know her least: her jittery, intense, word-besotted teenaged daughter Josee, and her passionately devoted but bewildered husband, Montreal police chief and television personality Paul-Francois (PF) Bastarache, who has known and been fascinated by Sandra since they were teenagers. Josee's and PF's collective composition of Sandra Beck is both compelling and contradictory.
Josee sees Sandra as her consummate and ultimate "happiness", but one that radiates only cold and is often simply not there. Josee's obsession with her mother overshadows everything, so much so that the girl's troubling sexual initiation seems like a peculiar afterthought, something with medical consequences that she simply must recover from so that she can continue to strive to please her mother.
Misunderstandings between francophone and anglophone culture, obdurate silences between Catholic and Protestant faiths, and odd miscommunication and misreading between French and English (the misapprehended phrase "Visit Bill" stands out vividly) all seem to be precursors of the more profound disconnection between Sandra Beck and her husband PF. While PF struggles to understand Sandra and give her personal and psychic space, while still feeling consumed by her powerful presence and wanting to support her, particularly during her recovery from the surgery to remove her foot, he despairs: "Sometimes I wonder if I'm listening in the same language she's talking in."
The first quarter of the book, told from Josee's point of view, is uneven, somewhat queasy and seemingly a little too captivated with its own wordplay, although that could be as much an accurate depiction of a bright, troubled teenager as it is lack of discipline on Lavery's part. It's worth pointing out, however, as that may be the point in the book where some readers might give up on the book. However, Sandra Beck swiftly gains momentum and gathers emotional resonance as soon as PF's voice takes over.
PF traces tenderly the milestones of the life of the woman he has known "off and on" (an odd but increasingly poignant phrase) throughout his life. He starts to mingle those memories with equally striking reminiscences about his career in law enforcement. PF is haunted by the victims of and suspects in crimes he has assisted in investigating, and that becomes entwined with an almost overpowering sense of Sandra Beck's presence in an empty car seat as PF drives and unspools stories and memories in an extended scene. PF's revelatory memory of the real-life École Polytechnique massacre is devastating, and then that shock builds to a stunning, emotionally lacerating crescendo - yes, the perfect musical metaphor to link to the mysterious and beloved Sandra Beck.
Although it is juxtaposed with thoughts and memories of his wife, PF's contemplations about his life in law enforcement unto themselves vividly capture the impact of violent crime on those who examine crime scenes and help seek justice for victims. In contrast to the numbing litany and inventory of death in Roberto Bolano's 2666, which has its own kind of power in sheer numbers but is grindingly inhuman, PF's insights are shockingly intimate, but humanizing in that very unsettling intimacy. As he observes: "Having spent the day tramping through the swamp of the vilest human conduct imaginable, he was in an over-extended state of brittle nervousness which neither gentility nor prayer had managed to appease."
What Sandra Beck the book seems to conclude is that neither love nor desire nor compassion, nor even acute powers of vigilance and observation, are ever going to give you the complete picture of another person, or solve the mystery that is another human being. However, this strangely bewitching book manages to couch that in a way that is not pessimistic. Although we have not learned as much as we would like to about Sandra Beck, we have learned a great deal about passionate, unconditional love that does not need to know all to love all.
What we do know fairly factually about Sandra Beck is that she is ravishingly beautiful, musically gifted, an indefatigable administrator for the Montreal Symphony and equally tireless about perambulating through the world on fiercely wielded crutches as the result of losing a foot to bone cancer. The impressionistic portrait of the spirit of Sandra Beck is painted by the two people who love her most, and perhaps know her least: her jittery, intense, word-besotted teenaged daughter Josee, and her passionately devoted but bewildered husband, Montreal police chief and television personality Paul-Francois (PF) Bastarache, who has known and been fascinated by Sandra since they were teenagers. Josee's and PF's collective composition of Sandra Beck is both compelling and contradictory.
Josee sees Sandra as her consummate and ultimate "happiness", but one that radiates only cold and is often simply not there. Josee's obsession with her mother overshadows everything, so much so that the girl's troubling sexual initiation seems like a peculiar afterthought, something with medical consequences that she simply must recover from so that she can continue to strive to please her mother.
Misunderstandings between francophone and anglophone culture, obdurate silences between Catholic and Protestant faiths, and odd miscommunication and misreading between French and English (the misapprehended phrase "Visit Bill" stands out vividly) all seem to be precursors of the more profound disconnection between Sandra Beck and her husband PF. While PF struggles to understand Sandra and give her personal and psychic space, while still feeling consumed by her powerful presence and wanting to support her, particularly during her recovery from the surgery to remove her foot, he despairs: "Sometimes I wonder if I'm listening in the same language she's talking in."
The first quarter of the book, told from Josee's point of view, is uneven, somewhat queasy and seemingly a little too captivated with its own wordplay, although that could be as much an accurate depiction of a bright, troubled teenager as it is lack of discipline on Lavery's part. It's worth pointing out, however, as that may be the point in the book where some readers might give up on the book. However, Sandra Beck swiftly gains momentum and gathers emotional resonance as soon as PF's voice takes over.
PF traces tenderly the milestones of the life of the woman he has known "off and on" (an odd but increasingly poignant phrase) throughout his life. He starts to mingle those memories with equally striking reminiscences about his career in law enforcement. PF is haunted by the victims of and suspects in crimes he has assisted in investigating, and that becomes entwined with an almost overpowering sense of Sandra Beck's presence in an empty car seat as PF drives and unspools stories and memories in an extended scene. PF's revelatory memory of the real-life École Polytechnique massacre is devastating, and then that shock builds to a stunning, emotionally lacerating crescendo - yes, the perfect musical metaphor to link to the mysterious and beloved Sandra Beck.
Although it is juxtaposed with thoughts and memories of his wife, PF's contemplations about his life in law enforcement unto themselves vividly capture the impact of violent crime on those who examine crime scenes and help seek justice for victims. In contrast to the numbing litany and inventory of death in Roberto Bolano's 2666, which has its own kind of power in sheer numbers but is grindingly inhuman, PF's insights are shockingly intimate, but humanizing in that very unsettling intimacy. As he observes: "Having spent the day tramping through the swamp of the vilest human conduct imaginable, he was in an over-extended state of brittle nervousness which neither gentility nor prayer had managed to appease."
What Sandra Beck the book seems to conclude is that neither love nor desire nor compassion, nor even acute powers of vigilance and observation, are ever going to give you the complete picture of another person, or solve the mystery that is another human being. However, this strangely bewitching book manages to couch that in a way that is not pessimistic. Although we have not learned as much as we would like to about Sandra Beck, we have learned a great deal about passionate, unconditional love that does not need to know all to love all.
March 20, 2011
Never before have the words “my happiness” been said with so much genuine feeling that, given the context, the resulting tone could be nothing but sad. Such is the case with Sandra Beck, the first novel from author John Lavery.
Known for his short fiction, Lavery writes this novel with a similar conceit—as a collective mosaic of memories that, through a series of peripherals, construct an emotional, physical and sexual blueprint of the titular character, Sandra Beck. Because this book is Sandra’s story, from start to finish, though she might refrain from ever stepping into the spotlight. Instead we are treated to two divisive viewpoints.
For the first quarter of the book, we see Sandra and her world through the eyes of her daughter, Josée. To Josée, Sandra is everything. She is her happiness, her world. She is even everything a person should never be to one who loves them so completely: not enough. Never enough. She is Josée’s life and is far removed from it at the same time. Years skip back and forth like a record warped and we see the daughter’s perspective change as she awakens sexually and moves away from the relatively constricted world of her parents.
The remaining three-quarters of the book are from the mind of her husband, Paul-Francois (PF, as he’s called more often than not). For the bulk of their lives, Sandra and PF have flitted in and out of each other’s circles, coming together, clashing, moving apart and finding one another all over again. With no destination in mind, PF drives for nearly 200 pages through Quebec back roads into Montreal with Sandra as a disembodied voice sitting in the backseat of his car. We see the many ways and many places they might have met for the first time; we witness the crimes PF has struggled to process as Chief of Police, watched him struggle through an interrogation as thoughts of Sandra and her ordeal rifle through his head. PF is a complex man, a difficult to understand man as we cycle through the different epochs of his life and the varied measure of a man he has built himself into, and all of it to service the memory of the woman he loved for most of his life.
Sandra. The mother, the musician with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra who lost a foot to cancer—a procedure which the book itself, mirrored through the ones she uses to propel herself through life, uses as a crutch by which the story circles at all times. She’s an enigma—difficult to love, impossible to forget, and by the last pages of the book, someone you wish you could get to know for even a few pages more.
The story is not always clear, and in some cases the diction proves difficult in establishing a rhythm, but Sandra Beck is further evidence that some of the best work, the most experimental work, is coming out of Canada these days. I’ve been torn as to whether or not I should recommend this book, knowing full well that it has a very specific audience and is most certainly not for everybody. But in the end I have to throw my weight behind this title. It really is like no other, and in getting to know Sandra through the people that loved her, I feel like I’ve seen more deeply into the heart of a character than any I’ve read in a very long time.
Known for his short fiction, Lavery writes this novel with a similar conceit—as a collective mosaic of memories that, through a series of peripherals, construct an emotional, physical and sexual blueprint of the titular character, Sandra Beck. Because this book is Sandra’s story, from start to finish, though she might refrain from ever stepping into the spotlight. Instead we are treated to two divisive viewpoints.
For the first quarter of the book, we see Sandra and her world through the eyes of her daughter, Josée. To Josée, Sandra is everything. She is her happiness, her world. She is even everything a person should never be to one who loves them so completely: not enough. Never enough. She is Josée’s life and is far removed from it at the same time. Years skip back and forth like a record warped and we see the daughter’s perspective change as she awakens sexually and moves away from the relatively constricted world of her parents.
The remaining three-quarters of the book are from the mind of her husband, Paul-Francois (PF, as he’s called more often than not). For the bulk of their lives, Sandra and PF have flitted in and out of each other’s circles, coming together, clashing, moving apart and finding one another all over again. With no destination in mind, PF drives for nearly 200 pages through Quebec back roads into Montreal with Sandra as a disembodied voice sitting in the backseat of his car. We see the many ways and many places they might have met for the first time; we witness the crimes PF has struggled to process as Chief of Police, watched him struggle through an interrogation as thoughts of Sandra and her ordeal rifle through his head. PF is a complex man, a difficult to understand man as we cycle through the different epochs of his life and the varied measure of a man he has built himself into, and all of it to service the memory of the woman he loved for most of his life.
Sandra. The mother, the musician with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra who lost a foot to cancer—a procedure which the book itself, mirrored through the ones she uses to propel herself through life, uses as a crutch by which the story circles at all times. She’s an enigma—difficult to love, impossible to forget, and by the last pages of the book, someone you wish you could get to know for even a few pages more.
The story is not always clear, and in some cases the diction proves difficult in establishing a rhythm, but Sandra Beck is further evidence that some of the best work, the most experimental work, is coming out of Canada these days. I’ve been torn as to whether or not I should recommend this book, knowing full well that it has a very specific audience and is most certainly not for everybody. But in the end I have to throw my weight behind this title. It really is like no other, and in getting to know Sandra through the people that loved her, I feel like I’ve seen more deeply into the heart of a character than any I’ve read in a very long time.
June 5, 2016
Four and a half stars.
The author writes from an obvious intelligence and insight of a searing quality. He often holds the reader hostage in the dilemma of "Am I reading fantasy now or is this reality?" or "Is this reality within fantasy within reality?" Such deceptive tactics.
His use of language is exceptional. He draws from the huge pool of vocabulary describing the mundane world to create a "textural text" (e.g.) that almost ambushes the reader…"His slick hair was combed into two fenders over the wheels of his ears".
And then the animation of the mundane…"the utterly bored Quebec flag hanging limply behind her".
Both fantasy and reality (if the reader can identify them as such) are heightened by the animation of objects, of landscape, of the environment.
The story often edges into dangerous sexual territory, quite as though it were unexpected, nothing unusual - engaging the reader, by both surprise and even complicity.
I won't say much about the device of enticing the reader to cast suspicion except that it's clever.
The seriously dark nature of the crime committed in this story slides underneath an eloquent patter of reflection that always appears to attempt to disengage from responsibility, not quite comedy, though somehow nonchalant.
The author writes from an obvious intelligence and insight of a searing quality. He often holds the reader hostage in the dilemma of "Am I reading fantasy now or is this reality?" or "Is this reality within fantasy within reality?" Such deceptive tactics.
His use of language is exceptional. He draws from the huge pool of vocabulary describing the mundane world to create a "textural text" (e.g.) that almost ambushes the reader…"His slick hair was combed into two fenders over the wheels of his ears".
And then the animation of the mundane…"the utterly bored Quebec flag hanging limply behind her".
Both fantasy and reality (if the reader can identify them as such) are heightened by the animation of objects, of landscape, of the environment.
The story often edges into dangerous sexual territory, quite as though it were unexpected, nothing unusual - engaging the reader, by both surprise and even complicity.
I won't say much about the device of enticing the reader to cast suspicion except that it's clever.
The seriously dark nature of the crime committed in this story slides underneath an eloquent patter of reflection that always appears to attempt to disengage from responsibility, not quite comedy, though somehow nonchalant.
November 14, 2011
Unfortunately, I read this too long ago (and gave away my copy) to write a decent review. My memory tells me the language was arresting and the story compelling. This isn't an easy book to navigate as you can't be sure of the "truth" about Sandra Beck from her daughter or her husband. I found the daughter's point of view more difficult to follow than the husband's and, perhaps consequently, the husband more sympathetic than the daughter.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews