Hey Joanne:
Good to hear from you!
I loooooooove this book. I will probably read it again this Summer, it's getting that time again.
Yes I teach literature and am doing my PhD in Spanish American lit.
What bits are you having trouble with? Maybe I can help?
I found the first 20 pages the most difficult, simply becuase the tone is so poetic and you are rapidly introduced to three narrative voices, all different, all telling their personal tale, or having it told by the narrator, but the three characters as yet remain un-identified. What you do get , however, in the initial narratives are identifying markers, clues embedded within their stories that will help you, as you continue to read and maybe cycle back to review early scenes, work out which voice is Kerewin's (very distinctive), which is Joe's (he's the character who will prove to have the strong link to his maori ancestry, through which cultural healing and heaing from personal traumas, as well as the traumas of colonialism and cultural loss, will be achieved, so read the end of the novel, Joe's sections, very carefully for this), and which voice belongs to "the boy", Joe's son.
Have you worked out what their relationships are? Do you see their lives beginning to intertwine? They each hold keys to the other's necessary healing process. Do you yet have a feel for what the different traumas are that permeate the text?
Stop me someone before I prepare a whole teaching seminar on this topic!!!!!!
I read this book here in the States on an English course on Women Writers for seniors and grad students. The focus given was quite general, somewhat feminist. One thing the professor did that was helpful was introduce a little psychoanalytic theory by Jessica Benjamin from her book called "The Bonds of Love". This is helpful to view the relationship between Joe and his son, the masochism that binds them both. Joe beats the crap out of his son: it is a response to his own deep-felt cultural loss, loss of his Maori roots through English colonialism. It is also the loss of his wife in an accident that he takes out on his son, and yet it is the son who still links him to the wife. It is masochism. He beats the son and yet any pleasure derived from this cannot be separated from the trauma and pain it causes him subsequently.
Joe accepts these beatings as the sign of his father's love and hence, within his psyche, this is a perverse pleasure to him, even as it is breaking his body.
The scene of the description of the first beating we see is so powerful, the body of Joe sacrificed, as a Christic image, as his arms are outstretched and his body broken in the space of the door frame.
How do we apply this reading of masochism to Kerewin? I'll leave you to ponder that one.
Bear in mind as you read, that great literature may not always answer every question for us, but that the ambiguity, which we must learn to tolerate, may also have a function within the novel's creation of meaning.
Sorry, so much teacher-speak, i can't help it. I love reading lit with my students, love to see them discover these great things, love to see their eyes light up when they "get it" and amaze themselves with what they can do.
Stick with it, it truly is one of the greatest books I have ever read.
Don't worry about feeling inept, that is the experience of reading a challenging text. I experience this all the time!!!!!! ;-)
If you have questions, drop me a line and if I can answer them, I will. OK? Enjoy.
Clare
