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WORK TITLE: Bone and Bread
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1979
WEBSITE: http://metaphysical-conceit.blogspot.com/
CITY: Montreal
STATE: QC
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
http://www.cbc.ca/books/2016/03/saleema-nawaz-how-i-wrote-bone-and-bread.html * http://www.quillandquire.com/authors/family-matters/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1979, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; married; children: one daughter and one stepdaughter.
EDUCATION:Carleton University, bachelor of humanities; University of Manitoba, M.A., 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor. Also freelance game writer for Discoglobe Interactive. Has been a writing instructor for Quebec Writers’ Federation and copy editor at the Manitoban.
AWARDS:Journey Prize, Writers’ Trust of Canada, 2008; Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, Quebec Writers’ Federation, 2013, for Bone and Bread.
WRITINGS
Has published short fiction in periodicals, including Prairie Fire, PRISM International, Grain, Dalhousie Review, and New Quarterly.
SIDELIGHTS
Canadian writer Saleema Nawaz earned a bachelor’s degree from Carleton University and then went on to pursue a master’s at the University of Manitoba. She graduated with a master’s in 2006, winning the Robert Kroetsch Award for Best Creative Thesis for her novella “The White Dress.“ Nawaz has published short fiction in various periodicals, including Prairie Fire, PRISM International, Grain, Dalhousie Review, and New Quarterly. She has named Alice Munro, Tobias Wolff, and Raymond Carver as literary influences.
Mother Superior
In 2008, she released Mother Superior: Stories, a collection of two novellas and seven short stories, which includes “The White Dress.“ Christina Decarie, reviewing the collection online at Quill & Quire, praised these stories about mothers and daughters, saying that they feature a “huge diversity of voices and perspectives, and are filled with great eloquence and great compassion.” In the Montreal Review of Books, Aparna Sanyal was impressed, commenting that the “range of circumstance and perspective is breathtaking.” Nawaz spoke to Decarie about the range of her characters, saying: “The real allure of fiction [is] imagining yourself as someone else, coming to terms with the fact that other people are just as real as you are, and imagining how they would react in that situation.”
Describing the novella “The White Dress,“ Decarie observed: “Nawaz relates the story of an Aboriginal child adopted . . . by a liberal white couple in a small Manitoba town. The child, like the reader, is initially unaware of her ‘otherness.’ Nawaz masterfully captures her precocious individuality and longing for love.” Speaking again about how she steps into these diverse characters, Nawaz focused on her attempts to truly see others, out of feeling of deep compassion. Decarie concluded: “Behind the sometimes surreal drama, under the often unexceptional voice, the reader mines the gold of an instinctive empathy which is rare in its breadth and power.”
Bone and Bread
In 2013 Nawaz published her novel Bone and Bread, which won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. The story follows the life of two sisters, Beena and Sadhana, who are orphaned as teenagers and put in the care of their uncle. One becomes anorexic, and the other becomes pregnant. A correspondent at Quill & Quire pointed to the “raw, emotional tone” of the “intertwined narratives” of the sisters as they grow into early adulthood, commenting that “the girls are yin to the other’s yang, spinning around each other.” As Nawaz herself told the reviewer at Quill & Quire: “I think that there is something primal about those first relationships that can set patterns in place for everything that comes afterwards, and for that reason they seem to have a special kind of power.”
Correspondent Alison Gillmor, writing in the Winnepeg Review Online, gave the novel a mixed assessment. The story of the sisters is an expansion of the tale of the same two sisters in Nawaz’s tale “Bloodlines,” part of the collection Mother Superior. Turning the story into a novel, Gillmor reasoned, made it “both padded and slight.” In the interwoven and amplified tale, “Nawaz has found an expressive metaphorical fulcrum,” Gillmor noted. Still, she concluded: “While the work retains Nawaz’s psychological insight and emotional generosity, its language feels loose, the storyline stretched. In this case, bigger isn’t better.” A critic in Kirkus Reviews reported that the novel seemed “ponderous” and “downbeat” with a “cast of cool characters” that readers may not appreciate. Even so, the reviewer found “sincere heart” in “this earnest story.”
Other reviewers were more complimentary. A Publishers Weekly commentator remarked that this “well-crafted debut novel is a somber tale of hidden secrets.” Heather Cromarty, writing in This Magazine, called the novel “Victorian in the depth and speed of tragedy inflicted upon its characters.” Emily M. Keeler, critic in the National Post Online, found the novel to be “suffused with strife and misery, cruelty, grief and despair.” The novel, “flawed and tragic, but also tender and loving,” brings the “reader into an intimate and devastating history, and holds you right until the end.” In the Toronto Star Online, Jennifer Hunter asserted that the novel “is a poignant read, but it captivates because it brims with humanity.” The novel, she observed, is composed of “multiple layers” that Nawaz brings together “into a cozy blanket that envelops the reader with the warmth of her characters and the flow of her story.” She concluded: “The wisdom of such a young novelist is staggering.” Cathleen With, writing online at Room, observed: “This gorgeously wrought book will make you uncomfortable at times because it is a peek inside us all, bound by bone and breaking bread.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2016, review of Bone and Bread.
Publishers Weekly, September 19, 2016, review of Bone and Bread, p. 44.
This Magazine, July-August, 2013. Heather Cromarty, review of Bone and Bread, p. 41.
ONLINE
Montreal Review of Books, http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca (July 11, 2017), Aparna Sanyal, review of Mother Superior: Stories.
National Post Online, http://news.nationalpost.com (March 28, 2013), Emily M. Keeler, review of Bone and Bread.
Quill & Quire, http://www.quillandquire.com (July 11, 2017), Christina Decarie, review of Mother Superior; (July 11, 2013), review of Bone and Bread.
Room, https://roommagazine.com (June 11, 2017), Cathleen With, review of Bone and Bread.
Saleema Nawaz Website, http://metaphysical-conceit.blogspot.com (June 21, 2017).
Toronto Star Online, https://www.thestar.com (March 28, 2013), Jennifer Hunter, review of Bone and Bread.
Winnipeg Review Online, http://winnipegreview.com (April 29, 2013), Alison Gillmor, review of Bone and Bread.*
Saleema Nawaz: How Bone and Bread had the most Montreal of origins
Wednesday, March 2, 2016 | 0
You have to wonder what author Saleema Nawaz would have thought had she prophesied, nine years ago, that the novel she had just dreamt up looking out on her Montreal balcony would end up in the running for Canada Reads 2016. Bone and Bread, which Farah Mohamed is defending in this year's battle of the books, is a wrenching, illuminating tale of sisterhood and secrets - and was born in a cloud of bagel smoke.
In her own words, Nawaz describes the moment that sisters Beena and Sadhana first came to her - and what happened next.
saleema_nawaz_hiwi.png
Bagel magic
One day in 2006, I was in my living room, and I just had this first sentence that came to me like a gift: "My sister and I stopped bleeding at the same time." With it came an image of two sisters who lose their periods for two very different reasons. At the time I was living in an apartment that was as close to Fairmount Bagel, a Montreal institution, as you could get without being on top of it. My living room balcony overlooked a little alley where the employees went on their smoke break. I grabbed a notebook and started writing really furiously for 30 minutes.
So it was in my living room, with that bagel smell and the smoke from the wood-fired ovens, that I got the first sentence and the subsequent storyline, which I hammered out in that intense half-hour. The short story that features the two sisters, Beena and Sadhana, "Bloodlines," uses that exact sentence as its starting point, and talks about those few months when they're teenagers, when Beena's pregnant and Sadhana is first suffering from her anorexia. What I wrote in that 30 minutes really encapsulates not only a lot of what happened in the short story, but the subsequent novel as well.
Revision vision
Bone and Bread really came about in the process of me revising the short story I had written about the sisters. I was at the writing studio at the Banff Centre, and at the same time that I was working on these story revisions, I knew that I wanted to take advantage of my five weeks at Banff and start a novel. I just found that I had so much to say about these sisters. I felt like I could write indefinitely about them, so it seemed like a really natural place to start. I wrote about 10,000 words of Bone and Bread's first draft while I was at Banff - the novel was born even before I published the short story.
Learning process
I wish I had known about Scrivener [the writing software] when I started Bone and Bread. I had so many scenes written out of order in various unwieldy Word docs, and I would have saved hours - or years - of time, because Scrivener works really well in terms of organizing scenes, tagging them, etc. In the end, I did the whole novel in Word, and it took almost six years to write and edit. I charted the novel out a bunch of times, and definitely there were multiple documents I kept losing track of that said what happened in each year of the timeline. I would have to figure things out over and over again. But then again, in writing Bone and Bread, I was learning how to write a novel. Before you write a novel, you don't really have any idea how to do it. And maybe I needed it to take as long as it did.
Saleema Nawaz's comments have been edited and condensed.
ABOUT
About the name of this blog
I love the metaphysical poets, as well as complex extended metaphors --- though, truthfully, I can rarely get away with them in my prose. Plus, it seems to me that there is something both conceited and metaphysical when it comes to blogging!
About the content of this blog
I write a lot about writing. (Although I probably write about not writing, or the attendant miseries and joys of writing as much as about the craft of writing itself.) I also write about other things because those are the kinds of things I like to read on other people’s blogs – about the fabric of people’s lives. Blogging is like journaling for me, so you will find me writing about, well, whatever I happen to be thinking about (e.g. my vacation…or reorganizing my closet). I can’t promise it will always (or even often) be of general interest. But if you use the navigation buttons below the header, you’ll find posts tagged for News and Writing.
Thanks for reading! And I’m always happy to read and respond to your comments.
About me
Born and raised in Ottawa, I attended Carleton University and the University of Manitoba. I now live in Montreal with my husband, stepdaughter, and baby daughter.
Giving a reading from an unpublished story is always nerve-wracking.
About my writing
I have always wanted to be a writer, and I published my first short stories in literary journals in 2005. My short-story collection Mother Superior was published by Freehand Books in 2008, the same year that I won the Journey Prize --- which is still pretty much the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.
My debut novel Bone and Bread was released by House of Anansi in Spring 2013. It has been widely reviewed (see here, here, and here), and it won the Quebec Writers' Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction...which means that the world's least athletic person finally has a trophy.
Besides fiction, I have also published book reviews, creative non-fiction, and a variety of freelance pieces to pay the bills.
My laptop holds drafts of all kinds: film treatments, detective fiction, children's books, and young adult fiction.. in various states of completion. Literary fiction is my primary focus, but I love creating characters and narratives of all kinds. I have also recently started doing some writing for video games, and I hope to do more!
I also enjoy editing fiction and giving feedback. Please see here for information on manuscript services.
I also have an embarrassingly lengthy but fairly accurate Wikipedia page, which is apparently due to a class project in digital media assigned by friend and poet Jonathan Ball.
Contact
The best way to get in touch with me is to drop me a line on Twitter.
Saleema Nawaz: BONE AND BREAD
Kirkus Reviews. (Oct. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Saleema Nawaz BONE AND BREAD Anansi Press (Adult Fiction) 16.95 ISBN: 978-1-77089-009-1
Two sistersclose when they were children but divided by pain and problems as they grew into adulthoodhave struggled ceaselessly with the bonds that connect them. Theres no shortage of issues in Canadian writer Nawazs (Mother Superior, 2008) first full-length work of fiction. Race, illegal immigration, anorexia, and single parenting are just some of the lesser tributaries swelling the main storytelling flow, devoted to the complicated relationship between sisters Beena and Sadhana Singh. Born of a Punjabi Sikh father and an Irish-born American mother, the girls live over the family businessa bagel shopin Montreal. Their fathers sudden death is followed by an arson attack on the building that engenders anxiety issues in younger sister Sadhana. Then their mother dies as the result of a celebratory meal prepared by the girls. Now, under the not-so-tender care of an uncle, the teenagers begin to go off the rails: 14-year-old Sadhana develops a life-threatening eating disorder while Beena, at 16, gets pregnant. Packed full of both content and introspective narration, the novel is ponderous and often downbeat, shuttling back and forth between the girls pasts and Beenas present as she copes with the aftermath of Sadhanas death, announced on the first page, for which her son, Quinn, blames her. As Beena sets about the sad business of sorting through her sisters possessions, additional plot points emerge involving Quinn, the father hes never known, and the fight to protect an immigrant family Sadhana was helping. Nawaz brings serious commitment to her ambitiously large tale, but its sluggishness and cast of cool characters work against the readers involvement, while the prose, often awkwardly intenseMore and more, regret has simply become the shadow I would cast if I stood in the sunsometimes makes matters worse. An overload of materialand pagesobscures the sincere heart of this earnest story.
Bone and Bread
Publishers Weekly. 263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p44.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Bone and Bread Saleema Nawaz. House of Anansi (PGW/Perseus, U.S. dist.; UTR Canadian dist.), $16.95 trade paper (456p) ISBN 978-177089-009-1
Nawaz's well-crafted debut novel is a somber tale of hidden secrets, separated sisters, and family stories that, when left unspoken, can eat a person from the inside out. Orphaned at a young age, sisters Beena and Sadhana Singh build their adult lives between Ottawa and Montreal, but Beena spends year after year watching Sadhana "disappear, little by little." After a lifelong struggle with an eating disorder, Sadhana dies of a heart attack at the age of 32. Beena, a single mother, is left alone to wrestle with her grief, as well as the secrets of her son Quinn's parentage of Sadhana's lover. The story is told in alternating timelines--shifting between the months directly following Sadhana's death and the years leading up to it, until the two converge, and Beena learns the truth about her sister's death. The novel's great strength is Nawaz's depiction of the sisters' relationship. In poignant but never flowery prose, she is able to portray the depth of a familial bond with accuracy and empathy. The relationship is not one of uncomplicated devotion but peppered with the jealousy, competition, and frustration that are so recognizable as ingredients in the love between siblings.
Agent: Martha Magor Webb, The McDermid Agency. (Nov.)
Bone and bread
Heather Cromarty
This Magazine. 47.1 (July-August 2013): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Red Maple Foundation
http://www.thismagazine.ca/
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BONE AND BREAD
by Saleema Nawaz
House of Anansi, $22.95
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In her first novel, Bone and Bread, Journey Prize-winner Saleema Nawaz has created a story that is almost Victorian in the depth and speed of tragedy inflicted upon its characters. As young children, sisters Beena and Sadhana lose their father, escape from a racist arson attack on their home, and witness the death of their mother. Orphaned, they become the charges of their strict uncle. New World rebellion clashes with Old World values when Beena experiments with sex and becomes a teenaged single mother. Meanwhile, Sadhana begins the long process of disappearing through anorexia. Nawaz's narrative meditates on "how much of love is simple hunger" and the food/eating metaphor runs from living over the family-owned bagel shop through to Beena mending the fraught relationship with her son Quinn over ad hoc peanut butter sandwiches after Sadhana's death. These moments only seem small, for when "we are eating together ... we are alive."
Cromarty, Heather
Family matters
Praised for its emotional complexity, Saleema Nawaz’s debut novel captures the complicated relationship between sisters
Saleema Nawaz’s debut novel, Bone and Bread, has such a raw, emotional tone, readers could be forgiven for assuming the story happened to her. It’s a common misconception about many first-time novelists, especially women who write about personal relationships and body issues. However, any attempts to tease out autobiographical threads woven into her story lead nowhere.
Released in March by House of Anansi Press, Bone and Bread is about orphaned sisters, an unexpected pregnancy, and a young woman with anorexia. Nawaz admits even she doesn’t know what draws her to such issues. “There are subjects that I find myself coming back to, for reasons that may not be 100 per cent transparent even to me,” she says.
We’re meeting at a small café, a hipsterish outpost in a stodgy area of downtown Montreal. Nearby is McGill University, where 33-year-old Nawaz is employed as student affairs coordinator for the microbiology and immunology department. Finding time to write while maintaining a full-time job is a daily struggle, she says: “I’m lucky to have the kind of day job, though, that I don’t have to bring home. Even when I’m there, it doesn’t really colonize my mental space.”
Nawaz radiates thoughtful energy. She listens with alertness, and often seems poised to break into laughter. Perhaps it’s this attentiveness that aids in her understanding of human behaviour, a talent praised by Anansi’s former senior fiction editor Melanie Little, who championed Nawaz’s manuscript.
“It’s incredible to write motherhood, to write sisterhood, without experiencing those things,” Little says.
This is the third time Little has edited Nawaz’s writing. As the founding editor of Calgary’s Freehand Books (the literary imprint of Broadview Press), Little worked on the author’s 2008 short-story collection, Mother Superior. In 2010, she edited the essay collection What My Father Gave Me: Daughters Speak (Annick Press), which included a contribution by Nawaz.
“I had really high expectations with [Bone and Bread], so I was a little bit nervous,” Little admits. “But she just blew me away with what she did with the story, and I found it really emotionally captivating. It’s one of the more emotional books that I’ve ever worked on.”
Bone and Bread follows the lives of two sisters. Beena and Sadhana Singh, born of a mixed marriage, live above a bagel shop run by their Sikh uncle in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood. The girls are yin to the other’s yang, spinning around each other in the vortex left by the sudden and unexpected deaths of their parents – especially that of their strong hippie mother, who held the family together after their father’s fatal heart attack.
Like the Singh sisters, Nawaz was raised by a single mother. An only child, she grew up in Ottawa, graduating with a B.A. from Carleton University in 2001. In 2006, Nawaz obtained a master’s degree in English from the University of Manitoba, winning the school’s inaugural Robert Kroetsch Award for best creative thesis.
After graduating, Nawaz landed a Banff Centre writing residency and published short stories in literary journals such as The New Quarterly and The Dalhousie Review. “My Three Girls,” a story that first appeared in the Winnipeg journal Prairie Fire, snagged the 2008 Journey Prize, the same year Mother Superior appeared.
Composed of seven stories and two novellas, Mother Superior was well received and named a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s McAuslan First Book Prize. One of the stories, “Bloodlines,” introduces the young sisters Beena and Sadhana.
The story’s intertwined narratives hinge on both sisters missing their menstrual periods. “I think I was just reading something or thinking about how when you have anorexia, sometimes you can stop getting your period, and how there was this parallel to that in pregnancy,” Nawaz says. “One is about life, and one is about moving toward the opposite of that. The first line of the short story came to me, and I just started writing.”
Bone and Bread revisits the girls in childhood, but also brings them into adulthood. “When I was working on it, I kept finding that I had more and more of the world in my mind,” says Nawaz. “I felt like I could write about it endlessly.”
After their parents’ deaths, Beena and Sadhana are adrift, with little in the way of close family bonds or guidance. Sadhana’s extroverted perfectionism quickly sharpens into acute anorexia, while Beena’s search for personal connection leads her to become pregnant by a “bagel boy” who works at the family bakery.
Nawaz reveals both Sadhana’s death and the existence of Beena’s son early in the book, while the remainder of the tale illuminates the path that led them there.
“It’s a really complex story, the way it goes back and forth between the past and the present, and so much of the mystery of the novel is a mystery to the reader,” says Little. “It’s a novel that really guards its secrets very carefully, and unravels them very, very slowly.”
Underlying Bone and Bread are Nawaz’s observations of kinship and family ties. She describes the minutiae of daily meals, chores, and rituals, while depicting the fierceness of a mother’s love, the ebb and flow of siblings’ affections, and the thousand petty resentments and jealousies that complicate them.
Although she may not have experienced motherhood or sisterhood first-hand, Nawaz can articulate her fascination: “I think that there is something primal about those first relationships that can set patterns in place for everything that comes afterwards, and for that reason they seem to have a special kind of power.”
Book Review: Bone and Bread, by Saleema Nawaz
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Emily M. Keeler, Special to National Post | March 28, 2013 1:30 PM ET
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Bone and Bread by Saleema Nawaz, reviewed
Bone and Bread by Saleema NawazBone and Bread
By Saleema Nawaz
House of Anansi Press
448 pp; $22.95
By what ugly turn of fate is it so simple and natural to display our ugliest selves to the people who, by birth or circumstance, are fated to be our intimates? A family, even the most loving one, is not an easy or pretty union to join. It’s hard not to call up Tolstoy’s ever-at-hand opener for Anna Karenina, if only because what was true of familial misery then has held fast — is there any human thing more interesting than unhappiness?
Saleema Nawaz’s first novel, Bone and Bread, is suffused with strife and misery, cruelty, grief and despair. Nawaz’s narrator, Beena, is so tied by blood and tragedy to her anoretic sister Sadhana that the story she tells skips in and out of the first person singular into plural. Growing up as mixed race kids in Montreal’s Mile End — a neighbourhood known primarily for being home to a large community of Hasidic Jews — Beena and Sadhana are used to talking through and with a multiplicity of voices and tenses.
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When their mother dies not long after their father’s sudden, fatal heart attack, Beena and Sadhana must start taking responsibility for raising themselves. The task proves difficult, and in another set of authorial hands their story would begin and end there, two solid coming-of-age tales twisted into one. But what Nawaz has done is somewhat more complex — the tragedies that befall these girls on their intertwined paths to adulthood invite our mythologies of childhood into question. Do the first years of life really make a person who they eventually become? What does it mean to come of age if one’s life has always already required the responsibilities of adulthood? At one point, shortly after giving birth to her son Quinn, 17-year-old Beena visits her sister in the psychiatric ward. Another anorexic girl stops by the room, and Sadhana cruelly mocks the girl, asking if she caught the devastating disease from fashion magazines. Beena admonishes her sister, who blows it off: “It’s just so boring, wanting to look like a model.” Navigating ugly territory, Beena grabs at a straw: “And you’re not boring?” she accuses.
Sadhana shuts her down: “ ‘No.’ Sadhana clasped her hands together behind her neck in false insouciance, stretching her bony legs out over the side of the arm rest. ‘I’m an orphan.’ ” Nawaz lets a true and cruel thought bloom in her reader’s mind: they’re both orphans, and so the disease couldn’t possibly begin there. There’s something other than origin at play, some irreducible element of spirit or character.
It’s a callous thought, that the difference between sick and well on such a small scale comes down to mere personality rather than heartbreakingly indifferent circumstance, the sheer luck of the draw. But as Beena develops both anger and compassion toward her sister and her eating disorder, the reader becomes complicit in the complexity of the situation — squeezed into the intimacy of this particular family, Nawaz’s reader becomes capable of the same wild turns between tenderness and cruelty as a real family member.
While Bone and Bread is gracefully plotted and occasions myriad interesting questions into the nature of the development of any one personality, Nawaz very occasionally missteps in her prose. Some sentences fail to settle into their intended rhythms, and instead seem littered through with claustrophobic clauses. Consider: “That was when Sadhana began talking about Mama as though her ideas were a kind of contagion, a viral pattern of thinking that would alter us, in obvious and irrevocable ways, into earnest, off-kilter versions of ourselves, wearing white to strengthen our auras or writing down our dreams to decode messages from our unconscious selves.”
This sentence falls apart toward the end, too invested in the cheap assonance of the easy slants of versions/ourselves/selves. At other times, Nawaz’s use of language is top-notch, evoking thoughts and feelings with a piercing clarity. Beena, at the moment of discovering men, and her own desire: “The truth was that I liked all of them. I wanted all of them the way a dissonant chord wants resolution, setting a vibration out into the world. In the way that a teenager wants her life to get started.” And so this novel, like the family it depicts, is flawed and tragic, but also tender and loving. Nawaz invites her reader into an intimate and devastating history, and holds you right until the end.
Emily M. Keeler is the editor of Little Brother magazine.
Bone and Bread by Saleema Nawaz: Review
The memorable tale of the relationship between two sisters
Bone & Bread, Anansi, 456 pages, $22.95
Bone & Bread, Anansi, 456 pages, $22.95
By JENNIFER HUNTERThe Reader
Thu., March 28, 2013
Bone and Bread, the first novel by Montreal writer Saleema Nawaz, is an emotionally complex, riveting story. It aches with sadness: children orphaned, a teenage girl who unwittingly becomes pregnant, a bitter uncle as step parent and a sub-plot about that ruinous psychiatric contagion of the 21st century, anorexia.
Bone and Bread is a poignant read, but it captivates because it brims with humanity. Nawaz hustles the reader along with vivid writing, scintillating characters, and the alluring element of mystery. Why does the narrator’s 32 year-old sister die unexpectedly? Has she slipped into anorexia again? Was it really heart failure? Did stress lead to her death?
As the eldest sister Beena considers the circumstances of her younger sister’s death, blaming herself for its cause, we learn about her family, and how two sisters, orphaned during their teen years, haphazardly learn to adapt to the loneliness of their lives.
At the beginning of the novel Beena notes: “Ghosts ought to have been my specialty. There were enough dearly departed in my family to haunt a dozen Gothic novels. . . ” So begins the tale of her earthy, idiosyncratic Sikh family who own a wood-fired bagel store and live in an apartment above the shop in the Jewish neighborhood of Montreal.
Papa, the blue-turbaned bagel maker, has taken on the bakery trade when he moves to Canada. When he dies, Mama, an American-born yoga instructor and Sikh convert, tries to keep the business going but she dies too. Various friends of Mama come to parent the two orphaned teens, Beena and Sadhana, but they are never able to stick it out and eventually Uncle, a slightly milder version of Cinderella’s cruel stepmother, becomes their guardian.
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Still, the girls, two years apart, have each other. Or so they believe. “We were strange little girls in our way,” Beena notes. “We had a hard time knowing where one of us left off and the other began.” They share a birthday and a bedroom, but as they grow up they find very different ways of coping. Sadhana is the artistic one, the dancer, the actor, the pretty one, the popular one, who hides her grief by secretly refusing food. Beena is heavy, less socially adept, more self-conscious.
Yet she is the practical one, the sister who watches over the family: her son, born from a brief relationship with one of the bagel bakers when Beena was a teenager, and her younger sister who becomes anorexic in response to the tragedies in their lives. There are multiple layers in this novel: the adaptation of immigrants to Quebec society, the angst of a single mother, growing up without the guidance of parents, and the worrisome situation of those with eating disorders.
Nawaz is able to bind these layers into a cozy blanket that envelops the reader with the warmth of her characters and the flow of her story. Beena concludes at the end of the novel that “the work of getting closer to the ones you love, of loving harder, is the work of a whole life.” The wisdom of such a young novelist is staggering.
jhunter@thestar.ca
‘Bone and Bread’ by Saleema Nawaz
Posted: APRIL 29, 2013
Book Reviews
Bone and Bread coverReviewed by Alison Gillmor
“We were strange little girls in our way. We had a hard time knowing where one of us left off and the other began,” writes Saleema Nawaz in this insightful but uneven debut novel about the complicated bonds of sisterhood. Caring but cutting, close but competitive, the relationship between Beena and Sadhana is formed by a childhood of sudden losses and later tested by adult tensions. After Sadhana dies at age thirty-two, her body lying undiscovered in her apartment for a week, Beena is left to unravel their knotted past: “I remember all too well the way that a single exchange could never be isolated but hearkened back irrevocably to other fights, old resentments spoken and unspoken. The deep trenches of our relationship that other people recognized only once they’d fallen in.”
The Montreal-based Nawaz won the Journey Prize in 2008 for “My Three Girls,” later published in her critically lauded short story collection, Mother Superior (Freehand). The thirty-four-year-old’s early recognition has brought acclaim and exposure. It has also created expectations, which seem to weigh heavily on the novelistic framework of Bone and Bread. Onetime Winnipegger Nawaz (she received her MA in English at the University of Manitoba, along with the 2006 Robert Kroetsch award for best creative thesis) explores family dynamics with tenderness and perception and pulls off some powerful descriptive passages. But in the move from short story to longer form, she struggles with structure. The novel feels both padded and slight.
This tale of two sisters centres on the characters found in “Bloodlines,” a story that was first published in The New Quarterly. When Beena is sixteen and Sadhana is fourteen, they both stop menstruating, but for very different reasons. Sadhana has become a dangerously underweight anorexic, while Beena has become pregnant by a callow kid who quickly disappears. As Sadhana becomes thinner, attempting to control the uncontrollable, Beena becomes heavier, taking on the unpredictable weight of another life.
Nawaz has found an expressive metaphorical fulcrum, one that suggests the ways in which the sisters are close and yet very different. The narrative, recounted by Beena, pivots on this point, slipping between the girls’ eccentric childhood and their diverging adult lives. After a cramped period in which the two barely grown girls live together, Sadhana ends up running with a creative crowd of actors, dancers and anarchist knitters in Montreal, while Beena concentrates on working as a freelance editor and raising her son, Quinn, in Ottawa. (One extremely uptight point here: If Beena is as an editor, she shouldn’t be misusing the word “disinterested.”)
Nawaz describes the caretaking role with agonized precision, suggesting the way in which Beena is driven to monitor her sister’s every mood, word and glance, to scrutinize each bite of food that she does or does not take. After Sadhana’s death, Beena is devastated but not surprised: “I spent so many years watching her disappear, little by little, that it is impossible for me to believe that there could be any of her left over.” But Beena’s grief is soon complicated by a growing suspicion that anorexia didn’t kill her sister. Sadhana’s fridge was full; her friends suggest that she was doing well. The connections between past and present become more urgent as Beena is drawn into a mystery, one that might trace back to Quinn’s long-gone father, Ravi Patel, now a hustling political opportunist aligned with a Quebec-based anti-immigration movement.
Nawaz’s strongest writing comes in the sections dealing with Beena and Sadhana’s childhood, with vivid pictures of the warm, yeasty, crowded apartment over the family’s bakery and of the multicultural Canadian mix of a Sikh-run bagel shop in a Hassidic Jewish neighbourhood in francophone Montreal. There is a brief glimpse of the girls’ father, who dies early and suddenly, and a slightly longer look at their sweet Irish-American mother, a New Agey spirit who follows him shortly after. (Hard not to think of Oscar Wilde—to lose one parent is a misfortune, but to lose both parents looks a bit like authorial carelessness.) Sadhana and Beena are left adolescent orphans under the gruff guardianship of their uncle, a traditional man who has a long list of things of which he does not approve: “music, sleeping in, caffeine, movies, phone calls for any purpose besides making plans, bright colours, Hallmark holidays, novels, exhibitions of emotion.”
Unfortunately, the sections set in the present time lack texture. We learn a few things about Beena’s relationship with Quinn, now a teenager who is becoming increasingly obsessed with finding his biological father, and about her romantic relationship with Evan, a prairie-boy cop who feels almost too good to be true. But neither connection feels as emotionally urgent as sisterhood. Maybe that’s the point.
Bone and Bread is one of those novels where individual sections succeed, often beautifully, but somehow fail to work together. The uncertainty surrounding Sadhana’s death should provide a narrative through-line, but the suspense feels trumped up and the solution strangely anticlimactic. The Ravi Patel subplot, which seems designed to bring in topical content—at one point, Nawaz references the infamous Hérouxville “guide for new immigrants”—also stalls out.
When Nawaz won the Journey prize for “My Three Girls,” the judges praised her for “condensing a novel’s worth of sorrows and joys into a few pages.” In Bone and Bread, she moves in the other direction, taking the concise core of a story and expanding it into a novel. While the work retains Nawaz’s psychological insight and emotional generosity, its language feels loose, the storyline stretched. In this case, bigger isn’t better.
House of Anansi | 445 pages | $22.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1770890091
Bone & Bread
By
Saleema Nawaz
House of Anansi, 448 pages, $22.95
Reviewed by
Cathleen With
The thing about Saleema Nawaz’s Bone & Bread is that I expected a book, (your typical book maybe?) about the larger sister and the anorexic sister. The tension between the two. How they navigated high school. How they were approached, or not, by boys. How they overcame their struggles and grew out of it all. As someone who has gone through a broad spectrum of eating disorders, I gravitate wonderingly to that kind of story, that novel that explores what’s going on—with young girls mostly, though of course we know that boys are increasingly disordered as well—and how they see their bodies. Usually a traumatic event tips the scales, as in the case of these sisters—but rarely have I seen a story so deftly and unusually described: two Sikh girls living above their uncle’s bagel shop in Montreal.
Their mother is a beautiful airy-fairy type who believes in many spiritualities, many religions, and exposes the girls to parties and sleepovers with strangers who are (thankfully) kind. They have the kind of existential conversations that few mothers do with their daughters. And the love and the taste and the colours of the mostly vegetarian food, fruits, vegetables, stews infuse the intense relationship Beena and Sadhana have with their mother. But this is soon to end, and Beena and Sadhana start to separate in ways that are completely off the spectrum: Beena toward teen motherhood and Sadhana toward voices attacking her already tiny body.
What is transcendent later about this story is Montreal in all her characteristic hues, and Beena’s son, who wants quite secretly in all his “manhood” of eighteen years to go back to seeing his aunt and living with her the way they used to during his first eight years. This book is about his journey too, and the secrets the sisters have kept from him. What I loved about this book was exactly what I didn’t expect, an intricacy of plot, sense-sound-space of Montreal and the fusion of an unhuggable, yet caring Sikh bagel maker uncle, a delicate dancer who is wasting away, and the mother and son who are bound together. This gorgeously wrought book will make you uncomfortable at times because it is a peek inside us all, bound by bone and breaking bread.
Cathleen With’s first book, skids (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2006), about street kids on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, was short-listed for a Relit Award. Having Faith in the Polar Girls’ Prison (Penguin Group; winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Award), is her first novel. She was recently in V6A:Writings from Downtown Vancouver’s Eastside, which was short-listed for a City of Vancouver award.
Mother Superior
by Saleema Nawaz
The opening lines of the first story of Montreal author Saleema Nawaz’s debut collection are riveting and set the tone for the entire collection: “Joan won’t get an abortion … says [drinking] won’t hurt the baby. At worst, she says, it might make it slow.” The seven short stories that comprise Mother Superior are all concerned with mothers, daughters, girls who are both, and sisters who sometimes help, sometimes hinder.
Nawaz writes about motherhood as something complex, daunting, often unchosen, and never performed with perfection. There are many mothers in this collection, not all of them good. The unnamed mother in “The Beater” abandons her three children, leaving them with the man who threw one of them against a wall. Her daughter from a later marriage struggles to understand this life – these lives – her mother left behind, and from all this, Nawaz presents a story so rich and complex, it deserves rereading.
But for every Joan, who is mismatched with motherhood, there is a Claire, who, in “Scar Tissue,” marvels at “the matchless feeling of suckling her babies at her breast;” or a Kate, who, in “Look, But Don’t Touch,” steps in where her cold mother doesn’t and loves and guides her disabled brother through a life that exhausts and frightens her. Nawaz’s stories have a huge diversity of voices and perspectives, and are filled with great eloquence and great compassion.
Reviewer: Christina Decarie
Publisher: Freehand Books
DETAILS
Price: $23.95
Page Count: 296 pp
Format: Paper
ISBN: 978-1-551119-27-4
Released: Sept.
Issue Date: 2008-10
Categories: Fiction: Short
The Human Protest
Review by Aparna Sanyal • Published in the Fall 2008 issue • Leave a comment
Mother Superior
Saleema Nawaz
Freehand Books
$23.95
paper
290pp
978-1-55111-927-4
The wounded characters in Mother Superior, Saleema Nawaz’s debut short fiction collection, wander the author’s smooth narrative landscapes like so many potential talk show guests. They include a nun-like lesbian devoted to her straight, Baby Duck swilling, pregnant roommate; a mother of three, tormented by marital jealousy and guilt-stricken over a kitchen fire that badly scars one child; a group of anarchists who shelter an obese young prostitute; a stained-glass artist searching for a missing sibling; and two orphaned sisters, one pregnant and the other dying of anorexia, whose parents died in separate freak accidents. The sheer range of circumstance and perspective is breathtaking.
The author herself projects neither a chameleon-like quality, nor a flair for the outré. Raised in Ottawa, Nawaz holds a master’s degree in English from the University of Manitoba. When I meet her, she is polite, dressed quietly, and disarmingly youthful. Her speech is sprinkled with “totally”s and “like”s and she breaks readily into lighthearted laughter. Asked about the wildly distinct and often dark realities she presents to the reader, she remarks, “That, for me, is the real allure of fiction. Imagining yourself as someone else, coming to terms with the fact that other people are just as real as you are, and imagining how they would react in that situation. And obviously it’s very freeing to write in another persona.”
The skill with which Nawaz does this redeems the occasionally melodramatic scenarios she sets up. She is at her most effective when she reveals the depths of tragedy in a simple conflict between desire and reality. In the novella “The White Dress,” for instance, Nawaz relates the story of an Aboriginal child adopted during the residential-school era by a liberal white couple in a small Manitoba town. The child, like the reader, is initially unaware of her “otherness.” Nawaz masterfully captures her precocious individuality and longing for love:
Before I was adopted, Linnie and Garek, but Linnie especially, were very sad because they weren’t able to have any children. I liked to think of her like this, going to the park or the store and seeing other parents with their little children, and filled with a sad, desperate wish.
Using subtle detail and shaded dialogue, Nawaz unveils the secrets of the adult world which drive the child into a chasm of uncertainty and loneliness. From the opening line (“Our house was always cold”), to the symbolism of the second-hand white dress, to the casual remarks that slowly betray the narrator’s origins to herself and to us (“I’m not one of those that say what’s bred in the bone can’t be worked out by the Lord,” offers one well-meaning neighbour), every stroke rings true and propels the conflict to its gut-wrenching conclusion.
In a scene near the end, the narrator is briefly addressed by a paramedic who has come to take her depressed adoptive mother, whom she loves deeply, to the hospital:
“Who are you?” he said. “Get on home.” His curt glance fell across my face toward the ground, and he gave a nod back toward the street that made me turn to see if there was someone yet smaller and more insignificant standing behind me […] I tried to move or speak, but I felt fixed and yet absent within his look, like a small stain first observed but then quickly forgotten.
As the child gradually grasps the extent of her social and emotional isolation, the reader longs to scoop her out of the tentacles of a flawed history. But Nawaz makes it clear that neither the parents nor the townspeople can escape their time and circumstances. The tension is thereby deepened, and the ache it leaves, beyond the reading, reminds one forcibly of Nawaz’s abilities.
How does the author step so effortlessly into the shoes of a character clearly not herself? “Actually, with that story I was drawing on a lot of my experience,” replies Nawaz, the daughter of a Nova Scotian mother and an absent Indian father. “Obviously I’m not Aboriginal, but I was the only brown child in a white family.” The same insight, however, is evident in stories that seem removed from Nawaz’s own experiences. Though single and childless, she deftly portrays a married mother’s feelings of insecurity and entrapment in “Scar Tissue.” An only child, she writes with remarkable authenticity in “Look But Don’t Touch” of a sister’s sympathy for her teenage brother, who has Down syndrome and irrepressible sexual longings. Nawaz explains: “I guess I sort of think of it as a logical puzzle: ‘What would so-and-so do?'” Asked whether she considers writing to be an act of compassion, Nawaz responds with sudden enthusiasm: “Oh completely, completely. That’s the number one aspect of writing. Most of the world’s problems seem to stem from not being able to imagine yourself as somebody else.”
Nawaz even makes writerly compassion the subject, obliquely, of the story entitled “Sandy.” The narrator, a sheltered young anarchist, weaves stories around a streetwalker whom she and her friends, with bourgeois unease, have temporarily taken in. The narrator notes, “I’ve read that compassion is different from mere pity, and I believe that to be true, but I’m not sure how it feels to inhabit it […] free of complacency and smugness.” As the prostitute sleeps, the narrator speculates in somewhat hackneyed terms on the former’s origins, childhood, and working life. The prostitute awakens and the narrator’s stories “slide off her, fall down her broad back onto the floor.” The narrator concludes with the sturdier supposition that “like anyone, she fights the pull between facelessness and notoriety, between meaningfulness and death.” Thus, it seems, the author reminds us that there is only ever one story.
Indeed, while many of Nawaz’s characters are misfits, their true outsider status springs from an isolation so primordial as to be universal. The Aboriginal child’s desire to belong, the Down syndrome boy’s frustrated lust, and the prostitute’s desire for an untroubled nap are our own. They are made so through Nawaz’s ability to inhabit these characters’ realities without “complacency and smugness.” If they are outsiders, so are we. Many writers are capable of describing “other” realities, but Nawaz gives expression, over and over again, to the fundamental human protest.
In spite of her politeness, Nawaz seems neither used to nor interested in offering insights into her own work. “I would say most of what I’m doing as a writer is totally unconscious. I write whatever comes to mind,” she states with characteristic simplicity, in response to a comment about the profusion of sibling relationships and babies in her stories. One guesses that, like the siblings and the babies, the sensationalism in Nawaz’s fiction – the battered women, anorexia, deaths, accidents, fires, disappearances, and ubiquitous pregnancies – is a red herring. Behind the sometimes surreal drama, under the often unexceptional voice, the reader mines the gold of an instinctive empathy which is rare in its breadth and power. mRb
Aparna Sanyal is editor of the mRb.