In Fond Remembrance of Me

From Booklist
Norman's evocative novels are drenched in the Arctic's treacherous beauty and pragmatic mysticism, and he has chronicled some of his real-life Arctic adventures in My Famous Evening [BKL Mr 15 04]. Here he focuses on his 1977 sojourn in Churchill, Manitoba, where he is sent by a museum to translate stories told by an Inuit elder named Mark Nuqac only to discover that he isn't the only folklorist on the case. His fellow traveler is Helen Tanizaki, a far more accomplished linguist, translator, and expert in Arctic culture, a poetic woman dying of cancer who changes his life. Naturally there is melancholy in this elegant and haunting remembrance, but there is also wonder and comedy, especially in the spiky Inuit tales Nuqac tells about how Noah goes crazy when his ark gets trapped in the ice in the Hudson Bay. As always, Norman has a fine touch, and a keen sense of life's splendor and absurdity, as he turns his lyrical homage to a lost friend into a glimmering reflection on the power of the human spirit. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"I read In Fond Remembrance of Me the way I usually find myself reading Howard Norman. The manner in which he writes--with great clarity and liveliness, and never with ostentation--makes me read too quickly. When I'm done, I feel impelled to go back to the beginning and read again, and I always feel repaid. There are layers and layers of meaning in this simple-looking tale. What a delightful book!" --Tracy Kidder, author of Mountains Beyond Mountains



Book Description
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.



About the Author
Howard Norman is the author of five novels, including The Haunting of L., The Bird Artist, and Northern Lights. He lives with his family in Vermont and Washington, D.C.



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A sometimes sad but seductive collage of memories of two months spent with a Japanese woman and an Inuit elder in Canada's far north. In the late summer of 1977, Norman (The Bird Artist, 1994, etc.), who had not then stepped into his novelist's shoes, went to a town on Hudson Bay in the employ of an American museum to transcribe and translate narratives of the Noah stories. By coincidence, Helen Tanizaki was also there, working on the same stories with the same elder, Mark Nuqac. Tanizaki and Norman were two sides of a coin. She was a sensitive, accomplished ethnographer and translator: introspective, ardent, lucid. He was a befuddled neophyte: agitated, anxious, without poise. Their friendship emerged as they worked to capture and clarify the Noah stories, which were radically different as perceived from the Inuit point of view, on the one hand, and from Norman's point of view, on the other. Less confusingly, these were stories about the precariousness of life, which reverberated long and hard with the fact that Tanizaki was dying of stomach cancer, and about a stranger in a strange land, which fitted Norman to a T. Now blessed with great poise, Norman twines 11 Noah stories with the landscape of melancholy: his ineptitude, the unforgiving Arctic, the "black butterflies" of Tanizaki's doom. Though Norman is careful not to get sentimental, something Tanizaki would not have appreciated, readers will find it hard not to fall, as he did, for her talent, her epigrammatic opinions, the freshness of her prayers ("I would like to see / a red phalarope / (please)") and the elegance of her restraint. Norman may have been in over his head, but he kept his eyes and curiosity open; he engaged, andTanizaki likely appreciated that very much. A deep-sounding recovery project of memories new and old, fired by years of reflection.


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