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The Monday Book – Reproduction by Louisa Hall

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Guest review by Janelle Bailey, avid reader and always learning; sometimes substitute teaching, sometimes grandbabysitting, sometimes selling books

Reproduction by Louisa Hall

Reproduction by Louisa Hall

Again, I seriously struggle to understand how books come to me exactly as and when they do such that they intertwine with and connect so completely in coincidental ways with my own life. It is not always as crazy as it is with this one, but this is a rare gem.

I can tell you that it was Wednesday, September 27, when I was working at my still newish job at an independent bookstore, when I visited at length with a customer, the two of us conversing at length over snippets of conversation interspersed among her browsing the books and my tending to other customers. It all began with my welcoming her and her sweet little dog (I still know his name), and us then sharing sort of leveled-up knowledge and understanding of books and authors and more. The end result–I have no recollection of what she may have purchased–was my having this title and another written on a scrap of paper, as they were the two books she’d most recently read.

I proceeded to put both titles on hold at my local library, and when this one became available, I added it to my to-read stack and near the top–well, left of my shelved short stack–and kept thinking that it was “truly next,” as I was eager to return to my conversation with this now friend and report, at her request, my thoughts about it. But for a bit, more pressing–book club, due sooner, etc.–titles took precedence.

At face value of the book’s title alone, this topic is one with which I am quite familiar, having successfully reproduced and nearly completely non-eventfully, five times. I often think–and usually with much marvel as well–about how gratefully awed I am by my body’s having handled this all so very well. Given that all five of mine are now adults and wishing to live very independently (more independent from me than pleases me, quite often), I find myself in a position to be trying on this new mature identity that doesn’t have me leading with that fact or role, when meeting new people these days. It’s a process, though, and for sure! Being a “mom” is truly all I ever wanted to do with my life, and then it became all that really mattered to me for the past thirty years since I first got to call myself one. But as I said, those girls…err, young women…are often determined to distance themselves from me, so I find myself trying to figure out who I am…newly and now.

All of that reproduction set me up–every single one of those five successful pregnancies led to the (re)production of another female–not only for exponential, as I’ve always hoped–numbers of grandchildren, but now includes continual and even more complex concerns about their own reproduction–including their rights, health, and so much, much more.

That Reproduction‘s cover flap reveals it to be a “genre-defying novel” had me fully engaged, as soon as I began reading it.

My first fondness came at mention of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a long-taught, long-favorite classic, and a book I discussed just days before with a student while substitute teaching. That the main character–or Hall, it isn’t completely clear–was planning to write a book about Mary Shelley was fascinating to me and that thread of connectivity throughout the book valuable.

The next connection was reference to author Tove Jansson and then very shortly later to Jansson’s Moomins. My heart was fully engaged for my fondness of and connection to Jansson; at this very moment in time a former student’s full collection of Jansson books is housed in my bedroom. I’ve had the box for more than two years, possibly…my slow reading of those slowly interspersed with other books. And my learning of Jansson’s Moomins traced to a very specific conversation in a Stockholm kitchen belonging to my cousins, the Finnish wife, C, of my cousin, H, telling me about them while simultaneously packing our picnic lunch and teaching me about haloumi…if I recall accurately.

Additionally and next, that someone very close to my heart had endured a “molar pregnancy,” as experienced by the book’s main character was consoling, in some ways.

But that wasn’t all of it. The next length of the novel addresses the main character’s horrible hemorrhaging after delivery of her daughter and all that traumatized her in those scary hours. And that was so specifically similar to what I experienced less than a week before my starting to read this book with my own daughter’s second delivery. How does all of this happen in and with one book that I am so divinely steered to read?

This would suffice for all of the relevant reasons I was enthralled, all the while, with this book, but for the crazy fun of my reading life, there is yet one more marvelously amazing layer to my own story with reading this book: and that is that, on my Facebook post of my “Here’s what I am reading right now” post last Friday morning, a dear treasure of a long-time AP Lit. teaching-met and AP Lit. Reading-established friend, who lives in Florida, commented that she used to babysit Louisa Hall, herself. Oh. My. Word.

I will simply keep listening generously to those steering me toward the books, taking direction as I always have from the usual places–awards, short lists, gut feelings about new publications, trusted authors, etc.–and additionally be forever grateful that my opportunity to work in the bookstore has become rewarding far, far beyond being paid to talk about books and/or sell them to others. Rather, it has also introduced me to smart, avid, and discerning readers, galore…and I’ve made many, many new friends of this very best kind: fellow readers.

Oh! Were you expecting to read about the book?

It’s likely to fall somewhere between triggering and satisfying in that “feeling seen” sort of way for a number of women who have endured similar difficulties with miscarriage and other pregnancy and/or delivery, post-partum concerns. And it does provide a certain amount of relief and satisfaction, too, for those of us who have had successful pregnancies and deliveries.

It does not read like fiction, given the similarities between the voice of the main character and Louisa Hall, herself. I wonder if it could be called “auto-fiction,” allowing for Hall to blend her truths in with other potentially fictional angles for these stories to take. There is lots to be learned and understood in reading this good book.

Come back next Monday for another book review!

Puiu

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When I started adjuncting at UVa Wise, the office next door belonged to a Sociology professor named Puiu. He came over to say hello and showed me around the building. Over the next months, I got to know Puiu not only as a nice guy, but as a brilliant statistician.

He came to my rescue while I was getting my MPH, spending three hours one afternoon explaining regression and means uses, patiently, over and over again, until I could recite the basics if not quite understand them. He’s one of the reasons I passed biostatistics. His kind, grandfatherly voice, his careful repetition of things and his teaching method of “here’s what you need to know” or “here’s how this works” based on whether my eyes were glazed or confused, his laughter when I tried very hard to get it right and his encouragement of what little pieces I had grasped as building blocks to the rest: they were incentives to do something I literally hated. I didn’t care about biostatistics but wanted Puiu to think I was smart because he was so smart.

Puiu came to our bookstore a couple of times, and as he told me during a biostats session, “I have fallen in love with your husband.” He and Jack started a bromance. They could talk European politics for hours—and did. Many a night they closed the bookstore sitting on the front porch, drinking and talking into the dark.

We often held international nights at the bookstore, and Puiu agreed to do one on his home country of Romania. He and his girlfriend brought desserts and drinks from his homeland (she was from New York), and he set up a slide show for the assembly.

It was then that we learned that he had been part of the occupying force in the Romanian capital building in 1989, fighting for the revolution. He pointed to the window where he had been stationed, showed us the angle from which he had been firing, explained why he had been there and what the whole thing was about. Then he said something that has haunted me ever since.

“Here we are, twenty years later, and everything in Romania has a different name and operates the same. In the same way as we fought against that summer. Nothing is different. It was for nothing. Oh, we believed it, at the time. We were young, we were idealistic, we would change the world. We would fight for our cause, we would die for it, to bring democracy to Romania.”

A teenager asked, “Did you kill anyone when you were shooting?” The assembly froze. Puiu shrugged. His girlfriend stepped forward and offered desserts at the back table. The group dispersed quickly to eat and chat.

I didn’t know whether to apologize for the poor taste of the child’s question, but after the event Puiu sat on the porch with Jack and me and his lady. And he said, as if continuing a conversation, “I saw a man fall. He didn’t get up. I think it was me. It was not worth it. Everything has a new name and it all operates in the same way as before. Do not—” and here he looked straight at me; I don’t know why— “do not ever let someone tell you, if only we overthrow this, if only we can change this one thing, then utopia is there. Violence for idealism is not strategy. It is a trick for the new dictator.”

I nodded, we drank. Puiu doesn’t have any fingernails on his right hand. I never asked, and he never offered to talk about that.

When people talk about divided America, I think about quiet, gentle Puiu, who killed a man and lost his fingernails for a cause he believed in but that didn’t believe in him. And I pray for wisdom.