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Checked out
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Call number
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Fantasy. Fiction. Literature. HTML:Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 Amazon First Novel Award Shortlisted for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English Winner of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design â?? Prose Fiction Longlisted for the 2019 Sunburst Award From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read. Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them. A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this. Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains. Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forg… (more)
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Publication
Penguin Canada (2019), Edition: Reprint, 208 pages
Original publication date
2018
Original language
English
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User reviews
LibraryThing member Smiler69
A Terrible Beauty
(Another reviewer mentioned this book should contain a trigger warning for sexual abuse. I concur.)
Should I put down my initial reactions to this book now I've just finished listening to it? Or should I take time to digest it a little so I can be sure not to say anything off
We living in the "southern" parts of Canada can't begin to imagine the kinds of harsh and frigid cold the Inuit must face as part of their daily existence, the punishing quality of it. Kids are only let off school in the Great North when the weather hits minus 50 degrees Celsius or less (that's -58 Fahrenheit). Sexual abuse is so common that Tagaq's character speaks of being jealous when she sees her teacher touching other girls's private parts in the same way, because, one is led to understand, this is part of a young girl's "normal" sexual development in those parts. Many passages made me want to... I don't know... vomit? cry? lay down on the sidewalk trembling and foaming at the mouth? All told with this oh so gentle voice, all part of everyday life. This is a place where people can't spare empathy for each other, much less for their animals. When there's not enough food for their dogs, they must be put down. When the fox population become too numerous, they starve and attack the children, so they must be exterminated, and Tagaq describes taking satisfaction from the popping sounds as they hit their targets while shooting at them, as part of a father/daughter bonding experience. There is no mystery about sex and certainly no such thing as modesty about it. Not in a world where parents and uncles and family friends regularly get blind drunk and children get high with whatever substance they can get their hands on, and I suppose one is naturally drawn to warm places. But Tagaq recounts all this with a clear, gentle, girlish... I want to say pure voice, and in between snatches of story/poetry there is the throat singing she is famous for, which is sometimes sublime and more often disconcerting and frankly disturbing, much like this book as a whole. That being said, if there ever was a book one should experience as an audiobook for the full effect, then this would be it.
Inextricably, melding the sordid with the sublime, there is the world of spirit and mythology. Ancient stories of humans transforming into sea creatures, who then take their vengeance on men for wrongs done to them. Representing man's endless struggle with cold and starvation and the unforgiving sea. There are astral voyages... out of body experiences she recounts as simply as if she were describing going to the store to buy a pint of milk; she lets her spirit roam to escape the horror of the violently drunk adults in the room, who are a regular feature of every young person's life. The Northern Lights are ever-present, and eventually, they impregnate her in a kind of psychedelic journey which yields actual babies, though whether they are fully human is never fully clear. She tells all these stories in the first person, as if this has all been part of her personal experience, but you eventually figure out that she has weaved together the story of her people, perhaps of her generation. It is part memoir, part myth, part history, part fantasy, part fiction and part non-fiction too.
I'm not a prude, I'm certainly not religious and I've never been a Christian, but this book made me feel like a Puritan at times. Tagaq managed to shock me with the raw sexuality and sheer savagery she described. This book took on a nightmarish quality for me. The kind of nightmares which both seduce and repel you. You desperately want to wake up for them to stop, but then again you want to follow those strange creatures around that structure to see where they might take you, though your heart is pounding and you're absolutely certain you're about to die because you know they're leading you to something truly horrific and from which you won't possibly be able to escape. Tagaq's mind, the culture she was describing seemed like it was from a completely different universe, and perhaps the throat singing made it seem more so, certainly it made the whole thing take on a different dimension. I thought I knew something about the Great North and its people before, had some kind of notion at least, but no. And now, here is an opportunity to hear a creative, smart, multi-talented, deep-thinking woman, one with a gentle and kind voice no less, and she terrified me with the raw brutality of her poetry. I suppose that's what she set out to do. Shake us Southerners out of our complacency and our comfort zone. She managed that extremely well. Never did I feel so much like the "other". Or so damn white. And have to wonder: is that really such a bad thing? And why must I be apologizing? And must I?. All questions which are big taboos if one is a liberal and loves all humanity equally. But when confronted with so much otherness, can one really not ask oneself those questions?
I will not say I loved this book. I did not. Nor did I like it. The same way I do not love the nightmares that visit me every night. My nightmares are filled with symbolism and strange creatures and memories that are sometimes my own and sometimes not too. But nightmares, much like Tanya Tagaq, are trying to convey important messages to us, and like it or not, we must listen. Some of us might be enchanted by what she has to say, some of us will not be. All the same, I'm glad I listened to this book. It felt like an important thing to do, and it certainly had a terrible beauty. I'm just thankful my nightmares can't possibly be worse than they are already, or this book would have proved traumatic in a truly lasting way.
(Another reviewer mentioned this book should contain a trigger warning for sexual abuse. I concur.)
Should I put down my initial reactions to this book now I've just finished listening to it? Or should I take time to digest it a little so I can be sure not to say anything off
Show More
colour? Most people seem to agree this book is brilliant. I suppose it is. It's raw. It's brutal. It speaks of the natural world in a beautiful way. It also speaks of the natural world as seen from the point of view of a carnivore and an active predator and who likes to eat flesh still living or raw or as close to pulsing life as possible to get maximum energy from it. It speaks of beauty and horror combined, harshly and dispassionately. We living in the "southern" parts of Canada can't begin to imagine the kinds of harsh and frigid cold the Inuit must face as part of their daily existence, the punishing quality of it. Kids are only let off school in the Great North when the weather hits minus 50 degrees Celsius or less (that's -58 Fahrenheit). Sexual abuse is so common that Tagaq's character speaks of being jealous when she sees her teacher touching other girls's private parts in the same way, because, one is led to understand, this is part of a young girl's "normal" sexual development in those parts. Many passages made me want to... I don't know... vomit? cry? lay down on the sidewalk trembling and foaming at the mouth? All told with this oh so gentle voice, all part of everyday life. This is a place where people can't spare empathy for each other, much less for their animals. When there's not enough food for their dogs, they must be put down. When the fox population become too numerous, they starve and attack the children, so they must be exterminated, and Tagaq describes taking satisfaction from the popping sounds as they hit their targets while shooting at them, as part of a father/daughter bonding experience. There is no mystery about sex and certainly no such thing as modesty about it. Not in a world where parents and uncles and family friends regularly get blind drunk and children get high with whatever substance they can get their hands on, and I suppose one is naturally drawn to warm places. But Tagaq recounts all this with a clear, gentle, girlish... I want to say pure voice, and in between snatches of story/poetry there is the throat singing she is famous for, which is sometimes sublime and more often disconcerting and frankly disturbing, much like this book as a whole. That being said, if there ever was a book one should experience as an audiobook for the full effect, then this would be it.
Inextricably, melding the sordid with the sublime, there is the world of spirit and mythology. Ancient stories of humans transforming into sea creatures, who then take their vengeance on men for wrongs done to them. Representing man's endless struggle with cold and starvation and the unforgiving sea. There are astral voyages... out of body experiences she recounts as simply as if she were describing going to the store to buy a pint of milk; she lets her spirit roam to escape the horror of the violently drunk adults in the room, who are a regular feature of every young person's life. The Northern Lights are ever-present, and eventually, they impregnate her in a kind of psychedelic journey which yields actual babies, though whether they are fully human is never fully clear. She tells all these stories in the first person, as if this has all been part of her personal experience, but you eventually figure out that she has weaved together the story of her people, perhaps of her generation. It is part memoir, part myth, part history, part fantasy, part fiction and part non-fiction too.
I'm not a prude, I'm certainly not religious and I've never been a Christian, but this book made me feel like a Puritan at times. Tagaq managed to shock me with the raw sexuality and sheer savagery she described. This book took on a nightmarish quality for me. The kind of nightmares which both seduce and repel you. You desperately want to wake up for them to stop, but then again you want to follow those strange creatures around that structure to see where they might take you, though your heart is pounding and you're absolutely certain you're about to die because you know they're leading you to something truly horrific and from which you won't possibly be able to escape. Tagaq's mind, the culture she was describing seemed like it was from a completely different universe, and perhaps the throat singing made it seem more so, certainly it made the whole thing take on a different dimension. I thought I knew something about the Great North and its people before, had some kind of notion at least, but no. And now, here is an opportunity to hear a creative, smart, multi-talented, deep-thinking woman, one with a gentle and kind voice no less, and she terrified me with the raw brutality of her poetry. I suppose that's what she set out to do. Shake us Southerners out of our complacency and our comfort zone. She managed that extremely well. Never did I feel so much like the "other". Or so damn white. And have to wonder: is that really such a bad thing? And why must I be apologizing? And must I?. All questions which are big taboos if one is a liberal and loves all humanity equally. But when confronted with so much otherness, can one really not ask oneself those questions?
I will not say I loved this book. I did not. Nor did I like it. The same way I do not love the nightmares that visit me every night. My nightmares are filled with symbolism and strange creatures and memories that are sometimes my own and sometimes not too. But nightmares, much like Tanya Tagaq, are trying to convey important messages to us, and like it or not, we must listen. Some of us might be enchanted by what she has to say, some of us will not be. All the same, I'm glad I listened to this book. It felt like an important thing to do, and it certainly had a terrible beauty. I'm just thankful my nightmares can't possibly be worse than they are already, or this book would have proved traumatic in a truly lasting way.
Show Less
LibraryThing member greeniezona
As soon as I knew this book existed, I put a hold on it at the library. And when I started reading it, I read it straight through in a single day.
This is one of those genre-defying books. It starts out fairly straightforward. A young girl growing up in a small town in the far, far north in the
There is also something else. Wild nature, magic, mythology. And these scenes break through on the "realistic" story with increasing frequency as the story progresses. At first these breakthroughs can be explained as dreams or the influence of alcohol/drugs. As they build, it can be bewildering what we are supposed to interpret as "real" or not. If you aren't comfortable with that kind of ambiguity, this story probably isn't for you.
Visceral, electric, and haunting. An incredible read.
This is one of those genre-defying books. It starts out fairly straightforward. A young girl growing up in a small town in the far, far north in the
Show More
1970s. It's fairly bleak -- with bullying, alcoholism, molestation, violence. But children always make their own worlds with whatever scraps of freedom they can paste together -- but even there you can see the same cycles growing, repeated.There is also something else. Wild nature, magic, mythology. And these scenes break through on the "realistic" story with increasing frequency as the story progresses. At first these breakthroughs can be explained as dreams or the influence of alcohol/drugs. As they build, it can be bewildering what we are supposed to interpret as "real" or not. If you aren't comfortable with that kind of ambiguity, this story probably isn't for you.
Visceral, electric, and haunting. An incredible read.
Show Less
LibraryThing member caanderson
A fantastic story of a girl navigating through her life with her friends, parents, and a pregnancy.
LibraryThing member LibroLindsay
Wow wow wow wow wow. That was wild and painful and cosmic and beautiful and heavy. I have never read anything like this book.
**24 hours later: I just want to go back and re-read this book. I stayed up far past my bedtime last night listening to Tagaq's music and interviews (I am so behind the
***As expected, the audio was phenomenal.
**24 hours later: I just want to go back and re-read this book. I stayed up far past my bedtime last night listening to Tagaq's music and interviews (I am so behind the
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times!), and it adds even more depth. I also need to buy her audiobook...after listening to a sample of that, my mind is just blown.***As expected, the audio was phenomenal.
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LibraryThing member monnibo
Read 60 pages... did not finish, but not for the reasons you're thinking. I didn't finish because it was too much emotion at this time. Tagaq is a skilled writer, and the book moves seamlessly between prose and poetic interludes. The stories and poetry are heart-wrenching, portraying a childhood
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cut too short and destroyed by sexual abuse. I would like to try reading Split Tooth again, but at this time I have to listen to my emotions. Show Less
ISBN
014319805X / 9780143198055