Runnymede's Wall of Fame Inductee

Runnymede's Wall of Fame Inductee - Kenneth Radu

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Some Reviews of Kenneth Radu's Books

Romanian Suite

I descend from a people chased by wolves through tangled forests, a people who blew panpipes by day until their hearts blossomed like flowers and they did not think so much music could rise out of the fields, out of centuries of labour, people who told stories of the wolf, the vampire, the devil.

This third book of poetry by Kenneth Radu (of Romanian descent) reflects the recent history of Romania by using the images and metaphors and dark traditions of the past. The poems are peopled by vampires, Dracula, Prince Vlad, the Devil, the tragic Romanian pianists Dinu Lipatti and Radu Lupu - both dead at an early age - and an unnamed gardener. These are symbols of the tragic recent history of a land racked by famine, disease, desolation, and oppression, with a Devil at the helm, and a scant hope of redemption for the future. The book begins with the section entitled "Tales from the Crypt" and with an introductory poem featuring the gardener musing over the images of Romanian children whose eyes are "darker than death."

The cover photograph is of a palace which looks like a prison. The images are predominantly of death, putrefaction, starvation, and "unrestrained slaughter." They country is a vast cemetery where the Dark Forces prevail. The poet's purpose "is the poetry of resurrection." The poems would be narrowly "political" if the images and metaphors were not universal and descriptive of the human condition everywhere - only heightened in this one country and at this one time. The faces of these starving, misshapen children were everywhere as the media showed us the horrifying conditions perpetrated in Romania by the despotic, decadent rule of Ceausescu.

The last poem is of a wedding feast featuring a cornucopia of rich, spicy food with every dish imaginable displayed and with the open invitation to come and partake - especially invited are the children so used to "gruel and weak tea."

The poems are accessible, powerful and would suit high school students in English courses or creative writing courses. They could also be used in Social Studies courses dealing with modern, European history - they give voice to the anguish of politics gone wrong.

Recommended.

Willa Walsh is a high school teacher-librarian in Richmond, British Columbia. To comment on this title or this review, send mail to cm@umanitoba.ca.

Published by
The Manitoba Library Association
ISSN 1201-9364

FLESH AND BLOOD

reviewed by Andrew Steinmatz

“Lies. Disappointment. Poverty.” This is how Rose, the central character in Flesh and Blood, sums up her marriage to Jacob. Sullen and resentful, her husband is a bottom feeder, the kind of man content to scrounge around like a billy goat, from meal to meal, always with “some kind of smelly little idea in his head.”

Enter Bobby Washington, grandson of a slave, son of a “full-blooded Sioux” and landlord to these descendants of Romanian farmers, Rose, Jacob, and their children, Eva and Nicky.

Mr. Washington takes a shine to Rose. He buys her a dress and lets her family off easy with the rent. And when no one’s looking, he invites Rose into his part of the house and serves her carrot cake and coffee and you can guess the rest.

Rose has never had it so good.

The overriding question of her life, and of the novel, becomes: Should she stay or should she go? Stay with Jacob or go with Bobby? The choice couldn’t be more clear to the reader, painted in black and white, right?

Not so fast. There are children involved … and there’s this matter of freedom. Does it really exist? For whom?

Flesh and Blood, a story of poverty, heartbreak, and empty promises, is set in the era gearing up to World War II. The action is grounded in Essex County, Ontario, and in the rural environs of Leamington, Chatham, and Windsor. But the forces at play in Kenneth Radu’s fourth novel – race, poverty, freedom – find their source waters elsewhere and betray an imaginative reach far beyond this border country.

Bobby Washington, landowner, is shackled by his past. Over the idea of running off with Rose, he reflects: “How easy to persuade himself that the world would not pursue them like overseers after escaped slaves.”

In Rose we see how real poverty places limits on freedom. Hers is a life of drudgery and compromise, of survival day to day. About her lot in life, Rose muses: “Working in a food-processing plant was not so different from slaving at home.”

The reader sees where Radu is going with this, all too clearly. The juxtaposition of Bobby’s heritage (grandson of a slave, remember) and repeated references to Rose’s “slaving at home,” struck me as false, facile if not disingenuous. But is this an example of Rose’s lazy thinking or Radu’s lazy writing? It’s hard to tell.

Certainly there are plenty of memorable lines of description throughout these pages. Cabbage “as tight and smooth as a skull.” A woman with scoliosis, walking, “her left hip surging out like a boat about to be launched.” But alongside these examples, there is some badly clichéd and mannered prose, a folksy rendering, one suspects, of simple folk. Case in point: “Why that honky jerk of a husband couldn’t get a job, Bobby didn’t know.” Later, life-challenged Jacob sizes up Bobby as “a pretty strong-looking buck.” Honky jerk of a husband? Strong-looking buck? I don’t think so.

The real threat to our suspension of disbelief is Rose. So sheltered is she that when Bobby recounts the story of his family’s flight from the plantations via the Underground Railway, Rose interrupts him:

“Slavers? What do you mean?”

Just when the reader might roll his or her eyes, Bobby too is dumbfounded:

“Why was he talking to this woman? Didn’t she know anything?”

At this point, I realized that my fate as a reader was tied to Bobby’s fate. But while Bobby gets a lover out of the deal, the reader inherits a point of view that, for the most part, is too loyal to Rose and her way of seeing things.

By Andrew Steinmetz, author of Wardlife and Histories. Wardlife was shortlisted in 2000 for the QWF/Mavis Gallant Prize for non-fiction and QWF First Book Award.

The Purest of Human Pleasures

Montreal Review of Books (http://www.aelaq.org/mrb/)
Reviewed by Elspeth Redmond

Kenneth Radu’s latest novel is set in the West Island of Montreal, in communities resembling the suburbs of Senneville and Baie d’Urfé. Something terrible is taking place in the gardens along the lakeshore: women are being hacked and bludgeoned to death by an unknown killer lurking among the hostas and trailing roses.

It is the gardener, Morris Bunter, who discovers the first victim. Wealthy divorcee Loretta Ferroux lies face down among the astilbes with her head smashed in “like the opening of a red poppy.” (Bunter sees everything in horticultural terms; there are many flower metaphors in this book.) He is deeply shocked and bewildered by the murder. We, on the other hand, have not only picked up all sorts of gardening tips from a careful reading of the excellent first chapter, but also know that at least three people stand to benefit from Mrs Ferroux’s untimely death. One of them, another Bunter client, is then brutally struck down under her very own pergola, less than a hundred pages later. Aha! we want to say, the plot thickens. But does it?

Strangely enough, the novel turns out not to be about the murders at all, and solving them is never a priority. They are merely used as props for the narrative without advancing it in any way. The emotional centre of the story is the widowed Bunter’s love and concern for Kate, his 19-year-old daughter and part-time assistant. Kate has successfully lodged a sexual harassment suit against Donald Ingoldsby, a professor at the local university. Since Ingoldsby lives next door to the late Mrs Ferroux, and since Kate inexplicably continues to work in the Ferroux garden despite both the unsolved murder and the proximity of the now-disgraced Ingoldsby, it’s no wonder that Bunter is a worried man.

The character of Morris Bunter is a problem. “Never one to debate the larger issues of life,” Bunter is really only interesting when his thoughts turn to gardening, his favourite topic. He spends too much time overhearing conversations, observing lovers’ trysts, and generally acting as a bystander in scenes where he should be the protagonist. When he does steel himself to act, declare, or confront, he often finds himself interrupted.

Kate, on the other hand, is well-drawn. We see her clearly, sticking out her chin as she argues with her mother-hen father, wearing a straw hat as she works in one of the gardens, a girl who is “rather pretty, despite her squarish frame.” Her youthful trust in the future and the university she has called upon to give her justice touches us, and we sympathize with her subsequent disappointments and loss of innocence.

The characters in this novel have curiously little contact with each other, even given that the occupants of the lakeshore mansions rarely see their neighbours, let along speak to them. There is no real dialogue apart from the exchanges between Bunter and Kate. What we get instead is a lot of internal musing.

In the later stages of the book, the writing deteriorates as the storyline grows increasingly contrived: Bunter and Ingoldsby become rivals in an unlikely romantic triangle, and the narrative finally culminates in an act of violence unrelated to the previous murders or to anything much that has gone on before.

There is a lot that is good in this novel, including the garden lore and sensuous and evocative descriptions of place. Sadly, though, the various elements fail to come together, and the plot never does thicken.