Gail Jones is a professor of literature, cinema and cultural studies at the University of Western Australia and those disciplines play a prominent role in her latest novel Sorry. The novel centers around the childhood of Perdita Keene whose dysfunctional English parents have come to the Australian backcountry where she is born. Her father has a job as an anthropologist which keeps him gone for long periods of time, while her mother Stella, mentally unstable and never able to make the transition from a middle-class life in London to the Outback or from a single woman to a wife and mother, obsessively recites Shakespeare. Their life is a shack with a metal roof on the edge of a desert, its inside walls covered with newspaper clippings documenting the ongoing progress of WWII, stacks of books creating aisles of walking space, a single bed for the parents, a sleeping rug for the unwanted child.

Perdita discovers friendships with Billy, the deaf-mute son of a neighboring rancher and Mary, an aborigine girl who comes to live with them and care for her increasingly depressed mother. Though Perdita can’t escape the fractured learning from Stella’s half-mad recitations, it is Mary who pulls Deeta into the sensory real world—of the desert, and the wandering heritage of the aborigines.

The murder of her father, seen through the gauzy filter of Perdita’s memory—the four of them there: Perdita, Mary, Billy and Stella—destroys the balance of her life in the backcountry. Mary confesses to the murder, is taken off to a juvenile detention facility; and Perdita and Stella move to the town of Broome.

But these are only the external outlines. This is the story of a childhood, told from many interspersed points of view: the first person adult Perdita, the child Perdita, and a third person narrator. As a reader, the book has the feeling of a series of movie scenes, of constantly shifting camera angles and focus. Those changes happen in front of your eyes, yet your consciousness remains firmly fixed on the story surrounding Perdita’s childhood.

If that weren’t interesting enough, following her father’s murder, Perdita develops a speech impediment, where she is unable to express herself in language. The story moves into a kind of one-sided dialog and into the realm of an almost silent movie. But it continues without losing a beat, going underground into Perdita’s internal observation of her condition.

In her masterful poetic language Jones translates the universal experience of the Australian Sorry Day, the government’s apology to the indigenous peoples of their country for past mistreatments and relocations, into Perdita’s final wrenching experience of her childhood—the single unsaid word that is the book’s title.
This is literature worthy of any must-reads list.

Copyright 2009 by Toby Heaton

In 1978, Velma Barfield, of Robeson County, N.C., was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death for murdering Stuart Taylor, a man with whom she had a romantic relationship. She also confessed to the murder of her mother and two elderly people she worked for as a live-in nursing assistant. She did not admit to the murder of her first husband—the father of her two children—or of her second husband, but both bodies, when exhumed, were found to contain traces of arsenic. Velma Barfield was executed on November 2, 1984. She was fifty-three years old and the first female murderer executed in the United States since 1976. Surviving her were a daughter, a son, and three grandchildren.

This is not a sensational story about a discontented loner who goes off the rails and kills people. Nor does its protagonist have the perverse fascination of serial killers like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. Velma Barfield was an ordinary, fiftyish live-in nursing assistant—an ordinary, working-class woman of no discernible distinction, unless you knew her secrets. These secrets included an addiction to prescription drugs, for which she needed money, and the habit of leaving behind dead patients, including her mother, which is how she got the money. Surely, a woman like Velma is not the stuff of which poetry is made—yet that is exactly what Pat Riviere-Seel, a journalist-turned-poet, has done. She takes the common clay of Velma’s life and, using her reporter’s skills and poet’s sensibilities, explores the tragic fate of a daughter who has a serial killer for a mother.

The facts in the poems, Riviere-Seel tells us, are real, but the thoughts and voices expressed arise out of the artistry and, in this case, the bravery of the poet. And it is a brave poet who puts herself into the mind of Velma to find her voice, and into the heart of the daughter to find her anguish.

The story of Velma and her daughter, who is never named, is told in a series of twenty-seven short poems narrated by the poet, the daughter, Velma, and, in one poem, Velma’s fiancé (Stuart Taylor, of whose murder she was convicted) as he is dying of rat poisoning. Riviere-Seel first introduces us to the present life of the daughter as seen through the poet’s eye: “The serial killer’s daughter wears tight curls made of cypress roots/ and washes them in buttermilk from the moon.” In the next poem, the poet switches to her reporter’s eye to describe the rural North Carolina background, with its poverty and despair, that is the setting of the story. From there, she moves easily into the daughter’s voice with its revealing glimpses of her parents’ marriage and the prophetic words of her father: “That woman’s gonna kill me.” The poet then segues into Velma’s voice, dark and ominous: “…my life/ muddy, uncharted—swallows/ everything without warning.” We next hear the daughter after she has put together the pieces of the various deaths that follow her mother and says, despairingly: “…I know, Mama/ someone has to stop you.” The daughter’s voice is poignant when she remembers the mother who baked yeast rolls and sugar cookies and blackberry pies, and who watched her play basketball “fifth row behind the home bench.”

A little more than half of the poems deal with the arrest, confession, conviction, and execution of Velma. Following the conviction, the media spotlight moves in to follow the daughter all the way through the last appeal. For the poem, “In the Hours Before the Execution,” Riviere-Seel quotes Velma as she approaches her death: “When I go into that chamber at 2 a.m., it’s my gateway to heaven” and goes on to place herself in Velma’s cell. There the poet listens to the sounds of the cellblock as and waits with Velma for the final call.

The last poem comes full circle back to the daughter and allows her to conclude her own story. And although she has forged a new life, an anonymous life in an anonymous place, she will never leave the past behind.

The Serial Killer’s Daughter is highly recommended for its masterful story-telling and a powerful poetic achievement.

The book is available from the publisher (www.mainstreetrag.com/store). And be sure to check out Pat’s website: www.patriviereseel.com.
Copyright © 2009 Genève Bacon

Johan Theorin
Translated by Marlaine Delargy

Echoes From the Dead is as unexpected as it is wonderful. The novel revolves around the disappearance of five-year-old Jens Davidsson from an island home twenty years before. Now, his grandfather Gerlof who lives in a retirement home has received a package in the mail which contains one of Jens’ sandals. Gerlof calls his estranged daughter Julia, Jens’ mother, a nurse whose life has degenerated into depression and alcohol abuse, and the two of them slowly begin their revitalized search for the boy’s fate.

Also on the island is a wealthy family whose son, Nils Kant, committed a series of murders, then fled – many years before Jens’ disappearance. Theorin does a masterful job connecting the two cases with seemingly unrelated facts and the chance meeting of the boy and man in the prolog. He reinforces that connection by writing the story in two threads: the first, the search by Julia and Gerlof written in the present time; and the second, the life of Nils Kant, written in the past.

The novel is set in the stark landscape of Oland, an island off the coast of Sweden. Even though the story is framed as a mystery, it is the depth of character – of Julia, of Nils Kant, and most of all, of Gerlof, a retired sea captain beset with physical infirmaries, that drives the novel. This is Gerlof’s story more than the others, and in the end, his bittersweet triumph.

We expect to discover the connection between Nils Kant and Jens’ disappearance in the end but Theorin easily exceeds our expectations with an outcome both amazing in its convoluted logic, and in retrospect, almost inevitable. Finally, it is the evolution of the relationship between Gerlof and Julia, father and daughter, that make this an extremely satisfying work.

The novel was translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy who also does the Asa Larsson mysteries. With many foreign works, the reader is sometimes jarred by inappropriate idiom or language. There is none of that here. The novel’s excellence in English is a testament to the partnership between writer and translator.

Highly recommended.