Richard Ford: Canada

Richard Fordin romaania ei tietääkseni ole vielä suomennettu, mutta olettaisin että kovin kauaa ei tarvitse odottaa, niin hyvä tämä romaani on: Canada (Bloomsbury, 2012; ISBN 978-1-4088-3656-9).



Kirja lähtee liikkeelle tähän tapaan: "Aluksi kerron ryöstöstä, jonka vanhempamme tekivät. Sitten murhista, jotka tapahtuivat myöhemmin."

Kun viisitoistavuotiaan Dell Parsonsin vanhemmat ryöstävät pankin, elämä muuttuu lopullisesti. Paluuta entiseen ei ole. Dellin ja hänen kaksoissiskonsa Bernerin kohtalo vanhempien pidättämisen ja vankilatuomion jälkeen on epävarma. Berner pakenee kotoa Montanasta ja hylkää veljensä. Dell puolestaan saa perhetuttavalta kyydin Kanadan puolelle Saskatchewaan. Dellin ottaa vastuulleen Arthur Remlinger, erikoislaatuinen amerikkalainen jonka karismaattinen olemus kätkee väkivaltaisen luonteen.

Andre Dubus III kirjoitti teoksesta kirja-arviossaan näin: "a mesmerizing story driven by authentic and fully realized characters, and a prose style so accomplished it is tempting to read each sentence two or three times before being pulled to the next."

Ja kerta kaikkiaan, tässä oli romaani joka tarrasi kiinni eikä päästänyt irti. Luin teoksen e-kirjana, ja vaikka luettavuus on paperikirjaa huonompi, luin 420-sivuisen romaanin yhdessä päivässä, ja moneen otteeseen oli pakko lukea tekstiä moneen kertaan, niin kirkkaan oivaltavaa se oli. Tummia sävyjä tässä tarinassa on riittävästi moneen romaaniin, mutta kohtalon murjomisesta huolimatta tarinan kertoja, Dell, pystyy näkemään mistä elämässä on oikeasti kyse, kolhuista ja vastoinkäymisistä huolimatta.

Dell pohdiskelee vanhempiensa kohtaloa, sitä mikä sai heidät lopulta tekemään pankkiryöstön, mitkä asiat olisivat voineet olla toisin ja miten elämässä sitten olisi käynyt:

[…] If that had happened, each of them would've had a chance at a good life out in the wide world. My father might've gone back to the Air Force, since leaving it had been hard for him. He could've married someone else. She could've returned to school once Berner and I had gone to college. She could've written poems, followed her early aspirations. Fate would have dealt them improved hands.

And yet if they were telling this story, it would naturally be a different one, in which they were the principals in the events that were coming, and my sister and I the spectators — which is one thing children are to their parents. The world doesn't usually think about bank robbers as having children — though plenty must. But the children's story — which mine and my sister's is — is ours to weigh and apportion and judge as we see it. Years later in college, I read that the great critic Ruskin wrote that composition is the arrangement of unequal things. Which means it's for the composer to determine what's equal to what, and what matters more and what can be set to the side of life's hurtling passage onward.

Lasten äiti olisi halunnut itselleen toisenlaisen elämän, jossa hän olisi voinut kirjoittaa runoja tai olla muuten tekemisissä kirjallisuuden kanssa, mutta hän ei pystynyt irtautumaan siitä millaiseksi elämä oli muotoutunut:

[…] My mother may have felt a "physical ennui," and thought increasingly of leaving. But she always thought more about staying. I remember she read a poem to me at around this time by the great Irish poet Yeats, which had in it the line that said, “Nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent." I've taught this poem many times in a life of teaching and believe this is how she thought of things: as being imperfect, yet still acceptable. Changing life would've discredited life and herself, and brought on too much ruin. This was the child-of-immigrants viewpoint she'd inherited. And while hindsight might conclude the worst about our parents say, that there was some terrible, irrational, cataclysmic force at work inside them — it's more true that we wouldn't have seemed at all irrational or cataclysmic if looked at from outer space — from Sputnik — and would certainly never have thought we were that way. It's best to see our life and the activities that ended it, as two sides of one thing that have to be held in the mind simultaneously to properly understand — the side that was normal and the side that was disastrous. One so close to the other. Any different way of looking at our life threatens to disparage the crucial, rational, commonplace part we lived, the part in which everything makes sense to those on the inside — and without which none of this is worth hearing about.

Tarinan kertoja ja päähenkilö Dell osoittautuu ihmiseksi, joka on kärsinyt, eikä kärsimyksestään ole ehjänä selvinnyt, mutta samalla tämä kärsimys on tehnyt hänestä kokonaisen ihmisen, joka ymmärtää, ja kaikessa epäilevyydessään ja kyseenalaistamisessaan tämä tarina viiltää lukijaa kuin elämä itse:

It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone assures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don't stay the way they are very long. Knowing this, however, has not made me cynical. Cynical means believing that good isn't possible; and I know for a fact that good is. I simply take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.

Ja vielä yksi lainaus romaanista, liittyen taideteoksen sommitteluun, missä yhteydessä Dell viittaa useaan otteeseen taidekriitikko John Ruskiniin, jonka mukana sommittelu on "erilaisten asioiden järjestämistä" ("the arrangement of unequal things"), mikä saa teoksessa useita toisiinsa linkittyviä tulkintoja:

[...] What I know is, you have a better chance in life — of surviving it — if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find. We try, as my sister said. We try. All of us. We try.