Book Review: The Good Works of Ayela Linde by Charlotte Forbes - Page 3

Just as the 16 storytellers look to a spare picture of an aloof woman in Santa Rosalia and discover a richness in the portrait that emerges, so it is for the readers who encounter this book. We arrive here with our own stories and discover points of intersection with Ayela's. These are not grand accounts, but simple ruminations. Maybe we have wondered, like Frederick, if in seizing certain of life's opportunities, we have denied ourselves other opportunities which might have answered our greatest longings. Like Xavier, the eldest son, we may have tried to assuage our guilt as we force our decisions upon an ailing parent. Or like Jesse, the youngest, we may have winced at our parents' entrenched foibles, only to realize with embarrassment that we have come from these people and may share more with them than we care to confess. We cannot look with clarity at the book; there are only glimmers refracted through our own ways of living.

There is a feature of this book's form –- its chronological arrangement –- which suggests another important concern: the passage of time. This is not so apparent in the first stories. Like youth, they are indifferent to the passage of time. Nevertheless, this concern is implied. The second story, "Flowers at Your Grave," tells the difficulty of burying Ayela's grandmother, whom the villagers believe to be a witch. They have their proof in the fact that all the flowers of the town are wilting, but they refuse to acknowledge the obvious fact that flowers wilt in scorching heat.

Here we find our first image of "ruination", which mounts in a crescendo until, near the end of the book, it screams for attention. By the end of the book we gaze upon an elderly woman in failing health whose once grand house has fallen into disrepair. She becomes preoccupied with the ruination all around her and most especially within her own body. But moving in counterpoint to this obsession are images, not of ruination's opposite, but of something which stands apart from the cycle of decay and rebirth, a timeless quality.

The young Ayela and her mother cannot bury her grandmother in the church cemetery, so Frederick intervenes. He rents a truck and they cart the body to a hasty gravesite somewhere else. As the burial comes to a close, everyone notes the unmistakable scent of roses. How odd. What sort of a witch would attract the timeless signs of the Virgin Mary?

Article Author: David Barker

Theoblogger - a forty-something ex-lawyer theologian from Toronto dedicated to finding the nuggets beneath the mountains of crap that some try to pass off as belief.

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